The Proustian Mind (Routledge Philosophical Minds) [1 ed.] 9780367357627, 9781032385143, 9780429341472, 0367357623

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THE PROUSTIAN MIND

When Marcel Proust started to work on In Search of Lost Time in 1908, he wrote this question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ Throughout his famous multi-volume work, Proust directly engages several philosophers, and few novels are as thoroughly saturated with philosophical themes and concepts as In Search of Lost Time. The Proustian Mind is an outstanding reference source to the rich philosophical range of Proust’s work and the frst major volume of its kind. Including 31 chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is divided into seven clear parts: • • • • • • •

Proust’s life and works metaphysics and epistemology mind and language aesthetics ethics gender and sexuality predecessors, contemporaries and successors.

Within these sections, key Proustian themes are explored from a philosophical standpoint, including time, the self, memory, imagination, jealousy, beauty, love, subjectivity and desire. The fnal section considers Proust in relation to important philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Deleuze. The Proustian Mind is essential reading for those studying aesthetics, philosophy of literature, phenomenology and ethics, and will also be of interest to those in literature studying modernism, French literature and the relationship between literature and philosophy. Anna Elsner is an Assistant Professor of French Literature and Culture at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is the co-editor of Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture (2009), Medicine and Literature (forthcoming), and the author of Mourning and Creativity in Proust (2017). Thomas Stern is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College London, UK. He is the author of Nietzsche’s Ethics (2020), and Philosophy and Theatre (Routledge, 2013), and the editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (2019), and The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama and Acting (2017).

ROUTLEDGE PHILOSOPHICA L MIN DS

In philosophy past and present there are some philosophers who tower over the intellectual landscape and have shaped it in indelible ways. So signifcant is their impact that it is difcult to capture it in one place. The Routledge Philosophical Minds series presents a comprehensive survey of all aspects of a major philosopher's work, from analysis and criticism of their major texts and arguments to the way their ideas are taken up in contemporary philosophy and beyond. Edited by leading fgures in their felds and with an outstanding international roster of contributors the series ofers a magisterial and unrivalled picture of a great philosophical mind. THE LOCKEAN MIND Edited by Jessica Gordon-Roth and Shelley Weinberg THE ANSCOMBEAN MIND Edited by Adrian Haddock and Rachael Wiseman THE BERGSONIAN MIND Edited by Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf THE JAMESIAN MIND Edited by Sarin Marchetti THE MURDOCHIAN MIND Edited by Silvia Caprioglio Panizza and Mark Hopwood THE PROUSTIAN MIND Edited by Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern

For more information on this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Philosophical-Minds/book-series/RPM

THE PROUSTIAN MIND

Edited by Anna Elsner and Tomas Stern

Cover image: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Elsner, Anna Magdalena, 1982- editor. | Stern, Tom, 1984- editor. Title: The Proustian mind / edited by Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern. Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge philosophical minds | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2022025964 (print) | LCCN 2022025965 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367357627 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032385143 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429341472 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. | Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922—Philosophy. | Philosophy in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. | Essays. Classifcation: LCC PQ2631. R63 A8625 2023 (print) | LCC PQ2631.R63 (ebook) | DDC 843/.912—dc23/eng/20220712 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025964 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022025965 ISBN: 978-0-367-35762-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-38514-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34147-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

List of contributors References to Proust’s Works in The Proustian Mind

ix xi

Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

1

PART 1

Life and Works

13

1 Marcel Proust: A Student of Philosophy William Carter

15

2 Proust’s Philosophical Training Luc Fraisse

29

PART 2

Metaphysics and Epistemology

41

3 The Mind in Time: Proust, Involuntary Memory, and the Adventure in Perception Garry L. Hagberg

43

4 In Search of Lost Place Anna Elsner

65

5 “Only Through Time Time Is Conquered”: Proust on Death Andrew Huddleston

79

v

Contents

6 The Self Ben Colburn

93

7 Knowledge Adam Watt

107

8 The Pursuit of Uncertainty: Knowledge, Deferral, and Self-Defeat in Proust Richard Moran PART 3

Mind and Language

120

147

9 Memory Simon Kemp

149

10 Proustian Habit Thomas Stern

161

11 Subjectivity: A Proustian Problem Robert B. Pippin

176

12 Speech Michael Lucey

191

PART 4

Aesthetics

209

13 Contemplating a Proustian Library Virginie Greene

211

14 The Experience of Beauty in Proust – A Freudian Account Julia Peters and Anna-Lisa Sander

224

15 The Arts Jennifer Rushworth

236

16 Art and the Life-World: The Duck, the Rabbit and the Madeleine Gary Kemp

250

vi

Contents PART 5

Ethics

263

17 Proust and the Philosophy of Love Martijn Buijs

265

18 Proust and Lying: Ethics and Aesthetics David Ellison

282

19 “Each of Us Is Indeed Alone”: Vulnerability in In Search of Lost Time Roos Slegers

294

20 Proust’s Abraham, the Other L. Scott Lerner

309

PART 6

Gender and Sexuality

323

21 The Logic of Gomorrah: Proust and the Subversion of Identities Justine Balibar

325

22 Proust on Desire Satisfaction Robbie Kubala

335

23 Proustian Jealousy Elisabeth Ladenson

349

PART 7

In Conversation with Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors

361

24 Proust and Romanticism Michael N. Forster

363

25 Proust and Schopenhauer David Bather Woods

384

26 Proust and Bergson: Fierce Criticality Suzanne Guerlac

397

vii

Contents

27 Proust and Nietzsche on Self-Fashioning: Towards a PostMetaphysical Reading of Proust Antoine Panaioti

414

28 The Alter Ego: Merleau-Ponty Anne Simon

431

29 Proust the Phenomenologist: Sartre and Beauvoir as Readers of Proust Lior Levy

443

30 Proust-Machine: Gilles Deleuze Thomas Baldwin and Patrick french

453

31 Proust and Philosophical Infuence Sebastian Gardner

468

Index

487

viii

CONTRIBUTORS

Thomas Baldwin is Professor of French and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Shefeld, UK. Justine Balibar teaches philosophy in preparatory classes in Paris, France. David Bather Woods  is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Martijn Buijs is a Research Fellow at the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. William Carter  is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. Ben Colburn is a Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow University, UK. David Ellison is a a Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at the University of Miami, USA. Patrick french is a Professor of French at King’s College London, UK. Michael N. Forster  is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor, holder of the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy and Co-director of the International Centre for Philosophy at Bonn University. Luc Fraisse is a Professor of French literature at the University of Strasbourg, France. Sebastian Gardner is a Professor of Philosophy at University College London, UK. Virginie Greene is a Professor of French literature at Harvard University, USA.

ix

Contributors

Suzanne Guerlac is a Distinguished Professor of French, Emerita, UC Berkeley, USA. Garry L. Hagberg  is the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy at Bard College, USA. Andrew Huddleston is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. Gary Kemp is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Glasgow University, UK. Simon Kemp is an Associate Professor of French at Oxford University, UK. Robbie Kubala is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. Elisabeth Ladenson  is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. L. Scott Lerner  is the Arthur and Katherine Shadek Professor of the Humanities and French and Italian at Franklin and Marshall College, USA. Lior Levy is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Haifa University, Israel. Michael Lucey is the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Professor of Comparative Literature and French at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Richard Moran is the Brian D. Young Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Antoine Panaioti is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Julia Peters is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Robert B. Pippin  is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago. Jennifer Rushworth  is an Associate Professor in French and Comparative Literature at University College London. Anna-Lisa Sander  is a PhD student in philosophy at the Universities of Tübingen and Heidelberg, Germany. Anne Simon  is a Director of Research at the CNRS specializing in twentieth- and twenty-frst-century French and Francophone literature at the Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France. Roos Slegers is an Assistant Professor at the Tilburg University Philosophy Department in Tilburg, The Netherlands. Adam Watt is a Professor of French & Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter. x

REFERENCES TO PROUST’S WORKS IN THE PROUSTIAN MIND

References to À la recherche du temps perdu in this volume have been standardized in the following way. All citations refer to one French and one English edition of the text. The standard French edition is the four-volume Pléiade edition, edited by Jean-Yves Tadié et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–1989). References to this edition are given as, e.g., ‘IV 173’, indicating p. 173 of the fourth volume – that is, the fourth volume of the Pléiade edition, which is not the same as the fourth volume of the novel itself. There is no standard, scholarly anglophone edition of Proust’s novel. We chose the Vintage edition, which is the translation by C. K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin (vols. 1–6) and Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (vol. 7), with all seven volumes revised by D. J. Enright. Citations to this edition use the following abbreviations: SW: Swann’s Way BG: Within a Budding Grove G: The Guermantes Way SG: Sodom and Gomorrah C: The Captive F: The Fugitive TR: Time Regained Thus, a reference to ‘III 848; C, 394’ means ‘volume three, page 848 of the French, Pléiade edition and page 394 of The Captive, in the Vintage edition’. Many authors preferred to write their own translations of passages under discussion in their chapters or to use a diferent translation. In such cases, this has been made clear, and Vintage edition page numbers have also been provided for reference purposes.

Converting references from Vintage to other anglophone editions The Vintage edition is not available in some regions. The Modern Library edition – which is also not available in some regions – uses the very same translation as Vintage, with different pagination. The Penguin edition uses a diferent translation from Vintage, carried out under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast, with a diferent translator for xi

References to Proust’s Works in Te Proustian Mind

each volume. At the time of writing, other major anglophone editions are either obsolete or incomplete. Precise matching of page numbers from one edition to another is not possible. However, as a rule of thumb, the rough page number for the Modern Library edition can be obtained by multiplying the Vintage page number, given in this volume, by 1.178. This will usually be accurate to within a dozen pages, often far fewer. Correspondence between Vintage and Penguin is weaker, but the intrepid reader can multiply Vintage page numbers by 0.845, and then fick forward a few pages. A more accurate, automatic page number converter between various editions of the novel, including Pléiade, Vintage, Modern Library and Penguin, can be found at http://sterntom. com/proust-page-number-converter/.

Other abbreviations used in Te Proustian Mind References to Proust’s essays and shorter writings refer to Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, translated by John Sturrock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988) and Contre Sainte- Beuve précédé de Pastiches et mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). They are abbreviated as ASB and CSB, followed by page numbers. Given that not all material that is contained in the French edition is available in Sturrock’s translation, authors have added their own translations in these instances without a reference to ASB. References to Jean Santeuil are abbreviated as JS, followed by a page reference to the translation of Jean Santeuil by Gerard Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955]). They are followed by a reference to Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, edited by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). If only one page reference is provided, this indicates untranslated material from the French edition. References to Proust’s correspondence (abbreviated as Corr, followed by a volume and page number) refer to Philip Kolb’s 21 volume edition Correspondance de Marcel Proust, Paris, Plon, 1970–1993. If not stated otherwise, translations from the correspondence and all other untranslated French material are by the author of the chapter in question.

xii

INTRODUCTION Proust as Philosopher?

Marcel Proust (1871–1922) is one of the most well-known and infuential twentieth-century writers. Yet, when Proust started to work on À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; henceforth RTP) in 1908, he wrote the following question in his notebook: ‘Should I make it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?’ (Le Carnet de 1908, p. 61). Given that the young Proust was an avid student of philosophy, the oscillation regarding the genre of the writing he was about to undertake is unsurprising. The work ended up being a novel, but one that references many philosophers and explores major philosophical themes and ideas. These are not merely mentioned in passing, but are explored persistently, both directly by Proust (or his narrator) and indirectly in the structure and narrative of the novel itself. Proust himself was drawn to philosophy just as much as his writing has seduced and challenged philosophy, in turn. RTP has, since its publication, sparked the interest of prominent twentieth and twenty-frst philosophers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Lévinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as, more recently, Judith Butler and Martha Nussbaum, to name but a few well-known fgures.1 Some, such as Deleuze, have dedicated book-length studies to him, while for others, such as Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, Proust’s novel constituted either something against which philosophers defned themselves, or a continuous point of reference as well as a kind of temptation to which they intermittently returned.

Te Narrator’s Philosophy at First Glance Proust’s relationship to philosophy cannot be reduced to RTP alone: his Correspondence is a testament to the continuous presence of philosophers in his thought and his early writings, essays, pastiches and translation do much to highlight the general importance philosophy played for him from a young age. But to understand the mutual afnity between Proust and philosophy, it is important to scrutinise the philosophical aspects of RTP. The novel ofers the most sustained and certainly longest elaboration of what might be called a philosophical position and it is to RTP that philosophers have primarily turned. On the face of it, the narrator of RTP structures his story around a philosophical outlook which is the task of his novel both to defend and to illustrate. Thus, if someone were to ask, ‘in what sense is Proust a philosopher?’, the obvious way to bypass the mire of debates about who counts as a philosopher, about philosophy’s relation to fction and so on would be to DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-1

1

Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

reply: his novel puts forth a philosophy, which is recognisable as such. While such a response would not satisfy a dogged sceptic, it has the advantage of giving the rest of us something more tangible to get our teeth into. What is this philosophical outlook? The following is an attempt to answer this question clearly and neutrally, before considering various challenges and complications. The philosophical outlook focuses primarily on a theory of the self, but the theory of the self in question is closely related to a corresponding theory of (good) art. The most accessible bridge between them, though there appear to be others, is a theory of time, which mostly rests on his understanding of the phenomenon of involuntary memory. While the self, art, time and memory are the mainsprings of the narrator’s theory, it draws on, and has implications for, his views on other philosophical topics. Among these related topics are knowledge, love, death, subjectivity, beauty, identity and various other themes treated in this volume. The theory of the self is as follows. Each of us has, or most really is, an extratemporal being or self. The extratemporal being or self has three features worth noting. First, it is what we really or truly are. It is ‘our true self ’ (‘notre vrai moi’; TR, 224; IV 451). It is true (or real), that is, in comparison with what the hero of the narrative, the narrator as a younger man, has – wrongly, as he realises at the end – taken throughout the course of the novel to be the self. The untrue or less true self was the apparent subject (or many subjects within one human lifespan, the narrator sometimes suggests) of ordinary, everyday experiences, unfolding and changing over time. Second, the extratemporal self is always there but largely hidden from view: it ‘seemed dead, but was not entirely’ (IV 451, our translation; TR, 224). Third, not only has it always been there, but, being extratemporal, it does not have any fear of the future or, consequently, of death (TR, 223; IV 450). It is ‘an extra-temporal being, therefore untroubled by the vicissitudes of the future’ (IV 450, our translation; TR, 223; also TR, 225; IV 451 and TR, 218; IV 446). The discovery of the self outside time reassures the narrator that his real self will not die, but it also motivates him to try to fnish his book before his biological death because, as we shall see, his real self is best expressed and communicated through a work of art. The image of Bergotte’s books outliving Bergotte himself further links the self outside of time to the thought of immortality on which the narrator’s aesthetic theory hinges, even if he also knows that books themselves tend, eventually, to be forgotten. The narrator’s discovery of his self outside time is presented as arising out of instances of involuntary memory. In the paradigmatic cases, such as the taste of the madeleine or stepping on uneven fagstones, the prerequisite is that the narrator has two similar but not identical experiences (at one point, he calls them a kind of miraculous ‘analogy’ (TR, 223; IV 450)), separated in time. These can be experiences of tastes, sounds, touches, bodily positions and so on, and the narrator’s emphasis tends to be on sensations, broadly construed. In the most prominent cases, the memories which surrounded the frst experience food the second, analogous experience and their combination is associated with a profound feeling of joy. As the narrator describes it, the later experience invokes or calls into being the earlier one, not merely by recalling the fact of it to mind, but in such a way that the earlier experience is superimposed upon the latter, creating an experience of something wholly or exclusively belonging neither to one nor the other – something he also calls their shared essence. In such instances, he experiences two times and places at once, the past and the present. But, on the narrator’s telling, it is the extratemporal being which is the subject of both experiences and which forms the link between them. The crux of it is expressed as the narrator compares the analogous experiences, noting that in each case, the common feature (the sound, smell and so on) was something that, as he puts it, 2

Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

I was experiencing at the same time in the present moment and in a far-of moment […], so that the past was made to encroach upon the present, so that I was made uncertain in which of the two I found myself; in truth, the being in me which was enjoying this impression was enjoying, in the impression, that which it had in common between a day past and now, that which was extratemporal about it, a being which only appeared when, by means of one of these identities between the present and the past, it could feel itself in the only environment in which it could live and take pleasure in the essence of things, that is to say outside of time. (IV 449–50, our translation; TR, 222–3) Tasting the madeleine as an adult, the experience of involuntary memory allows him no longer to ‘feel mediocre, contingent, mortal’ (SW, 52; I 44). This is because, as he explains, ‘the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being’ (IV 450, our translation; TR, 223) and he later refers to the joy itself as ‘extratemporal joy’ (TR, 231; IV 456) and the ‘joy of the real, found again (retrouvé)’ (IV 458, our translation; TR, 233). It is the being within him, outside of time, which ‘alone had the power to make me fnd (retrouver) the old days again, the lost time (le temps perdu) […]’ (IV 450, our translation; TR, 223). It is, therefore, here that time is found again (or regained) and the search is seemingly complete – at least until the experience of involuntary memory subsides. These are condensed passages which do not provide a thorough or unifed argument in favour of a self outside time. But there appear to be three possible lines heading in that direction. First, between the two analogous instances of madeleine-tasting (to take the most famous example), one as a child and one as an adult, there must be something in common, and there must be some kind of subject which accesses and appreciates this something in common. Since the common factor is restricted to neither the earlier nor the later instance, and since it is in fact restricted to no single temporal instance at all, this common factor lies outside time. Hence: ‘Nothing but a moment of the past? Much more, perhaps; something which, common at once to the past and the present, is much more essential than both’ (IV 450, our translation; TR, 223). And since the subject accesses and appreciates this extratemporal aspect, it, too, must be outside time. Second, using a similar approach but proceeding directly to the subject, we might say that the subject of the mix of past and present is obviously not merely the child madeleine eater, because it is aware of a state in which the narrator is an adult and the experience is somehow purer and more joyous than it had been in childhood. It is equally not merely the adult madeleine eater, because ‘the moment I was reliving [i.e. from the distant past] seemed to me to be the present moment’ (IV 447, our translation; TR, 219). Hence, the being that is the locus of this compound experience lies beyond time. The third, most indirect argument relates to joy in the face of death: the suggestion appears to be that, because involuntary memory is associated with both joy and indiference to death, it would make sense for the being in question to be extratemporal. The self outside time is presented as an important aspect of the resolution to the narrator’s quest, throughout the novel, to fnd a meaningful kind of satisfaction. While the considerations so far have been drawn almost exclusively from brief sections of the frst and fnal volume, the parts in between (which Proust in fact wrote later) implicitly present a series of candidates for fulflment, arising organically throughout the story. These include love, social status, travel and art. With the partial exception of art, on which more in a moment, these prove immensely disappointing. Experiences of involuntary memory, by contrast, are (typically) genuinely joyous. We have already noted that the self outside time does not fear death and presumably cannot in fact die, if death requires a change within time. But the narrator 3

Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

ofers a further explanation. One can only imagine that which is not present to the senses; the narrator can only take pleasure when he is imagining things; therefore, he can never take pleasure in anything which currently exists and is present to his senses (see Kubala, in this volume, for a discussion of this argument). However, in instances of involuntary memory, that which is absent (the frst sensation and its contingent surroundings) and can therefore be enjoyed in imagination is at the same time currently existent and, as it were, subject to live, present experiences (TR, 223–4; IV 450–1). In anachronistic terms, one might compare this to a virtual reality simulator, which is simulating a real experience from the subject’s past: the subject can use her imagination, because the simulation is not real; yet, she can respond, in real time, to her actual (virtual) surroundings. A major diference, of course, is that the narrator does not treat the reborn past as virtual in the sense of not really existing. Instead, he speaks, as we have seen, of a shared essence between past and present, which the self outside time is able to access and enjoy. Involuntary memory and its associated pleasure are a ‘contemplation of the essence of things’ (TR, 229; IV 454). The past – or its essence – is not simulated, but really found. The narrator’s satisfaction can be further accounted for when we have sketched his theory of art. The narrator treats the production of art as one way, perhaps the best and only way, to expose, preserve and communicate the deeper reality, and corresponding joy, which has been encountered in experiences of involuntary memory and in certain other revelatory experiences which are not straightforwardly memories of any kind (TR, 231–3; IV 456–8). Indeed, he claims that the work of art itself is the ‘only way of fnding lost Time again [de retrouver le Temps perdu]’ (IV 478, our translation and emphasis; TR, 258). The ‘essence common to both past and present sensations’ is said to convey to us certain ‘impressions, outside time’ (IV 477, our translation; TR, 257–8). Such impressions bypass everyday experience, which is typically a matter of chasing after various futile pleasures. They also bypass what he calls the ‘intellect’ or ‘intelligence’, our ordinary critical faculties, and, by extension, intellectual pursuits in general. The intelligence is not set up to access, describe or perhaps even make sense of the deeper reality in question and, he sometimes suggests, it obstructs or frustrates our eforts to do so (TR, 232–3; IV 457–8). A further claim is that the intelligence treats what is generally accessible, common to all, whereas reality’s deeper impressions are unique to the individual (TR, 233–4; IV 458–9). Thus, to encounter a genuine work of art is to engage on a deeper level, with the artist, than would be possible in everyday interactions. We will never know the real people we love in the way that we can know an artist through a work of art. Thus, ‘artistic sense’ is equated, in the end, with ‘submission to interior reality’ (IV 461, our translation; TR, 237). ‘To make a work of art’ (IV 457, our translation; TR, 232) just is a matter of, to adapt his phrasing, extracting something ideal, intelligible or intellectual (though not by means of everyday intellect) from a sense impression that reality has made upon the individual (TR, 232; IV 457). The impressions that reality makes bypass the intellect and are not chosen by the artist. Involuntary memory is one profound instance of this process, for we cannot seek these memories out and, when we get them, they are not experienced as rationally explicable. But the narrator supposes that other impressions made by reality are also available to us. His example is the Martinville steeples, the view of which he has experienced as deeply profound but not as a form of involuntary memory (TR, 231–3; IV 456–8), because there was no analogous past experience in that case, and so nothing to remember. Art, theorised in this way, rounds out both the satisfaction available to the narrator at the end of the book and the contrast with the false hopes of love, travel, society and so on.

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Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

(Art itself has until the fnal volume been hit-and-miss, because he has not understood what he is looking for.) In love, for example, failure is guaranteed: on the narrator’s account, the lover wishes to possess, fully know and (in his case at least) control the beloved, but such possession, knowledge and control remain necessarily evasive (see, in this volume, Ladenson, Moran and Buijs). Art, however, as theorised above, is as close as we get to genuine knowledge of another, a knowledge love cannot ofer. It is also a truer form of ‘travel’. When I travel from one place to another, I see a diferent place, while remaining essentially the same kind of person. When I ‘travel’ using a genuine work of art, I experience the world in a completely diferent way, with ‘new eyes’ (III 762, our translation; C, 291), that is, as the artist does (compare C, 188; III 676 with TR, 254; IV 474). In addition to a general account of what the artist is trying to do, the narrator draws some conclusions regarding the form and content of his planned work of art. For one thing, he rejects the ideal of the novel as ‘cinematographic parade [déflé cinématographique]’ (IV 461; TR, 237), that is, as the equivalent of a procession of images depicting perceived reality accurately from the outside. There would be no connection between that kind of novel and the preservation of reality’s impressions upon the self. Equally, he needn’t pay attention to people telling him to write about ‘great workers’ movements’ or ‘noble intellectuals’ rather than about ‘insignifcant members of the idle rich’ (IV 460, our translation; TR, 235–6) – RTP, to be sure, is largely about the latter, in terms of its main characters. If the work of art is the extraction of the unique impressions made upon the artist’s self by a deeper reality, then, at best, paying attention to which kinds of people are depicted (workers altering the course of history, rather than idle aristocrats) will miss the point. It would be to focus on what he calls ‘appearance’, rather than ‘depth’ (TR, 237; IV 461 – see also TR, 256–7; IV 476–7), and it would guide the artist towards what is common to all rather than what is unique to the artist herself. He also suspects such theorists (and the artists who follow them) of bad faith: the difculty of attending to the impressions of reality makes it tempting to abandon the true artistic calling, in favour of easier, less instinctive, more intellectual and therefore less authentic and truthful projects. While there is some critical debate about whether we are supposed to identify the narrator’s planned work of art with the novel we have just fnished reading, RTP looks consistent, at a minimum, with these aspects of the theory of art associated with the narrator’s fnal view. The aesthetic theory encapsulated in that view also hinges on a largely redemptive understanding of art (Bersani 1990), one that is built on a continuous collision between ethical and aesthetic considerations (see Ellison in this volume for discussion of this argument). The narrator describes his aesthetic ‘method’ (TR, 264; IV 482) as consisting in drawing out the universal, extratemporal character of his particular experiences, emotions and the relationships that have made up his life, before making use of them in his work of art. Although the work of art may be an act of genuine communication to an appreciative reader, the connection between art and life (on which see Greene and Gary Kemp in this volume) is narrowly utilitarian when it comes to those who are close to the artist: they have ‘in the long run done no more for [the writer] than pose for him like models for a painter’ (TR, 264; IV 482) and the sufering they have caused the artist provides ‘raw material’ (TR, 270; IV 487) for his work. As ‘ideas are the substitutes for sorrows’ (TR, 268, our translation; IV 485), this material afords the writer deep insights. This exploitation of others – justifed, in part, because they have little else to ofer him – is central to the narrator’s aesthetic theory, and as part of this, death, grief and loss play a particularly valuable role in his economy of artistic production (see Huddleston, in this volume, for discussion).

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Proust and Philosophy: Some Notable Interpretations Given that the view just described is plainly philosophical, and that it appears to illuminate both the content and the form of RTP, we should immediately make a further point clear: philosophers usually don’t like it. Philosophically minded commentators, both in this volume and in general, tend either to attack it along various lines, to ignore it altogether or to modify it substantially. As a result, though many philosophers writing about Proust wish to take him seriously as a philosopher of some kind, most of them steer the reader away from focusing on the philosophical outlook which apparently sustains the narrator and his narration. Some have pointed to passages in the novel, or aspects of it, which, they claim, cast doubt on Proust’s or the narrator’s commitment to these ideas (in this volume alone, see Forster, Guerlac, Hagberg and Panaioti). Others simply fnd the view so implausible that we are better of looking elsewhere (see Dancy 1995). Philosophical analysis is free, of course, to hear what it wants to hear and disregard the rest. But a notable line of philosophical criticism seeks either to downplay or to contextualise what we might call the openly philosophical passages of the book. Two of the most infuential philosophical treatments of Proust proceed in this way. In Proust: Philosophy of the Novel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992 [1987]), the philosopher Vincent Descombes challenged the view of what essentially is a kind of unmediated presence of a philosophical subtext guiding the novel. He claimed that it was pointless to look for a coherent philosophical theory in Proust. Descombes understands why such readings are tempting and cites a letter to Jacques Rivière in which Proust himself stated that he hoped that Time Regained would ‘clear up’ the misunderstanding that the previous volumes created. But while this kind of evidence may sustain the idea that the fnal volume contains something close to a fnal, philosophical view, Descombes warns that ‘the thoughts expressed in Time Regained were never really conclusions’ (Descombes 1992, 7). Instead, his view was that if we want to read Proust philosophically, we paradoxically must take The Search seriously as a novel. What Descombes calls ‘the philosophy of the novel’ (Descombes 1992, 10) means acknowledging that ‘the Proustian novel is bolder than Proust the theorist’ (Descombes 1992, 6). He concedes that RTP ‘does at times seem to be a book of philosophy, a dogmatic treatise on Time and Essence’, but that it is a book that is ‘philosophically instructive because of the concepts the novelist brings into play in order to build his story’ (Descombes 1992, 10). What Descombes efectively advocates in his study goes beyond Proust in the sense that his larger claim is that philosophers should be able to engage with works whose form diverges from philosophical writing, pithily bemoaning that ‘it is a pity that philosophers do not talk a great deal more about the novels they read’ (Descombes 1992, 8–9). Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction (2004) can be seen as following in Descombes’s footsteps in an attempt to treat RTP as a philosophical novel in its own right and beyond particular afnities to specifc philosophers. Landy’s work links Proust with Nietzsche, but he makes no claim for direct infuence. Instead, it is the distinction between author and narrator which is central to Landy’s approach and his argument that Proust the author could understand ‘more clearly than Marcel [the narrator] the instrumental and transitional roles of fction writing, its function as a stepping-stone on the path to becoming who one is’ (Landy 2004, 126). To be sure, Landy, like Descombes, is invested in grappling with Proust’s distinctive philosophical ideas, ideas that cannot be separated from the literary form in which he has opted to present them (both of them use the same Rivière letter as an epigraph!). But unlike Descombes and others, his focus on the connection between literary form and philosophy puts an emphasis on the role of fction. His claim is that it is only if we take RTP seriously 6

Introduction: Proust as Philosopher?

as a work of fction that we will be able to ‘extract a consistent, powerful, and original philosophical system’ from it (Landy 2004, 8). A diferent and complementary approach to Proust and philosophy looks at his ideas in the light of his philosophical context. It was the work of the literary theorist Anne Henry, and particularly her 1981 study Marcel Proust – théories pour une esthétique (Paris, Klincksieck, 1981), which constituted the starting point, here. Henry argued that the aesthetic theory driving both Jean Santeuil and In Search of Lost Time was largely based on Friedrich Schelling’s and Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of art. Indeed, she went as far as claiming that Proust’s novel was a kind of literary translation of distinctly attributable philosophical ideas. Linking Proust’s philosophical project with a more traditional philosopher – Schopenhauer, for example – has the advantage of supplying conventional philosophical support to the narrator’s claims. But, philosophically speaking, it is not without cost: there aren’t many Schopenhauerians around these days. Henry’s most ambitious conclusions have since been challenged by those who have sought to follow her lead in placing Proust in philosophical context. In this category, Luc Fraisse’s 2013 study of what he calls Proust’s ‘philosophical eclecticism’ remains the most comprehensive guide to the historical groundings of the interactions between Proust and philosophy. While he highlights, like some of his predecessors, afnities between specifc aspects of philosophical theories and their presence in Proust’s writing, his work takes seriously Proust’s own studies in philosophy. Fraisse’s point of departure is that ‘it is a fact that the mature Proust remains permanently connected to his former studies in philosophy’ (Fraisse 2013, 13). Fraisse seeks to demonstrate that for Proust, ‘philosophy did not simply constitute a compulsory step in his studies; philosophy ofered him a permanent home’ (Fraisse 2013, 13). His aim has therefore been not so much to give an account of Proust’s philosophy but rather to reconstruct ‘Proust’s philosophical culture’ (Fraisse 2013, 7). This means presenting how Proust interacted with a range of philosophers, including some of his teachers, and how his novel pays tribute to their thought. At the same time, Fraisse is opposed to the idea that any one extended engagement with a particular philosopher or philosophical idea can be singled out in what is essentially a multifaceted construct of interactions with philosophy and philosophers. Fraisse’s Proust makes a relentless use of philosophy, but in a piecemeal way which resists systematic reconstruction. A comprehensive genealogy of scholarly philosophical readings of Proust would need to include many more fgures.2 Yet, those we have briefy sketched here are exemplary in that they constitute radically diferent approaches that have either traced the presence of a particular philosopher or particular philosophical currents in Proust’s work, have tried to develop a Proustian philosophy in its own right based on his work’s novelistic form and/or the novel’s fctional character or have developed a historical approach that takes seriously Proust’s own training and exposure to philosophy. In doing so, they all move beyond what we might call the narrator’s ofcial philosophy. In bringing together this volume, we did not limit ourselves to any one of these approaches. We hope, instead, to pay tribute to the manifold forms the reciprocal interactions between Proust and philosophy have taken since the publication of RTP. Yet, it is also grounded in a more practical reason, namely that despite Proust’s own engagement with philosophers and philosophy, and despite wide-ranging engagement with Proust by subsequent philosophers, the present-day Anglophone reader has no place to look for a comprehensive analysis of Proust’s philosophy and of the philosophical study of Proust. In this volume, readers can fnd entries on his relation to particular philosophers – those who infuenced him and those he infuenced – as well as studies of his particular ideas. 7

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The chapters collected here thereby seek to provide a systematic overview of Proust’s philosophical context and of the key themes and concepts in his works. repetition of ‘thereby’ thereby avoided (see previous and next sentence). The Proustian Mind thus complements and fosters the interest in Proust’s contribution to philosophy, providing a comprehensive resource in English, the frst of its kind, for exploring key aspects of his thought. The diversity of themes gives a sense of the richness and fecundity of Proustian thought – be it when RTP is taken to put forward a philosophical position on a specifc theme, when the infuence of or afnity with specifc philosophers on Proust’s thought is traced or when RTP has itself become a point of departure for a subsequent philosophical engagement.

An Overview of Te Proustian Mind The volume is divided into seven subsections: Life & Works, Metaphysics & Epistemology, Mind & Language, Aesthetics, Ethics, Sexuality & Gender and In Conversation with Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors. In addition to its primary goal of helping the reader to know where to look on any given subject, the choice of subsections was intended to demonstrate the breadth and depth of Proust’s engagement with diferent areas of philosophy. It is also an invitation to read Proust in relation to traditional philosophical categories. While The Proustian Mind is not the product of any particular interpretative school or ideological agenda, the volume is intended to provide a fresh approach to Proust by allowing the reader to access his work through the voices of philosophers – some of whom write on Proust for the frst time, while others have a longstanding interest in his thought – as well as literary scholars whose work foregrounds the philosophical aspects of Proust. In calling on the scholars assembled here, and in structuring the volume this way, we have tried to allow readers both to get an overview of the key philosophical themes in Proust’s thought and to highlight his thought’s continued relevance for debates in contemporary philosophy. The frst section on Proust’s Life and Works features two chapters which allow readers to understand the origin and genesis of Proust’s interest and engagement with philosophy from an early age. William Carter explores how, as a young man, Proust thought of himself as a philosopher rather than a future novelist, foregrounding in particular the role played by Proust’s philosophy teacher at the lycée Condorcet, Alphonse Darlu and his philosophy professor at the Sorbonne, Emile Boutroux. Luc Fraisse provides a detailed overview of Proust’s philosophical training, highlighting that, behind the apparently decorative references to philosophers in RTP, Proust entertained throughout his writing career an intensive and diverse dialogue with key areas and thinkers of Western philosophy. The Proustian novel is at its core concerned with scrutinising the nature of reality, questions of existence and the epistemic possibilities of human experience. Metaphysics and Epistemology consists of six chapters that acknowledge how Proust’s work engages with these felds. In his treatment of the novel’s signature theme, time, Garry Hagberg reads Proust’s work alongside Henri Bergson, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead. This exploration of how Proust connects, disconnects and reconnects the construction/composition of the past and composition/construction of the self sets up RTP as a ‘massive case study’ on the workings of memory but also as a blueprint for thinking about philosophy in literature. Space is a category often sidelined compared to the role that time and memory play in Proust’s thought. Anna Elsner explores the role RTP plays in Jef Malpas’s philosophy of place and proposes that while the concepts of space and specifc

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places are central to understanding interconnection between memory, imagination and selfidentity, they are also riddled with uncertainty for the Proustian narrator. Some of the novel’s key scenes are concerned with death and dying – the death of the grandmother, Albertine, Swann, Saint-Loup, Bergotte and Elstir are some of the most prominent examples, as is the narrator’s anticipation of his own death at the end of Time Regained. Reading Proust alongside Derek Parft’s idea of ‘timeless’ characters, Andrew Huddleston singles out Proust’s philosophy of death as a condition for consolation in the Search. Proust’s narrator is fundamentally concerned with questioning the structure, consistency and continuity of selfhood. The word ‘moi’ (‘self ’ or ‘me’) occurs on average 1.1996 times per page, as computational scholarship has shown (Bowie 1998: 2). Ben Colburn examines three diferent models for the Proustian self, eventually defending one which reads the epiphanies of the fnal volume as transcendental arguments. Adam Watt focuses on diferent modes of knowing in Proust’s novel. He questions what constitutes ‘Proust’s knowledge’ as well as ‘knowability’ more broadly and ofers close readings of scenes that drive Proust’s economy of knowledge. It is the epistemic expressions of that economy that constitute the topic of Richard Moran’s chapter. His chapter highlights why the stakes of knowing and not knowing are so decisive and the essential role deferral and self-defeat play in resisting possession and maintaining uncertainty. In the following part, Mind and Language, we engage with how Proust explores what constitutes mental states, consciousness and thoughts, how meaning is created and what the interpretation of language and speech acts reveals about the functioning of the Proustian mind. Simon Kemp examines Proustian memory as a double experience, as part of which involuntary memory unlocks the essence of experience while at the same time, by overlaying and fusing multiple instances in one image, it uncovers open laws about human nature and the mind. Tom Stern focuses on the theme of habit in RTP – a major philosophical topic in Proust’s day – highlighting how that tradition and Proust’s re-conception of it shapes the Proustian self, its connection to the external world and other people. In his chapter on subjectivity, Robert B. Pippin scrutinises what he defnes as one of the key aims of the Proustian narrator: to escape subjectivity while remaining a subject. Michael Lucey reads RTP as a critical ethnography of the function of talk among certain social groups. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, his chapter explores the novel as a text that lays open multiple diferent language ideologies, the uncovering of which provides a deeper understanding of the relationship between language and mind. As the Aesthetics section makes clear, RTP does not only put forward a theoretical hypothesis about the genesis of literature. It explores music, the visual arts and theatre, offering theories about the relationship between the arts, questioning the role of beauty and exploring the connection of art and life, which preoccupied Proust ever since the writing of Contre Sainte-Beuve. Virginie Greene argues that the novel’s aesthetic theory is constantly undercut through Proust’s own life as well as the life of the reader. Julia Peters and Anna-Lisa Sander focus on Proust’s understanding of beauty, which they read through the lens of psychoanalysis. Jennifer Rushworth charts a development from a Schopenhauerian hierarchy of arts to a more inclusive approach inspired by the Wagnerian model, as part of which it also questions the privileged but not unchallenged role that literature plays. Gary Kemp juxtaposes Proust’s involuntary memory to Wittgenstein’s idea of aspect-perception, represented by the famous Duck-rabbit drawing. His reading excavates the symbolic character of Proustian involuntary memory, allowing readers to re-evaluate it as an aesthetic phenomenon that conspires beneath ordinary language and experience and sheds light on the multi-dimensional dynamics of perception.

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Compared with his landmark discussions of time, the self or art, Proust’s narrator does not linger on refections in conventional moral philosophy. Nonetheless, the Ethics section brings out and explores important ethical themes. Martin Buijs examines love in RTP, ofering a reading which, among other things, defends Proust against some of Martha Nussbaum’s moral objections. David Ellison’s analysis of lying in RTP, beginning with some of Kant’s famous remarks, reveals Proustian connections between ethics and aesthetics. Roos Slegers argues that RTP broadens philosophical readings of vulnerability by revealing that to be vulnerable does not only mean being susceptible to harm. Instead, vulnerability becomes the very condition for love, wonder and relationality. Scott Lerner examines the representation of the other in Proust’s writing from the perspective of an originary mother-son relation, drawing on both Derrida and Levinas. The section entitled Gender and Sexuality examines three central aspects of this topic. Key to questions of sexual and gender identity is an understanding of identity and how processes of identifcation work. Justine Balibar’s chapter explores RTP as a work essentially concerned with enabling and resisting identifcation. She proposes that two distinct logics are at stake in Proust’s project of challenging the concept of identifcation itself: the logic of inversion which switches the codes of identifcation or the logic of subversion which plays them of in a confused and ambiguous way and ultimately turns identifcation into an impossible and never-ending process. Robbie Kubala examines the workings of desire in RTP, as well as the relationship between desire, desire satisfaction and agent satisfaction. He focuses on the role of the imagination in the formation of desire, the distinction between hypothetical imagination and the imaginativeness that is involved in the perception of beauty. Elisabeth Ladenson situates jealousy as the nexus for philosophical, psychological and existential discourses in Proust’s novel. Arguing that all jealousy – whether heterosexual or homosexual – in RTP is general rather specifc, the chapter lays open how jealousy is the condition for all love relations as well as the precondition for the narrator’s turn to writing. Proust’s own readings in philosophy were broad. They started during his school years, blossomed during his studies of philosophy and endured throughout his work on RTP. Proust’s infuence on twentieth- and twenty-frst-century philosophy is as rich and multilayered as his own philosophical context. In conversation with predecessors, contemporaries and successors begins with Michael N. Forster’s chapter, which charts the common ground that exists between RTP and German Romanticism, drawing parallels, and noting diferences, in particularly with Herder, Goethe and Hegel, as well as the Schlegel brothers and Schleiermacher. David Bather Woods lays open the varied interpretations of Schopenhauer’s infuence and presence in Proust that have been put forward, ranging from the view that RTP constitutes a literary translation of Schopenhauer to the philosopher being cited as mere decoration. Henri Bergson, a contemporary of Marcel Proust and cousin of his by marriage, is another key fgure frequently held responsible for having shaped Proust’s thought on time and memory. Suzanne Guerlac focuses on Proust’s ambiguous relationship to Bergson’s thought, whose infuence he openly rejected, to explore afnities in their aim and method beyond infuence. While the frst three chapters treat likely infuences on Proust, the fourth takes a diferent approach. Proust certainly mentions Nietzsche, but writers who have linked the two have tended to focus on their afnities, regardless of infuence. Antoine Panaioti scrutinises these readings, and especially the idea of self-fashioning. An idea prominent in both Nietzsche and Proust, the chapter points to a way that allows the Proustian ‘true self ’ to exist for the narrator while simultaneously constituting a or fction for its author, which Panaioti presents as consistent with the spirit of Nietzsche’s endeavours. 10

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The following three chapters of the anthology ofer readers the possibility of exploring how Proust’s work and legacy after his death have shaped the thought of four twentiethcentury French philosophers: Merleau-Ponty; Sartre; de Beauvoir and Deleuze. Anne Simon explores Merleau-Ponty’s fascination with Proust – a fascination which lasted a lifetime, led to repeated engagements with RTP and as part of which the phenomenologist was particularly taken by the way Proust transforms existential duration into novelistic language. Lior Levy also acknowledges the proximity of Proust to phenomenology, turning to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in her chapter. She explores Sartre’s troubled relationship to Proust which she reads as pointing to tensions in Sartre’s own thought, and draws parallels between Proust and de Beauvoir with regard to their conceptualising of grief and loss. Patrick french and Thomas Baldwin’s chapter on Gilles Deleuze explores the substantial role of RTP in Deleuze’s philosophy. Their chapter proposes that Proust’s novel ofers Deleuze a paradigmatic example of a work of thought that fundamentally reconfgures Deleuze’s understanding of philosophy by allowing art, philosophy and other regimes of knowledge, including madness, to co-exist on the same terrain of invention. In the fnal chapter Sebastian Gardner returns to the question of philosophical infuences. He proposes that nothing can be proven regarding any narrow academic philosophical infuence; yet, in a revival of Anne Henry’s study, he upholds that RTP is a ‘philosophical novel’ because the expression of the idea at the heart of the novel has a philosophical character. *** At the culmination of À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator recounts several experiences at a party which add up to something both signifcant and banal: he is an old man now. One of these experiences is reported as follows: When someone, hearing that I had been ill, asked if I was not afraid of catching the fu which was prevalent then, another benevolent person reassured me by saying: ‘no, it mostly attacks those who are still young. People of your age are not greatly at risk.’ (IV 507, our translation; TR, 296) Proust is referring to what is still known, not altogether accurately, as the Spanish fu pandemic. This conveniently dates the party to the second half of 1918, at the earliest – though other, conficting passages make precise dating impossible. Based on one recent study, the narrator’s interlocutor is largely accurate: older people like the narrator were less likely to die from an infection compared to a young man, and, most importantly, much less likely to get infected in the frst place.3 When we started this project, Proust’s lines would have been much less salient than they are now. Most of us have since become charged with the nervous energy of gathering in the midst of a deadly pandemic, with its age-stratifed risk calculations and well-meaning reassurances based on incomplete understanding of incomplete data – even if, in the most recent outbreaks, the young have been less, not more vulnerable than the old. In practice, with regard to this volume, the pandemic meant several signifcant delays and even cancellations, limited access to libraries and resources and the swift abandonment of a plan for a conference. Needless to say, these are very minor costs in the grand scheme. Still, just as the narrator cannot separate the stifness of one particular towel from all of its contingent environment, ‘the whole instant of my life’ which surrounded it, so we are unlikely to think of this collection of chapters without calling forth the early stages of the 11

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COVID pandemic. We therefore take the opportunity to thank various people for their help, patience and perseverance: all our contributors; Josh Torabi, who provided invaluable editorial assistance; and our editors at Routledge. And we wish them, and our readers, the best of health.

Notes 1 Others include, but are not limited to, Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Ernst Bloch, Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin. 2 This would include, for example, recent works by Michel Ferraris, Mauro Carbone, Erika Fülöp, Miguel de Beistegui, Anne Simon and Martin Hägglund. 3 See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3310443/ (accessed 25 April 2022).

Bibliography Bersani, Leo. 1990. The Culture of Redemption. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowie, Malcolm. 1998. Proust Among the Stars. London: HarperCollins. Dancy, Jonathan. 1995. ‘New Truths in Proust?’, Modern Language Review, 90 (Winter), 18–28. Descombes, Vincent. 1992 [1987]. Proust: Philosophy of the Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fraisse, Luc. 2013. L’éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust. Paris: PU Paris Sorbonne. Henry, Anne. 1981. Marcel Proust – théories pour une esthétique. Paris: Klincksieck. Landy, Joshua. 2004. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. New York: Oxford University Press. Proust, Marcel. 1976. Le Carnet de 1908. Ed. by Philip Kolb. Paris: Gallimard.

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PART 1

Life and Works

1 MARCEL PROUST A Student of Philosophy William Carter

“Marcel Proust: A Student of Philosophy” traces Proust’s long search for the story he wanted to tell and for the structure and genre that suited it best. As a young man, he thought of himself primarily as a budding philosopher and was greatly infuenced by Alphonse Darlu and Anatole France. When writing Les Plaisirs et les jours, he remembered key passages in the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson and used some of these as epigraphs to stories in his frst book. After the disappointing reception of this work, he tried his hand at writing a novel, now known as Jean Santeuil. Having failed at this, he began translating and annotating works by the English art critic John Ruskin. Several years after the death of his beloved mother, Proust began a series of essays, under the general title Contre Sainte-Beuve. It wasn’t until then that his long apprenticeship began to bear fruit and he started to write what became À la recherche du temps perdu. He had at last found his true voice as a novelist and the story that he wanted to tell in a book of unprecedented depth and scope. As a youth, Marcel thought of himself as a philosopher rather than as a future novelist. Indeed, his entire life was a philosophical and literary apprenticeship until fnally, at nearly the age of forty, he found his mature voice as a writer and the story he wanted to tell. Proust’s lack of certainty is refected in the Narrator’s own in the opening page of the novel. We fnd the Narrator in the whirlpool of awakening. After having fallen asleep while reading a book, he does not know who he is, where he is, or even what he is: “…it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V” (SW, 3; I 3). Thus begins the Narrator’s lifelong philosophical quest to discover the truth about the human experience as well as the meaning and purpose of his own life. At age eleven, Proust entered the Lycée Condorcet which had a solid curriculum and a strong humanist tradition, with an emphasis on literature and philosophy. A year earlier while walking down the Champs-Élysées with his family, he had sufered a severe asthma attack. This chronic illness and other health problems would plague him his entire life. In Proust’s earliest texts, some of which were written as school exercises when he was an adolescent, we fnd aspects of his mature style and aesthetics. At the age of fourteen, he completed the type of assignment in which a student expresses himself freely on a simple theme. Normally, such assignments flled about twenty lines, but Marcel, never short on ideas and inspiration, produced four pages on “Clouds.”1 Of all the adolescent writings that survive, DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-3

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this text is perhaps the most distinctly Proustian in content and expression. The subject of clouds suited his contemplative nature: “…man, moved spiritually by the mysterious and solemn calm of this poetical hour, likes to contemplate the sky; he may then discover in the clouds giants and towers and all the luminous fantasies of his exalted imagination.” After stating that clouds make us dream because “their rapid passage plunges our soul into the most profound philosophical meditations,” he expresses a major tenet of his philosophy that will guide his aesthetics and vision: “…man has in his heart a secret and slender thread that binds him so closely to all parts of nature…”2 (CSB, 328). By the summer of 1888, Marcel had met Paul Desjardins, a teacher and moralist who wrote poetry, reviews, and essays, many of which were published in La Revue bleue. A rather stern and uncompromising moralist, Desjardins denounced what he viewed as the current scourges of intellectual life: religious skepticism and literary dilettantism. From a distinguished upper-bourgeois family, Desjardins had become friends with Proust’s parents and sometimes came to their home to read with Marcel the philosopher-poets Heraclitus and Lucretius.3 For a period, Desjardins would infuence Marcel’s ideas on morality and selfreliance, but teacher and pupil would soon drift apart because Desjardins loathed society and considered Marcel a lost cause once the latter began frequenting the salons of Paris’s “beau monde.” At the beginning of the 1888 school year, Marcel was eager to begin his studies of philosophy with Alphonse Darlu. Darlu was in his fourth year at Condorcet where he had acquired the reputation of being an outstanding teacher who awakened many adolescent minds to the intellectual joys of philosophy. Marcel would become one of Darlu’s preferred disciples, always referring to him as “our dear master.” After the frst day of class, as Marcel reviewed his notes and impressions, he realized that, despite the complexity of the opening lecture for the novice in philosophy, the teacher’s words had seemed addressed directly to him. That evening, after his second day in Darlu’s class, he wrote to him seeking a remedy to his intensive self-analysis that caused him to imagine his consciousness as containing multiple selves. He feared becoming too intellectual and losing his ability to “take complete pleasure in what used to be my highest joy, the works of literature.” Now when he read a poem by Leconte de Lisle, even while he was “savouring the infnite delights of former days,” his other self amused itself by looking for the causes of his pleasure and fnds them in a certain relationship between me and the work, specifcally, it imagines conditions diametrically opposed to beauty, and ends by killing all my pleasure. For more than a year I have been unable to judge anything in a literary light, I am devoured by the need for set rules by which to judge works of art with certainty. He feared that the cure would require him to cease the constant contemplation of his inner life, a thought that struck him “as frightful.” Marcel told his professor that he assumed his predicament was common in “persons of my age, whom ill health obliged in the past to live a good deal to themselves” (SL I: 23; Corr, I: 122). He urged Darlu to keep this letter confdential for fear of being ridiculed by his classmates who already found him sufciently odd. Proust would remember the danger of excessive intellectualization when creating the fctional writer Bergotte in In Search of Lost Time, whose last works are overly intellectual, indicating a dryness of the soul, a fatal condition for an artist. Marcel’s letters and preoccupations were not limited to philosophical concepts; he was flled with adolescent longings, some of which were explicitly sexual in nature. During one philosophy class, despite having been alerted by Darlu that the professor was going to call 16

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on him, Marcel wrote to Daniel Halévy, a schoolmate, a letter showing that his thoughts were, at times, on subjects less idealistic and transcendental than Plato and Kant. Daniel had apparently given Marcel a verbal lashing and called him a pederast. Marcel replied, stating in the opening paragraph that his “ethical beliefs allow me to regard the pleasures of the senses as a splendid thing.” He attempted to explain why afectionate caresses between boys need not be corrupt: You think me jaded and efete. You are mistaken. If you are delicious, if you have lovely eyes which refect the grace and refnement of your mind with such purity that I feel I cannot fully love your mind without kissing your eyes, if your body and mind, like your thoughts, are so lithe and slender that I feel I could mingle more intimately with your thoughts by sitting on your lap, if, fnally, I feel that the charm of your person, in which I cannot separate your keen mind from your agile body, would refne and enhance “the sweet joy of love” for me, there is nothing in all that to deserve your contemptuous words, which would have been more fttingly addressed to someone surfeited with women and seeking new pleasures in pederasty. I am glad to say that I have some highly intelligent friends, distinguished by great moral delicacy, who have amused themselves at one time with a boy…. That was the beginning of their youth. Later on they went back to women. (SL I: 24; Corr, I: 123–34) In the fall of 1888, Marcel wrote a prose poem that mixes sensuality and philosophy. The young poet yearns to escape into an idealized, decadent world where same-sex love is not merely tolerated but celebrated. One recognizes many of the feelings that Marcel hoped would be reciprocated by friends whom he found attractive. In the poem, a beautiful Greek boy named Glaukos, in love with philosophy, poetry, and other young men, surrounds himself with piles of letters expressing friendship as he sits nearly naked in a decadent decor flled with rare blooms. Glaukos has many male friends, all of whom are beautiful and delight in subtle thoughts; some of whom love him infnitely: Often seated on the sturdy knees of one of them, cheek to cheek, bodies entwined, [Glaukos] discusses with him Aristotle’s philosophy and Euripides’ poems, while they embrace and caress each other, making elegant and wise remarks in the sumptuous room, near magnifcent fowers….4 In his fnal year at Condorcet, as the text of Glaukos illustrates, Marcel was blithely hedonistic, appreciative of Anatole France’s brand of epicureanism, which perfectly suited his tastes and humor. Darlu was a friend of France’s and often discussed the writer’s works with Marcel. When a critic attacked Balthasar, France’s new collection of stories, for being “laborious, superfcial, artifcial, tedious, long-winded,” etc., Marcel sent France an anonymous letter, proclaiming his admiration for the writer’s books: “With the memory of the hours of exquisite delight you have given me I have built, deep in my heart, a chapel flled with you.” Marcel signed the letter, “A student of philosophy” (SL I: 25–6; Corr, I: 125–6). Young Proust’s own lack of confdence and the indecision about a literary genre are refected in the young Narrator’s dilemma: since I wished someday to become a writer, it was high time to decide what sort of books I was going to write. But as soon as I asked myself the question, and tried to discover 17

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some subject to which I could impart a philosophical signifcance of infnite value, my mind would stop like a clock, my consciousness would be faced with a blank […]. (SW, 205; I 170) During Proust’s university years, the men he continued to admire the most were his philosophy teachers, Alphonse Darlu and Émile Boutroux, a distinguished professor of history and philosophy with whom he studied at the Sorbonne. At the university, Proust continued to study with Darlu whom the family engaged to give him private lessons. Among the answers that Proust provided in what is known as the “second questionnaire,” flled out when he was in his early twenties, we fnd: My heroes from real life: M. Darlu and M. Boutroux (ASB, 114; CSB, 337). In order to please his family, Proust had also enrolled in law school. As graduation grew near, pressure from Proust’s father increased, urging him to concentrate on earning his law degree. This provoked the young man to write the following letter: My dearest papa, I have kept hoping that I would fnally be able to go on with the literary and philosophical studies for which I believe myself ft. But seeing that every year only subjects me to more and more practical discipline, I prefer to choose at once one of the practical careers you have suggested. […] As for a law ofce, I should vastly prefer going to work for a stockbroker. And I assure you, I wouldn’t stick it out for three days! I still believe that anything I do outside of literature and philosophy will be just so much time wasted. (SL I: 57–8; Corr, I: 238) No doubt Proust would later fnd a sweet irony in these words “time wasted” for, although he was apparently “wasting time” in his explorations of society and in his half-hearted attempts to choose a profession, the words temps perdu contain half the title of his future great work, temps perdu in French meaning both “wasted time” and “lost time.” What seemed to be Marcel’s wastefulness and insouciance constituted a highly particularized apprenticeship. But who could have known that at the time? Proust did, in fact, earn degrees both in philosophy and in law. In late March 1895, Marcel wrote to Reynaldo Hahn to give him the good news that he had passed his exam and would receive his degree in philosophy. But his heart and mind remained devoted to literature, art, and music. Sometimes in the fall, Proust wrote to Pierre Mainguet, publisher of the Revue hebdomadaire, wondering if his readers might be interested in a “little study of the philosophy of art, if the term is not too pretentious, in which I try to show how great painters initiate us into a knowledge and love of the external world” by opening our eyes. The artist Proust had chosen as his example was Jean-Baptiste Chardin, whose still lives reveal the beauty of the most common objects. Mainguet declined the article (Corr, I, 446). The year that Proust received his degree in philosophy was also the year that he continued reading the works of the American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by the Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. In January, Proust wrote to Hahn: “This morning I shall go to the Bois if I get up soon enough, for I am still in bed, drunk with reading Emerson” (SL I: 87; Corr, I: 363). Since his youth Proust had felt a profound afnity with writers in English whether British or American, an afnity he expressed in a letter to Robert de Billy: 18

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It’s odd how in every genre, however diferent, from George Eliot to Hardy, from Stevenson to Emerson, there’s no literature that has a power over me comparable to English and American. Germany, Italy, quite often France, leave me indiferent. But two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to make me cry. (SL III: 4; Corr, X: 55) In his late teens and early manhood, Proust became something of a social butterfy when he began to frequent literary salons. His friends worried that he had become too frivolous and too much of a snob to realize his ambition to become an important writer. During this period, he experimented with short stories and poetry. On June 9, 1896, a month before Proust’s twenty-ffth birthday, Le Gaulois and Le Figaro published on their front pages Anatole France’s preface to Les Plaisirs et les jours. On June 26, La Liberté carried a laudatory article that raised Proust’s hopes for the book’s success. The reviewer Paul Perret noted the melancholy nature and dangerous desires harbored by certain characters in the “short, fne, and often cruel stories.” He called Proust a “true modern because he conveys the present soul state, the profound ennui in daily life, with a touch of decadence.” Les Plaisirs et les jours ofered a variety of texts on a small scale: “short stories, very psychological in nature, fairly bold, always interesting, descriptions and landscapes, poems, even music….” Perret particularly admired the psychological insights: “Desire makes all things fourish, possession withers them; it is better to dream one’s life than to live it, although in living life one dreams it still.”5 This book might even act as a social “force” because “Marcel Proust is also a fne satirist.” Perret, more objective than Marcel’s friends, believed that Les Plaisirs et les jours marked a promising debut: “This young man, richly endowed, has put in his frst work all he has seen, felt, thought, and observed. Les Plaisirs et les jours,” Perret observed, “thus becomes the literary mirror of a soul and mind.”6 Les Plaisirs et les jours did not establish Proust as a rising literary star. Sales of the expensive volume were poor; most of the copies in circulation were gifts that the author sent to friends or to infuential acquaintances. In Les Plaisirs et les jours, Proust used as epigraphs for some of the stories fve quotations from Emerson’s essays. Among the epigraphs, we fnd one from Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” expressing a notion that was to become an important part of Proust’s aesthetics in In Search of Lost Time: …the poet’s habit of living should be set on a key so low and plain, that the common infuences should delight him. His cheerfulness should be the gift of the sunlight; the air should sufce for his inspiration, and he should be tipsy with water.7 We know that Proust was struck by this passage of Emerson’s because years later he quoted it from memory in a letter written to a friend on Christmas Day, 1908. (Corr, 8: 329) There are two texts that were omitted from the novel that seem directly or indirectly inspired by Emerson’s phrase about the intoxicating efect of a beam of sunlight. I will quote just one of them here. Although omitted, the text does contain a sentiment that is expressed throughout the novel. Whenever the Narrator is inspired or actually creates a text or describes the creativity of a character such as the novelist Bergotte, the overwhelming sensation is one of joy. In the omitted passage, we fnd the Narrator describing his reaction when a ray of early morning sunlight falls on his body and awakens him: I jumped of the end of the bed, I danced a thousand dances and made happy gestures that I watched in the mirror, I uttered joyfully words that contain nothing cheerful, and 19

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I sang, because a poet is like the statue of Memnon. All it takes is a ray of the rising sun to make him sing.8 Emerson represents the fgure of the “Poet,” as Proust does that of the artist and the scientist and the inventor, as examples of deities who make discoveries or inventions that are benefcial to humanity. In Swann’s Way, while listening to Vinteuil’s sonata, Swann compares musical and scientifc discoveries to “divine captives” (SW, 417; I 345). And Vinteuil’s creative power seems to stem from a supreme force: “From the depths of what well of sorrow could he have drawn that god-like strength, that unlimited power of creation?” (SW, 414; I 342). Proust expressed such an idea as early as 1893, again referencing Emerson, in a letter to Robert de Montesquiou: “…this God who, according to Emerson, reveals himself in all the great works of poetry” (Corr, 1: 217). Proust is perhaps thinking of this passage from “The Poet”: The poets are … liberating gods. The ancient British bards had for the title of their order, ‘Those who are free throughout the world.’ They are free, and they make us free. […] I think nothing is of any value in books, excepting the transcendental and the extraordinary.9 Proust and Emerson each believed in the transcendent nature of art, art as broadly defned by both men. Here is Proust: It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some defnite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless. (C, 427–8; III 876) And Emerson: …the highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor even porters of the fre and torch-bearers, but children of the fre, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted….10 Emerson, like Proust after him, stresses the importance of reality and originality: For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem, —a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture all its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.11 And words live, expressing thoughts that are “passionate and alive.” Later in the essay, we fnd Emerson using an analogy similar to one used by Proust when speaking of the brilliant evocative power of words: For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at frst a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the frst speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist fnds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.12 20

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Proust too stressed, in a letter to Marie Nordlinger, the vitality and pictorial power that words possess when liberated by a poet: Your verses are charming and evoke in my memory the delicious bouquet of spring fowers you once brought me from an excursion you went on […] Don’t complain of not having learned. Strictly speaking, no knowledge is involved, for there is none outside the mysterious associations efected by our memory and the tact which our invention acquires in its approach to words. […] Victor Hugo … says ‘For know that the word is a living being.’ You know. And consequently you love words, you don’t harm them, you play with them, you entrust your secrets to them, you teach them to paint, you teach them to sing. (SL I: 215; Corr, II: 390–1) Proust next attempted a highly autobiographical novel known as Jean Santeuil. Mortifed by the lack of success of his frst book, no one perhaps, other than his mother knew about his new eforts. The manuscript, consisting of fragments, some of which are fully developed and anticipate characters, episodes, and themes found in ISOLT, was found and published several decades after Proust’s death. The title was chosen after the name of the main character, whose name, Jean, may be seen as a tribute to Proust’s beloved mother, Jeanne, and the second syllable of Santeuil, an echo of her uncle’s home in Auteuil where Proust and his brother Robert spent many happy childhood summers. The sound of that syllable—teuil— was so important to Proust that he gave it later to one of the key characters in ISOLT, the composer Vinteuil. Shortly after Christmas day, 1898, Proust wrote to Marie Nordlinger a long meditative letter in which he spoke about topics that preoccupied him and were to form some of the major philosophical underpinnings of his future novel: the soul and its material encasement in the body, the passage of time and through time, the slow, unconscious accumulation of memories, largely ignored by the superfcial, egotistical, social self. As Proust sounded the depths of his being, he perceived only a faint echo indicating the unknown treasures that might lie buried beneath the sands of time. The scent of tea and mimosa furnishes the sesame that opens, at least briefy, the door to the treasure trove. He spoke frst about Christmas cards and other symbols and why we need them: If we were creatures only of reason, we would not believe in anniversaries, holidays, relics or tombs. But since we are also made up in some part of matter we like to believe that it too has a certain reality and we want what holds a place in our hearts to have some small place in the world around us and to have its material symbol, as our soul has in our body. And while little by little Christmas has lost its truth for us as an anniversary, it has at the same time, through the gentle emanation of accumulated memories, taken on a more and more living reality, in which candlelight…, the smell of its tangerines imbibing the warmth of heated rooms, the gaiety of its cold and its fres, the scent of tea and mimosa, return to us overlaid with the delectable honey of our personality, which we have unconsciously been depositing over the years during which—engrossed in selfish pursuits—we paid no attention to it, and now suddenly it sets our hearts to beating. (SL 1: 188; Corr, 269–70) Proust recognized the importance of these insights expressed and transposed them for a scene in Jean Santeuil ( JS, 463–4, 521). This text, along with the one in Jean Santeuil where Lake 21

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Geneva recalls Beg-Meil, the town in Brittany where Proust, vacationing with Reynaldo Hahn, is thought to have begun the frst drafts of Jean Santeuil. This passage is one of his earliest known attempts to elucidate the experience that he was to call involuntary memory. Many of the texts written in 1898 and 1899 for Jean Santeuil indicate that Proust thought the key to his work lay submerged in the past. If the past lay concealed in material objects— whose tastes, textures, smells, or sounds provoked in him the ephemeral but intense reliving of past moments—what was the nature of this phenomenon? Could it somehow be used in telling a story, even perhaps in a novel of considerable scale? In notes for Jean Santeuil, Proust wondered about the nature of the work on which he labored: “Should I call this book a novel? It is something less, perhaps, and yet much more, the very essence of my life….” He saw what he wanted to achieve but did not yet know how to transpose the “very essence” of his life into a work of fction. Jean Santeuil consisted of parts that he had gleaned from his own life, a book that “had not been manufactured: it has been garnered” ( JS, 1; 181). But Proust still lacked the ability to shape all that he knew and felt into an intelligible, coherent narrative. When read in light of ISOLT, Jean Santeuil contains many elements—themes, characters, and episodes—that Proust would perfect in the mature novel. By the time of Jean Santeuil and some of the essays, he had largely composed his palette—he has the color, the nuances, the signature brushstrokes, and a myriad of details from which to draw. Even the drafts contain distinguishing characteristics of the mature style and manner. He excels in psychological observations, in producing multiple motivations for the actions of his characters; he states what he calls his “laws” about human behavior in highly quotable maxims and produces a wealth of examples to prove his points, examples drawn from his extensive readings, from conversations at home, from the superfcialities of salon chatter, and from his interrogations of members of the servant and working classes. In the preface to Jean Santeuil, Proust had asked himself if he was a novelist. The answer to that question remained uncertain. But was he a writer? Yes. As a writer, his method of composition was largely set. Proust never composed in a linear manner or according to a plot outline but rather as a mosaicist, taking a particular scene, anecdote, impression, image, and crafting it to completion. His stated purpose in the Santeuil notes was to capture “the very essence” of his life. What Proust always sought was not the analysis of minutiae, but the truth, the “laws” that determine our behavior especially in its passions and its creative endeavors. Around 1900, Proust began the fnal stage of his apprenticeship as a writer, a period during which he refned his aesthetics and began to fnd his true voice as a writer. This was the year that he began his study of John Ruskin’s writings, especially the volumes devoted to France and Venice. Proust undertook to translate into English Ruskin’s book The Bible of Amiens. Proust had gone to Amiens, he told his readers, to fnd Ruskin’s soul … which he imparted to the stones of Amiens as deeply as their sculptors had imparted theirs, for the words of genius can give, as well as does the chisel, an immortal form to things. Literature, too, is a ‘lamp of sacrifce,’ consuming itself to light the coming generations. In this essay “John Ruskin,” Proust insisted on the universality of Ruskin and his search for truth: For the man of genius cannot give birth to immortal works except by creating them in the image, not of his mortal being, but of the humanity he bears within himself…. The 22

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work of Ruskin is universal. He sought the truth, and found beauty even in chronological tables and social laws.13 Proust found in such statements a confrmation of his own idealistic goals held since youth and frst ratifed by Darlu in his philosophy class at Condorcet. These words resound again in Proust’s ISOLT: universality and the search for truth. In 1904, Proust published his translation of The Bible of Amiens, dedicated to his late father, Dr. Adrien Proust, one of the era’s most important and infuential public health ofcials. Translation increased Proust’s already superior knowledge of words and their nuances; he had developed a style that was extraordinarily supple and complex while remaining lucid and remarkably light. In his preface to La Bible d’Amiens, Proust believed that the years spent translating and annotating Ruskin’s book constituted an important apprenticeship: “Mediocre people generally believe that to let oneself be guided by books one admires takes away some of one’s independence of judgment. ‘What is it to you how Ruskin feels: feel for yourself ’.” Therefore, what Proust called this “voluntary servitude” was actually the beginning of artistic freedom: “There is no better way of becoming aware of one’s feelings than to try to recreate in oneself what a master has felt.”14 Love is the great tyrant because “one imitates slavishly what one loves when one isn’t original. The truth is that there is only one real freedom for the artist: originality” (SL II: Corr, IV: 236). In June 1905, Proust published an essay “On Reading” in the review La Renaissance latine. The text, taken from his preface for Ruskin’s Sésame et les lys, contains this observation: “There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we let slip by without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.” The books that he had known and loved in childhood held the power to evoke the places in which he had frst read them: If we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see refected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.15 Proust himself may have been unaware that the essay contained a foretaste of Combray, one of the major locations of ISOLT. Illiers is not mentioned, but Proust evokes aspects of the little town, some of which he had already sketched in Jean Santeuil: the ruins of medieval towers near the river, the general Illiers topography, and the uncle who loved cooking and gardening. The critical response to Sésame et les lys was encouraging. At frst, Proust responded with delight at the reviews, especially those in Le Figaro. One review, written by André Beaunier, made what was apparently the frst comparison of Proust’s manner and style to that of Michel de Montaigne: “Proust reads Ruskin in somewhat the same way that Montaigne read Plutarch: he ‘essays’ his own ideas by bringing them into contact with those of another.” Such a method, Beaunier noted, allowed Proust to see clearly his own beliefs. “It’s the game of a delicate moralist, irresolute because he has a fne mind (l’esprit de fnesse) and sees the diverse aspect of things” (Corr, IV: 117, n. 2). Again, Proust was dissatisfed. He felt the intense frustration over his inability to create an original work of fction, the same frustration that he had expressed several years earlier in a letter to Antoine Bibesco: 23

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what I’m doing at present is not real work, only documentation, translation, etc. It’s enough to arouse my thirst for creation, without of course slaking it in the least. Now that for the frst time since my long torpor I have looked inward and examined my thoughts, I feel all the insignifcance of my life; a thousand characters for novels, a thousand ideas urge me to give them body, like the shades in the Odyssey who plead with Ulysses to give them a little blood to drink to bring them back to life and whom the hero brushes aside with his sword. (SL I: 282–4; Corr, III, 196) After the death of his beloved mother in September 1905, Proust sufered a period of intense grief that lasted until his 1907 summer vacation in Cabourg. After arriving at the seaside Grand Hôtel, “the pure air joined with a deadly dose of cafeine” allowed him “to go out every day in a closed car” (Corr, VII: 285–6). It was there that Proust met two chaufeurs, Odilon Albaret and Alfred Agostinelli, who were to play important roles in his life. Riding across the Normandy countryside with Agostinelli at the wheel, the writer said, was like being shot out of a cannon (SL II: 325; Corr, VII: 263). As the taxi sped along the road toward Caen, famous for its medieval churches, Proust watched the distant spires appear and disappear against the horizon in constantly shifting perspectives as he marveled at the phenomenon of parallax and relativity so keenly felt in the automobile. After returning to Paris, Proust wrote an article for Le Figaro, “Impressions de route en automobile,” about the motoring trips with Agostinelli. He described the trip to Caen, where, from the speeding taxi, he observed the rapidly shifting positions of the steeples of Saint-Étienne and those of Saint-Pierre. (Proust later used this part of the newspaper article, with a few changes, as a text the young Narrator writes when he has a similar experience seeing the steeples of Martinville from a fast-moving carriage near Combray.) One feature of the article is remarkable: Proust twice mentions arriving home to see his parents, who were no longer living. This article and “On Reading” contain the earliest known manifestations of the frst-person voice that belongs not to Proust the man but to Proust the storyteller. In the novel, it will become the voice of the Narrator. On New Year’s Day 1908, Mme Geneviève Straus gave Proust fve little notebooks from Kirby Beard, a smart stationery shop. Sometime in January or February, Proust chose the largest of the long, narrow notebooks and began making notes for another project. In this notebook, known as Le Carnet de 1908, he jotted down sensations—odors of rooms, bedsheets, grass, perfume, soap, and food—capable of reviving the past. But he was soon distracted by another scandal involving the De Beers diamond empire. Henri Lemoine, who worked for De Beers as an engineer, claimed to have invented a method of manufacturing diamonds. Lemoine had actually purchased the diamonds that he claimed were the product of the process, so when they were analyzed, they were found to be genuine. Inspired by the story’s rich comic material, Proust wrote a series of pastiches, in which famous authors narrate various aspects of the scandal. In February and March, Le Figaro carried his parodies of Honoré de Balzac, Jules Michelet, the Goncourt brothers, Emile Faguet, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and Ernest Renan. The pastiches, still considered the most accomplished ever written in French, demonstrate Proust’s astonishing versatility as a writer and his mischievous sense of humor. Having written the poems, sketches, and short stories in Les Plaisirs et les jours, drafted nearly a thousand pages for Jean Santeuil, translated major works by John Ruskin, written society and miscellaneous articles for Le Figaro, plus the stylistic tours de force in the pastiches, Proust had completed his long apprenticeship. In April 1908, he informed Louis d’Albufera 24

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that he is “about to embark on a very important piece of work” (SL II: 366; Corr, III, 99). Yet even now, Proust found it impossible to select a single topic or genre. In early May, he wrote Albufera again: …I have in hand: a study on the nobility a Parisian novel an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert an essay on women an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish) a study of stained-glass windows a study on tombstones a study on the novel (SL II: 371: Corr, VIII: 112–13)

These are the topics that preoccupied Proust in 1907–9, when he began writing the earliest drafts of ISOLT, drafts that contain many of the same elements as the stories in Les Plaisirs et les jours and the drafts of Jean Santeuil: the child’s nervous dependency on his mother, obsessive jealousy, snobbery in the world of high society, and the arts, especially literature and music. We do not know what he intended regarding the essay on women, but the other topics provide thematic material for ISOLT: stained-glass windows and tombstones in Gothic cathedrals are elements of the theme of art as an antidote to the destructive forces of times; a study on the novel, which, like the essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, contributed to Proust’s aesthetic credo expressed with such eloquence and force in the concluding pages of Time Regained. The essay on pederasty leads to a dominant theme of sexual obsessions and jealousy. Proust was to become the frst writer to depict the continuum of human sexuality. Of the eight items listed in the letter to Albufera, the single title “Parisian novel” eventually absorbed all the others. But that summer, Proust stalled yet again. He now felt a great sense of urgency, one that his future Narrator was to feel at the end of Time Regained: “Warnings of death. Soon you will not be able to say all that.” And he asked the same questions that he had been unable to answer a decade earlier: “Must I make of it a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?” Continuing to write down his thoughts, Proust found consolation in the examples of Nerval, Chateaubriand, and Baudelaire, all of whom had treated certain themes in various genres, indicating, perhaps, similar uncertainties about genre.16 There is a fne irony in this passage: while writing about his dilemma as an author, Proust is tracing, without seeing it, the answer to the question that had tortured him for so long. ISOLT is about a man who cannot write and spends his life pursuing the wrong paths (lost time, wasted time), until at the very end, ill, discouraged, and growing old, just like Proust, he discovers that his vocation is to write the experience of his life—now that he understands it at last and can transpose it into a work of fction. Yet at this moment in the fall of 1908, Proust still did not see that his lifelong search was nearly over. In late 1908, Proust began writing an essay attacking Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve. By the following summer, he had flled ten of these, writing nearly 700 pages for what was to be published posthumously as Contre Sainte-Beuve. Proust denounced the eminent critic’s method and legacy, as he had in the preface to Sésame et les lys, where he observed that “while Anatole France judges his contemporaries admirably well, one may say that Sainte-Beuve did not appreciate any of the great writers of his time.”17 In his critical remarks about Sainte-Beuve, Proust spoke in his own voice but as in a fctional situation, imagining a conversation with his mother before she died. This invented setting for a real person (Proust) commenting on the work of another real person 25

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(Sainte-Beuve) served as the incubator for the full emergence of the Narrator’s mature voice. In the Sainte-Beuve passages describing involuntary memory, Proust transmuted his lived experience and his invented ones into the life of the Narrator. He was creating what is perhaps the richest narrative voice in literature, a voice that speaks both as child and as man, as actor and as subject, and that in ISOLT weaves efortlessly between the present, past, and future. In the Sainte-Beuve drafts, Proust describes the past resurrected through involuntary memory, using the image of dried Japanese fowers, inspired by the pellets Marie Nordlinger had given him years earlier: …a whole garden, hitherto vague and colourless in my eyes, with its forgotten paths, was depicted, bed upon circular bed, with all its fowers, in the little cup of tea, like those little Japanese fowers which revive only in water. (ASB 4; CSB 212) Proust follows this involuntary memory, summoned by toast and tea, with another evoking Venice. Such rare moments are always triggered by the chance encounter with what Proust calls an object-sensation, an object unconsciously connected to a past impression. Venice is vividly restored to the protagonist’s memory when he happens to trip on an uneven paving stone in Paris similar to one he had stumbled over in Venice. The draft continues with a series of such experiences. In ISOLT, Proust places the toast and tea episode—replacing the toast with a madeleine—in the front section of the novel, although we do not know exactly when in the course of the Narrator’s life, this phenomenon occurred. There, it serves as an example of the “true life” and the type of vivid recollection the Narrator would like to capture in his writing, when he feels such joy at being outside time. Art is removed from the contingencies of time, thus giving the essence of human experience “true life,” a life of its own through literature. All the other involuntary memory experiences from Sainte-Beuve were developed and placed toward the end of the novel, where these moments bienheureux create a crescendo efect as the Narrator, after many years of disappointment and inability to work, reclaims his will, forfeited long ago in childhood in the scene of the goodnight kiss, and fnds his vocation as a writer. It was while denouncing the critic that Proust made the key discovery in his long apprenticeship to become a writer. The images used in ISOLT to explain why the Narrator had taken so long to discover his vocation include the metaphor of dried seeds, also from the essay on Sainte-Beuve: And I understood that all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life; I understood that they had come to me, in frivolous pleasures, in indolence, in tenderness, in unhappiness, and that I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant. Like the seed, I should be able to die once the plant had developed and I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realizing that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write and for which, when in the past I had sat down at my table to begin, I had been unable to fnd a subject. And thus my whole life up to the present day might and yet might not have been summed up under the title: A Vocation. (TR, 258–9; IV 478) 26

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Proust maintained that each work of art or scientifc discovery, although created or discovered by an individual, represents a new world, a small mirror refecting the infnite, and thus is profoundly emblematic and unifying. In a 1909 letter to fellow writer and former childhood friend Maurice Duplay, Proust said that Duplay, as does each of us, mirrors the entire universe: “As in everything that you write, each word refects the monad that says it, but this monad is itself a refection of the universe”18 (Corr. 9: 72). Proust’s vision is cosmic in that he believes all works of art and science are manifestations of universal harmony. The duty of the artist—a duty that can rightly be called philosophical—is to capture the vision of this unity and create its aesthetic or scientifc equivalent. Proust’s statements to this efect imply a belief in the idea of progress and perfectibility, of the gradual creation by artists and scientists past, present, and future of a fundamental unity consisting of all the fragments of true discoveries and corresponding to the ideal universe, a harmonious unity of all that exists. The challenge taken up by the Narrator is not, as some early critics believed, the examination of minutiae but the discovery of the great laws that govern the universe: Before very long I was able to show a few sketches. No one understood anything of them. Even those who commended my perception of the truths which I wanted eventually to engrave within the temple, congratulated me on having discovered them ‘with a microscope,’ when on the contrary it was a telescope that I had used to observe things which were indeed very small to the naked eye, but only because they were situated at a great distance, and which were each one of them in itself a world. Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail. (TR, 442; IV 618) At the end of his quest, the Narrator recognizes and accepts the moral duty of the artist and speaks of it as a religious obligation: “to accept it like a discipline, build it up like a church” (TR, 431; IV 610). He realizes that he has taken on nothing less than the challenge to create a cosmos that he must undertake “to transcribe a universe which had to be totally redrawn […]” (TR, 448; IV 623). The Narrator’s lifelong quest provides an ethos and an aesthetics, during the course of which many of our tenets, tastes, and mores are exposed and minutely examined. In so doing, Proust creates new ways of looking at the world, making his novel one of the most complex and stimulating optics that we have for viewing our own lives. Through its dynamic use of shifting perspectives as the Narrator journeys toward his goal, ISOLT ofers the reader a kaleidoscopic view of a world in motion. Few writers have given us so many ways of looking at the world and our own experience. By making us aware of these unplumbed layers within ourselves, Proust’s novel celebrates and expands the multiplicity and range of human perception and knowledge.

Notes 1 André Ferré, Les années de college de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 137. 2 My translation. Les Nuages was published in the Juvenilia section of CSB and not included in ASB. 3 See Paul Desjardins’s article “Un Aspect de l’œuvre de Proust: Dissolution de l’individu,” Hommage à Marcel Proust, La Nouvelle Revue Française, no. 112, 1er janvier 1923, 150. 4 Marcel Proust: Écrits de jeunesse, selected and edited by Anne Borrel (Illiers-Combray: Institut Marcel Proust International, 1991), 121–2. 5 Pleasures and Regrets, translated by Louise Varèse, New York: Crown Publishers, 1948, p. 123.

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William Carter 6 Marcel Proust, Les Plaisirs et les jours, suivi de L’Indifférent, edition de Thierry Laget (Paris: Gallimard [Folio], 1993), 289–92. “… le désir fleurit, la possession flétrit toutes choses; il vaut mieux rêver sa vie que la vivre, encore que la vivre ce soit encore la rêver…” ( JS, 111) 7 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays & Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 461. 8 A la recherche du temps perdu, Esquisse I, III 1096. My translation. 9 Emerson, “The Poet,” 462. 10 Ibid., 447. 11 Ibid., 450. 12 Ibid., 457. 13 Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, translated and edited by Jean Autret, William Burford, and ­Phillip J. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 28–29; CSB, 104, 106. 14 Ibid, 60. 15 Ibid., 99–100; CSB, 160. 16 Une filière noble,” Le Carnet de 1908, établi et présenté par Philip Kolb, Cahiers Nouvelle Série 8 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 61. In Time Regained, Proust uses the same examples and same phrase, “so noble a line of descent,” “une filiation aussi noble” (TR, 285; IV 499). 17 Marcel Proust: On Reading Ruskin, 138, n. 16; CSB, 189–90). 18 In Proust’s letters over the years, there are a number of allusions to Leibnitz’s Monadologie, which was translated by Émile Boutroux and published in 1881 as La Monadologie.

