Creative Development in Marcel Proust’s «A la recherche du temps perdu» 1433117479, 9781433117473

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JEFFREY JOHNSON is an independent Proust scholar living and working in New York City. Although he has spent much of his adult life in creative practice, Johnson has a background as a trained scientist. He brings insights from both fields to his reading, thinking, and writing about Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. Over the last several years, Johnson has presented papers at numerous conferences and given lectures and seminars on Proust in China and the United States. An article on Proust and the birth of the modern citizen appeared in the fall 2011 issue of the journal Nouvelles Francographies.

204 Jeffrey Johnson CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

This book focuses on creative development and empowerment in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It demonstrates Proust’s proof of the Romantic notion that art originates in the self of the artist. Approached as a bildungsroman, the psychological aspects of this development in Marcel, the principal character, are considered in terms of the stimulus/response mechanism in living organisms. It verifies Proust’s argument that time in the body, including all that one experiences unconsciously, is present within us whether it is accessible to memory or not. Through involuntary memories and inspiration at the end of the novel, Marcel finds the means to write the book he has long wished to write. Inspiration provides a link between Marcel, the novel’s protagonist, and Proust, its author. This volume balances its analysis of Marcel’s creative development and empowerment through inspiration with Proust’s experiences in May 1909, when he realized that the concept of the fourth dimension would serve as the unifying thread for his novel. Modernity is viewed as a crucial influence in the transformation of society that Proust’s novel chronicles. This study posits an allegorical reading of the novel in the relationship of the birth of the modern citizen to the making of an artist in an era of doubt.

Peter Lang

WWW.PETERLANG.COM

Jeffrey Johnson

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN

MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures

JohnsonJeffrey_dd_cb:PaulsonDD.qxd

3/15/2012

2:57 PM

Page 1

JEFFREY JOHNSON is an independent Proust scholar living and working in New York City. Although he has spent much of his adult life in creative practice, Johnson has a background as a trained scientist. He brings insights from both fields to his reading, thinking, and writing about Proust’s novel, A la recherche du temps perdu. Over the last several years, Johnson has presented papers at numerous conferences and given lectures and seminars on Proust in China and the United States. An article on Proust and the birth of the modern citizen appeared in the fall 2011 issue of the journal Nouvelles Francographies.

204 Jeffrey Johnson CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

This book focuses on creative development and empowerment in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. It demonstrates Proust’s proof of the Romantic notion that art originates in the self of the artist. Approached as a bildungsroman, the psychological aspects of this development in Marcel, the principal character, are considered in terms of the stimulus/response mechanism in living organisms. It verifies Proust’s argument that time in the body, including all that one experiences unconsciously, is present within us whether it is accessible to memory or not. Through involuntary memories and inspiration at the end of the novel, Marcel finds the means to write the book he has long wished to write. Inspiration provides a link between Marcel, the novel’s protagonist, and Proust, its author. This volume balances its analysis of Marcel’s creative development and empowerment through inspiration with Proust’s experiences in May 1909, when he realized that the concept of the fourth dimension would serve as the unifying thread for his novel. Modernity is viewed as a crucial influence in the transformation of society that Proust’s novel chronicles. This study posits an allegorical reading of the novel in the relationship of the birth of the modern citizen to the making of an artist in an era of doubt.

Peter Lang

WWW.PETERLANG.COM

Jeffrey Johnson

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN

MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures Tamara Alvarez-Detrell and Michael G. Paulson

General Editors Vol. 204

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Jeffrey Johnson

CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT IN MARCEL PROUST’S A LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU

PETER LANG

New York y Washington, D.C./Baltimore y Bern Frankfurt y Berlin y Brussels y Vienna y Oxford

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Jeffrey. Creative development in Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu / Jeffrey Johnson. p. cm. — (Currents in comparative Romance languages and literatures; vol. 204) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. 2. Self in literature. 3. Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) in literature. I. Title. PQ2631.R63A82535 843’.912—dc23 2011053454 ISBN 978-1-4331-1747-3 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4539-0585-2 (e-book) ISSN 0893-5963

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council of Library Resources.

© 2012 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited. Printed in Germany

To the memory of my father

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“Par quel miracle l’homme consent-il à faire ce qu’il fait sur cette terre, lui qui doit mourir?” François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1997), livre xiii, chapitre 8, p. 784.

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Contents Preface

xi

Abbreviations xvii Introduction – Un moment décisif

1

Chapter 1 Proustian Idealism

17



A Maxim of Marcel Proust

17



The Maxim Turned Inside Out: A Proustian Riddle



Chapter 2 Body and Mind

31



A Partially Opened Window

31



Consciousness

35



Distance

The Self as Observer

42

51

Chapter 3 Identity

61



Identity as a Social Marker

61



Identity and the Nineteenth Century

69



Identity in La Recherche

77

Identity and the Cinematic View of Life

81



Chapter 4 The Making of an Artist

87



Romanticism and the Origin of the Artwork

87



The Speculative Theory of Art

93

The Impediments and the Impulse

96



Lessons from the Masters Marcel/Marcel Proust as Writers

107

110

Chapter 5 Involuntary Memory and François le Champi

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27

The Madeleine, the Paving Stone, and François le Champi

113

113

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x

Involuntary Memory François le Champi

121

128

Chapter 6 The State of Genius

135



135

Proust as Writer

Time





140



The State of Genius: Marcel/Marcel Proust



The Efficacy of Language



146



155

Chapter 7 Proust and the Fourth Dimension

161



Perseverance and the Tension Inhering in a Quest



A Gift and Talent



The Fourth Dimension

161 165



172

Illumination Epilogue The Difficulty of Being a Human Being

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176

183

Notes

189

Bibliography

211

Index

217

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Preface Creative idealism underlies the Romantic precept concerning the origin of the artwork. This precept states that the source of the artwork is in the self of the artist. In A la recherche du temps perdu, a complex work of philosophical fiction, Marcel Proust tested the basis for this claim. He did so in the face of early twentieth-century skepticism of the precept’s validity and relevance. And he did so in light of then contemporary understanding of the workings of the mind offered by psychology and neurology. Romantic suppositions concerning individuality, human potentiality, and the artist were based on perceptions of how feelings develop in human beings and how they are expressed in the work of the artist. These suppositions answered questions for the Romantics as to what art is and who is the artist. Dovetailing with individualism’s intellectual liberation of the individual in the early nineteenth century, the result was the joint celebration of spiritual independence, the uniqueness of the artist, and emotive qualities of the self. Feeling, sensibility, and genius became catchwords of the era in which the solipsism of Chateaubriand’s character René was a model for the young who sought to emulate him. But like Icarus, who soared on false wings and crashed, this emphasis on the artist, the individual, and the self eventually collapsed. Ennui, alienation, and anomie—the depressive counterparts to individualism’s empowerment and to Romantic ecstasy—surfaced in the aftermath. Realist views of life were hard. As we will see in chapter 3, efforts to increase production in the nineteenth century were dependent on technological innovation and increasing rates of worker productivity. Science abetted this drive by showing the functioning of the body to be reflexive and human behavior to be largely repetitive and habitual. The conclusion to be drawn was that human reactions are predictable within a range of possible outcomes. In other words, uniqueness as a florescence of individual spirit, while flattering, was larger imaginary. Modernity as a cultural era which developed out of the Enlightenment can be seen as the crucible into which were thrown romantic, scientific, and industrial projections of what the individual was; could do; and/or could be, as if to see what would happen. What happened was a modern citizen appeared. We will discuss modernity as a set of cultural values and forces more fully, and define this modern citizen, in chapter 3. In Farewell to an Idea art historian T. J. Clark brackets the historical era of Modernity between the French Revolution and the opening of the Berlin Wall (1789-1989),1 a time period of exactly two hundred years which he defines in sociopolitical terms that reflect the changes that occurred in

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xii the make-up of national ruling structures in the West during the period. References to modernity in the present text adhere to Clark’s ideological definition of modernity which is Marxist. We follow the course and impact of modernity in France up to the First World War. In doing so we will see how Proust’s novel of the making of an artist in the early years of the twentieth century replicates the appearance of this modern citizen who came into being after a century of flux and change that saw the breakdown or rejection of such external referents as God and place. That Proust wrote a book in the early twentieth century which took a largely discredited philosophical position and tested it and then went on to offer a proof for the Romantic tenet which places the source of art in the self of the artist may seem an unusual project today given the ever-increasing influence of empiricism in explaining the world as the nineteenth century progressed. It might seem unusual especially in light of early twentieth century understanding of the operations of consciousness. But it was just because Proust, as a writer qua artist, had an intuitive grasp of these operations that he was able to put this notion of origins to the test through a narrative of the making of an artist. He focused on time, memory, and experiencing. James Joyce and the Austrian author Robert Musil were treating similar themes with considerable intensity in their own work at about the same time while doing so through characters other than artists. We should note that Proust came to this challenge slowly. He had not set out as a young man to take it up. Rather, over a lifetime of writing a set of themes related to issues of time, memory, experiencing, love, homosexuality, and the nature of creativity had cropped up repeatedly in the subject matter he had chosen to write about. Once the point was reached where Proust recognized these themes and issues as elements in a puzzle challenging him to solve it, his consciousness of them became a source of mental concentration. In 1908 Proust began working to resolve this puzzle through a novel he proposed to write. He did so, however, without having a clear-cut method of approach. The “puzzle” was still not sufficiently defined in his mind in 1908 for him to be able to approach it in so straightforward a fashion. After several months of work however, suddenly, as we will see, Proust saw his way through the thicket of these themes and issues and was able to write a novel of creative development and empowerment using these themes and issues as the parts of this problem which needed to be fitted into place in order to create an image of life at the time—and that would also serve as a proof of the Romantic precept concerning the origin of art in the self of the artist. In shaping his narrative,

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xiii Proust explored life as he found himself and others living it at the time. In consequence, La Recherche involved a huge amount of collateral thinking on issues pressing on the individual during the formative years of Proust’s life, including those mentioned above. A novel is eminently suited for testing a philosophical tenet. It is a difficult medium, however, through which to advance a clear-cut philosophy. Appetites, opportunities, and chance motivate characters in novels just as they do people in real life. This is why novels lend themselves to situational verification of philosophical points. For novels can explore these points through characters’ actions and through their responses to the situations created by an author. But to draw philosophical conclusions based on an author’s presentation of fictional situations in his book or books is not philosophy. And if the meaning one draws from a story one reads does not transcend the logic of it and actually impact the way one understands her or his own life then the term philosophical novel does not apply to what one is reading. Novels are discursive in the sense that they proceed from one topic, point of view, or situation to another. But the manner in which novels embody meaning is not discursive in the sense of being rationally and logically coherent. This is the reason some readers have problems when they expect discursive concision and a consanguinity of ideas in a novel that is purported to be philosophical in nature. Attempting to tease clear-cut outlooks on life from the actions and statements of characters, or from narratorial asides, or authorial comments inserted in the text can be frustrating. For characters, narrators, and even authors are participating in the events they are commenting on and thus lack the disinterestedness that opens the space for thoughtful speculation on the meaning of life. Discussing a novel in terms of its philosophical content is easier if one singles out for study a central tenet that relates to essential qualities of human experiencing as these appear in a fictional work. In identifying creative idealism the present work has done this. The tenet is very deeply embedded in the actions of the story which centers on the principle character in the novel’s progression through life. Creative Development accepts these conditions and accepts, also, that Proust’s characters are largely unaware of what their actions say about them philosophically. Thus the present work approaches its elucidation of Proust’s treatment of the Romantic precept of the origin of art through appreciating that La Recherche, as a philosophical novel, is a book about life. It finds in its hero’s quest to become a writer an understanding of how the experiences of living human beings define who they are and how they manifest their potentiality. This discussion encompasses an allegorical reading of the novel which

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xiv relates creative empowerment to the appearance of the modern citizen in the early twentieth century. Proust’s organizational program for his novel makes this allegorical reading possible. Ultimately, the creative idealism Proust enunciates through his hero’s growth to creative empowerment transcends the novel. It resonates in the consciousness of his readers as truth. The bibliography for the present work includes a number of titles not usually found in academic texts devoted to literature. These works broaden the range of support for the positions promoted in it. They reflect the nonacademic route by which I came to undertake this study of Proust and his novel. It is the result of forty years of reading and thought on La Recherche. My initial encounter with the novel came at a point in my life when I had just completed a graduate program in Zoology. I have spent my adult life in creative practice while supporting myself through employment. One might ask if this experience with artistic practice and my many years of reading and thinking about La Recherche mean anything in addressing Proust’s treatment of the issues identified above. The answer is: They can. If one accepts, on the one hand, that the practice of a skill offers insight into the accomplishments of those who practice that skill better, then experience in artistic practice can make it possible for someone to identify and grasp nuances of development and meaning in behaviors where others may not see them. By the same token, forty years of consideration does not, in itself, enable a person to comprehend embodied truths more successfully than someone less intimately associated with a text. What long experience does provide, however, is a set of ideas or values culled from and tested against a constant, in this case Proust’s novel. The fact that these ideas and values have endured the trial of my daily experience of life, and that they still resonate and hold true for me, is verification of the truth originally discovered in these ideas and values. No book comes into being without help from many people. Among those I wish to single out is my wife, Marcha Johnson. Marcha has been steadfast in her support of this project. She has buttressed me emotionally throughout the many years during which this project developed. With her innate fairness and the experience from her professional life she has offered balance and thoughtful comment to my responses to setbacks and frustration. Without her, it would not have been possible to write this book. I would also like to thank Michael Finn, Proust scholar from Ryerson University in Toronto. Michael read an early draft of this text and offered the sort of unvarnished but constructive criticism that stimulated further drafts through which the writing has, hopefully, been refined. George Braziller, the publisher, has been a watchful presence as this work developed. Donald Stone of Queens

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xv College of the City University of New York and Peking University, Beijing, China, has been steadfast in his support as well. My nearly twenty years of employment in the Bookshop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has afforded me almost daily opportunities to draw sustenance from the museum’s collections. I am grateful for my time at the Metropolitan. In addition to the benefit I have derived from being close to the museum’s collections, the museum has afforded me the privilege of working with many profoundly talented and committed individuals whose collective effort to advance our understanding of art from all cultures and their individual dedication to recognizing and respecting the origins of the impulse to art in human beings has meant that I have found support and understanding for the positions I promote in the present work. The list of these individuals is long. I apologize to any of those I owe much whose names I may have unintentionally missed in compiling this list. These individuals include: Harold Holzer, Maxwell Hearn, Judith Smith, Donald LaRocca, Ken Sohner and the staff of the Watson Library, Margaret Chase, Margaret Donovan, Joan Mertens, Romano Peluso, Maryann Ainsworth, and not least, Mr. Benny Hansen. I conclude by extending my heartfelt gratitude to my editor, Julia Moore, who helped make this a better book through clarify my prose.

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Abbreviations References to A la recherche du temps perdu are double. The first citation is to the French text, in this case, the single volume Gallimard Quarto paperback edition of the novel (1999). The citations are prefaced with a “G” for Gallimard and then an abbreviation in parenthesis of the volume followed by page number. The volume abbreviations are as follows: (CS) – Du côté de chez Swann (JF) – À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (CG) – Le Côté de Guermantes (SG) – Sodome et Gomorrhe (LP) – Le Prisonnière (AD) – Albertine disparue (TR) – Le Temps retrouvé The second citation in the series is to the six volume paperback edition of In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin revised by D. J. Enright, and published by the Modern Library 1998. The citation is prefaced with an “SLT” for In Search of Lost Time. It is followed by a roman numeral in parenthesis for the volume number (I-VI), followed by a page number. References to Contre Sainte-Beuve are also double. Again, the first citation is to the French text. CSB Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) CSB II Contre Sainte-Beuve, in Marcel Proust: On Art and Literature, 1896-1919, trans. Silvia Townsend Warner (New York: Carroll &* Graaf, Inc. 2nd edition, 1997) CSB III Contre Sainte-Beuve: précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1971)

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Introduction Un moment décisif

1

At the conclusion of A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel, the principal character in the novel, becomes a writer when he conceives the book he had long sought to write. Readers generally assume it will be masterfully written. We assume this in spite of Marcel’s limited experience as a writer. We having been taken in by the sleight of hand Proust incorporated into the opening pages of this first-person narrative. Succumbing to the ruse, readers assume the book we are reading is the book Marcel will write. In 1913 a similar magico/mythical assumption attended the appearance of Du côté de chez Swann, the first of seven volumes composing La Recherche to be published.2 In the minds of many, Proust was considered an overnight sensation with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann. This belief survived in early biographies whose authors saw the novel as autobiographical. It was not until the manuscripts discovered by Bernard de Fallois in the early 1950s which showed that Proust had been writing almost continuously during periods for which there had been no evidence of work that a more realistic picture of creative development emerged. For de Fallois’ findings showed that La Recherche was a result of the trials and errors that come from practicing a craft and from learning from failure. One of the ironies of Proust’s novel is that the lessons learned through practicing a craft form no part of the trial and error which accompanies what we will see in chapter 4 to have been Marcel’s multiple apprenticeships. Through these apprenticeships Marcel achieved: intellectual growth; an understanding of artistic consciousness and semiotics; and the ability to open the window wide on sensory congruencies in déjà vu. These achievements enabled Marcel to embody the Romantic ideal of the artist without having written hardly a word. The present text is a study of creative development and empowerment to the point of inception of great works of art. The creation of great works of art was the only art-making of interest to Proust in La Recherche. This is corroborated by the fictional works of art Proust discusses in some depth in the novel. The actress Berma’s portrayal of Phaedra 3, the heroine of Racine’s play, Phèdre, the painter Elstir’s Carquethuit Harbor ;4 and the composer Vinteuil’s Septet are presented as masterpieces of their kind.5 In describing them, Proust emphasizes the direct expression each projects of an essential quality of the artist’s individual experiencing, the source of which, shaped by sensibility, is the self.6 This quality in their work is achieved through a process of approach, contact, and conduction to the artist’s consciousness of some part of the deeply interior truth of experience they carry within them. Such truth is synthesized by the self from the life they

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2 have lived. It is communicated through their art. In Proust’s novel, Marcel’s artistic development leads him to the commencement of what will supposedly be a great work of art. A study of this process in La Recherche allows for complementary accounts to be given of both the hero’s and the author’s creative development. In the present work, Marcel’s development and empowerment will be referenced to Proust’s development and empowerment. The period leading to Proust’s creative empowerment will be followed in the sequence of linked stories, essays, and critiques Proust wrote between the fall of 1908 and the spring of 1909 that are known collectively today as Contre Sainte-Beuve. Pairings accounts of hero and author during the period in which they become creatively empowered (for Marcel, this occurs in Le Temps retrouvé in the scene in the Prince de Guermantes’ library which is followed by the bal des têtes scene; for Proust himself, the period noted above led Proust to inspiration in May, 1909 [see below]), together with the novel’s narration of Marcel’s childhood, provides a nearly cradle-to-grave narrative of the growth of an artist in as much as there are references in the novel to Marcel as a very young boy. Mastery, or readers’ assumption of mastery in Marcel, is the final stage in a narrative of the growth of an artist. Imagination enlivens mastery. Ill health impinges on it; death ends it. Berma, the writer Bergotte, and Vinteuil—archetypal masters of their respective arts in La Recherche—all die in the novel. And, of course, though this study does not reach so far, Proust died with corrections of Albertine disparue, the next to last volume of the novel, close at hand ready to be inserted into his text.7 Our study begins with Marcel. Throughout the novel readers see Marcel respond to experiences that appeal to the senses. His interest in these experiences is further stimulated by imaginative possibility. These incidents are readers’ introduction to how artists experience the world. Artists work by transposing experience and thought into art. In chapters 6, 7, and the epilogue we will turn to a discussion of Proust’s creative empowerment. These chapters come after our discussion in chapters 4 and 5 of Marcel’s experiences in Le Temps retrouvé. We will see that Marcel’s creative development and empowerment provides a model supporting the Romantic precept of the origin of art in the self of the artist. While efficacious in elucidating the empirical basis for this precept, the process Proust outlines is largely a theoretical construct. This is one reason for comparing Marcel’s development to Proust’s own experience. For Proust’s experience draws his fictional representation back to real life. The sequence of events in Proust’s development is consistent with actual practice. The sequence provides insight into the birth of the novel as a dynamic process of skill and thought in

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3 which Proust recognized in the dimension of Time, when he encountered it, the unifying concept for his work. This approach to the making of an artist—studying a fictional character side by side with the character’s creator—gives readers a more complete picture of artistic development and empowerment than a study of either Marcel or Proust alone could offer. The following premises provide the foundation for the present work:



1. creative idealism is the philosophical tenet underlying the novel; 2. the search for lost time is a search for spiritual unity with the self which Proust resolves through the dimension of Time, as does Marcel; 3. Marcel’s lack of spiritual unity is the cause of the problem-of-self he struggles with until his moment of inspiration at the end of the novel; 4. there are elements in Proust’s experience as a writer infused in the internal logic of the novel that carries over into the external reality of the reader as truths of human experience, and 5. the concept of the fourth dimension is the metaphoric vehicle which provided Proust the element he needed to visualize a foundation for his writing in the dimension of Time. (The fourth dimension is discussed at length in chapter 7.)

A study of Proust and his novel along these lines is not standard. Even so, topics addressed in this study are not new to Proust literature. Many have been treated elsewhere. The neurological validity of involuntary memory, discussed in chapters 2 and 5, was established by Jonah Lehrer.8 Modernity and Romanticism—forces of change in the nineteenth century—have been discussed frequently in relation to the novel. They are given significant coverage in chapters 3, 4, and 5. Inspiration has come up regularly over the years in discussions of Proust’s commencement of La Recherche. A review of this literature is presented at the end of this introduction. Genius is the subject of chapter 6. It has been written on extensively as a phenomenon of rare human achievement. But genius as a signifier for a rigorous exercise of creative thought and psychological positioning—the approach, contact, and conduction to consciousness of a truth of experience—has not been treated as a component in Proust’s empowerment. Finally, one cannot detach the inadequacy, stress, and exhilaration felt in frequenting “psychic territory most people would rather avoid” in the process of becoming and being an artist.9 Nor can one detach from practice the limits confronted in trying to achieve expressive authority in an artwork through the obduracy of the medium in which one works. Like twisting the barrel of a kalei-

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4 doscope, the epilogue reconfigures the subjects discussed in the book. It offers a picture of the artist as a human being for whom art-making is the defining quality of his or her life, a life in which doubt is a psychological nemesis stilled only by the intermittent control the artist is able to exercise over her or his experience through the making of the artwork. Proust dealt with creative development and empowerment lopsidedly in La Recherche. Common sense tells us art is a product of craft skills employed in the expression of ideas. The greatness of Berma’s Phaedra, Elstir’s Carquethuit Harbor, and Vinteuil’s Septet was dependent on the technical mastery these artists employed to infuse their work with the ideas it expressed. As we noted earlier referring to Marcel’s lack of practical experience, Proust marginalized practice in his presentation of creative development. Or, rather, he suppressed practice in order to focus readers’ attention on a psychological explication of the Romantic precept of the origin of art in the artist. For this reason, too, Proust presents the struggle to achieve mastery in a medium as indicative of an underlying spiritual lack. Proust’s separation of craft from spirit strengthens his promotion of the self as the origin of art in the artist. Promoting this thesis in the early twentieth century made becoming an artist a struggle against the centripetal forces of social and spiritual alienation in modernity that were pulling the individual away from the self while at the same time thrusting the individual into the anonymity that characterizes modern society. To become an artist under these circumstances one must counteract these forces of spiritual disintegration through attunement to the centrifugal forces of sensory stimulation and the qualities unique to one’s emotional and intellectual response to experience. From self-knowing, the synthesis of thought and feeling become the means to artistic expression. Artistic expression is dependent on contact with the self. Proust is emphatic in La Recherche that contact with the self is essential to making art. For Proust, art is a medium through which truths of human experience are communicated to readers, viewers, or auditors of the work (hereafter identified solely as the viewer). This is the reason that craft or technique-based art is not considered art in Proust’s program. For Proust to have considered technical accomplishment in his discussion of art-making would have muddied his argument. Proust underscores this point in the passage describing the young actress Rachel’s performance before the duchesse de Guermantes’ friends in the third volume of the novel, Le Côté de Guermantes. We see Rachel struggle to evoke feeling through costuming and the appropriation of gestures. Her performance, discussed in chapter 5, is a disaster. La Recherche thus sets up a two-tier system for gauging merit in art. Rachel seeks to entertain and give sensuous pleasure where

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5 she can and that is the extent of what she has to offer. Great art, on the other hand, employs these qualities Rachel was working to acquire as the base from which to communicate truth. Communication of truth is the province of great art. It is borne from an impulse arising from the self. Having spoken of the self so freely, we need to define it. Proust’s contemporary, the American philosopher and psychologist William James’s definition of the self appears in The Principles of Psychology. It will serve us in what follows. According to James the self is the active element in consciousness (all italics in this paraphrased statement originate with James’s), a something which seems to go out to meet whatever qualities a person’s feelings may possess or whatever content one’s thought may include while these qualities and contents come in to be received by it. James elaborates further. He concludes that all humans single out from the rest of what we call ourselves some central principle we recognize as our self, of which the above is part of a fair general description.10 Each of us recognizes our own self as the authoritative and authenticating essence of who we are; it is the guarantor of our uniqueness as an individual. For Proust, the years before 1909, the year he began La Recherche, were filled with writing. In addition to his published stories and articles and Ruskin translations there is the aborted novel he worked on from 1895 until 1899, Jean Santeuil. And there is Contre Sainte-Beuve. Among the many things Jean Santeuil reveals about Proust and his development as a writer is that in it Proust encountered and failed to surmount one of the major stumbling blocks the novel as a literary form poses to anyone attempting to write one: how to transcend the incidental and episodic nature of the events and experiences that make up the progression a novel chronicles. Or, to phrase it the other way round, how does one convey through a succession of distinct incidents and events the necessary relationship that exists between them and the single novelistic whole governing their presence in the story. This novelistic whole is missing from Jean Santeuil. In La Recherche, Marcel’s long-term well-being rests with his achieving a sense of psychological unity or duration as an antidote to the fragmented, discreet images that are all Marcel retains of his past in memory. Lack of a sense of unity with the self prevents Marcel from recognizing a connection between who he is in the present and each of the individual identities he has occupied in the past. For Proust, writing a novel in which he had so many things to say on so many different subjects required the strongest possible source of conceptual unity for all these topics to be contained in a novelistic whole. Finding or creating a unifying concept was essential, then, for his project to succeed. Proust’s need for conceptual unity is replicated in Marcel’s search for spiritual unity. The

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6 two are interdependent. Based on the concept of the fourth dimension, Proust’s figuration of the dimension of Time as the repository of all ones’ conscious and unconscious experience satisfied his need for a unifying concept for his work. For Marcel, the dimension of Time will offer him a window on the self from which to begin writing his book. Proust’s search for unity commenced in 1908 with the conception of an ambitious and creatively complex proposal for a book he was preparing to write. The project he conceived was to pair ruminations and commentary on criticism, particularly the criticism of the mid-nineteenth century literary critic CharlesAugustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–69), against whose views Proust bridled, with a fictional rendering of what we can call the domestic side of creative practice, namely at the moment a young writer sees his work in print for the first time and discusses it with his mother. The project would deal, at least in part, with art’s public reception. The powerful but flawed point of view of a critic who found in a writer’s social personality traits bearing on the quality of the writer’s work would be countered by the initial, emotionally charged response of a newlyminted author to seeing his work in print for the first time. Proust could speak knowingly from both positions. By this point in his career, he had been writing commentary and criticism, and seeing his work in print, for more than twenty years, since his days as a student at the Lycée Condorcet where he participated in the writing and production of a series of short-lived little magazines he and his friends put together one after another. In conceiving a dialectical program for a project in which fiction and critical thinking would commingle in a discussion of art’s reception, Proust admitted into his creative process a degree of open-endedness with respect to his conclusion. By contrast, writing a story or a novel in which a dialectical component was never part of the program, or in which the tension between opposing points of view has been resolved beforehand into a final statement, relies on an event or this dialectical conclusion which, lodged in the past, provides both the impulse for writing and the conclusion toward which the story moves. Proust had no end toward which to direct his writing when he started working in the fall of 1908. Following Proust’s progress to achieving directionality in his work makes evident the link between Proust’s and Marcel’s creative empowerment. Once Proust launched his project, it quickly spread beyond his initial conception for it. He began touching on a number of subjects that had interested him for a long time. These included memory, society and social relations, the faithful servant, homosexuality, and love. Their inclusion suggests that Proust may have been losing his focus. But in creative practice it is not unusual for an

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7 artist undertaking a large or complex project to grope for footing when getting started, even if he or she has a conclusion in sight. Given Proust’s experience as a writer and the problem he had set out to investigate; given his fascination with the aristocracy and the sense of urgency accompanying his middle-aged concern over being able to complete the work he envisioned before dying ,11 we can view these early peregrinations as way-finding. When, in early January 1909, Proust experienced an involuntary memory precipitated by his tasting a bit of toast soaked in tea yet another element was introduced into the mix of topics he was thinking and writing about. Through involuntary memory Proust gained access to an experience so deeply buried within him that, prior to the déjà vu which drew the experience out of his unconscious, he had had no way of knowing it was there. His déjà vu brought the experience close enough to consciousness for him to grasp the memory the sensation of tasting the tea-soaked bite of toast had released within him. The revelation was provocative. It struck him that within him there were memories inaccessible to voluntary recall. In the novel Marcel’s referable memories, those composing the past he could access at will and voluntarily, are as static as snapshots. They give him no sense of having lived the past they pictured. His experiences with déjà vu and involuntary memory, on the other hand, did. For Proust, resolving the conundrum this distinction posed was worth thinking about. The importance of involuntary memory to the concept of the dimension of Time on which the novel is based reflects the knowledge Proust gained concerning the contribution of the sensory unconscious to psychological duration. The event that precipitated the emergence of Proust’s concept of the dimension of Time coincided with a break and recommencement in Proust’s writing in late May or early June 1909. 12 Anthony Pugh exhaustively chronicled the period from 1908 to 1914 in two books covering the birth and growth of La Recherche .13 Pugh finds evidence for inspiration in this break, corroborating assertions many commentators have advanced over the years. Their point of agreement has always centered on the fact that after this event (the stopping and starting over) Proust’s writing became powerful and even economical in the way it now carried more than it had before. We can credit this capacity of his writing to convey greater levels of meaning to the presence of the unifying concept of the dimension of Time. We are going to review the positions held by many of these commentators on this decisive period in the development of La Recherche shortly. As for identifying the catalytic agent from which conceptual unity for the work emerged, various hypotheses have been put forward over the years. In the summation following this review it will be shown that none of these hypoth-

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8 eses for the agent or vehicle that precipitated Proust’s inspiration is satisfactory in terms of the logic underlying the respective assertions, nor do any meet the criterion of profound insight which is the product of inspiration as Arthur I. Miller describes it in Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (see chapter 7).14 In writing a book of imagination rather than of fancy;15 in selecting a subject close to his own experience (that of a boy who grows up to be a writer); in presenting his novel in the form of a bildungsroman we can see, without nominating Marcel the surrogate of Proust or blurring the distinction maintained throughout this text between Proust and Marcel, that in terms of the making of an artist we have here the double story to consider we noted earlier. For Proust became an artist of the first order with the inception of La Recherche. And over the course of the novel Marcel becomes an artist, too.16 Before we take up our consideration of Proust’s and Marcel’s creative development and empowerment we need to step back for a moment to note how Proust manipulated his story to heighten the impact the conclusion his account of Marcel’s becoming a writer has on readers. As noted earlier, this sleight of hand involves the ruse of authorship. After our initial acceptance that Marcel authored the book we are reading Proust goes on to instill and encourage readers’ doubts that Marcel’s youthful desire to be a writer will bear fruit. Even with the novel as evidence before us—it appears like the rabbit plucked from a hat—the issue of authorship diminishes in relation to readers’ increasing interest in the novel as an expository narrative of love, friendship, and social success. These stories absorb our attention and continue to do so for nearly two thousand pages of text until the events that unfold on the afternoon of the Princesse de Guermantes’ matinée in Le Temps retrouvé, the final volume of the novel, bring the subject of the creative development and empowerment of an artist back to center stage. Readers who have stayed with the novel this far can be excused for having lost interest in the story line of the growth of an incipient artist. For one thing, the narrative of the making of an artist is never identified as a story line in the novel. Thus readers could be expected to have lost interest in Marcel’s intention to become a writer. And by the time they reach this last volume they can feel justified in beginning to find the novel’s obsessive despair and highly nuanced social commentary tedious. Not until the end of Le Temps retrouvé do readers learn this dateless history trending toward a lamentable conclusion in frustrated desire has really been, all along, a tale of the psychological development of an individual to the point of artistic empowerment. In telling his story this way, Proust sets Marcel apart from Lucien Chardon (de Rubempré) and all the Frenhofers, Rudolfos, Lamberts, Stel-

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9 los, Des Esseintes’, and Frédéric Moreaus:17 artists, would-be artists, and dreamers who populated the bohemias and salons of nineteenth-century fiction. The presence of these characters in the minds of Proust’s contemporary readers would have offered them further cause to dismiss Marcel’s interest in writing as mere talk. The well-documented, colorful/tragic lives of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Stéphen Mallarmé, and many others would have done the same. The impression today’s reader holds through most of the novel as Marcel pursues love, friendship, and social success is of a precious, socially adept but emotionally crippled dilettante incapable of the effort writing requires. For much of the novel he seems to be reprising Swann’s social ascent while falling into the same kind of jealous love for a woman that had characterized Swann’s affair with Odette. That there might be more than youthful infatuation in Marcel’s interest in writing is suggested by Proust’s use of the term vocation. The word appears twice in the third volume of the novel, Le Côté de Guermantes.18 The second appearance draws attention to the fact that the book we are reading is the history of the development of this vocation, but most readers miss it. Other clues appeared earlier. In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the novel’s second volume, the writer Bergotte and the painter Elstir—masters in their respective arts—recognize Marcel’s perceptive acuity and artistic sensibility. The foppish engineer/ poet Legrandin also recognized these traits when he spoke so poetically to Marcel of these qualities in Du côté de chez Swann.19 Most readers know characters like Legrandin, and they know there are many exquisite young men and women in the world, most of whom never accomplish anything. Thus readers cannot be faulted for concluding that Marcel’s refinement and discernment in observation, coupled with his desire to be a writer, do not add up to very much. Losing interest in the matter, most of us accept his relation to the text as its putative author as a literary device and let it go at that. His worldly ambitions, then, and his continuing interest in anomalous psychic events, and his thoughts on art, love, social relationships and friendship are what continue to sustain our interest. And they do. Nonetheless, it is a relief when Proust finally draws back the curtain and readers see that all the while this tale of love, jealousy, loss, and resignation has really been the story of the making of an artist. Gérard Genette finds a parallel to this kind of interior growth masked by worldly striving and ambition in certain forms of religious literature, particularly the Confessions of Saint Augustine, where the narrator does not know anymore than Proust’s hero of what is in store for him.20 The word vocation and mention of the name of St. Augustine point to the

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10 subliminal insistence with which Marcel’s creative development unrolls, even if many readers have lost sight of it. In both French and English the word vocation is preponderantly associated with a calling to or a penchant for a task. A vocation supercharges what otherwise might be ordinary professional aspiration with something like religious purpose.21 This is in fact how James defines personal religion in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James calls personal religion an individual’s total reaction to life.22 “Reaction” is James’ word in these paraphrased comments. He differentiates total reactions from casual reactions to life. The mention of religion and the fact that Proust makes use of a psychical anomaly to resolve his novel would seem to allow mysticism and the supernatural—both popular in Proust’s day—a place in our discussion. But just as James might have done, we set them aside. Removing mysticism and the supernatural from psychically anomalous experiences permits these experiences to be looked at and analyzed as phenomena purely and simply. In both The Varieties of Religious Experience and in The Principles of Psychology James considers odd psychic events the result of a psycho/physiological progression. Many of the quirky experiences that can punctuate an individual’s day-to-day psychical operations, certainly those we are talking about here, are the product of such progressions. Factors inducing them include mental exhaustion, stress, anxiety, and illness.23 These conditions can lead to neural impulses going awry or an increased susceptibility to something from one’s subconscious being roused by external stimulation and piercing consciousness. How an individual responds to these experiences and whether and how she or he chooses to approach and develop similar psychic events in the future determine the terminology applicable to the situation. If one’s curiosity is excited by such experiences and they are viewed as analyzable or decipherable they are organic, not mystical. On the other hand, if one surrenders to them unquestioningly the experiences will likely be attributed to the supernatural or otherworldly. Much of the case material documented in The Varieties deals with religious experience and would seem to be mystical experiences par excellence. For this reason studying them was eschewed by many investigators in the late nineteenth century. Many early psychologists were biased against the subjectivity of such experiences. James rendered the material suitable for study by semantically disengaging religion from what he saw as only nominally religious phenomena. “Religious melancholy, whatever peculiarities it may have qua religious, is at any rate melancholy. Religious happiness is happiness. Religious trance is trance.” 24 [James’s italics] By this deft stroke, James gained a wealth of material to study which less sure investigators had largely dismissed as scientifically obscure and

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11 intellectually suspect. In chapter 2 we will look at Marcel’s experiences of sensory resonance, déjà vu, and involuntary memory in this Jamesian light. Having established the direction of this work, we are ready to turn to the subject of inspiration. In his book on Einstein and Picasso, Arthur I. Miller considers the subject. He outlines a sequence of events remarkably like the sequence of events leading to an involuntary memory (see chapters 2 and 7). This sequence, as will be shown, begins when the action of some catalytic agent presents already known facts in a new light, permitting the perception of a deeper understanding of a matter at hand than had formerly been possible.25 Inspiration is the result of thoughts suddenly juxtaposed in combinations that open the way for completely new relationships to be perceived. With the above as prologue, we are ready to consider various commentators’ thoughts on inspiration and Proust’s novel and various hypotheses that have been proposed identifying the catalytic element in Proust’s inspiration that enabled him in late May or early June 1909 to start over on the project he had begun in 1908. We will begin with André Maurois. Maurois’ biography of Proust appeared in its original French edition in 1950.26 The trove of material discovered, edited, and published as Jean Santeuil and Contre Sainte-Beuve was published a few years later, in 1952 and 1954 respectively. In his biography, Maurois addresses the question of inspiration by saying that “…almost certainly, an experience of sudden illumination” set Proust to work.27 And he accepts the event in the novel of the involuntary memory roused by the bit of madeleine dipped in tea as crucial to Marcel’s awakening understanding of self and time. Conflating Proust with Marcel in his text to a degree no longer credible in Proust scholarship, Maurois says that “no writer until Proust had thought of making the complex, sensation-memory into the essential material of his work.” 28 In identifying what Maurois calls the essential theme of the novel—“the struggle waged by the Spirit of Man with Time”— Maurois finds the subject of it to be “the impossibility of finding in ‘actual’ life a fixed point to which the self can cling” 29 (Maurois’ italics). If we replace “Spirit of Man” with “self ” we find the self the point to which Maurois’s conflated Proust/Marcel is led. Accepting this makes it possible for readers to appreciate the functional authority and authenticity that the self provides in grounding us in time. In identifying this theme and linking it to involuntary memory Maurois, without making a statement about the actual source of Proust’s inspiration, identifies inspiration’s defining relationship: that which takes place between the event and the knowledge gained from it. For Maurois identifies the madeleine experience of Proust/Marcel with a psychic event that precedes Proust’s/

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12 Marcel’s interpretation of the meaning of this event, which itself is an insight into the relationship of the self to time and memory. Thus Maurois, perhaps unknowingly, makes a claim on inspiration’s potentiality. Germaine Brée’s Marcel Proust and the Deliverance from Time also appeared in its original French edition in 1950.30 Unlike Maurois, Brée treats Proust and Marcel as separate entities. Like Maurois, Brée averts the issue of inspiration. At the time Brée was writing, the tea and toast episode of January 1909 still lay hidden in Proust’s undiscovered papers. Brée’s second chapter concerns itself with the revelation at the Princesse de Guermantes’ matinée at the end of the novel. The sequence of involuntary memories Marcel experiences in the library are not seen as linked to experiences Proust himself may have had. Brée treats Marcel’s involuntary memories as Proust’s means of resolving Marcel’s continuing failure to embark on a vocation.31 The earlier scene with the madeleine is Proust’s vehicle for “presenting his world in the double perspective which is so fundamental to his design.” 32 Thus Marcel’s inspiration in Le Temps retrouvé remains a novelistic device which expresses what Brée acknowledges as the interior/exterior progression we mentioned earlier “that relates the work of art to the world through the medium of individual experience,” 33 in this case Marcel’s. In his 1959 biography of Proust, George Painter does address inspiration in acknowledging Proust’s sudden empowerment as a writer. Painter lays out a hypothesis for Proust’s creative empowerment. He starts by comparing the Proust of 1908 with Marcel’s position prior to his transformation in the prince’s library. Painter refers to them both in similiar terms inasmuch as Proust still had not begun his major work at the time.34 Aided by the material relating to Proust’s involuntary memory in Contre Sainte-Beuve, Painter begins with the tea and toast episode in January 1909. Painter goes on to say that in January Proust had only seen his involuntary memory as a sign of his present thoughts rather than as the “missing key” 35 to the “hidden door” 36 of an inner reality which he would find in solving the “riddle of unconscious memory.” 37 Painter admits the identity of the true missing key remains an “impenetrable mystery” 38 while Proust’s revelation, manifest in La Recherche, is not. Painter goes on to ascribe Proust’s inspiration to a sense of personal redemption. Drawing a moral precept into a discussion of inspiration over-determines Painter’s hypothesis. Nonetheless, Painter firmly accepts inspiration as impacting Proust’s inception of La Recherche. The title of the present chapter references Philip Kolb’s assertion, in his introduction to Le Carnet de 1908, that Proust’s life was marked by un moment décisif in which, through inspiration, Proust found the means to begin writing La

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13 Recherche.39 He goes on to say that up until the present time (1976) no one had offered a proof of this widespread belief. Kolb suggests it is hard to doubt that Marcel’s experience in Le Temps retrouvé is not a transposition of Proust’s own experience in this decisive moment. Kolb goes on to emphasize Proust’s use of an elaborate notebook given to him by his good friend, Mme Strauss, as a New Years gift in January, 1908. This notebook is known in Proust studies as the Carnet of 1908. It is the subject of Kolb’s eponymously titled book. In his book, Kolb notes a somewhat tenuous connection between Proust and his illumination and the Memorial of the seventeenth century French mathematician and thinker, Blaise Pascal. The Mémorial is a scrap of paper that was found in a pocket of Pascal’s coat after he died. On it Pascal records an experience something like illumination which occurred to him one night in 1754. Twenty years later the issue of inspiration and Proust was still unresolved, even as the discourse had changed. Julia Kristeva alludes to inspiration in posing the question, “[W]hat exactly took place between Proust’s first response against Sainte-Beuve (1905) and the birth of his projected novel (1909)?” 40 She then looks at Le Temps retrouvé for the answer, as Painter did. Kristeva draws attention to the passage in this final volume that begins with Marcel’s realization that the material for his work of literature was simply his past life.41 We know how this past life became known to Marcel. As for Proust, Kristeva reminds us of the stumbling block still obstructing his progress in 1908. And she suggests in her poetic fashion that a similar coming-to-knowing had helped Proust overcome it.42 We come now to William Carter’s biography,43 which we will look at it in tandem with the biography of Proust by Jean-Yves Tadié.44 Both appeared in English in 2000. Once again the issue of inspiration is side-stepped if not wholly ignored. Carter notes that Marcel’s discovery of his vocation as a writer does not appear in the drafts that comprise Contre Sainte-Beuve. 45 Yet Carter states that it was while denouncing the critic that Proust discovered the value of his own experience to the book he was trying to write.46 Carter had stated earlier that Proust’s identity crisis was his most agonizing problem as an artist.47 He goes on to say that until Proust found his story line, he did not know how to write it.48 Carter, like Kristeva, finds the conscious, willful beginning of the novel to be when Proust realized the story of his own life could be the basis for a work of fiction.49 Carter goes on to note two events from late 1908 that indicate to him Proust’s outlook on the world had become more highly charged than previously. One was a feisty letter to Proust’s confidant and social benefactress Mme. Strauss, the same who had given him the carnet that became the subject

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14 of Kolb’s study. This letter is dated 6 November.50 Carter says mysteriously that something had happened to or in Proust to prompt him to write so boldly. It was about this time that Proust bought the large number of school notebooks (cahiers) in which the novel would develop the following spring.51 Tadié represents the opposite view from those who trace the origin of La Recherche to inspiration. Tadié nonetheless allows the language of possibility to enter his text in two places. Firstly, he mentions the year 1908 as the year “everything changed.” 52 In the second instance he comments on the day around the time Proust bought the cahiers when the nature of Proust’s work was “transformed.” 53 Rather than presenting these statements as opportunities to tell readers something about this process of transformation, Tadié preempts the need for explanation with two comments concerning Proust’s greatness as a writer 54 while referring separately to Proust’s brilliance.55 Tadié relies on the mesmerizing influence of greatness to bring readers to his way of thinking. (Tadié’s response to the reception of Du côté de chez Swann by André Gide is discussed at length in chapter 6.) Citing Tadié, Joshua Landy, claims there is no need to take the episode of the tea and toast in Contre Sainte-Beuve as an experience of Proust’s own,56 thus denying the efficacy of the first link in a chain that eventually led to Proust’s ability to write his novel. We now turn to Anthony Pugh and the timeline he constructed of Proust’s progress toward the novel in his book The Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu. We see Pugh starting his analysis with cahier 4 (Bibliothèque Nationale catalogue number nouvelle acquisitions françaises [n.a.f.] 16644), which Proust took up in May 1909,57 writing in it upside down.58 Pugh pays special attention to Proust’s mention of psychically disjunctive incidents of déjà vu/involuntary memory in the notebooks, the first one of significance being Proust’s mention of the paving stones recalling the baptistery in Venice in September 1908 which, Pugh notes, Maurice Bardèche promotes as the moment of revelation for Proust.59 Pugh goes on to say a few pages later that Proust held a conviction at the time that there was, lurking somewhere, a meaning to be brought into the open.” 60 Did he find it in the tea and cake episode of January? Pugh, like Painter, thinks not, but he agrees with Painter on the dating of this event.61 Pugh goes on to say that something did happen the following spring which with more justification could be called illumination.62 Pugh places Proust’s inspiration at a point in the spring where Proust is “more concerned with evoking the world of childhood than with the narrator in the present. It is while he elaborates this world that its unity becomes apparent.” 63 In his discussion of inspiration Pugh notes that Claudine Quémar believed it was with the adoption of the name Guermantes

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15 that Proust’s novel suddenly found the unifying structure which allowed Proust to develop his text without having to keep it so “manifestly symmetrical.” 64 Pugh counters Quémar without actually disqualifying her supposition by saying that “unifying” names had been imposed “on fragments of Jean Santeuil without affecting any kind of poetic miracle.” 65 In summation we can say that it is highly probable that Proust experienced inspiration shortly before he began writing La Recherche in the late spring of 1909. Such words and phrases as illumination, transformation, revelation, and the ambiguous “something happened” used by the commentators cited above are evidence of their belief in the likelihood of this event or something like it—un moment décisif. Even Tadié employed a vocabulary that infers something similar. Consensus breaks down, however, when naming the agent responsible for Proust’s inspiration. The following can be drawn from the observations and opinions expressed above:





1. An event occurred in Proust’s thought through which he found a unifying concept for the writing he was doing at the time. 2. This event can be equated with inspiration. 3. It caused him to stop and start over the work he was doing. 4. The catalyst for Proust’s inspiration has remained conjectural, the possibilities numerous.

We have seen a number of possibilities for the agent of Proust’s inspiration proposed. That number can be reduced immediately by removing the name Guermantes from our consideration (Quémar’s suggestion). A proper name does not meet the criterion of profound insight consistent with inspiration. By the same token we can eliminate Painter’s suggestion of redemption. Redemption can have a catalytic origin. It can precipitate a state of self-acceptance through reconciling an individual with her or his past. But redemption is consummately an end. Inspiration is a beginning. Finally, in Proust’s case, realizing one’s own life to be the subject for one’s novel fails the test of transformational event inasmuch as Proust had been writing about himself in one form or another all his life. If the agent was none of these, what prompted Proust’s illumination? The present work proposes the concept of the fourth dimension as this catalytic agent. As a metaphoric vehicle it enabled Proust to see Time as the repository for all one’s lived experience. The dimension of Time, a psychological construct co-extensive with the self, provided the foundation for the book Proust wrote.

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Chapter 1 Proustian Idealism A Maxim of Marcel Proust Proust bases a critique of art in La Recherche on an artwork’s capacity to convey through form some part of the deeply interior truth of experience that is shaping or has shaped the self of the artist. Examples of this capacity were cited in the introduction. The communicative arc Proust’s critique defines recognizes the protean quality of invention that goes into the making of the artwork and the essential communication conveyed through it. In Proust’s novel art is not alone in providing a medium for imagination or fancy to play upon, through which is expressed some truth internal to the motivation that is the source of a form’s appearance. Lies do the same. A medium of communication—a language of some sort—can be considered a bridge facilitating the exchange of ideas between individuals as speakers and auditors. Speaker, auditor, and language form a communicative triad. In bridge communication individuals make use of the bridge to speak and listen to one another. Communication flows in both directions. Participation is unconditional for anyone conversant in the language. Unconditional participation is not the only mode in which communicative interactions takes place however. There are forms of communication in which conditions apply and for which the bridge metaphor is not applicable. Of these specialized forms, arc communication recognizes the imbalance that exists for a communicative triad that is hierarchical and performative. A hierarchy is established when an individual preempts the medium of communication for his or her own use. He or she becomes the originator of communication. For the purposes of this discussion, we will designate the originator of the communication in this communicative arc the artist. The artist controls communication through his or productive capacity as an art-maker. In arc communication the medium of communication is objectified. The reception of the communication is formalized for the viewer—the third party in the triad—through this objectification. Guidelines govern a viewers approach to the object. These guidelines conventionalize the scheme of viewership. The principal consideration to keep in mind in arc communication is that the object occupies the high point of the arc, thus the term arc communication. In art, this object is the artwork. In a lie, it is the tale told. As a carefully produced performative statement where the artist is far removed from the viewer spatially, temporally, or both, the impact of the object on the viewer is greater than the impact of the artist can be because of the distance separating the two. We read Proust’s novel, but Proust is dead. Even in situations where the artist and viewer are

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18 together, as is sometimes the case with the lies told in La Recherche, the viewer is blocked by the lie from communicating directly with the artist/liar. The lies told Marcel by Albertine, for example, stop him in his tracks. They disorient him and momentarily deny him an ability to confront her about them. The inaccessibility of the artist notwithstanding, the power exerted over a viewer by the object in arc communication is dependent on the skill of the artist who produced it. It is the artist’s ability that determines the effectiveness of the object. In La Prisonnière Marcel speaks of an unnamed member of the band of girls with whom Albertine associated. This particular girl lies with considerable finesse. Cette jeune fille était, au point de vue de la fable, supérieure à Albertine, car elle n’y mêlait aucun des moments douloureux, des sous-entendus rageurs qui étaient fréquents chez mon amie. J’ai dit pourtant qu’elle était charmante quand elle inventait un récit qui ne laissait pas de place au doute, car on voyait alors devant soi la chose—pourtant imaginée—qu’elle disait, en se servant comme vue de sa parole. C’était ma vraie perception. G (LP), p. 1746. [This girl was, from the point of view of story-telling, superior to Albertine, for her narrative was never interspersed with those painful moments, those furious innuendoes, which were frequent with my mistress. The latter was however charming, as I have said, when she invented a story which left no room for doubt, for one saw then in front of one the thing—albeit imaginary—which she was describing, through the eyes, as it were, of her words.] SLT (V), p. 251.

This young woman’s lies are highly evocative tableaux. Their effectiveness reflects the investment artists make in the objects they create.1 The all-consuming concern for the artist is the book, the musical composition, the sculpture—the lie—or it can be an image produced to feed one’s desire. This object is the focus of what is, during the making of it, an internal communicative arc. This internal communicative arc engages the artist’s creative sensibility prior to the break that occurs with the completion of the object— after which the intimacy of production diminishes more or less rapidly. In La Recherche, where for reasons of ill-health Marcel is prevented from traveling; where, because of his age, social position, or lack of personal magnetism he is slow to possess the women he is attracted to, he nourishes his un-consummatory desire through the images he attaches to names. They become fetishes set at the apex of arcs of interior communication Marcel both fashions and savors. Internal forms of arc communication allow the creative process to redouble its contribution to the formation of the object produced. Interpersonal forms of arc communication, on the other hand, only become operational once the object

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19 has been put on view. We are going to look at a particular maxim embedded in Proust’s text through the model offered by arc communication. The reason for this is simple. The artist-object-viewer relationship replicates the Idea-formviewer idealism recognizable in this maxim. Proust’s Maxim:2 La beauté des images est logée à l’arrière des choses, celle des idées à l’avant. De sorte que la première cesse de nous émerveiller quand on les a atteintes, mais qu’on ne comprend la seconde que quand on les a dépassées. G (TR), pp.2312-13 [The beauty of images is lodged behind things, that of Ideas in front of them. Thus the first ceases to impress us when we reach them (things), whereas one only understands the beauty of Ideas when one has gone beyond things.] Author’s translation

A maxim is the product of an intellectual reduction. The process is irreversible and the product retains no trace of the material from which it was derived. Apart from the idealism that is the subject of Proust’s maxim, the form a maxim takes reflects the tripartite structure of arc communication. Encountering a maxim, readers have only the maxim to respond to. Grasping the general truth in this one is difficult. The meaning is not clear in the tricky syntax of the French original. English translators for the most part do not seem to have succeeded in sorting out the French before translating it.3 In consequence they miss the maxim’s idealism, a philosophical disposition consistent with the point of view taken by the novel that is apparent if one sees both appearances of the article les in the second sentence of the maxim as referring to the noun choses in the first sentence rather then to the nouns images and idées in the first. Parsing is one technique available to viewers to glean insight into the object in arc communication. Viewers of this particular maxim would be helped by having access to the source from which the maxim was derived. This same rationale applies whenever a viewer seeks to understand a work of art more fully by seeking details of the context out of which an artist produced the artwork. (This is the reason we will be looking at modernity, neurophysiology, and the history of the fourth dimension in the present work.) Gaining access to the source of Proust’s maxim would, in effect, reconstitute the experiential matter from which the maxim was distilled. Proust’s text does not help here, however. The maxim concludes a paragraph on the invisibility of aging in people we see all the time and the consequent ineffectiveness of the words that describe aging to bring aging’s effect to our attention. The connection between text and maxim seems tenuous. Thus readers must rely on other means to gain access to a fuller understanding of this maxim. To this end, we are going to approach the maxim through setting up a

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20 syllogism. A syllogism exists midway between life—the experiential source for all forms of cognitive activity—and the legalistic asperity of a maxim. Since this particular maxim is idealist and since idealism expresses a three part Idea-formviewer progression, selecting a situation that incorporates a three part progression should help enhance our understanding of this maxim. The situation we will work from will be Marcel’s habit of nourishing desire through names. Working from an experiential generality about names and images to a major premise, and working from an experiential generality about essential communication and intentionality to a minor one permits us to draw a conclusion. This conclusion will be the product of a reduction of Marcel’s experience with names. It will be a logical one. Further reduction would yield a maxim and a general truth similar to the truth in Proust’s maxim. With the maxim’s idealism having been made evident, in the second part of this chapter we will define various terms used throughout this text. We will then turn the maxim inside out. Doing so will reveal its connection to the riddle Marcel must solve to realize himself a writer/artist. The answer to this riddle supplies the Romantic precept of the origin of art in the self of the artist with the proof mentioned in the introduction. Movement swirls around, over, and under “les choses,” the “things” that stand between the antipodes of images and Ideas in Proust’s maxim. With “things” at the center of it, Ideas serve as the maxim’s generative source while the perception of beauty identifies the responsive participation of a viewer. Our access to Marcel’s habit to nourishing desire through names is an advantage here. Neither art nor lies, other forms of arc communication mentioned above, offer this perspective in the context of the novel. Our understanding of the internal workings of the bona fide masters in La Recherche is limited to Marcel’s interpretations of their processes of creation. We do not hear from the artists themselves. And readers have no access to the internal working of Albertine’s inventions.4 Access to processes of fabrication is critical in drawing forth a syllogism that points the way to Proust’s maxim. Names circulate freely in a language. They are public commodities. Anyone who comes in contact with them can use them. Gossip thrives. Names goad Marcel in his dreams to possess this girl or that woman or to break free from the life he knows for places, such as the city of Florence, which he imagines more entrancing than they could ever possibly be in fact. The process begins for him with the associations that accompany Marcel’s first meaningful encounter with a name.5 Strengthening the impression a name makes on Marcel is the way it looks when written and/or sounds when spoken. Marcel’s fascination with the Swann family only finally firmly settles on Gilberte when he sees the luxuriant

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21 way her signature sprawls over the rest of the message at the bottom of a note inviting him to tea. Marcel’s attraction to names is thus a highly charged means of possessing what he longs to possess. The sensuous and erotic pleasure Marcel feels from names extends to pronouncing them. Briefly holding the name of his imagined lover in his mouth, the laryngeal and buccal sensations accompanying his saying the name aloud becomes a form of oral pleasuring. As for the great love of his life, Albertine, we will see shortly that it was a word he associates with her sexual preferences and not her name that rouses him and fills his mind with intriguing images of love. In constructing our syllogism, however, we will use Marcel’s vicarious relationship with the duchesse de Guermantes as the experiential generality from which its major premise will be drawn. Long before the wedding of Dr. Percepied’s daughter, during which Marcel sees the duchesse de Guermantes for the first time, he carried an image of her in his mind. A product of words, Marcel crafted his image from stories that included reference to her or to Guermantes generally he listened to in the safety of the family circle. But more particularly his image developed from stories told by Dr. Percepied himself and from a picture of the duchess the doctor had shown him.6 These stories were the basis for innocuous fantasies of friendship with Mme de Guermantes he invented. In them he saw himself fishing for trout with her on the river Vivonne and being taught by her the names of flowers, pardonably ridiculous expressions of his desire to be admired and be loved by a woman at least twenty years older than he is.7 Following the amatory pattern set with his pre-pubescent infatuation with Mme de Guermantes, all Marcel’s love affairs, or the ones he images, are excited by fantasy. They flourish on subjective imagination, a fallacy of mental love-making. As he grows into early manhood his fantasies take on outré sexual overtones. But however Marcel thinks about the women he desires, the actual life of the woman he is pursuing at the moment is ignored in the fantasy he invents. Thus fantasy contributes to his failures in love. Marcel acknowledges as much in Le Côté de Guermantes. He says of his missed assignation with Mme de Stermaria: “C’est la terrible tromperie de l’amour qu’il commence par nous faire jouer avec une femme non du monde extérieur, mais avec une poupée intérieure à notre cerveau.”(G (CG), p. 1033) [It is the terrible deception of love that it begins by engaging us in play not with a woman of the outside world but with a doll inside our brain.] (SLT (III), p. 507) Marcel is not, with this admission, seeking to reform his approach to love. He is acknowledging a predilection. It is one he has no wish to suppress even if the solipsistic nature of it hobbles his success with real women. Thus his admission should be read as a declaration of his intention to continue to love as he does.

