Proust: Philosophy of the Novel 9781503623538

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PROUST Philosophy ofthe Novel

PROUST Philosophy ofthe Novel

VINCENT DESCOMBES Translated by Catherine Chance Macksey

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California I992

Translated with the assistance of the French Ministry of Culture Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 1992 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Printed in the United States of America C1P

data are at the end of the book

Proust: Philosophy ofthe Novel was originally published in French under the title Proust: Philosophie du roman, © 1987 by Les Editions de Minuit

And so I am forced to depict errors, but without feeling bound to say that I hold them to be errors. So much the worse for me if the reader believes I hold them to be the truth. -Marcel Proust, letter to jacques Riviere, February 7, I9I4

Contents

Abbreviations ix Introduction

I

I

The Novel: A Prosaic Genre I3

2

The Unknown Philosopher 2I Life and Opinions ofthe Pseudo-Marcel 24

3 The Philosophical Novel 28 4

Mental Optics 36 Note on Practical Egoism 53

5 Deceit and Truth in the Novel 55 Note on the Nature ofPhilosophical Clarification 74 Note on Textualism 78 6 A Question of Poetics 8o Note on Romanticism 89 7

The Ontology of the Work of Art 90

8 The Modern Regime in Art I05 Note on Concepts ofModernity I35

vm

Contents 9 10

Marcel Becomes a Writer I40 The Philosophy of Comb ray I 57

Note on the Comparison of Cosmologies I7I n

Am I Invited? I78 Theory ofInvitations I8I

12

The Invention of the Inner Life I95

13

The Inner Book of Impressions 2I8

14

The Dostoyevski Side of Mme de Sevigne 239

15

In the Atelier of Elstir 253

16

Self-Realization in the Institution of Literature 272

Note on the Beautiful 30I Bibliography 309 Index JI7

Abbreviations

References to Remembrance of Things Past (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, Random House, 1981) are cited in the text by the abbreviation of the individual work, the number of the volume in which it appears, and the page number (e.g., BG, I, 306). Silent corrections have been made where the author's commentary requires a more literal translation. Volume

I

sw BG

Volume n

GW CP

Volume

III

c F

TR

Swann's W'tiy Within a Budding Grove The Guermantes W'tiy Cities ofthe Plain The Captive The Fugitive Time Regained

Other abbreviations are as follows: ASB

JS

Against Sainte-Beuve jean Santeuil

PROUST Philosophy ofthe Novel

Introduction

B

I propose here a philosophical reading of Remembrance of Things Past. It is appropriate that I should say at the outset how Proust's work lends itself to such a reading, and what philosophical benefit this reading may afford. In the sense in which I use the term, a "philosophical" reading of Remembrance is not the kind of study that singles out passages of a speculative character in order to probe their content. As a rule, we need to distinguish among various "readings" when the meaning of a text is in dispute. A "reading" is in this case an interpretation-that is, a hypothesis about the sense in which the text is to be taken. This hypothesis is sustained by arguments. What I call a philosophical reading is one that is argued on philosophical grounds. One has, at times, to defend with philosophical arguments an interpretation that is really textual. When dealing with an ancient writer whose text we know only through scribal tradition, and sometimes only in fragments, we encounter problems of reading in the most elementary sense of the word. And there may be philosophical reasons for rejecting a certain "lesson," for adopting a certain punctuation or a particular grammatical construction. The difficulties we face in the course of reading Remembrance are not of this order. There is no philosophical reason for understanding the sentence "For a long time I went to bed early" any differently from the way in which it is usually understood.

2

Introduction

And yet Remembrance is not a mere text. We can, of course, act as though it were merely that: a text, a portion of what is preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale. In point of fact, we do not read Remembrance as we would read a piece of writing appearing out of nowhere, or extracted at random from the archives. We commonly read Proust's novel in the Pleiade collection, twentieth-century section. We read it, that is, as a literary classic. The questions raised by our reading bear not only on the meaning of the text but on the meaning of the oeuvre, of the book Proust composed. Stated in a different way, our problem most often is that of determining the meaning not of the sentence with which the text begins, but rather of the foctthat Proust inscribed this sentence at the beginning of his narrative. Here again we will speak of "readings" to designate different ways of reading the work. Each way of reading reflects a decision to emphasize certain passages, or to make certain particularities of the book stand out. In the course of the discussion this choice will be defended with arguments. One can distinguish as many types of reading as there are kinds of reasons available to support an interpretation. Commentators on Proust's work seem to appeal to three sorts of argument. If the arguments and the objections are grounded in fact, the reading is historicaL If one bases one's interpretation on grounds of personal appreciation, the reading is aesthetic (or "critical," in the sense ofliterary criticism). But if one's version of the text stands or falls on philosophical grounds, the proposed reading is philosophicaL A philosophical reading of Remembrance will concern the whole of the work. Its task is not to give special value to the sections that abound in propositions of a speculative character on Life and Art, Time and Eternity, Essences and Appearances, the Reality of the external world, Habit and Memory. The philosophical reading has no preemptive, proprietary claim to such passages, since there is also a historical reading-as well as an aesthetic/critical reading-of each of them. The historical reading establishes facts on factual grounds, or else uses certain facts, within an independently established theory of explication, to account for other facts. The facts adduced may relate to the text itself, to the person of its author, or to the nature of his audience. The shape they take may be chronological, philological, stylistic, biographical, ideological, and so forth, according to the kind

Introduction

3

of questions raised. There are also facts to be established with respect to his "ideas." For example, we will want to ask: What was Proust's philosophical baggage? Did he know German idealism first hand? How much Schopenhauer did he absorb? Did he read Bergson seriously? Or again: What is the source of the philosophical vocabulary in the language of Remembrance? How are we to understand terms such as "subjective idealism," "aesthetic sensation," "materialism," and "eternal essence"? The facts relating to Proust's ideas are no less factual than the facts relating to his fortune, to his love life, or to the physical circumstances in which he wrote. Only historical inquiry can provide the material for answering these questions. It goes without saying that such inquiry is indispensable for a better understanding of the work. This, however, is not my present project. Literary criticism applies to the text an aesthetic reading (not to be confused with the "critical reading" of historians and philologists) that defends its interpretations on aesthetic grounds. The meaning of a work is revealed in the fact that some of its elements evoke delight in the reader, while others produce irritation. In normative criticism (currently out of fashion), this reader is posited as universal. In impressionist criticism, the reader is a "sensitivity." My own ears, my auditory field, my thresholds of sensitive awareness, my old wounds, my pleasure-these are the arbiters that will cause me to favor a certain reading of the text. Nothing prevents the aesthetic critic from considering the thoughts expressed in the work. The ideas that will matter for an aesthetic reading are those that create a sensation: the thought that surprises, provokes, dazzles, exalts, overwhelms, or insptres. Finally, an interpretation may be defended on philosophical grounds. Philosophical arguments are those deriving from the logic of our concepts. Here we are not concerned with establishing points of fact concerning the text, or of expressing a personal reaction to it, but rather of determining whether the language in which we attempt to reconstruct the meaning of the work is philosophically clear. In other words, we must determine whether the concepts employed in constructing the interpretation have a meaning we can justify. But why should a commentary interpreting Remembrance be intelligible from a philosophical point of view? How is it that we can undertake to read Remembrance philosophically, in the same way in

4

Introduction

which one reads philosophically a work of ideas-Newton's Principia, for example, or Clausewitz's treatise On ~r-that is, with the intention of recognizing and elucidating its main concepts? Proust himself answered this question when he indicated, in his first letter to Jacques Riviere (Feb. 7, 1914), that his novel had a speculative dimension. In this letter Proust explains his ambitions for the novel just at the point when what he calls his "first volume," Swann's ~y, has been published by Grasset. He still expects Remembrance to be completed in three volumes, the next two to be entitled The Guermantes ~y and Time Regained. Proust is delighted that Riviere should already have foreseen what only the third volume was to establish: "Finally I find a reader who intuits that my book is a dogmatic work and a construction!" The first volume had created the "misunderstanding" that Proust's aim was to recover days gone by. In fact, Proust had set himself the very goal of philosophers and mystics: the search for Truth. (One can hear an allusion to Malebranche's work, De la recherche de la veriti.) ''As an artist I considered it more scrupulous and more tactful not to reveal or to announce that I was embarking on the search for Truth, or what Truth consisted in for me." In this expression, "the search for Truth," the word "search" begins with a lower-case letter, but "Truth'' with a capital. It is not the factual truth of historians and encyclopedists that concerns him, but rather the truth of sages and metaphysicians. Although Proust's declaration suggests that a theoretical reading of his work is not out of place, it remains to be seen how Remembrance invites such a reading. We may doubt that a theoretical reading is justified by Proust's borrowing of theoretical terms from the philosophy of his day. The solution is to be sought, rather, in the word Proust uses to describe his novel: a construction. But what sort of construction? It will not be the work of an ideologue. (He is explicit on this point: "I do so detest those ideological books in which the narrative amounts to no more than a constant failure of the author's intentions.") The dogmatic work is constructed like a work of art. Now this is what follows: Since the work we read is a narrative, and not a metaphysical treatise or a spiritual testament, the search for Truth necessarily takes the form of a depiction oferror. No, if I had no intellectual beliefs, if I were trying simply to remember and to create through memory a useless duplication of days gone by, I

Introduction

5

would not, ill as I am, take the trouble to write. But this evolution of a mind-I have chosen not to analyze it in an abstract way, but rather to recreate it, to bring it to life. And so I am forced to depict errors, but without feeling bound to say that I hold them to be errors. So much the worse for me if the reader believes I hold them to be the truth. The second volume will encourage this misunderstanding. I hope the last volume will clear it up. (Proust, Riviere, Correspondance, 3)