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2 PROUST’S PHILOSOPHICAL TRAINING Luc Fraisse

Writers have often crossed paths with philosophy – one thinks of the popularisation of Schopenhauer’s doctrine during Maupassant’s time, or of Bergson’s concept of intuition, which permeates Julien Gracq’s sentences – but there are few whose systematic philosophical training was as advanced as Proust’s. For Proust, the philosophy class which prepared him for the baccalauréat (1888–1889) was followed by a degree in arts and letters, during which he chose the Philosophy option (1893–1895). Pursuing this programme of study gave Proust access to a truly encyclopaedic knowledge of philosophy. Though he might seem to wear it lightly, the sum of that knowledge is very much present in a work which pertains not to philosophical writing, but to novelistic fction and to critical refection. The Lycée Condorcet, where Proust prepared for his baccalauréat, was notable for its interest in contemporary foreign literature and Symbolist poetry. Indeed, the poet Etienne Mallarmé himself had taught English at Condorcet. Symbolist and naturalist writers, philosophers, painters, as well as several future founders of La Nouvelle Revue Française preceded Proust in that school. These included the likes of Eugène Sue, Sainte-Beuve, and Labiche, Théodore de Banville, Taine, Dr. Charcot and Nadar, the Goncourt brothers, Verlaine, Toulouse-Lautrec, and later Bergson, Tristan Bernard, Vuillard, Maurice Denis, and Jacques Copeau – who later would be very much involved in the publication of the Recherche. Proust attended Condorcet from 1882 until his second baccalauréat, in 1889, around the same time as Jules Romains and Roger Martin du Gard, and quite some time before Jean Cocteau. Mallarmé’s presence had turned the lycée into one of the chapels of Symbolism, under whose infuence Proust, much like Gide, Claudel, and Valéry, grew familiar with literature. As an adolescent, Proust eagerly awaited his training in philosophy, expecting it to bring about a revelation. While attending Condorcet, and later the Sorbonne, Proust wrote letters that led to an astonishing conclusion about these formative years: the future writer appears very moderately afected by literary teaching; he does not expect to derive any decisive revelation from it, and indeed it seems that he did not do so, but from philosophy, he expects – and receives – everything. In fact, a comparison between Proust’s French compositions and his philosophy dissertations, preserved in several archives, 1 reveals that the content of the latter is much more decisive than that of the former, in terms of the long-term formation of Proust’s thought.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-4

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The day after he began his studies in philosophy, on October 2, 1888, he wrote an important letter to his teacher, Alphonse Darlu, speaking of the intellectual divide he had sufered from since he began “withdrawing into [him]self and examining [his] inner life”, which was itself borrowed from his literary readings: while reading, he wrote, “my other self is observing me, amused by the causes of the pleasure I take in reading, seeing them in light of a certain relation between me and the book, thus destroying the certainty of the book’s own beauty” (Corr. I, 121–2). And so began the preparation of the Recherche’s protagonist’s paralysis regarding his own literary vocation, which for a long time he would not know how to pursue. In Jean Santeuil (259–70), Darlu appears under the fctitious name of Monsieur Beulier, who is characterised by an indiference to the material. The young hero visits him with the same fascination that Proust showed when he went to take philosophy lessons. Robert Proust, the writer’s brother, would later evoke their cher maître Darlu, who certainly infuenced him a great deal. When teaching the critique of reality and its subordination to our creative thought, Darlu had a very personal and intuitive, almost poetic way of explaining, which Marcel found utterly delightful; he often used to speak to me about it. But of course he would himself make further, deeper forays into such matters. (Proust 1923: 25) And in fact, the philosopher’s character will completely disappear from the Recherche, as philosophy will be absorbed into the very texture of the novel. In addition to the material discussed in class, students had at their disposal, to help them prepare for the baccalauréat, a philosophy manual authored by Élie Rabier (1846–1932), who had been teaching at the lycée Charlemagne since 1876: his Lessons in Philosophy are divided into two volumes, Psychology and Logic (Rabier 1884 and 1886). Precisely by virtue of being a truly original work, Rabier’s manual was too personal and rather too lavish to be memorised by students. Nevertheless, Proust made use of it: his fle of school papers (NAF 16611, f. 49r°-56v°) contains the torn-out pages 449–464 of volume I, dealing mostly with the identity of the self. In his manual, Rabier is opposed to any analysis of the unconscious, opposed to Kantian philosophy, and opposed to the philosophical scope and import of literature – in short, opposed to everything that would characterise Proust’s future writing and in great part opposed to Darlu’s thought as expressed to his students in that same decade. And yet, this teacher, who took a frm position against Kant (“pointless speculation”, “a magnifcent and useless edifce” [Rabier 1884: 570], against literature, against the unconscious: “some imaginary Atlantis” [Rabier 1884: 155]), dedicated pages and pages to the self, to belief, to memory; pages which would remain present in Proust’s mind. Thus, what Rabier ofered the future novelist is a vocabulary, as well as a certain “tone” corresponding to this vocabulary. How was philosophy taught at the time? What was the curriculum? Despite dating back to February 16, 1810, the ofcial directives provided teachers of philosophy in nineteenth-century France with a long-lasting orientation (Nicolas 2007). Article 5 divides the discipline into three parts: logic, metaphysics, and morals. Metaphysics came frst: the formation of ideas was meant to be dealt with before analysing their deduction. Later came a science that would henceforth be centre stage: psychology, introduced into the curriculum by Victor Cousin (Cousin 1845). The three areas of philosophy, redefned in the instructions of September 28, 1832, are now four areas: psychology, logic, and morals – psychology frst, because one was supposed to start by studying the functioning of the mind. In 1865, 30

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metaphysics is also named again (Lelièvre 1990; Poucet 1999) and the four parts of philosophy to be taught in schools are psychology, logic, morals, and theodicy (initially referring to the undertaking of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of Evil, the notion is here assimilated to the question of the existence of God); and in 1874, psychology, logic, metaphysics, theodicy, morals, and the history of philosophy. The philosophy baccalauréat, which Proust earned in 1889, took into account the instructions of August 2, 1880, which stipulated teaching psychology, logic, morals, metaphysics, theodicy, and, fnally, the history of philosophy. The recommended manual at the time was authored by Inspector General Francisque Bouillier (1813–1899), entitled Notions d’histoire de la philosophie, à l’usage des candidats au baccalauréat ès-Lettres. A slight readjustment took place on January 22, 1885, which set in place, for years to come, the four parts of philosophy: psychology, logic, morals, and metaphysics. The enumeration of these four areas constitutes in and of itself a chronological approach, where each part can be seen as providing the basis for the next: the frst step is a descriptive study of the states of consciousness (psychology), which then moves on to how intelligence provides the foundation for truth (logic: Proust’s school papers contain a page titled “Formal Logic” [NAF 16611, f. 39r°], which clearly pertains to a larger collection, which is currently lost); the next step is envisioning the laws that govern action (morals), to fnally come to the conditions of the states of consciousness (metaphysics). Thus, if one studied philosophy in Proust’s time, one started from the observation of oneself, before expanding one’s refection by way of concentric circles. From that point onwards, philosophical training consisted of three parallel activities: inclass learning, the study of assigned texts, and a dissertation. In order to practise writing the dissertation – which was not held to particularly rigorous standards at the time – students would consult the Petit Traité de la dissertation philosophique: conseils, modèles, exercices, a reference text written by Charles Bénard (1807–1898), a teacher at lycée Charlemagne. The following were the assigned texts for the philosophy curriculum between 1885 and 1902 – Proust attended lycée Condorcet at the beginning of this period – frst, from Ancient Philosophy, the frst book of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, book VI of Plato’s Republic, book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, the Enchiridion of Epictetus, book V of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, the frst book of Cicero’s De Ofciis, and Seneca’s frst sixteen Letters to Lucilius; then, from Modern Philosophy, Descartes’s Discours de la méthode and the frst part of his Principes de la philosophie, Pascal’s De l’autorité en matière de philosophie, De l’esprit géométrique, and Entretien avec M. de Sacy (Proust’s school papers include pages torn from the introduction to a volume of Pascal’s Pensées, which includes a section dedicated to Entretien avec M. de Sacy [f. 70r°–72v°]), fragments on imagination from book II of Malebranche’s La Recherche de la vérité, the preface and the frst book of Leibniz’s New Essays on Human Understanding, his Monadology, the frst part of Condillac’s Traité des sensations, and the third part of Victor Cousin’s Du Vrai, du Beau, du Bien. Proust received his baccalauréat on July 15, 1889. His diploma, featured in the IlliersCombray Marcel-Proust Museum’s permanent collection, contains 3 philosophy grades: “The object of philosophy”, 3, assez bien; “Descartes”, 4, bien; “Monadology”, 3, assez bien. Proust and his schoolmates would forever remember this class and the teaching they received, as illustrated in a remarkably precise letter from Proust to Fernand Gregh in 1904: do you remember what we learned about Aristotle’s Metaphysics? Before him, so we were told, there was the error of materialists believing that they could, through analysis, fnd reality in matter, then the error of the Platonists, looking for it in abstractions outside of matter; but Aristotle understood that reality cannot reside in an abstraction, but neither 31

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can it be matter itself, but that which, in each individual thing, is somewhat behind matter, the meaning of its form and the law of its development. (Corr. IV, 140) No doubt this recollection brings to light the way in which the teaching of philosophy was brought to life by highlighting controversies between strongly opposed positions, but Proust himself turns the lessons of the past into his own personal conviction, his own way of thinking (even if Bergson proceeds in much the same way). This consists of placing two opposing positions side by side so to speak, so as to bring out a third. Thus, the author of À la recherche du temps perdu will place two contradictory points of view on literature side by side, that of the ambassador Norpois and that of the writer Bergotte, or two opposing positions on art, that of the aristocratic Guermantes and that of the grand bourgeois Verdurins, with the narrator fnally adopting neither of these positions. When defning the aesthetics of the work he is soon to begin writing, the protagonist of Le Temps retrouvé thinks about avoiding the error of dogmatic criticism (IV, 471), the error of popular or patriotic literature (IV 466; TR, 250), the error of the “célibataires de l’art” [“celibates of Art”] such as Charles Swann or Baron de Charlus in the novel (IV 470; TR, 249), and fnally the error, in the wake of the naturalist novel, of the “littérature de notations” [“literature of description”] (IV 473; TR, 253). We can see how much this mode of reasoning owes to lessons received in his philosophical past. Darlu is a thinker of the neo-Kantian persuasion, much like Renouvier before him. In fact, all the teaching provided at the time was dominated by a minutely detailed examination of Kant’s philosophy. Consequently, there is in Proust the novelist an adherence to Kantian semi-idealism: my perception of the world is ruled by the categories of my understanding, though the exterior world has its own consistency as reality, and thereby resists one at every step of the way. Darlu’s courses insisted on the role played within the self by intermittence 2 – a concept which would play an important role in the development of the Proustian hero (the novelistic cycle that the Recherche would turn into was originally supposed to be entitled Intermittences of the Heart, designating intermittences of the will and of consciousness). Like most of his generation (most notably Henri Bergson and Gabriel Séailles), Darlu was a disciple of Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), whose unpublished lectures exerted considerable infuence. Following De l’habitude, authored by Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900), Lachelier, a neo-Kantian, insists, in Du fondement de l’induction, on the role of induction in the formation of the self – and Proust’s novelistic cycle will be just that, an inductive novel, the novel of induction, as the nameless hero of the Recherche incarnates the inductive endeavour through which the self constitutes itself, and through which thought reconstructs the world, from random observations to the enunciation of laws. One of Darlu’s lecture series detailed the stages of the subject’s awakening to consciousness of the world; it would be masterfully illustrated with the sleeper waking up in the dark at the beginning of Du côté de chez Swann: in this course entitled “Théorie de la connaissance des corps” (Darlu 1884–1885: 185–8), Darlu describes the awakening of consciousness to the world based on a description of the sensations of the body, a kind of primary data, after which he details the stages of the slow taking possession of the sensible world by consciousness.3 On a related topic, Victor Egger (1848–1909) – who would be one of Proust’s examiners at the end of his Bachelor’s degree – had already tried to show, in La Parole intérieure (1881), how the self constitutes itself through a continuous inner monologue, which accumulates and coils around itself, thus slowly constituting personality: and so, the continuous discourse of the Proustian narrator, whose story unfolds in the frst person, sheds light upon the very process through which a psyche constitutes itself. And that is one of the novelistic cycle’s main endeavours. 32

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Later on, Leibniz’s monads will ofer the writer a vast poetic imagery to represent the universe of artists in his novel. But The Monadology, studied in the school edition abundantly commented on by Émile Boutroux (who taught Proust Modern Philosophy, particularly Kant, at the Sorbonne), contains a theory of the unconscious, a theory of memory, the idea that consciousness goes through a progressive development, by means of disorderly and confounding perceptions, within a world which is a priori divided, fragmented, and broken into pieces (which will be illustrated in the two “ways” of the Recherche, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way, which are also the two ways, the two paths, the two sides of consciousness). But the monad is above all the artist’s original universe, since the monadologic universe produces a cosmogonic vision of art. Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, also abundantly annotated and commented on in the school editions of the time, ofered the lycéen a formula, which would prove to have a radiant future, namely that of a dogmatic story taking the shape of an autobiography. The frst pages of Du côté de chez Swann parallel Cartesian thought, for they show the awakening of refection at the edge of nothingness (the nothingness of methodical doubt), and its constitution with respect to time which is its domain, and in opposition to space which is the domain of the body. This emergence of a discourse which comes to constitute a subject governs the unfolding of a new Discourse on Method. A founding father of the Revue de métaphysique et de morale in 1893, Darlu introduced Proust, albeit from afar, to the entire philosophical generation of his time – a generation to which the novelist – while distancing himself from it – would attach a real sense of belonging: the mention of names such as Lachelier, Boutroux, Darlu, Bergson, and Brunschvicg in his letters (Corr. IV, 234–5) suggests this on more than one occasion (Corr. VIII, 140). One of his co-disciples, both at the lycée and at the university, Fernand Gregh (1873–1960), became an agrégé de philosophie, and the somewhat older Léon Brunschvicg (1869–1944) would become, among other things, the 1897 editor of Pascal’s Pensées (which Proust had read in previous school editions). This is the context in which the future author of the Recherche grew up. This context nourished Proust’s forthcoming literary work in various ways. Darlu gladly, and often, integrated literature into his teaching of philosophy. But Proust struggled with one of his teachers, namely Rabier, who, unlike Darlu, but just as often, presented serious philosophical thought as opposed to literary fantasy. The writer would ask himself in 1908, while at the threshold of his own work: “Should I make this into a novel, a philosophical study, am I a novelist?” (Carnets: 50). His novel, nourished by aesthetic philosophy, would rise to the challenge. These two viewpoints would indeed leave hundreds of traces in the Recherche, even though Proust never adhered to any dominant philosophical system – as indicated in this note, written down without any further explanation, from the frst preparatory notebook of the novel: “No man has ever infuenced me (except for Darlu, and not in a good way, as I’ve admitted)” (Carnets 2002: 100–1). And so, after having prepared for and obtained a Law degree (1891–1893), Proust – who wrote this capital phrase to his father: “anything that I’ll do, other than literature and philosophy, is to me a waste of time [du temps perdu]” (Corr. I, 238), wherein one sees prefgured the path from time lost to time regained – pursues a degree in arts and letters (Philosophy option) at the Sorbonne, from 1893 to March 27, 1895. Indeed, this degree generally took one or two years or, to be more precise, between sixteen and twenty months, thanks to two sessions that usually took place in November and in April (Rauth 1895). Thus, aside from a pure Letters degree, one could pursue a Letters degree with a Philosophy option, or with 33

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a History option, or with a Living Languages option (in accordance to the decrees of July 28 and December 25, 1885). There was a fnal written exam for all students, comprising a French composition and a Latin composition (Proust’s are preserved in the fle of his school papers at the Bibliothèque Nationale [NAF 16611, f. 36r°–37v°]), as well as an oral exam – explanations of Greek, Latin, and French texts. The exams specifc to the Philosophy option were as follows: for the written exam, a general philosophy composition and a history of philosophy composition; for the oral exam, a question on general philosophy, a question on the history of philosophy, and a question on the subjects taught by the Faculty. Obtaining this degree was clearly very demanding. Culminating in no less than ten separate exams, the entire process was criticised from the beginning as being too disparate rather than versatile (Rauth 1895). The curriculum was considerable, to say the least, as illustrated by the enormous textbook authored by Pierre Janet and Gabriel Séailles, entitled Histoire de la philosophie. Les problèmes et les écoles ( Janet and Séailles 1894). This manual consisted of a detailed historical excursus, ranging from Antiquity to the nineteenth century, and concerning a series of questions that would constantly nourish the analytical endeavours undertaken by the narrator of the Recherche: senses and perception, the question of consciousness, memory, language, sensibility, habit, the question of general ideas, the theory of judgement, the questions of induction, scepticism, and certainty, as well as the question of afterlife. In short, the purpose was to become acquainted with the main, though numerous, strands of Western philosophy, from Antiquity to the nineteenth century. The idea of this manual, which had instantaneous success, was to bring together the two aspects of philosophy training: history and doctrines. In the space of 1,070 pages, the authors proposed a detailed overview of all the doctrines of philosophers, classifed by chapters and topics. This efectively meant that philosophy was divided into fve parts – psychology, morals, logic, metaphysics, and theodicy – and each chapter adopted, for each of these parts, what was the novel method of the time: envisaging a philosophical question (consciousness, language, habit, memory, theory of judgement, matter, etc.), and showing its evolution, and especially its construction, from the insights of the Pre-Socratics to near-contemporary thinkers. One of the manual’s two authors, Paul Janet (1823–1899), was the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy. In his youth, he had been Victor Cousin’s secretary, and had inherited from his eclectic master a vast array of knowledge, as well as a remarkable clarity of expression. His interests chiefy lay in moral philosophy. Gabriel Séailles (1852–1923), who would eventually succeed Janet, was Proust’s lecturer at the time. After having defended and published his thesis Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Séailles 1883) – a book which Proust would remember closely enough to include in the aesthetic theory developed in Time Regained an almost verbatim phrase from it – Séailles was elected, concurrently to Bergson, to the Sorbonne on December 13, 1886. At the time that Proust was taking a course on metaphysics and freedom, Séailles had just published one of his major books, Léonard de Vinci, l’artiste et le savant (Séailles 1892), that the writer read, in all likelihood, at Reynaldo Hahn’s enthusiastic suggestion. Since March 1, 1888, Émile Boutroux (1845–1921), who had joined the Sorbonne in 1885, had held the Chair of History of Modern Philosophy (Himly 1900: 25–6). In 1880, he had become interested in reforming the teaching of philosophy. Boutroux was a spiritualist, an enemy of scientism, just like Bergson: his doctoral thesis, entitled De la contingence des lois de la nature (Boutroux 1874), envisions the implications of Kantian philosophy for science. While Proust was working towards his diploma, Boutroux published De l’idée de loi naturelle dans les sciences et dans la philosophie (Boutroux 1894), two chapters of which deal with the laws of psychology. In 1881, he produced a richly annotated edition of Leibniz’s Monadology, 34

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occasioned by the introduction of this work, as we have seen, in the philosophy baccalauréat curriculum. During the 1894–1895 academic year, as Proust was fnishing his degree, Boutroux taught one full course on Kant, which would be published posthumously many years later (Boutroux 1960); Proust would only ever be acquainted with the frst half. One of Boutroux’s colleagues, Victor Brochard (1848–1907), from December 28, 1894, was elected as a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the Sorbonne. One may acquire a certain familiarity with his courses, thanks to the collected Études de philosophie ancienne et de philosophie moderne, published after his death (Brochard 1912). But his doctoral thesis in Modern Philosophy, De l’erreur (Brochard 1879), would end up informing Proust’s notion of lost time, as a relationship of error to truth. Based on Plato, Brochard insists that error is a moral fault, since access to truth is intrinsic to the human soul (Brochard: 27), and a latent guilt (linked to the lack of willpower) permeates the whole period of Proustian lost time. But since, according to Kant, error is “in a way the natural state of the mind” (Brochard: 7), to place oneself at the genesis of error is to explore the genesis of the mind (Brochard: 8). The long duration of lost time takes shape here, as well as the idea of the crossroads at the threshold of which the Proustian hero will very often fnd himself (art or life), for, as Brochard notes, “nothing compels the human spirit to seek the truth, and many things divert it from it” (Brochard: 175). The doctrine of “time regained” will fnally conquer that of “lost time”, because the experience of error teaches the thinking subject that “experience is a point of reference, not a process of knowledge”, something that Leibniz had already stressed (Brochard: 84). More concretely, the novelist draws on Brochard’s anti-Kantian philosophical theses and, more specifcally, on the blindness that plagued his last years of teaching, to create certain features and tirades of Professor Brichot, notably in La Prisonnière (Fraisse 2014). Finally, there was Victor Egger (1848–1909): having received his doctorate in 1881, he became a lecturer at the Sorbonne on November 7, 1893 (Himly 1900: 28); he would be one of Proust’s examiners. His doctoral thesis, La Parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive (Egger 1881), is to be taken into consideration for understanding how the narrative voice of the “gentleman who says: I” (Corr. XII, 92) was constituted in the Recherche. While pursuing his diploma at the Sorbonne, Proust also attended lectures at the École libre des sciences politiques, which put him into contact with the sociology of Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904). A recently discovered document shows that Proust was present at the sociologist’s inaugural lecture, and that he had started to prepare a chronicle on this important Parisian event of the time (Proust 2019: 139–44; 2022: 83–8). The author of Les Lois de l’imitation and of La Logique sociale (Tarde 1890 and 1895; Henry 1981: 344–66; Fraisse 2013: 959–1038) would play a crucial role in the conception and evolution of the characters in the Recherche, and even in Proust’s aesthetic conceptions, thanks to his theory, according to which any new idea originates in an isolated mind and propagates through imitations, so much so that each person imitates their past through tradition, their present through fashion, and themselves through habit. Contemporary psychophysiology, whose central fgure was Théodule Ribot (1839–1916), was also dealt with at some length in the classes that Proust attended. Ribot’s trilogy on the disorders of personality, of memory, and of the will (Ribot 1881, 1883, 1885) would inform Proust’s renewal of novelistic characters, particularly in the era of lost time (Fraisse 2013: 847–72). Why then did Proust, who possessed such a rich philosophical heritage, opt for the novel? He himself suggested an answer in 1914, in a letter to the director of La NRF, Jacques Rivière: “But I did not want to analyse this evolution of a thought in an abstract way; I wanted to recreate it, to have it come to life” (Corr. XIII, 99). That is why In Search of Lost Time is neither a Kantian novel (Fraisse 2019), nor a Schellingian novel (Fraisse 2018), nor 35

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even a Bergsonian novel (Fraisse 2015). But the philosophy lessons received at Condorcet and at the university would forever remain in Proust’s memory: as late as 1920, he would present Flaubert as someone who, through the completely new and personal use he made of the simple past tense, of the compound past tense, of the present participle, of certain pronouns and of certain prepositions, renewed our vision of things almost as much as Kant, with his Categories, his theories of Knowledge and the Reality of the external world. (Essais et articles: 586) How would such a solid philosophical background inform the conception of later works? On this point, critics diverge. Anne Henry was frst to highlight the importance of Proust’s university training (Henry 1981). According to her radical thesis, the young writer converted to Schelling’s and to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, whose novelistic episodes and refections in the Recherche constitute a rigorously faithful fctional projection: Proust would thus be a Schellingian and a Schopenhauerian novelist. This discovery considerably reconfgured the interpretation of the novelistic cycle as a dogmatic novel. Anne Henry provided evidence, indicating that Proust’s theories remained closely connected to the teaching he received. When the theorising narrator of Time Regained declares that “thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists” (Recherche: IV 474; TR, 254), he borrows almost verbatim several assertions from Gabriel Séailles’s Essai sur le génie dans l’art: “there are as many worlds as there are senses” (Séailles 1883: 8), “there are as many worlds as there are minds” (57), “there are […] as many viewpoints on the world as there are minds” (59). Anne Henry’s merit is to have allowed readers to notice that the evolution of the Recherche’s nameless hero completes a philosophical and aesthetic apprenticeship according to an itinerary composed of carefully coordinated stages: thus, the novelistic cycle features an “odyssey of the mind”. One can only marvel at the mature novelist’s capacity for turning the most abstract philosophical axioms into scenes and characters. That being the case, what remains open to debate is just how strong these infuences were, for Proust himself makes clear, in various ways, that he had gradually abandoned them (and in fact it’s worth noting that Schelling and Schopenhauer were hardly taught at the lycée and at the Sorbonne). Further proof of that is ofered by Anna de Noailles, who would write, after Proust’s death: “It’s true that he did not want to be associated with ‘authentic’ geniuses. I remember him displaying an almost discourteous indiference towards my later evocation of pages from Schopenhauer, though he had venerated him” (Noailles 1931: 23). In fact, drafts of the Recherche show that Vinteuil’s sonata, which had been very Schopenhauerian in the early versions of “Swann in Love”, became less and less so with every rewriting (Leriche 1991), to the point that one can notice, when arriving at Vinteuil’s septet featured in The Captive, a break with Schopenhauerian Will in favour of the artist’s original individuality (Proust 2013: 134–41). There was another task left: minutely examining the work accomplished by the novelist in order to project into literary situations and characters these fairly precise memories of his philosophical training. That is when Vincent Descombes intervened, shedding light upon said work and revalorising it. The title of his book, Proust. Philosophie du roman (Descombes 1987), infers that the author of the Recherche remains, when philosophising, a mediocre late nineteenth-century idealist philosopher, but that he becomes an original philosopher in his novelistic endeavours, for when it comes to Proust, the novel probes much further into the realm of philosophy than his direct engagement with philosophy. Still, one needs to read or 36

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to reread the mediocre late nineteenth-century idealist philosophers (Fraisse 2013) in order to discover that several of Proust’s sentences revisit philosophical theses without explicitly saying so, and often draw out unexpected solutions where the discussions at the time had got stuck in excessive classifcations and controversies. When philosophers, such as Emmanuel Levinas (1947), Gilles Deleuze (1964), or René Girard (1961), turn their attention to the Recherche, they fnd in Proust’s novel original philosophical positions: for example, an entire semiotics, or the mimetic dynamics of desire, or a metaphysics of love beyond the Schopenhauerian model. They all highlight the importance of the conceptual choices made by the novelist (Macherey 2014, Romeyer Dherbey 2015, Bensussan 2020). Once Proust’s vast philosophical culture, acquired for the most part during his student years, is reconstituted in its entirety (Fraisse 2013), it becomes clear that the novelist of later years cannot be placed under the tutelage of any one philosopher, even if the structures of Kantian philosophy and the universe of the monads defned by Leibniz ofer him constant points of support. The purely decorative value that the names of philosophers have in the novel, when they are unexpectedly mentioned, actually camoufages an intense dialogue with all of Western philosophy. But each thinker Proust had studied in his youth would reappear later in his prose, even momentarily, with one philosophical thought giving way to another just when the memory of one illustrious philosopher’s name had appeared to take over. Such is the main dynamic that gives all its complexity to Proust’s constant, subjacent dialogue with that great contemporary philosopher of memory, his cousin, Henri Bergson. The confrontation of the two greatest thinkers of the time, around 1900, shows Proust brushing up against Bergson’s philosophy: the two forms of memory that he distinguishes, involuntary memory and voluntary memory, bear only an air of resemblance to those defned by Bergson in 1896 in Matière et Mémoire, image memory and habit memory. The social self and the deep self, whose separation Proust opposes to Sainte-Beuve’s method, difer in part from what Bergson designates under the same terms; the novelist does not adhere to the Bergsonian distinction between intuition and analysis; the notion of homogeneity, which is completely negative in Bergson (corresponding to the divisions of the intellect), designates on the contrary in Proust, the internal harmony of a work of art; and language, which is extensively discussed by the philosopher, is the object of an exclusively positive analysis and implementation in Proust. The fact remains that Bergson’s theories work on the whole reasoning of the Proustian narrator. And when, for his part, Bergson congratulates his novelist cousin in 1920 for À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feurs, the words he uses, namely “It is a direct and continuous vision of inner reality” (Corr., XIX, 492), are of great importance, for they name the very goal of all his own philosophy.

Notes 1 The majority of Proust’s school papers are conserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (NAF 16611). Additional material is part of Bernard de Fallois’s archive and has been published under the title De l’écolier à l’écrivain. Travaux de jeunesse (1884–1895), Paris, Classiques Garnier, “Bibliothèque proustienne”, 2022. 2 Darlu teaches Proust that “La conscience n’est pas une connaissance continue; elle […] subit des interruptions (Consciousness is not continuous knowledge; it […] undergoes interruptions” (Darlu 1884–1885: 40). “L’acte de volonté est intermittent (Willpower is intermittent)”, underlines Élie Rabier (Rabier 1884: 86). And Félix Ravaisson, who is mentioned by all of Proust’s professors, notes: “c’est dans l’intermittence des fonctions que semble se manifester le plus clairement la spontanéité (it is in the intermittence of functions that spontaneity is expressed most clearly)” (Ravaisson 1838: 11). 3 For a detailed description of these stages, see Fraisse 2013: 362–5.

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Bibliography Bénard, Ch. (1866), Petit Traité de la dissertation philosophique: conseils, modèles, exercices, Paris: librairie Ladrange. Bensussan, G. (2020), L’Écriture de l’involontaire. Philosophie de Proust, Paris: Classiques Garnier, “Bibliothèque proustienne”. Bonnet, H. (1971), Alphonse Darlu (1849–1921), le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust, Paris: Nizet. Bouillier, Fr. (1878), Notions d’histoire de la philosophie, à l’usage des candidats au baccalauréat es-Lettres, Paris: Charles Delagrave. Boutroux, É. (1874), De la contingence des lois de la nature, Paris: Germer Baillière, rééd. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895. Boutroux, É. (1882), “De l’organisation de l’enseignement philosophique dans les Facultés des Lettres”, Revue internationale de l’enseignement, no. 3, 421–50. Boutroux, É. (1894), De l’idée de loi naturelle dans les sciences et dans la philosophie, Paris, Lecène et Oudin. Boutroux, É. (1960), La Philosophie de Kant. Cours de M. Émile Boutroux, Paris: Vrin. Brochard, V. (1879), De l’erreur, Paris: Berger-Levrault. Brochard, V. (1884), “De la croyance”, Revue philosophique, 7, 1–23. Brochard, V. (1912), Études de philosophie ancienne et de philosophie moderne, recueillies et précédées d’une introduction par Victor Delbos, Paris: Félix Alcan. Cousin, V. (1845), Défense de l’université et de la philosophie, Paris: Célestin Joubert. Darlu, A. (1884–1885), Cours de philosophie professé au lycée Henri-IV (1884–1885), pris en note par J[eanne] Delamarre, Paris: Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, MS 1787. Deleuze, G. (1964), Proust et les signes, Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Descombes, V. (1987), Proust. Philosophie du roman, Paris: Éditions de Minuit, « Critique ». Egger, V (1881), La Parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive, Paris: Germer Baillière. Ferré, A. (1959), Les Années de collège de Marcel Proust, Paris: Gallimard. Fraisse, L. (2013), L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, Paris: PUPS. Fraisse, L. (2014), “Jusqu’à quel point Victor Brochard (1848–1907) sert-il de modèle à Brichot?”, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 44, 153–62. Fraisse, L. (2015), “En quoi consisterait l’écriture d’un ‘roman bergsonien’?” in Swann a cent ans, publié par Adam Watt, Marcel Proust aujourd’hui, no. 12, 119–36. Fraisse, L. (2018), “Si d’aventure Proust avait lu Schelling…”, in Proust-Kant, une afnité élective?, 2018, 119–66. Fraisse, L. (2019), “Proust à l’écoute de ses professeurs de philosophie, ou les formes du roman kantien” in Proust et Kant. Hommage à Anne Henry, sous la direction de Gérard Bensussan et Luc Fraisse, Revue d’études proustiennes, no. 10, 2019–2022, 115–44. Girard, R. (1961), Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris: Grasset. Henry, A. (1981), Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, Paris: Klincksieck. Henry, A. (1983), Proust. Le tombeau égyptien, Paris: Flammarion. Henry, A. (1986), Proust, Paris: Balland. Himly, A. (1900), Livret de la Faculté des Lettres de Paris (1809–1900), Paris: Delalain frères. Janet, P. and Séailles, G. (1894 [1887]), Histoire de la philosophie. Les problèmes et les écoles, Paris: Charles Delagrave. Joly, H. (1886), Études sur les ouvrages philosophiques de l’enseignement classique, prescrits pour la classe de philosophie et les examens du baccalauréat. Analyses, commentaires, appréciations (programme de 1885), Paris: Delalain frères. Kant, E. (1869), Critique de la raison pure, traduit par Jules Barni, Paris, Germer Baillière, 2 vol. Lachelier, J. (1871), Du fondement de l’induction, Paris: Ladrange. Leibniz, G. W. (1881), La Monadologie, ed. Émile Boutroux, Paris: Charles Delagrave. Lelièvre, Cl. (1990), Histoire des institutions scolaires (1789–1989), Paris: Nathan. Leriche, F. (1991), La Question de la représentation dans la littérature moderne. Huysmans-Proust: la réponse du texte aux mises en cause esthétiques, thèse, université Paris VII. Levinas, E. (1947), “L’autre dans Proust”, Deucalion, no. 2, rééd. Noms propres, Saint-Clément-laRivière: Fata Morgana, 151–59. Macherey, P. (2014), Proust: entre littérature et philosophie, Paris: Éditions Amsterdam. Nicolas, S. (2007), Histoire de la philosophie en France au XIX e siècle. Naissance de la philosophie spiritualiste (1789–1830), Paris: L’Harmattan.

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Proust’s Philosophical Training Noailles, A. de (1931), “Un souvenir de Marcel Proust”, in Correspondance générale de Marcel Proust, t. II, Lettres à la comtesse de Noailles (1901–1919), Paris: Plon, 15–28. Poucet, B. (1999), Enseigner la philosophie. Histoire d’une discipline scolaire (1860–1990), Paris: CNRS éditions. Proust, M. (2002), Carnets, ed. by Florence Callu and Antoine Compagnon, Paris: Gallimard. Proust, M. (2013), La Prisonnière, édition de Luc Fraisse, Paris: Classiques Garnier. Proust, M. (2019), Le Mystérieux Correspondant et autres nouvelles inédites, suivi de Aux sources de la “Recherche du temps perdu”, ed. by Luc Fraisse, Paris: Éditions de Fallois; rééd. Paris: Gallimard, “Folio Classique”, 2021. Proust, M. (2022), De l’écolier à l’écrivain. Travaux de jeunesse (1884–1895), édition établie et annotée par Luc Fraisse, Paris: Classiques Garnier, “Bibliothèque proustienne”. Proust, R. (1923), “Marcel Proust intime”, La NRF, 112, Hommage à Marcel Proust, 24–6. Proust et Kant (2019), ed. by Gérard Bensussan & Luc Fraisse, Revue d’études proustiennes, 2019–22. Proust-Schelling, une afnité élective? (2018), ed. by Gérard Bensussan & Luc Fraisse, Les Cahiers philosophiques de Strasbourg, 43. Rabier, É. (1884), Leçons de philosophie, t. I, Psychologie, Paris: Hachette. Rabier, É. (1886), Leçons de philosophie, t. II, Logique, Paris: Hachette. Rauth, Fr. (1895), “La licence et l’agrégation de philosophie”, Revue de métaphysique et de morale, t. III, 352–66. Ravaisson, F. (1838), De l’habitude, Paris: H. Fournier et Cie. Ribot, Th. (1881), Les Maladies de la mémoire, Paris: Germer Baillière. Ribot, Th. (1883), Les Maladies de la volonté, Paris: Alcan. Ribot, Th. (1885), Les Maladies de la personnalité, Paris: Alcan. Romeyer Dherbey, G. (2015), La Pensée de Marcel Proust, Paris: Classiques Garnier, “Bibliothèque proustienne”. Séailles, G. (1883), Essai sur le génie dans l’art, Paris: Germer Baillière. Séailles, G. (1892), Léonard de Vinci, l’artiste et le savant, Paris: Perrin. Tarde, G. (1890), Les Lois de l’imitation, Paris: Félix Alcan. Tarde, G. (1895), La Logique sociale, Paris: Félix Alcan.

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PART 2

Metaphysics and Epistemology

3 THE MIND IN TIME Proust, Involuntary Memory, and the Adventure in Perception Garry L. Hagberg

That one frequently encounters the unforeseeable in life is a commonplace. The realization that we experience the unforeseeable within ourselves, as or more frequently than its outward counterpart, was, until Marcel Proust,1 less widely recognized and remained too little investigated. And those unforeseeable experiences within ourselves most often are a result of the past re-emerging and re-positioning itself in the present – it is in a sense the mind moving across time, from the past into the present but also, if somewhat counterintuitively and in a diferent way, from the present into the past. But once one sees precisely what it was that Proust brought into view, it seems all too like a case of something central to the mind’s experience having been hidden in plain sight. And similarly, once one sees this, one can then see why Proust’s work represents a contribution of great signifcance to philosophy. So one might ask: (1) What is so powerfully important to human self-understanding concerning the unforeseeable contents of the mind to which Proust drew the permanent attention of the entire literary world? (I will ofer an answer by extracting what I take to be seven central themes of Proust’s project.) (2) How might we make what he articulated, across long and masterful volumes of a life’s magnum opus, more conceptually precise, or understand it more richly, by bringing it into contact with philosophy? (I will ofer an answer by looking into the writings of a philosopher not usually associated with Proust, the American pragmatist George Herbert Mead along with some closely related thoughts of who is often linked to Proust, Henri Bergson.) (3) What was it that kept this feature of human experience submerged in such a way that its actual ubiquity was obscured? (Here, I will ofer an answer with a brief suggestion concerning the conceptually blinding dominance of what Wittgenstein called a philosophical picture.)

“Te shifing gusts of memory” and Romantic Despair of a Philosophic Kind One central theme is put into play almost immediately: in Swann’s Way, the narrator, in describing his early experience as a fedgling writer of attempting to capture in language what he has seen – in this case the bell towers of churches he saw while riding in a coach along a twisting road, he now realizes that, in that earlier and younger writing, he described the outward objects of perception in a manner that is physically impossible. That is, he described them as though they frst appear, then disappear, and fnally reappear in a diferent place or position, constantly changing relations to other objects in the visual feld. This is DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-6

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unquestionably physically impossible, but it is not mentally impossible – indeed that way of speaking (even if a violation of what we know externally) captures the experience. And so a primary theme is sounded: what may be an accurate description of the mind’s perceptual experience may not only be signifcantly diferent from, but may indeed be incompatible with, a description of the external world that occasions, or is the object of, that perception. Or to put the theme another way: the criterion of the truth or accuracy of the description of the mind’s experience is not transferred inwardly from the outside world – the verbal portrayal of a mind’s perceptual content does not (necessarily) answer to that.2 Having referred to “the shifting and confused gusts of memory” that “never lasted for more than a few seconds” (p.6; SW, 8; I 7), the narrator shows in detail what it is to recollect with the mind moving or swirling through time (in this case his early experience of going to bed, the awaited and comforting pleasure of receiving his goodnight kiss from his mother, details of his bedrooms, and details of the then-present relatives). Here, we see a second theme put into play. The famous case – indeed long a cliché concerning Proust’s work – of the madeleine is often taken as Proust’s leading example of how an artifact associated with earlier experience can suddenly and dramatically restore memory. It is that – but it is also much more than that. Just before the description of the Madeleine experience (pp. 34–6; SW, 52–3; I 44–5), Proust, responding to an imaginary questioner of the tale of his youth that he is presently recounting, wrote this passage: I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by an exercise of the will, by my intellectual memory, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us of the past preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead. (p. 33; SW, 50–1; I 43) This makes clear that Proust is not fundamentally interested in just any memory: it is not facts as recalled by an exercise of will of a kind that generates images – that is, mental photographs of the appearance of the external world – because these preserve nothing of the past itself. And this kind of memory need not be solely constituted of visual images: “pictures” is the word used in one translation but “information” in another, and it could also be “facts”, so the memory can be linguistic, verbal, or in a broad sense informational. But in either case, what he calls intellectual memory, or willed or volitional memory, is not, and cannot be, fundamental to his project. Involuntary memory is. We can pull memory up from the depths or out of the recesses (to use spatial metaphors for the mind), but that is not in and of itself an adventure; we would not call it that because it is too predictable. An outward adventure is full of the unforeseeable; an inward one displays the same defning characteristic. A walk along a very well-known path that we take daily is not an adventure; the word would be puzzlingly misused in that case (thinking through where we would and would not use a word is often the fullest way of comprehending its meaning). But going into an unknown forest for days, even going into an unknown city for days, or going anywhere with a person we are only getting to know for days – those are adventures, cases in which the word is called for and at home. It is thus in (a) unpredictably emergent memories, where (b) those memories are of phenomenological experience and not merely of either the physical appearance or the verbal description of the outside world, that Proust is interested. What he calls here “the reality” – meaning the external world as we take it to be objectively described and pictured – is for him 44

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“all dead”, precisely because that kind of memory, that conception of the experience of memory, leaves out the distinctiveness, the contour, the infections, of one’s sensibility in its creative and kaleidoscopic ever-changing interaction with the world. His focus is not the world, but the mind’s perception of the world, not externally verifed “photographic” memories or linguistic “transcriptions” or direct descriptions of the world, but rather the vicissitudes of consciousness as it experiences, and fuidly restructures, that world.3 And so Proust writes: [S]o it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die. (p.34; SW, 52; I 44) “Beyond the reach of the intellect” means it is not a matter of volition, not the reward of any decision to remember (where the memory is of the kind he is philosophically investigating and capturing in literary form). But the important and most revealing part of this passage is in parentheses: it is not a memory of the object unto itself; it is a memory of experience, a memory of experience in that moment occasioned by the object. It is the “sensation which that material object” stimulates, a sensation we discover upon encountering the object where the past experience is interwoven into the mind that we are now. It is not, nor could it be for Proust, a simple mono-dimensional recovery of the past or a re-enactment of the past. Rather, it is a remembrance infected by the relevant content of the intervening years and the sensibility as we have cultivated it right up to this present point. In that respect, rather than a mind recalling photograph-like images of earlier visual or ocular data, or a mind recalling words said and words heard, or a mind recalling any broad information as mentioned above, it is a mind moving through time, taking the present self into the past while bringing the past self into the present. This theme is encapsulated in the narrator’s description of his drinking the tea with the madeleine: with the second and third sips, the mnemonic strength weakens, and he realized, “It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic. It is plain that the object of my quest, the truth, lies not in the cup but in myself ” (p. 34; SW, 53; I 45). That is, the focus, the kind of knowledge being sought here, is inwardly phenomenological, not outwardly ontological. And so, with the frst two themes now interweaving, the truth will be a matter of truth-to-mind rather than truth-to-object. A third theme concerns the intricacy of the relation between the present self and the remembered self, and the way that the knowledge of that intricate relation then permeates and complicates present experience. The narrator, in remembering his young self waiting in special anticipation for the mother’s bedtime kiss, for the gentle sonic texture of the mother’s voice and that voice’s softly reassuring words, and for the security and comfort of her physical presence and embrace, now as a grown man realizes that the boy, his earlier self, was at the same time, as a kind of phenomenological underlayment, nervous, or somewhat agitated before his mother came (because for the boy the predictability of the world could change and she might not come – as indeed happens when guests are present), but then with this in mind the narrator now also realizes (and here is this third theme) that his boy-self was also somewhat nervous and agitated for a separate reason, which is that the boy somehow realized that this particular experience cannot happen, just as it is, ever again (p. 33; SW, 50–1; I 43). So the narrator realizes, through imaginative time-crossing interaction with his re-emergent boy-self, that a sense of impending loss was always contained within fulfllment. And so 45

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again with that in mind, the narrator, the adult, realizes within this recollection that all of life has been like that – as William James claimed as part of his pragmatism, experience is strictly speaking unrepeatable. (Of course, we have experiences that we call repetitions – but that covers over the diferentiating fact that even if it were otherwise identical – which in practice it would not be – the second is recognizable as a repetition, which of course the frst is not. The “identical” experience is thus not indistinguishably identical.) The narrator, with correlated memories fooding in as a result of the memory of the mother’s kiss, realizes that (a) he is the adult successor of that boy and so in a sense carries that boy within him, (b) he has had a lifetime of resonant, but not strictly repeated, experience, with the sense of non-repeatability running throughout, (c) even as a boy his nervousness outlasting the kiss showed that he instinctually knew that the precise experience could never be relived or regained, and (d) that his past (this is essential to the third theme) is both always with him, and yet that its memory will always be inextricably interwoven with, and infected by, who he is now. And so he realizes that the boy’s nervousness, a special admixture of “terror and joy”, was philosophically justifed. For the boy and for the man, desire satisfed is at that same moment forever lost. It is for this reason that love becomes a topic of extraordinary psychological complexity for the narrator, just as it is for Charles Swann.4 And so a fourth theme emerges: love as investigated by Proust-as-philosopher is complicated – but for him for a special reason that follows from the frst three themes. Swann experiences a magnetic attraction to Odette, which grows to what is for him love, growing, in turn, to obsession, and fnally to phases of frenetic and manic desperate physical action (e.g. searching frantically around Paris for her after he arrives late at a gathering and misses his anticipated seeing of her) fueled by desperate thought and emotion (e.g. where his psychic state unfolds from attraction to infatuation to a tortured condition in which the layered complexity of his mental world concerning her vastly outweighs what is actually taking place). So precisely what, then, is the special reason? Early in his interactions with Odette, Swann happens to hear a sonata with a phrase that lodged in his mind at an earlier point in life. His “madeleine” experience is thus musical rather than gustatory/olfactory, but with another more important diference: the experience reaches for him into the future, not into the past. So his mind senses, upon hearing the phrase in her presence, the possibility of a romanticized future with her that resituates the musical phrase from his past into an imagined future. Or: the narrator’s mind, with the madeleine, moved the past into the present. Triggered by a musical phrase from the past, Swann’s mind moves the present into the future.5 And he then sees what is for him a perceptiondetermining resemblance between Odette and a fgure in a Botticelli painting, a reproduction of which he thereafter keeps near. This further and still more dangerously aestheticizes his perception of Odette, so that (and here is the special reason) for him the perception of the outer world is covered over by a projection onto it from his inner world – the result, predictably, yielding romantic ruin, with the section entitled “Swann in Love” concluding with the famous remark that he wasted years of his life on a woman who was not even his type. That realization comes, after all kinds of agonies of the romantic mind (including unforeseeable chance hearings of the melody that each time reignites the fame), only when Swann fnally removes the aestheticized veil and sees her for who she is. But what, more exactingly, was the power of that musical phrase for Swann, and what does this tell us about the cautionary tale Proust is telling here? Proust wrote: So Swann was not mistaken in believing that the phrase of the sonata did, really, exist. Human as it was from this point of view, it belonged, none the less, to an order of 46

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supernatural creatures whom we have never seen, but whom, in spite of that, we recognize and acclaim with rapture when some explorer of the unseen contrives to coax one forth, to bring it down from that divine world to which he has access to shine for a brief moment in the frmament of ours. (p.269; SW, 417; I 345) The musical phrase, for Swann, although as a manifestation existent down here, was actually from another, higher, world, and it spoke to him of the transcendence of the commonplace. In his mind, he positioned Odette in that other world – only to fnd out the hard way that she was an embodied, fesh-and-blood person moving within our world. And so encapsulating this theme, Proust has the narrator warn us about the ever-interesting danger of attempting to coax an intransigent and multiform reality that defes any singly true description into conforming to pre-established images of the mind. And along with this warning, he conveys the sense that this danger, however much we understand and recognize it, is unavoidable. In Within a Budding Grove, it is the narrator’s turn to experience (as he will again later) romantic despair of a philosophical kind: love can make us selectively attend to what lies before us, to change in memory the infection and thus the emotive signifcance of what was said, and to not see what is there and to see what is not there. All that we have seen with Swann. But here there is an augmentation of the theme: love’s pursuit in this case shows its power to greatly magnify the force on the mind of chance or unforeseeable events. Here, one case may stand for many: the narrator happens to see his love interest, Gilberte, out walking in a familiar way with a young man. Shortly thereafter, he believes that he is lied to about it – he is told that she is out walking with a friend, a young woman. Concluding immediately that she has a new lover and this is being concealed from him to protect his feelings or preserve her privacy, he sinks into swirls of despairing thoughts, sufering torments of rejection.6 He undergoes all the difculties of this chapter of his life, only to fnd out (volumes later) that what he was told was true – she was walking with an actress-friend who was on that day dressed as a man. The emotional content, the emotional and intellectual experience was real – but based on a falsehood; in retrospect, he readily recognizes – not itself an uncommon or striking realization – that the truth of the experience is not directly linked to, nor is its veracity measured by, the facts of the outside world. But what he does beyond this thought then recognize more strikingly is that the important part of his life is his life as individually lived, so that the life experience based on falsehood is not for that reason rendered irrelevant or set aside into a mental category of what one might call the untruly lived. Here again, Proust’s themes are intertwining – but before moving to the ffth theme, there is one more aspect of the fourth to bring into the discussion. Proust ingeniously discusses the signifcance of place, and of placenames. Closing Part I of the section entitled “Place-Names: the Place”, he writes, …just as a Sovereign would sooner see his son marry the daughter of a dethroned King than that of a President still in ofce. That is to say, the two worlds take as fantastic a view of one another as the inhabitants of a town situated at one end of Balbec Bay have of the town at the other end: from Rivebelle you can just see Marcouville L’Orgueilleuse; but even that is deceptive, for you imagine that you are seen from Marcouville, where, as a matter of fact, the splendours of Rivebelle are almost wholly invisible. (p. 533; SW, 326; II 63–4) His acute observations concerning our perception of place often serve as powerful metaphors for our perception of each other: we can have a fully imagined yet wholly fantastical view 47

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of the “other world” of another mind; we can imagine that we are seen, that we are visible, in ways we are not. And we can (to which I will return in Part 3) build a radically misled conception of the mind and its contents based on our perception of the external world and its contents. We see a ffth theme by standing back and taking a broad view of the narrator’s engagements in love; this theme can be stated briefy. His early experience with Gilberte in all its initial complexity prefgures his later experience with Madame de Guermantes (in The Guermantes Way) with sufering of a more intellectual kind, which then together prefgure the extraordinarily wrought and then overwrought life-world with Albertine. So this theme, one that we see in seemingly countless ways throughout the entire work, is this: any factual description of the outward events of his relationships could seem full and accurate in and of themselves, but such descriptions would invariably fail to capture what is experientially fundamental to them, i.e. that the newer experience is seen in the light of the previous, or the new experience has an underlayment from his past that shapes it as it progresses. So the given experience of any single episode is never, nor could it be, only that – precisely because the individual mind of the experiencer is bringing to it echoes, reverberations, resonances, transparency-like overlays, structuring underlays, and sinews of psychologically time-traveling connections that, for that sensibility in that moment, make that experience what it is for him. Generic or context-transcending descriptions of events – to which Proust is philosophically allergic – while to a casual glance may seem sufcient, but in truth are blunt verbal instruments that bulldoze over the subtleties of the mind’s adventure. A number of authors have, rightfully, employed the analogy of the palimpsest for the mind of the narrator; it has writing, then over-writing, and then further over-writing over that.7 And so one important aspect of this theme that can too easily be elided: the experiences of the events are as has been suggested palimpsest-like, but also, the descriptions of those events both in the moment and after the fact are palimpsest-like as well, as they weave through a life, through a mind’s trajectory, connecting and infecting as they will in their happenstance, non-volitional, emergent, and unforeseeable ways. Ever aware of the “modifcations” that can be caused by a person’s recent experience, the narrator says: In any case, whatever the modifcations that had occurred at some recent time in her life, which might perhaps have explained why it was that she now readily accorded to my momentary and purely physical desire what at Balbec she had with horror refused to allow my love, another far more surprising manifested itself in Albertine that same evening as soon as her caresses had procured in me the satisfaction which she could not have failed to notice, which, indeed, I had been afraid might provoke in her the instinctive movement of revulsion and ofended modesty which Gilberte had given at a corresponding moment behind the laurel shrubbery in the Champs-Elysees. (p. 980; G, 422; II 661) He is in the present but infected by the past refusal of Albertine’s, which changes the present allowance of love, with the past re-emerging as a fear re-enlivened from the memory of the revulsion of Gilberte, so that this present moment is layered with the recent past and an earlier past with another – all making this moment what it actually is. Multiple descriptions of this mind in cross-temporal motion suggest themselves; no one seems defnitive. Sixth, there is a strong theme that, when it surfaces time and again, one realizes that one has at some level been aware of as it has been growing all along. Continuous, yet intermittently visible, is an investigation into what the narrator is as a human self, not intrinsically, 48

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but rather as composed by the network of relations into which he enters. This comes out in his relations with his parents, with Swann, with the members of other families, and with many other acquaintances, but naturally most prominently with his love objects. What those investigations bring into sharp relief (and this is studied in beautiful, microscopic detail of a kind that literature at its best can aford and that philosophy rarely provides but frequently needs) is that his almost instinctive or animal desire to control the women he loves, most notably and extensively with Albertine, invariably yields a psycho-emotional circumstance in which he is almost completely controlled by that impossible desire. The narrator judges (in The Captive) what he calls her “bad taste in music” (p. 384; C, 3; III 521), along the way nudging her, as he sees it, upward toward his taste, and he judges her phraseology as improving along a trajectory from her girlhood to the present, where his own mastery of language and his exact phrasing would be the ideal toward which she should aspire; there are many other attempts to shape her into his image of what she should be, some overt and some subtle. This is like Swann with Odette and the Botticelli, except that the narrator has created internally his own private “Botticelli” of the mind, his own image to which she should correspond (and so here again, the themes are layering over each other). But we see this grow, slowly and inexorably, into an obsession that has his mind, increasingly extending beyond his own control, speculating about what he increasingly senses as the iceberg concealed beneath the tip that he sees. “I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again, reposing by my side” (p. 427; C, 74; III 580). And as this psychological condition advances, it is all too telling that he fnds mental peace and comfort in watching her sleep: that is, when she is inert, when she is static, and when her mind is not manifesting itself in action, he has the feeting illusion of her containment within his image of her. “Her sleep brought within my reach something as calm, as sensually delicious as those nights of full moon on the bay of Balbec…” (p. 426; C, 72; III 579). In the end, with his mind invaded by thoughts and increasingly deep suspicions and speculations about her having deceived him in all kinds of ways (afairs, brief trysts, dissimulations, misleading statements, outright lies, etc.) to the point of fnding himself wholly unable to work (“…the grief that these memories were causing me…”, p. 483; C, 164; III 656–7), he resolves to break of entirely with Albertine – only to discover that while he was out contemplating and then solidifying in his mind his resolution to break it of, she was planning the same, and so while he was sleeping, she quietly packed her bag and left him. While she sleeps, he is at peace; while he sleeps, she fees the incarcerating power of his presence. Again, the title of this book is The Captive, and there are two captives; the obvious one, Albertine, and the less obvious but more caged one, the narrator (it is true that in French the noun is feminine and so it in a primary sense refers to Albertine, but this should not cancel the doubled referent to the narrator). I will return to this in Part 2, but the sixth theme encapsulated is: we human beings are not hermetically sealed repositories of consciousness that we, wholly and autonomously, control. Rather, as the American pragmatists argued, we are relationally constituted beings with minds furnished with self-constitutive contents that come, at least in large part, from without, from the complex contexts of our interactions. Like us, for the narrator, the slightest chance encounters, chance discoveries, can exert sudden and unexpected great infuence on the contents of our minds that we do not, and indeed cannot, anticipate. And the magnitude of their infuence will also be determined, not by any external description of what they are unto themselves, but by the contextual intricacies of the mind that absorbs them. “How suddenly do the things that are probably the most insignifcant assume an extraordinary value when a person whom we love…conceals them from us!” (p. 442; C, 99; III 601). And, as Freud wrote, we are not the masters of our own houses. 49

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The narrator writes, “I was more of a master than I had supposed. More of a master, in other words more of a slave” (p. 488; C, 172; III 663). The seventh theme, fundamental to everything so far discussed and to the philosophical considerations to follow, is perfectly encapsulated by Proust: Life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, … these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infnite variety of communicating paths to choose from. (TR, 428; IV 607) 8

George Herbert Mead and the Unpredictable Past The vision of the mind’s experience so incisively and beautifully examined by Proust is, as suggested briefy above, one that has remarkable afnities with the philosophical conception of the mind in time articulated by George Herbert Mead. A central fgure in American pragmatist thought, and a colleague and inheritor of the work of C. S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, a phrase that became a slogan for Mead’s position was “the self is a social process”. That we will come to – but he was, and is increasingly once again, known for his philosophical conception of our engagement with the past. In his “The Present as the Locus of Reality”,9 he writes, “The pasts that we are involved in are both irrevocable and revocable” (p. 606). The irrevocability claim is intuitively immediately clear: we cannot go back into the past and change it; Proust, like everyone else in human history, cannot do that. But the revocability thesis? This is the “perpetually weaving fresh threads”. Mead writes (of our historical or any inquiry or refection considering the past): [O]ur research work is that of discovery, and we can only discover what is there whether we discover it or not. I think however that this last statement is in error, if it is supposed to imply that there is or has been a past which is independent of all presents, for there may be and beyond doubt is in any present with its own past a vast deal which we do not discover, and yet this which we do or do not discover will take on diferent meaning and be diferent in its structure as an event when viewed from some later standpoint. (p. 609) This is the sense in which the search for lost time proceeds. And here we see Mead strongly articulating in philosophy what we called Proust’s frst theme above. There will not be a single, ultimate, context-transcending criterion for the accuracy of a description of a past event, be it action, interaction, thought, speech, or cognitive content of any kind. A singular and defnitive past that is “independent of all presents” for Mead is a myth, just as it is shown to be in Proust. And so Mead continues: Is there a similar error in the suggestion that it implies the absolutely correct, even if it never reaches it? I am referring to the “in-itself ” correctness of an account of events, implied in a correction which a later historian makes. I think that the absolute correctness which lies back in the historian’s mind would be found to be the complete presentation of the given past, if all its implications were worked out. (p. 609) 50

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If all its implications were worked out. Precisely. And that, as Proust has shown over the span of more than two thousand pages, is never-ending; there is no ultimate working-out. This was his point in the seventh theme (to which I will return shortly), just as it is Mead’s point here. The second theme concerned the paucity of content of a volitional memory; as we saw, this could be photographic memory or a mental snapshot of how the world externally looked at a given moment, or a verbal memory of anything from a passing remark to a full description of a complex state of afairs, or information of a descriptive kind that may or may not have been said or written at the time. That, for Proust, was a “dead” past, precisely because the complex network of implications is not capturable within volitional memories, the truth of which answers only to a frozen time-slice of the external world. Yet, again, we intuitively cling to the idea that the past, as a simply incontrovertible fact, is unto itself permanently settled. This intuition, and within its frame indeed incontrovertible, is easily misunderstood. Proust shows it; Mead says it. He does so by reference to his central concept of the emergent – a sudden life change that carries power and signifcance well beyond what one could presently assess; a sudden wholly unexpected meeting with a heretofore long-lost person of great signifcance to us where who we are now is deeply informed by who we were then; the sudden encounter of an artist with a painting of his that with massive power reawakens, disturbingly, a slice of his past; a reader stumbling onto a poem that uncannily captures a psychologically submerged experience; and a thousand other things where in all cases the psychic time-travel moves in both directions, i.e. from the emergent past into the present and from the present into a now-reconsidered past. And then both of these directions (past-into-present and present-into-past) seem to together reach into the future with strongly sensed but as-yet unspecifed implications or trajectories. Mead writes: It would probably be stated that the irrevocability of the past is located in such a metaphysical order, and that this is the point which I wish to discuss. The historian does not doubt that something has happened. He is in doubt as to what has happened. He also proceeds upon the assumption that if he could have all the facts or data, he could determine what it was that happened. That is, his idea of irrevocability attaches, as I have already stated, to the “what” that has happened as well as to the passing of the event. But if there is emergence, the refection of this into the past at once takes place. There is a new past, for from every new rise the landscape that stretches behind us becomes a diferent landscape. The analogy is faulty, because the heights are there, and the aspects of the landscapes which they reveal are also there and could be reconstructed from the present of the wayfarer if he had all the implications of his present before him; whereas the emergent is not there in advance, and by defnition could not be brought within even the fullest presentation of the present. (p. 610) So it is what Mead calls the emergent that is non-volitional, unexpected, reorienting, changeable, revocable, amenable, and fuid. The third theme concerned the intricacy of the relation between the present self and the remembered self. And that led into a discussion of the boy’s fear that the pleasure of the mother’s bedtime kiss might not happen again; the narrator, with the memory of the boy within him, philosophically realizes that not only it might not, but indeed that it could not, happen again (again, for reasons that William James adumbrated concerning the non-repeatability of experience). Mead just above said, “the emergent is not there in advance”; the emergent is of its moment, of the present that itself is both passing into the past and yet reaching forward with sinews for future implications, 51

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resonance, and newly connected signifcance. The narrator realizes the boy’s sense of loss, of the unrepeatability of the mother’s bedtime kiss, and the way that the boy’s fearful sense carried forward-directed implications across the time of his life from bedtime then to the present refective moment. And he now recognizes another if directly related fear that the boy sensed but could not articulate – it foreshadowed his mother’s ageing and her ultimate worldly transience. Our fourth theme, exemplifed in Swann discovering that Odette was not the transcendental embodiment of his mental image, not his Botticelli, not his musical phrase made corporeal (and so ultimately not his type), concerned the way that our attention can be selective, and the way our interest in a person can, blindingly, be in the fnding of an external realization of a pre-established interior image. Similarly, if with some diferences, the narrator’s pain and jealousy at seeing Gilberte with what he took to be another man and then being lied to about it was corrected not of course by going back into the past, not by comparing his perception with an original fact of a past moment, but by (in his case much later) learning that he was not lied to, that the “man” was indeed a woman, and that while the pain and jealousy he sufered were real, the circumstances motivating it were not. This revised, realigned, and restructured both his past and its reach into his future. Swann and the narrator learned, revised, reconnected, and restructured exactly as Mead describes it here: We certainly cannot go back to such a past and test our conjectures by actually inspecting its events in their happening. We test our conjectures about the past by the conditioning directions of the present and by later happenings in the future which must be of a certain sort if the past we have conceived was there. The force of irrevocability then is found in the extension of the necessity with which what has just happened conditions what is emerging in the future. What is more than this belongs to a metaphysical picture that takes no interest in the pasts which arise behind us. (p. 613) Their pasts change, the pasts which arise behind them connect the dots of experience diferently, and that change reaches through the present and into the future. The ffth theme, that factual descriptions of outward events can seem full and accurate unto themselves (but only misleadingly so), because they systematically leave out the “palimpsest” dimension of experience for any individual, appears and reappears throughout Proust’s grand project. And Mead writes: Given an emergent event, its relations to antecedent processes become conditions or causes. Such a situation is a present. It marks out and in a sense selects what has made its peculiarity possible. It creates with its uniqueness a past and a future. As soon as we view it, it becomes a history and a prophecy. Its own temporal diameter varies with the extent of the event. (p. 616) This is not easy to parse, but it goes to the core of the philosophical articulation of Proust’s vision. This intricate passage’s individual elements are as follows: a

an emergent event is one that clearly possesses signifcance because of its power to connect to previous experiences and color them, shade them, cast them in a new light, deepen their meaning, lift a hypothesis about them to knowledge about them, correct 52

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b

c

d e

f

g

a false belief about them, and engender insight about a previously undetected pattern of action or experience; the web of relations of that emergent event to the past reveal themselves to be either the preconditions for the present event (so that we now see, through those relations, how they served as the present event’s condition of possibility), or, more directly, the cause or causes of the present event (so that we now see the present emergent event as the efect of a causal chain); counterintuitively, the present as we experience it is not a given, but is rather a matter of recognizing the relational reach across time in both directions of the emergent event (so that what we call the present actually has varying durations and diferently sensed temporal reach); by marking out and selecting what is and is not relevant to it, the event focuses its own power and defnes its own special particularity; in creating its own past and future, it positions itself across time, so that the movement of the mind in perceiving it, in frst sensing and then assessing its signifcance, is temporally extended in both directions, with its perceived relations coming from the past, going into the past, coming from an expected future, and going into the future; our attention to these constitutive relations of the emergent event – the relations that make it what it is, both create our history for us and project a future for us not in an objectively external way but rather in a manner unique to our sensibility; so with all these elements working together, what Mead calls the temporal diameter of the event will vary according to its magnitude as determined by the preceding six elements.

All of this, taken together, is what “the palimpsest dimension” means, and it articulates what is left out by seemingly full but actually deeply incomplete externally factual descriptions of life’s signifcant events. The sixth theme concerned the supplanting of a long-entrenched conception of human self hood – a private mind or consciousness with full, transparent, and immediate access to its own contents – with a very diferent conception, one of a relationally composed mind. We saw Mead’s slogan (“the self is a social process”), and among the foundational pragmatists it was he who most fully developed this conception. His conception is that we, as minds, are not separate observers of an independent world apart from us, but rather that we are indissolubly in it, of it, becoming who we are through our interaction with it. If the former conception were true, the fundamental question of epistemology would be how it is that a hermetically sealed mind can gain knowledge of something (the world) metaphysically separate from it. With the latter, the question concerns rather the nature of our self-composing and world-composing interaction with it, as we are embedded in it. Here, Mead sees a deep parallel between our construction or composition of the past and the construction or composition of our self – and if there is a most fundamental Proustian relation, this is it. Mead writes: When we elaborate the history of a tree whose wood is found in the chairs in which we sit, all the way from the diatom to the oak but lately felled, this history revolves about the constant re-interpretation of facts that are continually arising; nor are these novel facts to be found simply in the impact of changing human experiences upon a world that is there. For… human experiences are as much a part of this world as are any of its other characteristics, and the world is a diferent world because of these experiences. (p. 618) 53

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Small things that were (or would ordinarily have been) insignifcant for the narrator suddenly, unexpectedly, and unforeseeably emerge and loom large, changing his relation to Albertine, changing his understanding of the past, changing his conception of possible futures, and – taken together – changing him. He elaborates his own history throughout the seven volumes, with that history revolving around constant re-interpretations of facts that are continually arising. And his experiences are not at a spectatorial distance from a world that is there; they are part of it, and the world is diferent because of them. (It is true that we will see him at the close of the book longing for a self above time, and so a completed and unchanging self in possession of all of its history in a state of what one might call experiential simultaneity – but in describing this longed-for state of self-completion, he intimates that this description is taking place, after all, in time and surrounded by experience he is trying, impossibly, to shut out. He realizes that he may try to shield himself from the changing fux of the world, but the cognition within him about that attempt does not stop.) Of the seven themes, as intimated above, it is the frst and the seventh that are most closely connected. Proust’s words, themselves now rewoven with this section’s discussion of Mead and the signifcance-enhancing and meaning-enriching relations they now hold, were: Life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, … these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infnite variety of communicating paths to choose from. (Watt, p. 102; TR, 428; IV 607) Mead wrote that what his refection on the past and on the temporally and relationally expanded conception of the present mean is that we should have an inconceivable richness ofered to our analysis in the approach to any problem arising in experience. (p. 617) Proust, perhaps more than any other literary author, has shown what “inconceivable richness” means. But Mead also, as a brief mention along his way, writes, “Or take Bergson’s conception of all our memories…” (p. 617). What was it he had in mind about the work of an author frequently connected to Proust? What did he say about “all our memories”, and why is that important to the philosophical understanding of Proust on the nature of the mind, on the workings of consciousness?

Henri Bergson, Time, and Proust’s Portrayal of Temporally Moveable Consciousness In Matter and Memory,10 Henri Bergson presents a restructuring of a common conception (for him a deeply rooted misconception) of the relation between perception and memory. The picture or model to which he is opposed (although its infuence and its variations continue to the present day) is that of British empiricism: sensory perception is an immediate and forceful impression on the senses, and memory, by contrast of quantity but not of kind, is a less forceful version of the same. For Bergson, this makes two interesting mistakes. The frst 54

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is that it drastically oversimplifes perception; rather than being an isolated sense impression wholly contained within its moment, as Proust shows, it itself already is interlaced with memory content, with layers – some explicit, some less so (to which I will return shortly) – of recognition and association that are anything but simple. The second is that memory is also drastically oversimplifed and made to seem precisely like the photographic-snapshot model, or like the exactly remembered word or phrase on a tape-recorder model, or like a fxed piece of information we recollect when needed: Proust’s project exposes all of these as models that systematically exclude virtually everything of humane interest. (A camera does not perceive in the way we do; nor do we, at an analytically bottom level, visually perceive like it; the same is true of sound recorders for auditory perception and of any information-delivery device.) One way of encapsulating Bergson’s vision of the presence of memory in perception is to say that it is not additive: it is not a matter of any bounded sensation of the moment having added to it as a supplementary constituent part a similarly bounded memory image. And, less obviously but equally importantly, for Bergson nor can what this model identifes as the essential or primary (he opposes this too) part of perception be purifed (also a mistaken model) by subtracting the memory content. Any such bifurcated schema would fail to accommodate the truer and richer phenomenological facts of the case – with, again, Proust presenting them at the length they require. And on this point: Bergson does not exactly say, but his work certainly shows, that philosophy has too often presumed a possibility that is itself for him yet another mistake: that is, the possibility of providing a single-phrase essentialistic account of memory. (Knowledge is…justifed true belief. Art is…a mirror held up to reality. Memory is…). On inspection, philosophy discovered neither of those succinct defnitions of knowledge or artwork, and Bergson was writing at a time when it was appropriate to say that it was time to make the parallel discovery about phrase-length defnitions of memory. And he virtually suggested that the time was right to expansively show what it is rather than to try to say, on the model of succinct defnitions, what it is. And of course it was Proust, answering this philosophical call in literature, who did precisely that. (Bergson published Matter and Memory in 1896, with the widely disseminated 5th edition in 1908; Proust read Bergson’s book in 1909 and published his seven volumes between 1913 and 1927. But one should not overstate the relation between the two as a relation of direct and immediate infuence of Bergson on Proust: Proust had already given a central place to memory, recollection, and the mind’s movement through them in his previous writings on aesthetics by 1895, so the relation is more one of fellow travelers with a profound afnity.) Bergson writes: Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and inversely, a memory … only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis (p. 72; endosmosis is the passage through a membrane from a region of lower to a region of higher concentration). The memory, “borrowing the body” of a perception, inhabits the present; the narrator, enjoying the kisses of a lover, thinks (somewhat disturbingly) in that moment of his childhood love of his mother’s bedtime kisses. In experiencing his increasingly mentally pressured obsession with the infdelities of Albertine, he thinks (“exchanging something of their substance”) of Swann’s love afair deteriorating step-by-step on its road to ruin. Bergson also writes: 55

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We assert, at the outset, that if there be memory, that is, the survival of past images, these images must constantly mingle with our perception of the present, and may even take its place. For if they have survived it is with a view of utility; at every moment they complete our present experience, enriching it with experience already acquired; and as the latter is ever increasing, it must end by covering up and submerging the former. (p. 70) And may even take its place; covering up and submerging the former. Along the troubled path of his romance with Albertine, the narrator at frst loves her, then loves her with occasionally intruding doubts, then strives to overcome his fears about her with focused attention, then fails to do so, then lives in a half-romance/half-insecure state, then has brief episodes or small islands of trouble free love in a sea of anxiety. Finally, with the full set of past-accumulated images, fears, anxieties, broken hopes and aspirations, and attendant inability to see her as a person through that veil of sufering, he resolves to leave her. Love’s place has been taken, covered and submerged. But what Bergson is discussing further ties Proust and Mead together. The emergent event moves across time, creating a present whole out of the inseparable materials of past and future. Mead writes: [O]ur past psychical life is there: it survives … with all the detail of its events localized in time. Always inhibited by the practical and useful consciousness of the present moment, that is to say, by the sensorimotor equilibrium of a nervous system connecting perception with action, this memory merely awaits the occurrence of a rift between the actual impression and its corresponding movement to slip in its images. (p. 113) Memory of the kind being investigated here – by Proust, Mead, and Bergson – can be held at bay by the pressures of immediate practical circumstances. So memory awaits a “rift”, for Mead, an emergent moment, where that “actual impression” is mobilized (its “movement”) across time, with the mind experiencing a panoply that no simple additive model could begin to accurately capture. Complex, layered, intricate (and often beautiful) literary prose of a Proustian kind does.11 And “the number and complexity of these images will depend on the degree of tension adopted by the mind” (p. 126). That is, as we have seen in the experience of Swann and in the experience of the narrator, these can be small or large – and as Proust wrote, the most seemingly small detail can suddenly emerge and loom large when the temporal reach of its signifcance carries the mind with it, or when, as in the case of the narrator thinking about Albertine, it in its extreme manifestation entirely takes over the mind – subjecting the master to slavery. However, the vast majority of cases in which we experience memory in perception of this kind are not like the narrator’s unpleasant experience in the fnal stage with Albertine. Rather, they are, as Proust has shown throughout his work, usually of a less mind-controlling and far more pleasant, interesting, and intellectually, autobiographically, and emotionally engaged kind. And that is the adventure of experience that Proust, Mead, and Bergson are portraying. Also, the narrator so often departs from the immediate circumstance into fights of interpretive fancy that one sees that the time-crossing refection is pleasurable and deeply engrossing even if the subject of the refection (e.g. Swann’s difculty) is not the kind of human experience in which one would or should take pleasure. Before moving forward to my third section, there are two remaining points to cover to understand what Mead had in mind concerning Bergson’s conception of memory. The 56

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frst concerns the model, or the analogy, we should employ in order to avoid the simplistic reductionism of the empirical model of sensation, memory, and their relation. A model that presents itself intuitively and that Bergson opposes is more fully elaborated than the simplest formulation of the empirical model, but it does or can follow from it. It is that (a) we have the sensation of the moment, (b) the sensation triggers ideas associated with them, (c) those ideas, now as central to the mind as the original sensation, trigger subsequent ideas associated, in turn, with them, and (d) those then do the same again, and frame by frame the mind moves farther from the sensation-perception that started the chain. It may seem natural to picture the workings of the relations between sensation and memory this way, but Bergson fnds this instructively erroneous. He writes: Attentive perception is often represented as a series of processes which make their way in single fle; the object exciting sensations, the sensations causing ideas to start up before them, each idea setting in motion, one in front of the other, points more and more remote of the intellectual mass. Thus there is supposed to be a rectilinear progress, by which the mind goes further and further from the object, never to return to it. (p. 126) This more sophisticated model derives from the misleading empirical model because it still clings to the notion of the original snapshot that then has layered over it, in single fle, subsequent snapshot-images drawn from other, mentally interconnected snapshots of experience. One can see at a glance, once this picture is articulated, that this is not what Proust has represented; it is not the way he has portrayed the movements of consciousness; and were we to impose this model on Proust’s countless cases, we would only both distort and simplify what we fnd therein – it would be a case of philosophy deforming and oversimplifying literature. Bergson blocks this with an analogy that, in Wittgenstein’s sense, changes our way of seeing. Bergson writes: We maintain on the contrary, that refective perception is a circuit, in which all the elements, including the perceived object itself, hold each other in a state of mutual tension as in an electric circuit, so that no disturbance starting from the object can stop on its way and remain in the depths of the mind: it must always fnd its way back to the object whence it proceeds. (pp. 126–7) No “disturbance” starting in the psychological feld of the narrator even once stops on its way; in the circuit of his perceptual-intellectual consciousness, neither the perceptual nor the intellectual is isolable. Like ours. The second point introduces one fnal aspect of Proust’s work that runs throughout his masterpiece and that was not among my seven selected themes above: the sense of subconscious content being summoned, by thought and by circumstance, to the surface. Bergson observes that a presumption – one that is on scrutiny unsupportable – blocks refection on the possibility of subconscious mental content. That presumption just is that for any mental content to exist, it must by defnition be conscious. [O]ur unwillingness to conceive unconscious psychical states is due, above all, to the fact that we hold consciousness to be the essential property of psychical states: so that a psychical state cannot, it seems, cease to be conscious without ceasing to exist. (p. 181) 57

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To break free of this presumption is for him to expand our conception of the mind (actually to break free of the mind’s limited conception of itself ) so that it includes what he regards as plainly phenomenologically evident – that subconscious content is present, if inconspicuously so, and it becomes conspicuously present at the moment it is called to explicit consciousness by Mead’s emergent or suddenly signifcant thought-saturated perception or Proust’s formerly small but now large-looming item of knowledge. Bergson summarizes his point: “[I]n the psychological domain, consciousness may not be the synonym of existence” (p. 181). This is of course either of great fellow-traveler afnity to Freud’s developing theories of the mind (Freud published The Psychopathology of Everyday Life in 1904 and Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis in 1910, among other widely known works starting in the 1890s; Bergson mentions Freud’s On Aphasia of 1891) or it is Bergson’s explicit reliance on Freud’s work. So one way to psycho-philosophically characterize the adventure of experience (as shown by Proust perhaps more fully than anyone) is indeed in Freudian terms, where the content of the adventure is in part a matter of becoming aware of present, yet previously consciously absent, causally infuential contents of the mind. But this established spatial or architectural metaphor for the mind and its content-moving activity (the two-way stairwell between the main foor and the basement) is not, I would add, the only way to describe what Proust shows. One could also put the matter linguistically, where the descriptions of objects, events, people, interactions, conversations, solitary refections, and so forth are what is explicitly stated, with each such statement residing within what one might call an atmosphere of implications, a surrounding network of implication-awakened associations, themes, and ways of speaking that would otherwise lie dormant. And anyone moving within language will sense, to greater or lesser degrees depending on the circumstance, these possible supplemental ways of speaking, ways of describing, ways of explaining, ways of further refecting, that we often call hidden or subconscious thoughts, but that are actually resident within the implication-content of our language. Proust, in his phenomenal mastery of language with all its beauty, its power, and its capacity for generating insight clearly on display, supports both ways of modeling the mind’s capacity for refective discovery, the one broadly psychological and the other broadly linguistic. Be that as it may, Bergson replaced the classic empirical conception of experience as a sensory snapshot, of the relation between sensation and memory as one of a diference of quantity rather than quality (e.g. Hume’s diference of force and vivacity as the diference between his impressions and ideas), of the additive model and the model of one associated image (of a visual-snapshot kind) coming up in single fle one after the other in an orderly fashion, and a misleading analytical model in which the clearly divisible constituent parts of memory-awakening perception can be categorized with neat boundaries, all with his summarizing concept of duration, “of which the fow is continuous and in which we pass insensibly from one state to another: a continuity which is really lived” (p. 243). That is the mind’s continuous fow, passing without borders from one state to another, that we “really live”. It is what Mead had in mind, and it is what Proust gave us as the refective mirror in which we could, in all our complexity, see ourselves.12

“Perpetually weaving fresh threads” My third governing question was to ask: if what Proust puts on display is actually a marvelously full-scaled presentation of the human mind’s experience of living in perceptual, refective, psychological, and linguistic life, why did it, why does it, seem like a discovery, like a revelation, like a great disclosure in the realm of human self-understanding? Walter Benjamin, in his short essay “On the Image of Proust”,13 writes: 58

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In the 1800s there was an inn by the name of ‘Au Temps Perdu’ at Grenoble; I do not know whether it still exists. In Proust, too, we are guests who enter through a door underneath a suspended sign that sways in the breeze, a door behind which eternity and rapture await us (p. 125) The eternity of which he speaks is not, I think, the theologian’s eternity; it is, rather, the eternity of ever-expanding descriptions, ever-expanding refective associations, ever-new insight-generating mental content either brought to consciousness in Freudian terms or brought to consciousness by moving ever further into the unbounded language in which we live. That is Proustian eternity (or perhaps better, infnity.) But then what about the mind’s crossing of time, of what we too easily take to be the hard temporal boundaries of the mind’s experience? Benjamin continues: The eternity which Proust opens to view is intertwined time, not boundless time. His true interest is in the passage of time in its most real – that is, intertwined – form, and this passage nowhere holds sway more openly than in remembrance within and aging without. To follow the counterpoint of aging and remembering means to penetrate to the heart of Proust’s world, to the universe of intertwining. (p. 126) That distinction – remembrance within, aging without – is precisely the distinction between the physical laws of the external world and the very diferent psychological “laws” of the internal world that we saw at the beginning of the frst section, where facts concerning the external do not invariably serve as the criteria for the truth or veracity of the internal. As we saw there, Proust’s world is indeed a “universe of intertwining” – and that world is one in which involuntary memory, unforeseeable memory, unplanned memory, and unthought connections are everywhere, and so again: it is why the word “adventure” fts. Benjamin further clarifes the point: [A]nyone who wishes to surrender knowingly to the innermost sway of this work must place himself in a special stratum – the bottommost – of this involuntary remembrance, a stratum in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a whole, amorphously and formlessly, indefnitely and weightily, in the same way the weight of the fshing net tells a fsherman about his catch. Smell – this is the sense of weight experienced by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the whole enormous efort to raise the catch. (p. 128) Like Bergson, neither the materials of memory nor our sentences appear singly; the mind’s web of expanding experience tells us, “weightedly”, of emergent content. Benjamin’s sensory metaphor for our intellectual sensing of content only now emerging, only now being recalled, only now fnding its way into what we explicitly state, is olfactory; the sense of weight, in our language, the sense of proximate not yet explicit content to investigate, is the intimation for us of a “catch”. And the sentences – the language – of Proust do this heavy-pulling work. Again, like us in our language. And so fnally, I come to a suggestion about why we can so easily philosophically veil something that, once seen, is so evident in mental life. Wittgenstein showed, across the 59

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broad span of his investigations, how easy it is to fall under the spell of what he called a “picture”, a conceptual model – often but not always of a pictorial or graphic kind – that both contracts the scope of our vision of what actually lies before us and pre-determines what we expect, and will or will not accept, as an answer to a given question or quandary. Words such as think, perceive, know, learn, understand, want, hope, wish, decide, resolve, imagine, interpret, remember, and so forth are mental verbs. And verbs are, of course, action-words – we learn from early school that what one does is indicated by the verb in any sentence. And then, perhaps later than school, in philosophical thinking about language, it is all too easy to initially grasp and then cling to the notion – the picture – that the meaning of a word is the object to which it refers, its referent. With those elements in place, it then naturally seems that remembrance is a variant of “to remember”, and that is a mental verb the referent of which is the mental action. And with that assembled picture in place, the very notion of involuntary memory seems either like an oxymoron or, at best, a strange and rare case that lies on the distant periphery of the concept of memory. As Wittgenstein said, the subject under discussion is thus reduced, made to appear always smaller and often simpler and more unitary than it is in life, or as Bergson said, as actually “lived”. The picture leads us to select what Wittgenstein called a “one-sided diet” of examples, and so in thinking of memory and its role in the mind we think frst of intentional or volitionally controlled action and then select accordingly. With all that in place, the personal adventure of involuntary memory is hidden. Proust expansively covered the themes we saw in the frst section, which included: (1) What may be an accurate description of the mind’s perceptual experience may not only be signifcantly diferent from, but may indeed be incompatible with, a description of the external world that occasions, or is the object of, that perception. (2) What he calls intellectual memory, or willed or volitional memory, is not fundamental to his project; involuntary memory, of the far less predictable and emergent kind, is, and his focus is not the world, but the mind’s perception of the world. (3) The intricacy of the relation between the present self and the remembered self, and the way that the knowledge of that intricate relation then permeates, infects, enriches, and thus complicates rather than simplifes the description of, present experience, requires linguistically microscopic detail to accurately capture. (4) Proust has the narrator deliver a warning about the ever-interesting danger of attempting to coax an intransigent and multiform reality that defes any singly true description into conforming to pre-established images of the mind. (5) Any factual descriptions of the outward events may seem full and accurate in and of themselves, but such descriptions would invariably fail to capture what is experientially fundamental to them, i.e. that a newer experience is seen in the light of a previous, or the new experience has an underlayment from the past that shapes it as it progresses; thus, the given experience of any single episode is never only that, precisely because the individual mind of the experiencer is bringing to it echoes, reverberations, resonances, transparency-like overlays, structuring underlayments, and sinews of psychologically time-traveling connections that, for that sensibility in that moment, make that experience what it is for that person. (6) We human beings are not hermetically sealed repositories of consciousness that we, wholly and autonomously, control. Rather, as the American pragmatists argued, we are relationally constituted beings with minds furnished with self-constitutive contents that come, at least in large part, from without, from the complex contexts of our interactions. Like us, for the narrator, the slightest chance encounters, chance discoveries, can exert sudden and unexpected great infuence on the contents of our minds that we do not, and indeed cannot, anticipate (hence “adventure”). (7) And to now see Proust’s words one fnal time but now in light of everything since we last saw them: 60

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Life is perpetually weaving fresh threads which link one individual and one event to another, … these threads are crossed and recrossed, doubled and redoubled to thicken the web, so that between any slightest point of our past and all the others a rich network of memories gives us an almost infnite variety of communicating paths to choose from. Yet, there remains one fnal issue, briefy mentioned above. At the end of Proust’s great achievement, there surfaces from the depths of his text a conception of self hood for which we are in a sense unprepared: it is a conception of a self outside of time, a self that has amassed everything considered above in a lifetime of experience but that then stabilizes, fxes in place, all memory content, seeing all temporal placements as parts of one grand whole. It is a picture of a self that has earned a place above the world of fux, above the world of interminable ever-new interweaving. He describes this as a “notion of Time evaporated, of years past but not separated from us” (p. 1138; TR, 449; IV 623). And he describes the experience that led him to this conception: he hears the garden bells that the child listened for, the bells that meant “Mama would presently come upstairs” to deliver the goodnight kiss, and he says – as if truly moving across time – “unmistakably I heard these very sounds, situated though they were in a remote past” (p. 1139; TR, 449; IV 623). But he signals to us that this is not truly real, not truly a time-traveling experience, not truly a godlike view of himself across his internal history or the self seen by itself sub specie aeternitatis. For he writes that he had to block his ears to the conversations around him to hear the bells, and “it was into my own depths that I had to re-descend” (p. 1139; TR, 450; IV 624). That is, he is actually inextricably in the present of those surrounding conversations, and it is his inward powerful imagination that is bringing him the auditory image of the long-ago bells in his mind’s ear. This fnal glimpse of a self above time is a picture of a self very much like another myth – that of the fully interpreted work of literature. There is no such thing, precisely because every work can always be brought into another juxtaposition anew, always brought into a new dialogue with another work, past, present, or future, and so, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, have new aspects dawn. So this picture of temporally transcendent self hood does briefy emerge in his fnal pages – but it is a picture of a self not of this world, and one can argue that this picture of a fnished self, a fully settled self, a self interpretively closed and in full possession of all it contains within, is an impossible dream – an impossible dream shown to be that by everything Proust has revealed across the vast expanse of the volumes of work leading up to this point. Proust closes his book with a dream of fully interpreted self hood, a fnal stasis, in order to show that there is no such thing – that any such self is a dream and not of this world. We, like Proust, are in this one. What he does then say is that he now realizes that he has all his life carried his past with him (“the whole of that past which I was not aware that I carried about within me”, p. 1139; TR, 450; IV 624), and that the mind unendingly recovers it, selects from it, edits together excerpts from it, re-contextualizes it, and forever newly feels its infuence and measures its impact. And he observes that the mind moves with lightning speed through the vastness of the accrued time of a life in a way that the body cannot begin to do through space. We can think that we might look down on that vastness of experience, of memory, from a transcendent station of stasis above it, but re-descending into our own depths will always be yet another experience – precisely like his moment of bringing the remote past into the present via his exceptionally vivid sonic memory image – that further augments his continually expanding past. Consciousness, as Proust if anyone has taught us, stays in motion, and among its defning features is that it doesn’t stop. And if one senses an elegiac mood in these fnal pages, what one is detecting is Proust’s sense – perhaps a universal sense, whether articulated or not – that the contents of this consciousness, this mind in its 61

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time, this inner library of memory, is unique in all the world and will never be replicated again. And when the body that carries that consciousness ceases to exist, it too will perish. Yet against this darkening sense of ultimate loss, we, as the narrator in the last few pages indicates, have writing – the ofoading and preservation of that unique library into a book that will survive us, speak for us in absentia. The narrator’s concern – that concern serving as a kind of literary memento mori – is whether he has the time remaining to write such a preservation of consciousness. We are not told that the massive book we are just fnishing is that grand project. But of course, it is. And so it is in those fnal sentences that Proust and his narrator fnally converge, fnally become one, and they do so in the name of saving, in words, that unique cognitive identity. Looking back then, in considering the philosophical work of Mead and Bergson, along with a small hint of the methodological snares about which Wittgenstein warns us, we saw that each of the seven themes above holds direct signifcance for our philosophical methodology in approaching the topic of memory, and particularly the way in which memory moves through and within time, as one component of a philosophy of mind: that itself is an incontrovertibly powerful case of philosophy in literature. And as a massive case study of the ways in which memory works in our lives as it negotiates movement across the span of a life’s time, the achievement of Proust is without peer. But Proust’s project is not containable within that defnition, not within that description of the experience of reading him. The experience of reading Proust replicates in the mind of the reader what his volumes show – we as readers make connections, we encounter emergent sudden recognitions with the economy of importance changing accordingly, we fnd new articulations of content we initially only sensed. With our imaginations moving inside the great expanse of his book, we relive, each in our own way, the mental life he describes.

Notes 1 In this chapter, English quotations from In Search of Lost Time are taken from Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief (New York: Random House, 1961). Citations give the page number to this edition, followed by the corresponding references for the Vintage and Pléiade editions. 2 We know that Proust had a lively interest in the writings of Nietzsche, and he may have appropriated a broad conception of Nietzschean perspectivism or the fundamental idea that there will not be one, single, perspective-free description of an experience that serves as the criterion for all other descriptions (so that, on that misleading model, the closer one is to that one masterdescription, the truer one is, and the farther from it correspondingly less true). Similarly, many have made interesting comparisons to the early cubism of Braque and Picasso, and they are right in terms of afnity – but the way Proust develops this theme across the span of the volumes is, one should say, all Proust. 3 For discussions of photographic memories and the role they play in Proust as well as the verbal stimulation of visual imagery in the reader, see Mieke Bal, trans. Anna-Louise Milne, The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), and Katja Haustein, Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity and Afect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012 and London: Routledge, 2020). 4 For a fascinating discussion of Proust’s own amorous adventures and, as the author says, misadventures, as they interconnect with the descriptions and analyses of love that the narrator provides, see William C. Carter, Proust in Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). This book captures well the way in which Proust’s personal relationships and intimate experiences are articulated ever more fnely and deeply in his writing, and then how that writing, those articulations, live on to infect his own subsequent experience. 5 For an engrossing and original discussion of Swann’s experience with this musical theme, but as interwoven with the autobiographical experience of the author as a composer and pianist (where

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The Mind in Time that experience is constantly informed and infected by reading Proust), see James Holden, In Search of Vinteuil: Music, Literature, and a Self Regained (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2010). The book shows a good deal about the role that memory (of a thoroughly Proustian kind) plays in musical experience. 6 For an insightful study of the central role of emotion, its articulation, its re-articulations, and its infuence on subsequent perception and on the constitution of personhood (particularly in connection with both separation anxiety in love relationships and narrative identity), see Inge Crosman Wimmers, Proust and Emotion: The Importance of Afect in A la recherché du temps perdu (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003). Also, Martin Hagglund ofers an insightful set of unobvious connections concerning time and memory in their connections with the unavoidable threat of loss in love, in Dying for Time: Proust, Woolf, Nabokov (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012): My argument, then, is that the experience of involuntary memory leads Marcel to pursue chronolibidinal aesthetics. For a chronolibidinal aesthetics, the point is not to redeem the condition of temporality but, on the contrary, to mobilize it as the source of pathos. Indeed, there would be no pathos without the drama of temporal fnitude that exposes every libidinal investment to the possibility of loss. The key to generating aesthetic pathos is therefore to intensify the sense of the passage of time. p. 45 7 In an extraordinarily interesting and intricate study of time in literature, Mark Currie, in About Time: Narrative, Fiction, and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), accurately calls what I am discussing here Proust’s “double time”. He writes One of the reasons that the whodunit acts as a kind of typological model for much fction beyond the genre of the whodunit is that its description seems to work very well for any narrative which involves an interplay between narrated time and the time of the narrative, where the time of the narrative functions as the site of self-conscious refection both on past events and on the nature of writing about them. This is, after all, the double time of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time…. The idea that moving forwards in time involves a backwards narration is more than just a novelistic structure, and might be thought of, with Proust, as the shape of time itself. (p. 88)

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So one way to characterize what I am discussing here as the infection of the past on present (adventurous) perception is, with Currie, to say that backward narration fowing in and through the present is the language of a perceiving mind that, in this way, traverses time (or is not containable within any momentary present). One notable case of a narrating author employing the concept of a palimpsest is in Gore Vidal’s autobiography (obviously in its title but more importantly in its underlying authorial approach to self-description): Palimpsest: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1995). This passage, from the revised translation, is reproduced in Adam Watt, The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust (Cambridge: 2011), p. 102. A note about this volume: when I turned to work on this paper, I realized that I had not read Proust in some years and I thought I might scan a short review-book to refresh my memory and fnd my way back in. As it happened, Watt’s book is not one that can be scanned; it is packed with insight and, although I have not taken anything (apart from this revised quotation) from it directly, it has been of tremendous help. It is a far greater contribution than its presentation as a series-style introduction might suggest. George Herbert Mead, “The Present as the Locus of Reality”, in John J. Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 606–21; taken from Mead’s volume The Philosophy of the Present, ed. Arthur E. Murphy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1–31; orig. pub. 1932. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola, New York: 2004), trans. orig. pub. 1912; orig. French pub. 1908. By “layered”, I mean of course that the experience of perception cannot be isolated (apart from a phenomenologically misleading bifurcating analysis) from the content of refection. Malcolm Bowie rightly calls Proust’s work “a portrait of a single, intensely perceptive and refective mind” (Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 52; my point is that Proust showed philosophically that the mental words “perceptive” and “refective” do not name two isolable categories.

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Garry L. Hagberg 12 On this point, see the beautiful closing of Adam Watt’s biography of Proust: Toward the close of Time Regained Proust’s narrator speaks of how an artist’s commitment to his work might be thought of as ‘an egotism which could be put to work for the beneft of other people (Time Regained, 436). Proust’s work had taken his health, ruined his eyesight. Robert leaned forward and gently closed his brother’s eyes. Marcel would see no more, but the work he had created by dint of his single-mindedness would be ‘a kind of optical instrument’ for generations of curious minds, enabling each reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself; (Time Regained, 273) in Adam Watt, Marcel Proust (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p. 194. 13 Walter Benjamin, “On the Image of Proust”, in Theories of Memory, ed. Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), pp. 119–29; orig. in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 237–47.

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4 IN SEARCH OF LOST PLACE Anna Elsner

In The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Edward S. Casey opens his assessment of the concept of place in philosophy by observing: To be at all – to exist in any way – is to be somewhere, and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place. Place is as requisite as the air we breathe, the ground on which we stand, the bodies we have. We are surrounded by places. We walk over and through them. We live in places, relate to others in them, die in them. Nothing we do is unplaced. How could it be otherwise? How could we fail to recognize this primal fact? (Casey 2013: ix) Place and places are omnipresent in our lives and, as Casey shows, from Aristotle’s theory of ‘topos’ to Martin Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the world’, various philosophers have grappled with understanding the role and signifcance of place and places. And yet, the concept of place in Western philosophy since Aristotle has also been largely bypassed, according to Casey, cast aside to focus on other, abstract and seemingly more important concepts, such as Space and Time. As his study illustrates, place has often been considered a mere modifcation of space and was therefore frequently viewed as less important until it made a reappearance in twentieth-century continental philosophy via the work of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Gaston Bachelard and Henri Lefebvre. Critical engagements with Marcel Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, are marked by a similar tendency. As this chapter points out, In Search of Lost Time, as well as Proust’s Correspondence, provides ample evidence that an engagement with the meaning and concept of place, as well as space, is key to Proust’s project. Given the title of Proust’s work, it is no wonder that critical works that have focused on philosophical aspects of the Search have prioritized the engagement with time over space. The rare philosophical treatments of space in Proust, however, have also largely underplayed the role place plays in Proust’s novel. The most notable work on Proust in this regard is Georges Poulet’s Proustian Space (1977), which focuses on space as an abstract concept and metaphor. ‘Proustian space’, according to Poulet, is ‘an aesthetic space, where, in ordering themselves, moments and places form the work of art’ (Poulet 1977: 4). As part of this, place is presented as a mere subcategory of space, and Poulet therefore often uses the terms interchangeably. To be sure, the Proustian narrator DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-7

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moves through a variety of spaces – urban and rural, social and domestic1 – and yet, Proust’s narrator also lives in specifc places, remembers specifc places, dreams of specifc places and relates to and mourns in specifc places. While space constitutes an abstract concept that designates a realm or an infnite expanse, a place is generally associated with being relative and fnite, as well as subjectively sensed and experienced (Tuan 2001). To start with, both the narrator’s bedroom in Doncières and his hotel room in Balbec constitute unfamiliar spaces; yet, the narrator’s experience there turns them into distinct places – locations with a particular meaning, endowed with a set of individual characteristics. This general distinction may already be reason enough to consider place as a category distinct from space. One reader of Proust, who has picked up on this relevance of place within the Proustian universe, is the philosopher Jef Malpas. In his study Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, Malpas does not focus solely on Proust but heavily relies on him to assert that subjectivity is necessarily tied to specifc places and that our own identities are fundamentally shaped by the places we inhabit. Key to Malpas’s understanding of place is what he prominently calls the ‘Proust Principle’, according to which the concept of place in Proust brings together ‘a structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other’ (Malpas 2018: 166).2 Malpas’s study of place and subjectivity is one that, like Casey’s work, seeks to highlight the importance of place for philosophy at large. Given this ambitious goal, he defends his ‘use’ of Proust to substantiate his arguments by claiming that since there are […] few philosophical sources to which appeal can be made in such an endeavor, much of my discussion will look to the appearance of place in contexts outside of philosophy, especially literature, and, in particular, in the work of Marcel Proust. (Malpas 2018: 161–2) The premise of this volume is a diferent one, namely, to read the work of Proust as one that can speak to philosophy in philosophical terms. While this chapter considers the concept of place, and the relationship of space and places in Proust, I propose that while specifc places are omnipresent in the Search and central to understanding the interconnection between memory, imagination and self-identity, they are simultaneously riddled with uncertainty and doubt for the Proustian narrator. The Proustian text thereby afrms but also resists the very terms that Malpas lays out as evidence for why Proust rehabilitates place as a philosophical concept. In other words, my chapter will demonstrate that Proust does not always follow the ‘Proust Principle’. Given the breadth of Proust’s novel and the sheer frequency of specifc places that are alluded to, my approach here is necessarily selective. In the frst two sections of the chapter, my main focus will be the novel’s opening, which I read as a primal scene for understanding the interaction of place and space in Proust. Being rooted in a specifc place – the narrator’s bedroom, one of the many domestic spaces structuring the Search – the narrator ventures to remember and imagine many of the other places that have shaped his life, while, at the same time, seeking to locate himself in the actual space he is occupying. In the third section, I then connect this duality, namely being in a specifc place and imagining/thinking/ remembering other places and spaces, to other parts of the novel and, in particular, to the two sections tellingly entitled – in translation – ‘Place Names: The Name’ (‘Noms de Pays: Le Nom’) and ‘Place Names: The Place’ (‘Noms de Pays: Le Pays’). I propose to lay out that while a number of specifc places are presented as integral to the working of memory and shape the narrator’s identity – just as Malpas proposes, the narrator’s refection on the 66

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places that have shaped his life, as well as on place as an abstract category marked by language, imagination and experience, also reveals the diversity inherent in Proust’s thinking on place. As part of this, specifc places always fail to deliver what they promise and the disorienting loss of place as much as a purely fgurative understanding of place is as much part of Proust’s philosophy of space and places than those instances in the novel that speak to the central role of specifc places.