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22 The keenly-felt joys and sorrows which raise him to exquisite pitches of emotion during the most heated period of his pursuits are sensations worth savoring in themselves regardless of their side-effects. And experience has given him no assurance that women free of fantasy offer better. At the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe, the fourth volume of La Recherche, at a point where the novel seems to have no place to go, a revelation by Albertine rouses Marcel from indifference to her. The name that blooms miraculously in his mind on hearing her boast of a friendship with the actress Léa whom Marcel had seen passionately embracing Mlle. Vinteuil at Montjouvain years earlier, is one we never hear: lesbian. Lesbianism spawns fantasies Marcel exults in. They remain private however. Readers know nothing of them. Nevertheless they are the propellant that drives the novel forward in the fifth and sixth volumes of the novel, La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue. The major premise of our syllogism can be deduced from Marcel’s actions: individuals hold images in mind. Our minor premise turns on the “thingness” of things. In Book 10 of The Republic Plato alludes to this characteristic of beings and inanimate objects when he addresses mimesis. Plato describes a three-part mimetic hierarchy which begins with a God-created original or ideal form. Thingness extends to the copy of this ideal form by reason of the Idea that is the cause of its realization. In The Republic, Plato uses a bed and a table as his examples. These objects of everyday use are manifestations of the bedness or tableness inherent in them (whereas a drawing of a bed or table, the third mimetic level in Plato’s hierarchy, would not share this quality). Bedness and tableness are ideational to the object in the same way that storytelling is ideational to La Recherche. Scientists have identified inherent structural characteristics of crystals and atoms. And the genetic code is a matter of fact. Atomic and crystalline structure and the genetic code are different from the bedness of a bed Plato speaks of. Bedness is recognized by a beholder in an assemblage of parts familiar from past experience with beds. Use, utility, and potentiality are posited in our encounter with beings and things through our faculties of intuition, imagination, and invention. Sense data inform all three. They are registered through our organs of sense: the eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin, and transmitted to the brain where the mind makes use of them. Originating outside us in the world of beings and things, beingness and thingness is recognized by us at some unarticulable level of understanding. Such recognition is different from Marcel’s belief that a relationship with the duchess is possible. Marcel’s desire to have relations with her is a willed, articulable determination. To anticipate a statement by Edmund Husserl cited in the next chapter, perception of an essential quality of beingness or thingness (intentionality in Hus-

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23 serl’s terminology) is not a one-sided fantasy of an observer/viewer. As Husserl notes, the presence of a meaning-bestowing level (Husserl uses the term strata) in perception is related to the intentionality of the object itself; nothing is put into such experiences that is not conveyed in the essence of the object encountered and absorbed through perception.8 As something real, intuitive understanding is largely predicated on suppositions of intentionality. This leads to our minor premise: essential qualities of beings and things are expressed through intentionality. Marcel’s image of the duchess originated with the duchess just as his suspicions of Albertine’s lesbianism originated in Albertine’s sexuality. One can thus identify a relationship between Marcel’s image of Mme de Guermantes and Mme de Guermantes herself even if she is unaware of it. The relationship is possible due to the presence of her name in Marcel’s thought. The same holds true of his suspicions of Albertine’s sexual proclivities. Our minor premise makes a claim supporting the connection between intentionality and objective presence. In both cases we can deduce the presence of a communicative continuum between an image in mind and the beingness or thingness that is its source. Image, individual, and Idea are linked through intentionality. Ergo: a connection exists between the image of a being or thing a viewer holds in mind and the Idea animating that being or thing for which physical presence is the point of reference for both. This conclusion is very close to the idealism captured in Proust’s maxim. The pathway the maxim identifies between things and the Ideas behind them, and the one our syllogism elucidates, opens the way to a further insight Marcel will achieve into the nature of the self and time at the very end of the novel. That insight will manifest itself in a jumble of metaphors Marcel uses to render the dimension of Time in evocative physical terms. They present readers a forceful, albeit odd, pair of images of aging as temporal extensity that is suggestive of psychological duration.9 In the introduction we pointed out that in Contre Sainte-Beuve Proust calls time a dimension of space.10 Added to the three dimensions we are familiar with—height, width, and depth—time necessarily becomes the fourth dimension. But the dimension of Time does not refer to clock time. Neither does it refer to the time of the moment, or ontic time. Rather, Proust is referring to ontological time. Ontological time is an experiential trace. It is time in the moment (ontic time) incorporated in the bodies of being and things as a progressive augmentation and alteration of them through growth and decline in a process of becoming that affects all matter in the presence of time. In the present work, ontological time is represented by the word “time” spelled with a capital T. In all that follows, Time with the capital T refers to ontological time except where

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24 the word appears as the first word of a sentence, where the context will suggest its meaning. Ontological time is the no-longer time of past becoming. We will discuss these various expressions of time when we look at it more thoroughly in chapter 6. The warm familiarity most of us feel in reminiscence assures us of the inimitability of our memories. The immediacy of the emotions that fill us preserves our sense of psychological continuity with our past. Psychological continuity, the sense of occupying a single continuous past forever lengthening with the onward flow of the present came under assault in the West in the nineteenth century with change and the increasingly rapid pace of it. Coupled with the intellectual foment of Modernity—a historical period defined in the preface as lasting some two hundred years—change brought about by the Industrial Revolution fractured the generationally seamless homogeneity of village life and artisanal production into a heterogeneous sequence of increasingly urban experiences in which workers vied for positions in factories producing machine-made goods. Compounding the impact of these forces, the technological revolution fueling progress made adapting oneself to the new necessary for the way life was coming to be lived. The point we are making here is that change effected social norms and institutions, cultural hegemony, agricultural practice, and the use of the natural environment. The result was a deterioration of individuals’ psychological stability, especially for those caught in the flux, which was almost everyone. We will discuss these forces at greater length in chapter 3. Psychological instability is reflected in Marcel in the way he viewed his referable memories. They were like the snapshots that had become ubiquitous by the end of the nineteenth century. They left him with no sense of having been part of the scenes depicted even if the boy or young man he looked at in them he knew to be himself. For cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, old photographs provide “not knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment; what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her.”11 In other words, no self is present; it is the last thing one can subtract from a person yet it can only be taken away with life itself. With conscious memory closed as an avenue to maintaining psychological continuity, Marcel was forced to look elsewhere for it. As readers know, Marcel eventually finds stability in the self through the sensory unconscious (see chapter 2). For the moment we can say of the sensory unconscious that it is an aspect of the self that retains the sensory traces of one’s unconscious experiencing. The sensory unconscious is Time lost in the body. Time registers as change in matter. In living bodies, change is manifest in organic process; growth and alteration equate with aging. Physiognomy incor-

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25 porates this ontological dimension of time in the three-dimensions of one’s objective presence and physical appearance. In the last pages of La Recherche it is through a metaphoric exteriorization of ontological time that Marcel narratively represents his personal insight into Time. Entering the crowded rooms of the Princesse de Guermantes’ matinée, the appearances of his acquaintances offer Marcel an opportunity to test the validity of the conception of a dimension of Time he had formulated a short while earlier in the library of the prince. This newly gained insight into the nature of the self makes it possible for Marcel to see aging as a process of always becoming: Time in the body. Time in the body reaches back to the point of origin of individuals as living beings. From this observation, Marcel obtains a proof of his insight’s validity. Marcel recognizes that the past is present in the people before him. Time in the body extends them figuratively back to their point of origin as if along a tether lengthening with the passing of time. Just as Marcel’s coming-to-knowing demonstrates his superior intuitive capacity compared to his fellow party-goers who readers see dwelling in darkness relative to Marcel’s state of enlightenment, so too, after his long absence from society readers see through him the force of time expressed in the bodies of his acquaintances. It should go without saying—but we will say it anyway— everyone reflects the physiognomic objectification of time as aging. Most of us most of the time do not think about it. But when confronted with it as Marcel is, aging shocks us. It does so as much for what it tells us about others as for what it says about us. The hallucinatory effect on him of the scene he enters reverberates symphonically beyond the pages of the novel. In a coda in which a macabre set of metaphors presents visual images of temporal extensity, readers are brought face-to-face with universal truths of life and time. It moves us profoundly. From the language of thought Marcel uses in the prince’s library to postulate the dimension of Time he shifts to colloquial language to draw attention to the fact that among the ways we generally characterize people is by referencing their age. Our doing so reflects our understanding of change and becoming as life-defining.12 In the second half of the coda Proust ratchets up the emotional impact his conclusion will have on readers by shifting modes of speech once again. This time he switches from everyday language to the broodingly folkloric: Je venais de comprendre pourquoi le duc de Guermantes, dont j’avais admiré en le regardant assis sur une chaise, combien il avait peu vieilli bien qu’il eût tellement plus d’années que moi au-dessous de lui, dès qu’il s’était levé et avait voulu se tenir debout, avait vacillé sur des jambes flageolantes comme celles de ces vieux archevêques sur lesquels il n’y a de solide que leur croix métallique et vers lesquels s’empressent des

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26 jeunes séminaristes gaillards, et ne s’était avancé qu’en tremblant comme une feuille, sur le sommet peu praticable de quatre-vingt-trois années, comme si les hommes étaient juchés sur de vivantes échasses, grandissant sans cesse, parfois plus hautes que des clochers, finissant par leur rendre la marche difficile et périlleuse, et d’où tout d’un coup ils tombaient. G (TR), p. 2401 [I understood now why it was that the Duc de Guermantes, who to my surprise, when I had seen him sitting on a chair, had seemed to me so little aged although he had so many more years beneath him than I had, had presently, when he rose to his feet and tried to stand firm upon them, swayed backwards and forwards upon legs as tottery as those of some old archbishop with nothing solid about his person but his metal crucifix, to whose support there rushes a mob of sturdy young seminarists, and had advanced with difficulty, trembling like a leaf, upon the almost unmanageable summit of his eightythree years, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both difficult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which suddenly they fall.] SLT (VI), p. 531

This passage is followed a few sentences later by another in which the same phenomenon is visualized in a startlingly different form. Marcel says of individuals that, in contrast to the restricted place they occupy in space in the present, the distant epochs their lives touch make them like “des êtres monstrueux,” giving them the proportions of titans or dinosaurs. Taken together, these comparisons create an immediate and evocative image in a reader’s mind of physical extension as an alternate state of the body which in actual life we see telescoped in physiognomy. This description gives to what is conventionally referred to in Proust scholarship as the bal des têtes—a French term for a party or ball where people wear masks or otherwise disguise their faces and heads while dressing normally—the bizarre quality of a painting by Proust’s contemporary, the Belgian artist James Ensor.13 But they do more. Fabulous and somewhat terrifying, these oddly juxtaposed images of stilts and monsters provide the rich, expressive figures which would have frightened or befuddled Marcel’s old servant Françoise had she confronted them. They make an impression on us, too. For it is with this fusillade of powerful images that the last evocative words of Proust’s book: “dans le Temps” are launched. They strike us forcefully, resonating within us long after we close the book for the last time. The final scene of the novel draws strength from the strangeness of the picture Proust paints. The aptness of his insight gives it punch. The clinically spare functionality of Proust’s maxim lends authority to this later scene. It prepares us to accept the metaphor of interior dimensionality as valid. So too, Proust’s final

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27 recapitulation of the dimension of Time is strengthened and authenticated as a universal truth by the quality of the details with which Proust, throughout the novel, individualized his characters in their everyday struggle with life. The Maxim Turned Inside-Out: A Proustian Riddle We noted in the introduction that the present work subscribes to a Jamesian notion of the self. This self is the expansive middle term of an ontic progression: being-self-identity. This notion of the self accepts the self as a response in human self-awareness to the doubt self-awareness itself gives rise to. Other terms in use in this work need to be defined also. Beingness, Platonic Ideal, and essence are three of them while intentionality was defined earlier. Beingness and Platonic Ideal refer to an outside-of-time quality of an organism’s existence. Platonic Ideal also applies to inanimate matter. Both designate a form-generating ideational constant. Beings and things exist in space and time as manifestations of the Ideal form that is the source of their appearance. Essence is communicative. Essence broadcasts the intentionality of beings and things as aura. Thus it is through essence that intentionality is discernable. Finally, becoming refers to the continuous state of development of beings and things in time. As for the terms experiencing and experience, experiencing is a process. It will be discussed in the next chapter. Experience is a fact. Having identified physical presence as the manifestation of beingness, and having identified becoming as development in time, a reader can reasonably ask with reference to an image one holds in mind with which of these two aspects of beings and things does intentionality originate: with beingness or with our continuous state of becoming?14 In La Recherche, Marcel takes up this question in reflecting on the nature of duration and authenticity. Proust uses the apparent contradiction between beingness and becoming as a riddle Marcel will have to solve in order to find the ground from which to launch himself as a writer. The riddle is the maxim turned inside-out. Proust’s riddle centers on the distinction between beingness as an outsideof-time Platonic Ideal and the self as the repository of one’s becoming. Marcel ultimately recognizes the two to be one. The riddle can be stated as follows: if intentionality is the essential expression of beingness and thingness then for an individual self-consciously reflecting on him- or herself, the outside-of-time impulse of one’s own beingness offers no ground upon which to secure one’s experiencing in time due to this ideal’s antithetical relation to space and time. In its constancy, beingness is insulated from the vicissitudes which drive each of us to seek an authoritative, law-giving referent as a ground from which to extend

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28 oneself in life. On the other hand, if intentionality is viewed as an essential expression of the self in human beings, and if we accept from what has been posited already that the self in the present moment is informed by an individual’s past experience, and finally, if past experience is limited to only referable memory, then the intentionality cast in one’s aura is only partial. Questions of the communicative content carried in the intentionality arising from either of these sources aggravate an existential state of doubt in self-reflection. If, for the sake of argument, we take the conundrum posed by this riddle and set beside it the body in its state of continuous becoming, we see psychological discontinuity juxtaposed with physical duration. Psychological duration must be intellectually postulated if one is to accept that the self and the body advance as one. Marcel recognizes the need for an intellectual conception of this unity. Not until he formulates the concept of the dimension of Time, however, does he find a way to accomplish it. Through the dimension of Time he is able to reconcile the enduring quality of the body with a rationale for psychological duration of the self that works. The synthesis that results justifies the use of the adjective expansive applied to the self earlier in this discussion. Once Marcel recognizes this means to unity he achieves union with the self and is able to start writing. Union with the self fulfills the romantic criterion of creative empowerment. Proust’s novel thus succeeds in resolving a conundrum of modernity in the making of an artist. Loss of contact with the self was one effect of modernity on the human spirit. This lack of contact nags Marcel throughout the greater part of La Recherche. Connecting with the self and finding a stable referent in it involved Marcel in transforming experience into a puzzle over which he could then deliberate. Issues related to this puzzle rise and subside over the course of the novel. Yet the puzzle is never straight-forwardly articulated. It can only be identified as the lack Marcel becomes aware of through his exploration of resonance and déjà vu. Marcel arrives at the universal truth represented by the dimension of Time through inductive reasoning. If, for him, psychological duration is guaranteed by the sensory unconscious, then it must be so for everyone. Marcel’s puzzling this out might have gone something like this: “Consciousness of beingness cannot psychically sustain me; therefore it can sustain no one (for reasons set out above). Accessible memory cannot sustain my belief in psychological duration either. Only through my repeated encounters with various kinds of arresting sensory phenomena have I been able, through making a concerted effort to deal with these disturbances intellectually, to discover the sensory unconscious through involuntary memory.15 My familiarity with these disjunctive sensory experiences leading to involuntary memories has enabled me to appreciate the

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29 self as the repository of my becoming. Grounded in an understanding of the self, I am free to write.” Movement, distance, and directionality are encountered in every aspect of the present text just as they are in La Recherche.16 We identified directionality in Marcel’s image of Mme de Guermantes, a directionality originating in her. Broadcast through her aura as the intentionality of her beingness, it was directed outward commingled with the intent of her acts of volition referenced through the self. Her aura absorbed, reflected, and recast as stories by members of Marcel’s family and their acquaintances provided Marcel information about the duchess he transformed for his own purposes. Another kind of distance and directionality is the common sense variety of becoming exemplified by Marcel’s movement from ignorance to coming-to-knowing. There is, in such cases, in addition to directionality, the realization of a destination reached, which we recognize as an end. Thus implicit in directionality is an acknowledgment of the distance-to-becrossed to reach these ends. That Marcel would eventually be able to begin writing at the level of mastery he wished was dependent on just such a change of states. Acknowledging this changing of states from one form to another signals we are ready to move on to a discussion of the biological-physiological implications for déjà vu and other sensory anomalies in sense perception. This discussion will provide the ground for accepting anomalous sensory/neural events as real and the insights gained through them true for the subject experiencing them.

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Chapter 2 Body and Mind A Partially Opened Window No one is born wise the painter Elstir tells a youthful Marcel in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur. No one is born an artist, either. Artists develop. They do so individually and at their own pace. In telling the story of Marcel’s creative development, an older Marcel, not yet the artist he will become, introduces readers to a youth filled with idealized desires. Among these is Marcel’s desire to become a writer. At the beginning of the novel however, Marcel knows next to nothing about what it takes to be a writer in terms of thought and the explorations of experience within oneself required of a writer to produce work of merit. Proust’s interest in art in La Recherche centers on the importance of perceptive acuity to the inception of great art. As noted earlier, through approach, contact, and conduction to consciousness of deeply interior truths of experience, something of the essential quality of being can be communicated through an artist’s work. This is true of the greatest artists’ achievements. Consistent with the view of art-making put forward in the novel, and, again, as already noted, no mention is made of the technical expertise needed to produce art. In Proust’s representation of artists, skill in handling materials is considered a poor substitute for the intuitive insights perceptive acuity makes possible. These insights enable art to carry meanings that transcend craft. A lack of perceptive acuity is evident in the performances of the two actresses playing supporting roles to Berma’s Phaedra in Racine’s Phèdre.1 It is also evident in Proust’s depiction of the striving in performance of the young actress Rachel when she performs before the Duchesse de Guermantes’ guests. It is also noted in the Baron de Charlus’ admonition to the violinist Charles Morel to invest his playing with feeling. We will discuss Proust’s treatment of these last named young performers, both approximately the same age as Marcel, in chapter 4. Implicit in Proust’s treatment of Rachel and Morel as artists is a negative bias based in part on their lower class social origins, which both seek to obscure. Life experience and social origin are, on the surface, less problematic for Marcel. He is not trying to conceal his background, for one thing. When the time comes, he moves with relative ease into the higher social world of the aristocracy. What he does not know he quickly learns. And the courtesy and manners he acquired growing up in a conservative and prosperous bourgeois household are of greater account in the social circles he comes to frequent than is his bafflement before an unfamiliar utensil in a place setting or his not knowing on which side of her to place himself the first time he leads a lady into dinner.2 Rachel’s,

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32 Morel’s, and Marcel’s responses to their life experiences illustrate the influence of the past in shaping one’s actions. Rachel and Morel are reacting against the persistent shadow their pasts cast over their lives. As for Marcel, his past is a source of standards that serve him well in society. In a study of the mind, these behaviors would be considered superficial manifestations of one’s relationship to one’s past. Proust’s first-person narrative of the making of an artist eschews the superficial however. Deeply unsettling solipsistic concerns come to the fore whenever Marcel opens his mind to reflect on his experience. As readers, we are privy to Marcel’s thoughts through the window we possess onto the workings of his mind. We are aware, then, of the rift Marcel detects between his remembered past and his state in the present. The images his past offer him convey nothing to him of the moments they picture. Rather than being embraced by his memories when he turns to his past, Marcel feels isolated in the present. Unsettled by this disjunctive condition, the nature of experience and the meaning of the past become problems Marcel puzzles over. This tendency to analyze his feelings is one of Marcel’s most deeply-seated characteristics. Through attempting to answer questions related to experiencing and the past he sharpens the incisiveness of his perceptive acuity. Marcel will become skillful in revealing truths of experiencing to the point of achieving enlightenment without the aid of a master. In doing so, he will realize himself an artist. Considering everything we are told of the work of the great masters in La Recherche—Berma, Bergotte, Elstir, and Vinteuil—readers come to appreciate that Marcel is in some ways like them.3 How does Marcel’s possession of traits similar to those possessed by these masters affect Proust’s story of Marcel’s development to creative empowerment? In analyzing arc communication in chapter 1, we noted that the communicative pathway between artist and viewer runs through the artwork. The artwork and the viewer reside in the public sphere of ideational exchange. The third member of this triad, the artist qua generator of the artwork, resides in the private sphere of his or her creative consciousness and unconscious. In real life, becoming and being an artist involves the artist in all three ventures. The artist makes art. The artist views the art of others, thus occupying the niche of viewer, sometimes. And artists talk with other artists, some more often than others. But as we have seen, Proust was not interested in issues of crafting, nor did he concern himself with viewer response except as Marcel responds to great works of art. In the novel, Proust was not interested in shop talk, either. Elstir does not talk about how he paints. Bergotte does not give Marcel suggestions on how to write. Marcel and his literary friend Bloch do not talk about writing and Bloch is the one person with whom one might reasonably expect Marcel to do

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33 so.4 There are no little magazines in La Recherche. When, early in the novel, Marcel’s grandmother’s sister Flora brings up having heard how the actor Maubant prepares for his roles, interest falls flat. Proust’s sole point of concentration is on spiritual and intellectual growth. All else he eliminated. What did not interest him or got in the way was pushed aside or denigrated, the better to focus on this single point of emphasis. By making use of the qualitative judgments of masters Proust was able to highlight creative/artistic intelligence over practice. We noted in the introduction Bergotte’s and Elstir’s assessments of Marcel’s sensibility. Their appreciation is indicative of the feeling of kinship he rouses in them due to special qualities they recognize in his conversation. It is Bergotte who noted Marcel’s suitability to the life of the mind.5 In saying this to Marcel, Bergotte touches on the quality through which Proust addresses the Romantic precept of the origin of the artwork. Proust renders intuitive supposition quantifiable by positioning perceptive acuity as the key to the discovery of truths in experience. It is the augur by which the truths that flow through great works of art are tapped. So, to answer the question posed at the end of the last paragraph, the opinions of masters help Proust elevate the interior development of an artist so that it alone occupies the field of play for his narrative. Denigrating technique is one way to reinforce this position. Presenting the two actresses in Phèdre as mechanically parroting classic forms, and by associating striving for proficiency with Rachel and Morel, both of questionable moral integrity, readers’ valuation of technique-based art is lowered. Thus when considering art in the context of La Recherche our attention falls squarely on the question of how, internally, one realizes oneself an artist. Even with viewer and artwork removed from the discussion, the masterpieces of the great artists in the novel continue to exert an influence on our understanding of the artist. They do so by serving as mirrors reflecting a generalized conscious and unconscious state from which great art springs. Marcel’s response to these masters’ works is the image cast back by them. This is a tricky proposition for Proust to carry off. For Marcel’s response becomes the de facto source/impulse of their works, and he is only a viewer of them. The proposition passes unobserved because Marcel’s comments are placed far apart. The brief and early examples of Berma’s acting and Elstir’s painting fade rapidly from view; readers’ interest in the novel’s tales of social interaction and love eclipse them. The very long passage taken up with Marcel’s response to Vinteuil’s Septet in La Prisonnière is subject to the same viewer/source obfuscation. Yet it stands for most readers as an independent critical analysis of art, which it is not. It is only with the level of consideration this subject is given here that the blur-

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34 ring of the viewer (Marcel) and the source/impulse of these masters’ work becomes noteworthy. From the way Proust presents Marcel’s development, one could argue that a mental state of conscious and unconscious awareness is being posited as a metaphysical equivalent to the artwork. As if to prove the point, in the novel the state of enlightenment Marcel realizes has primacy over the book that will be the product of it. If, for arguments sake, we accept momentarily as true what cannot be true—that a state of equivalency exists between thought and a finished work—then Marcel is positioned by Proust to recognize an internal state of mastery in himself as a self-justificatory antidote to whatever fate his yet-tobe-written book will meet. Re-positioning this internal state of mastery so that it becomes a stimulus to begin working is to recognize it as a permutation on a thought expressed elsewhere in this text, that visualization is the way to belief. It is a short-lived state which spurs the transmutation of thought into art. Proust could have passed through this state in the spring of 1909 on discovering the dimension of Time. To conclude our discussion of how Marcel’s possession of traits similar to those possessed by the great masters in the novel affected Proust’s didactic narrative, one last point can be made. By following no master, Marcel’s creative development is in line with Proust’s representation of the greatest artists as isolated from the society of which they are a part. Not only are they cut off from others during their most active periods by the nature of their talent, they are unable to pass their mastery to their children. Neither Berma’s daughter nor Vinteuil’s inherit talent from the parent. Taken altogether, these criteria point the way to genius, the sine qua non of the Romantic vision of the artist. Genius is the subject of chapter six. Having come this far, we are now ready to test the veracity of the fiction Proust created in this didactic narrative of the making of an artist to see whether the logic of the argument transcends the novel (this narrative is didactic in as much as readers are taught by the novel how an artistic sensibility develops and becomes empowered). We will start by asking a question. Is the logic internal to the novel valid in terms of the conclusion Proust draws from it? As noted previously, some commentators have reservations concerning the plausibility of involuntary memory and Proust’s personal acquaintance with such experiences. These reservations challenge the veracity of the fiction. Our goal in this chapter and in chapters 3, 4, and 5 will be to establish the veracity of the fiction grounded in the validity of the logic supporting it. The veracity of Marcel’s involuntary

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35 memory is the critical element in this exercise (for the moment, Proust’s experience is not an issue because it is not part of the fiction we are discussing). Once the veracity of involuntary memory is demonstrated other parts of the fiction can be tested until the weight of positive results establishes the fiction’s truth. In this process, the threshold for testing the veracity of involuntary memory—an interior, private, and highly subjective experience—is set higher than the thresholds for other factors we will test because of this subjectivity . What are these other factors? They are:





1. the impact of modernity as an intellectual development changing one’s outlook on the world vis-à-vis her or his position in it; 2. the impact of industrialization and technological change on psycholo- gical stability; 3. the nature of a problem-of-self; 4. the relationship of a lack of psychological continuity to a problem-of- self; and 5. the solution to the conundrum posed by opposition of Romantic pre- cepts of art and the artist to the impact of modernity.

Turning to Marcel, readers quickly learn that he is almost totally consumed by his life in the world. As we have already noted, he is fascinated by the aristocracy, the Duchesse de Guermantes particularly. Swann figures prominently in his imagination. So do the real and fictional people and places and events he reads about in books, with many of whom and with many of which he is prone to identify. It would seem on the surface of it that Marcel makes a poor protagonist for Proust. But rather than being this, Marcel actually suits Proust’s purposes well. As a character, Marcel is an example of how carefully Proust wrought his story of the becoming of an artist. For it is through the partially opened window of Marcel’s sensibility, represented by the “almost” modifying his total absorption in life that provides Proust the means to expose the presence of a plausible channel available to Marcel through which to discover the self. We are never told how, individually, Bergotte, Berma, Elstir, and Vinteuil tapped this source of art in themselves. Their experiences would have been as different from each others as the media through which they worked. As for Marcel, his responsiveness to resonance and déjà vu, coupled with his inquisitive nature, led him to knowing. Consciousness At the end of chapter 1, the maxim that was the focus of that chapter was turned

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36 inside out to produce a riddle. Taking the conundrum posed by the riddle and setting beside it the body in its state of continuous becoming juxtaposes an image of psychological discontinuity with physical duration. Psychological discontinuity is associated with alienation. Experiences do not run together in memory. No empathetic flow softens their outlines. They do not register as “me” to the person looking back at them. This problem can only develop in self-conscious beings. We are going to start our discussion of consciousness by looking at how the material world interferes with the cultivation of an enduring sense of self. It does so by being the arena in which life is lived. Life and living is where effort is expended to secure and maintain physical and emotional wellbeing. The attractive force of life locks one into it. It is the focus of our senses. An identification of the world-as-barrier is mimicked in human self-conscious awareness by the concept of body-as-barrier. The body prevents the free movement of the will from realizing its desires. Both world and body lend themselves to the notion of a material/ideal dualism animating the world. From the concept of world/body-as-barrier we will proceed to look at the morpho/physiological basis for the kind of resonant experiences to which Marcel is prone. John Onians speaks of subjectivity in the introduction to his book, Neuroarthistory.6 He draws attention to the correlation between experience and subjectivity. Central to the latter “are the biases of perception, behavior, belief and so forth” to which experience has given rise.7 We will see that Marcel’s repeated experiences of resonance and déjà vu shape his subjectivity. Among the biases that develop from his experiences of resonance and déjà vu is an acceptance that the exclusive authority most people vest in physical reality is a palliative to avoid questioning experience. The concepts of distance, directionality, and ends were introduced briefly in chapter 1. The concept of self-as-observer is new. We will turn to it in the last section of this chapter. These four concepts figure prominently in shaping an understanding of the making of an artist. They have philosophical and psychological implications as well. The importance they acquire in a story of the creative development of an artist relates back to Onians’ comment on the correlation between experience and subjectivity. This, in turn, relates to the material/ ideal dualism in human thought. This duality is a product of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness manifested itself as doubt long ago with early humans seeking to comprehend events in their experience they could not account for from knowledge at hand. These events came to be attributed to a force or forces beyond fathoming. By appealing to this force or these forces, early peoples sought to placate it/them and/or win favor for themselves in doing so. Spirits

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37 and deities arose from the need for assurance as a quid pro quo to experience and subjectivity. Having been deified, these forces were seen as animating and guiding the course of the world. Spirits and gods are external to individuals. They represent logic, authority, and order to those supplicating themselves to them. Applicable to both natural and human events, the relationship with one’s gods falters if the authority vested in them fails to supply the logic and order individuals and societies need to thrive. However extraneous to life’s all-consuming struggle for survival these metaphysical speculations on the origins of worship may seem, it is important to keep in mind that human self-consciousness—out of which such knotty complications arose for which worshipping gods became an answer—represents an evolutionary advance over hominoids with lesser cognitive abilities.8 Human self-consciousness, with its doubt and its consequent need for counterbalancing assurance, is the result of biological development in which an ability to think strategically and speculatively, and to make choices, all with the self at the center of a web of relations, offered early humans advantages in their struggle for survival against those other beings who lacked self-consciousness, that is, who could not recognize a self. That struggle is represented in the anthropological record of hominoid groups demonstrating lesser capabilities than Homo sapiens sapiens. For advantage in nature is reflected in a species’ reproductive success, by which means useful traits—in this case, an aptitude for foresight and invention—are carried forward. This is the first of three points that can be made concerning consciousness: self-consciousness, like a capacity for experiencing in lower organisms and consciousness in higher ones, which are human self-consciousness’s ontological antecedents, can be viewed at its point of emergence in human development as supporting the reactive potentiality of those beings in possession of it with the same economical deployment of morpho/physiological capabilities as any other system in a living body. From establishing this first point we can continue to our second, which concerns action and memory. We can begin by saying that sensory structures in simple organisms or sense organs in higher animals and humans provide them the means to monitor, interact with, and prosper in their physical environment. This is true for all living things. Thus long before the appearance of multi-cellular organisms whose nervous systems dominated by the brain and connected by nerves to sense organs and muscles (and other tissues in the body) gave rise to the phenomenon of consciousness there was in the stimulus/response mechanisms of the earliest single-celled organisms engagement with their surroundings through their detection of, and response to, stimuli. Viewed ontologically, that is recognizing evolutionary change as the source of variation and develop-

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38 ment in living systems, such engagement or interaction as these a-conscious and pre-conscious organisms display is linked to awareness in conscious animals and human beings. A universal condition of living things is that all sense data in the environment that an organism’s body is morphologically equipped to receive are absorbed by it indiscriminately and passed on, internally, in the form of electrochemical charges. In organisms with central nervous systems these charges are relayed to the brain through nerves. The absorption of stimuli and the responses that pass through an organism’s body leave traces drawn through the tissues affected. These traces are the basis for physical dexterity through repetition, as in typing, for example, and for the phenomenon of cognitive memory. This is how one’s past accumulates, through the piling up of these traces. Henri Bergson says, in Creative Evolution (1907), referring to the past (italics are his): [I]n reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside. The cerebral mechanism is arranged just so as to drive back into the unconscious almost the whole of this past, and to admit beyond the threshold only that which can cast light on the present situation or further the action now being prepared—in short, only that which can give useful work. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (originally published as L’Évolution créatrice in 1907 by F. Alcan, Paris), trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911) p. 5

Although the consciousness of the past Bergson describes here is probably unique to humans, Bergson makes two points that are important to sense detection and response regardless of an organism’s evolutionary state of development. The first point he makes is that all stimuli absorbed by the body remain incorporated in it (“all that we have felt”). The second point is that the criterion of use determines whether something is actively remembered or not. With regard to the first point, possessing a past is a universal condition of matter. This should not be confused, however, with the retentive capacity of tissues in living bodies to hold the traces of stimuli and responses as potentially recallable data. It is important to keep in mind that this capacity in tissues is indistinguishable from their materiality. The material past of inert matter, as opposed to the memorial past of living organisms, represents, in the present moment, the closed and completed sequence of events preceding the present moment preserved in the form that matter possesses when entering it (the progress of tree resin to amber can serve as an example). There is no way to open the sequence to recall. By contrast, in living systems means exist to access this past, at least theoreti-

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39 cally; it is open to possible use while an organism is alive. We noted that all sense data a body is able to absorb is absorbed indiscriminately. This is effectively an infinite pool of data. Those stimuli that elicit a response in the form of action are singled out as referable. The referential contents of memory in organisms that can reference them are actions and acts. This is true even where “memory” is a euphemism for some other kind of process. As nervous systems developed in multi-cellular organisms, reaching states we refer to as consciousness and then, in ourselves, self-consciousness, this basic reference to acts and actions in memory was elaborated. Regardless of the state of elaboration however, the process remains essentially the same for all organisms. The second point concerning consciousness is: activity produces “focal actualities,” as Edmund Husserl calls them,9 which compose an organism’s referable past. Adam Zeman refers to this referable past in humans as declarative memory.10 Proust calls it intellectual memory or voluntary memory.11 Referable memory, the term to be used for these variously labeled forms of recallable memory going forward is related to acts and actions and their associated stimuli. Utility derives from referability for an individual promulgating action based on this past experience. Referring to experience in general, Husserl states “What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (to some extent at least) is partly pervaded, partly girt about with a dimly apprehended depth or fringe of indeterminate reality” (Husserl’s italics).12 It is this fringe to which we turn our attention now. It refers to the full range of sense data absorbed by the body, including all that generate no response at all. Whether an organism is a protozoan or a human being every moment is one in which the full range of parameters the organism’s sensorium tests are tested. And while only stimuli of sufficient intensity to breach the response threshold for any given sensory structure generate a response, it should be apparent that such stimuli form the least or lesser part of the total stimulation received by an organism in the experiencing moment. The greater number of stimuli fall into the category of subthreshold stimuli. The presence of thresholds in reactivity makes possible the separation of stimuli into those that elicit a response and those that do not. These are broad classes within the total experiencing of an organism which offer, by being indexed to specific levels of intensity, either the basis for a repertoire of successful behavioral responses or, being absorbed as sub-threshold stimuli, add to the cumulative ground of sense data which settle in the body as the lost sensations of total experiencing. Put another way, responsive acts divide the totality of experiencing into a foreground composed of the act (accompanied by the stimulus or stimuli responsible for it) and a background registering as the

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40 sensory context for it. In the present text, the terms action experiencing, sensuous experiencing, and total experiencing designate these different fields of the stimulus/response mechanism’s absorption and retention of stimuli in the body. An organism’s sensory apparatuses monitor its environment, as we know, enabling it to respond to beneficial or detrimental conditions in it. In the formulation of the dimension of Time Proust relies on the sense data composing one’s sensory past, not one’s remembered past, to tether a person to one’s point of origin as a living being. The traces of these stimuli, representing past sensory experience, support and refine an organism’s reflexive responses to sensory stimuli by calibrating the threshold at which a response is generated from the individual’s past experience. When these traces and the traces of action responses are combined into referable memories we can refer to the phenomenon as action experiencing, or more simply by the term experiencing. As we use the term, experiencing applies to both referability to past actions by the organism generating a present response to stimulation and to action in the moment. Which of these two senses of the term is being employed at any given time should be clear from the way the term is used in a phrase or sentence. In higher multicelled organisms, behavior comes under the control of neurally coordinated reception, evaluation, and response mechanisms of a centralized nervous system. Relying on morpho/physiological mnemonic processes to inform this system, these processes, in their primitive forms, served as a model the further development of which, in higher organisms, gave rise to neural memory, consciousness, and human self-consciousness, along with consciousness’ unconscious component. Action experiencing is the basis of behavior and individual subjectivity. By contrast, the term sensuous experiencing applies to all sub-threshold stimuli forming the cumulative ground of the sensory unconscious. It is a memory trace buried in the sensory unconscious that is excited in experiences of déjà vu by the similarity to it of a sensation in the present. The congruence of these two sensations provokes the momentary state of arrest most readers are familiar with from having experienced déjà vu. Such experiences generally provoke a shudder in people caught up short by them, usually just long enough for the individual to note the weirdness of the sensation. As for total experiencing, the term refers to the full complement of sensory absorption in the moment that, as the past, is represented by the aggregate of voluntarily referable past experience (experiencing) and the lost sensory experiencing of the sensory unconscious (sensuous experiencing). The third point of the three to be made concerning consciousness is: the sensory unconscious is a continuously accumulating body of sensations lost to voluntary cognition. It is the source of the sensation that is drawn toward consciousness

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41 in déjà vu. It yields, as Marcel demonstrates, full-blown involuntary memories when subjected to intense intellectual analysis. Before concluding this discussion of consciousness we are going to jump ahead to a subject that will be given more attention in the next chapter: identity. Identity is mutable. As much as it is a projection of the self in the world it is, even more, a response to the experience shaping an individual’s subjectivity. Just as children in early childhood discover hallmarks by which they will come to know their surroundings familiarly, so it is among the people, places, and things populating their world that they will find a niche in it for themselves. This niche equates with the identity one grows into. It is a role made available in the community for the individual to fill; as such it is accepted and recognized by the community. Applying what we have been saying about consciousness and the limitations of referable memory when we turn to it for a sense of psychological duration, it is clear that one’s present identity, if it is different from an earlier one or ones, and it or they are alienated from the self, will be isolated from past identities—much as Marcel felt isolated in the present by the stiffness of his memories of his past. In both cases, identity and memories, like snapshots, are cut off by the edges of the image recalled. Referring back to Kracauer’s comments on old photographs in chapter 1, images called up in mind from the past are isolated from each other by all that is unavailable to make a memory “lively” in conscious recollection. What is missing are the sensations of the sensory unconscious. Without them there is only the “spatial configuration of a moment” to look at. In Part I of Du côté de chez Swann, Marcel says: À vrai dire, j’aurais pu répondre à qui n’eût interrogé que Combray comprenait encore autre chose et existait à d’autres heures. Mais comme ce que je m’en serais rappelé m’eût été fourni seulement par la mémoire volontaire, la mémoire de l’intelligence, et comme les renseignements qu’elle donne sur le passé ne conservent rien de lui, je n’aurais jamais eu envie do songer à ce reste de Combray. Tout cela était en réalité mort pour moi. G (CS) p. 44 [I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by voluntary memory, the memory of the intellect, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead.] SLT (I), p. 59

It is on the basis of the incompleteness and lack of vitality in the referable past that makes an individuality defined by consciousness alone problematic.

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42 Bergson saw no use-value in the free, ambient sensations that define place for a moment, that represent the balance of the sensations occupying the moment from which the act is excised. And he felt psychic disturbances such as faux connaissance –a term which, for Bergson, encompassed a range of experiences from déjà vu to involuntary memory—which brought them to mind to be nothing more than harmless forms of inattention and thus also without merit.13 What Bergson calls inattention (for he restricts the use of the term attention to the life-affirming activity of consciousness) becomes, in Marcel’s unguided quest for a sense of duration, attention redirected to the interior ground of past sensuous experiencing in the sensory unconscious. In La Recherche, the use-value of this vast field of sensuous experience resides in the continuity it can provide the individual tapping into it. Through such experiences as déjà vu and involuntary memory the warmth and intimacy by which we know feelings and thoughts as our own can be felt. At odds with Bergson’s attitude toward the sensuous past, the sensory unconscious confirms for Marcel, through its warmth and intimacy, psychological duration through his recognition of continuity between the present and past sensuous experiencing. In the novel, Marcel’s need for psychological continuity is a motivating factor for the search that leads to his discovery of it. Thus, this feeling of psychological discontinuity is of considerable importance to the fact that the phenomenon of involuntary memory provided the means for Marcel to overcome this block. Psychological discontinuity was a product of the alienating, experientially compartmentalizing environment of modernity. Consequently, understanding the underlying causes that contributed to the psychological state referred to here as the problem-of-self will strengthen the impact of involuntary memory as the means by which Marcel resolves this problem. Distance The great difference between the effort to recall things forgotten and the search after the means to a given end, is that the latter have not, whilst the former have, already formed a part of our experience. If we first study the mode of recalling a thing forgotten, we can take up with better understanding the voluntary quest of the unknown. William James, The Principles of Psychology (originally published in 1890 by Henry Holt and Company, Boston); unabridged and unaltered present edition in 2 volumes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1950), Vol. I, p. 585

This quote from James (the italics are his) serves as an introduction to a discussion of distance. It will take on resonance as we proceed. For in seeking to understand the meaning of his past, Marcel reaches the stable ground upon

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43 which his vocation as a writer will be built. Marcel traveles from one point to another. He changes states in becoming an artist. Distance is the measure of space and time between two points or figures. We can label them A and B. Identifying B reminds us that consciousness is always a consciousness of something.14 Before it can be anything in mind, this something is always and firstly in the world, embodied in a being or form from which emanates the energy that draws an individual’s attention to it. Consciousness then, as a state of observation, permits an organism to discover the Other in the sensory field beyond itself. Implicit in this discovery is the relationship that governs such encounters, the expression of which, in its most rudimentary form, is distance. As an expression of relationship between forms, distance is dependent on these forms for its meaning. To speak effectively of distance one must know the character of these forms to render the distance measured meaningful. The distance between several grains of sand, for example, is not an active relationship. Grains of sand are unable to effect any change in their positions relative to each other. Where one figure is animate however, an active relationship is possible. The animate figure allows a descriptive meaning to be derived from distance. Relationship becomes most significant where both figures can move of their own accord. This last is the basis for narrative distance as we describe it below. The proportions of one’s own body are the primordial rules employed in measuring. This is true across the sensible world. The extent of one’s reach marks the limits of one’s physical extensity. With the evolutionary development of sense organs physical extensity became augmented by the much greater state of sensory extensity associated with vision, hearing and olfaction. In humans, this led to the virtual and infinite reach provided by thought and imagination. Measuring distance characterizes an observer. This observer in the present discussion will be our subject, the A in an A-B relationship where B is an Other. This Other can be defined either by its material or manifest appearance or as a metaphysical unknown. In humans, even material relationships can become largely or wholly mental constructs for the individual sighting the Other and measuring, as demonstrated by Marcel’s infatuation with Mme de Guermantes. As we discussed in chapter 1, in his mind Marcel positions the duchess’ love for him as a goal to be reached. We can refer to the relationship established by his siting her there as narrative distance. Where one’s goal lies in abstract possibility, as with the “unknown” James mentions in the quote above, and which is exemplified by Marcel’s quest to comprehend the nature of his psychological discontinuity, the goal is attainable only through exploring the uncharted terrain of thought to the point of discovery. The distance traversed in such crossings we can call metaphysical distance.

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44 As a novel of manners, La Recherche is necessarily concerned with relationships and measuring—in a word, with narrative distance. Relationship, distance, and measuring drive themes of love, travel, and social gerrymandering in Proust’s text. The course of the metaphysical quest associated with Marcel’s becoming an artist runs through it. Both as a novel of manners and as a bildungsroman Marcel’s measuring is about distance in mind rather than about placement of actual objects or beings in space. (This is another reason for Proust’s de-emphasizing performance and reception in the making of an artist.) Marcel’s essay on the steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq is of little intrinsic merit not because it is about distance in mind but because it describes a one-sided relationship. The steeples are static. The relationship is not dynamic. Only Marcel’s changing view of the steeples from the carriage, and the relationship into which he draws his view vis-à-vis his thoughts at the moment lends interest to that paragraph. Much more interesting are Odette’s prohibition to Swann, and later Rachel’s prohibition to Robert de Saint-Loup, on visiting them.15 The physical distance the women charge their lovers to keep reflects the state of the emotional relationship between the partners in these couples from the women’s point of view while giving readers a sense of their lovers’ impatience. Marcel’s anxiety, too, over the image he projects in company is an expression of his fear of being prevented by physical insignificance from contact with people he wishes would see him as worthy of interest.16 An example of Marcel’s over-compensating for the impression he makes on people presents itself on a drive in the vicinity of Balbec which Marcel takes with his grandmother and the Marquise de Villeparisis. Marcel leaves the two friends and goes off by himself for a walk. He agrees to rejoin them at a pastry-cook’s shop for the ride back to the Grand Hotel. As he approaches the village where he is to rejoin them, he invokes the name of the marquise when he stops to ask directions of a pretty girl of the neighborhood and sends her with a message to the pastry shop where the ladies are to be waiting for him, all in order to impress her with his importance.17 Likewise we learn in Le Temps retrouvé that Gilberte Swann’s intention in making the obscene gesture at Marcel when he sees her watching him from the shrubbery at Tansonville, in Du côté de chez Swann, was to forcefully impress an image of herself on him so that he will remember her.18 In other words, it was a way for her to bridge the distance separating him from her at the time. We have already referred to this kind of psychologically-determined distance between active pairs as narrative distance. Derived from movement, which is a response to stimulation, narrative distance measures an A-B relationship whose finite limits are defined by the material.

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45 We are now going to compare narrative distance to metaphysical distance. In our comparison, military history will represent knowledge as material evidence of past military operations. This is a narrative relationship. The transmission of this history is a form of storytelling. Metaphysical distance, which will be represented by Marcel’s experience in l’hôtel de Flandre, cannot be narrated the same way if only because one cannot very well tell a story of sensation and the meaning in signs or intentionality as the expression of being or, for that matter, sensory resonance, as Marcel ruefully acknowledges at one point while considering the books he might one day write.19 If one is likewise unable to recognize these experiences as markers on a path to a coming-to-knowing, which represents the B state of a metaphysical relationship, then one cannot weigh the significance of these events relative to the final outcome of the metaphysical journey, either. There is no way to apply emphasis to a sequence of experiences that may be only random, where one’s destination is unknown. Given this limitation, Proust adopted the method of embedding the incidents associated with Marcel’s coming-to-knowing in the flow of his everyday life. Everyday life is easily narrated. Doing so, Proust achieves the realism of contradiction in thought and the lurching forward toward understanding which characterizes both life and these metaphysical crossings from A to B. This is something Vincent Descombes seems to have overlooked in his description of the philosophical position of La Recherche as “scarcely intelligible.”20 The incidents marking Marcel’s coming-to-knowing occur with such life-like infrequency as to suggest, again, how easy it is for them to be ignored by most people reading the novel. Like the rest of us pursuing our interests in our daily lives, readers are focused less on metaphysical signposts they may encounter in a story than they are focused on the actions and responses of the characters in it. Yet these metaphysical signposts that punctuate daily life shine out clearly, retrospectively, as marking the route by which one who has achieved enlightenment reached it, a fact Marcel and readers only confirm at the end of the novel. Moving from A to B constitutes a changing of place. B represents the new. Arriving at B changes one’s position relative to where one was before. Looking back, the space between the two positions which identifies the distance crossed is not retraceable. One cannot return to her or his starting point ever again. When Mme Swann reveals to the young Marcel what he himself was not yet clearly aware of, that he was Gilberte’s most intimate acquaintance—her boyfriend as we would say now—he is momentarily stunned. Having ceased being an aspirant to love by having suddenly become her nominal lover, Marcel finds himself unable to communicate this good fortune to his former self to whom such an eventuality would have meant so much.

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46 Et la pensée ne peut même pas reconstituer l’état ancien pour le confronter au nouveau, car elle n’a plus le champ libre: la connaissance que nous avons faite, le souvenir des premières minutes inespérées, les propos que nous avons entendus, sont là qui obstruent l’entrée de notre conscience et commandent beaucoup plus les issues de notre mémoire que celles de notre imagination, ils rétroagissent davantage sur notre passé que nous ne sommes plus maîtres de voir sans tenir compte d’eux, que sur la forme, restée libre, de notre avenir. G (JF), p. 428 [And our thoughts cannot even reconstruct the old state in order to compare it with the new, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk we have heard, are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination, they react more forcibly upon our past, which we are no longer able to visualize without taking them into account, than upon the form, still unshaped, of the future.] SLT (II), p. 151

Before we turn to Saint-Loup and his friends, their conversations with Marcel, Marcel’s thoughts on his experiences in the hotel where he is staying, and a comparison of narrative and metaphysical distance, we are going to re-present this movement from A to B from a different perspective. Doing so will help clarify what is attained at B when the distance traveled is metaphysical. What is attained, of course, is determined by the path taken toward it (Onians’ experience/subjectivity correlation, again). In his essay, “Mathematics and Philosophy: What Thales Saw . . . ,” from which the passage below is quoted, Michel Serres discusses the origins of math and geometry in the context of the distinction that exists between empirical data and intuitive understanding. He does so in relation to measuring that which cannot be physically measured by direct application of a rule of some kind because the spatial separation between the object to be measured and the individual doing the measuring is greater than direct application will allow. This discussion provides Serres a means to address that which cannot be identified through the information measuring provides. That which cannot be discerned through external analysis of a thing is the nature of its intentionality conveyed through the manifested presence of the object or being. Analytical data gained through technical analysis, i.e., measuring of one kind or another, provides physical, compositional knowledge of a being or form. Measuring does not yield intuitive understanding. Unless this data can be used to draw one closer to it, the intentionality emanating from a being or form will be missed. Sometimes, for some investigators, a point is reached in the process of accumulating data from which the investigators are able to successfully leap the divide between empiricism and essential understanding. This is dependent

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47 on the sensibility of the investigator. Without such a leap these two methods of approaching a problem remain mutually exclusive. This explains why the two do not yield to integration without there being responsiveness to resonance in the investigator. This is always the case with measuring and counting. Empirically, an object tells one very little beyond what is materially evident in its physical description. What is revealed through intentionality as broadcast through essence is grasped intuitively. But there is a third shadow [beside the pyramid’s shadow and the man’s shadow mentioned in his example] of which the two others provide only an image, or a projection, and which is the secret buried deep within the volume. Now it is probable that true knowledge of the things of this world lies in the solid’s essential shadow, in its opaque and black density, locked forever behind the multiple doors of its edges, besieged only by practice and theory. A wedge can sunder the stones, geometry can divide or duplicate cubes, and the story, indefinitely, will begin again; the solid, whose surfaces cannot be exhausted by analysis, always conserves a kernel of shadow hidden in the shade of its edges. Thales, while reading and noting the volume’s traces, deciphers no secret except that of the impossibility of penetrating the volume’s arcana, in which knowledge has been entombed forever, and from which the infinite history of analytical progress bursts forth as if from a spring. Michel Serres, “What Thales Saw. . . ,” in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy. Ed. Joshué V. Harari and David F. Bell [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982] pp. 93-94

We can apply Serres’ comparison to the discussion of Saint-Loup, his friends, and Marcel. The episode being cited appears in Le Côté de Guermantes. Narrative distance (and its goal) is represented, as we have said, by conversations between Robert and his friends and Marcel on the subject of the aesthetics of warfare. Set beside these conversations are Marcel’s feeling of never being alone for a moment as he wanders the corridors of l’hôtel de Flandre on the first night he stays there. He meets, during a nocturnal perambulation of this eighteenthcentury palace-turned-hotel, chairs, draperies, and flower arrangements all of which together seem to him to reside there rather than being merely lifeless furnishings easily interchangeable with others.21 In the conversation on the aesthetics of warfare, the meaning sought lies within deeper layers of material factuality present in the event. In Marcel’s experiences in the hotel, he is responding to resonance. In the example with Robert, the goal is to achieve a higher degree of strategic knowledge based on examples from history in preparation for possible future military operations. In Marcel’s acclimation to his new surroundings a degree of psychic frisson is initiated by his response to these surroundings. It produces a reverberative sensation of kinship preliminary to intuitive under-

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48 standing but does not easily translate into it. At the point in the novel where this episode occurs none of these young men, neither Robert nor any of his friends nor Marcel, has yet mastered whatever it is he is seeking to achieve; in fact, Marcel is not really aware of seeking anything as he savors his surroundings. On the evening the main conversation on military matters takes place, Robert and his friends take up the subject of the aesthetics of warfare as if eager to impress on Marcel that the term art can be applied to the practice of war. They make their point by arguing that the outcome of an engagement is a result of multiple factors the knowledge of which, coming to light after the fact, is able to reveal as meaning whatever had transpired in the skirmish or battle. These factors, such as the condition of the troops entering the engagement, their resources and reserves, the weather at the time, the nature of the site and whether it was chosen or was the result of necessity: all these things, and many more, while finite in number and at a first remove from the event, influence the outcome of the encounter. At the next further remove, the factors contributing to the conditions of the troops for example, considerations tied to a quartermaster’s decisions based on his response to even more remote contingencies, become exponentially more numerous. Separated from the engagement by space and time, all these distant factors contribute to the outcome of the engagement through their influence on events and incidents approaching the moment of action itself. Learning this helps these young officers understand the complexity of military operations and the need for a commander to cope with circumstances beyond his control. As one of Saint-Loup’s friends says in reference to empirical data, “tout ce que vous lisez, je suppose, dans le récit d’un narrateur militaire, les plus petits faits, les plus petits événements, ne sont que les signes d’une idée qu’il faut dégager et qui souvent en recouvre d’autres, comme dans un palimpseste,” (G (CG), p. 829) [all that you read, let us say, in the narrative of a military historian, the smallest facts, the most trivial happenings, are only the outward signs of an idea which has to be elucidated and which often conceals other ideas, like a palimpsest.]. (SLT (III), p. 140) Robert and his friends, sheltered by the security of the classroom from the kind of shock that disrupts thought, were able to thoroughly contemplate the meaning of the events they studied. And yet they stop at the goal of gaining hold of the factual data they are so proud to possess. They stall at the point where their interest is consumed with physical aspects of causality that will aid them in their training for the officers’ corps. This level of engagement with ideas equates with the distance Robert and his friends are willing to cross to attain knowing. It is a knowing that does not entail any profound leap to a deeper understanding of warfare that might bring them to a philo-

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49 sophical comprehension of human aggression, something which would not help them in battle where the gut issue of survival overshadows everything else. Robert and his friends are enamored of their learning. They enjoy demonstrating the concept of causality they invoke in their discussion with Marcel. But, as we have suggested, this is where their relationship to the idea of war rests. This being the case, one wonders if they could have been prompted to go further along the pathway to knowing. Could they have reached a point nearer Marcel’s, whose intuitive responsiveness, though still undeveloped, was so different from theirs? What is being asked here is, could they have posed questions, as Marcel does in this conversation, in hope of approaching the essence of a thing? As he badgers them for information, Marcel reveals a desire for essential knowledge of, in this case, military superiority. Answering his questions would require of them a valuation of intuitive responsiveness. For Marcel is hoping to use the data they give him as a basis for understanding military brilliance: “[j] e voulais qu’il existât des différences profondes jusqu’entre les officiers subalternes du régiment, et j’espérais, dans la raison de ces différences, saisir l’essence de ce qu’était la supériorité militaire,” (G (CG), p. 844) [I should have liked there to exist profound differences even among the junior officers of the regiment, and I hoped, in the reason for these differences, to grasp the essence of what constituted military superiority.] (SLT (III), p. 167) It seems safe to say that Marcel’s friends would not approach a problem this way if only because they had failed to do so in declaiming over what constitutes the meaning behind the battles they discussed with Marcel. Likewise, it is doubtful they would have been responsive to the extra-mundane community Marcel encountered in his exploration of l’hôtel de Flandre. It is likely, too, that even if they had sensed such responsiveness in themselves they would have suppressed it. Responsiveness to resonance such as Marcel experiences would have likely been interpreted by them as reflecting mystical tendencies or a susceptibility to trafficking in the occult. This would have tarnished their self-images as fundamentally practical men. What is more, had Marcel spoken to them of the experiences he had in the hotel they would probably have been just as uncomfortable as if they had felt these things themselves. One consequence of this would have been that Marcel’s intellectual prestige with them would have suffered. For a propensity for what we can call resonant idealism is ground for doubt concerning a person’s intellectual integrity—(which, alas, I suppose opens a door to criticism of the present text). It is interesting to note with respect to this last comment that Marcel, in whichever narrative guise he adopts at any given moment, never speaks of such experiences to anyone. These comments appear only in self-reflection. The one

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50 character who does give way to expressing sentiments that seem to draw on resonances from beyond the material world is M. Legrandin. But Legrandin is among those characters readers come to view most skeptically. His speaking of the sublime comes across as caricaturing the poetic rather then expressing it.22 The question of response to resonance is important to our study because it marks a major division in the general category of humankind that will ultimately identify Marcel as an artist. On one side of this division we have the quest for meaning limited largely to the empirically identifiable in memory and history exemplified by Saint-Loup and his friends. They are bright, articulate, and robust in character. They possess the refined tastes of the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, the classes from which they spring, as reflected in the places where they chose to take their meals and in their intellectual interests. They enjoy the comradeship of their peers as well. In this group of sophisticated, rich young men Marcel is accepted as someone special. It is a status he never loses even though many of these friendships are of brief duration. In this regard, Robert can neither fathom the origins of Marcel’s neurotic sensitivities nor ascend to the intellectual sphere Marcel seems to occupy so comfortably. Outclassed sensibly and intellectually, Robert, true to his aristocratic upbringing, goes out of his way to protect his friend from discomfort. Not the least of these efforts was his gaining permission for Marcel to spend his first night in Doncières with him in his barracks. On the other side, we have a search for meaning defined by an intuitive understanding of the essence of being, whose utility, for Marcel, will be to embody it in art. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James describes the individual responsive to resonance and to transformative experiencing (James refers to it as religious experiencing). He points out the neurotic conditions which characterize virtually all the subjects in his studies.23 Having done so, he goes on to say that if there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm it might well be that a neurotic temperament contains within it the necessary pre-conditions which allow the phenomenon of inspiration to fluoresce in an individual. Having previously described the type of person most likely to be susceptible to such experiences, James contrasts them with those who remain adamantly unmoved by such feelings: Few of us are not in some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the sine qua non of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one to regions of religious

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51 truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition, would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors? William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (originally published in 1902 by Longman, Green and Co., New York), ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books, 1982) p. 25

We need not go so far as to brand Marcel’s acquaintances philistines. But we may as well admit that the prestige they accord Marcel, which is based initially on all Saint-Loup has told them about him, is, in itself, an acknowledgement of Marcel’s rarefied sensibility and his sublime intellect which none of them, as we have suggested, seems to possess. A question touched on in chapter 1 has been hovering just beyond articulation for much of our present discussion. The question: Are the resonances Marcel experiences in l’hôtel de Flandre and in all the other objects he responds to without actually comprehending what it is in them that attract him simply the result of imagination and/or fancy? Or, is that to which he responds truly present in the intentionality of the object he observes; is it something that is really there, like the “third shadow” Serres mentions? Extending our reference to Husserl’s phenomenology, Husserl identifies an “animating, meaning-bestowing stratum [within the object] . . . through whose agency, out of the sensile-element, which contains in itself nothing intentional, the concrete intentional experience takes form and shape” (Husserl’s italics).24 What he is referring to is intentionality as the expression of being which is allied to the Platonic Ideal of form. As articulated in chapter 1, intentionality is broadcast through essence. In his extended analysis, Husserl uses an apple tree in his garden as the point of reference for his discussion of meaning and intentionality. This apple tree serves, as do the hawthorns placed on the altar in the church of Saint-Hilaire, to emphasize the importance of ordinary objects and familiar and routine interactions in everyday life as our only gateway to knowing anything about what may lie behind the surface of the sensible world. This emphasis on the commonplace as the means through which to reach an essential understanding of a thing or being is central to the mechanics of La Recherche, just as it is to art and to life in general. The Self as Observer The concept of self-as-observer is difficult to differentiate from an individual’s own responsive stance to the world. But if we refer back to the A-B relationship mentioned earlier and situate the relationship in terms of the self-awareness of our subject A, we see that response to the Other is characterized by two factors

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52 defining the relationship created by the presence of an Other before an observer. These are the sensory/mechanical factor and the psychical factor. We can say of self-aware human beings that the psychical factor or component of responsiveness plays a greater role in the response process than in other living beings. Due to our state of self-conscious awareness, humans reference what we see to ourselves. Through the presence of the self, the Other’s primacy as the sole object in our perceptual field is abolished. The self, too, is engaged in our encounter with the Other. Fitting the self into our A-B terminology would make the self A¹. The relationship can be presented as A- A¹-B. The adoption of a psychological stance in which our own presence in the encounter is in view creates a mental image for A¹ with two figures in it, A and B, where formerly there had ever only been B in view for A. With the emergence and adoption of this internal spectator in self-conscious relationships thought processes developed which also recognized change, i.e., the re-positioning of figures, as occurring in time. Time was recognized as the medium in which movement and change occurs. The concept of cause and effect also came into being contributing to the emergence of gods mentioned earlier. These intellectual achievements, by situating the encounter with the Other in the temporal framework of a chain of events leading from the opening of it, with the appearance of the Other, to its close in an end, permitted the self, as the observer A¹, to visualize or imagine a desired end before an actual end came into being. Imagined ends, conceived in the realm of possibility, are necessarily different from actual ends. The disjunction between imagined ends and real ones, once recognized, can weigh heavily on an individual in whom second-order emotional influences such as embarrassment, envy, pride, guilt, and shame are active in shaping a self-conscious response to an Other.25 Recognizing the difference between imagined and actual ends is a condition of self-consciousness. Through the spectatorial and responsive stance of the self, the self-conscious observer is aware—as less-aware beings cannot be—of an existential condition perceived in which we acknowledge chance as an agent impacting results and influencing the ends reached.26 As noted previously, non-self-aware beings have no such ability to forecast a result and reference it or acknowledge the difference between it and an actual result. Thus, with the appearance of the self the cautionary check on unrestrained responsiveness we know as doubt began tempering the prospect of opportunity in encounters with the Other while nuancing the threat posed by the Other through relativizing the Other’s menace. It is this observational stance, and its influence on thought, which, after the fact, permits individuals to judge the degree of difference between projected ends and realized ones. In this reflective process, ends come to be identified with the outcome of a set of foregoing acts

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53 the trajectories of which, moving from cause to effect, are retrievable after the fact as memories. This sequence also applies to learning, both as behavioral reinforcement and in the acquisition of physical abilities. Facilitated by the agency of language, which identifies changing states of relationship as narratives, memories and physical abilities become the basis of storytelling, an activity by which human beings can be defined. Narratives in their simplest form are launched by the retrospective glance of a storyteller working back from something he or she wishes to speak of to an initiating event with which the story begins. In this process, ends become keys to understanding the meaning of prior actions and events. They become vested with the gravity of moral judgments on the motivations and courses of action pursued by the characters in the story. One result is the inscription of social values in stories. Thus stories, in whatever form they take, serve both the individual and a culture similarly, the only difference being that of scale. In complex modern societies the wealth of stories available to us far outstrips any individual’s capacity to be acquainted with more than a few of them. This being the case, the stories we have once heard or read and those which compose our own past define the limits of our experience. These limits broaden with time. Based on the stories one knows, individuals make choices. By the same token, stories one could know but does not know curb the seemingly oceanic mimetic potentiality of human beings. The foregoing bears on Marcel becoming a writer for, as we will see in the next paragraph, Proust gave strict bourgeois limits to Marcel’s youthful experience in order to situate Marcel’s achievement at the end of the novel in the romantic tradition of the artist we discuss in chapter 4. In examining the purely fictional life or lives presented to us in a story what we are told by the storyteller establishes the limits of a character’s experience. A story can thus function as a reasoning process whose conclusion can only be logically derived from the multiple statements presented in the text. Given in the form of verbal portraits, anecdotal remarks made by characters about each other, and by the situations characters find themselves in and work themselves through and out of, the images of characters that develop in a reader’s mind act as statements in a thesis from which the logic of a novel is built. The veracity of these statements impacts our valuation of the story. Thus, as one reads, and as the text unfolds, we stay with book or put it down. As viewers, our participation is limited to reading or deciding not to. Our decision is based on a judgment of validity of the story’s internal logic. We act based on the veracity of the fiction unless we are applying some other measure to the work in which case other standards apply. The logic of Proust’s argument is based on the following conditions:

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54



1. the stories Marcel knows shape his development; 2. the stories Proust denies Marcel from knowing in the early stages of the novel must be accepted by readers as purposeful omissions, and 3. a reader’s own experience must support the fiction. It is the fiction that manifests the logic of the author who has shaped it.