This letter in effect announces to Riviere that one is meant to read the volumes on lost time in the light of Time Regained. Proust's commentators have all done just that. The last volume contains the narrator's well-known reflections on the "conditions that are necessary to a work of art" (TR, III, 960). He discusses the "very essence of the work of art" (TR, III, n02) just as he is deciding to write "this story" (TR, III, IIOJ)presumably the one we have just read. Reflection on the "very essence of the work of art" is the mark of a kind of thinking typical of philosophy. It seems natural then to conclude, along with all previous critics concerned to find a philosophical meaning in Remembrance, that there is indeed a philosophical reading of the narrative, and that this reading is provided by Proust himself in the last volume. Literary historians have established the fact, moreover, that the novel began as the unexpected expansion of an essay Proust had undertaken in 1908 or thereabouts. Fragments of the essay have been published as Against Sainte-Beuve. In this essay Proust wanted to set forth his ideas about literature in the form of a critique of the method of Sainte-Beuve, who commits the error of trying to understand the work on the basis of personal knowledge of the man. Sainte-Beuve fails to realize that the author of a work is not to be confused with the "external man" one may have met in salon society. Scholars who have studied Proust's notebooks describe the way in which this essay was taken over by bits of narrative originally intended as illustrations supporting its theses. Thus the meditation of Time Regained was not added to the narrative, as an afterthought, in order to bring out its meaning. What happened was the reverse: The novel was born of a desire to illustrate the propositions of the essay. And so we have this commonly held view of the work, amply justified on historical grounds: Remembrance is a novel entrusted with a meaning; this meaning must be disclosed by philosophical examination; the novel itself furnishes this examination, as the theses of the

6 Introduction essay Against Sainte-Beuve become the thoughts of the narrator in Time Regained In short, the book can be described from the point of view of its construction as a novel transposing the theoretical propositions of an essay. A number of critics have concluded that a philosophical reading of the novel amounted to nothing more than identification of these theoretical propositions. In sum, one need only go from the novel back to the essay. Is this really the way to do a philosophical reading? Certainly not! For it leaves us still at the stage of the historical reading; the philosophical reading has not even begun. It is a fact that Proust began to write an essay, and that he subsequently abandoned the project as he plunged into the novel. It is a fact that in Time Regained he comes back to the theses of the essay Against Sainte-Beuve. It is a fact that he does indeed mean to present his doctrines in narrative form. But to do a philosophical reading is not simply to state that Proust gives us one portion of the text as a philosophical commentary on the other. To read philosophically means to understand this commentary, that is: to understand the narrative portion ofthe novel with the aid of the theoretical portion. Is the narrative of Remembrance elucidated if one sees it as the transposition of a theory, of a system of ideas to be found in the narrator's reflections on the true essence of the work of art? For the novel to be this transposition would require: (r) that the theoretical proposition in question be philosophically intelligible, and (2) that it actually contain the meaning of the narrative. In this attempt at a philosophical reading of Proust's novel I do my best to establish just the opposite, to wit: (r) that the theoretical proposition, rightly identified by historians as Proust's philosophical thought, is scarcely intelligible, and (2) that the novel is what makes it possible for us to understand the essay. Through the voice of the narrator, Proust observes ofElstir that the paintings are bolder than the artist; Elstir's painting is bolder than Elstir the theorist. The sole intention of the present essay is to apply the same distinction to Proust: The Proustian novel is bolder than Proust the theorist. By this I mean that the novel is philosophically bolder; that it pursues further the task Proust identifies as the writer's work: the elucidation oflife, the elucidation of what was experienced in obscurity and confusion. We can see that the formation of this hypothesis is in no way

Introduction

7

prevented by the historical facts mentioned above. The novel was not Proust's point of departure. The thoughts expressed in Time Regained were never really conclusions. The novel form, moreover, was a natural choice for Proust, whereas it was a struggle for him to write his pages attacking the method of Sainte-Beuve. This being so, why should we not find the novel philosophically more advanced than the essay? Why should we not look to the narrative for the more enlightening ideas? Reversing the usual order, I have tried to consider the novel as an elucidation, and not as a simple transposition, of the essay. I have posited a kind of novelistic elucidation of the obscure, paradoxical, and misleading propositions of Proust the theorist. The hypothesis that governs my reading rests on a distinction between the thought of the novelist and the thought of the theorist. Proust as theorist mobilizes contemporary theses of the philosophy of mind, and uses them in defense of his literary doctrine (that the oeuvre cannot be explained by the man). He keeps calmly repeating the most aporetic conclusions of modern philosophy as though they were so many luminous verities: r. the belief that language is private (I alone can really know what is signified by the words I use); 2. the temptation of solipsism (I am the only being presently given to myself; other beings appear as only images or representations); 3· the myth of interiority (the meaning of what I say or do is whatever I have in mind as I am saying or doing it); 4· the subjectivity of one's perception of the world (since I am L I cannot know how you see the world); 5· the virtual impossibility of communication (I lack the power to perceive directly someone else's thought [F, III, 58o]); 6. the idealism of representation (it is impossible to know whether one's representation of a thing is accurate, since one cannot compare the representation to the thing-as-it-is, independent of the representation); 7· the aesthetic theory ofthe arts (what we seek in a work of art is sensations); 8. the doctrine of abstraction (the "concepts of the intelligence" are produced by an extenuation of "impressions"); 9· art conceived as the expression of self (the artist manages to

8

Introduction achieve the miracle of communicating what is, by definition, incommunicable).

If Proust were the author of a book of philosophy-and we must be careful not to confuse a book of philosophy with a book that is philosophically instructive-we would have to accord him the same sort of importance Freud had for Wittgenstein: that of being the author of a work in which one can find inexhaustible examples of "typically philosophical errors" (that is, errors rooted in a desire to give explanatory value to what ought to be taken simply as one manner of speaking among others). Proust as theorist generally remains trapped in the confusion affecting all philosophy of the thinking subject (the "subject" here being the possessor of mental states, the one to whom they are attributed). The particularity of point of view is confused with the subjective uniqueness ofexperience. The fact that my representation of a thing is not your representation, when we are not looking at that thing from the same direction and the same angle, is confused with the supposed fact-a tautological property, actuallythat my representation can never be your representation, because mine is mine and yours is yours. Whence the temptation of solipsism in the Proustian essay, with the inexplicable solution of communication through art. But a solipsist does not become a character in a novel. What the novelist relates is, by definition, what goes on between one character and another. Proust does not distinguish, any more than the philosophers he may have read, between the actual solitude of a solitary person (of the only one who, for reasons of fact, can think or experience something), and the theoretical solitude of a solipsist (of the only one who, for reasons of logic, can know or judge something). Whereas philosophers write about the solipsist or the "isolation of consciousness," only the solitary, isolated individual can interest the novelist. When he presents a character who is alone, he in so doing makes the absence of other people an event in the interaction between this character and others. It is regrettable that philosophers do not read more novels-or at least one might be tempted to think so, given the meagerness of moral philosophy's current vocabulary. But let me recast that remark. It is a pity that philosophers do not talk a great deal more about the novels

Introduction

9

they read. In France as elsewhere contemporary philosophy proves inadequate when it enters the domain of what the Ancients called the "philosophy of human affairs" -he peri ta anthropina philosophia is Aristotle's expression. We lack even a name for such a field of inquiry. At the end of his Ethics, in the text that introduces the expression, Aristotle is saying specifically that his work of "philosophizing on human affairs" will not be complete so long as he has not added to his Ethics proper a philosophy of law and a philosophy of political regimes. But with us the "philosophy of human affairs" -often limited to personal ethics-has been cut in two. On the one hand, we recognize the question of foundations as the province of philosophy. It is the philosopher's task to determine whether or not we need an ultimate basis for our judgments. On the other hand, we are convinced that what was still for Kant "anthropology from a pragmatic standpoint" belongs to the "human sciences" -the only task left for philosophers being the examination of these human sciences from an epistemological point of view. In other words, practical philosophy for us has been cut off from what served as its very matrix in an age more congenial to this sort of thought. Moral philosophy is finally reduced to reflections on the foundations of moral judgment, as we ignore the essential problem of discerning the multiple forms taken by moral judgment. We proceed as though the problem were that of knowing in the name of what one is to judge-in the name of what · absolute-rather than how one is to judge: in what terms, using what lexicons. On this as on other subjects the thoughts of the philosopher remain superficial if they are not preceded by a description ofphenomena. Now "phenomena," in the order of human affairs, are the things we say, our common ways of thinking and judging. (Aristotle, at the beginning of Book 7 of the Nicomachean Ethics, says: The method will be to establish the appearances-tithenai ta phainomena-that is, to assemble the legomena, the things we say about the subject.) Why have philosophers tended to abandon the observation of human behavior? This tendency has left us hard put nowadays to see the kinship that exists between the moral philosopher and the writer we call the moraliste, the painter of manners or mores. One explanation of this defection is that philosophers have too easily acquiesced in a legalistic notion of morality (the moral law, as we put it). Another reason is that the philosophy of human affairs has become, from