Armchair Space Travel Casey’s reading of the history of philosophy as a history that has, from Aristotle to the mid-twentieth century, prioritized space as an abstract concept over the particularity of place and places may resonate with Proust criticism but not with the Proustian novel itself. On a purely textual level, and given the subject matter of Proust’s text, specifc places of course largely outnumber the instances in which the abstract concept of space is mentioned. At the same time, there are nonetheless sixty instances when the word ‘espace’/space is explicitly mentioned (Frantext 2021). But these constitute a mere fraction of the instances where the names of specifc places enter the text or place as such (‘lieu’) is evoked as a concept.3 Moreover, whenever ‘espace’/space is directly evoked, the word does not – in most cases – refer to the abstract concept of space but is used fguratively (see, for example, ‘Ce qui m’aida à patienter tout l’espace d’une journée’ (I, 612), translated as ‘What helped me to remain patient throughout the long day that followed’ (BG, 230), as part of which ‘espace’ is a period of time), and in the rare cases when it does, it is coupled with time, as in ‘space and time’. The opening of the novel illustrates this interplay of space, places and place. ‘Combray’, the title of the frst part of Swann’s Way, refers to a specifc place. As a section, it sets out many of the novel’s key themes regarding place and space, presenting, in miniature, what will be expanded upon later, namely the evocation of several specifc places that the narrator remembers from diferent parts of his life and which the subsequent parts of the novel will fesh out. Yet, the novel’s famous frst pages also break with what the section title promises. These pages are concerned with documenting, in slow motion, the sense of displacement that sleep – and its absence – brings about. Headed by a title that asserts the importance of a specifc place, these pages are a testimony to the disorienting efects a loss of place can cause. Starting with an exploration of this disorientation, the ouverture sets the novel up as concerned with essentially retrieving not only the specifc place that is Combray, but one’s physical positioning in the world. As the narrator wanders in and out of sleep, he juxtaposes the notions of space, place and time, thereby illustrating how interconnected the three concepts are in Proust’s thought. Sleeping is described as a state of consciousness as part of which the self becomes disconnected from time; awaking, however, is frst linked to discovering one’s place in the world. Falling asleep in an unhabitual position can, as the narrator highlights, produce particularly disorienting efects in that respect: When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively he consults them when he awakes, and in an instant reads of his own position on the earth’s surface and the time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. […] Or suppose that he dozes of in some even more abnormal and divergent position, sitting in an armchair, for instance, after dinner: then the world will go hurling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time 67

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and space (‘espace’), and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place (‘dans une autre contrée’- in its specifcity, this would be closer to ‘landscape’ or ‘region’ than ‘place’). (SW, 5–6; I, 5) Next to placing the primacy of a spatial positioning for the Proustian subject boldly at the beginning of the novel, the above passage also includes one of the novel’s few direct references to the abstract, metaphysical concept of space in its allusion to the journey ‘through time and space’ that falling asleep in an unhabitual physical position can potentially trigger. This journey is furthermore projected onto an imaginary ‘man’. The narrator/Proust supposes this man to fall asleep in a particular position, which turns the passage into a kind of case study on the disorienting efects of sleep generally rather than the narrator’s particular experience itself. Given that the narrator has just opened the Search by relating a similar experience, the image inserts a mise-en-abyme of the very opening of the novel itself – which occurred only a couple of paragraphs earlier. This defection of the narrator’s own disorienting experience onto an unknown other thereby produces a similarly disorienting efect for the reader. At the same time, this uncanny parallel also casts the narrator’s own endeavor in the novel as a journey ‘through time and space’. Forcing us to think about space and time as such, the Search thereby also appears as a journey into metaphysics, one as part of which the world the Proustian narrator and reader is about to explore may ‘go hurling out of orbit’. The Pléiade edition proposes that the reference to the ‘ journey through time and space’ constitutes an allusion to H.G. Wells’s science fction novella The Time Machine (1895), which depicts an anonymous time traveler’s journey into the future. Proust read Wells’s novella as soon as it was available in French,4 and the reference to ‘the magical chair’ – the same device that initiates time travel in Wells’s novella – further supports the claim that Proust is presenting a variation on the Wellsian theme. The reference may therefore be read as, once more, highlighting the importance of time for the Search, even if the Proustian sleeper, unlike the Wellsian time traveler, embarks on a journey into both past and future. André Benhaïm, however, who has analyzed the presence of Wells’s writing across the Search, claims that Proust’s variation on the Wellsian utopia is, on the contrary, one that is primarily concerned with space and place. According to Benhaïm, Proust ultimately pleads for an ‘ou-topos’, in the original sense of the word, namely a no-place. The opening of the Search, according to him, presents the journey that the narrator is about to undertake as a journey that leads no-where. As Benhaïm puts it, ‘the Search is a work of estrangement, of a journey toward a no-place’ (Benhaïm 2003: 48). Various letters from the Correspondence, in which Proust describes his ambivalence to actual travel (VI, 267; XV, 248 quoted in Fraisse 2011: 97–8), prepare this idea that the Proustian journey is an inward journey and will not lead to any place in particular. Indeed, journeys to actual places, particularly those that we have previously heard of and want to discover for ourselves, are prone to creating the kind of idolatry that Proust vehemently opposed in Contre Sainte-Beuve. Sainte-Beuve, according to Proust, championed a kind of biographical criticism that confates the subject of literary texts with the lives of their writers, as well as being prone to praising writers while they were alive before attacking them once they were dead. In line with Proust’s opposition to Sainte-Beuve’s ‘method’, he stated in the preface of the Bible of Amiens that the kinds of journeys in which we try to follow into the footsteps of writers we idealize are unlikely to lead us to the destinations we wanted to reach in the frst place: 68

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The indications that writers give us in their works of the places that they have loved are often so vague that the pilgrimages we try to undertake there have something uncertain and hesitant about them, as if we were afraid that they are misleading. (Ruskin/Proust 1904:18, my own translation)

Journey around the Narrator’s Bedrooms Yet, wherever the journey evoked in the ouverture ultimately leads, it is undertaken from the distinct physical positioning of an armchair. Before turning into a Wellsian magical armchair, the image of a man undertaking an imaginary journey after falling asleep in his armchair also recalls one of the most famous accounts of armchair travel, Xavier de Maistre’s Journey Round My Room (1794). In the posthumously published book, Xavier de Maistre – brother of the royalist philosopher Joseph de Maistre – describes a 42-day period of voluntary confnement to his bedroom after fghting a duel. The text parodies grand tour travel writing but also presents several philosophical ponderings, as part of which de Maistre delves into ethics, metaphysics and aesthetics. Importantly, however, these considerations are always directly related to the precise spatial positioning from where the thinking subject comes to consider them, namely de Maistre’s confnement to his bedroom and, more precisely, his positioning in his armchair. Indeed, his philosophical considerations, which make up a large part of the account, are throughout the text repeatedly presented as mere digressions from the real subject of the text, which is to undertake a journey around de Maistre’s room. The following passage highlights how de Maistre intertwines his considerations about metaphysics with his own physical positioning in the world: But you must not let yourself think that instead of keeping my promise to describe my journey round my room, I am beating the bush to see how I can evade the difculty […] and while my soul, falling back on her own resources, was in the last chapter threading the mazy paths of metaphysics, I had so placed myself in my arm-chair, that its front legs being raised about two inches from the foor, I was able, by balancing myself from left to right, to make way by degrees, and at last, almost without knowing it, to get close to the wall, for this is how I travel when not pressed for time. (De Maistre 1871[1794]:29) Journey Round My Room may constitute another possible intertext of the Search’s opening, as Proust was familiar with de Maistre’s work, a bestseller at the time (Correspondence 15, 248; Fraisse 2011: 98; Fraisse 2017). And if Proust’s hypothetical travel through ‘time and space’ from the position of an armchair is read in relation to the above excerpt from the Journey, a diferent perspective on the role of place comes to the fore. Namely, that the physical confnement to a given room that is explored here becomes itself a trigger for the journey of the mind the narrator sets out to undertake. This recalls a famous link between physical confnement and happiness, most memorably expressed in the words of Blaise Pascale, who remarks in a section entitled ‘Diversion’ in his Pensées in 1660, ‘on the occasions when I have pondered over men’s various activities […], I have often said that man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room’ (Pascal 1995: 44). As de Maistre’s writing illustrates, his confnement does not separate him from the world outside his room; on the contrary, the world beyond his room becomes accessible to him through the power of imaginative solitude triggered by his confnement and separation from the places he is thinking about. Throughout his writing, 69

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Proust engages with precisely this theme, namely the connection between the limitations that special confnement imposes and the access to thought it simultaneously provides. In a letter to Antoine Bibesco in 1899, for example, this motif appears when he describes how upset he is that he cannot meet Bibesco and a common friend in person, remarking, ‘I envy each of you seeing the other, while my only change is turning over in bed; and yet, how many places I create in my mind and in my heart during this specious rest’ (Proust 2006 [1899]: 76). He may be confned to a seemingly limited bedroom, but this confnement affords him a privileged vision and access to places beyond that room. In Pleasures and Days, the narrator, also confned to his room due to ill health, develops this image further5: When I was still a child, no other character in sacred history seemed to me to have such a wretched fate as Noah, because of the food which kept him trapped in the ark for forty days. Later on, I was often ill, and for days on end I too was forced to stay in the ‘ark.’ Then I realized that Noah was never able to see the world so clearly as from the ark, despite its being closed and the fact that it was night on earth. ( JS, 6) This connection between a narrowing and a widening of vision grounded in a confnement to a specifc place is also at stake in the Madeleine episode. What the involuntary memory of the Madeleine brings back is indissociable from the specifc place where the narrator had frst tasted it, namely in the sickroom of his aunt Léonie’s house in Combray – Léonie who is described as confned (perhaps willingly so?) to her room and who may not be undertaking actual or metaphysical journeys, but who is presented as possessing the best available knowledge of the life of Combray and its inhabitants. Léonie knows Combray intimately even if she is separated from it, and it is only from the confnes of her bedroom that she attains the kind of Caspar Friedrichian viewpoint which the taste of the Madeleine recalls for the narrator. Specifc rooms and confnement within them are thereby intimately connected to memory, knowledge, self-identity and, at least in the Madeleine scene, also to a (temporary) sense of happiness. But Proust’s vision is more complex and often darker than de Maistre’s. The Proustian sleeper is restless and disoriented, and aunt Léonie and the narrator of Pleasures and Days are confned to their bedrooms due to ill health. The Search brims with examples where confnement in a specifc place, and particularly in the bedroom, becomes the reason for unhappiness, despair and pain. Indeed, in the drame du coucher, the narrator describes his bed as a kind of grave, remarking that ‘once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bedclothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt’ (SW, 32–3; I, 28). Being confned to his room and waiting for his mother gives rise to anxiety, as does the unknown Balbec Hotel room on his frst journey there. And once he returns to Balbec, after the death of his beloved grandmother (whose dramatic death takes place in her bedroom at the narrator’s family’s apartment), the hotel bedroom becomes the scene for one of the book’s most painful accounts of mourning, the ‘Intermittences of the Heart’. Later, in The Captive, the interior space of the narrator’s Parisian apartment turns into a prison for Albertine, a setting against which the narrator’s jealousy, desire, disappointment and despair play out. And, once Albertine passes, the narrator describes the terror and pain he experiences in his home, never leaving his Parisian fat as he enters a period of grieving and forgetting. And yet, while the ability to endure physical grounding in a confned place may not lead to a Pascalian happiness, it does indubitably become a vehicle that transports the narrator elsewhere, on a journey of self-discovery, as part of which the kaleidoscope of 70

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remembered and imagined places stirs the narrator toward the discovery of the redemptive power of art in Time Regained.

Displaced Places: Proust’s Cogito It is the connection between self-identity and place that Malpas picks up on when he argues that Proust’s work can substantiate a philosophical reappraisal of the concept of place. Malpas writes that ‘Proust’s achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and therefore of the world, as something that occurs through the spatiotemporal unfolding of place’ (Malpas 2018: 166). What he calls the ‘Proust Principle’ is what he describes as the place-bound identity of persons – that the identity of persons is inextricably bound to place, and not merely to place in some general, abstract sense (which would be meaningless), but also, as a consequence, to those particular places, multiple and complex though they may be, in and through which a person’s life is lived. (Malpas 2018: 12) Accordingly, the connection between self-identity and place is so tight that ‘the recovery of self can only take the form of a recovery of place – both a recovery of specifc places as well as the recovering of an encompassing place’ (Malpas 2018: 180). What Malpas calls the ‘recovery of self ’ is the phenomenon by which the identity of a subject is constituted in a fusion of memory and subjectivity. This fusion, according to him, happens when memory becomes bound to particular places, whereby memory itself becomes spatialized and embodied. ‘It is only within the overarching structure of place as such that subjectivity is possible’ (Malpas 2018: 180), and Proust, Malpas argues, illustrates this philosophical stance in his writing because he writes of persons as if they were tied to places in some such very basic fashion – not as remembered only in relation to place, but as being who and what they are through their inhabiting of particular places and their situation within particular locations. (Malpas 2018:180) What this efectively means is that for Proust, the search for lost time necessarily encompasses the search for lost place, just as the recovery of place entails the recovery of time. In other words, involuntary memory, according to Malpas, is always a spatiotemporal experience – it is never only a privileged access to the past; it is always also a spatialized access. By revisiting the ouverture and connecting it to later parts of the novel, I want to propose that Malpas’s argument about the unity of experience as rooted in a specifc place holds true, particularly if we consider the previous discussion which has already demonstrated that key experiences in the narrator’s development are connected to particular rooms and specifc places. At the same time, I want to argue that the ‘Proust Principle’ – a term that connects the idea of a place-bound conception of identity to Proust specifcally – is also signifcantly challenged in the Search. What Malpas calls the ‘recovery of place’ becomes difcult, if not impossible, when the narrator engages with the plurality of any one place as well as when he is refecting on the distinguishability between actual and imagined places, ultimately, calling into question the role of specifc places itself. If places are key aspects of the self ’s self-creation, then the multiple and complex relationships to a particular place, as 71

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well as conficting images of particular places that emerge in the Search, end up destabilizing self-identity, as well as casting doubt on the role of place in enabling the fusion between memory and subjectivity that Malpas views as key for establishing the identity of the subject. If we return to the opening of the Search and its hypothetical armchair travel, then place emerges indeed as central to the genesis of personal identity. Following the passage on the hypothetical sleeper, the narrator shifts to consider the efects of his own sleep. As part of these, the sense of displacement triggered by an unhabitual position is not even needed to instantiate the kind of disorientation that must be overcome to aford him access to self-identity: But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at frst who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and ficker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a fash I would traverse centuries of civilization, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the components of my ego. (SW, 6; I, 5–6) The awakening narrator has a sense of existence, but mere existence is not enough for knowledge of who he is – that knowledge emerges only once the sense of existence is spatialized. This may be why Patrick Bray reads this passage as a variation on Descartes’s cogito, commenting that for Descartes, the knowledge of existence, proven by the simple act of thought, was suffcient to guarantee being; for Proust’s awakened sleeper, mere existence is not enough; it is his essence, here connected to a place, that must be found. (Bray 2013: 195) Proust describes memories here not as memories of past times but memories of past places. Yet, these memories are, while rooting the narrator’s self in a specifc place, also linked to an abstract notion of space, as they are seemingly let down like a rope from above. The concepts of space and place are thereby intimately connected. As Georges Poulet has poignantly put it, ‘one could say that space is a sort of undeterminable milieu where places wander in the same fashion that in cosmic space the planets wander’ (Poulet 1977: 12).6 And within that planetary constellation, places and the people that inhabit them are, if not synonymous, often presented as tightly interwoven. As the narrator remarks in the ouverture: I used to spend the greater part of the night recalling our life in the old days at Combray with my great aunt, at Balbec, Paris, in Doncières, Venice, and the rest; remembering again all the places and people I had known. (SW, 10; I, 9) The identity of characters in the novel and the narrator himself are presented in this statement, as inextricably shaped by, and linked to specifc places. This connection predates the Search 72

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and is already apparent in Proust’s Correspondence, such as, for example, this letter to the actress Louisa de Mornand in 1904, where Proust highlights his interest in the specifc, arthistorical features of places, a setting that seems to be more important than the person herself: Chère amie, Your souvenir is precious to me, thank you for it. How I should love to walk with you in the streets of Blois, which must be a charming frame for your beauty. It is an old frame, a Renaissance frame. But it is a new frame, too, since I have never seen you in it. And in new places the people we love appear to us somehow new, too. I should fnd your beautiful eyes refecting the lightness of a Touraine sky, your exquisite fgure, outlined against the background of the old château, more moving than seeing you in just another dress. (Proust 2006 [1904]: 120–1) This fuid interweaving of persons and places recalls instances such as the narrator’s spotting of the little band of adolescent girls at the Balbec seashore or the framing of the narrator’s mother in the Venice Baptistery, as part of which natural and architectonic motifs come to stand for the narrator’s relationship with particular people and particular places. Importantly however, while the Search brims with reference to actual places, such as Paris, Venice, Florence and a string of Norman towns, two of the novel’s key places, Combray and Balbec, have imaginary names. Proust thereby efectively takes away the possibility of associating these places with a reality outside of his book.7 Transforming the names of these places turns them into mere memory-places, thereby undoing their reality outside of the narrator’s mind – even if Balbec, just as Combray, is also itself located in a real region or on a real coast. To be sure, Malpas is interested in both the relevance of place as an encompassing concept and particular places that become instrumental in shaping self-identity. However, regarding the latter, it is crucial to highlight how Proust’s novel challenges Malpas’s argument. Proust’s invented place names already speak to an undoing of the importance of any particular, real place, but so does the section of the novel entitled ‘Place Names: The Name’ in Swann’s Way as well as ‘Place Names: The Place’ in Within a Budding Grove. Both sections are themselves a testimony to the centrality of place and specifc places within the Search. Yet, both are also putting forward arguments according to which an encounter with the real, unlike with the merely imagined place, is bound to disappoint. Dreaming of Norman and Tuscan towns by alluding to the magic of their evocative names, the narrator comes to remark that the ideal image he has constructed of these places – prior to visiting and experiencing them – will only contribute to his disappointment when he fnally travels there. The made-up images are not only more beautiful but also ‘diferent from anything that the towns of Normandy and Tuscany could in reality be’, which, in turn, ‘aggravated the disenchantment that was in store for me when I set out upon my travels’ (SW, 462; I, 380). The narrator comments that he should have ‘realized that what I saw was in no sense a town, but something as diferent from anything that I knew’ (SW, 465; I, 383). He is here merely describing his imagination prior to traveling to these places; yet, he also describes these visions as taking on a ‘reality’ even if they ‘had been elaborated by the spell of my dreams and not perceived by my senses at all’ (SW, 466; I, 384). Indeed, it is only when his father announces an actual trip to Italy, taking practical steps to go there, that he comes to realize that Florence is more than an image or a name, but ‘a particular place on the earth’s surface’ (SW, 468; I, 385). In ‘Place Names: The Place’, the narrator further expands on this critique of place and places, enriching it with a concept he calls ‘the tyranny of the Particular’ (BG, 274; II, 20). Discussing his disappointment when frst seeing the Balbec church and its Virgin of the Porch, the narrator describes the ways in which the reality of the place – its architectural 73

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make-up within the city, its particular smell, its specifc light on a specifc day – brutally erodes the ‘intangible beauty’ with which his mind had (erroneously?) endowed it (BG, 274; II, 20–1). The confrontation with the real – and this includes places as much as people  – causes not only disappointment, but in the case of the Balbec church, also – and perhaps paradoxically so – a sense of spatial disorientation, as it is the church’s place in the narrator’s mind – rather than its experience in reality – that had given it what he calls ‘a general existence’ (BG, 274; II, 20). Seeing the real church transforms the ideal into something shifting and ungraspable, as the actual place is now itself an organic part of a town, a street, the shifting light of day and night and the seasons, the infuence of wind and topography. The particularity of the place is not stable but prone to change, determined by a set of infuences outside of the narrator’s control. As such, the church resists the relationship the narrator had pre-established and, by extension, puts the narrator’s knowledge of the self that relied on the very relationship to this particular place in jeopardy. The narrator’s ambivalent relationship to the reality of specifc places goes even further. These places can frequently not live up to how he has imagined them and their ideal image can no longer be controlled due to external infuences when he actually experiences them. What is more, he claims that any one memory of a place is itself made up of a number of diferent memories of the same place at diferent times, which have turned into a seemingly stable and unifed mental image. Venice and Florence by that mode of functioning ‘emerge, no longer only from the abstraction of Space, but from that imaginary Time in which we place not one journey but others simultaneously’ (SW, 468; I, 385). In fact, the ouverture, like so often, already presents a microscopic vision of this merging of diferent impressions of a place across time. The sleepless narrator proposes that the memories of the ‘various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be’ precede the realization of the place in which he actually is. It is therefore the traveling across remembered (and imagined) places which ultimately roots him in any one place; yet, this rooting is undone by the fact that any single memory of a place is itself made up of multiple, diverse impressions of that place: These shifting and confused gusts of memory never lasted for more than a few seconds; it often happened that, in my brief spell of uncertainty as to where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed any more than when we watch a horse running, we isolate the successive positions of its body as they appear upon a bioscope. (SW, 8; I, 7) The passage’s reference to an optical instrument – strangely evocative of the photographer Eadward Muybridge’s photo sequence of a horse in motion, which he took on tours across Europe in the late 1890s – speaks to the way in which the awakening self is perceiving a set of related, rapidly succeeding images of the world and the place the narrator inhabits. Marco Bernini has related Proust’s optical image here to neuroscientifc research on memory and imagery, claiming that the Proustian self is becoming ‘conscious of its ontology in momentary accesses to the holographic working of memory’ (Bernini 2020: 109). While the larger implications of this for Proustian memory are outside the scope of this chapter, its reference to ‘holographic’ as a term meant to capture the three-dimensional working of memory brings to the fore the important role of spatialization. In episodes of involuntary memory, the past does not appear ‘fat’, but is thereby compared to a three-dimensional projection that gives memory images the appearance of real, solid objects positioned in a particular space. Yet, the simultaneous focus on the ‘multiple, diverse impressions’ deriving from the 74

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continuous succession of mental images of the same place but across time also destabilizes the reliability of any one such image of a place. The last sentence of ‘Combray’ echoes this, when the narrator remarks that the dwelling-place which I had built up for myself in the darkness would have gone to join all those other dwellings glimpsed in the whirlpool of awakening, put to fight by that pale sign traced above my window-curtains by the uplifted forefnger of dawn. (SW, 222; I, 184) In his mind, place and places are merged, as the Proustian bedroom becomes a far less reliable anchor than the de Maistrian. Bray therefore remarks that the ending of ‘Combray’ is ‘another revelation that places and identity cannot be accurately remembered, but instead must be created’ (Bray, 2013: 196). While the awakening sleeper’s experience speaks to an interdependence of place, space, memory and self-identity – an interdependence that structurally confrms Malpas’s argument, the ending of ‘Combray’ already destabilizes the certainty through which the narrator constructs such a sense of self via a connection to a specifc place. Not only because any one place is itself just as fragmented, multiple and indeterminate as identity itself, but more importantly, because it is the creation of places from within the self – rather than their existence outside of it – that produces self-identity.8 As such, it would seem that in order to create the knowledge of the self that can only be achieved through its relation to particular places, there must already be an extraspatiotemporal self within which such knowledge can be created. *** In this chapter, I have attempted to set out how the Proustian narrator sleeps in, lives in, loves and mourns in specifc places. He also imagines places, dreams of them and remembers them. He is surrounded by places and his refections and hypotheses often arise in a specifc place to which they are explicitly tied. Less frequently, he considers space as a metaphysical concept, but fguratively, the domestic space – as much as the social and urban spaces, which I have not engaged with here – shapes his relationship to the world, its people as much as these spaces shape the narrator’s own identity. At the same time, particular places, as well as an all-encompassing concept of place, are perhaps as multiple and ungraspable as identity itself in Proust. I would like to close by turning to the very end of the novel to highlight where I think Malpas instrumentalizes Proust to support his argument about place in philosophy rather than tending to Proust’s philosophy of place in its own right. As part of this, place may play an important role, but one that cannot be understood outside of the novel’s broader conception of memory, the self, time and art. Proust ends Time Regained with a sentence that highlights, once more, that place, space and time are intimately intertwined, as the narrator remarks: If I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the efect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place (‘place’), compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space (‘espace’), a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves – in Time. (TR, 451; IV, 625) 75

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Malpas reads this as pointing to the spatialization of memory, a passage that highlights the importance of space and specifc places at the end of the novel. Yet, this passage, just like the end of Combray which alludes to the instability of any given place in memory, is again ridden with doubt. The original words chosen by Proust in this last sentence to describe place matter: unlike his preferred ‘lieu’, he here uses the French ‘place’, in the singular, and inscribes this fgurative place that his hypothetical livre à venir, the book that he is supposedly about to write, would carve out into the abstract concept of space (‘espace’). While this last sentence is indubitably a testimony to a three-dimensional conception of art in which place and space play a defning role alongside time, the absence of ‘lieu’, his preferred term to refer to particular places, suggests that the importance of the non-fgurative, actual places has moved into the background to make space for a theoretical conceptualization that turns away from the ‘tyranny of the Particular’. Importantly, the last reference to place and space at the end of the novel is also preceded by the narrator’s doubt whether he will even be able to undertake the project that would assign such a privileged role to place and space. While this does not mean that the narrator is not committed to wanting to write a book that can speak to the spatialization of memory, to conceive of a project in which particular places will play key roles in creating knowledge of the self, Proust the author nonetheless chooses to leave the actualization of such a project in limbo by framing it against the narrator’s impending death. And this uncertainty – as much as the fact that place and space have taken on a merely fgurative meaning here – is one that refuses any general principles regarding the primacy of place that may be erected in Proust’s name.9

Notes 1 See, for example, De Soto (2018), who reads the Search and its interior spaces in particular in the light of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1964). 2 Malpas’s book was originally published by Cambridge University Press in 1999. In 2018, Routledge published a revised edition that includes a new chapter and, importantly, also Malpas’s responses to some criticism that the frst edition met, particularly with regard to the ‘Proust Principle’; see note 8. 3 Proust uses both the terms ‘place’ and ‘lieu’. It is necessary to mention in this regard that the French ‘lieu’, which is often translated as ‘place’ in English, has a narrower meaning in French, in the sense that it mostly refers to a precise location. The French ‘place’ has a range of diferent meanings, among them an actual seat, the square (of a city), space (in the sense of ‘room’) or place, in the sense of ‘the site of something’; see http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfv5/visusel.exe?13;s=467949735;r=1;nat=;sol=2 (accessed 15 April 2022). In addition, as Malpas notes, there are other terms in the Search, such as ‘pays’ (see, for example, the sections ‘Noms de Pays: Le Pays’ and ‘Noms de Pays: Le Noms’, where ‘pays’ is translated as ‘place’ in English) or ‘patrie’ ‘that can carry connotations of place, but again, without the breadth of the English “place”’ (Malpas 2018: 42). 4 See Proust’s reference to Wells’s time machine in ‘Sentiments fliaux d’un parricide’ (CSB, 152). 5 Though primarily working with biographical information, Diana Fuss in her Sense of an Interior, and more recently Michelle Perrot in The Bedroom: An Intimate History have engaged with the cultural imaginary of the bedroom – and the role the confnement to the bedroom may have played in shaping Proust’s imaginary. 6 In addition to this relationship between space and places, it is also important to point out, as Luc Fraisse has done, that Théodule Ribot’s Maladie de la personnalité may have played an important part in shaping Proust’s understanding of place and space here, and specifcally the role that memory plays in uniting them (Fraisse 2017). 7 David Ellison has remarked in this respect that ‘if one allows the signifer “Balbec” to resonate freely, one can ascertain a curious acoustic resemblance between the imaginary Norman site of the

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In Search of Lost Place Recherche, and the real ancient city of BAALBEK, now situated in Lebanon, whose name comes from Baal, Phoenician god of the sun’ (Ellison 2009: 15). 8 Malpas’s ‘Proust Principle’ was criticized on philosophical grounds for assuming that it can accommodate the general argument that identity is constituted by place and that one’s particular self-identity is constituted by particular places. In the second edition of his book, Malpas turns to these criticisms (Malpas 2018: 22) and argues that the complexity and indeterminacy of any one place are refected in identity. Christensen, for example, rejects Malpas’s argument on several grounds, criticizing his overall argument for confusing the possibility of being a selfconscious subject – and for which, according to Christenson, Malpas rightly sets up location at a place as a condition – with the role he assigns to place as establishing a particular self-identity. He claims that perhaps to be a self-conscious subject entails having a self-identity in the sense of having, and knowing oneself to have, a certain distinctive individuality and a certain specifc “place” (status) in life. But in no non-trivial sense does being who and what one is require that one either is now inhabiting, ever has inhabited or ever will inhabit any particular place. (Christensen 2001: 791) While Christensen does not engage with the question of whether Proust’s work can even be called upon to support Malpas argument, he describes it as ‘false psychology’ and doubts whether it can be Proust’s, suggesting that a great writer of fction tends not to push universal barrows. Rather, he creates such a powerful individual case that his readers are compelled to ask whether (or at least how) what is described there might apply in their own case. (Christensen 2001: 791–2) 9 Thanks to Tom Stern for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

References Benhaïm, A. (2003) “‘L’Êtrange humain.’ Proust lecteur d’ H.G. Wells,” Bulletin Marcel Proust, 53, 37–50. Bernini, M. (2020) “The Heterocosmic Self: Analogy, Temporality and Structural Couplings in Proust’s Swann’s Way,” in M. Anderson, P. Garrat and M. Sprevak (eds) Distributed Cognition in Victorian Culture and Modernism, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bray, P. M. (2013) The Novel Map: Space and Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century French Fiction, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Casey, E. S. (2013) The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Christensen, C. B. (2001) “Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography by Jef E. Malpas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)” (Review), Mind, 110.439, 789–92. De Maistre, X. (1871[1794]) Journey Round My Room, trans. by H. Attwell, New York: Hurd and Houghton. De Soto, J. (2018) “The Poetics of Domestic Space in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Journal of Modern Literature, 42.1, 49–64. Ellison, E. (2009) “The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust,” in A. Benhaïm (ed.) The Strange M. Proust, Oxford: Legenda. Fraisse, L. (2011) “L’ ‘exposition de cent tableaux hollandais’: sources et enjeux esthétiques,” Marcel Proust Aujourd’hui, 8 (2011): 77–101. ——— (2017) “‘Le seul veritable voyage, le seul bain de Jouvence’ (Marcel Proust),” Fabula/Les colloques, L’art, machine à voyager dans le temps, http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document4717.php, accessed 27 August 2021. Frantext, Base de données, developed by ATILEF (Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française) and C.N.R.S; www.frantext.fr (accessed 25 August 2021) Fuss, D (2004) The Sense of an Interior: Four Rooms and the Writers that Shaped Them, London: Routledge. Malpas, J. E. (2018) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography, London: Routledge. Pascal, B. (1995 [1670]) Pensées and Other Writings, trans. by H. Levi, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Anna Elsner Perrot, M. (2018) The Bedroom: An Intimate History, trans. by L. Elkin, New Haven: Yale University Press. Poulet, G. (1977) Proustian Space, trans. by E. Coleman, Baltimore, MA: Johns Hopkins University Press. Proust, M. (2006) Letters of Marcel Proust, trans. and ed. by M. Curtiss, introduction by A. Gopnik, New York: Helen Marx Books. Ruskin, J. (1904) La Bible d’Amiens, trad. by Marcel Proust, Paris: Mercure de France. Tuan, Y.-F. (2001 [1977]) Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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5 “ONLY THROUGH TIME TIME IS CONQUERED” Proust on Death Andrew Huddleston Introduction Among its many narrative threads, In Search of Lost Time relates Marcel’s entry to the fashionable aristocratic circles of Parisian society. From this perspective, consciousness of death is perhaps most epitomized by the fatuousness of the Duchess at the end of the Guermantes Way. Charles Swann has announced to Oriane de Guermantes that he is terminally ill and has only a short time to live. She, however, is heading of to a party: Placed for the frst time in her life between two duties as incompatible as getting into her carriage to go out to dinner and showing compassion for a man who was about to die, she could fnd nothing in the code of conventions which indicated the right line to follow; not knowing which to choose, she felt obliged to pretend not to believe that the latter alternative need be seriously considered. “We’ll talk about it another time,” she says to Swann (GW, 688–9; II 882–3), with callousness poorly disguised as polite disbelief. But when she moments later realizes that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress, she nonetheless fnds time to change her ensemble before departure. Needs must.1 When it is not focused on the spiritual vacuity of the world the narrator worked so hard to join, and moves into the narrator’s introspective musings, the novel has a religious favor of resurrection and salvation in the face of death, and the idea, closely connected, that lost time might somehow be brought back to life—resurrected too, one might say—in memory or in literature. In the fnal pages of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator contemplates his past, recognizes the prospect of his impending death, and considers whether time might remain for him to complete his planned work. Like his narrator, Proust himself spent the fnal years of his life in seclusion in his Paris apartment and often in his bed trying to complete his masterwork, which did not appear in its entirety until after his 1922 death. The specter of death hangs over the fnal volume, Time Regained, and lends the narrator’s recollections, and his literary project, a particularly existential weight, already in evidence from early in Swann’s Way. The novel, and particularly this fnal volume, is rich in philosophical ideas on a number of topics. Among its recurring themes is that we might, through some combination DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-8

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of art and memory, have a defense against death, or at least a consolation for it—both when it comes to our own deaths and the deaths of those we care about. It is often held that the novel’s aspiration is for the titular “lost time” to be “regained” or in a better, if more ungainly translation, “re-found” [retrouvé] and the seeming inexorability of loss and death that comes with time’s passing to in some way be answered, philosophically and artistically. Malcolm Bowie nicely describes this way of understanding the novel in terms of a “grandly orchestrated redemptive view” (Bowie 1998: 62). In some way, both memory and art are supposed to be complementary routes to “a celestial exit from loss and waste” (Bowie 1998: 65). “In due course,” Bowie writes, “time will be redeemed. A lost past will be recovered, and the dying creature’s messianic hopes will be fulflled” (Bowie 1998: 31).2 Two of the novel’s recurring themes—the power of memory and the transfguring capacity of art—are often couched by the narrator in such a way as to try to speak to concerns about death. In the two sections to follow, I will review some of the novel’s refections in this vein and then go on to develop another proposal that is in the spirit of the novel. As befts a great, multifarious work of art, we don’t really get arguments or even a single, coherent, clearly delineated view across its thousands of pages. But we do get a number of profound and suggestive ideas, which invite philosophical treatment.3 The positive view I develop here is Proust-inspired, but not, in its details, a view elaborated as such. It is thus, as it were, philosophy with Proust, engaging with some ideas he and his narrator (and sometimes the younger Marcel) put forward, and then presenting a variation on them.4 We are, on the reading I propose, invited to transform our attitude to the pastness of the past and to see it not as mattering less simply because it is past. Perhaps that past is ontologically still there, as though in a distant realm, as Proust’s narrator at times suggests. But even if it isn’t, this attitude toward the past—and how we think about the whole of a life—is a way of thinking we might try to adopt.

Memory and Metaphysics C.K. Scott Moncrief, Proust’s original English translator, took poetic license in rendering the novel’s title as “Remembrance of Things Past,” with a nod to Shakespeare. While not accurate to Proust’s French, Moncrief’s title puts a central, and in its way ftting, place on recollection. Memory, and particularly so-called “involuntary” memory, is of course a central theme in the novel. The iconic scene of the madeleine is familiar even to those who have never read the book. The narrator dips the madeleine into his fragrant lime blossom tea and it triggers a powerful recollection. This is echoed in other important memorial scenes in the novel— the paving stones in the Guermantes courtyard, the clatter of a spoon, the texture of a linen napkin. In these cases, a sensory trigger (e.g., a taste, a sound, and a feel) awakens a powerfully vivid and emotionally laden experience. In the case of the madeleine: I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indiferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the efect, which love has, of flling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence 80

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could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it infnitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? (SW, 52; I 44) Through this “all-powerful joy” of recollection, the narrator ceases to feel “contingent, mortal.” The narrator frames this sort of memory as a potential answer to what we might call the lost time problem and the death problem, respectively. While conceptually distinct, Proust sometimes couches the former as a metaphorical extension of the latter: lost time is a matter of the past being “dead” to us, as Combray was dead to him, before his recollection (SW, 51; I 43). The lost time problem arises from the pastness of past, our feeling that with the past having already transpired, it is no longer available to us, and thus somehow lost. Memory, unsurprisingly, is an answer to the lost time problem. At some level of description, this is an utter banality: we are reconnected with the past when we remember it. (It is perhaps ever so with the profound philosophical themes of novels, which sufer from being pressed into simple formulas.) Those with decent memories can call the past to mind, at least encoded at a certain thin level of description or with a faded snapshot. But the Proustian involuntary memory is supposed to have a special vividness that surpasses ordinary memory. The vividness is not something we can conjure through eforts of willing, hence the involuntary, but instead comes through something outside our agency.5 We might, to use the semi-religious register that Proust operates in, describe it as a kind of grace or epiphany or perhaps a vision. The involuntary character per se is, to my mind, less important than the vividness and immediacy of the memory that is conjured. Many of our memories are involuntary, but are fairly trivial and insignifcant, not the profound experiences that Proust describes. When some memory pops into our heads, thanks to a sensory stimulus, it may be mundane, e.g., I remember when I smell the baking bread that I was told this morning I need to buy bread on the way home. “Involuntary memory” has become a term of Proustiana, following his own usage, but it is, in my view, a somewhat misleading shorthand, even if all the relevant experiences are indeed involuntary. The vividness, by contrast, is more important. It makes it as if we are actually experiencing whatever it was again, and not simply remembering it in a thin way—something perhaps approaching, if not reaching, phenomenal indistinguishability between experience and memory.6 The process Proust describes is a well-studied psychological phenomenon.7 Vivid memories (both positively and negatively valenced) stand in an intimate connection to sensory triggers. The death problem is related. We, and those we care about, are mortal beings, for whom the moments slip away like grains of sand into the bottom of the sand timer. By having the past brought to mind, it is as though we halt, or circumvent, this process in some way. The narrator sees this sort of awakening as a way of connecting with those we care about who have died and thereby bringing them back to us: I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus efectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognised them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. 81

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And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the eforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. (SW, 51–2; I 43–4) A crucial feature of these moments, according to the narrator, is that they are somehow “outside” time (TR, 223; IV 449): The truth surely was that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifcations of the present with the past, it was likely to fnd itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. This explained why it was that my anxiety on the subject of my death had ceased at the moment I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, since the being which at that moment I had been was an extra-temporal being and therefore unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future. (TR, 222–3; IV 449) In what sense is this extratemporal— “outside”—time? After all, it would seem to presuppose a temporal timeline—and a past on this timeline. But I think the narrator’s idea is that it is outside the fow of present time, but nonetheless still available in a mysterious and vivid way that outstrips the capacity of ordinary memory. He posits that there must be an underlying “medium” which enables this, something which metaphysically underwrites this vividness, enabling things still, in their way, to be again present through memory. This, apparently, is what consoles him and allays his anxiety on the subject of his death. Lost time is still there, and he (as an extratemporal being) is there with it, also outside present time. This idea of being outside time provides a certain consolation for the deaths of others as well. A common trope of the afterlife is that the dead carry on living elsewhere, e.g., heaven, purgatory, and the underworld. The narrator’s variation on this is that they are still somehow there outside time, and that if we too get outside time through memory, specifcally “involuntary memory,” we will be reunited with them. The three central loses for the narrator are his lover Albertine, his grandmother, and his mother (though the latter death is never described, only implied). Albertine occupies the narrator’s thoughts with jealous obsessiveness in life, and this does not cease even after her death. He continues to dwell on the posthumous Albertine at length in The Fugitive, and this attention, he thinks, gives her a kind of ongoing existence: people do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It is as though they were traveling abroad. This is a thoroughly pagan survival. (F, 584; IV 92) It is unclear what the narrator has in mind by “true immortality” here (the heaven of Christian metaphysics, or his own conception of immortality through being outside time?). 82

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But in the case of all three of these central loves, memory provides a way of keeping a connection with the person lost. Perhaps it is my idiosyncrasy, but for all the narrator’s prodigious ruminations on Albertine, alive or dead, it is in his connections to his grandmother and mother that his most profound and resonant refections on death, it seems to me, are to be found. Marcel’s grandmother, to whom he was very close, sufers a stroke when they are out for a walk and dies shortly thereafter. He does not fully process her death and grieve (F, 736–7; IV 220–1) until some years later when he is in Balbec, the seaside resort where he spent summers with her as a child. As he stops to take of his boots, the memories of her come back in a rush: On the frst night, as I was sufering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take of my boots, trying to master my pain. But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, flled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes […] I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that frst evening of our arrival […] I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. (SG, 179–80; III 152–3) Through this vivid memory, he is back with her. In keeping with the narrator’s remarks about existing outside time, particularly from later in the Recherche, the thought could be that his grandmother thus has a kind of continued existence outside time, if not as a spirit (Cf., SW, 51–2; I 43–4), then in some other way. So too with Marcel and his mother, but here the intricate temporal layering, of which Proust was such a master, is even more complicated. The narrator is writing at a point that is apparently after his mother’s death, yet looking back on a moment during their time in Venice, and appreciating her mortality in a way he couldn’t fully appreciate then. It is a passage of subtle, but arresting poignance: Today I am sure that the pleasure does exist, if not of seeing, at least of having seen, a beautiful thing with a particular person. A time has now come [Une heure est venue pour moi] when, remembering the baptistery of St. Mark’s—contemplating the waters of the Jordan in which St. John immerses Christ, while the gondola awaited us at the landing stage of Piazzetta–it is no longer a matter of indiference to me that, beside me in that cool penumbra, there should have been a woman draped in her mourning with the respectful and enthusiastic fervour of the old woman in Carpaccio’s St. Ursula in the Accademia, and that that woman, with her red cheeks and sad eyes and in her black veils, whom nothing can ever remove from that softly lit sanctuary of St. Mark’s where I am always sure to fnd her because she has her place reserved there as immutably as a mosaic, should be my mother. (F, 742; IV 225) He was indiferent to his mother’s presence with him at the time, but now recalls it, in her absence, with regret for his own indiference. She is to be found now only outside time, “immutably as a mosaic,” in St. Mark’s. As in a dream, the literal and the symbolic registers interweave and cannot be fully pried apart. Memory transposes the future into the past, with “time future,” in the words of Eliot’s Burnt Norton, “contained in time past.” Through the lens of Marcel’s memory, his mother (who, during the time in Venice, was mourning her own mother) now appears clothed as though to mourn herself. In one sense, the remembered 83

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scene is, from the temporal standpoint of its past occurrence, framed, with knowledge of the future, as a sort of proleptic anticipation of death—a death that, by the time that Marcel is writing and recalling this, has already come to pass. The simile of the immutable mosaic suggests as well the enduring quality of works of art. They outlast our fnite lifespans. Another of the narrator’s important suggestions is that art also provides a defense against death, a bulwark of sorts against fnitude. It is to this idea that I now want to turn.

Art as Lasting as Bronze It is a well-worn theme that art grants a sort of permanence that life does not. From Horace’s Odes (“Exegi monumentum aere perennius,” III:XXX) to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,/When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st) to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Baudelaire’s “Une Charogne,” we have the idea that art lasts, where life fades. Art is often thought, in this way, to be a consolation for death. We may be ephemeral, but, if we are preserved in or through art, we can somehow transcend, or at least have less cause to regret, our mortality. This idea is suggested in In Search of Lost Time as well.8 In The Captive, the writer Bergotte goes to see an exhibition, including Vermeer’s View of Delft. Bergotte feels dizzy and unwell as he enters the exhibition, but his attention is transfxed by a patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s painting, and it prompts him to reevaluate his entire oeuvre: “That’s how I ought to have written,” [Bergotte] said. “My last books are too dry. I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.” Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. (C, 207–8; III 692) Art can achieve a kind of perfection that the rest of life (seemingly, at least) cannot. Bergotte convinces himself that his dizziness is merely the result of indigestion. He sinks down into a settee at the exhibition for a rest, and thereupon a new pain grips him and he dies (C, 208; III 692–3). “Dead for ever?” the narrator asks, “Who can say? Certainly, experiments in spiritualism ofer us no more proof than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death.” The narrator then refects on how the celestial ethical and aesthetic imperatives that we obey will not matter to our “worm-eaten bod[ies]” (C, 208; III 693), and must therefore have their source in a diferent order. If it were just a matter of self-interest in the here-andnow, the narrator seems to be saying, we wouldn’t devote ourselves with such sacrifce and scrupulousness to things such as artistic accomplishment. But through aesthetic creation, we can have a way, through efort and struggle, to create something enduring. As that patch of yellow wall, and the painting it is in, outlasts the man Vermeer, so too Bergotte’s works outlast him, his self-criticism notwithstanding: They buried him, but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop-windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection. (C, 209; III 693)

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Through the ongoing infuence of his books, Bergotte continues, at least insofar as he is read, to have an afterlife. The narrator sees death as a threat to his own unfnished work, which has, at this twilight stage, become his central life project. He fears that he will not be able to complete the book before his death. He thinks (partly for the reasons enumerated in the previous section) that to fear death is a “folly.” Yet, he continues: it was precisely when the thought of death had become a matter of indiference to me that I was beginning once more to fear death, under another form, it is true, as a threat not to myself but to my book, since for my book’s incubation this life that so many dangers threatened was for a while at least indispensable. (TR, 438; IV 615) Unlike Bergotte, he has no legacy yet. The narrator compares his work to a church still under construction. What will become of it he does not yet know: Whether it would be a church where little by little a group of faithful would succeed in apprehending verities and discovering harmonies or perhaps even a grand general plan, or whether it would remain, like a druidic monument on a rocky isle, something forever unfrequented, I could not tell. (TR, 442; IV 618) The narrator wants to construct something that will survive his mortal, bodily self. Of course, if his remarks elsewhere are right, he will still exist in some sense outside time. But this is an alternative, or a parallel possibility. The narrator’s literary project will also be in service of (to whatever extent possible) aiding and stirring memory and thereby helping us grasp the extratemporal. Thus, the narrator’s stated “ambition [is] to make visible, to intellectualise in a work of art, realities that were outside Time” (TR, 298; IV 208–9). There is an important refexive dimension to Proust’s and the narrator’s tasks accordingly. The narrator is describing, in more abstract philosophical terms, how memory enables us to access what is outside time. Yet, he is also thinking that his own art itself potentially plays a signifcant role in enabling this. The narrator compares our past to photographic negatives in need of being developed: The greatness, on the other hand, of true art […] lay, I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, re-apprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life which in consequence can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defned is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. And therefore their past is like a photographic darkroom encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them. (TR, 253–4; IV 474)

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The narrator seeks to write a work that will shed this light and develop the negatives. This appears to function at a more personal, autobiographical level for the narrator, but also in a more general way. Through literature’s insights, readers can come to see more clearly what they otherwise cannot. And yet one wonders how much can really be achieved through art. At times, there seems to be no substitute for involuntary memory. If all the eforts of our intellect indeed must prove futile in resurrecting the past, how is discursive literary description supposed to help (SW, 52; I 44)? The narrator himself is sensitive to art’s limitations, even as he praises its redemptive possibilities in Time Regained: To me it seems more correct to say that the cruel law of art is that people die and that we ourselves die after exhausting every form of sufering, so that over our heads may grow the grass not of oblivion but of eternal life, the vigorous and luxuriant growth of a true work of art, and so that thither, gaily and without a thought for those who are sleeping beneath them, future generations may come to enjoy their déjeuner sur l’herbe. (TR, 438; IV 615) The artwork persists—a form of “eternal life”—but with its creator unrecognized. Tombs are unknowingly visited without a thought for their occupants; the narrator muses with evident insecurity. The creator’s work will live on, but he will not, not in body, and not really even in consciousness and memory. Even the works themselves may not live on. At some point too, they will come to nothing: “Eternal duration is promised no more to men’s works than to men” (TR, 445; IV 620).9 Bergotte’s books in the shop window may outlast him, but a time will come when he, and they, will be forgotten. The route of memory outlined in the previous section might be thought even more inadequate. The narrator’s mystical pronouncements about memory bringing us “outside time” are beautiful and moving, but is there really any substance to them? In William Empson’s classic of literary criticism Seven Types of Ambiguity, he delivers a withering verdict on what he sees as the essential emptiness of this Proustian idea: you remember how Proust, at the end of that great novel, having convinced the reader with the full sophistication of his genius that he is going to produce an apocalypse, brings out with pathetic faith, as a fact of absolute value, that sometimes when you are living in one place you are reminded of living in another place, and this, since you are now apparently living in two places, means you are outside time, in the only state of beatitude he can imagine.10 Perhaps the idea is as “pathetic” as Empson supposes. But I think more can be made of the theme of extratemporality as a defense against death. It is to the elaboration of this idea that I now turn.

Embracing the Past One lesson we might take from In Search of Lost Time involves a transformation of how we think of our existence in time, as well as in how we structure our patterns of concern for ourselves and for others. We feel prone to a sort of sadness at the thought of something cherished being past and ceasing to be present (and corresponding relief at the passing of something bad). (This might, as with Proust’s narrator, have a delayed onset, with the mourning 86

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coming somewhat after the loss.) We are sometimes prone as well to a related sadness at the idea that our future, or someone’s we care about, might approach its fnal limit. Our dissatisfaction, even despair, at the idea of death is bound up with these familiar and entirely understandable attitudes. It is natural to think that while our pasts have shaped us, and while there are things to recall fondly there, the future is in our hands. So long as we are living, we can potentially turn over a new leaf and move past something. Similarly with how we think about the lives of other people. Their future is ahead of them. Even the determinist will allow us this much, and will simply stop by saying that what will come is not within our control. There is thus a widespread bias or favoritism toward the present, and, to a lesser extent, the future. And perhaps with justice: the past is somehow thought unreal, evanescent, and evaporated. The present, by contrast, is really “real,” and the future inherits its value from the fact it will be present (and thus real) as time marches on. Of course, various views in the metaphysics of time will see the ontological realities diferently, with respect to the reality of the future, or the past, or indeed (objective) time itself. At points, the narrator seems drawn to such a metaphysical line: that we occupy a place, always growing [sans cesse accrue], in Time is something everybody is conscious of, and this universality could only make me rejoice, it being the truth, the truth suspected by each of us, that I seek to elucidate. […] This notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separated from us, it was now my intention to emphasise as strongly as possible in my work. (TR, 448–9; IV 623) As discussed in the third section, “years past,” on the narrator’s view, are really still there ontologically. This can be combined with a memorial reading: these years past are not separated from us, insofar as we are able to remember them in the sort of vivid, involuntary fashion the narrator describes. I’d like to suggest one way we might think about this, but one whose consoling potential is independent even of our (or indeed anyone’s) capacity to remember. What fundamentally matters to it is where our concerns are invested. As noted, when the present and the future are compared, it is psychologically common for people to have a bias (or more neutrally, a weighting of concern) toward the present. They will put of something unpleasant to the future, even if it may be even worse at that later point. Some part of this may be explained by uncertainty about whether they will ever need to undergo it, but often this is not an appreciable or important reason. It is rather that people care most—when it comes to themselves anyway—about their present arena of consciousness, and what will follow in short temporal succession. We sometimes have a parallel, if less strong, thought about those we care about. We care most about their sharing the present with us, and about their having a future with us. Unless we are extremely egotistical, we also care about how they would get on in their lives, if or when we are gone. However, in keeping with our structure of concern about ourselves, we are likely to care more about their present and their future than their past. We prefer their bad days to be behind them, and their best days ahead of them. Maybe it is psychologically ineluctable to think this way—not to mention what rationality requires. Yet perhaps it can be resisted. Philosophical arguments query whether it is rational to prefer, say, that pains be in our past (or someone else’s), and try to prime us with various examples (Parft 1984). For instance, a person wakes up in hospital, not remembering whether he has already undergone a painful operation, or he is about to undergo it. Many 87

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would say that they wish the painful operation to be in their past. But Parft questions this, and seeks to motivate the idea that this time preference is not rationally mandated: we might (maybe even should) care equally about all temporal stages of our life. Derek Parft describes a character he calls “Timeless” who is equally concerned about his past, present, and future (Parft 1984). He would not prefer that the painful operation be in the past, simply because it would then be past. The present is no doubt diferent in being directly experienced, but the question is why this itself should be of especial signifcance. Some of course think that experiences are all that matter to how a person’s life goes, but this is by no means obvious, and indeed is subject to some damning criticisms. Would we, for example, be satisfed to be hooked up to machine that just furnished us with experiences?11 Presumably most of us would not. But if experiences are not the be all and end all, why grant such privilege to the present (or the-past-as-vividly-remembered-in-the-present)? Proust at times can seem to be in the camp of those thinking experiences are what matter ultimately. But on another way of reading him, he is inviting us to share the attitude of “Timeless” and to care about our past as much as our present and future. We are, for him, not simply the present agents remembering a past and anticipating a future. What we are, in some sense, is instead apparently the totality of our life: And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, and secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it. A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years. (TR, 450–1; IV 624) The images pull in conficting directions. On the one hand, the past is a monumental support beneath us. On the other hand, we sit vertigo-stricken on its parlous summit. On the one hand, our life is seemingly constituted by this past. On the other hand, the connection to it is somehow still fragile. The narrator then switches to another pair of images set in a similar tension. He describes the 83-year-old Duc de Guermantes, tottering and uncertain of his footing, as though men spend their lives perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes they become taller than church steeples, making it in the end both diffcult and perilous for them to walk and raising them to an eminence from which they suddenly fall. And I was terrifed by the thought that the stilts beneath my own feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a past which already went down so far. (TR, 451; IV 625) The narrator thus juxtaposes the precariousness of stilts with the lasting solidity of a church steeple. We then come to the novel’s majestic conditional conclusion: So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the efect were to make [men] resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared to the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place 88

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on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time. (TR, 451; IV 625) In one respect, their place in space is restricted. The Duc’s frail body, and Marcel’s, will cease to exist. But in another way, they are “like giants plunged into the years,” and occupying a place “prolonged past measure.” They are spread out across time, and by having lived, remain there eternally. That invites a metaphysical reading, which is perhaps what Proust wants his narrator to suggest. Past time or the self is somehow still there, outside the ordinary temporal course. In what follows, I’d like to suggest a way in which this might be true. Even if someone ceases to exist, as an acting, experiencing bodily creature, the totality of the life, in some sense, remains behind. But in what sense? It remains, I would suggest, as a history— a life story. One of the novel’s invitations, through its comparisons, even equations, of life and literature, is to suggest that we can think of ourselves, in certain respects, as like the characters in these stories. Characters, on one external way of looking at them, exist outside of the narratival time of their stories. As we might put it with an air of paradox, they survive their deaths. Marcel, in the world of In Search of Lost Time, by its temporal clock, would be long dead by now. But he is still with us. And what he is, in that relevant sense, is not an acting and experiencing agent, even in the world of the story, but rather a diachronic life, as a (nearly) completed whole. He, qua character understood in this particular way, is the totality of his life, with the “is” being either literal identity, or something close to it.12 We—most of us anyway—are not memorialized in books, nor do we have our life stories told, so the analogy is imperfect. But perhaps we might come to think of ourselves, and others, as remaining behind as something like this— characters—at once within time, and yet, in another way, outside it. Death marks the endpoint of one such history, and birth its beginning, but death extinguishes neither the character nor (in an important sense) the history itself, which remain, impervious to time’s passing. Even if it does not take the form of a crafted narrative, our life still has a history, and the central character of that non-fctional history is the person whose life it is, or was. The idea of a life story or history contains the ambiguity present in “history” in general. It is both what transpired (i.e., events), and accounts of what transpired (i.e., those events, as described in a certain way). There are numerous, perhaps innumerable, true descriptions, drawing certain connections, selectively emphasizing some aspects more than others. Once events occur, or once a life gets going, the raw material for a narrative account (indeed, for many narrative accounts) is there, in the form of those events. My focus here is thus on history-as-transpired events, not history as narratives of them. And my Proustian suggestion, following Parft, is that there is no reason for privileging the events that we are presently experiencing, as though value resided solely in our self-refexive experience of them. The events themselves are potentially a locus of value, regardless of whether they are in the past or not. To be sure, some might have pasts that were terrible, compared with their present life, or what is on the horizon in their future. Psychological health and happiness for them (or for those who remember them) may call for downplaying this in memory, or in what narratives they prefer. But the past is still, for all that, part of their life history (understood as what in fact transpired). And where there was value in the past, that value arguably remains.13 The signifcant, valuable events in a life are no less valuable simply because they are no more. 89

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This is all another way of saying that the fact of having been, having lived a life, gives, in this admittedly limited way, a kind of eternal permanence outside time. Even if untold and forgotten, the history of that life, in the relevant sense of history, once it comes into being is always there, like indelible footprints in a never-melting snow. If we try to shift some of our concern in this direction, ongoing existence could matter less to us, and correspondingly, whole lives (including, importantly, the features that are in the past) could matter more to us. This is one sort of consolation for death that, on my reading, Proust’s novel might invite us to explore. Cold comfort, one might think. To modify the famous quip of Woody Allen’s, one doesn’t want to live on as an eternal history, one wants to live on in one’s apartment.14 How could this be consolation for death? Parft puts the potential benefts of such a perspective in this way: We should then greatly gain in our attitude to ageing and to death. As our life passes, we should have less and less to look forward to, but more and more to look backward to… Now suppose that our lives have nearly passed. We shall die tomorrow. If we were not biased toward the future, our reaction should mirror the one that I have just described. We should not be greatly troubled by the thought that we shall soon cease to  exist, for though we now have nothing to look forward to, we have our whole lives to look backward to. (Parft 1984: 66–7) It doesn’t matter so much, I would add, that we can revisit it vividly in memory (though, as Proust so beautifully records, that recollection is good too). The key point instead is that there was a life that was there, its story remains, and, by its nature, that cannot be taken away. It will always be there, outside time. That, of course, requires a metaphysical commitment of some sort. But it is a fairly weak one. It is difcult to deny that histories exist. The crucial question is an evaluative one. Does something’s being history—that is, in the past—ipso facto deprive it of value? That, to my mind, is an open question. If we start caring more about these histories, and less about ongoing existence, we may fnd some consolation for death.

Conclusion People are sometimes accused of “living in the past,” as though this were a psychological failing. It conjures the image of Miss Havishams unable to move on. One alternative is supposed to be “living in the moment”—that mantra of mindfulness—or else a focus on the future, as what we can direct, or at least experience. The ethical tenor of Proust’s masterpiece is that this implicit denigration of the pastness of the past and of our past is misplaced. Proust sets out on a mission of salvation to save us from the ravages of time, and this is a crucial part of his answer. Describing Proust’s ambitions, Christopher Prendergast aptly observes: Proust was not a ‘religious’ writer and the Recherche is not a ‘religious’ book. He wrote in and for a secular world long since forsaken by the gods…Yet if Proust is not a great religious writer, there can be little doubt that at a very deep level and after a certain fashion he wanted to be one. The grandest of his big themes is, after all, Death and Resurrection, its articulation in Le Temps retrouvé moreover stamped by a terminology straight out of the mystico-metaphysical lexicon of religious thought…. (Prendergast 2013: 85) 90

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The verdict of Prendergast and others is that Proust’s redemptive project is essentially bankrupt, and that Proust’s text itself gives indications of this.15 Co-existing with the salvifc endeavor and high-fown vocabulary, we have death treated more matter-of-factly, even brushed aside, as Oriane de Guermantes does. But I also think that Proust is on to something signifcant in his metaphysical refections. This requires a transformation in our attitudes, albeit perhaps an impossibly challenging transformation in those attitudes, worthy of a saint, or an enlightened contemplative. It is in this regard that Proust’s (broadly speaking) religious favor can be found as well. “Only through time time is conquered,” Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton.” For Eliot, only Christianity can secure that victory. Not so for the Proust elaborated here. But his is a more limited victory. Embracing the past, in the way suggested, is at once an admission of defeat in the face of fnitude, if eternal life in heaven is the measure of success, and at the same time a conviction that we have a kind of eternal life, however gossamer, even still.16

Notes 1 Cf., the Duke’s attitudes to his cousin Amanien d’Osmond’s impending death and its efect on the Duke’s social life (GW, 665–6; II 863) or the Professor more concerned about his buttonhole than attending to Marcel’s grandmother (GW, 360; II 610). 2 Bowie, it should be noted, goes on to challenge and complicate this interpretation. 3 See Descombes 1992 for a discussion of these issues. 4 Following Nehamas 1987, we might distinguish between Proust the man (in Nehamas’s terms, “the writer”) and “the author” who emerges from our interpretation of In Search of Lost Time. Except where context makes it clear that I mean otherwise, I use “Proust” to refer to the latter—“the author.” 5 See Moran 2017. 6 My thanks to Robbie Kubala for this suggestion. 7 For a critical philosophical take on this, see Mole 2017. 8 See Bucknall 1969 on the similarities between art and religion in Proust. 9 Cf. Landy 2004, 161–2 n 3. 10 Empson 1949: 131. 11 For one famous such criticism, see Nozick 1974, Ch. 3 on the “experience machine.” 12 Fine-grained debates could be had about the metaphysics of characters, and I will not weigh in on the specifcs. 13 The value of an event needn’t be atomistic; it might be afected by what comes after, depending on the arc in which it is situated. The point is instead that pastness per se does not, certain specifc exceptions aside, strip something of the value it had. 14 Thanks to Ken Gemes for reminding me of the relevant line. 15 Cf. de Man 1982. 16 My thanks to Anna Elsner, Robbie Kubala, Tom Stern, and an audience at the Birkbeck Works in Progress Seminar for helpful comments on this paper.

References Bowie, M. (1998) Proust Among the Stars, New York: Columbia University Press. Bucknall, B. (1969) The Religion of Art in Proust, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. de Man, P. (1982) Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven: Yale University Press. Descombes, V. (1992) Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, trans. Catherine Chance Macksey, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Empson, W (1949) Seven Types of Ambiguity, London: Chatto and Windus. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Andrew Huddleston Mole, C. (2017) “Are there Special Mechanisms of Involuntary Memory?,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8, 557–71. Moran, R. (2017) “Proust and the Limits of the Will,” in The Philosophical Imagination: Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nehamas, A. (1987) “Writer, Text, Work, Author,” in A. J. Cascardi (ed.), Literature and the Question of Philosophy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nozick, R. (1974) Anarchy, State, and Utopia, New York: Basic Books. Parft, D. (1984) “Rationality and Time,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 84:47–82. Prendergast, C. (2013) Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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6 THE SELF Ben Colburn

Introduction Marcel, Proust’s narrator in A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, spends most of the novel aficted by doubt about the nature of the self and his ability to grasp it, to the point he complains that ‘my life appeared to me … as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self ’ (F, 680; IV 173). This pessimism is later juxtaposed with something more optimistic: by the end of Time Regained, Marcel is convinced that he has overcome his earlier doubts and grasped the self he had sought. There are multiple ways to understand the theory of the self which Marcel arrives at, and how it relates to the anxiety-drenched scepticism which pervades most of the novel. In this chapter (after explaining the pessimistic conception), I explore three readings of the optimistic shift: that we can excavate a timeless self from sensory experience; that ‘creation and discovery come together’ (Landy 2004: 114) and the self is something we ourselves construct; and that the self is transcendent, manifesting in the episodes of involuntary memory that punctuate the novel. I conclude with reasons to doubt that Marcel’s author shares his optimism, or that his readers should.

Fragmentation One of Marcel’s key concerns throughout the novel is to escape the view that the self is fragmentary, fragile, mutable, and opaque. In this section, I set out that pessimistic picture. I start with fragmentation. Marcel often describes himself as being made up of many diferent selves, referring to the ‘innumerable and humble “selves” that compose our personality’ (F, 490; IV 14), and saying, ‘I was not one man only, but as it were the march-past of a composite army’ (F, 559; IV 71). The fragments are, as Joshua Landy points out (2004: 101), dispersed both diachronically and synchronically. When Marcel is mourning Albertine’s death, he refects on the succession of selves in mourning, and dreads that there will be some future self indiferent to his pain (F, 680–2; IV 173–5). Earlier, agonising over her departure, he anticipates having to inform many selves diferentiated by activity and inclination (F, 490–1; IV 14–15); elsewhere, he also speaks of how our selves are splintered by the diferent social gatherings we join (BG, 520; II 224–5). DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-9

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This double fragmentation engenders fragility and mutability. The dispersed elements undergo ‘fragmentary and continuous death’ (BG, 288; II 32), composing a consequently unstable whole: In a composite mass, the elements may one by one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if we were a single person. (F, 559–60; IV 71) The self is unravelled by changes of location, company, and sensory input (Bersani 2013: 23–4, 32). It can even alter in response to merely imagining diferent aspects of another person (who will themselves be just as fragmented, as the depiction of Albertine shows) (BG, 609–10; II 299–300). So total is the dispersal that our later selves are ‘unfaithful’ to the plans and principles which were constitutive of earlier selves (SG, 297–8; III 253–4), an ethical change signalling that earlier self ’s death. In short, it is impossible to grasp a clear picture of oneself: ‘a character alters no less than [societies and passions], and if one tries to take a snapshot of what is relatively immutable in it, one fnds it presenting a succession of diferent aspects … to the disconcerted lens’ (C, 373; III 830). Jonathan Dancy (1995) sees in Proust an echo of David Hume’s view (1878: 251) that there is nothing more to the self than an obscure succession of loosely constellated instantaneous mental states; we fnd something similar in Derek Parft (1984), who reportedly developed the connection with Proust in his lectures (cf. Small 2007: 164). It is a view which provokes a profound crisis. Marcel feels ‘devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self ’ (F, 680; IV 173). For many critics, this crisis is the core of the book. It is built around the question ‘is the self one or many, concentrated or dispersed, continuous or fragmented?’ (Bowie 1998: 1–2); driven by ‘anxiety about the stability and value of his whole being and its relationship with the outside world’ (Bersani 2013: 43); and haunted by the question ‘whether the self – that shadowy and fragmented …entity – can ever achieve any real degree of harmony’ (Landy 2004: 101). Leo Bersani argues that this anxiety leads Marcel through a succession of attempts to anchor a stable self in outside truth: in nature, in social relations, and in jealous love (ibid: 43, 110, 139). Each attempt ends in failure. Marcel wants to appreciate nature directly, but fnds that he cannot, because his experience makes sense only when it has been cognitively penetrated by something he has projected (perhaps because of what he has read or been told in advance): Always I was incapable of seeing anything for which a desire had not already been roused in me by something I had read, anything of which I had not myself traced in advance a sketch […]. (TR, 35; IV 297) This is not by itself bad. It unlocks valuable ways of seeing. But for experience of nature to be an outside foundation for knowledge of the self, it cannot already be shaped by a projection of meaning which comes from (and hence presupposes) the self. Marcel’s experience of nature is mediated in this sense: he has no such experience unless he has ‘traced in advance a sketch’. So any ‘self ’ he fnds is there because he put it there. Relationships are unreliable for the same reason (except more so, because they involve two unstable selves), and also because 94

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of their instability, as Marcel discovers when he defes his mother’s injunction to leave Venice and fnds himself evaporating in her absence (F, 748–52; IV 230–4). Love is a theme that deserves a chapter by itself; it sufces here to observe that Marcel’s successive loves for Gilberte, Madame de Guermantes, and Albertine fail to soothe his existential anxiety, to put it mildly. To summarise, then: throughout the novel, the self is depicted as ungraspably and multiply disintegrated. This picture is the foil for something else which supersedes it. In what follows, I explore some diferent accounts of what this something else is, and how it answers the metaphysical (what is the self?) and epistemic (how do we know about it?) challenges that Marcel’s pessimism poses.

Timelessness The frst reading focuses on the idea that we can excavate a timeless self in Proust’s narrative. This self is transcendent in the sense that it is eternal, lying ‘behind’ the surface impressions of Marcel’s life, but we know about it by the comparatively familiar routes of sensory experience and recollection. Bersani’s is the best example of this view. For Bersani, Marcel’s succession of failures (to ground the self in nature, society, and love) sets up something which does work. Throughout the novel, Marcel experiences powerful moments of involuntary memory. Bersani sees a strongly Platonic character in how these experiences ‘satisfy Marcel’s need for a sensory contact with an extra-temporal reality’, and how Marcel sees them as gateways to ‘eternal truths of nature, art and love’ (Bersani 2013: 22). The culminating instance comes in Time Regained, when Marcel has a linked cascade of epiphanies like this. Bersani says that after this ‘Marcel deduces … the fact of a continuous personality in a peculiarly detached and intellectual way’ (ibid: 35) and provides ‘overwhelming evidence of the persistence in time, and therefore of the reality of the self ’ (ibid: 209, my emphasis). On Bersani’s view, Marcel deduces the existence of an eternal self in the same way that he deduces the ‘eternal truths’ of beauty and love. This echoes Plato’s theory of the forms, on which we get knowledge of those truths from directly apprehending them between lifetimes. The self is either itself a form we can apprehend, or the thing which apprehends; either way, it is safe from decay because it is outside time: it is transcendental, even if we grasp it through more familiar epistemic tools (of memory and perceptual evidence). Józef Czapski also detects something Platonic in Proust.1 Refecting in the aftermath of Bergotte’s death, he says: It’s as if we live under laws of justice, of absolute truth, of perfect efort, which were created in another world of harmony and truth, whose refections appear to us on earth and guide us. (Czapski 2018: 65) This could be taken straight from Plato, locating the eternal truths (of justice, harmony, and perfection) in ‘another world’. In fact, the relevant passage is even more explicitly Platonic than Czapski (who was working from memory, giving lectures while incarcerated in a Soviet prison camp) recalled. It evokes not only the forms, but also the transmigration of the soul as an explanation for our knowledge: All these obligations, which have no sanction in our present life, seem to belong to a different world, a world based on kindness, scrupulousness, self-sacrifce, a world entirely 95

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diferent from this one and which we leave in order to be born again on this earth, before perhaps returning there to live again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, not knowing whose hand had traced them there – those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only – if then! – to fools. (C, 208–9; III 693) Proust clearly had something like Plato’s theory in mind as he wrote. Czapski’s reading is compelling. But this passage doesn’t directly concern the self, at least not in the sense that Bersani was exploring; rather, it is a speculation (in the aftermath of a great artist’s death) about the survival of the soul. We should be cautious about drawing inferences about a theory of the former from these eulogistic remarks about the latter.2 Considered as an account of the self, I am less persuaded by Bersani’s Platonism. He identifes the key moment not in the episode of involuntary memory itself, but after the party, when Marcel ‘deduces the fact of a continuous personality in a peculiarly detached and intellectual way’ (Bersani 2013: 35). ‘Detached and intellectual’ deduction is appropriate for a Platonic inference from the evidence of our senses to the existence of the forms (including to the existence of an eternal self ). But it is a strained reading given how Proust presents the immediately preceding epiphany in the courtyard. That moment is neither intellectual nor detached. Marcel tells us that he follows ‘no new train of reasoning’ (TR, 217; IV 445) (meaning the kind of methodical evidence-based process with which he has tried to alleviate his depression since his return to Paris (TR, 202; IV 433)), and his cascading insights are fused with powerful emotion: his ‘discouragement’ and ‘anxiety’ vanish; he experiences powerful ‘happiness’ and ‘joy which was like a certainty’ (TR, 216–18; IV 445–6). Triumphant thunder echoes through the passage: ‘joy’, ‘enjoyment’, or ‘enjoy’ appear thirteen times, ‘happiness’ or ‘happy’ eleven times, ‘pleasure’ nine times, and ‘delight’, ‘delightful’, ‘delicious’, ‘transported’, ‘felicity’, ‘savour’, ‘exaltation’ once or twice each. This is not ‘detached and intellectual’. As I argue in Section ‘Doubt’, we should beware of over-emphasising the epiphanies in our reading, but a reading like Bersani’s which does emphasise them yet sidelines this incandescence is hard to accept. Another reason to be doubtful comes from Bersani’s remark that ‘the experiences of involuntary memory presumably satisfy Marcel’s need for a sensory contact with an extra-temporal reality’ (Bersani 2013: 22). The theory of recollection is supposed to tell us how humans can gain genuine knowledge without relying on experience: we do so through direct contact with the forms in an ‘extra-temporal reality’ (ibid.) between incarnations. However, the solution it ofers – recollection – can’t resolve that worry: what we are supposedly recollecting is itself an experience, and at that an odd extra-temporal and extra-spatial one with none of the sensory apparatus that experience normally requires. If relying on experience was the problem, this doesn’t seem like a solution.3 Of course, our conclusion here could just be that Marcel’s solution to the problem of the self is a bad one, but that seems unreasonable as a reading of the novel. The problem just sketched with Plato’s epistemology would not have escaped Proust, given that he had enough knowledge of Plato to include the allusions identifed by Bersani and Czapski. As Bersani points out, Marcel sees that his attempts to grasp the self through experiencing nature, society, and love come to nothing because he has no ‘sensory contact’ with anything which isn’t frst saturated with his own projections. The problem is with relying on sensory contact as such. Why would he think this supposed ‘sensory contact’ with an extra-temporal self any diferent? 96

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Maybe (to anticipate Section ‘Doubt’) we should embrace that self-contradiction as a feature, deliberate or otherwise, of Proust’s novel. For now, it will be worth continuing to see if we can excavate a more consistent conception of the self.4

Self-construction We might react to these doubts about the Platonic proposal by reconceiving what is going on when we enquire about the self. Rather than giving us knowledge of some already-existing entity, we might instead understand that activity as practical and creative: these processes don’t give us access to the self, they construct the self. Constructivism (e.g. about morality or abstract entities) is sometimes ofered as a way to avoid metaphysical and epistemic problems associated with Platonic realism (see e.g. Korsgaard 1996, Clark-Doane 2020). Given Proust’s clear awareness of those problems, might a constructivist reading work? Landy takes this line, arguing that Proust’s novel is a story about ‘how to make a self ’ (Landy 2004: 48). Landy is not the only reader of Proust to have taken this kind of line, but he is unusual in elaborating it explicitly in the terms of analytic philosophy, so it is worth exploring his view in some detail.5 Landy emphasises (when explaining the pessimistic view) that the self is ‘doubly fragmented’ (Landy 2004: 101–6). Synchronically, the self is divided into multiple faculties and drives, pulling in diferent directions and blocking a unifed answer to questions like ‘What do I really want?’, ‘What do I know?’, and so on. Diachronically, we experience ourselves as a succession of diferent entities, as when Marcel is reeling from Albertine’s escape: [A]t every moment, there was one more of those innumerable and humble “selves” that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it […]. (F, 490; IV 14) The word ‘compose’ here is apt. Landy argues that a unifed enduring self can be constructed despite this disintegration. Indeed, on Landy’s view, the construction is possible because of the fragmentation’s doubled character: we use the (synchronic) multiplicity of faculties to ‘impose order on a diachronically fractured Self ’ (Landy 2004: 102). The basic building blocks, on Landy’s picture, are momentary selves, each ‘a disposition towards a specifc object of attention … comprising a certain hierarchy of faculties and … taking the object in its current, momentary form’ (ibid: 109). These ‘lowest-level selves’ combine into second-level selves, ‘sets of identifcations with diferent objects of desire, belief and adherence’ (ibid: 107), their characteristics settled by the relative prominence of their lower-order components. There is no guarantee of harmony either between lowest order selves or between second-level selves, whose composition is moreover unstable over time. This is what creates the ‘double fragmentation’ of the self. However, this fragmentation can be overcome, if the second-level selves are brought together, in imagination, into an overall Self which – as if it were one and the same over the entire course of its life – dares to call itself “I”. (ibid: 109) This bringing together is diferent to the composition of lowest-level into second-level selves. According to Landy, that latter composition is organic, unstable, non-voluntary, and 97

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ontologically insubstantial (because there’s nothing to those second-level selves except a momentary constellation of lower-level components). By contrast, the composition of the overall Self is a contingent achievement, deliberately constructed using the tools of involuntary memory, perspective, and style (ibid: 111 et seq). Landy’s describes this construction as follows. The starting point is (again) the epiphanies of involuntary memory. It often seems to Marcel that these truths tell him something about the world, but that is not so. In fact, ‘[w]ere Marcel but listening … he would hear the images telling him a truth about his nature’ (ibid: 67, my emphasis): despite everything there exists in him something continuous, ‘an aspect of the mind that organises the data of sense in a comprehensive and consistent manner’. This aspect could be construed in a Kantian way: it consists in categories which structure experience in the same way for all cognising agents, since they are implicit in what it is to be such an agent irrespective of any other distinguishing features that such agents might have. But Landy sees Proust as a follower of Nietzsche rather than Kant (ibid: 113, echoing Alexander Nehamas’s reading of the former in Nehamas 1990).6 On this view, there isn’t any reason to assume convergence: a given person’s perspective is composed of ways of looking and thinking about the world that are particular to them. It represents a specifc and unique temperament, even if it contains some elements that are ubiquitous. This temperament is necessary but elusive, since we can’t perceive it directly (it consists in the medium whereby we perceive anything else). As Proust himself writes: [T]hroughout the whole course of one’s life, one’s egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that “I” itself which is perpetually observing them […]. (F, 532; IV 48) According to Landy, we can learn about that (consistent but idiosyncratic) point of continuity, and also stabilise it, through artistic creation. We discover things about our own temperament by refection on how it shapes the words, music, or pictures we create. More importantly, by treating one’s own life the same way, as a work of art with a distinctive individual style to be developed as fully and uniquely as possible, we create unity out of the disintegration described earlier (Landy 2004: 123–7). Refecting on our synchronic fragmentation lets us identify our underpinning temperament and then cultivate and exercise it to defy the diachronic disintegration, creating a unifed Self which endures over time. Landy’s reading has the satisfying quality of unifying many strands in the novel which might otherwise seem disparate and unconnected: not just Marcel’s own pessimistic and optimistic views of the self, but also the themes of memory, art, and style. It also escapes an obvious philosophical dilemma. If the self is easily grasped through sensory impressions, then it is no better able to endure over time than those impressions themselves, but the more metaphysically rarefed a self we posit to deal with this problem, the greater the epistemic difculty in explaining how we can know about such a thing. Landy’s constructivism dissolves the problem by domesticating the Self as something we ourselves create, and know through the act of creation. Nevertheless, I think we should be hesitant. For one thing, we might doubt the textual evidence. Landy himself relies heavily on Odette’s remarkable capacity for shaping her own fashion and style, and on Marcel’s observations about how our attention can shape other people and give them unity; he says that to solve the conundrum of the self ‘requires no more than Marcel turning upon himself a type of attention [i.e. this type of unity-bestowing 98

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creativity] he has been lavishing on those around him’ (ibid: 117). Marcel never actually does this to himself, though. Proust is a writer who constantly writes about writing, but he never uses the image of self-authorship or writing as a way of creating the self. Indeed, the episode when Marcel fails to recognise himself as the author of his essay in the Figaro (F, 649–50; IV 147–8) rather bespeaks doubt about the unifying power of authorship.7 The closest we come to Landy’s idea is this passage: In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he ofers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. (TR, 273; IV 489–90) But this actually puts things the other way round: one is a reader, not a writer, of oneself, discovering what is already there. To be fair to Landy, his observation is just that this solution is available to Marcel, not that he adopts it. Given Landy’s sensible insistence on distinguishing between Proust and Marcel (Landy 2004: 13–18), we might say: this is a theory of the self which the former leaves implicit, to be inferred by the reader from the latter’s failure to connect the dots. This would be surprising in a novel so full of explicit discussion of the importance and nature of creative art, especially writing, but it isn’t impossible. We can put further pressure on the view, though. Landy’s constructivism plumps for Nietzsche rather than Kant, but this raises problems: if one’s temperament is indeed so particular, why think it is consistent and stable over time? Moreover, even granting that it is, this provides only a partial solution: we achieve diachronic unity, but the cost (as explained above) is accepting synchronic disunity. The unity one gets by living one’s life as though it were a work of art is provisional, retrospective, and selective: we don’t eliminate our myriad drives and faculties, but rather choose selectively to foreground and background those elements (to oneself and others) in a way that generates an apparent perfection (ibid: 124–6). Landy himself is clearly aware of this: he notes that this process is ‘always something of a failure’ and says: What enables us to heal the diachronic rift is, in fact, the very schism of the Self with which this chapter began; like the côté de Méséglise and the côté de Guermantes, the two types of division have, somewhat improbably, come together in the end. (ibid: 126) How satisfying this ‘coming together’ is depends on how far we, like Landy, think the priority is ‘to heal the diachronic rift’. That assumption puts him in good company – it is the bedrock of the lengthy philosophical debate about personal identity over time – but not, I think, the company of Proust. As the discussion in Section ‘Fragmentation’ shows, and as Landy’s own quotations demonstrate, Marcel was equally concerned about both forms of disintegration. Finally, like Bersani, Landy’s theory gives us an unsatisfying treatment of the epiphanies. Involuntary memory plays a role in the process of self-creation for Landy, but it is swiftly passed over for the more exotic creative function played by exercising one’s temperament to create a personal style. Given what Landy says about the force of the latter, it’s unclear whether involuntary memory plays much of a role at all. (Did Odette ever experience her own epiphanies?) 99

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This just doesn’t ring true. Proust invests those scenes with great literary force, especially the culminating one in the Hôtel de Guermantes, and the description of the latter (not, let’s note, the description of Marcel’s subsequent exercises of creativity!) is saturated with joy that the self has been saved, resurrected, and protected from time (e.g. TR, 222; IV 449 et passim). There are reasons (I come to them in Section ‘Doubt’) to doubt whether we should understand the optimism of the epiphanies as Proust’s fnal word on the nature of the self. But an account of the Proustian self which relegates those episodes to (possibly optional) preliminaries is bound to be disappointing, howsoever ingenious and ambitious it might be on its own terms.

Transcendence In this section, I sketch an alternative view of the Proustian self which does give the epiphanies central importance. It diverges from Landy when he chooses a Nietzschean understanding of the underpinning perspective, and instead sketches a more Kantian and less constructivist reading. This takes us back towards Bersani’s Platonic view, on which the self is something transcendental to discover, not something immanent to create, but it avoids the problems raised in Section ‘Timelessness’ because this time both the metaphysics and the epistemology are transcendental. The position is philosophical, but (as should be clear from the ends of the preceding sections) the reasons for adopting it are literary. So, I begin here by returning to the epiphany outside the Guermantes party. Marcel – despondent, inert – is ruing his lack of literary talent, his ‘sterile lucidity’, and his ‘tedious existence’ (TR, 216; IV 444). But then, ‘it is sometimes just at the moment when we think that everything is lost that the intimation arrives which may save us’ (TR, 216; IV 445). Marcel stumbles on an uneven stone, and has a moment of sudden and vivid joy, which he recognises as being the same as he has experienced at certain moments in the past, when he has felt some profound insight to be almost within his grasp. Those times, the insight slipped away. But now, by repeating his stumble and focusing solely on that feeling of joy, he captures it: his stumble was the same as ‘the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Marks’, and this recurrence ‘restored [it] to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place […]’ (TR, 217–8; IV 446). This epiphany is double-layered: Marcel involuntarily recalls his stumbling in Venice because he involuntarily recalls the vivid joy he has felt on previous, albeit incomplete, episodes of involuntary memory. This double layering lets him recognise the pattern in the occasions when he has felt this before. Each involved a striking similarity between present and past experience: between the madeleine he eats as an adult and the fragments his aunt Léonie gave him as a child in Combray (SW, 53–4; I 46–7); between the geometry of the trees near Balbec and the steeples of Martinville (BG, 342; II 76–7; SW, 216; I 179–80). Recognising this pattern then stimulates a further series of involuntary memories as he waits to enter the party: the sound of a spoon on a plate, which echoes the sound of a workman hammering a train wheel; the feel of a starched napkin on his lips, with the same texture as a hotel towel in Balbec; and the sight of a copy of François le Champi by George Sand, which his mother read to him as a child. Over the course of twenty pages, the names of these talismanic experiences (‘the sound of the spoon’, ‘the taste of the madeleine’, ‘the sight of the steeple’, ‘the uneven paving slab’) are intoned repeatedly, the pattern in the prose evoking the patterns of recollection which Marcel has now recognised (TR, 216–35; IV 445–59). He is transported: the epiphany gives him 100

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a joy which was like a certainty and which sufced, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indiference to me [.] (TR, 218; IV 446) Proust bends all his literary powers to emphasising the importance of this moment: it is a crux, emphasised narratively, tonally, and structurally. To explain this, and also how it cures Marcel’s writer’s block (cf. White 1999: 142; Carter 2006: 40; Bersani 2013: 193; Czapski 2018: 26), we must see it as the moment when Marcel has a realisation about his own nature which overcomes his earlier pessimism about the self: he is a stable self that has endured despite the fuidity and mutability of his psychology and perceptions over the course of the novel. Setting aside (for now) the question of whether we should share Marcel’s decisive optimism about this realisation, what exactly is going on here? The sudden insight is, in efect, a transcendental argument (that is, an argument of the form ‘X is a necessary condition for the possibility of Y; Y; therefore X’). The key thing is not the content of what Marcel recalls, but the relationship between that content and what he presently experiences. He engages in ‘no new train of reasoning’ (TR, 217; IV 445), by which (as I argued above) he means methodical deduction from the evidence (TR, 202; IV 433), but – in the characteristic way of transcendental arguments – by refecting on what he already grasps, he is able to learn more. In suddenly recognising a point of exact similarity between a present and a past experience, he also realises that for that recognition to be possible, something must have been present for both experiences, and moreover endured in the interval between them. As Marcel says, almost at the very end of the novel, in the fnal episode of involuntary memory (this time the sound of a bell evoking the garden gate at Combray): When the bell of the garden gate had pealed, I already existed and from that moment onwards, for me still to be able to hear that peal, there must have been no break in continuity, no single second at which I had ceased or rested from existing […]. (TR, 450; IV 624) The self is just the enduring entity implicit in this recognition. How does this compare to the readings we have already explored? Predictably, there is overlap. My view shares the metaphysical endpoint of the Platonic view. On my reading, we need not construe the self as literally ‘extra-temporal’ (Bersani 2013: 22) or ‘outside time’ (Kristeva 1993: 54). Nevertheless, it is certainly something that persists while one lives, and is not identical with any of one’s psychological states at particular times. These facts soothe Marcel’s anxiety about his death (TR 222–3; IV 449–50), either by themselves – because they reveal the existence of the self – or because they point to the grander Platonic conclusion that the self is eternal – and hence reassure him about its non-termination. My view also shares part of the epistemology of the constructive view. But I understand the epistemic story diferently to Landy, because I construe the epiphanies as transcendental arguments. So for me, as for the Platonist, the self is something which exists prior to our search for it, and is discovered (not created) by the same. When Marcel is refecting on the episodes of involuntary memory, he says that their essential character was such that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they were given to me. And I realised that this must be the mark of their authenticity. (TR, 232; IV 457) 101

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Strictly speaking, he is speaking here just about the recognition of similarity between present and past experiences, but the same quality (lack of freedom to choose) is true also of the insights this epiphany prompts about himself. Proust’s language whenever Marcel experiences or refects on an episode of involuntary memory tells the same story: these are ‘discoveries’, ‘revelations’, and moments when by efort he uncovers something that was already there. Landy is right, nevertheless, that there is something of creative activity in the epistemology here. At one point, for example, Marcel muses that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efcacious […]. (G, 69; II 366) These ideas – which is to say, Landy’s ‘stable perspective’ (Landy 2004: 112–3) – ‘compose’ our experience, and do so freely in the sense that the outcome isn’t determined by the reality which prompts that experience. But this composition is nevertheless not under volitional control; one isn’t ‘free to choose’ how one’s experience is shaped, its being necessitated by the character of the perspective itself. Whether we give this a Kantian or a Nietzschean reading, as distinguished above, the creation or ‘composition’ here is something which is done by the self (to experience), not to it. Landy at one point says that ‘[c]reation and discovery come together’ (Landy 2004: 114), but that just highlights the gap in the reading, rather than flling it. Better to say, I think, that the idealism implicit in both ways of understanding the perspective presupposes a self which is prior, and which we therefore discover, not create.

Doubt Here is general worry about views like these, on which the epiphany of involuntary memory is an epistemic key which lets us discover or construct a determinate and enduring self. As Bowie puts it: the sudden ecstatic rediscovery of a past that had been thought forever lost reveals the temporal architecture of the self, the invariant substratum that until then had been present but unrecognised beneath its fuid and accidental surface forms (Bowie 1998: 4–5) Bowie recognises the force of this reading, but urges caution when putting this moment in the context of the whole novel. What happens here is that Marcel has a very profound experience, exciting because it includes the strong conviction that he now grasps something which can replace his prior pessimism about the self. However, that conviction being part of the content of Marcel’s epiphany doesn’t mean that we must accept it without resistance as Proust’s fnal considered view of the self. Bowie’s reasons are twofold. One is that we shouldn’t discard the earlier, inconsistent, sceptical pictures of the self: [T]he clarity and complexity that the books’ earlier images of dispersal possess cannot simply be removed from the record by the last fortifed version of self hood upon which the narrator reports. On the contrary, those earlier explosions and starbursts have such 102

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imaginative authority that they may prove to be the feature of the book that we remember best and cherish most. (ibid: 28–9) This seems right: we are pushed to both endorse and resist Marcel’s transcendental optimism (Bowie 1998: 5). Landy warns us to beware of confating Proust with Marcel, or Proust’s philosophy with Marcel’s (Landy 2004: 25); and there are plenty of places in the narrative where Marcel is straightforwardly signalled as an unreliable narrator. So, it seems plausible that the ambiguity we end up with is deliberate: Proust leaves open whether Marcel’s concluding optimism really falsifes the pessimistic view, which has been conveyed with troubling ‘clarity and complexity’ throughout (Bowie 1998: 28, and see also Pippin 2005: 317). Bowie’s second argument is that Marcel’s epiphany is unreliable, for the same reasons he himself has articulated concerning his experiences elsewhere in the novel. Bowie says that the ‘performance of this harmonising and integrating role … [could be] no more than a lightweight intellectual superstructure and an air of righteous thinking’ (ibid: 5–6). It feels like Marcel has grasped a deep truth about himself, but his feelings (and ours!) can mislead. Maybe this is just a set of powerful positive emotions – joy, happiness, and the rest – with some superfcial rationalisation (an ‘intellectual superstructure’) intended to vindicate them by short-circuiting our scepticism. The problem is that we can’t eliminate error by fat. The dreamer can think with complete certainty ‘I am not dreaming, I am awake!’, but that doesn’t prove anything, howsoever convinced they are by the intensity of their conviction. Marcel’s ‘air of righteous thinking’ might be similarly illusory. As Bowie puts it, ‘the centralised and resolved self on which the novel ends may be seen not as a redemption but as one momentary geometry among many others’ (ibid: 29).8 One reason to resist this second conclusion is that it clashes with Bowie’s own embrace of ambiguity: if Marcel’s optimistic conclusion is deluded, then in fact Proust is presenting a univocally pessimistic stance (which his narrator, in the end, is unable to share). Another is that I think the transcendental reading I gave in Section ‘Transcendence’ can adequately respond to Bowie’s argument, albeit that it needs some refnement to do so. When describing the epiphanies, Marcel tends to focus on similarities in the structure of experiences, rather than simply their content. Involuntary memory is triggered by recognising of patterns: the same stumbling movement in the Hôtel courtyard and in Venice; the geometrical identity between the relative locations of the Martinville spires and the Houdimesnil trees (which ‘formed a pattern which I was not seeing for the frst time’ (BG, 342, my emphasis; II 76–7)). In Swann’s Way, Marcel encounters three alleys and a wall, and their arrangement makes him ‘instinctively’ (or ‘involuntarily’, translating the French ‘involontairement’) exclaim ‘The Church!’, recalling the church in Combray (SW, 72–3; I 62). In The Captive, Marcel attempts ‘to link to one another the fragmentary and interrupted lines of the structure which at frst had been almost hidden in mist’ (C, 425, my emphasis; III 874). Most emphatically, when writing about Vinteuil’s precious theme, he calls it that distinctive strain the sameness of which – for whatever its subject, it remains identical with itself – proves the permanence of the elements that compose his soul. (C, 291; III 761–2) Vinteuil’s theme is always associated with the epiphanies (cf. TR, 217; IV 445). Here, Proust explicitly links it to the transcendental upshot of those epiphanies – the enduring self 9 – while also emphasising its abstract, structural nature. The ‘strain’ is not identical with any 103

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particular appearance it makes in Vinteuil’s works, any more than with any particular performance: it is a multiply realisable structure which we can recognise in these diferent tokens. That we can do so proves something about the self too. Apprehending structure (and comparing structures of experiences separated in time) is diferent to simply experiencing a sensory content. The former, unlike the latter, presupposes not just a perspective, but also a capacity for comparison through refection. Bowie is surely right that something that feels like an epiphany might still be mistaken. Maybe when the narrator stumbles on the steps of the Hôtel, he at that moment also fabricates the memory of doing the same on the steps of St Mark’s; after all, he never described this moment when originally recounting his trip to Venice (F, 715–53; IV 202–35). But even if this is an error, it is an error of a particular kind: a misrecognition of identical structures across time. And from that error we could deduce that we are the kinds of entities that can – through comparative refection – recognise such higher-order similarities between experiences separated by time, just as we could from the epiphanies if they are veridical as Marcel says. In other words, even if Bowie is right about the potential for error here, Marcel’s optimistic conclusion about the enduring self would still be secure. It is – for the other reasons Bowie gives – not the only conception of the self in A La Recherche. But it emerges unscathed from Bowie’s scepticism.

Conclusion I have argued that we should understand the epiphanies as moments of transcendental reasoning, where Marcel deduces the existence of an enduring self from the fact that he has been able to recognise a present experience as being structurally the same as some previous experience. This retains the plausible metaphysical conclusion of the Platonist reading, while jettisoning its problematic epistemological baggage; and it shares the attractive idealism of Landy’s reading, but in a Kantian (not Nietzschean) form on which the self is something we discover rather than create. It provides a more satisfying reading of the epiphanies, while also being consistent with Bowie’s observation that we shouldn’t focus on those passages to the exclusion of the ‘images of fragmentation’ which paint a more pessimistic picture for much of the book. I conclude with some brief refections on the interaction between philosophical and literary criticism in this reading. These modes of textual engagement might, at frst sight, seem mutually destructive. For one thing, as Proust himself observes: ‘[a] work in which there are [philosophical] theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it’ (TR, 236; IV 460): trying to do philosophy through literature often just produces poor writing, because the norms of philosophical reasoning don’t make for good literary fction. Relatedly, relying on those norms in one’s literary engagement can just lead one to be obtuse, as in Jonathan Dancy’s virtuosic but frustrating essay ‘New Truths in Proust?’ (1995), which fllets the novel into a fimsy argument against Hume’s bundle theory of personal identity, then archly dismisses it as either unoriginal or unsound. Without prejudice to the philosophical points Dancy makes, it’s hard not to conclude that if this is what follows from using philosophical tools to analyse Proust, it’s hardly worth the efort. In the opposite direction, one might worry that the features picked out by a literary analysis – narrative structure, character development, tone, vocabulary, pace, pattern, rhyme, imagery, and so on – are irrelevant to the norms of philosophical writing, at least in the analytic tradition. Indeed, a text’s containing elements which are susceptible to this sort of practical criticism might indicate failure as a piece of philosophy, since it would mean that 104

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the efect of the text on the reader was not merely to do with the transparent and methodical advancement of deductively sound arguments. On this way of understanding philosophy, we should instead aim for is a style shorn of questionable literary features, perhaps what Nussbaum characterises as a style correct, scientifc, abstract, hygienically pallid, a style that seemed to be regarded as an all-purpose solvent in which philosophical issues of any kind at all could be efciently disentangled. (Nussbaum 2005: 148) To some extent, these lines of thought depend on unfair caricatures of philosophical fction, and of analytic philosophical non-fction. But even if they are unfair, their familiarity might explain the strangeness of trying to combine philosophical and literary criticism in an essay like this. Nevertheless, I think they can be coherently deployed together. At various points in this chapter, I have evaluated philosophical readings by using tools of literary criticism, or suggested that Proust makes philosophical points by literary means. I hope that in doing so, I have shown how the literary features of A La Recherche are relevant and important for a philosophical reading. There are two main mechanisms I have highlighted in my own reading. One is Proust’s use of literary technique – pace, tone, vocabulary – to afect our attention. The epiphanies, in particular, are invested with great narrative and stylistic force, which (I have argued) counts against readings which treat them as peripheral. The other is his use of technique to guide the reader’s normative judgement. In Section ‘Timelessness’, I argued that Bersani’s ‘detached and intellectual’ Platonist reading of the epiphanies was undermined by Proust’s forceful repetition of positive emotional terms in the relevant passage: ‘joy’ or its derivatives appears thirteen times, ‘happiness’ or ‘happy’ eleven times, ‘pleasure’ nine times, and so on. The repetition draws our attention to this moment, and – besides giving the lie to the idea that this is ‘detached’ – implies an evaluative stance, which is that what has happened is good. These are plainly philosophical features of the novel – that these passages are salient, and that we are invited to adopt a particular normative stance – which we appreciate and understand by engaging fully with the literary qualities of Proust’s novel. We miss part of the philosophy if we don’t attend to those qualities. If that’s so, it suggests a way in which analytic philosophers might engage with fction without simply flleting novels to extract (meagre) arguments: reading (and criticising) them as novels is necessary for full philosophical understanding. And maybe – since we are writers, as well as readers – it suggests something even more exciting, which is that the project of analytic philosophy might be conducted in literary forms other than the ‘hygienically pallid’ essays which Nussbaum decried.10

Notes 1 See also Kristeva (1993: 53–4), Carter (2006), and Deleuze (1973). 2 Landy sometimes uses the word ‘soul’ (2004: 109–11), but only to describe the complex moral psychologies of Plato and Augustine, rather than to imply that the question of the self is the same as the question of one’s survival after death. 3 Cf. e.g. Scott (2009). 4 In a non-Platonist variant of this thought, Jonathan Dancy thinks that the episodes of involuntary memory are supposed to prove the existence of a persisting self because they involve the self experiencing both past and present simultaneously (an idea which Dancy rejects as ‘highly tendentious’) (Dancy 1995: 20–4). His evidence is here:

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5 6 7 8 9 10

Dancy reads this literally, but I think the simultaneity here is fgurative, capturing a disorienting quality of Marcel’s present experience. Dancy’s reasons for rejecting this reading are unclear; he remarks only that ‘the feature ofered seems not to be a feature of the content of the experience’ (Dancy 1995: 22, my emphasis). For others, see Rorty (1989: 100); Beckett (1999); and Bersani (2013: 104). Thanks to Tom Stern for pointing this out. Thanks to Anna Elsner for this point. Dancy develops a similar line of criticism to this: trying to derive an enduring self from our present recollection of past experiences commits the fallacy of thinking that ‘one must have the temporal qualities of that which one experiences’ (1995: 22–7). Saying ‘soul’ rather than ‘self ’ is here just for emphasis, I think. My great thanks to Harry Adamson, Gabriel Doctor, and Tom Stern; this paper grew out of conversations we had as we read In Search of Lost Time together between 2009 and 2012. Thanks also to Anna Elsner and Tom for their patient and generous support as editors; and for other conversations on Proust to Jennifer Corns, Gary Kemp, Callum Weir, and James Williams.