These conditions allow the mix of knowing and not-knowing through which Proust defines Marcel to establish the context for the didactic narrative in La Recherche. The picture we are given of Marcel’s childhood shows him being nurtured within an extensive and stable bourgeois family. He is presented as having a normal number of boyhood acquaintances some of whom occasionally visit him. And he has a young person’s distorted perspective on the personalities that figure prominently in the local community and in his family’s relations with other people. These images and impressions, along with a fascination with the aristocracy, become the narrative models for his youthful longing for love, friendship, and social success through which Marcel aspires to fulfillment in the society of which he is a part. Centered on family life, school, and the means by which one becomes valued in one’s community, these stories offer the kind of promise in life most people seek. Given this background, Marcel would likely have conformed to the model offered by the life of his father, and he might been satisfied with the external support such a life would have given him, and he might have lived his life happily and conventionally had the window of his sensibility been tightly closed against the possibilities offered by resonance and déjà vu. His pursuit of understanding through these phenomena upended the smooth curve of a well-ordered life laid out for him in his parents’ expectations. In this picture one notes that Proust does not expose Marcel in childhood and early youth to stories of artists, either through firsthand acquaintance with them or through books he is reading in which artists figure. This lack signals that Marcel will not be able to imitate a model in his desire to become a writer. He will have to cobble together a story of art and the artist applicable to his circumstances. For a long time it was simply his admiration for the books he read that made him want to write them. At the same time, it was the similarity between feelings and thoughts Bergotte expressed in the books of his Marcel was reading at the time, which Marcel found similar to things he had felt and said himself, that made apparent the egalitarianism of access to expression but this was too tenuous an observation in itself to go beyond instilling in Marcel an affinity for Bergotte’s style.27 The Marquis de Norpois picks up on this “affinity”

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55 when shown a sample of Marcel’s writing on the day he dines with Marcel’s family. This takes place on the same day Marcel attends the performance that introduces him to Berma’s acting. However, the insights Marcel gains from observing Berma’s inimitable skill as an actress are, on their own, too disconnected from what he had gleaned from Bergotte to coalesce into a story of the artist. Not until Marcel meets Bergotte at the Swann’s sometime later does this lack of familiarity begin to change. For the first time, at the Swann’s, Marcel observes and speaks with a writer. Following this up with his introduction to Elstir, which he affects himself, and the instruction Marcel gains from listening to the painter talk about life and work, slowly a narrative does begin to shape itself in Marcel’s mind, establishing a ground of legitimacy for his own creative reactions to life at the end of the novel. This approach accords with a romantic vision of the artist. The artist comes into being as a unique, inimitable voice whose art, arising from within the self, communicates some essential quality of being synthesized from her or his experience of life. The full significance of the transformation Marcel undergoes in La Recherche is dependent on this strict reading of the text, for Proust has imposed these limits to underscore the uniqueness of the artist from the point of view of origin, as well as from the point of view of message conveyed. We have one further note to make on Proust’s didactic narrative in this discussion. This is, it is the warmth and intimacy we feel from reading about Marcel which unites for us all the Marcels speaking in the text. This is in contrast to the considerable amount of work done by many commentators who dwell on the plural nature of Proust’s presentation of Marcel. This warmth and intimacy is the reason for speaking throughout the present text of Marcel as a single psychological entity. It provides yet another opportunity to see how Proust organized his narrative to support the conclusion he leads us to in Le Temps retrouvé. We are going to conclude our discussion on the self-as-observer by looking for a moment at the self ’s urgency to satisfy libidinal desires. We will do so in terms of the self ’s own subjectivity as this subjectivity is nurtured through vision. The homosexual proclivities of many of the characters in La Recherche are exposed in the text as a way of making comprehensible the emotional, ethical, and moral trajectories they chart through the book, trajectories which, if these individuals’ sexual orientation is not taken into account, leave readers, just as in real life, with patterns of behavior which can seem erratic, arbitrary, or eccentric. M. Nissim Bernard’s insistence on taking lunch every day at the Grand Hotel, Balbec is a case in point. We learn he does not go there for the food or for the view from the dining room. He goes there because he has taken a fancy to one of the young servers working in the restaurant. This is something his family knows nothing about.28

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56 Among all its other responsibilities, the self is critical in establishing and maintaining one’s psychological disposition toward one’s own sexuality as a biological male or female. As such, the self ’s urgency for participatory gratification is the source of the sexual proclivities which define each of us, sometimes against our will. Through being stimulated and responding resonantly, the self helps mold our sexual identity, orchestrating, through vision, behaviors gratifying to its needs. We have already established that our senses are always open to stimulation. They are most acutely so in our waking state but they are always operative unless damaged. As Sigmund Freud notes in Civilization and Its Discontents, with the adaptation of an upright posture vision became the dominant sense in pre-hominoids, supplanting smell.29 As humans, we visually scan our environment for threats or opportunities in it the way bats sonically scan theirs. The authoritative role vision plays in our sensorium provided the opportunity in early human beings for the self to capitalize on the independence of our gaze. Through the self ’s influence this independence became looking. Looking can only be suppressed by a willful turning away or by covering one’s eyes. In La Recherche, there are multiple examples of desire originating in the self expressed through looking. When these examples are coupled with Marcel’s responsiveness to resonance and déjà vu, issues of self which might otherwise be overlooked as minor effects can be seen as exerting a major influence on the course the novel takes. The four examples cited below, presented in order of their appearance in the novel, catch Saint-Loup, Charlus, Swann, and Albertine in an act of looking that can be termed predatory. In each of these cases, it is Proust’s language that draws a reader’s attention to the origin of their gazes. Words and phrases suggest an unrestrainable intent to focus on that which the self desires to touch through looking, often, as noted, even in spite of what might be a struggle to do otherwise. Similar to the response springing out of the sensory unconscious in experiences of resonance, the incidents cited below generate the brief confusion one feels in moments of nervous excitement. Both originate in the receptivity and the interests of the self recognizable in the alertness to the sight of whatever the self covets or makes a fetish of. The self does so through taking advantage of the implicit invitation that that emanates from the thing seen which one also finds in the free circulation of names, as we saw with Marcel and the duchesse de Guermantes. The invitation looking offers the self is couched in terms of the beautiful. We are defining beauty as a subjective quality we savor in our connoisseurship of the things that attract us. It is taken up either through the self ’s grabbing what it desires through the dart of a furtive, momentary, locked-on

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57 stare or through a more languorous contemplation of form accompanying the cultivation of pleasure. Example One – Saint-Loup.1 At the point in the story where this passage occurs, Saint-Loup’s homosexuality has not been revealed. Rachel and Marcel know nothing about it. Marcel attributes Robert’s response in this incident to jealousy. As we see from the way the passage unfolds, and from what we learn later, it is an example of the emotional complexity that attends the self catching sight of that which it desires. Whenever Robert and Rachel are about together, whether in a theatre, a restaurant, or even in a cab, if a man near them, or their driver, is at all good-looking Robert becomes agitated. Rachel assumes this is because Robert senses she might find the man attractive and, making eye-contact, strike up an acquaintance with the fellow. But when Rachel is out with Robert she is mostly content to be with him unless he acts up. This is why she finds it particularly annoying when Robert draws her attention to someone. Prompted by his over-reaction, to spite him she will show interest in the man, flirt with him and, occasionally, find a way to arrange an assignation or to get down to business on the spot. At bottom, in these situations, it is Robert’s own desire, stimulated by the young man’s good looks or his provocative attitude which is roused and that puts Robert a sweat. Example Two – Charlus. The Baron de Charlus is well versed in the desires of the self. Still, Proust’s language conveys the ever-spontaneous titillation that springs from within the baron at the sight of forms of beauty he has long savored. Car ce regard-là, était un regard autre que ceux que M. de Charlus avait pour les femmes; un regard particulier, venu des profondeurs, et qui, même dans un soirée ne pouvait s’empêcher d’aller naïvement aux jeunes gens, comme les regards d’un couturier qui décèlent sa profession par la façon immédiate qu’ils ont de s’attacher aux habits. G (SG), pp. 1282–83 [For that look was different from the looks which M. de Charlus kept for women; a special look, springing from the depths, which even at a party could not help straying naively in the direction of young men, like the look in a tailor’s eye which betrays his profession by immediately fastening upon your attire.] SLT (IV), p. 131

Example Three – Swann.31 Alone among these individuals, Swann’s gaze represents heterosexual desire. In contrast to the others, Swann’s looking is of the general class of response welcomed and appreciated in society. This also characterizes the

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58 marquis de Norpois’ remarks when asked to comment on Mme Swann earlier in the novel.32 Licensed as Swann is by social convention, in the scene at the Princesse de Guermantes which follows on the one where Marcel observes and then spies on M. Charlus and Jupien in the courtyard of the hôtel de Guermantes, Marcel observes Swann in the act of looking. He notices Swann’s concupiscent gaze, a mark of the connoisseur sighting the thing he or she covets. In pointing out the origin of Swann’s gaze, Proust is drawing attention to the fact that Swann could not prevent himself from fastening his eyes on Mme de Surgis’ décolletage. The effect of this gaze on Swann is expansive, absorptive, and distracting though his long familiarity with such encounters enables him to maintain his composure. He is able to tell Marcel of his conversation with the Prince de Guermantes concerning the Dreyfus affair without betraying his momentary sexual excitement. Both he and Charlus are well-seasoned men of the world. They have long since molded their social persona to absorbing the pleasure the self takes in looking while continuing to conduct themselves with social aplomb. This is an acquired response of an individual who accepts his or her eyes as panders. It is a response that Robert de Saint-Loup and, as we will see next, Albertine have yet to master. Example Four — Albertine. Like Saint-Loup, Albertine responds to the self ’s need with a momentary loss of composure. Robert responds with an extreme nervous agitation while Albertine’s response to a troubled preoccupation with something she has seen is to force herself to turn away from it. Et pourtant j’avais remarqué qu’avant ce mouvement, au moment où étaient apparues Mlle Bloch et sa cousine, avait passé dans les yeux de mon amie cette attention brusque et profonde qui donnait parfois au visage de l’espiègle jeune fille un air sérieux, même grave et la laissait triste après. Mais Albertine avait aussitôt détourné vers moi ses regards restés pourtant singulièrement immobiles et rêveurs. G (SG), p. 1361 [I had noticed, however, that, before she changed her position, at the moment when Mlle Bloch and her cousin appeared, a look of deep attentiveness had momentarily flitted across her eyes, a look that was wont to impart to the face of this mischievous girl a serious, indeed a solemn air, and left her pensive afterwards. But Albertine had at once turned back towards me a gaze which nevertheless remained strangely still and dreamy.] SLT (IV), p. 273

Albertine’s habit of turning away provokes the following outburst of frustration in Marcel. Looking away is evidence to him of Albertine’s lesbianism. But in La Prisonnière he complains ruefully “Il est déjà difficile de dire «pourquoi avez-vous regardé telle passante?» mais bien plus «pourquoi ne l’avez-vous pas

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59 regardée?» (G (LP), p. 1669) [It is hard enough to say: “Why did you stare at that girl who went past” but a great deal harder to say: “Why did you not stare at her?”] (SLT (V), p. 110) Without saying more about any these incidents, we can move on to the subject of identity.

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Chapter 3 Identity Identity as a Social Marker The past would be meaningless if the new and the random were all one ever encountered or if no means existed to mine what the past holds, which amounts to the same thing. But this is not the case. The molecular structure of the universe; matter’s propensity for pattern replication; the presence of thresholds in response to stimulation; the ease with which habits form and guide behavior; and referable memory all signify the importance of the past to the present in the economy of natural systems. In chapter 2 we set out to demonstrate the validity of the argument Proust presents in La Recherche concerning the origin of art in the self of the artist in order to support the judgment, advanced in the present text, that the logic internal to the novel transcends it. We proposed to do this by testing the veracity of the fiction Proust created in telling the story of the making of the artist. We started by testing the veracity of the phenomenon of involuntary memory in the last chapter. Based on the way stimuli are processed by living things and in the occasional occurrence of various kinds of anomalous psychic events in the flow of normal neurophysiological functioning, we accepted that Proust’s presentation of involuntary memory is valid. In addition to involuntary memory, five other factors were identified for testing. These five factors contribute to the mise-en-scène in which Proust situates his narrative of the making of an artist. We are going to test the veracity of the first four of these factors in the present chapter which will conclude with the development of what we call the modern citizen. The fifth factor will be treated in chapter 5, where we discuss Marcel’s commencement of his vocation as writer. The factors to be considered are: 1. the impact of industrialization and technological change on an indivdu- al’s sense of psychological continuity; 2. the relationship of a lack of psychological continuity to a problem of-self; 3. the nature of a problem-of-self; 4. the impact of modernity as an intellectual development changing one’s outlook on the world vis-à-vis her or his position in it; and 5. the solution offered to the conundrum posed by modernity’s opposition to Romantic precepts of art and the artist.

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62 These five factors plus involuntary memory play large roles in shaping the logic of Proust’s argument. They do so through elucidating an experiential ground for the origin of art in the self of the artist. They reflect the extent to which modernity and the social, cultural, and political change attendant on it, as well as modernity’s emphasis on the present, the new, and the possible, challenged the effectiveness of long-standing ways of doing things through favoring resourcefulness and adaptability. In this chapter we will see how the forces mentioned above cast into doubt the pertinence of the past to the here and now. It will also become apparent as we proceed how important identity became as a means by which individuals found ways to maneuver and find places for themselves in the anonymous environment of modernity’s rapidly developing urban societies. We have noted that very young children find a place for themselves among others through their repeated encounters with the people, places, and things populating their surroundings. Individually, their experiences contribute to a personal past stretching back to the intimate relationship they formed with their mothers in the womb. This prenatal past will be augmented over time by stories. From stories individuals gain access to a past shared with others. The integration of stories into one’s life experience is the means by which we achieve intellectual growth. Proust replicates this growth through the story he tells of Marcel’s becoming an artist. If one’s personal past and the collective past one aquires from others flow into each other and do so uninterruptedly from the present all the way back as far as the history goes in the stories one is told, the two form a past we can call hegemonic. A hegemonic past satisfies the human need for psychological groundedness. It is the source of historical continuity for a community and, through close association with those parts of the physical environment which define place for the individual, it is a touchstone in the present for an individual’s ever-strengthening bond to a specific locale. This is what modernity displaced. In terms of identity, the strength of this bond between an individual and place conferred rights on the individual while also imposing restrictions on the individual’s ability to make choices and define him or herself elsewise than one’s traditional role in the community allowed. As for the rights mentioned above, for an individual living under the sway of a hegemonic past, one’s relation to place and community fluoresces as place-identity. Place-identity is imbued with the resonant properties of home. It is a feeling similar to that which identifies “me” and “mine,” as James notes of an individual’s understanding of self.1 In this figuration of the past, the progression within the individual of being-self-identity is barely discernable. The three tend to blur into a single, undifferentiated whole though it is only the authority of this hegemonic past that blurs them into one.

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63 Identity is an interfacial, interactive component of physical presence. In the progression being-self-identity, identity is the means through which an individual projects him or herself into a community of other human beings. To accept the self as the expansive middle term of this progression is to recognize the self as grounded in the outside-of-time agency of beingness and extended through identity to the frontiers of ipseity. A construct of human self-consciousness, the self is ephemeral. It vanishes at death. Care of the self as soul is one of the principle concerns of religion. Identity is different. It is an amalgamation of the self and one’s physical presence augmented by one’s psychological outlook. It is further defined by the things one puts on, with which one adorns oneself. Therefore, unlike the self, identity has physical qualities appended to it that develop through conscious enhancement of one’s person. Directed toward others, the identity one projects is accepted, qualified, questioned, or denied by others. Where the social constraints of a community derive from a hegemonic past, the assertion of identity as a self-invented role generally fails under the weight of social opprobrium. But even under the strictest social circumstances or where identity is an extension of a hereditary model, who one is, is, first of all, an expression of primary or genetic identity defined by one’s sex, race, parentage and siblingship. Genetic identity is biologically inalienable whatever one may do to alter or disguise it. The body is the form through which identity is manifested. A physician performing an autopsy can often tell a good deal about the way a deceased person lived through seeing the state of the corpse’ organs and muscular development.2 This is something Proust notes at the conclusion of La Recherche where he recognizes in the physical state of his acquaintances the telltale signs of an active sporting life or the traces etched across a person’s face of cruelty or meanness. The authority of a hegemonic past is founded on its enduringness. The psychological stability an individual derives from a hegemonic past is contingent on the stability of the external referents, described earlier, upon which its authority depends: God and place. If these referents falter or are displaced, psychological stability becomes subject to the same effects of interruption, forgetting, and supersession that obliterates habit when the purpose a habit serves vanishes or as the need arises for new habits. In this chapter we are going to look at how psychological stability based on external referents was rendered moot or ineffective in the West by the spiritual liberation achieved during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment which raised the individual to parity with God in terms of access to truth, and by the social, political, industrial, and technological revolutions in the nineteenth century. For the hegemonic past which had been the source

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64 of the individual’s stability was progressively undermined by the changes these revolutions initiated. The hegemonic past became an anachronism in the West as obsolescence became a recurring phenomenon with which people had to contend in their continual encounter with the new. The combination of these effects on the psyche was to fracture and compartmentalize experience into distinct and frequently unrelated memory sets. Even as the subject at the center of these memory sets remained the same, the settings and the relationship of the individual to the activities central to them diverged. For Marcel, viewing himself in this heterogeneous past, the person he recognized to be himself had become a stranger. Each new memory set further aggravated his sense of psychological discontinuity and alienation from his past. For each was focused on a goal or object he had wished to attain at the time which was necessarily different from his goal or object at present and different from other goals and objects in his past. Marcel is most acutely aware of this when he thinks of the women he has loved. Identity in such an environment, linked to a goal or object, is a free agent. Chance and the need to respond to change preempted the self in providing the originating impulse for the identity one projected. As the self ’s role in the projection of identity receded it became marginalized. Once identity was no longer a community-based extension of the self but had become a means to define oneself independently of one’s community the connection to the past through the self was broken. A problem-of-self was the result. It led Marcel to search for a new ground of psychological continuity. As we proceed we will see by the examples drawn from the novel how central these concerns were to Proust’s narrative and how a search for lost time is a search for the self. Memory sets are centered on a core image, as noted above. This could be a place, an occupation, a relationship. Moving from one memory set to another involved a letting go and a taking up of one picture after another. The fact had been masked in premodern societies, that is, societies as they existed before being transformed by the effects of modernity. Both the starkness of one’s awareness of the alienation felt in turning to the past and the speed with which external connections can be eclipsed in one’s memory by the new and unfamiliar, contributed to the problem-of-self. Through the work of several nineteenth-century British writers and painters, Anne Colley in Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture looks at displacement and loss of continuity in people’s lives in the nineteenth century and at the resulting psychological crisis of self they came to face.3 Among the works she discusses is Richard Redgrave’s painting The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858). Redgrave’s canvas depicts a rural family encumbered with belongings on the road leading out of the valley where they have spent their lives. We see them at

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65 the moment they turn to look back on all they are leaving. “The villagers who gather in groups on the hills to wave farewell are a reassuring presence, although, admittedly, a dispersing one, by which the man, with his wife and children, can still measure and understand himself. For the extended moment of this painting, his neighbors replicate his physical being and legitimate his identity.”4 Implicit in this scene is the imminent loss this family will feel once they turn away. Turning back to the road, they will encounter the same abruptness and wariness they had themselves formerly directed toward strangers. As the painting and Colley’s comments on it make clear, those leaving are not the only ones facing the challenge of an uncertain future. The rent in the social fabric caused by this family’s departure will affect those staying behind as well. The mutually wistful expressions of farewell between the two groups reveal the anxiety of a society in transition. For the security of those who remain behind has become less secure with this family’s departure. Individuals in transitional situations such as the man in Redgrave’s painting must quickly adapt to their change in status. Whatever trade the emigrant in the painting pursued until then he will probably try to pursue elsewhere. His past

Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home by Richard Redgrave, R. A. (1858), oil paper mounted on canvas, 26 ¼ x 38 ¼ inches. ©Tate, London 2011.

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66 will help him but only to the extent he is able to replicate his former life someplace else. The question whether this will be possible would have loomed large in his thoughts. Depending on what he did for a living and where he is leading his family, he may have to look at his skills and select those most appropriate to the need of a new tenant overseer or employer. Anonymity will help this man in his search for work. He will be able to promote himself however he sees fit to people who do not know him. Associating himself with a skill or talent being sought by an employer or with one he feels he could successfully handle may help him keep his family together, a very real concern. The associative identity he adopts to gain work will exist alongside his identities as husband, father, and head of his family. Associative identity, at least as it is embodied here, is an identity based on need, happenstance, and opportunity. With the changing nature of work and the rise of recreation in the nineteenth century associative identity also came to embody those identities with which an individual chooses to ally her or himself. The sports fan, the opera buff, and the movie addict are all associative identities. A declarative identity on the other hand is the product of reflection. It begins as a projection thrown less on the present than to the future and is more expressive of desire than necessity. Marcel’s desire to be a writer is an example. Education is an enabler of declarative identity through providing the imagination with models or stories in which one can place oneself. The emergence of associative and declarative identity in these two forms, as a means of either negotiating an immediate place for oneself in the world or as a desire thrown to the future where it may or may not be realized, was critical to the emergence of the modern citizen who came into being in the early twentieth century. We can describe this modern citizen as one who:



1. moves freely in her or his own person; 2. is reconciled by a self-authorizing conviction in the uniqueness of his or her individuality; 3. possesses a conviction grounded speculatively in a concept of work or purpose in life for one who is both 4. proficient in the body disciplines required of an industrial or post- industrial society and 5. can nimbly assimilate the constant stream of technological innovations into his or her psychological and physical regimes.

On another plane, Redgrave’s painting captures the moment the impact of profound change on peoples’ lives sets in motion the psychological and emo-

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67 tional journey that will ultimately come to rest with the emergence of this modern citizen. It is the moment the self succumbs to the dissolution of place as a stable referent. It was and is a moment of both personal and social importance inasmuch as whole populations, individual by individual, experienced this dissolution with the woeful force that makes itself felt in this scene. Prior to this moment, Redgrave’s family, if prone to reflection, would have considered themselves and their identity much as we have described it earlier—as having developed as an unconscious expansion of their relationship to the place where they and their forebears had spent their lives. In these surroundings the potential for an identity to be consciously constructed for one’s own benefit would have been largely unutilized because, as we noted earlier, identity is subject to the approval of the community of which one is a part. Making such a claim is less likely where there is little tolerance for it, a condition one would expect to find in premodern societies. In La Recherche, a remnant of this premodern view of the individual persists in the Combray of Marcel’s youth, as it did in many places in France well until into the twentieth century.5 But the imperviousness to change which the “spirit of Combray” suggests obscures the fact that Combray, as elsewhere, was experiencing change even as attitudes of caste and a suspicion of strangers hardened into a reaction against the social mobility of Swann, the Verdurins, and Legrandin—all sons of Combray. The railway had arrived as had the telegraph and, somewhat incongruously given the date at which this event must have occurred in the story, an X-ray machine had been brought to Combray to evaluate Marcel’s aunt Léonie’s condition.6 Once begun, change did not stop. By the time Marcel is an adult his great aunt’s house in Combray and the rue des Perchamps on which it stood had given way to a school,7 and the public gardens had replaced the boulevard de la Gare—which itself would not have existed before the arrival of the railroad—along which the principal villas of the town had stood in Marcel’s childhood.8 Thus, while inhabitants of the countryside and especially those living in its remote hinterlands, might still have spoken a regional dialect or even a distinct language such as Provençal, Catalan, or Breton, and while some might still have gone about in traditional garb, change would have filtered into their consciousness.9 In the remote and wild Cévennes in south-central France for example, Robert Louis Stevenson notes in Travels with a Donkey (1879) that he shared lodgings with engineers laying out the right-of-way for a rail line, the quintessential harbinger of change at the time. Further, the impact on the consciousness of a community of the experiences men brought home from military service, especially after World War I, was considerable. These former soldiers had been exposed to the nationalizing

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68 influence of the French language and had seen with their own eyes the effects of progress. Their modernized perspective would have presaged the future in their communities if only through provoking a reaction in the more conservative segments of rural society.10 We have made several points concerning the self, identity, and the problemof-self which may be helpful to summarize before we continue. 1. A stable concept of self is essential to human psychological well-being. 2. Place-identity as an unconscious development of a stable, long-term association with a particular locale is a product of uninterrupted place memory. 3. Place memory as a hegemonic, monolithic psychological structure pro- vides the sense of psychological duration supportive of a stable concept of self. 4. Where change is slow, place serves as a stable external referent for the self. 5. The alienability of the elements composing the environment of place is obscured by long-term familiarity with one’s slowly changing surroundings. 6. Nonetheless, these elements can be put on or taken off; the non genetic components of identity are alienable. 7. Associative identities and declarative identities are consciously adopted to cope with change. 8. These identities are adopted in relation to circumstances in one’s world. 9. With these identities the self is marginalized as an authenticating agent of who one is. 10. The problem-of-self is the result. Throughout the nineteenth century the rate of change accelerated. Change broke the hegemonic past into memory sets, as we have described. The heterogeneity of these memories eroded a sense of psychological continuity or duration, creating the problem-of-self. Marcel’s discovery of the use-value of the sensory unconscious through his experiences of involuntary memory enabled him to address this problem. Through involuntary memory Marcel re-established a stable ground in the self by means of the unconscious record each moment of time traces within the sensorium. Thus the sensory unconscious served Marcel as an interior referent of psychological continuity. The sensory unconscious dissolves the heterogeneity of distinct memories by revealing the underlying presence of the sensory memories governing all experience. The agency here is the warmth and intimacy the sensory unconscious generates in involuntary memory.

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69 Marcel’s sudden understanding, achieved in the Prince de Guermantes’ library, revealed his life to be experientially enduring through all the identities he had adopted or had had pressed upon him through the course of his life. Marcel’s discovery was critical to the logic of the novel and the making of an artist. As for Marcel’s declaration to be a writer, making the claim established a before/after break in his consciousness of himself. It further emphasized the successive and arbitrary in shaping Marcel’s life. To reach one’s declaration one’s connection to the self—already marginalized by nineteenth-century processes of change—was largely forgotten. This is the conundrum to be resolved in chapter 5. As Proust presents it, for a declarative identity in the arts to be realized necessitates searching for a ground in the self through which one’s experience can be authenticated, that is to say, so that experience actually contributes to the uninterrupted flow of one’s psychological existence. In the balance of this chapter we look at how singularly and together rapid social, cultural, political, and technological change in France during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influenced the structure of La Recherche. Identity and the Nineteenth Century Throughout this work we argue that forces associated with modernity contributed to the loss of a sense of psychological continuity or duration, creating a problem-of-self for individuals affected by it. Some of these forces of change were: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

education and the growth of the professions in France; individualism and romantic thought; the scientific desacralization of the body; the discovery of the unconscious; and industrialization and the impact of technology on the individual.

Establishing the presence of these conditions and their effects on individuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the France of Proust’s novel will identify and verify sources of the foment Proust captures in his fictional account of Marcel’s becoming an artist. We have described the emergence of the modern citizen as the result of the individual’s encounter with change in the nineteenth century. This modern citizen surfaces in an allegorical reading of Proust’s story of the making of an artist as the birth of the modern citizen. In this reading, the artist is the paradigm of the self-empowered modern citizen who can be further defined as:

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70

1. an internally grounded, freely itinerant individual for whom 2. identity is a preferential and substantially self-declarative stance. An individual imbued with these characteristics plus the five traits enumerated earlier is a psychologically different person than his or her premodern counterpart. The nineteenth century stands between them, a period of transition during which individuals in the Christian and secular West who had lost both God and place as stabilizing referents sought, and ultimately found, new, internally grounded bearings by which to regain the stability necessary for psychological well-being. The process of transformation can be called modernization. As we look at the forces listed above, and as they are elaborated below, attention will be drawn to their influence on Marcel’s personal development and/or to their effect on French society as depicted in La Recherche. Concluding this review, we will look at how identity is treated in the novel and, lastly, at identity and the cinematic view of life. Education and the Growth of the Professions in France. Christophe Charle writes in A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century about the mobility, both social and physical, in the French populace in the period covered by his book.11 He supports with statistical evidence the growth of the liberal professions in France, especially from the 1850s onward, and their concentration in cities, most notably Paris.12 Charle’s study focuses primarily on physicians, lawyers, engineers, journalists, and the like. Our interest here is with artists among whom a similar pattern of dawning professionalism and migration can be assumed to have occurred with Paris, the art capital of the world at the time, once again being the center to which most gravitated. Such movement reflects the ages-old attraction power exerts over the ambitious. But as Charle demonstrates, with the spread of education in the nineteenth century and the concomitant rise in the number of people comprising the educated classes, opportunities for individuals who could supply the creativity required of a rapidly evolving society multiplied. Many of these positions were for what we now call white collar or technical jobs in journalism and publishing, or for painters, sculptors, and model-makers in the production of panoramas, architectural detailing, and the like, or for musicians in theatres and orchestras, rather than being a call for fine arts practitioners. Most of those who came to the city hoping to succeed in becoming a celebrated master of their art had to settle for work as craftsmen or in other roles to make a living. Setting aside for the moment the level of success these individuals met, it is important to realize that in most cases it was the individual himself (to a

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71 lesser extent, herself) who, having nurtured a creative persona through early and local experiences (though not necessarily through conventional apprenticeships), moved to a regional center or to the capital on the strength of their particular archetypal vision of the creative individual. Their twenty-first century counterparts continue to do the same today. The point here is that, with the spread of education, young people of an age by which, today, we would expect them to be making decisions about what they wished to do or become were discovering, on an unprecedented scale, opportunities for themselves beyond the roles they would have filled in their communities had they not become educated. And they were relocating to realize these opportunities. In La Recherche, Théodore, Camus’ shop assistant, who we first meet as a youth in Combray in Du côté de chez Swann, becomes the pharmacist of Méséglise.13 The rise of Proust’s own father, Dr. Adrien Proust, from shopkeeper’s son in Illiers to prominent physician in Paris is paradigmatic of a meritocratic model Charle outlines. Thus, the horizon-broadening effect of French educational reforms, which were extended to girls in 1880, had a profound effect on the possibilities individuals perceived their lives opened to during the period.14 Not to be overlooked in this pattern of change was the disillusionment which came to many attempting to achieve success through a creative or professional career. Contingent on performance and therefore always threatened by personal failure or public rejection, one could, and can, fall relatively swiftly from the ranks of promising poet or lawyer to that of hack or, falling even further, to the anomie of the disillusioned, ungrounded masses. Balzac’s Lucien Chardon is an example of such a fate. Individualism and Romantic Thought. Much as Humanism laid the groundwork for the social, cultural, scientific, and technological achievements of the Renaissance, the achievements of modernity reflected the advancement of Enlightenment thought. The Enlightenment had repositioned the individual vis-à-vis his or her relation to God in terms of access to truth, making truth “accessible without recourse beyond the confines of the self.”15 Doing so mooted divine authority. The confidence with which Marcel recognizes the validity of his experiences of involuntary memory, which revealed to him the use-value and meaning of the sensory unconscious, is a case in point. It exemplifies confidence in one’s ability to evaluate experience and to judge truth in what was a speculative assertion on Marcel’s part. He found, accepted, and verified a truth for himself which could, and would, serve as the basis for the belief that freed him to write. The concept of art that makes the authenticity of the artist’s impulse the authoritative determinant of a work’s capacity to convey the ideational within

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72 material form is most immediately Romantic in origin, but it is based on the ancient belief in the poet as seer. This concept accepts that art gives expression to affinities artists discern in their experience of life. Proust describes the circumstances surrounding such events. In his review of Le Prince des cravates, a book by his friend Léon Daudet, Proust wrote, “[E]t puis un beau jour, tous ces éléments se découvraient une affinité secrète les uns pour les autres, se mêlaient en un composé unique: l’écrivain était né.” CSB III, p. 553 [And then one fine day, all these elements revealed a secret affinity for each other; joined into a unique form, the writer was born.] (Author’s translation) In this statement, as in La Recherche, Proust views art as the conveyance of a direct and originary communication from the fully self-authorized self. While consistent with a romantic view of art, Proust’s twentieth century understanding of the origin of art is grounded in the nature of human experiencing rather than in Romanticism’s spirituallycharged claims. Nonetheless, throughout the nineteenth century, including the formative years of Proust’s development as a writer, these claims and ta continuing romantic celebration of individual feelings and sensibility redefined what it meant to be an experiencing human being. Scientific De-Sacralization of the Body. Almost simultaneously with Romanticism’s empowerment and celebration of the individual as a unique center of feeling and expression, this romanticized individual was being blind-sided by commercial, political, scientific, and religious forces operating in the culture of modernity that flipped this celebration on its head. Individuals were seen as mere instruments of consumption. Science looked on the body as a subject of psychological and anatomical investigation. Philosophy had supplanted the primacy of God with the primacy of freedom that quickly dissipated. Hugh Honour called interest in the individual the one and really only unifying element in the far-flung Western romantic tradition of the nineteenth century.16 But as scientists atomized fields of study into smaller and smaller areas of interest in their obsessive fascination with classification—itself characteristic of the century’s approach to critical investigation—their work neutralized the celebration of uniqueness in the individual. The individual became little more than a specimen for study. Discoveries were being made in areas as immediately familiar as vision and as seemingly invisible as the internal state of the living body. Investigators were casting light on the workings of consciousness and finding a basis for diversity through speciation. The tension between these contrasting views, with the individual situated between them, contributed to what Gustave Flaubert called l’ennui moderne;17 the hyper-boredom or “deep-seated agony, scarcely

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73 realized except by its effects, which was brought on by an all-inclusive, persisting perception of what is taken to be one’s existential situation.”18 Ennui was a form of psychological retreat. It began to be experienced in “epidemic proportions during the 1840s,”19 contributing to the condition we call the problem-of-self. In chapter 4, we will discuss late nineteenth-century romantic feelings, the speculative theory of Art, and Proust’s effort to ground his reader’s understanding of Marcel’s impulse to art in romantic notions of creative production consistent with then-contemporary thought on the nature of the artist. Consciousness and the Unconscious. In The Principles of Psychology, William James refers to consciousness as a stream.20 In doing so he offers an approach to understanding consciousness that countered philosophical views going back to René Descartes in the seventeenth century and David Hume in the eighteenth century. Both held consciousness to be composed of discreet states of awareness which developed one after another.21 As the names of Descartes and Hume suggest, interest in consciousness or, more properly, interest in psychology as a subject of study was closely tied to philosophy in this earlier period. One of the things James sought to do in Principles, published in 1890, was to separate psychology from this metaphysical connection and establish it as one of the natural sciences.22 By then neurology had become a branch of medicine focusing, diagnostically, on diseases of the nervous system. Jean-Martin Charcot, at l’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, in Paris, began studying nervous conditions in the 1860s. In 1882, he was made the first head of the newly organized clinic for nervous diseases at the hospital.23 Freud studied there from October 1885 to February 1886.24 Much of the early work of Charcot, and later Freud, dealt with female hysteria. Hysteria’s male counterpart, neurasthenia, was identified by the American George Beard in the early 1880s.25 Asthma, a condition Proust suffered from most of his life, was also considered under some circumstances to be nervous in origin.26 Proust’s father, a noted physician and public health official, wrote on asthma, among other subjects. Michael Finn argues that Dr. Proust dealt largely with symptoms Marcel exhibited in his book, L’Hygiène du neurasthénique (1897).27 “Not only does Dr. Proust’s study discuss real problems faced by Marcel Proust, it dips into the same pool of images and family experiences as A la recherche. At times, in fact, it takes on the tone of an avant-texte of that novel.”28 Investigators studying the nervous system, the brain, the workings of the mind, and consciousness and the unconscious frequently bump up against metacognitive events such as déjà vu, synesthesia, trance, and involuntary memory.29 Compelling as a subject of investigation, in the late nineteenth century it was

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74 the lack of “consistently observable behaviors or clearly identifiable eliciting stimuli” in these events that caused scientific interest in metacognition to gradually diminish.30 These events do not fit easily within the empirical framework behaviorism was establishing over psychological investigations during the 1880s and 1890s. Nonetheless, the general public remained fascinated by them. Bucking behaviorism’s prejudices, James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, circumvented those who eschewed the study of religious experiencing by stating quite commonsensically that such experiences are “religious” only to the extent the person experiencing them is religious.31 The same would be true whatever the orientation or belief the individual holds—creative, scientific, or philosophical. In this way James was able to approach the originary impulses of these phenomena free of the subjective interest of the individual. Likewise, he destigmatized the mystical aspect of these events by accepting the results of such experiences as the basis for judging their value. This contrasted with medical materialism, which diminished the importance of the results because of this mystical aspect.32 By recognizing these psychological and physiological underpinnings James effectively bracketed the term “mysticism” in quotation marks, just as he had done with religion elsewhere in Varieties.33 Thus dissociated, James was able to trace the psycho-physical operations at work in these experiences to their site of generation in the much vaster realms of the human subconscious and unconscious. Varieties includes descriptions of metacognitive or transmarginal experiences by people of many different backgrounds. All make reference in one way or another to a set of four basic characteristics by which James delineates these experiences. These characteristics are: 1. ineffability, 2. possession of a noetic quality, 3. transience, and 4. being passively experienced.34 Apart from the highly variable eliciting stimuli that call forth these experiences, the courses they take are quite regular.35 James’s analysis of his subjects makes this clear. Modern commentary on these phenomena has since corroborated his findings. Marcel’s experiences with involuntary memory fit this pattern. Industrialization and Technology. In the nineteenth century, advances in transportation and manufactory transformed people’s perception of time and space. The changes affecting their understanding of them impacted their everyday lives

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75 every bit as much as the psychological impact on people of migration, anonymity, and an altered relationship with God. Among early humans, time as the cosmic field in which action takes place was the source of the impulse to seek shelter from its menace. Time also provided early humans a conceptual field open to rationalization for use. “Before” and “after” became appended to it, as did the past and the future. Temporality and the atemporal (represented by God) became problematic in the nineteenth century. The development of railways required the re-conceptualization of space and time as a single field allowing for movement along a single right-of-way so that trains could pass each other safely, reaching sidings and making station stops that cleared the track for a train passing in the opposite or in the same direction. Thinking in terms of simultaneity provided the conceptual means to plan these crossings. Likewise, telegraphic and voice technologies altered communication beyond anything people had previously known. Clocks also became more prevalent as the nineteenth century progressed. With them, time became bifurcated into public time, the shared time of the community, and private time, its antithesis. Using a clock, a relationship can be established between time and motion. With a clock, productivity can be measured in units of time, generally an hour. Standards can be set to measure output per unit and multiples of it. Clock time does not reflect natural rhythms, it only counts. The natural, cyclical rise and fall of activity accompanying the movement from morning to night was thus forced into a regimentation that was based on the insensible measurements of clocks. Insensible or not, return on investment in factories and offices could be plotted with considerable accuracy based on x number of operations per hour, per day, per annum.36 With the introduction of the punch clock in the early 1890s, accountability could be applied to attendance and punctuality. Workers became slaves to the clock.37 And while hardly any of these considerations would have touched people of the class to which Marcel belonged, the precision enunciated in the posted schedule for the 13:22 train to Balbec did touch their lives. They, too, had to accommodate themselves to the exactitude with which clocks and commerce organized life.38 This regimentation and organization was captured in Georg Simmel’s 1903 article “The Metropolis and Modern Life.” In it, Simmel states that “if all the watches in Berlin suddenly went wrong in different ways even only as much as an hour, its entire economic and commercial life would be derailed for some time.”39 Martin Heidegger addressed clock time in Being and Time thusly: “Measuring time is essentially such that it is necessary to say now, but in obtaining the measurement we, as it were, forget what has been measured as such so that nothing is to be found except distance and number.”40 His comment resonates with Serres’ on

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76 measuring and what measuring cannot tell one about the inner aspect of a form (see chapter 1). The clock and measuring, and the disparity between public and private time, contributed to time becoming “a root concept in philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”41 Julia Kristeva notes, “Since Hegel, the great modern philosophers—Bergson, Husserl, and especially Heidegger—have all been philosophers of time.”42 Regulation stimulates a counterforce. Private time became a means of escape from the rule of the clock. In La Recherche, Marcel’s remark that an “hour is not simply an hour” clearly identifies the navigable time of inner experiencing where the exaggerated processes of human selfconsciousness become the active ground of a seemingly boundless subjectivity incorrigibly resistant to the clock.43 As if to exaggerate further the stress associated with change on the psychological apparatus of the individual, including sense organs and the means by which sense data are interpreted by the mind, forms of amusement appeared in the nineteenth century that challenged peoples’ understanding of the real. Photographs, panoramas, wax museum tableaux, and ocular instruments of various kinds had become popular by mid-century. Toward the end of the century they were joined by the telephone, the phonograph, and the cinema. All took advantage of human sense organs’ ability to make inferences from available data. In the same way the eye can be tricked into “seeing” what does not exist—depth, for example, in a two-dimensional painting or drawing—these inventions relied on illusion and sensory metonymy to convince viewers or listeners of their reality. Marcel says of his telephone conversation with his grandmother from Doncières, “[C]ar jusque-là, chaque fois que ma grand-mère avait causé avec moi, ce qu’elle me disait, je l’avais toujours suivi sur la partition ouverte de son visage” (G (CG), pp. 848–49) [A]lways until then, every time that my grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she said on the open score of her face]. (SLT [III], pp. 175–76) Not being able to see her, Marcel’s grandmother’s voice alone must tell him everything his combined senses would have told him if she were before him: her physical state and the way she looked and moved at the moment they were speaking. Having been disembodied, her voice caused a shudder of ill-recognition to run through Marcel. His shock is given an unusual complement on his return to Paris. Marcel catches sight of his grandmother as she sits alone reading. She is not yet aware that he is in the house. Observing this lack of consciousness of him in her expression, he once again sees her, in relation to himself, as incomplete. Presaging her death, this scene is also a reminder of the extent to which contact with others began being fractionalized with the introduction of these aforementioned devices.44 An accepted

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77 condition of social interaction today, the fractioning of one’s interaction with others so that it is only their voice one hears or their face one sees was something to which people at the end of the nineteenth century had to adjust. It is difficult to appreciate the full impact of these changes on peoples’ ways of living then. Once change is assimilated what came before is forgotten. Throughout this discussion, evidence of this technological assault on the human psyche is found in the weakening ability of the past to provide the template for future action. The inability of the past to be projected forward opened a gap between the past and the present that denied the individual such comfort as a hegemonic past can offer. The problem-of-self which appeared under a raft of different terms was something of a fact of life by the time Flaubert was talking about ennui in the passage cited earlier. This is attested to by the amount of published work that appeared on the subject during the period, including work, already noted, by Proust’s father. We can conclude from this that the condition Proust gave Marcel to deal with was real. We will review the problem-of-self again in the last section of this chapter. The neurophysiological basis for involuntary memory was established in the previous chapter. Of the three factors we set out to test in this chapter for the veracity of their historical impact in modernity, as this impact was reflected in the fictional accounts given of them in the novel, we can attest to the veracity of all. We can say that industrialization and technological change impacted psychological continuity of those affected by them. We have shown that a relationship does exist between a sense of discontinuity and a problem-of-self. And we have determined that the problem-of-self was related to issues of identity at a time when identity became a largely preferential and self-declarative stance asserted in a social arena defined by anonymity. In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary offers a window on the process of assimilating the new. He points to the arbitrariness of culturally organized patterns of vision.45 We began the previous paragraph by noting how hard it is to appreciate how we adapt to change when our familiarity with the way we do things is, for us, the norm. Crary’s comments help us understand how it is that we “see” differently than do people whose requirements for visual precision and attention to detail are much different from our own. This enabled Crary to make the point that vision is modifiable. In the industrial era, it became suited to the prolonged states of alertness the repetitive actions of machines required. Identity in La Recherche Having established the veracity of the social conditions underlying Proust’s fiction, we can proceed to the issue of identity and how it is treated in the novel. We

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78 can start by saying that in La Recherche identity is almost exclusively a bourgeois concern. Proust spends a good deal of time on the subject. He does so by comparing and contrasting the assertion and reception of identity in the principal settings of the novel: Balbec, Combray, and Paris. They represent, by the community one finds in each, strikingly different milieus. Balbec, or more properly Balbec-plage, is a newly developed resort town. Combray is a reactionary backwater. Paris is, of course, the great urban center whose cosmopolitanism creates an atmosphere in which anonymity begets social fluidity. At the time of Marcel’s first visit to the Grand Hotel-Balbec it had only recently been built. It owed its existence to the spread of the railroads. As with any place where people are largely unknown to each other, where everyone is a stranger, a person’s manner of dressing and how one carries oneself and behaves offer others a preliminary gauge of one’s status in society. But one needs to know how to read the signs conveyed in these forms to judge them accurately. Almost everyone at Balbec who passes judgments makes mistakes in this regard. What distinguishes a place like Balbec, and makes judging the social position of others difficult, is idleness. Leisure robs holiday-makers of all but these ambiguous and superficial appurtenances of class. Because there is little other than clothing and comportment to identify one’s social position, how one rides a horse or dances, wins or loses money at the casino, or whether or not one eats hard-boiled eggs in salad become more important than work-related attributes because the latter cannot be practiced while the former indicate social refinements having money makes possible.46 As such, these skills impart a prestige that often has little currency elsewhere. At the same time, at Balbec just as in Paris, the donning of a boater and a pair of white gloves can turn almost any young man into a dandy. The Grand Hotel’s elevator operator becomes one on his days off.47 Exacerbating the issue of identity in this seaside community for those made uncomfortable by their inability to demonstrate their actual social worth is the nagging suspicion that as one judges others, so in turn one is being judged. For those susceptible to the slight of being thought less of, there are few means other than a harsh tone and a critical demeanor or the distance one keeps from others to project exclusivity and suggest that one really is somebody of note, somewhere. At Balbec, the angst and the fatuousness of the errors made by the small legal fraternity that gathers at the hotel is a source of amusement for readers.48 Their reactions and judgments, their insecurity and self-importance are, on the face of it, farcical. But if one looks beyond the caricature to the probable source of their actions one sees their insecurity is tied to professional inactivity. Their claim to prominence is based on the professional positions occupied by

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79 the men in Caen, Cherbourg, and Le Mans, where they live and work. Inasmuch as they derive prestige from their professional identities in these departmental centers, any place where these cannot be exercised—and a declarative identity is valid only so long as one is practicing it—these men and their wives are made to feel vulnerable. They have only their friendship with each other and their aforementioned severity of judgment to compensate for the fact that they fear they are looked upon as rather common. Thus when the Marquis de Cambremer and his wife, prominent members of the local nobility, accept an invitation to lunch with the president of the Cherbourg bar and, later, when M. de Stermaria introduces himself as the friend of someone for whom the president had done a particular service in the past, the president immediately feels his professional identity assert itself. It affects him so forcefully that, momentarily, he relaxes and becomes volubly friendlier to the others.49 Speech habits and the subjects one chooses to speak of also offer a measure for gauging merit. But one has to converse with people to judge them and this is not always easy to do. Until the dowager Marquise de Cambremer and her daughter-in-law come to pay a visit to Marcel he has no way of appreciating their individual merits and faults. In The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer states that consciousness presupposes individuality.50 What Schopenhauer is saying directly relates to this discussion of identity. It was Marcel’s and the three advocates’ and their wives’ acute consciousness of themselves among the strangers populating Balbecplage that kept them from seeing themselves clearly. The inverse of this relationship is represented by the opening passage of Du côté de chez Swann, where Marcel awakes in a state below consciousness. Marcel tells us he panics on finding himself momentarily trapped in an un-individuated, rudimentary state of existence. Not until he finally identifies his surroundings, enabling him to know where he is, is he able to know who he is and become calm. By contrast, little changes for Françoise in Balbec. She knows her place and is busy with her responsibilities. In this sense, her worldly life travels with her. She is like the Marquise de Villeparisis who carries with her furnishings and mementoes to surround herself with things that will make her feel at home. (The Verdurins go one better, bringing both furnishings and friends to La Raspelière.) Françoise, thus prepared, very quickly commands the respect due her as the servant to wealthy “masters.” As for Marcel’s grandmother, she is baffled by his social anxieties. She pays no attention to what others may say or think. She is visiting Balbec solely to gain the benefit of the sea air for Marcel. She is not there to socialize or make an impression on others. As for the Guermantes who visit Mme de Villeparisis, they are scarcely aware of anyone but themselves.

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80 Combray provides the opposite situation. It is a socio/economic unit at one time enfeoffed to the lords of Guermantes. Everyone in the town fills a role in the economy. There is little redundancy or competition. Left to its own internal operations, Combray runs smoothly. In this setting strangers are unheard of. Seeing someone one does not know sets off alarms and consultation until the unknown entity becomes someone’s cousin or sister, transforming the new and unheard of into the familiar. This is true, too, of the artist copying one of the windows in Saint-Hilaire.51 His purpose establishes the reason for his presence with his identity as painter. M. Legrandin is another matter altogether. A son of Combray, he is an engineer in Paris who, because of the railway, is able to spend holidays at his house in the town. Legrandin’s declarative identity of engineer is overshadowed by his social ambitions. His sister is married to the Marquis de Cambremer, whose family we have already mentioned. Like the lawyers and their wives at Balbec, readers only encounter Legrandin at leisure. Unlike them, he is well known to Marcel’s family. We are thus able to see their initial bafflement and later annoyance in discovering that his odd behavior reveals him to be a striver and snob. His desire to associate with “de’s,” and his appropriation of la particule for himself at the end of the novel (he styles himself Legrand de Méséglise) make him an object of ridicule.52 M. Bloch, the father of Marcel’s friend, offers a variant on middle-class striving by making heavy use of a pass to which one of his acquaintances has access for free passage on a railway line. His purpose, apart from avarice, is to impress clerks!53 Both in Combray and in Paris, Charles Swann is a special case. He has no career. He has a highly developed aesthetic sense. His grooming, conversation, and style reflect the erudition and taste of a truly remarkable person. Interestingly enough, he is also imbued with the “spirit of Combray.” To be credited with this spirit one must be old-fashioned or honor long-standing traditions of decorum. This means knowing the rules governing local society. This extends to sharing the bounty of one’s garden, as Swann does. Possessing an income that allows one to live comfortably and with the lack of ostentation that signals the quality of one’s family characterizes the spirit of Combray. Politically one is conservative if not an outright monarchist. And one is Catholic (Swann’s family converted from Judaism at some point in the past). Like all those characterized by the epithet “spirit of Combray,” his understanding of himself is complete and disinterested. The modern concept of identity as preferential stance cannot be applied to him, just as it cannot be applied to his great friend, the Duchesse de Guermantes (one is either a duchess or is not). Legrandin’s assertiveness would have been incomprehensible to Swann if knew of it, and we do not know

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81 that he does. Some readers might consider Swann differently. After all, his life in Paris is quite different from the one Marcel’s family sees in Combray. And yet, even in Paris, Swann visits them as he does other families he is connected with through long family associations. He enjoys these visits, and his hosts enjoy them, too, for Swann’s naturalness is reassuring, supportive, and friendly. After his marriage to Odette, Swann becomes a striver. But he becomes so to lend support to her aspirations for a salon. He wants to make her life easier and, to the extent he can, neutralize the effect of her past as a famous courtesan on her present situation, making it easier for the women who might reasonably befriend her to do so. Throughout, the essential Swann remains intact. He is among the people Marcel most admires. The epithet “feudal” attaches to him. In Marcel’s mind this is a positive attribute.54 Having spoken at length of identity in Balbec and Combray, identity in Paris is a much simpler matter. If one possesses the éclat and the wherewithal to play the role one has chosen to play few questions are asked. If they are, the answers are not long remembered. Identity and the Cinematic View of Life In Time and Free Will (1913), Bergson uses the notes of a song to suggest how memory frees us from the limitations of the present by allowing the past to bear upon it. He points out that in a song there is ever only one note sounding in the moment; one note followed by another in succession.55 The individual hearing a first note and then a second begins collecting them in consciousness and, melting them together, “hears,” as Bergson says, the song that only exists in his or her head. Like the pendulum of a clock, which Bergson also discusses in this section of his book, there is ever only one note sounding in space to register in the ear. A song, from beginning to end, is a becoming. Each further note bearing on those already heard extends a pattern in the listener’s present-memory and present-consciousness that, in turn, will influence the next note as it, too, is drawn into the duration of the song. And while a song one hears is dependent on prior experience and learning to be understood as a song and to be dissociated from other sounds heard at the same time, and while we can acknowledge that a sound is a resonant stimulus that extends outward after the event of its sounding into the field to be occupied by the striking of the next note sounded—in other words, there is tonal overlap just as there is an afterimage in vision—the point Bergson is making is that remembering in consciousness creates one’s sense of duration.56 As a sorting, processing, and synthesizing progression, the same technique of remembering and running together in consciousness past events in one’s life should apply to one’s memories to establish a similar sense of dura-

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82 tion. Marcel’s problem-of-self is in large part the result of his inability to do this. This is the cause of his lack of a sense of psychological duration when he looks at his past. As we have already demonstrated in chapter 2, referable memory is a memory of acts; it does not encompass the whole of one’s field of experiencing which is layered through degrees of unconsciousness. These unconscious parts of experiencing register as gaps. In 1895, the Lumière brothers began projecting films to the Parisian public. They showed actual, unscripted events such as a train arriving at a station, workers leaving a factory, and a snowball fight (among other subjects).57 These activities, filled with movement and action were preserved on film as a sequence of static images. Earlier, in the 1880s, Eadweard Muybridge achieved a similar effect in a series of photographs which showed horses running that he produced for Leland Stanford in California.58 The technology of capturing movement on film broke the flow of their motion into discreet frames, producing a series of still images that when seen in rapid succession made the horses seem to move. The imagery offered by the photograph and the linked frames of a film are like the positions of the arrow in Zeno’s paradox.59 The paradox of stasis and movement that film represents, in which the border of each frame takes on the significance of a gap between them, allows one to draw an analogy between cinematic process and the way Marcel viewed his past life when he looked back on it in reflection. Photographs and later film, through the emphasis they place on the moment(s) in which they are shot and the activities they capture, upend peoples’ sense of the past. A photograph can stand for the whole of an event while being only a small part of it. Photographs can document presence, as in the snapshot Saint-Loup took of Marcel’s grandmother at Balbec when she was already troubled by the illness that will kill her. Through artfully arranging her hat, which cast part of her face in shadow, she was able to appear healthy when this was not entirely the case. Photographs can both lie and tell the truth. In The Emergence of Cinematic Time Mary Ann Doane links the impact of photographically captured moments to the individual’s understanding of time as a synecdoche affecting one’s perception of continuity.60 Marcel’s view of memory fits Doane’s description of cinematic time which emphasizes the sequence, separated by gaps, of discreet events. The gaps that interrupt Marcel’s understanding of the past would have been of little consequence had place and an acceptance of the authority of God maintained the flow of his psychological duration. In support of this, Descartes found connectivity to be preserved by God.61 This suggests that for him, too, in the seventeenth century, the gaps between cognitive events loomed as barriers

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83 to establishing a sense of duration. The heterogeneity of short-lived memory sets and the identities associated with them made the past little more than a gallery of snapshots. Bergson’s solution, which he offers in Time and Free Will, could be viewed as a twentieth-century version of Descartes. “[P]ure duration is the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.” (Bergson’s italics)62 Marcel could not refrain from separating these events into discreet memories. The problem of dealing with them was central to his thought. It kept cropping up. Understanding the phenomenon of dead memory in contrast to the vivacity of resonance and déjà vu was something of an obsession of his. This can be seen in his finding his memories of Combray to be essentially dead images, or in encountering the implicit gaps between frames, which he acknowledges in talking about the Méséglise and the Guermantes’ ways as being sealed in the vessels of their separate afternoons,63 or when he tries to inform his past self of his success in being recognized as Gilberte’s boyfriend and finds he can no longer communicate with that former self because it no longer exists.64 These images can be contrasted with his excited response to the hawthorns at Tansonville and the pear blossoms in the suburb of Paris where he went with Saint-Loup to meet Rachel. Analyzing this state of affairs, an internal monologue can be composed the logic of which is similar to that Marcel frequently employed. It is worth noting that Marcel never approached his problem-of-self this way, in part because he was never able to formally articulate it. Unarticulated, he could draw no deductions from his observations as we are doing here. The fact that he never deduced something like the following passage does not negate the usefulness of our reasoning and deduction. Based on the veracity of Proust’s fiction the foregoing material has established, this exercise is valid. The monologue is written in the first person, as if by Marcel. When I look over my past life, I have no sense of duration. This is because my memories and the identities I have adopted and filled over the course of my life do not flow into each other; instead they are like snapshots or the frames of a film. They resist interpenetration into a single enduring entity. This being so, the question, “Who am I?” becomes “Who am I now?” leading to empty solipsism. If identity, which effectively defines for others the position of one’s body in space and time, is an external, phenomenal, and transitory position of an individual in the world, then it is like an act in the moment. In this respect, identity, past identities, and memories exist sequentially; even in their multiplicity they are held by me, who is often torn between them, only one at a time. This means when I am my mother’s son I am not Albertine’s lover; when I am conversing

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84 in company I am no longer a solitary thinker. The notes of a song that run together in one’s mind is an example of duration. But I cannot run together my present identity (whatever identity that might be) with my other identities or with past ones. The images remain separated by gaps; my memories are like pictures in a scrapbook. These pictures in which I occupy the center convey nothing of the potentiality latent in the moment they were taken in that could be carried forward to be amalgamated into psychological duration. Therefore, I am deprived of the continuity and sense of duration I seek from the past.65

Until to the end of the novel Proust gives readers nothing to help us identify a path by which Marcel might resolve his problem-of-self. Brought to a standstill after having worked through the above monologue, we see, as Marcel would have, that there was no solution to be found in rooting through this monologue for answers to his plight. Thus at the point at which Marcel takes up the invitation to the matinée at the Princesse de Guermantes, at the end of La Recherche, he sees himself a failure, destined for a life of social boredom. As we will see in chapter 7, his transformative experience ending with his encounter with François le Champi will resolve this conflict for him. He will achieve resolution not by analyzing his problem to the sort of dead end we came to in our analysis and then stopping. Nor will he quiet his doubt by accepting a Cartesian affirmation in the authority of God or, through a course of Bergsonian instruction, relieve himself of the problem by letting his ego “live,” or in taking faith from something like James’s stream of consciousness. Instead, as a middle-aged manabout-town, Marcel kept pushing onward for light, alone. It is remarkable to see a person continue to struggle with basic questions concerning an understanding of life and experience far beyond youth, especially when he or she has so little that can be considered success in this regard. But this happens sometimes. It is a trait that characterizes the artist, the scientist, and the philosopher imbued with perseverance. La Recherche is full of characters; there are hundreds of them in the book. They occupy nearly every level of society and every economic bracket from Eulalie, who lives on the goodness of the townspeople of Combray, to the extremely rich Princesse de Luxembourg. At whatever level of wealth and emotional/intellectual development a character exists when we meet her or him, and regardless of the interest in life and the talent she or he possesses, almost all have faded into complacency and/or tired worldliness by the end of the novel. Marcel is the exception. Of all the characters in the novel he is the only one viewed closely enough for us to gain a feeling for his motivations in life. How is it that he kept pushing onward for light? The answer rests with his responsive-

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85 ness to resonance and déjà vu. These psychic events had diverted him throughout his life from the course a man of his background might be expected to take toward the free and unencumbered pleasures offered by life’s urbane environments—Swann comes to mind here. As we know, Marcel savors these events. The impressions he takes from them are distinguished by a delicious levitation of joy which lift him briefly above his worldly concerns. It is a predilection and propensity by which he has been marked since early childhood. These phenomena, speaking directly to his heart, had simultaneously briefly disencumbered him of habit and enabled him to soar above the commonplace. Surprise and elation define these experiences for him. The shock of these incidents is the source of his surprise. The questions they provoke and his efforts to answer them elates him with the possibility that they are leading him to something as yet unknown. His responses to these experiences thus ally him with James’s subjects in The Varieties of Religious Experience. Through imagination and intellectual effort Marcel fosters the potential these experiences awaken in him, even as he can think of no use to which it could be put.66 Thus Marcel was prevented from succumbing altogether to a life like Swann’s, one illuminated by wit but largely defined by idleness and, ultimately, boredom. To be aware of resonance and to be moved by incidents of psychic transposition is to see reality as a screen beyond or within which lies something from which an essential understanding of the visible can be reached. Such awareness makes the screen itself more clearly comprehensible. From boyhood, then, readers see unfold in Marcel’s creative development the responsiveness of an individual whose predilections and purpose will lead him to self-realization and art. We are now ready to proceed to chapter 4, where we look at Marcel’s problem with his declaration to be a writer and the challenge that existed for Proust to convince readers of the validity of this identity for a hero who shows us so little of his talent.