IO

Introduction

Hobbes to Freud, a "theoretical" rather than a "phenomenological" enterprise (taking the word phenomenon in the Aristotelian sense). The ambition of the various theories of human nature has been to imitate the scientific method of reconstructing an observable datum as the interaction of a small number of basic elements. These theories have sought to identifY the elements of human nature (the natural impulses) and to find the mechanism of their interaction. The result, as Wittgenstein might have said, is that the "philosophy of psychology" is a mine of "typically philosophical errors." If it is true that the novel today is the form richest in legomena, in specimens of those common ways of thinking that are the raw material of practical philosophy, then philosophers have an enormous need for novels. It is apparent by now that I expect a philosophical reading of the novel to give us a clearer vocabulary for the description of human affairs. Remembrance does at times seem to be a book of philosophy, a dogmatic treatise on Time and Essence. But Remembrance is a book that is philosophically instructive because of the concepts the novelist brings into play in order to build his story. These include, by way of example and in random order: prestige, misunderstanding, distinction, election and exclusion, personal charm, arrogance, duties and obligations, boredom and elation, conversation, privacy, worldly priorities, the art of knowing one's place. Such is the stuff of the Proustian philosophy ofthe novel, which I shall try to prove superior to the Proustian philosophy of the essay. Whereas the essayist thinks on the level of a philosopher of consciousness, with the scene of action reduced to the mind of a thinking subject, the novelist conceives each event according to a scheme of action involving a number of characters. Proust as theorist is resolutely hostile to any sociological view of human life. Proust as novelist, in constructing characters and episodes, shows exceptional sociological flair. In my use of the term "sociological," I am following the authors of the French school, from Durkheim and Mauss to Louis Dumont, for whom the first principle of a sociological view of things is that the group precedes the individual. Human individuality cannot be considered a basic datum. It must be described rather as the product of individual labor, applied to collective material, and supported by institutions. As I attempt to articulate the philosophy of the novel, my recourse to the conceptual apparatus of anthropology and the sociology of religions should cause

Introduction

n

no surprise. This practice is by no means original; it takes its authority from the examples of Roger Caillois (Puissances du roman), of Georges Bataille (Literature and Evil), of Rene Girard (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel), and of Pierre Pachet (Le Premier venu). The essay that follows comprises four parts. The first part (Chapters 1-5) introduces the notion of a philosophy of the novel. Here I advance the idea that a novel may be philosophically instructive as a novel, and not only through the speculative digressions intermingled with the narrative. A novel can give us the means of thinking about certain subjects, without being the simple transposition of a body of philosophical doctrine. My principal argument, presented in Chapter 4, is that the doctrine professed by Proust as theorist is particularly inappropriate for narrative transposition. With a doctrine that confuses point of view and subjectivity, no one could tell a story. The second part (Chapters 6-8) defends the principle of reading Remembrance as a "search for Truth." A number of contemporary critics have sought to interpret Proust's work within what they conceive of as literary modernity. According to them, Proust's work is a typical case of a typically modern phenomenon, in which literature retreats into writing, while the book to come(to use Maurice Blanchot's phrase) is announced and perpetually withheld. Proponents of this ultra-romantic tendency in criticism have defended paradoxes that are due, it seems to me, to the adoption of certain misleading philosophical methods. One example of this is the procedure of defining a category of things by abstracting their alleged common essence. In the third part (Chapters 9-n) the question addressed is this: What is the subject of Remembrance as a novel? I propose here that we redefine the notions of"narrative theory'' and "narratology." Contemporary poetic theory has done us a great service in reinstituting consideration of literary forms and genres as a genuinely serious pursuit. Without the study of these forms there can be no literary theory-only literary criticism. And yet poetic theory itself, I believe, like theories of writing, has fallen victim to the essentialist mirage when it comes to the rubric of "narratology." Poetic theorists have sought a definition of"pure narrative," subject to further subdivision into kinds-as though the important distinction occurred between

I2

Introduction

narrative and every other form of writing. I believe the category of pure narrative is bound to remain empty, and that the theory of narrative must give way to a theory of the forms of narrative. Any story about what happens can be told only if the facts are presented in their circumstantial context, in what can be called a world. Now there is not just one cosmology and one alone for all literary forms, or even for all narrative forms of literature. The cosmology of the epic, for example, or of the melodrama, is not that of the novel. And so we must define the cosmology of a novel. In Proust's case, the cosmology of Remembrance grows out of the contrast established between Combray and the world of Paris, with Balbec in between as the antiCombray. In the final part of this study (Chapters 12-16) I examine two images Proust uses to explain what he means by the depiction oferror. First, there is the image of an internal book, mistranslated over the years, that the author must translate afresh. And then there is the optical illusion as image of the error that must be corrected by the novel's protagonist in the course of his life. Proust attempts to define an impressionistic art whose mission it is to depict error as error: This is the "Dostoyevski side of Madame de Sevigne." The psychological theory invoked by the image of the internal book is a fine example of the myth of interiority. And, for its part, the attempt to reduce novelistic error-Swann's error concerning Odette, for example-to an optical illusion caused by a curious perspective, is a good illustration of the mental optics underlying Proust's theory. I intend to demonstrate that the novel does not simply transpose these two Proustian dogmas-far from it. The novel's version decisively corrects them, thereby assuring the victory of the Proustian philosophy of the novel over the Proustian philosophy of the essay. The last chapter records this victory and proposes an interpretation of the mystical episodes of Time Regained. In them we see the resolution of a poetic crisis in the world of the individualist-a resolution for the narrator, at least, as he takes it upon himself to turn the usual order of priorities upside down and to judge the value of things according to his own most "intimate" impressions. He therewith retreats from the world and assumes the status of writer.

r

B

The Novel· A Prosaic Genre

Where are we to look, in a novel, for the philosophy of the novel? The question is a general one; it can be asked of Proust's novel as of any other. Is it important that the book entitled Remembrance of Things Past is a novel-however unconventional-rather than a philosophical treatise? The answer is: "Of course." But having answered in the affirmative we can no longer seek the philosophy of the novel by attending exclusively to thoughts enunciated by Proust. We must first of all consider the philosophy of this novel, by which I mean the kind of philosophy that will account for this choice of the literary form called a novel as a vehicle for the expression of thought. Such questions of literary form are much too easily dismissed nowadays on the strength of a nominalism ofliterary genres. In the eyes of a number of critics, literature consists in individual works. As for forms, say these same critics, they are no more than catch-all denominations we invent for works that resemble one another. We are reminded that genres vary with time and place, being no more fixed or grounded in the nature of things than are natural species. The nominalist critic, then, will reject the question asked above. Asked whether Remembrance is a novel or a philosophical treatise, he will reply: "It need be neither." The form of the novel is not fixed once and for all. The most diverse critics, from Thibaudet to Marthe Robert, have stressed the

I4

The Novel

novel's powers of metamorphosis. "Why should the novel not become philosophical-as it has become, in turn, historical, naturalistic, and psychological?" the nominalist will ask. Nor is philosophy itself, he will add, wedded once and for all to a single form of communication. The predominant form today in philosophical writing is the Paper or Essay. Over the centuries philosophers have written Treatises, Systems, Dialogues, Elements, Problems (e.g., The Critique of Pure Reason), Letters, Mirrors, Tales, Commentaries, Theorems, Meditations, and so forth. Why not novels, then-along with melodramas, confessions, lyric poetry, and epics? A5 our point of departure for a philosophical reading of Remembrance, should we take the familiar statement that Remembrance is a novel whose originality stems in part from its also being, among other things, a book of philosophy? I shall maintain that we must begin, rather, from this premise: Remembrance is a novel that might have been a book of philosophy. Where are we to look for philosophy in Remembrance? If Proust's work is at one and the same time a book of philosophy and a novel, the philosophy of this novel is to be sought in the novel. Gilles Deleuze makes the ingenious suggestion that this novel contains a "critique of philosophy." If so, this critique of philosophy-which Deleuze acknowledges to be "eminently philosophical" (Proust and Signs, 165)-is to be sought in the novel. But if Remembrance had to give up being a book of philosophy (and perhaps other kinds of books as well) in order to be the novel it is, then the philosophy of this novel is to be sought first and foremost in the fact that a thing like the novel exists. The philosophy of this novel must be understood through the philosophy of the genre itsel£ What do we mean, properly speaking, by philosophy of the novel? The term should here be understood to mean: the express reasons the author would have given-had he been asked, and had he taken the trouble to formulate them-for his choice of the novel in preference to other forms. According to this hypothesis the only ideas there can be in a novel are "novelistic ideas." (The term "novelistic" will be discussed in Chapter 5.) A5 for the philosophy of the novel, it is never set forth in the novel itsel£ It will be found in our commentary-the commentary we must construct in order to explain why we understand and love the novel. We know that Proust hesitated for some time between the genre of

The Novel IS the essay and the genre of the novel and that he was severe in his diagnosis of this state of uncertainty. He saw it as a new manifestation of the enemy within that blocked achievement of his vocation to be a writer. Premonitions of death. Soon you will be no longer able to say it all. Sloth or doubt or impotence hiding behind uncertainty as to form. Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist? (Le Carnet de I908, 6r)