References Beckett, S. (1999) “Proust” in Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit, London: John Calder, pp. 9–93. Bersani, L. (2013) Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, 2nd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, M. (1998) Proust Among the Stars, London: HarperCollins. Czapski, J. (2018) Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, trans. E. Karpeles, New York: New York Review of Books Classics. Carter, W. C. (2006) ‘The Vast Structure of Recollection’ in R. Bales ed. The Cambridge Companion to Proust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 25–41. Clark-Doane, J. (2020) Morality and Mathematics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dancy, J. (1995) “New Truths in Proust?”, The Modern Languages Review 90, 1: 18–28. Deleuze, G. (1973) Proust and Signs, New York: Penguin. Hume, D. (1978) A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, C. M. (1996) The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kristeva, J. (1993) Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. S. Bann, New York: Columbia University Press. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nehamas, A. (1990). Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. (2005). “The ‘Ancient Quarrel’: Literature and Moral Philosophy” in S. K. George ed. Ethics, Literature, and Theory: An Introductory Reader, Lantham: Rowland and Littlefeld, pp. 139–52. Parft, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon. Pippin, R. (2005). The Persistence of Subjectivity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scott, D. (2009) Plato’s Meno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Small, H. (2007) The Long Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press. White, E. (1999) Proust: A Life, New York: Penguin.

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7 KNOWLEDGE Adam Watt

The world of À la recherche du temps perdu is a vast and complex knowledge economy.1 At its centre stands Proust’s narrator, an ‘epistemologically voracious subject’ (french 2019: 66) driven by an unremitting desire for understanding. Knowledge is the narrator’s oxygen. It fuels a rich, vibrant, multifaceted engagement with the world around him and with the people in it. Where knowledge is withheld, or inaccessible, his mind is quickly invaded by jealousy, fear, insecurity and neurosis. This is not to say, however, that when starved of knowledge, the narrator’s energy dwindles and with it his capacity to hold together the unruly tangle of threads that make up the novel. Rather, and this is a dimension of the Proustian knowledge economy that is of fundamental importance, not knowing for the narrator prompts speculation, hypothesis and inventiveness, major motor forces behind the novel’s forward momentum. As Joshua Landy puts it, Proust’s protagonist ‘must learn not only that knowledge is sometimes inaccessible (and where accessible, almost always dissatisfying), but also that it is sometimes unendurable’ (Landy 2004: 85), and the protagonist’s responses to this situation expand and extend the narrative world of the novel whilst repeatedly posing challenges to reader and narrator alike. A reminder of the centrality of knowledge to the work as a whole might be taken from Gilles Deleuze’s highly infuential characterisation of À la recherche as ‘le récit d’un apprentissage’ (the story of an apprenticeship, Deleuze 1970): the novel is intrinsically concerned with the process of coming by knowledge, in the sense of wisdom (‘la sagesse’), knowing something to be the case (‘le savoir’), and applied konwledge (‘le savoir-faire’). We will return to these categories below. In his much-read early essay on Proust, Walter Benjamin argues that ‘all great works of literature found a genre or dissolve one’ (Benjamin 1999: 197). With this in mind, I would venture that the prominence and importance of knowledge are such in À la recherche du temps perdu that we might wish to think of it as a new genre apart—the knovel: a work always and everywhere  concerned with knowledge. Knowledge takes many shades and colourings in À la recherche—from the quasi-intractable (knowing oneself, knowing others) and the profound (knowing right from wrong, knowing how to act), to the more humdrum which, in Proust’s hands, can itself be highly revelatory (knowing where one is, what time it is, what the weather is like).2 Proust’s novel has sheer breadth and capaciousness that mean the potential scope of a discussion of what knowledge is or might be conceived as within it is well beyond the limitations of a single chapter. In what follows, then, I take a necessarily selective approach. I begin by DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-10

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asking what might be meant by ‘Proust’s knowledge’, a question considerably more complex than it might frst appear. Second, I broach the question of modes of knowing in the novel and in exploring this I consider some of the novel’s tutelary fgures, the guides and mentors who assist the protagonist in the various stages of his apprenticeship. Finally, I close with an examination of what are undoubtedly the best-known pages of Proust’s novel to show how these connect, in characteristically plural, reticulated ways, with the question of knowledge.

‘No jam, no ducks’ At the start of his chapter on ‘Art’ in Proust Among the Stars, Malcolm Bowie reminds us of Mary McCarthy’s argument that novels are often what Bowie describes as ‘lumpy with undisguised “fact” and could be put to use for all manner of everyday purposes’. From Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, he continues, quoting McCarthy, ‘“you can learn how to make strawberry jam […] and how to reap a feld and hunt ducks”’ (McCarthy 1962: 259, quoted in Bowie 1998: 68). Many readers of Proust, however, hold his work to function on a higher aesthetic plane, Bowie argues, one far removed from the practical, instrumental matters of tending the land or preparing conserves: ‘No jam, no ducks’ (Bowie 1998: 68). What Bowie shows in his chapter is that the view of Proust as an ivory-tower exponent of art for art’s sake does an injustice to the nuance and richness of ways in which À la recherche frames art not as an enterprise wholly distinct from the realm of daily life ( jam-making and its cognates, as it were) or that of business and the commercial concerns of proft and loss (reaping a feld, hunting ducks and so on), but intertwined with them both. Proust’s novel may not feel ‘lumpy with undisguised “fact”’, but I would like to suggest that it is nevertheless, as I have indicated above, implicitly and explicitly concerned with the nature, accessibility and value of knowledge from start to fnish. There may be no thinly veiled lessons in jam-making, but sufcient dishes are discussed and consumed (these stretch well beyond the much discussed madeleine and the bœuf à la gelée from Françoise’s kitchen) for a reader of Proust to garner a not insignifcant awareness of culinary trends during the belle époque.3 Proust distributes his own knowledge in a range of ways, which is how, to return briefy to Bowie again, his novel never feels ‘lumpy’. Proust’s knowledge of the combinatory complexity of preparing beef in aspic is granted to Françoise, who approaches the dish ‘selon des méthodes sues d’elle seule’ (I 437; ‘by methods known to her alone’, BG, 18) but it is used as a prompt for a diferent sort of knowledge to come to the fore. In ofering his account of Françoise’s care and discernment in preparing the dish, the narrator compares her to Michelangelo, drawing on a range of details concerning his sculpture, biography and working methods that demonstrate the narrator’s own form of expertise: his knowledge of art and artists but also his capacity (so important for the work as a whole) to recognise shared traits and fliations that may not at frst be obvious to the uninitiated. This frst example ofers some preliminary steps towards an answer to our question ‘What is Proust’s knowledge?’ Knowledge in À la recherche is seldom presented to the reader in isolation, celebrated for its own sake, left lumpy within the narrative. We can look to the author’s correspondence for the sources of his knowledge: the many letters Proust writes to friends and acquaintances to confrm or discover details that will fnd their way into his novel. Luc Fraisse has characterised the correspondence as ‘a free sedimentation of thoughts’ (Fraisse 1998: 107, my translation), a sort of mulch of knowledge and know-how that in time gave life and structure to Proust’s novel. From etymologies and genealogies to architectural details or information on the sort of blooms that are available from Florentine fower-sellers on the Ponte Vecchio in spring: all these nuggets of information, and countless others besides, are 108

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sought out in Proust’s letters. Or rather, confrmation of his hunches and imaginings are sought, often after—as scholars have shown—his initial drafts for this or that part of the novel have taken shape.4 Knowledge from an extraordinary range of felds fuels Proust’s imagination and enriches the pages of his novel. Much of it comes from his early education and subsequent, curiosity-driven reading of books, journals and newspapers, in which no domain was out of bounds.5 A measure of his attitude to knowledge can be gleaned from a letter written to his friend the scientist Armand de Guiche in 1918, where Proust challenges Guiche’s scepticism about the potential for overlap or continuity between the arts and the sciences. ‘Pourquoi voulez-vous que la littérature soit un jardin à part, et non pas une fouille un peu profonde dans les divers jardins des autres?’, he asks (‘Why do you insist that literature should be an isolated garden, and not an extensive search of the diverse gardens of others?’).6 ‘Une fouille’—a search or excavation—is of course in keeping with the notion of questing and searching for knowledge and the notion of apprenticeship, to which we alluded above. Proust’s knowledge, then, is at once factual and what we might call networked: his extensive knowledge of process, practice and fact (whether culinary endeavour, military strategy or botanical category) is stitched into the narrative of his novel in ways that underline commonality, connection and continuity in the world where a lesser observer-participant might see none. Françoise’s kitchen errands are allied to Michelangelo’s selection of marble; the study of wartime manoeuvres reveals hidden patterns and structural echoes across time; and the species of fowers in the beds that form a backdrop to the narrator’s frst encounter with Gilberte become so many windows on the perception and construction of beauty and our sensory engagement with it. But knowledge of the world and its bewitching variousness is only one dimension of what I have called the ‘knowledge economy’ of the novel. Every bit as important, and much more challenging in its status and potential for disruption or instilling instability, is what one critic has aptly called ‘the “knowability” of other people’ (Prendergast 2013: 10), about which the narrator has ever increasing doubts.7 Proust’s knovel is of course a fction of self-discovery, a journey towards self-knowledge and self-understanding, but along the way one of the primary sources of fascination, frustration, illumination and pain for the narrator is the business of trying to (get to) know other people. To take a group of key examples, Swann, Legrandin, Odette, Gilberte, Charlus, Saint-Loup, Elstir and, above all, Albertine represent so many mysteries or puzzles to measure up and fgure out. And coming to a knowledge of them is a necessarily iterative process of trial and error, of fruitless search and revelatory happenstance. The processes of learning that contribute to the acquisition of knowledge of others are always interconnected with his concomitant arrival at a knowledge of the world in which they move, the particulars of time, place and milieu against which they take form and substance before his eyes. Beyond very broad generalities, it is not possible to ascribe to a particular category the knowledge garnered by the protagonist through his relations with each of the eight individuals just mentioned. Elstir represents the world of art, of course, but by no means this alone; Charlus is a larger-than-life embodiment of ancien régime nobility, but much more besides; Saint-Loup is an aristocrat, intellectual, political progressive, soldier; and so on. As Mary Rawlinson succinctly puts it, ‘each character in the Recherche is in fact a series of characters’ (Rawlinson 1982: 11). Each of these characters to a greater or lesser extent provides evidence of the plurality and mutability at the heart of the individual—his or her status, name, occupation, reputation, the way they are perceived by others, their sexual preferences—these elements shift and alter, causing the narrator repeatedly to question the feasibility of ever actually knowing who they are. Though he gains considerable knowledge of artistic practice and vision from Elstir, knowledge that will shape his own aesthetic that emerges towards 109

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the close of the novel, he also learns how one individual can harbour a sensibility at once artistic and vulgar (embodied in his two appellations, Elstir and ‘M. Tiche’).8 Knowledge of a similar duality (or, very often, plurality) emerges from his acquaintance with all the other individuals mentioned above. Drawing on this summary discussion and an awareness of the patterns that emerge in this domain elsewhere in the novel, it is possible to identify three key elements that tie together the protagonist’s encounters with the ‘knowability’ of others. First, the resistance of most individuals’ complex, polyvalent character to being known in any manner that could be construed as comprehensive or defnitive; second, the protagonist’s nevertheless unstinting desire to know and understand those he meets; and third, the resulting hybrid or manifold nature of the knowledge thereby acquired. Knowledge of the other, in Proust, is always partial, provisional, apt to morph into something new and unexpected, or to disappear, displaced by something new, like clouds cleaving and shape-shifting from one form to another in the sky.9 Albertine is of course the individual who poses the most complex and enduring epistemological challenge to the protagonist. Her dynamism and quicksilver mutability combine to accentuate her allure (at once—in French—her attractiveness and the speed at which she moves) whilst keeping her always just out of his hermeneutic reach. His love for her becomes a need to know, but knowledge of the truth of her past and her sexual identity, though irresistible, is a constant threat to the protagonist’s own mental stability. He is, as he sums up in Albertine disparue, ‘tossed to and fro […] between the desire to know and the fear of sufering’ (F, 595; IV 102 ‘ballotté […] entre le désir de savoir et la peur de soufrir’). The pivotal place of knowing—or not knowing, as is so often the case—in the protagonist’s relationship with Albertine stands out in the following passages taken from the early part of Albertine disparue, where he is striving to come to terms with her departure. The narrator looks to art for an analogy for the situation in which he fnds himself: Novelists sometimes pretend in an introduction that while travelling in a foreign country they have met somebody who has told them the story of another person’s life. They then withdraw in favour of this chance acquaintance, and the story that he tells them is nothing more or less than their novel. Thus the life of Fabrice del Dongo was related to Stendhal by a canon of Padua. How gladly would we, when we are in love, that is to say when another person’s existence seems to us mysterious, fnd some such well-informed narrator! And undoubtedly he exists. Do we not ourselves frequently relate the story of some woman or other quite dispassionately to one of our friends, or to a stranger, who has known nothing of her love-afairs and listens to us with keen interest? [qui ne connaissaient rien de ses amours et nous écoutent avec curiosité] Such a person as I was when I spoke to Bloch about the Princesse de Guermantes or Mme Swann, such a person existed, who could have spoken to me of Albertine, such a person exists always … but we never come across him. It seemed to me that if I had been able to fnd women who had known her I should have learned everything I did not yet know [si j’avais pu trouver des femmes qui l’eussent connue, j’eusse appris tout ce que j’ignorais]. And yet to such strangers it must have seemed that nobody could have known as much about her life as I did [il eût dû sembler que personne autant que moi ne pouvait connaître sa vie]. (F, 629–30; IV 131, my emphasis) Loving someone is framed as the experience of encountering mystery in their existence and wanting to know more.10 The narrator’s belated realisation here is that the plurality of character he has gradually come to know in others is in fact a trait he himself shares and one that 110

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at this point impedes his ability to know and understand Albertine’s reasons for feeing their shared life in his Paris apartment, since his present self is unable to access the knowledge and insight of his earlier selves. His apparent awareness of their co-existence (albeit without intercommunication) anticipates the involuntary memory experiences that begin in the Guermantes’ courtyard in the novel’s culminating volume and lead to his realisation that ‘all these materials for a work of literature were simply my past life’ (TR, 258; ‘tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée’, IV, 478). A little later in the same refective passage, the narrator draws again on the lexical feld of knowledge to underscore the turmoil of his predicament: Whether or not I could learn anything from them, the only women towards whom I felt attracted where those whom Albertine had known or whom she might have known, women of her own background or of the sort with whom she liked to associate, in a word those women who had in my eyes the distinction of resembling her or of being of the type that might have appealed to her [celles qui lui eussent plu]. (F, 630–1, my emphasis; IV 132) The possibility of knowledge of Albertine’s identity (or the impossibility of such) is one of the primary motors of the narrative in À la recherche, a desire that grows from attraction to infatuation to what verges upon an obsessional neurosis in La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue. (As Pippin puts it, jealousy in the novel is ‘a function of a general state of unknowingness about the other’ (Pippin 2021: 203)).11 By the time Albertine fees the apartment that has become their shared prison, as the passage above indicates, knowledge of his beloved can come to the narrator only from those she knew or could have known, with a merging of the epistemological and the physical in Albertine’s purported ‘knowledge’ of other women and their ability to give her pleasure taking us into the realm of bodily intimacy or, as we might put it, ‘carnal knowledge’. (For more on pleasure and knowledge, see our fnal section below.)

Modes of Knowing Physical intimacy is of course one mode of knowing among many to feature in Proust’s novel. As noted in our introduction, since Gilles Deleuze’s highly infuential Proust et les signes, a fruitful and enlightening approach to the novel is to think of it as the story of an apprenticeship, or perhaps more properly several apprenticeships. By this account, the unfolding of the protagonist’s life can be considered as a series of interconnecting processes of discovery in various domains, defned by Deleuze as the realm of ‘mondanité’ or the social world; the realm of love; the realm of sensory impressions and the realm of art, towards which all the other realms converge (Deleuze 1970: 12–22). I would like to argue that his initiation in each of these domains is shaped by various tutelary fgures, whose wisdom and knowhow (as well, intriguingly, as their failings) shape the protagonist’s knowledge of the world and in turn his understanding of his place in it. These fgures represent diferent modes of knowing—diferent sorts of engagement with the world around them—and would include Swann, Legrandin, Norpois and the protagonist’s grandmother as well as Cottard, Brichot, Elstir and Bergotte. Although this list is by no means exhaustive of all those who shape the protagonist’s epistemological Bildung, reasons of space mean that a degree of selectiveness is nevertheless necessary here. As such, rather than attempting to ofer an account of how the Jewish socialite and clubman, the snob, the diplomat, the grandmother, doctor, academic, painter and writer each imprints on Proust’s protagonist a specifc set of attitudes towards 111

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knowledge and know-how, I will concentrate my comments on just two fgures that strike me as pivotal in the ways in which they school the protagonist, but also in the ways in which their role as purveyors of knowledge is entangled with the problem of the ‘(un)knowability’ of other people discussed above. The fgures I will consider are Charles Swann and Elstir, who in a range of ways enrich and inform the narrator’s existence. Swann’s relation to knowledge is intriguing for protagonist and reader alike. First, as regards the status of knowledge in the novel, his story is a special case, since the unfolding of his courtship of Odette, and their marriage, took place well before the narrator’s birth, and are only known to him via indirect means, told to him ‘many years’ after he had left the Combray of his childhood (SW, 221; I 184). Additionally, Swann represents for the reader, as critics have long observed, a foreshadowing or fore-knowledge of the man the young protagonist will become: a connoisseur, an outsider with privileged access to the most exclusive ‘in groups’, a jealous lover, a self-deceiver. He is at once connoisseur and dilettante, an appreciator of the fne arts and a seeker of pleasures both high and low. His essay on Vermeer is abandoned: his knowledge of the arts feeds not publications but associations made, in his mind, between the people he gets to know and works of art with which he is intimately familiar. (Most famously, his knowledge transforms the protagonist’s family kitchen maid into Giotto’s ‘Charity’, but equally Swann’s coachman, who assists him on his nocturnal search for Odette during their courtship—another of the novel’s knowledge-driven quests—is in his mind an embodiment of Rizzo’s bust of the Doge Loredan.) Swann is a family friend who moves in circles wholly distinct from the world of Combray: in many ways, he is the fgure that points, for the young protagonist, to the realms of opportunity—social, material, aesthetic, erotic—that lie beyond the narrow limits of the provincial town where everyone ‘knows’ everyone else. Swann’s allure for the young narrator might be said to stem from his capacity as a code-switcher, someone with breadth and depth of knowledge that remain hidden except when circumstance dictates. When he frst speaks of Bergotte (‘I know him well’, SW, 115; ‘Je le connais beaucoup’, I 96) and of Berma with the young protagonist (‘she’s only an actress, if you like, but you know I don’t believe very much in the “hierarchy” of the arts’, ibid. [original emphasis]), he initiates him into modes of thinking about and responding to art, both personally and critically, that are of vital importance for the protagonist’s own developing aesthetic understanding. In Swann, we have someone who knows art and artists, writers and actresses (with all the demi-monde latitude of that term), someone who is as comfortable in the company of a ‘little seamstress’ who waits for him on a street corner as he is in the illustrious company that resides in the faubourg Saint-Germain. It is Swann’s knowledge that ignites the protagonist’s fascination with Balbec: ‘Yes indeed I know Balbec! [ Je crois bien que je connais Balbec!]’, Swann says: The church there, built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and still half Romanesque, is perhaps the most curious example to be found of our Norman Gothic, and so singular that one is tempted to describe it as Persian in its inspiration. (SW, 459; I 377–8) Swann’s knowledge of architectural history fuels the protagonist’s excitement about visiting this particular locale and later, in situ, when he confesses his disappointment with what he fnds there, it is Elstir’s specifc brand of knowledge that allows him to recalibrate his appreciation of the church façade (BG, 485–6; II 196–7). We will return to Elstir shortly. For now, let us consider just one more brief example of Swann’s role as a tutelary fgure. In the frst part of À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feurs, as his relationship with Gilberte develops, 112

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the protagonist’s connection with the Swann family in Paris evolves to a degree he had never imagined possible in Combray. A familiar of the Swann household, he is introduced into the sanctuary that is Swann’s private library; yet, his emotional state is such that he is unable to learn anything from his idol: Swann, with an infnite benevolence and as though he were not over-burdened with glorious occupations, would take me into his library and there allow me for an hour on end to respond in stammered monosyllables, timid silences broken by brief and incoherent bursts of courage, to observations of which my excitement prevented me from understanding a single word [m’empêchait de comprendre un seul mot]; would show me works of art and books which he thought likely to interest me, things as to which I had no doubt that they infnitely surpassed in beauty anything that the Louvre or the Bibliothèque Nationale possessed, but at which I found it impossible to look. (BG, 94; I 500) Swann here is a gatekeeper of knowledge and one willing to share the treasures of his inner sanctum, opening up the realms of art and culture to his young guest, but instead of enlightenment and a deepening of his own knowledge, the protagonist comes away only with fustered embarrassment and dismay. The resources of Swann’s social poise, his ability to converse with wit and charm and ‘the style of the Guermantes set’ (SW, 407; I 336, ‘le tour de la coterie Guermantes’) cannot be transmitted to the young protagonist in the space of a few hours in a library, so over-stimulated is he by the experience itself. He can no more appreciate the bindings on the books or the qualities of the objects profered than he can absorb and beneft from Swann’s words. Rather, the narrator’s somewhat desperate summary of these missed opportunities is itself couched in terms of knowledge: ‘I no longer knew what I was doing [ je ne savais plus ce que je faisais] (BG, 95; I 500; original emphasis). Much, much later in the narrative the protagonist fnds himself in another library similarly surrounded by the trappings of knowledge. There—fnally—is he able to realise how he might fulfl his vocation, subsequent to the series of revelations of involuntary memory that transport him to various points in his past, whilst moving between the courtyard and the ‘salon-bibliothèque’ of the Prince de Guermantes. And there the protagonist realises, though as we’ve just seen his early tutelary eforts came to nought, it is Swann who is at the origin of the novel he feels ready to write: the raw material of my experience, which would also be the raw material of my book, came to me from Swann, not merely because so much of it concerned Swann himself and Gilberte, but because it was Swann who […] had inspired in me the wish to go to Balbec […] and but for this I should never have known Albertine. (TR, 278–9; IV 493–4) And thus the workings of the novel’s knowledge economy are laid bare. Elstir, to turn now to our second tutelary fgure, also has a vitally important role in the protagonist’s development. Had it not been for Swann, he would not have been in Balbec to meet Albertine, but without Elstir he would not have been introduced to her, nor indeed to the painter’s artistic mode of engagement with the world. Elstir, then, like Swann, is at least a double conduit: the link to an object of desire, Albertine (Gilberte in Swann’s case) and doyen of an unknown but irresistible domain, the world of artistic creation (that of the Faubourg St Germain for Swann). At key moments, Elstir presents accounts of art and artistic 113

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practice that have a profound impact on the protagonist’s developing sensibilities and are founded on a very particular sort of knowledge that I consider in some detail in what follows. It is Elstir who ofers a ‘reading’ of the façade of the Balbec church that illuminates and animates what the protagonist had found fat and uninspiring in situ following his lengthy romantic imaginings prior to his arrival on the Normandy coast. But before we come to this lesson in reading, the narrator explains that it is Elstir’s practice to ‘strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual notion’, to ‘[make] himself deliberately ignorant before sitting down to paint’, in order to capture what he actually perceives before him rather than what his intelligence, his knowledge of the world, would dictate, since ‘what one knows does not belong to oneself ’ (BG, 485; II 196 ‘ce qu’on sait n’est pas à soi’).12 This attitude to intelligence is of a piece with Proust’s narrator’s position, arrived at in part, thanks to various instances of involuntary memory: experiences that underline for him the value of that which is unfltered, unmediated by acts of mind or will. Long before Proust’s narrator arrives at his own mature appreciation of how his engagement with the world might lead to a work of art, the protagonist is privy to a sort of epistemological position statement from Elstir. The painter observes that the missteps of one’s early life are not to be regretted but are crucial in arriving at a fuller understanding of the world. Never to have done something one might regret is to have a wisdom that is ‘negative and sterile’; rather, he argues: We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey […] which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. (BG, 513) ‘On ne reçoit pas la sagesse, il faut la découvrir soi-même après un trajet que personne ne peut faire pour nous, ne peut nous épargner, car elle est un point de vue sur les choses’, II 219. These words, combined with the striking material illustrations of Elstir’s applied approach that the protagonist encounters in the painter’s studio at Balbec, are crucial empirical foundations in the protagonist’s personal ‘journey’ towards the sagesse, or experiential wisdom required to fulfl his vocation, the culmination of which comes, as noted above, in the Guermantes’ library. Here, many years after Swann’s death and Elstir’s lessons in light and line, the narrator formulates his own account of what is of value to the artist: ‘What we have not had to decipher’, he notes, to elucidate by our own eforts, what was clear before we looked at it, is not ours [ce qui était clair avant nous, n’est pas à nous]. From ourselves comes only that which we drag forth from the obscurity which lies within us, that which to others is unknown [et que ne connaissent pas les autres]. (TR, 234; IV 459) Given the importance of the involuntary in À la recherche, it may seem peculiar to note the unmistakable emphasis on active pursuit (‘discover’, ‘decipher’, ‘drag forth’) in both of these statements about artistic practice. It bears clarifying, then, that Proust does not reject the notion of knowledge per se as a basis for artistic endeavour, in favour of what might be revealed without a conscious application of mind: rather, he considers it of fundamental importance that the artist interrogate her or his knowledge and the impact of the impressions left on them by experience, in lieu of mechanically reproducing ‘what they know’ in their 114

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chosen medium. It is for this reason, the necessary combination of involuntary experience and active, transformative engagement, that the narrator is able to famously claim that the only true book […] does not have to be “invented” by a great writer—for it exists already in each one of us—[it] has to be translated by him. The function and task of a writer are those of a translator (TR, 247; IV 469) In these heady, dense pages, Proust’s narrator, moving at speed, seems to categorise knowledge into at least three categories: what is obvious at frst glance; what we are on some level aware of but what needs actively to be ‘drawn out’ from within; and fnally what is deeply interior, known only to me and what, handled appropriately, may become the substance of a work of art.

Te Taste of Knowledge My fnal section borrows its title from a rich and subtle book by Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, based on his sparkling Empson Lectures at Cambridge in 2003 and which addresses a range of questions germane to our discussion here. Wood suggests, indeed, that ‘[Proust’s] novel’s persons, places, events and long theoretical passages certainly add up to a philosophy of knowledge’ (what I earlier called a complex knowledge economy), ‘but they also add up to what’s wrong with that theory if we think there is something wrong with it’ (Wood 2005: 119). Wood highlights tensions between passages concerning attitudes to knowledge, the shortcomings of positions the narrator takes up and the gaps in his criticisms of those held by others. Rather than extend this line of enquiry, thoughtfully pursued by Wood in light of Martha Nussbaum’s analysis of love and jealousy in Proust, I want to close, instead, with a consideration of the notion of taste in relation to knowledge, via a revisiting of the best-known of Proustian passages—the madeleine scene—in order to rethink its relation to the novel’s epistemological currents. This is a passage in which taste plays a pivotal role, as is well known; my purpose is to tease out how taste leads us to and in a sense is a form of knowledge itself. ‘On ne reçoit pas la sagesse’, says Elstir, ‘il faut la découvrir soi-même’ (We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves). And some of the narrator’s own ‘sagesse’ is discovered precisely through the involuntary memory experience prompted by the petite madeleine. Etymologically, ‘sage’ in French comes from the Latin sapidus, ‘qui a du goût, savoureux’ (that which is tasty, favourful), deriving from the verb sapere, which means both to taste of and to know (‘avoir du goût […] avoir de l’intelligence […] se connaître en quelque chose, connaître, comprendre, savoir’).13 Tasting and knowing are long intertwined (as far back, at least, as the Garden of Eden) of course. In the madeleine scene, these very traits are foregrounded: ‘D’où avait pu me venir cette puissante joie? Je sentais qu’elle était liée au goût du thé et du gâteau […] (I 44; ‘Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the taste of the tea and the cake’, SW, 52); ‘[…] Certes, ce qui palpite ainsi au fond de moi, ce doit être l’image, le souvenir visuel, qui, lié à cette saveur, tente de la suivre jusqu’à moi’ (I 45; ‘Undoubtedly what is palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind’, SW, 54). The connection in this much commented scene goes beyond the ‘saveur’/‘savoir’ pairing to the very substance of the experience itself. As Cassin has it, 115

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la sagesse, sapientia […] is initially connected with taste, with the ability to appreciate, with discernment—and Thomas Aquinas is still aware of the etymology: Doctrina per studium acquiritur, sapientia autem per infusionem habetur [doctrine is learned by study, but wisdom is acquired by infusion] (Summa theologica, 1.1a6). (Cassin 2004: 1110; my translation) When fnally the penny drops for the narrator and the distant memory of Combray emerges, we are told that the taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray […] my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it frst in her infusion of tea or lime blossom [son infusion de thé ou de tilleul]. (SW, 54, translation adjusted; I 46) Infusion for Aquinas of course was not a soothing beverage but something altogether more complex, that we might schematically summarise as the process by which virtues are bestowed on human subjects by God. The lexical overlap, however, is irresistible: the taste of knowledge, the continuity with his past, emerges for the narrator from his infusion, not God-given but nevertheless foundational for the development of the novel.14 Here, however, we fnd a divergence between Proust and a more recent philosophical account of taste (and knowledge). Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘Gusto’, originally written for an encyclopaedia in 1979 but published as a stand-alone work only in 2015 (and in English translation as Taste in 2017), ofers a brief but wide-ranging survey of the place of taste and its relation to knowledge in Western philosophy, starting out from the shared etymological roots of sapor, taste, and sapiens, wise man. As Agamben works towards his conclusions, he argues that Taste is an empty or excessive sense, situated at the very limit of knowledge and pleasure […], whose lack or excess essentially defnes the stature of both science (understood as knowledge that is known, can be explained and, therefore, can be learnt and transmitted) and pleasure (understood as a possession on which one cannot found any knowledge). (Agamben 2017: 51) What intrigues me about these remarks is how certain aspects seem most apposite for our discussion and others appear rather unwieldy. Agamben sets taste between a kind of knowledge on the one hand and pleasure on the other. As we have seen above, however, the kinds of knowledge and knowing associated with human relationships, which so preoccupy Proust’s protagonist, are hard to square with what Agamben calls ‘science’ in this passage. Given the emphasis on the extraordinarily rich and multifaceted nature of the revelations of the madeleine scene, it is difcult to think of taste in Proust as ‘empty’, though ‘excessive’— troublingly ‘at the limit of knowledge’ (as evinced by the confusion and powerfully destabilising sense it provokes) as well as at the very limit of pleasure (‘An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses’, SW, 52; I 44)—is nearer the mark. What is more challenging is the defnition of pleasure that Agamben ofers here in contradistinction to taste. Pleasure, he writes, is a sort of possession ‘on which one cannot found any knowledge’; yet in Proust though the experience of taste undoubtedly is one of pleasure, it is also precisely that on which knowledge is founded: ‘taste and smell’, the narrator argues, ‘bear unfinchingly, in the tiny 116

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and almost imperceptible drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection (‘l’édifce immense du souvenir’) (SW, 55; I 46). And this, we might say, is why Proust’s work is a novel and not a conventional work of philosophy. His account of knowledge and, for that matter, his presentation of taste, pleasure and possession, does not seek to match a category, confrm a hypothesis or prove a theorem. His narrator gets involved in all of these processes—he is an arch taxonomist and hypothesiser extraordinaire—but his engagement is never (or very rarely) that of a philosopher, rather that of a human subject in thrall to love, desire, ambition, jealousy, anxiety and loss. And what all of these experiences point to (even if he is slow to understand or accept it) is the fact that there is always more to know, always something that slips past or doesn’t register, something inaccessible or unnoticed because unsuspected. In this, Proust’s novel upholds James Wood’s view that ‘fction must not stroke the known but distress the undiscovered’ (Wood 1999: 272).

Notes 1 I am immensely grateful to the editors of the present volume for their immensely thoughtful and helpful refections and feedback on this chapter, whose arguments are improved and enriched as a result. 2 For two equally insightful engagements with the profundity in Proust of that most banal and quotidian of phenomena, the weather, see Richard 1999 and Sedgwick 2011. 3 Indeed, a whole manual exists expanding on this ‘knowledge’: see King 2006. A parallel extrapolation and illustration of another equally extensive set of references exists in the shape of Eric Karpeles’s Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’ (Karpeles 2008). 4 On the role of Proust’s correspondence in the preparation of his novel, see Fraisse 1996: 448–57. 5 On Proust’s early education, see Ferré 1959; on the specifcs of his philosophical education and the various inter-relations between his novel and Western philosophy as it existed between the 1880s and 1920s, see Fraisse 2013. For a brief, engaging account of role of the press in À la recherche, see McGuinness 2015 and for a wider overview of the feld, see the ‘carnet de recherche’ published online by Yuri Anjos, https://www.openedition.org/18579 (consulted June 2021). For insights on the books Proust handled and read during the writing of his novel, see Szylowicz 2013. 6 Letter to Armand, Duc de Guiche, 1 July 1918, Corr., XVII, pp. 293–4. My translation. 7 Knowability’ might be thought of as a measure of how far we can know something or someone. It isn’t another category of knowledge to put alongside ‘savoir’, ‘sagesse’ and ‘savoir faire’. If we were to seek out a French formulation, it would be parallel to ‘savoir faire’ and something like ‘pouvoir savoir’, that is, the degree of accessibility to knowledge that something has. 8 Or perhaps three: he is known chez Verdurin as both Biche and Tiche. 9 For an important philosophical intervention on self-other relations in Proust, see (Levinas 1976). For Martha Nussbaum, the other, as beloved, is unknowable and love in Proust is, accordingly, merely ‘a rather interesting relation with oneself ’ (Nussbaum 1990: 272). This view of love as solipsistic is extended and developed by (Langton 2009) and countered by (Kubala 2016). I am grateful to Anna Elsner for drawing my attention to Langton’s work. 10 Drawing on this passage and calquing on Mallarmé, we might think of love in Proust, therefore, as the lure of ‘le mystère dans les êtres’—a fundamental dimension of the novel’s epistemological backbone. Mallarmé’s well-known essay defending the art of symbolism against Proust’s attack in his article ‘Contre l’obscurité’ was published as ‘Le mystère dans les lettres’ in La Revue blanche on 1 September 1896. For a recent, highly insightful account of love and jealousy in Proust, see Pippin 2021. 11 Pippin goes on to underline the central position of love in novel’s knowledge economy: ‘love is treated’, he writes, ‘largely as an epistemological problem, as inseparable from the desire to know and (in a less prominent way) to be known’ (Pippin 2021: 204). Though unacknowledged by Pippin, the critical touchstones in this area are Bowie 1987 and Martha Nussbaum’s essays ‘Fictions of the Soul’ and ‘Love’s Knowledge’ (Nussbaum 1990). Bowie reminds us that ‘jealousy […] is the quest for knowledge in a terrifyingly pure form: a quest for knowledge untrammelled and unsupported by things actually known’ (Bowie 1987: 58). Joshua Landy has extended and enriched

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Adam Watt the discussion begun by Nussbaum and Bowie in his Philosophy as Fiction, cited above. Given constraints of space in the present chapter, readers wishing to pursue the question of knowledge in relation to the self, love and jealousy in Proust’s novel are encouraged to do so in the pages devoted to them by Nussbaum, Bowie, Landy and Pippin. We might say, to return to the terms frst mentioned in our introduction, that the experience of seeking knowledge (savoir) of the other leads to a form of wisdom (sagesse) – an awareness that comprehensive understanding of the other (and possibly of the self ) is impossible. 12 In the opening chapter of Mirages and Mad Beliefs, Christopher Prendergast identifes this attitude towards knowledge as the direct borrowing of an anecdote about J.M.W. Turner that Proust encountered in his reading of Ruskin and incorporated into the preface to his translation of Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens. See Prendergast 2013: 21–2. For an account of what I have called Elstir’s ‘lesson in reading’ on the Balbec church façade, see Watt 2009: 83–5. 13 On ‘sagesse’ and these etymological details, see Cassin 2004: 1110. On the pairing ‘savoir’/‘saveur’ and their shared roots in sapere, see Roland Barthes’ inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Leçon (Barthes 2002: 429–46), and for wider discussion on the conjoining of ‘science et jouissance’ in the work of Barthes, one of Proust’s most gifted readers, see Hanania 2010: 216–17. 14 Though it is not impossible that Proust may have read these lines of Aquinas, we have no documentary evidence: Aquinas makes no direct appearance in Proust’s correspondence, nor is there any suggestion of textual familiarity via his other philosophical reading, as outlined in Fraisse 2013.

References Agamben, G. (2017) Taste, trans. by Cooper Francis, London: Seagull Books. Anjos, Y. ‘Proust et la presse’: https://www.openedition.org/18579 Barthes, R. (2002) Leçon in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, vol. V, Paris: Seuil, pp. 429–46. Benjamin, W. (1999) ‘The Image of Proust’ [1929] in Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn, ed. by Hannah Arendt, London: Pimlico, 1999, pp. 197–210. Bowie, M. (1998) Proust Among the Stars, London: HarperCollins. ——— (1987) ‘Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge’ in Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45–65. Cassin, B. ed. (2004) Vocabulaire européenne des philosophies, Paris: Seuil/Le Robert. Deleuze, G. (1970) Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964; fourth edn, rev. 1970). Proust and Signs (2000), trans. by Richard Howard, London: Athlone. Ferré, A. (1959) Les années de collège de Marcel Proust, Paris: Gallimard. french, P. (2019) Thinking Cinema with Proust, Cambridge: Legenda/MHRA. Fraisse, L. (2013) L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, Paris: PUPS. ——— (1998) La Correspondance de Proust: son statut dans l’œuvre, l’histoire de son édition, Paris: Annales littéraires de l’Université de Franche-Comté/Belles Lettres. ——— (1996) Proust au miroir de sa correspondance, Paris: SEDES. Hanania, C. (2010) Roland Barthes et l’étymologie, Brussels: Peter Lang. Karpeles, E. (2008) Paintings in Proust: A Visual Companion to ‘In Search of Lost Time’, London and New York: Thames & Hudson. King, S. (2006) Dining with Marcel Proust: A Practical Guide to French Cuisine of the Belle Epoque [1979], Lincoln, NA and London: University of Nebraska Press. Kosofsky Sedgwick, E. (2011) ‘The Weather in Proust’ in The Weather in Proust, ed. by Jonathan Goldberg, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–41. Kubala, R. (2016) ‘Love and Transience in Proust’, Philosophy, 91.4 (2016), 541–57. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust, New York: Oxford University Press. Langton, R. (2009), ‘Love and Solipsism’ in Sexual Solipsism: Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectifcation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 357–82. Levinas, E. (1976) ‘L’Autre dans Proust’ in Noms propres, Montpellier: Fata Morgana, pp. 147–56 McGuinness, M. (2015) ‘Presse et modernité dans l’œuvre de Proust’: http://www.item.ens.fr/ articles-en-ligne/presse-et-modernite-dans-loeuvre-de-proust/ Nussbaum, M. (1990) ‘Fictions of the Soul’ [1983] and ‘Love’s Knowledge’ [1988] in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 245–60, 261–85.

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Knowledge Pippin, R. (2021) ‘The Shadow of Love: The Role of Jealousy in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu’ in Philosophy by Other Means: The Arts in Philosophy & Philosophy in the Arts, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, pp. 197–217. Prendergast, C. (2013) Mirages and Mad Beliefs: Proust the Skeptic, Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Rawlinson, M. (1982) ‘Art and Truth: Reading Proust’, Philosophy and Literature, 6, 1–16. Richard, J.-P. (1999) ‘Proust météo’ in Essais de critique buissonnière, Paris: Seuil, pp. 107–19 Szylowicz, C. (2013) ‘Proust’s reading’ in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Adam Watt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43–50. Watt, A. (2009) Reading in Proust’s À la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture’, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, J. (1999) ‘Julian Barnes and the problem of knowing too much’ in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, London: Jonathan Cape, pp. 261–72. Wood, M. (2005) Literature and the Taste of Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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8 THE PURSUIT OF UNCERTAINTY Knowledge, Deferral, and Self-Defeat in Proust Richard Moran

Desire and Disillusion The story of the interrelations of desire, disappointment, and self-defeat is well known in Proust, and there are several dimensions to it. Early in the story, the child Marcel’s manipulative stratagems and expressions of desire for his mother’s goodnight kiss annoy his father and embarrass his mother, but worse than that they transform his own “victory” over his mother, and the kiss that is at last granted, into a crisis for him rather than the soothing pleasure he anticipated, its warmth now cooled by the feeling he had extorted it from her.1 Having forced it, he can no longer experience the kiss as an expression of her love, but only of her resignation, her succumbing to his own unruly and hysterical will. Later in the story, the adolescent Marcel’s desire is driven primarily by his solitary reading and the new worlds that books open up for him, as well as by his conversation with worldly men like Swann, which excites the desire to someday see the places named and described in books, to behold the genius of Berma in the fesh, to see the real face of Mme. de Guermantes at the church in Combray, to behold the “storm battered” “almost Persian” church at Balbec. In these cases as well, the realization of desire is internally and not accidentally related to disillusion, to disappointment. But here it is not the desperate, controlling expression of desire that ruins success, but rather the sheer intensity of the imagination fueling his desire which ensures that anything discoverable in the actual world through the ordinary senses could only seem disappointing in comparison. The young Marcel positions himself as perpetually at the brink of life and actual experience, 2 and his only access to that imagined life and experience is his power of imagination itself, which in his case is of such an extraordinary depth and intensity (and here the Narrator “Marcel” shows his fliation with his creator, the author Marcel Proust) that it overpowers and shadows whatever actual life and experience will be his. At this stage, the power of his imagination is his only access to the Real, but one whose very power renders the actual satisfaction of desire, such as his fnally visiting the church at Balbec, seeing Berma for the frst time, a disappointment, a dissatisfaction with the ordinary world. And later still the story of erotic love for Swann or Marcel is a relentless demonstration of the internal relations of desire, disappointment, and self-defeat. Desire is frst excited by the idea of inaccessibility, distance, unknownness, an unknownness which that same Narrator’s imagination will food with content derived 120

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from his own dreams. 3 At the same time that his fantasy concerning the unknown Other is being nourished, constructing the image of the desired person, the Proustian desiring subject will more urgently have to take care that the original distance and mystery of the Other are somehow preserved and not overcome, since the overcoming of its mystery will be the end of what made the Other desirable in the frst place. When it is under the guise of the inaccessible that something or someone is desired, then the realization of desire will be self-defeating for reasons internal to the nature of the desire itself. To the extent that value attaches to mystery, to unknownness, success in knowing will itself be a form of disillusionment, the knowledge being purchased at the cost of the value of what is known. And conversely, in the penultimate volume, the death of Albertine only infames desire and the activity of imagination further, now that she has attained the ultimate inaccessibility. The same thematics and structures of self defeat have various more explicitly epistemological expressions in Proust and it is these that I wish to focus on in this paper. Central both to the child’s desire for the beginning of real life and experience and in the young man’s desire for an inaccessible erotic Other, there is the desire to know, and the conditions of satisfaction of desire will be understood in terms of the desire to know something or someone. Hence, the forms of success or failure in the story will depend on how the possession of knowledge is conceived, as well as on presumed answers to why it is knowledge as such that matters here, why the stakes of knowing or not knowing are so decisive in these various dimensions of the Proustian world. One thread to follow up here is that knowledge and possession are understood in terms of each other: knowledge seen as the privileged form of possession,4 and the value of possession itself is seen in terms of the forms of knowledge it makes possible. This is particularly clear in the heated passage where Marcel is about to kiss Albertine for the frst time (GW, 416–20; II 656–9), to be discussed later. The obstacles to knowledge can come from within or without. There are the ordinary human limitations on knowledge, the difculties in being in a position to know something, gaining access to the object of knowledge, all the work of investigation and confrmation. The object of knowledge is external to the potentially knowing subject and has to be brought into view somehow. On the side of the subject himself,5 he will have to overcome the distortions of his own subjectivity, his own passions, whether stemming from love, fear, vanity, or fantasy life. Knowledge will be associated with the anticipated pleasures of discovery, mastery, and assimilation, where the internal threat to knowledge is from the power of fantasy to occlude the real, to mask it. Or the desire to know will be driven by what one fears to know, by the anticipation of some painful discovery, and hence this desire will have to contend with the opposing desire to avoid any sufering. In both the case of fantasy-driven desire and that of fearful apprehension, the inquiring subject will be interfering with himself. In these situations, the obstacle to knowing is located in the subject himself, rather than in the general difculties of access to an independent world.

“Everything that was not myself” Other reasons for self-defeat are more metaphysical and concern the structure and value of knowledge as such. Like the Cartesian subject, the Proustian subject defnes itself by opposition to the world outside of it and as independent of it. This subject, the potential knower, is a philosophical construction arrived at by a process of reduction; it is what remains after the abstraction from all that is contingent or dubitable, that is, what will now be seen as the “external” world. This “self ” is not to be found anywhere within the richly populated scene 121

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before it, the one upon which it focuses its dreams and desires.6 Instead, it is less like another person occupying a place within the world along with the others, and more like a pure perspective on the world, a witness not part of the action itself. It is this sort of subject who can experience a problem of making contact with the world as such, of fnding itself somewhere within it, since it originally conceives of itself as in some way outside the world, independent of it. If the world as such is literally everything, all of reality (and how could it be anything less and still deserve to be called the world?) and yet the subject is somehow apart from and outside of it, then there is not only a problem of where that subject may be locating itself, but also a problem with its very reality, since there seems to be nothing substantial left over once we have used the all-encompassing word “world” for everything independent of the subject.7 In the case of the Proustian subject, this metaphysical starting point is combined with the child’s perspective on the world of grown-ups as what is other to itself, with the fantastic worlds of literature and theater, and later with the glittering social world of fashionable Paris (which the French idiom of Proust’s day refers to simply as “le monde”). Here, the quest for knowledge is fgured in terms of eventual access to a world hitherto held at a distance, a world that is not only more beautiful and exciting, but more powerful and more real than the insubstantial subject who is left out of it, seeking access to it. Insofar as the (external) world is defned by exclusion of the subject, its diference and distance from oneself, the problems of knowledge and the desire to know will be liable to special forms of self-defeat. If, as Leo Bersani put it, “For Marcel, the condition of knowledge is a total suppression of the diferences between the self and the world”,8 and the self is conceived as in some way outside the empirical reality of the world, then such an ideal of knowledge will have consequences for the sense of the reality of what the self manages to make contact with, threatening it with a sense of de-realization upon contact. Suppression of the diference between self and world will mean suppression of the criterion for reality, knowability, and the value of that knowledge, what makes it worth knowing. […] the idea of the real is so inextricably linked with the idea of the unknown that inaccessibility is the sign by which Marcel recognizes something worth knowing or possessing. As a result, the actual contact with Balbec, or with Berma’s style of acting, or with the Guermantes circle, by the very fact of being an actual contact, destroys the sign of the unreachable which, for the narrator, adheres necessarily to truth.9 From within this understanding of his quest, knowledge and possession are aligned, and Marcel will be guided throughout by the image of knowledge as a form of assimilation, taking inside the object of knowledge and making it part of oneself. The combination of this “assimilationist” image of knowledge itself and the conception of the object of knowledge and its value as consisting in its distance and distinctness from oneself will generate several of the paradoxes Marcel faces in his relation to the external world, the world of beauty and art, the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the world of erotic love. Mystery and inaccessibility are the signs of something worth knowing or possessing, and hence the successful quest for knowledge can only lead to the dispelling of mystery and with that the presumed value or even reality of what is known. The Proustian Narrator cycles from fascination with what is conceived of in its sheer diference from himself to disappointment and disillusion as he succeeds in overcoming its mystery and diference. To the extent that the reality of some independent world is defned by the subject’s exclusion from it, gaining access to it or incorporating it in oneself can only de-value or de-realize that world.10 122

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Te Deferral of Satisfaction Distance and distinctness from oneself are criteria which are shared by the object of desire and the potential object of knowledge, part of the eroticization of knowledge in Proust as well as the epistemological character of erotic desire itself (e.g., the theme of desire, jealousy, and suspicion). Opposition and resistance characterize the idea of an independent world as a possible object of knowledge as well as the idea of an object of desire. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel says: It has been asserted that our conception of objective reality originates in the resistance that objects present to us, especially through our sense of touch. We can apply this at once to the practical problem. We desire objects only if they are not immediately given to us for our use and enjoyment; that is, to the extent that they resist our desire. The content of our desire becomes an object as soon as it is opposed to us, not only in the sense of being impervious to us, but also in terms of its distance as something notyet-enjoyed, the subjective aspect of this condition being desire. […] The object thus formed, which is characterized by its separation from the subject, who at the same time establishes it and seeks to overcome it by his desire, is for us a value. The moment of enjoyment itself, when the opposition between subject and object is efaced, consumes the value. Value is only reinstated as contrast, as an object separated from the subject.11 Here, Simmel moves from an idea of objective reality and the conditions of its knowability to an idea of value and the possible tension for the subject between the preservation of the value and its consumption (and hence its destruction). The connection is made possible by the fact that, for the class of desires he is thinking of, whose satisfaction consists in consumption and the experience of satisfaction, the satisfaction of desire is also an immediate form of knowledge, the knowledge of the desired experience itself.12 It is partly for these reasons that even the most positive expressions of the desire to know, the excited anticipation of an experience long imagined, unhampered by a contrary desire to avoid some painful discovery, will still be accompanied by a contrary desire to hold back, to put of the attainment of actual knowledge. Thus, we see Swann hold back for a moment when he is at last about to kiss Odette for the frst time, “to leave time for his mind to catch up with him” and cherish the thought of his imminent, but not yet completed, possession. But more than that, he feels that with this consummation he is about to lose the original focus of his desire, “the face of an Odette not yet possessed, nor even kissed by him, which he was seeing for the last time”.13 Desire, having been so long nourished and enfamed by imagination, hesitates when anticipation and imagination are about to be replaced by reality. The same theme is intensifed and located more squarely in the nexus of knowledge and possession in the more extended passage when Marcel is about to kiss Albertine for the frst time. Here, his frst thought is that “the knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s cheeks was a possible thing was a pleasure perhaps greater even than that of kissing them” (GW, 417; II 657). How could the mere knowledge of its possibility be greater than the experience itself? In the present context, the primary reason would be that this new-found possibility of kissing her means that she has recognized and consented to his desire, perhaps even responded to it with her own desire. This knowledge of possibility changes his world and his understanding of himself and is not simply a long-awaited experience. Earlier, in his observations of Albertine his imagination could only feed on itself, but now when combined with the sure knowledge of possession the pleasure of imagination rivals 123

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the pleasure of the experience itself, since this certainty still in prospect is thus safe from the disappointments of actual realization. The pleasure now available to him is fgured in explicitly epistemic terms. “Life had obligingly revealed to one in its whole extent the novel of this little girl’s life, had lent one, for the study of her, frst one optical instrument, then another”, and he is now in a position to “to gain possession of a whole tract of memories” (GW 495, GB III 334). The independence and the resistance of the object of knowledge, the uncertainty of attainment, confrm its value both epistemically and erotically.14 Like Swann, Marcel pauses and wishes to retain the aura of the unknown before he is about to dispel it in the consummation of his desire to know: “I should have liked, before kissing her, to be able to breathe into her anew the mystery which she had had for me on the beach before I knew her” (GW, 419; II 659). (Sartre speaks of erotic desire in terms of the fantasy of “possessing a freedom as freedom”. Here, Proust may be seen as describing a parallel fantasy of knowing the unknown as unknown, preserving its mystery within one’s very possession of it as known.)15 The passage concludes with the most unexpected barrier to the knowledge that he seeks. Marcel imagines the knowledge he is about to acquire in alimentary terms; tasting, devouring, and assimilating, but it is in the frst instance his own memories of seascapes of Balbec that he seeks to re-fnd in kissing her: At the same time, Albertine preserved, inseparably attached to her, all my impressions of a series of seascapes of which I was particularly fond. I felt that in kissing her cheeks I should be kissing the whole of Balbec beach.16 However, this desire to “discover [savoir] the fragrance of the rose that blooms in Albertine’s cheeks”, will be thwarted and not for reasons connected with what is outlandish in the fantasy of “kissing the whole Balbec beach”, but instead for reasons concerning human anatomy and the mechanics of kissing itself. He tells himself, “I shall at last have knowledge of it through my lips”, but he only tells himself this because at the time he believed that there was such a thing as knowledge acquired by the lips; I told myself that I was going to know the taste of this feshly rose, because I had not stopped to think that man, a creature obviously less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and notably possesses none that will serve for kissing.17 (GW, 419–20; II 659) To return to Simmel, the primary reason for the delay or deferral of knowledge that is anticipated as pleasurable rather than painful is the need to maintain the separation and distance between the subject and the object of knowledge or pleasure, in particular to maintain the temporal distance between desire and satisfaction. Marcel holds back so that his imagination can still hold sway, infusing this discovery with all that his fantasy can provide it with, so that the reality of the experience will not pass too quickly into disappointed memory. The assimilationist model encourages the confusion of knowledge and consumption, which then subjects it to Simmel’s observation that “The moment of enjoyment itself, when the opposition between subject and object is efaced, consumes the value”. Temporal separation between Present and Future maintains the opposition between subject and object, as well as gives further play to the imagination. By contrast, once possessed in present actuality, the longed-for kiss is already gone and lost forever. As long as the possibility is still held in imagination, it is prevented from disappearing into 124

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the past along with everything else, and Marcel can postpone the efacement of subject and object. While holding himself back he retains this knowledge of possibility and experience, something “forever warm and still to be enjoyed” (Keats), while at the same time preserving it from perishable actuality. With the entry into actuality, the experience will have fallen into Time, another merely actual event, which passes into the fow of other events slipping away. For, regarding the actual event there will be either regret and loss, in the satisfying case, when the unrepeatable experience is gone forever, or disappointment when it is measured against one’s anticipatory imagination. In either case, the claim of deferral and the fantasy of preservation in imagination will prevail over the tempting but risky claims of reality.

Knowledge, Self-management, and Self-undermining When one loves one doubts even what one most believes.18 It is of course the prospect of a painful rather than a pleasurable discovery that puts the epistemic drive most directly in confict with itself.19 In the story of jealousy, whether Swann’s or Marcel’s, the suspicion of some painful truth concerning Odette or Albertine produces both fascination and ceaseless investigations concerning that terrible possibility and (especially in Marcel’s case) a determination never to arrive at certainty concerning it, to constantly defer arriving at a stable conclusion. The jealous lover is obsessed with some painful possibility and pursues it relentlessly, but at the same time makes sure that he will stop before the threshold of actual knowledge. The classic scene of this combination of fascination and epistemic holding back appears early in The Captive, when Marcel watches Albertine asleep in a chair and notices the letters in the pocket of her kimono, which he believes is quite possibly her correspondence with her lovers, which fxes his attention for a long time but which he nonetheless never opens.20 He is unable to resist either the attraction, the will to know, or the contrary will to thwart that drive, to postpone, to create new doubts, and to forget. He is prey to “an inquisitorial sentiment that desires to know, yet sufers from knowing, and seeks to learn still more” (C, 57; III 566). When the prospect of some knowledge is painful, one seeks it out because the condition of suspecting-but-not-knowing is itself unbearable, while at the same time hoping to be able to forget the truth once one’s curiosity has been satisfed: “It is human to seek what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it” (SG, 268; III 227). The anxiety of the jealous lover does not only create this confict between the desire to know and the desire to postpone or forget knowledge but is also responsible for the centrality of knowledge itself in the jealous lover’s relation to the beloved. The anxiety of his dependence on a being he cannot control and with an independent mental life about which he can only speculate provokes in him the fantasy of control or possession through knowing itself, as though an advantage in knowing could make up for the dissatisfactions of unhappy love. These origins in an anxiety of dependence on an other create an epistemic subject with conficting motivations: It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. (SG, 268; III 227) 125

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We are more mistrustful because we hope to master the situation through adopting the position of the investigator, outside the immediacy and the reciprocal demands of the intersubjective relation itself, hoping what we discover will gain us a measure of control, if not of the situation itself then at least of our own responses to it. And we are more credulous because the anxiety that motivates our investigations is constantly seeking relief and reassurance. Anxiety motivates suspicion, mistrust, “the inquisitorial spirit”, but it also motivates the will to believe and the will to forget, hence our greater credulity. As a way of dealing with one’s vulnerability and dependency, adopting the position of an investigator is ofered as at the very least an expression of a kind of symbolic agency with respect to a situation evading one’s control. One may feel less helpless, as though in one’s ceaseless questioning one were taking steps to address one’s situation, whether or not the goal is actually arriving at knowledge. Indeed, arriving at a stable conviction would mean concluding one’s researches, leaving the position of investigator, and that would raise the more unsettling problem of determining how to act on what one knows. From this perspective, the importance of the self-defeat of knowledge is less in the preservation of one’s ignorance21 and more in the deferral of conclusive knowledge, keeping the various conficting hypotheses in suspense, thus maintaining oneself in the stance of an external investigator and holding of the demands of action from the participant’s stance within the relationship. Hence although he will make inquiries, enlist his friends as spies, he will not believe what his spies tell him. 22 He will treat as doubts what really are not doubts at all.23 He will exploit the ambiguity of the facts to open them to reinterpretation when he is in danger of approaching a stable conviction, maintaining the position of inquirer but availing himself of what Sartre calls “non persuasive evidence”: Bad faith apprehends facts that are evident, but it is resigned in advance not to be fulflled by such evidence, not to be persuaded and transformed into good faith. The person in bad faith becomes humble and modest: he is aware, he says, that faith is a decision and that after each intuition one is obliged to determine what is and to will it. Thus, in its basic project and from the moment it arises, bad faith determines the precise nature of its requirements: it becomes visible in its entirety in its resolution not to ask for too much; to consider itself satisfed when it is poorly persuaded; to force through, by a decision, its adherence to uncertain truths.24 In all of this activity, either Swann or Marcel will see himself as discharging his epistemic responsibilities, alternating between the lover’s greater mistrust and greater credulity. Each of these conficting stances can be given its temporary justifcation: And thus I sought to rid myself—and gradually succeeded in ridding myself—of the painful certainty which I had taken such trouble to acquire, tossed to and fro as I still was between the desire to know and the fear of sufering. (F, 595; IV 102) The lover described here is a self-aware epistemic agent, who realizes that his ability to learn the truth about his situation is always liable to distortion from his instinctive desire to avoid sufering, and so he seeks to adopt a more objectifed stance toward his own reasoning, to provide a more pessimistic counter-weight to the pressures of wishful thinking. He will thus be motivated to adopt an epistemic policy of anticipating the worst, most distressing possibility, as though in this way he budgets for it in his mental expenditures, and assures himself 126

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that the catastrophe, when it arrives, will not have taken him unawares.25 At the same time, and in virtue of the same self-awareness, he realizes that this critical, objectifying strategy presents him with the question of its own limits and trustworthiness. How much of a pessimistic counter-weight is too much, and when does it start to lead one astray? The external stance on his own reasoning itself provides no answers of its own here. From this perspective, even the resistance to wishful thinking and the habitual concentration on the most painful possibilities can be seen to function as mere performances of epistemic vigilance calculated to ward of knowledge rather than genuine attempts to answer some questions. Doubtless I had long been conditioned, by the powerful impression made on my imagination and my faculty for emotion by the example of Swann, to believe in the truth of what I feared rather than of what I should have wished. Hence the comfort brought me by Albertine’s afrmations came near to being jeopardised for a moment because I remembered the story of Odette. But I told myself that, if it was right to allow for the worst, not only when, in order to understand Swann’s suferings, I had tried to put myself in his place, but now that it concerned myself, in seeking the truth as though it concerned someone else I must nevertheless not, out of cruelty to myself, like a soldier who chooses the post not where he can be of most use but where he is most exposed, end up with the mistake of regarding one supposition as more true than the rest simply because it was the most painful. […] I should therefore be guilty of an error of reasoning as serious—though in the opposite sense—as that which would have inclined me towards a certain assumption because it caused me less pain than any other, in not taking into account these material diferences in their situations, and in reconstructing the real life of my beloved solely from what I had been told about Odette’s. (SG, 268–9; III 228) (my emphases) While measuring the truth by either the pleasure or pain of learning it is plainly misguided as an epistemic policy, it can nonetheless be employed to serve the same purposes as the postponement of conviction, keeping one’s options open: […] as a by-product of the instinct of self-preservation, the same jealous man does not hesitate to form the most terrible suspicions on the basis of innocuous facts, provided that, whenever any proof is brought to him, he refuses to accept the irrefutable evidence. (C, 89; III 593) In this way, we can see the proliferation of painful hypotheses as itself a defensive maneuver against knowledge. One elaborates the worst possibility hyperbolically, the hyperbole itself being a signal to oneself that one has placed such a possibility beyond any reasonable suspicion, and hence not one to which one could be obliged to really give one’s credence. “Armed with this self-protective belief, I could with impunity allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but lent no credence” (F, 588; IV 96).26 But with this gesture, one grants oneself a certain credit for having entertained this possibility, to the point of even dwelling upon it painfully. One thereby feels protected from the dangerous prospect of actually believing this possibility by the very power of one’s extravagant imagining of it, knowing it to be extravagant. But by that same gesture, one feels that one has duly confronted the worst and so cannot be thought to be taken by surprise when the worst actually happens. Without having actually believed in the frst place, one will still claim the cold comfort later of saying “Just as I thought. I knew all along”. (Proust plays this maneuver to great comic 127

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efect, as when Swann strains his imagination to conceive of the perfdy of Odette sending him a letter asking for money to join the Verdurins in Bayreuth without him, giving full vent to his hypothetical indignation at such an outrageous request, which makes him feel better, but only to receive just such a letter from her the following day. Here, his devastation when he actually receives Odette’s request reveals how little in fact he knew all along (SW, 359–60;-428; I 296–7).

Desire and the Social Dynamics of Knowledge It is naturally with respect to the case of knowing another person, and not simply the world as such, that we fnd the primary associations between knowledge and deferral and self-defeat. Here, the quest for knowledge must overcome not only the ordinary difculties of knowing an independent world but must also contend with concealment and deception on the part of the potential object of knowledge. The person to be known will be seen as having a motive to defeat the eforts to be known. Understanding how the subject conceives the other person as motivated to defeat eforts at knowledge requires better understanding of the prior question of how the subject makes the other person a problem of knowledge in the frst place. Many of the stratagems of self-defeat can be seen to follow from the original re-conception of the relation to the other person in terms of problems of knowing and being known. It is easy to miss this, since nearly all of the drama in the story of Swann and Odette or Marcel and Albertine is framed by the presupposition that the problem to be solved is a problem of knowledge: knowing where she is, where she has been, what she is thinking, and what she has experienced with others. Prior to this framing of the relationship the disappointed lover may have despaired of an ideal of mutual satisfaction and already begun to conceive of the relationship in strategic, competitive terms. From this point of view, the best that can now be hoped for is to anticipate or control the situation through epistemic advantage, knowing the other more than one is known by her, and most of all avoiding being her dupe. The enterprise of knowledge becomes a matter of maintaining contact with the other, but while conducting the relationship from the unilateral stance of an investigator. The adoption of this stance determines much of what follows. And since this is a totalizing point of view for the disappointed or anxious lover, a vision of the world, it will be natural for him to project the same stance onto the loved object herself, and so to impute to her the same motives of concealment and the maintaining of epistemic advantage that he himself is guided by. The adoption of an essentially epistemic relation to the loved object is grounded in a strategic vision of human relationships and motivated by the desire to maintain a position of advantage with respect to who knows what about whom. When the same vision is projected upon the other person, the potential object of knowledge herself, the various forms of self-defeat in what we will call the “social dynamics of knowledge” will follow as a matter of course. To begin with, the other person is not simply a possible object of knowledge like the phenomena of the independent world, or like the facts about the future which are difcult to know from one’s present position. Rather, unlike these potential objects of knowledge, the other person is presumed to be in possession of the knowledge that one seeks. Hence in this arena, the knowledge that one seeks is seen as knowledge withheld.27 The object of knowledge is conceived of as a secret in someone’s possession, and the form taken by knowing is that of capture or exposure of the other. The quest for knowledge is already conceived of as a contest between the subject seeking knowledge and the potential object of knowledge. Epistemic success is measured in terms of various forms of positional advantage: to know more than the other, to know what the other person does not suspect you of knowing, to know 128

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without surrendering knowledge of oneself, to appear to already know without needing to ask, to keep one’s own secrets, and to expose the other. The social dynamic of knowledge does not only structure the epistemic quest as a matter of strategic advantage, but also characterizes the epistemic goal itself in a particular way. What is aimed at in knowledge of the other person is less a matter of, say, knowing her circumstances of life, or her temperament and character, and rather a matter of knowing what she knows (and is keeping from me). Still less is it a matter of two people “getting to know each other” in the ordinary give and take of an ongoing relationship. Rather, the form of knowledge here is radically unilateral. Unlike the aim that is realized in two people coming to know each other, the knowledge sought here [“knowing what she knows”] can be attained, and can perhaps best be attained, without the other person even being aware that “what she knows” is now available to someone else. This is the ideal of knowledge captured, not knowledge shared. As we have seen, the will to know commonly co-exists with a contrary will, the will to avoid sufering, to remain blind, to delay arriving at a distressing conclusion and keep the competing possibilities in play for as long as possible. In the context of the social dynamics of knowledge in particular, the relations between knowledge and desire (including the desire to know) will be further complicated by the interplay between the desire to be known and the desire to remain unknown. Hence, “I want to know” (e.g., where Odette has been, who wrote the anonymous letter denouncing her, what Albertine is thinking, and how she experiences pleasure) will interact with I want not to know. I want to forget. I want to deny. I want not to see. This interaction can be simultaneous or sequential. As mentioned, in Proust the avoidance of knowledge will be aided in particular by the strategies of selective skepticism, the indulgence in doubts that “in reality were not doubts at all” (F, 588; IV 96), keeping the opposing ideas in play so as to avoid any stable conclusion. The social context, especially when lived out in terms of jealous rivalry, introduces a more complex interplay between knowing, the desire to know, and the demonstration of one’s knowledge to the relevant other. At its simplest expression, we have: “I want to know her”, where that means: “I want to know her thoughts, her desires, her private life.” Its most basic expression is in “The desire to know at all costs what Albertine was thinking, whom she saw, whom she loved—” (C, 102; III 604), in the “anxious need to know where, and with whom, she was spending her time” (SG, 150; III 127), in “the painful longing to know what she could have been doing …” (SG 228; III 193). The origin of this desire is not in mere curiosity about another’s actions and desires but rather because I want to know her thoughts, her feelings, concerning me. Or more generally: I want to know her desire, her possible desires. 129

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The interest of the more general question naturally reverts to the subject, the jealous lover himself. In the end, the question of Albertine’s wayward or indeterminate desires matters for what it signifes regarding her desire or lack of it for Marcel himself. From within this perspective, the knowledge of her desire, either generally or concerning himself, is seen as something in her possession and something that is being withheld. The thought is: “I need to know her desires generally in order to know what else I may need to know about her, in order to manage my own desire for her. Her desire itself, as well as her own knowledge of it, belongs essentially to an independent subjectivity that is not mine, that is outside my ability to control or possess”. It is indeed its position beyond his will or activity that makes her desire an object of his own desire in the frst place. The otherness of Odette’s or Albertine’s desire is not just a matter of its unknownness or mystery, but also as something outside the world of manipulable, serviceable objects, at the disposal of the subject. What is primary is the metaphysical source of this desire in the other person, its independence of the subject, which is only later interpreted in epistemic terms as its essential unknowability. Hence for Swann or Marcel, the question of the woman’s desire is conceived of as a matter of secrets, of a truth that is possessed by the other, who assumes power over them by the withholding of knowledge, the maintaining of a position of epistemic advantage. From within this situation, the lover represented by Swann or Marcel is in a position of dependence on the Other that seems impossible to overcome. His need is focused on something that is not just contingently out of his reach, like the chair on the other side of the room, or even the letters hidden in the pocket of Albertine’s kimono, but rather something whose source in the other person is the very form, the condition of his own desire for it, like Mamma’s goodnight kiss, or the letter he dreams of receiving from Gilberte and is tempted to write for himself (SW, 488; I 402).28 To reinterpret this metaphysical, erotic reliance on an independent Other as a problem of knowledge being withheld is to attempt to convert the forms of dependence that are simply given with human distinctness and relationality into a potentially tractable problem of discovery and proof that would overcome or replace that dependence.29 At the same time, this unsurpassable dependence on the other person, both epistemic and metaphysical, can be found intolerable, and its exposure can be experienced as humiliating. Insofar as the jealous lover merges the epistemic and the erotic, he will feel a constant pressure to emerge from this dependence by gaining a position of epistemic advantage: knowing without being known, concealing or denying his need to know, presenting himself as always already knowing. There are several variations here. In the frst instance, this concern with one’s epistemic positioning relative to the other person will require the separation of one’s need to know from one’s dependence on the person in possession of the knowledge in question. Hence: I want her not to know that I need to know; in particular, that I need to know from her. I want to know her desire (but I want her not to know of this desire of mine to know her desire). This need to mask one’s need will steer the form of the inquiry into various oblique paths, such as asking without appearing to ask,30 or avoiding face-to-face encounters altogether in favor of spying and using other people as informants. This need to conceal one’s own need is in confict with the dream of mutual open declaration, as in Marcel’s early love for Gilberte31: I want to declare my love, to make it known, to no longer be burdened by its privacy. 130

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It will sometimes interact with the contrasting thought: I want to know her desire, but not by her declaration of it to me (which I could never trust), but by signs or indications she may not be aware of herself. Or: I want her to know my own desire, but not to hear it from me. The desire to remain unknown to the other person, or for one’s own knowledge to remain unknown to them, takes various forms: I want her not to know that I already know about her (for here I retain a tactical advantage, something I can deploy to greater efect later). I want to remain unknown, but I want you to want to know me (or even: I wish to remain unknown so that you will want to know me).32 I know that you know (my secret), but you’ll never hear it from me. I am delighting in the private thought that you don’t yet know that I already know your secret, and that you will be shattered when I reveal this to you. It will be noted that these last formulations sometimes shift between a form that describes a thought about another person (third-person form) and a thought that is addressed to that other person themselves (second-person form). Sometimes, this makes no diference and sometimes it makes all the diference. For instance, when the thought addressed concerns what the other person is unaware of, what she little suspects, the form of expression addressed to the other person will involve paradox in a familiar way when treated as an ordinary public statement to that very person: “You have no idea that P (which I’m now informing you of )”. Paradoxical or not, the frame of mind being given expression in such situations will sometimes require the second-person addressive form, even while it is understood that no other person is actually present to receive this message and be informed by it, or in a position to respond to it. As with the use of apostrophe in poetry, the jealous lover will employ forms of thought that appeal to an absent fgure, imagining a form of contact that is nonetheless outside of any context of reciprocal dialogue. Here, the other person herself is addressed and not merely talked about, but their absence from the speaker (from the speech situation) preserves the statement (“You have no idea”) from immediate self-defeat. In some contexts, it is as though the person addressed is imagined as hearing but immediately forgetting what you have to tell them, or hearing and immediately leaving the encounter, like a visiting spirit, perhaps as being annihilated by the announcement.33 These tensions will be particularly prominent in the varieties of desire to expose the other by declaring that one knew her secret all along, that one was never taken in by her deceptions, and that her imagined position of advantage was never anything but an illusion. Hence the transition from I want her to know that I know. To I want to confront her, to show her that I know, that I knew all along. I want her to hear this from me and to be forced to acknowledge her defeat. Or its second-person variant: “I’ll show you that I knew all along”. 131

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Within the jealous lover’s world of suspicion and deception, the question of who has the upper hand epistemically, who is fooled and who mistakenly believes themselves to be successfully manipulating the other, will come to dominate over the question of the content of the knowledge or deception itself, the thing known or hidden, which is reduced to that of an indiferent token in their scorekeeping (e.g., the “syringa incident” involving Albertine and Andrée).34 For Swann, suspecting Odette and Forcheville, “the advantage which he felt— which he so desperately wanted to feel— that he had over them, lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being able to show them that he knew” (SW, 328; I 270), while for Marcel, “the need to know” had “always been exceeded, in my love for Albertine, by the need to show her that I knew” (F, 593; IV 100). And as a matter of scorekeeping, what matters is not simply the fact that one has turned the tables on one’s rival but the announcement to and its acknowledgment by the person one has scored of. The defeat of one’s rival is only completed when they are publicly forced to recognize it themselves. Not only does the content of the knowledge drop out of consideration, but the need to show the other person that one knew all along, that one was never taken in, survives love itself and not only whatever epistemic interest there may be in the thing known. After the death of Albertine, and his claim that love is dead as well, Marcel fantasizes more intently than ever about a possible scene of confrontation with her in which he declares his knowledge of all that she tried to conceal from him when alive. And now, since she was dead, the second of these needs had been amalgamated with the efect of the frst: the need to picture to myself the conversation in which I would have informed her of what I had learned, as vividly as the conversation in which I would have asked her to tell me what I did not know. (F, 593–4; IV 100) A few pages later, Marcel begins to question the coherence of this fantasy of confrontation and exposure beyond the grave: As she was alive at the moment when she committed her misdeed, that is to say at the moment at which I myself found myself placed, it was not enough for me to know of the misdeed, I wanted her to know that I knew. Hence, if at those moments I thought with regret that I should never see her again, this regret bore the stamp of my jealousy, and, very diferent from the lacerating regret of the moments when I loved her, was only regret at not being able to say to her: “You thought I’d never know what you did after you left me. Well, I know everything—the laundry-girl on the bank of the Loire, and your saying to her ‘Oh, it’s too heavenly,’ and I’ve seen the bite.” Of course I said to myself: “Why torment yourself? She who took her pleasure with the laundry-girl no longer exists, and consequently was not a person whose actions retain any importance. She isn’t telling herself that you know. But neither is she telling herself that you don’t know, since she isn’t telling herself anything.” (F, 604; IV 109) (my emphases) Even if Marcel is correct in his assumptions that he now knows the truth of Albertine’s secret life (which is itself quite doubtful), his epistemic victory is a hollow one, since now he can never confront Albertine and force her admission of defeat. If Marcel does indeed now “know all”, then he may rest assured that Albertine did not take her secrets to the grave with her. He is now in possession of those secrets. But what she did take with her is something far 132

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more important, namely the possibility of her knowing from him that her secret is exposed and conceding to him his fnal epistemic advantage.

“A fight that is symmetrical with our investigations” (C, 95; III 597) As elsewhere in Proust, these observations and the forms of confict they express are condensed by the Narrator in the form of various “laws”, about love, human relations generally, social types, about responses to sufering or to death and loss, about art and aesthetics. The statements of the laws are often reactions to experiences of disappointment or frustration of one sort or another. They are both an attempt to sum up and extract the lesson from a series of disappointments (in oneself, in others, in life), and an attempt to occupy a position from beyond those disappointments, from which they can be seen as unavoidable but still illustrating some important truths. As such, these statements of laws, despite their often skeptical or disillusioning form, play a compensatory, even consoling role in the broader situation of the Narrator. Even as the expression of disillusion, the arrival at the statement of some “law” is a kind of stable resting point in the sea of conficting forces and dashed expectations that the Narrator is subject to. Rhetorically, the statement of some observation in the form of a “law” aims to give it the character of fnality and unanswerability. (“This is how things are, how they must be”.) In the current context, the “laws” in question are presented as observations of the social dynamics of knowing and being known, but within the psychic economy of the jealous lover, they function as self-reinforcing justifcations for the egoistic, strategic view of human relations within which his struggles take place.35 In particular, there are three interrelated laws concerning knowledge that form a kind of series, a progression from general thoughts about the mind’s access to the world to the scenes of what we’ve been calling the social dynamics of knowledge. We have encountered the frst law under various guises and may now refer to it as the Law of Anticipation and Disappointment. The world as such is wholly other to the mind which seeks to know it, and genuine access or contact will always be problematic. This distance, this resistance to the mind, is not simply an obstacle to knowing but is the index of the value of reality itself, what makes it worth knowing, what what incites the quest for knowledge in the frst place. As with the passages from Bersani and Simmel discussed earlier, the very desire and dream of knowing are governed by the thought of distance overcome, of access achieved, and of initial mystery revealed. The knowing subject is thus frst initiated on the path of knowledge by desire and imagination: “We need imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object, to create a goal which hides the other goal from us”.36 What he comes to realize is that while it is the force of his desire and imagination that fuels his investigations, this force is also what stands between him and the external object of knowledge, obscuring his vision or simply substituting the fantasy object for the reality he seeks: “It might well be, of course, that it was not in reality an unknown pleasure, that on close inspection its mystery would dissolve, that it was no more than a projection, a mirage of desire” (BG, 436–7; II 156). The result can only be series of disappointments when the encounter with reality fails to measure up to imagination. And with the overcoming of distance and mystery, there is the destruction of the epistemic/erotic value of the thing known. It can be seen as a corollary of this law that we can only know that which we are indifferent to, what Bersani refers to as the “typically Proustian dichotomy between interest and knowledge; whatever engages our feelings thereby becomes unknowable”.37 With respect both to other people and to other places or realms of experience, when desire and imagination direct us to encounter them, their reality will also be obscured by the projection of the 133

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desiring mind. At the frst stage of Marcel’s obsession with the celebrated Berma, “I admired too keenly not to be disappointed by the object of my admiration” (GW, 52; II 352). But on a later occasion, when his ardor had cooled after his frst disappointing encounter, “the talent of Berma, which had evaded me when I sought so greedily to seize its essence, now, after these years of oblivion, in this hour of indiference, imposed itself on my admiration with the force of self-evidence” (GW 46; II 347). In the context of erotic life, the multiplicity and incessant mobility of this “little band” on the beach at Balbec is what both excites desire and speculation and makes it difcult to make out their image clearly, or to single out an individual from the series. Marcel can anticipate the day when his vision will be clearer, but only in terms of his eventual indiference. I do not say that a day will not come when, even to these luminous girls, we shall assign sharply defned characters, but that will be because they will have ceased to interest us, because their entry upon the scene will no longer be, for our heart, the apparition which it expected to be diferent and which, each time, leaves it overwhelmed by fresh incarnations. Their immobility will come from our indiference to them, which will deliver them up to the judgment of our intelligence. (C, 67; III 574 (my emphases)) And by the time the very idea of erotic love has been fused with that of jealousy, indiference can seem the only refuge from delirium; for now, the very desire to know, fueled by endless contradictory speculation, produces a “dizzy kaleidoscope” which makes knowledge impossible. It is one of the faculties of jealousy to reveal to us the extent to which the reality of external facts and the sentiments of the heart are an unknown element which lends itself to endless suppositions. We imagine that we know exactly what things are and what people think, for the simple reason that we do not care about them. But as soon as we have a desire to know, as the jealous man has, then it becomes a dizzy kaleidoscope in which we can no longer distinguish anything. Had Albertine been unfaithful to me? With whom? In what house? On what day? On the| day when she had said this or that to me, when I remembered that I had in the course of it said this or that? I could not tell. (F, 593; IV 100 (my emphases)) The same Law of Indiference is invoked to account for the strange experience of being a “spectator of one’s own absence” (GW; 155; II 438), when Marcel returns home from visiting Saint-Loup at Doncieres, and sees his grandmother absorbed in some work, before she is aware of his presence. He compares the unaccustomed “impersonal” vision he briefy has of her to the purely mechanical efect of light on a photographic plate: The process that automatically occurred in my eyes when I caught sight of my grandmother was indeed a photograph. We never see the people who are dear to us save in the animated system, the perpetual motion of our incessant love for them, which before allowing the images that their faces present to reach us catches them in its vortex, fings them back upon the idea that we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it. (GW, 156; II 438–9)

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When his “incessant love” is momentarily caught of guard before the automatic, indiferent image reaches him directly, the appearance of someone who is dear to him can be disconcertingly replaced by that of “an overburdened old woman whom I did not know”.38 In the context of the anxieties of erotic life, the appearance of indiference will be as important to the quest for knowledge as actual indiference. Here, we encounter the interaction between the desire to know and the potential object of knowledge, the other person. What we may now call the Law of Withdrawal is that the revelation of one’s desire to know the other person motivates that person to withdraw, conceal, and dissemble, in a “fight that is symmetrical with our investigations” (C, 95; III 597). From this “symmetrical fight”, we can see how the projection of apparent indiference will matter to the possibility of knowledge of the other person. In understanding these reasons, we must bear in mind that the situation is described from the point of view of the jealous, dependent lover, who projects his own understanding of the situation on the other person, and forms his own strategy accordingly. So we can understand one of the motives given expression in the Law of Withdrawal as the motive to preserve distance and mystery as a primary value. This motive will be ascribed to the other person because such distance and mystery was a condition of the subject’s desire in the frst place. In holding back from kissing Albertine for the frst time, Marcel wishes “to be able to breathe into her anew the mystery which she had had for me on the beach before I knew her” (GW, 419; II 659). In general, he is drawn to what he sees as “unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible” (BG, 436; II 155) and it is natural for him, for only partly narcissistic reasons, to see the other person as investing her own unknownness with a comparable value, and hence with a desire to preserve it. In addition, and still at the level of projection, the anxious lover sees indiference itself as an attractive quality, a sign of all that he feels the lack of in terms of self-sufciency, power, and non-dependence; and so he seeks to cultivate the appearance of these qualities in himself and thereby attract the desire of the other person. More fundamentally, the jealous lover cannot bear the position of needing to ask the only person who can tell him what he needs to know, and thus expose his singular dependence on her. Again in projecting his strategic view of the situation on the other person, he sees revealing his need to know the truth from her as not only humiliating in itself but as providing her with a power she can use against him. In asking her openly, he would be providing her with a new motive for concealment and deception beyond whatever such motives she may already have, since she will now know (they both will know) that she holds a certain power over him as an inquiring subject. Once his question is answered, the knowledge conveyed, she loses this particular advantage and can’t get it back. Seen from this angle, the better epistemic policy for the anxious lover will be to present himself as already knowing what is in question and/or as being indiferent to it. The pathological structuring of the epistemic situation by the Law of Withdrawal comes into full fower with the fusion of the ideas of love and jealousy, of desire and suspicion, for now the reactions of jealousy and suspicion will be experienced by the other person as attacks which justify counter-attacks. “As soon as jealousy is discovered, it is regarded by the person who is its object as a challenge which justifes deception”39 (C, 62; III 570). With this, we move beyond the motive for withdrawal that may be provided by the exposure of the lover’s need, dependence, and epistemic disadvantage, to the provision of something like a right, a justifcation for thwarting the jealous lover’s investigations, for keeping him in the dark. We now move from a situation of jockeying for position in a contest for epistemic advantage to a situation of more or less open confict.

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For both parties, love itself is now scarcely distinguishable from the “inquisitorial sentiment” which inspires concealment in the other: Everything that she would have admitted to me readily and willingly when we were simply good friends had ceased to fow from her as soon as she had suspected that I was in love with her, or, without perhaps thinking of the name of Love, had divined the existence in me of an inquisitorial sentiment that desires to know, yet sufers from knowing, and seeks to learn still more. Ever since that day, she had concealed everything from me. […] she had already begun to “freeze,” confding words no longer issued from her lips, her gestures became guarded.40 (C, 57; III 565–6) (my emphases) And once love is indistinguishable from jealousy, and the need to know has supplanted every other need, the contest of knowing and being known is played out as a zero-sum game. [W]e feel that if she were to tell us everything, we might perhaps easily be cured of our love. However skillfully jealousy is concealed by him who sufers from it, it is very soon detected by her who has inspired it, and who applies equal skill in her turn. (C, 61; III 569) Besides, if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency to falsehood in the woman we love, it multiplies this tendency a hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous. She lies (to an extent to which she has never lied to us before), whether from pity, or from fear, or because she instinctively shies away in a fight that is symmetrical with our investigations. (C, 94–5; III 597) (my emphases)

Swann before the Door: Dupe and Counter-dupe An episode from “Swann in Love” provides not simply a foreshadowing but an early culmination of the themes concerning knowledge, deferral, and self-defeat that we have been exploring and the close reading of which will serve as a conclusion to this paper. The scene (from pp. 387–1 in SW; GB I 260–3) is that of Swann at night before the door of what he takes to be Odette’s apartment, where he has gone to allay his suspicion that she is with someone else. He had made a brief visit to see her there an hour or so before, when she pled fatigue for declining to join him in a “cattleya” (their pet name for erotic foreplay) and seemed peevish to him when she turned him away and asked him to put out her light on the way out. A bit later, the thought occurs to him that she may be expecting someone else that night, and when he returns he sees what he takes to be the light on in her room, which flls him with insatiable curiosity and apprehension. He is seized by the imagination that there in the light behind those shutters is Odette’s private life, her real life apart from him,41 excluding him, perhaps mocking him. He immediately imagines inside her with another lover. Certainly he sufered as he watched that light, in whose golden atmosphere, behind the closed sash, stirred the unseen and detested pair, as he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his own departure, the perfdy of Odette, and the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger. (SW, 325–6; I 268–9) 136

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The mention of “the unseen and detested pair” is our frst indication of how much Proust will make use of “free indirect discourse” in the unfolding of this scene. Grammatically, the scene is written in the third person, but throughout the “objective” narrative description is fltered through Swann’s own consciousness and moves freely between these two perspectives. Even when this third-person narration presents something as plain description (“he listened to that murmur which revealed the presence of the man who had crept in after his departure”), the reader knows, or will soon know, that there is no such man, and that here we are inhabiting Swann’s fevered imaginings. This technique will be more subtly deployed as the scene enters into Swann’s imagination of how he is being imagined by the “unseen and detested pair”. For now we may also note that the reference to “the pleasures which she was at that moment enjoying with the stranger” hearkens back to the “drame de coucher” when the boy Marcel is tormented by the thought of a space he is barred from where his mother is “tasting of unknown pleasures” with others.42 As he stands before the door, Swann’s own consciousness moves freely between two different perspectives. There is of course pain in the thought that Odette is presently betraying him with another man, but he also takes pleasure in the thought that they have no idea that he knows all and is about to expose them. The primary “fact” of Odette’s infdelity is a painful one for him, of course, but he can take pleasure in the fact of his own knowledge of it, that it is not happening behind his back, especially when this knowledge comes with the refection that the “unseen and detested pair” do not know that he knows about them. The original fact of her betrayal remains a source of sufering, but his self-conscious knowledge of it transmutes it into something he can take pleasure in, that is, the disparity of knowledge between himself and Odette (who does not know that he knows), which is experienced by Swann as already an advantage that he holds over her, despite her betrayal of him. In his imagined knowledge of Odette at this moment, a knowledge of which she herself has no idea, he sees himself as capturing and containing the hitherto secret life of Odette which had always eluded his grasp. [N]ow that Odette’s other life, of which he had had, at that frst moment, a sudden helpless suspicion, was defnitely there, in the full glare of the lamp-light, almost within his grasp, an unwitting prisoner in that room into which, when he chose, he would force his way to seize it unawares; or rather he would knock on the shutters, as he often did when he came very late, and by that signal Odette would at least learn that he knew, that he had seen the light and had heard the voices, and he himself, who a moment ago had been picturing her as laughing with the other at his illusions, now it was he who saw them, confdent in their error, tricked by none other than himself, whom they believed to be far away but who was there, in person, there with a plan, there with the knowledge that he was going, in another minute, to knock on the shutters […].43 (SW, 326; I 269) (my emphases) Odette’s life is there behind that door, now within his grasp. Her power was her hiddenness, her secrecy, and her ability to deceive him, but now he has the upper hand. At this moment, he enjoys an epistemic advantage over her that she little suspects and this thought already flls him with a sense of capturing her, “the unwitting prisoner”, enclosed within his mind, bounded by his knowledge of her. And since Odette’s original deception concerns him (“He little knows”), his knowledge of this presumed deception of him places him in imagination outside that deception altogether. In a delicious reversal, at one stroke, he is released from 137

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being deceived and she, the would-be deceiver, is shown to be the deceived one, trapped within her own conceit. From this perspective, he can even take pleasure in “picturing them laughing at his illusions” because that only shows how deeply deceived they actually are, how “confdent in their error”. All this is a pleasure he takes in the imaginary epistemic advantage he has over them, simply in virtue of his knowing that what they take themselves to know (that Swann is fooled) is wrong. His very consciousness of this truth embodies the fact of their own illusion and undoing. He takes his own state of knowledge to contain them within the bounds of a thought that is currently unavailable to them but which he is savoring, the thought of their own error. At the same time, this thought of their capture, of Odette as the “unwitting prisoner in that room” which he is about to enter, reveals a further layer of irony in Proust’s portrayal of Swann’s state of mind. As Swann sees it, the “detested pair” are enclosed within their illusions the way they are enclosed within the room. And his imagination merges both senses of enclosure with the capture of that pair within his own superior knowledge of them, which they have no inkling of, an enclosure that is invisible to the pair of lovers themselves, even though they exist within it. But the irony in the parallel between Odette enclosed in her room and Odette the “unwitting prisoner” is that it is Odette’s physical enclosure within her room, her hiddenness, that bars Swann from actually knowing what is going on inside. Rather than being a prison, her enclosure within her room is a representation of his own ignorance and exclusion, his need to be given access in order to fnd out what he needs to know. This physical enclosure is in fact her power over him and not her capture by him. In noticing this, we as readers take a step outside of Swann’s own consciousness and can appreciate how powerfully his imagination is controlling and distorting the description of the scene, even while the narration remains ofcially third-personal. The knowledge that he takes such pleasure in at this moment is a private knowledge, a knowledge of the detested pair which they do not have of themselves. This selfrepresentation of his knowledge depends on the contrast between what he knows (about them) and what they think they know (about him). In this, his pleasure is not primarily epistemic but is the pleasure in the idea of a positional advantage vis-à-vis the others, part of the social dynamics of knowledge. It is the positionality of his imagined triumph, his victory over them while they still believe themselves to be deceiving him, that is expressed in the insistent language of contrast between how Swann imagines them seeing the situation and what he, standing just outside, realizes in his own consciousness as the truth. A moment ago, he pictured them laughing at his illusions, but now here he is, none other than himself, the very one they thought was their dupe, knowing all and about to expose them.44 He has turned the tables on them, and all that remains is for him to knock. He hesitates for a moment to savor the thought of his current advantage and prospective victory. And his thoughts take the opportunity to propose a more purely intellectual source for the pleasure he is feeling. He compares it with the “passion for truth” which he had followed in his youth as a student of history. The curiosity he feels now had nothing to do with the gossip about trivialities that consumes other lovers but is an expression of the same “passion for truth” that animates the scholar. He realizes that he is now engaged in activities that would once have struck him as “shameful”, such as “spying, bribing servants, listening at doors”, but he now equates such activities with “the deciphering of manuscripts, the weighing of evidence […] so many diferent methods of scientifc investigation with a genuine intellectual value and legitimately employable in the search for truth” (SW, 327; I 270).