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Chapter 4 The Making of an Artist Romanticism and the Origins of the Artwork Romanticism as a movement in art gave way to Realism by the middle years of the nineteenth century. But romanticism as a sum of values crediting the individual—the artist above all—with a potential for heightened levels of experiencing and expression continued to inflect discussions of art throughout the nineteenth century. It continues to do so today though now the discussion is marked by the reaction provoked by the special-case terms Romanticism made use of in championing art and the artist. Jean-Marie Schaeffer’s Art of the Modern Age characterizes this reaction. Schaeffer argues that a willingness to attribute a role in art-making to a charge, borne in the self of the artist, which sets the artist and her or his art apart from everyone and everything else is detrimental to contemporary thought about art. According to Schaffer, it undermines a clear-sighted understanding of art’s function in the post-modern world. Art is a multipartite project. To understand it, it his helpful to differentiate its parts and single out those pertinent to one’s particular interest. Three of these elements or parts touched on in the opening sentences of this chapter are: 1. art-making; 2. thought on art, and 3. art’s function in the post-modern world. Art-making can be divided into a) the source of art in the artist and b) its expression, the latter leading to issues of practice. It is with the origin of art that Romanticism was most directly concerned. Discussing the source of art in the artist in light of Proust’s narrative of the making of an artist allies our interest with this romantic concern while separating our subject from the larger subject of art. It also makes clear the subjects we will not be taking up. We will not be taking up the issue of thought on art— what art is—except as this issue develops for Marcel as he comes to understand the subject matter for the books he wishes to write. And we will not concern ourselves here with art’s function in society. Nowhere in the present work do we discuss the function Proust expected his novel to perform. Nowhere in La Recherche does Marcel ruminate on what he wishes his work to do, either. Rather, in both cases, the work is presented, at least ostensibly, without consideration of the function the work will perform once completed. Both La Recherche and

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88 Marcel’s planned book are presented as freestanding forms brought forth from their authors. A birth metaphor is apt. As we established in chapter 1, intentionality is the answer to the question, “What is communicated through form?” But intentionality, broadcast through essence, is elusive. This is true for an artwork as it is for everything else. Physical qualities of things easily overshadow the intentionality expressed through them. Intentionality in an artwork is no exception. As a young person, Marcel was infatuated as most people are with the excitement that can sweep through us while reading a book, watching a play, or listening to music. As an adult, his appreciation for art matured. He came to appreciate the intentionality expressed through an artwork as being the source of the communication that made the most striking impression on him. By contrast and even though he was widely recognized as a connoisseur, Swann’s appreciation of art is limited to surface phenomena associated with the works he admires. With the possible exception of the Baron de Charlus, this is the case for the other characters in the novel, including Mme Verdurin, the Cottards, the Marquise de Cambremer (Legrandin’s sister), and the Duc de Guermantes. Like most people, their understanding of, and appreciation for art is limited by their likes and prejudices which may or may not have been colored by the influence of public opinion, popular criticism, and/or the new and exciting. It is ironic that Schaeffer felt the need to address the origin of art at the very end of the twentieth century, long after the post-structuralists had detached the artist responsible for the appearance of a book, poem, piece of music, painting, or sculpture from the artwork. But it is important to appreciate the distinction between thought on art and art-making, mentioned above. For Schaeffer seems to be pointing his remarks to artists rather than to theorists. Artists are the one’s being reminded that today’s concept of the artist is not what it used to be. Bringing this up when he did (2000) acknowledges the remarkable staying power of a conception of art and the artist which, even if romantic notions of the origin of art exist at present in much reduced forms, sites the source of art in the self of the artist and calls the artwork arising out of it the product of genius. Variously discredited today, genius was the great engine driving the Romantics’ cause. It was the sine qua non of their all-consuming claim of primacy for artistic sensibility and for what Baudelaire called the “almost divine faculty which perceives at once . . . the intimate and secret relations of things, correspondences and analogies:” imagination.1 The concept of genius suffuses La Recherche.2 So does a romantic faith in the transformative power of art to convey truths of experiencing through material

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89 form. The latter is underscored by the lessons Marcel learns from the works of Bergotte, Berma, Elstir, and Vinteuil. The former emerges, in vivo, in Marcel’s internal monologues. There is something of an obsession with genius in the earlier volumes of the novel which cover Marcel’s youth. The frequent references to art and genius in these volumes bare this out.3 Emphasis on genius and a belief in the transformative power of art mark La Recherche as one of the last major statements of a romantic faith in art.4 But too much had occurred over the course of the nineteenth century for Proust to be able to tell a story of creative genius without providing proof, through evidence, of his hero’s profound capacity to feel. Such evidence was necessary to counter growing scientific understanding of the human psyche and skepticism over whether a romantic concept of genius had any meaning for either artist or viewer. (It is the same skepticism that surfaces nearly a hundred later in Schaeffer’s book.) Proust referenced a story of creative development to aspects of his own experience. La Recherche is an expansive non-autobiographical but self-analytical novel that is much more then the story of a life. Rather, it is a story of the life of a mind. This is a reason for its being written in the first person. Third-person accounts are restricted to external features of life, the actions and social pressures impacting the individual’s growth, development, success or failure. By contrast, the relationships that appear to an individual among things he or she observes; the correspondences one senses; and the images the imagination concocts occur in one’s head. Where the hero or protagonist of a story is a character of considerable observational and intellectual insight destined to become an artist of the first order and where, therefore, a principle theme of the work is the birth, blossoming, and expression of genius, a third-person account is insufficient. Like the lives of saints, the story of genius is bound up with spiritual transformation and empowerment. It unfolds internally and, to an extent varying with the individual, unconsciously. In order to believe in a character’s potential, readers need to witness, in operation, processes of association by which the thought underlying an artist’s creative work comes into being. No writer is able to make a fictional character write better than he or she can. This fact impacted Proust’s approach in writing La Recherche. It explains why he did not use a format such as Thomas Mann would employ in Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: the Early Years, published in English in 1955, in which Marcel would have admitted he wrote the book we have just read. Mann’s book concludes this way, with Krull, in jail, admitting to writing the account we are just finishing reading. Had Proust done the same he would have effectively relinquished control over Marcel’s, and, by extension, the novel’s critical reception,

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90 which he had no intention of doing. Allowing Marcel to claim authorship would have transferred the prerogative of conferring the accolade of genius on Marcel to readers. As the novel stands, nothing in it reveals Marcel’s greatness as a writer. Yet by the end of the novel, because of the evidence Proust offers, readers have a strong sense the book Marcel is about to write will be masterful. As we have already noted, Proust carefully orchestrated this response through the sleight of hand he perpetuated concerning authorship, which we mentioned in chapter 1. The impossibility, on purely qualitative grounds, of Marcel writing La Recherche will be discussed at the end of this chapter. Proust offers readers several forms of evidence to support a potential for genius in Marcel. These forms of evidence are intimacy with qualities of his sensibility, access to his interior life, and the intricate, idiosyncratic clockwork of his mind from which the Romantic concept of genius can draw authority. Genius would not have mattered, of course, if the nature of it had not been of considerable interest to Proust and if he had not positioned genius as the state to which Marcel is advancing. We know Marcel is advancing toward it because of the attention Proust draws to the achievements of great masters. Their skill establishes a standard against which, from the beginning of the novel, readers can judge artistic merit and against which, too, Marcel can judge his own insufficiency of talent. He bases his perceived lack on his inability to settle down to work. The fact that intellectually he cannot take a subject in hand and treat it incisively through writing on it, and the fact that his thought is so easily derailed when he experiences certain kinds of sensations, together seem to work against his ever being able to develop into a writer.5 Advances in psychology and, increasingly, after the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in neurology and, still later, the development of psychiatry, made this psychological approach in a novel possible in the early years of the twentieth century. Proust illuminates the seemingly inexplicable phenomenon of the source of art in the artist through exposing the relationship between an artist and the self. Readers are thus able to make a connection between Marcel’s unsettled psychological state and his growing understanding that the source of the déjà vus which arrest him lay within a past his referable memory cannot reach. Exposing the connection casts light on the phenomenon of the origination of art in the self of the artist. Proust accomplished this feat through linking sensibility, the phenomenon of genius, and inspiration to a universal human potential Proust identifies in a well-known and often quoted passage near the end of La Recherche. In this passage, Proust clearly links the generative capacity of the artist to an innate capacity in human beings to draw meaning from experience and

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91 communicate this meaning to others through art. One of the characteristics of an artist in this identification of human potentiality is the artist’s compelling need to respond.6 This being the case, from the moment an individual accepts for the first time the repeatedly proffered invitations to pursue the ineluctable, he or she commences on a path which can lead to the kind of illumination Proust speaks of in the passage alluded to above. It also points to the fact that, as with everything in life, the origin of art—before art can ever be said to arise from within the self— is in the world. While keeping his focus on the artist, Proust, through crediting total experiencing as the source of all we feel and respond to, is acknowledging the external source of one’s creative sensibility. Doing so allowed Proust to preserve what he saw as the validity of what then becomes a “quasi-ontic” origin of the artwork in the artist while distancing art from the divine influence Romanticism credited to its origin.7 Proust was not devoutly religious. Sacralizing what he valued was not part of his psychological makeup. In this sense, Proust was quite as pragmatic as Bergson and James. Pragmatically, then, identifying this origin with experience answers a significant question by diffusing the ultimate source of art in the artist over so wide a plane (human experiencing) that one can only come back, in dealing with the issue, to the artist her or himself. For Proust, sacralization’s “capacity to survive the abandonment of romantic onto-theology, and thus to continue to develop itself even in the absence of the theological roots that alone seemed able to endow it with a certain plausibility,”8 was dependent on locating an agent other than God through which to vest the creative potential of the self with the authority of truth which his idealist view of art and the artist required. With experience as agent, Proust was able to make use of the utility that exists in the term genius to identify in human beings an interior responsive impulse the product of which, if activated and realized, is among the rarest of human accomplishments. He was able to do so by presenting empirical evidence for psychological duration—already established as an essential human need—as authenticated by an individual’s sensory experiencing. A moment ago in mentioning human potentiality we noted that Proust identified an ability to develop one’s experiences to the point of understanding something about one’s life, and the course it has taken, as being immanent in everyone. This ability, beginning with the earliest experiences of childhood, is mingled with sensibility and imagination. The origins of genius are to be found here also. Demonstrating this in the novel involved a complex process of exposition which Proust began revealing from its opening pages. Almost from the

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92 moment one begins reading, Marcel’s keen sensitivity and his fertile imagination are evident. His sensibility is even provided with a familial prototype in the eccentricity of his maternal grandmother. Her outlook on the world and the way she responds to it are amplified and sharpened in Marcel. Through this link Proust establishes the role of environment and the influence of antecedents in fostering innate, individually-exercised perceptive and intuitive abilities of an individual. Readers come to understanding that these abilities, by helping Marcel satisfy his curiosity, enabled him to see “the world as an object to be deciphered.”9 Proust does not rest with this exposition of the growth of Marcel’s creative consciousness. He goes further. He places an incident of childhood recovered in the novel’s opening section. This event, an involuntary memory experienced by Marcel as a mature man, effectively alters the perspective of Proust’s storytelling. This remarkable experience arrests the flow of the story. Through Marcel’s involuntary memory, Proust declares psychically disjunctive events, in this case déjà vu and involuntary memory, will be major factors in Marcel’s creative development. By demonstrating that involuntary memories spring from the unconscious, and by having enlarged further Marcel’s responsive field through his experience of resonance with the hawthorns a short while later, Proust positions his readers to regard Marcel as both gifted and possessed of a sublime ability to “feel.” Both are necessary attributes of the greatest artists. In The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire wrote: [B]ut genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will—a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated. (Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. By Jonathan Mayne (London; Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), p. 8)10

That Marcel recovers a past experience in much richer detail through involuntary memory than he could have ever mustered any other way demonstrates his ability to move beyond the limits constraining Baudelaire to his referable memory (“childhood recovered at will”). Marcel’s experience with the madeleine demonstrates the novel’s idealism. And it establishes the authenticity of involuntary memories as conveyers of truth. This authenticity is based on their origins in chance. Having started here, over the course of the novel, Proust punctuates the novel’s exposition of Marcel’s life and his pursuit of love, friendship, and social success with various kinds of incidents and encounters related to his creative development. Altogether, these experiences position Marcel to take advantage of three insights into being, time, and memory, and into art and the artist,

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93 he gains in the Prince de Guermantes’ library. These insights enable Marcel to appreciate the value of his past with greater clarity then his referable memories have ever offered him. They were roused in him by his probing the distinction between his unconscious past and the past he can call up at will in the contemplative period following his experiences of resonance and déjà vu/involuntary memory. For these insights point to the possible existence of a relationship between what he had learned from metacognitive experiences as portals into the self and his seemingly lackluster attempts to become a writer. Flipped, these insights will become answers to the questions: 1. What is art? 2. Who is the artist? 3. How is the artist recognized in him or herself ? We will look more closely at how Proust develops Marcel to convince readers of his potential for greatness in a later section of this chapter titled, “Impediments and the Impulse.” In the last section of this chapter, “The Lessons of Masters,” we conclude the exploration of these themes by looking at the lessons in art Marcel learns from Bergotte, Berma, Elstir, and Vinteuil. But first we will discuss Schaeffer’s Speculative Theory of Art. The Speculative Theory of Art In the introduction to Art of the Modern Age Schaeffer cites a lecture given by the poet Paul Valéry in 1937 in which Valéry spoke of being a poet at the end of the nineteenth century, In his lecture, Valéry reflected on the fact that many young people of his generation (it was Proust’s, also) saw art as a kind of “supernatural nutriment.”11 One could argue that such nutriment would intensify these young persons’ commitment to the cause they championed, their cause being art. To take up a cause is to place one’s life in service to an ideal, the something larger that infuses life with meaning and material reality with transcendent possibility. Even if supernatural nutriment motivates and informs a person’s actions, not everyone who draws sustenance from a cause or ideal necessarily sees her or himself in such service however. Actually, Proust may not have. He was not a “to the barricades” type of person. And the supernatural has no place in the phenomena he describes and analyzes. Proust was a hyper-intense, self-medicating analyst of his own health and experience. In his work, he was self-serving. Picasso is another artist who it is hard to imagine serving art rather than his own demiurgic drive to create. Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1953, finding

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94 Stéphane Mallarmé’s psychological environment drained of virtually any capacity to sustain a romantic notion of the artist as the trumpet of God, argues that this “trumpet” had become a tin horn by the 1890s.12 These examples not withstanding, Valéry’s comments on the creative milieu in which he lived and worked as a young man draw attention to the faith he and some other artists (Proust among them), placed in art to shape expression. The religious terminology Valéry employed suggests, too, the fervor with which the young people he alluded to devoted themselves to art. It was, for them, the only productive means left for experiencing intense feelings of universal value as science, philosophy, religion, and metaphysics had lost much of their luster for these youth by 1900.13 The elevation of art to this plane was sacralizing. Sacralization entails a process of arbitrary selection. The thing chosen is invested with a higher level of authority than it possessed prior to its elevation. This investment, as Schaeffer says, “distorts the component of prosaic life” elevated for reverential purposes.14 At the same time, the thing chosen is expected to provide the raison d’être for those pledging allegiance to it as well as providing the insulating stability of the sacred that is the quid pro quo of such relationships. In this approach to structuring one’s life, a more sacralized world is a more secure one. Schaeffer locates the source of the Romantic concept of sacralization, as well as the concept of the artwork as arising in the artist from a magico/mythic source, in German philosophy beginning with Kant. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant notes the uniqueness of the “poet.” He links the interrelated phenomena of sensibility, imagination, and genius to the purposefulness of essential communication as projected through the artist’s work. Kant says those who have a “talent for fine art are the elect of nature.”15 To the discussion of the enigmatic source of the artist’s message he offers the confirmation that the imagination “is a powerful agent for creating, as it were, a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.”16 But, Kant goes on, even Homer himself could not “show how his ideas, so rich at once in fancy and in thought, enter and assemble themselves in his brain” because, as Kant concludes, Homer himself did not know how they did so.17 And even though Kant qualified his statements almost as soon as he made them so that they reflect what he saw as the limitations in the greatness he had just credited to art and its workers,18 Schaeffer is able to see articulated in Kant’s comments on genius and the origin of the work of art attitudes that are “already partly pre-romantic.”19 Similar sentiments had been sounded earlier in the work of others.20 In fact murmurings of increasing valuation for the irrepressible energies that ignite the emotions of one’s creative soul and that lay buried as unknown potentialities in the most of humankind had

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95 been growing throughout the period before the Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790.21 In France, Diderot’s Salons, beginning in 1759, were reflecting interest in the artist’s vision and the creative imagination.22 Maurice Shroder calls upon the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that of his disciple, Mme de Staël, in making his point that it was a developing regard for the creative imagination which “was one of the most important factors contributing to the emergence of the artist as an ideal type.”23 Schaeffer labels a romantic sacralization of art and the whole collective animus which developed around and out of this concept the speculative theory of Art. The speculative theory of Art—the name we propose to give this conception—thus combines an objectal claim (“Art…performs an ontological task”) with a methodological one (in order to study art, we have to bring to light its essence, that is, its ontological function). It is a speculative theory because in the diverse forms it assumes in the course of time, it is always deduced from a general metaphysics—whether systematic like Hegel’s, genealogical like Nietzsche’s, or existential like Heidegger’s—that provides its legitimation. It goes without saying that the definitions of art thus proposed are not what they claim to be; they present themselves in a descriptive grammatical form, that of the definition of an essence; but since art has no essence (in the sense of a substantial identity) and is never anything but what people make of it, they are in fact evaluative definitions (the art works are identified as art works insofar as they conform to a specific artistic ideal—that of the alleged definition of essence). It is a theory of Art with a capital A because beyond works and genres, it projects a transcendent entity that is supposed to found the diversity of artistic practices and to have ontological priority over them. Only the postulated priority of the essence as a transcendent entity permits an apodictic discourse to say what art is “as such,” that is, to pass off its evaluative definition as an analytic definition. Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 7.

As attractive as the sacralization of art may have been to the Romantics attempting to understand art, the artist, and the nature of genius, sacralization is not about schemes of production. Thus it was, and is of little use to the artist in practice. There is a basic anxiety in any artist’s creative consciousness over his or her ability to be and produce. It is reflected in the artist’s unsteady faith in the sureness of his or her purpose that often consumes the artist with a dark, originary self-questioning doubt that is as essential to an artist’s relationship to art as the confidence she or he exercises in producing it. This self-questioning revolves around clarity, effectiveness, and expressive force in handling one’s medium. Because an artist is above all human, life plays a part in the physical making of art. And the muddle of making leaves one vulnerable to doubt as to the merit of

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96 what one has just done (almost regardless of what anyone else might say about it at the time or afterward). The Impediments and the Impulse Proust goes out of his way to show that not every individual in whom an impulse to art begins to develop will chose to pursue it. And, of course, not everyone who pursues it will succeed. Swann, Legrandin, Charlus, and Ski are all mentioned as having tried their hand at art and then given it up. In the case of Ski, he channeled his talent into the production of entertainments for the Verdurins and their friends. Elstir, too, readers are told, had at one time been a member of the clan and had done much the same thing. But he freed himself from it in part as a response to efforts on the part of Mme Verdurin to separate him from the woman he would eventually marry. In doing so, in breaking with the Verdurin’s and their all-consuming social demands, Elstir was also able to dedicate more time to his art. Parenthetically, it is useful to note that readers rarely see Proust’s great masters in elaborate or distracting social settings, with the exception of Bergotte. These masters are examples of artists who successfully preserve their time and energy for creative work. Throughout La Recherche, whenever Proust looks at creative practice he does so by providing a spectrum of capabilities, talents, and accomplishments. Providing this range sets Marcel’s emergence as a writer apart from what Proust implies are the lesser achievements of those who, for whatever reason, have squandered or abandoned their talent or have allowed it to dissipate or be absorbed by other pursuits. The problem for Proust of securing the validity of his hero’s identity as a writer is twofold. First, the reader must be convinced from the very beginning that Marcel will eventually realize himself a writer even if, over the course of the narrative, Proust allows our belief in Marcel’s future as a writer to be displaced by more immediate narrative concerns. Second, Marcel must sustain himself in this very same belief once he identifies himself with this vocation. On the first count and regardless of our interest in Marcel’s future, our belief in Marcel as an extraordinarily gifted individual is established without reservations through our witnessing Marcel’s initial experience of the world in waking in the middle of the night wondering where he might be. In treating this event with an imaginative, self-stimulating suspension of the quotidian logic which forbids hypernatural suggestion from playing any part in an individual’s interaction with his surroundings, readers find themselves attributing Marcel’s response to a creative sensibility consistent with a recognizably romantic view of emotionally responsive individuals. From this introduction, the further one reads the more a reader

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97 associates Marcel’s thought and his responses to life with a romantic vision of the artist. As for Marcel, he must sustain himself in this belief, also; he cannot lose faith. This is Proust’s story which he advanced through intermittent arrests to the movement of the novel during which Marcel’s powers of observation; his ability to intuit relationships and the reflections readers are privy to remind readers that Marcel is no ordinary individual. As the novel proceeds, these incidents, so unsettling to Marcel’s equanimity, display his increasing incisiveness in interpreting them. This allows the depth of his capacity for response to be gauged. The results suggest the visionary. These incidents pave the way for readers to witness, at the end of the novel, a becoming: the making of an artist. The novel’s dénouement coincides with the moment of inspiration in which Marcel realizes this becoming. This fortuitous incident, occurring late in his life and late in the novel, has roots in Marcel’s youth in a first lesson in art learned from reading Bergotte. The lesson Marcel gains from Bergotte inaugurates a series which concludes with the lesson he learns from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet. With the exception of Elstir, all these lessons come to Marcel through these artists’ work. Alone of this group, Elstir spoke to Marcel about art and moral growth at a point in his own career when he was actively engaged in his work, exploring the capacities of paint to convey a reality of his experiencing. Because he was actively working, he was able to speak from a position of creative authority. Marcel could value Elstir’s conversation because the meaning expressed in Elstir’s spontaneous speech was understood by Marcel on the same grounds of kinship that prompted Elstir to invite Marcel to his studio the first time he met him, in the restaurant at Rivebelle.24 As for the others, Vinteuil died while Marcel was still a boy; he only knew him as the young son of friends in Combray. Bergotte had exhausted almost all his talent, and had shriveled intellectually as a result, by the time Marcel met him. And Marcel only met Berma after she had reached semi-retirement. Thus Marcel’s lessons from Elstir extend beyond those he derived from looking at Elstir’s pictures; he benefited from Elstir’s practical wisdom as well. Reflecting on his own experience, Elstir justifies the path one’s life takes, for those with the capacity to transcend their own complicated and confusing humanity in work, by seeing the plentitude of human experiences as the only field available to us in which to achieve an individual discovery of Truth. Before we proceed with a discussion of these lessons and their meaning for Marcel’s development, three points concerning Marcel’s creative development and Proust’s program for him need further elucidation.

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98 Point 1: Origins. A bourgeois, Marcel has more than one hurdle to cross in his quest to realize himself a writer. For it will be through pursuing the phenomenological promptings proffered by chance that the groundwork for the kind of discovery of Truth Elstir refers to will be achieved. Not only will Marcel have to identify a gift within himself and exercise it through talent, he will have to loosen the constraints of class concepts of duty and the habits reinforced by family to achieve the freedom to move as he must. This will entail a reordering of the values inculcated in Marcel from birth, the model for which is his father. They reflect an order and style of living founded on the prosperity derived from the business acumen of his in-laws inflected with the parochialism of Combray. To these values Marcel’s father enjoined a respect for tradition, discipline, fairness, and duty that embody the conservatism of rural France and underlay the family’s position in the community and its continuing success. This success and these values exclude from their purview the kind of responses to contemporary life, expressed in the production of the new, which are inherent to art-making and which reveal the grand themes of an age through art contemporary to the time. Marcel’s responsiveness to resonance and déjà vu have no immediate practical worth for him. Nonetheless they intrigue him with the elusiveness of the meaning which seems to be carried within these experiences. For a long time understanding them remains beyond his fathoming. As we have noted, Marcel’s responsiveness and outlook find their antecedents in his grandmother’s enthusiasms and emotional attachments. His parents view the recurrence of these traits in their son with more despair than pleasure for they see them as liabilities to Marcel’s advancement in life. Their despairing over Marcel is related to the chagrin expressed on numerous occasions when the men attached to the family through marriage ridicule the odd aesthetic and social principles expressed by the women, all of whom are blood relations (while Marcel’s mother was largely exempt from this criticism, her own mother certainly was not; the sarcasm leveled at her ideas and ways of doing things by Marcel’s father could be blistering).25 Thus sensations which seemed to Marcel to carry within them something special for himself alone nonetheless made Marcel acutely aware of a familial, but more especially, a male bias against indulging such feelings.26 In sum, Marcel felt the effects of his sensibility to be so much a part of him that the ineluctable joy he experienced through it only contributed to his general feeling of low self-esteem. Unable to meet his parent’s expectations for a successful career in the world of appearances, Marcel was prevented from breaking his ties to that world and pursuing a path to enlightenment because his encounters with resonance and déjà vu seemed to offer nothing that would promote his interest in becoming a writer.

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99 Some years after the episode atop Dr. Percepied’s carriage, during which Marcel dashed off his sketch of the church towers of Martinville and Vieuxvicq, but still while he is an adolescent, the marquis de Norpois suggests there is nothing wrong with the career of writer and that a person could actually be as influential in that way as in diplomacy. His remarks prompt Marcel’s father to recant his earlier plan of a diplomatic career for his son. Ironically, Marcel does not find his way made easier by his father’s change of heart.27 In fact, as he cogitates on his father’s new attitude, which his mother initially disapproves of, he feels worse for the predicament he is now in then he felt before, for if one is going to be a writer one has to write things, and he can’t. His stumbling block is having nothing to say. On top of this, and regardless of his parent’s acquiescence to his choice of career, Marcel’s family lives in the provinces of Parisian bourgeois officialdom. For all the access he has to living artists, Marcel might as well have been living in Combray.28 Thus, just as if he had been living in that somber country town year-round, he still needed to migrate to a community where artists reside in flesh and blood as people one knows in order to access the support such a community offers its members. It was an important opening to pursue, then, when Swann mentions that Bergotte, whose books Marcel was then reading, was a great friend of his daughter. Marcel’s already vivid impression of Gilberte was given added luster by her acquaintance with Bergotte, and the Swann family and the life they led immediately rose in his estimation.29 The first point we wish to make concerning Marcel’s development is: In becoming an artist, one must move to an environment in which artists exist. The experiences motivating one’s creative necessity to produce art are the principal means by which one disengages from one life and moves toward another. Point 2: Creativity and Isolation. There are five young people in the novel, including Marcel, who are, or will be, active in the arts. Based on the above statement, it is worth noting their backgrounds. They are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Marcel: bourgeois; Bloch: bourgeois; Young set-designer: bourgeois; Charles Morel: servant class; Rachel: presumed lower class.

None of these young people has an artist for a parent. In fact, lacking a parental model is characteristic of all the fictive artists in the novel.30 One can

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100 deduce from this that artists develop spontaneously out of whatever particular circumstances they were born into. Marcel’s lack of a patronymic indicates a similar parentless quality, as if there is no family from which he has sprung regardless of his closeness to his mother and grandmother. As we noted earlier, of the great artists we meet, only Vinteuil and Berma have children—daughters—neither of whom demonstrates any talent for art. Parentless, artists are, in this accounting, unable to pass on their talent to a child, a point we noted earlier.31 Through his characters then, Proust identifies artists as developing out of some confluence of being and experiencing intransmissible through the flesh. And since being itself is a term expressive of one’s separate, individual existence, the artist is thus further eremiticized by art from the company of her or his fellow human beings even as he or she lives in their midst. Our second point: As Proust set up the problem, the artist is an isolate. Point 3: Youthful Aspiration. Each of the young people mentioned above can be paired with one of Proust’s masters with the exception of Marcel who has no counterpart: Rachael actress Berma Bloch writer Bergotte Morel musician/composer Vinteuil. 32 Octave set designer/painter Elstir All these youths represent variations on a type: the incipient or aspiring artist. Among this group Rachel stands out. Along with Morel, Rachel is the only one readers see perform. But she fails in performance. We see her early, while she was still undifferentiated from the bohemian lifestyle seekers she lived among who, drunk on the poetry of youth, enliven art with their energy before burning out. And we see her later, at the very end of the novel, by which time she has become a celebrated actress. But look for details of her development between times. They do not exist. The reader can only infer from this later success that Rachel had continued to perform and improve. By contrast, we follow virtually every move Marcel makes from adolescence onward. And yet, with the exception of the essay he wrote atop Dr. Percepied’s carriage, we never see him working. In fact, as a character much of what he is famous for is this lack of industry, what the Baron de Charlus calls his “procrastination.”33 In contrasting artistic acolytes with masters, Proust emphasized qualities that portend mastery in art. Doing so draws attention to Marcel’s potential while

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101 relieving him of any need to actually exercise his talent. The masters in the novel make this possible. They are authenticated for the reader, beyond Marcel’s descriptions of their art, by the apparent lack of struggle which marks their artistic production. We, as readers, are led to infer from the information we are given that a lack of struggle is characteristic of a master and that masters are, in a way, the instrument of their genius; as such, work comes out of them virtually fully formed. Positioning the artist as the trumpet for which God supplied the breath is, readers may remember, a romantic notion of the artist Sartre derided.34 But the provenance of the concept extends beyond the Romantic era, as we have noted, to the earliest notions of the poet.35 We have only to look at Berma’s acting or Elstir’s painting or Vinteuil’s music to see this concept borne out anew but made modern by Proust who substituted for the breath of God the impulse of the self ’s response to individual experiencing.36 This being the case, Bloch’s posturing and Rachel’s struggle in performance (which will be discussed further below) serve as indicators of an essential creative lack. Thus when readers see Rachel actually striving to advance her career by stretching her craft-skills in performance we do not see her efforts ennobling her. A lingering doubt persists over the genuineness of her later accomplishments as it does over Bloch’s accomplishments as a writer.37 By contrast, even Vinteuil’s Septet, which the composer left behind at his death in a disarray of manuscript fragments that his daughter’s lover, Léa, painstakingly organizes into the finished work, is not only presented as unqualifiedly complete but as wholly Vinteuil’s work. Léa is presented as little more than a housekeeper whose fastidious ability to straighten and tidy is appreciated within the limits of her talents, much as Françoise will be credited with helping Marcel keep his papers together once he starts writing his book.38 Here again Proust is presenting a masterpiece as springing forth from the artist more or less without struggle. As for Marcel, he struggles, of course. But rather than watching him make his way as a craftsman and creator and forcing his way to the heart of the literary world we see him completing, almost unconsciously, the odyssey he was launched on early in the book the night he stopped his mother on the stairway, a subject we take up in chapter 5. Completing his odyssey, Marcel will be able to write. When we look at Rachel’s struggle in performance, and then reflect on how little writing Marcel has done before he begins his great work, the two form a diametric pair worth comparing. At the period when Rachel was being kept by Robert de Saint-Loup, she was just starting on her career as an actress. A theatrical ingénue, she made ends meet through working in brothels and with procuresses—a common practice reflected in the incorporation of the term actress

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102 into the nineteenth-century lexicon of sexual availability that also included milliners and young shop assistants in its net (Odette had pursued a similar career as actress a generation earlier). So when Saint-Loup wrangles an invitation for Rachel to give a reading from a symbolical play in which she had performed at an evening party given by one of his aunts, later identified as the Duchesse de Guermantes, Rachel naturally sees the invitation as an opportunity, while we have doubts about her ability to succeed.39 And sure enough, after having convinced herself of the probability of the immediate gain to be reaped from entertaining these fashionable people who could make so many (imaginary) things happen for her if they wished, we see her humiliated by their response to her presentation. There were many reasons for this to be sure. Her failure had much to do with her lack of experience. First, Rachel arrived at the reception unaware of how she was viewed by her audience. Composed of individuals for the most part only conventionally discriminating and prone to respond unfavorably to anything new, they had no clue who Rachel was beyond their snickered references to her relationship with Robert. Secondly, she stepped before them to perform garbed in an outlandish costume, holding a lily in her hand, which they found bizarre. Thus, even before she opened her mouth she had exhausted whatever reserve of tolerance her listeners possessed. Consequently, they formed a collective opinion almost at once that her acting was nothing wonderful. They watched her as she began, poised to have fun with her at her own expense. For her part, Rachel, by displaying all the arrogance of a young person less sure of herself than her attitudes proclaimed her to be, made matters worse. For she covered her nervousness being in these unfamiliar, aristocratic surroundings with the disdain Robert had inculcated into her for the incapacity of the Faubourg Saint-Germain’s denizens to understand anything of any depth. Nervous and disdainful, she launched directly into her interpretations of scenes from the advanced theatre group she had been with without conceding an aesthetic iota to her audience’s limitations by first giving them something easier to digest, establishing her bone fides as an actress with some classic or well-know popular work to give her listeners an idea of her range and, thus, the confidence to follow her elsewhere. Very likely she would have felt compromised altering her program even slightly in this way to gratify their expectations or perhaps, being young, she had no such range. Whatever the case, the impasse created by these opposing attitudes and the stance of the material she had chosen to perform resulted in a wholesale condemnation of her presentation. She incurred the scorn of these self-important people and was jeered by them for presuming to think she could dazzle them with so little. As for readers, we sit in the audi-

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103 ence alongside the duchess’ friends. We can no more appreciate Rachel’s interior state of motivation or grasp a sense of the expressive ideal she is striving to realize than they can. Denied the kind of access we have to Marcel’s thought, and cowed from forming an independent judgment of her performance by the opinions being expressed by this social elite, we go along somewhat sheepishly with their mockery of her. Even if (and this itself is questionable) the texts she recited were inherently meritorious, it is clear to them/us she has no talent. Feeling they are being made the butt of a joke, victims of Robert’s misguided infatuation with a girl who could be got for x-number of francs in houses of assignation, they laughed her from the stage to teach them both a lesson. Returning to Marcel, he was still, prior to the Princesse de Guermantes’ matinée with which Le Temps retrouvé concludes, at a stage not too far from the one Rachel may have been exploring at the time of her mortification, now so many years in the past. This is to say Marcel was stirred to creative unrest by the convulsions of an artistic necessity seeking to be expressed. As we know, it could not be expressed because Marcel did not know, yet, what it was he was trying to say. He remained virtually craftless. And Proust kept him so deliberately while he meticulously constructed the metaphysical and spiritual rationale for his comingto-knowing. He was intent on furnishing the Romantic concept of genius with a proof that would legitimatize this unspoken claim of genius for Marcel. Proust did so by demonstrating through Marcel’s experiences the quasi-ontic origin of art in the influence of experience on the self as that influence is reflected in the depth of understanding out of which Marcel’s work will spring. Our third point: A masterpiece arising from the self of the artist shows no trace of the means by which it is produced. Marcel, of course, had no comprehension of any of this. He was aware only of his inability to get down to work. His difficulties with subject matter would persist until his moment of inspiration. Inspiration revealed his life as the source of the material for the book he would write. Until this moment, whenever he thought of writing and of the books he wished to author he found himself stuck. He could think of nothing to write about. No subject came to his mind on which he felt he could say anything of significance. His efforts would collapse and he would give up. Marcel makes a remark to this effect while still an adolescent but the statement will remain valid for years to come.40 His desire to produce a work of great philosophical value on a subject selected by him from among grand themes in literature was part of his problem. It draws attention to his misunderstanding of where great themes come from in art and how they gain their philosophical importance. It also suggests a lack of confidence in the

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104 value of his experience as a repository of meaning. When we look at the only writing sample Proust allows readers to see, the brief essay on the steeples of Martinville and Vieuxvicq mentioned earlier, what we see is that the resonance they roused in Marcel loosened the constraints within which he normally functioned to give him a glimpse of a reality he only knew in moments such as these. Confronted by and responding to the material reality of these three steeples his excitement and energy was transformed into verbal cogency. This represents quite a change from his shouting and thrashing about with his umbrella as he had done on seeing sunlight sparkling on a wet tile roof. Intellectually, he reached a higher reality in this experience. The experience became a locus of meaning for him. It became so in an instant of creative recognition. Marcel was overjoyed. He assumed, wrongly as it happens, that this image and his reaction in a focused response—the first product of his necessity to see itself expressed— were indissociable and that the words he chose to address it with, through which he was creating his reciprocating image, carried the essence of its inspiration. They did not. This was only his first attempt to think and reach through thought the indefinite, interior level of a sensuous impression which had been born in him in what Walter Benjamin calls the mystical instant of a symbol’s effect.41 Doing so, he was not aware the enthusiasm guiding his response was lending his work the brilliance he felt from it; that this brilliance was as external to his work as the purely imaginary orchestra one “hears” accompanying us as we get carried away pounding out ersatz crescendos on a piano.42 But how could he have realized a distinction? He was still a boy, thrilled to intoxication to be articulating at all formally the elusive quality of an essence which had provoked him. He captures this impression, as readers know, by describing the scene before him. This first time out, Marcel approaches the fugitive element at the remote heart of this experience as if it had been conveyed in the physical aspect of something material. Like the Eucharist, he felt this fugitive element pass into him as if it had been a sacrament. Being thus blessed, he had dedicated himself to it through writing on the phenomenon of relationship caught in the impression the steeples gave him. His response points not only to an imaginative relationship to the world we associate with the artist but also to Marcel’s inexperience. Next day, under less provident circumstances, he stares at the page, unable to write. This in itself draws attention to an interesting aspect of Marcel’s creative development. For without writing, an activity Marcel tells us he found almost impossibly hard to undertake, he had no portfolio of material to show and share with other writers or interested friends and family members to help him establish an acknowledged identity for himself among peers.43 Bloch and he, for example, while they

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105 enjoy being “literary” together, do not share poems or stories they have written with each other as young writers do to compete and learn. Thus Marcel must contend with the possible falsity of his self-ascription. This is the reason his “I am” is permeated with the same anxious “Am I?” that plagued those creative types unable to sustain themselves as artists in the artistic bohemias of the time. During Marcel’s long years of working through his problem-of-self, his everyday existence was intermittently punctuated by the progressive series of heightened states of sensory experiencing we have mentioned often. They were progressive in that, commencing with the three trees outside Hudimesnil and concluding with Marcel’s interlude in the Prince de Guermantes’ library, Marcel becomes increasingly adept at piercing the obscurity of the sensations rousing his response and able to reach and grasp the message within them and draw them to consciousness. Until Marcel succeeds in piercing their obscurity, which he does with the bit of madeleine dipped in tea some years before the events at the end of the novel, these experiences actually exacerbated his already anxious state of existence because the wonder they roused in him marked him to himself as different. They prevented him from unquestioningly anchoring himself in the material world through the kinds of attachments in love, friendship, and social success he saw other people enjoying with seeming effortlessness all their lives. The suggestion posed here is that if Marcel could have been more like them perhaps a life of conventional contentment could have been possible for him also. Wonder is part of early childhood development. But a child’s sense of wonder often dissipates by the time he or she reaches adolescence. With the sharpening focus on material well-being and as the responsibilities of adulthood and economic and emotional pragmatism come to dominate one’s concerns, a sense of wonder in life can be lost. Few peoples’ outlook escape this fate. For many, their dreams shrink to a sour sensual/materialist residue of possibility. One of the sadder hallmarks of aging, in La Recherche only three adults besides Marcel can be identified as having carried a sense of wonder into adulthood. They are: Marcel’s grandmother; the dowager Marquise de Cambremer, and Céleste Albaret (Proust’s real-life housekeeper who Proust introduces in a cameo in Sodom et Gomorrhe). The only man other than Marcel who may have been given to some form of this wonder was Swann’s father, but he is only mentioned in passing in the novel. Is there a link between innocence and wonder? This is a question worth asking at this juncture because Marcel preserved his sense of wonder while he experienced his lose of innocence traumatically at the very onset of puberty on the night he accosted his mother on the stairs. Marcel’s loss of innocence was

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106 bound up with the shock of recognizing in himself the male drive for dominance he felt asserting itself when he pleaded with his mother for her kisses. The shock that the grip of this sexual drive held him in prompted the psychological repression of this incident that George Sand’s François le Champi came to screen. Thus banished almost at once from Marcel’s memory, his sense of wonder remained largely unaffected. He was thus able to sharpen his perceptive acuity in identifying relationships and affinities lost to those for whom material reality increasingly marks the limit of their concerns. And while Marcel was probably no longer a virgin thanks to the ministrations of a female cousin and his carousing with Bloch, he was still largely an innocent, much like François in Sand’s story. Both had somehow been spared. Was Marcel protected by the interference of his creative necessity which, by its insistence, seemed determined to direct his life else wise? How can anyone say? But it was his continuing susceptibility to being moved to wonder that made him different from other people as an adult. For by turning into his thoughts for much of the time, and by his rarely having sexual encounters that led to coitus, he was able, unconsciously, to isolate his physical desire from his contemplative enjoyment of imaginative fulfillment in love as soon as its object was achieved in ejaculation. By contrast, Théodore, Camus’ shop assistant, and Gilberte lost their virginity in the ruins of the keep of Roussainville as soon as they were old enough to do so (while Marcel watched them, metaphorically, through the window of the orris-scented water-closet where he masturbated).44 Solitary, effervescent release became a pattern for Marcel. Even when he was seeking physical closeness with someone, as on the afternoon he came in his trousers when he was grappling with Gilberte in semi-conscious foreplay in the Champs-Élysées for possession of a letter she held above her head, physical release was sufficient to calm his enthusiasm for the game.45 What does seem evident is that Marcel’s repression of his awakening sexuality the night of the kisses was balanced to some extent by the protraction of his sense of wonder into adulthood. Preservation of innocence came with his loss of contact with the self. With the self as the expansive middle term of the progression being-self-identity, and as the repository of all one’s experiencing, an inverse relationship is suggested between the two. Marcel’s resonant experiences served as a continual check on the temporal concerns which occupied him through middle age, during which he attempted to follow a pattern he assumed had been followed by Swann to fulfillment in love and social prominence. This explains, in part, the sense of futility with which Marcel is stricken throughout the greater part of the time we see him, right up until the end of the novel in fact. In the particular case of the books he wished

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107 to write, his inability to write is most significantly a function of the anomie we mentioned earlier that was related to a problem-of-self. Indeed, as we learn in Le Temps retrouvé, and discuss in the next chapter, Marcel’s long failure to succeed as a writer was linked to the psychological conflict associated with the fraught selfconsciousness which arose the night he accosted his mother.46 The alienation born of sexual repression was aggravated much the rest of his life by the incursionary edge of self-definition at which Marcel lived—at which he chose to live we should say, where self and world collide and identity confronts the judgment of those it wishes to impress. Thus, whether Marcel’s nascent manhood was being challenged by Gilberte’s obscene gesture,47 or an older and socially insecure Marcel, in Le Côté de Guermantes, worried that a coveted invitation from the Princesse de Guermantes might be someone’s idea of a practical joke, and goes to seek confirmation of the invitation’s genuineness from the Duc de Guermantes (who refuses to oblige), Marcel’s perpetual state of unease over who he is contributes to his inability to write.48 Lessons from the Masters We are now ready to turn to the lessons Marcel took from Bergotte, Berma, Elstir, and Vinteuil. They complement the points we have made in defining the challenge to Marcel in realizing himself a writer. These lessons guide him toward an understanding of art as a response to life arising within the self of the artist. They give him the following: 1. 2. 3. 4.

confidence in the value of his thought; an appreciation of the unique and inimitable quality of an artist’s work; the directive to note the sublime in his own experience; and a determination to penetrate his experience deeply.

We are going to look at these lessons, which readers are being taught along with Marcel, as a way to begin synthesizing the various lines of Marcel’s experiencing into the ground from which he will discover the relation between experience and the self and between the impulse to art and its expression. Lesson One (From the Writer):49 Through passages in Bergotte’s novels with thoughts in them similar to ones he himself had had and remarks similar to ones Marcel had made, Marcel felt this author he admired confer on his thoughts and observations a legitimacy he never suspected they had. Through Bergotte, then, Marcel recognizes that he possesses the potential to expression through which

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108 he could realize himself a writer. This was his (and readers) first lesson into the nature of the artist.50 Lesson Two (From the Actress):51 Through her interpretation of Phaedre at the matinee he attended, Berma gave Marcel not only the insight that works of genius are often difficult to access but also, and vastly more importantly, that an artist’s vision is unique, originary to her or his creative necessity and that the art produced out of it is inimitable to her or him. He received a visual testament of this lesson in the acting of the two subordinate actresses who came on stage before Berma appears. Their acting demonstrates that however studiously others may observe the manifestations of a great artist’s work in an attempt to transfer a master’s style to themselves they cannot completely assimilate it because the source of an artist’s work is too complexly compounded of impulse and experience to be anything other than unique. Lesson Three (From the Painter):52 Elstir spoke to Marcel through his work, just as Bergotte, Berma, and Vinteuil did. But in contrast to the impersonal and disinterested instruction he took from the work of these others, Elstir and Marcel talked in the artist’s studio as well. There, the painter gave Marcel practical lessons in life. He also spoke to Marcel of the dependency of l’esprit (or the self, as the word esprit is interpreted here), on experience to thrive. Reflecting on his past, Elstir tells Marcel that the self actually draws moral nourishment from the chaos of our embarrassments and shames, from the perplexing mix we concoct from innocent pleasures and vicious ones, and from the work we attempt to do. Without an individual experiencing life in the full sense Elstir is referring to it here, she or he would never be confronted with the choices through which a life acquires the spiritual and moral depth of character without which there could be no depth of understanding to infuse purpose into the form of human expression we call art. It is not at all surprising that Proust chose a painter for this role of counselor. For painting, with its avuncular concerns for probity and technique; with its indulgent, therapeutic kitchen-work of mixing paint and priming canvas, is better suited, with all its special implements and materials to be cared for and put to use, than are the literary or performance arts in conveying to the young the simple yeomanry of practice. For Marcel, learning these lessons in the studio amid the comforting hodge-podge of work stacked here and there, the fertile mess of Elstir’s palettes and sketches, rags and brushes, in the only true home an artist has, provided the perfect setting for the charitable reflections of this

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109 wise man who was telling Marcel, by way of his own example, that it was okay for him to be who he was. Marcel’s visits to Elstir’s studio taught him several things. During the first of these visits Elstir spoke to Marcel of moral values. Other visits opened Marcel’s eyes to the world around him. In hearing Elstir speak of the sublimity which exists in the familiar and even commonplace features of our sensuous environments, Marcel gained an appreciation for the riches surrounding him in waking life. Thanks to the prominence Elstir gave to what might be considered minor or insignificant details in his pictures, which Marcel noted, and through listening to the emphasis which Elstir placed on such details when discussing some “view,” Marcel found himself taking an interest in such modest concerns. “[J]’essayais de trouver la beauté là où je ne m’étais jamais figuré qu’elle fût, dans les choses les plus usuelles, dans la vie profonde des «natures mortes.»” (G (JF), p. 682) [I tried to find beauty there where I had never imagined before that it could exist, in the most ordinary things, in the profundity of “still life.”] (SLT (II), p. 613) Marcel’s mind opened by these lessons; his artistic potential recognized, and his anxieties acknowledged as being legitimate corollaries to his artistic temperament,53 he was now ready for the final lesson, the lesson from Vinteuil, which would prepare him to seize inspiration’s possibilities should an “Open Sesame” ever open the portal to art within him. Marcel’s lessons in art came to him with considerable intervals of time between them. These lessons served Marcel as an apprenticeship in shaping his creative consciousness. They can be set beside the skill he acquired in perceiving material relationships, which can be labeled a semiotic apprenticeship, and the phenomenological apprenticeship he progressed through, by which he came to experience involuntary memories. These bodies of knowledge, which addressed different interests and concerns occupying Marcel’s attention, remained compartmentalized in his thought and would likely have remained so indefinitely had he not made his sequence of discoveries in the library of the Prince de Guermantes on the fateful afternoon of the princess’s party where, in synthesis, they permitted Marcel to elucidate for himself the nature of the self and discover psychological duration to be the tether of experiencing linking him, through the self, to being. Marcel called this tether the dimension of Time. (We will discuss it in chapter 7.) Like the exotic plant in the Duchesse de Guremantes’ garden, which could only bring forth fruit if the one insect capable of pollinating it drifted over her garden wall to find its blossoms, and like the Baron de Charlus and Jupien, which this disquisition on the flower in the garden introduces, the necessary elements which needed to be brought together before Marcel could

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110 produce art were dependent on chance to meet. These cases suggest the near impossibility to affect unions. A person could set bookmaker’s odds on the probability of conjugation for any of them. And yet similarly improbably unions happen all the time, everyday. Lesson Four (From the Composer):54 The lesson that completed Marcel’s understanding of what it is to be an artist and where the origins of art in the individual are to be found comes to Marcel while listening to Vinteuil’s Septet. Listening, Marcel feels the spirit of Vinteuil resurrected. He senses the uniqueness of a song-to-be-sung (le chant) originating in Vinteuil that was all his own, of which Vinteuil himself may have been partly or wholly unaware so much a part of him was it, as if the things that make, say, a French person a French person cannot altogether be recognized by someone who is French. This inimitable place Vinteuil wrote from, his homeland (la patrie intérieure) colored his music with the essences of his art. Experiencing it provided Marcel, as it provides each of us, a way of seeing the world through different eyes. It would be several years before Marcel would be able to appreciate the full significance of this last lesson to his development as a writer. But like all of these lessons, it contributed to forming his sense of himself as an artist. It had come after a long struggle changing places. This act of moving from one point to another, represents, in the traversal of the space between, a kind of Bergsonian netherworld (see chapter 5) between innocence and maturity and between wanting to be a writer and becoming one: a trap if one gets caught in it, for between the two positions of a pendulum is nothing.55 Marcel had been caught in a netherworld bracketed by François le Champi, the story of a boy who grows up to fall in love with and marry the woman who raised him as her own child. Released from this purgatory, he learned for himself what art is. His subject became clear to him and he was able to write. Marcel/Marcel Proust as Writers Marcel Proust wrote one of the greatest works of fiction of the twentieth century; Marcel wrote nothing of any consequence during the span of his life covered in La Recherche. Furthermore, having never practiced the art of writing, Marcel would have found it nearly impossible to do so at the level he proposed to work, a level approaching that of Proust himself, regardless of the theoretical basis for such an undertaking, because, in part, he had developed it purely abstractly, without jotting any of it down to refer back to when the time came to write his book. In The Proustian Vision Milton Hindus enumerated three diverging char-

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111 acteristics between Proust and his hero.56 One can argue that the characteristics Proust gives Marcel make Proust’s story easier for him to tell. They are: Proust homosexual mother was Jewish had a brother

Marcel heterosexual mother is a gentile is an only child.

There is a fourth distinction between author and character, and it is far more significant to Proust’s interest in the creative development of an artist than the other three. This is their experience as writers. Marcel, as we know, wrote virtually nothing during the course of his life readers follow. By contrast, as has been made abundantly clear over the years, Proust developed as a writer through writing, gaining facility with language, and an increasing depth of thought, as he accumulated a body of work which, as a working writer, constituted his search for the pitch of voice to carry what he felt a need to say. Only through the act of writing, through his constant putting together of words in formations that were attempts to iterate elements forming his thought—this making of art through the many dimensions of his creativity (in letters, non-fiction essays, critical commentary, translations, parodies, and stories)—could Proust have furnished himself with the technical and intellectual resources which in the early years of the twentieth century enabled him to begin fashioning this form, A la recherche du temps perdu, a novel near enough the Kantian ideal of the finality of a genius’ work to justify our saying that the convulsions of Proust’s necessity, which he had not, until the spring/summer of 1909, been able to channel onto the page, had at last become effable.57

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Chapter 5

Involuntary Memory and François le Champi

The Madeleine, The Paving Stone, and François le Champi In chapter 4 we established that the origins of Marcel’s problem-of-self are to be found in his repression of events which unfold in the episode of the good-night kisses in Du côté de chez Swann. The psychological significance of these events— long forgotten by readers by the time they are resurrected in Le Temps retrouvé—is revealed in Marcel’s reaction to a copy of François le Champi he encounters in the Prince de Guermantes’ library.1 The older Marcel who narrates the opening passage of the novel, which introduces readers to Combray, is unaware of the effect this event has had on his life. The reason we know this is that, as narrator, he does not intercede, correct, or comment on the interpretation he gave to these events as a boy. At the time, Marcel’s reaction emphasized his parents’ capitulation before his nervous fragility and his guilt over having learned to use the emotional and physical state of his health as a lever against the strictures governing his up-bringing. The repercussions of traumatic actions and experiences on psychological development are indeterminable. At the same time, we understand only provisionally what is happening to us in moments of crisis. The result is that the origin of problems or conditions manifesting themselves later in life are often obscure. Short of psychoanalytical revelation, life-defining events in our lives sometimes never come to light. One can thus live in ignorance or denial of the source of behavioral traits which define one psychologically. The night of the kisses is an example. Looking at what happened that night, we see that Marcel was immediately conscious of the threshold he has crossed in his relationship with his mother. But in resolving for himself the emotional confusion he was cast into by this transgression of family rules governing bedtime, he settled on an effect of his actions rather than their cause. Marcel thus views what happened in terms of the concession he had just won from his parents, as we noted above. “Il me semblait que si je venais de remporter une victoire c’était contre elle, que j’avais réussi comme auraient pu faire la maladie, des chagrins, ou l’âge, à détendre sa volonté, à faire fléchir sa raison et que cette soirée commençait une ère, resterait une triste date.” (G (CS). p. 40) [It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date in the calendar.] (SLT (I). p. 51). As a ten to fourteen year old boy, this is what one might expect of Marcel. It would have

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114 been entirely beyond his grasp, at his age, to attribute the cause of his actions to biological maturation. Significantly, his response effectively elides the sexual tension charging this event which François le Champi will screen. The long-term effect of this elision and screening was to check his psycho/sexual development. It precipitated a retreat from male assertiveness, alienating him from the self. In the short term, however, by pushing these events into his subconscious and blocking them with François le Champi, a space was cleared in which Marcel’s thoughts could develop unperturbed. He was shielded from having to grapple with his troubled need for his mother’s affection radicalized by puberty. At the end of the novel Marcel will quite suddenly comprehend, from his chance encounter with François le Champi, the sexual urgency driving the highly risky venture he had undertaken that night long ago when he forced his mother into comforting him. The repression of this incident in Marcel’s memory set up a relationship between consciousness and the subconscious comparable to that which occurs in the relationship of referable memory to the sensory unconscious. If we imagine consciousness as bounded, interiorly, by one’s decreasing ability to grasp the contents of one’s experience, we can accept that at some point the obscurity of dim memories will produce the effect of a wall. Beyond the wall lays the subconscious and the unconscious. We can visualize thought as moving in the space in front of this wall free of what lays behind it. The sensory unconscious exists in darkness impenetrable to voluntary recall. But sensory memories are retrievable through déjà vu, a condition of sensory congruency. With screen memories, renewed contact with the object forming the screen, in situations such as Proust describes, lifts the screen from the memory it covers exposing the memory. The result is past experience is drawn forward in the same way sensory memories are drawn forward in déjà vu. Both are accompanied by a momentary state of nervous agitation. This being the case, it seems logical that techniques Marcel used to realize involuntary memories from déjà vus could be applied to realize— with as much richness—the events covered by François le Champi should he ever encounter the book under similarly unexpected circumstances. As readers know, and as we will discuss later in this chapter, this is exactly what happens when Marcel absent-mindedly pulls Sand’s book off its shelf. The jolt Sand’s novel gives Marcel derives from the congruency of the prince’s copy of the book with Marcel’s embedded image of it. The resonance stimulated by the proximity of the two, given the heightened state of cognitive activity Marcel is experiencing at the time, leads him to apply to this new congruency the same intellectual technique which only a few minutes earlier roused Venice from an uneven pav-

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115 ing stone; the train in the countryside from a spoon hitting a cup, and the dining room of the Grand Hotel, Balbec, from the feel of a starched napkin brushing against his lips. Marcel pursued the sensations accompanying his seeing Sand’s book with the same lack of foreknowledge of what he was about to discover as he lacked when he pursued the meaning underlying his experiences of déjà vu. Like them, François le Champi opens a specific experience in Marcel’s past. Sand’s novel thus becomes, through Marcel’s inadvertent physical contact with a copy of it, the means by which Marcel comes to terms with a sexual identity he had attempted to deny in the confusion of feeling the paradisiacal ease he had always known in his mother’s affection suddenly lost to him. Marcel’s ability to resuscitate the experiential totality of particular moments in his past until they release the underlying memory they are the key to is our reason for speaking of Sand’s novel, the madeleine, and the paving stone together. On the one hand, Marcel finds in his experiences of involuntary memory the authoritative ground for accepting his life a duration or unity. Through the absorptive capacity of the self all the identities he has occupied over the course of his life and all the referable memories associated with them become the exposed face of a tether composed of the lost sensations of the sensory unconscious. Marcel will call this tether anchored in the atemporality of being the dimension of Time. It is in this tethering extensity of the self, the core of which is the sensory unconscious, where Marcel will find his homeland, a concept he articulates listening to Vinteuil’s Septet. Coming to his homeland he is brought to the subject of his work. As for François le Champi, confronting face-on the fright of sexual assertiveness he felt long ago enables Marcel to accept as part of him all that attends being a man. Together, these revelations free Marcel to write. Before we discuss involuntary memory, its precursory déjà vu, and the integration of lost experience into consciousness, we are going to pause—as we have at the beginning of several major discursive points in this book—to consider an issue that bears on our subject at the moment: involuntary memory. We are going to focus not on the science of the phenomenon but on its philosophical impact on the novel. To gain a perspective on the philosophical impact of involuntary memory on La Recherche we are going to ask two questions: (1) why did involuntary memory come to play so large a role in La Recherche and (2) how does involuntary memory support Proust’s program for his novel? Answering these questions will shed light on how Proust made use of states of consciousness and involuntary memory to support a romantic view of the origin of art in the artist. The answers will also make clear that Proust’s use of involuntary memory in La Recherche was not ad hoc. Proust did not make use of it as an avail-

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116 able means to resolve the complicated problem of ending his novel in a manner similar to the way Gérard de Nerval used it at the beginning of Sylvie to move the action from one place to another. This is a refutation of the position on the subject of involuntary memory taken by commentators from Brée to Landy and others who qualify the phenomenon’s importance to Proust’s novel, reducing it to a numinist solution for drawing his story to a close. The most straight-forward answer to the question, “Why involuntary memory?” might be to say that an involuntary memory had proved pivotal to Proust’s own understanding of the past and how memory functions to support psychological duration. Proust made use of his experiences of involuntary memory to resolve, in advance as it were, what would be, in the novel, his hero’s problemof-self. Proust’s experience with a cup of tea and toast in January 1909 revealed the force of randomly recovered sensuous memories to him, and probably not for the first time.2 This particular involuntary memory brought the garden of his great-uncle Louis Weil about him again.3 By resuscitating with such clarity and completeness a former setting of his life Proust became aware of a more potent rendering of his past than referable memory could provide. Through this experience, Proust felt he had not only encountered an actual moment from his longago but that through it he had also come in contact, as one rarely does, with the self that absorbed these impressions originally. How could it be otherwise? What his eyes had seen, what his ears had heard, the tactile sensations which had been registered by his skin; the complete impression of his sensuous experience of that moment had been resurrected from the same self which had registered the sensations in the first place. The euphoria ensuing from this resurrected memory derived from his consciousness, now, of these elements which had defined his environment then but which had passed unperceived by his intellect. As the boy fed this concoction of toast and tea, the young Marcel Proust had been too actively engaged in life and, therefore, too filled with the plans and concerns occupying his attention at the time to focus on more than that fragment of experience we call reality, the reality of thought and action. Coming upon this understanding was something marvelous. It was not, however, as we noted in the introduction, the event which is credited with inspiring La Recherche, but it was a part of it: the first part.4 Through this experience of a fully-realized involuntary memory, Proust:



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1. re-experienced sensations which had been registered by his body in specific moments in his past; 2. effectively re-lived the original moments in re-experiencing the sensa-

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tions and henceforth would recognize them as recovered moments of time; 3. encouraged these sensations to become the subject of his thought in a way they never had originally, because they occupied his consciousness for the duration of the involuntary memory; 4. was permitted, through this self-consciousness, to identify with this self of his youth, from which could be posited the constancy of the self as a stable referent through life.