Proust is not the only one, of course, to have known sloth or doubt or impotence hiding behind uncertainty as to form. In fact we recognize here a very modern experience: a sort of paralysis of the will, growing in proportion to the wealth of possibilities open to the individual. Why this form rather than another? The answer is up to the writer, who finds himself assuming an onerous burden: total personal responsibility for choosing his form. He alone must decide whether he will write in essay form or novel form. Does he wish to write a novel? No one will stop him. Would he prefer a philosophical study? Why not? Something else again? Let him go right ahead. Whatever he writes will be judged in any case as though the rules of the chosen genre were his own rules. That is why the official modern solution to this burden of choice is, theoretically, the refusal to choose. At least that is the solution professed by nominalist critics. The artist, they say, does not have to choose among the art forms already established. He is to appropriate them just as he pleases. He must "create" his art form, his style, his "aesthetic values," his medium of expression. Here as elsewhere modernism amounts to a call for the emancipation of the individual from historical and collective constraints. The modern response is the response of the individualist. But it is not we, his readers, who force upon Proust the choice between novel and philosophical study. It is Proust himself who takes seriously the alternative of being either novelist or philosopher. It is perhaps a little simplistic to reduce literary genres to mere conventions, powerless to constrain the sovereignty of the writer. For what happens is that as soon as a novelist writes down "philosophical study'' the words tend to take on a Balzacian meaning. A philosophical study, coming from a novelist, is not a variant of the philosophical paper, but rather a variant of the narrative in novel form, as in the study ofmorals, the study ofwomen, and so forth. A philosophical study

r6

The Novel

in the Balzacian mode is so designated because its action revolves around a thinker (rather than an ill-married woman or a poor but ambitious young man). The reader of a novel about the thinker does not, in fact, expect anything from the narrative that is not proper to the novel. This kind of novel shows how Thought-exactly like Love or Ambition-sets up a conflict between the individual and those around him. Proust spells this all out in the projected essay against Sainte-Beuve, where he devotes a footnote to the titles of Balzac's novels. It is true that here he is still attributing to a natural vulgarity of Balzac's an effect that perhaps inheres in the prosaic (or, as he says, positive) structure of the genre itself. His titles themselves bear this positive stamp. Whereas often with writers the title is more or less a symbol, an image to be taken in a more general, more poetic sense than a reading of the book will give to it, with Balzac it is rather the reverse. A reading of the admirable book called Lost Illusions restricts and makes concrete rather its beautiful title, "Lost Illusions." It signifies that in coming to Paris Lucien de Rubempre has realized that Mme de Bargeron was ridiculous and provincial, that journalists were two-faced, that life was difficult .... In The Search for the Absolute, the absolute is a formula, something alchemical rather than philosophical. Moreover, it hardly comes into it. The subject of the book is much more the ravages caused by the selfishness of a passion in the loving family which suffers it, whatever the object of that passion may happen to be: Balthazar Claes is brother to the Hulots and the Grandets. Whoever was to write the life of the family of a neurasthenic might paint a picture of the same kind. (ASB, 6m)

Here we see Proust indicating in passing what would have become of his own subject-the life to which a neuropath subjects his family-in Balzac's hands. Proust's judgments of Balzac are always ambivalent. His admiration does not manage to allay a certain uneasiness. But Balzac, with all his vulgarity, is the novelist, so that Proust's mixed feelings about him betray a sort of resistance to the genre itself. The note cited above provides us with the clues needed to explain this resistance. Balzac's titles are positive. The title says what it says and only what it says. A poetic title should say what it says and, at the same time, say something else. Now to say something while at the same time saying something else is to allegorize. But allegory, strictly speak-

The Novel I7 ing, requires the second (figurative or allegorical) meaning to be as clearly defined as the first (literal) meaning. To say something while giving the audience to understand something else, without ever saying this something else-or to say something while suggesting that there is something else, something one cannot identifY-this is symbolism, in the sense of the literary school of the same name (and also the sense in which Proust is here using the word "symbol"). Positive, then, stands in contrast to symbolic. Balzac, in the present context, is the author furthest removed from "symbolism." He makes no distinction between the world and the ideal. He does not aspire to paint more than a middle-register reality. "This half-way reality, too fanciful for life, too down-to-earth for literature, means that in his writing we savour pleasures scarcely different from those afforded us by life" (ASB, 61). Proust, on the other hand, espouses as his own the principal antitheses of symbolist cosmology. Matter forms the inferior pole: the positive, the particular, the down-to-earth. Here things are only what they are. The other pole, the pole of the spirit, corresponds to the idealizing ambitions of poetry and philosophy. The categories of this cosmology are to be found in Remembrance. They make it possible, for example, for Proust to prepare the case against the Baron de Charlus (and to conclude that he will be pardoned). The Baron's behavior, in going to get himself whipped and bound in chains, at the house run by Jupien, is first and foremost a proof of spiritual decay. Proust says that "this consenting Prometheus had had himself nailed by Force to the rock of Pure Matter" (TR, III, 868). But immediately following this indictment come the arguments for the defense, the reasons for showing leniency. Yet I have perhaps been inaccurate in speaking of the rock of Pure Matter. In this Pure Matter it is possible that a small quantum of Mind still survived. This madman knew, in spite of everything, that he was the victim of a form of madness and during his mad moments he nevertheless was playing a part, since he knew quite well that the young man who was beating him was not more wicked than the little boy who in a game of war is chosen by lot to be "the Prussians." ... The victim of a madness, yet a madness into which there entered nevertheless a little of the personality of M. de Charlus. Even in these aberrations (and this is true also of our loves or our travels), human nature still betrays its need for belief by its insistent demands for truth. (TR, III, 869)

r8

The Novel

At one pole of the Universe we find pure Matter and Force; at the opposite pole, Spirit and personality. Between the two stand human desires, tending sometimes toward the brutality of this world, sometimes toward the poetry of other worlds. Charlus dreams of something else, and so in the very depths of the brothel remains a spiritual creature. In short his desire to be bound in chains and beaten, with all its ugliness, betrayed a dream as poetical as, in other men, rhe longing to go to Venice or to keep ballet-dancers. And M. de Char! us was so determined that this dream should give him the illusion of reality that Jupien was obliged to sell the wooden bed which was in Room 43 and replace it by an iron bed which went better with the chains. (TR, III, 870-71) A prosaic title says only what it says, promises only what there is. A title that says more is poetic or philosophical. It symbolizes something, impossible to communicate directly, that is beyond ordinary life and its triviality. In his study of Flaubert, Proust praises the title of Sentimental Education as "a beautifully solid title, and a title which would as it happens fit Madame Bovary equally well" (ASB, 263). Is it not true that the beauty of this title, Sentimental Education, derives primarily from its being a more general title, appropriate for many a novel? The title Madame Bovary, in contrast, is positive; it is valid for a single novel. Symbolism in literature is precisely this aspiration to generality, which is on a par with immateriality. The symbolist dreams of writing a book that would be the equivalent of all books and of finding for this book-the Book-a title that would be all titles, that would concentrate in one sentence, in one word, the secret of all sentences and of all words. This undertaking involves a danger Proust recognized quite early. In 1896 he was already raising objections. If I may be allowed to say also of symbolism ... that by claiming to ignore "accidents" of time and space so as to show us only eternal truths, it misunderstands another law of life, which is to realize the universal or eternal, but only in individuals .... There is thus a risk that purely symbolic works will lack life and hence depth. If, what is more, instead of affecting the mind, their "princesses" and their "knights" offer to its perspicacity a meaning both difficult and imprecise, the poems, which ought to be living symbols, are no more than lifeless allegories. (ASB, 139)

The Novel I9 Behind all of these texts we can see the outlines of a fundamentally dualistic cosmology in which everything, as with the Pythagoreans, is arranged by pairs of opposites: Matter ugliness positive limited commonplaceness space and time

Spirit beauty symbolic, figurative general poetic reverie eternity

But the point must be stressed that this cosmology is not "the philosophy'' of Proust. It represents not his thought, but the worldsystem within which he-like others-thinks. At no point does Proust feel the need to argue or to defend these oppositions. He proceeds as though he saw in them an order essential to thought, an unquestionable common asset. In this world-system, poetry and philosophy are on the same side. Faithful to a tradition that goes back to Aristotle's criticism of Plato, Proust sees poetry and history as in opposition to each other. Poetry is more philosophical than history because it presents the necessary and the universal. In The Fugitive, the narrator and his mother comment on two surprising marriages, those of "the little Swann girl" and of]upien's niece. This conversation occasions an interlude of "the wisdom of families." (Who in Comb ray would have predicted it? If your grandparents could have seen this!) This rather simplistic wisdom is foreign to poetry. Its muse is not the muse of childhood. It is the wisdom inspired by the Muse whom it is best to ignore for as long as possible if we wish to retain some freshness of impressions, some creative power, but whom even those who have ignored her meet in the evening of their lives in the nave of an old country church, at a point when suddenly they feel less susceptible to the eternal beauty expressed in the carvings on the altar than to the thought of the vicissitudes of fortune which those carvings have undergone, passing into a famous private collection or a chapel, from there to a museum, then returning at length to the church. (F, III, 692)

This is not the muse of lofty thoughts; this is the muse of concrete details and significant facts about a fundamental instability of things. She is, in a word,

20

The Novel the Muse who has gathered up everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent, but that reveals other laws as well: the Muse of History. (F, III, 692-93)

Proust accepts the categories of a cosmology that sees the historical as being in opposition to the poetic/philosophical. But the novel is fictive history. The novel is on the side of the commonplace, the contingent, the ephemeral. This being so, a writer's choice of the novel form cannot be viewed as a minor consideration. Choosing to write a novel amounts to choosing to gather up, in one form, everything that the supposedly more exalted Muses ofphilosophy and (poetic) art have rejected. Anyone writing a novel has chosen not to exclude the commonplace. When Proust abandons his project against SainteBeuve and commits himself to Remembrance, he accepts the risk of mixing with the ordinary, thereby resisting the seductions of the poetic dream and the unattainable ideal. In the form of a novel the "search for truth'' will no longer be the idealists' search for the Absolute. It will be a search for the Absolute in the Balzacian sense. Once we are inside a novel, Truth and the Absolute necessarily take on the aspect of concrete fact. Philosophical truth becomes the philosopher's stone. The search for truth becomes the inquiry into Odette's past, or the task of identifying Albertine's friends. Swann and Marcel are two great seekers after truth, but the questions that drive them are always specific: Was Odette with Forcheville on the afternoon when she would not open her door? Did Albertine have a rendez-vous at the Verdurins' with Vinteuil's daughter?