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But even this self-justifying thought, putting an “intellectual” cast on obsessions and actions he would formerly have found shameful, brings the topic of shame back into his consciousness. For the sentences immediately following this intellectual self-justifcation begin with shame. On the point of knocking on the shutters, he felt a pang of shame [un moment de honte] at the thought that Odette would now know that he had suspected her, that he had returned, that he had posted himself outside her window. She had often told him what a horror she had of jealous men, of lovers who spied. What he was about to do was singularly inept [bien maladroit], and she would detest him for ever after, whereas now, for the moment, for so long as he refrained from knocking, even in the act of infdelity, perhaps she loved him still. […] But his desire to know the truth was stronger and seemed to him nobler. (SW, 327; I 270) The shame he anticipates is “that Odette would now know that he suspected her” and come back to spy on her. This is experienced as shame because it reveals his subordinate position, his abject need to know her secret life. His imagined moment of triumph is in fact the most public admission of his dependence on her. For him to say to himself now that “his desire to know the truth was stronger” is to misrepresent the motive he is actually acting upon. Just before he actually knocks we are told that “the advantage which he felt—which he so desperately wanted to feel— that he had over them, lay perhaps not so much in knowing as in being able to show them that he knew” (SW, 328; I 270). To begin with, it could be argued that it cannot be the desire to know the truth which is stronger and which fnally moves him to knock on the door because he already takes himself to know the truth. He does not doubt that Odette is behind that illuminated wall with her lover. He is taking pleasure in that very knowledge, in his knowing of it (while the pair inside still believe him deceived). But more directly this last sentence makes it clear that it is the need “to show them that he knew” that most immediately brings him to knock on the door. So, rather than the more “noble” desire to know the truth being the motive that leads him to action, what moves him is precisely the most transparently other-dependent need to show the others that he was never taken in and to force their admission of defeat. The revelation of this motive to the “detested pair” is not the revelation of an autonomous, disinterested search for truth but rather of his continued dependence on them and their responses to him. Moreover, this need to show them that he knows is not simply a less noble motive following upon his discovery of the truth, but is the basis for the pleasure he is able to take in what is, after all, the knowledge of a painful fact. That pleasure in the thought of his superior position vis-à-vis the unwitting pair inside depends on the thought that he will soon be exposing them. And at this moment of hesitation he realizes that exposing them involves exposing himself, most immediately exposing his jealousy and his need and thus risking Odette’s contempt. This gives him pause. His hand raised before the door, Swann is hesitating between two scenarios. In the frst, he is presently enjoying his private imagination of having turned the tables on them and now enjoying a position of epistemic superiority of which they have no inkling. But the pleasure he takes in this thought depends on the second scenario, the imagination of the scene where he confronts them with the shattering knowledge that he knew all along, that it is they and not he who are the deceived ones. In his book Comeuppance, William Flesch nicely captures the doubleness of perspective in fantasies of vindication and exposure like Swann’s:

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The combination of present and future tenses in our fantasies of vindication makes possible the otherwise inconsistent doubleness of our relation to the objects of rage and spite. Now they think they’ve won, but they have another think coming. We anticipate of the person we will punish how much that punishment will undermine his or her present complacency.45 Swann is caught between these two scenarios, the “now” and the “what’s coming”, and two diferent conceptions of the power he takes his knowledge to give him. The pleasure he is currently experiencing depends on his appreciation of his private possession of this knowledge, for what he is delighting in is the thought of the simultaneity of his own possession of the truth with the confdent illusion of the detested pair inside. It is the contrast, the disparity in knowledge that he fnds so gratifying. This is his power to claim this knowledge but withhold it from others, to glory in his exclusive possession. At the same time however, the pleasure in this power is merely potential unless it is coupled with the power to show them that he knows, to expose and humiliate them. And here he hesitates because it now dawns on him that to expose them is by that same stroke to expose himself: “Odette would now know that he had suspected her … she would detest him forever” (SW 389; GB I 262). He exposes not simply his own suspicions, but his desperate need to know and then post himself outside her door. He imagines showing them who has the upper hand but doing so can only reveal his position of dependence to the very people he must keep this from. Even more directly, once he has shown them that he knows, by telling them what he knows, he will have lost the epistemic disparity between them that was so important to his original pleasure. Acting on the need to show them that he knows, communicating his “private” knowledge to them, will mean that they both know, they all know, and epistemic parity will be established between them. Any sense of epistemic advantage will be abandoned, with the additional consequence that Odette will detest him and (invoking the Law of Withdrawal) the revelation of his need to know will make her conceal and dissemble only more efectively in the future. Deferral and delay are once again part of the story of knowledge in Proust, since the value of the knowledge produced by Swann’s spying and speculating is like the accumulation of capital that he can never spend. His “private” knowledge has value for him as an expression of his positional advantage vis-à-vis the “detested pair”, but this value is merely potential unless he can brandish it before them, which he now realizes will undermine any advantage over them he may have imagined outside the door. In the social dynamics of knowledge, the jealous lover is consumed with the thought of being betrayed, of being a dupe of his object of desire. The dupe is not merely ignorant, but deceived, kept in the dark. More specifcally, he is the person who doesn’t know what other people know about him, his own situation. Years after his love for Gilberte has “died”, Marcel is pained to learn from her maid at the time that Gilberte had been “in love with a young man of whom she saw a great deal more than of myself ”. Since I do not believe that jealousy can revive a dead love, I supposed that my painful impression was due, in part at least, to the injury to my self-esteem [amour-propre blessé], for a number of people whom I did not like and who at that time and even a little later—their attitude has since altered—afected a contemptuous attitude towards me, knew perfectly well, while I was in love with Gilberte, that I was being duped [que j’étais dupe]. (C, 146; III 641–2) 140

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This is humiliating, to discover that other people, strangers even, could be parties to the truth of his own situation when he is not. Finding himself in this position, the jealous lover dreams of adopting the position of “counter-dupe”, the person who can “turn the tables” so that the would-be deceiver is now the deceived one. This positional aspect structures the situation as a kind of zero-sum game. The fantasy is: so long as I am deceiving them, I am no longer the dupe. There can be only one dupe in this structured situation. That’s what the metaphor of “turning the tables” means. If I am deceiving the other, then I cannot be the dupe. All this is of course manifestly untrue, an “error of reasoning” quite as serious as what Marcel catches himself at in imagining the most painful possibility as if that either led him closer to the truth or actually prepared him for the worst (SG, 268–9; III 227–8). The dilemma of Swann before the door illustrates what we may call the problem of the counter-dupe, as compared with the original deceiver: for the counter-dupe (and not the original deceiver), there is an important value in confronting the deceiver with the humiliating truth of her situation, the failure of her deception, informing her of this and thus putting the two of them on an equal footing epistemically. This desire will always be in confict with the equally strong desire to preserve their epistemic diference, the superior position of the counter-dupe contemplating the pathetic self-assurance of the original deceiver who little knows that her scheme has come to nothing. By contrast, the original deceiver (Albertine, say) need not be conficted in this way, since the advantage that she seeks over him does not include as part of its content that he should (eventually) recognize his position as deceived and sufer that humiliation in front of her. Rather, she simply seeks her freedom, which as a practical matter may require deceiving him about her whereabouts or her various possible lovers. Her project of deception does not require imagining the moment of the dupe’s recognition of his deception. That’s not part of her project’s conditions of satisfaction, and hence that project is not threatened with its own undoing as with the project of the counter-dupe. In this way, the fantasies of Swann and Marcel are shown to be essentially reactive, a form of getting back at Odette or Albertine for their imagined infdelities. For their part, Odette and Albertine may or may not take pleasure in the thought of their epistemic advantage visà-vis Swann and Marcel and in any case any such pleasure is incidental to their purposes. Nor do they fantasize about confronting Swann or Marcel with the superiority of their own epistemic positions (and in so doing losing that very superiority). By contrast, even in his imagined triumph, the counter-dupe must see his project as essentially tied to the responses of the original deceiver, and in this way the more fundamental disadvantage in his position in this contest is preserved and furthered. Even within his epistemic advantage over her, he remains dependent on her for the satisfaction of his project in a way that she is not similarly dependent on him. To the extent that the expression of his desire is a form of the thought “I’ll show her, and then she’ll see who’s the real dupe”, he has already lost, not only because in “showing” her what he knew all along he thereby puts her back on an epistemic par with himself, but because the need to show her that he knew means that the fundamental positional disadvantage between them never was the epistemic one to begin with but rather the diference in dependence on the imagined responses of the other. In resenting his own emotional dependence on her and seeking to reverse the pain of fnding himself deceived, the counter-dupe looks to reasserting a more purely epistemic advantage as the way out of his subordinate position, but the form of his imagined satisfactions only deepens that very dependence. In the end of course, Swann is rescued from his folly this time because he has knocked on the wrong door. The room with the light on was never Odette’s to begin with, and he merely disturbs “two old gentlemen” conversing. 141

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He made what apology he could and hurried home, overjoyed that the satisfaction of his curiosity had preserved their love intact, and that, having feigned for so long, when in Odette’s company, a sort of indiference, he had not now, by a demonstration of jealousy, given her that proof of the excess of his own passion [cette prevue qu’il l’aimait trop] which, in a pair of lovers, fully and fnally dispenses the recipient from the obligation to love the other enough. (SW, 328; I 271) Thanks to his own mistake, Swann is saved from the necessity of revealing to Odette that he “knows all” (when in fact he knows nothing), and the proof that he loved her too much (meaning, in positional terms again, that he loves more than she does). For all his researches and spying and speculation, he is none the wiser, either about Odette or about himself, but at least the full force of his love can remain unknown to the object of his love, and he leaves happy to have preserved the appearance of his indiference, keeping faith with the “law” he lives by and projects upon his world.46

Notes 1 See my discussion of the “original trauma” of the goodnight kiss in “Proust and the Limits of the Will”, in my collection The Philosophical Imagination (Oxford, 2017). 2 Leo Bersani on the young Marcel: “It could be said that he lives without a sense of time; he is convinced that life has not begun yet for him that the only ‘real’ things in his experience are those the future will bring”. Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, second edition (Oxford, 2013), p. 12. 3 “[O]ne only loves that in which one pursues the inaccessible, one only loves what one does not possess […]” (C, 438; III 885–6). 4 “To know a thing does not always enable us to prevent it, but at least the things we know we do hold, if not in our hands, at any rate in our minds, where we can dispose of them as we choose, and this gives us the illusion of a sort of power over them” (SW, 376; I 310). 5 In referring to the epistemic subject here, I will tend to use masculine pronouns, to refect the fact that situation in Proust’s novel is normally that of an anxious man seeking to know and control a woman. 6 “For at that time everything that was not myself, the earth and the creatures upon it, seemed to me more precious, more important, endowed with a more real existence than they appear to fullgrown men” (SW, 186; I 154). 7 The roots of this metaphysical picture in Proust are as much Schopenhauerian as Cartesian. In a passage near the beginning of The World as Will and Representation, which Proust was undoubtedly familiar with, Schopenhauer says: The subject is the seat of all cognition but is itself not cognized by anything. Accordingly, it is the support for the world and always presupposed as the general condition of all appearances, of all objects: whatever exists, exists only for the subject. We all fnd ourselves as this subject, although only in so far as we have cognition of things, not in so far as we are objects of cognition. […] We never have any cognition of it [the subject]; rather, where there is cognition at all, it is what has that cognition.. vol. 1, sec. 2, Cambridge edition, p. 25 For more on Proust and Schopenhauer, see Woods, David Bather, “Proust and Schopenhauer”, in this volume, and my “Swann’s Medical Philosophy”, in Oxford Studies in Literature and Philosophy: Proust. Edited by Katherine Elkins (Oxford UP, 2022). 8 Bersani, op. cit. p. 13. 9 Bersani, op. cit. p. 28. 10 “I was curious and eager to know only what I believed to be more real than myself ” (SW, 458; I 377). And upon his frst access to one of the dinners at the Guermantes, Marcel refects:

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arm of the chair that kimono which would perhaps have told me much” (C, 76; III 582). Joshua Landy devotes a fne chapter of his book to this scene and the interactions of the will to knowledge and the will to ignorance in Proust (Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004). I have beneftted from his discussion and his book quite generally. Compare Landy: the quest for knowledge as the “single most efective way of keeping our ignorance intact”, 85. Landy 96 “Marcel’s spies are in fact never intended to gather the truth in the frst place”. “So it was that when I received Aimé’s letter, I realize that if I had not until then sufered too painfully from my doubts as to Albertine’s virtue, it was because in reality they were not doubts at all”. F 694; GB VI 93. Later on that same page: “believing mistakenly that I was uncertain”. Being and Nothingness, Richmond translation, p. 103. See Oded Na’aman’s refections on this strategy as general philosophy of life in his essay “Imagine the Worst”, Boston Review, November 2021. The surrounding passage of this sentence makes clearer the connection with “non-persuasive evidence” and the idea of “believing mistakenly that I was uncertain”: So it was that when I received Aimé’s letter, I realized that if I had not until then sufered too painfully from my doubts as to Albertine’s virtue it was because in reality they were not doubts at all. My happiness, my life required that Albertine should be virtuous; they had laid it down once and for all that she was. Armed with this self-protective belief, I could with impunity allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but lent no credence. I said to myself, “She is perhaps a woman-lover,” as we say “I may die tonight;” we say it, but we do not believe it, we make plans for the following day. This explains why, believing mistakenly that I was uncertain whether Albertine did or did not love women, and believing in consequence that a proof of Albertine’s guilt would not tell me anything that I had not often envisaged, I experienced, in the face of the images, insignifcant to anyone else, which Aimé’s letter evoked for me, an unexpected anguish, the most painful that I had ever yet felt, and one that formed with those images, with the image, alas! of Albertine herself, a sort of precipitate, […]. (F, 588; IV 96) (my emphases)

27 There are childhood roots to the general picture of knowledge as something concealed: from the child’s point of view, the world is the world of the grown-ups, and what is knowable is what they know but won’t tell you, because you’re not old enough. It can happen that the shattering of this view of the knowable as being in someone else’s possession, as something withheld, leaves only a kind of skepticism in its place, once the knowable has no particular locale. 28 I briefy discuss the fantasy of writing his own love letter from Gilberte toward the end of “Proust and the Limits of the Will”, op. cit. 29 The question of how the Other is transformed into a problem specifcally of knowledge is brilliantly discussed by Stanley Cavell, particularly in his writing on Shakespeare (Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, 1987). One diference in my discussion here is the relative lack of appeal to the idea of skepticism about other minds as such, or to the idea of the distinctness of persons as a form of separation to be overcome. My discussion begins with a world of other subjectivities whose reality is not in doubt, and whose distinctness from myself is the ground of the possibilities of both separation and relatedness, and hence not a problem to be overcome. 30 “I wanted to ask Albertine whether it was true. But I preferred to give the impression of knowing rather than inquiring. Besides, Albertine would not have answered me at all, or would have answered me only with a ‘no’ of which the ‘n’ would have been too hesitant and the ‘o’ too emphatic” (SG, 575; III 482) (my emphases). “I spoke to Andrée, not in a questioning tone but as though I had known all the time, perhaps from Albertine, of the fondness that she herself, Andrée, had for women and of her own relations with Mlle Vinteuil” (F, 624; IV 127) (my emphases). 31 “The important thing was that we should see each other, Gilberte and I, and should have an opportunity of making a mutual avowal [l’aveu réciproque] of our love which, until then, would not ofcially (so to speak) have begun” (SW, 477; I 393). 32 “In the week that followed I scarcely attempted to see Albertine. I made a show of preferring Andrée. Love is born; we wish to remain, for the one we love, the unknown person whom she may love in turn” (BG, 586; II 279) (my emphases).

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The Pursuit of Uncertainty 33 For a related discussion, see Chapter 7 (“The Self and Its Society”) of my The Exchange of Words (Oxford, 2018). 34 There are ways in which the entire Lesbian sub-plot functions as what Hitchcock and others call the MacGufn in plot formation: the mysterious but otherwise indiferent object whose pursuit by the rival characters drives the plot. For Swann and Marcel, what is fundamental is their response to the felt dependence on an independent Other frst with panic and the desire to control, then with her conversion into a problem of knowledge and surveillance. For Marcel, the question of Albertine’s Lesbianism provides him with an inexhaustible epistemic framing for the entire relationship, for the conception of her as radically “other”, but where that “otherness” is interpreted epistemically as a matter of secrets and knowledge withheld. Hence, the lover-as-inquirer can conceive of his dependence on the other as a contingent one of insufcient knowledge and so in principle something he can hope to overcome, unlike his metaphysical dependence on the responses of an individual other to himself. See Elizabeth Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism for a different, though I think complementary, reading. 35 In “Swann’s Medical Philosophy” (op. cit.), I discuss the invocation of “laws” in the text in connection with the idea of an “Unreliable Philosopher”, analogous to the familiar fgure of the Unreliable Narrator. 36 Here is the context: This evanescence of persons who are not known to us […] urges us into that state of pursuit in which there is no longer anything to stem the tide of imagination. To strip our pleasures of imagination is to reduce them to their own dimensions, that is to say to nothing. Ofered me by one of those procuresses whose good ofces, as has been seen, I by no means always scorned, withdrawn from the element which gave them so many nuances, such impreciseness, these girls would have enchanted me less. We need imagination, awakened by the uncertainty of being unable to attain its object, to create a goal which hides the other goal from us, and by substituting for sensual pleasures the idea of penetrating another life, prevents us from recognising that pleasure, from tasting its true savour, from restricting it to its own range. (BG, 434–5; II 154) (my emphases) 37 Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (Oxford, 1965), p. 172. 38 See the discussion of this scene in Dora Zhang, “A Lens for an Eye: Proust and Photography”, Representations, vol. 118, No. 1 (Spring 2012), pp. 103–25. 39 Here as elsewhere, a Proustian law has an earlier formulation in La Rochefoucauld: “Our distrust of another justifes his deceit” (Maxim 86), op. cit. 40 “It was when she had not yet suspected that I was jealous of her that I should have asked her to tell me what I wanted to know. One ought always to take advantage of that period. It is then that one’s mistress tells one about her pleasures and even the means by which she conceals them from other people” (C, 58; III 566–7). 41 In happier times, he can at least imagine that the reality of Odette’s life may be compatible with his own presence in it, even if normally they are thought of as excluding each other: He had the sudden suspicion that this hour spent in Odette’s house, in the lamp-light, was, perhaps, after all, not an artifcial hour, invented for his special use (with the object of concealing that frightening and delicious thing which was incessantly in his thoughts without his ever being able to form a satisfactory impression of it, an hour of Odette’s real life, of her life when he was not there,) with theatrical properties and pasteboard fruits, but was perhaps a genuine hour of Odette’s life; (SW, 356; I 294) 42 “The ice itself – with burnt nuts in it – and the fnger bowls seemed to me to be concealing pleasures that were baleful and of a mortal sadness because Mamma was tasting of them while I was far away” (SW, 35; I 30), and a few pages later, “Those inaccessible and excruciating hours during which she was about to taste of unknown pleasures” (SW, 36; I 31). 43 The French is clearer about the opposition between “then” and “now”, and between Swann’s self-reference and his imagination of the “detested pair” on the other side of the door: maintenant que l’autre vie d’Odette, dont il avait eu, à ce moment-là, le brusque et impuissant soupçon, il la tenait là, éclairée en plein par la lampe, prisonnière sans le savoir dans cette chambre où, quand il le voudrait, il entrerait la surprendre et la capturer; ou plutôt il

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Richard Moran allait frapper aux volets comme il faisait souvent quand il venait très tard; ainsi du moins, Odette apprendrait qu’il avait su, qu’il avait vu la lumière et entendu la causerie et lui, qui tout à l’heure, se la représentait comme se riant avec l’autre de ses illusions, maintenant, c’était eux qu’il voyait, confants dans leur erreur, trompés en somme par lui qu’ils croyaient bien loin d’ici et qui, lui, savait déjà qu’il allait frapper aux volets. (my emphases) 44 The translation by C. K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright, does a good job of bringing out the insistence on “Not I, but they (are the deceived)” and “Not they, but I (have the upper hand)”. In both the English and the French, this essentially frst-personal thought is given in the form of third-person narration, referring to “he” and “him”. Proust’s French shows some of the beautiful tension between these two perspectives in the fervid repetitions of the emphatic “lui”, which only really make sense here as expressed by a “je”: “maintenant, c’était eux qu’il voyait, confants dans leur erreur, trompés en somme par lui qu’ils croyaient bien loin d’ici et qui, lui, savait déjà qu’il allait frapper aux volets” (SW, 327; I 270) (emphases mine). 45 William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Harvard, 2007), p. 45. 46 I am grateful to the editors of this volume for comments on this paper.

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PART 3

Mind and Language

9 MEMORY Simon Kemp

On a carriage-ride with Mme de Villeparisis through the no-man’s-land that lies between the fctional seaside town of Balbec and the real Normandy village of Hudimesnil, Proust’s Narrator has a curious experience. He is struck by the sight of three trees together in a formation that seems to stir a memory deep within him. The visual impression calls to a similar one from his past in a way that turns his surroundings to a dream as if, in Georges Poulet’s words, two places ‘are fghting over the same space’ (1963: 17). Searching his mind, he gropes for the memory image that is rising towards consciousness, and with it the lost moments of his past which might return to life, ‘as when an object is placed out of our reach, so that our fngers, stretched out at arm’s-length, can only touch for a moment its outer surface, without managing to take hold of anything’ (BG, 343; II 77). And then, nothing. The presence of the aristocratic lady in the carriage beside him makes the moment unpropitious for introspection; the trees are lost to sight and the memory lost to mind. Of those trees themselves I was never to know what they had been trying to give me nor where else I had seen them. And when, the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and ceased to see them, while Mme de Villeparisis asked me what I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as if I had just lost a friend, had died to myself, had broken faith with the dead or repudiated a god. (BG, 345; II 79) A happier experience of involuntary memory with a madeleine and a cup of tea awaits him in the future, as his narration foreshadows while recounting the Hudimesnil episode, but this is the frst encounter with the phenomenon in the course of the Narrator’s life, and it is a failure. The failings of Proust’s other kind of memory, voluntary memory, are very much to the fore in the novel; indeed, failure seems to be its principal characteristic. Consumed by jealous suspicions of Albertine’s lesbianism after her death, the Narrator tries to recall her reaction one evening in his Balbec hotel room when he spoke negatively of lesbian relationships: I could not recall whether Albertine had blushed when I had naively expressed my horror of that sort of thing, for it is often only long afterwards that we long to know DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-13

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what attitude a person adopted at a moment when we were paying no attention to it, an attitude which, later on, when we think again of our conversation, would elucidate an agonising problem. But in our memory there is a blank, there is no trace of it. (F, 583; IV 91) At each stage of the process, there is the possibility of fatal error. Perception may fail to register, attention may fail to note, memory may fail to store, to safeguard across time or to retrieve when needed. Voluntary and involuntary memory alike are presented in Proust as unreliable, apt to let us down even when we need them the most. We can forget something that happened, like Albertine’s blush, or falsely remember something that did, as we see in Sodom and Gomorrah when the Narrator doubts his own recollection of having spotted the Prince de Sagan at a Guermantes soirée: ‘I can see all that departing crowd now; I can see, if I am not mistaken in placing him upon that staircase, a portrait detached from its frame, the Prince de Sagan’ (SG, 138; III 118). Moreover, our memories of the past can be distorted by the present. We can be convinced by others that we remember diferently, as when the Narrator’s recollection of La Berma’s performance as disappointing is revised upwards by Norpois’s more positive opinion (BG, 33; I 449), and we can convince ourselves of similar distortions if they cohere with our preconceptions, as when the Narrator’s memory gifts Gilberte blue eyes to accord with her blond hair (SW, 168; I 139), or to better suit our self-image, as when, many years later, Gilberte’s journey to Tansonville at the outbreak of the First World War is retrospectively reconfgured in her mind as an attempt to confront the Germans rather than to fee them (TR, 79; IV 334). We can lose track of the chronology of past events like a sailor losing his bearings when a mist descends on the sea (F, 680; IV 173), we can lose our whole sense of self as age-related decline cuts us of from our own history (TR, 325; IV 529), and even with a young and healthy brain the selectivity and arbitrariness of memory may furnish a poor record of reality, as the Narrator laments in one particularly pessimistic moment on a return visit to a Balbec that fails to live up to expectations: The images selected by memory are as arbitrary, as narrow, as elusive as those which the imagination had formed and reality has destroyed. There is no reason why, existing outside ourselves, a real place should conform to the pictures in our memory rather than those in our dreams. (SG, 175; III 149) I open with these negative examples, not only so that we can remind ourselves of the diversity inherent in Proust’s representation of memory through some of its less discussed aspects, but also to emphasize the vital point that Proust’s memory is our memory. In Search of Lost Time is not about the mastery of advanced mnemotechnics, nor is the Narrator’s madeleine experience some superhuman feat. The madeleine moment is miraculous, not because the Narrator has a miraculous memory, but because memory itself is a miracle. Rather than singling out the Narrator as special, the novel is drawing attention to the nature of memory as both ordinary, in the sense that its characteristics are shared by all, and extraordinary, in its immense powers that go unrecognized and often untapped. Memory is a faculty of mind that can take our life’s experience, from our innermost feelings to the smallest nuance of our perceptions, bury them deep below our consciousness for half a lifetime, and then restore them to us with a vividness that is like living through the moment for a second time and with a joy that comes from the recovery of lost time and the unifying of our own self across the years. At the same time, it is about as reliable as a skittish race-horse, erratically 150

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performing or withholding its wonders according to its own whims. For Proust, the fascination with memory arises from its failings as well as its marvels, and his exploration enthusiastically ventures into both. As his Narrator puts it at a more cheerful moment: ‘An unfailing memory is not a very powerful incentive to the study of the phenomena of memory’ (SG, 60; III 52).1 Proust’s most sustained and systematic discussion of memory comes right at the start of In Search of Lost Time in the run-up to the madeleine episode, where the Narrator explains his theory of voluntary and involuntary memory. Having described at length his one persisting memory from his childhood visits to Combray, that of waiting anxiously at bed-time for a good-night kiss from his mother which may or may not come, the Narrator acknowledges that other details of his Combray life were also within reach of memory: I must own that I could have assured any questioner that Combray did include other scenes and did exist at other hours than these. But since the facts which I should then have recalled would have been prompted only by voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence, and since the pictures which that kind of memory shows us preserve nothing of the past itself, I should never have had any wish to ponder over this residue of Combray. To me it was in reality all dead. (SW, 51; I 43) The quality of recollection that is available to us via, as it were, a manual search of our memory storage is so low, so devoid of the vivid experience of life and of the pleasure that comes from its rediscovery, that the Narrator deems the reward not worth the efort. Proust expands on this view when he returns to the topic in Time Regained, this time setting up an illustrative comparison with the small contrivance of having the Narrator’s dispiriting dip into voluntary memory immediately and coincidentally followed by the triggering of an involuntary memory of the same past experience. As he arrives at the Guermantes mansion for a party after a long absence from Paris, the Narrator is feeling downhearted at the lack of creative inspiration aforded to him by present perceptions, and turns to memories of foreign travels in the hope of greater riches: ‘I tried next to draw from my memory other “snapshots” [“instantanés”], those in particular which it had taken in Venice, but the mere word “snapshot” made Venice seem to me as boring as an exhibition of photographs’ (TR, 215; IV 444), he says expressing the lifelong ‘overt denigration of photography’ that Áine Larkin (2011: 56) has analysed. Moments later, still lost in thought, he stumbles on uneven paving while avoiding an oncoming car, and as with the sight of Hudimesnil trees and the taste of the madeleine before them, the feel of the paving stones beneath his unsteady feet sets a memory foating to the edges of consciousness: the dazzling and indistinct vision futtered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” And almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my eforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Mark’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place – from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge – in the series of forgotten days. (TR, 217–18; IV 446) 151

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Involuntary memory, then, is like a photograph as the early twentieth century conceived them: colourless, sometimes indistinct images in shades of grey, impersonal framings of famous landmarks for the tourist market, and in Proust’s original French term, instantanés, there is also the connotation of a frozen moment, snapped lifelessly out of the noise and movement of reality. Implicit in the metaphor is photography’s inadequacy both against the object of its gaze, with the black-and-white freeze-frame ofering a feeble imitation of the multisensory experience unfurling in time that was before the camera lens, and against the superior visual representation aforded by painting. Painting is a privileged medium of representation in Proust, combining as it does the full-colour sweep of the visual panorama laid out before the artist with the unique subjectivity of the painter, encoding onto the canvas the personality of the artist, their emotional state as they painted and the private connotations evoked by each element of the scene. Both of these missing elements from voluntary memory – the multisensory fow of real life and the mood-coloured subjectivity of the painter’s view of it – are clearly to be seen in Proust’s characterization of its more celebrated counterpart, involuntary memory. As we saw with the Hudimesnil trees, the midwifng process for these involuntary memories is fragile, emotionally fraught and despite their label requires active participation and mental efort on the part of the person recollecting. In the madeleine moment itself, as in the subsequent instances of the phenomenon, the frst consequence of the triggering sense impression in the present is one of joy: ‘An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, and with no suggestion of its origin’ (SW, 52; I 44). While it does not yet connect to the memory in question, this happiness does have a curious and counterintuitive link to time itself, which the narrator remarks upon: at once the vicissitudes of life had become indiferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the efect, which love has, of flling me with a precious essence, or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. (SW, 52; I 44) This feeling of an escape from mortality accompanies the Narrator’s subsequent experiences of involuntary memory, and on the paving slabs of the Guermantes courtyard he resolves to work out why. When two further involuntary memories follow in quick succession – the sound of a spoon against a plate recalls a hammer on a train wheel heard from a carriage, and a starched napkin brushed against his face evokes a stif towel in the Balbec hotel – he divines the answer. Involuntary memory restores past experience to the present mind in a way that not only spans the gap of years between them but abolishes the gap as if abolishing time itself. The narrator says of each of the revived memories: I experienced them at the present moment and at the same time in the context of a distant moment, so that the past was made to encroach upon the present and I was made to doubt whether I was in the one or the other. The truth was surely that the being within me which had enjoyed these impressions had enjoyed them because they had in them something that was common to a day long past and to the present, because in some way they were extra-temporal, and this being made its appearance only when, through one of these identifcations of the present with the past, it was likely to fnd itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. (TR 222–3, IV 450) 152

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The link across time thus brings the real of the past experience back to life and into contact with the present experience, but also brings the ideal. Through the common attributes of the two experiences the rememberer is aforded access to a shared essence between them. This essence allows the narrator not only to retrieve but to comprehend the experience that is returning to him – for Gilles Deleuze, it is the sens that the signe of the memory image is pointing towards (Deleuze 1964: 50). And since these shared elements are attributable neither to the present nor to the past experience alone, they take the essence of the experience outside time, into a realm that resembles the Platonic ideal, and in doing so take the Narrator with them. These essences of experience are, of course, personal to the Narrator. The singular conjunction of events, whereby the taste of a madeleine dipped in lime-blossom tea connects directly to the same sensation decades earlier, with no intervening experience of a similar sensation to contaminate the link, is particular to his life, and no amount of madeleine-dunking will replicate the phenomenon for us. Rather, our own madeleine moments are scattered in objects around us that can arouse sense impressions with analogous connections to our own pasts, as Proust explains with his parable of the trapped souls. According to Celtic belief, the Narrator claims, dead souls will remain trapped within objects until a loved one comes into contact with their prison and thereby restores them to life. The Narrator draws the following conclusion from the tale: so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the eforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die. (SW, 52; I 44) Voluntary memory may be a weak substitute for the time regained of involuntary memory, but at least the former puts access to our past experience within our conscious control. The arbitrariness of involuntary memory depends on good fortune to match its keys with its locks, and if we are short of luck we may never in our lives bring them together. Proust’s theory of memory is thus sketched through a series of contrasts between its two modes. Voluntary memory escapes the element of chance by being within the control of our intellect, but this intellect can only bring back colourless facsimiles that give us information about the past but neither the richness of the experience nor the insight into its essence. Involuntary memory requires a link to be set up through a singular sense impression, and the chance event of a connection sparked by a matching sense impression in the future. Any sense will do, as Proust underlines by using all fve: taste and smell in the favour of the madeleine, sound with the spoon, touch with the napkin and paving stones, and sight in the abortive incident of the trees. It would seem to be no accident that sight, the everyday workhorse of our senses, is portrayed as the least successful in replicating a unique sensation across a span of years, whereas the prime example of an involuntary memory trigger is given to taste and smell, widely experienced (and confrmed by neuroscience) as the royal road from perception to memory.2 The memory that returns is equally rich and multisensory. From the recaptured moment itself, the past moment expands outwards – like an origami fower unfurling in water in Proust’s memorable image – to recover days, weeks or even years of lost time. These memories begin at their triggering sensation. The Narrator’s Combray memories start with the great aunt who was the supplier of tilleul and madeleines to his childhood self and retain 153

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a preponderance of tastes and smells in their opening episodes. Then, they head outwards in expanding ripples, proceeding through association of ideas as mention of Catholic mass leads to memories of the Church, or a room associated with Uncle Adolphe leads to the episode of Adolphe and the lady in pink. All of this is recaptured in the vivid detail of the real and the emotional and connotative colouring of the subjective: visual details of stonework and fower petals, accents and intonations of voices are minutely recorded, along with the private feelings, connotations and misunderstandings that are unique to the Narrator’s perspective. All these particularities are blended with elements of the typical, the essential and the timeless, especially in the madeleine memories of Combray that overlay repeated experiences from summer after summer. The balance of individual and typical is refected through Proust’s tendency to narrate through the imperfect tense, recounting scenes as if they ‘would happen’ time and again across the years, but ofering details too specifc to have plausibly occurred more than once, including entire conversations rendered in direct speech. In an early scene in Swann’s Way, for instance, a single, highly specifc conversation between Françoise and Aunt Léonie is recounted through the imperfect tense: ‘répondait Françoise’, ‘disait Françoise’, etc., in the original French, and rendered in the translation as ‘would be the answer’ or ‘Françoise would say’ (SW, 65; I 54). The particular instance stands for the typical, and we infer that, while the details of the gossip between Aunt Léonie and Françoise will vary depending on who she sees from the window that day, the exchanges between the pair will be variations on the theme we have been given. The binarism of voluntary and involuntary memory is a real and fundamental part of Proust’s conception of the mind, but there are some uncomfortable problems that arise if one takes it too systematically. One difculty arises with the very frst memory we encounter in the novel, that of the Narrator’s childhood anxiety awaiting a good-night kiss. Into which of our two categories should this memory be placed? In the method of recall, it would seem to fall clearly into the category of voluntary memory, and critics refer to it as such (Carter 2000: 550). There is no madeleine moment to trigger the memory’s return, and the Narrator’s presentation of it as brought to mind repeatedly ‘when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray’ (SW, 50; I 43) plainly implies intentional recollection. However, the quality of the memory itself has nothing in common with the dry snapshots of voluntary memory. On the contrary, everything about it accords with the characteristics ascribed to involuntary memory: The vivid detail, extending to include direct speech, the personal perspective and emotional resonance from anguish to delight, even the overlaid instances from diferent remembered evenings that allow him to extract the essential features of the repeated trauma. Most telling of all is the Narrator’s own characterization of the memory: it is brightly illuminated as if in the glare of a searchlight beam, and as we saw in an earlier quotation, it is the other aspects of his time at Combray, those lost in the darkness beyond the edge of the beam, that are available only in the drab guise of voluntary memory. This is the means by which Proust introduces the concept of voluntary memory, by defning it in explicit opposition to the memory of the kiss. The likely solution to this conundrum is not hard to fnd. This vivid childhood memory needs no madeleine moment to evoke it because it has never left the Narrator’s mind. Seared into his recollection by the traumatic nature of the experience – a trauma that is presented as utterly real, despite the apparent triviality of the circumstances – the memory has remained, fresh and raw, within reach of consciousness throughout the Narrator’s adult life. (This is one point, incidentally, on which Proust’s view of mind and memory difers from the psychoanalytic model, which would expect traumatic memories to be less likely to be available than happy ones.) Once we begin to look, we fnd other examples too of memories that do not ft 154

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neatly into the voluntary and involuntary categories as the novel describes them. There are, for instance, involuntary memories that do not bring joy, as Jean-Yves Tadié (2012: 79) has pointed out. Leaning forward to remove his boot one night in Balbec, the Narrator’s gesture brings back a similar one in similar circumstances from his grandmother, returning as ‘the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection’ (SG, 180; III 153), except that, rather than a joyful transcendence of time, it brings with it an outpouring of grief and an awareness of the fnality of loss. Elsewhere, we see involuntary memories that are not sparked by connected sense impressions, as when Albertine mentions having been a friend of the woman known by the Narrator to have been Mlle Vinteuil’s lover (SG, 596; III 499), and the memory of spying on the lovers at Montjouvain surges back into the Narrator’s consciousness. Plus, along with these dramatic resurrections, there are instances in Proust of a more humble, everyday kind of involuntary memory. When the Narrator hears himself say to Andrée on the telephone, ‘Are you coming to call for Albertine tomorrow?’, a memory sparks of Swann telling him ‘Come and see Odette’ (C, 106; III 607), but this leads only to a brief meditation on proper names on the Narrator’s part and has none of the trappings of an incidence of involuntary memory ‘proper’. What we learn from these exceptions to the rule, the vivid voluntary memories and the joyless or banal involuntary ones, is that Proust’s theorizing on the nature of memory was never intended to be a watertight typology, with the faculty of memory made up of two entirely separate systems and every recollection assigned to one or other of them. Rather, memories can be vivid or lifeless, recall can be unbidden or deliberate, and the strong association of these four possibilities into two couplets does not rule out other combinations, as Proust is careful to demonstrate with the very frst example in the text. What does hold true, though, in the novel’s view of memory, is that once an experience is beyond the reach of conscious recall, no amount of deliberate searching will ever restore it to life. Only involuntary memory can return the favour and colour to what we have lost to the darkness. Proust’s theory of memory is unique, but that does not mean it was conjured up out of introspection alone, and his possible infuences have been much discussed. As discussed elsewhere in this volume, early readers of Proust looked primarily to Henri Bergson for the source of Proust’s ideas, often to the author’s dismay. Proust’s conception of time is fundamentally diferent to Bergson’s, as Poulet (1963: 9) has discussed, and Proust himself suggested that his distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory was not only absent from Bergson’s philosophy but in contradiction to it (Proust 1965: 287). Deleuze sees a passing resemblance between Proust’s view of memory and Bergson’s, in that both see the experience of memory as an immersion in time past (Deleuze 1964: 73). But when we come to Bergson’s fundamental conception of memory, which in his mystical view is the mind’s perception of a still-existing past in a manner analogous to the eye’s perception of the present, the thoroughly unmystical Proust could not disagree more. For Proust, the mind is the product of the brain, as he states in explicit opposition to Bergson in his notebook: I regret to fnd myself contradicting on this matter an admirable philosopher, the great Bergson. And among my contradictions, to add the following: it is true that M. Bergson claims that consciousness overfows the body and extends beyond it; and indeed, in the sense that one remembers things, or that one thinks about philosophers, etc., this is obvious. But M. Bergson does not mean it in this way. According to him, the soul, extending beyond the brain, can and must survive it. Well, this consciousness can be damaged by any cerebral shock; a simple fainting ft wipes it out. How can we believe that it will survive after death? (Proust 2008: LIX, 17) 155

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The novel’s one reference to Bergson is compatible with this materialist view. The Narrator recounts a discussion of Bergson’s theory of memory by an unnamed, and fctional Norwegian philosopher, for whom Proust fretted that his correspondent, the Swedish philosopher Algot Ruhe, might recognize himself as the model. After considering the experience of memories obliterated in the wake of drug-induced sleep, the Narrator views with a sceptical eye the Bergsonian theory, reported by the Norwegian philosopher, that such memories persist unscathed but have been rendered inaccessible to consciousness. He declares: In spite of all that may be said about survival after the destruction of the brain, I observe that each alteration of the brain is a partial death. We possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them, said, echoing M. Bergson, the eminent Norwegian philosopher whose speech I have made no attempt to imitate in order not to slow things down even more. But not the faculty of recalling them. What, then, is a memory which we do not recall? (SG, 444; III 374) A memory which we do not remember is not a memory at all, and Bergson’s distinction between memories that exist inaccessibly and memories that do not exist at all is a specious one, the Narrator concludes. He ends the discussion by extrapolating from this position that, even if the non-materialists are right and we have a soul that outlasts our body, it would be a poor sort of immortality that wiped the slate clean of memories on the death of the physical brain. Other fgures proposed as infuential on Proust’s view of memory include Saint-Simon (Kristeva 1994: 229–30), and the early psychologist Paul Sollier, who treated Proust in a sanatorium in 1905–1906 (Bizub 2006). Edward Bizub’s controversial contention is that Proust was heavily infuenced by Sollier’s proto-psychoanalytic theories of restoring a divided self through the recovery of blocked memories. Joshua Landy (2011) is one scholar to express scepticism, pointing to the presence of supposedly Sollier-derived ideas in Proust’s work from before 1905, and to important diferences between Sollier’s divided self and Proust’s representation of a self reunited through involuntary memory. More promising as an infuence is the philosopher Elie Rabier, whose work Proust studied as a teenager and who, as Joyce Megay has shown, has a number of ideas on memory in common with Proust. For both, memory has a role in establishing self-identity in an experience that transcends time, allowing a permanent self to exist beyond the everyday experience of discontinuity; like Proust, and unlike Bergson, Rabier also situates memory frmly among the neurons of the brain (Megay 1976: 22, 76). As well as these links between Proust’s representation of memory and theories in circulation as he was writing his novel, In Search of Lost Time also displays parallels with ideas on memory that have subsequently come to prominence, including from psychoanalysis (Kristeva 1994: 18–46; Tadié 2012), twentieth-century phenomenology (Richard 1974; Hughes 1983) and twenty-frst-century sciences of the mind and brain. Emily Troscianko notes several aspects of Proust’s involuntary memory that accord with modern cognitive neuroscience, including that the Narrator’s reminiscence and dissatisfaction with the present leave him psychologically primed for such a memory event to occur, and that the literal proximity of the olfactory system with centres of memory and emotion in the brain would seem to account for the scientifcally documented potency of odours and favours in triggering memory, and the emotional intensity of the memories that can result (Troscianko 2013: 442–4). Also of interest is the way that phenomena now categorized under the name of unconscious or nondeclarative memory feature prominently in Proust’s novel, even though they were not often considered forms of memory at all at the time of writing. The concept 156

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of the nondeclarative comes from the distinction drawn by J. F. Kihlstrom (1987) between information processing that is available to consciousness and that which is not, such as the distinction between the meaning of the words we hear and the phonological and linguistic principles via which we decode that meaning. Nondeclarative memory, then, is the suite of memory systems, including priming, conditioning and procedural ‘muscle’ memory, in which our experience is stored and recalled without any words, images or other impressions available to be ‘declared’ in consciousness. (For an overview of these memory systems, see Squire 2004.) Habituation, the form of unconscious memory in which a repeated stimulus triggers a gradually diminishing response, has close parallels to Proustian habit, which is presented specifcally in the novel in terms of a diminution of the distressing sensory overload caused by unfamiliar environment. For instance, the higher ceiling than the Narrator is used to in his Balbec hotel room causes him a series of sleepless nights until his discomfort fades: for a neurotic nature such as mine – one, that is to say, in which the intermediaries, the nerves, perform their functions badly, fail to arrest on its way to the consciousness, allow indeed to reach it, distinct, exhausting, innumerable and distressing, the plaints of the most humble elements of the self which are about to disappear – the anxiety and alarm which I felt as I lay beneath that strange and too lofty ceiling were but the protest of an afection that survived in me for a ceiling that was familiar and low. Doubtless this afection too would disappear, another having taken its place (when death, and then another life, had, in the guise of Habit, performed their double task). (BG, 288; II 32) What Proust presents here as an act of forgetting – the dying of the old self who liked his ceilings low above the bed – is also an act of remembering. The new dimensions of the Narrator’s bedroom imprint themselves on his mind to become, over time, comfortably familiar instead of strange and disorienting. This habituation to his surroundings is a form of nonassociative learning (Squire and Kandel 2009: 16): repeated exposure to a particular stimulus has modifed the Narrator’s attitude towards it, and this learning is stored and employed by his memory without conscious control. Habituation has thus produced a change in attitude and behaviour without conscious recollection of an image or proposition. The phenomenon occurs in even simple life-forms that are almost certainly devoid of conscious experience, and when it happens to us, it must be unravelled after the fact by a process of introspective deduction, as the Narrator embarks on in this case. Memory is a central concern in itself of In Search of Lost Time, but also one that entwines closely with the novel’s other major themes of art, love and self, and we should end by establishing its place in the weave. Here again, of central importance is the idea of the essence that Proust associates with involuntary memory. Where artistic creation is concerned, memory is the source of a writer’s subject matter in the most banal sense: ‘there is not a single gesture of [the writer’s] characters, not a trick of behaviour, not a tone of voice which has not been supplied to his inspiration by his memory’ (TR, 259; IV 478). But true value in art comes from the discovery and communication of essence, and it is for this reason that literature derived from voluntary memory, material found to hand in the recent past or perhaps noted down at the time of experiencing for future use, will never have the power of that derived from the doubly experienced transfguration of involuntary memory: As for the truths which the intellectual faculty – even that of the greatest of minds – gathers in the open, the truths that lie in its path in full daylight, their value may be 157

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very great, but they are like drawings with a hard outline and no perspective, they have no depth because no depths have had to be traversed in order to reach them, because they have not been re-created. […] I felt, however, that these truths which the intellect educes directly from reality were not altogether to be despised, for they might be able to enshrine within a matter less pure indeed but still imbued with mind those impressions which are conveyed to us outside time by the essences which are common to the sensations of the past and the present, but which, just because they are more precious, are also too rare for a work of art to be constructed exclusively from them. (TR, 257–8; IV 477) Proust’s ideal literary work, then, subsidizes the essential truths gained from involuntary memory with representations drawn from less exalted forms of memory, but even in these latter it is the generality drawn from comparing repeated instances that is the writer’s goal. The writer hones ‘a feeling for generality’ and ‘remembers only things that are general’; he pays attention to people when ‘stupid or absurd though they may have been, they have turned themselves, by repeating like parrots what other people of similar character are in the habit of saying, into birds of augury, mouthpieces of a psychological law’ (TR, 260; IV 479). It is the associative nature of memory, connecting the present to the past or linking past instances to each other, that is at the heart of its artistic value, since it is the interrogation of these associations that brings understanding of the laws and essences of experience that it is the mission of literature to express, and which thus allows Proust’s Narrator to reach the paradoxical conclusion that ‘reality takes shape in the memory alone’ (SW, 219; I 182). The self too is for Proust formed in and from memory. We see the defnitive loss of self with age-related memory failings, as with M. d’Argencourt at the fnal matinée, who in his dementia ‘had so far become unlike himself that I had the illusion of being in the presence of a diferent person, as gently, as kindly, as inofensive as the other Argencourt had been hostile, overbearing and dangerous’ (TR, 288; IV 501), as well as in the last, tragic portrait of Odette, dismissed and humiliated as ‘a bit gaga’ as she sits alone, bewildered by her surroundings and failing to recognize old friends (TR, 325; IV 529). For Proust, though, this is just the most catastrophic manifestation of an everyday phenomenon that attends us all through our lives. ‘[S]ince my childhood I had already died many times’ (TR, 437–8; IV 615) states the Narrator matter-of-factly of the serial selves he perceives within him as his forgotten love for Albertine (in this instance) replaces the person who loved her with someone else, in a process that is so much more than simply a metaphor for death that it convinces the Narrator it is ‘the merest folly’ (TR, 438; IV 615) to fear the end of life itself. But as we know, unlike the irreversible losses of senility, these dead selves are not altogether lost. Things forgotten ‘know of secret paths by which to return to us’ (F, 558; IV, 70), deep-buried sedimentary layers of self can be thrown to the surface by the great emotional earthquakes of our lives (F, 622; IV 125), and ‘[t]he memory of the most multiple person establishes a sort of identity in him’ (TR 2, IV 268), seeing to it that the promises made by the former self are fulflled by its successor. These are the insights the Narrator realizes most fully at the very end of the novel, as the succession of involuntary memories and the sound of the Combray gate-bell still ringing in his mind prove to him that ‘there must have been no break in continuity’ (TR, 450; IV 624), an underlying unity of self for which memory is both the proof and the means. Proust’s conception of memory, then, is founded upon the double experience of involuntary memory, which brings together the past and present in a moment of vivid recollection, while unlocking an essence of experience or a law of human nature through their elements 158

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of unity. This is distinct, although not rigidly so, from ordinary experience of memory, which retrieves information from our past without bringing that past fully to life, and which also has a more limited potential for discovering artistic truth through the intellectual comparison of shared elements between past instances. While failures in both kinds of memory lead to blanks and distortions in recall, Proust’s principal theme is not so much the shortcomings of memory that I gathered together from his novel at the start of this study, but rather the extraordinary potential of this most ordinary of faculties to store up a lifetime of impressions, and to release them to us in an unexpected moment of joy and unity. The fndings of his introspection concur with empirical investigations into memory that have come after him, and neuroscience’s recent interest in nondeclarative forms fnds a precursor in the Proustian conception of habit. Memory in its involuntary form is seen by Proust as vital in artistic creativity, which deals at its best with the generalities and essences that memory supplies, as well as in countering the dispiriting sense of fragmentation we feel within ourselves as we grow and change through the course of our years. It makes of us ‘amphibious creatures who are plunged simultaneously in the past and in the reality of the present’ (F, 610; IV 114), and even this present reality is composed to a large extent of associations from the past: ‘what we call reality is a certain connexion between these immediate sensations and the memories which envelop us simultaneously with them’ (TR, 245–6; IV 468). Within us and around us, memory makes up much of the world we perceive, and most of the enduring self that we are. The three trees glimpsed on the road to Hudimesnil may leave the Narrator frustrated as they refuse to give up their secret. They have value nonetheless in afording him the frst lesson in his long apprenticeship towards understanding the nature of memory and its pervasive role in our existence.

Notes 1 Memory failings in In Search of Lost Time are explored in detail as part of Harald Weinrich’s ambitious overview of cultural representation of forgetting, Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting (2004). 2 Herz and Schooler (2002) are among those to have explored the relationship of memory and smell from a scientifc perspective. Troscianko (2013) ofers an overview of neuroscientifc parallels and engagement with Proust’s theory of memory.

References Bizub, E. (2006) Proust et le moi divisé: La Recherche: creuset de la psychologie expérimentale (1874−1914), Paris: Droz. Carter, W. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life, New Haven: Yale University Press. Deleuze, G. (1964) Proust et les signes, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Herz, R. S. and Schooler, J. W. (2002) “A Naturalistic Study of Autobiographical Memories Evoked by Olfactory and Visual Cues: Testing the Proustian Hypothesis”, American Journal of Psychology 115: 21–32. Hughes, E. (1983) Marcel Proust: A Study in the Quality of Awareness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kihlstrom, J. F. (1987) “The Cognitive Unconscious,” Science 237: 1445–52. Kristeva, J. (1994) Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire, Paris: Gallimard. Landy, J. (2011) “Proust among the Psychologists,” Philosophy and Literature, 35, 375−87. Larkin, A. (2011) Proust Writing Photography, London: Legenda. Megay, J. (1976) Bergson et Proust: essai de la mise au point de la question de l’infuence de Bergson sur Proust, Paris: Vrin. Poulet, G. (1963) L’Espace proustien, Paris: Gallimard.

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Simon Kemp Proust, M. (1965) Choix de lettres, ed. by Philip Kolb, Paris: Plon. Proust, M. (2008) Cahiers 1 à 75 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 75 vols, ed. by B. Brun and others, Turnhout: Brepols. Richard, J.-P. (1974) Proust et le monde sensible, Paris: Seuil. Squire, L. (2004) ‘Memory Systems of the Brain: A Brief History and Current Perspective’, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory 82, 171–7. Squire, L. and Kandel, E. (2009) Memory: From Mind to Molecules, 2nd edn, Greenwood, CO: Roberts. Tadié, J.-Y. (2012) Le Lac inconnu: entre Proust et Freud, Paris: Gallimard. Troscianko, E. (2013) “Cognitive Realism and Memory in Proust’s Madeleine Episode,” Memory Studies 6(4), 437–56. Weinrich, Harald. (2004) Lethe: The Art and Critique of Forgetting, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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10 PROUSTIAN HABIT Tomas Stern

The reader of RTP is granted just a few paragraphs before habit is introduced: Habit! That able but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds sufer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our mind is nonetheless only too happy to fnd, for without it, reduced to its own devices, it would be powerless to make any room habitable. (SW, 9, translation altered; I 8) Implied is a view of mind: powerless to interfere with habit’s course, but equally powerless to reconcile us even to something as innocuous as a room, were it not for habit’s work. Corresponding to this is a view of the world: hostile. The objects are nasty, imposing, menacing: a ‘mentally poisoning’ smell, malicious curtains and a cruel mirror (SW, 9; I 8). Habit, unbidden but welcome, steps in. The mirror becomes compassionate. Habit is a central aspect of the narrator’s worldview. It appears both at major plot points and in signifcant theoretical passages. Proust had already thematised habit in some of his earliest published work – notably in ‘Violante ou la Mondanité’ (1892) (‘Violante, or High Society’) – as well as in unpublished material (see II 1352 fn. 2). His ideas have their roots in his philosophical education, where habit formed a key part of the syllabus. Indeed, in retrospect, we can say that Proust may have been taught philosophy at a time and place where habit, as a philosophical topic, was approaching its high watermark, as a major theme in French philosophical thought. Another major theme, of course, was time. It is my aim to explicate habit in RTP, with a view to a better understanding of the text, and a better understanding of the phenomenon which the novel describes. The prominence of habit in the novel has never been a secret (Beckett 1969, 18–29; Henry 2004; Fülöp 2014). But philosophical treatments of Proust have nonetheless tended to ignore or underplay its essential role. After noting some terminological issues (‘Terminology: L’habitude, Habit and Habituation’), I set out a background theory of habit, based on RTP and the philosophical tradition that lay behind it (‘Habit in Context: Two Models’). The section entitled ‘RTP as Habit in Action’ returns, with this theory, to habit’s role in the plot of RTP. The next three sections look at habit’s connection with the self: its mediation of the external world (‘Selfng

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-14

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the World’) and of other people, in the form of love and loss (‘Habits of Love and Loss’) and, fnally, its relation to the self outside time (‘Habit and the Self Outside Time’).

Terminology: L’habitude, Habit and Habituation Contemporary readers of an English translation can be forgiven for missing and misunderstanding the nature and the signifcance of habit in the novel. This is partly a function of diferences between French and English when it comes to the word ‘habit’ – the subject of this section. A second factor is the comparative lack of philosophical or psychological analysis of habit in our intellectual context (see ‘Habit in Context: Two Models’). Looking back to the work of the ‘slow-moving arranger’ (or ‘very slow housekeeper’ (Proust 2003b, 8)), we might already feel that ‘habit’ is an unnatural English term for what is going on. The narrator, we might say, is getting used or accustomed to the room. L’habitude, the term which is standardly translated as ‘habit’, is indeed often captured better by something like ‘getting used to’ or, more directly, by ‘habituation’. Sometimes, by all means, une habitude is a habit: Albertine’s ‘stupid habits of speech’ (C, 11; III 527), for example. Often, though, habitude (and its cognates, such as ‘s’habituer’) is not translated using ‘habit’ (and its cognates, such as ‘habituate’) at all.1 Readers of English translations of RTP therefore meet the word ‘habit’ (and its cognates) less frequently than French readers meet ‘habitude’ (and its cognates).2 Just after the introduction of habit, cited above, the magic lantern undoes habit’s careful work by changing the way the room looks. In French, the lantern destroys ‘l’habitude que j’avais de ma chambre’ (emphasis added). Literally, it destroys ‘my habituation to my room’ or even ‘the habit I had of my room’ (my translations, emphasis added). In the Scott Moncrief (et al.) translation, it destroys ‘the familiar impression I had of my room’ (SW, 10, emphasis added; I 9); Lydia Davis has ‘the familiarity which my bedroom had acquired for me’ (Proust 2003b, 9). Here, as elsewhere, the French expression ‘avoir l’habitude de’ (literally, the ugly phrase ‘to have the habit of ’), followed by a noun, can prove elusive. To take another example, ‘où nous avons l’habitude de vivre’ (literally ‘where we have the habit of living’) becomes ‘where one is accustomed to live’ (G, 103; II 395; or see I 110; SW, 131: ‘as a rule’). Overall, a wide variety of terms are used to translate the habitude family: ‘grown accustomed’ (F, 621; IV 123); ‘growing used to’ (BG, 282; II 27); ‘ordinarily’ (SW, 52; I 44); ‘normal’ (SW, 186; I 154); ‘practised’ (SG, 41; I 33); ‘normal practice’ (G, 296; II 555); ‘routine’ (G, 266; II 531); ‘familiarity’ (G, 41; II 343). Proust often uses habitude (and cognates) repeatedly in the same sentence or passage. This, too, is liable to be removed in translation. For example, at the start of The Captive, the sun brings new decoration to a room by shining on it at an unfamiliar hour: it changes ‘celle que nous avions l’habitude d’y voir’ and reveals, in the narrator, ‘un jeune homme plus ancien qu’avait caché longtemps l’habitude’ (III 520–1, emphasis added). Literally, that is, it changes ‘what we had the habit of seeing there’, revealing ‘a previous [or: former] young man whom habit had long concealed’. In translation, it changes ‘what we were accustomed to see’ while revealing ‘an earlier young man whom habit had long concealed’ (C, 3, emphasis added 3; for other instances, compare SW, 406 and I 335; SW, 47 and I 40; BG, 482–3 and II 194). If the aim is to produce a readable translation, then this removal of habitude/habit in favour of other expressions is perfectly understandable. But it weakens the links that the narrator draws between habitude and many of the other aspects of RTP, some of which we investigate below. Moreover, repetition itself bears a close relation to habit. Prima facie, we might say that we get used to things, grow accustomed to them, become familiar with them precisely by repeated exposure; and Proust’s prose repeatedly exposes us to ‘habitude’. Habit 162

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was defned in terms of repetition in one of Proust’s philosophy textbooks, as we shall see. Even if this is not the whole story – one can get accustomed to a single, prolonged but not repeated noise – accounts of habit must grapple with repetition in some form or another.4 Proust’s repetitions of habitude may be a deliberate play on that – an attempt to habituate the reader to its use and signifcance, to slip it under the radar, in preparation for occasional, surprisingly direct treatment. While refecting upon the diferent translations presents us with some of the ways in which habitude can be rendered into English, the overriding point here is that there is no easy, frictionless translation of this family of terms. Compounding that problem is the fact that habitude was a theoretical term with a particular set of meanings and associations in Proust’s intellectual context – the point we turn to next.

Habit in Context: Two Models In present-day anglophone, philosophy, habit is not a major topic; nor does it pose a conventional, precisely defned problem, puzzle or paradox. It has a long history (for the most comprehensive historical analysis, up to its date of publication, see Funke and Schmandt 1961), but one in which it frequently takes an auxiliary role, as it does in Aristotle’s ethics, Hume’s account of causation or Hegel’s philosophy of spirit – to name three prominent treatments. In Hume’s case, to which Proust obliquely refers (F, 576; IV 85), habitual association (or ‘custom’) is required for us to form the idea of a cause, but its operations ‘seem […] not to take place, merely because [they are] found in the highest degree’ (Hume 2007, 4.8, p. 20; see also 5.4–5.5, pp. 31–2). (‘Custom’ is translated ‘l’habitude’ in the quotation of Hume known to Proust (see Fraisse 2013, 666).) This is not to imply that nothing recent has been written on habit and philosophy (Carlisle 2014; Caruana and Testa 2020), let alone historical analysis of particular eras or fgures, such as Aristotle, Early Modern accounts of habit, Ravaisson or Hegel (McCumber 1990; Rodrigo 2011; Wright 2011; Sinclair 2019; Novakovic 2019; and see Sinclair and Carlisle 2011). But habit is unlikely to have a chapter to itself in a textbook introducing high school students to philosophy or in a philosophy textbook aimed at university students. Proust had both (in Rabier 1888 and in Janet and Séailles 1887, respectively; for an extensive discussion of these and further sources, see Fraisse 2013). Of the two chapters in Proust’s textbooks, Rabier’s is more systematic and analytical, dealing, albeit idiosyncratically, with habit’s causes, nature and efects. Janet and Séailles begin with a defnition: a ‘disposition acquired or contracted [“contractée”, which has the medical connotation, too – almost “caught”] by repetition or continuation of impressions or acts’ ( Janet and Séailles 1887, 357). The authors then ofer their students a history of philosophical discussions of habit, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, moving via the Stoics and Epicureans to (among others) Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Maine de Biran and Herbert Spencer. In France, in particular, theorists were building on the work of Maine de Biran (1841 [1802]) and Xavier Bichat (1805 [1800]) at the turn of the nineteenth century, and on Ravaisson’s infuential Of Habit (2008 [1838]). A vast array of studies were published towards the end of the century and shortly thereafter (for a partial list, see e.g. Funke and Schmandt 1961, 16), many of which were known to Proust, directly or indirectly. The philosophers just listed do not always mean the same thing by habit, nor are they giving answers to the same questions about it. As told by Janet and Séailles, for example, habit was primarily a focus for moral philosophy, most famously in Aristotle, until the early modern empiricists brought it to bear on theoretical philosophy, most famously in Hume’s 163

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account of causation ( Janet and Séailles 1887, 370–1). For Leibniz, according to Proust’s textbook, habit is in efect a ‘universal metaphysical law’, while for Hume it is the psychological mechanism by which we access matters of fact ( Janet and Séailles 1887, 369, 374). Ravaisson connects habit with a speculative philosophy of nature. On Spencer’s evolutionary account, habits are hereditary – ultimately continuous with instincts, only not yet as well established ( Janet and Séailles 1887, 385–7). Bichat (whom Proust mentioned in passing in one of his Pastiches) had combined physiological research with philosophical refection, producing a vitalist account of the diference between animal life, including humans, and non-animal life: habit’s efects are felt in animal life only (Bichat 1805; for a brief, clear account of Bichat on habit, see Sinclair 2019, 25–39). More broadly, and in today’s terms, two major debates were, frst, whether or not habit can be explained naturalistically (for example, as in Malebranche, by changes in the brain (see Wright 2011, 23)) and, second, whether habituated actions were voluntary in a morally relevant sense. Proust therefore had every reason to think of habit as a major philosophical theme, historically and in contemporary work. In passing, therefore, we might note one of the diffculties of enquiring into Proust’s philosophical status: if habit formed part of his formal, philosophical landscape, but not ours, he might have considered himself more philosophical than we would. Faced with all of this variety, how might Proust and his contemporaries have understood the role and signifcance of habit? We can usefully begin with a collection of psychological observations, parts of which were emphasised by some, others by others, but which can be summarised by putting together two parallel models of habituation: one for how we habituate sensations, the other for the habituation of activities. These models are my own summaries, abstracted from various sources, including Proust’s textbooks. Each model contains three stages. Sensation: 1 2 3

A new sensation appears, the novelty of which draws the subject’s attention to it. For example: a sound, a sight or a bodily feeling, including pleasure or pain. This sensation is repeated or endures and, on repetition or duration, produces a diminishing impact on the subject, who pays it and is able to pay it less and less attention. Now, if the sensation ceases, then the subject’s attention is drawn to its absence.

Activity: 1 2 3

The subject performs some new action, which requires the subject’s close attention: an activity, a skill, a way of behaving. With repetition, the action becomes easier to perform and demands less of the subject’s attention. Once habituated, the subject has, or may have, an unwitting or involuntary tendency either to perform this action or to seek out occasions to perform it.5

These abstracted models were rarely set out as universal patterns or as the fnal word on the matter. Plenty is left unanswered. Why do some sensations become more irritating with repetition, while others simply cannot be tuned out? (Bichat has a category of ‘absolute’ sensation, usually extreme pain or pleasure, which is immune to habituation.) Why do some activities never get easier? Some skills do not seek expression at every opportunity: why not? Are the models roughly analogous by coincidence, or is there a deeper connection between 164

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them? The distinction between sensation and activity is not easily maintained: if paying attention to sensations is a kind of activity, then, according to the activity model, we ought to be able to improve at it; on the sensation model, meanwhile, the sensations in question ought slowly to disappear. Making sense of this distinction and interrelation was the focal point of Maine de Biran’s long essay. More ambitiously, Ravaisson, known indirectly to Proust, attempted, frst, to unify these models under one principle and then to invoke that principle as the key to understanding the relationship between mind and nature. Regardless of their faults or incompleteness, Proust draws on these underlying models, aspects of which appear at various points in RTP. The magic lantern undoes the ‘anaesthetic efect of habit’ (SW, 11; I 10). Originally, new sensations, pressing in on the mind of the narrator, had prevented him from settling in his room (1); they were dulled by habit (2); the lantern produces a room full of new sensations, unsettling him again (3). The novel is full of the ways that habituation renders things invisible or prevents us from feeling or experiencing them with their initial force: weather (G, 76; II 372), landscape (G, 85; II 380), the ‘monstrous abnormality’ of the lives of servants (G, 66; II 364), unpleasant memories (SG, 207; III 176; F, 611–3; IV 115–7), the pleasures of a long-term partner (F, 488; IV 12), the ageing of those we frequently see (TR, 448; IV 623) or miraculous new technology (G, 147; II 431). The narrator observes that being in a non-habituated location makes it harder to detach ourselves from our immediate sensations, whether they are thereby experienced as threatening and intrusive (the magic lantern), a pleasant distraction (G, 103; II 395) or the life-afrming basis for falling in love (BG, 270; II 17). Habit also operates according to the activity model. It ofers a ‘dispensation from efort’ (G, 88; II 382). Walking a route which is unfamiliar to him, the narrator’s limbs ache. Upon realising that he has unwittingly arrived home, everything becomes easier: I no longer had another step to take, the ground walked for me in this garden where for so long my actions had ceased to be accompanied by voluntary attention: Habit came to take me in her arms and carried me up to my bed like a little child. (I 114, my translation; SW, 136) Habituated actions are not even really actions, because the ground moves and Habit carries him to bed. Likewise, in the habituated room, the doorknob ‘seemed to move of its own accord […] so unconscious had its manipulation become’ (SW, 11; I 10). As for the third stage: the narrator, long after Albertine’s disappearance, is ‘keeping a girl in Paris’, behaving towards her according to the patterns established by the multiple habits he formed with Albertine (F, 780–1; IV 255–6). Keeping these two diferent models in mind shines a light, moreover, on the way that Proust plays with them. Once he has had time to adjust to certain painful memories associated with Albertine’s (alleged) infdelities, the narrator writes: I was habituated to these latter [painful] memories […], ever present albeit obscured in my memory, like those pieces of furniture placed in the half-light of a gallery which, without being able to pick them out, one nonetheless avoids bumping into. (F, 621, translation altered; IV 124) The narrator’s point is that an objectively less threatening memory is more upsetting at this moment because it, unlike its nastier but better-habituated rivals, has not been dulled by repetition and can therefore strike the mind with full force. But Proust’s choice of image is 165

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revealing. He conjures up the mind as a space flled with potentially hazardous furniture (the more sinister but better-habituated memories) and pictures the thinker as a person nimbly but non-consciously weaving around this furniture, precisely by means of habituation. Thus, habituation on the activity model (nimbly stepping around obstacles) is used, metaphorically, to illustrate habit’s dulling efect on the displeasure associated with bad memories – in other words, to illustrate something akin to the sensation model. The general idea is that habituation dulls the signifcance, emotional impact and even the ability to recall or pay attention to memories, but that this inability to recall or re-experience is a skill, an active form of memory-making. I have set out the models, above, in a way that emphasises their parallels: a frst stage of novelty and attention; second, repetition and what we might call ‘disattention’; fnally, compulsion towards an absence, whether by paying attention to the absent sensation, or by performing the missing activity. We ought not to miss the much-discussed diference between habituated sensation and action. In the case of sensation, habit kills it of; in the case of ability, habit may enable or liberate. An optimistic spin on this diference would be that in both cases the result may be positive. Irritating or obtrusive sensations, coming from without, are dulled and made hospitable, while the subject is freed up to do more of what she wants, to pursue her own activities, which come from within. The result, in both cases, is a person increasingly self-propelled and less bufeted about by external impositions. This was the view of Albert Lemoine (Lemoine 1875), for example, whose book on habit was cited, with approval, by Rabier, as evidence for the claim that, without habit, there would be no progress: It is thanks to habit that man can run instead of crawling, that the sciences are created and enriched; that virtue is acquired; that in all things progress is accomplished. Because the [habituated] act requires less efort to be repeated, the surplus power which the cause does not expend on reproducing it becomes available, in some way, for new and higher eforts. (Lemoine, cited in Rabier 1888, 1:587) Though he allows for habit’s role in making his room less hostile and in making certain tasks less efortful, Proust’s narrator wisely eschews a simple, optimistic reading along these lines. For one thing, as had long been pointed out, some of the sensations that are dulled are those that, all things considered, we might prefer to retain. Bichat noted, in passing, the efects that habit had on pleasurable sensations: ‘it is the nature of pleasure and pain to destroy themselves, to cease to be, because they have been’ (Bichat 1805, 41). Pleasure, understood as a sensation of a sort, ofers diminishing returns on repetition: we are all chasing the dragon. The sensation model, when the sensation is the hum of the radiators in the corridor, enables me to get on with my work. Substitute the hum of the radiator for any pleasurable experience and what you get is the Rake’s Progress, or the Hedonic Treadmill, or, in Bichat, a sardonic explanation for why men get bored with their wives (Bichat 1805, 41–2). Sensory habituation, on such accounts, is at best a mixed blessing. As Rabier puts it: Any phenomenon that is repeated or prolonged, if it is left on its own and abandoned to the power of habit, is a phenomenon lost to consciousness. Habit is like avarice: it gathers treasures, but it hides them from all eyes. Hence, habit tends to make us perfect automatons: it gives us the sureness of action of the automaton, but also the unconsciousness of the automaton. (Rabier 1888, 1:580–1) 166

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The narrator agrees that habit impedes delight (BG, 337; II 72). But he takes this further: habituated experience is not merely hidden, but thereby distorted, for ‘we only truly know what is new, what suddenly introduces into our sensibility a change of tone which strikes us, what habit has not yet replaced with its colourless facsimiles’ (F, 605; IV 110; see also F, 642; IV 141 on habit blocking us from ‘the reality of life’ and BG, 337; II 72). Likewise, not all aspects of the activity model are welcome. As the third step highlights, we must be careful what we do. Each action is not an isolated way of behaving, but a blueprint for how we are likely to behave in the future, for what we will (and will be able to) pay attention to and what we will desire or seek out. Habit, on this model, does not distinguish between an aptitude that can be summoned at will and a bad habit or an irritating propensity (Rabier 1888, 1:517) and no desire can be considered in isolation from past and future habits (Rabier 1888, 1:529). Some authors drew analogies between habit, in the organic realm, and the inertia of material bodies: in both cases, things tend to remain the way they were (Rabier 1888, 1:575). Metaphorically, in RTP, habit renders inert (G, 166–7; II 448; see also ‘Violante ou la Mondanité’). All of this is not to rush to the other extreme – to suggest that habit is merely hostile or negative in RTP. Rather than asking whether it is treated positively or negatively, it is more fruitful to consider, frst, how habit appears in the action of the novel, and, second, the account of the self which emerges from taking these two models seriously in the light of this action.

RTP as Habit in Action RTP is a drama of gathering and casting of habits, of slow accrual and then of equally slow dehabituation (that is, of unlearning or being cut of from the relevant habits), or of sudden, peculiar interruption. The magic lantern has a sharp dehabituating efect on the young narrator in his room. But, more importantly, the madeleine episode is possible only because the tea that he drinks is ‘contrary to my habit’ (I 44, my translation; SW, 52). What happens next presages the diminishing returns that come with habituated sensations. With each mouthful, the power of the tea-dipped madeleine reduces: the third ‘gives me rather less than the second’ (SW, 53; I 45). The novel springs forth from this interruption of habit. Moreover, as Erika Fülöp points out, dipping the tea in the madeleine was itself a habit from the narrator’s childhood (Fülöp 2014, 357). An interruption of his habits puts him in contact with a former habit, a point we return to later. By the time the narrator eats the madeleine, habit’s signifcance has been signalled, not just in the habituated room, but also in the drame du coucher. To her dismay, the young narrator has become habituated to Maman’s kiss (SW, 14–5; I 13). The theme recurs twice. First because, when they have guests, Maman, who habitually ofers the kiss in his bedroom, bestows it downstairs: an interruption of habit, but at least a habitual interruption which is tolerable enough (SW, 26–7; I 23; compare the early lunch on Saturdays: SW, 131; I 109). Second, on fnding him distraught, Maman is reluctant to concede to his special request, precisely because she is reluctant to habituate him (SW, 42; I 36). As this example indicates, habit appears not merely as a force in the narrator’s own interior world, but as something that his characters fnd themselves reckoning with, often explicitly – as though it were a local deity, the power of which is known to many in the book. Swann, sufering from jealousy, cannot bear the thought of leaving Paris, fearing the consequences of going to a place in which habit hasn’t deadened his sensations (SW, 421; I 348). Being exposed to a raft of non-habituated impressions will undermine 167

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his carefully constructed defences. Cottard, in his fateful remark about Albertine and Andrée’s dancing, notes that ‘parents are very rash to allow their daughters to form such habits’ (SG, 225; III 191). Meanwhile, interruptions of habit presage dramatic consequences. Strange things happen when people do things they don’t habitually do or are taken from their habitual environments. We have already mentioned the magic lantern and the madeleine. There are others. The narrator, his habits interrupted, becomes fascinated with the milk-girl (BG, 270; II 17). Swann visits Odette at a non-habitual hour (SW, 331; I 273), with disturbing results. The Baron’s arrival, contrary to habit, leads to his frst encounter with Jupien (SG, 2; III 4). Albertine returns to Paris, breaking the ‘habitual order’ of her plans, and the narrator ends up kissing her for the frst time (G, 406; II 648). The revelations of the fnal volume are likewise occasioned by an interruption of habit (TR, 215; IV 444). Symbolically, as well as literally, habit interferes with knowledge: it keeps characters set in their ways, including those literal ways which the novel will have to work to undo: it ensures that the narrator’s family never takes both ways – the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way – on the same day (SW, 160–1; I 133). This is one reason why, as Henry notes, the cessation of habit leaves the subject ‘unprepared, more receptive, even vulnerable’ (Henry 2004, 458), open to more profound insight. Consequently, the novel examines the ways that habit is thwarted, undermined or interrupted. In Rabier’s chapter on habit, the author attempts to present a counterforce to habit: attention, which he calls habit’s ‘antagonist’ (Rabier 1888, 1:581). By concentrating on something, he claims, we can oppose the way that habit undermines attention. Rabier seems to acknowledge, tacitly, that this isn’t altogether a satisfactory counterforce: habit functions precisely to dull attention over time, so to say that we should lavish more attention on something begs the question. In any case, Proust does not explore this possibility; interruption or dehabituation seems as little willed as habit itself. But he does consider alternative ways in which habit is interrupted. These can be mundane: time apart from someone we regularly see (G, 157; II 439–40); new technology (G, 149; II 433) or a change of weather (C, 20; III 535). In fact, though, many of the major subjects treated by the novel have an intricate relation with habit’s interruption. Art is a disrupter of habits (BG 482–3; II 194; G, 90; II 384; F, 642; IV, 141; TR 254–6; IV 474–6). Love, grief and jealousy are tied to habit (see below). Habit’s connection with memory was a commonplace observation in Proust’s context (Egger 1880, 218; Janet and Séailles 1887, 368), though the exact nature of that connection was much disputed.6 Likewise, habit’s connection with time was known and disputed. Rabier cites Albert Lemoine’s study (1875), for whom habit appears, in efect, as sedimented time: For a being capable of habit, it is not true to say that the past is no more, nor even that the future is not yet. His past is not abolished; he carries it with him in his very present; and, with this past, he anticipates the future. For him, the past accumulates and is summed up in the present; it is all there in the form of habit. (Albert Lemoine, quoted in Rabier 1888, 1:585) While we touch on some of these themes in the remainder, my focus will be on habit’s relations to the novel’s conception of the self. This focus is warranted by the centrality of this topic, by its interconnectedness with habit’s other roles, and by the novelty with which Proust treats habit in this regard. 168

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Selfng the World The twin models of habituation, taken together, yield a vision of human experience and action which the present-day reader is unlikely to carry with her into the novel. A person, on these models, is dynamic. She is not permitted a moment’s peace to observe or to act in isolation without drawing on or invoking ties to the past and without strengthening and weakening ties to the future. At any given moment, new sensations are being suppressed and incorporated. They are made less intrusive, by all means, but only at the cost of distortion and dependence. Attention cannot be maintained at will, because it is dulled by repetition. Even willing appears in the novel as a kind of activity which can be lost from lack of practice, like any other habit (F, 489; IV 13). Likewise, new skills can always be acquired, but we lose the ability to pay attention to them and we may seek out opportunities to display them. A person, subject to these two models, is composed to a signifcant degree of constantly shifting patterns of layered and interwoven habits. Layered, because many habits will be contingent on previous ones: the habituated activity of walking up the stairs at Combray depends upon the habituated activity of walking and walking upstairs. Interwoven, because we never perform an activity, or sense our surroundings, in isolation from other sights, sounds and activities: I walk, but I do so here, at this time, in this weather, with these preoccupations – all of which get bound up with my habits, however contingently. In principle, with perfect repetition or uninterrupted duration, habit would tend towards complete indiference with regard to sensation and unconsciousness with regard to action. But perfect repetition of a sensation or action is precluded, meaning that our habits change over time. Though our current patterns are not the same as the earlier ones, they do bear an intricate relation to them, just as they lay down patterns for the future. Each step is portentous, shaped by the past and shaping the future. Nothing is innocuous. Taken as an always-habituated and always-habituating being, it is not clear how we could conceive of a person isolated from her past, a will that stands apart from a set of choices that are presented to it, or a way of experiencing the world that is not intimately tied to the journey of the experiencer. When it comes to morality, the narrator is clear-eyed in his view that habit overrides moral conscience – one reason, perhaps, why he shows little sustained interest in the latter (TR, 180–2; IV 415–7). While some fgures in the history of philosophy disputed whether habituated actions are voluntary or not (Wright 2011), a better way of putting things might be that the concept of the always-habituating self frequently undercuts the question of whether or not some action is voluntary in any neat or fnal sense. As in Hegel’s treatment of it, habit ofers a grey zone between freedom and necessity, between will and nature (Hegel 1970, Volume 10, Sections 409–10, pp. 182–91). Is this dynamic, habituating self, this grey zone, all there is to us? Bichat answered in the negative: physiologically, some aspects of us are cordoned of from habit. Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theory was taken, at least by Janet and Séailles, to answer afrmatively: we are habit all the way down, some inherited (therefore essentially fxed as far as we are concerned), others added by us, but all in principle open to dehabituation over time. Others, like Rabier, fnd this question unanswerable. The narrator, however, appears to afrm that there is a self completely apart from habit. We return to this important point at the end. Meanwhile, our focus for the moment is on the everyday self, by which I mean the self in time, the habituating self that is the subject of most of the novel. We begin, in this section, with its relation to the external world and look, in the following section, at its relation to other people. Through habituation, we might say, a person selfs the world. In putting it this way, I aim to make clear, albeit in ugly language, a feature of the narrator’s and others’ emphasis on 169

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habit. Namely, that focusing on habituation prevents us from thinking of the boundary of the body as the boundary of the self. From a phenomenological point of view, we might say, the habituated, humming radiator has been selfed or me’d, and turning it of would therefore be like removing a part of me. Likewise with activities: one would be hard pressed to separate a ‘me’ of from those activities I am able to do without thinking. Janet and Séailles, summarising an aspect of Ravaisson’s account, note that a repeated sensation, once habituated, becomes ‘a permanent state of the soul, something of ourselves’ ( Janet and Séailles 1887, 382). Hegel suggests that, prior to its habituation, a sensation may be so intrusive that it is as if the mind is the sensation (Hegel 1970, Volume 10, Sections 409–10, pp. 182–91). Habituation to sensation elevates us above mere susceptibility towards control. Habituation is therefore a form of freedom, as Hegel understands it, namely a way of being at home with yourself in the world. Similarly, habituation is not merely presented in Proust as a tuning out of noise or gaining skills in some action, but rather as a mine-making and, because what is ours is absorbed into us through habit, as a me-making or self-constituting process. In the Balbec hotel, habit becomes a dragon-slayer (SG, 189; III 160–1), by means of which we ‘impose on things the soul which is familiar to us in place of their soul, which terrifes us’ (III 161, my translation; SG, 189). Earlier, the ‘anaesthetic efect of habit’ on the impression of the room is at the same time a mine-making, a ‘flling [the room] with my own self [moi] until I paid no more attention to it than to my self ’ (I 10, my translation; SW, 11). Things in the narrator’s Paris room did not disturb him because they were ‘merely extensions of my organs, an enlargement of myself ’: consequently, in the new Balbec room, he experiences himself as literally diminished (BG, 282–3; II 27). These are examples from the realm of sensation, but activity, too, is a kind of me-making. As we have seen, habit makes the ground walk for you and doorknob move itself: the external world is admixed with will. The habituated room is one I have selfed, or made part of me. Yet, Proust also uses an apparently opposing image to make a similar point. After the rooms in Paris and Balbec come the room at Doncières, which he anticipates with fear, expecting to fnd it unfamiliar and disturbing. (The fear is unfounded, as it happens, because these dwellings are, as it were, pre-habituated [G, 87; II 382]). He remarks that every bedroom he fnds himself in is a new bedroom, because once a bedroom has been habituated, he is no longer present in it: ‘my mind remained elsewhere and sent mere Habit to take its place’ (G, 86; II 381). (Conversely, the milk-girl gets the narrator’s full attention, his ‘whole being’, due to the cessation of habit [BG, 270; II 17].) This is a diferent image of the relation between self, habit and the fully habituated room: in the frst, the self expands beyond the body to absorb the room; in the second, it vanishes to the point of absence, its thoughts elsewhere.7 The connection between them lies in the narrator’s view that the body, including the expanded body (the habituated room), commands no attention as such, unless something changes or goes wrong, as in the case of sickness.8

Habits of Love and Loss Proust was not the frst to remark on the impact of habit on interpersonal relations – Bichat calls habitual memory the ‘only evil of happy lovers’ (Bichat 1805, 42) – but RTP concentrates on this subject to an extraordinary degree, developing its own picture. For it is not just rooms, walks and drinks which are habituated (or ‘selfed’) in RTP. Other people are, too. To be in love is to be habituated to another, and the depth of that love corresponds to the degree of habituation (F, 489; IV 13). With habituation, predictably enough, comes the invisibility 170

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of the other. Conversely, both falling out of love and grief – processes which are, at times, indistinguishable in the novel – are presented as forms of dehabituation. To grieve someone is to get out of the habit of them and to get them out of one’s habits. Habit’s relation to love is explored in three of the major loves in the novel (and briefy in others): Swann and Odette; the narrator and Gilberte; the narrator and Albertine. This section reconstructs a Proustian account of how habit and love progress. First, meeting, novelty and relative indiference, followed by the slow accumulation of habits relating to the other. As noted, interruption of habit itself can be fertile ground for love (BG, 270; II 17). Proust likes to emphasise how little notice is taken, at frst, of the future beloved. This is symbolised by Albertine’s roaming beauty spot (BG, 489; II 200; BG, 526–7; II 230). Indeed, he suggests that this inobservance results from an unguardedness which is a precondition for great love. Swann’s love for a woman who is not his type is explicable with reference to habit: by not taking such a woman seriously as a potential great love, Swann can permit her to make herself part of ‘every hour’ (TR, 416; IV 599), thus enabling him to get habituated. The narrator concludes: ‘what is dangerous and productive of sufering in love is not the woman herself, it is her presence every day […]; it is not the woman, it is habit’ (IV 599, my translation; TR, 417; see also C, 406; III 857–8). With the increase of love comes an increased habituation – that is, behaving in ways which mean you will meet them (SW, 110; I 92–3), thereby associating them with certain accidental, proximate sensations (waves, music, fowers). Third, the other is strongly but not fully interwoven with the lover’s habits. The narrator’s love of Gilberte can be broken by a combination of will and luck (BG, 190; I 579); his love of Albertine is similar before the end of Sodom and Gomorrah, when he leaves her for Balbec, hoping to form new habits with new women (SG 178; III 151). Fourth, incorporation into all habits – for example, when the narrator has lived with Albertine for some time (F, 489; IV 13). Fifth, a process of dehabituation caused by ceasing to see the beloved. We can usefully elaborate on the fourth and ffth stages. Love reaches its zenith when, in one of Proust’s favoured medical metaphors, it is declared ‘no longer operable’ (SW, 368; I 303). Once fully in love with someone, the beloved is, on the one hand, fully enmeshed with our being (hence inoperable, unable to be removed without destroying us) and, on the other, invisible, precisely because she is everywhere. Swann’s love becomes ‘so closely interwoven with all his habits’ (SW, 368, my emphasis; I 303) that its object, Odette, disappears altogether. Of course, it is a general tendency of habit to diminish, to make less salient and even make vanish our habituated sensations and activities. But, in the case of the habituated room, one can move to another room. Love, by contrast, represents habit at its limit: the beloved is absorbed not by means of one kind of habituation but into every habit; consequently, she is nowhere to be found in the mind of the lover, a mind condemned to remain elsewhere. Yet, there is no other room. Indeed, the narrator’s love of Albertine frst undoes his habituation to his room, and then rehabituates him to it with her in mind – a concise example of how the beloved gets incorporated everywhere (BG, 584; II 278). The narrator therefore likens the fully habituated love-object to our consciousness: omnipresent and invisible (F, 532; IV 48). This phenomenon explains why Albertine, prior to departure, seems to be ‘nothing to me’, whereas, afterwards, she is revealed as ‘my entire life’ (F, 477; IV 3).9 In the previous section, we looked at a diferent way of conceiving of a fully habituated room – as an extension of the self. Does love ofer the same? It appears to in the case of the love of the narrator for his grandmother in Balbec (BG, 283–4; II 28). Yet, the most prominent loves in RTP are jealous loves. The narrator’s jealousy makes him keep Albertine prisoner, thereby locking her into his habits. But jealousy is also a dehabituating force, a magic lantern constantly changing the beloved, forcing the lover to look again, to see familiar 171

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things in a new light (such as certain words: SW, 428–9; I 354; see also G, 405–6; II 647). Jealous love, in the novel, moves back and forth between the invisibility and consequent boredom of full habituation and the agony of dehabituating jealousy. Habit therefore goes some way to account for the dystopian element in so many of the personal relationships in the novel. Love, full habituation, is a not-seeing and not-knowing. To see the beloved, love must be partial or riven by jealousy. Even the more harmonious love between the narrator and his grandmother has a darker aspect: despite his loving description, she efectively becomes his replacement bedroom, merely an extension of him (BG, 283; II 28; on love and lack of separation, see G, 157; II 439; BG, 549; II 248–9). When he describes the ffth stage, falling out of love, Proust likewise invokes the workings of habit. When Albertine leaves, he moves from seeing habit as a dulling force (when Albertine is always with him), to a disorientating one: Hitherto I had regarded [habit] chiefy as an annihilating force which suppresses the originality and even the awareness of one’s perceptions; now I saw it as a dread deity, so riveted to one’s being […] that if it detaches itself […] this deity that one had barely distinguished inficts on one suferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself. (F, 478; IV 4) If love, at its limit, means full habituation, then a sharp severance means total dehabituation. As its frst appearance makes clear (see above), one of habit’s main functions is to render the external world less hostile. After her initial departure, the narrator is powerless against this aggressive onslaught, maladapted, a fsh out of water. Of course, little by little, new habits, not associated with the loved one, cannot help but accruing (F, 512–3; IV 32–3). These are, in turn, alterations of the self which appears composed of these habits. On the narrator’s telling, therefore, the constant, shifting process of habituation and dehabituation amounts to a process of death (‘a true death of the self ’ (II 32, my translation; BG, 288)) followed by the resurrection of a slightly diferent self (BG, 286–9; II 30–2; also TR, 438; IV 615). The fear, for example, of a future in which he does not love Gilberte is simultaneously a fear of the death of the part of him that loves her (ibid.) and which, at the inoperable stage of love, would require the alteration of all habits. After Albertine’s departure, a similar pattern emerges. The narrator soon experiences moments of calm in which the absence of the beloved is not salient to him. He recoils with horror: my love, which had just seen and recognised the one enemy by whom it could be conquered, forgetting (l’oubli), began to tremble, like a lion which in the cage in which it has been confned has suddenly caught sight of the python that will devour it. (F, 511, translation altered; IV 31) Love entangles the other in many, if not all, of our habits; dehabituation is a change of self; therefore, falling out of love is a kind of death. It is a characteristic feature of dehabituation in Proust that its progress is not strictly chronological. Habits associated with the departed do not simply diminish over time. Habit deadens or overrides what is frequently encountered, which means that habits associated with infrequent events or sensations are not overridden as quickly (BG, 254; II 4–5). The narrator speaks, in this context, of a multiplicity of ‘selves’ (‘moi’), each of which must be told that Albertine is gone. The ‘moi’ that must get his hair cut, for example, might be informed long 172

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after the ‘moi’ that must get out of bed – the former taking place less frequently than the latter (F, 491; IV 14). Nonetheless, following a rupture, love tends to diminish over time, as habits are unlearned and replaced. Once he has broken with Gilberte, habit works both to diminish his love for her and to preserve it indefnitely in Paris, fossilised in various activities. Leaving Paris for Balbec, habit therefore has contrary efects. First, it awakens his former love, because he can encounter non-dehabituated memories and phrases; second, these reanimated memories are quickly deadened through exposure and habituation, so the narrator achieves a fuller break with Gilberte. In efect, going to Balbec fushes out and eradicates the fnal vestiges of his love (BG, 253–5; II 3–5). This is one way in which habit connects with involuntary memory.

Habit and the Self Outside Time As we have already seen, habit requires time. If I am habituated to some sensation, I have encountered it in the past; a habituated activity is one which was impossible without a prior instance, and it is one which I may look to repeat in the future. Proust knew that he was not the frst to theorise habit in relation to a victory over time. Lemoine writes, for example, that though the feeting moment may have passed, through habit ‘I have wrested from time something which henceforth belongs to me’ (quoted in Rabier 1888, 1:586). Habituation, on this optimistic model, keeps for the self the best of the past, equipping it for the future. In RTP, however, it is not habit which wins the victory over time. Far from liberating us from the weight of the world, habit forms part of that weight. If anything, interruptions of habit reconnect us with the past, with past or other selves. These models are consistent: habit could secure useful aspects of the past, as Lemoine has it, while opening us up to interruptions of a Proustian kind, connecting us more directly with a diferently habituated past self, otherwise lost to us. Nonetheless, the real victory over time occurs at the end of the novel, when the narrator experiences the revelation of a self that lies not in the past (like the earlier young man revealed by a change of light) but which lies, explicitly, outside time (TR, 222–3; IV 449–50). The nature of this being is hardly self-evident (see, in this volume, the Introduction and chapters by Colburn and Panaioti), but what concerns us here is its relation to habit. One symbolic relation is clear: experiences which provoke involuntary memory – some of which are linked to the revelation at the end – may be occasioned by interruptions of habit: the madeleine; the Guermantes courtyard (TR, 215; IV 444). Erika Fülöp posits a further, intrinsic connection. The madeleine episode, enabled by the interruption of habit, yields a diferent habit, that of ‘Sunday morning tea with a piece of madeleine’ (Fülöp 2014, 357). She concludes that, while interruptions of habit reveal ‘the fundamental unity and continuity of the self, habit itself is a key component of that suddenly revealed continuity’ (Fülöp 2014, 357). In other words, she suggests, the revealed self has a habit among its features. As things stand, this seems like a step too far. While it is true, and curious, that a former habit is revealed by the madeleine episode, this is very much an exception among the sensations which provoke the thought of the self outside time, most of which are not habits (the uneven stones; the spoon and the hammer; the napkin and the towel (TR, 218–9; IV 446–7)). More importantly, it is difcult to see how anything outside time, including a self, could be subject to habituation – a temporal phenomenon which, as we have seen, renders the self in question open to constant change. However, we might develop Fülöp’s underlying thought that there is a deeper connection between the two. It appears to be part of the appeal of the self outside time that it is immune 173

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to habituation, and in this light it is important to keep in mind the strong structural similarities between involuntary memory and habit formation. Both can follow from repetition over time of some sensation or act (repeatedly opening the door of a bedroom; stepping on uneven stones in Venice and in Paris). Yet in one case, the self in time becomes further habituated, so that the repeated sensation or action becomes less present to mind. In the other case, the self outside time takes pleasure in some extratemporal essence common to both experiences. Why, we might ask, does repeatedly stepping on uneven stones not simply yield a habituated ability to balance on them without paying it much attention? I can fnd no explanation in the text itself. Symbolically, as well as theoretically, however, what is ofered is a way out, an escape from the many lives and deaths of the habituated self.10

Notes 1 See below for examples. This observation holds even when one factors out ‘d’habitude’, the standard term for ‘usually’ or ‘normally’. 2 A brief, cursory linguistic analysis of Swann’s Way yields 54 instances of words containing ‘habit’, compared with 156 in the French original (excluding d’habitude). 3 Similarly in the Penguin translation (Proust 2003a, 4). 4 There was also a discussion of whether habit is formed by repetitions, or whether, more abstractly, habituation is a tendency we have to produce or bring about the repetitions themselves. Rabier, following Egger, stresses that the very frst instance of a sensation or action is already working towards the formation of a habit; thus, repetition is not required (Egger 1880; Rabier 1888, 1:572; this line of argument is taken up in Sinclair 2019). 5 This observation is commonly associated with Thomas Reid, whom Proust knew through Janet and Séailles (1887, 377). See also Hume (2007, 5.5., p. 32). As Wright notes (2011, 19), some authors, like Locke, remain ambiguous regarding this third stage, but it plays an important role in Ravaisson, among others. 6 Egger, for example, had claimed that ‘the distinction between habit and memory has no scientifc character’ (1880, 217). 7 Hegel, at the end of his discussion of habit, calls attention to this seeming paradox: once habituated, what he calls the ‘soul’ both ‘penetrates’ (or pervades), completely, its environment and ‘leaves’ it (Hegel 1970, vol. 10, p. 191). 8 I explored Proust’s treatment of sickness, in this regard, in Stern 2011. 9 Sedgwick remarks, in passing (2012, 23), that the narrator’s relation to Françoise has similar features: he appears habituated to and almost completely unappreciative of her service. Only he never gets an equivalent moment of revelation, a Françoise Disparue. 10 Thanks to Anna Elsner and Andrea Haslanger for their comments on an earlier draft.

References Beckett, Samuel. 1969. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder Publications. Bichat, Xavier. 1805. Recherches Physiologiques Sur La Vie et La Mort. Paris: Brosson. Carlisle, Clare. 2014. On Habit. New York: Routledge. Caruana, Fausto, and Italo Testa, eds. 2020. Habits: Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Egger, Victor. 1880. ‘La Naissance des Habitudes’. Annales de La Faculte Des Lettres de Bordeaux 2: 209–23. Fraisse, Luc. 2013. L’éclectisme Philosophique de Marcel Proust. Paris: PUPS. Fülöp, Erika. 2014. ‘Habit in À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu’. French Studies 68(3): 344–58. Funke, Gerhard, and Jürgen Schmandt. 1961. ‘Gewohnheit’. Archiv Für Begrifsgeschichte 3: 7–606. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1970. Werke. Edited by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel. 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Henry, A. 2004. ‘Habitude’. In Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, edited by Annick Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers, 458–59. Paris: Champion.