Proust’s reliance on, and his willingness to embrace, such fragmentary evidence as this involuntary memory supplied him to make an a posteriori claim for the significance of the dimension of Time demonstrates Proust’s confidence in his ability to access and assess truth. His confidence was based on the validity of a sampling technique controlled by chance. In Le Temps retrouvé Marcel argues that chance establishes the legitimacy of experiences of involuntary memory.5 For the subject experiencing involuntary memories is unable to consciously initiate or even prepare for their occurrence. The fact that such psychic events occur, and with absolute specificity, testifies to the wealth of sensations which compose our full experience of the world. As for the intuitive suppositions Marcel draws from his experiences of involuntary memory, the fact that past moments can be retrieved from the memorial limbo of our unconscious means the self plays the role of guarantor of psychological duration through the totality of experiencing it retains. Since déjà vus rouse moments dispersed randomly throughout one’s past, one can deduce that every moment one has lived has the potential to be resuscitated the same way. Thus from mere fragments of one’s sensuous past one can hypothesize the recessive linearity of sensuous memory. Proust himself must have recognized this. Recessive linearity was the second element contributing to his illumination of the dimension of Time for which the concept of the fourth dimension (see chapter 7) will be the third and final part. In Matter and Memory, Bergson lays the foundation for Proust’s later discovery of the use-value of sensuous memory as well as the spiritual utility of involuntary memory.6 This rendering of the past—which positions the past to serve, through memory, consciousness, and the importance of the present, which provides the field of movement for feeling and thought—would have been useful to Proust in the winter/spring of 1909 as he fulminated over his recent experience of involuntary memory.7 It would have enabled him to realize what he had never realized before: all our past, including our unconscious sensuous experiences

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118 and our referable memories, is present within us. None of it is lost until dying. This is what the tea and toast had confirmed so boldly. As for our second question, “How does involuntary memory support Proust’s program?” we can say it does so in three ways. The first two are: (1) involuntary memories support the novel’s idealism. They act as proofs of an organic/experiential basis for the romantic concept of genius, and (2) involuntary memory addresses Marcel’s need to take hold of a demonstrable proof that his life—and therefore every life—is composed of a single, uninterruptable and, consequently, accumulative and self-affirming psychological duration. The discovery of such a proof of psychological duration was necessary to liberate Marcel from the tyranny of the present. Involuntary memory provides access to the self. In the Romantic tradition, art arises from the self of the artist. The origin of art in the self is quasi-ontic as Schaeffer describes it because one’s experience in the world not only becomes incorporated into the body as reflected in aging and physiognomy it also reaches deep within us, becoming one with the self. The impulse which the artist shapes into art carries the imprint of this experience. As a pathway to the self, involuntary memory supports the romantic concept of the artist. The veracity of this relationship supports the validity of the internal logic of the novel enabling it to transcend the limits of the story Proust tells. Psychological duration is fundamental to our sense of well-being. It is critical to the belief that human life is anchored in meaning and purposefulness. Such assumptions form the basis for the cultural model individuals carry within themselves. This cultural model is one of many models individuals possess which guide our conduct. Other models are those of citizenship, enthusiasm for whatever excites us, and maleness or femaleness. These models represent patterns on which the identities associated with them are built. In this sense, models are aspirational. An individual’s personal model, which provides the template for one’s declarative identity and moral code, is formed from our individual knowledge of the world—the stories one knows, mentioned in chapter three—and from psychological representations linked to events which, lodged in the unconscious, remain forever beyond our knowing unless they are somehow brought to light.8 In Marcel Proust et la theorie du modele, Roger Paultre says that for the artist this personal model is both the motivating force prompting her or him to expression and an obstacle to achieving it.9 It launches one’s efforts while, sometimes, it makes it nearly impossible to produce work, as was the case for Marcel. These contradictory forces need to be transcended in order for the artwork to be brought forth from the inchoate state of an artist’s creative drive. It is, as

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119 Paultre says, as if the existence of these contradictions, which seem to be a part of personal models, is imposed on each of us as a problem for which each of us has to find a solution for him or herself.10 Marcel’s inability to understand: (1) the relationship between present experience and present identity, (2) the relationship of both to the self and, then (3) the relationship between the self and art prevented Marcel from entering upon his vocation as writer. As for the relation of the self to art, Marcel was aided immeasurably by the discovery he made many years prior to the events at the end of Le Temps retrouvé. While listening to Vinteuil’s Septet he was able to identify, through empathy, the concepts of la patrie intérieure (homeland) and le chant (song-to-be-sung) in Vinteuil’s music, singling them out as the source and potential of art in the artist.11 From the above it is possible to see how involuntary memory can serve as a proof of duration as well as a proof of idealism. It reveals a condition of being in the world analogous to the “authentic” non-desacralized state Schaeffer found a yearning for in the writers he focused on in his book.12 This brings us to the third way involuntary memory supports Proust’s program. Involuntary memory is a variant of arc communication where the viewer is the self-same experiencing subject from whom the communication originates. We defined arc communication in chapter 1 as flowing from artist to viewer through the artwork. When dealing with involuntary memory the model of arc communication still holds but in a modified form, due to the ambiguous nature of the eliciting agent: the congruency itself between an external prompt and a sensation in the sensory unconscious. Thus involuntary memory as a form of essential communication taking place within the individual enabled Proust to talk about the origin of art using Marcel’s ability to perceive relationships and realize profound insights in a resonant environment, this time from contact with the work of great masters. Among the meaningful examples of communication between viewer and artist in La Recherche and within Marcel’s developing creative consciousness Proust gives a single noteworthy event from the less lofty plane of everyday life. Doing so extends the range of the point he is making concerning essential communication. The example concerns le bœuf froid aux carottes which Françoise prepares for M. de Norpois. Her culinary skill affects the marquis. It gives him something more than the cumulative caloric and nutritive value of the food he is eating. A gourmand, the marquis gains access through his palette to an intellectual sphere where he is able to form a judgment on the general excellence of Françoise’s cookery through the subtlety of her achievement with this familiar dish. In doing so, he gains respect for her abilities, calling her a chef of the first order.13 The marquis’ response is one thing. What Marcel gains

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120 from Vinteuil’s Septet is more intellectually penetrating, reflecting the respective strengths of the two men. For Marcel, his response to Vinteuil’s Septet enables him to broaden his understanding of the source of art in the artist. From this he gains his understanding of (1) what art is, (2) who is the artist, and (3) how he or she becomes known to him or herself. Enumerated in chapter 4, these are the questions Proust posed for Marcel to answer. In this passage Marcel gains an understanding of the origin of art in the artist in the concept of homeland from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet. Marcel gains this understanding from grasping the presence of this personal song, son chant, in Vinteuil’s music. As intentionality, this song expressed itself through Vinteuil. As a communicative essence it was embedded in his art. This explains its inherency in his work. Thus even though this “song” may never have figured consciously in Vinteuil’s compositional goals for his music it was expressed through it as part of his work’s finality. Referencing Kant, Schaeffer refers to the artwork as being “finality without representation of a specific end.”14 If we accept this to mean that the carrying capacity of the work of art is greater than its form would seem to allow in terms of the functional economy of matter, then we can suppose this essence is received intuitively in experiencing the artwork in those individuals able to respond to the attraction of this embedded “song” in the work through the correspondence that is established in the person encountering it, such as Marcel for Vinteuil’s music. Not everyone can respond as Marcel could respond to Vinteuil’s music, nor can everyone respond as M. de Norpois responded to Françoise’s cooking. But not everyone needs to for such phenomena to be accepted as authentic in terms of communicative validity. Having established this point, we can draw from Marcel’s ability to perceive all he does from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet the possibility that the artist, too, can be aware of this song within him- or herself, if only as a “something” affecting his or her experience of everyday life and fueling his or her impulse to create. This is to say that Vinteuil, like Berma, while unable to articulate as Marcel could the character of this impulse to create, may have been conscious of carrying it as this thing that would not let him, or her, alone. Drawing this quality of ingenium into the finality of his art is what the Romantic concept of genius signifies when the term is applied, after the fact, to someone like Albrecht Dürer, Ludwig von Beethoven, or Proust himself.15 Now if this is true, then we can say, in the context of La Recherche, that in Marcel’s special case it was this occupation of him by a finality in so inchoate a state that he could neither work at will nor live a life like those of most of the people around him that signals his potential for greatness to readers. But of course potential for greatness is not greatness. As we will see in the next chapter, such potential

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121 can fade; it was certainly trending toward moribundity in Marcel near the end of Le Temps retrouvé. Yet throughout the novel, even at the end, this impulse to art in Marcel, and his sense of impending production, was continually being roused as a secondary effect of his experiences of sensory resonance of one kind or another, events which re-animated his thought of writing. Involuntary Memory Experiences of déjà vu are among a range of anomalous experiences that include such things as the sensation of “falling” asleep, where we are abruptly jerked back toward consciousness by a muscular reaction on the part of the body to arrest our fall. Generally such experiences leave us with a vague sense of unease that is usually soon forgotten. This is why skepticism greets anyone claiming to have gained otherworldly insights from metacognative events. They seem to most people to be devoid of any potential for meaning or for being gateways to higher levels of understanding. In the discussion which follows, it will be helpful for readers to keep in mind our discussion in chapter 2 of the neurophysiological basis for such quirky psychic events as déjà vu presents. It will also help to remember the subjective nature of perception. Furthermore, what we recognize as reality, that is the field of our day to day intercourse with others in the world, is, by and large, a consensual field defined by the community of which each of us is a part. Reality does not, perforce, exclude the always-possible from the interplay of stimulus and response. Alan Brown, defining metacognition, says it “pertains to the ways in which we are aware of, monitor, and resolve our personal cognitive experiences.” He goes on to say, “What makes déjà vu unique among metacognitive phenomena is that the experience has no clearly identifiable cause, and no objective behaviors against which it can be verified,” (Brown’s italics)16 a point which came up when we were discussing scientific empiricism in chapter 3. Highly subjective, déjà vu has nevertheless been clinically associated with agoraphobia, as a fear of the outside world, synesthesia, and dreamy periods proceeding and following sleep.17 In the opening scene of Du côté de chez Swann, Marcel’s reaction to the lack of definition in the room he awakens in: the darkness; the night sounds which conspire to remove all shreds of fixity of place for him, is an example of the last mentioned association, a highly imaginative response to the ambiguity of Marcel experiences in not being able to recall at once where he is. Such a mental response reflects how intimate the relationship is between the mind, brain events, and present experiencing, something Zeman comments on in reference to déjà vu. This intimacy stamps such events “with a sort of aboriginal authenticity impos-

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122 sible to describe,” as G. K. Chesterton, whom Zeman quotes, says, speaking of a recollection from childhood.18 As we have noted, most investigators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries found metacognitive experiences the relatively minor aberrations of normal activity they continue to be thought of today. This is how Bergson saw them too. But Bergson also added comments that where philosophical in nature. Always emphasizing utility, Bergson found faux connaissance life-denying because it places the subject momentarily in a state of sensory and psychical transgression of time. Experiencing involuntary memory turns the individual in upon the past (which, as we know, only exists within the individual) whereas memory’s life-affirming function is to help us engage the future.19 What Bergson could not appreciate in this turning inward in experiences of involuntary memory was the stunning display of euphoric oneness-in-being which characterizes such psychic states to a prepared mind. We will see this more clearly when we discuss Marcel’s involuntary memory derived from the bit of madeleine dipped in tea. While Bergson correctly sensed in the phenomenon the profligate’s disregard for the limits habit purposefully imposes on life, what he could not see, from never having believed in, or, he claims, ever having experienced involuntary memory, was that the transcendence born out of a fully evoked involuntary memory illuminates a vista of profound commonplaces for the individual so moved.20 This explains Bergson’s lack of belief in the utility such experiences might have to the present/future, the moving point toward which Bergson sees all utility focused. For Marcel, involuntary memories enriched him spiritually and intellectually by giving him a nascent understanding of what it means to be in time through revealing the full sensuous content of particular moments in his past. Déjà vus initiated, in Marcel, sensory encounters which opened him to the infinite and domiciling reality of the self in contrast to the more general class of stimuli which initiate one’s narrowing focus on an impending psycho/physical contact with the Other. This explains Marcel’s sense of relief in them. For contact with the Other implicitly challenges one’s place in the world as defined by identity. In involuntary memory, on the other hand, the self exercises an encompassing, if only momentarily, sovereignty over the individual. It presents, in this case, Marcel with a forgotten sensuous world at one with who he knows himself to be in the present. As Bergson points out, most individuals treat these momentary lapses of sensory control as startling but innocuous anomalies in their “normal” sensory experiencing.21 To the extent these individuals are susceptible in this way to these experiences, Bergson’s dismissal is accurate. But what of those individuals Wil-

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123 liam James speaks of, cited in chapter 2, individuals responsive to resonance and transformative experiencing: neurotic individuals such as Marcel? Reviewing the literature of déjà vu, Brown enumerates some of the physical conditions individuals subject to frequent metacognitive experiences display immediately prior to their experience. They remind us of Marcel. They include fatigue, nervous excitement, and/or a susceptibility to mental distraction.22 One only has to remember Marcel’s weariness when he stoops over to undo his shoes on his second visit to Balbec and the full force of his grandmother’s death is borne in upon him to see how close to type Marcel is. Fatigued from travelling and finding himself once again in the same hotel; in the same room; and starting to perform the same task his grandmother had taken over for herself on their first visit to Balbec, a congruency occurs which exposes for Marcel the absoluteness of her death. Suddenly he understands for the first time the magnitude of his loss. It shatters him. A list of similar responses suggests Marcel’s predisposition to metacognitive events:



1. Marcel interprets his experience imaginatively; 2. he wonders, quite appreciatively, over the phenomenon of hours vanishing during the course of an afternoon reading a book; 3. he responds to emanations from the hawthorns at Tansonville and at- tempts to communicate with them without knowing how; 4. he expresses a similar hyper-acute consciousness of these same flowers on the altar of Saint-Hilaire, as well as commenting on the role they play in the sacred rites of the church; 5. his consciousness of the special atmosphere of the church and his close attention to what constitutes this sacredness elicits the observation that if there is bad weather outdoors one can be assured of good weather inside because of the effect of the half-light on the stained glass of the sanctuary; 6. he is an adherent, he tells us, (he is older, now) of the Celtic belief that souls are interred in objects and waiting to be delivered; and 7. as a young man he is able to say of the time he spent in society that his attention could only be arrested from its social preoccupations by the appeal to it of realities that addressed themselves to his imagination.

A point worth noting concerning both James’ neurotics and Bergson’s normal subjects is the role imagination plays in every individual’s life. If neurotics happen to be more imaginative than their less susceptible counterparts, then

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124 what they achieve in juxtaposing elements of experience into new cognitive formations is probably much greater then what can be achieved by the less imaginative. After all, imagination is limited to what it can image. Like everything else, it is strengthened by exercise. This is reflected in the role imagination plays in Marcel’s creative development. Familiar with the number of ways people communicate with each other; adept at catching meanings carried in gestures, comportment, and patterns of expression in both verbal and non-verbal interactions; and sensitive to resonant experience, Marcel is able to imagine by way of analogy that experiences of déjà vu possess communicative value. How great this value might be relative to other forms of intuitive comprehension he could not say, thus his inability to put a value on these experiences. As for resonance, Marcel continued to respond to it throughout his life. He did so because he accepted, at some level, that resonance, too, offered a means of reaching a source of understanding even if he had yet to gain understanding through it, which, in fact, he never does. In Mysticism, Sacred and Profane, R. C. Zaehner, refers to the types of altered states of consciousness experienced by artists (the particular subjects of his study). He states unequivocally that the “natural mystical experience,” as he calls metacognitive events, is a widely authenticated fact.23 Much as James did earlier, Zaehner says of the individual experiencing such events that she or he “has gone through something of tremendous significance beside which the ordinary world of sense perception and discursive thought is almost the shadow of a shade.”24 In the present text we use the term transformative experiencing rather than natural mystical experiencing, in doing so we distance ourselves from a term which suggests the imponderable. In this we remain true to James for whom casting light on the imponderable in human reactivity opened supposedly mystical phenomena to objective analysis. More importantly, the term transformative experiencing is faithful to Proust’s own presentation of this material. Of the accounts of involuntary memories Proust gives Marcel to speak of, about which Proust would have been relying on his knowledge of such experiences, Zaehner says “[b]ecause of all men who have left records of their “natural mystical experiences” he [Proust] had by far the most acute and remorselessly analytical mind, his writing on this matter is worthy of the most respectful attention.”25 James, Zaehner, Zeman, and Brown all remark on the predictability of the sequence of stages through which such experiences progress. As we will see in the next chapter, they are very similar to those described by Arthur I. Miller as leading to inspiration.26 We have noted James’ suggestion, speaking of religious experiencing, that the impulse driving the individual’s quest for union with the unknow-

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125 able defines the nature of the unknowable one encounters in transformation’s realization. In Marcel’s case, this impulse is bound up with his imaginative curiosity and his desire to uncover the relationship between these external stimuli and the interior workings of his psyche. He approaches them, then, as phenomena subject to scientific analysis. The union Marcel seeks is a psychological truth of human experiencing. Without a ready-made code of practice to follow the play existing in physical reality, as well as the distortions to that reality affected through commonplace phenomena such as we have mentioned, must be probed, if they are to be probed at all, by an individual without formal guidelines to structure his or her investigations. This is what Elstir had to do when he tried to show what his eye saw before his eye had time to think.27 He had to work toward the strictly literal reading of visual stimuli his eyes registered, even if, momentarily, they projected a world all topsy-turvy. This is what Marcel would have to do to understand mental distractions that altered his perception of time passing.28 The same was true as he tried to grasp the fleeting suggestions charging his experiences of resonance and déjà vu. This is where the broader inclinations of an individual’s life—in Marcel’s case, his self-seeking and his desire to be a writer—come into play. These inclinations exert an influence in shaping the approach an individual adopts through experimentation to phenomena which seem to offer an opening to greater understanding. They also shape the handling of the knowledge gained in the aftermath of the experience. We said previously, citing Marcel’s description of his experience with the madeleine, that involuntary memory is an intellectual achievement capitalizing on the opportunities afforded by chance. This can be explained as follows: because actions require nearly all one’s attention to see them completed, we, perforce, take no notice of anything that does not assist us in their execution. From this sharply focused orchestration of our body by our brain that is a biological expedient for survival there is little left over in consciousness to remark on the nuancing conditions our environment fills time with. Our senses take them all in nonetheless, secreting these sensations that occupy time in glyphs each of us becomes the sole possessor of, their only possible discoverer and translator.29 By this unconscious means of registration, our senses fill a system of memory already full at birth which our intellect, once having gained access to this system through the superventions of involuntary memory, can nurture into an understanding of the self through the subjective associations discovered between present and past. This explains the importance of present experiencing for gaining access to the self. Our nervous system, being a conductive and

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126 reactive faculty, must, of necessity, rely on the piloting sensations of everyday life to rouse from the sensory unconscious this re-experiencing of the past.30 We are dependent, then, on the operation of chance in the mundane activities of living for the startling congruencies of sensations which can open the ground otherwise held fast by the sensory unconscious. Such congruencies come upon us happenstantially, however, generally when we happen to be least disposed to believing in the possibilities latent in life and our mind is a blank. This being so, like Marcel, one needs to be able to come alert and focus intently on the incident to support in the shock of recollection which rouses from the dispersed and illogically encrypted space of past moments the original sensation as it is lifted from the depths of the self by its congruent in the present. For an involuntary memory does not develop on its own from déjà vu. It must rely on the mediating curiosity of the intellect to bring the full panorama of a particular sensuous environment that was piqued by chance about us in its entirety. Surrounded, we experience in this resurrected portion of time moments that have been lost. This resurrection we will only experience once, for the involuntary memory itself, by supplanting whatever else might have occupied the moments it takes over, becomes the sole occupant of these moments. It becomes an image observed and will be remembered afterward in our conscious memory in the standard, abstracted form all the facts of our days are remembered in our mind. How does involuntary memory do this? First, we should note in considering the amplification of déjà vu into involuntary memory the distinction Théodore Ribot, writing in 1896, marks between true and false involuntary memories, or as he called them, mémoires affectives. In true involuntary memory the individual enters a state such as Marcel describes in which an actual experience from the past floods the consciousness of the individual with a complete revivification of the individual’s sensuous experience as that experience was registered unconsciously originally.31 By contrast, what Ribot calls false involuntary memories— which are more common than the other—are incomplete and little more than partially developed déjà vus. This said, by suspending the physical properties of earlier moments in the atmosphere of the moments it of necessity preempts for its own, an involuntary memory pulls the individual briefly out of time, as Bergson hypothesized and objected to.32 For Marcel, tasting the madeleine soaked in tea, the physical properties of this earlier moment were those of his Aunt Léonie’s room in Combray. He never would have been able to experience this recrudescence of his life lived then without the aid of the tea-soaked madeleine, for the outside-of-time characteristic of involuntary memory is inimitable to it and at the extreme of human experience; no matter how strenuously he might

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127 have tried to deduce such results from facts in his mind he could never have done so. Yet in this psychic experience these treasures were given him almost for nothing—by a simple spoonful of refreshment. As would a messenger from another world, it surprised him by bringing from seemingly out of nowhere, but really from deep within himself, the complex of stimuli composing the actual but obscure moments in time evoked by his coming upon a resonant fragment of it in the present. What is more, his involuntary memory resurrected his former state of receptivity to these stimuli and presented the simultaneous impressions each of his senses unconsciously registered as they were received; by doing so, Marcel became acquainted with a setting he had no complete picture of before, exposing the mystery of Time through these operations as something extant within him that he was drawn to with the same insistence which compels migratory species to seek wintering grounds they have never seen. Without his being conscious that these sensations had ever been a part of any moment he had lived, they came to him by the congruence of sensations which called them forth. He instantly recognized them. They composed the totemic landscapes of his “homeland.” His recognizing them as such effectively authenticated his life in Time. Remarkably, until the instant of their discovery, he knew nothing of their power. But once re-experienced, he realized how central they were to his sense of self. This is the nature of the dimension of Time. Such landscapes flavor the essence of us. They are the reason art can be called a quasi-ontic production. The utility of this oneness is in affecting the transcendence that, in the case of the greatest artists, informs their art. In the case of the madeleine, it was a transcendence eclipsing Marcel’s experience of the room he was then sitting in with his mother. It was at the end of a raw afternoon during which he was drinking tea, a beverage he rarely drank, and softening crumbs of the madeleines he was eating in it. But the atmosphere called up of Combray was more highly charged than the atmosphere of the room in which this involuntary memory occurred. It was so, absolutely, because Marcel perceived suddenly as a totality in these moments what he had only taken from his surroundings piecemeal then, as accompaniments to his actions. This experiential saturation and excitation is the reason the state of consciousness we enter through involuntary memory appears more real than the reality of present-time quotidian events. Released briefly from the exigencies of the present through them, we perceive the projection of these sensations as the natural environment of our homeland. Within this environment lays the way to enlightenment. Through involuntary memory the details in the background of the moments we have constructed our life from restore the temporal context our movements were cut out of, and we experience

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128 a mode of existence in which we are, once again, everlastingly alive in Time. This is the pathway along which Marcel had been making progress for so long when he entered the Guermantes’ mansion at the end of the novel. Beginning with the involuntary memory of Venice roused from the feel under his foot of an uneven paving stone in the mansion’s forecourt, the sequence of involuntary memories which followed during the next half-hour or so brought him to the point where the shock given him by François le Champi suddenly opened his life to his view. He accepted what he saw, relieving the tension from the guilt and confusion which had been suffocating him since the night years before when he begged his mother for her kisses and she had come to him and read to him from this book. In doing so his creative necessity was freed to expression. The trauma of that night had impaired Marcel’s ability to recognize the sensory resonances he responded to so readily as means through which to make contact with the self prior to his moment of inspiration, for his self had been imbricated by the screen memory which partially obscured it. The significance of the self to human life had thus been lost to him. Having looked at the impact of involuntary memory on Marcel’s understanding of the self, we are now going to look at Marcel’s problem-of-self from the point of view of impacted sexuality.

François le Champi Marcel’s problem-of-self was a wholly interior state which readers are aware of but about which Saint-Loup, Albertine, and other characters know nothing. Saint-Loup and Albertine would have been hard pressed to believe Marcel’s failure to work had anything to do with a psychological dilemma. Stimulating and inventive in conversation, both felt all Marcel needed to do was to write down the things he said to produce really interesting books. They encouraged him to do so, as we noted in chapter 2. But if we look at the subjects Marcel brings up and talks about with them and others, we see the extent to which he dwelled on variations of the theme of great ideas from among which he hoped to find a subject for his book. Conversation is not literature; neither is an extemporaneous monologue or a harangue.33 As the perceptive reader appreciates, while Marcel’s remarks and comments are insightful, they are so within the bounds of the conversational range and intellectual limits of his interlocutors. Thus, based on his conversational ability, Marcel would have had to undertake a substantial amount of work to produce a book which was actually able to contribute to the advancement of thought. Laziness, then, does contribute to Marcel’s inability to write, effectively masking, publicly, the fact that he had nothing to say. Art comes from of life. This is the reason Marcel was able to say art is

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129 immanent in all of us.34 But first life is living, which is something Marcel had to learn for himself. To give credit where credit is due, it was Bloch (the same who offered no encouragement to Marcel’s urge to be a writer) who helped him experience life as a real encounter with the world outside himself. It was Bloch, readers may remember, who opened the field of love to Marcel. By disclosing the universality of desire in women, Bloch gave Marcel an alternate view of the sexuality Marcel had denied in himself. Complicating this discovery however was Marcel’s observation, provoked by his falling in love with Gilberte, that the field of love is unstable in its determinancies, much as he had found space and time to be. If we look at Marcel’s boyhood it becomes apparent how powerfully experiences of resonance shaped his imagination and responses to life. In the in-and out-of-scale objects of a child’s world all the special but unintelligible “secrets” whispered to him or her through the essences of objects distort the world out of all proportion to the matter-of-fact way it presents itself to an adult who does not happen to be in love.35 They loom so large because the conundrums they pose to the child so obscurely magnify the importance of these objects which the child’s imagination then proceeds to make bigger than everything else for a moment as they become the subject of his or her attention. Beginning early in childhood, these “secrets,” speaking directly to Marcel’s heart, un-countenancing habit and releasing him to flight simultaneously, had fostered his imagination through the rewards of possibility they promised. Distance is a dream of childhood Walter Benjamin notes in The Arcades Project, thinking of Baudelaire.36 In La Recherche the reader is attuned to such distances and distortions. We are sensitized to the power of resonance long before Marcel is able to appropriate these experiences for creative use. Even without his knowing the value of what he was learning, Marcel was acquiring, nonetheless, a piecemeal and incremental appreciation for:



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1. the plasticity of space (through aesthetic pleasure gained through objects 2. the ecstatic potential of the body (through his pubescent traversal of the threshold of pleasure which opens, in masturbation, out of the simpler comfort to be had touching oneself, experiences distinct from but concomitant to love and the beliefs of the flesh); and 3. time’s temporal dimensionality perceived as mutable through the contraction or distension of its hours depending on what he was doing in them).

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130 The value of this knowledge cannot be overestimated in chronicling Marcel’s development. Without his gaining an appreciation for the profundity of these more or less familiar, random experiences in his daily life Marcel would not have been able to plumb the depths of sensuous congruence that led to his experiences of involuntary memory. And without his having gained sufficient knowledge of who he was as a human being and a man, as well as an understanding of what this meant to him as a writer, from the lessons he learned from the masters in La Recherche, he never would have been able to achieve the resolution of self from his encounter with François le Champi one afternoon late in his life moments after he had given up a vocation in art. Ultimately, each of us is alone. It is only by believing we can be heard and held in the souls of others (and/or by God) that has kept and keeps us from the despair of what would otherwise be an existence of nothingness. Art also reaches into the thoughts and souls of others. By contrast, spontaneous and/or thoughtless speech seldom reaches so far. Unless it wounds or elates, the affect of everyday speech usually subsides quickly into the noise of daily life. As with any response to stimuli, spontaneous speech is directed to the eliciting agent. Habitual and reflexive, it relies on vocal and verbal tropes to meet both the familiar and the new or particularly striking. It is the quid pro quo of interaction with the Other which causes us to blurt or shout out, often almost meaninglessly, some ejaculation or other (while that which is truly extraordinary often leaves us speechless). Readers are given multiple examples of this. As a boy, Marcel becomes so excited by tiles glistening in the sunlight after being washed by rain that in an outburst of giddy hilarity he shouts out joyfully his pleasure to an irritated passerby who fails to be moved by Marcel’s enthusiasm.37 And he was still popping up with these artless effusions years later as a young socialite. At La Raspelière, the country house near Balbec the Verdurin’s rent from the Cambremers, we see him so taken with the compositional beauty created from his seeing all at once and together the long view from the drawing room, the plantings of the Verdurin’s garden from which Mme Verdurin had brought in arrangements of grasses and flowers and placed them about the room, and the refinement of the drawing room itself that he spoke of his admiration spontaneously and with an enthusiasm which prompted the Verdurins and their other guests to look at him with barely suppressed approbation for interrupting their card games with such untutored remarks, as if his excitable nerves agitated on the drive up to the house from the station had left him light-headed and inappropriately loquacious.38 Chance is often the catalyst for a coming-to-knowing. As Marcel learned from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet, the very nature of the transformation a com-

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131 ing-to-knowing is proof of requires the discovery, through chance, of a ground of expression. Through such a coming-to-knowing one gains access to a truth such as Vinteuil expressed in his work. It was a truth similar in kind to the truths expressed by Elstir, Bergotte, and Berma: the truth of the self expressed through art. By mid-life Marcel was conscious of the implicit challenge his psychological need for grounding carried for him, for it made his ability to create art contingent on an interior coming-to-knowing. He reached this understanding by a series of disconnected observations, including those lessons learned from Proust’s four masters. Marcel had come to see creativity as a deep, interior function of the self to which the Romantic assumption of an ecstatic origin for art is connected. Lacking such an experience, and, by the end of the book, feeling he was no longer capable of having one, Marcel sees no hope of salvation in everlasting life through art such as Bergotte and Vinteuil achieve after their deaths.39 Because Marcel’s thoughts on and reactions to experience expressed who he was, and because he had yet to accept for himself the role of artist which would have, ipso facto, validated this experience and set him to work, he stews in his artist’s quandary of coming into his voice throughout the novel. Consigning himself in Le Temps retrouvé to the nullity of flânerie and social digression, Marcel claims, by way of settling his own mind on his future, that he is through questing into the realm of ideas. He had always only been drawn to ideas anyway through resonance—a condition which may have been mooted by the deadness with which he greeted the landscape he viewed from a train the day before. Leaving for the party at the Guermantes’, Marcel effectively washes his hands of literature. He summarily consigns all his investigations, or so he thinks, to a kind of dead file of false promises and sensuous curiosities which his restless inquiries, stimulated by this responsiveness to resonance, had generated. All they had ever seemed to give him were merely pleasurable sensations, as he noted as he walked along the Guermantes way as a youth. They had never rewarded him with inspiration. He still could not produce a work of art which would possess the “infinite value” he fully expected should be expressed through it. Having renounced writing, Marcel crosses Paris ignoring appeals which, until recently, would have roused him to inquiry. Even as a flood of resonant sensations test his resolve against placing hope in art with opportunities that stir his creative necessity afresh, he resists them until the incident with François le Champi re-consecrates his dedication to writing. Creative fulfillment grew from his encounter with François le Champi. He says so himself. Catalyst of his inspiration and final test as it were of his ability to intuit relationships—this time between identity and self—this encounter with Sand’s novel and the illumination which arose out of it restored

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132 a sense of purpose to his life and enabled him to see the possibilities realizable through art. It did so by showing him, in something like a miracle of awakening, who he is through showing him who he had been long ago when he first saw this book. Seeing the prince’s copy of Sand’s novel thus breaks the spell Marcel had been cast under the night his mother read to him from it after putting him to bed.40 What is more, this encounter enables him to place a value on the interval that passed between times, during which he had continued to experience life. He is able to recognize that what he had accumulated throughout the intervening years would be the raw material for the work he was now prepared to write.41 Marcel’s happenstantial encounter with François le Champi pierced the mantle within which he had been enfolded that night perhaps forty years earlier, which had ever afterward forced into convoluted growths his complex emotional responses to the life chance threw in his way.42 Through the breach effected by Sand’s novel he was able to view and what is more actually re-enter the paradisiacal dimension of freedom-in-being from which he had been expelled that night long ago while all his life’s learning suddenly empowered his spirit with the themes for his art, investing, too, his voice with the authority to produce it. But the vocabulary of his story had come from having lived among men and women in the error-ridden and disconnected staking of relationships in a world filled with the objects of his particular world. This is the universal condition of human experience: it is individually unique. Formerly, Marcel had viewed his life as devoid of value in terms of an experiential history.43 With this new awareness he saw his life in a context which gave it meaning. These were incidents which, through art, would be shot through with the essence of his being: the song of his homeland. They would contribute to his producing a work of merit; a work without artifice which would be more real in his telling because of these resonances emanating from Time than any recitation of ordinary life he had ever read in the pages of literary men of the Goncourt’s ilk.44 Marcel sensed the nearness of immortality, even as he felt death take up its abode in him. François le Champi had long been lost among other lost articles of Marcel’s youth. This lack of consciousness was important for the development of his encounter with the prince’s copy of the book. For through being lost, and through Marcel’s having forgotten about his first encounter with it, François le Champi had retained its full potency just as the memory associated with it had remained in its original state of crisis by this same lack of contact with it. As a symbol, then, the sight of the title, François le Champi, stamped on a binding was particularly efficacious whereas the narrative content of the book was of little symbolic value to him. Marcel actually remarks that had the subject of Sand

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133 come up and had he spoken of this book during the intervening years, he would have spoken of it only as a “not very extraordinary novel” by George Sand, set in Berry,45 and not as a thing that had personal meaning for him. Thus, under the circumstances of his encounter with a physical copy of the book in the prince’s library, François le Champi provided the necessarily external prompt which re-cast all his thoughts in a new light. It brought him in contact not with the sensory unconscious, the presence of which within him was revealed through his involuntary memories. Instead, he confronted a set of actions he had repressed. Consequently, when the image of François le Champi was lifted from the memory it covered Marcel found the sexually-charged events that had shocked him as a boy. Everything that had happened to him since in terms of love could be traced to this event. His sexual passivity toward women and his craving for doting attention from them simulated conditions as they existed in his pre-pubescent childhood where he basked in the unqualified, un-quantified love of his mother and grandmother. The impossibility of love on these terms, especially from the women who became objects of his attention, manifested itself most often in their rebellion. His lovers became exasperated with him and broke things off. They could not help themselves. Marcel demanded far more then they could provide while he never satisfied them sexually. Only Albertine, who gained considerably, materially, from her live-in arrangement with Marcel, ever came close to satisfying his desire. But she did so most completely as he watched her sleep. Then, when she was as impassive under his gaze as a stone; when she was not even there as a conscious being, did he make love to her, ejaculating while he lay beside her. The striking difference between Marcel’s involuntary memories and his encounter with François le Champi is that Marcel was brought face to face with an act of sexual volition rather than experiencing the euphoria associated with his involuntary memories. But in the context of all that had been revealed to him during his sojourn in the prince’s library, Marcel is able to accept both the shock of the original experience and the nature of his subsequent history of love with the exculpatory equanimity of one free in himself to be who he has become. This encounter, as readers know, follows immediately on the sequence of involuntary memories that conclude in the prince’s library. In Du côté de chez Swann we have the mirror image of this relationship. Marcel’s involuntary memory developed from the madeleine dipped in tea follows even more closely on the episode of the good night kisses than follows his taking François le Champi from its shelf the involuntary memories he developed from the déjà vus that sprang from the paving stone, the spoon hitting a cup, and the feel of the starched

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134 napkin brushing his lips. In placing these mirroring events in this order, Proust performs a narrative pirouette of considerable dexterity. In the first instance, in Du côté de chez Swann, Proust effectively buries a narrative of incipient sexual anxiety (which, then, readers forget) under what follows. In placing the scene of Marcel’s first fully-realized involuntary memory immediately after the good night kisses, Proust relieves himself of what could have been a fruitless psychological account of the “conflict between the claims of sexuality and those of the ego” as it played itself out in Marcel’s development.46 What is more, Marcel’s involuntary memory sets the stage for Proust’s operatic curtain-raising on the town of Combray with its lively and entertaining cast of characters. In Le Temps retrouvé we have the reverse situation. Proust moves from the idiosyncratic—Marcel’s involuntary memories—to the universal in which individuals live in Time as complex persons bringing to the place they occupy in the present the psychological outlook developed over the course of their lives. In Le Temps retrouvé Marcel is finally able to enter upon his vocation as writer securely grounded in the authority of self and the authenticity of the experience it holds. As Proust develops this theme in the novel, art as expression, and the self—or, more accurately, art as impulse to expression, and self as the source of the resonance within the artist—are equi-primordial in the individual. Understanding this is central to our understanding Marcel’s creative development for it encompasses the terms of his problem-of-self which he needed to resolve before he could realize himself a writer. Marcel’s ability to achieve groundedness in the sufficiency of the self, while accepting identity as a fully credentialed extension of it, reflects, allegorically, the achievement of the individual in coming to terms with the forces of modernity.

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Chapter 6 The State of Genius Proust as Writer Proust was not considered much of a writer prior to the publication of Du côté de chez Swann in 1913. Though he was appreciated as a brilliant conversationalist and a mesmerizing monologist by his friends, he was regarded by many more people who knew him, or knew of him, as a fashionable aesthete who dabbled in the arts. And while his Ruskin translations were respected, the balance of his literary output was not considered out of the ordinary; articles and stories were mostly applauded by his social acquaintances. Furthermore, the notice taken of his penchant for gravitating to hostesses with the grandest social positions, whose salons were the preeminent ones of the day, classified him a social climber, a label which invariably colors people’s perceptions of whatever else it is one does. André Gide, at the time of his rejection of Du côté de chez Swann on behalf of the Nouvelle Revue Française, in December, 1912, was conscious of this reputation when he referred to Proust as “a snob, a literary amateur, the worst possible thing for our magazine.”1 Gide’s criticism was animated by disdain for whatever he may have seen or read of Proust’s articles published in Le Figaro over the preceding several years and any lingering recollection he may have had of Les Plaisirs et les jours, published in 1896. Yet little over a year later, in January, 1914, after Du côté de chez Swann had been published by Bernard Grasset,2 Gide wrote Proust his well-known declaration of regret which was followed, two months later, by an offer “to publish the remaining two volumes of La Recherche and buy back the rights to the first volume from Grasset.”3 What had changed? At first glance the answer is simple: the book had been published.4 But this answer does not address Gide’s dramatic change of opinion convincingly. For as much as the history of publishing is a chronicle of any one publisher’s success in discovering and promoting writers of merit, it is also, unavoidably, a record of poor choices and missed opportunities. Having made his decision, one can suppose Gide was content with it and thus not particularly interested one way or another in learning the book was to be published by Grasset. Indifference is very probably what he felt in November, 1913 when Du côté de chez Swann was published. Then reviews started coming out which provided a steady, though not unanimous, stream of praise heralding the publication of the book as an extraordinary event.5 André Gide was a founder of the Nouvelle Revue Française (hereafter referred to as the NRF), and one of its guiding spirits.6 He was by all accounts a rising figure in the French literary world. Setting aside the fact that Proust’s book was now in print, and assuming no reactionary atavism had, incomprehensibly,

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136 infected the standards by which he (and several others) evaluated work during this fourteen month period—and there is no evidence to suggest it—we can ask what had changed among the relatively few other variables that could have affected Gide’s reversal of opinion—apart from the fact that Gide actually read the book the second time he encountered it. The answer is, of course, that Proust’s writing had changed. As has been stated frequently, Gide had not read the novel when it was first submitted to the NRF. His opinion of Proust remained sufficiently negative even after the NRF’s reading committee, including Gide, Jacques Copeau, and Jean Schlumberger, had been lobbied by Proust’s intermediaries, the princes Antoine and Emmanuel Bibesco, to fate Du côté de chez Swann to summary rejection.7 At over three hundred pages, Proust’s novel was lengthy for the time. One could guess the writing was undisciplined and, given Proust’s social reputation, overly precious as well.8 These considerations in themselves were enough to justify Gide’s taking only a confirmatory dip in the text before returning it.9 With the flurry of positive reviews that accompanied publication however, the situation changed considerably. By 1914 there was some buzz about the book and Jean Cocteau had urged Gide to read it. This he now did, “reveling in it,” as he wrote Proust, recognizing at once the power of Proust’s voice.10 This brings us to two questions: How had Proust achieved such total unity in form and content in this first volume of La Recherche that some critics placed it in the company of masterworks from the start, and how had his writing acquired the mastery Gide responded to so unreservedly?11 Jean-Yves Tadié looks at this change in Gide’s attitude and comments on it in his biography of Proust. In doing so, Tadié overlooks any suddenly realized artfulness in Proust’s writing as the reason for this change. In fact, he does not mention Proust’s writing at all in his discussion of Gide’s change of opinion even though Gide refers to it himself. Instead, Tadié draws his reader’s attention to “two mysteries” as he calls them: “Why did Gide now like Proust?” and “Why did the latter attach such importance to the opinion of the former…?”12 The second “mystery” he identifies says more about Tadié then it does of Proust. It reflects Tadié’s failure or refusal to acknowledge the role desire plays in shaping a person’s attitude toward those in a position to support or reject them. Almost everyone begins life as an outsider relative to the establishment he or she imagines becoming a part of. Proust attached importance to Gide because Gide was the gatekeeper to the NRF and the NRF was the publisher Proust most wanted for his book. Gide’s endorsement would have assured this. It would have boosted Proust’s self-esteem while propelling him toward the forefront of French letters. With this “mystery” dismissed from consideration, only Tadié’s

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137 first “mystery” remains to be solved. Tadié solves the riddle of why Gide now liked Proust by promoting the surprisingly facile view rejected almost out-ofhand in the opening paragraph of this chapter: the book’s being published had made the difference for Gide. Tadié attributes Gide’s change of mind to the new signification Proust’s work carried as a published book, the form in which work such as a novel becomes legitimized for the general public. Tadié suggests in this way that Gide’s second, ecstatic response was due exclusively to the persuasive force of packaging. In support of this position Tadié emphasizes two seemingly irrefutable points about a published work: (1) “a printed book, especially if it is greeted by favorable reviews, will carry more weight than a typescript,” and (2) “if it is published elsewhere, the book is seen from another person’s viewpoint.”13 By not addressing Proust’s writing, Tadié introduces Gide to his (Tadié’s) readers as a publisher of little imagination and an editor who possessed no more than a rudimentary talent for assessing work. It could be argued that this criticism applies in this case because Gide allowed a subjective opinion of Proust to interfere with editorial objectivity. Gide is thus lowered in our esteem. His position on Proust is no different than that of the anonymous mass of materialists who judge a book by its cover. But editorial objectivity is not the issue here because Gide’s response to reading Proust’s book went so far beyond merely acknowledging Proust’s competence in the medium of fiction that we are forced to look more closely at the work. By having chosen to emphasize material aspects of the experience of art rather than granting any role to the pulse of essential communication contained within it, Tadié seems to be suggesting that Proust’s writing before La Recherche had been this good too. The implication is that if Gide had been reading Proust carefully over the years he would have welcomed Du côté de chez Swann from the start. In other words, Tadié is proposing an interpretation of Proust’s career as a writer which brings it in line with the more well-exampled pattern of authorial development whereby a general refinement of the craft-skills in story-telling is demonstrated as youthful talent matures into mastery of the medium. Anyone who has looked at Proust’s early writing knows Proust’s writing had not been this good for so long. A look at this work makes its limitations evident. His stories are as confusedly motivated to reveal as to hide (Confession d’une jeune fille, 1896), while his critiques trend toward apologia in the guise of analysis (Sur la lecture, 1905; Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide, 1907). Reading this material today leaves one unfulfilled and restless for something better. And though it is true that Proust’s parodies were applauded for their cleverness and bite, parody is a form which loses its piquancy as it loses its contemporaneity. As for his studies

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138 of artists, they are perceptive, but not profoundly so. In contrast to writers like Alois Riegl, Jakob Burckhardt, or John Ruskin, whose works are still consulted and discussed, Proust’s few articles lack the incisiveness that would have kept them useful to art historical investigation even today, even in a field in which so much has been written since.14 In the end, the parodies, pastiches, and articles fail to transcend their topicality. As for the novel, Jean Santeuil, which Proust ultimately abandoned, his decision should have sufficed to leave it were it lay though now everything Proust wrote is consulted and evaluated because of the light it sheds on Proust’s creative development. Du côté de chez Swann is the most accessible of the seven volumes composing La Recherche. True to the organization of multi-volume novels, this first volume of La Recherche introduces themes and concepts which will be developed over the course of the book. Their presence in Du côté de chez Swann orients readers to Proust’s focus in the whole work. In his approach, Tadié may have been attempting to eliminate from his argument concerning Gide’s change of mind the personal knowledge he, Tadié, had of the full scope the novel reaches, something Gide could not have known in his appraisal of 1912. For the novel swelled from three to seven volumes during the course of the First World War. But Gide had at least heard of some of this from the manifesto the Bibesco brothers gave to the NRF.15 Granted, it would have been virtually impossible for anyone to grasp from reading Du côté de chez Swann that Proust would be thoroughly investigating the origins of art in the artist and the relationship of the self to art through fiction. From reading this first volume, it would also have been difficult, though perhaps not impossible, to gauge the incisiveness with which Proust would be emphasizing the psycho/physiological origins of art rather than falling back on the mystical/spiritual sources claimed for it in early nineteenth century Romantic thought. Some early commentators did catch some of this in their responses to the work however. The fact is, there is a good deal of talk of art in Du côté de chez Swann. In the Combray section of this first volume readers unequivocally identify the narrator as the author of the book we are reading. In this section the as yet unnamed narrator talks about his youth.16 In talking about it, he is, we imagine, looking back on his origins as a writer. Some of the events he mentions indicate developmental proclivities of his sensibility—his self-dramatization for instance—others were formative in shaping his personality as an adult (his fascination with the aristocracy). The narrator’s account also exposes readers to his reflective and imaginative mental life as a child which continues into adulthood. The novel opens with a slate-clearing breakdown and reconstruction of individuality based on place-identity and temporal positioning. One could argue from

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139 this that Proust was proposing radical terms for the definition of psychological stability and identity formation. In dealing with time and psychological duration, for example, Proust broaches the subject of the dimension of Time in talking about the church of Saint-Hilaire in Combray. He shows, by way of analogy, how memories function as the landmarks of our past. Like the physical effects which chart the history of that church, our memories, too, can fade, warp, or flow beyond the original outlines of the events they chronicle in charting our lives back through time. But these landmarks, in the case of Saint-Hilaire, tell one nothing of the specific circumstances under which they came to be in the church while nonetheless being part of the fabric of the church which signify specific events in its history. Like snapshots, these artifacts give only a partial accounting of the past. Much else is missing just as with Marcel’s referable memories. In one instance, what was missing for Marcel is completed by the involuntary memory of the tea-soaked madeleine. It returns the actual sensations his body registered at the time to consciousness. The involuntary memory of the madeleine is critical in bringing up the subject of memory and lost experience. This was a far more powerful, authoritative, and insightful treatment of experience than Proust had been able to give similar subject matter earlier. With Proust’s conception of the dimension of Time his writing broke free of the communal language of his day and became an innovative medium Proust employed to realize the vision inspiration had provided him concerning the nature of experiencing.17 As the novel progressed, Proust showed Time to be the tethering extensity of the self: a peduncular, fourth dimension of existence composed of one’s total experience in life. It springs from the encounter of being with time and it accumulates as one’s becoming. The dimension of Time is the key to Marcel’s understanding the self in relation to being and identity. The importance of this concept which Proust had worked out by August 1909, is underscored by his alluding to it in the manifesto the Bibesco brothers gave to the NRF in November, 1912.18 By conceptualizing Time as a fourth dimension of one’s physical presence in the world, Proust was able to tell a story which, while standing as an ekphrasis on isolation as the universal state of our being in the world, pierced the endemic loneliness of contemporary life through the power of art.19 This opening, and the whole of the Combray section, thus positions the tale of Swann’s affair with Odette as a model for Marcel’s pursuit of love through the youthful difficulties and infatuations that surface in Marcel’s attraction to the Duchesse de Guermantes and his curiosity about Gilberte, Swann’s daughter, when he sees her watching him from the shrubbery of Tansonville. On the level of characterization, Charles Swann is one of literatures truly fascinating charac-

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140 ters. La Recherche abounds in such characters (Françoise, Léonie, the Duchesse de Guermantes and Mme Verdurin are a few who appear in this first volume). Proust’s ability to catch people’s quirks and foibles is one of the hallmarks of the novel. In the case of Swann, Proust renders this multi-faceted personality straightforwardly and with real humor and warmth. Swann lives life as he chooses and accepts his lot in the world with a good deal of self-deprecating amusement. He is vaguely aware of the monadic state in which he, and every one else, exists, much like Joyce’s Leopold Bloom and Robert Musil’s Ulrich in A Man without Qualities. We admire Swann for his independence as well as for his loyalty and for his connoisseurship in judging people as well as art. As accessible as this first volume of La Recherche is, it is also innovative, imaginative, and psychologically challenging. This is what Gide responded to in the unfolding of Du côté de chez Swann,20 not to the material quality of a book he could never have been impressed by knowing the author himself had paid for its publication. Time We have noted that Marcel’s need to resolve a problem-of-self equates with a search for lost time. And we have seen that Marcel’s discovery of the sensory unconscious revealed lost time to be the component of total experiencing which enters us without provoking a response. We have discussed at some length the neurophysiological and psychological basis for this claim and for the validity of scientific evidence implicit in Marcel’s descriptions of his experiences. Proust could not have achieved this level of insight into the nature of experiencing without having a thorough understanding of time to support his argument. In what follows, we are going to look at suppositions of what time is based on Proust’s presentation of time in the novel. The intricate relationship between the self, experience, and time at the center of Proust’s narrative of the making of an artist is a logical complement to the subject of the present chapter, the state of genius. In Le Temps retrouvé Marcel establishes a ground for psychological duration in the sensory unconscious by deducing the completeness of his past from the random moments recalled from it through his experiences of involuntary memory. Deducing this completeness involved integrating the sensory unconscious into his referable experience. Fully integrated, the sensory unconscious and his referable past created the experiential totality upon which psychological duration is based. The first intimation that this unconscious past exists comes to Marcel relatively early in the novel in his encounter with the group of trees outside the village of Hudimesnil in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. Seeing the trees while on

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141 a drive with Mme de Villeparisis and his grandmother precipitates a déjà vu. The sensation accompanying it tantalizes Marcel with the possibility he might capture the elusive something it seemed to be offering him through chance. Unwilling to give the experience time to develop however, and unsure if it is worth the risk of making himself look eccentric in front of the marquise, Marcel ceases to pursue the opportunity when it fails to yield readily to his effort to discover the place in his past the trees seemed to be attempting to recalling to him. Two volumes later, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, Marcel speculates on the completeness of the past within him. He comes very close to realizing the constancy of the self necessary for establishing a sense of psychological duration. But he is prevented from reaching this conclusion due to the recollection that is borne in on him in this incident. It is that of his grandmother consoling him as he undressed on the first evening of his first visit to Balbec. It brings home the reality of her death. Encountering the totality of his loss, he is shocked into remorse. Rather than pursuing knowledge disinterestedly, Marcel is led to consider the ways in which factual /intellectual knowledge can disengage from our feelings to protect us emotionally, creating the intermittencies of the heart Marcel speaks of in this passage.21 This experience brings Marcel closer to an understanding of the self and the self ’s relationship to being and identity that he will surmise listening to Vinteuil’s septet, in La Prisonnière, which was discussed in chapter 4. Proust had written of resonant experiencing and déjà vu in Jean Santeuil, but without making a connection between the latter and a discussion of time-related concerns such as psychological duration. This connection only became evident to him in the spring of 1909 with his discovery of the sensory unconscious. Collateral with this discovery was Marcel’s discovery of the importance of the sensory unconscious to the constitution of the self. For Marcel this revelation is the product of inspiration. It was by inspiration, too, that Proust came to formulate the dimension of Time. For both author and character conceptualizing duration required discovering the binding capacity of the sensory unconscious through which the various episodes of one’s life can be brought into psychological unity. As we know, Proust’s and Marcel’s respective involuntary memories contributed to their inspiration. Their involuntary memories provided the mechanism by which both found fragments of the sensory unconscious reintegrating lost experiences into their referable memories with the vividness of the real events. Both make the connection that these fragments are representative of the single and same self which, having absorbed the original sensation, makes it possible for sensory congruence to develop when a similar sensation in the present is

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142 encountered. Proust did not just make all this up. The fact that La Recherche continues to resonate in the consciousness of readers today is due to the veracity of the psycho/physiological process elucidated in the novel by which the Romantic precept of art originating in the self of the artist is validated. We are going to approach Proust’s treatment of time in La Recherche through Marcel’s search for le temps perdu, or lost time, a search that equates with Marcel’s search for psychological duration and an understanding of the self. We are going to begin with what can be considered an everyday or common sense conception of time in which what we did and who we saw yesterday remains a part of a present that extends to what we will do tonight and with whom. We can refer to a conception of time that incorporates the past and future into a freely-accessible and vital present monolithic time. Monolithic time is an illusion. It replicates a spatial model in which a person, being, or thing can have something in front of it and behind it which the person or being can approach or move away from. This is a familiar set of relations for bodies and forms in space. They are relationships associated with physical presence and, for sentient beings, sense detection. This analogy to space does not work for time. Time is neither expansive nor a field for movement. Time as the becoming of matter is movement. In fact, if we look at time on a more analytical level we see how quickly this conventional understanding of time breaks down. If we look at time as the medium in which becoming occurs, it is apparent that a break occurs along the inner or trailing edge of becoming. It is the point where becoming becomes itself the substrate for a further becoming. Becoming is the present. Past becoming is the no-longer time of the past. The imagery associated with these conceptualizations of time calls for a set of terms to support it. We mentioned them earlier, in chapter 1. They are ontic time, ontological time, and conceptual time. In what follows these terms replace present, past, and future. Onotic Time. Ontic time is the becoming of matter. It equates with the present. All that materially is, from a speck of dust to ourselves, is ontically; that is, is in time (a tautology). This is the universal condition of existence, and ontological time and conceptual time exist apart from but within it. Onotological Time. Ontological time is the no-longer time of past becoming. It is also universal. But only with the advent of living things capable of referencing past experience in constructing a response to stimulation in the present was ontological time incorporated into an organism’s ability to survive. As the nervous systems of experiencing organisms became more complex ontological time

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143 as memory came to have a greater and greater role in shaping action in the present until, with humans, the past fully occupies the projection Bergson gave to it in Matter and Memory, mentioned in chapter 5. It is the unconscious component of ontological time which exists as unknown or lost memories within us that Marcel taps to resolve his problem-of-self in Le Temps retrouvé. Conceptual Time. This last permutation of time, the not-time of our conceptualization of ontic and/or ontological time is exclusively a product of conscious beings. It is the realm of the future and the possible. It is also a means for mentally structuring ontic time for use, especially when differentiating ontic time into private and public spheres, a subject discussed in chapter 3. Having established the above, we need to step back in this discussion of time to a point anterior even to the appearance of the single-celled organisms we discussed earlier which helped us establish an understanding of sensory response and the functioning of the nervous system. Doing so will make it easier to appreciate how advanced was Proust’s thought in La Recherche concerning time and the concepts of self, being, and experiencing. As for our experience of the world, we noted earlier that we habitually perceive time monolithically, that is as inclusive of the immediate past and the near future. This perception is reassuring for it suggests that we can move as easily in time as in space, which we cannot. We cannot exercise control over time but our misperception gives us access to the past and the future which becomes impossible if we think of them in terms of ontological and conceptual time. Thus, for example, because Marcel saw his Aunt Léonie perpetually in the same room performing the same rituals day in and day out, she seemed to live in a monolithic moment of considerable expanse. In perhaps a better example of the convenience and perceived control in our conventional relationship to time, it happens that when we forget something we go back to get it. This “going back” suggests we have re-entered the past where we left or forgot the thing and altered the past by carrying the thing away with us now. A similar example of this sense of freedom of movement we enjoy in our conception of monolithic time is harder to come by when considering the future because we traffic in hope and think about what may be continuously. As we have noted in an earlier chapter, physical duration is different from psychological duration. Physical duration is life in the body. Psychological duration is a construct of consciousness. As such, it is an inner body phenomenon. We know Marcel lacked a sense of continuity with his past. His memories were little more than snapshots to him, dead images. For Marcel, pushing beyond this

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144 complex intersection of conventional time-experiencing, memory, and physical presence and duration would be critical for him to gain a clear understanding of the fallacy under which he struggled to achieve a sense of psychological duration. It is worth remembering here, too, that inner-body phenomena cannot be encountered in the selfsame organism whose organic, physiological processes of becoming and experiencing they are—except through transference from the example offered by an Other. Thus we have cited James’ psychological studies frequently. His subjects provided James a model through telling him of their experiences, through the answers they gave to his questions, and through his candid observations of them. James’ study provided details which, when corroborated by other accounts, gave him insight into physical states he could not otherwise effectively deduce. Not being a clinician, Marcel had no way to evaluate his own feelings of psychological discontinuity. And looking outward to others did not help him. Marcel, like most of us, saw in the numerical abundance and physical diversity of the people, places, being, and things he encountered free creations operating in time independent of any referencability beyond the extended present in which he encountered them and thought about them. In other words, he did not reference people, places, beings, and things to their individual experiential histories which, in any event, he could not have known or knew only know in part. Even less, then, did he reference persons, places, beings, and things to the atemporal, incorporeal germ of being at the core of their objective presence. Referencing to origin is a philosophical stance which may pervade one’s moral or ethical outlook when one is alone with one’s thoughts but it is something hard to maintain when interacting with others on a daily basis over their, and our, needs and wants and expectations. These conditions set up something of a hermeneutic problem for Marcel vis-à-vis experiencing and psychological duration. For Marcel did not possess the means to discover in the existential condition of another person a means for comprehending and dealing with his own existential state. Marcel’s need to discover the relationship of identity to self and self to being would require him to construct a model to draw understanding from in order for him to understand that the dynamic state of always becoming in which he lives, which commenced at the moment of his inception as a living being. For he would not be able to find a model ready-made. Given the nature of the problem he was working to overcome it is not surprising that, as an autodidact in this as in most everything else, Marcel was able to put together bits and pieces into a structure which served this purpose for him. These bits and pieces included the historic dimension of the church of Saint-Hilaire; the fully real-