2

B

The Unknown Philosopher

Readers who look for a doctrine representing "Proust's philosophy" or the "Proustian world view" do not feel they are abusing the text or forcing irrelevant questions upon it. The narrator himself, in fact, is in many respects a mentor. He claims not only to draw lessons for us from his life, but also to arrive at important conclusions: "great laws," "precious truths." Of all the doctrines Remembrance seems to contain, the most celebrated is the doctrine of time and memory. But on the subject of this narratormentor we can make the same observation that the narrator makes about the painter Elstir: His painting representing a hospital-"as beautiful beneath its lapis lazuli sky as the cathedral itself" -is "more daring than Elstir the theorician, than Elstir the man of taste, the lover of things medieval" (Gw, n, 436). It may well be that Proust's narration is bolder than its narrator. None of the characters in Remembrance is presented as a thinker. The writer Bergotte is a skeptic. The scholar Brichot seems superficial. A single philosopher makes one fleeting appearance during a dinner party given by the Verdurins at La RaspeW~re: a Norwegian professor, ill at ease in conversation. All we learn about him is that he speaks French slowly, for two reasons. In the first place he has just learned it, and therefore lacks spontaneity. In the second, he is a philosopher, and "being a metaphysician, he always thought of what

22

The Unknown Philosopher

he intended to say as he was saying it, which, even in a Frenchman, is a cause of slowness" (cP, u, 96r). The only philosopher in Remembrance is, as though by chance, Norwegian. Madame Verdurin is quick to interrupt him. AI> we know, the characters in Remembrance spend a great deal of their time in chatting. The philosopher among them would have to be a Norwegian, to compound the problems any metaphysician would face at a social gathering. We can understand his not being able to remain on stage for very long: "This man who was so slow in his diction (there was an interval of silence after every word) developed a startling rapidity in escaping from the room as soon as he had said good-bye" (ibid.). There was an interval ofsilence after every word: This halting speech represents the total presence granted by the novel to metaphysics. Poetry is given equally short shrift. When Rachel reads a fable of La Fontaine at the final afternoon party of the novel, there is general astonishment. As the poem is well known, the guests expect to hear something familiar. But Rachel's performance, Proust tells us, was intelligent, "for it presupposed the existence of the poem whose words she was speaking as a whole which had been in being long before she opened her mouth, a whole of which we were hearing merely a fragment" (TR, III, ro5o). The recitation interrupts conversation. A fragment of poetry rises up to dominate the gathering, never blending into the ordinary chit-chat. Rachel reads poetically, with lavish gestures and with pauses between the words. The announcement that she was to recite poems with which nearly everybody was familiar had been well received. But when the actress, before beginning to speak, was seen to shoot searching and bewildered glances in every direction, to lift her hands with an air of supplication and then to utter each word as though it were a groan, the general reaction was to feel embarrassed, almost shocked by this display of sentiment. Nobody had said to himself that a recital of poetry could be anything like this. (TR, III, 1050)

On this occasion it is the Duchess of Guermantes who intervenes in order to keep the situation from deteriorating. She almost interrupts the actress by giving, prematurely, the signal for general applause. "The Duchesse de Guermantes sensed the slight wavering of opinion and turned the scale of victory with a cry of 'Admirable!,' ejaculated at

The Unknown Philosopher

23

a pause in the middle of the poem which perhaps she mistook for the end" (TR, III, 1052). Neither philosophy nor poetry manages to impose its presence upon the novel. One does, it is true, encounter the writer Bergotte in the drawing room of Madame Swann. But just at the critical juncture Proust musters his distinction (already elaborated in his criticism of Sainte-Beuve's method) between an authentic self and a social self. The person one may meet in Odette's drawing room is Bergotte the man ofthe world. As for Bergotte the artist, one can never meet him in a drawing room. He has to be read. Now remarkable as it may seem, Proust never gives us a sustained sample ofBergotte's prose. He speaks to us with great frequency of Bergotte's style, without ever delivering up a single complete sentence from his pen. We are destined never to see more than such scattered fragments as the "vain dream of life," the "inexhaustible torrent of fair forms," the "sterile and exquisite torture of understanding and loving," the "moving effigies which ennoble for all time the charming and venerable fronts of our cathedrals" (sw, I, IOI), the "mysterious tremors of beauty" (BG, I, 594), along with phrases from his brochure on la Berma: "plastic nobility," "Christian austerity," and the like (BG, I, 478). The great man is presented-pictured for us, in the flesh-as a man of the world. The writer within is never more than an evocation. Neither the profound thinker nor the contemplative poet can become a character in a novel. This limitation of the novel-a limitation that is as much a resource as a restriction-has to be taken seriously. The novel is at home in prose only on condition that it confine itself to what can be related in limpid prose. Novelists have no difficulty in showing us a character who would like to be an artist, or who believes himself to be one, or who has not proved capable of being one. The novel can accommodate the apprentice philosopher, the budding poet fresh from the provinces, or the student who may someday be somebody. It can also accommodate the mad thinker, the bankrupt genius, the failed artist, or the uninspired poet. What the novel cannot show us is the artist in the act of producing his work or the writer in the act of writing. And yet the subject of Remembrance, by common agreement, is Marcel becomes a writer-is it not? That remains to be seen. The doctrine of the dual self would certainly seem to rule it out: Marcel

24

The Unknown Philosopher

the man of the world is not to be confused with the being who, in the end, is vouchsafed the strength to write. But whatever may be the case with the writer, must we not recognize that the narrator, a very real presence in the novel, is also a mentor? And his teachings-are these not the "philosophy ofProust"? One of the distinguishing characteristics of philosophy, however, as we have understood it from the time of Plato, is that it can be transmitted through a logos (unlike bodies of wisdom that cannot be revealed or transmitted except in the presence of the master). In order to contain a philosophy, Remembrance would have to be an expository work of the same type as those that discuss Proust's philosophical doctrine. In point of fact, a book that claims to give us "Proust's philosophy" is purveying a fiction. This philosophy is non-existent. It is a doctrine that might have been professed by someone at the turn of the century, if there had just been someone to profess it. That someone is not Proust, nor is it Marcel, who is merely a person who might become a philosopher, he says, if only he could find a subject to which he could give "a philosophical significance of infinite value" (sw, 1, 188). The fictive "philosophy of Proust" is fabricated nonetheless on the basis of Marcel's disconnected propositions. In order not to confuse the philosopher to whom this philosophy is attributed, with Marcel, who longs in vain to find his subject, we would do well to refer to the former as the pseudo-Marcel (just as we say: the pseudo-Dionysius). Then we might imagine the following encyclopedia entry:

Life and Opinions of the Pseudo-Marcel The Pseudo-Marcel was a French philosopher who left no texts and about whom we have no first-hand information. Everything attributed to him is in fact drawn from the remarks and reflections that Proust (the writer) attributes to his fictional narrator. The Pseudo-Marcel is an unknown philosopher who finds a sort of echo in the thoughts of Marcel (the character in Remembrance). What were the teachings of the Pseudo-Marcel? What was his mode of argument? How did he answer his critics? What kinds of proof did he accept? Did he have a particular method, a point of departure, original techniques? On all of these points we are ignorant. And so we lack not only this philosopher's

The Unknown Philosopher 25 text but even his logos, his philosophical discourse. We lack the very thing that makes a philosophy. On the other hand, we can easily date this body of thought (about which we know nothing) within the French tradition. What we know, through Marcel, about the vocabulary used by the Pseudo-Marcel, shows us that he spoke in the post-Kantian idiom of the generation of Lachelier, Boutroux, Brochard, et al. His philosophical program, too, insofar as we can make it out, has a period flavor. In it we observe the French tendency to consider philosophical psychology (known as "reflective psychology") and metaphysics as belonging to the same discipline. For that generation the problem addressed by metaphysics is the "essence of the world" (an expression of Schopenhauer's that reappears in Wittgenstein's Tractatus). French thinkers since the eighteenth century have felt compelled to approach the problem in the specific terms of the union-ofsoul-and-body question. The Pseudo-Marcel seems to have been an idealist. In this respect the narrator's remarks are not very enlightening. There is no way to tell whether the philosopher espoused "subjective idealism'' (The world is my representation) or "objective idealism'' (The world is the representa-

tion through which universal mind achieves, in me, the thought of itself). Like many thinkers and writers of his generation, the PseudoMarcel seems to have been an avid reader of Schopenhauer. We find a clue to this in the kinds of problems the narrator mentions most often: the problem of the "meaning of life" (Is there reason to be either an optimist or a pessimist?), the problem of solipsism, the problem of determinism and free will, the problem of the reality of the external world, the problem of the permanence of the self within the flux of consciousness. We note that these same problems are addressed by a number of the major philosophers of the period, notably William James and Henri Bergson. Does Proust believe in idealism, in pessimism, in monadology, in solipsism (in all those doctrines clarified for us by Andre Lalande and the French Philosophical Society in the Vocabulary ofPhilosophy)? Is he convinced that these are serious matters? Does he seriously believe that the professionals-whom he sometimes calls "the philoso-

26

The Unknown Philosopher

phers" -know the answers to these disputed questions? The truth is that we have no idea. It is easy enough to find eminently quotable setpieces expressing the most orthodox "pessimism." For example: The bonds between ourselves and another person exist only in our minds. Memory as it grows fainter loosens them, and notwithstanding the illusion by which we want to be duped and with which, out of love, friendship, politeness, deference, duty, we dupe other people, we exist alone. Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying. (F, III, 459)