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Proustian Habit Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter Millican. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janet, Paul, and Gabriel Séailles. 1887. Histoire de La Philosophie. Les Problèmes et Les Écoles. Paris: Charles Delagrave. Lemoine, Albert. 1875. L’habitude et l’instinct: Études de Psychologie Comparée. Paris: Germer Baillière. Maine de Biran. 1841. ‘Infuence de l’Habitude Sur La Faculté de Penser’. In Oeuvres Philosophiques, edited by V. Cousin, 1:3–310. Paris: Ladrange. McCumber, John. 1990. ‘Hegel on Habit’. The Owl of Minerva 21(2): 155–65. Novakovic, Andreja. 2019. ‘Hegel’s Real Habits’. European Journal of Philosophy 27(4): 882–97. Proust, Marcel. 2003a. In Search of Lost Time, Volume 5: The Prisoner and the Fugitive. Edited by Christopher Prendergast. Translated by Carol Clark. London: Penguin. ———. 2003b. Swann’s Way. Translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Viking. Rabier, Elie. 1888. Leçons de Philosophie. 2 vols. Paris: Hachette. Ravaisson, Félix. 2008. Of Habit. Translated by Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair. London: Continuum. Rodrigo, Pierre. 2011. ‘The Dynamic of Hexis in Aristotle’s Philosophy’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42(1): 6–17. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2012. The Weather in Proust. Edited by Jonathan Goldberg and Michael Moon. Illustrated edition. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sinclair, Mark. 2019. Being Inclined: Félix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Sinclair, Mark, and Clare Carlisle, eds. 2011. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Habit. Vol. 42. London: Taylor and Francis. Stern, Tom. 2011. ‘The Human and the Octopus’. The Point, no. 4: 81–91. Wright, John P. 2011. ‘Ideas of Habit and Custom in Early Modern Philosophy’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 42(1): 18–32.

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11 SUBJECTIVITY A Proustian Problem Robert B. Pippin

I Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time begins with a famous scene in which the narrator describes “what it was like” for Marcel, some past version of himself, to go to bed early, drift between sleep and waking, experience various memories, and fnally settle on memories of going to sleep at his grandparents’ country house in Combray. The novel thus introduces us to its most radical experiment: a seven-volume, 3,000-page novel, with over 2,000 characters, the events of which span several decades, but which presents the reader throughout with the single, intensely refective, and endless analytic point of view of a single character. Everything that happens in the novel happens “for Marcel.” Even what happens to and for others, even in extended narratives like Swann in Love, or in what occurs to a person and in a social world very diferent from him and his world (like Charlus), are what it seems to Marcel it must be like or must have happened, the product of his (never unmotivated) imaginings. Indeed, for vast stretches of the novel, Marcel’s inner life is completely self-enclosed. His attempt to describe what is happening to him and his sometimes quite ambitious and general theorizing about the meaning of what he experienced, are basically conversations with himself, indirectly revealed to (very occasionally addressed to) only the reader.1 He rarely makes known to anyone else the character of his experience, his anxieties, suspicions, or his theories. The life we read about is overwhelmingly the life of a mind, one mind, Marcel’s. As readers, we live inside its diachronic development for the very long time it takes to read all the volumes. A novelist’s attempt to fnd a way to describe “what it is like” for a character to experience his or her singular, distinct experiential path through a life, and how such a character would understand and interpret such experiences, is the frst and most general manifestation of “the problem of subjectivity.” That problem is simply: what would count as success in such a project? It is a diferent, but related problem in the novel itself because Marcel thinks frequently about and worries about the issue; and in roughly three dimensions. These will be the subject of the following discussion. First, he wonders if anyone else experiences the world – its external objects, architecture, nature – as he does, and he feels anxious whenever experiencing anything novel, anything that intrudes on the familiar subjective inner life he has known. Such novelties can appear to him unintelligible and so even hostile, threatening. Second, 176

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he wonders whether another’s subjectivity, what it is like for them, or really anything about them, can ever be known, as opposed to the role that some imagined other plays in his inner life. (He convinces himself that the answer is no, that another cannot be known and they only play this inner role, but as we shall see, very little of that and many other theories of his can be taken at face value.) And third, he wonders about his experience of himself; how reliable is “who he seems to himself to be.” Most dramatically, he believes that he is an aspiring writer, even though, after formulating that intention, he fnds that he is a writer who cannot write. What does it mean to him to aspire to be a writer, and why, in his own mind, can’t he begin? Or he asks himself: Is his experience of himself in love – his feeling, for example, that the state is inseparable from jealousy – his experience of love, or the experience of love itself. This aspiration to some sort of generality in all his refections, often signaled simply by an unremarked-on slide from his frst person characterization to a general theory, from “I think” to “one thinks,” and by a constant hedging and qualifcation (“perhaps,” “it could be that…,” “it seemed likely that…,” and so forth) signals the problem of the novel’s status itself. It takes a long time for Marcel’s views to evolve into the narrator’s, and so the views of the young Marcel on society and art are often clearly not those of the older Marcel, the narrator who explains the novel he will write after the events of the last volume. And neither point of view can be identifed with Proust himself, at least not without extreme caution and attention to any number of possible qualifcations. There is obviously no easy solution to this problem, although it would be far too extreme to suggest that none of the analytic refections represent what Proust himself thinks. But since the problem itself is a problem for Marcel, we can trace his ways of dealing with it, while remaining cautious about its fnal status.

II That frst internal “problem,” subjective experience and the external world, emerges immediately. After we are introduced to a complex confusion of sleeping and waking states (while asleep, the thought that he must go to sleep awakens him; when awake, he keeps on thinking about what he had been thinking while dreaming),2 we are told that he was thinking about the book he had been reading, with a “peculiar turn” [un tour un peu particulier] (SW, 3; I 3). It now seemed to him that the book had been about him, but in a way that is indeed peculiar. It seemed to him that he was a church, a quartet, an aristocratic rivalry (between the Hapsburgs (Charles) and France (François) over leadership of the Holy Roman Empire). 3 This would certainly solve any skeptical problems that arise from what will later emerge as Marcel’s concern, that we do not experience the external world or the social world directly, but via a subjective perspective that may not be sharable or common, and that means that access to the “world as it is in itself ” is unavailable. In this fantastical dream picture, this is not so because all there is oneself, as if some divine monism. There is also a subtle irony in this opening. Marcel’s dreamy identifcation of himself with everything he reads about directs us to the world of a book. And the objects he mentions will resonate with the book we are beginning to read, and so the scene is a strange foreshadowing or prelude. A church, the Balbec church, will be the occasion for a major lesson from Elstir about art. (In that scene, he imagines writing his name on the church, another way to make it his, or even him.) A quartet signals the massive importance of music, the Vinteuil sonata, and especially later the Vinteuil septet. (It would not be an exaggeration to say that he begins to “fnd himself ” as an artist in hearing the septet for the frst time.)4 And the rivalry he mentions, essentially between Germany and France, will re-appear in the later novels because of the Dreyfus afair, World War I and in Charlus’s divided loyalties. As we have just 177

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seen, the novel cannot be said to be directly about these objects and events; they are always about what they are for Marcel, and so in a certain sense, he is those things; in reading about them we are always reading about him. (This, that he imagines the book being about him, is ironic in another way: of course, Marcel thinks that his book is “about him”; he thinks everything is about him.) However, these fantastical imaginings just state another aspect of the problem, not a solution. Marcel’s aspiration in the novel to come will be to escape his subjectivity, but in doing so by identifying with what is other than himself, he would have also lost himself. There would be just the world. If he is a church, he is not Marcel. If he is Marcel-being-a-church, then he is not the church itself; the original aspiration is not fulflled. (This is actually a version of a not unknown philosophical fantasy: to know the world as it is in itself, I must be present to the world without being there, without being present. My being there is always a distortion I must seek to eliminate. This of course insures that there is no possible solution to the problem.)5 The beginning sentences set what will be Marcel’s real major aspiration: to escape subjectivity, while remaining a subject. This paradox is given an intensifying exemplifcation a bit later in these opening explorations when Marcel recounts what it was like to experience the magic lantern show he watched, while his great-aunt recounted the plot of the thirteenth-century crimes of Golo, the majordomo of Siegfried, a high ofcial in the empire. Marcel’s frst reaction is typical. The show is disturbing. It has intruded on the deep familiarity of his bedroom and its objects, objects which, by being so familiar do not seem alien or other, but sufused with his subjectivity. This familiarity is the comforting result of habit, often invoked in the novel as having this result, but habit turns out not to be a stable solution, since after time, habit deadens experience, makes everything too familiar; the otherness of objects disappears, absorbed into Marcel’s subjectivity. This habit-induced tranquility is what is disturbed by the moving fgures, but what is important for the paradox just noted is how he describes the “presence” of Golo in his room. The body of Golo himself, being of the same supernatural substance as his steed’s, overcame every material obstacle—everything that seemed to bar his way—by taking it as an ossature and absorbing it into himself: even the doorknob—on which, adapting themselves at once, his red cloak or his pale face, still as noble and as melancholy, foated invincibly—would never betray the least concern at this transvertebration.6 (SW, 11; 1 10) Golo has “become” those objects on which he is projected, and the objects remain other than him, but Golo is still Golo. This image, which recurs a couple of more times in the novel, is an image of some sort of solution to that paradox, and the task is to understand how such an ideal could be made manifest in more straightforward philosophical and experiential terms. There is another dimension to the skepticism about reaching any stable knowledge of the world around us that the realization of the subjectivity of experience can give rise to. This is the temporality of subjective experience. The picture the narrator presents is one of an experience of objects, events, and of others that, subjectively, is a rapid surging of temporal moments succeeding each other, all of them colored by present concerns that exclude from conscious attention a number of dimensions of such experience that would be essential to any truth about what the world ofers up to us, and which rush by far too rapidly for us to avoid this involuntary inattention. This notion of what is unattended to as such, but nevertheless experienced, is the basis for the recovery both of what it was “truly like” for us in the experience, as well as for the recovery of a social and ontological truth we were in no position to 178

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attend to originally. This is of course the famous redemptive notion of involuntary memory, an experience (and here another paradox) that we cannot will or call up or direct the intellect to, and so is greatly subject to chance, but which can return us in a kind of lightning strike to “how it was” in an experience we cannot be said to have “fully” experienced. The paradox is of course how this could be; how it could be that what we experienced is “back there” in our memory, even though it was not “what we experienced” consciously at the time, and so not what would be called up by voluntary memory. This paradox is embraced by the narrator at several points. A good example occurs in Within a Budding Grove. But when, even without knowing it, I thought of them, [Mais quand, même ne le sachant pas, je pensais à elles, ] they, more unconsciously still, were for me the mountainous blue undulations of the sea, the outline of a procession against the sea. […] The most exclusive love for a person is always a love for something else. [est toujours l’amour d’autre chose]. (BG, 476–7; II 189) The possibility of an unattended-to experience, and even the suggestion that those aspects of the experience, because not distorted by the self-interestedness, even the wishful thinking of conscious interpretation, contain the recoverable truth of the experience, are in themselves not wholly implausible. We can think back on a conversation and suddenly (involuntarily) recall the tone with which an ambiguous remark was made by a friend and only now realize that the friend was warning us, and in the context of that moment and given later developments, we can realize in a fash and with certainty that was unquestionably what had happened. And in this account, it is not so much that we reinterpret a past event, although that must be part of it, but we recover what we must have experienced (otherwise how could we “recall” it?) but which was not attended to as such at the time. Perhaps the impression of a warning fashed by so quickly that it was, as we have been saying, why it was unattended to, not fully registered. But the philosophical presuppositions required to make sense of this are difcult to understand. Marcel says that he was thinking of the little band without realizing that he was thinking of them. And this is in two senses. He took himself, apparently, to be thinking of the undulations of the waves, and came to realize that he was actually thereby thinking of the band, but not only thinking of the band – he does not say that he was thinking of the undulations and these reminded him of the band – but he realized he was thinking “more unconsciously still,” that they were the undulations of the waves. One would assume that it is a necessary condition of thinking about X that one be aware one is thinking about X, and that if one is thinking of X as Y, one is aware that one is thinking that identifcation. But while Proust is clearly assuming that something like this is true (he must have, in thinking of the undulations, been thinking of the band or he would not be able to recover, bring to light, this fact) he is assuming that there is something like degrees of attentiveness in consciousness, in the way that one can see something at a time (and thus “know” that one saw it) but only realize later that one did see it. This is one way one can be said to escape subjectivity while remaining a subject. One can correct the subjective distortions caused by the transitoriness of experience and the self-interestedness of one’s interpretive attentiveness by being able to recover “true” dimensions of the experience that registered in one’s consciousness without full attentiveness and thus without the manifold causes of distortion in much conscious attentiveness. This is the premise for (but not only for, as in this passage) involuntary memory as a solution to the subjectivity problem. If one takes one’s bearings from the narrator’s stance in the last scenes, the entire novel is an example of this, a recovered memoir. 179

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Indeed, these involuntary memories, or any means of recovering what is unattended to in our experiences but nevertheless experienced, serve as a general fgure for literature itself, the ultimate solution to escaping subjectivity while remaining a subject, as in this passage, which is worth quoting at length: The greatness, on the other hand, of true art, of the art which M. de Norpois would have called a dilettante’s pastime, lay, I had come to see, elsewhere: we have to rediscover, to reapprehend, to make ourselves fully aware of that reality, remote from our daily preoccupations, from which we separate ourselves by an ever greater gulf as the conventional knowledge which we substitute for it grows thicker and more impermeable, that reality which it is very easy for us to die without ever having known and which is, quite simply, our life. Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defned is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. And therefore their past is like a photographic darkroom encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them. (TR, 253–4; IV 474) This is a description of the paradox in all its glory: real life, la vraie vie, is literature. The descriptions of such recovery can often sound like a simple “fash from the past,” as it was in all its interpretive complexity. But Proust suggests otherwise. From the frst moment of the madeleine episode in Swann’s Way, it is clear that there is work to be done in such recovery. After the frst fush of the experience, which caused him great joy, he says: It is plain that the truth I am seeking lies not in the cup but in myself. The drink has called it into being, but does not know it, and can only repeat indefnitely, with a progressive diminution of strength, the same message which I cannot interpret, though I hope at least to be able to call it forth again and to fnd it there presently, intact and at my disposal, for my fnal enlightenment. (SW, 53; I 45) And then, What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not yet exist, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day. (SW, 53; I 45) This passage is important for the last dimension of the subjectivity problem, the self ’s experience of itself, but in this moment, Marcel fgures out that the memory is of Sunday mornings in Combray with his Aunt Léonie, and then all that Combray has meant to him is available for recovery and interrogation. It is striking that even though the memory is involuntary, we must do far more than simply re-experience the sensation. “Seek,” chercher, is not adequate to the task, but we must “create” something “which does not yet exist.” The full importance of this interpretive transformation, which he will also call a “translation” of 180

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these messages from the past, is on view in this passage from Time Regained. The sensual or “material” dimension of the memory (for Marcel a sign of its genuineness) is as prominent as the interpretive task. For the truths which the intellect apprehends directly in the world of full and unimpeded light have something less profound, less necessary than those which life communicates to us against our will in an impression which is material because it enters us through the senses but yet has a spiritual meaning which it is possible for us to extract. In fact, both in the one case and in the other, whether I was concerned with impressions like the one which I had received from the sight of the steeples of Martinville or with reminiscences like that of the unevenness of the two steps or the taste of the madeleine, the task was to interpret the given sensations as signs of so many laws and ideas, by trying to think—that is to say, to draw forth from the shadow—what I had merely felt, by trying to convert it into its spiritual equivalent [un equivalent spirituel]. And this method, which seemed to me the sole method, what was it but the creation of a work of art? (TR, 232; IV 457) In the undulations passage, to add to the complexity, he believes that the realization of what he was really thinking without fully knowing he was shows him a general truth (one of the “laws and ideas” above), that love is always of something else than the person loved. The added complication is that this inference is hardly an obvious one, just given the simple fact that he realized that in his fantasy life, he thought of the young girls as undulations of the waves. It is very unlikely that he means that he was really in love with wave undulations, not the girls. He must mean that he loved in them something that resonated as meaningful in him, some set of images that meant something to him, that he loved. And, as in all statements of theory, the inference is not entirely trustworthy. (Marcel often defends himself against the vulnerabilities of being in love by insisting to himself that the beloved herself really doesn’t matter; something else, internal to the lover, is what resonates in experiencing another.) It is not entirely clear in the novel how all this is supposed to work. The very premise that makes it possible, experiential distortions in the present, would seem to bear on the stance of any recollector in the present. The idea seems to be that somehow the experiential memory of Sunday morning tea with Aunt Léonie, prompted by the taste of the madeleine, comes rushing back involuntarily as it really was, not the fragmentary appearance Marcel experienced at the time, unafected by what, say, the recollecting Marcel needs or wants to believe about Combray, or by what Combray in general has come to mean to him in the present. Something about the brute involuntariness and the sheer sensual force of the memory is supposed to help us understand the possibility of this directness. He goes so far as to admit that what is preserved of the past experience can be said to be diferentially responsive to the present. “Our ego [notre moi] is composed of the superimposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratifcation of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits” (F, 622; IV 125). But this responsiveness just concerns the timing of the returned experience, not its content. There is some common sensory link between the present experience and a past one that, just by being felt, brings the past back. Interestingly, he had described this unsought-out return in language that recalls the Golo image long ago introduced. And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely [qu’il couvre 181

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tout entier], then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague sufering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time. (F, 621–2, my emphasis; IV 125) Even so, however, as with the frst episode of involuntary memory described above (the madeleine episode), the “return” of the event does not avoid the necessity of interpretive work, and that would have to increase the chance of the infuence of a “present” subjectivity. But Proust is phenomenologically convincing enough that there is sufcient directness and force in such a return that the experience serves as a good, even if not perfect, example of “escaping subjectivity while remaining a subject.” It is particularly clear how wedded the narrator (and here we can, I think, safely add, Proust) is to the possibility of this reacquaintance in the multiple revelations at the Guermantes matinée in the fnal volume. And what I found myself enjoying was not merely these colours but a whole instant of my life on whose summit they rested, an instant which had been no doubt an aspiration towards them and which some feeling of fatigue or sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec but which now, freed from what is necessarily imperfect in external perception, pure and disembodied [pur et désincarné], caused me to swell with happiness. (TR, 220; IV 447)

III The claim that in loving another we actually love “something other” is consistent with the way he often speaks of his relation to others, and again the problem is the subjective “absorption” of others into oneself. An oft-repeated maxim of sorts for Marcel appears shortly after the undulations passage. when we are in love with a woman we simply project on to her a state of our own soul; that consequently the important thing is not the worth of the woman but the profundity of the state; and that the emotions which a perfectly ordinary girl arouses in us can enable us to bring to the surface of our consciousness some of the most innermost parts of our being […]. (BG, 477; II 189) 7 But this projection theory is inconsistent with the distinctiveness of the narrator’s treatment of love as much a cognitive state as an emotional one, as a need to know the other as she really is, and this aspiration does not appear undermined by skepticism about others’ inner lives. Marcel is often surprised, even shocked by what he fnds out about another.8 It is belied by evidence throughout the love afairs, Swann’s and Marcel’s especially, of the need to be loved by the beloved.9 Admittedly, the characters often fee such a need in self-deceit (as is perhaps the case with the “autre chose” passage above). The purported skepticism about knowing the other and indiference toward her is just as much an expression of a fear of being known and being vulnerable to an other.10 It is the most obvious case of such skepticism in the novel, the theories propounded by Marcel, especially about love and jealousy, are 182

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clearly ironic refections of Marcel’s (and Swann’s) self-deceit, and hardly “Proustian views.” Perhaps the clearest case of such defensive self-deceit is Swann’s famous remark at the end of Swann in Love, so transparent as to be pathetic, when he bemoans the fact that he has wasted his life for a woman who was not even his type, who did not even please him. The narrator cannot refrain from cluing us in, noting that this was a product of Swann’s occasional “caddishness” (muferie) and a result of his “moral standards” for himself having dropped (SW, 454; I 375). We are also shown several times both that Odette “pleased” him enormously (their cattleya moments) and that he was desperately in love with her and desperately wanted to be loved by her.11 This is not to say that the problem itself, understanding another as she or he understand themselves, perhaps even understanding them better than they understand themselves, is not a serious one. It is obviously of deepest importance in love afairs, where the complexities quickly multiply.12 This creates the temptation to believe that there could be a fact of the matter one could discover that would resolve the unavoidable doubts about whether, say, the beloved feels about the lover as she represents herself. No such moment is possible; such knowledge that is possible requires nothing like a punctual insight into some fact about another’s inner life (for one thing, the other may not know how she feels, her feelings might be ambiguous and unsettled, what she believes may be self-deceived), but it requires an engagement with an other over some time, understanding the relation between what is said and what is done, what happens in moments of crisis in the love, a variety of conversations and so forth. In this case, escaping one’s subjectivity while remaining a subject requires mostly a kind of openness to the other, a willingness to be known as a subject by an other, and so to confront, potentially, characterizations of, reactions to, oneself that challenge one’s one self-understanding and what one thinks one has learned about the other. But the temptation is understandable. In the novel that temptation is often connected with a letter and the hope for documentary, fnal “proof.” Swann is devastated by the contents of the anonymous letter he receives, in which Odette’s relations with women are revealed. His reaction is gullible, naïve about the writer’s motives, reductive and panicked, but the reaction also testifes to his frustration with trying to understand a woman who is much more a match for him in psychological sophistication than he will admit. Likewise, Charlus’s relations with Morel slip into jealousy and panic when he reads a letter to Morel from the actress Léa, suggesting that Morel of “one of us”; that is, that Morel’s temperament is lesbian. It would be an understatement to say that Charlus cannot handle such a claim, but, again, he treats it as some sort of empirical fact he has learned from the letter, and because he believes that, his relation to Morel is permanently afected. Finally, after the famous passage where Marcel watches Albertine asleep, when he sees a potentially revelatory letter in her kimono, he is tempted to read it and “learn the truth” in some way. In this case, though, however desperately Marcel has been trying to learn about Albertine’s secret life with other women, in a moment when, he thinks, he could resolve such doubts, he decides not to read the letter. He prefers to leave the issue in doubt, adding another layer to the complexities involved in trying to understand another (that is, also trying to avoid understanding an other). All of these social dimensions of the subjectivity problem remind one of more wisdom by Elstir, when he explained to Marcel the virtues of error in reaching the truth. Here, the error is the far too observational or “inspectionist” view of what it would be to escape one’s need to absorb the other into one’s imaginative and fantasy world, and so by contrast highlights the much more difcult and uncertain process of engagement and openness as such an escape. Once again, as with the frst “escape,” the model for experiencing another’s subjectivity is great art and is presented in the most detail in Marcel’s refections on hearing for the frst 183

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time a new composition by Vinteuil, a septet at a concert at Mme. Verdurin’s in The Captive. At frst, the piece seems to him discordant, difcult to understand, but it begins to dawn on him how important the accomplishment of the septet is. He begins with an image of what it is to begin to experience “who Vinteuil is,” what it would be to be him. Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, and which is diferent from that whence another great artist, setting sail for the earth, will eventually emerge. Certain it was that Vinteuil, in his latest works, seemed to have drawn nearer to that unknown country. […] Composers do not remember this lost fatherland, but each of them remains all his life unconsciously attuned to it; he is delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land, betrays it at times in his thirst for fame […]. (C, 290–1; III 761) The closer Vinteuil can come to remembering his lost fatherland, the land of his past, the environment that is distinctly his, who he really is, the more authentic his art becomes, the less it could be a mere refection of his ambition for renown. The image of remembering links the achievement with involuntary memory, and the image of a native land and fatherland suggests that the object of this remembering cannot be isolated as just some singular, private ego’s. It includes all that he is and was, including his “native land,” and his social world. The link between access to a subjectivity and to the objects of that subjectivity, its world, is asserted in one of the novel’s most famous passages. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fy from star to star. (C, 292; III 762) In aesthetic experience, we experience the world as seen by Elstir and Vinteuil, and by entering imaginatively into those worlds, we do not lose our own, another dimension of the solution to the paradox. In fact it is the felt contrast with our own subjectivity that is so thrilling, and the force, the power, and the strangeness of their vision makes it impossible for us to absorb it into ours. This is so important an experience that Marcel says that “music seemed to me something truer than all known books” (C, 427; III 876),13 and truer must mean not only true to themselves, truly what they see, available to us in art, but as he says, aspects of “the universe” as well as “their universes.” Marcel gets somewhat carried away by the exhilarating possibilities of such an escape and says, It seemed to me, when I abandoned myself to this hypothesis that art might be real, that it was something even more than the merely nerve-tingling joy of a fne day or an opiate night that music can give; a more real, more fruitful exhilaration, to judge at least by what I felt. It is inconceivable that a piece of sculpture or a piece of music which gives us an emotion that we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some defnite spiritual reality, or life would be meaningless. [ou la vie n’aurait aucun sens.] (C, 427–8; III 876) 184

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IV Marcel’s exploration of his own identity, the self-knowledge built on experience and refection on that experience, involves a number of distinctions. He had pointed to the difculties already in Swann’s Way, noted above. “What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing” (SW, 53; I 45). There is no way to achieve a perspective on oneself from outside oneself. In this case, the subject and the object are identical. Even in cases where one distinguishes one’s past self from a present self – and Marcel is frequently given to claiming that he had been many diferent selves, even that such selves had died, and that new ones were born14 – there is also clearly some sort of continuity underlying such discreteness and so a radical discontinuity claim cannot be the whole story. This suggests both logical and psychological difculties for any subject that wants to turn on itself as an object of knowledge. Just as, throughout the whole course of one’s life, one’s egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that “I” itself which is perpetually observing them, so the desire which directs our actions descends towards them, but does not reach back to itself, whether because, being unduly utilitarian, it plunges into the action and disdains all knowledge of it, or because it looks to the future to compensate for the disappointments of the present, or because the inertia of the mind urges it to slide down the easy slope of imagination, rather than to climb the steep slope of introspection. (F, 532; IV 48) This “just as” [de même…de même] structure highlights the two difculties. The logical point is frst most clearly raised by Kant.15 The “I” who experiences some content cannot be an object of experience like any other just because any object of experience will always require such a subject as the subject of that experience. There is no way for a subject to experience itself as an object of experience as well as the logical subject of experience, without setting of an unacceptable regress. This is not to say such a subject cannot be self-conscious. In fact in all its experiences, it is self-conscious, aware of itself experiencing, but only in experiencing, not in attending to itself as an object. As Kant was the frst to point out, that the “I think” must accompany all my representations, any “take” on how things are, for them to be representations, is a logical point, not a psychological one. For temporally extended experiences to be possible, this logical or “transcendental” “I” must be the same, continuous subject across such time, but it cannot matter for any of these points who or what such a subject is. It is just “that which thinks.” The same is actually true of what we and Proust have been referring to as the “world,” or sometimes “the universe” of a subject. The term does not refer to the collection of everything in a world, but to the inter-related sense-making practices, saliences of signifcance, horizon of meaningfulness, determinate features of such meaningfulness so deeply presupposed that they cannot rightly be called presuppositions or beliefs or attitudes. That world, Hegel’s “shapes of spirit” [Gestalten des Geistes], Wittgenstein’s “form of life” [Lebensform], or Heidegger’s world [Welt], cannot be objects within the world as well. This, the coincidence of these two points, is why Wittgenstein can say such things in his Tractatus as 5.63 “I am my world (The microcosm)” or, 5.632 “The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.” And, 5.64 Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are followed out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.16 185

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But it is the psychological point that is important to Proust, that we desire the objects we desire but do not desire refexively; desire does not often refect back on itself. This notion of the subject of desire, itself to be desired, is not immediately clear. As he indicates, the reason for the lack of self-attentiveness is often laziness (“inertia”), utilitarian interest in mere results, and so he appears to mean something similar to what Nietzsche says at the beginning of his Genealogy of Morals, that “We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves – so how are we ever supposed to fnd ourselves?”17 But aside from the various reasons why we are so often unrefective, what is it we have not sought, do not desire? When Marcel says that desire “does not reach back up to itself,” 18 “ne remonte pas à soi,” or that desire “disdains all knowledge of it,” “dédaigne la connaissance,” to what do “itself ” and “it” refer? In the Socratic invocation of the Delphic oracle, “know thyself,” he took that to mean: know what it is to be a human being, what life is the best human life, but in later modernity the imperative is connected with a virtue like authenticity. “Know who you really are,” in the sense of “face who you are, who you’ve become, what your limits are,” and “avoid self-deceit and wishful thinking about yourself,” and so forth. Since such realizations may be unpleasant and defating, it would be understandable if many avoided any such inquiry. But understanding the injunction that way assumes that what is most needed to carry it out is courage, a willingness to face potentially unpleasant facts. But these are Nietzschean or perhaps Heideggerian (early Heidegger) virtues, and are not prominent in Proust’s novel. This is so for an obvious reason: he clearly thinks that under any interpretation of what self-refectiveness would involve, it is inordinately difcult and elusive, especially since the idea of “turning back around” to “see” something is an inappropriate and misleading model. The massive presence of self-deceit in the novel is evidence enough of a typical difculty, since one of the paradoxes of self-deceit is that, for it to be successful, subjects must (somehow) keep from themselves that they are deceiving themselves. Once “inside” such a structure, it is hard to imagine how it would even occur to one to escape it, much less why they would want to. Almost everyone in the Faubourg and in Mme Verdurin’s little clan, are, besides being worthless people, simply incapable of such refection on themselves. But the greatest difculty in specifying the referent for those pronouns is clearer when we consider the intersection of the logical and psychological issues. The reason why some substantive “true self ” or one’s “real identity” cannot be an object of experience or refection is diferent in the psychological case, but the result is the same. That is, the drive to understand oneself is unavoidable in life (however common is resistance to such a call), but the temptation to aspire to a punctual and decisive moment of insight, an apprehension of oneself as an object, is a futile aspiration. In the psychological case, the reason is the radical temporality of the self. The fundamental experience of oneself is of the variations across time in one’s reactions to others, to experiences, and there is the change in perspective due to simple ageing.19 There is a continuity in these variations, but it cannot be substantive because this self-transformation is constant, unceasing, and deep. The continuity must be something on the order of the logical continuity of the “I” of the “I think,” but, in contrast to this merely formal structure, this kind of psychological formality must have some sort of distinctive personal infection. What sort is the question. As in so many other cases in the novel, the model here, the best way to think about the problem as Proust does, is music. In the frst place, music is an essentially temporal medium, making it quite a natural model. The moments of a musical piece emerge and immediately vanish, held together by memory, so that the comprehension of a piece is 186

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necessarily retrospective and interpretive. It is only in such retrospectivity that the musical piece is fully available to one, after it is fnished, and the narrator treats self-knowledge in the same way. As we have seen, the premise for all of this is the unusual claim that our conscious experience is too transient, pragmatic, and inattentive to be revelatory of external, social, and psychological realities. The need for self-understanding may be constant but it is not in the nature of desire, the engine of life, to be refective.20 So the “errors” can be profound, as in Marcel’s too late realization of the depth of his love for Albertine. “So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself…” (F, 477; IV 3). But if a post-facto refective turn cannot seek an object, what would the activity of self-understanding, assuming this post-facto, retrospective musical model, look like? There is no question that Proust has confdence that a work of art can help us understand the question. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short can be realized within the confnes of a book! (TR, 431; IV 610) And he is confdent that, having shown us such a life within a book, the readers of that book can proft from such exposure with regard to their own lives. I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate even to say that I thought of those who would read it as “my” readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician at Combray used to ofer his customers––it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. So that I should not ask them to praise me or to censure me, but simply to tell me whether “it really is like that,” I should ask them whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written (though a discrepancy in this respect need not always be the consequence of an error on my part, since the explanation could also be that the reader had eyes for which my book was not a suitable instrument). (TR, 431–2; IV 610) The primary example of how this could be possible is Vintueil and his septet. Everything in Vinteuil’s musical expression of himself refects who he is, distinctly and unmistakably, even though there is no moment or section of the piece that could be pointed to as a distinct moment of revelation. It is in hearing his music attentively that we meet the real Vinteuil, not “the melancholy, respectable little bourgeois” (C, 295; III 765) from Combray. Something like the tonality of the piece, together with Marcel’s ability to appreciate that distinct tonality, can be said to constitute “who Vinteuil is.” He is nothing other than this “unique accent, unmistakable voice” (C, 289; III, 760).21 One phrase from the older sonata can reappear “the same and yet something else, as things recur in life” (C, 293, my emphasis; III 763). Thereby the phenomenon counts as “proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul” (C, 290; III 760). This is all not to say that anyone’s life over time can be said to fnd expression in this way. It requires something equivalent to musical talent and commitment to that talent, come what may, to be able to live out and understand such expressiveness 187

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in the way Vinteuil manifests himself in his work. And it is only a great artist who can be said to be “delirious with joy when he sings in harmony with his native land,” something clearly not the case in inferior art or in thoughtless lives (C, 291; III 761). At the psychological level, it is in such an achievement that one can be said to achieve a consistent fdelity to oneself, honesty, genuineness in the relation between one’s very being and one’s deeds, and it is something that is only achievable over time and so never fnal or complete. Readers of Proust’s book, by having heard his “unmistakable voice” for so long, can then become “readers of themselves” (a phrase that indicates self-knowledge is like reading and interpreting an extended narrative in a book) not by seeing themselves as “like Proust,” but by having come, like the narrator, to distrust the intellect as a guide, by a receptiveness to the sensual power of involuntary memories, by appreciating the complexities of the interpretive task needed to “translate” such memories, and by a kind of patience in understanding the provisionality and tentativeness of any such interpretation, given what the future might also reveal. It is this task that is summarized in the last sentence of the book. So, if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not fail, even if the efect were to make them resemble monsters, to describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a place on the contrary prolonged past measure, for simultaneously, like giants plunged into the years, they touch the distant epochs through which they have lived, between which so many days have come to range themselves—in Time. (TR, 451; IV 625)

Notes 1 I proceed on the assumption, admittedly controversial, that what we are reading is a memoir written by the narrator in anticipation of the novel he will write; that is, that what we are reading is not that novel. See Landy (2004) for the extensive evidence he compiles for this claim. I am much indebted to Landy for several conversations about the issues in this piece. 2 This image itself is worth an extended discussion on its own. Proust is introducing it to us so early because it will play a large role in a crucial conversation with Elstir, whose views seem quite authoritative throughout. The conversation occurs toward the end of BG and is introduced by Elstir saying: “Not at all”; he replied. When a mind has a tendency towards day-dreams, it’s a mistake to shield it from them, to ration them. So long as you divert your mind from its day-dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will be the victim of all sorts of appearance because you will not have grasped their true nature. (BG, 488; II 198) 3 Marcel also opines that the immobility of things is a function of the immobility of our conception of them (SW, 6–7; I 6), and often expresses other such “subjective idealist” views. 4 The reader is already familiar with the music because of what “we” know about Swann. 5 This is what Virginia Woolf is having fun with in To the Lighthouse when Andrew responds to a question about what his philosopher father’s books are about. “Subject and object and the nature of reality,” Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant. “Think of a kitchen table then,” he told her, “when you’re not there” (38). 6 This unusual word appears to mean something like “transmogrifcation,” although, crucially, Golo is transmogrifed into the doorknob, while remaining Golo. 7 Cf. also SW, 274–5; I 226; BG, 505–6; II 213–4; BG, 548; II 248. 8 The predominant and repeated example is the discovery that someone is an “invert,” that almost all the women Marcel is interested in, Gilberte, Odette, Albertine, Rachel When from the Lord, Vinteuil’s daughter and her friend, are lesbians. He also discovers a number of things about

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Saint-Loup, the phoniness of his republican politics, his own “inversion,” and his extraordinary courage in the war, that certainly “get through” to him, are not “absorbed.” BG, 112–3; I 515–6; C, 109; III 610. I discuss this issue and the general “reliability” problem in Pippin (forthcoming). As at BG, 112–3; I 515–6. Aside from all the complications involved in understanding another with whom one is love, complications largely a result of one’s needs and the fragility of one’s ego, Marcel does not treat the problem of interpreting others all that skeptically. He is frequently given to remarks like this one from BG, and there is no indication that he is anything but correct in what he “sees” in Cottard’s eyes. 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 not forgotten to tie one’s tie. (BG, 81; 489)

13 This touches on the unusual hierarchy of the arts that Marcel seems to assume: literature (Bergotte), painting (Elstir), and “at the top” music (Vinteuil.). He says that music seems “to follow the very movement of our being” (C, 427; III 876). Understanding why there should be this hierarchy would require a substantial independent discussion. See the fourth section. 14 See, for example, SW, 442–3; I 366, and especially F, 682; IV 175: “It is not because other people are dead that our afection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying.” 15 The claim is that Kant illuminates this problem, not that Proust has Kant in mind, was infuenced by Kant and so forth. 16 Wittgenstein, 2002. 17 Nietzsche 2007, 3. 18 Translation altered, to better capture the sense of “remonte.” 19 In this vast dimension which I had not known myself to possess, the date on which I had heard the noise of the garden bell at Combray – that far-distant noise which nevertheless was within me – was a point from which I might start to make measurements. And I felt, as I say, a sensation of weariness and almost of terror at the thought that all this length of Time had not only, without interruption, been lived, experienced, secreted by me, that it was my life, was in fact me, but also that I was compelled so long as I was alive to keep it attached to me, that it supported me and that, perched on its giddy summit, I could not myself make a movement without displacing it. A feeling of vertigo seized me as I looked down beneath me, yet within me, as though from a height, which was my own height, of many leagues, at the long series of the years. (TR, 450–1; IV, 624) 20 Cf. Impressions such as those to which I wished to give permanence could not but vanish at the touch of a direct enjoyment which had been powerless to engender them. The only way to savour them more fully was to try to get to know them more completely in the medium in which they existed, that is to say within myself, to try to make them translucid even to their very depths. I had not known pleasure at Balbec any more than I had known pleasure in living with Albertine except what was perceptible to me in retrospect (après coup). (TR, 230; IV 456) 21 I discuss such an “accent” view of the self in further detail in Pippin (2005).

Works Cited Landy, J. 2004. Philosophy as Fiction. Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press) Nietzsche, F. 2007. On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. K. Ansell-Pearson, trans. C. Dieth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

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Robert B. Pippin Pippin, R. B. 2005. “On ‘Becoming Who One is’ (and Failing): Proust’s Problematic Selves,” in The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 307–38. Pippin, R. B. Forthcoming. The Shadow of Love: The Role of Jealousy in Proust’s À la recherche de temps perdu, In a volume on Proust in the Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, ed. Katherine Elkins. Wittgenstein, L. 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness (Routledge: New York and London)

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Indexicality: From Peirce to Linguistic Anthropology and Back to Proust When glossing the concept of social indexicality, linguistic anthropologists often turn to the notion that there are many ways of saying what we call “the same thing.” A classic example comes from Susan Ervin-Tripp’s 1976 article on directives in American English: “May I have a match?” “The matches are all gone.” “Gotta match?” “I need a match.” “Could you gimme a match?” “Gimme a match.” “Match” (Ervin-Tripp, 1976: 29; Silverstein, 2019: 60). Ervin-Tripp divided directives into six diferent categories and then ofered an extended analysis of what it meant to use one form of directive instead of another in this or that situation. Were the people involved in a relation involving subordination; were they familiar equals; were they unfamiliar; was there a chance of non-compliance; was it a routine request? Toward the end of her analysis, Ervin-Tripp sums up: If what is said matches what would be within the predicted range for the social context, the interpretation as a directive is all that is made, and there is otherwise no social interpretation needed. If there is a mismatch, the hearer identifes what social features the mismatch might be appropriate to. These features are being imputed by the speaker to the hearer, the task, or the setting. The main point is that the social interpretation or marking derives from the existence of norms which can be compared: the form which was expected, and the social features appropriate to the expression used. Obviously for such a process to fow smoothly participants must share norms; if not, what is intended as socially unmarked interaction will be heard as marked and misunderstood. (63) Because there are multiple ways of “saying the same thing,” in certain circumstances, we are required or provoked to pay heightened attention to the indexical semiosis in which an utterance is involved as well as to its denotational semiosis. “A skilled speaker relies on the contrast between what is expected and what occurs as a resource for implying meaning,” Ervin-Tripp points out (64). Linguistic anthropologists, developing Charles Saunders Peirce’s thinking about semiosis, conceive of indexicality as that part of semiosis that allows meaning to occur because of the way in which “signs-as-occurrences point to the very conditions of DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-16

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their occurrence” (Silverstein, 2010: 340). If someone hears the utterance “Match,” and understands it to be a directive, it would seem correct to say that the utterance, by way of its unspoken diference from the other ways of “saying the same thing” that might have occurred, has to some extent been successful at indexically presupposing certain features of the context in which it occurs. Depending on what occurs after the utterance (if someone politely and deferentially—or perhaps begrudgingly—gives the speaker a match, for instance), it may have both successfully presupposed and also indexically entailed other understandings about its context of occurrence and about the participants in it. But diferent choices from an array of possible utterances clearly involve diferent presuppositions and potential entailments. The choice of an option from this array will thus index a range of diferent features of context and also assumptions about role relations of the participants. Also, the various possible forms of the directive could be said to belong to diferent registers, and diferent speakers will have diferent degrees of acquaintance with or diferent degrees of competence in these diferent registers. Here is Asif Agha: An individual’s register range–the variety of registers with which he or she is acquainted – equips a person with portable emblems of identity, sometimes permitting distinctive modes of access to particular zones of social life. In complex societies, where no fuent speaker of the language fully commands more than a few of its registers, the register range of a person may infuence the range of social activities in which that person is entitled to participate; in some professions, especially technical professions, a display of register competence is a criterion of employment. (2004: 24) Your command of a given register, or your acquaintance with one, are also indexes of your social history or your present social position that are revealed through diferent verbal interactions. There are probably what we might think of as register requirements for admission to certain social circles and the events that produce and maintain them (e.g., dinner parties, garden parties, and soirées). We can go further and say that certain registers also indicate something about the language ideology of the speaker. (I will explain further what I mean by this in what follows.) Peircean pragmatics, as developed by the feld of linguistic anthropology, provides a compelling characterization of the understanding of language that one fnds in Proust’s Recherche, and I would like to explore some of the consequences of that fact here. There are many ways of thinking about or experiencing the relations between the denotational semiosis and the indexical semiosis taking place simultaneously in any utterance. Obviously, the two levels are not fully distinct. When Ervin-Tripp imagines a “skilled speaker” relying on an indexical contrast between an unmarked way of doing something with language and a marked one (“A skilled speaker relies on the contrast between what is expected and what occurs as a resource for implying meaning”), she invokes (implicitly) a common understanding regarding, we might say, what is done directly and what is done indirectly, or to use a term from philosophical parlance, she invokes the idea of implicature as a kind of secondary phenomenon to the primary denotational (referential or predicative) one that occurs when we make utterances. Yet, the choice to imagine what is happening on the plane of indexical semiosis as secondary or “indirect,” perhaps somehow parasitical upon other primary or “direct” modes of semiosis is an ideological one. Silverstein has noted, for instance, how often “denotational function masks the indexical plurifunctionality of communicative use” (2010: 341) and observed that “the very concepts of ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ are just local cultural facts of Standard Average European ethno-metapragmatic provenance” 192

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(2010: 338). I would like to make the case in what follows that Proust’s novel ofers the occasion for critical refection on the “ethno-metapragmatic provenance” of certain ways of fguring social indexical semiosis, and in a way that calls into question what Silverstein has referred to as “folk doctrines of directness” (2010: 343) that characterize and limit certain common ways of thinking about language (both every day and philosophical ones) because of the way they understand implication, implicature, connotation, social indexicality to be somehow secondary or to exist “behind the scenes” of language use. Proust is like linguistic anthropologists in being intensely interested in social indexicality, and interested as well in ways that in diferent cultural circumstances diferent uses of indexical semiosis are made. As Silverstein observes and as I think we will be able to see in our examples from Proust, “all indexicality is metapragmatically regimented,” which means that indexical semiosis occurs (is perceived and experienced) diferently under diferent cultural circumstances. Proust’s novel studies a clash of cultures, of course, and so, I hope to show, it turns out to be interested (again in Silverstein’s terms) in several “culture-specifc ethnometapragmatics” (2010: 347) through which indexical semiosis transpires. Silverstein suggests that in our day-to-day understanding of what language is we are biased toward the denotational channel, and this can cause us to misrecognize what is happening as we use language. By “we,” Silverstein means speakers of what Benjamin Whorf called Standard Average European (SAE), a group of languages sufciently close to each other to share not only grammatical and syntactical features, but perhaps also certain kinds of language ideologies. It is part of one dominant SAE language ideology to think about language as primarily referential or propositional or denotational, and to think of other kinds of language use as somehow exceptional, parasitic, or non-normative.1 But even language use that seems propositional or about information exchange is, in fact, doing a lot of other work. Silverstein writes: universally, humans experience their mutual adjustments through the use of language and surrounding codes as a process of talking one to another about various things, a process of communicating propositional information so as to inform one another of states-of-afairs in the universe of experience and imagination. My point is that as a consequence of this intuition about what goes on in discursive interaction, they—we!—really misrecognize what is going on. (2007: 34) Now if we think of Ervin-Tripp’s “skilled speakers” who know how to imply things by choices they make in crafting their utterances, or if we think of all the times that we use language ritually (greetings, cheers, prayers) or aesthetically (poetry readings, song cycles, plays), it becomes clear that “we” sometimes have at least a practical understanding of diferent orders of semiosis, and that in any case we use them, both intentionally and unwittingly, all the time. And yet when I set out to use language deliberately to some end, as I am now, what is your or my initial understanding of what I am doing? Here I am, constructing something like an argument for you, conveying information, organizing concepts, predicating like mad. It would feel awkward, would it not, if I were to suggest not only that this is not normal, but that it can be a disabling understanding of how language works in the world? Or that, at the very least, it is not a sufcient description of what is going on? Linguistic anthropologists will often use examples from languages and cultures distant from SAE to point out how limiting SAE-based language ideologies can be. (See, e.g., along with Silverstein, 2010; Faudree, 2015; Handman, 2017; Hanks, 2014; Harkness, 2017; Nakassis, 2017.) The ethnographic aspect of the Recherche might convince us that strong divergencies in language 193

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ideologies that lead to diferent understandings of language-in-use can be found even within the confnes of a single SAE speech community. What is going on when people speak to each other, for example, asking questions and giving answers about plans for tomorrow? For a certain kind of ethnographer, this is a linguistic anthropological question but is also, as it turns out, a novelistic one. It is a central question for Proust, whose novel demonstrates that diferent people hold diferent ideas regarding what is going on when they speak to others, and that this infuences their speech behavior. That is, Proust’s novel takes up an ethnographic stance toward talk. Suppose you are at an evening party given by someone quite important in your social world. Suppose a garden party is being given the next day by someone less important, but still important enough that many people at the evening party also plan to be at the garden party. Suppose this is a cultural universe in which it matters very much who gets invited to certain parties and who actually shows up. Suppose you decide to let some group of people know that, even though tomorrow’s hostess is very much counting on your presence, you will not be attending. That is a piece of information that you are sharing, but sharing the information is only part of what you are doing in making the utterance. In Silverstein’s words (and he could be glossing Proust here), “what humans say one to another, the propositional content they feel that they are communicating as ‘information’ or denotational content, comes to mediate how humans interact one with another” (2007: 34). Interestingly, any number of the aristocratic speakers in Proust’s novel do not seem to sufer from the bias toward the referential or denotational channel that Silverstein mentions. They seem to understand that their utterances are often not primarily about the information contained within them, but about asserting their position in the world—indeed, about shaping the world to their requirements.2 When Oriane, the Duchesse de Guermantes, lets it be known that even though she has just been to dinner at Madame de Saint-Euverte’s and knows that Madame de Saint-Euverte is counting on her presence at her garden party the next day, she will not be going; it both is and is not the piece of information that matters: “I need not ask whether you are going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s tomorrow,” Colonel de Froberville said to Mme de Guermantes [...]. “The whole of Paris will be there.” […] “Well, the fact is I shan’t be in Paris,” the Duchess answered Colonel de Froberville. “I must tell you (though I ought to be ashamed to confess such a thing) that I have lived all these years without seeing the stained-glass windows at Montfort-l’Amaury. It’s shocking, but there it is. And so, to make amends for my shameful ignorance, I decided that I would go and see them tomorrow.” M. de Bréauté smiled a subtle smile. For he was well aware that, if the Duchess had been able to live all these years without seeing the windows at Montfort-l’Amaury, this artistic excursion had not all of a sudden taken on the urgent character of an “emergency” operation and might without danger, after having been put of for more than twenty-fve years, be retarded for twenty-four hours. The plan that the Duchess had formed was simply the Guermantes way of decreeing that the Saint-Euverte establishment was defnitely not a socially respectable house, but a house to which you were invited so that your name might afterwards be faunted in the account in the Gaulois, a house that would award the seal of supreme elegance to those, or at any rate to her (should there be but one), who would not be seen there. The delicate amusement of M. de Bréauté, coupled with the poetical pleasure which society people felt when they saw Mme de Guermantes do things which their own inferior position did not allow them to imitate but the mere sight of which brought to their lips the smile of the peasant tied to his glebe when he sees freer and more fortunate men pass by above 194

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his head—this delicate pleasure could in no way be compared with the concealed but frantic delight which M. de Froberville instantaneously experienced. (SG, 96–7; III 82–3) There are any number of ways of saying you won’t be going to Mme. de Saint-Euverte’s party tomorrow. The Duchess does not exactly say that she won’t be attending, although she makes it clear in so many words. But what we see in this passage is that even though the utterance somehow contains and conveys that information about her planned non-attendance, the information can hardly be taken to be the point of the utterance. Part of the point, we might hazard, is for the Duchess to be the person she is, and for the world in which she is the Duchess and can play the role she plays here to go on existing. Indeed, one of the points of the entire soirée could be said to be the ritual reproduction of the social world in which it transpires. People at the party pay attention to who else is there, to how or why they might have been invited. Some are interested in various political goings on, perhaps the latest doings in the Dreyfus Afair, or shifting positions regarding the Afair on the part of various attendees. Others are interested in shifts in intimate relations of various party goers. Silverstein writes: In multi-party discursive interaction each participant seems to contribute to an ongoing, emergent structure of denotational information ‘in play’.… The structure of this co-participation aligns each participant with this emergent structure of information, thus in efect mediately constituting a fgure of mutual alignment of participants one to another. (2007: 37–8) Certain people who have never met will arrange to be introduced in the course of the evening. Others will insist on avoiding someone or each other. Talking about other guests or politics or tomorrow’s parties allows people to come into diferent kinds of relations with new acquaintances or to maintain or shift their relations with people they already know. Silverstein, in describing verbal exchanges, will create an analytical distinction between the denotational text that participants construct and the interactional text. They are in some ways inseparable: speakers, for instance, exchange information in the pursuit of other goals. The co-construction of denotational text… projects into the actual world of social relations; it is not merely a matter of informing one another of the contents of one’s cognition. This structure of movements-over-time of mutual alignments and their indexed implications in the world of social life is what we term the interactional text emergent between or among participants. It is the model of how they are in fact coming to mutual adjustment in a momentary and continuously changing groupness, or in a mutual group relationality frequently consequential beyond the interactional moment. And all this is accomplished by interlocutors as they seem just to be conveying information in denotational text. (2007: 38) Silverstein is suggesting that much of the time while we think we are talking about politics, or people’s private lives, or the season’s social calendar, we are also engaged in actions relating to maintaining or altering in-group or out-group status. What is interesting about the scenes being described in Proust’s novel is that people like the Duchess seem fully conscious of the 195

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fact that the information they are conveying to others is merely an alibi for the main purpose of conversation, which obviously has to do with “mutual group relationality” in a way that is “consequential beyond the interactional moment.” Actually, “fully conscious” might not be correct. The Duchess might not be able to articulate for you (should she agree to submit to your ethnographic interview request) that her language practice is often fully oriented toward the maintenance of certain hierarchical structures of prestige in her social universe, indeed that the informational content of what she is saying is often incidental to this other purpose, and yet she demonstrates this—practically—at every turn. Perhaps we could say she does it without thinking, but this doesn’t seem particularly accurate either, given the carefully crafted nature of her utterances (and the admiration they inspire among her set for the craft they display). We might decide that the narrator is calling our attention to the linguistic habitus of this brilliantly trained improviser of talk, whose rigorous (and ongoing) training in this linguistic universe has made her such an admired “spontaneous” producer of utterances that manage to display so acutely the relation of these two channels in her speech: the denotational (I will be out of town and so unable to attend tomorrow’s party) and the interactional (while I am willing to dine with Mme. de Saint-Euverte under certain circumstances, and sometimes attend her parties, I am sufciently important, and she sufciently unimportant, that I feel under no obligation to appear at her parties when it seems the main reason for doing so is to guarantee her a status I don’t wish to be seen as according to her). Notice also how the reporting of this bit of conversation by the narrator is composed: he reports the understanding one of the other participants (Bréauté) in the conversation has of the Duchess’s utterance, thereby implying that he has also understood, and making sure the reader does. But he also contrasts Bréauté’s uptake of the utterance with that of Froberville and by doing so provides further ethnographic details about the variety of language practices and the range of competencies in them that he fnds within the set of people he is observing. By ofering an explanation of this linguistic encounter to the reader, he produces the sense that the Duchess, Bréauté, and Froberville belong to one speech community (without being equally adept as speakers), but that he and the reader belong to another, and that the distinction between the speech communities might have to do with the way the interactive and the informational channels relate to each other. Bréauté discretely appreciates the work the Duchess’s masterfully constructed reply is performing, and in doing so, indicates that he has understood and endorses the claim to status and precedence she has made. Froberville, however, delights too much in the Duchess’s verbal prowess and in the way her status allows her to demonstrate an independence from social obligations that neither he nor Bréauté has by planning to skip tomorrow’s party: The delicate amusement of M. de Bréauté […] could in no way be compared with the concealed but frantic delight which M. de Froberville instantaneously experienced. The eforts that this gentleman was making so that people should not hear his laughter had made him turn as red as a turkey-cock, in spite of which it was with a running interruption of hiccups of joy that he exclaimed in a pitying tone: “Oh! poor aunt Saint-Euverte, she’ll make herself sick over it! No, the unhappy woman isn’t to have her duchess! What a blow! It’ll be the death of her!” He doubled up with laughter, and in his exhilaration could not help stamping his feet and rubbing his hands. Smiling out of one eye and one small corner of her lips at M. de Froberville, whose aimable intention she appreciated, though she found less tolerable the deadly boredom of his company, Mme de Guermantes fnally decided to leave him. (SG, 97–8; III 83) 196

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Froberville seems not so appreciative of the elegant circumlocution found in the Duchess’s speech, her verbal dexterity, as he is of the potential spectacle of the efects of her social cruelty. He also seems to be demonstrating a kind of communicational incompetence, or some kind of norm-violating behavior that Oriane experiences as “mortel ennui” (“deadly boredom”). That is, he is translating her elegant but transparently false alibi into its efects. Now surely both Oriane and Bréauté understand the efects that her non-attendance at the party might have, since they contribute somehow to—they give value to—her verbal performance. But they understand that the performance is best appreciated without translation or explicitation. They respect an unspoken code of appropriate linguistic behavior in the social universe in question. The result of Froberville’s crassness is that Oriane is obliged to craft another utterance that does not say what it means, but that somehow puts Froberville in his place: “I say, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bid you goodnight,” she said to him as she rose with an air of melancholy resignation, and as though it grieved her […]. “Basin wants me to go and talk to Marie for a while.” In reality, she was tired of listening to Froberville, who went on envying her her visit to Montfort-l’Amaury, when she knew quite well that he had never heard of the windows before in his life, and besides would not for anything in the world have missed going to the Saint-Euverte party. (SG, 98; III 84) Perhaps one of the things we are learning about the way talk works in this community is that while the art of disguise is practiced, success consists in creating a disguise which disguises nothing—at least for some interlocutors. The narrator performs his own act of explicitation here, to make sure we understand what the Duchess is “really” saying, and includes further information describing Froberville’s ongoing bad linguistic behavior: Froberville dwells on the topic of her trip to see some stained-glass windows for far too long in a clumsy way. He lacks verbal elegance and eloquence. Let me summarize. Proust’s narrator is playing a number of roles simultaneously. He is an ethnographer or linguistic anthropologist investigating practices in a speech community to which he does not belong, practices that he takes to be diferent from his own and diferent from the practices of his readers. Ethnographers or linguistic anthropologists, if their aim is to contrast one set of speech practices with another, need some common conceptual ground on which to do so. I have suggested that the common conceptual ground in play here has to do with the simultaneous distinction between and intrication of a denotational semiotics and a pragmatic or indexical one. The interplay between these two semiotic regimes (see Silverstein, 2014) is brought to salience through an idea of the “appropriateness to context” of a given utterance, an utterance that is chosen from a rich set of possibilities for “saying the same thing.” The narrator uses the Duchess’s speech to examine the particular poetics of this social group, a poetics wherein “appropriateness to context” is played with as part of a demonstration and even production or reproduction of status hierarchies. The narrator presents the varied reactions of Bréauté and Froberville to show that there is also a hierarchy of values within this speech community regarding ways of expressing appreciation for strong poetic performances: best to be refned and delicate in your expressions of appreciation and not overly keen and obvious. The narrator understands this community to use talk to reinforce—sometimes in verbally brutal ways—status orders. He understands that successful poetic performances (which are highly valued) sometimes involve the pretense of disguise or circumlocution, but that sophisticated listeners within the community take particular 197

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enjoyment from utterances in which the cleverly elaborated disguise is in fact perfectly transparent for the well-informed listener.

Language Ideologies in Confict Yet, Proust’s narrator is not only an ethnographer of this speech community. He (or his younger self ) is also a participant observer, perhaps even an aspirant to membership in the community. That would explain why he seems as scornful of Froberville as is the Duchess. Yet, he remains somehow outside this speech community because he understands that his norms, his language ideology, and his sense of what constitutes an appropriate (ethically appropriate, we might say) relation between the denotational and the indexical orders do not correspond to those of the Duchess and others of her set. Or we might say the hero is an aspirant to membership in a social group whose language practices are diferent from his own, and which he is observing with an idea to mastering, whereas the narrator is ofering an ethnographic description of a speech community (one that includes both the hero and the Duchess) that contains an array of divergent speech practices. Those speech practices index forms of social belonging, involve diferent ethical norms, and occasionally produce scenes flled with sharp misunderstandings. The narrator considers the hero’s experience as a source of data in his construction of the ethnographic description of this speech community, one in which the Duchess constructs verbal performances out of the socio-poetic possibilities in which she has been trained and to which she feels entitled, and the hero will be sometimes shocked—ethically troubled—and sometimes fascinated by forms of speech that he is becoming familiar with while nonetheless fnding foreign. The ethical trouble will become most palpable in this scene in the novel when someone highly entitled, the Baron de Charlus, asserts his opinion of Madame de Saint-Euverte’s standing in his world, just as did the Duchess, but both more brutally and within the earshot of Madame de Saint-Euverte. That the hero is disturbed by what he hears, whereas others present (including Madame de Saint-Euverte) do not seem to be, serves to index his outsider perspective on the world he is visiting. This more extreme moment of interlocution, where we can see the hero taking a normative distance from the verbal performance he witnesses, is, interestingly, a performance that he himself has elicited. It still has to do with who from the present soirée will or will not be attending Madame de Saint-Euverte’s party the next day. Indeed, the narrator seems to have understood that posing questions on this topic is a good way of eliciting utterances flled with data regarding speech practices. Here is the Baron de Charlus speaking to Madame de Surgis knowing full well that Madame de Saint-Euverte is within earshot: “Would you believe it, this impertinent young man,” he said, indicating me to Mme de Surgis, “has just asked me, without the slightest concern for the proper reticence in regard to such needs, whether I was going to Mme de Saint-Euverte’s, in other words, I suppose, whether I was sufering from diarrhoea. I should endeavour in any case to relieve myself in some more comfortable place than the house of a person who, if my memory serves me, was celebrating her centenary when I frst began to move in society, that is to say, not in her house. [...] Are you going to wallow there?” (SG, 116–7; III 99) We are again back with the interrelated questions: How many ways are there of saying you will not be attending a party? And: When you tell someone you won’t be attending a party, what are you really doing? The Baron de Charlus’s brutal strategy seems diferent from the 198

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Duchess’s refned indirection; yet, there are aspects of its poetics and of its efects that are similar. Like the Duchess, the Baron is concerned with the ruthless assertion of hierarchies, and with the assertion of his right to be the arbiter of the status of others. So the narrator could here simply have repeated a version of what he said after transcribing the Duchess’s performance: The plan that the Duchess had formed was simply the Guermantes way of decreeing that the Saint-Euverte establishment was defnitely not a socially respectable house, but a house to which you were invited so that your name might afterwards be faunted… In fact, the two moments seem composed in a parallel fashion, as if they are part of the same ethnographic case study of what the narrator refers to as “the Guermantes way,” a study of the pragmatics and metapragmatics of language-in-use in a certain privileged sector of a given speech community. The narrator ofers us a chance to experience how microcontexts of verbal interaction are linked indexically to larger social structures and processes. They not only help reveal the existence of those larger structures, but they in fact also continually reconstitute them. They are also a training ground for practitioners. That is, Charlus and the Duchess are not just achieving various social ends through their utterances; they are also virtuoso performers whose poetic techniques hold lessons for others. Froberville was receiving a lesson not just in how a masterful utterance might be crafted, but in how to respond to it appropriately. He failed that lesson. Madame de Surgis similarly fails in crafting a response to Charlus’s question to her. Note that what Charlus is listening for is not a yes or no answer to his question, but how that information (about which he probably doesn’t even care) will be given a verbal form: “Are you going to wallow there?” he asked Mme de Surgis, who now found herself in a quandary. Wishing to pretend for the Baron’s beneft that she was not going, and knowing that she would give days of her life rather than miss the Saint-Euverte party, she got out of it by a compromise, that is to say by expressing uncertainty. This uncertainty took a form so clumsily amateurish and so cheaply sewn together [mesquinement couturière] that M. de Charlus, not afraid of ofending Mme de Surgis, whom nevertheless he was anxious to please, began to laugh to show her that “it didn’t wash.” “I always admire people who make plans,” she said. “I often change mine at the last moment. There’s a question of a summer frock which may alter everything. I shall act upon the inspiration of the moment.” (SG, 117; III, 99–100) (If Charlus is unexpectedly—and perhaps only temporarily—anxious to please Mme de Surgis, it is because he fnds her two sons, whom he has seen for the frst time at this party, attractive and has therefore decided that it is in his interest to ingratiate himself—to a degree—with their mother. He is, therefore, juggling multiple and perhaps conficting interactive agendas as he speaks—amorous ones as well as status-based ones. I will return to this question of multifunctionality in a moment.) In the speech universe in question, certain utterances that speakers exchange are judged for their poetic success, and the evaluation is made apparent in various ways—discreetly by someone like Bréauté, with clumsy obviousness by someone like Froberville, or here, with evident disappointment that Madame de Surgis couldn’t have done better by someone like Charlus. We might notice that we have been provided the information we need to understand why her utterance fails to 199

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garner Charlus’s approval by our ethnographically attuned narrator. Taking the Duchess’s and Charlus’s examples together shows us the importance of a poetics of extravagance here: Charlus’s extravagance is in the play with extreme vulgarity in his fgural language. Oriane’s extravagance is in the very idea of planning to travel 50 kilometers outside of Paris to view a set of Renaissance stained-glass windows in order to be able to pretend to have an excuse to skip a party. Madame de Surgis temporizes by pretending to worry about having the right outft for the party. It is a cheap excuse, rather than an extravagant one, “mesquinement couturière,” as the hero has it: a poetic fop, a fashion failure. Madame de Surgis is not here primarily conveying information about her possible attendance at Madame de Saint-Euverte’s party, nor about the contents of her wardrobe, but rather about her level of improvisational skill within a certain kind of verbal performance structure, her knowledge of the codes that govern the poetic shaping of utterances in this universe, her ability to manipulate them and in doing so to acknowledge the status of her interlocutors, to assert her own status, to gain ground or potentially lose it, and so on. By participating in language use in this way, she contributes to the ongoing existence, organization, and status of the social group to which she belongs. Linguistic anthropologists point out that people are always doing some version of this when they speak whether they are conscious of it or not. Proust is showing us a social universe in which this is done quite knowingly, in which people are, in fact, trained to use language to do this, and trained to understand this as perhaps the predominant function of language-in-use in certain social conditions. It seems fair to say that Charlus, the Duchess, and Madame de Surgis understand themselves to be participating in a culture in which language is used in a highly ritualized fashion. This shared understanding of language use, this shared language ideology, makes them part of a collectivity. We could say that the vision being put forth by Proust is of a social mind that is being continually produced and reproduced through a collective semiotic activity. The hero/narrator’s position is immensely complex. He is, in this scene, both ethnographer and aspirant. It might be tempting to say that it is the narrator who is the ethnographer and the hero the aspirant, but the novel does not divide the roles up so clearly. The fact of being an aspirant might seem to impugn one’s ethnographic integrity. Various oddities of the hero/ narrator’s own verbal behavior and personal social agendas in this scene and throughout the novel regularly trouble his own attempts to come across as a reasonably objective observer of the cultural universes through which he moves (see Lucey, 2006: 215–49; Lucey, 2022a: 123–68). Also, both the hero and the narrator exist within the frame of a novel that is itself, we might say, ethnographic, and where the hero/narrator—of a diferent mind and of a concomitantly diferent language ideology than the Baron or the Duchess—is included in the analysis the novel is providing (Lucey, 2022b). Consider the narrator/hero’s reaction upon hearing Madame de Saint-Euverte being insulted by the Baron: For my part, I was incensed at the abominable little speech that M. de Charlus had just made. I would have liked to shower blessings upon the giver of garden-parties. Unfortunately, in high society as in politics the victims are such cowards that one cannot for long remain indignant with their executioners. (SG, 117; III 100) Madame de Saint-Euverte conducts herself obsequiously toward Charlus after having heard his insults, and shortly thereafter encourages the hero to fnd a way to bring the baron along to tomorrow’s party. As the narrator describes his own reactions to the various turns in this 200

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scene—his shock at Charlus’s violence and his displeasure at Madame de Saint-Euverte’s craven meekness—we can see how imbricated his ethnographic stance is with his role as a participant in this particular universe. Both as a participant and as an ethnographer, he speaks as if what is normative for him in terms of language use and what is normative for speakers such as the Baron, the Duchess, Madame de Saint-Euverte, and Madame de Surgis is not the same. Throughout the novel, his stance is presented to the reader as somehow unmarked, his language ideology as a common-sense standard from which other practices represent deviations of one kind or another. There is a certain ambiguity in the observation that in high society, “one” cannot help but forgive someone like Charlus for his treatment of someone like Madame de Saint-Euverte. Does “one” refer to people who are at home in that culture/ language ideology, or does it include the narrator, and if so, what kind of moral compromise would it represent? Would it represent a kind of acculturation, a shift of norms, a gradual modifcation of his language ideology toward a situation in which the aristocratic speech behaviors he has been detailing for us would somehow shift to belong to some prerefexive understanding of what language is for? Were it to be that, there could be no Recherche. The Recherche depends on the tenuous pretense of an unmarked position from which the narrator/hero can observe (among other things) the strange language practices and ideologies not only of the aristocratic circle of the Guermantes and their crowd, but also of other people whose speech does not conform to his norms, like Albertine and her girlfriends, Swann, Odette, and Gilberte, Françoise, Morel, and even people presumably quite close to him in social space but whom he implicitly insists he can hold at a distance, like Madame de Cambremer-Legrandin, Bloch, or Legrandin. It is a tenuous pretense not only because he also exhibits strange language behavior and is involved in any number of potentially disreputable social and sexual projects of his own. It is tenuous because the novel understands that a claim to occupy a position within a conficting feld of language ideologies that could somehow be unmarked, neutral, and normative is ultimately unsustainable. Perhaps the narrator manages to represent a language ideology that has an aspirational SAE normativeness about it, embodying a set of what we might call “native intuitions” (Silverstein, 2010: 345) about language use—seeing it as primarily communicational or denotational, but involving exceptional instances of performative uses, parasitic or aesthetic forms of indirection, and so on. Perhaps we tend to think about language the way the narrator does, even though our own usage might not bear out what we think we think. When we encounter people like Charlus or Oriane who clearly have diferent coordinates for their language practices, we do seem to have words that mark them as exceptional: fabulators, megalomaniacs, narcissists, grifters, politicians, diplomats… Yet, as a novel, Proust’s Recherche perhaps suggests that the adumbration of a set of norms present within a particular (and quite widespread) language ideology that happens to be the hero’s and the narrator’s, but not Charlus’s or Oriane’s, or that of many others around him, is one to be viewed with some kind of critical suspicion. That is, the hero is fnding himself to be part of a speech community in which diferent language ideologies are operative, and, indeed, in confict with each other. The narrator seems sometimes to negotiate between these ideologies, to study them. Yet ultimately, he, too, is part of the novel. Consider a passage from an essay by Silverstein that captures in analytical language what Proust’s novel aims to narrate: In communicating people seem (at least at frst) to be giving evidence of knowledge, feeling, and belief, even creating, sharpening, and transforming knowledge, feeling, and belief in themselves and others. What, then, is the sociological condition of existence of 201

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such—as we should term them—“cultural concepts” of which cultures are constituted in the face of the very individual-centric assumptions that our own culture persists in having about knowledge, feeling, and belief? How can we see that language as used manifests such cultural concepts, ones specifc to a sociohistorical group, notwithstanding the “freedom” we think we manifest in saying what we want, as a function of what we, as individuals, “really” believe we want to communicate about? Is there, in short, a sociocultural unconscious in the mind—wherever that is located in respect of the biological organism—that is both immanent in and emergent from our use of language? (2004: 622) Proust’s novel is fascinating because it is flled with what Silverstein has here called “individual-centric assumptions” about, say, forms of aesthetic experience, about the experience of emotion, or about the use of language to either communicative or aesthetic ends. Yet, those assumptions are consistently challenged by the novel’s narration of the collective semiotic production of diferent competing cultural universes, and by its sense that as those universes are collectively produced and reproduced, so are the individual agents (including the narrator) who compose them and the minds these agents profess to possess. Their experience of language-in-use, however tightly localized it may seem to be within a given person, is a piece of a collective cultural production; that experience is constructed through an array of semiotically inculcated cultural concepts that shape, that mediate, that determine the social, aesthetic, and afective cognitive possibilities available to them. The novel watches the collision of such cultural universes and their corresponding language ideologies (which carry implicit theories of mind with them) and delicately assumes a critical and skeptical stance toward them—including, it seems, to those embodied and voiced by the narrator/hero.

Can You Stand Outside Language and Watch It Work? In the passages I have considered so far, the hero seems at sea in conficting metapragmatic regimes associated with diferent language ideologies. I would like to consider one more passage in which the novel refects more specifcally about its own relationship to language-inuse, its own work in producing what we might call novelistic transcripts of imaginary scenes of talk. What I have been suggesting so far is that we can extrapolate from these transcripts a rich conceptualization of the way verbal universes are structured by competing language ideologies that help determine the way people use speech, the interactive poetics of talk. In this fnal passage, there is an intriguing kind of metaleptic break in which the novel looks at itself recording and commenting on a scene of talk, and seems to notice that in doing so, it is itself sometimes an actor, a participant in the language ideologies of the world it observes: it indexes what we might almost call a guilty or an uncomfortable awareness of a kind of complicity it demonstrates with a particular verbal culture and perhaps in doing so confrms some aspects of the precarious critical stance toward language-in-use that I have been aiming to outline. The scene involves one of the novel’s main diplomats, the Marquis de Norpois. We might think that if the fgure of the diplomat is so prominent in the Recherche, it would be because diplomats, like our narrator, if they are to do their work well, require a kind of ethnographic understanding of the ways in which language-in-use is organized according to diferent metapragmatic regimes in diferent cultural and sociopolitical environments. Perhaps skilled diplomatic speech must itself surf across a sea of multiple metapragmatic regimes, and must know how to work efectively in quite diferent kinds of speech contexts. Diplomats might 202

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turn out to be people who use language in a way that demonstrates a particular theoretical acuity. At frst, this is what the passage that interests me seems to be demonstrating. In this scene from the novel’s penultimate volume, the elderly Norpois and his longtime companion, Madame de Villeparisis, are on holiday in Venice. Norpois may be elderly, but he harbors a desire to remain an important fgure in international diplomacy, perhaps to be named, even at his advanced age, to a post in Constantinople. An Italian government ofcial, Prince Foggi, is dining at a table near them and joins them at their table after dinner. The conversation turns to the present political situation in Italy: a new cabinet will likely soon need to be formed: “the Prince declared that he was indiferent to the fate of the Cabinet and would spend another week at least in Venice. He hoped that by that time all risk of a ministerial crisis would have been avoided” (F, 728; IV 213). The novel spends about a page preparing to present to us one single short sentence that Norpois will utter, an utterance, it goes on to explain, that garners a certain amount of fame. For a while, Norpois remains silent and the Prince surmises that these local political questions don’t interest him, or that Norpois feels it would be inappropriate for him to say anything that might constitute interference in local political afairs. But this is not, the novel tells us, what is really going on: Silence and an air of indiference had remained, in M. de Norpois, not a sign of reserve but the habitual prelude to an intervention in important afairs. The Marquis had his eye upon nothing less (as we have seen) than Constantinople, after the prior settlement of the German question, with a view to which he hoped to force the hand of the Rome Cabinet. He considered, in fact, that an action on his part of international signifcance might be the worthy consummation of his career, perhaps even a prelude to fresh honours, to difcult tasks to which he had not relinquished his pretensions. We are being prepared for a bravura verbal performance by a diplomat, one so remarkable that it could, if reported to the right people, produce the possibility of Norpois being ofered a new post. This means, of course, that the utterance itself will not be sufcient. It will need to be reported. (But by whom? There are only three people present to hear it: Norpois, Foggi, and Madame de Villeparisis.) The Prince, to put the Marquis at his ease and to show him that he regarded him as a compatriot, began to speak of the possible successor to the Prime Minister then in ofce. [...] When Prince Foggi had mentioned more than twenty names of politicians who seemed to him suitable for ofce, names to which the ex-Ambassador listened with his eyelids drooping over his blue eyes and without moving a muscle, M. de Norpois broke his silence at length to utter the words which were to provide the chancelleries with food for conversation for many years to come, and afterwards, when they had been forgotten, would be exhumed by some personage signing himself “One Who Knows” or “Testis” or “Machiavelli” in a newspaper in which the very oblivion into which they had fallen enabled them to create a fresh sensation. So Prince Foggi had mentioned more than twenty names to the diplomat who remained motionless and silent as a deaf-mute, when M. de Norpois raised his head slightly, and, in the form in which his most pregnant and far-reaching diplomatic interventions had been couched, albeit this time with greater audacity and less brevity, shrewdly inquired: “And has no one mentioned the name of Signor Giolitti?” At these words the scales fell from Prince Foggi’s eyes; he could hear a celestial murmur. Then at once M. de Norpois began to speak about one thing and another. (F, 729–30; IV 215) 203

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We are left to fgure out for ourselves what is so magical about Norpois’s utterance. At least it is clear that it is not meant as the simple request for information it appears superfcially to be. Nor, apparently, is Norpois’s sole or primary goal to infuence the choice of who to name Prime Minister. His goal, we have been told, is to do something so impressive that it might relaunch his career. He appears to succeed in saying something memorable, at least so it seems from what the novel tells us before it transcribes the utterance for us. That is, to be precise, he says something both memorable and forgettable, since apparently there are anonymous fgures who track its presence in the collective memory of the diplomatic world; when that memory seems to be fading, they renew it by means of an anonymous article signed with a fetching pseudonym. But how do we actually know that this utterance was so special? The novel heavy-handedly insists on its extraordinary qualities: We cannot say what exactly were Prince Foggi’s impressions. He must certainly have been delighted to have heard the gem: “And Signor Giolitti, has no one mentioned his name?” For M. de Norpois, in whom age had extinguished or deranged his most outstanding qualities, had on the other hand, as he grew older, perfected his bravura, as certain aged musicians, who in all other respects have declined, acquire and retain until the end, in the feld of chamber-music, a perfect virtuosity which they did not formerly possess. However that may be, Prince Foggi, who had intended to spend a fortnight in Venice, returned to Rome that very night and was received a few days later in audience by the King in connexion with certain properties which, as we may perhaps have mentioned already, the Prince owned in Sicily. The Cabinet hung on for longer than might have been expected. When it fell, the King consulted various statemen as to the most suitable leader of a new Cabinet. Then he sent for Signor Giolitti, who accepted. (F, 730; IV 215) Notice that the second time the utterance is cited, its form has shifted slightly. Notice that the evidence provided of the utterance’s efectiveness is a series of correlated events: Foggi changes his plans, returns to Rome, sees the king ostensibly about some other matter, and then the king ofers the position to Giolitti. Supposing that Norpois’s words did have something to do with Foggi’s returning to Rome, what would be the diplomatic or political signifcance of Giolitti’s appointment other than being an index of Norpois’s skill? We are not told. But now comes the truly astounding bit of this passage: Three months later a newspaper reported Prince Foggi’s meeting with M. de Norpois. The conversation was reported as we have given it here, with the diference that, instead of: “M. de Norpois shrewdly inquired,” one read: “M. de Norpois said with that shrewd and charming smile which is so characteristic of him.” M. de Norpois considered that “shrewdly” had in itself sufcient explosive force for a diplomat and that this addition was, to say the least, excessive. He had even asked the Quai d’Orsay to issue an ofcial denial, but the Quai d’Orsay did not know which way to turn. (F, 730–1; IV 215–6) This is one of those breathtaking, if understated moments in Proust’s novel where something truly startling happens with regard to what we might call the novel’s voicing, or with regard to our understanding of the parameters that make its narrative practice cohere. What were we reading, when we read just a little bit earlier the words: 204

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M. de Norpois raised his head slightly, and, in the form in which his most pregnant and far-reaching diplomatic interventions had been couched, albeit this time with greater audacity and less brevity, shrewdly inquired: ‘And has no one mentioned the name of Signor Giolitti?’ Were these or were these not the words of Proust’s narrator? Is this a novel in which voices other than the narrator’s can take over the narration? How is it that Norpois could have read that sentence—almost as if he were reading a draft of a journal article (and perhaps one that he was himself authoring)—and then could have decided to cross out the word “shrewdly” and replace it with “said with that shrewd and charming smile which is so characteristic of him”? Has the narrator’s account of his time in Venice been infltrated by the text of a self-composed puf piece by a diplomat who has guaranteed private access to certain journals that he uses (anonymously or pseudonymously) to curate his own reputation and pursue his own political agenda? Should we even include the account of the conversation between Norpois and Foggi as something that “really happened” in the novel? Or could it possibly be a fction within a fction? However we decide to understand this moment in the novel, it seems clear that we have implicitly been informed that it is not Norpois’s utterance itself (should he ever have actually uttered it) that matters. What matters is, so to speak, its circulatory fate, the fact that it is discussed as if it were a notable and miraculously efective and efcacious utterance. The novel, we might say, is collaborating with Norpois by reentextualizing his words and also his manner of speaking so as to maintain a public sense of his expertise, strategic eloquence, and infuence. Of course, the novel has also then left the explicit and disconcerting traces of its own complicity (and also plenty of prior evidence that Norpois is someone with a very mixed record of diplomatic skill and success) so as to leave us taken aback regarding what this episode is about. Perhaps it is about producing an occasion for asking a series of critical questions about how things are done, collectively, with language. That is, the novel is showing us the work that is required in order to make Norpois’s utterance seem powerful. It shows us how someone might record the utterance, how someone might recount it, so that it can be taken to be powerful; the novel shows how to make it an ongoing part of interdiscursivity instead of something once said and then forgotten. At the same time, it participates (but fctionally) in an efort that it also describes, the efort of a group of linguistic agents to maintain a belief not only in that utterance’s power, but therefore also in the idea that utterances can be powerful in that way. It also shows that belief to be a cultural construct, a part of a linguistic ideology. Saying that such a belief is a cultural construct is not to say that an utterance such as this could not contribute to making something happen. But it is to suggest that there might be multiple descriptions of how it does so, that they might be framed in diferent ways, and that the descriptions themselves could have diferent efects (say, on Norpois’s future). There might equally be descriptions that contradict the claim that Norpois’s utterance had this efect, or that reframe the discussion into one about interlocution and interdiscursivity in a way that makes the kinds of claims the novel seems to make for the brilliance of this utterance appear overreaching. Norpois may or may not have said something that infuenced Foggi’s actions and had an impact on the shape of the new Italian government. But Norpois knows that people believe in the magical perlocutionary efects of certain kinds of utterances, including diplomatic ones. He understands that he can use that belief to construct a story that can be told of his after-dinner conversation with Foggi. He knows how to use the media system to make sure 205

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that story is told (repeatedly) in venues where people central to the maintenance of his reputation will read it. The novel we are reading becomes one of those venues, but duplicitously so, we might say. Both Norpois and the novel demonstrate a practical understanding of something linguistic anthropologists have discussed in a number of ways in recent years, “the need to view speakers’ awareness of the linguistic system as part of language” (Kroskrity, 2004: 506). Silverstein reminds us that thinking about “conscious purposivity in language use entails a consideration of the ideologies about language form, meaning, function, value, et cetera that the users apparently bring to bear on the activity of using it” (1985: 222–3). This is diferent from imagining we all use language in the same way, diferent from imagining that everyone thinks that language works in a certain way and acts accordingly. It means understanding that beliefs about how language works (often not uniformly distributed among members of a speech community) contribute to language working. This is an important lesson for today’s political moment, a moment in which many of our least admirable political and journalistic fgures demonstrate forms of purposivity in the use of language and versions of a ruthless language ideology not unlike Charlus’s or Oriane’s or Norpois’s. They demonstrate a language ideology and a use of language we might not wish to countenance, or to put into practice ourselves; we should at least (like Proust’s narrator) be able to be discerning about how it works.

Indexicality and Irony In using the word “duplicitously” in the previous paragraph to describe something about the way the Recherche functions, I was thinking specifcally about the way Ross Chambers talked about duplicitous texts in his book The Writing of Melancholy, where he describes how sometimes when a text “folds back on itself,” it “defnes itself as an enunciation by drawing attention to the pertinence of the situation from which it speaks to an appropriate reading of the text” (1993: 13). More generally, I was thinking of the importance of understanding the Recherche as fundamentally and formally ironic, in a way that is related to the Schlegelian notion of irony as “permanent parabasis,” a constant or endless interruption or intrusion or digression, something that breaks frame, a consistent calling of attention to the conditions of an utterance (see Chambers, 1993: 95). In the scene with Norpois, where the novel forces us suddenly to wonder who is writing it, the breaking of frame is clear and its forcing of a new perspective is startling. Yet, another consistent question raised by the composition of the Recherche, and tied to what we could call its ironic duplicity, is the question of when, so to speak, the narrator is a character whose speech is ethnographic evidence of how people of a certain kind speak and when the narrator speaks while standing, as it were, on solid ground as an ethnographer or a narrator. The novel’s playing with frames for the narrator’s own speech adds a disconcerting level of richness and complexity to its understanding of language-in-use and of the language ideologies that lie behind the world of competing language practices the novel presents to us. This irony carries over into speech about aesthetics in the novel. Take as an example something like the occasional cheap sloganeering of phrases the narrator sometimes voices, such as “A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it” (TR, 236; IV 461), an observation so unsubtle and unsatisfactory as to be utterly inadequate to the novel in which it occurs. One could easily imagine the narrator, in another moment, making fun of someone for saying something so clumsy, something that forecloses modes of critical experience of diferent kinds of artworks. Or one could imagine the narrator signaling the area of social space and the type of person from where or from whom an observation like that might be expected. Said another way, we 206

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might expect the narrator to hear a phrase like “a work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it” indexically. An obsession with indexical semiosis runs throughout the Recherche and it helps to produce and sustain its fundamental ironic posture. Take even a declaration such as the following: This work of the artist, this struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath experience, beneath words, something that is diferent from them, is a process exactly the reverse of that which, in those everyday lives which we live with our gaze averted from ourselves, is at every moment being accomplished by vanity and passion and the intellect, and habit too, when they smother our true impressions, so as entirely to conceal them from us, beneath a whole heap of verbal concepts and practical goals which we falsely call life. (TR, 254; IV 474–5) It is possible to hear there a description of a certain kind of listening to which a novelist might aspire, a listening for what is happening in language and other works of art through indexical (rather than denotational) semiosis. There is a moment in The Captive where the narrator indeed listens to himself in this way, as if previewing the lesson of the fnal volume: What is more, at the moment when this new personage took shape in me, he found his language ready made in the memory of the sarcastic, scolding things that had been said to me, that I must now say to others, and that came so naturally to my lips, either because I evoked them through mimicry and association of memories, or because the delicate and mysterious incrustations of genetic energy had traced in me unawares, as upon the leaf of a plant, the same intonations, the same gestures, the same attitudes as had been characteristic of those from whom I sprang. Sometimes, playing the sage when talking to Albertine, I seemed to be hearing my grandmother. (C, 115; III 615) The narrator understands that there are multiple signatures in his speech that might be discerned by someone with the tools, the capacity, and the aesthetic or novelistic impulse to notice them (see Lucey, 2022a: 261–74). But then, and this is the novel’s most profound indexical irony, even in a sentence like the one that begins “This work of the artist, this struggle to discern beneath matter, beneath experience, beneath words, something that is diferent from them,” we must be struggling to discern something diferent from those very words yet nonetheless present in the utterance, some indexical sign of talk’s work maintaining or recreating or modifying worlds or persons or cultures, including a world in which we might imagine someone like a narrator saying something that sounds like this.

Notes 1 “The basic idea, elaborated as part of the anti-Catholic English Enlightenment by Bacon, Wilkins, Locke et al., is that language forms ‘represent’ universes of denotation, and that rationally instrumental use of language is—and ought to be—oriented to maximize the ‘directness’ of denotational use” (Silverstein, 2010: 351). 2 The sociolinguistic side of Proust’s novel has been helpfully treated by many previous critics. See, for instance, Hughes, 2011: 175–88. My linguistic anthropological interest is slightly diferent, in that I am interested in the way the novel seems to observe (ethnographically) a clash of cultures that is also a clash of language ideologies and from which diferent implicit theories of language seem to emerge.

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References Agha, A. (2004). Registers of Language. In A. Duranti, (ed), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 23–45. Oxford: Blackwell. Chambers, R. (1993). The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism. Translated by M. S. Trouille. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ervin-Tripp, S. (1976). Is Sybil There? The Structure of Some American English Directives. Language in Society 5(1): 25–66. Faudree, P. (2015). Tales from the Land of Magic Plants: Textual Ideologies and Fetishes of Indigeneity in Mexico’s Sierra Mazateca. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(3): 838–69. Handman, C. (2017). Languages Without Subjects: On the Interior(s) of Colonial New Guinea. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7(1): 207–28. Hanks, W. F. (2014). The Space of Translation. Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(2): 17–39. Harkness, N. (2017). Transducing a Sermon, Inducing Conversion: Billy Graham, Billy Kim, and the 1973 Crusade in Seoul. Representations 137: 112–42. Hughes, E. J. (2011). Proust, Class, and Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kroskrity, P. V. (2004). Language Ideologies. In A. Duranti (ed.), A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, 496–517. Oxford: Blackwell. Lucey, M. (2006). Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Durham: Duke University Press. Lucey, M. (2022a). What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lucey, M. (2022b). Introduction: Proust’s Modernist Sociology. In M. Lucey (ed.), Approaching Proust in 2022, a special issue of Paragraph 45(1): 1–21. Nakassis, C.V. (2017). Rajini’s Finger, Indexicality, and the Metapragmatics of Presence. Signs and Society 5(2): 201–42. Silverstein, M. (1985). Language and the Culture of Gender: At the Intersection of Structure, Usage, and Ideology. In E. Mertz, E and R. J. Parmentier (eds.), Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives, 219–59. Orlando: Academic Press. Silverstein, M. (2004). ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-Culture Nexus. Current Anthropology 45(5): 621–52. Silverstein, M. (2007). How Knowledge Begets Communication Begets Knowledge: Textuality and Contextuality in Knowing and Learning. Intercultural Communication Review 5: 31–60. Silverstein, M. (2010). “Direct” and “Indirect” Communicative Acts in Semiotic Perspective. Journal of Pragmatics 42: 337–53. Silverstein, M. (2014). Denotation and the Pragmatics of Language. In N. J. Enfeld, P. Kockelman, and J. Sidnell (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology, 128–57. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, M. (2019). Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of Discourse. College English 82(1): 55–76.

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PART 4

Aesthetics

13 CONTEMPLATING A PROUSTIAN LIBRARY Virginie Greene

Introduction About four decades ago, on my own, I decided to read Proust. I went to the public library of my French hometown and pulled from the shelf the frst volume of the Recherche that was there. It was Within a Budding Grove. I started reading Proust in medias res. I don’t remember at what point I was able to borrow Swann’s Way, and if I had then already read Time Regained. In any case, I read the Recherche in disorder, and did not get much of its plots and sub-plots. It is only later in my life that I found out who the lady in pink was, whom the young Marcel met at his uncle’s fat (SW, 89–90; I 75) and that I understood that Legrandin was not only a closeted snob but also a repressed homosexual (SW, 142–52; I 118–26). The advantage of this inconvenience was that I admitted from the start that I should not read that book to understand it, but to be confused and enchanted by it. I had read difcult books before, and I could bear with some amount of efort and discomfort. I never felt uncomfortable in reading Proust because it brought back to me the forms and modes of reading of my childhood: immersive, haphazard, and without any other purpose than the total loss of oneself in a book, the transformation of oneself into a book, a library, and therefore an author, an author being someone whose mind contains books. When I discovered Proust as a young adult, I remembered my childish belief in the permeability between books and minds, authors and readers, bodies and libraries, and lives and stories, which I had forgotten as I grew up and started to study literature at school. Reading Proust without professorial guidance was to fnd the key to my inner library and to synthesize various ways of reading into a contemplative act. This may sound like an oxymoron (contemplation being often understood as a passive state) but I cannot fnd a better approximation to my frst reading of Proust, and a better starting point to approaching Proust’s elusive, contradictory aesthetics. Wherever more than one book come together, there is a library. But how do books come together in one’s mind to be contemplated as well as to be read? Proust describes that process at the beginning of Swann’s Way and comes back to it at the end of Time Regained. His narrator’s thoughts on and interactions with books and libraries in these parts of the novel do not form a consistent theory or program. They ofer more to twenty-frst-century readers: a challenge to think anew their own books and libraries.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-18

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Genesis In the beginning, there is sleep, and sleep cannot happen without a book: For a long time I would go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have time to tell myself: ‘I’m falling asleep.’ And half an hour later the thought that it was time to look for sleep would awaken me; I would make as if to put away the book which I imagined was still in my hands […]. (SW, 3; I 3) Falling asleep is like falling into the book you were reading as a preparation to sleep: I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (SW, 3; I 3) Proust describes a state of consciousness in which, at times, prevails an archaic self that does not recognize the boundaries between subject and object, the book read and the mind reading it. Books are identifable although as foating items rather than as defned objects, but a library is not yet conceivable. After meditating about sleep, space, time, oblivion, and memory, the narrator shares what he was able to remember voluntarily about his childhood: certain moments while his parents and him spent their vacations at his grandparents’ home, in the small town of Combray. The frst memory retrieves a magic lantern used to distract the boy (I call him “the boy” since he is not named in this part of the novel) from his anxiety about sleeping in an unfamiliar room. The magic lantern projects the legend of Geneviève de Brabant on the walls of the room, thus transforming them into stain-glass windows: [...] and, after the fashion of the master-builders and glass-painters of gothic days, it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted as on a shifting and transitory window. But my sorrow were only increased thereby [...] (SW, 10; I 9) This should appear as a marvelous transformation, but the anxious child is neither appeased nor distracted. He views the show as creepy because the projected images make his bedroom look beautiful and mysterious, that is also hostile and unfamiliar: But I cannot express the discomfort I felt at this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room which I had succeeded in flling with my own personality until I thought no more of it than of myself. The anaesthetic efect of habit being destroyed, I would begin to think—and to feel—such melancholy things. The doorknob of my room, which was diferent to me from all the other doorknobs in the world, inasmuch as it seemed to move of its own accord and without my having to turn it, so unconscious had its manipulation had become—lo and behold, it was now an astral body for Golo. (SW, 11; I 9) 212

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The story of Geneviève makes the boy identify guiltily with her persecutor Golo, while fearing that his mother would be sufering unjustly like Geneviève (SW, 12; I 10). The magic lantern is for the boy like a book out of bounds, or an unbound book whose powerful imagery invades his space and consciousness without letting him a place to escape, at least until dinner time. In the little world of Combray, adults too must cope with threatening books. During a conversation, the neighbor, M. Swann, shares his taste for Saint-Simon’s aristocratic memoirs about Versailles: Well, Saint-Simon tells how Maulévrier had had the audacity to try to shake hand with his sons. [...] I cannot say whether it was ignorance or cozenage,’ writes Saint-Simon. ‘He tried to give his hand to my children. I noticed it in time to prevent him.’ (SW, 30; I 26) The grandfather marvels at Saint-Simon’s style, but Aunt Céline becomes indignant: What! You admire that? Well, that’s a fne thing, I must say! But what’s it supposed to mean? Isn’t one man as good as the next? What diference can it make whether he’s a duke or a groom so long as he’s intelligent and kind? He had a fne way of bringing up his children, your Saint-Simon, if he didn’t teach them to shake hands with all decent folk. Really and truly, it’s abominable. And you dare to quote it! (SW, 31; I 26) We, readers of Proust, smile at good-hearted Aunt Céline’s naiveté. Swann and the grandfather are right to enjoy reading Saint-Simon, who is such a great writer, despite his belief in dynastic purity, fundamental social inequality, and despotism as the best mode of government. Nonetheless, Aunt Céline unwittingly points out that the bourgeois citizens of the Third Republic display a strange infatuation for the Grand Siècle of Louis XIV through their habit of quoting Molière, Corneille, Racine, Saint-Simon, or Mme de Sévigné as a proof of good Republican, democratic education shared by secular Christians and assimilated Jews. Combray is a place of discord, where books are dividing rather than uniting on issues such as esthetics versus ethics. Moreover, if some members of the family circle are obviously well read, it also appears that their reading habits are dominated by the empire of the printed press. M. Swann, whose name has recently been mentioned in relation to his art collection in no other venue than the Figaro, expresses his opinion about the disproportionate amount of attention that the news gives to insignifcant events and that readers give to the news: The fault I fnd with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of any real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper of our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to fnd inside it—oh! I don’t know; shall we say Pascal’s Pensées? [...] And then, in the gilt and tooled volumes which we open once in ten years [...] we should read that the Queen of the Hellenes had arrived at Cannes, or that the Princesse de Léon had given a fancy dress ball. In that way we should arrive at a happy medium. (SW, 30; I 25–6)1 213

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Swann’s irony is built upon a syllogism: 1 2 3

We should spend more time reading the content of serious books than frivolous news. We spend more time reading the newspapers than reading serious books. Therefore, the newspapers should print the content of serious books.