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145 ized involuntary memories he experienced beginning with the madeleine; and the lessons in art he took from the four masters in the novel, particularly of the concept of homeland he gained from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet. Through a step-by-step process of model-building and making use of the information this model provided, Marcel was led to his discovery of the self. To review, his recognition of the sensory unconscious as the repository of one’s past sensory experiencing, which he discovered through his involuntary memories, enabled him to picture to himself the tethering extensity of past sensory experience. The sensory unconscious established a ground for psychological duration. While the novel provides no clear timeline for when the various parts of this model come together, they were ready to fall into place when inspiration struck Marcel on the afternoon of the Princesse de Guermantes’ party. Encountering his friends and acquaintances in the princess’s drawing rooms after making this discovery, Marcel was able to imagine from the physiognomies they presented the extensity, if not the contents, of their lives, projecting backward from their present state to their points of origin as individuals. They offered proof of the validity of his conception of the self and the dimension of Time in being representative of a model of both physical and psychological duration. The latter he projected onto them from his own recent understanding of the sensory unconscious and its relation to the self. Recessive linearity—a term we defined in chapter 5 as the thread of experience reaching back to one’s point of origin as a living being— giving form to the notion of ontological time as a metaphysical extensity, presented itself as a dimension of existence. Added to the three dimensions matter occupies in space, recessive linearity necessarily becomes the fourth dimension of being. Yet because this extension only exists in the mind of the observer, that is it does not exist materially (while matter exists as a three-dimensional entity), aging as a physical phenomenon could not have appeared to Marcel as a proof of psychological duration without his having recognized the individual and collective nature of this continuous confluence of time, space, and matter first. His experiences in the prince’s library made it possible for him to do so while his friends provided Marcel proof of his supposition’s validity. The understanding Marcel gained of his own inner body phenomena he then projected back onto them. This complicated pedagogical method allows us to say, as Husserl does, that “whatever holds good for me personally, also holds good, as I know, for all other men whom I find present in the world about me.”(Edmund Husserl, Ideas. §29, pp.94-5) Of this world Husserl goes on to say that, despite the uniqueness of individual experiencing, “we come to understandings with our neighbors, and set up in common an objective spatio-temporal fact-world as the world about us

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146 that is there for us all, and to which we ourselves none the less belong.”(Ibid., p. 95 [Husserl’s italics]) However Proust may have worked himself to the point where the fourth dimension appeared to him as a metaphor for his conception of ontological time, he argues successfully through Marcel that by means of the physiological and psychical mechanisms of experiencing, the universal phenomenon of material becoming is given referential continuity. Built of moments flowing through matter, sensuous experiences recalled through déjà vu and made legible through involuntary memory provided a bridge between the present and the past Marcel had been looking for without actually knowing it was the object of his search. Gaining this insight resolved his problem-of-self by identifying the self, with its enduring capacity for experiencing and grounded in the authoritative permanency of beingness, as the guarantor of continuity in individual existence. Thus to state the obvious for the record, Marcel’s problem-of-self was resolved through his recognizing in his dispersed sensuous memory the component of ontological time which authenticated one’s life in Time. As Marcel’s example shows, this fusion of time, experience, and the self into the dimension of Time is the result of a vigorous exercise of skills gained through pursuing the ineluctable in experience and thought. It launches an individual into a state of hyper-awareness in which the individual yields to the authority of the moment. It had taken intense intellectual effort on Marcel’s part, at a time when he was already worn out, to resurrect Combray from the madeleine soaked in tea. And it took an even greater effort to synthesis in thought a fundamental condition of being out of later involuntary memories which enabled him to identify a dimension of Time in his total experiencing through hitting on the metaphoric potential of the then popular concept of the fourth dimension. He was able to do so through recognizing that the stimulus/response processes of the body can be made to yield the lost sensuous experiences which the sensory unconscious holds in suspension in the body. The State of Genius: Marcel/Marcel Proust We are now ready to turn from considerations of time to Proust and to genius as it is manifest in La Recherche. We can begin by saying that genius is identified in work. It is only applicable to transcendence in practice. This is to say, life in the body is the generative force which makes possible work that in rare instances results in the accolade “genius” being credited to the individual who produced it. Genius is something different from a moral quality of character revealed through actions such as those depicted by Giotto in his Virtues and Vices in

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147 the Scrovegni (Arena) chapel in Padua, Italy, to use a Proustian example. Such qualities lend themselves to symbolic representation just because we reveal our moral disposition in the unpremeditated responses we make to events in our daily lives. This gives these qualities their narrative value in storytelling. By her actions we recognize charity in Marcel’s grandmother, and Legrandin’s snobbery is revealed through his social intercourse with friends and neighbors. By contrast, genius is a phenomenon which erupts in a sharply-focused insight which pierces conventions of thought and practice current at the time. Genius brings new forms and new ways of thinking into being that could not have appeared without the individual advancing the frontiers of her or his medium of expression sufficiently to encompass it. It is this revelatory enlargement of a medium’s expressive potential that draws attention to the individual responsible for it. Not only is a living individual the sole agent who can produce such work, genius is also, by this measure, intransmissible to a designee, that is, a fictional character. Thus genius has no narrative value in fiction other than as a descriptive moniker suggestive, perhaps, of an erratic brilliance, or the kind of creative madness Balzac’s Frenhofer displays in Chef d’œuvre inconnu. The above description also points to the fact that genius is a retrospective judgment. At the most elementary level this means work has to be produced before the individual who produced it can be identified and appreciated. This can take time. Often the accolade is the result of a slowly gathering appreciation of the fullness with which an artist has given extraordinary expression to the resolution of the problem motivating the work. Acceptance requires familiarity. This means time must elapse before the standards materialize by which the work will be judged. These often come into being in cooperation with the work itself. In the sciences, this generally depends on verification of a speculative thesis. A proof is required to confirm the work’s empirical validity. Based on these judgments and proofs, genius is conferred and confirmed by the few and accepted by the rest of us. Thus most of us accept Einstein or Stephen Hawking as geniuses without being able, personally, to understand the intricacies of their work or its value to a better understanding of the physical universe. The same might be said of James Joyce or Proust. By this same process of judgment and commentary, work which has been lost, or work superseded by further advances in thought, can still exert the power necessary to maintain an individual in the pantheon of genius through the continuing impact of those contemporary responses to the work available to us. Thus if Proust had been speaking of Sarah Bernhardt rather than of Berma, the consensual weight of fin-de-siècle opinion which still exists might support a claim to genius for Bernhardt whereas Marcel’s talk of the

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148 sublime qualities of Berma’s acting, being composite and wholly the product of Proust’s imagination, could not do the same for her. Even choosing a play from the canon of French dramatic art (Racine’s Phèdre) to provide a context for the interpretations of Phaedra Berma is credited with being so famous for could not help. Berma’s acting never existed. Thus, while we can talk of genius in reference to Proust (or Einstein, Bernhardt, Beethoven, or Dürer), it is inapplicable to Marcel, Bergotte, Berma, Elstir or Vinteuil, to none of whom, by the way, is the term genius applied as a tribute in the novel.22 Genius then, in relation to La Recherche, can only apply to Proust and he is our subject at the moment. Limiting the application of the term genius to a human being does not automatically exclude Marcel from our continuing consideration of genius in relation to Proust however. There are three reasons why Marcel is important to this discussion. Each reason is based on Marcel’s relationship to Proust. The first reason Marcel is important to our discussion is that Proust had Marcel raise issues which brought greatness of the sort encompassed by the term genius within range of Marcel’s self-reflection. By contrast, there is little mention in Proust’s letters of the subject just as there is no mention of a problem-of-self or of Proust’s doubt over the source of his creative voice. This lack of evidence makes it difficult to say definitively of La Recherche that it is an elucidation of Proust’s own struggles and an explication of a philosophical position he himself believed. Thus we have the lingering question of the validity of involuntary memory. This lack of documentation has nourished the question of Proust’s beliefs for many years. Nonetheless, taking into account the supporting evidence we have been laying down throughout this text for the near-universality of self-questioning in young people who are identifying a career for themselves to pursue—a phenomenon which spread with education and the wide-scale subscription to Romanticism’s emphasis on the self—we can deduce the likelihood of Proust’s self-questioning in adolescence.23 What is more, we can assume this self-questioning extended over the whole course of his life. We can assume this because La Recherche came at the end of his career rather than somewhere at the beginning or in the middle of it. He continued to work while dealing with a private sense of frustration throughout the years before he began the novel. Proust’s sense of failure is demonstrated by, among other things, his aborting after twenty-some hundreds of pages of writing the work we know as Jean Santeuil, a work in which thought which would only reach conceptual clarity in the great novel appears in rudimentary form. (While it is important to continually remind ourselves of the care one needs take when identifying points of congruence between Marcel Proust’s life and the experiences of Marcel, we are justified in this linkage of doubts Marcel

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149 expresses as he came to terms with the pressures and potentialities of a vocation in writing with those Proust himself may have experienced haphazardly as he grew and matured. We say ‘haphazardly’ because Proust’s experiences occurred in life; they would not have had the synchronicity or rhythmicity Proust, as a novelist, gave to his hero’s creative development.) Furthermore, Proust alludes to a sense of failure in Contre Sainte-Beuve. Setting aside the fact that Marcel wrote so little over the course of the novel, the familiarity with which Proust wrote of Marcel’s cogitations over talent, subject matter, and greatness, as well as the authenticity with which Proust reveals the psychic processes of self-exploration and self-knowing motivated by doubt suggests considerable familiarity with such feelings. Add to these feelings Marcel’s angst, which Proust described with knowledgeable sharpness, and the sum produces an effect far richer than a less psychologically open characterization of a developing artist could have done. The persuasive force of the novel as bildungsroman is anchored through the verisimilitude to lived experience Marcel’s alienation from the self represents. La Recherche possesses an undramatic almost dull naturalism Joyce also achieved in his treatment of self and work in the experiencing of Stephen Dedalus in both The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Such expositions of artists’ lives would have quickly bored Swann’s lover, Odette. She imagined the lives of artists always exquisitely pitched to feeling (though she would have been hard pressed to say what she meant by this). This is why Swann refrained from informing her about the way artists live when she expressed an interest in knowing more about them.24 Proust knew intimately the extent to which life impacts the production of art. The strain of being part of a community and the tension and limits, frustrations and joys associated with the needs and desires of one’s body and psyche are real. To this must be added the spur of possibly capturing the elusive in the odd juxtapositions of forms and thoughts that can develop while tinkering in the studio or making corrections on the page. These pressures and opportunities conspire to make of most artists’ lives remarkably work-a-day existences of daily crafting. The fullness of Marcel’s experience is one reason he is valuable to our consideration of Proust and genius. The second reason Marcel is important to this discussion is related to his response to sensory phenomena. The operative criterion here is authenticity. The déjà vu moments and involuntary memories Marcel experiences are knowingly written. This permits them to successfully stand up to the challenge of those who, like Landy, use the lack of documentation in Proust’s letters or in conversations recollected by his friends of Proust’s interest in experiences of involuntary memories to suggest Proust did not experience such events.25 It is worth remem-

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150 bering in this regard how chary Marcel was of bringing up similar experiences in conversation with Robert and his friends when he would meet them at dinner in Doncières, a point raised when we discussed these dinners in chapter 2. The Doncières passage in the novel is a credible rebuttal to the argument of no documentation with its implicit suggestion that Proust invented the involuntary memory in Contre Sainte-Beuve and embellished it later as the madeleine scene of the novel chiefly as a way to move his story forward. But, as discussed in chapter 4 and as we will see in Zaehner’s comments on this subject in the next chapter, Marcel’s description of the involuntary memory roused by the madeleine soaked in tea documents precisely and with analytical clarity details only someone who has experienced involuntary memory could relate.26 From Proust’s descriptions, little alternative exists but to attribute involuntary memories to Proust, whose experiences Marcel’s reflect and which Proust could not have invented from reading Théodore Ribot or anyone else’s accounts of involuntary memory.27 And this brings us to something else we touched on earlier: the insistence of the communicative potential Marcel struggled to unlock when arrested, intermittently, by various kinds of sensory disturbances. It is a significant part of the conundrum Marcel is caught up in that his problem-of-self was compounded and made more acute by his never being able to disentangle moments of rapture from desires for love, friendship and social success which these sensory experiences interrupted, upset, and undermined. They kept him in a state of psychic conflict at the same time he was trying to establish where the source of authenticity lay in his life-experiencing. Did it lay in the material world or in the intimation of something larger behind it? An irritant in the sense that his resonant experiences called attention to themselves, these experiences sporadically and without warning disrupted his otherwise carefully modulated, aestheticized way of life. They did so by breaking through the barrier of habit with the force of the raw sensations which drove them. Protecting himself against them would have forced Marcel to make the choice he perpetually forestalled making. Unlike a physical complaint, such as a sensibility to draughts one can mitigate by bundling oneself up, these psychic disturbances required some sort of suppression to free him from their immediate effects. This would have required stifling his tendency to respond when these eruptions occurred. Doing so at any point prior to his answering the question of authenticity which these experiences so pointedly raised would have left him no more sure of where value lay in his life (a problem-of-self) then the sexual problematic subconsciously affecting his relationship with women. One of the costs of repression is psychic imbalance. Thus ignoring this invitation offered by sensory resonance would have resulted

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151 in the desensitizing of the only means a human being has to establish rapport with all that lies beyond the apprehension of appearances. Marcel knew this at some level below knowing. In freeing him briefly from the grind of duties and obligations making up the banal existence of a man-about-town, he experienced a joy which drew him toward something unknown, a joy his desire for amatory diversions and social amusements of one kind or another could not give him even as he continued to wonder if somehow they might. In other words, Marcel lived his life in a nearly ceaseless repetition of the moment in Mme de Villeparisis’ carriage where he was caught between responding to the trees calling to him or rejoining the conversation with his grandmother and her friend. Finding oneself having to choose between pursuing some form of spiritual enrichment or acquiescing to one’s social obligations is not so uncommon for any of us. Granting this, we can tell ourselves, citing for proof the way this scene outside Hudimesnil is written, that there must have been moments of this kind of joy (and tension) for Proust then, too, for him to have been able to write about both with such finesse. Supposing this the case, it is only through Marcel that Proust betrays a public reticence toward discussing experiences of resonance, déjà vu, involuntary memory, and questions of grounding for the self he may have had. Furthermore we can say of Proust’s and Marcel’s respective metacognitive experiences that, to whatever degree they overlapped or were different, they contributed to the sense of difference both men lived with, a difference Proust’s biographers do not deny in either of them. (The problem of difference will be dealt with in the epilogue to this text where we will address this issue of the difficulty some people live with in the very condition of being a human being.) Being different was something they endured but also indulged. Marcel, for instance, was more moved by the emanations from things and by the abstract images he held of people then he was, often, by the people and things themselves. He allowed his projections of dramatic social or romantic success for himself, or reversal for others, to flourish to an almost pathological extent. Wishful thinking is common to us all to varying degrees, but in Marcel’s case, he exaggerated his projections to the point where they pushed his face-to-face encounters with people into the shadows. Compounding the emotional ambiguity such mental activity created, as often as not, too, Marcel’s attention would focus on the sense impression he registered rather than on the physical presence of the person or thing before him. In doing so he realized his impression was dependent on the material existence of bodies as the source of stimulation responsible for it. From understanding this, it was a very small leap for him to draw from such thoughts an analogy to his own life in his body exaggerating into

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152 stark polarity this fundamental duality of substance and essence characterizing matter at the heart of the body/spirit duality characterizing humanity.28 This in turn enabled Marcel to formulate the concept of homeland from hearing Vinteuil’s Septet later on. Thus Marcel’s sensitivity to these emanations, drawing his attention to the role his sense organs played as conductors of the sensations generated in the world around him to his consciousness of them offered him an unlooked-for compensatory reward, especially by doing so in a field of interest (sensuous experiencing) he could not help focusing on and contemplating. For Proust too, this field of contemplation was the one which ultimately opened the way to his great work after years of addressing these themes and issues inconclusively. The third reason for Marcel’s value in a discussion of genius is that both Marcel Proust and Marcel faced uncertainties over their artistic identities. The thought of being a writer remained so important to each of their free-standing senses of who they were that neither of them would, nor could, let go of it for fear of dropping into the void of being defined by nothing at all if they should. This was regardless of the hardship maintaining these identities subjected them to. Not until Marcel finds—with something like relieved surprise as we know— his homeland: Time, was he able to free himself of the doubt which shrouded his desire to be a writer. At this point in this text, readers should be able to appreciate that before Marcel was freed to write Proust himself had been freed to engage his necessity and express a finality through art. But before these events occurred, Marcel, to deal with him first, had to gain insight into the nature of the resonances which started, sympathetically, within him whenever he was touched by certain external stimuli. He documented these as early in his youth as his encounter, in nature, with the hawthorns at Tansonville and, in art, with his first readings of Bergotte.29 Not everyone capable of pursuing such an understanding of self and seeking such an elucidation of the meaning of sensation would have bothered to do so. But, as we have pointed out, dispositionally Marcel had no choice. Whatever it was that was attracting and exciting his necessity, Marcel, as a middle-aged man, was still unable to let go and move beyond disturbances by which he was occasionally called up short. That is, he could not do so until he suddenly renounces writing and gives himself up to life in society near the end of the novel. It was as if the intentionality of certain objects, images, and events being broadcast indiscriminately and insensibly into space would not let him alone. As a communicative effect, intentionality is a call. Sympathetic congruencies are roused in those beings and things receptive to it. This being true, Marcel was responsive to intentionality, as each of us is. Those emanations to which

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153 he was attracted left him uncomprehending at first, but the more he explored them the more he was able to sensitize his inquiring mind to the communication conveyed through them. The result of which was his discovery of the essential pathway of communication in art. As for the creator of this character, Marcel Proust was, at the point in his life when he began working on what became La Recherche, also entering middle-age. He never made a list of the metacognitive events which may have intensified his disquietude over his inability to grasp whatever it was that was so elusively present in his thought, but at least a few of these experiences are documented for him as an adult. One incident was noted by his friend and lover, the composer Reynaldo Hahn. Hahn noted Proust being arrested by Bengal roses he encountered during a walk in the gardens of Réveillon, the country house of Mme Madeleine Lemaire, in August, 1894.30 It was an experience similar to the one Marcel had encountering pear blossoms on the day he went with Saint-Loup to fetch Robert’s mistress, Rachel, before going on to pay a call on Mme de Villeparisis for the first time.31 The other experience was the tea and toast.32 Proust’s life, then, was punctuated, at least occasionally, by resonance and some form of metacognitive experience. Proust shared this with Marcel also: that his was an exceptionally long and superficially static development if only because, in addition to his sense of being set apart for a larger task he also possessed an observational and analytical interest in the essences expressed in social and sensuous phenomena alike.33 As we noted earlier, Proust must have been frustrated, by 1909, with the middling body of writing he had produced (Les Plaisirs et les jours; the inconclusive Jean Santeuil) and was currently involved with or could return to (his journalism; the Ruskin translations). As far as journalism was concerned, he could have made a career of it, continuing to write with the fin-de-siècle preciosity seen in the poetry of his friend Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, or in the prose of the Daudets. By following this course, by accepting what was at hand he would have ceased trying to extend the reach of his language further than what was allowed by the contemporary thought patterns with which he was conversant. Through backsliding into complacency, he would have eventually defaulted his necessity which would have then been rendered mute because the only channel to expression opened to it would have been sealed shut. It is only through enlarging a medium’s ability to envelop and contain the essential impressions of one’s own individual experience that an artist can claim legitimacy for his or her work. Artists do so, as we have noted in this chapter, through pushing their media beyond the limits of current usage. For Proust, to have avoided the challenge implicit in his ambiguous sense of himself as an artist, by depriving

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154 his ability to fuse thought and experience into a base for exploration beyond the limits of conventional practice would have come at the cost, too—which he, at some level, must have realized—of his ignoring and then ultimately being unable to be arrested by the temporal disequilibria provoked by his attention to his surroundings. Until he began La Recherche, these temporal disequilibria had contributed to the frustrating breakdowns and abandonments in his longer works (Jean Santeuil; his eventual restiveness with continuing his Ruskin translations which by the time he set them aside had become “tedious in many ways”34). Yet the very fact of his working on these projects had sharpened his response to sensuous experiencing. Because the impulses which rose within him were still constrained by the flaccidity of an imitative prose style attempting to support contents insufficiently conceived to assert anything like an authoritative originality in thought, none of his fictional work had yet reached any great depth of insight or feeling. For the great dynamism let loose through his necessity required an as yet unknown form to hold the product of such disequilibria in the necessarily fluid suspension of great art. This frustration would have been exacerbated for Proust in his extended crises of letting go of these projects had he understood that were he someday to find his “voice,” art would provide the distinguishing characteristics necessary for him to create the work he sensed within him. Yet right up until the moment of his creative enlightenment he had no certainty he would find his voice. But then, in the twinkling of an eye so to speak, the fusion of his formerly self-conscious adaptations of the styles of those writers he most admired with the generative impulses of his being transformed Proust’s thought into language of which he was, for the moment, the original and only speaker, through which his necessity was to be realized in art. Proust laid out with great precision the stages in Marcel’s advancement toward realizing himself a writer whereas he never mentioned his own with similar clarity. Readers know much more about the creative development of Marcel than we will ever know about the critical turning points in Proust’s own process of creative development. This is a fourth reason Marcel is useful to this discussion. He is the measure against which stand impressions we have formed of Proust’s inner, creative life. Everything Proust gave Marcel to tell us about himself is all we will ever know of Marcel’s development as an artist. It is as sketchy in its way as any chronicle of a person’s development. At the same time, as an invention of Proust’s imagination, Marcel has always been in the unique and privileged position of having been exposed by this connection to all the experiences Proust himself was shaped by, that were part of Proust’s own broad absorption of life. Marcel embodies a selected remembrance of Proust’s growth

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155 refined and tailored still further until Marcel’s tale becomes the tale of an artist’s development. In this representation, we see Marcel succeed at last to a state of enlightenment. It is as close as anyone could come to the revelation of genius in a fictional character who has no work to show us—a state, the state of genius, which Proust himself succeeded to just prior to beginning La Recherche. Marcel achieves this synthesis at the moment he comes to hear the sound of the garden bell at Combray. C’est qu’à ce moment même, dans l’hôtel du prince de Guermantes, ce bruit des pas de mes parents reconduisant M. Swann, ce tintement rebondissant, ferrugineux, intarissable, criard et frais de la petite sonnette qui m’annonçait qu’enfin M. Swann était parti et que maman allait monter, je les entendis encore, je les entendis eux-même, eux situés pourtant si loin dans la passé. G (TR), p. 2400 And at this very moment, in the house of the Prince de Guermantes, as though to strengthen me in my resolve, the noise of my parents’ footsteps as they accompanied M. Swann to the door and the peal—resilient, ferruginous, interminable, fresh and shrill—of the bell on the garden gate which informed me that at last he had gone and that Mamma would presently come upstairs, these sounds rang again in my ears, yes, unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past. SLT (VI), p. 529

This moment provides an intimation of the work Marcel is now capable of producing. It also offers a glimpse of the story that will be conveyed through it. For this is the moment when from the deep core of the self, his voice surged upward to liberate and energize his creative necessity. As in a play, where it is only by the removal of the wall which the proscenium outlines in a theatre that viewers see the action on the stage, Proust’s novel allows readers to see what no one in the novel is aware of: the transformation Marcel undergoes while alone in the prince’s library. No one ever saw Proust experience a similar moment, either. But Proust reached the state of genius through inspiration just as surely as Marcel experienced inspiration; it generated his book. We will look at this moment for Proust in the next chapter. The Efficacy of Language In Le Côté de Guermantes Marcel speaks of his difficulty with a certain new author whose work he found hard to read at first.35 This author’s language seemed to make no sense to Marcel and yet it conveyed, even through its obscurity, something that made Marcel (and presumably others) continue reading. This had been the case for the first readers of Bergotte many years before. Intrigued, Marcel

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156 tells us that gradually, by continuing to read and by going over a second time the passages which were most difficult, he reached a point where he found himself deriving pleasure from this new work and appreciating certain rhythms and meanings in this author’s no longer abstruse style. Marcel is describing the acclimation we go through when confronted with anything new which seems to possess merit. Marcel goes on to prophecy that this artist’s work would soon acquire a following. As his reputation progressed and his work began having some influence on his fellow artists, some writers might start incorporating certain of his patterns into their own work. This new writer would likely find himself then, over the course of many years, being hailed a master just as Bergotte found himself to be at the end of his life. This trajectory Marcel charts accords with the first two of the three stages in the development of the artist art historian Erwin Panofsky details in The Life and Work of Albrecht Dürer, a work originally published in 1943, that is just before the beginning of the later twentieth century assault on the relationship of the author/artist to his or her work. However great an artist may be, he will normally begin by absorbing the tradition prevailing at the time of his youth, and by taking a definite attitude toward it. During his second phase, formerly often called his ‘best period,’ he will develop a style entirely his own and, if he is strong enough, create a tradition himself. In the last phase, finally, he may either continue with the style of his maturity in a more or less mechanical way and thereby cease to be productive, or else—and this applies to the greatest only—he will outgrow the tradition established by himself. In both cases this ‘late period’ will mean a certain isolation, and it depends on the artist’s stature whether this isolation is a ‘splendid’ or a pathetic one. Minor personalities will end as the mannerists of their own ‘classic’ style and will be left behind by younger artists—great masters will do the opposite; while followers and imitators will continue to work, with suitable concessions to a changing taste, along the lines laid down by the great master in his middle period, the great master himself will venture into entirely new regions inaccessible to any of his contemporaries. He, too, will therefore cease to have an immediate following and often forfeit his former popularity, not because he is ‘outmoded’ but because he has overstepped the limits of contemporary understanding. The latest works of Rembrandt, Titian, Michelangelo and Beethoven are cases in point.” Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1955), p. 13

Panofsky goes on to state that Dürer was an exception to this progressive development of the great artist. For Dürer, rather than pushing beyond contemporary understanding and use of the various media he employed in his work to explore the uncharted terrain of invention, continued, even through his latest periods, to move back and forth over the ideas and attitudes of his entire

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157 career, always synthesizing from the entire range of his experience a profound and timeless art. As Dürer’s example demonstrates, there is no formula or pattern for greatness, there is only greatness. This being so, how do Panofsky’s three stages relate to the career of the man before our consideration, and to his character who lives in the pages of his book and in our imagination? Marcel Proust never established himself in anything like Panofsky’s second stage to mastery to begin with. Instead, he went from the first to the third through inspiration. Marcel, on the other hand, had an even more meteoric ascendance. For dramatic effect, he went from being a virtual neophyte to mastery in one step through transformational experience. For Marcel Proust, thought and work were parallel tracks of an artistic development that moved through words into written language. To a greater degree than any other medium, writing heightens the ambiguities inherent in art’s fundamental abstraction. It is directly linked to cognition. The images it calls up occur in the mind where it simulates the external reality of sensation and reaction. Color, line, form and sound on the other hand are first perceived and responded to on the physical level of sensation by our sense organs and nervous system prior to intellection. Through language Proust could approach life without actually touching it and create art without recourse to physical mimeses. Through writing he could do so without having to involve himself, and possibly be distracted by, the sensuous qualities of paint, sound, stone, or clay. In his short fiction and commentary Proust achieved a position, and relatively quickly, consistent with Panofsky’s first stage of an artist’s development, in which he achieved a proficiency in writing that by 1900 earned him a place among the constantly increasing numbers of men and women working in this craft of writing. But Proust could not move beyond this stage of development, and his early work is known today only because he went on to write A la recherche du temps perdu during the last fourteen years of his life. Had Proust not realized this great work, his œuvre would have slipped into obscurity and then into oblivion. In contrast to the work and lives of the greatest artists, as Marcel describes them in commenting on the death of Bergotte, whose names and works continue to be known throughout the centuries, the names of such writers as Proust prior to the emergence of La Recherche, live on, once the man or woman has died, as most names do, that is not through the work they have done while alive but as representing personalities in the memories of the relatively few people who remember them.36 In this life after death, a person’s aura quickly fades until, with the death of the last of the people who knew them, they enter oblivion too, but at a point long after their work has done so, thus the still-born air such work exhales

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158 if one should encounter it years later. Until 1909, Proust was stuck. And it was not until 1913, with the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, that he began to extricate himself publicly and in print from the finite limits and reputation of a middling talent. Prior to the commencement of the novel his prose had not been able to concretize and express what it was he was trying to say through the language he had use of. It was always lagging behind or over-reaching his understanding which was being stimulated by a kind of intuitive, forward-reaching metaphysics sustained in him by his continuing engagement of life. Up until the spring of 1909 the originating impulses rising out of his experience of life were being restrained by the language he and his fellow Frenchmen made use of to explain to themselves and each other the experiences of their shared daily lives. It was a language he could not get beyond because what was beyond for Proust was not sufficiently there yet for him to seize; it still existed in the unknown. Thus his response to his experiencing remained unarticulable. Unable to give any kind of name to the formlessness occupying him, Proust’s artistic dilemma remained centered on his inability to find an equivalency in the vocabulary of early twentieth century France for these increasingly restive images that were agitating him. The fact was, in order to realize this necessity through words, Proust needed to create the language able to express it. In this sense, his dilemma remained one of talent. For at the same time he was able to achieve facility as a writer in a series of stories he placed in reviews and articles printed in newspapers, he was being challenged continuously (subliminally at least) by the larger demands of his artistic necessity which left him, creatively, seeking an epiphanic satisfaction he seemed to have felt moving within him without being able to aid it manifesting itself on the page. But through writing, and through the intermediate stages of his thinking and the writing accompanying these thoughts, his writing was gradually acquiring terms necessary to contain the definition-less impressions which had accumulated and were still accumulating within him. These gradually sharpening thought-images were, consequently, being brought closer to verbal containment. In the process of being brought into visual resolution, these vague sensory/metaphysical impressions were slowly becoming recognized by him as constituting the materials of selfhood. Once these impressions were envisioned Proust was able to break them down and attach names to them, making them material. For human beings, visualization has always been a way to belief. Now, suddenly, Proust could articulate the stages of a process through which his hero could move. Marcel’s experience would demonstrate what no one had ever seen before in quite this way: sensory experience when roused into consciousness constitutes a psychologically acceptable concept of duration for the self. This

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159 realization enabled Marcel to find in the self the source of authority to be and to do. For Marcel, this translated into his discovering that the source of literature had been for him like the fabled source of the river Vivonne. He says of these sources that they had had for so long so indefinite a place in his consciousness of himself and his surroundings that at first he found it as hard to accept his art might originate in himself as he found it difficult to believe this river originated very near to where he was when he stood beside it in and around Combray.37 Contrary to what he had believed when he rummaged through the great public store of ideas for subject matter as a young man, his work would become, like the last work of Vinteuil, a medium for conveying an expression of being and it would be so through his drawing out of himself a form/finality to bear the essence that was its extension in him: altogether, a natural product of genius. From the moment this occurred, Proust entered in communion with his homeland. Through the self Marcel found the means of establishing psychological duration in a manner which allowed for the integrity of an individual to be maintained as she or he moved freely through the constantly changing environment of modernity. Recognizable after the fact, this panacea Proust offers his readers had been, prior to his elucidation of it, an example of a view of the world more or less “inaccessible to his contemporaries” which Panofsky writes of as a great artist’s legacy to his age. Through work and thought Proust gained an understanding of the relationship of identity to self and being. It enabled him to move in art from a state of temporality to timelessness in which he was able to access unaided and at all times the impulse of a finality generated out of Time that was to become, in his art, the object of a necessity which had given him no peace: A la recherche du temps perdu, a story of a boy, as Howard Moss long ago noted, who grows up to be a writer.38 Admittedly, these are all grandiloquent terms for framing a preposterously lofty concept for Proust’s hero to start writing a book from and yet, quite simply, this is a truth manifest through art as Marcel Proust has given it to us.

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Chapter 7 Proust and the Fourth Dimension Perseverance and the Tension Inhering in a Quest Perseverance is a moral quality of character. Arthur I. Miller mentions it in writing of the experiences of Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso saying that “under the most severe conditions perseverance is a hallmark of genius.1 Under the guise of Fortitude perseverance is one of the Virtues Giotto depicted in the Arena Chapel. Like all moral qualities, perseverance is identified by those who see us in action. One must know a person or have knowledge of how an individual deals or has dealt with what has confronted her or him in life to recognize perseverance and make a judgment of character. This is, in fact, how Giotto presents these qualities at Padua. His Virtues and Vices in grisaille appear to us as people we might know. Not only do we see each of them as they are depicted in the frescoes, we also see many of them surrounded with details that reveal the larger results of the kind of habitual behavior for which they are emblematic. Thus in giving us an idea of their past we ourselves are able to corroborate the truth in Giotto’s assertions of virtue or vice in their characters. By the same token, in attributing a moral quality to someone the designee can become a personification of it. One only has to think of Charles Dickens’ Scrooge (avarice), or of Florence Nightingale (mercy), or of Abraham Lincoln (honesty) to see this point. When perseverance is attributed to someone engaged in a metaphysical quest, where a “B” state of knowing, as described in chapter 2, is the goal, there is in the ascription a recognition that one’s need to find an explanation for the appearance of a particular phenomenon or sequence of events, feelings, or sensations is at the root of one’s drive to elucidate a truth of experience. Perseverance in such cases is not an unswerving, Sisyphean soldiering on against bodily exhaustion and/or physical hardship, though this can be part of it. More precisely, the ascription acknowledges this drive to elucidate truth as an interior urgency motivating the individual to reveal it. It is this charge—borne in the self of an individual—that enables one to push on undeterred by the indifference and/or skepticism one’s project may meet from others. It strengthens the individual against neglect and the demands of the community of which one is a part. And it draws one forward along the path of discovery to this truth even if enlightenment is never reached. As to the origin of this charge, it is the same as that which gives rise to the art-impulse in the artist. Beyond one’s introduction to that which rouses interest, one’s motivation in struggling to gain the new is not generally focused on the hoped-for product of one’s metaphysical quest, for this cannot be known until the goal is reached. The attractive agent

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162 is something amorphous, elusive, and only partially or occasionally visible. It is a truth clouded by the state of confusion roused in the individual drawn to it by the phenomenon or sequence of events, feelings, or sensations. This could be, as it was for Marcel, a desire to understand why certain experiences affected him the way they did and why he felt so little connected to his past. Or it could be, as it may have been for Proust, the effort to explain for himself, through storytelling, something about the world he lived in. Or it could be, as it often is for scientists and philosophers, the disbelief that rouses them to question the validity of the conventional wisdom of their day. To see such truths clearly they must be grasped conceptually. Once in hand they can be communicated to others. Perseverance is often required to accomplish this. By all the criteria mentioned above, the term perseverance applies to Proust. From his first blush of enthusiasm for becoming a writer Proust worked at writing: in his days at the Lycée Condorcet where, in schoolboy fashion, he was active in a succession of little magazines that flourished and faded one after another; through the once considered empty years before he was able to begin La Recherche; and then all the way through the writing and promotion of this masterwork, Proust persevered. Retrospectively, his perseverance becomes more evident as he came closer to understanding the particular set of problems associated with the puzzle that had long been the focus of his interest. This is to say, had he not been persevering in his efforts to elucidate the metaphysical issues challenging him prior to 1908 he could have pushed them aside and forgotten them without affecting his writing at the time. A desire to be famous can frequently spur someone to excel in whatever it is she or he is trying to do. The intensity with which such individuals pursue accomplishment—in order, initially, to achieve fame—often leads to the kind of total commitment William James spoke of in The Varieties of Religious Experience. One result is that the rewards of mastery some individuals realize sometimes come to overshadow the rewards that accompany fame when it comes, if it comes at all. We can imagine fame being a sort of goal for Proust as a young man. The desire for fame is part of the mythology of commitment that attracts youth without their necessarily knowing anything at all about what fame means beyond photo ops and name recognition. We can also assume that like most young people Proust did not start out with a problem at hand and begin attacking it straight away the way Marcel thought he could do when he sought some topic of philosophical importance to write about. Proust was only gradually drawn to the issue that would be the focus of his later creative life: discovering a ground for psychological duration in the intersection of time, memory, experiencing, and the self that would serve as

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163 an internal referent for the individual in modernity. This issue and those related to it arose as Proust continued to write. During much of his early career then, issues connected with writing occupied Proust more than pursuing an interest in a particular set of problems related to psychological stability. Thus Proust’s experience stands in stark contrast to that of his character. As a youth and well into adulthood Proust was very probably unaware that within his interest in writing there was a set of metaphysical concerns he was drawing closer to through writing. He certainly would not have been aware that the difficulty of a young man becoming an artist could be addressed as a lack of understanding of the self as guarantor of psychological duration, even as time and memory were sources of fascination for Proust. Ultimately it was Proust’s recognizing this difficulty as his subject that freed him from the limitations he seemed to have been bound by in his writing prior to 1909. Thus we can say that Proust wrote himself closer to an understanding of the self through the process we described in the last chapter. By contrast, Einstein, to reference one of Miller’s examples, apprehended a fallacy in contemporary explanations for the workings of the physical universe and set out to refute them through presenting alternatives of his own on such problems as the movement of light and nature of the medium through which it moved, questions which were being asked by physicists at the turn of the twentieth century. In the strongest individuals—and here we have to admit Proust for all his frailties among the very strong—their involvement with their work means they cannot so simply quit it. In this sense, the term tenacity actually captures the psychology of the individual better than does the word perseverance. Tenacity hints at the trace of quixotic mania that can run through the elements driving one forward while perseverance is more suggestive of a steady determination not to be put off by the hardships put in one’s way. In either case, after a certain stage of one’s endeavor is reached, set-backs, exhaustion, neglect, and/or ridicule, having lost their ability to affect one’s efforts, cease to matter. The individual continues to the end, often in defiance of common sense. In the case of artists, an individual’s creative necessity pushes him or her across one threshold after another into further states of diminishing restraint on the will. Having gone too far along the road to resolution and fulfillment, one can no longer stop. The thing itself must be achieved—as it was for Einstein, Picasso and Proust—or he or she is crushed by its unattainability. This is the case for Balzac’s Frenhofer and for all the unknown individuals whose efforts fall short of a revelation of truth. This aspect of the creative process is especially relevant in a discussion of Proust because he both demonstrated this drive in the characterization of his

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164 hero’s intent to express himself, and he lived it. As Proust moved through his various projects over the years at some point the impasse preventing him from realizing through the material he chose to work with more than the topical dexterity he displayed with it became a source of frustration for him. As noted in the last chapter, evidence of this surfaces in the argument on the nature of creative expression Proust constructs in Contre Sainte-Beuve. His argument identified the interdependence of a gift for discerning and identifying relationships in one’s experience and a talent for demonstrating these relationships through one’s medium of expression to achieve success in literature (in his case). This analysis can be read as drawing so heavily on Proust’s own experience as a writer that the passage’s applicability to him is hard to deny. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, it is worth noting, the fictive “I” and the autobiographical “I” exist side by side. Throughout the present text we have represented Marcel’s problem-of-self as a stumbling block preventing him from realizing himself a writer. Proust’s biographers, particularly George Painter, comment on the extent to which, up until Proust began La Recherche, Proust too, could not go beyond the surface of things as he seemed to wish to do. Painter draws special attention to the similarity between author and character in this regard, noting that up to the very end of the novel Marcel exists in the netherworld of a writer manqué.2 It is only by drawing past experience into the present that we are able to represent the world to ourselves and others as somehow governed by logic. Logic supports the beliefs by which we live our lives and envision the future. In his writing up until the spring of 1909 Proust was not able to see clearly an underlying logic into which the disparate elements of his experience could be integrated, one solid enough to construct a life-view through fiction that, set within the everchanging environment of modernity, could withstand the challenges to that lifeview posed by his characters’ experience of the world. As we have tried to show throughout this text, during the years around the turn to the twentieth century many people not just Einstein, Picasso, and Proust were attempting to fathom the ramifications for themselves—and for society—of the disintegrative force of modernity. They were seeking what had been lost, a stable core of belief through which to penetrate the confusion and change be-fogging their vision of the world. In the particular case of Proust, he would have to identify a foundation in the self to succeed in establishing a sense of psychological duration. Until he could do so, his writing was largely bereft of the single-mindedness which infuses La Recherche with a liveliness that comes from an author’s having “broken through the surface and made his way into the underlying truth of life…”3 It was only after Proust promulgated the dimension of Time, whose inspiration

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165 he found in the metaphoric potential of the fourth dimension, that he was able to introduce into narrative devices he had been working with for some twenty years the essence of life and experience that gave to episodes he transferred to La Recherche from elsewhere not only the continuity the dimension of Time brought to the lives of the heterogeneous community of characters populating the novel but also the painful reality that each of us is isolated in his or her own individuality and experience. Proust was able to accomplish this in language that had become, in the process, concise in its way and honed to a precision that enabled it to both enfold our human longing for soul-felt union with another and pierce the stifling veil of words that interpose themselves between each and every one of us. This longing is most evident in our drive for intimacy with another. The longings men in the novel feel for the ones they love—Swann’s for Odette; Robert’s for Rachel, Marcel’s for Albertine, and Charlus’ for Charles Morel—eloquently evoke this longing. It was through his newly gained ability to infuse his language with authority that Proust was able to draw attention to the no-longer time of our past showing how, in each ontic moment, the no-longer time of our past effects private and public aspects of our conceptualization of who we are. A Gift and Talent The final chapter of Contre Sainte-Beuve is in large part an assessment of writing and Proust’s own competence as a writer. Painter asserts this material was written in the period from late December 1908 to early January, 1909.4 In it Proust alludes to an inner space wherein the man of genius finds the source of his art, the seat of his gift. Proust refers to it as the sphere of another self different from the everyday self a person of talent lives in most of the time as clumsily and complicatedly as everyone else does, genius or not. Proust goes on to say that when a man of genius (he chose the writers Alfred de Musset, Pierre Loti, and Henri de Régnier as examples) must supply a hack article to some magazine or write something quickly, without “n’ayant pas le temps de forer son moi banal pour en faire sortir l’autre qui viendrait se superposer, now voyons que sa pensée et son langage sont pleins […]” CSB, p. 362 “having had time to break the surface of his everyday self and release that other self which would emerge from it, we see that his thinking and his style are full […]” CSB II, p. 268—brackets appear here in Proust’s text, indicating an incomplete thought.5 In other words, the artist must tap this source within him or herself before being able to transcend the commonplace. For all the writing Proust had produced up to this point, this passage suggests Proust felt, to his dismay, that he had never

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166 broken the surface of his everyday existence and released that other self living within him through whom, he was convinced, great work could be realized. The passage can be read as his wondering on the page if he ever would. This was the state of Proust’ thought in the fall of 1908 when, with a new set of notebooks, he began once again an effort to reach a higher form in his writing. Leading up to this new beginning there was, as there had always had been for Proust, talk and reading and reflection on current events; the supplementing of his odd diet and the fumigations he subjected himself to with the tonic of new music, dance, and art, and the almost intoxicating sense of possibility injected into society by the automobile, the airplane, electricity, the cinema, and the telephone. To all this there was also, beyond fiction, criticism and poetry, the published work of such men as Henri Poincaré and Proust’s own cousin by marriage, Bergson, to sharpen his intellectual questing. Living in Paris as he was, at the center of the world of ideas and high creative energy (as New York became after World War II), it was through this Parisian environment of superabundant creative force that the irrepressible originary impulses arising within him propelled Proust closer to the ground out of which his fiction would achieve, through the ‘Open Sesame’ of the dimension of Time, the indivisible union of form and content we identify with the power of greatness in art. From the fall of 1908 onward Proust began his struggle to realize and channel the force of his creative necessity onto the page once again. Working in the disjointed fashion Anthony Pugh so carefully documents, Proust began writing. He had been thinking about an essay in the manner of French historian and critic Hippolyte Taine (1828-93) and fashioning a narrative out of contrasting views of the reception of the artwork, as well as sensory revelries associated with sleep, bedrooms, and morning.6 He was not getting very far, at least on the surface of it. For he had not yet found the means to reach beyond his everyday life and release the “other self ” out of which great art comes. Proust’s effort to go beyond the limits of what he had accomplished thus far in this new project can be ascertained through the argument for achievement in writing he constructed in the winter of 1908-09. It expresses the state of creative despair he felt at the time he was writing it.7 Looking at the material Painter attributed to the winter of 1908-09 but which forms the last chapter of Contre Sainte-Beuve, and excising and juxtaposing two quite specific statements pertaining to the creative process, we can deduce what Proust deduced for himself: the difficulty of his position. From these statements we can, as a first step, derive a set of terms: art; necessity; talent, et cetera, that can be quantified as factors in an equation for art-making as Proust laid it out before he found his necessity’s ideal

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167 form of expression. By contrasting this formula with a second modified from it that includes the factor of inspiration as catalyst (given at the end of this section) it will be possible to see how important to the inception of the novel it was for him to link the concept of a fourth dimension to the totality of one’s experiencing. But before we proceed it is important to establish the obvious: Proust’s evaluation of his position as an artist in this material was accurate at the time he wrote it. Through a quite clearly delineated syllogism he concluded in almost the last moments before his breakthrough that great art was beyond his reach. The fact that he omitted inspiration from his analysis tells us clearly that prior to his epiphanic experiences in the winter and spring of 1909 profound inspiration had not figured in his work. Once it did of course it changed everything to the extent that it became immaterial, after the fact, to go back and reformulate an assumption he had drawn in Contre Sainte-Beuve. For inspiration made clear the distinction between his previous position and the new one: that (after so long) he was home and complete in himself. Is it too reductive to approach the origins of A la recherche du temps perdu as if the book was the logical consequence of specific, formalized elements falling into place within the author’s mind at a given time; that it is a simple sum of discrete and quantifiable motivations and predilections working upon, and in, the author’s imagination? It seems ludicrous to propose such a thing and yet La Recherche, reduced to the essentials in this analysis, bears this out. The equations we are about to write reflect the sudden shift in Proust’s creative intensity in the spring and early summer of 1909. They also express the progression Proust would lay out for Marcel at the very end of La Recherche, before his hero finds his “Open Sesame” through taking François le Champi from its shelf in the Prince de Guermantes’ library. If we accept that the origin of this work can be viewed this way, we can begin setting up the equation to express it. To begin with, we need to accept Proust’s great novel as his necessity’s ultimate realization in art. Having done so, we can designate it (his art) by the letter “A” in what follows. It will be the product of our equation. Next, it is necessary to take a step back to the last chapter of Contre Sainte-Beuve to locate the factors identified by Proust as necessary for (his) artistic production. Proust defined two of them and aligns them so that they settle into the equation that is the expression of Proust’s thoughts on his own artistic operation.8 This was shortly before he experienced the involuntary memory induced by tea and toast in January, 1909.9 We can reckon the opening of his necessity to the homeland within him from this date even if he could not appreciate its significance at the time. It was from this point that he could finally hear its song and would soon be able to

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168 transcribe it. Up until this point this homeland had existed within him his whole life without his ever having been able to recognize and give expression to it. In Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust established the logic of his despondency through plotting the void of his future as a writer due to his continuing inability to realize his gift as he identified it here: Dès que je lisais un auteur, je distinguais bien vite sous les paroles l’air de la chanson, qui en chaque auteur est différent de ce qu’il est chez tous les autres, et tout en lisant, sans m’en rendre compte, je le chantonnais, je pressais les notes ou les ralentissais ou les interrompais, pour marquer la mesure des notes et leur retour, comme on fait quand on chante, et on attend souvent longtemps, selon le mesure de l’air, avant de dire la fin d’un mot. Je savais bien que si, n’ayant jamais pu travailler, je ne savais écrire, j’avais cette oreille-là plus fine et plus juste que bien d’autres, ce qui m’a permis de faire des pastiches, car chez un écrivain, quand on tient l’air, les paroles viennent bien vite. Mais ce don, je ne l’ai pas employé, et de temps en temps, à des périodes différentes de ma vie, celui-là, comme celui aussi de découvrir un lien profond entre deux idées , deux sensations, je le sens toujours vif en moi, mais pas fortifié, et qui sera bientôt affaibli et mort. (CSB, pp. 358-59) When I began to read an author I very soon caught the tune of the song beneath the words, which in each author is distinct from that of every other; and while I was reading, and without knowing what I was doing, I hummed it over, hurrying the words, or slowing them down, or suspending them, in order to keep time with the rhythm of the notes, as one does in singing, where in compliance with the shape of the tune one often delays for a long time before coming to the last syllable of a word. I knew quite well that, if never having been able to work I was no good as a writer, my ear for this sort of thing was sharper and truer than is common, which was what had enabled me to produce literary imitations; since when one picks up the tune the words soon follow. But I have not put this gift to use; and at different periods of my life I feel it, as likewise that other gift for discovering a profound affinity between two ideas or two feelings, still intermittently alive in me—but it is vacillating, and will soon dwindle and die out. (CSB II, p. 265)

In this passage Proust establishes for himself that he is gifted, uselessly gifted as this passage suggests. Regardless of his inability to make use of it, Proust identifies giftedness as the first factor in the production of art. For our purposes we can label this quality of giftedness by which one is be blessed as “G.” The second factor necessary for the production of art, according to Proust, is talent (“T”).

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169

Les belles choses que nous écrirons si nous avons du talent sont en nous, indistinctes, comme le souvenir d’un air, qui nous charme sans que nous puissions en retrouver le contour, le fredonner, ni même en donner un dessin quantitatif, dire s’il y a des pauses, des suites de notes rapides. Le talent est comme une sorte de mémoire qui leur permettra de finir par rapproacher d’eux cette musique confuse, de l’entendre clairement, de la noter, de la reproduire, de la chanter. (CSB, p. 372) The fine things we shall write if we have talent enough, are within us, dimly, like the remembrance of a tune which charms us though we cannot recall its outline, or hum it, nor even sketch its material form, say if there are pauses in it, or runs of rapid notes. Talent is like a kind of memory, which in the end enables them [gifted individuals] to call back this confused music, to hear it distinctly, to write it down, to reproduce it, to sing it. (CSB II, p. 276)

Proust has identified in these passages two factors necessary for art-making. He has only to put them together to come to a general conclusion on his own condition. And he does put them together in the sentences that link the two statements just cited: Ceux qui sont hantés de ce souvenir confus des vérités qu’ils n’ont jamais connues sont les hommes qui sont doués. Mais s’ils se contentent de dire qu’ils entendent un air délicieux, ils n’indiquent rien aux autres, ils n’ont pas de talent. (CSB, p. 372) Those who are haunted by this confused remembrance of truths they have never known are the men who are gifted; but if they never go beyond saying that they can hear a ravishing tune, they convey nothing to others, they are without talent. (CSB II, p. 276)

Here he gives it to us—before his experience with involuntary memory and before inspiration has been added to the equation: Gift + Talent → Art. G + T → A. Art does not come into being so simply, however. Proust knew this; he implied as much in his work. After all, he had been writing for years working to express himself. He knew that one has to want to write. And Proust wanted to write; he had a need to whereas plenty of gifted and talented people fail to make

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170 any substantial contribution through art because they lack motivation or interest. Thus, there has to be an accommodation for necessity in Proust’s basic equation, and a term for it, which we will designate by the letter “N.” It does not change anything for Proust at the moment, but it is important to acknowledge it. More properly stated then, Proust’s basic equation for art-making is:

G+T→A N It would be hard to argue with the simplicity of this equation. Anyone applying this formula to his or her own production could hardly help but conclude that if one is gifted but has produced nothing of note, while all the while wanting to do so, it is because one has no talent. Certainly Proust saw it this way. It allowed him to draw the lamentable conclusion he drew in one of the passages cited earlier (“…I was no good as a writer…”), doomed to fail for as ever long as he tried to make art. In these quotes, written more or less as an argument to himself and as a statement of his problem, we see that Proust had yet to catch the “Open Sesame” that is like an eternal possibility mingled in the current of daily events for each of us. For like Ali-Baba, in the Thousand and One Nights, who found himself quite by accident overhearing the thieves as they approached their lair and thus learned the magic words that would make him rich, Proust had no way to anticipate stumbling upon the opportunity that would do something similar for him.10 How could he have? Thus he makes no accommodation for inspiration. Instead, there is only the burden of a perceived futility in even trying to push ahead. And yet, within a very few days of concluding that his efforts would continue to be futile, Proust experienced the involuntary memory that was to lead to the transformation of his fiction. As Painter makes clear in his comments on the tea and toast-induced involuntary memory, Proust saw this incident as “a symbol of his present theme, the nature of artistic creation; for the act of unconscious memory combined both the aspects of art of which he had written a few days before, the sensation in the depths of the self of a pure reality, and the discovery of an affinity between two feelings.”11 Painter goes on to conclude his thought by saying that Proust did not yet realize this was the missing key, the “Open Sesame” that, put to use, would open his necessity to the song of his homeland and enable him to render it in prose. Proust did not recognize this because his involuntary memory was but the first element, the embedded figure within him, grounded in his intellect through remembrance. Like the whole of

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171 his sensuous experience, the sensation of the tea and toast had lain within him in a state of latency ready to spring to consciousness should a similar sensation call it forth. From this experience, the process of discovery for Proust moved forward. Those parts of his thought given over to the puzzle came alert sensing the nearness of their metaphysical goal. All that was wanting—this was something Proust could not know—was a catalyst, a metaphoric vehicle enabling his quest to reach a new state of knowing. A metaphor acts on thought in a manner similar to the way the congruencies of involuntary memory work. But in the case of inspiration, congruency gives rise to something new. For Proust, it would enable him to write. Thus, to comment on Painter’s remarks, the significance of involuntary memory was unclear to Proust because it was only a means of approach to the puzzle of psychological duration. It set in motion a process from which assertions and conclusions particular to it might open the way to knowing. Thus there is a dialectical relationship between Proust’s involuntary memory and the fourth dimension, the metaphoric potential of which was opening so many creative minds at the time. There is an active component of free association in thought-processing that brings into it all manner of extraneous material from the world around us. Occasionally, in a fortuitous sequence of events some random element is brought into contact with thoughts that cast a problem in a new light. The result can be revelatory insight into relationships that suddenly seem obvious but that were unnoticed previously. They open the way for a solution to materialize as if from out of nowhere. In visualizing a solution it becomes communicable. We call this inspiration. Arthur I. Miller, commenting on it, draws attention to certain basic facts concerning the phenomenon:.





1. inspiration occurs to a prepared mind—there are not bolts from the blue; 2. it is preceded by periods of conscious work; and 3. the cycle leading to inspiration most frequently runs through phases of conscious thought, unconscious thought, illumination, and verification.12

Proust’s development up to the point of inspiration fits within the scope of these three conditions given the range of individual variation inherent in the creative process. As we have seen, his inquisitive mind, his well-developed gift for perceiving relationships, and his enhanced ability to articulate his understanding in prose argue for the fact that, over the period of years we have been considering, Proust had been readying himself for his great work. By the time he became

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172 engaged in the specific thought problem out of which would come the illumination of his subject and theme—roughly from the fall of 1908 to the spring of 1909—he had unwittingly prepared himself to benefit from a chance occurrence of just this kind of event. This cycle Miller mentions—of conscious thought, unconscious thought, illumination and verification—can be used to describe the sequence that followed on the involuntary memory which became the madeleine scene in La Recherche. There was, first of all, the incident of it in January, 1909, which Proust deciphered successfully, recognizing its importance at the time. This was followed by an indefinite period during which, apparently, there was little happening in Proust’s mind in this regard. And yet in the process of mulling over whatever was filling his thoughts, at some point there was the flash in which he was able to incorporate into his thoughts an element from a source external to himself. It was this external element that precipitated a sequence we identify as inspiration. In Proust’s case it was the application of the concept of a fourth dimension to Time. By visualizing the sensory unconscious as a recessive, linear path, which the fourth dimension allowed him to do, Proust was able to visualize the self in a comprehensible way as a tethering plane linking the individual to being. Around this concept he was able to build his story. Proust alludes to this process in Du côté de chez Swann where Swann gains insight into his suspicions of Odette with the chance juxtaposition of two thoughts that enable him to visualize a sequence of events he had no image of before.13 His sudden recollection of something Odette had said to him allowed him to shed light on assertions made in the anonymous letter he had recently received that alluded to Odette’s numerous sexual transgressions. Swann’s response accords with the description of inspiration given above. Adding inspiration (“I”) to the formula for art-making transforms it. It becomes:

G+T ―I→A N This equation can be distilled to: I α A ↔ I α N: Inspiration is proportional to Art as Inspiration is proportional to Necessity.14 The Fourth Dimension The concept of a fourth dimension, as Proust knew it, developed as an outgrowth of speculations by mathematicians early in the nineteenth century into

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173 the nature of space. Their speculations focused attention on the parallel postulate, the fifth postulate of the geometry set forth by Euclid in the Elements around 300 BCE.15 A proof of the fifth postulate has never been established (the validity of the first four postulates were established in antiquity). Linda Dalrymple Henderson notes in her book on the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries that lack of a proof for the parallel postulate was the basis for challenges to it and by extension to Euclidean geometry as a whole.16 These challenges had recurred throughout the course of history. In the nineteenth century, scientists and mathematicians speculating on the nature of space were once again drawn to seek proofs and test hypotheses against such absolutes as Euclidean geometry represented to them. This resulted in the proposal of alternative geometries based on, among other things, the possibility that space “beyond our immediate perception,” might be curved.17 These non-Euclidean geometries put forward by Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1829), János Bolyai (1832), and Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1854), among others, established relatively quickly a new area of study within mathematics.18 Not surprisingly, both the qualifier “beyond our immediate perception” and Riemann’s assertion that as figures moved they would necessarily change their shapes and properties if curvatures in space were irregularly curved suggested to theoreticians what might be gained from experience informed by a broadened—or heightened—perception than is possible through human sense organs which define experience in three dimensions for us.19 Thus within these geometries there appeared a rationale for the recognition of a fourth dimension of space. Interest in the fourth dimension and in n-or multi-dimensional geometries developed slowly however. This situation persisted until 1870 when Arthur Cayley set forth general principles of n-dimensional geometry.20 Until he did so, the fourth dimension remained little more than an “algebraic variable of analytical geometry.”21 For without unifying principles and theorems a field of study in the sciences is difficult to establish and advance. From 1870 on, the fourth dimension gained a steadily higher profile in both scientific and popular discourse. By the turn of the century, by which time Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy had become a popular movement, C. W. Leadbeater had compared theosophy’s concept of ‘astral vision’ to four-dimensional sight (1895).22 In fields of physical inquiry, the fourth dimension was figuring prominently in the thought problems being conducted by such investigators as Poincaré, who considered dimensionality and relativism in his book La Science et l’hypothèse (1902), Einstein as he was progressing toward his Special Theory of Relativity (1905), Hermann Minkowski, who formulated the space-time continuum (1908), and, again, Einstein as he came to propose his General Theory of Relativity (1915).