This is the mentor speaking, the disciple of La Bruyere and Schopenhauer. But is this also the voice of the novelist who is telling the story? Not necessarily. The very tone of the assertion has something sharpedged and aphoristic about it. It makes one think of a "maxim," of a choice "thought" from a personal diary. One can multiply quotations in defense of one position or the other. The last word belongs by rights to the genre that follows the example of history in accepting "everything that the more exalted Muses of philosophy and art have rejected, everything that is not founded upon truth, everything that is merely contingent." The novelist shows us a subjective idealist just as he comes, not only in his pronouncements but also in his "contingency," and by the same token in his infidelities to "truth." He may for example be someone like Legrandin, who cannot refrain from confessing his social aspirations. I knew, of course, that idealism, even subjective idealism, did not prevent great philosophers from still having hearty appetites or from presenting themselves with untiring perseverance for election to the Academy. But really Legrandin had no need to remind people so often that he belonged to another planet when all his uncontrollable impulses of anger or affability were governed by the desire to occupy a good position on this one. (GW, II, 209)

Does this mean that the idealist is unmasked or that his idealism is denounced as merely the ideology of a social climber? The novel tells us nothing of the sort. Legrandin may be a sorry specimen of idealism, but there is no figure in the novel who represents true idealism. What we have is the character Legrandin-a curious name-whom we must accept as a novelistic idea. As for the narrator, it is true that

The Unknown Philosopher 27 he learns from life a lesson in idealism, as we read in Time Regained. "When I considered my past life, I understood also that its slightest episodes had contributed towards giving me the lesson in idealism from which I was going to profit today" (TR, III, 948). The mind cannot get outside itself to reach external things. The mind knows only its own representations. Is this not the philosopher speaking through the narrator? But all Proust means is that we fail to take into account a reality that is all the while perfectly accessible. The episodes that are most revealing, with regard to the subjective idealism in which we live (in ignorance and at our own cost), are the episodes of our love life. Proust does indeed sound like a metaphysician when he speaks of the existence of the external world. But he uses the phrase in an odd sense, in which existence of the external world means the role played in the birth of love by the reality of the person loved. The narrator falls in love with Gilberte and with Albertine but he is not even sure he can describe them. When he conceives a sudden passion for a young blonde he sees on the street and believes to be a certain Mlle d'Eporcheville (having retained in garbled form the name of a young woman of excellent background who frequents houses of ill repute, who was pointed out by Saint-Loup, and whose name is in fact "de l'Orgeville"), the narrator has had only a glimpse of her, knows absolutely nothing about her, and so does not know that she is Gilberte Swann who has become Mlle de Forcheville. "Had I been obliged to draw from memory a portrait of Mlle d'Eporcheville, to furnish a description of her, or even to recognize her in the street, I should have found it impossible" (F, III, 577). The external world really does exist. In it one may actually meet and recognize both Mlle de l'Orgeville and Mlle de Forcheville (alias Gilberte). But none of this counts, according to Proust, at the point when love crystallizes around a fleeting image. This lesson in idealism has nothing to do with metaphysics. It coincides, rather, with the conclusions of an unsparing observer of human behavior. Certain philosophers assert that the external world does not exist, and that it is within ourselves that we develop our lives. However that may be, love, even in its humblest beginnings, is a striking example of how little reality means to us. (F, III, 577)

3

B

The Philosophical Novel

We all know what a philosophical tale is: a narrative organized around an idea. Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, Jarry, Kafka, Orwell-all wrote, among other things, philosophical tales. Can the philosophical novel, too, be defined as a genre? Just how would we define it? Remembrance does seem to be such a novel, inasmuch as the reader is invited to discover in it not mere anecdote but truth. Is the philosophical novel, like the tale, made up of ideas? The answer to this question is far from obvious. On the one hand Proust speaks of his "demonstration." He is constantly promising us truths and laws-"mysterious truths," "great laws" -and the reader is tempted to search the text for the statement of these laws. On the other hand we know that Proust disapproves of intellectual books. ''A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it" (TR, III, 916). But in the mind of the reader an allusion to truths and laws always carries greater weight than a warning against the intrusion of theory. Critics tend to see such a warning as nothing more than a transparent disclaimer, a sort of coyness on the author's part. And yet the problem posed here is the serious and perennial one of the relationship between literature and philosophy. Stated in general form the question is this: Must a written work communicate philosophical ideas in order to be called philosophical? The difficulty of the problem seems to revolve entirely around the notion of philosophical communication. Here we may find it instruc-

The Philosophical Novel 29 tive to compare Remembrance with rwo other rwentieth-century classics of the philosophical novel: The Magic Mountain and The Man Without Qualities. Among the actors in these rwo novels are thoughts as well as characters, and yet neither of them communicates any definite doctrine. In the novels of Mann and Musil, as in Proust's, the action from time to time comes close to a standstill and gives a character time for speculation. But with both these authors the speculation remains a part of the drama. Various intellectual stands are taken and we become spectators at veritable dialectical jousting matches. Thoughts are not introduced as considered opinions, but are presented as discourses in head-on confrontation. The characters allowed by each author to embody this theoretical interest are not really subjects to whom active thought can be attributed. They are rather the partisans of certain forces and tensions. A struggle for ambiguous stakes-mental enlightenment? domination of another human being? possession of another's body?-mobilizes intellectual forces in the service of certain positions that are, themselves, inconstant. The author, meanwhile, is a voice with nothing to add. As far as dogmatic assertions are concerned, he plays the part of an impassioned skeptic. But of all the characters in Remembrance only one is revealed to us from the standpoint of his mental experience. Proust has systematically deprived his narrator of any occasion requiring revelation of his deepest thoughts to another character. The narrator addresses us and us alone. At one point the narrator is still too young to answer the criticism of another (when his aesthetic opinions are condemned by Norpois). At another point the circumstances are not favorable (SaintLoup would be willing to participate in serious discussions with Marcel, but the moment is never right). At still another point the narrator's potential pupil is too much of a novice to receive anything more than tidbits ofwisdom (Albertine is making progress but still has a good way to go before she will understand literature). In Time Regained the soliloquy of the narrator is entirely free of the presence of any interlocutor who would need to be convinced. All that remains is a single train of thought in which observation is followed in due course by reflection, just as in a laboratory demonstration. Mann and Musil, because of the way in which they distribute the various discourses within their narratives, prevent our seeing in the thoughts expressed there any philosophical statements requiring dispassionate examination. In Remembrance a single character lives through an intellectual

30

The Philosophical Novel

adventure that he comments on for our benefit, and we are inclined to forget that this commentary is a part of the story. We are tempted to accept the narrator's reflections as the philosophical proposition of the novel. By entrusting the telling of the story to its own protagonist, Proust avoided the serious stumbling block he had encountered in jean Santeuil: that of having to communicate, through the indirect discourse of the anonymous narrator, the incommunicable illuminations of the hero. If the ecstasy ofJean Santeuil can be described in indirect discourse, it is not an authentic ecstasy but a mere state of mind subject to psychological description. When one writes, for example, that the character has the impression of re-living a moment from his past, one describes the impression (a psychological phenomenon), but not the fact of re-living a moment from the past (an incommunicable ecstatic phenomenon). And if the third-person description merely attributes to Jean Santeuil an ecstatic experience, the narrative will quickly lose momentum or become incoherent-in somewhat the same way as in the "celestial" parts of the Human Comedy, when Balzac allows certain individuals to have angelic thoughts or flashes of genius, and immediately finds himself in the embarrassing position of having to cite angelic thoughts or the ideas of a genius. Remembrance steers clear of this problem. The character who has received the beatific impressions is also the one who reports this unique experience. Subjugated as we are by Proust's style, we sometimes forget that the commentaries of the narrator belong to the narrative, and not to the philosophy to be drawn from it. Any character who expresses his thoughts expresses them within the story being told. The thoughts reported in the narrative do not coincide with thoughts that may be communicated by the narrative. Under what conditions are we prepared to accept a novel as philosophical? The question presupposes an answer limited by hypothetical parameters. We can, in fact, conceive of two conditions, mutually independent: I. In order to be philosophical, a novel must contain, at some point in the text itself, a philosophical proposition. 2. In order to be philosophical, a novel must communicate a philosophical proposition.

The two conditions are independent of one another. One can posit, in principle, that a novel may contain philosophy with-

The Philosophical Novel JI out communicating it (as in the case of Thomas Mann). Or that a novel may communicate it without containing it (as in the case of the esoteric philosophical tale). If one holds with the first condition one will look to see whether there are elements in the novelelements of any kind: a character's words, the narrator's comments, the observations of the author-that are the utterances of a philosopher. This condition may seem to be clear and easy to apply. It says that the presence in a novel of philosophical sentences is enough to make it a philosophical novel. But Proust tells us that theory is to be avoided, even in a novel that purports to be a search for Truth. This first condition, moreover, runs the risk of being too broad. All novels, in its terms, will prove to be philosophical to one degree or another. In a conversation with the young narrator, Swann says casually: "I was simply trying to explain to this young man that what the music shows-to me, at least-is not the 'essential Will' or the 'Synthesis of the Finite and the Infinite,' but shall we say old Verdurin in his frock coat in the palmhouse in the Zoological Gardens." (BG, 1, 575)

Swann is using words here that belong to the jargon of philosophy. According to the first criterion proposed, this sentence alone would be enough to make Remembrance a philosophical novel. And even if we eliminate from Proust's text the terms borrowed from idealism ("the Will," "the Infinite"), Swann's remark is nonetheless theoretical. Its presence amounts to inclusion in the novel of an aesthetic theory of music-Swann's theory, of course, and not necessarily the author's own. But where is the novel in which one could not seize upon some vague generalization and label it theory of something-or-other? The second condition proposed looks more interesting. If we opt for the second, we must determine whether or not a particular novel, as a whole, communicates thought we can identifY, if not as the author's thought, at least as the thought of the novel. Opinion here will be divided among the following four hypotheses: A part of the text carries the thought of the whole. The whole of the narrative is the direct communication of the novel's thought. 3· The whole of the novel is the indirect communication of its thought, which cannot be communicated directly. 1.