We can refute the syllogism through discussing the notions of “seriousness” and “frivolity,” and questioning Swann’s reduction of news to what was called in Proust times “mondanités.” We could also argue that newspapers and printed books are diferent sorts of media, for different usages, and are not easily interchangeable. But that would not answer the following questions: Why is it funny to imagine the frst page of the Figaro, Le Monde, The New York Times, etc., flled with Pascal’s Pensées (or Proust’s Recherche)? And to imagine, conversely, private and public library shelves stacked with bound volumes full of reports about celebrities’ trivia? Is it because Swann himself appears regularly in the mondanités he denounces as invading the printed sphere? Or because his witty denunciation echoes Blaise Pascal’s stern pages about divertissement? Is it particularly funny for us since the printed sphere has in our times exploded into another sphere, where you can open Pascal’s Pensées or Proust’s Recherche in one window while scrolling down through your newsfeed to fnd out the last word about whatever happens to be viral right now? This leads me to thoughts that are neither funny nor stern, but serious. Where does literature stand when the printed press becomes accessible to the masses? Where does literature stand when an enormous quantity of texts, images, data, sounds, trivia, tidbits, etc., becomes accessible to the masses? How can one constitute an inner library at such moments when knowledge and communication drastically shift in quantity and form? A response to the late nineteenth-century information shift appears later in the little world of Combray as the narrator remembers it after the madeleine realization, thanks to another provincial aunt who has invented an efcient networking and streamlining technique. Since Aunt Léonie decided to live in her bed, she had to establish a network to remain connected with her community and continue being a highly respected member of it. First, to foster her physical and spiritual well-being, she has organized her living space in such a way that fundamental texts are constantly available to her: At one side of her bed stood a big yellow chest-of-drawers of lemon-wood, and a table which served at once as a dispensary and high altar, on which, beneath a statue of the Virgin and a bottle of Vichy-Célestins, might be found her prayer-books and her medical prescriptions, everything that she needed for the performance, in bed, of her duties to soul and body, to keep the proper time for pepsin and for vespers. (SW, 61; I 51) Second, she keeps her main channel of news open all day non-stop and uses the service of a competent and devoted fact-checker: “On the other side her bed was bounded by the window: she had the street in full view, and would while away the time by reading in it from morning to night, like the Persian princes of old, the daily but immemorial chronicles of Combray, which she would discuss in detail later with Françoise” (SW, 61–2; I 51). When she gets worrisome news such as “An unknown dog has been spotted in town” or “It has been reported that Mme Goupil arrived late at mass,” Aunt Léonie consults experts, such as Eulalie who lives near the church or Théodore who works at the grocery’s store (SW, 64–9; I 54–8). 214

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As she keeps up with both scriptures and news, aunt Léonie does not have much time for literature. Nonetheless, she manages to ft in some quality reading during her lunch break: I hope you won’t forget to give me my creamed eggs on one of the fat plates?” she would add. These were the only plates which had pictures on them, and my aunt used to amuse herself at every meal by reading the caption on whichever one had been sent up to her that day. She would put on her spectacles and spell out: “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” “Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp” and smile, and say: “Very good, very good. (SW, 67; I 56) This admirable routine perfectly fulflls aunt Léonie’s ambitious hypochondriac project, but fails to produce a library, unless we admit that a collection of illustrated plates would do. Combray at frst appears to be a universe full of literary citations and news in circulation, while deprived of literary breadth and depth and lacking the notion of a library. Books are everywhere and nowhere. They merge into one another and are not clearly separated from other receptacles of words. This maybe because this universe is fltered by the perception of a child who is just entering literacy, and this childish perception is remembered by an adult who tends to be foating between sleep and wakefulness and to confuse himself with the table of contents of the book he is reading.2 This may also indicate a more fundamental uncertainty about literature, books, and their place in the universe, as modeled in the microcosm of Combray. At the end of the frst remembrance of Combray, the boy’s relation to books and literature goes through a drastic change. One evening, at Combray, the boy is sent to bed without receiving his mother’s kiss. He is so upset that he waits until she goes to bed and then he runs to her in the hallway asking for her kiss. She refuses to kiss him, but the father intervenes, and, against all expectations, asks his wife to spend the night in their son’s bedroom, since he is so upset. Another bed is made for the mother. The boy is still crying because he now feels guilty to have forced his mother to yield to his nervousness. The mother, upset too, does not fnd any other way to console them than opening a packet of books the boy’s grandmother selected for his birthday. Mamma went to fetch a parcel of books of which I could not distinguish, through the paper in which they were wrapped, any more than their short, wide format but which, even at this frst glimpse, brief and obscure as it was, bade fair to eclipse already the painting box of New Year’s Day and the silkworms of the year before. The books were La Mare au Diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette, and Les Maîtres sonneurs. (SW, 45–6; I 39) Then literature becomes possible, thinkable, and tangible, starting with a modest library of four books written by one female author, chosen by a grandmother and presented by a mother to a child who has only heard about “novels” but never read one: Mamma sat down by my bed; she had chosen François le Champi, whose reddish cover and incomprehensible title gave it, for me, a distinct personality and a mysterious attraction. I had not then read any real novels. I had heard it said that George Sand was a typical novelist. This predisposed me to imagine that François le Champi contained something inexpressibly delicious. (SW, 48; I 41) The materiality of the book (its shape and color) gives a non-threatening form to the incomprehensible and the unknown. Since François le Champi is the title of a novel by a typical 215

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novelist, it won’t transform the bedroom in an unfamiliar gothic chapel. It will transform it into a library for two, that is a safe place to go through nocturnal fears, without being distracted by the daily assault of insignifcance and routine. The book does not belong to the fickering world of the news, either Parisian or Combraisian. It does not have the canonical authority of Le Grand Siècle and does not risk raising moral disputes in the family. It doesn’t have the scriptural authority reserved to books of prayers and medical prescriptions. Its lack of authority and power is what makes it enjoyable. Anxiety can be replaced by expectation and guilt by excitement, for the book allows the boy to discover a way to share the world with his mother without provoking the wrath of his father or causing pain to her. The book can be opened and closed numerous times without losing its ability to contain emotions and afects, and to restitute them afresh any time one is ready to read or to listen to a reading. While the magic lantern projected anywhere on the boy’s bedroom walls unsettling images of abandon, danger, and guilt, the book encloses another story of abandon (François is a foundling), danger (the constant fears of the very poor youth or the long-sufering wife), and guilt (François falls in love with his foster mother) in a form that is controllable and reliable. Moreover, the opening of this new era in the boy’s life, which could be called a “biblical” era if one takes the adjective in its etymological sense, happens with the approbation of the father and through the intercession of the mother. Last, François le Champi contains a scene in which a boy is introduced to books and literacy by his (foster) mother, who “owned only two books, the holy Gospel and an abridged Lives of the Saints” (Sand 1853: 11).3 The shared reading of François le Champi ends the frst Combray episode, just before the madeleine epiphany. The more I read the beginning of the Recherche, the more I wonder why Proust did not start directly with the madeleine. Instead of “For a long time I would go to bed early” (SW, 3; I 3), the frst sentence would have been something like “And so it was that, for a long time afterwards, when I lay awake at night and revived old memories of Combray […]” (SW, 50; I 43). This would have been followed by a brief evocation of the episode of the kiss, and then would have bloomed the madeleine. No reader would have been put of by ffty pages about a man who cannot sleep without a book, a child who cannot sleep without a kiss, and little chit-chat between provincial bourgeois. But then, something essential would have been taken away: the depiction of a world without literature, the apparition of a book, and the formation of a library.

Revelation At the end, in Time Regained, the narrator fnds himself alone in the library of the Prince de Guermantes. The whole passage occupies over sixty pages in Time Regained (TR, 219–82; IV, 447–96). At an early stage of writing, Proust called it L’Adoration perpétuelle, in reference to the Catholic worship of the host.4 This difcult text is one of the closest to an aesthetic theory in the whole novel, and one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-theoretical, and anti-social. Authentic art has no use for proclamations of this kind; it accomplishes its work in silence. Moreover, those who theorized in this way used hackneyed phrases which had a curious resemblance to those of the idiots whom they denounced. 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 parts of his work. (TR, 236; IV 460) The narrator condemns artists who betray their instinct and follow current literary theories by fear of not looking intelligent enough. This anti-theoretical theory is made doubly 216

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paradoxical by the fact that its author is still a fctional character, who is both Marcel Proust and not Marcel Proust, as critics have pointed out. For instance, Pierre Macherey reminds readers that “the long digression in Time Regained that is dedicated to explain the art theory Proust presents in his letters as ‘my thought’, constituting in his eyes the truth, is nothing else than a narrative development” (Macherey 2013: 188). Following his insight, I consider this “fctional” aesthetic in relation to the fctional setting in which it happens: the private library of a character named the Prince de Guermantes. Nothing could be at frst sight more opposed to the foundational library of Combray, containing four books, shared by a grandmother, a mother, and a boy, in the bedroom of a provincial bourgeois home, than the crepuscular library located in the aristocratic Parisian Guermantes mansion in which the narrator waits to enter the main rooms: But when I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting-room used as a library, next to the room where the refreshments were being served (un petit salon-bibliothèque attenant au bufet), until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance. (TR, 218; IV 446) The library is an ancillary room like the bufet, the heart of the mansion being the succession of salons in which the Prince and the Princesse (ex Mme Verdurin) receive and entertain (TR, 282; IV 496). Not only is the library used as a waiting-room, but—anathema for anyone involved in the care of books—its temporary resident is provided with food and beverage: a butler, who had long been in the service of the Prince de Guermantes having recognized me and brought to me in the library where I was waiting, so that I might not go to the bufet, a selection of petits fours and a glass of orangeade... (TR, 901; IV, 447) The trigger of the aesthetic revelation that the narrator will experiment in the library is a series of incidents which have nothing to do with books. It starts outdoors with his tripping on uneven paving-stones in the courtyard (TR, 216–7; IV, 445), then continues with the sound of a spoon against a plate probably coming from the bufet (TR, 218; IV 446) and culminates in the library with the touch of the napkin the narrator uses to wipe his mouth (TR, 219; IV, 447). The signs leading him to his vocation as a writer are related to the basic human activities of walking and eating, not to intellectual or cultural activities such as writing or reading. Amazingly, the narrator having time to kill in a library does anything but read. He could be as well in a kitchen, a stable, a church, an ofce, or on the beach. The touch of the napkin transports him to Balbec: “and this napkin now, in the library of the Prince de Guermantes’s house, unfolded for me—concealed within its smooth surfaces and its folds—the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock” (TR, 219–20; IV 447). To fnd out what book he must and will write, the narrator frst forgets the library he is in, that is, the library as a display of social and cultural capital, and lets his mind browse through his own memories, sensations, thoughts, ideas, intuitions, and other mental items available to him. During the frst pages of the scene in the library, there are no allusions or references to literature and books. Time, life, memory, and forgetfulness are the foundations of “this contemplation of the essence of things [to which] I had decided therefore that in future I must attach myself, so as somehow to immobilise it” (TR, 229; IV 454). Once he starts 217

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to think about the form his contemplation must take to be “immobilised,” a book appears, “the inner book of unknown symbols” (le livre intérieur de signes inconnus) that will need to be translated in another book to become available to other minds (TR, 233; IV 458). Books written according to this austere discipline are the only books that represent reality, life as it is lived in depth and as it is impressed or printed in us: “at every moment the artist has to listen to his instinct, and it is this that makes art the most real of all things, the most austere school of life, the true last judgment ( Jugement dernier)” (TR, 233; IV 458–9). This allusion to the biblical end of times and book of Revelation reinforces the mystical aspect of the text, and announces a second coming, which prevents the theory from closing on itself and being like a price tag left on an object. After the momentous pages on the inner book and its translation, the narrator muses on a childhood memory of sunlight, and, as he refects on the impact of the Afaire Dreyfus, the war, and cinema on contemporary literature, he develops his anti-theory theory (TR, 234–8; IV 459–61). In these pages, he seems to lose steam compared to the high intensity of the preceding ones, which may be in part because Proust died before he could revise the manuscript of Time Regained but also fts with major ideas of his aesthetics, such as the role of chance and the unconscious in the authentic life of the mind. The whole Adoration perpétuelle as we have it refects a “thought in becoming” (Macherey 2013: 32), as well as an embodied thought. All of a sudden, the narrator realizes that during the time his mind was working so productively, his body had been active too: As I entered the library where I had pursued this train of thought I had remembered what the Goncourt say about the magnifcent frst editions which it contains and I had promised myself that I would look at them while I was waiting. And all this while, without paying very much attention to what I was doing, I had been taking frst one and then another of the precious volumes from the shelves, when suddenly, at the moment when I carelessly opened one of them—it was George Sand’s François le Champi—I felt unpleasantly struck by an impression which seemed at frst to be utterly out of harmony with the thoughts that were passing through my mind, until a moment later, with an emotion so strong that tears came to my eyes, I recognised how very much in harmony with them it was. (TR, 238–9; IV 461) The confict of emotions comes from the fact that, as he is elaborating his own defnition of literature, difering from various doctrines, practices, and tastes of his days, he comes across what has been and still is for him “the essence of the novel”: François le Champi. It is only one of George Sand’s country novels, a book that, as an adult reader, he does not esteem much. And yet, this book is crucial for what he calls later his “Vocation” (TR, 259; IV 478). François le Champi connects dramatically the frst and the last libraries of RTP, and opens the possibility of another kind of library, a library in which readers contemplate more than they read. I call this library “a Proustian library.”

My Proustian Library A Proustian library comes into existence when certain books are related to afects, events, places, and people in one’s life, and tamed into items archivable in one’s memory. In such a library, a book is not just a book (like François le Champi), but a book and its ramifcations in a living memory (François le Champi in the red volume bought by Grandma that Mama 218

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read to me one night I was very upset). Proust describes these books as “enriched” with remembrances like medieval manuscripts with illuminations (TR, 244; IV 466), and carefully detaches them from the original material book (the exact copy of François le Champi the narrator received from his mother) to avoid the kind of fetishism that collectors of rare books and archivists of their own lives commit (TR, 243–4; IV 465–6). Subjectivism must not turn into idolatry or fetishism and must remain rooted in a situated sense of self. There is no Proustian library until someone claims it as “my Proustian library,” meaning by “my” what pertains to a fctional person narrating their real life. I met the library of my life in the United States: the Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked several years as a research assistant to Philip Kolb. For a while, I was a world expert in the Figaro mondanités of the years 1919–1922. I knew all about the Queen of the Hellenes and the Princesse de Léon, and many others of their ilk. I spent forty hours per week in the library, in a small ofce full of annuaries, dictionaries, microflms of Parisian newspapers, and, above all, the card catalog Philip Kolb had compiled for his lifetime œuvre: the edition of Marcel Proust’s correspondence. From Room 413 (Professor Kolb’s ofce), I was sent on missions to the stacks, tracking the books Proust cited in his letters and rarely read beyond a few pages. I hardly read any critical work on Proust, but I read the complete works of Robert de Montesquiou and other celebrities of the Belle époque. My training included oral history about Proustians, their networks, quarrels, and feuds, as well as about the people who had met Marcel Proust and Philip Kolb, such as the Prince Antoine Bibesco, the banker Lionel Hauser, and the poet Anna de Noailles’s son, Anne-Jules de Noailles. This strange way of discovering the United States of America and being initiated into Proustian studies was my lanterne magique stage, during which literature appeared to me as a mosaic of slides, cards, lore, and letters projected inside the pyramidal contraption of a microflm reader. As I was still using microflms, the quiet world of the university library was already altered by the growing presence of computers. As the machines became smaller, faster, and easier to use, readers of books became readers of screens too. Prints, manuscripts, pictures, and maps started a massive migration toward electronic memories. The stately buildings preserving and profering the civilization of the printed book looked more and more like museums. In their less stately quarters (often in basements, or in other countries), catalog cards were digitized, and librarians, ahead of many scholars, moved into another information age. Philip Kolb learned to use a personal computer when he was more than eighty years old, a few years before his death in 1992. His card catalog started to be digitized in 1993 in one of the frst digital humanities projects in North America.5 A Proustian library takes today a relevance it did not have a century ago, since it is basically a network: a network of mental associations, built in the subjective time of a living mind. It is not a fctional library like the Prince de Guermantes’ one, but an imaginary library, which brings to mind Borges’s library of Babel.

Proustian Library versus Borgesian Library If a Proustian library combines network and subjectivity, the Borgesian library is a combinatory system detached from any human subjectivity. As described in “The Library of Babel,”6 it contains all the possible books of 410 pages composed with an alphabet of 22 letters and 3 signs of punctuation. The books are arranged in hexagonal rooms all identically disposed and furnished.According to the librarian narrator of the story, it has been established that the library of Babel 219

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Is total and that its shelves register all the combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (whose number, though vast, is not infnite); that is, everything which can be expressed, in all languages. Everything is there: the minute history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalogue of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of these catalogues, a demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary of this gospel, the commentary on the commentary of this gospel, the veridical account of your death, a version of each book in all languages, the interpolation of every book in all books. (Borges 1965: 75–6) Somewhere in the library of Babel can be found Proust’s novel at all its stages of completion, its translations in all past and future languages, and all the comments and critical essays on it, including the one I am writing now as well as all the others that will be contained in The Proustian Mind. But the library is so vast that fnding any specifc book is an impossible task for a human mind and even for a current computer.7 As diferent as they can be (for one, the Borgesian library is total, perfect, and impossible, while a Proustian library is incomplete, imperfect, and possible), Borges and Proust’s imaginary libraries share common traits. Both were conceived during the frst half of the twentieth century by two writers of fction inclined toward philosophical thinking presented in paradoxical and non-systematic ways, and through frst person narrative voices. The old librarian of Babel is more concise than the narrator of the Recherche but both are close to death and want to leave after them a writing trace of their efort to understand. Their meditations on life, death, and books cannot be read as a direct exposition of Borges or Proust’s philosophy of art, although they are the fruits of a lifetime dedicated to thinking and writing. They also refect the historical moment of their elaboration, regarding the evolution of books, information, media, and technologies. “The Library of Babel” and others of Borges’ works have led some readers to view Borges as a herald of the internet, virtual reality, and artifcial intelligence – in short, of the computing revolution that fully bloomed after him – a view contested by other readers.8 Without entering the fray of this dispute, I suggest that a Proustian library is closer to the internet and social media than the Borgesian library, which is rather related to coding and artifcial intelligence. In any case, I don’t believe that either Proust or Borges “invented” or even “announced” the internet, but I do believe that their writings have afnities with aspects of our current neo-biblical era, and that they may help us to better understand our ways of reading and writing, making books, and using them.

From a Proustian Library to an Unbound Book The catalog of my Proustian library so far lists the following items: (1) The volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu I borrowed from a French municipal library that has now become a “médiathèque”; (2) various parts of the Library of the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign such as Room 413, which does not exist anymore; (3) a book titled Rossignol des neiges, published in 1935, printed in 1949, of which I still own the copy I read as a child in the 1960s; (4) the faded pink and green satin ribbon I used as a bookmark that is still hanging out from my Rossignol des neiges. I could indeed add more items, but that is enough for a start. None of these specifcs is important but it is important that each item has specifc traits that can be ramifed in various patterns changing with time.

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Contemplating my Proustian library led me to muse on the nature of books. My collection refects an era still dominated by the printed codex, as an object, a form, and an idea, but already in competition with other media and forms of written expression. I grew up and became a young adult in a world close to Proust’s world regarding books, but already massively changing regarding libraries. Proust envisioned his own book according to an abstract idea of the book, that I call the “bound book” or “bBook” for short. A bBook is a discrete unit, non-paradoxical, stable, and complete even if it is unfnished. All his life, Proust attempted to write bBooks. For instance, in a letter to Mme Straus, dated around August 16, 1909, written as the Contre Sainte-Beuve had morphed into a novel: “I really would like to fnish, to end. If all is written, a lot of things need to be reworked.”9 These two sentences contain the desire for a fnished, defnitive book (“aboutir” means both “to end” and “to achieve”), as well as the pulsion of reworking, which will goad Proust to modify massively his text until the very last proofs before printing and until his last conscious moments, when, agonizing, he was still trying to “rework” what he had already written. This pulsion corresponds to his aesthetics of writing as a deep, slow process led by chance, forgetfulness, the unconscious, and singularity, and shaped by intelligence, refection, labor, and generalization. The result is a book, but is it a bBook? The Recherche as a book continued to grow after his author’s death. Les Soixante-quinze feuillets recently published by Gallimard is less a “Graal proustien” than a recent manifestation of the vitality of the Proustian text.10 The “ feuillets” are loose leaves, but even in their bound, published form (384 pages, 165×215mm, under the white cover of the Collection Blanche), they still participate in the general state of proliferation caused in part by Proust’s writing habits and in part by the logical conundrum of self-referentiality the Recherche fosters. It is impossible to decide which one of the two following statements is true: “I am the book this book is about” or “I am not the book this book is about.”11 The combination of this undecidability between the fctional and the real books with the numerous traces of the reworking process preserved in Proust’s notebooks, typescripts, proofs, and letters opens the Recherche to potentially unlimited hermeneutic and editorial reworking. Proust is not the only writer to have left traces of a complex writing process, or to have played with a paradoxical author status and a paradoxical book status, or to have insisted in his aesthetics on the process rather than on the product, but he is probably the writer in whom these three traits converge with the maximum of efect on the book produced. While he was striving to create a bBook, he unwittingly created a uBook, that is an unbound book. I am at this very moment surrounded by books piled and shelved around my desk. If in a moment of madness, I was to cut of their binding with a sharp and heavy blade and let their loose pages sediment like dead leaves on the foor, I would not create uBooks, but a mess in my room. However, the idea of releasing bBooks from their binding can be used as a metaphorical short-cut toward the concept of uBook, in the same way that the magic lantern in Combray can be viewed as the prototype of a uBook, this time not as the result of a savage act of “disbounding, “ but from existing in a proto-biblical world. Like a bBook, a uBook is an ideal book. Its main traits are to be unstable, open to later transformations even when it can be considered fnished and ramifed in multiple ways (not just along one singular subjectivity as books in a Proustian library are). It doesn’t have an author, but an originator, or frst reworker (premier remanieur). Some uBooks have an uncertain, anonymous, plural, or collective origin. Even those with a single, defned origin looking like an “author” have moved away from authorship as Proust knew it. All uBooks are rooted in the culture, history, and imaginary of the book and the library. They open more possibilities than bBooks, but not the kind of mathematic possibility ruling the library of Babel. To become a reworker of uBooks

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instead of a writer of bBooks, one must renounce any ambition toward achieving a totality, a fnality, or a perfection. One must admit the incompleteness of one’s work at any stage and view it as opening paths to human desires and dreams, including one’s own.

Conclusion The narrator of La Recherche believes in art as he believes in nature or science, and views the work of the writer as following the model of scientifc discovery: I had arrived then at the conclusion that in fashioning a work of art we are by no means free, that we do not choose how we shall make it but that it pre-exists us and therefore we are obliged, since it is both necessary and hidden, to do what we should have to do if it were a law of nature—to discover it. (TR, 235; IV 459) It is unclear to me what aesthetic law the narrator discovers in La Recherche that could be transmitted to other aspiring writers or artists, as a law of nature can be transmitted from one mind to many. If instead of a law, I look for a practice, I fnd in what I know of Proust’s work (looking in his writings in all kinds of state, in others’ writings on his writings, and in my Proustian library) that he discovered or created a way of associating at and across diferent levels: material, personal, social, and fctional. The madeleine as a material object, a personal memory, a marker of banality, and a fction (in early drafts, it was not even a madeleine that the narrator dipped in a cup of herbal tea) stands today as an emblem of Proustianity, indicating that in everyone’s memory something trivial, like my pink and green satin ribbon, may trigger a rich network of associations. Indeed, this is not enough to lead to a novel or any other art form, even more so because Proust undermined the art forms of his days as he opened a path toward a new concept of the book that remains to be worked out in its fullness. This is a challenge, reader. Stop reading me (or Proust). Go build your Proustian library and create your uBook.

Notes 1 The translation is misleading here. Swann does not imagine a magical “transmutation” of the news happening when the reader opens the paper, but a change in editorial choices: “Du moment que nous déchirons févreusement chaque matin la bande du journal, alors on devrait changer les choses et mettre dans le journal, moi, je ne sais pas, les. . . Pensées de Pascal!” (I 26). 2 “Falling asleep radically severs the narrator’s connection to the waking world and transposes him onto a plane governed by a set of foreign rules, the ontological rules of dreaming” (Spellberg 2016: 57). 3 Translation is mine for all cited works in French other than Proust’s. 4 The phrase l’Adoration perpétuelle does not appear itself in the published versions of TR but is still used by editors in their summaries. The 1989 Pleiade edition gives “Matinée chez la princesse de Guermantes. L’Adoration perpétuelle” (IV, 1488). On the evolution of this section in Proust’s manuscripts, see Brun 2014: 598, and Nicole 2015: 75–88. 5 See the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research: https://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/kolbproust/ about. 6 First published in The Garden of Forking Paths in 1941, it was republished in Fictions in 1944. 7 Jonathan Basile has created a website emulating the Library of Babel, which contains “all possible pages of 320 characters, about 10 [power 4677] books.” See https://libraryof babel.info/About. html. Most of the texts one can retrieve in this library reads like “yhsgu, jfvqihkzvrfronxi agzfvfury, yahzikjadqbyoijtiljnrchw” rather than “Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure.”

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Contemplating a Proustian Library 8 For a bibliography and an appraisal of this position, see Brown 2009: 231–40, and Basile 2018: 87–92, accessible at https://jonathanbasile.info. 9 “Je voudrais bien fnir, aboutir. Si tout est écrit, beaucoup de choses sont à remanier. ” Corr, IX, 163. This letter was written around the time Proust wrote to Alfred Vallette, director of the Mercure de France, with a proposal for a novel titled Contre Sainte-Beuve: Souvenir d’une matinée (Corr, IX, 162–5). 10 “Graal proustien, les “soixante-quinze feuillets” de très grand format étaient devenus légendaires.” Publication announcement accessed on March 17, 2021: http://www.gallimard.fr/Catalogue/ GALLIMARD/Blanche/Les-Soixante-quinze-feuillets. 11 Reading the Recherche as the book “Marcel” will write is a naive lecture, which doesn’t mean it is stupid. Most critical readings uphold that the Recherche cannot be the book the fctional narrator will (may?) write. I prefer to follow those who, like Pierre Macherey, think this is undecidable: “But this written report, as it is recorded in the novel that we are reading, is it the novel itself? [...] It is impossible to give a defnitive answer to this question; it is upon this impossibility that the novel is built and it is from this impossibility that the novel takes the fctional dimension that forbids us from taking it for a piece of news directly extracted from reality” (Macherey 2013: 79–80).

References Basile, J. (2018) Tar for Mortar: The Library of Babel and the Dream of Totality, Berkeley: Punctum Books. Borges, J. (1965) Fictions, trans. A. Kerrigan, London: John Calder. Brown, J. A. (2009) “Retasking Borges: Technology and the Desire for a Borgesian Present.” Variaciones Borges 28: 231–40. Brun, B. (2014) “Matinée chez la princesse de Guermantes” in A. Bouillaguet and B. G. Rogers (eds) Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, Paris: Champion. Macherey, P (2013) Proust entre littérature et philosophie, Paris: Editions Amsterdam. Nicole, E. (2015) “Edition et genèse de ‘l’Adoration perpétuelle’” in Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 45, 75–88. Proust, M. (2021) Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, N. Mauriac Dyer (ed.), Paris: Gallimard. Sand, G. (1853) François le Champi, in Œuvres illustrées de George Sand, Paris: J. Hetzel, vol. 3. Spellberg M. (2016) “Proust in the Dreamtime” The Yale Review, pp. 55–79.

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14 THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY IN PROUST – A FREUDIAN ACCOUNT Julia Peters and Anna-Lisa Sander

Introduction At several pivotal moments in the narrative of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Recherche), the narrator undergoes sensory experiences that turn out to be of outstanding importance for him. The frst volume of the novel famously starts with the narrator recounting a recurring childhood bedtime-drama revolving around him and his mother. The novel then takes a great leap in time, now speaking explicitly with the voice of the adult narrator. One afternoon his mother serves him tea and madeleines, and after taking one bite, he fnds himself propelled into the past in a whirl of memories conjured up by the taste and texture of the tea-soaked madeleine. This gustatory experience is the prelude to the account of events and personages of the narrator’s childhood that makes up the frst volume of the Recherche. In the fnal volume, similar sensory experiences mark a crucial turning point in the narrative. Having idled away years of his life in the fashionable salons of Paris, and having so far failed to take any serious steps towards realizing his ambition of becoming a writer, the narrator is depressed and weary. However, entering the courtyard of the noble Guermantes family as he attends one of their receptions, he trips on an uneven fagstone, thereby fnding himself transported back in memory to a visit of St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, where he stood on a similarly uneven piece of foor; shortly after, the sound of clattering cutlery takes him back to a railway country trip in his youth, where the sound of the cutlery is mirrored in a railway construction worker’s clanging hammer; the sensation of a starched napkin on his lips carries him all the way back to the seaside resort Balbec, where he used to spend his summers and dry himself with an equally stif towel; and the sudden noise of a water pipe reminds him of the cry of the pleasure boats in Balbec. Again, these sensory experiences are signifcant for the structure of the novel as a whole. For it is in light of these sensations and the insights on memory and literature unlocked by them that the narrator is fnally able to make the life changing commitment to become a writer.1 These sensory experiences constitute episodes of what is commonly called involuntary memory (IM). While the sensory experiences that trigger the narrator’s episodes of IM in the Recherche are manifold and involve diferent sense modalities, the episodes as described by the narrator all have certain general features in common. One striking characteristic is that, in contrast to ordinary sensory experiences, they point beyond themselves towards an 224

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-19

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underlying meaning which presents itself with an urgent appeal to be deciphered. Another noteworthy feature is that they grant the narrator an exquisite, unique kind of pleasure – one that is, despite being a sensory pleasure, categorically distinct from the pleasures of good drink, food or smell. This suggests that the phenomenon of IM plays an important role in the context of the aesthetic theory contained in the Recherche, specifcally of the theory of beauty and its experience. There is textual evidence to support this hypothesis: the Proustian narrator speaks in relation to the phenomenon of IM of “the beauty of memory” (IV 455, our translation; TR, 230; see also TR, 246; IV 468), indicating that the experience of this kind of memory as such, regardless of its content, is beautiful. Commentators have picked up on this association; specifcally, Richard Moran has recently ascribed a broadly Kantian conception of beauty to Proust.2 However, it should be noted that episodes of IM as described by the Proustian narrator also exhibit features that are diametrically opposed to the characteristics of the experience of beauty as traditionally conceived. Consider the fact that episodes of IM are triggered by olfactory, gustatory or tactile sensations. Against the background of traditional conceptions of beauty, this is unheard-of: the senses of smell, touch and taste are typically considered to be too lowly and in any case unft to aford experiences of beauty. 3 Furthermore, it is striking that the narrator tends to describe his episodes of IM as experiences of being overwhelmed, submerged, even wrestled down in an almost violent way by the sudden revelation of meaning.4 This stands in stark contrast to the notion that the experience of beauty essentially involves active cognitive engagement with the beautiful object by its perceiver, and even more strongly, some form of disinterested detachment from the object. In this chapter, we suggest that instead of merely revealing an inconsistency in the narrator’s thought, these conficting fndings point to a substantial view about the nature of beauty and its experience that is expressed in the Proustian text.5 This view is in important respects opposed to the Kantian conception. In arguing for this claim, we will avail ourselves of a psychoanalytic methodology that we fnd in Freud, specifcally in his Interpretation of Dreams. The underlying hypothesis is not that episodes of IM in the Recherche are to be considered literally as dream episodes. Rather, we treat the episodes of IM as dream-like in the sense that they express unconscious content through the methods of displacement and condensation. In this vein, we seek to show that the narrator’s notion of an aesthetic experience that keeps itself aloof from sensuous desire and its satisfaction in a broadly Kantian sense is revealed by the Proustian text to be partly delusional – in efect, it is the manifestation of an attempt to disavow unconscious desires and their traumatic connotations. However, there is also a more positive lesson regarding beauty and memory emerging from this confictual structure. In undergoing IM, the narrator becomes self-aware of his unconscious desires in a condensed, codifed form: for instance, the taste and texture of the madeleine in his mouth become a stand-in for his desire to merge with the warm, maternal space embodied by his aunt Léonie. Thus, the imagery of IM is a way of both expressing and processing unconscious desires, much like dream content does according to Freud. This brings into view the idea of a stance towards one’s sensuous desires that neither categorically staves them of, nor indulges them in a self-oblivious way but engages them in a process that enables selfrefection. This idea, we propose, lies at the core of the theory of beauty and its experience that is articulated in the Recherche. We will proceed as follows. In order to develop our interpretation, we frst need to lay out some basic concepts of Freud’s method in his Interpretation of Dreams (2). In part (3), we discuss the Proustian narrator’s account of episodes of IM vis-à-vis the Kantian conception of beauty and its experience. We then ofer a Freudian analysis of the narrator’s account of 225

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IM (4). We close with a sketch of the distinctive, non-Kantian theory of beauty and its experience that our psychoanalytic approach to the Recherche brings into view (5).

Freud and the Interpretation of Dreams In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud’s frst major psychoanalytic work, he lays out what he believes to be “the royal road to the unconscious of the mind” (Freud 1900: 604). The fundamental idea behind Freudian psychoanalysis is that in order to understand and change our conscious lives, we need to analyze and study the unconscious. As per defnition, the unconscious can never be accessed directly. Accordingly, there are a number of techniques which are supposed to reveal just enough of it so that it becomes possible to tease out its decisive content, the interpretation of dreams being one such technique.6 Freud’s basic idea and hypothesis was “that dreams are capable of being interpreted” (Freud 1900: 96). Speaking to an ancient, folkloric belief, dreams are then by no means nonsensical but rather express fundamental, hidden truth about our state of mind. They do so in devising a unique kind of dream language that comes to pass since the conscious mind is for the most part non-active in dreaming. Accordingly, not only the rules of coherent reality are suspended, the internalized rules of morality are also considerably weakened. Thereby, wishes that are repudiated by the waking mind can now rise to the surface, since, as Freud says, “a dream is the fulfllment of a wish” (Freud 1900: 122). Still, in order to “escape the censorship imposed by resistance” (Freud 1900: 308), the dream must employ a number of methods to disguise and distort the wish-fulfllment which Freud calls “dream-work.” Dream-work includes the use of symbolism as well as verbal thoughts and speech. Its chief ingredient, however, is imagery, thereby limiting the possibilities of expression. What the dream-work ultimately brings about is the manifest dream or dream-content in which its latent meaning or dream-thoughts are articulated in coded form. To fnd out about the dream-thoughts, the report of the dream alone is not sufcient. Rather, the dreamer is asked to refect on the elements of the dream and voice all spontaneous thoughts and ideas that come to mind. In this vein, dream-analysis makes use of a major technique of psychoanalysis, free association. By contextualizing the dream with free association and these, in turn, with the dreamer’s current living circumstances, Freud holds, it is possible to come up with dream interpretations which then allow for a better understanding of the dreamer’s state of mind. Apart from symbolism, speech and the use of imagery, the major methods of dream-work are condensation and displacement. Condensation refers to the way that dream-elements in the manifest dream speak to the latent dream-thought in a number of ways and serve as “nodal points”: “each of the elements of the dream’s content turns out to have been ‘overdetermined’— to have been represented in the dream-thoughts many times over” (Freud 1900: 283). Freud demonstrates condensation by analyzing his own dream of a botanical monograph by employing free association. “‘Botanical’ was related to the fgure of Professor Gärtner [Gardener], the blooming looks of his wife, to my patient Flora and to the lady [Frau L.] of whom I had told the story of the forgotten fowers” (Freud 1900: 282). Having discovered all these associations, the next step would be to explore how all these diferent points of reference feature into the dream-thought. Displacement describes the way the dream distorts its central relation to the dream-thoughts by emphasizing elements which carry low psychical value, thereby displacing the ones with high psychical value: “a transference and displacement of psychical intensities occurs in the process of dream-formation” (Freud 1900: 307-8). In Freud’s dream of the botanical monograph, the dream-thoughts turn out to 226

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be about “conficts arising between colleagues” (Freud 1900: 305), which is only accessible by retracing all the steps through which this content has been displaced into the botanical monograph. According to Freud, “[d]ream-displacement and dream-condensation are the two governing factors to whose activity we may in essence ascribe the form assumed by dreams” (Freud 1900: 308). We will therefore focus on these two major methods of dream-work in our analysis of a central episode of IM as described by the Proustian narrator. The IM here takes the place of the manifest dream, while the sequence immediately following the IM is akin to the free association the patient produces in analysis. The goodnight-drama, then, is something like the general confict with which the patient begins analysis.7 On occasion, we will refer to other basic tenets of Freud, primarily the Oedipus complex, in such a way that no further elaboration is needed. Our analysis complements extant Freudian readings of Proust by focusing specifcally on the aspect that the narrator presents his experiences of IM as aesthetic experiences. In particular, our approach allows us to synthesize two diferent strands in the literature on Proust’s Recherche. While there are authors like Lennon and Moran who read the Recherche’s narrator as channeling Proust’s own theoretical views on beauty and aesthetic experience (see Moran 2012, Lennon 2007), there are other authors like Doubrovsky, Bowie, Splitter and Kristeva who additionally use Freudian or other psychoanalytic tools by way of complement or contrast to enhance their reading.8 We draw on the insights of the former, while employing a method that is similar to the latter. As we seek to demonstrate below, psychoanalytic tools of interpretation can be fruitfully employed in order to extricate the aesthetic theory contained in the Recherche.

Involuntary Memory and Kant’s Aesthetic Teory In a recent paper, Richard Moran juxtaposes Kant’s theory of beauty and its experience with the narrator’s aesthetic refections in Proust’s Recherche. Moran’s discussion ofers a helpful starting point for us to throw into relief the aesthetic aspects of the narrator’s account of IM.9 The frst crucial aspect of the experience of beauty that Moran fnds in both Kant and Proust is that the pleasure we take in beauty is disinterested: it neither results from the satisfaction of a sensuous desire, nor from the pursuit and realization of a (moral) interest. Moran helpfully points out that these diferent aspects of aesthetic disinterestedness are woven together in one central theme, the theme of aesthetic autonomy or freedom: “The pleasure in the beautiful is autonomous in the sense of answering only to itself and its own conditions, and not to those of any antecedent desire or interest we may have” (Moran 2012: 311). Note that this aesthetic autonomy holds for both the subject and the object of aesthetic experience. Enjoying aesthetic experience, the subject is not in “bondage” (Moran 2012: 311) to their desires. The aesthetic object, on the other hand, is preserved and respected in the aesthetic experience, insofar as it is neither consumed nor manipulated or acted on by the subject but left to appear the way it is.10 It is not to be interfered with through active intervention but left to its own devices. Aesthetic autonomy understood in this way is importantly diferent from practical autonomy according to Kant which essentially involves the free choice of an end based on a practical interest.11 These features of aesthetic experience are clearly refected in the narrator’s account of IM. To begin with, he goes out of his way to emphasize that no satisfaction of a sensuous desire can be evoked in order to explain the pleasure arising from IM. This is particularly striking in the case of the madeleine episode. Prior to putting the madeleine into his mouth, 227

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the narrator feels no desire to consume it: he only reluctantly accepts tea and madeleine from his mother, after having frst rejected them (SW, 52; I 44); he carries the spoon to his lips only “mechanically, dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing future” (SW, 52; I 44); later on, he notes that the pleasure he takes in the madeleine is “infnitely transcended” and is not “of the same nature” (SW, 52; I 44) as the ordinary pleasure one takes in eating something tasty.12 The aesthetic autonomy of the object in the narrator’s episodes of IM becomes apparent through the contrast he draws between voluntary memory and IM. The organ of voluntary memory is the intelligence, the narrator states, which is subject to the will (TR, 224; IV 451). The intelligence carves up the past into fragments, “made arid by the intellect” (TR, 224; IV 451), “whose reality it still further reduces by preserving of them only what is suitable for the narrowly human, utilitarian purpose for which it intends them” (TR, 224; IV 451). By contrast, the imagery surrounding the narrator’s episodes of IM emphasizes how in IM the impression and the memories it evokes are left to appear and unfold as they are, of their own accord. Thus, he compares the way episodes of IM appear before his mind to the unfolding of Japanese paper fgures when steeped into water (SW, 55–6; I 47), to the sudden emergence of a “docile genie” (TR, 219; IV 447) in the Arabian Nights; the “essential character” of these impressions, he writes, “was that I was not free to choose them, that such as they were they given to me” (TR, 232; IV 457). A second central aspect of aesthetic experience is that the beautiful object is experienced as being fraught with meaning (see Moran 2012: 300). That is to say, not only is it experienced as a sign or expression that points beyond itself towards its underlying meaning; rather, it is overloaded with meaning to such an extent that uncovering what it conveys is a matter of an ongoing, potentially infnite process. According to Kant, this process is carried out as a free play of two cognitive faculties: understanding and imagination (see KU, 216–9). The object stimulates the subject to continuously try out new conceptual interpretations, which, in turn, inspires his imagination to seek out novel units of meaning. This idea also connects with the notion of aesthetic autonomy: the aesthetic subject is autonomous not merely in the sense that they are not driven by desire or practical interest but also in the stronger sense that they freely engage in cognitive activity. Again, this aspect is obvious in the narrator’s account of his episodes of IM. When he takes his frst mouthful of madeleine and tea in the frst volume, he immediately fnds himself in the powerful grip of the riddle posed by this sensory experience; he fnds himself called upon to “discover the truth” (SW, 53; I 45) behind it. Similarly, when undergoing the sequence of IMs in the fnal volume, he feels that “another inquiry demanded my attention more imperiously, the inquiry [...] into the cause of this felicity which I had just experienced, into the nature of the certainty with which it imposed itself ” (TR, 222; IV 449); he speaks of something hiding “beneath the signs [...] which I must try to discover” (TR, 232; IV 457), and of the “inner book of unknown symbols” that he has to “decipher” (TR, 233; IV 457). In the fnal volume of the Recherche, the process of revealing the meaning of IM is likened to the process of writing a book. Thus, the narrator conceives of his role in the experience of IM as that of an aesthetic subject who is active in the creation of beauty – as an aesthetic agent, in short. Furthermore, note that the narrator’s phrases also draw attention to the fact that deciphering the plenitude of meaning buried in these sensory experiences is a project of great urgency. These experiences issue a summons, a demand, which the person who undergoes them cannot remain indiferent towards. This aspect can be understood as an echo of the Kantian notion that the experience of beauty is accompanied by a sense of necessity, in fact of obligation: one must not remain indiferent towards beauty but ought to attend to it (see 228

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KU, 236–7). In conclusion, there is ample evidence that the Proustian narrator conceives of his episodes of IM as experiences of beauty in a broadly Kantian sense. At the same time, there is a striking ambivalence at work in the way the narrator presents these episodes. To begin with, consider the characteristic of disinterestedness. While the narrator emphasizes that the pleasure he gets from eating the madeleine is diferent in kind from sensuous pleasure, his way of describing his experience also reveals another side of this situation altogether. When he speaks of how a “delicious pleasure [...] invaded” (SW, 52; I 44)13 him, “having had the efect, which love has, of flling me with a precious essence” (SW, 52; I 44), sensual overtones are very much apparent. The term “delicious [délicieux]” refers to the ingestion of excellent food and is a particularly sensual term in the way that, say, “exquisite” or “extraordinary” is not. The talk of something invading him and flling him – with a precious essence no less – even has sexual overtones. Taken from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, it is particularly telling that this oral pleasure of the madeleine he describes so vividly involves the fantasy of merging with the object of desire. While the narrator frst states that he is flled with a precious essence, he then clarifes “or rather this essence was not in me, it was me” (SW, 52; I 44). The enjoyment of the object gives way to a merging with the object, of becoming the object. By merging with the object, the pains of separation and limitedness, which threaten the narcissistic tendencies of the self (Freud 1914b), are surpassed and a god-like perfection is acquired. In the narrator’s words: “I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal” (SW, 52; I 44). Furthermore, there is also another ambivalence at work here. While the tremendous pleasure that the madeleine brings is apparent, there is also a subtext of violence at play. “A delicious pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin” (SW, 52; I 44). As much as the narrator revels in the unexpected pleasure, it is something that does not come about freely out of his own volition. He is invaded, isolated and clueless. It might be an “all-powerful joy” (SW, 52; I 44), but it leaves him powerless. Accordingly, the crucial dimension of autonomy in the disinterest of aesthetic experience is undermined. Considering the second central aspect of aesthetic experience mentioned above, the aesthetic object carrying an abundance of meaning, we must keep in mind that within the Kantian account, this meaning can only be brought to light through ongoing cognitive activity on the side of the subject. As we saw, this is refected in the Proustian narrator’s comparisons between experiencing IM and the creative activity of writing. By contrast, the narrator’s description of his episodes of IM betrays his infatuation with the idea that the meaning they contain should be revealed through a process in which he remains entirely passive. IM is to wash over him and food him with meaning, thus freeing him of the task of having to interpret, analyze, decipher and judge his past self. One can see how this infatuation with passive revelation is closely related to the subtext of violence mentioned above, the desire of being submerged and invaded by one’s memory. Consider in this context the telling metaphor that the past sensation is meshed with the current one “like a wrestler” (TR, 227; IV 453), trying to subdue the former. Likewise, he speaks of how the past bursts into the present, making the objects of the latter topple (TR, 227; IV 453), of how the past moment “force[s] open” (TR, 227; IV 453) the doors of his present location. He also states that the quality of the impressions delivered to him through IM is comparable only to the quality of dreaming and sleeping (TR, 227; IV 454, TR, 229; IV 455). These ambivalences, which remain unacknowledged by the narrator himself, can be taken as a hint that the latter image of sleeping and dreaming is to be taken seriously. That is to say, just like a dream brings to the surface of the dreamer’s consciousness his 229

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dream-thoughts in displaced form, the narrator’s episodes of IM bring to his mind events and desires from his past that he partly distorts by fashioning IM as an experience of beauty in the Kantian sense, especially by emphasizing the aspects of freedom from sensuous desire and exercise of cognitive agency. This is the interpretive hypothesis we want to pursue in the following section.

Aestheticizing as Defense and Wish-Fulfllment We want to suggest that by describing his episodes of IM as aesthetic experiences in a Kantian sense, the narrator conceals two central aspects of himself: on the one hand his active, sensuous, even unruly desire for the object; on the other hand, closely linked, his desire for passivity. Both aspects revolve around an oedipal confict. While commentators such as Simon Kemp have raised concerns about the oedipal theme of the goodnight drama (see Kemp 2014), we will argue that this is based on an over-simplifed understanding of said theme. To begin with, by describing himself as disinterested and thus free from sensuous desires in undergoing episodes of IM, the narrator disavows desires that resurface in his IM and are vividly manifest in the course of the bedtime-drama recounted in the beginning of the Recherche. Here we encounter a typical oedipal setting, that the narrator presents in condensed form by elaborating on a particular sequence of events, the ritual of receiving a goodnight kiss from his mother: “when I went upstairs for the night [...] Mamma would come in and kiss me after I was in bed” (SW, 14; I 13). The amount of libidinal energy the narrator bestows on the ritual (see SW, 26–7; I 23) is revealed, when this “kiss of peace” (SW, 15; I 13) is denied or only granted feetingly at the dinner table. The narrator is devastated beyond consolation and at all costs seeks to receive the kiss after all.14 That this is in fact an oedipal setting is confrmed both by the way the narrator’s desire for his mother evokes feelings of pleasure as well as guilt, and by his parents’ reaction. The father clearly disapproves of the ritual, while the mother responds to the father’s unease by only reluctantly fulflling the son’s wishes (Freud 1900: 1923). She went to kiss him only as a “concession [...] to [his] wretchedness and agitation” (SW, 15; I 13) since the ritual “annoyed [his] father, who thought such rituals absurd” (SW, 15; I 13). What carries this typical oedipal confict into the narrator’s adult life is its troublesome resolution. When one particular night he cannot stand to be away from his mother and makes the desperate move to intercept her on her way to her bedroom, the father is with her but fails to react in a way that is ft to his oedipal role. Instead of insisting the mother must be left to the father, he shockingly does the opposite and convinces his reluctant wife to not only indulge their son with a kiss but spend the night at his bedside (SW, 41–2; I 35). This, of course, is not a miraculous wish-fulfllment but a complete failure of the oedipal complex. Consequently, the narrator is not thrilled so much as horrifed, which he soberly notes: “I ought to have been happy; I was not” (SW, 44; I 38). His wish was not there to be fulflled but to be rejected. Incest looming over him is surely a terrifying prospect. Kemp takes the way the familial confict turns out to signify that there never was an oedipal confict, since the father does not adhere to his role of standing between mother and son (see Kemp 2014: 88). However, this reading is too selective and fails to take into account how the oedipal dynamics unfolds as a whole. First, the father, as we demonstrated, is in fact very much bothered by the son’s desire for the mother and second, just because the oedipal complex is not resolved properly, it does not therefore disappear. What is more, by granting him his wish, both mother and father cease to try and educate him but treat him as if he was not strong enough to learn, a lost cause. Later on, when 230

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mother and son are on their own and he is crying bitterly, he is not scolded for this either. Thus, he concludes, “[his] unhappiness was regarded no longer as a punishable ofence but as an involuntary ailment that had just been ofcially recognised, a nervous condition for which [he] was in no way responsible” (SW, 44; I 37). In efect, this means that he was no longer considered as an agent in his own right but ill, passive, powerless, losing all hope of becoming a man his mother would fnd desirable. Her concession to stay with him “was a frst abdication on her part from the ideal she had formed for [him], and that for the frst time she who was so brave had to confess herself beaten” (SW, 44; I 38). In the narrator’s mind, his actively desiring self had failed which leads him to a reversal, namely to embrace passivity instead. Let us look at how this reversal comes about. To begin with, the narrator presents himself as active and forceful in terms of his desire to be kissed goodnight by his mother, and how to fulfll that desire. “I would hurry down to the dining room [...] and I would fall into the arms of my mother” (SW, 11–2; I 10). Furthermore, when he is prevented from receiving the kiss since guests occupy the mother’s attention and the father also intervenes, despite spiraling into despair, he is not prepared to passively give in to his fate. Instead, he comes up with the elaborate plan of sending a letter to his mother (SW, 33–4; I 28–9). Even though his plan does not work out and his mother sends the note back unopened, there can be no doubt about the activity and ingenuity the narrator demonstrates here. Let us also note that there is a positive passive dimension to his active desire. The narrator wants to be kissed, wants to be taken to bed, making him the passive object of his mother’s afections. What is crucial here is that the passivity to his desire does not impede its active aspect. Accordingly, the narrator’s childish desire embodies a balance of passivity and activity. When his desire nevertheless fails and he is humiliated by the father granting his oedipal wish for the mother, he is neither satisfed nor empowered but on the contrary compelled to repudiate and devalue his own desire and henceforth establish a passive attitude in life. Against this background, we can now see how another objection of Kemp to Freudian readings of Proust can be countered. According to Kemp, the goodnight drama would have to be repressed rather than remembered as it qualifes as a traumatic childhood event (see Kemp 2014: 87, 88). By contrast, we ofer a more nuanced reading: the goodnight-drama is in fact not only a trauma but also a wish-fulfllment. This is the reason why it takes a central place in the narrator’s memory. It is obvious how it is traumatic: the narrator’s attempt to realize his desires dramatically fails. What can be easily missed is how the memory includes a wish-fulfllment. Despite the ultimate failure of desire, in most of the goodnight drama the narrator’s desire is still alive and thriving. Thus, by remembering the goodnight drama, the narrator is in touch with himself when he was still hopeful, when depression did not exacerbate the fulfllment of essential desires of his: In his adult life, he whole-heartedly wants to be a writer but is oftentimes unable to actually write. Here we are confronted with the way his passive attitude turns out to keep the narrator from bearing a fulflled life. Let us explore in more detail wherein lies the ambivalent attraction of this passive attitude for the narrator. This will lead us to widen the scope beyond the goodnight-drama by taking into account two crucially related sets of experiences, namely the madeleine-episode and memories of his aunt Léonie who frst ofered him a tea-soaked madeleine in his childhood (SW, 54–5; I 46) to which his IM takes him back. Condensation and displacement will turn out to be essential to understand this dynamic. To begin with, the allure of passivity is easily observable in the madeleine-episode. The narrator fnds himself overwhelmed by “delicious pleasure,” such that “the vicissitudes of life had become indiferent” to him, “its disasters 231

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innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the efect, which love has, of flling me with a precious essence” (SW, 52; I 44). Being overwhelmed is in this instance clearly a joyous experience. This kind of joy is however short-lived. The intense pleasure quickly fades, when the narrator attempts and fails to willfully repeat the experience and to make sense of it. Even without focusing on the dissolution of pleasure into a kind of existential dread, careful consideration of the exact words the narrator uses to describe his intense pleasure points to the frightening aspects of being overwhelmed. Pleasure “had invaded [his] senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin” (SW, 52; I 44). Invasion, isolation, having no understanding of the sensation’s origin all render the narrator powerless. Let us examine the narrator’s relationship to aunt Léonie to further confrm our hypothesis that passivity holds both danger and relief for the narrator and to see how condensation determines the way the narrator relates to her in his memories of visiting her in her bedroom in Combray. Aunt Léonie embodies passivity to perfection. She is ill and permanently confned to bed but more than that, she rather embraces her stationary existence, she “had gradually declined to leave” (SW, 58; I 48). The disturbing aspects of a passive way of life are aptly described by the narrator. “[She] lay perpetually in a vague state of grief, physical debility, illness, obsession and piety” (SW, 58; I 48). And yet these visits also hold a strange kind of allure to the narrator. Her room receives and encloses him like a cocoon or nest built from the smells, tastes and textures that make up aunt Léonie’s confned life. There are “linen smells, morning smells, pious smells” (SW, 59; I 49), smells that form “an exquisite, limpid jelly” (SW, 58; I 49); the air is “saturated with the fne bouquet of a silence so nourishing, so succulent, that I never went into them without a sort of greedy anticipation” (SW, 59; I 49). He eats himself a path through the “dough,” the “invisible though not impalpable country pie” (SW, 59; I 49) that makes up the air of aunt Léonie’s room. These images of jelly, dough and bread, of being wrapped in a giant country pie, evoke a sense of being embraced and comforted but also of being trapped. Thus, the atmosphere in aunt Léonie’s room is itself a highly condensed state, comprising within itself the enticing but also sufocating image of motherhood as complete paralysis. These considerations shed further light on the narrator’s relationship to his mother and aunt. While ultimately the mother is the central object of desire, the desire is displaced from mother to aunt, as Julia Kristeva explains: “actual experience (the mother’s madeleine) is imbued with a disabling intensity and gives rise to states of emptiness and confusion which would be ungovernable, if the narrator were not able to stabilize his pleasure through a displacement” (Kristeva 1993: 47). The narrator’s inability to control and make sense of his intense pleasure elicits dread: “I do not know yet what it is, but I can feel it mounting slowly; I can measure the resistance, I can hear the echo of great spaces traversed” (SW, 54; I 45). Thus, the memory of aunt Léonie coming up immediately after the madeleine-episode ofers both intense enjoyment of passivity and the relief of being able to place the desire somewhere away from the mother. We conclude that the narrator’s account of the madeleine-episode in conjunction with memories of aunt Léonie and the bedtime drama works as instantiations of wish-fulfllment as well as defense. The situation is complex: on the one hand, the madeleine-episode ofers a wish-fulfllment in the sense that here the narrator can experience exquisite pleasure and joy while being himself in a passive position. This libidinal investment in passivity, we argued, is a defense against repeating and reliving the oedipal failure of his childhood as well as a substitute way to experience pleasure. On the other hand, the investment in passivity is problematic: being passive often means being powerless without agency. Thus, the goodnight 232

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drama appears as a wish-fulfllment since notwithstanding its painful resolution, it contains a version of the narrator’s self whose active and lively desire was still intact.

Conclusion: Te Beauty of Involuntary Memory Dreams, according to Freud, are ambivalent creatures. They bring to light and fulfll a wish of the dreamer, but they do so only in oblique form – they reveal and conceal at the same time. This is made possible through the often surprisingly creative unconscious process of dream-work, whose main mechanisms consist in displacement and condensation. The thesis we put forward in the preceding discussion is that the narrator in Proust’s Recherche, in undergoing episodes of IM and presenting them as instances of aesthetic experience, is equally creative in expressing wishes and desires arising from the deep layers of his psyche that were formed in his childhood. These wishes and desires demand the narrator’s attention – indiference towards them is not an option. At the same time, he cannot address them head on, in a straightforward way since their satisfaction would confict with the psychical repression of disavowed wishes. The phenomenon of IM comes to his rescue, by ofering him not only a sensory experience in which the satisfaction of his secret desires is contained in a highly condensed and displaced form but also an opportunity to disguise this experience by fashioning himself as a disinterested aesthetic agent. Seen from this point of view, the aspects of Kantian disinterestedness and aesthetic agency which the narrator emphasizes in his account of IM are merely parts of a psychical defense, and in this sense delusional. However, our psychoanalytic approach also points us towards a more positive lesson regarding the aesthetic qualities of involuntary memory and the aesthetic theory contained in the Recherche more generally. What emerges here is a conception of the experience of beauty revolving around the phenomenon of IM that is markedly diferent from the Kantian one invoked above. According to the present conception, the most paradigmatic instances of the experience of beauty engage precisely those senses that are most closely associated with the satisfaction of sensuous desire, and that are categorically excluded from the sphere of beauty according to Kant: touch, smell, taste. Furthermore, in contrast to the Kantian emphasis on cognitive agency, the experience of IM involves a high degree of involuntariness. It appears that the subject must relinquish control altogether and hand himself over to the sensuous experience in order to resurface on the other side with a heightened self-understanding. Nevertheless, cognitive agency still plays an important role here as well since on this account the immediate experience of certain sensuous qualities is a constitutive part of a process of what Freud calls “Durcharbeiten,” working through (see Freud 1914a), one’s traumatic past, and thus of appropriating and coming to terms with it.15 One can therefore surmise that on the present account, the intense pleasure that arises from the experience of IM, rather than being disinterested in a Kantian sense, is partly related to the fact that episodes of IM make accessible and obliquely satisfy desires that would otherwise remain shielded from consciousness. At the same time, this pleasure is not simply reducible to the pleasure of satisfying a sensuous desire since it also afords a cognitive satisfaction insofar as it inspires a process of self-recognition. To sum up, we can say that in IM sensuous pleasure is experienced in a transformed and cognitively enriched way. According to the view that emerges here, then, the experience of beauty is in essence the experience of being reconciled, in a sensory experience, with one’s unconscious sensuous desires – i.e., being reconciled with a part of one’s sensuous nature that one would otherwise have to remain alienated from.16 233

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Notes 1 For a discussion of the literary theory laid out by the narrator in light of the signifcant sensory experiences reported in the fnal volume of the Recherche, and of how they relate to the novel as a whole, see Peters 2010. 2 See Moran 2012. We will consider Moran’s paper in detail below. 3 In Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, one can fnd a succinct statement of this view: Smell, taste and touch are concerned with the material aspect as such and its immediately sensuous qualities. (...) For this reason, these senses cannot be concerned with the objects of art [which, for Hegel, are the only objects that can grant proper aesthetic experiences] which are supposed to maintain themselves in actual self-sufciency and do not admit of a merely sensuous relation. (VÄI, 61, our translation) 4 As Randolph Splitter notes, this in fact puts the narrator’s experience of IM in the vicinity of what the Romantics would have called the sublime: see Splitter 1981: 95–6. 5 We intend to remain neutral on whether the theory of beauty and its experience we extract from the Recherche is Proust’s own, and was explicitly articulated by him in the Recherche, or whether it needs to be excavated through a creative process that makes use of psychoanalytic methodology. 6 While psychoanalytic discourses difer widely on the issue of how central dream-interpretation is, the minimal consensus is to accept dream-interpretation as one technique among others for accessing the unconscious. Some analysts hold the stronger view that the interpretation of dreams is indispensable to this purpose, while also highlighting the variety of ways analysts have moved beyond the Freudian beginnings in their understanding of dreams (see Fischmann et al. 2012). 7 We propose that the rest of the novel, insofar as it contains episodes of IM, is susceptible to analysis in the same way such that the whole novel should not be considered as a dream, but rather as a spelled-out analysis in reference to dream episodes. 8 See Doubrovsky 1975, Splitter 1981, Bowie 1987, and Kristeva 1993. For an account of Proust’s relation to Freud, see Surprenant 2013 and Miller 1956: 143–58. 9 It should be noted that Moran does not explicitly draw on the phenomenon of IM in discussing Proust’s conception of beauty. There are two reasons why we believe that transferring his analysis to the narrator’s episodes of IM is nevertheless justifed. First, the narrator makes it clear that episodes of IM are for him not just an example of the experience of beauty, but the most paradigmatic one (see TR, 230–2; IV 455–6, TR, 246; IV 468). Second, the examples of beauty in Proust used by Moran, the narrator’s encounter with the hawthorns and a scene in which he is intrigued by a row of trees outside his railway coach: are essentially related to the phenomenon of IM, insofar as they hold a promise of joy which is only fulflled once the scenes are revisited in IM (see TR, 218–9; IV 446–7). 10 See KU, 204–11; Hegel agrees with Kant in this regard, emphasizing even more strongly the autonomy of the aesthetic object: see VÄI, 58. 11 This is one reason why post-Kantian authors such as Schiller, who were worried about potential inconsistencies in Kant’s conception of free choice, held that a more viable notion of freedom is to be found in Kant’s aesthetic theory. 12 To be sure, the narrator’s IM might just as well have been triggered if he had eaten the madeleine with and from a hearty appetite. However, the fact that the narrator feels no sensuous desire when eating the pastry helps to highlight the idiosyncratic nature of the pleasure arising from IM. 13 In contrast to Moncrief and Kilmartin, we translate the French term “délicieux” as “delicious” instead of “exquisite.” 14 Compare in this context also Splitter’s discussion of the mother’s kiss as a volatile transitional object in Winnicott’s sense: see Splitter 1981: 95–6. 15 That this is only a frst step in a process of self-recognition becomes apparent in the fact that these experiences merely lay the ground for the narrator to write the novel which is devoted to unfolding the meaning buried within these episodes. For a similar assessment regarding the relation between the narrator’s episodes of IM and the process of composing his novel: see Splitter 1981: 92. 16 We would like to thank Anna Elsner and Tom Stern for their perceptive criticisms and constructive comments on a previous draft of the paper. The paper has benefted greatly from revisions made in light of their comments.

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Bibliography Bowie, M. (1987) Proust, Freud and Lacan: Theory as Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Doubrovsky, S. (1975) “The Place of the madeleine: Writing and Phantasy in Proust,” translated by Carol Bové, in boundary 2, 4 (1), 107–34. Fischmann, T., Leuzinger-Bohleber, M., Kächele, H. (2012) “Traumforschung in der Psychoanalyse: Klinische Studien, Traumserien, extraklinische Forschung im Labor,” in Psyche 66 (9/10), 833–61. Freud, S. (1900) The Interpretation of Dreams, in Strachey, James (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IV+V (1900, 1900–1901), The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part, Second Part). London: Hogarth Press, 1–627. ———. (1914a) “Remembering, Repeating and Working Through,” in Strachey, James (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XII (1911–1913), The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 145–56. ———. (1914b) “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Strachey, James (Ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX (1923–1925), The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 67–102. ———. (1923) “The Ego and the Id”, in Strachey, James (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX (1923–1925), The Ego and the Id and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press, 1–66. Hegel, G.W.F. (1986) Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik I. Theorie-Werkausgabe, Volume 13 (ed. by Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp. [VÄI] Kant, I. (1908) Kritik der Urteilskraft. Königlich Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin: Reimer. [KU] Kemp, S. (2014) “Postpsychoanalytic Proust,” in Modern Language Quarterly, 75 (1), 77–101. Kristeva, J. (1993) Proust and the Sense of Time. Translated and with an Introduction by Stephen Bann. New York: Columbia University Press. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. New York: Oxford University Press. Lennon, T. M. (2007) “Proust and the Phenomenology of Memory,” in Philosophy and Literature 31, 52–66. Miller, M. (1956) Nostalgia: A Psychoanalytic Study of Marcel Proust. Boston: Houghton Mifin. Moran, R. (2012) “Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty,” in Critical Inquiry 38 (2), 298–329. Peters, J. (2010) “Proust’s Recherche and Hegelian Teleology,” in Inquiry: an Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 53 (2), 146–61. Splitter, R. (1981) Proust’s Recherche. A Psychoanalytic Interpretation. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Surprenant, C. (2013) “Freud and Psychoanalysis,” in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. by Adam Watt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 107–14.

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15 THE ARTS Jennifer Rushworth

What counts as an art? In the ancient world, almost any learnt subject was an art, in the sense of an acquired and perfected skill (see Mason 2016: 1–2). From the early Middle Ages, formal education was divided across the seven liberal arts, which began with the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and progressed to the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy).1 Of these, nowadays we are likely to accept only music and perhaps some forms of rhetoric as belonging to what we would understand as “the arts”. Debates about how to defne art and the arts fuctuate in scope and intensity (see Stecker 2005 for a fuller historical overview), but what remains constant is the reliance of such defnitions upon various organisational structures which seek to contain and order the arts and to classify the relationships between them. Marcel Proust’s thinking about the arts was especially shaped by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German aesthetics, which had devoted itself in part to seeking to understand the arts through establishing a hierarchy between them. Put simply, the question was which arts were better than other arts, and therefore higher in the hierarchy, according to certain criteria. Philosophers such as Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer arranged this hierarchy diferently.2 As we will see, Proust borrowed diferent aspects of these hierarchies, with particular attention to the elevation of music found in Schopenhauer. At the same time, Proust’s artistic approach could also be less hierarchical, embracing instead the ideal of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk or union of the arts as well as expanding the very category of the arts newly to include skills such as cooking or dressing. This chapter considers each of these two positions in turn, and ultimately uncovers the priority of language as the means through which artistic theories and other arts are expressed and explored.

Te Hierarchy of the Arts In The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer established a hierarchy of the arts according to what he perceived as their immediacy and relationship to the “will”, a term he proposed to describe the inner essence shared by nature, the individual, and humankind, the world ultimately being read as a manifestation of the will (see Janaway 1999). At the bottom, he placed architecture (in his words, “the dumb striving of the mass” (Schopenhauer 1958: I, 255)) and landscape-gardening. Moving upwards, he turned to sculpture and painting, 236

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within which he acknowledged further sub-hierarchies; here, his theory overlaps with that of the traditional hierarchy of the genres governing academic attitudes towards painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and which, for example, held history and genre painting to be superior to landscapes and still-life.3 Above all these diferent arts stands poetry, which “has the beneft of progress and movement which the plastic and pictorial arts lack” (Schopenhauer 1958: I, 244). Like painting, poetry is also subdivided into diferent genres (lyric, epic, drama), with tragedy “as the summit of poetic art, both as regards the greatness of the efect and the difculty of the achievement” (Schopenhauer 1958: I, 252). At the very top of the hierarchy, there is music. Or rather, as Schopenhauer argues, music “stands apart from all the others” (Schopenhauer 1958: I, 256), as if beyond comparison and beyond hierarchy. In “Chapter XXXIX: On the Metaphysics of Music”, Schopenhauer further explains music’s special status: Because music does not, like all the other arts, exhibit the Ideas or grades of the will’s objectifcation, but directly the will itself, we can also explain that it acts directly on the will, i.e., the feelings, passions, and emotions of the hearer, so that it quickly raises these or even alters them. Far from being a mere aid to poetry, music is certainly an independent art; in fact, it is the most powerful of all the arts, and therefore attains its ends entirely from its own resources. (Schopenhauer 1958: II, 448) What is crucial in this quotation (without getting caught up in its more technical parts) is that music is claimed to be unique amongst the arts in its direct embodiment of the will, in its immediate acting on the emotions, and in its power, independence, and self-sufciency.4 Given music’s claimed independence, it is unsurprising that the best music for Schopenhauer should be not opera but rather the symphony, and in particular the symphonies of Beethoven: Now if we cast a glance at purely instrumental music, a symphony of Beethoven presents us with the greatest confusion which yet has the most perfect order as its foundation; with the most vehement confict which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful harmony. It is rerum concordia discors, a true and complete picture of the nature of the world, which rolls on in the boundless confusion of innumerable forms, and maintains itself by constant destruction. But at the same time, all the human passions and emotions speak from this symphony; joy, grief, love, hatred, terror, hope, and so on in innumerable shades, yet all, as it were, only in the abstract and without any particularization; it is their mere form without the material, like a mere spirit world without matter. (Schopenhauer 1958: II, 450) This encomium to the Beethoven symphony implicitly requires leaving to one side the programmatic sixth, “Pastoral” symphony, with its birdsong, storm, shepherds, and so on, and even the ninth, “Choral” symphony with its incorporation of voices and poetic text. Instead, Beethoven is called upon as a composer of paradoxes (confusion/order; confict/harmony) which capture entirely both “the nature of the world” and “all the human passions”. 237

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There has long been a debate in Proust criticism about how much Proust owes to Schopenhauer. On the one hand, the extensiveness of his debt has been argued by Anne Henry, who even proposes that Schopenhauer is the author of Vinteuil’s score, particularly that of the sonata (“la partition de Vinteuil est écrite par Schopenhauer”, Henry 1981: 8). Henry’s view is reafrmed, for instance, by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his study of Proust as Musician (Nattiez 1989: 7). Proust certainly read parts of Schopenhauer’s writings in French translation and likely encountered his work at university through the philosopher Gabriel Séailles.5 Moreover, Schopenhauer is even named explicitly (though only twice) in the fnal volume of Proust’s novel.6 On the other hand, Joshua Landy warns against “the temptation to reduce Proust’s position to that of an illustrious philosophical predecessor”, and explicitly takes issue with Henry’s staunchly Schopenhauerian reading (Landy 2004: 5). Landy instead argues that Proust’s narrator “becomes the paradigmatic philosophical self-fashioner, namely one who achieves unity not in spite of but out of conficting philosophical systems” (Landy 2004: 49). Luc Fraisse similarly argues for Proust’s philosophical eclecticism, with regard to Schopenhauer fnding that there is evidence only for “a fragmentary reading” of Schopenhauer on the part of Proust (Fraisse 2019: 743) and ultimately calling for greater attention to diferences and incompatibilities between the two (Fraisse 2019: 845). As will become evident, I side with Landy and Fraisse in this debate when it comes to the role of art in Proust’s novel, although I turn frst to an early letter by Proust on music that is clearly Schopenhauerian in tone and import. In a letter to Suzette Lemaire – the daughter of the salon hostess, patron of the arts, and painter Madeleine Lemaire, who illustrated Proust’s frst book Les Plaisirs et les Jours (1896; Pleasures and Days) and introduced Proust to the composer and singer Reynaldo Hahn – Proust explains his philosophy of music as follows in highly Schopenhauerian terms: I believe that the essence of music is to arouse the mysterious depths (which literature and generally speaking all fnite modes of expression that make use either of words and consequently of ideas, which are determinate things, or of objects – painting, sculpture – cannot express) of our souls, which begin where all the arts aimed at the fnite stop and where science as well stops, and which for that reason can be termed religious. This doesn’t make much sense when said so quickly, it deserves a longer conversation. (Proust 1983: 93; Corr. I 386–7) The infuence of Schopenhauer in this passage is clear, although the syntax itself is already markedly Proust’s own in its self-aware tortuousness. Music is better than the other arts, with literature, painting, and sculpture named explicitly, since the latter are all “fnite”, that is, reliant upon “words” or “objects”, whereas music is infnite, “mysterious”, and therefore “religious”. The irony, of course, is that music relies upon language to establish this claim.7 Proust’s defnition of “the essence of music” is quite particular, since it evidently excludes not only opera and song but also music inspired by other arts such as painting and literature. In the same letter Proust goes on to explain that for him: a Beethoven symphony […] to me is not only the most beautiful of music but also fulfls the highest function of music, because it operates outside the particular and concrete – is in essence, that is, quite apart from the particular external objects to which it may attach, as vague and profound as our emotion. (Proust 1983: 93–4; Corr. I 387) 238

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Here, Proust is clearly inspired by Schopenhauer in his reassertion of praise of Beethoven’s symphonies couched in terms of their generality and their embodiment of emotion. This letter illustrates Proust’s early views on music in highly philosophical terms. Proust is not his narrator, as critics have reiterated (see Landy 2004: 14–24 and 42–7 for a relatively recent, playful explanation of this fact), a letter is not a novel, and in any case Proust only begins his novel over a decade after this missive. Bearing all this in mind, what we fnd is that a Schopenhauerian view of music and the arts is undercut in Proust’s novel in various ways: by a degree of critical, ironic distance with regard to the very concept of the hierarchy of the arts; by an expanded defnition of what counts as an art; by comparisons between diferent arts; by un-Schopenhauerian descriptions of music; and fnally, by the primacy of literature rather than music. The clearest sense of a hierarchy of the arts in In Search of Lost Time comes from a reading of the novel as a Bildungsroman (novel of education) and more specifcally as a Künstlerroman (an artist’s novel). As Gilles Deleuze argues, it is “the narrative of an apprenticeship: more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters” (Deleuze 2000: 3). From this perspective, we watch the protagonist grow from childhood to adulthood, progressing, as he does so, through the various stages of his artistic formation and initiation, guided by imaginary artist-fgures: Bergotte the writer; Vinteuil the composer; Elstir the painter.8 Yet while critics tend to agree that the order of the arts and artists in Proust’s novel is directly related to their importance and place in the artistic hierarchy (in short: the later their appearance, the greater their importance), they do not agree, however, on the specifc form taken by this progression from art to art. For Michel Butor (1964: 13), the order is from music (Vinteuil’s sonata), to painting (Elstir), to language (Proust’s novel itself ), but this order is revised by Nattiez, who argues that “painting precedes music in Proust’s hierarchy of the arts” (Nattiez 1989: 53). For Henry (1981), meanwhile, the structure is more intricately based upon nineteenth-century German aesthetics, from architecture and sculpture to painting, music, and literature, in a toppling of music from its apex that owes more to Schelling than to Schopenhauer. My own view is that Proust’s novel is rather messier, anti-hierarchical, and inclusive than these readings suggest. For a start, this view of literature problematically requires ignoring the child protagonist’s love of reading, whether real novels such as, famously, George Sand’s François le Champi or the works of the imaginary writer Bergotte (see Watt 2009). Bergotte’s writings include an essay on Racine (given by Gilberte to the protagonist: SW, 480; I 395), and the author is also strongly connected to architecture since we learn early on from Swann that Bergotte and Gilberte “‘go and look at old towns and cathedrals and castles together’” (SW, 117; I 98). In this way, literature, as represented both by Bergotte’s writings and by his interests, mediates between the highest and lowest points in the aesthetic hierarchy, conjoining tragedy (as we have seen, “the summit of poetic art”; Schopenhauer 1958: I, 252) and architecture. In this light, the eventual supremacy of literature – which the readings of Butor, Henry, and Nattiez all have in common – suggests something more circular or cyclical than a hierarchy: a more fexible pattern within which art forms are celebrated then discarded, but can also return in triumph. It is, moreover, striking how sceptically explicit references to the hierarchy of the arts are treated in Proust’s novel, a fact which rather undermines any attempt to take such hierarchies seriously. Ironic distance from the concept is introduced already in the frst volume of the novel with the character Swann, who mentions the hierarchy of the arts in conversation with the child protagonist. Swann has asked the protagonist if he has been to see the actress La Berma, to which the protagonist replies that his parents do not allow him to go to the theatre. Swann responds: 239

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“That’s a pity. You should insist. Berma in Phèdre, in the Cid; she’s only an actress, if you like, but you know I don’t believe very much in the ‘hierarchy’ of the arts.” (As he spoke I noticed, what had often struck me before in his conversations with my grandmother’s sisters, that whenever he spoke of serious matters, whenever he used an expression which seemed to imply a defnite opinion upon some important subject, he would take care to isolate, to sterilise it by using a special intonation, mechanical and ironic, as though he had put the phrase or word between inverted commas, and was anxious to disclaim any personal responsibility for it; as who should say “the ‘hierarchy,’ don’t you know, as silly people call it.” But then, if it was so absurd, why did he use the word?) (SW, 115–6; I 96–7) As Alain Badiou has remarked, it is “rather rare for theatre to be explicitly included” in hierarchies of the arts, “and even rarer for it to occupy a preeminent place” (Badiou 2013: 95). As we have seen, Schopenhauer did privilege tragedy in his hierarchy, albeit under the general category of poetry.9 In meditating on the place of theatre in the hierarchy of the arts, Swann draws on a diferent history of dislike of the theatre for its supposed immorality, especially as regards concerns about women on stage. Having begun by implying the lowliness of theatre in the hierarchy of the arts, Swann suggests that there is something embarrassing in general about speaking of this hierarchy, both because of the awkwardness of such technical language in conversation and because of the philosophical mindset that is thereby implied and to which he claims not to subscribe. Swann has often been contrasted with the protagonist on account of his failure to become an artist, and this may be a further example of his limitation. Yet I tend to think, instead, that this penchant for irony is something the protagonist struggles to understand as a child (as in the passage above) but for which he eventually acquires greater taste and understanding. This exchange with Swann is particularly interesting for the young protagonist, given his long-standing love of the theatre, as an earlier passage explains: All my conversations with my friends bore upon actors, whose art, although as yet I had no experience of it [bien qu’il me fût encore inconnu], was the frst of all its numberless forms [la première forme, entre toutes celles qu’il revêt] in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment. Between one actor’s tricks of intonation and infection and another’s, the most trifing diferences would strike me as being of an incalculable importance. And from what I had been told of them I would arrange them in order of talent in lists [ je les classais par ordre de talent, dans des listes] which I used to recite to myself all day and which ended up by hardening [par durcir] in my brain and hampering it by their immovability [et par le gêner de leur inamovibilité]. (SW, 87; I 73) The designation “frst” here is somewhat ambiguous as to whether the theatre has primacy in time and/or in the young protagonist’s personal hierarchy of the arts. What the end of the passage suggests, however, is the danger of hierarchies for their list-like, infexible structure. The narrator may be refecting here on his childish construction of a fxed hierarchy of artists (actors, in particular), but the insight also has implications for the hierarchy of the arts, suggesting that both Swann and the narrator are rightly suspicious of the rigidity of this particular organising structure. What is especially comical about this passage is that such “lists” are based on hearsay and reputation, rather than on direct experience of the theatre, an art which is as yet “inconnu” (literally, unknown) to the protagonist. Here we see quite 240

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clearly the dangers of prioritising aesthetic theorisation over experience of art, although we also know how disappointing experience rather than anticipation can be for the protagonist, as for example in his frst experience of La Berma on stage (BG, 17; I 437).

Te Gesamtkunstwerk Against the vertical inequality of the hierarchy of the arts, a diferent model – one certainly less hierarchical, though not entirely without hierarchy, as we will see – is ofered by theories of the Gesamtkunstwerk. This term is usually translated as “total art work”, although as Lutz Koepnick notes “the idea of ‘gesamt’ could just as well be translated with words such as ‘aggregate’, ‘sum’, and ‘collected’, and thus describe a process of combination featuring traces of heterogeneity and diference, of amalgamation and construction” (Koepnick 2017: 273–4). In Wagner’s works, the term frst appears in essays from 1849 (“Art and Revolution”; “The Artwork of the Future”) as well as in Opera and Drama (1851), with the purpose of envisaging a collaborative relationship between the arts. Wagner proposes an ideal “artwork of the future” which will unite diferent art forms, heralding his own music dramas though also suggesting a return to the past, since ancient Greek drama is presented as a “great unitarian Art-work” existing in a golden age prior to the separation of the arts (Wagner 1892: 52). For Wagner, the arts are stronger together: But to force his own specifc nature to the highest blossoming of its contents in this one and highest art-work [i.e. Drama], the separate artist, like each several art, must quell each selfsh, arbitrary bent toward untimely bushing into outgrowths unfurthersome to the whole; the better then to put forth all his strength for reaching of the highest common purpose […]. This purpose […] the separate art-branch will never reach alone, but only all together. (Wagner 1892: 193–4) Despite Wagner’s presentation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in these essays, Juliet Koss importantly points out that “Wagner was neither the frst to theorize the Gesamtkunstwerk nor the frst to name it; indeed he himself used the term in his writings only a few times and in later years strongly disavowed it” (Koss 2013: 158).10 Moreover, as Jack M. Stein already suggested (1947), Wagner’s reading of Schopenhauer in 1854 necessitated a revision to his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk.11 Accordingly, as theorised in Wagner’s later essay from 1870, written to celebrate the centenary of Beethoven’s birth, language became subordinate to music, in line with the Schopenhauerian scheme (see Wagner 2014). Regardless of these reservations, I remain here with Wagner’s earlier position for its delineation of an alternative – and, for Wagner, pre-Schopenhauerian – relational aesthetic model. The afterlives of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk have been explored extensively by other critics.12 Proust’s love of Wagner is also well known, with Wagner being, for instance, the real composer whose name appears most frequently in À la recherche (see Bedriomo 1984). JeanJacques Nattiez has even argued for a hidden Wagnerian trajectory modelled upon Parsifal as guiding Proust’s novel (Nattiez 1989: 12–33; see also Mein 1989). More modestly, I want to follow Momcilo Milovanovic (2005) in using the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk to suggest not only a non-hierarchical relationship between the arts but also an expanded sense of what counts as an art in Proust’s novel. Proust’s frst published book, the aforementioned Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ofers a striking example of the material possibility of a collaborative relationship between the arts. The frst 241

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edition included illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire and musical scores by Reynaldo Hahn, alongside Proust’s texts and a preface by Anatole France (Proust 1896; on the relationships between these collaborators see Proulx 2015). We might, then, argue for this book as a Gesamtkunstwerk in miniature, bringing together art, music, poetry, and prose – such indeed is the suggestion of Mary Breatnach (2020: 542 n. 5). Yet the reception of this work also points to the dangers of such formal experimentation; the volume was costly, published at Proust’s own expense, and fuelled a prejudiced and long-lasting view of the author as a dilettante and socialite. In contrast, À la recherche du temps perdu puts forward a diferent view of the Gesamtkunstwerk: no longer a material reality but rather an imagined and much more wide-ranging ideal. In the fnal volume of the novel, the narrator sets out a series of models for the creation of his envisaged work, noting that: “To give some idea of this task one would have to borrow comparisons from the loftiest and most varied arts [aux arts les plus élevés et les plus diférents]” (TR, 431; IV 609). In the end, it is variety that the narrator privileges over verticality, as he turns to the domestic arts of dress-making and cooking: I should construct my book, I dare not say ambitiously like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress. (TR, 432; IV 610)13 I should be making my book in the same way that Françoise made that bœuf à la mode which M. de Norpois had found so delicious […]. (TR, 434; IV 612) On the one hand, these types of comparisons call for an expansion of what counts as an art. On the other hand, such comparisons between art forms – necessarily broadly conceived and defned – destabilise any fxed hierarchy of the arts as separate entities. The second example, in particular, harks back to much earlier descriptions (from the frst part of the second volume of the novel) of Françoise preparing the family dinner at which the marquis de Norpois is a special guest. There, cooking had already been defned as an art and Françoise herself as “the Michelangelo of our kitchen” (BG, 33; I 449): And ever since the day before, Françoise, rejoicing in the opportunity to devote herself to that art of cooking [art de la cuisine] at which she was so gifted, stimulated, moreover, by the prospect of a new guest, and knowing that she would have to compose, by methods known to her alone, a dish of bœuf à la gelée, had been living in the efervescence of creation; since she attached the utmost importance to the intrinsic quality of the materials which were to enter into the fabric of her work [la fabrication de son œuvre], she had gone herself to the Halles to procure the best cuts of rump-steak, shin of beef, calves’feet, just as Michelangelo spent eight months in the mountains of Carrara choosing the most perfect blocks of marble for the monument of Julius II. (BG, 18; I 437) After the meal, “Françoise received the compliments of M. de Norpois with the proud simplicity, the joyful and (if only momentarily) intelligent expression of an artist when someone speaks to him of his art” (BG, 65; I 475). The interpolated remark is quite cruel, and suggests that the comparison between Françoise and Michelangelo may be similarly momentary, designed to celebrate an ephemeral, domestic art in mock-heroic terms. Notwithstanding, 242

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Françoise’s “simplicity” is something the narrator will later wish to emulate, as is evident in his desire to construct his book “simply [tout simplement] like a dress”, at a key moment in the novel where surprising comparisons of creativity across diferent spheres return in earnest. Julia Hartley argues, with such examples in mind but with a particular focus on Odette as a sartorial artist, that Proust “fattens out hierarchizations between forms of creative expression” (Hartley 2016: 351).14 Hartley also connects this aesthetic position to a tendency towards a “democratic levelling” within society that Edward J. Hughes has observed in the fnal volume of Proust’s novel (Hughes 2011: 236, cited in Hartley 2016: 351). Such a radically capacious, non-hierarchical defnition of art irrevocably thwarts attempts at constructing an artistic hierarchy within Proust’s novel. An even more capacious “will-to-include” is evident in the description of the protagonist’s experience of discovering Vinteuil’s septet in the ffth volume of the novel, as Malcolm Bowie recounts: The clarion-call that his writing sounds, its noisy dawn-song and its forward-rushing clamour, are born of a will-to-include that thrives equally on eloquence and babble, ecstasies and exertions, cabbages and stars. For a moment even Mme Verdurin’s snoring dog is caught up in the enlarged acoustic space of Vinteuil’s work, and writing has a similar opportunistic power of absorption. These pages are a gloriously impure, lumber-flled rhapsody. (Bowie 1998: 86) In Bowie’s analysis, it emerges quite clearly that the score of Vinteuil’s septet is written not by Schopenhauer but rather by Proust.15 Where Schopenhauer celebrates music as beyond language and as “vague” and “mysterious” (adjectives from Proust’s Schopenhauerian letter of 1895), the musical descriptions of the septet are “gloriously impure”, as Bowie remarks, and rooted in strikingly concrete, colourful, and eclectic imagery. Music in Proust’s novel is no longer an embodiment of and incitement to pure, abstract, grand emotion, but rather comically contingent on performance context and on the narrator’s distracted listening. With this “will-to-include”, the already fragile and contorted hierarchy of the arts collapses. What the septet episode also suggests, in terms of its broader signifcance within the novel, is that music, for the narrator, is not an end in itself but rather a promise of the value of art and a call to art: “the strange summons [l’étrange appel] which I should henceforth never cease to hear, as the promise and proof that there existed something other [autre chose], realisable no doubt through art” (C, 297; III 767). In a revision to the Schopenhauerian scheme to which the earlier, epistolary Proust seems to have been wedded, literature has pre-eminence over music, as is confrmed by the one shared point in the distinct hierarchies of the arts postulated by Butor, Nattiez, and even Henry. Despite my reservations about such a hierarchical structure, literature clearly does have a special status in Proust’s novel, both as the endpoint of the protagonist’s intellectual, social, and amorous apprenticeship and as the site within which all the other arts are variously described, defned, and compared to one another. If Proust’s narrator plans to write a Gesamtkunstwerk – and if the Search itself may fruitfully be read as akin to a Gesamtkunstwerk, though the narrator’s book and Proust’s novel can only ever be distantly related –, this work is one in which literature is the dominant mode, mediating all the other arts. The consequences for music – and the same is surely true for the other arts – are that its “value” may be “to be a good metaphor”, to borrow words from Roland Barthes (Barthes 1985: 285, cited in O’Meara 2008: 9). Like Françoise’s pot roast, the septet becomes “a model 243

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for literature” and “a microcosm of A la recherche itself ” (Nattiez 1989: 35, 59). Returning to Bowie’s reading, “it is an allegorical representation both of what the narrator’s book will eventually be like and of what Proust’s book has already been like from its frst page” (Bowie 1998: 86–7). In this way, music becomes subservient to literature, whilst the distinction between the two arts is also eroded through an allegorical or metaphorical reading of music as literature. Instead of a hierarchy of the arts, we fnd a unity of the arts within the novel’s aforecited “opportunistic power of absorption” (Bowie 1998: 86). There is no neutral site for the staging of a Gesamtkunstwerk. Proust’s choice of the novel as his own Wagnerian theatre means that even in the absence of a fxed hierarchy of the arts, literature still assumes an advantageous viewpoint over all the other arts.

Te Triumph of Literature In a brief pause between movements of the septet, Proust’s narrator refects regretfully on the diference between music and language: The andante had just ended on a phrase flled with a tenderness to which I had entirely surrendered. There followed, before the next movement, a short interval during which the performers laid down their instruments and the audience exchanged impressions. A duke, in order to show that he knew what he was talking about, declared: “It’s a difcult thing to play well.” Other more agreeable people chatted for a moment with me. But what were their words, which like every human and external word [comme toute parole humaine extérieure] left me so indiferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing [la céleste phrase musicale avec laquelle je venais de m’entretenir]? I was truly like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality. And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I wondered whether music might not be the unique example of what might have been – if the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas had not intervened – the means of communication between souls [la communication des âmes]. (C, 291–2; III, 762–3) This passage is as close to a Schopenhauerian defnition of music as Proust’s novel gets. It presents music as divine and as a form of communication that is beyond language. Compared to music, language appears as limited, grotesque, and debased. These criticisms apply to language in general, but they are especially true of spoken language and of social conversation, as well as of the attempt to translate music into words. The experience of hearing the septet is inefable, and comments from the audience in response to the music can only be bathetic and disappointing. In describing music in these terms, however, Proust’s narrator ironically shows the necessity, in his case at least, of language as a form of mediation for understanding musical experience. Put simply, the very argument that music is beyond language inevitably relies upon language. A similar point has been made by Daniel Chua (1999) and Carl Dahlhaus (1989) in their analyses of the idea of “absolute music”, a nineteenth-century term for wordless, orchestral music, in particular the symphony, which in its lack of referentiality has at times been argued to be superior both to music with words (opera, song) and to music with a narrative (so-called “programme music”).16 As Chua and Dahlhaus point out, the purported superiority of absolute music, thanks to its wordlessness, is nonetheless a product of language: 244

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the Romantics did not compose; they merely talked. They fabricated from the symphony the discourse of absolute music. So far from standing speechless before its inefable utterances, the Romantics spoke absolute music into existence. It is a music emancipated from language by language; “were it not for the poetic conceit of unspeakability”, writes Carl Dahlhaus, “there would have been no words available for reinterpreting the musically confusing or empty into the sublime or wonderful”. This is not to say that the symphony does not exist, but that the process of naming changes the meaning of the symphony. (Chua 1999: 6, citing from Dahlhaus 1989: 63) Like absolute music in general, Vinteuil’s septet is similarly “a music emancipated from language by language” (Chua 1999: 6). Indeed, this statement is especially true of Vinteuil’s compositions, which – besides being instrumental works that may be classifed as absolute music – are after all imaginary and exist only on the page. Of Proust’s choice to celebrate fctional rather than real music, Nattiez comments that “The Narrator had to experience his revelation through an imaginary work of art, for according to the logic of the novel a real work always disappoints” (Nattiez 1989: 30). One of the consequences of this necessary situation is that these imaginary works of non-linguistic art (which include not only the music of Vinteuil but also the paintings of Elstir) owe their existence to language, even as they are also claimed to ofer preferable alternatives to language. This linguistic dominance is further heightened by the fnal volume of Proust’s novel, where literature makes a triumphal return. Literature in general is discovered and afrmed, in this volume, to be “Real life [La vraie vie]” (TR, 253; IV 474). A library is also the site of the narrator’s fnal refections and commitment to art, in opposition to the music that is going on in a nearby room: when I had gone upstairs, a butler requested me to wait for a few minutes in a little sitting-room used as a library [un petit salon-bibliothèque], next to the room where the refreshments were being served, until the end of the piece of music which was being played, the Princess having given orders for the doors to be kept shut during its performance. (TR, 218; IV 446) In an earlier version of this passage, these doors had been “left half-open because of the heat”, and through these doors the narrator had heard the “Good Friday Spell” from Wagner’s Parsifal (Proust 1982: 172, with reference and English translation taken from Nattiez 1989: 28). In the fnal version, however, the doors are frmly shut and apparently soundproof. Music has been banished from the library and Wagner has been specifcally suppressed from the fnal scene of illumination. In this library, the narrator plans his own future book, which he presents as involving the deciphering and translation of his personal “inner book of unknown symbols” (TR, 233; IV 458). Alongside this introspective, future-oriented mode, the narrator also browses the shelves of the physical books that surround him in the present, and in so doing rediscovers favourite books from his childhood: George Sand’s François le Champi as well as an unspecifed book by Bergotte. The return of Sand and Bergotte is a fnal piece of evidence as to the non-viability of a hierarchical model of the arts in Proust’s novel. Rarely is anything banished or left behind in À la recherche; at most, as is the case with examples of literature in the novel, there is a temporary relinquishing only in order for the lost object to make 245

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an unexpected and grandiloquent return. This return, however, does not necessarily mean the supplanting of all the other arts by literature. Rather, literature, as we have seen, is also defned in relation to other art forms (broadly understood as such, since the narrator’s future novel is compared to dress-making and cooking). As a result, the arts rise and fall together, not separately, although literature retains its pre-eminence both by seeing the other arts primarily as a refection of itself and by being the only art with a voice through which to establish these artistic comparisons.