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174 Charles Howard Hinton began his 1904 book, The Fourth Dimension, by juxtaposing Plato’s hypothetical, immobilized cave-dweller whose only visual experience is the two-dimensional shadows flickering on the wall of his cave, with individuals capable of perceiving three dimensions of space, such as his readers.23 In contrasting the two it becomes obvious at once that the understanding Plato’s cave-dweller draws from his experience of his environment is misconstrued relative to the fuller understanding of the world attainable through perception of it in three dimensions. Hinton then asked his readers to extrapolate from this the gain that would accrue to one capable of four-dimensional experience, clearly connecting the fourth dimension to a dimension of space.24 Later in his book, in commenting on references to the soul by Aristotle, Hinton noted that Aristotle “was not far from the recognition of the fourth dimension of existence,” suggesting the fourth dimension to be interior and a quality of being.25 In both instances Hinton presented these contradictory interpretations of what the fourth dimension is as beyond immediate human perception, either as an external reality of space and time or as an interior, subjective state of existence, which in humans can be equated with the self. The history of the fourth dimension begins in the seventeenth century when the philosopher Henry More, in his Enchiridion Metaphysicum, coined the term to designate “the realm necessary for the Platonic ideal to occupy.”26 As it was originally conceived then, the fourth dimension represented a higher reality. What kind of reality it was—spatial, temporal, psychical, or spiritual—remained conjectural. By the eighteenth century, the fourth dimension had taken on familiar spatial connotations. Yet in 1754, in France, Jean le Rond d’Alembert, in his article on “Dimension” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie referred to the spirited and original friend of his who considered the fourth dimension to be simply time.27 Thus, long before the concept ever reached public consciousness, what the term fourth dimension actually represented, beyond representing possibility, was contested, subject to interpretation by the individual using it. As Henderson notes, even Kant, who accepted the grounds of Euclidean geometry as the a priori ground of spatial experience, seemed to hint at the possibility of a spatial fourth dimension when he speculated that the fundamental difference between our right and left hands must be due to their “different orientation with respect to absolute space.”28 Moving into the nineteenth century, the spatial definition for the fourth dimension, established earlier, continued to predominate in mathematical discussion. Time remained an alternate possibility, however, chiefly for the convenience it offered theoreticians by giving them a fixed quality they could visualize easily, that is, without having to resort to the labored models and projections

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175 of what an object “looked like” when seen in four dimensions. As the century progressed mystical and theosophical uses for the term were taking on lives of their own, as we have noted. In 1895, H. G. Wells used time as the fourth dimension in The Time Machine. In the early years of the twentieth century the concept contributed to the development of Cubism. And in 1909 Proust adopted it to represent the tether linking the individual to being through the totality of his or her inimitable sensuous experience in time just as the church of Sainte-Hilaire was linked through the totality of its material history to its founding. As for the popular understanding of what the fourth dimension was, by the early years of the twentieth century it had become the field of experience outside the ordinary it continues to be today.29 As with other abstruse subjects which have excited public interest over the years, it was the possibility revealed through the vocabulary associated with speculative geometries and not the math and science behind them that resonated in the popular imagination and in the minds of artists. In addition, the rejection of an existing order implicit in the promotion of these non-Euclidean geometries and in hyperspace theory (as n-dimensional theories were alternatively called) also heightened popular interest in them. The theories of “revolutionary” mathematicians and scientists working in this area were seen as exposing the fallibility of Euclidean and Newtonian thought. The early twentieth century was an era of frustration with unresponsive and seemingly unyielding power structures of all kinds. Many of these power structures, including four political empires, would be swept away during the first two decades of the twentieth century. This was the same era during which Einstein’s work was upsetting long-standing notions on the nature of the physical universe. The importance of taking up and sharing a confrontational stance toward the rote of past practice was attractive to many who shared this revolutionary fervor. Innovation in one field encouraged the efforts of men and women working in other fields to pursue their researches in the hope of discovering more fundamental or truer expressions of universal laws than those governing thought at the time. As for the fourth dimension and art, the painterly abandonment of strict linear perspective—itself a result of science, philosophy and art having come together in the Renaissance to represent Europeans’ new attitude toward themselves in their relation to God and the world—is an example of a technical absolute under fire wherein detractors found a justification for their position in the tenets of these new geometries. But whether artists saw themselves as overthrowing restrictive conventions of the past or as re-synthesizing elements freed by science into new forms of expression, as Proust would do, throughout the period during which popular interest

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176 in the fourth dimension and non-Euclidean geometries was greatest— roughly speaking, from the publication of Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatlands: A Romance of Many Dimensions in 1884 until the verification of Einstein’s theory of Relativity in 1919—creative individuals were making use of the possibilities in these geometries to represent modernity in their work.30 This was true especially after the turn of the twentieth century. During these first years of the new century, one can argue that an aesthetics of the fourth dimension developed, as opposed to its use as merely a novelty in storytelling. Artists recognizing “the inadequacy of present language to deal with the new reality of higher dimensions,” sought ways of accessing and communicating the meaning in this reality.31 Who were these artists? Henderson lists Picasso, Georges Braque and the Cubists in France, Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists in Italy, and El Lissitzky and the Futurists in Russia. These artists also included H. G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, the composer Alexander Scriabin, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, Max Weber and, of course, Proust, among others in a much longer list.32 Taking advantage of the possibility in the concept of the fourth dimension, they were all using their own conception of it as a vantage point—like the astral plane of theosophy—from which to view and gain a perspective on the world around them. Taking information from a jumble of sources and points of view, including the best-selling and influential writings of Poincaré; the mathematical interpretations of Picasso’s friend Maurice Princet; the attention-getting antics of Alfred Jarry who wrote an article that was published in the Mercure de France in 1899 telling readers how to make a time machine like the one described in Well’s The Time Machine, and from journalistic accounts in Comœdia, and elsewhere, artist’s used the fourth dimension to explore experience.33 Marcel Duchamp, one of the major artists to emerge in the period, was heavily influenced by the fourth dimension. Later, he “disparaged his own science as mere sophistry. Everyone,” he said, “prattled in those years about the fourth dimension, though no one had the faintest idea of what or where it was.”34 But the science never really was the point; the expressive opportunity artist’s found in the concept was. Illumination It is the nature of genius to move forward into the unknown. Proust located a source of meaning in experience vis-à-vis the self in urban life in the era of high modernity. In doing so, he expressed a truth of being to stand against an ever-accelerating pace of change in the world. Thus Proust’s work must be accepted as forward-looking rather than nostalgic. All the attention given by readers and commentators to Marcel’s childhood in Combray and to the socio-

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177 logically fascinating portrait Proust offers of the then recently vanished Belle Époque notwithstanding, La Recherche is not an expression of Proust’s longing for the past. Rather, Proust shaped the past into a site of departure: a launching pad to the future. This approach sets La Recherche apart from those writers who were fixated on the past whom Colley refers to as writing toward home. Proust’s approach also set his work apart from writers who had used aspects of memory in their fiction without addressing the nature of time. As Georges Poulet comments, to see La Recherche as simply a novel of the affective memory would be to confound it with the novels of Proust’s contemporary, Pierre Loti; while on the other hand, Poulet continues, to see it as a purely psychological exposition of Marcel’s character would confound it with the novels of Paul Bourget, another prominent writer of the period little read today.35 These authors, a generation older than Proust, were among those mentioned in endnote 8 in chapter 6, as producing work which seemed outmoded and tedious to André Gide and the literary staff of the Nouvelle Revue Française.36 As noted in the introduction, inspiration has been linked to Proust’s empowerment as a writer by many commentators on his work. By contrast, the concept of the fourth dimension has not been promoted as a source of Proust’s inspiration. Henderson suggests the lack of critical reference to the fourth dimension in arts criticism stems from the fact that few critics have a sufficient background in the sciences to feel able to discuss this influence in the work of the artists, writers, poets, and musicians they write about who were drawn to concept.37 Even Julia Kristeva, in Time and Sense, does not pick up on the connection between ontological time and the metaphoric projection the fourth dimension offers to a visualization of the dimension of Time and psychological duration. Nevertheless, Proust’s use of the concept to represent a recessive and linear interior environment of sensuous experience was consistent with the way all the artists Henderson cites co-opted aspects of the highly reasoned theoretical speculations addressed by Einstein in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 to interpret modernity. It enabled Proust to shape a story grounded in a sense of the self ’s enduring reality and from this understanding to express a reality of our human condition through fiction. Given the concept’s broad influence, accepting that Proust’s fourth dimension was not related to scientific fact but was a creative appropriation of his own from a popular belief in what the fourth dimension allowed in terms of heightened perception should not and cannot mar his accomplishment nor lessen the plausibility of the assertion that Proust’s source of strength in La Recherche derived from it.38 Having claimed this, we are ready to lay out the proposition upon which this claim is based.

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178 First, inspiration as a process has much in common with the process of involuntary memory. Yet the magic of inspiration precludes its being considered as completely after the fact as Proust described involuntary memory with exquisite precision in the introductory section of Du côté de chez Swann. In part this is because an involuntary memory represents an end. It can be looked at again, retrospectively. Inspiration, on the other hand, launches one into a new world from which few look back. Furthermore, whereas in involuntary memory an embedded sensuous impression is resuscitated by a similar sensation experienced in the present that attracts and unites with it in déjà vu, the two elements combining in a moment of illumination have no causal relation to each other, and it is not the past that is recovered, but the new. Nonetheless, a comparison between the stages leading to the kinds of metacognitive experiences we are working with here—involuntary memory and inspiration—show how similar they are. First, they have in common preparatory mental phases that position the individual to benefit from an external stimulus that launches him or her into a momentary state of clarity. And they are both dependent on the jolt of an external stimulus to affect this momentary metacognitive state. In Proust’s case, as we have seen, time and memory, as the conditions in which we live and see our life, were central elements in the mental phase out of which would come the metaphysical basis for his work. To this we can add the subliminal impact on Proust of his re-reading and thinking about both Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe and Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie shortly before his experience with involuntary memory. Both writers record similar experiences in their work. For Proust, it was his involuntary memory which created the pattern which would allow him to recognize the unexpected opportunities in the concept of the fourth dimension when it came to him like an Open Sesame in the spring of 1909, and it was to Chateaubriand’s, Nerval’s, and Baudelaire’s experiences that he referred it for precedent.39 Proust’s deepened insight into time and memory as they prescribe identity added a sense of imminence to his search for the basis of the self in experience as he continued to grope for an understanding and proof of psychological duration. Of the two elements that combine in inspiration, this one, the internal, intellectual puzzle that is the focus of an individual’s profound interest provides the peculiarly onerous restlessness which seems to have been linked for Proust to the “tune” he was more or less conscious of resonating within him mentioned earlier.40 The other element in this pair, the one which acts as the vehicle through which the barriers preventing an individual from reaching into him or herself are overcome, comes from an external source and though it may quite possibly be

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179 familiar to the subject, as the fourth dimension was to Proust, some secondary element randomly projects this catalytic element in a new light, creating a juxtaposition in mind which allows the individual to perceive a relationship he or she had never perceived before. As Arthur I. Miller states, “the flash of revelation is not a what but a how. It does not provide new facts; rather, finding the right image or metaphor tells one how to think about facts already at hand.” (Miller’s italics)41 For Proust, the fourth dimension was the metaphor which enabled him to visualize his whole life as an enduring sensory continuum. He could never have accepted this visualization of a sensory continuum without having had the experience of the involuntary memory of January, 1909 which itself had sharpened his technique sufficiently for him to take advantage of the opportunity in this second kind of transcendent experience when the experience presented itself. Without such an experience Proust would probably have remained in the dark much longer. For rack his brains as he might, what he would have been looking for to arrive at this point (and that is part of this kind of intellectual problem: What should he have been looking for?) would have continued to elude him even though all the elements composing the solution were there, in his mind. But through the fourth dimension, a view of the self opened before him. He was able to view his past as a plane—perpendicular to his present existence— extending back from the present all the way to the essential ground out of which he had sprung as a living being. This was the dimension of Time. Once articulated, the dimension of Time allowed Proust to assume that every sensation from his sensuous experience which had never come back to him through involuntary memory was nonetheless within him in a state of potentiality which a scent or a sound or a touching might retrieve so that he did not need to have his whole life retrieved from this sensuous memory to believe in its whole existence. The text, which one finds in Contre Sainte-Beuve, will be quoted shortly. Before it is, it is worth noting that we still cannot know what the secondary element was which worked its magic unobserved and unrecorded to bring the fourth dimension into this condition of metaphor that freed Proust. It occurred in the pure realm of chance. Now, at the present day, it is not important to find out what it was, for the particulars of Proust’s inspiration were the product of Proust’s unreproducible mental activity at the time. What is important is to recognize that the same pattern of mind Proust had described as efficacious for an enhanced experience of sensuous congruence would have been underlying his ability to achieve inspiration. The one provided the template for the other. We see this in the passage where Marcel picks up François le Champi. His response to seeing the book in his hands describes fairly accurately such moments in the experience of others.42 As

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180 was true for Marcel, such moments of illumination arrive without fanfare for those capable of making use of them, like the coincidental sensation eliciting an involuntary memory. As R.C. Zaehner commented with reference to Proust’s description of involuntary memory, so here too, in this scene of coming-to-knowing in the prince’s library where Marcel is absent-mindedly pulling rare first editions from the bookshelves, Proust’s attention to detail and the specificity with which he assembled the elements composing the scene attest to his ability to transcribe his own metacognitive experiences into fiction. Marcel marvels over the ordinariness of his inspiration’s catalyst: a copy of a book once read to him by his mother. For it was François le Champi that enabled him to make the profound discovery of ontological permanence and sensuous continuity. Through this twofold discovery, his self and the nature of his task were revealed to Marcel, releasing him to perform it.43 When in 1909 did a similar experience happen to Proust? Circling any date is only guessing at one. And because Proust’s work habits were idiosyncratic, it is difficult to determine a precise moment for the event. Very likely it would not have coincided exactly with his psychological commencement of the novel. What we do know is the novel was conceptually in existence by the middle of August, 1909 when Proust wrote Alfred Vallette, the publisher of the Mercure de France, about a novel he was writing in which he proposed a scenario to Vallette for the novel’s serialization in the Mercure de France with eventual publication in a single volume.44 Proust drew special attention to the novel’s indecency due to the homosexual element which was both important to Proust and a concern. As for Time, it was not mentioned, as such. The impact of the past on the present was, however, mentioned as important to Proust’s conception of his novel whose provisional title was, at the time, “Contre Sainte-Beuve: Souvenir d’une matinée.”45 As close as we can come to assigning a date to his inspiration and the consequent commencement of his work is sometime during the five or six week period between late May and early July, 1909. The date 23 May, 1909 stands out for many because on this date Proust wrote a letter to his friend Georges de Lauris in which he asked about the name “Guermantes” and whether it was extinct and therefore available for use.46 It is the earliest reference to this name that will figure so prominently in La Recherche and so marks a kind of turning point on the way to the novel. Since Proust frequently commented on his work after the fact rather than before he had begun to do it, we can surmise that he had probably been using the name Guermantes, or Garmantes, for some length of time already that spring before he asked his friend about it. A Comte and Comtesse

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181 de Guermantes appear in four sections of Contre Sainte-Beuve. Prior to writing these sections Proust had written one titled “La Comtesse,” which describes but does not name a woman much like the Comtesse de Guermantes in the other sections. According to Painter, these four chapters in which the name Guermantes appears were the last ones written before Proust essentially started over with a new goal in mind. This would have been at the end of May, or in early June, though Painter dated the commencement to the period of 4-6 July, when Proust worked continuously for a stretch of sixty hours.47 Claudine Quémar, who studied the early notebooks (cahiers) in which both Contre Sainte-Beuve and La Recherche took form, concludes the transition point was in June, therefore after the letter to Lauris, in notebook number 8.48 Referring to the letter to Lauris, Painter calls Proust’s inquiry concerning the name “Guermantes” an “epoch-making question.”49 Carter says Proust “may not have wanted to take the time to explain (why he wanted the information), or he may not have realized that he was ready to cut the umbilical cord that bound him to Sainte-Beuve.”50 The most taciturn of Proust biographers, Jean-Yves Tadié, merely cites the letter in a footnote.51 However differently Proust’s biographers saw or see it, this date carries a certain resonance in the evolution of Proust’s development and the development of La Recherche. From this being acknowledged, and from the comments of Proust’s biographers on these weeks and months, and from the references to this period by other commentators, it would appear there is no connection to the fourth dimension in the writing done during this transitional period covering late spring and early summer of 1909. But if we look at the last of the sections written in what became Contre Sainte-Beuve; the last of the four chapters in which the name “Guermantes” figures, and, consequently, near the turning to the novel we find the following connected passages in the chapter titled “Retour à Guermantes:” Ce qui est beau à Guermantes c’est que les siècles qui ne sont plus y essayent d’être encore; le temps y a pris la forme de l’espace. On sent bien qu’on traverse du temps, come quand un souvenir ancien nous revient à l’esprit. Ce n’est plus dans la mémoire de notre vie, mais dans celle des siècles. Et si Guermantes ne déçoit pas, comme toutes les choses d’imagination quand elles sont devenues une chose réelle, c’est sans doute que ce n’est à aucun moment une chose réelle, car même quand on s’y promène, on sent que les choses qui sont là ne sont que l’enveloppe d’autres, que la réalité n’est pas ici, mais très loin, que ce choses touchées ne sont qu’une figure du Temps, et l’imagination travaille sur Guermantes vu, comme sur Guermantes lu, parce que toutes ces choses, ce ne sont encore que des mots, des mots pleins de magnifiques images et qui signifient autre chose. (CSB, pp. 338-39)

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182 What is beautiful at Guermantes is that dead and gone centuries try to maintain themselves in it. Time has assumed a dimension of space. One feels oneself swept back through time, as when an ancient memory comes back to mind. Here it is no longer a personal memory, it comes out of the remembrance of centuries. And if Guermantes does not disappoint one as all imagined things do when reduced to reality, this is undoubtedly because at no time is it a real place, because even when one is walking about in it, one feels that the things one sees there are merely the wrappings of other things, that reality lies, not in this present but far elsewhere, that the stone under one’s hand is no more than a metaphor of Time; and the imagination feeds on Guermantes visited as it fed on Guermantes described because all these things are still only words, everything is a splendid figure of speech that means something else. (CSB II, pp. 249-50)

In writing the passage from which these quotes have been taken Proust must have been struck by the significance of what he had just written in a way that illuminated for him the meaning of all that he had been searching for unsuccessfully for years. Here was the “Open Sesame” that dissolved the block that had prevented him from expressing what he had long felt a need to say. His happenstantial reference to a fourth dimension of space as the dimension of Time reconciled his thoughts on time and memory with self and being, allowing him to grasp a conception of the self uniting all the disparate parts of one’s personal past into psychological duration. From this moment he was able to commence a narrative of coming-to-knowing in the making of an artist. Suddenly, Proust was able to move quickly into both parts of Du côté de chez Swann and Le Temps retrouvé written that summer. After all, he had been working for years with variations of some of the scenes that would comprise parts of these books. He could now re-assemble them once again, but this time with the unifying metaphysical foundation of the dimension of Time supporting all he wrote.

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Epilogue The Difficulty of Being a Human Being “Life hurts so much.” This was Andy Warhol’s response to Letitia Kent upon her reminding him, in an interview published in Vogue (March, 1970), that he had once said he wished he was a machine. “If we could become more mechanical,” Warhol had gone on, “we would be hurt less—if we could be programmed to do our jobs happily and efficiently.”1 In this brief exchange, Warhol touches on a condition of being a human being which reverberates throughout the development and execution of artistic intention and practice. As a reflection of human potentiality, the blank surface of the screen, page, stone, or canvas stretches before an artist with the menacing indifference of the cosmic void. An artist’s attraction to it, and his or her anxiety facing it, can bring to the fore all doubt concerning one’s ability to traffic in the emptiness out of which the new is coaxed into material form. Exacerbated by an artist’s acquired sensitivity to rejection and given that any project can as easily end in failure as in success, this aspect of practice, the psychological plaint Warhol puts into words, should be considered a very real part of creative production. This is why the difficulty of being a human being interests us here. It completes, in a minor key, this study of the making of an artist. Proust, too, dealt with the difficulty of simply being who he was. His lifelong struggle with asthma suggests as much, as does the obsessive care he took to control his immediate physical environment. It also surfaces in various pieces of exculpatory fiction he wrote throughout his life including the truly bizarre voyeuristic passages in La Recherche. The first of these episodes occurs in Du côté de chez Swann. Marcel has been out for a walk and fallen asleep on a hill overlooking Vinteuil’s house at Montjouvain. When he awakens he watches, through the open windows of a room, Mlle. Vinteuil and the actress Léa in hot pursuit of each other. The second voyeuristic passage comes in Le Temps retrouvé. It finds Marcel entering Jupien’s male brothel after a nighttime air raid during the First World War in search of something to quench his thirst. Marcel stays to watch what goes on through a hole in a door. These two scenes strain readers’ credulity in Marcel’s excuses for stumbling into these situations. As one reads, one starts asking oneself the question, Why is he there? The thought that he may be there to fulfill a voyeuristic interest of Proust himself is certainly among possible answers. But in both cases we, too, want to see. In getting caught up in looking on scenes of abasement, we forget our suspicions. Bringing these things up here is not intended to suggest the beginning of a psychobiography of Proust at this point in this text or elsewhere. Rather, in dis-

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184 cussing a condition which shadowed Proust’s life—the difficulty he faced, sometimes, being a human being—we can come to one more level of understanding of art, the artist, and art-making. Thus, rather than probing the particulars of Proust’s condition vis-à-vis the difficulty he experienced being a man and an artist, we are going to look at the condition in relation to general terms of artistic development such as we have touched on throughout this text, approaching the subject through Warhol’s comments above. In doing so, in singling out the artist as the ideal type for discussing a psychic state potentially activated in any one of us, we are continuing in a tradition going back, as we noted in chapter 3, to précieux writers in seventeenth-century France. From Warhol’s reference to machinery as well as to “doing our jobs happily and efficiently” we can infer the source of hurting Warhol is referring to is associated with work. For him “work” would be making art. We can juxtapose Warhol’s statement that life hurts so much with a paradox of creative production: the shedding of one’s social identity as an artist is inversely proportional to the emergence of the artist’s responsive consciousness and creative sensibility. Together, statement and paradox reveal the source of creative doubt for the artist to be the vulnerable state of exposure in which one finds oneself when bringing the new into existence. What is also emphasized by this discussion is how different creative work is from the way bureaucratic or household work is performed and the way machines make things. What most of us do most of the time is “small work.” The role of creative thinking in small work is limited to decisions effecting performance of a task. Habit defines most of what we do. Small work is what inches life along. As for machines, they operate with emotionless efficiency. Machines are uninvolved with the goods they produce. If we accept that Warhol’s “hurting so much” equates with practice, the terms torment, hurting, and the difficulty of being a human being become roughly homologous in referring to a neurotic condition in which an always-present crisis of performance marks those for whom self-awareness is fraught with conflict and working comes at a very high cost. In looking at Warhol’s concern, his vocabulary reflects the work he was doing at the time in The Factory, his studio in New York. His work included the famous silk-screened Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes and portraits in various multiples of images. The process by which he made these images draws attention to the manufactory of goods. In Warhol’s interview with Kent he spoke of mechanical production as a panacea for the artist. To the extent the methods he was employing were industrial ones, and the fact that much of his production at the time mimicked products produced through commercial

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185 manufactory, what more, we can ask, could he have wished relief from if he still felt compelled to speak of the pain of being an artist? It is worth noting in this regard that during the 1960s and 70s, during which Warhol was thinking along these lines, there was a general reaction occurring in much of the creative world against emotional exegesis and the kind of highly gestural effusions which characterized Abstract Expressionism some years earlier. A vocabulary of manufactory expresses this attitude well, as does a creative stance of detachment and irony which came into use as a means to distance the artist from his or her production of art, as if industrial techniques and the appropriation of found and/or ready-made materials to hide one’s hand could hide one’s hand. Today this theoretical posture toward art and authorship advanced during the Cold War in the writing of such critics as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida seems as out of kilter with the reality of art-making as the trumpet of God theory Sartre derided.2 For artists’ efforts to detach themselves from a personal intimacy with their work have always largely failed. Observers at the time, due to the influence of the promotional organizations supporting talent (publishers, galleries, promoters of dance and music), and regardless of the prounouncements of theorists, recognized and identified artistic production the way knowledgeable people have always identified the work of artists they know and/or study: by mannerisms characteristic of an individual’s style which immediately calls to mind the name of the individual responsible for producing it. Nonetheless, we can accept Warhol’s polemical position expressed in a language of industrial production as a way for artists working at the time to come to terms with questions concerning art, who is the artist, what is the artist’s role in contemporary society, as well as what is the role of art and artists in the West in an era when the cultural hegemony of the West in the post-World War II world was confronting challenges on every front. We can accept this because the questions: What is art? and Who is the artist? are questions which have reverberated through artistic practice at least since the Renaissance. Since the Renaissance artists have posed these questions in the language reflecting the intellectual currents of their time. Artists continue to do so to understand themselves and what it is they do and to come to terms with issues of performance impacting their making of art. By disregarding the topicality of their various historical vocabularies and focusing on the underlying concerns they are addressing, their concerns are revealed to be similar, all-in-all, to the difficulty of being an artist and a human being Proust reacted to in facing the issues of performance he dealt with. For making art has always necessitated artists situating themselves briefly in the unstable terrain of production where, in the heady but heedless atmosphere of

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186 the creative present, they work. And having worked? They stand by as the “insulating boundaries between art and life” rise between them and what they have produced.3 In this Proust was no exception. From the above, we can ask the following question: Was Warhol, in calling for a more mechanical way of producing art, attempting to circumvent some part of himself to produce it? If so, did he think he could? Viewing his work, we can ask rhetorically of his experience, as of Proust’s, what the source of his hurting was without seeking to answer the question for either man in particular. In asking the question what we are really asking is: If the anxiety robbing Warhol of peace of mind vis-à-vis his consciousness of himself as an artist was his being-who-he-was, was something similar the source of hurting in Proust’s life, also? And if so, was Proust wishing he, too, could find a way to feel less the urgency of his necessity to write? But if this was so, what was it these men were trying to say? And could the kind of blindered, blemish-free life Elstir spoke of so disparagingly have provided them a better platform or base from which to say it?4 Having asked these questions, we can wonder, more fundamentally, whether or not anyone could ever produce art without the influence of her or his own experience entering the process of art-making? For if the continuum from impulse to completion of a work of art is inseparable from the cognitive base of lived experience which has led one to art in the first place, how could the necessary disassociation from this base, upon which the mechanics of practice facilitate the production of the new, be effected while still allowing for the production of art? This question bears on our current discussion, because it is through their art, as we have already established, that artists find value in their lives. Thus whatever might compromise their art would threaten their own psychological well-being, as well. As we have said before, what most of us do most of the time helps us avoid the very thing artists grapple with in their work. In contrast to artists, most people attempt to live and do their jobs without the kind of psychological torment associated with confronting the void. We protect ourselves from it by immuring ourselves in habits which mask the threat. In doing so, we take on semi-mechanical or automatic qualities of performance, consuming ourselves with the mundane tasks of our day-to-day existence in order to survive psychologically. At the same time we expect something more from life. At the most fundamental level of living, existence is organic process. But mere organic progression is not enough to satisfy self-consciously aware human beings. Consequently, we look to those activities we have undertaken for the very purpose of supplying meaning to our lives to sustain this sense of purpose. For the self-aware, life without

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187 purpose is nothing. Through faith then, and belief in purpose, we live lives nonetheless easily shattered by happenstance, contingency, chance, or whatever one wishes to call the dynamic potential unleashed in the ontic moment in which life is actually lived. Just as chance can break through the surface of our complacent comings and goings and render them folly, so, too, on occasion, chance can reveal the presence of forces at work more powerful than those we recognize from our physical interactions with the sensible world. It is the latter potential in chance, intuited through the subjectivity of human self-awareness, which prompts our questing for answers to the mystery of the unknown, in part to claim knowledge of it by finding logic in the nature of matter as it exists in time. Art is one mode in which this logic is formulated; religion, science, and philosophy are others. From being a source of knowing for the artist, creative practice offers a model from which others may draw insight so that the imaginative life of the mind can blossom into the rich and varied experiencing we live inside and outside our heads.







✴✴✴

I began this book with an epigraph quoted from Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outretombe. “Par quel miracle l’homme consent-il à faire ce qu’il fait sur cette terre, lui qui doit mourir?” François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre tombe (Paris: Quarto Gallimard, 1997), livre xiii, chapitre 8, p. 784 [By what miracle does man do what he must do on earth, he who is destined to die?] François-René de Chateaubriand, The Memoirs of Chateaubriand, selected, trans. and with intro. Robert Baldick (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), p. 205 From the outset it has been my intention to conclude this book by answering this question. The miracle by which we do what we must do, in spite of all, as suggested above, rests in the nature of human consciousness. The rewards of awareness are everything we gain in the way we live at present and will live in the future. The knowing we have won from the relationships we have intuited from our experience of the world, and the thought we have built upon these relationships, is responsible for culture and all that attends it. In its boldest form, the perception of relationships upon which our knowing is based is the product of genius. In La Recherche, it is Marcel’s restless questing for he-knew-not-what which led to his identifying a relationship between self and time through the authoritative insight given him in a moment of inspiration. The sign which embodied this relationship for him was the garden bell at Combray, noted in chapter 6. The ferruginous tintinnabulation of this bell, announcing the arrival of someone from the outer world, had been

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188 sounding within him throughout his life. It was the cause of his restlessness even if he could not hear its crow-ish call. Finally able to hear it, Marcel found his existence in the world authenticated by the bell’s reminding him of the existence of the Other. It is the Other who shatters our revelries and, in doing so, makes it possible for us to see that we live our lives among people who are the source of our understanding.

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Notes Preface 1. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from the History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) pp. 8, 15.

Epigraph 1. “By what miracle does man agree to do what he must do on earth, he who is doomed to die?” The Memoirs of Chateaubriand.  Selected, translated and with an introduction by Robert Baldich. (New York; Alfred A. Knopf, 1961) pg. 205.

Introduction 1. “La vie de Proust est marquée par un moment décisif où lui vient l’inspiration d’où sortira sa grande œuvre.” Philip Kolb, Le Carnet de 1908 (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976), p. 7. 2. The other volumes in the novel are: A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (1919); it won the Prix Goncourt in 1919; Le Côté de Guermantes (1920 part I; 1921, part II); Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921) Le Prisonnière (1923); Albertine disparue (1925); Le Temps retrouvé (1927). Marcel Proust died on November 18, 1922, before the whole of his novel had been published. 3. G (JF), pp. 360-61; SLT (II), pp. 25-27. 4. G (JF), pp. 657-58; SLT (II), pp. 569-569. 5. G (LP), pp. 1790-1803; SLT (V), pp. 331-353. 6. This quality of individual experiencing is reflected in the language Proust uses to describe these artists’ work. In each case he references some level of corporeal (in the case of the actress, Berma) and spiritual synthesis that is inimitable to them.

Berma’s Phaedra: “ou comme si Phèdre elle-même avait dit en ce moment les choses que j’entendais, sans que le talent de la Berma semblât leur avoir rien ajouté.” G (JF), p. 360 [Phaedra herself had at that moment uttered the words that I was hearing, without its appearing that Berma’s talent had added anything at all to them.] SLT (II), p. 26 Elstir: Carquethuit Harbor is an example of “l’effort qu’Elstir faisait pour se dépouiller en présence de la réalité de toutes les notions de son intelli gence…cet homme qui avant de peindre se faisait ignorant…” G (JF), p. 660 [the effort made y Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual notion…made himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint, forgot everything that he knew in his honesty of purpose]. SLT (II), pp. 572–73

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190 Vinteuil’s Septet (see chapter 4 for a more complete discussion of the Septet): “Ce chant, dif férent de celui des autres, semblable à tous les siens, où Vinteuil l’avaitil appris, entendu? Chaque artiste semble ainsi comme le citoyen d’une patrie inconnue, oubliée de lui-même, différente de celle d’où viendra, appareillant pour la terre, un autre grand artiste.” G (LP) p. 1796 [Where had he learned this song, different from those of other singers, similar to all his own, where had he heard it? Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that whence another great artist, setting sail for earth, will eventu ally emerge.] SLT (V), p. 342 7. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1959), vol. II, p. 360. 8. Jonah Lehrer, Proust Was a Neuroscientist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007), chapter 4. 9. Mark Epstein, “Meditation as Art/Art as Meditation,” in Learning Mind: Experience into Art, ed. Mary Jane Jacobs and Jacquelyn Bass (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 44. 10. William James, The Principles of Psychology (originally published in 1890 by Henry Holt and Company, Boston); unabridged and unaltered present edition in 2 volumes New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1950), vol. I, pp. 297–98. 11. “[W]ork while you have light,” paraphrasing Saint John’s Gospel (via Ruskin) was something of a mantra for Proust for a while, according to Anthony Pugh. Anthony Pugh, The Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987), 35. 12. Anthony Pugh, The Growth of A la recherche du temps perdu: A Chronological Examination of Proust’s Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), p. 3. 13. Anthony Pugh, The Birth of A la recherche and The Growth of A la recherche. 14. The notion of profound insight is implicit in a study of Picasso’s and Einstein’s meth od as examined in Miller’s book. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 15. George Painter makes this comment in the preface to his biography of Proust, citing Word sworth’s distinction between the two. George Painter, Marcel Proust, vol. I, pp. xiii–xiv. 16. Roland Barthes suggests the similarities between Proust and Marcel should be viewed as homologous rather than analogous. See Roland Barthes, “Proust et les noms,” in Le Degré zéro de l’écriture: Suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques [par] Roland Barthes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 123–24. 17. Frenhofer in Honoré de Balzac, Chef d’oevre inconnu, 1831; Lucien de Rubempré in Balzac, Illusions Perdues 1837–43; Rudolfo in Giacomo Puccini, La Bohème, 1896; Lambert in Balzac, Louis Lambert, 1832–23; Stello in Alfred de Vigny, Stello, 1832; Des Esseintes in J. K. Huysmans, À Rebours, 1884; and Frédéric Moreau in Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale, 1869. 18. The first appearance of the term vocation is at: G (CG), pp.860; SLT(III), p. 196. The second appearance of the term is at: G (CG), p.1053; SLT (III), p. 544. Over all, Etienne Brunet identifies seven occurrences of the use of the word in the 1954 Pléiade edition of La Recherche. Etienne Brunet, Le Vocabulaire de Proust (Genève: Slatkine Champion, 1983), vol. III, p. 1,495. 19. “Vous avez une jolie âme, d’une qualité rare, une nature d’artiste, ne la laissez pas man quer de ce qu’il lui faut.” G (CS), p. 62 [You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs] SLT (I), p. 93.

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191 20. Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972), p. 260. 21. When the marquis de Norpois speaks of writing as a career to Marcel and his father the night he dines with the family, in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, he does not speak of writing as a vocation. He speaks of it as a technical profession and career by which one can make a respect able living. The marquis is not talking about writing as a form of creative expression. G (JF), p. 364; SLT (II), p. 32. 22. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (originally pub lished in 1902 by Longman, Green and Co., New York), ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1982), p. 35. 23. Alan S. Brown, The Déjà Vu Experience (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), pp. 47-48. 24. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 24 25. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, p. 249. 26. André Maurois, Proust, a Biography, trans. Gerard Hopkins (New York: MeridianBooks, 1958). 27. William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 124. 28. Ibid., p. 170. 29. Ibid., pp. 170-71. 30. Germaine Brée, Marcel Proust and the Deliverance from Time, trans. C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt (New York: Grove Press, 1955). 31. Ibid., p. 43. 32. Ibid., p. 22. 33. Ibid., p. 56. 34. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II, p. 127. 35. Ibid., vol. II, p. 129. 36. Ibid., vol. II, p. 142. 37. Ibid., vol. II, p. 130. 38. Ibid., vol. II, p. 146. 39. Philip Kolb, Le Carnet de 1908, p. 7. 40. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 172. 41. G (TR), p. 2287; STL (VI), p. 304. 42. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense, p. 173. 43. William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 44. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, trans. Euan Cameron (New York, Viking, 2000). 45. William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, pp.468–89. 46. Ibid., p. 468. 47. Ibid., p. 459. 48. Ibid., p. 472. 49. Ibid., p. 472. 50. Ibid., p.460. 51. Ibid., p. 460. 52. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, p. 504. 53. Ibid., p. 520. 54. Ibid., pp. 503; 520 55. Ibid., p. 503.

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192 56. Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford: Oxford Uni versity Press, 2004), p. 16. 57. Anthony Pugh, Growth of A la recherche, p. 3. 58. ___________, Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu, 63. 59. Ibid., p. 32. 60. Ibid., p. 35. 61. Ibid., p. 50. 62. Ibid., p. 51. 63. Ibid., p. 58. 64. Ibid., p. 67. 65. Ibid., p. 67.

Chapter 1 1. An association of the lie with art carries through in La Prisonnière where Proust speaks of the perfect lie in terms similar to those he will use when speaking about Vinteuil’s Septet a few pages further on. G (LP), pp.1765-66; SLT (V), pp. 281-82. 2. According to Justin O’Brien’s count, there are four hundred twenty eight maxims in La Recherche. O’Brien organizes the maxims into five categories: Man; Society; Love; Art; and Time and Memory. The maxim cited here, number sixty-two in his compilation, comes under the heading “Man.” Justin O’Brien, The Maxims of Marcel Proust, trans. and ed. Justin O’Brien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), p. 33. 3. This maxim has been translated by several translators over the years. Each translator has translated the maxim more or less differently from the others. Three of these translations are given below. Justin O’Brien: “The beauty of images lies back of things and ceases to dazzle us when we have reached them. But the beauty of ideas lies in front of things and we understand it only when we have gone beyond them.” Ibid., p. 33. Andreas Mayer: “The beauty of images is situated in front of things, that of ideas behind them. So that the first sort of beauty ceases to astonish us as soon as we have reached the things themselves, but the second is something that we understand only when we have passed beyond them.” SLT (VI), p. 355. Note: This translation from the 1993 translation revised by D. J. Enright remained unaltered from the original translation by Mayer wheich appears in the two volume Random House translation of Remembrance of Things Past. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff; The Past Recaptured trans. Andreas Mayer (New York, Random House, 1970), vol. II, p. 1049. Thus it remained unaltered through two subsequent reviews of the translation, the second being the revision of the translation by Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), vol. II, p. 974. Ian Patterson: “The beauty of images lies behind things, the beauty of ideas in front of them. So that the former cease to impress us when we reach them,

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193 whereas we have to go beyond the latter in order to understand them.” (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI, Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson, ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Allen Lane Penguin Press, 2002), p. 240. 4. Both Marcel and Swann lie of course, but they are not very good at lying. This is why their lies are not being considered here. Odette is not a particularly good liar; Alber tine is a better one. Few rival the young woman mentioned earlier in this discussion of arc communication. 5. The first time Marcel hears the name Albertine, her name slips right passed him without his paying attention to it because, at the time, Gilberte is the focus of his attention. G (JF), p. 409; SLT (II), p. 116. Marcel comments on this phenomenon later in this same volume. G (JF), p. 496; SLT (II), p. 277. 6. G (CS), pp. 143-44; SLT (I), p. 245. 7. G (CS), p. 142; SLT (I), p. 243. G (CG), p. 756; SLT (III), p. 7 8. Edmund Husserl. Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, Collier Books, 1962), §90: 245. 9. In what follows, we can consider the term extensity as referring to a concrete quality of matter bound up in a form’s physical presence; in like manner we can consider the term duration as an abstract quality of conscious awareness and self-awareness. Depending on the context they can sometimes be used interchangeably. 10. CSB, p. 339; CSB II, p. 249. 11. Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 56–57. 12. G (TR), pp. 2399–2400; SLT (VI), pp. 528–29. 13. James Ensor: 1860–1949. 14. Roger Paultre identifies two other contradictions relating to this riddle Marcel contends with that likewise are resolvable into unity. Paultre’s contradictions are (1) «[l]’ecoulement irréverible du Temps et l’intemporité accessible par l’Art» [the irreversible flow of time and the timelessness accessible by art] and (2) «[l]e particulier et le subjectif opposés à l’universel et à la réalité objective» [the particular and the subjective opposed to the uni versal and the objective] (author’s trans.). Roger Pautre, Marcel Proust et la théorie du modele (Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1986), p. 117. 15. G (CS), p. 45; SLT (I), pp. 60–66; G (TR), p. 2262–63; SLT (VI), p. 255–57. 16. Directionality refers to a movement to which an end can be identified after the movement is complete even if no end was established as a goal at the beginning. Marcel’s progression toward being able to realize involuntary memories was an unconscious directional devel opment whereas his early conscious desire for love and friendship never achieved the specific end he had originally sought.

Chapter 2 1. G (JF), p. 360; SLT (II), pp. 25-26. 2. G (CG), p. 1080; SLT (III), p. 595. 3. Both Bergotte and Elstir recognize qualities in Marcel, when they meet him, that set him apart from others. Bergotte does so as they talk at the Swann’s, and afterward. (G (JF), p. 452-53;

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194 SLT (II), p. 196-99) Elstir appreciation results in his inviting only Marcel to visit him in his studio when he talks with Marcel and Robert de Saint-Loup at Rivebelle. (G (JF), p. 651; SLT (II), p. 556) 4. Bloch occasionally casts aspersions on the books Marcel is reading but Marcel and he do not discuss the reasons for Bloch’s opinions. (G (CS), pp. 79-80; SLT (I), pp. 124-25) By the same token, Marcel and his school friends make lists rating the leading actors of the day. In Marcel’s case, he does so without having yet been to the theatre (the irst play Marcel sees, that readers know of, is Phèdre, some years after his list-making days are over). (G (CS), p. 67; SLT (I), pp. 101-02) 5. G (JF), p. 452; SLT (II), p. 196. 6. John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 7. Ibid., p. 15. 8. For a discussion of competition between early hominoids leading to the dominance of Homosapiens see: Yan Wenming and Wang Youping, “Early Humans in China,” in The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective, ed. Sarah Allan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005) pp. 11-25. 9. Edmund Husserl. Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York, Collier Books, 1962), Ideas, § 35, p. 107. 10. Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User’s Guide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 65. 11. G (CS), p. 44; SLT (I), p. 59. 12. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, § 27, pp. 91-93. 13. Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Johns Mullarkey (New York; Continuum, 2002), from Mind-Energy pp. 153-55. (Mind-Energy was originally published as L’énergie spirituelle in 1920 by F. Alcan, Paris.) 14. Adam Zeman, Consciousness, p. 155. 15. Swann (in Paris and elsewhere): G (CS), pp. 237-38; SLT (I), pp. 415-16; Saint-Loup (at Doncières): G (CG), p. 841; SLT (III), p.161. 16. G (JF), p. 670; SLT (II), p. 590. 17. G (JF), p. 567; SLT (II), p. 403. 18. G (TR), p. 2126; SLT (VI), p. 5. 19. G (CS), p.147; SLT (I), p. 252. 20. Vincent Descombes, Proust, Philosophy of the Novel, trans. Catherine Chance Macksey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), p 6. 21. G (CG), p. 809; SLT (III), p. 102. 22. Examples of Legrandin’s poetic speech can be found at G (CS), pp. 102-03; p. 110; SLT (I), pp. 167-68; 182-83. 23. It is interesting to note that in their comments on this kind of experience, Bergson, James and Sigmund Freud all excuse themselves from direct experiences of this kind. 24. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, § 85, p. 226-27. 25. Adam Zeman, Consciousness, p. 25. These second-order emotions require a sense of self,  ZKHUHDVÀUVWRUGHUHPRWLRQVVXFKDVMR\DQJHUVDGQHVVLQWHUHVWGLVJXVWDQGIHDUGRQRW 26. Marcel mentions chance in this way musing on the fact that the whole of his life might have

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195 turned out differently had Swann not suggested to his parents that he be sent to Balbec for the sea air. G (TR), p. 2300; SLT (VI), p. 328. 27. G (CS), p. 84; SLT (I), p. 133. 28. G (SG) pp. 1391-93; p. 1397; SLT (IV), pp. 327-31; p. 337. 29. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Starchy, intro. Louis Menand, biographical afterward Peter Gray, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 87n. 30. G(CG), p. 872; SLT (III), pp. 217-18. 31. G (SG), pp. 1288-89; SLT (IV), p. 131. 32. G (JF), p. 378; SLT (II), p. 60.

Chapter 3 1. See James’s definition of the self as “me and mine,” chapter 1, p. 35 n15. 2. An example of this can be found in John Onians’ comment “the little finger on the left hand is so important to a concert violinist that the connections between the neurons that control it develop to such a degree that the area of the brain in which they are located becomes greatly enlarged.” John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 19. 3. Anne Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998). 4. Ibid., p. 36. 5. “[a]n ancient peasant France, a France of bourgs, villages, hamlets and scattered houses sur vived more or less unchanged until at least 1914 and some would say 1945.” Fernand Brauddel, The Identity of France, vol. 2, People and Production, trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1990), p. 674. 6. G (CS), p. 51; SLT (I), p. 73. 7. G (CS), p. 137; SLT (I), p. 233. 8. G (CS), p. 98; SLT (I), p. 160. 9. Pierre-Jakez Hélias notes in The Horse of Pride that “[t]oday, most grandmothers know nothing but Breton; their children are fluent in both languages; and their grandchildren speak only French.” His remarks suggest the extent to which rural isolation persisted to preserve old ways, even in the face of change. Pierre-Jakez Hélias, The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, trans. and abridged by June Guicharaud (New York: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 340. In 1976, the present author remembers seeing elderly Bretons, both men and women, still dressed in their traditional garb in the streets of Quimper. 10. Peter McPhee, A Social History of France: 1789-1914, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 2nd edition), p. 268. 11. Christophe Charle, A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Miriam Kochan (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994). 12. Ibid., pp. 168-78. 13. G (AD), p. 2126; SLT (VI), p. 6. A few pages later, he is identified as living in the Midi, in south central France; his surname is given as Sanilon, G (TR), p. 2134; SLT (VI), p.15. 14. The law providing for secondary school education for girls was promoted by Camille Sée and Jules Ferry. William Fortescue, The Third Republic in France, 1870-1940: Conflicts and Continuities (London: Routledge, 2000) pp. 89-91. In A l’ombre de jeunes filles en fleurs, Gisèle

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196 sends a letter to Albertine in which she discusses her recent school examination. G (JF), pp. 713-715; SLT (II), pp. 670-675. 15. Daniel Shanahan, Toward a Genealogy of Individualism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), p 21. 16. Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Westview Press, 1979), p. 23. 17. Flaubert called it this in a letter to Louis de Cormenin: 7 June 1844. Sean Desmond Healy, Boredom, Self and Culture (Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1984). 18. Ibid., p. 28. 19. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 108. 20. William James, The Principles of Psychology (originally published in 1890 by Henry Holt and Company, Boston); unabridged and unaltered present edition in 2 volumes (New York: Dover Publications, Inc, 1950), vol. I, chapter IX, p. 239. 21. Ralph Pred, Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005) pp. 4-5. 22. Gerald E. Myers, “Introduction: The Intellectual Context,” in William James, The Principles of Psychology, eds. Frederich H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. xiii. 23. Dictionaire de biographie Française, ed. M. Prevost et Roman D’Amat (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, 1959). 24. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, introduction by Peter Gay, (New York: W. W. Nor ton & Company, 1961), p. xi. 25. Michael Finn, Proust, the Body and Literary Form, Cambridge Studies in French 59 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 38-39. 26. When Dr. Boulbon, in the novel, responds to Marcel’s grandmother’s protestations that she has albumen in her urine (urémie), by saying that her albumen is only “mental,” “albu mine mentale” and that she was sick only because she thought herself ill, his remarks reflect attitudes similar to those expressed by Dr. Proust himself. G (CG), p. 977; SLT (III), p.410. 27. Michael Finn, Proust, the Body and Literary Form, p. 15. 28. Ibid., p. 58. 29. “Metacognition pertains to the ways in which we are aware of, monitor, and resolve our personal cognitive experiences.” Alan S. Brown, The Déjà Vu Experience, (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), p. 4. 30. Ibid., p. 2 31. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (originally published in 1902 by Longman, Green and Co., New York); ed. Martin E. Marty (New York: Penguin Books USA, 1982), p. 24. 32. Ibid., pp. 16-17 33. Ibid., pp.13-18; 53-58. 34. Ibid., pp. 380-81. 35. See: Alan S. Brown, The Déjà Vu Experience; R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); Adam

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197 Zeman, Consciousness: A User’s Guide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 36. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002) p. 20. 37. Ibid., p. 5. 38. G (JF), p. 514; SLT (II), pp. 305-6. 39. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Modern Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 328. 40. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), §40, p. 384. 41. “Time assumed prestige as the dimension of growth, change, fulfillment, and hope, as opposed to the older view of time as an eroding, destructive force, pertaining to the ruin ation of things and death.” Meyer Schapiro, The Unity in Picasso’s Art (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 2000), p. 87. 42. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 305. 43. G (JF), p. 485; SLT (II), p. 257. 44. G (CG), p. 853; SLT (III) p. 183. 45. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cam bridge, Mass.: October Book, MIT Press, 1996). 46. Eating hard boiled eggs in salad was not done in the best society of Alençon. G (JF), 537; SLT (II), p. 347. 47. G (CG), p. 1353; SLT (IV), p. 257. 48. This group includes the senior judge from Caen, the president of the Cherbourg bar, and the notary from LeMans. G (JF), p. 536; SLT (II), p. 345-6. 49. G (JF), pp. 545-46; SLT (II), pp. 361-63. 50. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation , trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), Vol. II, p. 325 (this is a republication, with minor corrections, of the work published in 1958 by The Falcon’s Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colorado). 51. G (CS), p. 89; SLT (I), p. 143. 52. G (SG), p. 1570; SLT (IV), p. 660. 53. G (JF), p. 610; SLT (II), p.482. 54. By contrast, the term feudal has only negative connotations for the Duc de Guermantes. G ( CG), p. 928; SLT (III), p. 321. 55. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: As Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, (Time and Free Will was originally published in 1889 in Paris as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, this edition is an unabridged republication of the 3rd edition of the work origi nally published in 1913 by George Allen & Co., Ltd., London) trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), p. 105. 56. Ibid., pp. 100-110. 57. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 22. 58. Muybridge later went on to produce motion studies of human activities. 59. Zeno’s paradox of an arrow in flight states that at each moment the arrow is occupying a position of space and, in Doane’s explanation “simply is where it is. At each point in its course, it is motionless; hence it is motionless during the entire time it is allegedly moving.”

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198 Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, p. 173. 60. Ibid., p. 103; p. 209 61. Ralph Pred notes that for Descartes, “God preserves the “illusion” of connectivity between the independent parts of the stream of experience.” Ralph Pred, Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2005), p. 5. 62. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 100. 63. G (CS), p. 114; SLT (I), 189-90. 64. G (JF), p. 428-29; SLT (II), p. 151-152. 65. It is for similar reasons that Siegfried Kracauer, speaking of photography, says, “A shud der runs through the viewer of old photographs. For they make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment.” Siegfried Kracauer, “Photog raphy,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 56-57. 66. Similarly, in a letter to Suzette Lemaire, Mme. Lemaire’s daughter, which William Carter quotes, Proust tells her that he has “…never written a line (his italics) for pleasure but only to express something that struck my heart or imagination…” William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p.178

Chapter 4 1. Baudelaire, Charles, “Further Notes on Edgar Poe” (1857), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), p. 102. 2. The word génie appears 145 times in the 1954 Pléiade edition of La Recherche from which Brunet worked from (CS - 13 times; JF – 39 times; CG – 38 times; SG – 19 times; LP – 16 times; LF – 10 times , and TR – 10 times). It is most often used in the sense of an aptitude (Françoise’s genius for cooking). But it is also used as an accolade for greatness. Etienne Brunet, Le Vocabulaire de Proust, (Genève, Paris, Slatkine-Champion, 1983), vol.I, p. 673. 3. Especially in the first two volumes, where Marcel fulminates over his lack of genius, it is clear that genius is clearly in his mind when he thinks of his future accomplishments. 4. In this vein, Maurice Schroder, in stating that Proust “created one of the last major state ments of the Romantic faith in art” (p. 238), suggests “the true fate of Icarus”, the Romantic’s mythic counterpart to the artist, “may simply be to grow up.”(p. 246). Maurice Shroder, Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1961). 5. G (CS), pp. 142-43; SLT (I), pp. 243-44. G (CS), p. 147; SLT (I), pp. 251-52. 6. G (TR), pp. 2284-85; SLT (V), pp. 298-99. 7. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 93. 8. Ibid., p. 91. 9. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1972), p. 26. 10. See also Baudelaire’s poem, Le Paradis artificiels (Le Génie enfant) 11. “I lived in a milieu of young people for whom art and poetry were a kind of essential nourishment they could not do without; and even something more besides: a supernatural

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199

nutriment. At that time, we had…the immediate sensation of a sort of cult, a religion of a new kind, was very close to being born, and would give form to the almost mystical state of mind that was then dominant, and that was inspired in us or communicated to us through our very intense feeling of the universal value of the emotions of Art. When one thinks of the youth of that time, of that time more full of spirit than the present, and of the way in which we approached life and the knowledge of life, one sees that all the condi tions of an almost religious training and creation were absolutely brought together. In fact, at that moment there reigned a sort of disenchantment with philosophical theories, a disdain for the promises of science, which had been very badly interpreted by our prede cessors and elders, who were the realistic and naturalistic writers. Religions had bee subjected to the assaults of philological and philosophical criticism. Metaphysics seemed to have been exterminated by Kant’s analysis. Paul Valéry, “Propos sur la poésie,” Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), I: 1381. 12. Jean-Paul Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (University Park, Penn sylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988), pg. 25. 13. See Valéry’s statement, note 10, above. 14. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, p. 12. 15. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1952), Book II: § 47, p. 170. 16. Ibid., II: § 49, p. 176. 17. Ibid., II: § 47, p. 170. Milton Hindus makes a similar remark. “Socrates reaches the conclsion that the poets themselves are often the most ignorant of the meaning of their own works and the very last who ought to be appealed to for an interpretation of them.” Milton Hindus, The Proustian Vision (Carbondale, Illinois, Southern Illinois University Press, 1954), p. 9. 18. “…genius reaches a point at which art must make a halt, as there is a limit imposed upon attained” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, book II, §47, p. 170. 19. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age, p. 19. 20. Ibid., p. 17. 21. This is why Proust is able to say of the artist that he or she pursues through art what is “habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste. Mais ils ne la voient pas, parce qu’ils ne cherchent pas à l’éclaircir.” G (TR), pp. 2284-85 It is [immanent in ordinary men no less than the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it.] SLT (IV), pp. 298-99. 22. Helen Osterman Borowitz, The Impact of Art on French Literature: From de Scudéry to Proust (Newark, Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 19. 23. Maurice Shroder, Icarus, p. 16. 24. G (JF), p. 651; SLT (II), p. 556. 25. The following episodes demonstrate this point: (1) the row over the selection of books for Marcel’s birthday which resulted in his grandmother returning the first set of presents and returning with three of Sand’s novels; (G (CS), p. 40; SLT (I), pp.51-52;); (2) in the give and take over whether or not young Marcel will be able to go hear Berma, upon hearing that M. de Norpois’ endorsement of his going seemed to override all of Marcel’s father’s concerns, he and his mother-in-law exchange words, (G (JF), p. 353; SLT (II),

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200 p.12); and finally, (3) when it is a matter of arranging their first trip to Balbec, Marcel’s father flatly refuses to let his mother-in-law set the itinerary for the trip fully knowing things would turn out wrong. (G (JF), 514; SLT (II), pp. 304-5). 26. G (JF), pp. 455-56; SLT (II), pp. 201-03. 27. G (JF), pp. 353-54; SLT (II), pp. 13-14. 28. Ironically, Vinteuil lived near Combray, but his greatness as an artist was unperceivable to his neighbors. 29. G (CS), pp. 86-87; SLT (I), pp. 1135-36. 30. Bergotte is the only one of the masters of whom we hear anything about the family he or she grew up in. We learn about Bergotte because of comments Marcel makes on speech patterns also used by his brothers and sisters that the writer reproduced in his books. G (JF), p. 440-41; SLT (II), pp. 174-76. 31. In Le Temps retrouvé, Bloch it is noted that Bloch has children but nothing is said of any of them possessing creative talent. G (TR), p. 2228; SLT (VI), p. 192. 32. This young man turns out to be a cousin of M. Verdurin. Albertine was in love with him at one time. He eventually marries Andrée. He has attributes of genius that none of the other young people in this group ever really show. Genius manifests itself in him with an untainted brilliance at a late stage in his life and does so, from the little the reader is told, without any warning or preparation on his part, spontaneously. In this sense, he antici pates Marcel’s sudden evolution, becoming the example for it. G (AD), p. 2060-62; SLT (V), pg. 817-21. 33. G (LP), p. 1667; SLT (V), p. 106. Saint-Loup also uses this expression, G (AD), 1900. In the English edition, the expression is credited a second time to Charlus, (SLT (V), p. 693 34. Sartre, Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, p. 24. 35. Erwin Panofsky’s discussion of the Albrecht Durer self-portrait points out that rather than over-weaning pride, the Christ-like resemblance Durer portrayed draws attention to his sense of being God’s instrument. Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princ eton: Princeton University Press, 8th edition, 1995), p. 43. 36. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 163. 37. There is precedent for this attitude also, as Henry Majewski points out: “It is precisely the lack of individual inner resources that Gautier and Musset both mock in their satiric and parodic portraits of romantic painters and writers in Les Jeunes-France (1833) and the Lettres de Dupuis et Cotenet (1836-37). Henry F. Majewski, Paradigm and Parody: Images of Creativity in French Romanticism – Vigny, Hugo, Balzac, Gautier, Musset (Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1989), p. 8. 38. Léa’s efforts described: G (LP), pp. 1800-01; SLT (V), pp. 349-50; Françoise’s efforts: G (TR), p. 2391; SLT (VI), p. 510. 39. Rachel’s humiliation occurs in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs: G (JF), pp. 618-19; SLT (II), p. 497-98. It is referred again, with the duchess identified as the hostess: G (CG), pp. 916-17; SLT (III), p. 301. G (TR), p. 2360; SLT (VI), p. 449. 40. G (CS), p. 143; SLT (I), p. 243. 41. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1968), p. 165.

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201 42. G (CS), p. 150; SLT (I), pp. 256-57. 43. The piece on the steeples and the fragment of writing he showed Norpois are of insuf ficient quantity to qualify as a body of work. 44. Gilberte and Théodore: G (AD), p. 2126; STL (VI), pp. 4-5. Marcel: G (CS), p. 20; SLT (I), p. 14. 45. G (JF), p. 394-95; SLT (II), p. 90. 46. G (TR), p. 2278; SLT (VI), p. 287 47. G (CS), p. 119; SLT (I). p.199. 48. G (CG), pp. 1180-84; SLT (III), pp. 779-84. 49. G (CS), p. 84; SLT (I), p. 133. 50. It is interesting that while Proust is laying out Marcel’s justification he is very much schooling the reader, too, in an appreciation for these lessons. Readers gather the force of these lessons before Marcel does. We are thus satisfied with Proust’s book when Mar cel comes to understand their meaning for him. 51. G (JF), p. 360; SLT (II), pp.25-26) 52. G (JF), pp. 677-78; SLT (II), pp. 605-06. 53. It was Bergotte who expressed tolerance for Marcel’s particular mental and physical anguish, seeing it rather as confirmation of Marcel’s artistic temperament than anything else, as noted above (G (JF), pp. 452-53; SLT (II), pp. 196-97). 54. G (LP), pp. 1791-97; SLT (V), pp.332-43. 55. Henri Bergson draws attention to this awkward state, but he applied it to merely physical positions of a pendulum. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: As Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, (Time and Free Will was originally published in 1889 in Paris as Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, this edition is an unabridged republication of the 3rd edition of the work originally published in 1913 by George Allen & Co., Ltd., London) trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Dover Publications, 2001), pp.108-110. 56. Milton Hindus, The Proustian Vision. pp. 10-11. 57. “Genius is the talent (natural endowment) which gives the rule to art.” (Kant’s italics) (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement [sic], I,§ 46, p. 168) “For the beautiful must not be estimated according to concepts, but by the final mode in which the imagina tion is attuned so as to accord with the faculty of concepts generally; and so the rule and precept are incapable of serving as the requisite subjective standard for that aethetic and unconditioned finality in fine art which has to make a warranted claim to being bound to please everyone.” (I, § 57, remark 1, p. 212)

Chapter 5 1. (TR), p. 2275; SLT (VI), p. 281. 2. Anthony Pugh, The Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987), pp. 49-50. 3. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1959), vol.. II, p.129 4. The fact of Proust’s illumination was established in the introduction. We will discuss it again and more fully in chapter 7. 5. G (TR), p. 2272; SLT (VI), p. 274. 6. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer

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202 (New York: Zone Books, 1991), pp. 152-53. 7. Proust notes that he was staking an independent position from Bergson in his consideration of involuntary memory. It is not likely, then, that Bergson’s comments on the uti ity of the past to the present would have been considered by Proust in these weeks of late winter and spring, 1909. CSB II, p. 558. 8. Roger Pautre, Marcel Proust et la theorie du modele (Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1986), p. 15. 9. Ibid., p. 17. 10. Paultre says “…comme si leur existence inhérent à la vie s’imposait à chacun de nous comme un problème dont il a à trouver une solution pour son propre compte.” Ibid., p. 117. 11. See Moshe Barasch for a discussion of empathy in art. Moshe Barasch, Theories of Art, 3: From Impressionism to Kandinsky (New York: Routledge, 2000): chapter 11. The concepts of la patrie intérieure [homeland] and le chant [song-to-be-sung] appear as follows: G (LP), p. 1796; SLT (V), p. 342. 12. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 92. Among the writers Schaeffer focuses on, beside Kant and Heidegger, are Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 13. G (JF), p. 367; SLT (II), p. 39. 14. See “The Judgment of Taste and Finality without Representation of a Specific End.” Jean Marie Schaeffer, Art of the Modern Age: 19-31. 15. “According to classical rhetoric since Quintilian, ingenium signifies innate ability that cannot be learned. It is usually defined in opposition to the term ars, meaning a skill, com petence, or art learned through rule and imitation.” Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 213. Elsewhere (p. 246) Koerner notes the etymological link between genitals, genius, and ingenium. 16. Alan S. Brown, The Déjà Vu Experience (New York: Psychology Press, 2004), p. 4. 17. Ibid., p. 25. 18. Adam Zeman, Consciousness: A User’s Guide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 4. 19. Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson and Johns Mullarkey (New York; Continuum, 2002), from Mind-Energy pp. 153-55. (Mind-Energy was originally published as L’énergie spirituelle in 1920 by F. Alcan, Paris.), pp. 153-54. 20. Ibid., p. 154. 21. Ibid., pp. 153-55. 22. Alan S. Brown, The Déjà Vu Experience, pp. 47-48. 23. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 50. Zaehner further states in his introduction that states of natural mystical experience “…may occur to anyone, whatever his religious faith, or lack of it and whatever moral, immoral, or amoral life he may be leading at the time.” Ibid., p. xv 24. Ibid., p. 199. 25. Ibid., p. 59.