2.

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The Philosophical Novel 4· The whole of the novel is the indirect communication of its thought, which can be communicated directly.

Such are the four ways in which we can imagine a novel's being constructed, like a tale, in order to communicate philosophical thought. Unfortunately none of these hypotheses seems to be valid for Remembrance. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the first hypothesis does not correspond to Proust's intentions. It describes precisely what Proust condemns as the intellectual work. He informs us as well that his novel is a construction, and therefore to be considered as a whole. He emphasizes the fact that the thought of the book-its vision-is to be found in its style. If we take seriously these repeated warnings, we cannot extract from the narrative the reflections of the narrator and equate them with the thought of the novel as communicated in the novel itsel£ The second hypothesis amounts to an assertion that the novel can be a direct mode of philosophical communication. This is in fact the position of one school of philosophy, the school of"concrete thought" and "existentialism." According to this school, the concepts in which we think-even the most general-are derived by abstraction from the life each of us leads, among his fellow citizens, in the physical world. Since concepts are abstracted from life, they have to be re-immersed in life in order to be presented clearly. Thus communication through narrative fiction or drama is not only permissible; it is recommended as more authentic. "Concrete" presentation of thought is more valid than "abstract" exposition. We must go from concepts that appear to be the products of pure logic ("existence," "identity," "difference," "unity," "negation," "opposition," etc.) back to the human relationships of which they are abstractions (the life one leads, personal identity, the difference between oneself and others, the feeling of integrity, the attitude of refusal, conflict, etc.). This solution is the formula of the existentialist novel. Opinion is divided as to its fruitfulness in literature. This is not the place in which to demonstrate the incoherence of such a theory of the concept. But, concept theory aside, I know of no one who claims that Remembrance is an existentialist novel. The third hypothesis projects something that appears to be impossible: the symbolist novel. This is the novel of an Idea that cannot be

The Philosophical Novel 33 communicated. The author is expected merely to suggest it. It is poetry, of course, that Mallarme has in mind when he states that philosophy must be present in the literary work, but present in its very absence, or present through the very thing that blocks its appearance. "I revere Poe's opinion that no vestige of a philosophy, either ethics or metaphysics, must show through; I add that it must be there, included and latent' ("Sur Poe," in Oeuvres, 872; italics mine). What is it that prevents philosophy's appearing in the poem? Its abstractness! Then how can the poet include a latent philosophy? By suggesting the abstractness of the Idea through images of abstraction. A piece of lace effaces itself In the doubt of the supreme Game Half-revealing like a blasphemy Only eternal absence of the bed. ("Une dentelle s'abolit," in Oeuvres, 74)

But is a symbolist novel possible? Maurice Blanchot once called upon novelists to make themselves disciples ofMallarme ("Mallarme et 1' art du roman," in Faux pas). One can point to a few subsequent pieces of fiction corresponding to this turn of mind. And yet the solution of the symbolist novel is not that of Proust, who in "Against Obscurity" (Against Sainte-Beuve) reproaches the symbolists for ignoring the condition of individuality in life and in art. There remains the fourth hypothesis-the one adopted by the best of Proust's commentators. This hypothesis would have us look for the philosophical proposition of which Remembrance is the literary translation. One can try to make out this proposition by way of a "structural" study (in Martial Gueroult's sense). This is the approach of Gilles Deleuze in Proust and Signs. Or the proposition can be the object of an inquiry into the sources of Proust's thought. Anne Henry, in her excellent study, posits the theory that Proust transcribed Schelling's philosophy of identity. And yet, grateful as we may be for the results of such historical investigation, it does not free us from the need to address this essentially philosophical question: How can a philosophical proposition be transposed into a novel? (I call this question essentially philosophical because its occurrence obviously has nothing to do with the philosopher to whom the proposition is attributed, be it Schelling, Schopenhauer, or even Marcel Proust.) But

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one can draw from Anne Henry's own study a decisive objection to the idea of any transposition of metaphysics into novel form. Writing of Proust's reasons for preferring Emile Male to Ruskin, Anne Henry suggests that the author of Remembrance ("constructed like a cathedral" [TR, III, I090]) could see his own case in Male's explanation of the mode of intelligence at work in the Gothic cathedral. Ruskin's approach is "aesthetic": It reserves a large place for the individual artist. Male's is iconographic: The builder's art is purely and simply that of transposing into stone a sacred teaching. Now this is precisely the thesis of Anne Henry, who tells us that Proust's novel is the literary transposition of a philosophy of nature and of art. Thus the method of Male is bound to be congenial to Proust. One can scarcely ignore the extent to which the results of the iconographic method, justifYing Proust's whole undertaking in the novel, won Male his sympathy. Male had in fact demonstrated at length that sculpture is simply the transposition of a theoretical truth. What had Proust himself attempted, for his part, if not just such an illustration of a philosophical Speculum under the dictates of an invisible Abbot Suger? (Marcel Proust, 189)

In this comparison of Male's theses and Remembrance we see the kinds of terms Anne Henry uses: Proust attempted to provide in his novel an "illustration," a "transposition," a "transcription" of the doctrine of identity elaborated by Schelling and seized upon by the post-Kantians. But the resulting analogy leads to a conclusion that Anne Henry would surely reject. If Male's cathedral corresponds to Remembrance, then Abbot Suger is to the cathedral as Schelling is to Remembrance. By the same token, Emile Male writing about the cathedral corresponds to Anne Henry writing about Proust. And yet, throughout her chapter on Proust and Ruskin, the author points out that Proust is unjust in preferring Male's iconography to what she calls the hermeneutics of Ruskin. Ruskin gives the artist his due: according to him the artist never loses the initiative, even when working on command. Emile Male, in contrast, is satisfied as a positivist that the statues of the central portal of a cathedral are wholly explained once we have identified the sacred text of which they are "the plastic transposition" (ibid., 192). Ruskin, Anne Henry writes, is more perceptive. He sees in the statues of the cathedral portal at Amiens "the logical continuation of a creative architectural thought" (ibid.).

The Philosophical Novel 35 Have we now reviewed all conceivable hypotheses regarding the definition of the philosophical novel? By no means. There is, in fact, one suggested by Anne Henry's very discussion of Proust's unfairness to Ruskin. The portal of a cathedral cannot be reduced to the plastic transposition of a sacred dogma. Such a reduction would deny the existence of architectural thought. Nor can a novel be considered the illustration of a philosophical proposition. The novel could have no point of contact with metaphysical propositions if it were not the fruit of novelistic thought. But this is precisely Proust's constant refrain. He insists on this point: The "intellectual value" of an artist does not depend on his espousal of fashionable ideas or avant-garde attitudes. The philosophy of the novelist is to be sought in what has required the greatest effort on his part. His task is not to illustrate philosophical themes, but to compose a narrative. ''And it is perhaps as much by the quality of his language as by the species of aesthetic theory which he advances that one may judge of the level to which a writer has attained in the moral and intellectual part of his work" (TR, III, 916). This intellectual and moral work is an effort to elucidate what was obscure. And so we have still to find, in the genre of the novel, an autonomous power of elucidation. The philosophy of the novel is not to be sought in this or that thought content, but rather in the fact that the novel requires of the reader a reformation ofthe understanding. A novel, in order to be philosophical, does not need to communicate anything at all. What it does need is the philosophical power to exact intellectual and moral work. A novel is philosophical when it manifests a discipline of thought analogous to that embodied in the philosophy of the Western tradition. As for what confers on the genre its powers of elucidation, that is what we have still to determine.

4

Mental Optics ... a singular and moreover providential law, a mental optics (a law that signifies perhaps that we are unable to receive the truth from anyone, and that we are obliged to create it ourselves). "Days of Reading," in

[I]

ASB, 2ro

One cannot argue with the fact that Remembrance contains many sentences that might figure in a book of philosophy. By supplying the appropriate dialectical devices, one can even fashion them into such a book. This has been demonstrated more than once by writers of some talent (in the studies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain de Lattre, for example). And yet these demonstrations shed no light on the philosophy ofthe novel as I understand it. Is the thought of Proust the novelist necessarily the thought of Proust the theorist? This is not a philosophical question (an a priori question). Is it possible to make anything like a novel out of the doctrines that can, admittedly, be drawn from the novel? I believe one can demonstrate that it is not. The philosophy alluded to in the novel is not the philosophy ofthe novel once it is written-although it may very well be the philosophy Proust would have proposed if he had ultimately chosen to write an essay instead of a novel. Accepted opinion has it that Proust proposes to write a perspectivist novel. Now the doctrine of Proust the theorist-which I distinguish from the doctrine of Proust the novelist-equates perspective with subjectivity. But subjectivity is by definition what cannot be shared. Now a viewpoint is, by definition, something that can be shared, through actual or imaginary movement in space. A theory that confuses perspective with subjectivity defies logic. I conclude that