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203 26. The predicability of these kinds of psychic events allows some people to convince themselves that a written account of involuntary memory can be faked, as if one could write of making love to someone from reading books about it for regardless of the predi catability of the stages love-making goes through it is only the nuances a lover can bring to light in writing about his or her own experience it that makes love making come across as real in print. 27. “Or, l’effort d’Elstir de ne pas exposer les choses telles qu’il savait qu’elles étaient, mais selon ces illusions optiques don’t notre vision première est faite, l’avait précisément amené à mettre en lumière certaines de ces lois de perspective, plus frappantes alors, car l’art était le premier à les dévoiler.” G (JF), p. 659 [Now the effort made by Elstir to reproduce things not as he knew them to be but according to the optical illusions of which our first sight of them is composed, had led him exactly to this point; he gave special emphasis to certain of these laws of perspective, which were thus all the more striking, since art had been the first to disclose them.] SLT (II), p. 570. 28. The example Proust gives us is of one’s losing track of time while reading. G (CS), p.77; SLT (I), p. 120. 29. G (TR), p. 2272; SLT (VI), p. 275. 30. G (CS), pp. 44-45; SLT (I), p. 60. 31. Théodule Ribot, La psychologie des sentiments (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896), p. 161. 32. This is what Bergson noted when he referred to false recognition as the “most harmless form of inattention to life. Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy, in Key Writings, p. 155. 33. Marcel comments on the distinction between talking and writing in comments based on the baron de Charlus’ consummate conversational skills. He finds no relationship between the two. G (LP), p. 1759; SLT (V), p. 292. 34. G (TR), pp. 2284-85; SLT (VI), p. 298. 35. For a discussion of the significance to the artist of maintaining a child’s receptivity to sen sation see Charles Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life, (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1995), p. 8. 36. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cam bridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 319 (J50, 6). 37. G (CS), p. 129; SLT (I), p. 219. 38. G (SG), pp. 1437-38; SLT (IV), p. 411. 39. Berma dies, too. But as an actress, her acting died with her person. Only her reputation lived on. 40. This incident of picking up Sand’s book randomly and happenstantially is one which just as easily might not have occurred—and Proust expresses again what he has demonstrated over and over in A la Recherche: his belief in the changes initiated in our lives by even the most slight of casual influences—if, for example, Swann had not mentioned Balbec and its almost Persian church, as Marcel suggests in Le Temps retrouvé, his whole life might have proceeded differently, He says, “Si Swann ne m’avait pas parlé de Balbec, je n’aurais pas connu Albertine, la salle à manager de l’hôtel, les uerman tes.” G (TR), p. 2300. [If Swann had not talked of Balbec, I should not have known Alber tine, the dining room of the hotel, the Guermantes]. SLT (VI), p. 330. 41. G (TR), p. 2278; SLT (VI), 287.

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204 42. Using Marcel’s comment: “Car si dans ces périodes de vingt ans…” G(TR), p. 2359 If in a period of twenty years, like this that had elapsed since my first entry into society…] SLT (VI), p.: 446 and assuming that he was in his early twenties at the time of this entry, then the time period covered could be, approximately, forty years. 43. “All these mistakes, if not overcome, prevent one from becoming a creative person.” William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p.565 44. G (TR), p. 2146; SLT (VI), p. 38. 45. G (TR), p. 2275; SLT (VI), p. 282. 46. Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 38. Bowie quotes Freud’s ‘Instinct and Their Vicissitudes’ (1915) XIV:124-5.

Chapter 6 1. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1959), vol. II, p. 188. 2. The book carries a publication date of 14 November 1913. Grasset had agreed to publish the book when Proust offered to cover the cost of publication himself. For a discussion of the contract see Painter. Ibid. p. 191. 3. Ibid., p. 204. Gide’s remark, as cited by Painter, was “The refusal of this book will always be the gravest mistake the NRF ever made—and (for I have the shame of being largely responsible for it) one of the most stinging regrets, nay, remorses, of my whole life.” 4. Auguste Anglès offers something of a defense for the rejection the Revue handed Proust. Anglès points out that the Nouvelle Revue Française was experiencing growing pains at the time. The group had recently moved, costs were mounting, and the nature and extent of operations were on the minds of the principle participants including, along with Gide, Gaston Gallimard, J. G. Tronche, Jean Schlumberger, André Ruyters, Jacques Copeau, Jacques Rivière, and Henri Ghéon, and others. Auguste Anglès, André Gide et le premier groupe de La Nouvelle Revue Française: L’âge critique 1911-1912 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), pp. 385-390. 5. William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 557-61. He notes a wide-ranging group of incisive reviews that, on balance, make clear the book’s critical reception was lauded with superlatives. 6. Van Meter Ames, André Gide (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions Books, 1947), p. 23. 7. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, II. p. 186. 8. It is interesting to note that at the time of Proust’s submission the novel as a genre had been generating a good deal of discussion at the NRF and “successful post-symbolist novelists (Barrès, Bourget, Loti, Anatole France), and the neo-naturalists all seemed to Gide’s friends outmoded and tedious” Germaine Brée, Gide (New Brunswick New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963), p. 207. 9. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, II, p. 188. 10. Ibid., II. pg. 204 11. It is interesting to note that in the passage concerning the response to the publication of Du côté de chez Swann cited in William Carter’s biography both Reynaldo Hahn and Lucien Daudet, close friends of Proust who had been supporters of his writing for a

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205 number of years, responded to the book as if the startling pleasure with which they recognized its greatness had taken them by surprise. This supports the thesis of a sud denly engaged artfulness in Proust’s work because neither had ever spoken about his writing in quite this way before. William Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, pp. 555-61. 12. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, trans. Euan Cameron (New York, Viking, 2000), p. 611. 13. Ibid., p. 611. 14. The 19th century work of Jacob Burckhardt (The Civilization of the Renaissance), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Theory of Colours), Walter Pater (The Renaissance) and John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice; The Seven Lamps of Architecture, among other titles); the 18th century work Johann Joachim Winckelman (Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art) and Denis Diderot (Le Salon de 1765, Le Salon de 1767) are examples of texts still in print, often in multiple editions, that attest to their continuing importance to this field. 15. According to George Painter, this manifesto is virtually the same document printed in Le Temps, on 12 November, 1913. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II, p. 200. 16. It is not until La Prisonnière that readers learn the principle character’s name when he ess entially forces himself to reveal it in quoting Albertine’s terms of endearment for him. G (LP), p. 1658; SLT (V), p. 91. 17. See comments apropos genius and self by Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1966), vol. I, bk. 3, § 36, p. 185 (this is a republication, with minor corrections, of the work published in 1958 by The Falcon’s Wing Press, Indian Hills, Colorado). 18. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II. p. 186 19. Proust offers a variation on this theme in the meaningfulness Swann gives to the little phrase in Vinteuil’s Sonata. Swann’s loneliness is relieved by the essential communication he feels held out to him by the phrase. It is a means by which the pain from the impos sibility of his ever being able to reach Odette in like manner is lessened. But in contrast to what Marcel gains from listening to Vinteuil’s Septet, which comes to him from Vinteuil, what Swann gains from hearing the phrase is but the dividend of all that he has invested in it. 20. Proust’s handling of this material also set him apart from writers like Loti and Bourget. See Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1956), p. 299. 21. G (SG), pp. 1327-28; SLT (IV), pp. 211-12. 22. Etienne Brunet’s analysis of word use in La Recherche notes 145 appearances of génie in the text (see note 2, chapter 4). 23. In his biography of William James, Robert D. Richardson notes this same self-questioning in his subject. See Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006), chapter 12. 24. G (CS), pp. 197-98; SLT (I), pp. 341-42. 25. Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 14-16. 26. R. C. Zaehner, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Praeternatural Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 59.

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206 27. Théodule Ribot, La psychologie des sentiments (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896), chapter 11. 28. Proust’s asthma is a obvious example in the present discussion of this lower body tyranny over the spirit. 29. This passage on viewing the hawthorns and Marcle’s sense that something was trying to be said to him, and the way he approached attempting to receive their message, anticipated, almost exactly, the technique he would use elsewhere to release essential communication from a container of it. G (CS), pp. 116-118; SLT (I), pp. 195-97. 30. Jean-Yves Tadié in his biography of Proust notes this incident and comments rather matter-of-factly that it re-appears in the novel in the scene with the hawthorns. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, p. 188. William Carter gives a fuller rendering of Hahn’s account. William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, pp. 173-74. George Painter explained in his biography that these flowers which had also grown in the Pré Catalan garden of Proust’s uncle, Jules Amiot, would have been a continual part of Proust’s con scious memory, so that, perhaps, there was something subsidiary, or ancillary, to the roses that arrested him that evening. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. I, pp. 170-71. 31. G (CG), p. 866; SLT (III), pp. 207-08. 32. Anthony Pugh also finds reference to the paving stone recalling Venice. Anthony Pugh, The Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987), Pp. 31-32; 49-50. 33. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust, p. 609. “ ‘How did “little Marcel” become a genius?’ Jean Guitton asked her [Celeste Albaret]. ‘Little Marcel always knew he would become the great Proust,’ she replied.” 34. Ibid., p. 398. Tadié quotes Proust here. 35. G (CG), pp.999-1000; SLT (III), pp. 444-45. 36. G (LP), p. 1741; SLT (V), pp. 240-41. 37. G (CS), p. 41; SLT (I), p. 241. 38. Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past (Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1963), p. 13.

Chapter 7 1. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 216. 2. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1959), vol. II, p.127. 3. CBS, pp. 269-270. 4. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, II. p. 126. 5. ibid., p. 268. 6. Anthony Pugh, The Birth of À la recherche du temps perdu (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987), pp. 31-38. 7. CSB, chapter 16 “The Return to the Present,” pp. 265-76. This passage reveals his thinking on the problematics of his situation, vis-à-vis what he was trying to achieve, better than do his letters over the same period. 8. Ibid., p. 265. 9. George Painter, in his biography of Proust, dated the various manuscript-fragments that Fallois gathered into Contre Sainte-Beuve. Painter dated the “Prologue,” in which Proust

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207 writes of the involuntary memory induced by his taking tea and toast, to January, 1909. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II, p. 129. 10. See the story “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” in The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights. 11. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II. p. 129. 12. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, pp. 216-17. 13. G (CS), p. 289; SLT (I), p. 513. 14. Personal communication from Mr. Barry Hayden. 15. The fifth postulate states: “That, if a straight line falling on two straight lines makes the interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, the two straight lines, if pro duced indefinitely, meet on that side on which are the angles less than the two right angles.” 16. Linda Dalrymple Henderson gives a broad historical and scientific overview of these alternative geometries and their impact on art including this comment on the parallel postulate in her introduction. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and non Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 3-4. 17. Ibid., p. 6. 18. Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky and János Boylai, working independently of each other share the honor of discovering non-Euclidean geometry. Linda Dalrymple Hender son, The Fourth Dimension, p. 4-5. A full discussion of the impact of non-Euclidean geometry and the fourth dimension on art, particularly painting, can be found Henderson’s introduction. 19. Ibid., p. 5. 20. Ibid., p. 7. Cayley presented these principles in his “Memoirs on Abstract Geometry,” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the (British) Royal Society. 21. Ibid. p. 7. 22. Ibid. pp. 31-32. Henderson notes that Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the moving force behind Theosophy, found no place for the fourth dimension in her doctrine. 23. Charles Howard Hinton, The Fourth Dimension (New York: John Lane, 1904). 24. Ibid., p. 3. 25. Ibid., p. 39. 26. John Adkins Richardson, Modern Art & Scientific Thought (Urbana, Illinois: University of Ill inois Press, 1971), p. 106. 27. d’Alembert states in this entry: “I know a man of intelligence (homme d’esprit) who be lieves that one is able to regard duration as a fourth dimension and that what is made in time is also a product of the fourth dimension; this idea is perhaps contestable but it has to my mind some merit …” Denis Diderot, Encyclopédie, ou Dictionaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de letters/mis en order et publié par M. Diderot…& quant à la partie mathématique, par M. D’Alembert (Lucques: V. Giuntini, 1758-1771). 28. This passage appeared in Kant’s “On the First Grounds of the Distinction of Regions of Space” (1769). Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, pp. 17-18. 29. Along with its scientific meanings the fourth dimension is defined secondarily in Web-

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208 ster’s Third International Dictionary, as “something outside the range of ordinary experience,” which approximates what it meant almost three hundred and fifty years ago. Webster’s Third International Dictionary (Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster Inc., 1993). 30. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, p. 2. 31. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. xxiii. 32. Ibid., p. xix. 33. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, p. 100-4. 34. Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), p. 80. 35. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press. 1956), p. 299. 36. See chapter 6, p. 220. 37. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension, p. XX. 38. Cubist painting, long associated with the fourth dimension, as a critical achievement was in fact distinct from what was actually occurring in physics at the time. Albert Ein stein made this clear in a comment quoted in Meyer Schapiro, The Unity of Picasso’s, Art, p. 50. 39. G (TR), p. 2303; SLT (VI), p 335. 40. See pg. 150. 41. Arthur I Miller, Einstein, Picasso, p. 249. 42. See Miller’s discussion of illumination. Arthur I. Miller, Einstein, Picasso, pp. 249-52. 43. G (TR), p. 2275; SLT (VI), p. 281. 44. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, trans. Euan Cameron (New York, Viking, 2000), pp. 521-22. Proust was proposing that the fictional part of his book be serialized and then published, with the addition of his critical commentary, in a single volume. 45. bid., p. 521 46. Lauris never answered Proust’s question. William S. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 490. 47. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II, p. 146. 48. Claudine Quémar, “Autour de trois “avant-textes” de l’ouverture’de Le Recherche: nouvelles approches des problmes du Contre Saint-Beuve,” Bulletin d’Informations Proustiennes, vol.3, 1976, pp. 7-22. Looking at Cahier 8, in the Bibliotèque Nationale, in Paris, a viewer is struck by the orderly and neat first page of this notebook. It looks as hopeful and fresh as a conscientious beginning could be expected to look, before gradually reverting to Proust’s usual scrawl and hatchings and balloon inclusions that express him at work. 49. George Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, vol. II, p. 123. 50. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, p. 474. 51. Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, p. 522.

Epilogue 1. Kenneth Goldsmith, I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews 1962-87 (New York: Carroll and Graf, Publishers, 2004), p. 190. 2. Charles G. Salas, “Introduction: The Essential Myth?,” in The Life and the Work: Art and Biography, ed. Charles G. Salas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007).

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209 3. Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) p. 121. 4. See chapter 4

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212 Brown, Alan S. The Déjà Vu Experience. New York: Psychology Press, 2004. Brunet, Etienne. Le Vocabulaire de Proust. Genève: Slatkine-Champion, 1983. Carter, William S. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Charle, Christophe. A Social History of France in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Mir iam Kochan. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994. Chateaubriand, François-René de. Mémoires d’outre tombe. Paris: Quar to Gal limard, 1997 ———. The Memoirs of Chateaubriand trans. with introduction Robert Baldrich. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1961. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from the History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Colley, Anne. Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Inc., 1998. Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineeenth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: October Book, MIT Press, 1996. Danto, Arthur. The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles. Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard. New York: George Bra ziller, Inc., 972. Descombes, Vincent. Proust, Philosophy of the Novel, trans. Catherine Chance Macksey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Dictionaire de biographie Française, ed. M. Prevost et Roman D’Amat. Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Anê, 1959. Doane, Mary Ann. The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, and the Archive. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Epstein, Mark. “Meditation as Art/Art as Meditation,” in Learning Mind: Experi ence into Art, ed. Mary Jane Jacobs and Jacquelyn Bass. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Evans, Rand B. “Introduction: The Historical Context” in William James’ The Principles of Psychology, gen. ed. Frederick H. Burkhardt, text. Ed. Fredson Bowers, and ass. ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard Univer sity Press, 1981. Finn, Michael. Proust, the Body and Literary Form, Cambridge Studies in French, no. 59. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Fortescue, William. The Third Republic in France, 1870-1940: Conflicts and Contin uities. London: Routledge, 2000.

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213 Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey, intro duction by Gregory Zilboorg, biographical introduction by Peter Gay. New York: W. W.Norton & Company, 1961. ———. Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Starchy, intro. Louis Menand, biographical afterward Peter Gray. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972. Goldsmith, Kenneth. I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews 1962 87. New York: Carroll and Graf, Publishers, 2004. Healy, Seán Desmond. Boredom, Self and Culture. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1984. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1996. Hélias, Pierre-Jakez.The Horse of Pride: Life in a Breton Village, trans. and abridged by June Guicharaud. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Henderson, Linda Dalrymple. The Fourth Dimension and non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. Hindus, Milton. The Proustian Vision. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Uni versity Press, 1954. Hinton, Charles Howard. The Fourth Dimension. New York: John Lane, 1904. Honour, Hugh. Romanticism. New York: Westview Press, 1979. Husserl, Edmund. Ideas: General Introduction to Phenomenology trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York, Collier Books, 1962. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1890, idem New York: Dover Publications, 1950. ———. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature Longmans, Green & Co., 1902, idem New York: Penguin Books USA, Inc., 1982. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Clar endon Press of Oxford University Press, 1952. Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Kolb, Philip. Le Carnet de 1908. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995 Kristeva, Julia Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Landy, Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lehrer, Jonah. Proust was a Neuroscientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007.

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214 Majewski, Henry F. Paradigm and Parody: Images of Creativity in French Roman ticism. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1989 Maurois, André. Proust, a Biography, trans. Gerard Hopkins. New York: Meridian Books, 1958. McPhee, Peter. A Social History of France: 1789-1914, 2nd ed. London: Palgrave Macillan, 2004. Miller, Arthur I. Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Moss, Howard. The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust: A Critical Study of Remembrance of Things Past. Boston: Nonpareil Books, 1963. Myers, Gerald E. “Introduction: The Intellectual Context,” in William James, The Principles of Psychology, eds. Frederich H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981 Onians, John. Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Painter, George. Marcel Proust: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1959. Panofsky, Erwin. The Life and Art of Albrect Dürer. Princeton: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1943; edition cited,1995. Pautre, Roger. Marcel Proust et la théorie du modele. Paris: Librairie A.-G. Nizet, 1986. Poulet, Georges Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1956. Pred, Ralph. Onflow: Dynamics of Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Proust, Marcel. The Maxims of Marcel Proust, trans. and ed. Justin O’Brien. New York: Columbia University Press, 1948. Pugh, Anthony. The Birth of A la recherche du temps perdu. Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, Publishers, Inc., 1987. ———. The Growth of A la recherche du Temps perdu: A Chronological Examina tion of Proust’s Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Quémar, Claudine. “Autour de trois “avant-textes” de l’ouverture de La Recherche: nouvelles approches des problmes du Contre Sainte-Beuve,” Bulletin d’Informations Proustiennes, vol. 3, 1976. Ribot, Théodule. La psychologie des sentiments. Paris: F. Alcan, 1896. Richardson, John Adkins. Modern Art & Scientific Thought. Urbana, Illinois: Uni versity of Illinois Press, 1971. Richardson, Robert D. William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006.

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215 Salas, Charles G. “Introduction: The Essential Myth?” in The Life and the Work: Art and Biography, ed. Charles G. Salas. Los Angeles: Getty Research Insti tute, 2007. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art fromKant to Hei degger, trans. Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Schapiro, Meyer. The Unity in Picasso’s Art. New York: George Braziller, Inc., 2000. Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Serres, Michel. “Mathematics & Philosophy: What Thales Saw…,” in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Joshué V. Harari and David F. Bell. Balti more: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Shroder, Maurice. Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1961. Shanahan, Daniel. Toward a Genealogy of Individualism. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Modern Life,” in On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings, ed. Donald N. Levine. Chicago: University of Chi cago Press, 1971. Tadié, Jean-Yves. Marcel Proust: A Life, trans. Euan Cameron. New York, Viking, 2000. Yan Wenming and Wang Youping. “Early Humans in China,” in The Formation of Chinese Civilization: An Archaeological Perspective, ed. Sarah Allan. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. Zaehner, R. C. Mysticism, Sacred and Profane: An Inquiry into Some Varieties of Prae ternatural Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957 Zeman, Adam. Consciousness: A User’s Guide. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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Index A

Abbott, Edwin, A., 176 Abstract Expressionism, 185 accessible memory. See memory, referable acuity, perceptive, 9, 31, 32, 106 affective memory. See memory, referable aging, as Time in the body, 25. See also becoming; time, physiognomic objectification of Albaret, Céleste, 107 alienation, xi, 42, 64; 149 born of sexual repression, 107, 114; psychological discontinuity associated with, 36 allegory, reading of Proust’s novel as, birth of the modern citizen, xiii, 70, 134 Ames, Van Meter, André Gide, 135n6 Anglès, Auguste, 135n4 anomie, xi, 71; Marcel’s inability to write a function of, 107 apprenticeships, creative, phenomenological, semiotic, 109 aristocracy, 50 Marcel’s fascination with, 35, 54, 138 Marcel moves among, 31 Proust’s fascination with, 7, 135 Aristotle, 174 art, artist as viewer of, 32 as conveyor of truth of experience, 4, 5, 17, 32 as form of essential communication, 4, 17, 23, 55, 72, 91, 94, 119, 130, 153 as impulse to expression, 134 as multi-partite project, 87 as object, in arc communication, 17-18, 32 as set apart, in terms of production and use, 87 as supernatural nutriment, 93 comes from life, as originating in world, 91, 128, equation for making, offered in Contre Sainte-Beuve, 167-73 experiential ground for origin of, in self of artist, 62 function of, 87 great, only art of interest to Proust, 1, 31

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great, transcends craft, 31 grounded in nature of human experiencing, 72 Marcel’s comments on Vinteuil’s septet as analysis of, 33 Marcel’s lesson in, from Proust’s four great masters, 97, 107-10 necessity as factor in making, 170 origin of, in artist, quasi-ontic, 91, 118 production of, mechanical means, 31, 188 reason for being called “quasi-ontic,” 103, 127 qualities in artist that define, 31 reception of, by public, 6, 88, 166 romantic faith in, 89 source of, in self of artist, xii, 4, 55, 88, 166. See also Romantic precept on the origin of art in self of artist Swann’s appreciation of, 88 technique-based, not of interest, 4 thought on, 87, 88 transformative power of, 89 ultimate origin of, in world, 91 what is, question posed, 93, 120 with capital “A,” in Schaeffer’s speculative theory of Art, 95 artist(s), altered states of consciousness experienced by, 124 anxiety in creative consciousness of, 95 art-making defining characteristic of, 4 as ideal type, emergence of, 95 as instrument of their genius, 101 as isolates, 34 as trumpet of God, 94, 101, 185 authenticity of impulse in, 72 cannot pass talent to their children, 34 contrast established between masters and aspiring, 31, 100 create new language through their work, 176 distanced from work through irony and detachment, 187 and experience of everyday life, 32, 62, 72, 120, 149, 165 hampered by class concepts of duty, 98, 99. See also bourgeois, bourgeoisie impact of modernity on, 62 importance of perceptive acuity to, 31

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218 lack of struggle in masters, 101 Marcel as, allied with masters, 34 migration to urban centers, 70-71 Morel, Charles, as, 31 no one born an, 31 originator of communication in arc communication, 17 pain associated with being an, 187 paradigm of modern citizen, 70 parental model, lack of in, 99-100 preempt new ideas for own use, 176 relation to self, 90 romantic image of, 97, 149 source and potential of art in, 119 struggle, for incipient or aspiring, Rachel’s example of failure in performance, 31, 100-03 support gained from living in community of, 99 technique alone in, insufficient, 31, 44 uniqueness of, 55, 94 use of time by, 96, 149 would-be, Marcel set apart from, 9-10 asthma, nervous origins of, 73 Proust’s father wrote on, 73-74 suffered by Proust, 73 Augustine, Saint, Confessions of, 9 aura, intentionality broadcast through, 27, 28, 29 authenticity, 27, 92, 149

B

bal des têtes, 2 defined, 26 Balzac, Henri de, works cited (with characters): Chef d’œuvre inconnu, Frenhofer, 9, 147, 163 Illusions perdues, Lucien de Rubempré (Chardon), 8, 71 Louis Lambert, Louis Lambert, 9 Barasch, Moshe, 119n11 Bardèche, Maurice, 14 Barrès, Maurice, 136n8 Barthes, Roland, 187 Le Degré zéro, 8n16 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 129, 178 The Painter of Modern Life, 88, 92, 129n15 Beard, George, 73 beauty, the beautiful, as subjective quality, 57 becoming, as creative development of artist, 97 as growth and decline (aging), 19, 24, 25, 27, 118, 139, 145

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as progression of a song, 81 contrast between, and being, 27 directionality of, 29 equates with Platonic Ideal, 27 equates with the present, 142 outside of time quality of, provides no ground for experiencing, 28 past, as ontological time, 24. See also time, ontological physical presence as manifestation of, 27 self, as repository of one’s, 27, 29 Beethoven, Ludwig van, and genius, 120, 148 behaviorism, 74 being, beingness, connection between image in mind and, of other, 23 as outside of time impulse, 27, 63 atemporality of, 115 essential quality of, 23, 55. See also intentionality essential quality of, communicated through art, 31 feeling of oneness-in-, 122. See also memory, involuntary insulated from vicissitudes of time, 28 sense of freedom-in-, 132 part of ontic progression, with self, identity, 27, 62-63, 106 Benjamin, Walter, works cited: Arcades Project, 73n19, 129 Origin of German Tragic Drama, 104 Bergson, Henri, 50n23, 91 as philosopher of time, 76 attention and inattention in reference to use-value, 42 concept of succession, 81-82 concept of utility and use-value, 38, 41-42, 122 Creative Evolution, 38 faux connaissance as life-denying, 122, 126. See also memory, involuntary Matter and Memory, 117, 143 Mind-Energy, 42 negative attitude toward sensuous past and anomalous sensory events, 41-42, 50n23 remembering in consciousness creates duration, 81-82 Time and Free Will, 81-82, 83, 84 Berlin Wall, xi Bernhardt, Sarah, 147-148 Bibesco, Princes Antoine and Emmanuel, 136, 139

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219 bildungsroman, 8, 44, 149 Blavatsky, Mme Helena, 173 body-as-barrier, 36 body/spirit duality, 152 Bolyai, János, 173 Borowitz, Helen Osterman, 95n22 bourgeois, bourgeoisie, 50, 53, 98, 99 Bourget, Paul, 136n8, 177 Bowie, Malcolm, 134n46 Braque, Georges, 176 Braudel, Fernand, 67n5 Brée, Germaine, Gide, 136n8 Marcel Proust and the Deliverance from Time, 12, 116 Brown, Alan, 10n23, 74nn29-30, n35, 75n35, 121, 123, 124 Brunet, Etienne, 9n8, 88n2 Burckhardt, Jakob, 138

C

Carter, William, 13-14, 85n66, 132n43, 135n5, 136n11, 181 causality, 48-49, 52-53 Cayley, Arthur, 173 chance, 64, 131, 141, 179, 187 authenticity of, 92 chant, le. See song-to-be-sung Charcot, Jean-Martin, 73 Charle, Christophe, 70, 71 Chateaubriand, François René de, René, in René, Mémoires d’outre tombe, 178, 187 model for young in Romantic era, xi Chesterton, C. K., 122 cinema, 76, 82, 84 cinematic time. See time, cinematic cinematic view of life, citizen, modern, xi, xii, xiii, 67, 69 different from premodern counterpart, 70 traits, defined by, 66, 70 Clark, T. J., xi-xii clock(s), 23, 75-76, 83 prevalence of, in nineteenth century, 75 punch, 75 Cocteau, Jean, 136 Colley, Anne, 64-65, 177 coming-to-knowing, 13, 29, 45, 103. See also enlightenment, spiritual state of art contingent on an interior, for Marcel, 103, 131 chance as catalyst for, 130-31

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Proust able to write narrative of, through own experience, 182 Comœdia, 176 communication, arc, 17-19, 20, 32 internal , art-making form of, 18 involuntary memory, form of, 119 bridge, 17 of intentionality, through form, 88 Conrad, Peter, 176n34 conscious memory. See memory, referable consciousness, 41, 43, 74, 79 and duration, 81-82 as discreet states of awareness, as state of observation, 43, 125 as stream, 73 creative, artist works from, 32, 92, 95, 109 Descartes, Hume imagined, as composed of discreet states, 73 life affirming activity of, 42 nervous system dominated by brain gave rise to, 37 of past, 38 operations of, Proust’s intuitive understanding of, xii relationship between, and unconscious, 114 presupposes individuality, 79 states of, preliminary to metacognitive events, 127. See metacognition truths of experience brought to, expressed in artist’s work, 31 consciousness, self-, 27, 28, 187 and second-order emotions, 52 capacity for experiencing and the antecedents of, 37 chance recognized as factor, in 52 represents evolutionary advance, 37, 40, 52 alienation problem of, 36 doubt a manifestation of, 36, 37 reference what we see to self in, 52 requires assurances against doubt, 37 self active element in human, 5. See also self source of material/ideal dualism, 36 continuity, psychological. See duration, psychological Contre Sainte-Beuve: souvenir d’une matinée, early working title for La Recherche, 180 Copeau, Jacques, 135n4, 136 Cormenin, Louise de, 71n17 Crary, Jonathan, 77 creativity, as function of the self, 131 Cubism, 175, 176

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220 D

d’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 174 Danto, Arthur, 186n3 Daudet, Léon, Le Prince des cravates, 72 declarative memory. See memory, referable déjà vu(s), 42, 36, 178. See also resonance; metacognition experiences of contribute to sense of difference felt by Proust and Marcel, 151 have communicative value, 124 one of many anomalous psychic events, 121 excited by sensory congruency, 40, 114, 178 has no clearly identifiable cause, 121, 123 potential for all sensory unconscious to be roused, 117 precursory event to involuntary memory, 115 relationship to involuntary memory, dependent on intellect, 126 takes one briefly outside of time, 126 déjà vu, Marcel’s experience of, 11, 28, 35, 56, 83, 85, 90, 92, 93, 115, 122, 125, 141, 146 and of resonance are of no immediate practical use, 98 his fascination upends otherwise well- ordered life, 54 knowingly written, 149 shapes his sensibility, 36 déjà vu, Proust’s experiences of, eliciting agent: paving stone, Venice, 14 tea and toast, 116 Proust’s descriptions of, accurate, 124 Proust’s public reticence in talking about, 151 Deleuze, Gilles, 92n9 Derrida, Jacques, 187 Descartes, René, 73, 83, 84 Descombes, Vincent, 45 desire, 56 heterosexual, exemplified by Swann, 58 homosexual, 55-59 destination reached. See End, concept of development, creative, xii, 8, 36 importance of déjà vu and involuntary memory to Marcel’s, 92 importance of imagination to Marcel’s, 124 Marcel’s, 2, 8, 10, 31, 34, 85, 92, 97-107, 110, 149, 154, 155 Proust’s, 5, 8, 138, 154

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Proust dealt with lopsidedly, marginalized practice, 4, 31 Proust related Marcel’s, to his own experience, 89 development, Marcel’s non-creative, 134 development, psychological, 113 Dickens, Charles, A Christmas Carol, Scrooge, 161 Diderot, Denis, Encyclopédie, 174 Salons, 95, 138n14 dimension of Time. See Time, dimension of directionality, concept of, 29, 36 Proust’s search for, 6 discontinuity, psychological, 36, 42, 64, 77, 144. See also alienation; problem-of-self distance, 43, 49 comparison of narrative and metaphysical, 46 concept of, 29, 36, 42 directionality of, not retraceable, 45 dream of childhood, 129 measure of space and time between points, 43 measured from point of view of observer,43 metaphysical, 44, 45 narrative, 43, 44-45 static versus dynamic, 43, 44 Doane, Mary Ann, 75nn36-37, 82 doubt, 28, 36-37, 52, 149, 183 Dreyfus affair, 58 Duchamp, Marcel, 176 duration, physical, 28, 36 and psychological duration, different, 143, 145 linked through the dimension of Time, 145 duration, psychological, 23, 24, 27, 64, 77, 83, 91, 139, 141, 142, 144, 159, 163, 164, 171, 177, 178-79, 182 and belief life is anchored in meaning and purposefulness, 118 as construct of consciousness, 143 as succession, 84 involuntary memory and, 116, 118 loss of, 69 God and, 82-83 ground for, in intersection of time, memory, experiencing and the self, 162 hegemonic past and, 62 intellectually postulated, 28

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221 Marcel’s well-being dependent on a sense of, 5 referable memory and, 41, 81-82 relationship to problem-of-self, 35, 61 relationship of sensory unconscious to, 7, 28, 42, 68, 140, 141, 145, 158-9 search for self equates with search for, 142 self guarantor of, 117 Dürer, Albrecht, 120, 148, 156-57

E

education, as enabler of declarative identity, 66, 69, 70-71 public, extended to girls, 71 Einstein, Albert, 163, 164, 174, 175, 176, 177 and genius, 147, 148 and perseverance, 161 emotions, second-order, 52 empiricism, 91 influence of in science, xii, 74 as measuring, 46 in contrast to intuitive insight, 47, 50 empowerment, creative, xii and allegory of the modern citizen, xiii Marcel’s, 2, 8, 32 Proust’s, 2, 3, 8, 12 union with self fulfills, 28 end, concept of, 6, 36 as destination reached, 29 as key to understanding prior actions, 53 imagined, versus actual, 52-53 invested with gravity of moral judgments, 53 enlightenment, spiritual state of, 45, 98, 155, 161 importance of, in novel, 34 Marcel achieves without aid of a master, 32 way to, 127 Enlightenment, era of, xi, 71 ennui, xi, 77 comments on, by Gustave Flaubert, 72-73 Ensor, James, 26 Epstein, Mark, 3n9 essence, 23, 49, 120 defined, 27 duality of substance and, 152 elusive quality of, 104 intentionality broadcast through, 51, 88 of being, 50 question of, in art, 95 Eucharist, 104 Euclid, 173 geometry of, 173, 174, 175

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experience(s), as agent, 91 as puzzle, 28 authenticates declarative identity, 69. See also, identity, declarative confidence to evaluate one’s, achievement of individualism, 71. See also, individualism conscious. See also consciousness conscious plus unconscious, 6 humans draw meaning from, 91, 104 life, influence of, 31-32, 72 lost, 139 mystical, See also déjà vu; metacognition; metacognitive events; memory, involuntary nature of, problematic for Marcel, 32 origin of art grounded in artist’s, 72, 91, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108 past. See, memory, referable; unconscious, sensory psychically anomalous, 10. See also déjà vu; metacognition; metacognitive events; memory, involuntary relationship of sensibility to, 36, 107 relationship of, to self and time, 140 restricted use of term, 27 self dependent on, to thrive, 108. See also self sensory or sensuous, 40, 171 stories one knows define, 53. See also stories unconscious, register as gaps in referable memory, 82 truths of, communicated through artist’s work, 31 experiencing, xii, 76, 139, 146 action, 40 and the past, 32 antecedents in lower organisms, 37 defined, 27 heightened levels of, in artists, 87 nature of human, 72, 140 provides psychological continuity, 42 referable memory does not encompass all, 82 relationship of, to psychological duration, 144 religious, four characteristics, 74. See also enlightenment; inspiration sensory (or sensuous), 40, 42, 91, 105, 145 total, 39, 40, 91, 117, 139, 140, 146 layered through consciousness and the unconscious, 82

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222

F

transformative, 50, 84, 124, 157. See also, enlightenment; inspiration truths of, revelation of, 32, 89

failure, Marcel’s sense of, 84, 90, 107 Proust’s sense of, 148-49, 164, 168, 170 Fallois, Bérnard de, 1 fancy. See imagination faux connaissance. See memory, involuntary Ferry, Jules, 71n14 fiction, philosophical. See novel, philosophical Figaro, Le, 135 film. See cinema finality, concept of, as expressed through art, 120 Finn, Michael, 73-74 Flaubert, Gustave, 9n17, 72-73, 77 focal actualities. See memory, contents of Fortescue, William, 71n14 Foucault, Michel, 185 fourth dimension, 3, 6, 19 and art, 175, 177 aesthetics of, 176 and astral plane of theosophy, 176 as an additional dimension of space, 173, 174-75 as catalytic agent, 15 as higher reality, 174 as interior quality of being, 174 as time 23, 174, 175 geometrical proposition, concept of, 6, 173 employed in scientific thought, 173, 175 history of, 174 lack of understanding of, by art critics, 177 popular concept of, 146, 171, 173 as employed by artists, 175, 176 development of Cubism, 175, 176 as possibility, 174, 175 in relation to Plato’s cave dweller, 174 Proust’s use of, as metaphor, 146, 165, 172, 179 relationship between, and involuntary memory, 171 relationship to total experiencing, 167 Proust’s us of. See Time, dimension of France, Anatole, 136n8 François le Champi, novel by George Sand, 113, 130 as psychological screen, 114-115

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encounter with prince’s copy, 130, 131-132, 133, 167, 180 importance of lack of contact, 132 Freud, Sigmund, 50n23, 73 Civilization and Its Discontents, 56 Futurists, Italy, Russia, 176

G

Gallimard, Gaston, 135n4 Gautier, Théophile, 101n37 Gay, Peter, 73n24 Genette, Gérard, 9 genius, xi, 90, 91, 140, 147, 152, 165, 187 a retrospective judgment, 147 and inspiration, 90 and Marcel, 90, 155 and Proust, 3 and Romantic concept of, 103, 120 and Romantic vision of artist, 34, 88 art as product of, 88 Baudelaire’s definition of, 92 bound up with spiritual transformation, 89 conferred and confirmed by the few, 147 empirical skepticism of, 89 identified in work, 146 Kant’s view of, 94 moves into the unknown, 176 no formula or pattern for, 157 no narrative value in fiction, 147 perseverance a hallmark of, 161 Proust and, 148, 149 suffuses La Recherche, 88-89 term only applies to real persons, 146, 147-48 Ghéon, Henri, 135n4 Gide, André, 137 attitude toward older French writers, 177 reason for revising opinion of Proust’s novel, 136-37, 138, 140 founding member of Nouvelle Revue Française, 135 response to Proust’s novel, 135-36 gift for detecting relationships, in formula for art-making, 165, 168-172 Marcel must identify, in himself, 98 Giotto di Bondone, Virtues and Vices, Padua, 147, 161 God, 84, 75, 130 artist as trumpet of. See artist as trumpet of, as agent, 91 as stabilizing external referent, 63, 70, 82-83

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223 authority of, 82-83 breath of, source of art, 101 changing relationship of man to, 175 individualism and, 63, 71 primacy supplanted by philosophy, 72 gods, 37, 52 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 138n14 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 183n1 Goncourt, Edmond de, Jules de, 132 Grasset, Bernard, 135 groundedness, psychological. See duration, psychological

H

habit, 63, 85 Hahn, Reynaldo, 153 happiness, religious, 10 Hawking, Stephen, 147 hawthorns, Marcel’s encounter with, 83, 92, 152 Hayden, Barry, 172n14 Healy, Seán Desmond, 73n17 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 76, 95, 119n12 Heidegger, Martin, 75-76, 95, 119n12 Hélias, Pierre-Jakez, 67n9 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 173, 174, 176, 177 heterosexual desire. See desire, heterosexual Hindus, Milton, 94n17, 110-11 Hinton, Charles Howard, 174 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 119n12 home, 62, 108 one’s life setting as, 62-63 homeland, concept of, 110, 115, 120, 145, 152, Marcel, and, 127, 132 Proust and, 159, 167, 168, 170 Homer, 94 homosexual desire. See desire, homosexual homosexuality, xii, 180 female (lesbianism), 22 Albertine, 23 male, 6. See also desire, homosexual Honour, Hugh, 72 Hume, David, 73 Humanism, 71 Husserl, Edmund, 22-23, 39, 51, 76, 145-46 Huysmans, J.-K., 9n17 hysteria, 73

I

Icarus, myth of, xi

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Idea, 20, 22, 23 progression of, form, viewer, 20 ideas, 22, 49 art conveyer of, 72 Marcel drawn to through resonance, 131 Ideal, Platonic, 27 idealism, 19-20, 23, 95, 119 creative, xi, 3, 103 idealist view of art, 91 reflected in Marcel’s involuntary memories, 92, 118 resonant, 49 identity, 41, 68, 77, 78, 81, 83-84, 122, 139, 141, 178 and modernity, 62, 68, 80 and place, 62, 67, 68 and problem-of-self, 77 as bourgeois concern, 78 as free agent, 64 as projection of self in world, 41, 63, 80, associative, 66, 68 based on model, 118 community’s role in defining, 63, 67, 68, 107 consciousness presupposes, 79 declarative, 66, 68, 69, 79, 80 defined, 63 relationship to individual and place, 62, 64, 65 genetic, 63 influence of community on, 41, 65 Marcel’s, as writer, 96, 107 multiplicity of, for each person, 69, 115 mutability of, 41, 68, 77, 78 physical qualities associated with, 63, 68, 78 relation of present, to past identities, 41 self ’s role in projection of, 64 sexual, 56, 115 molded by self, 56 illumination. See enlightenment; inspiration imagination, 2, 8, 22, 43, 51, 85, 89, 91-92, 94, 167 art and lies, vehicles for, 17 Baudelaire’s comment on, 88 becomes sharper through use, 123-24 creative, 95 Marcel’s, 92 resonance stimulated Marcel’s, 129 subjective, 21 imaginative possibility. See possibility, imaginative individual, 63, 65, 72 creative, image of, 71, 96 difference from premodern counterpart, 70

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224 impact of modernity on, 69, 70, 76-77 medical and scientific deconstruction of, xi, 72 relationship to God, 71 relationship to place, 62, 64, 67 Romantic celebration of, 72 subjectivity, 41 individualism, xi, 71, 72 individuality, xi, 41 and choice, 71 inductive reasoning. See reasoning, inductive Industrial Revolution. See Revolution, Industrial industrialization, impact on individual, 77 ingenium, 120 inspiration, 2, 15, 90-91, 124, 171, 178-79, 180 as catalyst in equation for art-making, 167, 170, 172 end result of a foregoing process, 11, 178-79 François le Champi catalyst for Marcel’s, 131 Marcel’s, 12, 97, 103, 128, 131, 145, 155, 180, 187 Proust’s, 2, 7- 8, 11-15, 139, 141,155, 157, 164, 167, 177-182 relation between, and neurotic temperament, 50 relationship between event and knowledge derived from it, 11 instability, psychological, 24 intellectual memory. See memory, referable intentionality, 20, 23, 27-28, 88 as call, 152-53 as expression of being, 29, 45, 46, 47, 51 expressed through form, 88, 120 intuition, 22, 92 and art, 31 intuitive understanding, 23, 48, 50, 124 Proust and, xii responsiveness, 49 supposition, 33 involuntary memory. See memory, involuntary

J

James, William, 27, 43, 62, 84, 91, 123, 124, 144 Principles of Psychology, 5, 10-11, 42, 73 Varieties of Religious Experience, 10-11, 50-51, 74, 85, 162 Jarry, Alfred, 176 Joyce, James, xii, 147 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 149 Ulysses, 140, 149

13_Proust_Index.indd 224

K

Kant, Emmanuel, 94-95, 111, 119n12, 120, 174 Kent, Letitia, 183, 184 Koerner, Joseph Lee, 120n15 Kolb, Philip, 1, 12-13, 14 Kracauer, Siegfried, 24, 41, 84n65 Kristeva, Julia, 1376, 177

L

Landy, Joshua, 14, 116, 149 Lauris, Georges de, 180-81 Lehrer, Jonah, 3 Lemaire, Mme Madeleine, 153 Leadbeater, C. W., 173 Lehrer, Jonah, lesbianism. See homosexuality, female lies, as object, in arc communication, 17-19, 20 visual standard applies in judging, 18 life, cinematic view of, 70 Lincoln, Abraham, 161 linearity, recessive, 117, 145, 177 as image of fourth dimension, 145, 172 Lissitzky, El, 176 Lobachevsky, Nikolai Ivanovich, 173 looking, as vision guided the self, predatory, 56-59 Loti, Pierre, 136n8, 165, 177 love, xii, 6 Bloch introduces Marcel to, 129 instability of, 129 jealous, 9 Marcel and, 21-22 Lumière brothers, 82 Lycée Condorcet, 6, 162

M

madeleine and tea, 11-12, 92, 105, 115, 122, 126-27, 139, 145, 146 relationship of, to tea and toast episode for Proust, 12 Majewski, Henry F., 101n37 Mallarmé, Stéphen, 9, 94 Mann, Thomas, 89 Marinetti, Filippo, 176 material/ideal dualism, 36 as difference between meaning and material reality, 93 Maubant, French actor, 33 Maurois, André, 11-12

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225 maxim, defined, 19 Proust’s, under discussion, 19-20 idealism of, 19-20, 23 Mayer, Andreas, 19n3 McPhee, Peter, 68n10 measuring, 43, 76. See also empiricism melancholy, religious, 10 memory(ies), xii, 38, 114 as landmarks of past, 177 dead, 83 utility of, 38, 42, 117, 122 notes of song suggest how memory frees us from present, 81-82 source of fascination for Proust, 163 subject to distortion, 139 memory, involuntary, 11, 42, 93, 115, 145 as bridge between present and past, 146 as conveyers of truth, 92 as end, 178 as literary device used by Proust, 12, 115-16 as metacognitive event, 73, 122 chance establishes validity of, to dimension of Time, 7, 11 completes the totality of one’s experience, 139 importance to La Recherche, 92 integrates sensory unconscious into referable memory, 140 legitimacy of, 117, 140 Marcel’s, 12, 68, 69, 92, 114-115, 122, 126- 27, 128, 130, 133-34, 172 give access to self, 128 not linked to Proust’s, 12 veracity of, 34-35 philosophical impact of, on La Recherche, 115-21 product of chance, 125 Proust’s experience of, 116, 170-71, 179 no mention of in letters, 149-50 betrays knowledge of only in La Recherche, 151 plausibility of, questioned, 14, 34, 150 tea and toast episode. See also Proust, tea and toast episode Venice, 14 sensory unconscious discovered through, 28 spring from unconscious, 92 takes one briefly out of time, 126 veracity of, as psycho/physiological experience, 35 memory, referable, 7, 39, 40, 61, 93, 118, 139 as past experience, 28

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as static as snapshots, 7, 24 fractured into discreet images, 5, 36, 83 gap in cognitive events undermines sense of duration, 83 inimitability of, 24 limits of in supporting psychological duration, 41 relationship to self and time, 12 rift between, and present, 32 memory, screen, 106, 114, 128 memory, sensory (or sensuous), 7, 117 memory set(s), 64, 68, 83 Mercure de France, 176, 180 metacognitive events, 93, 121, 122-23, 124, 153, 178, 180 Bergson sees no use-value in, 42 result of a psycho/physiological progression, 10 organic versus mystical, 10 metaphor, as vehicle in inspiration, 171, 179 fourth dimension as, 3, 146, 165 metaphysical distance. See distance, metaphysical metonymy, sensory, 76 Miller, Arthur, I., 8, 11, 124, 161, 163, 171, 172, 176nn30, 33, 179, 180n42 mimetic hierarchy, 22 mind, life of the, 33, 89 Minkowski, Hermann, 174 model(s), 40, 54, 144-45 are aspirational, 118 creative practice offers, 187 cultural, 118 education provides imagination with, 66 hereditary, 63 personal, 118, 119 spatial, of time an illusion, 142 stories as. See stories modern citizen. See citizen, modern modernity, xi-xii, 3, 19, 28, 42, 62, 64, 72, 163, 164, 177 constantly changing environment of, 159 Enlightenment led to achievements of, 71 impact of, on individual, 35, 61, 69, 77 loss of contact with self one effect of, 28 Modernity, as historical period, xi, 24 modernization, 70 Montesquiou-Fezensac, Comte Robert de, 153 More, Henry, 174 Moss, Howard, 159 Musil, Robert, A Man without Qualities, xii, 140 Musset, Alfred de, 9, 165

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226 Muybridge, Eadweard, 82 Myers, Gerald E., 75n22 mysticism, 10, 49, 74

N

names, 18, 20-21, 22 narrative, allegorical, didactic, 34, 54, 55 expository, 8 narrative distance. See distance, narrative natural mystical experience. See enlightenment; inspiration necessity, in formula for art-making, 170 Nerval, Gérard de, 116, 178 netherworld, Bergsonian, 110 neurasthenia, 73 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 95, 119n12 Nightingale, Florence, 161 Nouvelle Revue Française, 135-36, 139, 177 Novalis, 119n12 novel, philosophical, xi, xiii

O

O’Brien, Justin, 19n2, n3 observer, in relation to Other, 43, 52 self-as-. See self-as-observer Onians, John, 36, 46, 63n2 Open Sesame, 109, 167, 170, 182 Other, the, 43, 52-53, 122, 130, 144

P

Painter, George, 2n7, 8n15, 12, 13, 15, 116n3, 135nn1-3, 136nn7, 9, 10, 138n15, 139n18, 164, 165, 167n9, 170-71, 181 Panofsky, Erwin, 156-57, 159 Pascal, Blaise, 13 past, the, 24, 38, 77, 93, 139 hegemonic, 62, 63, 64, 68, 77 possession of, universal condition of matter, 38 personal, 116 versus collective, 62 Proust’s view of, not nostalgic, 177 remembered, 40 sensory (or sensuous), 40, 42, 117 inaccessible to voluntary recall, 90 shapes one’s actions, 32, 81 patrie intérieure, la. See homeland Patterson, Ian, 19n3

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Paultre, Roger, 27n14, 118-19 perception, 23, 36 subjective nature of, 121 perceptive acuity. See acuity, perceptive perseverance, 84, 161-62, 163 phenomenology, 51 photographs, 24, 41, 76, 82, 84 as synecdoche for event captured, 82, 139 physical duration. See duration, physical physiognomy, 25-26, 119, 145 Picasso, Pablo, 93-94, 161, 163, 164, 176 place, as a position one fills, or would like to, 62 as a physical location, 62 equates with community, 63 as stabilizing external referent, 63 loss of, 64-67, 70 place-identity derives from, 62 place identity, 68, 138. See also identity, and place Plato, 22, 174 Platonic Ideal, 22, 51, 174 Poe, Edgar Allan, 9 Poincaré, Henri, 166, 173-74, 176 possibility, imaginative, 2 post-structuralists, 88 Poulet, Georges, 177 précieux, 184 Pred, Ralph, 73n21, 83n61 premodern, 67 citizen, 70 societies, 64 Princet, Maurice, 176 problem-of-self, 3, 35, 42, 61, 64, 68, 69, 73, 77, 82, 107, 148, 150 analysis of Marcel’s, 83-84 Marcel’s, 105, 113, 128, 140, 164 Marcel resolves his, through involuntary memory, 42, 146 Proust, Dr. Adrien, 71, 73-74, 77 Proust and Marcel, as artists, difference between, 12, 110-11, 152, 163 double story of becoming, 2-3, 8, 11, 12, 13, 146,148-49, 151, 152-53, 155 differences between (general), 110 Proust, Marcel, came to issues addressed in La Recherche slowly, xii Proust, Marcel, tea and toast episode, 7, 12, 14, 118, 167, 170-71 Proust, Marcel, Contre Sainte-Beuve, 2, 5, 11, 12, 149, 150, 165, 166, 179, 181

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227

fictive “I” and autobiographical “I” exist side by side in, 164 formula for art-making in, 165, 167-72 time called dimension of space in, 23 Proust, Marcel, Jean Santeuil, 5, 11, 14, 141, 148, 153 aborted, 5, 154 novelistic whole missing in, 5 Proust, Marcel, Les Plaisirs et les jours, 135, 153 Proust, Marcel, other works, 1, 5, 135, 137-38, 162 “Confession d’une jeune fille,” 137 Ruskin translations, 5, 135, 154 “Sentiments filiaux d’un parricide,” 137 “Sur la lecture,” 137 psychology, as a science, 73, 90 psychological continuity. See duration, psychological psychological discontinuity. See discontinuity, psychological psychological duration. See duration, psychological psychological groundedness. See duration, psychological psychological instability. See alienation; anomie; ennui psychological stability. See stability, psychological psychological well-being. See stability, psychological Puccini, Giacomo, 9n17 Pugh, Anthony, 7, 14-15, 116n2, 153n32, 166

Q

Quémar, Claudine, 14-15, 181 Quintilian, 121n15

R

Racine, Jean, 31, 148 railroad(s), 67, 75, 78 Realism, xi, 87 reality, 121 indeterminate, 39 reasoning, inductive, 28 Redgrave, Richard, 64-65, 66-67 referent(s), 63 external, xii, 63, 67, 70 finding stable, 28 internal, 70, 163 Régnier, Henri de, 165 relationship(s), 23, 44, 119

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distance as am expression of, 43 Marcel’s ability to recognize, 131, 144, 159, 164. See also gift Proust’s ability to recognize, 171-72 religion, 10, 37, 63, 187 of art, 94 religious experiencing. See enlightenment; inspiration Renaissance, 71, 175, 185 resonance, sensory, 28, 45, 56, 93, 125, 129, 151 Marcel’s responsiveness to, 35, 36, 47, 51, 92, 98, 121 drawn to ideas through resonance, 131 he never speaks of, to anyone, 50 impact on his life, 54, 85 ignored by most people, 47 of questionable value to some, 49 vivacity of, 83 resonance, stimulated by intentionality, stimulated by the sensory congruency. See déjà vu, stimulated by relationship between an embedded image and new encounter with same, 114 Revolution, French, xi Industrial, 24 revolutions, political, social technology, effect of, on populace, 24, 35, 63 Ribot, Théodore, 126, 150 Richardson, John Adkins, 174n26 Richardson, Robert D., 148n23 Riegl, Alois, 138 Riemann, Georg Friedrich Bernard, 173 Rimbaud, Arthur, 9 Rivière, Jacques, 135n4 romanticism, as a cultural tendency, 72, 87 celebration of individual, 72 faith in art, 89 feelings associated with, 73 vision of artist, 53, 55, 72, 89, 94, 96-97, 101, 115, 118 exists today in reduced form, 88 Romantic precept on the origin of art in self of artist, xi, 2, 4, 20, 33, 34, 35, 61, 72, 118, 131, 142 Romantic ideal of artist, 1, 34, 90 Romanticism, 87 and concept of sacralization, 94 divine influence in, 91 emphasis on self, 148 genius and, 88 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95

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228 Ruskin, John, 7n11, 138 Proust’s translations of, 5, 135, 153-54 Ruyters, André, 135n4

S

sacralization, as phenomenon, 94-95 Proust not interested in, 91 Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin, 6, 13 Salas, Charles G., 185n2 Sand, George, 9 François le Champi, 106, 132-133 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 94, 101 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, 87, 88, 89, 93-95, 118, 119, 120 Schapiro, Meyer, 76n41 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 119n12 Schlegel, Friedrich, 119n12 Schlumberger, Jean, 135n4, 136 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 79, 119n12, 139n17 Scriabin, Alexander, 176 Sée, Camille, 71n14 self, 11 absorptive capacity of, 115 art arises from, 55, from an inner, 165-66 as construct of human self-consciousness, 63 as defined by William James, 5, 27, 62 as repository of one’s becoming, 29, 125 as soul, 63 ephemeral, 63 emotive qualities of, xi, 1, expansive middle term in progression being-self-identity, 63, 106 experience shapes, 17, 101 intentionality expression of, 28 maintains disposition toward sexuality, 56 modernity marginalized, 4, 64, 67, 69 nature of, 25, 109 libidinal needs of, satisfied by looking, 56-57 lack of, present in photograph, 24 Marcel’s loss of contact with, 106, 128 discovery of, 145, 159 ontological time (Time) tethering extensity of, 139, 172, 174 presence of, alters role of Other in encounters, 52 Proust’s contact with, through tea and toast experience, 116 Proust’s promotion of, as source of art, 4, 61, 72, 91, 163

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psychological duration supports stable ground for, 68 relationship of, to art, 90 relationship to being, 141 relationship of, to time and memory, 12, 23 role of, in identity, 64, 144 search for lost time equates with search for, 3, 142 sensibility provides channel to, 35 spectatorial stance of, 52 stable sense of, critical for psychological well-being, 68 unity with, frees Marcel to write, 28, 122 world interferes with cultivation of, 32, 36 self awareness. See consciousness, selfself-as-observer, 36, 52, 55 sense data, 22, 38, 40, 76 absorbed indiscriminately, 39 sensibility, xi, 1, 47, 72, 94 creative, 96, 184 has external source, 91 Marcel’s, 35, 51, 54, 90, 92, 98, 138 grandmother is prototype for, 92 sensory (or sensuous) experiencing. See experiencing, sensory (or sensuous) sensory (or sensuous) past. See past, sensory (or sensuous) sensory resonance. See resonance, sensory sensory unconscious. See unconscious, sensory sensuous experiencing, 42 Serres, Michel, 46-47, 51, 76 sexuality, Marcel’s impacted, 128 Shanahan, Daniel, 71n15 Shroder, Maurice, 89n4, 95 Simmel, Georg, 75 simultaneity, 75 snapshots. See photographs; photography society, 65, 152 French, 70 song-to-be-sung (le chant), 110, 119, 120 space, nature of, 173-175 space and time, 27, 28, 75, 174 instability of, 129 speculative theory of art, 95 spirit of Combray, 67 stability, psychological, 63, 139, 163, 186 as well-being, 68, 70 impact of modernity on, 24, 35 Staël, Mme de, 95 Stanford, Leland, 82 Stein, Gertrude, 176

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229 Stevenson, Robert Lewis, 67 stimuli, 39, 40 sub-threshold, 39 threshold-breaching, 39 stories, as experience, 53, 62, 66, 118 Marcel knows and does not know, 53-54, 118 storytelling, 45, 53 involuntary memory alters Proust’s, 92 Straus, Mme Geneviève, 13-14 subconscious, 114. See also unconscious subjectivity, correlation between experience and, 36, 40 Marcel’s shaped by resonance and déjà vu, 36 self ’s, nurtured through vision, 55 succession, 81 supernatural, 10 syllogism, 20, 22-23, 167 synesthesia, 73

T

Tadié, Jean-Yves, 13-14, 15, 136-37, 138, 153nn30, 33, 154n34, 180nn44-45, 181 Taine, Hippolyte, 166 talent, 94, 101, 165, 166, 169-70 exercise gift through, 98 Marcel’s perceived lack of, 90 Proust and, 158, 164 tea and toast episode. See Proust, tea and toast Thousand and One Nights, 170 time, xii, 5, 139, 162, 163 as fourth dimension, 174, 175 art moves through, to timelessness, 159 cinematic, 82 conceptual, 142, 143 is conceptual field of before and after, 75 lost, 140 lost, equates with search for the self, 3, 64, 142 humankind’s struggle with, 11, 75 measurement of, 75-76 medium in which becoming occurs, 142 monolithic, an illusion, 142, 143 philosophers of, 76 physiognomic objectification of, 25. See also becoming private, arena of inner experiencing 76 public, 76 railways required re-conceptualization of, 75 registers as change in matter, 25

13_Proust_Index.indd 229

relationship of, to self and memory, 12 sensory composition of, 127 Time (with capital T), dimension of, 3, 23, 109, 117, 127, 139, 146, 177, 179 as interior fourth dimension, 182 as “Open Sesame,” 166 as unifying concept for La Recherche, 7 experience, time, and self fused in, 139, 146 neurological validity of, established, 3 Marcel and, 6, 28 physical and psychological duration united by, 28, 145 physiognomy incorporates, 25, 145 Proust’s concept of, 40, 141, 146, 164 Proust’s use of, 117, 165, 177-178, 181-182 repository of all experience, 15 satisfied need for a unifying concept for La Recherche, 6 tethers individual to being, 40, 115, 139 validated by nature of Proust’s narrative, 27 time, ontic, 23, 142 time, ontological, equates with Time (with capital T), 23, 24, 132, 134, 142-43, 145,146 homeland exists in, 152 nature of, 127 relation between, and fourth dimension, 177 sensory unconscious is, lost in body, 25 springs from encounter of being with, 139 temporal extensity equates with, 25 trance, 73 religious, 10 Tronche, J. G., 135n4 truth(s), access to, 71, 117, 125 art as conveyor of. See art, as conveyer of truth of experience individual discovery of, 97-98 of experience, 25, 161, 162 through coming-to-knowing, 131 universal, represent by dimension of Time, 28

U

unconscious, 40, 73, 74, 82, 114 involuntary memories spring from, 92 unconscious, sensory, 28, 42, 56, 114, 115, 126, 141, 145, 172 continuously accumulating, 40-41 relation of, to psychological duration, 7 repository of sensory experiences, 146 use-value of, to Marcel, 24, 68-69, 71, 122, 140, visualized as a recessively linear path, 172

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230 V

Valéry, Paul, 93-94 Vallette, Alfred, 180 Vigny, Alfred de, 9n17 vision, 56, 77, 82 as way to belief, 34 invitational quality of, 57 vocation, 9-10, Marcel and his, as writer, 12, 13, 96, 130, 149 Vogue, 183 voluntary memory. See memory, referable

Wells, H. G., 175, 176 Wilde, Oscar, 176 Winckelman, Johann Joachim, 138n14 wonder, 105 world, post-modern, 87 world-as-barrier, 36

X Y

Yan, Wenming, 37n8

W

Wang, Youping, 37n8 war, idea of art can be applied to, 48 Warhol, Andy, 183-86 Weber, Max, 176 Weil, Louis, 116

13_Proust_Index.indd 230

Z

Zaehner, Robert, 74n35, 124, 150, 180 Zeman, Adam, 39, 43n14, 52n25, 74n35, 121, 122, 124 Zeno, paradox of, 82

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