Mental Optics

37

if Remembrance manifests any coherence at all, it was written in violation of the theory it is supposed to "demonstrate." Proust's aim, as we know, is to write a perspectivist novel by introducing into the narration the "dimension of time" (TR, III, no24). Proust sometimes speaks in so many words of the "temporal perspective" (Gw, n, 435). The idea is clearly expressed in a 1913 "interview'' with Proust (probably written by Proust himself): "You know that there is plane geometry and geometry in space. Well, for me, the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time. I have attempted to isolate the invisible substance of time .... I hope that at the end of my book, some minor social event of no importance, some marriage between two persons who in the first volume belong to very different worlds, will indicate that time has passed .... "Then, like a town which, as the train follows a curve in the track, appears now on our right hand and now on our left, the various aspects that a single character has taken on in someone else's eyes, to the extent of being like different and successive characters, will convey-but only by this-the sensation of time having elapsed." ("Swann Explained by Proust," in ASB, 234)

Proust goes further than Balzac. He does more than simply bring back characters at different periods in their lives or at various stages in their social careers. The added dimension of time allows him to organize the successive aspects these characters take on in the eyes of one among them: the narrator. Later appearances may refute or confirm or illuminate a conclusion arrived at about a character on the occasion of an earlier encounter. (The classic example of this is the development over time of the various aspects of Charlus.) Proust can thus insist on the artistic purity of his technique: but only by this. He intends to depict errors and not to denounce them. Proust's problem then is a problem of construction (as when one speaks of "legitimate construction'' in a geometrical perspective). But the construction of a linear perspective is not a haphazard affair. An inconsistent theory of point of view will allow for constructions that prove in practice to be impossible. The official Proustian theory-the one repeated by his commentators-treats subjectivity as a case of vision determined by a perspective. Subjectivity corresponds to a single point from which the observer has a unique view of things. AB we know, the construction of a picture

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Mental Optics

around a central perspective (costruzione legittima) assigns to the picture a unique station point. "The picture, defined as a plane intersecting at right angles the axis of the visual cone, requires in order to be seen 'right' that the viewer place himself at the 'point of sight.' Leonardo da Vinci already states it clearly: 'Only one person at a time can occupy the most propitious position for viewing the picture'" (Flocon and Taton, 52). For any picture so constructed there is one point in space and one alone from which the spectator can see the picture as it is supposed to be seen. Only one person at a time can occupy this single point. We can, of course, succeed each other in this position, so that each enjoys in turn the view of the picture (defined as the view one has from this viewpoint, while this viewpoint is defined reciprocally as the point from which one has the right view, the one called for by the geometrical construction of the picture). Thus the single station point of the legitimate geometrical construction has nothing subjective about it. It is predetermined for any observer. All spectators who in turn occupy this point will have the same view. To equate subjectivity with a single point of view is to assert that every subject has his own view of the world, a unique view corresponding to a vantage point of which he is, of necessity, the only possible occupant. Subjectivity is in fact invoked to indicate that certain things are, essentially, someone's. The relationship of subjectivity, however, needs to be distinguished from the relationship of property, whereas our grammar appears on the surface to place them perilously close together. My automobile is mine, and yet it is not inconceivable that the automobile I call mine may turn out not to be mine. But it is inconceivable that my experience should not be mine or that my feelings should not be mine. And so we say that the experience or the feelings are "subjective." Why this difference between possession and experience? The difference is one of logic and not of physics. The difference is not that the automobile is a material phenomenon whereas the experience is held to be a mental or spiritual phenomenon. The difference is that one may ask to whom this automobile belongs but not to whom this experience belongs. It is possible to speak of the automobile (to refer to it, to point it out among other objects, to identify it) without having to specify its owner. The principle of individuation of the automobile is independent of the principle ofindividuation of its owner. The relationship between this

Mental Optics 39 automobile and this person is always a logically external one. Now the reverse is true in the case of subjective entities. The relationship between this pain and this sufferer is not external. And so there is something radically incommunicable in everything that is subjective. It is true that the notion of"communication'' is often ambiguous. For example, the verb "communicate" can be used-at least in French-to mean either to convey the contents of a document (i.e., the meaning) or to deliver the actual, physical document. The impossibility of any "communication" in the second sense marks all the instances we label subjective. I can share my impressions with you by talking to you about them. I cannot share them with you by making them yours so that you will experience them in my stead. The idea of viewpoint, either in the original usage of the surveyor or in the broader contemporary sense, is the idea of a position from which any observer whatsoever will see things arranged according to certain proportions that are dictated by his view of them. The viewpoint is a point at which, theoretically, anyone can station himself. (The fact that this point may be difficult of access, for geographical or physical reasons, in no way alters its public nature and its complete openness as an observation point.) Now if we want to define subjectivity as point of view, we will have to accept one of two equally absurd consequences. Either (a) I can share your subjectivity (have the same internal relationship as you have to your experience) or (b) I cannot share your point of view (can in no way understand what is happening to you when you suffer, or have the faintest notion of what you are seeing when we view the same spectacle). The impossibility of either position is by now more apparent to us, thanks to Wittgenstein's discussion of the paradoxes of solipsism. In a mutual assimilation of subjectivity and point of view, subjectivity may be taken for a point of view or, conversely, point of view for a case of subjectivity. If subjectivity is after all only a point of view, then there is no reason for my not being able to experience your pain. If I really agreed to put myself in your place, then your pain is precisely what I ought to experience. But the assimilation can also be made in the other direction. If the singular point of view corresponding to your vision of the world is a subjective point, then I cannot even imagine what happens to you when you suffer. My pain alone is real, says the solipsist, since it is the only one given to my consciousness.

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Mental Optics

It has been common practice since Leibniz to attribute to each mind its own unique vision of the world. Leibniz compares the substance "mind" to a "mirror, alive or endowed with internal activity, representative of the universe as seen from its own point of view, and just as well regulated as the universe itself" ("Principles ofNature and of Grace," §3, in Monadology, 409). To be a mind is to be "representative," or to reflect the world according to a particular perspective. To be this mind is to have this vision of the world. If minds are like mirrors, then we can organize everything there is to say about minds into a "mental optics." This is just what Proust does throughout his novel. He does his best to reduce intellectual errors to optical errors that can be explained by the way things appear from such and such a perspective. Leibniz's comparison of the monads to so many perspectives on the universe forms the basis of a philosophy of expression that is universal and reciprocal. Everything corresponds to everything else according to harmonious rules. Communication is assured, provided we understand it in the first sense (transmission of content) and not the second (physical influence). There is no paradox in seeing Leibniz as the philosopher par excellence of communication (see Michel Serres, Le Systeme de Leibniz), because he is still innocent of "subjective idealism." French writers will become acquainted with "subjective idealism" when they read Schopenhauer at the end of the nineteenth century. Remy de Gourmont states the case well when he links symbolist literature with idealistic philosophy. "The world is my representation. I do not see that which is; that which is, is what I see" (Book ofMasks, 13). This results in a new definition of writing: The only excuse a man has for writing is to express himself, to reveal to others the world reflected in his individual mirror; his only excuse is to be original. He should say things not yet said, and say them in a form not yet formulated. He should create his own aesthetic, and we should admit as many aesthetics as there are original minds, judging them according to what they are, and not according to what they are not. Let us admit then that symbolism, though excessive, unseasonable and pretentious, is the expression of individualism in art. (Ibid.)

We are very close here to Proust the theorist. Here, too, the original aesthetics merely translates the original vision of one mind, of an

Mental Optics 4I individual mirror. As Proust will put it, "style for the writer, no less than color for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision" ( TR, III, 931). In order to translate for others the world as it is uniquely reflected (or imprinted) in him, the writer must say new things in a new form. And there we have a definition of what it is to do intransitive writing. to write not this or that (which will always already have been done), but simply to write, so as to write oneself Now Gourmont can clearly see that the literary (or "symbolist") program of the idealist is hopeless. To write oneself, yes, but for whom? In the text devoted to Gide, he has this to say: The human species, doubtless, in its entire aspect of a hive or colony, is only because we are a part of it superior to the bison species or the kingfisher; these latter are sorry automata, but man's superiority lies in his ability to attain consciousness; a small number reach this stage. To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that one no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences-while social fraternity is based on resemblances. This full consciousness of self may be called originality of soul-and all of this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs. The misfortune of these beings, when they wish to express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities. (Book ofMasks, 178-79)

The spiritual exercise of writing in pursuit of self-consciousness leads the writer into a dangerous area. In choosing to write he has rejected the brotherhood of society, preferring the ideal-the Nietzscheans' "stellar" -brotherhood. The human flock finds its cohesive principle in resemblance. In order to attain to self-consciousnesswhich is consciousness of one's singularity-one must first scorn resemblance, which is always resemblance to something else and therefore a failure of originality. Those elite beings who achieve sovereign self-consciousness have nothing in common except the knowledge that they are different. They are alike because of their very differences. One misfortune undeniably shared by this ideal brotherhood is the impossibility of being understood. Proust as theorist frequently invokes the dogma of the isolation of

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Mental Optics

consciousness. Each of us lives imprisoned in his own representations and sees only himself wherever he looks. These "pessimistic" proclamations, however, are generally limited to occasions involving jealousy or frustration in love. For at other moments, when no passion is involved, the narrator is sometimes gifted with such clairvoyance that one is prompted to wonder how other people can be so transparent to him. For example, the narrator observes Doctor Cottard giving his prescriptions: I could see in Cottard's eyes, as anxious as if he was afraid of missing a train, that he was wondering whether he had not succumbed to his natural gentleness. He was trying to think whether he had remembered to put on his mask of coldness, as one looks for a mirror to see whether one has forgotten to tie one's tie. (BG, r, 537)

Nor is it possible to hide anything from Fran