Conclusion Drawing on an earlier quantitative study by Michèle Magill (1987), Jean-Marc Quaranta notes in his entry on “art” in the Dictionnaire Marcel Proust that “The discourse on art represents a ffth of the novel, in other words the length of Le Côté de Guermantes” (my translation from Quaranta 2014: 83). Since the scope of the present essay could in no way claim to account for this much of the novel, I have preferred to focus primarily on three interrelated aspects: the ways in which the relationships between the arts are conceived and organised by Proust; Proust’s expansive attitude towards what counts as an art in his novel; the importance of literature as the site within which other arts are invoked, defned, and celebrated. In my view, Proust moves from a hierarchical understanding of the relationship between the arts, inspired by Schopenhauer, to a more inclusive viewpoint in À la recherche. Literature inevitably has a certain priority in this respect, since the other arts are mediated by this literary representation and are valued in part as metaphors for novelistic writing. At the same time, literature’s own value is reliant upon comparisons to a variety of other arts, and Proust’s narrator’s encomium to music is also a celebration of the non-linguistic, despite, as we have seen, being couched in language. In a memorable phrase on a related topic, Leo Bersani has argued that “In Proust, art simultaneously erases, repeats, and redeems life” (Bersani 1990: 11). Borrowing this phrase, I would like to suggest that a similar form of complexity is evident as regards the arts in À la recherche. In other words, in Proust, literature erases the other arts by turning them into waymarks on the path to the Novel and by using other arts as a mirror for its own ambitions and practices. And yet, simultaneously, Proust’s novel also represents and even redeems these same arts, by recognising a greater and more democratic variety of art forms and by portraying them as artistic ideals to which literature aspires.

Notes 1 See Young 2019 for an overview, including the origin of the seven liberal arts in Martianus Capella’s On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (ffth century). 2 On the hierarchies of Schelling and Hegel, see Bowie 2017. 3 For a succinct explanation of the meaning of “genre” for art history, see Harris 2006: 131–3. 4 For an explanation of what Schopenhauer means by “Ideas”, see Foster 1999. 5 On the evidence for Proust’s reading of Schopenhauer, see Fraisse 2019: 735–48 (with discussion of Séailles on 744). 6 In À la recherche the narrator frst recalls Mme de Cambremer’s impressive knowledge of Schopenhauer (TR, 60; IV 318), and Mme de Cambremer herself is subsequently reported as saying “‘You must re-read what Schopenhauer says about music’” (TR, 378; IV 569). On the latter quotation, Nattiez comments: “perhaps we should have responded sooner to Mme de Cambremer’s injunction” (Nattiez 1989: 89). 7 See the later discussion of “absolute music” in this chapter. 8 Elisabeth Ladenson rightly criticises the reduction of artist-fgures in Proust’s novel to these three and suggests in addition “the alternative trio of less exalted, semi- or para-artistic fgures, Bloch, Charlus, and Legrandin” (Ladenson 2015: 214), playwright, pianist, and novelist, respectively. It

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9 10 11

12

13

14 15

16

is true, nonetheless, that none of these three have as their primary function their role as artists, unlike the main trio of Bergotte, Elstir, and Vinteuil, nor do we hear very much about their art. See Stern 2014 for an overview of philosophical attitudes towards the theatre. On the frst appearance of the term, in a text from 1827 by Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorf, see Neumann 1956 (also cited in Koss 2013: 158). For more recent studies of Schopenhauer’s infuence on Wagner, see Young 2013 and Karnes and Mitchell 2020. Interestingly, in the Beethoven essay Wagner draws upon Schopenhauer’s theory of music but also criticises Schopenhauer “as a layman […] insufciently competent and familiar with music” (Wagner 2014: 47). See especially Smith 2007; Koss 2010; Roberts 2011; Imhoof, Menninger, and Steinhof 2016; Fusillo and Grishakova 2021. The last volume includes an essay specifcally on Proust (Hagen 2021), although it is focused on the theatrical genre of the féerie, and draws more on Shakespeare and Michelet than on Wagner. While there is an important negation in the frst part of this comparison, Roberts 2011: 128–9 argues instead for Proust’s understanding of worship in cathedrals as another kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, with reference to Proust’s early essay in Le Figaro on “La mort des cathédrales” (“The Death of Cathedrals”). See also Milovanovic 2005: 49–89 on “les toilettes féminines” of Mme Swann, the duchesse de Guermantes, and Fortuny, as well as Weber 2015 for a discussion of the duchesse de Guermantes’s “artful fashions”. Having made the bold initial claim, cited earlier, that Vinteuil’s score is written by Schopenhauer (see Henry 1981: 8), Henry later suggests that Proust’s approach to music in his novel is an attempt at a “synthesis of Schopenhauer and Schelling” (302), moving from the Schopenhauerian sonata to the more Schellingian septet. For further discussion of “absolute” versus “programme” music and the origins of these terms, see also Scruton 2001a and 2001b.

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Jennifer Rushworth Henry, A. (1981) Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, Paris: Klincksieck. Hughes, E. J. (2011) Proust, Class, and Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Imhoof, D., M. E. Menninger, and A. J. Steinhof (eds) (2016) The Total Work of Art: Foundations, Articulations, Inspirations, New York: Berghahn. Janaway, C. (1999) “Will and Nature,” in C. Janaway (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 138–70. Karnes, K. C. and A. J. Mitchell (2020) “Schopenhauer’s Infuence on Wagner,” in R. L. Wicks (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 517–34. Koepnick, L. (2017) “Gesamtkunstwerk,” in V. Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge History of Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 273–88. Koss, J. (2010) Modernism After Wagner, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2013) “Gesamtkunstwerk,” in N. Vazsonyi (ed.), The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 158–60. Ladenson, E. (2015) “Proust and the Marx Brothers,” in C. McDonald and F. Proulx (eds) Proust and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 213–22. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Magill, M. (1987) “Art et littérature dans À la recherche du temps perdu: étude quantitative des références et des comparaisons artistiques,” Bulletin d’informations proustiennes 18: 79–88. Mason, A. S. (2016) Ancient Aesthetics, London: Routledge. Mein, M. (1989) “Proust and Wagner,” Journal of European Studies 19(3): 205–22. Milovanovic, M. (2005) Les Figures du livre: essai sur la coïncidence des arts dans “À la recherche du temps perdu,” Paris: Honoré Champion. Nattiez, J.-J. (1989) Proust as Musician, trans. D. Pufett, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neumann, A. R. (1956) “The Earliest Use of the Term ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’,” Philological Quarterly 35: 191–3. O’Meara, L. (2008) “Atonality and Tonality: Musical Analogies in Roland Barthes’s Lectures at the Collège de France,” Paragraph 31: 9–22. Proulx, F. (2015) “‘Irregular’ Kin: Madeleine Lemaire and Reynaldo Hahn in Les Plaisirs et les Jours,” in C. McDonald and F. Proulx (eds) Proust and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 232–51. Proust, M. (1896) Les Plaisirs et les Jours: illustrations de Madeleine Lemaire, préface d’Anatole France et quatre pièces pour piano de Reynaldo Hahn, Paris: Calmann-Lévy. Available online at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ ark:/12148/bpt6k1522325d. ——— (1982) Matinée chez la Princesse de Guermantes: Cahiers du “Temps retrouvé”, ed. H. Bonnet with B. Brun, Paris: Gallimard. ——— (1983) Selected Letters: 1880–1903, ed. P. Kolb and trans. R. Manheim, London: Collins. Quaranta, J.-M. (2014) “Art,” in A. Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers (eds), Dictionnaire Marcel Proust, Paris: Honoré Champion, pp. 83–5. Roberts, D. (2011) The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Schopenhauer, A. (1958) The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne, Indian Hills: Falcon’s Wing Press. Scruton, R. (2001a) “Absolute Music,” Grove Music Online: https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000000069. ——— (2001b) “Programme Music,” Grove Music Online: https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000022394. Smith, M. W. (2007) The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge. Stecker, R. (2005) “Defnition of Art,” in J. Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 136–54. Stein, J. M. (1947) “The Infuence of Schopenhauer on Wagner’s Concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” The Germanic Review 22(2): 92–105. Stern, T. (2014) Philosophy and Theatre: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Wagner, R. (1892) The Art-Work of the Future, trans. W. A. Ellis, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. ——— (2014) Richard Wagner’s “Beethoven” (1870), trans. R. Allen, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press. Watt, A. A. (2009), Reading in Proust’s “A la recherche”: “le délire de la lecture”, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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16 ART AND THE LIFE-WORLD Te Duck, the Rabbit and the Madeleine Gary Kemp

My task might be described unsympathetically as the bootless one of attempting to clarify one enigma in terms of another. One is Proust’s emphasis on the madeleine and on other cases of ‘involuntary memory’. The other is Wittgenstein’s discussion of ‘aspect-perception’, the sections of Part Two of the Philosophical Investigations where he discusses the ‘duck-rabbit’ picture among other examples. Many an able mind including Proust’s has wrestled with his madeleine. But as far as I know, a satisfying account has proved elusive of why the seemingly isolated and anomalous phenomenon of involuntary memory could genuinely be hoped to reveal, in one fell swoop, the whole secret of a man’s life as well as the secret of art. Perhaps Proust’s (fctional) narrator doesn’t put it as starkly as that, and perhaps Proust himself never intended it in that way. But the fact that the phenomenon is dwelt upon most at the end of the book, during Time Regained—indeed at a crucial juncture of that rather more explicitly philosophical part of Time Regained—must make it the default assumption. I’ve come at any rate to think that Wittgenstein’s account of aspect-perception can help us with this. Not that there is any question of direct infuence, at least as far as I know. Although their lives overlapped considerably—Wittgenstein lived from 1889 to 1951 and Proust from 1871 to 1922—it is most doubtful that either fgure read the other. But aside from the happy thought that great minds tend to converge on the truth, there is on the surface a more promising connection. To see one thing as another—as when we suddenly come to see the drawing as a duck—is to associate one thing with the other in a peculiarly intimate way, as if the one thing were magically present in the other, even though of course one knows it is not literally a duck. So it is with Proust’s narrator—I will follow Landy (2004) and others in calling him Marcel—when he rediscovers his aunt Leonie’s bedroom at Combray in the savour of a tea-soaked biscuit (SW, 52–56; I 44–47). I suggest accordingly that some of the primary lessons that Wittgenstein draws from the phenomenon of aspect-perception can go some way towards a substantive explanation of why Proust could have presented involuntary memory as if it were the key to his great book. Initially, and typically, the content of an involuntary memory is concealed. Marcel trips over a paving stone, and is momentarily fummoxed at the inscrutable familiarity of the sensation—until, quite unbidden, a long-stored away memory of a similar sensation, immediately followed by a whole constellation of connected memories, foods into his mind. It is this that links this discovery of his own idiosyncratic psychology to general and ultimately communicable matters of art. I am supposing that 250

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these channels can be illuminated by aspect-perception. In both cases what he fnds is that in a certain sense, the sense that matters, the two are really one: you really are the boy who snifed the madeleine so many years ago, and as we’ll see somewhat more of later, this phrase of a Beethoven string quartet really is a transmogrifed version of an earlier phrase. Marcel’s narrator invites us to fnd that the signifcance of art and the mode of being of ourselves are intimately linked in this way. They are both ‘subjective’—where to be is to be perceived, in Berkeley’s terms—yet if these two ideas are connected in something like the way I am supposing, this signifcance is communicable, as we will see. I will lay two cards on the table before proceeding in earnest. First, I want to take the signifcance of Wittgenstein’s discussion to be as maximally general as I can. As Malcolm Budd pointed out, aspect-perception is ‘a point from which lines radiate in all directions across the feld of psychological phenomena’ (Budd 1987, 1). Accordingly—though this, in turn, is not exactly Budd’s thought—it’s very tempting to take a concern with aspect-perception as partly a ‘phenomenological’ concern, a concern with what happens at the margins of language, or between language and the world—that indeed it underlies our forms of life (in certain dimensions), the unity of (communicable) experience, and the experience of similarity (or identity) and diference. Although Wittgenstein himself was doubtful to say the least that there is such an intelligible subject as phenomenology (he seems to dismiss it for example in the Remarks on Colour, RC II.3), I will yield to this temptation (for corroboration see Baz 2020b and the essays in Kuusela et al. 2020). But second, I do not wish to underestimate the surface distance between the two phenomena. In particular, involuntary memory can be distinguished from ‘ordinary’ cases of aspect-perception in that (i) it is intimately personal and (ii) it is unlike voluntary memory in coming unbidden—which perhaps explains why it is so peculiarly and overwhelmingly compelling. (i) registers the fact that unlike a standard case of aspect-perception—which can always in principle be enjoyed by others—it seems that involuntary memory can never be enjoyed by others, and hence the very idea of its playing a role in aesthetics is problematic; I will address this point head-on only towards the end. By (ii) I mean that the experience of involuntary memory, like an episode of ordinary perception, is an unimpeachable experience of certainty, of ‘truth’, which, perhaps strangely, does not inevitably dissipate even if one comes to believe that it is unlike ordinary perception or memory in being merely subjective, incapable of being corroborated in terms of some external fact. Further clarifcation, however, must wait. I will discuss Wittgenstein, then Proust, then the two together.

Aspect-Perception and Its Domain The duck-rabbit drawing, for all its ubiquity, is in a sense misleading as a basic example of what Wittgenstein called ‘aspect-seeing’ or ‘aspect-perception’, for the essential phenomenon is evident in the simpler case of seeing a passing cloud as, for example, a cow (Wittgenstein also uses for example a child’s seeing a chest of drawers as a house; PI II, 206). The cloud ‘looks like’ a cow, or ‘has a cow-aspect’. Or one might say to the question ‘What animal is that?’, put to us by a playful companion gesturing at the sky, ‘It’s a cow’. What is positively useful in the duck-rabbit drawing is that its having two diferent aspects shows that the experience of one aspect at a given time must exclude the experience of the other, and, in some perhaps mysterious sense, under what aspect one sees it as depends at least partly on one’s will, as when we switch back and forth between duck and rabbit. Although it is not guaranteed to be successful, one can always try to see an aspect, or not to see an aspect, in way that 251

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one cannot try to see a red berry as blue or to stop seeing it as red. In this sense, the presence of the aspect, in many cases at least, depends on us; in Wittgenstein’s words one ‘brings the concept to the object’ (RPPI, §961, §518). Of course, one is not normally under the illusion that the drawing really is a rabbit or a duck, or that the cloud is really a cow, or forgets that what one is looking at is a drawing or a cloud. As mentioned above, the phenomenon upon closer inspection proves to have several dimensions. I will frst briefy survey the extent of the feld, before making some points about the feld in depth: it is vital for my purposes to stress the diversity of phenomena naturally grouped under ‘aspect-perception’, and there are some fner elaborations I need to spell out. First then the extensive points. The Extent of the Field. Wittgenstein discusses many psychological phenomena that are either varieties of aspect-perception or are at least interestingly related to it, if not straightforward varieties of it. The similarities and diferences between the latter and the former are sometimes subtle and complex. For my purposes, I don’t see that it matters too much how we classify these phenomena—strictly as aspect-perception or not—so much as to notice certain non-superfcial similarities. A

B

C

D

E

Wittgenstein distinguishes ‘conceptual’ aspects—the duck-rabbit—from ‘optical’ ones—such as a drawing which can be seen as a black cross on a white background, or a white cross on a black background (PI II, 207; see also RPPI, 971, 1017; RPPII, 509; LWI, 700–5, 582; BB, 163–4). The event of noticing that one thing can be seen as another—when an aspect ‘dawns’ or ‘lights up’ as Wittgenstein puts it—can be distinguished from the state of ‘continuously’ seeing one thing as another (PI II, 194b; cf. 200d, 205i). The continuous case—for example in our normal perceptions of pictures—often arises without an aspect’s having dawned; one does not normally fnd it ‘new’ (PI II, 210f.).1 Regarding-as (PI II, 205g). This is an artifcial label for those aspects that have lost their novelty, whether or not they are currently being perceived by anyone: An object is ‘regarded-as’ a (type of ) thing when it is the subject of a well-known disposition to be seen as that (type of ) thing despite it’s being known that it isn’t that (type of ) thing. An example is Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, California, which locals know as the ‘Sleeping Lady’; residents are typically no longer ‘struck’ by it. Still, it is common knowledge, and a local might point it out to a visitor without even looking at it. Resemblance (RPPII, 219, 317; RPPI, 947). Aspect-perception is closely related to the experience of resemblance—the phrase ‘looks like’ is ambiguous between the two—but they are not the same. I will not go into the details of this, except to point out that experienced resemblance is a matter of degree, whereas aspect-perception is discrete, either on or of.2 Seeing-in. Occasionally, when Wittgenstein is discussing aspect-perception, he speaks of one’s seeing a secondary object in the primary object (RPPII, 552, 556—cf. PI II, 193d; RPPI, 1042), such as one’s seeing a father’s face in a child’s face. Richard Wollheim has famously taken this as the starting-point for a theory of pictorial-representation (Wollheim 1987, 46–51; for commentary see Kemp 2016). Wollheim takes it to difer from seeing-as in three ways, but only one is of special interest here: whereas in the case of seeing-as the term for the secondary object is necessarily a singular term (indicating an object) or a predicate (indicating a property or quality), the term for the secondary object in the case of seeing-in may, in addition, be a relative clause indicating a state of afairs. We see in a picture that the execution of the criminal was attended by a large crowd. 252

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F

Association and Familiarity. Wittgenstein writes: Look at a long familiar piece of furniture in its old place in your room. You would like to say: “It is part of an organism”… One might even feel like this: “Everything is part and parcel of everything else” (internal and external relations). Displace a piece and it is no longer what it was. Only in this surrounding is this table this table. Everything is part of everything. (RPPI, 339; cf. RPPI, 335–8, 970)

Mere familiar juxtaposition can bring about one thing’s being thought of as ‘part of ’ another. This will prove important when Proust is considered. In other cases, the best we can do is to locate facts about the individual’s history, which may or may not be shared by others (as at PI II, 215d; as far as I know, this is the closest Wittgenstein comes to considering involuntary memory head-on). The individual’s experience establishing an association may be highly idiosyncratic, or reasonably widespread, as in this example: “I feel as if the name ‘Schubert’ ftted Schubert’s works and Schubert’s face” (loc. cit.; cf. RPPI, 243, 336, 337; CV, 24–5). The Field in Depth. Wittgenstein sometimes discusses the moment when one ‘knows how to go on’ as if there were a ‘click’ in one’s experience. He does this with respect to rule-following, but also with respect to aesthetic matters: … if I say to someone “Hear it like this”, he must now be able to say: “Yes, now I understand it; now it really makes sense!” (Something must click.) (RPPI, 546, 691; cf. PI II, 206j; LA, I 12, III 1–5, 4; Z, 158; BB, 167) Like its objective rule-following counterpart, the confdence is that one now knows how to go on. Seeing one thing as another can alert one to other things to see or think, patterns to be on the look-out for, a template in terms of which to make sense of things (Z, 209–10): ‘[S]eeing-as may have an efect like that of an alteration of what is seen, e.g. by putting between brackets, or underlining, or making a connexion of one kind or another etc.’ (RPPI, 992; emphasis added). Generally speaking, the ‘clicking’ only has the signifcance that it does in a particular context (PI, 154–5), against a background of a practices. That along with various other sorts of human response these render it intelligible is a recurring theme in Wittgenstein. In the simplest sort of case involving aspect-perception, a fgure surrounded by rabbits in a picture is seen as a rabbit, whereas the same fgure surrounded by ducks in another is seen as a duck (PI II, 195e; cf. LWI, 165–70); the practices involve the common words ‘rabbit’ and ‘duck’. The scope of contextual factors is almost limitless (cf. RPPI, 1, 34, 339–41; RPPII, 468–9, 497, 501, 503; CV, 51–2; PI II, 202k, 209f ): ‘It is not only difcult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have describe the whole environment’ (LA, I 20). And: Doesn’t the [musical] theme point to anything outside itself? Yes it does! But that means:— it makes an impression on me which is connected with things in its surroundings—e.g. with our language and its intonations; and hence with inference, with the whole feld of our language-games. (Z, 175; see also Z, 155, 162, 170, 173, 175; cf. CV, 51–2) Nearby is a point about the rampant interconnectedness and bafing complexity of the ‘bustle of life’ (RPPII, 625): 253

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How could human behaviour be described? Surely only by showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly, is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgement, our concepts, and our reactions. (RPPII, 629) Aspects—in a wider sense inclusive of the above varieties A-F—are rife in our lives. Completely. Yet they are not objective, at least not straightforwardly so; they don’t ‘teach us about the external world’, as Wittgenstein puts it using scare quotes (RPPI, 899). An aspect is not a ‘property’ of the object (PI, 212a). The verbal expression of an aspect-perception, as when we say ‘that’s a rabbit’ of the passing cloud, lies outside the language-game of reporting, of conveying information. But neither are aspects merely subjective; they are not ‘there’, but also not ‘not-there’. They represent a kind of unclaimed frontier between the inner subjective and the outer objective. What we are often struck with, when we see an aspect, is our own power of seeing, of, again, ‘bringing the concept to the object’. But we are not typically satisfed merely to have the experience; we frequently wish to corroborate the experience with that of others. When I call the cloud a ‘rabbit’, my expectation, aim or hope, is that you too should see it, that we should fnd our perceptual propensities to be in harmony, similarly disposed. Inevitably, the defeat of such a plea for perceptual intimacy is surprising, puzzling, frustrating or defating. That is why the seeing of an aspect, unlike the mere seeing of a rabbit, gives one a reason to say outright ‘that’s a rabbit’ to our companion; we specially value the fne-grained attunement, and its corroboration. Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to think that this is the basic undergirding to our perceptual and conceptual lives. One of Wittgenstein’s most frequently cited maxims was that ‘[I]f language is to be a means of communication then there must be agreement not only in defnitions but also … in judgements’ (PI, 242). His point is that the very possibility of language depends not on there being ‘rails to infnity’ that we grasp in some kind of foundational cognitive act and which determine the correctness-conditions of our judgements but in our propensities to go on to the new case in similar ways. Shared propensities for aspect-perception show us that such intersubjective propensities are not only necessary for language but also outrun anything already provided for by language. And seeing aspects, insofar as it is susceptible to the will (see the beginning of this section), is something we do. In seeing an aspect, typically we are aware that we are not identifying something in the object, but doing something with sensory materials that the facts invite but do not compel. Aspect-perception is subjective and autonomous, but non-capricious and shared (for much more see Baz 2000, 2016, 2020a, and 2020b).

Involuntary Memory and Its Domain My Proustian question might be re-stated as: ‘How can the Madeleine explain the communicability of art?’. And the hunch I’m following—with the Madeleine of course standing for involuntary memory in general—is that despite its special characteristics, involuntary memory is part of the general constellation of aspect-perception just outlined; if art fundamentally acts by activating our capacities for aspect-perception, then it too is subjective yet shareable. To make all of this plausible, I shall frst state some key philosophical themes that are present in the Proustian narrative. The themes, naturally, are intertwined. Theme 1: Interpenetration. Swann’s love for Odette is partly catalysed by a resemblance between her face and that of Jethro’s daughter in a favourite Botticelli; his ambivalence about 254

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Odette, so thoroughly ordinary in many respects and not even, so Swann believes, ‘his type’, is partly alleviated by the only half-acknowledged idea that in loving her, he is in some way expressing or acting out his love of Florentine art, and indeed remaining true to his artistic and intellectual personality, or at least not betraying it—which would threaten thereby to reveal it, perhaps, as not quite whole-hearted. His love is even more potently amalgamated with the ‘little phrase’ that forms the basis of the Vinteuil sonata which he gets to know precisely as the die of his love for Odette is cast; it forms the leitmotif of his condition, its presence in his consciousness inseparable from the thought of her. His longing for it, or for something ideal towards which it seems to point, is virtually the same malady as his love. Marcel’s incipient passion for Albertine is fused with the ravishing but almost inhuman image of the little band of impudent teenage girls at the seaside; in loving her, he imagines he might enter into that rapturous tableaux, and perhaps love all the girls at once, or rather the essence they collectively represent. His infatuation with Madame de Guermantes is partly a longing for a mythic image of the ancient French aristocracy, partly a love for certain rustic aspects of the Combray of his childhood. The phenomenon’s activity in love is only the most acute; more generally, what Proust fnds in human desire is its inexorable and constant tendency to cross-pollination: the desire or esteem for this gets spread onto that, resulting in desires, evaluations and meanings that far outrun what might have been attached to the objects individually (see SW, 185–7; I 154–6). The channels of pollination are as various and adventitious as life itself: the only constant is the human need and propensity to believe in life, to fnd value, and thereby to use any excuse to transfer value from one object to another, thereby not only augmenting the frst evaluation through a kind of reciprocal action but also fnding in its trumped-up re-instantiation a spurious corroboration of it. Theme 2: Multiplicity. Marcel, like Swann before him, devotes a great deal of time and cognitive resources towards a kind of question that he eventually realises has no answer, at least not of the kind he was searching for: Just what is Albertine, Saint-Loup, the Duchess, Odette, really like? Who is the real Albertine? What does she really think? As a young man Marcel believes that such a person as the Duchesse de Guermantes contains an essence, that she is not merely some patchwork compromise between her inbred instincts, the habits of her forbears, the demands of modern Parisian social life, her feminine vanities, her artistic and intellectual pretensions, her desires to seem both up-to-date but independent of her peers and contemptuous of her admirers. As a tormented lover he begins to suspect that there is nothing more to Albertine than the surface animation of the moment, that her opposing tendencies need not be explicable in terms of some deeper aspect of her personality, some underlying motive, afection or plan; that she too is perhaps a victim of the multiplicity of life. But the younger Marcel was looking in the wrong place, as emerges in his later refections and below. As Jean-Yves Tadié puts it, there are no keys to Proust’s characters (Tadié 1999, 655). As readers of Proust, only frustration can result from reading as we read Dickens or George Eliot, as if a book were the trail of a crime, a sequence of clues converging on the dark secret of character. The case is summed up perfectly by the evolution of Marcel’s attitude towards architecture: his childish belief in the perfect aesthetic unity and integration of the church at Balbec—the ‘almost Persian’ edifce lashed by the gales of the Normandy coast—must ultimately give way to a more worldly understanding of the great Gothic cathedrals as eclectic objects, constructed over long and often interrupted periods of time, subject to the vicissitudes and caprice of succeeding generations with their variable and often conficting purposes and sensibilities. Theme 3: Projection. ‘Only imagination and belief ’, says Marcel, ‘can diferentiate certain objects and people from the rest, and create an atmosphere’ (G, 27; II 331). This process of 255

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unifying disparate impressions, the subjective synthesis of identity, is something like the underlying principle of Proustian composition, as the twelve-tone system was for serial composers. The identity, unity or essence projected onto a collection of impressions, for Proust, obeys not laws of outer nature but the needs of the organism. Such needs are many, but by far the profoundest is the need to act out the inner drama of love. 3 Swann eventually comes to see that the beloved is only the adventitiously selected focus of the internalised fantasy that constitutes love, not its explanation or justifcation: Odette’s person, indeed, no longer had any great place in it. When his eyes fell upon the photograph of Odette on his table, or when she came to see him, he had difculty identifying her face, either in the fesh or on pasteboard, with the painful and continuous anxiety that dwelt in his mind. He would say to himself, almost with astonishment, ‘It’s she!’ as if suddenly we were shown in a separate, externalised form one of our own maladies, and found that it bore no relation what we were sufering. (SW, 367–8; I, 303) The point, of course, is not merely the subjective basis of love; the point is that the intentional object of love is not the external object but the subjective representation that happens to be assigned to the external object, like a costume for the masque. Nor is the point confned to people we love (nor even to people, as in the Balbec church). Marcel, musing on the contrast between Swann as known in society and Swann of ‘good country neighbourliness’ known to his parents at Combray, says: …even in the most insignifcant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act that we describe as ‘seeing a person we know’ is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have formed about him, and in the total picture that we compose in our minds, these notions certainly have the principal place. (SW, 21; I 18–19) Theme 4: Contextualism. Later in life, Marcel recognises that he would not fnd lost meanings if he were merely to rediscover the objects that had seemed to contain them. Walking at the eastern edge of the Bois de Boulogne, he looks with dismay upon the fashions that have superseded those that so charmed him as a youth. He remembers Mme Swann’s clothes, and how he used to take tea with her in his adolescent years, when he was getting to know the Swann family again: But it would not have sufced me that the costumes alone should still have been the same as those in distant years. Because of the solidarity that binds together the diferent parts of a general impression that our memory keeps in a balance whole of which are not permitted to subtract or to decline any fraction, I should have liked to be able to pass the rest of the day with one of these women, over a cup of tea, in an apartment with dark-painted walls (as Mme Swann’s were still in the year after that in which the frst part of this story ends) against which would glow the orange fame, the red combustion, the pink and white fickering of her chrysanthemums in the twilight of a November evening […]. (SW, 505; I, 418) 256

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A strong echo of this is conspicuous in the philosophy of language. Frege’s context principle states that only in the context of a sentence has a word really a meaning; Quine and Davidson extended the point, holding that there is no assigning meaning to a sentence without interpreting the language as a whole (or a large portion of the language). Wittgenstein too is often said to have gone in for this holism. Still, the principle of compositionality demands a pretence of atomism: if we were not permitted to think of words as bearing meanings independently, we could not interpret new sentences. It is most plausible that a similar dialectic holds in the case of value. If so then we should expect the unrefective person to be subject to an illusion of axiological atomism, that meaning and value are to be found in things. For Proust, the undoing of this illusion is the progress of disenchantment, but also, as we will see, of aesthetic revelation. Indeed, it would not go too far to group him with certain idealists— Schiller, Croce, Bosanquet, perhaps Schopenhauer, Bergson—in holding that aesthetic consciousness enables us at least partially to grasp the interdependence of things, thus that the meaning and value that things have for us cannot survive their detachment from their actual context. And aspect-seeing, remember, involves self-consciousness, awareness that we create the unity, the aspect. This point thus goes beyond the interpenetration of meaning and value, since it tells us that interpenetration is not merely actual but necessary, telling us something about what it is to have meaning and value. Theme 5: The Ideality of Art. If there is a watershed in the evolution of Proust the artist, then it was the sequence of events 1905–1908, when in succession he completed his translation of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, mourned his mother, and began to write the frst recognisable version of In Search of Lost Time, comprising certain scenes and episodes that would be woven into the eventual fabric, along with notes on literary aesthetics written partly in opposition to Sainte-Beuve, and which would eventually be incorporated into the essay that forms the conclusion of In Search of Lost Time. Proust’s opposition to Sainte-Beuve partly concerned the relation of the writer’s life to the meaning of his works. But the seeds of the opposition had already sprouted when he was fnishing with Ruskin three years before. Reading, Proust had realised, is not merely an activity of the intellect, in the sense that to understand the work is to apply one’s knowledge of language and to draw inferences based upon one’s knowledge of matters of fact, including knowledge of the author’s life and probable intentions. It is rather an activity of the imagination, in the sense that the reader’s task is to generate a meaningful experience. ‘The substance of our books … should be drawn from our imaginations’ (CSB, 273); only then can [s]uch things show us that what [is valid for] that admittedly rather subjective self … extends, with a more generalized validity to selves of the same nature, and to that more objective self, the cultural group we belong to when we read; is valid not only for our private world but for our universal world. (CSB, 275) The imagination obeys its own laws that lie outside the domain of logic or reason, and it is only the imagination that can deliver the experiential understanding characteristic of art. That is exactly the distinction that Proust is insisting on when contrasting voluntary memory with involuntary memory: voluntary memory is irrelevant to art because it is an exercise of reason, delivering mere propositions—I did this, then I did that and so on, whereas involuntary memory spontaneously delivers the phenomenology of what transpired. Interestingly, there arose at roughly this time the Ideal Theory of Art, in Croce’s landmark book of 1902 Aesthetic (neither Tadié nor any other writer I know suggests that Proust 257

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read Croce, but he did get to know Croce’s English translator Douglas Ainslie at this time; Ainslie’s frst edition was 1909). According to the ideal theory, the work of art cannot be identifed with the material work, because the material lacks the essential properties of the work of art, and nor do those properties supervene on any set of objective facts such as those about the author’s life. This way of thinking about art is conspicuous in Marcel’s discussion of the imaginary painter Elstir—not least because unlike the case of the written word, painting is one domain where an ideal theory of art might seem at its least plausible: unlike poetry or music, which seemingly can exist in advance of being written down, played or recited, it does not seem that a painting is anything other than a material object, which simply cannot enjoy a merely mental existence. Elstir’s paintings have the character of picture puzzles: they are superfcially visual nonsense, depending for their sense on the spectator’s capacity to organise the visual stimulus into a coherent representation of reality (BG, 477–88; II 190–9). Perhaps in some sense that is ultimately true of all pictures; but Elstir’s genius lay in his ability self-consciously to exploit that power of visual imagination in radically new ways, thereby showing just how little in our interpretation of the world depends on what is given, how much of it is contributed by ourselves. Theme 6: The Subjectivity of Unity. This is implicit in the previous, but it’s worth it to give it a separate if brief mention. Marcel’s story is one of simultaneous disenchantment and enlightenment, perhaps a disenchantment that is enlightenment. His propensity to believe that beauty, value, and meaning are to be found in things, that one might come to possess or know the precious commodity by approaching nearer to the thing, cannot be sustained. On the contrary, for Marcel, closer inspection seems to reveal only the dissipation of beauty, value and meaning; all that is evident on closer inspection is a disconcerting multiplicity that cannot logically be reassembled into the unitary whole that had been cognised from afar. Like that of a work of art, the unity of a personality, of a place, of a style or a social group cannot be discovered by analysing the thing because it is imposed by the mind. That the unity of a structure is the product of belief in that unity, and not vice versa (C, 67; III 574), is exemplifed most literally by his aforementioned realisation concerning the church at Balbec. The revelations at the end of the narrative do not change this, but they involve a drastic re-orientation of his attitude towards it.

Te One and (as) the Other Thus, along with the six aspect-types or aspect-like phenomena A-F, we have six interwoven themes in Proust: Interpenetration, Multiplicity, Projection, Contextualism, the Ideality of Art, and the Subjectivity of Unity. I do not suggest that the six are to be compared with the other six one-by-one. Rather, what I am suggesting is that the Proustian six are Proust’s ways of coping with what Wittgenstein’s six collectively embody from a very diferent point of view: That art, in particular, makes manifest at once the subjectivity of the particular things that it represents or expresses, and that these things are shareable. They are not objective matters of fact, but intersubjective. Those things constitute our ‘life-world’, and the fundamental foci of the life-world are not further spatio-temporal objects along with trees and bicycles, but human beings, the entities that perceive and experience it, for whom it is a life-world.4 The rest of this piece explores this further. Before doing so in earnest, I must frst return to a point intimated in the introduction that the very idea of involuntary memory seems to run counter to Wittgenstein’s anti-privacy stricture. I can now say why I do not see this especially as a problem. First, there is no question of using involuntary memory in an account of linguistic meaning; that is most visibly 258

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what Wittgenstein is inveighing against in the famous passages in the so-called ‘Private Language Argument’ (PI, 244–71). Second, although it is typically highly idiosyncratic, there is often nothing notably private about the content of involuntary memory, at least not on its surface. Third—and this is what is most interesting and is what we are now set up to hear—insofar as it involves a dimension of privacy, the content or proto-content dwells on the fringes of the sayable, of the objective, of the linguistically intelligible, of what is provided for by established language-games. That is the point of the last paragraph of “AspectPerception and Its Domain” in this piece, generalised to related phenomena, to the many inscrutable similarities found in life, in the way I have described. The experience is uniquely overpowering, overpoweringly unique, and in a sense absurd—there is nothing objectively special about the similarities at work—but it does not involve garden-variety capacities of mind that are not active elsewhere. Now back to Proust. Unity, as we have seen, is imposed according to the habits, needs and desires of the individual. But unifcation (or individuation), on the surface at least, violates or ignores contextualism. As such, it amounts to a double form of idolatry: the belief that the thing contains its own principle of individuation, plus its own essential meaning or value. This ignores not only the context-dependence of meaning and value but also its subjectivity. Thus to think of art as itself containing meaning or value is itself a kind of idolatry—the very idolatry with which Proust ultimately came to charge Ruskin (RR, 99–130). On the contrary, the signifcance of art is precisely that by exercising our value and meaning-generating capacities so deeply and in so many dimensions, it reveals to us our actual axiological relation to reality—namely that insofar as it means something to us is beautiful or valuable, it does so or is so only by virtue of our own mental activity. And realising this—as in the Past Recaptured, the conclusion of the Recherche, fnding an allegory in the joining of the Méséglise and Guermantes ways, a unifcation made incarnate in the form of Gilberte’s daughter (SW, 159–61; I 132–3; TR, 426–8; IV 606–7) turns disillusion into enlightenment, re-animates and indeed recaptures the past and the people who inhabit it. The Proustian accepts a maximum generalisation of Forster’s ‘only connect’— meaning that such connection by the individual is the only way of having a life. Insofar as it means something to us, the world is what it is by virtue of exactly the same dynamics that constitute aesthetic signifcance, the signifcance of works of art. This is not to aestheticise life in the manner of Pater or Wilde but to re-substantiate the aesthetic, to put meat on its bones. Indeed, it should lead us to conclude that sheer aestheticism is not fully intelligible, for aspects in all their variety can be known only by living them—morality in particular is not a system of dry propositions but comes into our existence as forms of life, practice. Once we recognise the dependence of art on aspects and related phenomena as described in “Aspect-Perception and Its Domain”—which we might sum up as the ‘intersubjective character’ of art—we recognise that the whole world of human beings—that is the whole world, insofar as it has value in it—is an ‘aesthetic phenomenon’, or can be justifed only as such, as Nietzsche said (2000, 38). The unity of things in life and the unities experienced aesthetically are the same. Involuntary Memory perhaps afords us a symbol rather than a proof, but psychologically a uniquely efcacious one, with an uncanny conviction of verisimilitude. It afords not a vision of the randomly collected, ossifed wastage of one’s personality, nor the charming felds of Elysium, but an ineluctable glimpse of something real: the real structures and multi-dimensional dynamics of the life-world that normally pass unremarked. It may be subjective—maybe even ‘ideal’—but the credulousness of the experience is overwhelming and undeniable; life as we know it simply cannot happen without it, not without the unfathomably many connections that conspire beneath ordinary experience and language. It is the mode and manner of our being. 259

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It is also why Marcel can think of the fnal epiphany, the transmogrifcation of pessimism and despair to something like hope, or at least to an afrmative if retrospective conclusion, as a reunifcation not only of things but also of persons: Saint-Loup, Gilberte, Swann, Albertine, the Duchesse, Françoise and himself. What he fnds is that they are not adventitious constellations of this and that, as he had so long feared was true, but things with an essence that reaches across time (although her conclusion difers from mine, this situation is wellgrasped by de Dobay Rifelj 1984, 228 and passim.) It is not that he fnds at last their inner haecceities, but that they too are the foci of the life-world, of the aesthetic, intersubjective phenomena that I have described. Our experience of people is explained in terms of spontaneity, metaphor, aspects, etc. that are projected but on the whole shared. It is not just wishful thinking that is on display when he renders the Duchesse, Saint-Loup and Albertine in near poetry; he is doing justice to the fact that they really are works of art—and again, this is not to think of people as mere objects to play with our artistic games, but to recognise the pervasive nature of the aesthetic. Proust the man as well as Marcel the narrator came to place ever more importance on music— especially for Proust the late quartets of Beethoven, for Marcel the music of Vinteuil. Again we can think of this theme under the guise of aspects, as hinted before. What makes a variation a variation? Perhaps it’s possible to hit on an extensionally adequate answer purely in terms of music theory—in terms of transposition, repetition, inversion, retrogression, and so on—but the intentional question, the question of why the given extension is correct, of why this is a variation and not that, can ultimately be answered only in terms of the way things strike an experienced listener. In other words because we say so. It is aspect-perception at its purest (Tadié 1999, 636). Tadié emphasises ‘Style’ in Proust’s vision, and maybe at bottom, in characterising it that way, Tadié is seeing the same thing as I have been trying to convey. In saying Style is in a sense everything, of course, Tadié does not mean style in the sense of sartorial choices. He means literary style, and more generally artistic style, as having the power to expand consciousness, as creating the world (as it is for us). And this shows why points about reading— frst broached in Contre Sainte-Beuve—are foundational for a thorough understanding of Recherche (aestheticism, again, has things back-to-front). A dimension of this is the thought that the very syntax of Proust seems to as it were expand the mental horizon—the wonderful, efortlessly long sentences, with clauses within clauses, with deliciously extended waits for the verb, are central to Proust’s vision—a thought had by so many. The picture then is that the essence of the personality is the artistic but the essence of the artistic is the personality. It is an equation, running both ways. Much as Nietzsche, Croce and Collingwood held, although for somewhat diferent reasons, everyone is an artist. The self is, or least it must be experienced as not merely the here-and-now batch of sense-data that no longer exists once they happen, to be replaced by another one; not a sequence of disconnected events or episodes. It is a structure brought into being by aspect-perception and related phenomena. The artist makes this manifest that the self embodies a constellation of memories, a thing that has temporal parts, which can be revisited more than once; however many dimensions this complex entity requires—again Balbec church is a perfect allegory for this—one of them is time.5

Notes 1 See Baz 2000, 2016, 2020a and 2020b, and Agam-Segel 2019. In the Investigations there is just one place in which Wittgenstein speaks of ‘continuous aspect-perception’ (PI II 194b); later (PI II 205b) he calls the attitude we take normally towards portraits as ‘regarding-as’ (see PI II 198h, 203a,

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Art and the Life-World 206d, 205c, 207c; RPPI 23, 31, 54, 156, 190, 316, 207, 379, 411, 526, 528, and 532; LWI 580, 583, 588, 697; see Baz 2016 for doubts). It does seem central to Wittgenstein’s interest in aspects that we be struck by them, that we fnd them surprising: If this constellation is always and continuously a face for me, then I have not named an aspect. For that means that I always encounter it as a face; whereas the peculiarity of the aspect is that I see something into a picture. So that I might say: I see something that isn’t there at all, that does not reside in the fgure, so that it may surprise me that I see it. (RPP: 1028)

2

3 4

5

And: “I should like to say that what dawns here lasts only as long as I am occupied with the object in a particular way… Ask yourself ‘For how long am I struck by a thing?’ For how long do I fnd it new.” (PI: 210c). But evidently Wittgenstein was not quite certain whether we should refuse to speak of continuous cases as ones of aspect-perception; and again, I suppose that the underlying similarity is enough for my purposes (PI I: 194c-g; cf. ‘acute’ and ‘chronic’: RPPI: 508; see RPPI: 1028; see also RRPI: 507, 1021, 1022, 1034; LWI: 555; LWII: 14h). Resemblance (along a certain dimension such as shape) is symmetrical (if x resembles y then y resembles x), refexive (x resembles itself ), and weakly transitive—the last object in a sufciently long chain of strongly resembling objects (along a certain dimension) may fail to resemble the frst. Aspect-perception is not symmetrical (not asymmetric; faces may share an aspect), irrefexive, and not transitive (see Kemp 2021 for details). Likely philosophical fgures here include Hume, Kant and Nietzsche; one thinks of Freud in this connection too. A further Freudian theme is introjection: Marcel’s need to act out the drama of love is borne of his having overcome the resistance of his mother by internalising her. Kant characterised experience as ‘spontaneous’. In Kant’s eyes the verb ‘experiencing’ is apposite in conveying something that we do. It is—at least from the critical point of view—active. When Kant says that it is necessary that the I-think should accompany my representations, the selfconsciousness is not that of a silent witness to mental events, but that there are no representations that are not—though perhaps in an extended sense—the upshot of a subject performing an action. In the Critique of Judgement, Kant famously characterises aesthetic experience in terms of the ‘free play’ of the conceptual and perceptual faculties (Kant 1987). Because experience is never the mere passive reception of contents from without, it must in some sense be free, even if it is normally constrained by the logic of appearances. That is what aesthetic experience is: in the free play of our spontaneity, we become conscious of ourselves as the author of experience. Since the organs thereby exercised are preconditions of objective experience, we reasonably expect that objects that activate our faculties in those ways will do it for others. I dedicate this to the memory of Jim Edwards, with whom I discussed Proust in the years around 2000. I would also like to acknowledge comments and reactions over the years of Avner Baz, Christopher Belshaw, Ayala King, Joshua Landy, and Andrew Lugg. I also thank the editors Anna Elsner and Tom Stern for their many helpful suggestions. Early versions of parts of this were delivered in 2003 as ‘Wittgenstein, Proust, and the Metaphysics of Mind’, American Society for Aesthetics, annual meeting, San Francisco; and in 2019 as ‘The Duck, The Rabbit and the Madeleine’, Philosophical Angles on Proust, The University of Glasgow. I thank the participants.

References Agam-Segal, Reshef (2019) ‘Avner Baz on Aspects and Concepts: A Critique’. Inquiry, on-line, doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1610049. Baz, Avner (2000) ‘What’s the Point of Seeing Aspects?’. Philosophical Investigations 23: 97–122. ——— (2016) ‘Aspects of Perception’, in Gary Kemp and Gabriele Mras, Wollheim, Wittgenstein, and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in, Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge: 49–76. ——— (2020a) Wittgenstein on Aspect Perception, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2020b) The Signifcance of Aspect Perception: Bringing the Phenomenal World into View, New York: Springer. Budd, Malcolm (1987) ‘Wittgenstein on Seeing Aspects’, Mind 96/381:1–17. Croce, Benedetto (1902) Esetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Bari: Laterza. Tr. by D. Ainslie as Aesthetic, London: Noonday (1909).

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Gary Kemp de Dobay Rifelj, Carol (1984) ‘Circumscription: Proust’s The Captive and the Problem of Other Minds’, Studies in 20th Century Literature 8/2: 211–31. Kant, Immanuel (1987) Critique of Judgement, Tr, by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Co. Kemp, Gary (2016) ‘Seeing a Measure of Kant in Wollheim’, in Kemp and Gabriel Mras, eds. Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation: Seeing-as and Seeing-in, Oxford: Routledge: 183–204. ——— (2021) ‘The Logic of Aspect-perception and Perceived Resemblance’, Acta Analytica 36(1): 49–53. Kuusela, Oskari, Mihai Ometiță and Timur Uçan, eds. (2020) Wittgenstein and Phenomenology, Oxford: Routledge. Landy, Joshua (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2000), The Birth of Tragedy, tr. by Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Proust, Marcel (1958). Contre Sainte-Beuve, in Marcel Proust on Art and Literature, tr. by Sylvia Townsend Warner, New York: Meridian Books: 19–276. Noted as CSB. ——— (1987–1989) À la recherche du temps perdu, Pléiade edition, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié et al., Paris: Gallimard. References are indicated by a roman numeral to indicate the volume and an arabic numeral to indicate the page numbers, i.e. ‘(II 345)’. ——— (1989) On Reading Ruskin, tr. and ed. by Jean Autret, Phillip J. Wolfe, William Burford, New Haven: Yale University Press. Noted as RR. ——— (2000–2005) In Search of Lost Time, Vintage Classics six-volume tr. by C.K. Scott Moncrief, revised by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright, London: Vintage. References are to the abbreviated volume title—SW (Swann’s Way), BG (Within a Budding Grove), G (The Guermantes Way), SG (Sodom and Gomorrah), C (The Captive), F (The Fugitive), TR (Time Regained)—followed by page numbers, i.e. ‘(SW, 345)’. Tadié, Jean-Yves (1999) Marcel Proust: A Life, tr. by Euan Cameron, London: Penguin. Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, tr. by E. Anscombe. Noted as PI. References to this work are to section numbers in Part I, and page numbers with paragraphs in the case of Part II. ——— (1958) The Blue and Brown Books. Ed. by R. Rhees. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as BB. References to this work are to page numbers. ———(1967) Zettel. Ed. by G. Anscombe and G. von Wright, tr. by G. Anscombe. (Berkeley: University of California). Noted as Z. References to this work are to section numbers. ——— (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief. Compiled from notes taken by Y. Smythies, R. Rhees and J. Taylor. Ed. by C. Barret. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as LA. References to this work are to its various parts, followed by paragraph numbers. ——— (1977) Remarks on Colour, ed. G. Anscombe and trans. by L. Schättle. Oxford: Blackwell. Noted as RC. References to this work are to the three parts, followed by paragraph numbers. ——— (1980a) Culture and Value. Ed. G. von Wright, tr. by P. Winch. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as CV. References to this work are to section numbers. ——— (1980b) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. Ed. by G. Anscombe and G. von Wright, tr. by G. Anscombe. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as RPPI. References to this work are to section numbers. ——— (1980c) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Ed. by G. Anscombe and H. Nyman, tr. by C Luckhardt and M. Aue. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as RPPII. References to this work are to section numbers. ——— (1982) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume I. Ed. by G. von Wright and H.  Nyman, tr. by C Luckhardt and M. Aue. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as LWI. References to this work are to section numbers. ——— (1992) Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II. Ed. by G. von Wright and H.  Nyman, tr. by C Luckhardt and M. Aue. (Oxford: Blackwell). Noted as LWII. References to this work are to page numbers followed by paragraph numbers. Wollheim R (1987) Painting as an Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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PART 5

Ethics

17 PROUST AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF LOVE Martijn Buijs

Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu ofers us a profound but deeply ambivalent engagement with the nature of love. Routinely equated with the French Moralists’ skeptical view, in which love is merely the thinly veiled desire to possess the object of our afections, Proust’s idea of love in fact emerges from the Recherche as a painful form of self-knowledge that lays bare both our need of the other, and the fact that we remain, in the fnal reckoning, hopelessly alone. Only the power of art provides a way out of this solipsism. This vision cannot simply be disqualifed on moral grounds. Yet perhaps, something of what it misses about the possibility of an encounter with the other becomes clear in what it sees in Albertine’s eyes.

Proust’s Erotic Ambivalence Proust’s imagination is ruled by a strangely ambivalent fascination with the nature of love. The throb of passionate longing is, for sure, everywhere in the Recherche, and operates a driving force without rival on the people who inhabit it. One does not have to look far to realize this. Already the goodnight kiss from Maman the young Marcel waits for anxiously at the top of the stairs serves as a frst hint, one that is soon confrmed by his successive dreamy infatuations with his playmate Gilberte, her stylishly disreputable mother, and the myth-shrouded fgure of the Duchesse de Guermantes. Nor is Proust’s protagonist alone in this matter. Swann’s pursuit of the faithless Odette, Saint-Loup’s obsession with Rachel, and Charlus’ fatal desire for Morel all show the singularly imperious grasp that love has on the lives we encounter here. These three loves might each in their own way be said to form anticipatory sketches for the histoire d’amour that will end up colonizing much of the Recherche: that of Marcel’s love for Albertine, see-sawing between turbulent passion and bored possession, and of the consuming mourning that follows upon her loss. This is a world in which Eros is a phenomenon of the frst order. This is not merely because love seems to rule much of human behavior. In a manner altogether unlike what we experience in our goings about in our everyday world, Proust is keen to underline, love is nothing less than a traumatic shock. Our lives as we lead them are on the whole hopelessly under the sway of ingrained personal habit, social convention, or the fragile constructions of our conscious intellect. However we may convince our waking selves that these patterns that make up our lives represent the earnest commitments our innate desires and our refective choices have brought us to, they are in fact little other than comforting DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-23

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self-deceptions we have become so used to that even upon close inspection we are no longer able to recognize them as such. Not so in the case of love. If Eros is a great god, it is because he overturns our customary ways and thoughts with an unparalleled vehemence, breaking down our illusory self-conceptions through a depth of pain and desire that cuts us to the core. It exposes our hidden truth. It is unsurprising, given this eminent role of the erotic, that one of the titles Proust considered giving his book is Les intermittences du cœur. The heart with its rhythm of vehement alterations knows, with a certainty rooted in our physical being, what our minds normally so successfully obscure from ourselves. For all this, Proust is not a pious devotee of the god of love. If love is to be likened to cardiac arrhythmia, a condition that deeply troubles our tranquility of mind and confronts us with something we can no longer simply deny or alter, it is by the same token also a disease – and a deadly one at that. Under Proust’s coolly clinical examination, this sickness of the heart reveals that we are not the self-transparent, self-determining individuals we usually fatter ourselves we are – or at least strive to become – but hopelessly dependent creatures who, much as we hide it from ourselves where we can, are ruled by lack and longing. But there is no remedy for this lack. The promise that love seems to hold out that we may regain our wholeness by being united with the object of our afections – a wholeness which, in truth, we never had – is to Proust an altogether specious one. For what the lover wants in Proust, what would rescue him or her from his unbearable sense of lack, is one thing only: to have full and total possession of the beloved. The problem is not that such a desire is at base a narcissistic demand for control, and thus of morally dubious origin, though Proust would no doubt readily admit it is, and would as the unrepentant a-moralist he is remain unperturbed by the moral implications.1 Nor is it that the desire is fed not by one’s genuine devotion to the other, but instead by jealousy – the vivid experience that the other is not, and can never fully be, under our control, an experience that frst creates, and subsequently repeatedly infames, the controlling urge. It is rather that in Proust’s universe this demand for control and the jealous frustration that feeds it do not seem to be aberrations, signs of love gone awry, but the sum total of what love amounts to. As fnite beings, we are both painfully incomplete and yet trapped in the boundaries of our own being. We cannot help but strain for the other that we are constitutively unable to reach, let alone have as our own. There are no happy loves. This then is the Proustian ambiguity towards love: it is an afect that lays bare in a world caught in illusion a truth we could not otherwise reach, but it is a truth which understood properly – as the lover in the grips of passion cannot, but the writer who has survived his brush with love might – is a profoundly pessimistic one: we need the other; we remain alone. 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, 515; IV 34)

Erotics beyond the French Moralists We should keep in mind that this vision, however pessimistic it may seem, does not altogether reduce love to a form of self-deception. Such a view is of course profoundly familiar to Proust from the tradition of the French Moralists: love as a mere sickness which we infict 266

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on ourselves and which leaves us caught in illusion. Were we to go by La Rochefoucauld, what we hide under the gallant name of love is a fever tied to jealousy, fed in its need for novelty only by uncertainty, akin mostly to hatred, and at base little more than the unsightly desire to possess the body and lord it over the mind of our love interest.2 Stendhal for his part speaks of crystallization – whatever accident it may be that gives the frst impulse to our desire, it is only after, through a process of subjective projection, that we imbue the object of our amorous sentiments with its precious value, the way salt crystals will form on an old tree branch if one leaves it in a salt mine – and the more unattainable the object, and the less we may in fact know about it, the greater the crystallization.3 That Proust is no stranger to such points of view will be evident. Alain Badiou and JeanLuc Marion, the two contemporary French philosophers who have most explicitly grappled with the question of love and in diferent ways, have placed it at the center of their philosophical work, in fact roundly attribute it to him. Thus, for Badiou, Proust as the “greatest genius” of the Moralist tradition simply denies the psychological reality of love other than as an imaginary construct; intense and diabolical, the true content of amorous subjectivity is carnal jealousy.4 If this were what Proust’s anatomy of love amounts to, he would surely be a psychologist, whether shrewd or wrong-headed in his pessimism, but not a potential rival to the philosopher of love. To claim this, however, is to sidestep that love in Proust is not merely an irrational sentiment, however entrenched in our thoughts, but a disruptive shock that brings to our potential awareness a truth that otherwise would remain hidden. Marion for his part sees in Proust the literary embodiment of a larger, and specifcally philosophical, conundrum. In the broad sweep of Marion’s analysis, modern philosophy from Descartes up to Husserl dictates that love is a passion inherently based on confused and thus arbitrary and irrational ideas. Such a passion says little about the beloved object, because it cannot form any adequate idea of it, but it says all the more about the loving subject and its failure to grasp the beloved. Instead of giving access to the beloved, of opening the way to the possibility of anything resembling communication or communion, love is a prison for the lover. This is all the more so because, if the subject cannot reach an adequate idea of its object, then the sole determinant of the love relationship is the arbitrary will of the subject; the object is, in the fnal analysis, the interchangeable place holder to which the subject attaches itself in erotic desire. In such a love relationship, the subject only loves its loving, or in other words, it ultimately only seeks to love itself. The other never appears as such, but at best forms the useful occasion for an attachment that is both devoid of reason and anchored only in the subject itself. Love thus seen is defned by its ignorance of the other. Marion comments: Sticking with the best-known examples, from Stendhal to Proust, the amorous hero suffers a passion that, confrming Spinoza, describes much more obviously the state of his own subjectivity than this other whom he nevertheless claims to love so much that he would sacrifce and throw over everything for her. Passion is born of the desire, the imagination, the timidity, the admiration, the audacity, – of he who loves; it grows all the more as the object stays far away, unavailable, missing – in short, does not appear, and indeed, is not. Reciprocally, passion ceases as soon as its object becomes, for the frst time, visible as such: when she at last shows or ofers herself, the principal of reality that she puts into motion defuses a passion that, precisely, fed itself solely on her unreality […].5 No doubt this is love in action as we fnd it in much of the Recherche – a momentous subjective passion that, as soon as it feels it securely grasps the object of its desire, loses interest in it, 267

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only to spring to life again violently when that grasp begins to slip or suddenly proves illusory. Yet what both Badiou and Marion miss, or perhaps willfully overlook, is that although this is accurate enough a description of the experience of love that takes a hold of Swann, Charlus, or the protagonist himself, it does not follow that this is all that the Recherche has to say about love. For none of this can account for the revelatory power Proust also ascribes to love, and it leaves out altogether the fact that the narrator refects at length not only on the illusions of love but also on the indispensable role it plays in the life that is most, and perhaps solely, worth living: a life transformed into an aesthetic phenomenon through the power of art. Yet it is precisely here, where such a thing as a possible connection between love and transcendence is at stake, that Proust explicitly engages with the two most classical philosophical works on Eros: Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus. If there is such a thing as Proust’s philosophy of love, it is only in its engagement with Plato that it can be understood and critically scrutinized.6 There is no guarantee, of course, that situating Proust against the backdrop of the philosophy of love in general, and that of Platonic Eros specifcally, will save him from accusations leveled against him. It might be, on the contrary, that precisely because Proust is rooted in this tradition, an attempt at understanding his fascination with love will show up defects in that tradition itself that one may otherwise have missed. Conversely, Proust’s engagement with Plato will not necessarily lead us to change the picture of love sketched above, but it will perhaps give us room to ask the question where it is that Proust’s erotic solipsism comes from, what justifes it in his eyes, and whether it is indeed as inescapable as he would have us believe.

Love as Self-Knowledge In order to approach the question of the role of Platonic Eros in the Recherche, I turn to another recent philosophical engagement with Proust – that in the work of Martha Nussbaum.7 What is crucial for our purposes is that Nussbaum’s readings of Proust provide a patient and sustained attention to his work that goes beyond making him the mouthpiece, however splendid, of a certain opinion on what love is or how it functions, an illustration of a take on the nature of love we might just as well come to by some different way. Her manner of reading equally avoids the opposite error – to suppose that, as a work of literature, the Recherche is simply not in the business of telling us what the truth about love is. Instead, she is attentive both to the claims about love that the Recherche advances in what it says and what it shows, and to the far from accidental way it chooses to advance these claims in its highly self-conscious form as a work of narrative fction of peculiar scope and ambition. 8 This ambition, expressed both in the work as what drives the narrator and by the work as its own aim, is to seek the truth. As Deleuze, to whom we will have occasion to return, already noted, the recherche of the title is not to be taken as a form of musing over the ephemeral past but as an attempt to redeem from the time that has run through our fngers a truth that eternally outlasts it.9 There’s a resonance of sorts here with Malebranche’s De la recherche de la vérité, and – though the analogy is, to be sure, not to be stretched too far – here too the search that the protagonist is engaged in is essentially guided by the attempt to pierce through the various errors of the senses and the understanding that cloud one’s view. But what is this curious truth that the Recherche is in pursuit of, which seems to announce itself in every signifcant corner of experience, hints at being all-encompassing, and yet frustratingly keeps withdrawing before us? 268

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By Nussbaum’s lights one could begin, somewhat tentatively, by suggesting that it is a form of self-knowledge, a knowledge of the soul, that is being pursued here. Now, knowing the self is an eminently philosophical desire. The Recherche thus conceived has an aim similar to that of philosophy, but rejects its methods as altogether unsatisfactory for unlocking what goes on in the soul. This rivalry, which is also not lost on Deleuze, makes Nussbaum depict the Recherche, at least at frst, as an anti-Platonic work.10 A “Platonic” account of the soul in the sense Nussbaum has in mind would be one given from an intellectual standpoint untrammeled by the confusions of our appetitive and emotive embodied natures, and consist only in rigorous and universal argumentation. By contrast, the perspective of the Recherche never leaves that of our time-bound worldly existence and of its needs and desires, even in those moments where it ofers a universal image of what self-knowledge might look like, and has a sharp sense for the inherently contradictory nature of our psychic lives. Above all, it casts suspicion on our attempts to gain self-knowledge through anything like a calm detached investigation ofered by calm detached means. True experience in the Recherche is, Nussbaum suggests, achieved only in and through the sufering brought about by violent passion. Contemplative introspection might tell the protagonist that, all things considered, he cares little for Albertine, but it is the revelation of her acquaintance with Vinteuil’s daughter – an infamous lesbian – and the stabbing jealousy it causes that speaks the “open sesame” showing him Albertine lodged inside his heart; he may well decide calmly to break with her, but when it is Albertine who turns out to have left him, he learns a lesson his dispassionate self-observing has in fact only been serving to hide from him: “Comme la soufrance va plus loin en psychologie que la psychologie!” [“How much further does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!”] (IV 3; F, 477). Nussbaum comments that we might see the knowledge of love […] as very diferent from a grasping of some independent fact about the world; as something that is in part constituted by the experience of responding to a loss with need and pain. Love is grasped in the experience of loving and sufering. That pain is not some separate thing that instrumentally gives us access to the love; it is constitutive of loving itself. (Nussbaum 1990, 255) But if this is the case, and if love is not an accidental but an essential way in which we relate to the world and those that make it up for us, then the philosophical attempt to understand the self through disengaged, rational scrutiny of inner states as if they were outside ourselves is not merely mistaken – it is a way of avoiding ourselves, a way of avoiding to love. This opposition between the Recherche and its “Platonic” rival is striking in more than one way. Nussbaum readily admits that her hard-nosed, abstract Platonist here will hardly do as a portrait of the Plato of the Symposium and the Phaedrus. Her criticism seems sooner aimed at a certain mode of philosophizing, one that is above all committed to dispassionateness, clarity and certainty in its views of what makes up knowledge and self-knowledge, and holds corresponding commitments about how such knowledge should be articulated and expressed. This description more straightforwardly fts the views of what philosophical style should be, and how it relates to the rational nature of philosophy itself, that we fnd in (say) Locke or Kant. More striking for present purposes is that Proust, scolded by the likes of Badiou and Marion for reducing love to a self-deceptive exercise in possessiveness and vanity, seems on the contrary to emerge from Nussbaum’s account here as a champion of love; the sufering it brings is the privileged key to self-knowledge. What sort of self-knowledge is it precisely that we are here confronted with, however? 269

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Love as Cataleptic Impression Proust, it turns out, is not as unlike the philosophers as this frst account might have led us to believe. For while he may reject the idea that dispassionate introspection could yield the truth about ourselves, he too no less than his philosopher opponent is sold on clarity and certainty as hallmarks of true self-knowledge. To bring this out, Nussbaum weaves an extensive analogy between the insight yielded by love’s sufering in the Recherche and a concept from Stoic philosophy: that of the cataleptic impression.11 The concept of katalepsis, roughly a “frm grasp”, is frst attributed to Zeno of Citium, the father of Stoicism.12 In the briefest of terms, a cataleptic impression is a form – indeed, the only form we have – of unmediated contact with reality. Stamped onto our souls directly, the cataleptic impression is by its very nature so clear and forceful we could not possibly be mistaken about it; it bears its own mark of truth. It is only because there are such impressions, the argument runs, that knowledge is possible; arranged together systematically in the appropriate manner, they are the building blocks that make up all our meaningful acts of knowing. To the Stoics, of course, the emotions could not possibly qualify as such impressions. Emotions are to them forms of mistaken judgment; they boil down, in one way or another, to the erroneous idea that this or that outside us that we fear or desire is somehow tied to our ability to achieve fourishing. And yet, transposed into the register of afect, it is precisely such an idea of an unmediated truth forcing itself upon us that seems to underpin the power of erotic sufering in the Recherche. The overwhelming force of such an impression, which bypasses our habitual strategies of comfort and concealment, shocks us into passivity and pained surprise. It is not our intellect that is the proper instrument of truth, but rather the brusque reaction of pain. In this sense, sufering yields a knowledge of the self no theory of the soul could provide. And this genuine sort of self-knowledge through love the Recherche strives for has a further characteristic: there is not, frst, a fact out there in the world or inside ourselves that the impression subsequently signals; in a paradoxical yet intimate way, love is constituted by the impression that reveals it. If we agree that it is something analogous to the Stoic cataleptic impression, some immediate and incontrovertible touch of the real, that the protagonist of the Recherche seems to come to discover in the experience of love’s sufering, and if we are also willing to accept that this is not yet another folly of youth, but rather an idea that the narrator self equally unreservedly seems to embrace, we may well ask whether this idea does in fact hold up under the light of critical scrutiny. A calm, detached form of introspection of our erotic household economy, far from uncovering the truth about ourselves, turned out to be a way to avoid one’s self, a way to avoid loving. How does the cataleptic view fare by comparison? One might ask, Nussbaum points out, why it is through sufering, or only through sufering, that such an experience ofers itself to us; one might wonder whether there is no possibility at all that we are deceived about such a feeling, or whether any one feeling in isolation can be truly cataleptic; there is certainly a lingering doubt that it is also the way we seize upon our feelings and respond to them that shapes our ability to experience profound love. But there is a more fundamental worry that Nussbaum points out. What if the demand for certain knowledge in matters of the heart, for an undeniable truth that forces its way up from the hidden recesses of our consciousness, is itself of a dubious nature? Does it not leave out from the beginning the possibility that the truth of love may not be a matter of our individual afective criteria, or at least not solely or even primarily such a matter, but of an always fraught way of attempting in one’s vulnerability to relate 270

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– a form, in other words, of openness to the other? A cataleptic impression, if there is such a thing, would be an inherently solitary experience, and while it would not be excluded that in a pair of lovers, each one has such an experience in reference to the other, it would for all that fail to be a reciprocal experience as long as my experience remains incommunicable in its truth, and that of the other remains on principal equally inaccessible to me. The demand for certainty, as an escape from doubt but above all an escape from risk – from the possibility that in exposing myself to the other I may well fail to be acknowledged – ends up producing the twin certainty that the other is unknowable, and that I remain closed in upon myself. Such a reading has not gone unchallenged. Robbie Kubala argues against what he calls the “Langton-Nussbaum view” of the Recherche as presenting love as in its essence self-regarding and solipsistic.13 There is a diferent view of love also present in the novel, one that envisages what he calls the “partial knowability of the reality of the other”. One may agree with Kubala that there is indeed another model of love present in the Recherche. But eforts to see such a model in the relationship between the protagonist and Albertine – rather than, say, the Grandmother’s love for the protagonist – seem little more than a brave attempt at defending the indefensible. To say that the protagonist discerns something particular in Albertine’s looks and personality, and that in their everyday lives he is sometimes moved to attempt to see a book or a work of art in a diferent light at her prompting, is as true as it is banal. For all that, the overwhelming impression the protagonist gives the reader is that he sees little beyond faddishness, whimsy, and a lack of culture in what goes on in Albertine’s thoughts. Where he does attempt to see more, he swiftly comes to discover he is engaged in an attempt at projection à la Stendhal. On the contrary, his attraction to Albertine seems premised upon the fact that her very blankness makes her an ideal projection screen for his jealous fantasies, thus eminently suitable to deliver the sort of sufering he seeks both to receive and, conversely, infict. In all this, the protagonist’s concern is hardly with a “partial knowability of the reality of the other” – which, as we will see, Proust’s metaphysics in any case seems to rule out – but with the efect she may have on him. He does not renounce love in favor of art; he transforms the former into the latter, and this can only be done if it delivers him to the depths of his own despair. But in this transformation, the particularity of his successive loves is erased. Faced with this Proustian solipsism, Nussbaum thus rightly comments that skepticism is not just an incidental and unfortunate consequence of Marcel’s epistemology. It is at the same time its underlying motivation. […] It is because he wishes not to be tormented by the ungovernable inner life of the other that he adopts a position that allows him to conclude that the other’s inner life is nothing more than the constructive workings of his own mind. The skeptical conclusion consoles far more than it agonizes. That love is not a source of dangerous openness, but a rather interesting relation with oneself. (Nussbaum 1990, 271–72) The Recherche develops great attentiveness to the successive, always particular, and irreducibly afective way our world is disclosed to us. But much like the philosophical mode it rivals, with its dispassionate, abstract knowledge, the Recherche does not see the self-knowledge it ultimately aims at as being bound up with love, if by that we are to understand anything resembling a genuine relation to another particular self. At best, what it ofers is the self-immunizing comfort we derive from embracing our failure to escape isolation. 271

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Love as Contemplative Ascent Even if the experience of love itself in Proust were nothing but the ongoing alternation between raging despair at failing to possess the other, and deadening boredom when such possession seems however momentarily ensured, the Recherche does not end in resignation to this fact. If there can be no happy loves, after all, this does not mean there can be no fruitful ones. What fruitfulness here consists of, and how it is to be achieved, Nussbaum explains by placing the Recherche within a specifc tradition of writing about love: one that describes love as an ascent.14 If the pain and unruliness of love cannot simply be uprooted from human life, this tradition argues, and that not only negatively – because, that is, of our factual inability to let it be – but also positively – because it would be madness to deny that love and what it entails form an essential part of our genuinely being alive as human beings – then what is needed is a way to transform our problematic loves into something better, a way of climbing up as by a ladder from our lower erotic experience to an allegedly higher sphere. This tradition goes back to Plato, whom Nussbaum sees connected in an unlikely trio with Spinoza and Proust in successive attempts to articulate, more specifcally, a contemplative ascent. The goal of such an ascent of love is the self-overcoming of the vulnerabilities of passion by becoming a passion of the understanding – turning the violent emotions perturbing the subject into knowledge of such emotions, which can safely and permanently be held at the subject’s disposal. As starting point of such an ascent we might take Aristophanes’ speech on love in the Symposium. The myth Aristophanes relates about the split nature of human beings, sundered in two by Zeus so that they would not dare again to threaten his reign, is essentially nostalgic; it imagines an original state of well-rounded wholeness where we sufered no sense of dependency or incompleteness, and sees love as the desire to regain this self-sufciency by being welded back together with our lost other half, forever one. This fantasy of possessing the other by being restored to oneness is not accidentally reminiscent of the infant’s desire to have control of the mother’s body. But it is an idle fantasy. The desire for wholeness, once achieved, would simply disappear – and with it our distinctness as individuals. Love may well be the desire to be whole, but it can only live in the distance not yet crossed to consummation. Thus too in the Recherche love lives only in virtue of its non-achievement: Il faudrait choisir ou de cesser de soufrir ou de cesser d’aimer. Car, ainsi qu’au début il est formé par le désir, l’amour n’est entretenu plus tard que par l’anxiété douloureuse. Je sentais qu’une partie de la vie d’Albertine m’échappait. L’amour, dans l’anxiété douloureuse comme dans le désir heureux, est l’exigence d’un tout. Il ne naît, il ne subsiste que si une partie reste à conquérir. On n’aime que ce qu’on ne possède pas tout entier. [I must choose to cease from sufering or to cease from loving. For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence only by painful anxiety. I felt that part of Albertine’s life eluded me. Love, in the pain of anxiety as in the bliss of desire, is a demand for a whole. It is born, and it survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess.] (III 614; C, 113–4) However strong the infantile desire for such wish-fulfllment, then, other paths will need to be trodden. In Diotima’s celebrated speech, the Symposium ofers one such path beyond Aristophanes’ myth of oneness. Here, it is not the desire of the other as such, but rather a desire for the 272

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excellence that attaches to him or her that is at work – it is the beauty in the beautiful person we seek to possess, and the more of it, the better. It is not surprising, then, that such a desire will, if it knows itself at all, swiftly move from the beauty of this body to the beauty of bodies as such, then on to the beauty of excellent ideas, ever purifying its passion so far that it might, ultimately, catch a glimpse of what is eternally and fully excellent: beauty itself. And yet the goal of even this fnal vision is not merely rapt contemplation: the purpose of the experience of beauty is, in turn, to beget beauty, that is to say, to create works of beauty that will outlast us. Time-bound and limited as our own lives are, we can nevertheless achieve a form of immortality in this way. It is precisely this escape from the bounds of time through creative activity, the redeeming transmutation of life into literature, that the Recherche itself will come to embrace: “La vraie vie, la vie enfn découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c’est la littérature” [“Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature”] (IV 474; TR, 253). But that is getting ahead of ourselves. In the case of Plato, as critics have long pointed out, this ascent through love from the concrete beauty of the beloved to Beauty itself leaves us with one thorny problem: going up Diotima’s ladder of love means leaving the beloved as this concrete, individual person behind.15 At best, our love object is the bearer of a multitude of excellent properties, but it is the properties and not the bearer we ought by Diotima’s lights to be interested in. The other is therefore not perceived as qualitatively diferent from anyone else, not seen in his or her particularity, and if ever we get to the point where we might dispense of him or her altogether, and hold directly onto the good or beautiful we seek, then all the better. As Nussbaum again rightly underlines, the other is a stepping stone – useful on our way up, perhaps essential even, but of no particular concern once we have ascended. What is more, there is no sense at all here that the other, if he or she is to be understood as a person, would have to be understood not merely as an object of our contemplative delight, but as a subject with its own desires and agency. What Diotima is advocating, in other words, is a refned form of spiritualized egocentrism. That the Recherche advocates such Platonic spiritualized egocentrism becomes clearer yet when we turn to a third point where Proust intersects with Plato’s philosophy of love, in a passing reference to the Phaedrus. The madness of love that Plato here describes is one where, having fallen from our state as pure souls following in the heavenly train of this God or that, we now on earth pursue and worship those individuals that most resemble the divine patron we in our fall have lost from sight (252c). So too the Recherche, in its culminating refections, would have it: Chaque personne qui nous fait soufrir peut être rattachée par nous à une divinité dont elle n’est qu’un refet fragmentaire et le dernier degré, divinité (Idée) dont la contemplation nous donne aussitôt de la joie au lieu de la peine que nous avions. Tout l’art de vivre, c’est de ne nous servir des personnes qui nous font soufrir que comme d’un degré permettant d’accéder à leur forme divine et de peupler ainsi joyeusement notre vie de divinités. [“(every individual who makes us sufer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary refexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before—indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we sufer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they refect and thus joyously to people our life with divinities)”] (IV 477; TR, 258) 273

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The goal then is to transform one’s sufering from love into joy by means of contemplation. This for sure is not the motionless rational sort of contemplation that philosophers dream of, and is perhaps best exemplifed by Spinoza’s intellectual love of God. It is rather an artistic form of contemplation. Its goal is to take from our painful encounter with the beloved the peculiar spark that only it could have occasioned in just this way, and to turn this spark, and the person who occasioned it, into the raw material of the work of art that bears our own signature of style and ordering control. It is only the artist – in particular, perhaps, the narrative artist – who achieves this freedom, because it is only the artist who can show the true form of love as the peculiar and complex web of relations we have to our emotional states through time, and in showing it reverse – however belatedly – his or her subjection to these states. The other enters into this alchemical process of transmutation only, we might say, as an ingredient of which nothing remains left; or in other words, other people are no more than rungs on the artist’s ladder, and only if we are willing to treat them as such can we acquire the temperament requisite for attempting a true work of art.

Art as Escape from Solipsism Love is fruitful then, if not happy, because the depth of sufering it inficts is a precondition for artistic creation, and creation, in turn, is the one way to escape the passivity of inficted sufering by turning it into the joyful activity that is bears my true signature, that is most my own. Yet, the Recherche seems to hint that this supreme form of spiritual egocentrism might also be, paradoxically, the only escape available from the despair of solipsism in which, by its lights, we fnd ourselves in. If the only dedication in this world that is not tainted by our selfshness – a selfshness which, what is more, we more often than not manage rather well to conceal from ourselves – is the artist’s pure dedication to his work, then this dedication is perhaps at the same time the only pure gift to others we are capable of. Nor is it a gift that merely brings enjoyment. It is through art and only through art that the other – if he is fnely attuned enough to its rhythms – can come to know my world in its depth and complexity, can come to know me; and this understanding, in turn, can become, with patience and diligence, a means to the other’s self-understanding, a way of setting out on his or her own journey of self-exploration. And if in this sense it is the only form of genuine human contact, artistic creation in all its isolated self-obsessiveness is paradoxically the only form love might take that is not, ultimately, merely solipsistic self-love, but instead achieves a kind of reciprocity. This much, Nussbaum allows, the Recherche might say in its own defense. She is less than convinced, for all that, that such rarifed gifts can begin to make up for the loss of common ground in human life: In the end, then, just as the novel adopts a view about the object of sexual love that implies that all sexual acts are essentially masturbatory, so too it adopts a view of sympathy and altruism – even, I think in the end, of the artist’s altruism – that implies that all such altruism is at bottom egoistic self-gratifcation. (Nussbaum 2001a, 521) This touches, I think, something essential, yet the question remains whether the Recherche is, on its own terms, undone by such criticism. If like Nussbaum one approaches Proust from the angle of a normative ethical project in which the rationality of afectivity, and in particular that of love, is the lynchpin, then the conclusions here spelled out may well seem 274

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a reductio ad absurdum. Even if the Recherche grants to the artist the miraculous ability to break out of the prison of solipsism, and produce at least the possibility of some genuine mode of being with the other, there is no bridge from this summit of the Recherche back to a more common, everyday sense of compassion, reciprocity, and individuality such as Nussbaum’s project requires. It is yet less likely to produce “an account of love that really does make it reasonable to expect that the emotional life of citizens will support pluralistic liberaldemocratic institutions”, 16 as she avows her aim to be. Much the contrary – what makes the Recherche so compelling is its refusal to moralize. If this be egoistic self-gratifcation, Proust might say, make the most of it. This becomes clearer yet when we take a step back from Nussbaum’s particular reading and regain sight of what it excludes in focusing on the revelatory force of love, the sufering it entails, and the joy it may ultimately be transformed into by the unique creative act. The Recherche is to be taken, we said, as a search for the truth; and this truth, we added with intentional vagueness, would be some form of self-knowledge. In this sense, it presents itself as the rival of a certain mode of philosophizing that thinks it has access to such knowledge through dispassionate rational introspection. We then followed Nussbaum in an assumption – that we can acquire such self-knowledge by exposure to erotic desire. But this is a narrowing of focus, and distorts the Proustian project. As preoccupied as the Recherche is with love and the sufering it brings, it is not exclusively or even primarily a love story or a discourse on love. Much else is at stake in the novel. If the Recherche is a search for truth, it is not merely a search for the truth of love, but rather one in the much wider sense that Deleuze rightly emphasizes: it is frst and foremost an apprenticeship in the ability to fnd and to read signs. Love is, to be sure, one realm in which signs manifest themselves abundantly, the more so the more tortured and jealousy-infamed it is. If jealousy is the truth of love, it is because the jealous lover’s world is one with hidden layers of signs to be deciphered, and thus requires a higher refnement of the understanding. But they are by no means the only signs. The Recherche is concerned equally with the signs of worldliness – with the complex nuances of the world of manners and society, with the symptoms of sickness and their diagnosis, with the origins of words and what they reveal, with the subtleties of military strategy and the secrets of diplomacy. So too the sensuous presence to our consciousness of the material world, with its madeleines, its landscapes, and its uneven cobblestones is a realm of signs, one that breaks in upon us in its unavoidableness through the upsurge of involuntary memory.17 All these signs in their murky ambiguity force upon us, as much as our jealous rage does, an art of deciphering that is not a freely entertained intellectual endeavor, but a deep-seated need that can only be addressed through a slow and error-strewn path of learning. Fourth and last in Deleuze’s taxonomy, there are the signs of art. What distinguishes these signs from the others is that they are not present to us in material form in a straightforward sense. All signs for Proust press us to be deciphered because they hint at a greater reality behind them, without ever quite delivering this reality to us. There is something – admittedly vague enough a term, but the vagueness is Proust’s – in the particular way the protagonist is struck by the feeling of an uneven pavement beneath his feet, or by Albertine’s store of secrets, that transcends the stones and the girl, the here and the now. The force of these experiences, or so Proust believes, stems in the fnal reckoning from how they chime with an only dimly perceived mysterious reality, one not subject to time and place, that he refers to as eternal essences. What these essences are, and precisely how it is that they come to manifest themselves by cutting across our lived experience, Proust never quite comes to say. But what is clear is that it is the signs of art that bring us closest to them. Where the other kinds of signs can ultimately express essences only poorly, caught up in the moment and material of their 275

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manifestation as they are, the signs of art are diferent: they are the conscious and creative re-working, on a higher level, of the signs that make up the artist’s world. Works of art are not, to be sure, generalized abstractions from experience. But if it is true that the this-ness and now-ness of the other signs reverberates with the pulse of something eternal, whatever this may be, then the work of art is, in a reversal of Plato, closer to these essences rather than at a “third remove” from them. Truth in its fundamental Proustian sense is artistic truth, because it is only in the artist’s quest to touch upon and expresses these essences under the idiosyncratic signature of his or her own style that they become truly manifest. Such a-temporal essences, which light up for me in a world that remains mine and mine alone, that cannot be meaningfully be said to be known – they are not concepts or propositions or otherwise bundles of knowledge that can be grasped by the intellect and exchanged with others – but can only be expressed through art. But it is precisely by expressing the essences of our world as we perceive them that, in turn, we might be able to inspire others by our artistic example to uncover their own, strictly personal stylistic ways to express the essences that light up their worlds.18 One may well feel that this grand artist’s metaphysics of eternal essences, one which the Recherche more hints at than expounds, but which for all that underpins its nature as an apprenticeship in signs, is itself another manifestation of the desire to escape our time-bound, needy, fragile existence by promising us – some of us, at least – a sliver of eternity. It may well be that we have reasons to suspect it is another self-deceptive kind of wish-fulfllment, a specious attempt at outrunning our fnitude. But if we wish to challenge Proust’s solipsism, it had best be with at least an eye on this metaphysical core, however vaguely the Recherche may sketch it, rather than by a merely moral rejection of the consequences it may yield.

In Albertine’s Eyes For all that, Proust has unexpected bedfellows. It is Levinas, the aim of whose philosophical project is precisely to expose the Western philosophical tradition as a whole as a totalizing ego-logy that would encompass the other and reduce it to the same, who in a curious essay mounts a defense of Proust’s supposed narcissism. If it seems to us that the Recherche expresses more than anything a profound inability to love, his argument runs, this is not so much a failing on its part, but rather on ours. The love we believe is missing here is, in the fnal reckoning, itself an expression of the totalizing urge of the self, our refusal to grant the other his or her painful separateness from us: Marcel did not love Albertine, if love is a fusion with the other, the ecstasy of one being before the perfections of the other, or the peace of possession. Tomorrow he will break with the young woman, who bores him. He will take that trip he has been planning for a long time. The story of Marcel’s love is laced with confessions apparently designed to put in question the very consistency of that love. But that non-love is in fact love; that struggle with the ungraspable, possession; that absence of Albertine, her presence. […] But Proust’s most profound teaching – if indeed poetry teaches – consists in situating the real in a relation with what for ever remains other – with the other as absence and mystery.19 What strikes some as the utter failure to step outside the confnes of one’s own selfobsessiveness is here provocatively, perhaps outrageously, vindicated as the truth of love – the experience of the enduring otherness of the other. Albertine can never be known, for 276

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any such knowledge would reduce her to an object; she cannot be communicated with, because conversation would presume she is already drawn into a shared circle of language and meaning; she cannot be admired for her qualities, as that would presume she is submitted to the admirer’s criteria. Only negatively, in her mute, elusive inscrutability, is she present. Would such a defense of non-love as true love convince those who see in the Albertine love story the clearest emblem that the Recherche, for all its subtlety in unraveling the pathologies of love, takes too eager a comfort in its solipsism, speciously turning a particular failure to love into a grand metaphysical fact of our separateness? It seems doubtful. What is above all striking is the uncompromising either – or that Levinas here imposes: either Albertine remains an eternal mystery, communicating only her non-communicability, or she must fall to the violence of the same and to assimilation. But how binding is this choice between domination or alterity? Or is there instead something that both of these alternatives share, and equally condemns them? Levinas markedly passes over in silence that it is precisely the reduction of Albertine to, if not quite a lifeless object, then at least a de-subjectivized, motionless organism that the narrator imagines as allowing for the rare moments of his greatest nearness to her. As a prisoner in his room, cut of from the world of Sapphic betrayal that lures her away from him, she breathes softly in an unperturbed sleep, her face expressionless, her eyes shut, resembling nothing so much as a plant, as the narrator on more than one occasion lets his fantasies suggest to him. The philosopher of the face would not, it seems likely, willingly countenance this de-facing of Albertine. Yet is the ungraspable, mysterious absence which Levinas here lauds any more the sign of Albertine’s separateness as a self? The reverse sooner seems to be the case. His insistence on the otherness of the other, which rescues Albertine from the desire of fusion or domination, does not let her emerge as self in any meaningful sense, but rather makes the accidental placeholder of a blank alterity beyond the narrator. It reduces her to an efect on him, namelessly taunting and tormenting.20 In concluding I want to suggest that, pace Levinas, there are even within the Recherche itself occasional hints that something in its solipsism may be less the result of the metaphysical makeup of the world and more the result of a failure – be it through shame, disgust, or fear at our separateness – to engage with the other in a manner that risks exposing ourselves. The scene is the moment on the beach where Albertine, appearing before the narrator’s gaze, frst emerges in individual outlines from the little band of friends she is surrounded by, and yet at the same time seems to the narrator to be caught up in a diferent world, utterly inaccessible. Tout occupée à ce que disaient ses camarades, cette jeune flle coifée d’un polo qui descendait très bas sur son front, m’avait-elle vu au moment où le rayon noir émané de ses yeux m’avait rencontré? Si elle m’avait vu, qu’avais-je pu lui représenter? Du sein de quel univers me distinguait-elle? […] Si nous pensions que les yeux d’une telle flle ne sont qu’une brillante rondelle de mica, nous ne serions pas avides de connaître et d’unir à nous sa vie. Mais nous sentons que ce qui luit dans ce disque réféchissant n’est pas dû uniquement à sa composition matérielle; que ce sont, inconnues de nous, les noires ombres des idées que cet être se fait, relativement aux gens et aux lieux qu’il connaît […] les ombres aussi de la maison où elle va rentrer, des projets qu’elle forme ou qu’on a formés pour elle; et surtout que c’est elle, avec ses désirs, ses sympathies, ses répulsions, son obscure et incessante volonté. Je savais que je ne posséderais pas cette jeune cycliste si je ne possédais aussi ce qu’il y avait dans ses yeux. 277

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[Wholly occupied with what her companions were saying, had she seen me—this young girl in the polo-cap pulled down very low over her forehead—at the moment in which the dark ray emanating from her eyes had fallen on me? From the depths of what universe did she discern me? […] If we thought that the eyes of such a girl were merely two glittering sequins of mica, we should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to ours. But we sense that what shines in those refecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is the dark shadows, unknown to us, of the ideas that that person cherishes about the people and places she knows […] the shadows, too, of the home which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her, and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will. I knew that I should never possess this young cyclist if I did not possess also what was in her eyes.] (II 152; BG, 432) The distance that separates Albertine here from the narrator in the far of universe she inhabits is measured not in miles. It is constituted by the non-encounter of their gazes. What is it that in this non-encounter eludes the narrator in Albertine’s eyes? Were they shiny pieces of mica, they would not attract him as they do; but as the opaque windows of the soul they are, they make dimly visible an inner world to which the narrator can never have access, a world beyond his grasp, in which Albertine’s secrets are stored up. The only response he imagines to his sudden awareness of her inner world is to break into it and seize its treasures, as if they are already present there and for the taking. But is this what we see when we look into the eyes of the other, when we cross gazes and stare into their depths? What the narrator imagines to be there as the objects of his acquisitive desire – the unknown world of memories of the past that shaped her inner life, and the hopes and fears of things to come that orients her – are, in fact, no such thing. For Albertine’s world, no more than that of the narrator, is not one that is already set out in determinacy, only waiting to be discovered. To the extent that she is a self, her inner world is nothing either an inquisitive spectator nor she herself could simply inspect. It is instead an essential indeterminacy, an openness to future possibilities not yet given. Such openness cannot be known; it can only be freely acknowledged. But what such acknowledgment would entail, if it is to be true, is no less than letting the gaze of the other return upon me, exposed in my own fraught fnitude and vulnerability.

Notes 1 Some would argue that Proust’s detachment from morality is easily overstated, and that the Recherche shows genuine moments of deep and abiding attachment, not merely in (say) the Grandmother’s love for young Marcel, but equally in his deep mourning for her. But a-moralism does not rule out attachment. It merely means the author does not condemn his characters for failing to escape from the narcissistic circle of desire that binds them – a circle we may feel does not fulfll the full claims of love, as it does not let the other speak. The protagonist is without question loved by his mother and grandmother, but it is the way their love nourishes his sentimental life, or fails to do so when it is withdrawn, that is the novel’s interest. By contrast, the Recherche is not, it seems, interested in showing us what it means for us to love someone else in such a way – and if we accept Proust’s premises, perhaps rightly so. It is unclear how such an account could be squared with Proust’s frmly held belief that the only form in which a genuine understanding of someone else’s world becomes possible is through the powers of art. 2 La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims are littered throughout with remarks on love; see also his Refexions 8, “On the Uncertainty of Jealousy”, and 9, “Life and Love” (La Rochefoucauld (2007), 213–15).

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Proust and the Philosophy of Love 3 On Stendhal’s concept of crystallization, see his 1822 treatise Love, in particular Book I Chapter II: “Leave a lover with his thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafess wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom-tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one” (Stendhal (1975), 45). For a detailed comparison of actual passages in Stendhal and Proust that discuss the origins, development and ends of love, see Ifri (1985), who argues that Proust’s conception of love in the Recherche essentially is that of Stendhal. 4 Thus Badiou in his In Praise of Love (2012), especially 38f and (in reference to Proust) 59-60. For Badiou’s critique of three false concepts of love – the fusional, the oblative, and the superstructural or illusory, under the last of which he places the Moralists and Proust – see also his “What is Love?” in Badiou (2008), 181f. 5 “What Love Knows” (original French title “La dernière virtue”) in Marion (2002), 157. 6 I am less interested here in the question of Proust’s personal familiarity with Plato than I am in the question of how a certain Platonic problematic regarding love’s claims works itself out in the Recherche, including those (sparse) moments where the text incorporates key imagery from Plato’s dialogues. For a wider consideration of Proust’s relation to Plato, see Fraisse (2013). In a general sense, it may be relevant to recall, from a more biographical angle, that the journal Proust started as a young man already bore the title Le Banquet – though whether this echo of the Symposium should be read as a tribute or rather as a form of cynical parody remains an open question. 7 Nussbaum’s early engagement with Proust is found in “Fictions of the Soul” and “Love’s Knowledge”, two of the essays from Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990). In a more general sense, however, Proust is never far from her mind in her attempts to bring philosophy and literature into dialogue in order to articulate a theory of ethics that takes the rationality of the afective life seriously. This is even more so the case in her monumental Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001a), the title of which itself is a nod to the jealousy-stricken Charlus’ “véritables soulèvements géologiques de la pensée” [“veritable geological upheavals of the mind”] (III 464; SG, 553). Though it is only in the ninth and tenth chapter that she focuses on her reading of Proust – and in a wide-ranging discussion that connects Proust closely to Plato and Spinoza – her project is throughout steeped in ideas occasioned by her reading of the Recherche. A briefer version of these chapters are published as “People as Fictions: Proust and the Ladder of Love” in Bartsch and Bartscherer (2005), together with a response by Peter Brooks. 8 Nussbaum has for all that been criticized for making merely instrumental use of Proust in the service of her own philosophical analysis. To the extent that Nussbaum’s project is frst and foremost one in moral philosophy, broadly conceived, one that seeks to provide a theory of the emotions that would form a suitable basis for a certain kind of moral life of human beings together, such criticism is not altogether beside the point: it is true that Proust does not labor in this particular vineyard. Yet this does not mean that Nussbaum is unaware that the Recherche is not a philosophical tractate dressed up as a novel; much the contrary, her argument relies on the idea that there is an understanding of the human condition that can only be unlocked by works of narrative prose, precisely because, much like our feelings and the lives in which they are embedded, they unroll in time and through long cycles of prospective and retrospective imagination. More doubtful it seems to me to argue, as Peter Brooks (2005) does, that Nussbaum unduly confates the perspectives of the protagonist, the narrator, and Proust the author in her approach. The Recherche is the slow and painful discovery of a metaphysics of the artist, and Proust does not ofer this metaphysics as another of the many shaky opinions, accidental errors, or self-inficted delusions that the narrator observes in himself and in others along the course of the novel, but as an authoritative answer to the questions that plagued the protagonist from the outset. In this sense, there is (pace Brooks) indeed no diference between the book that the protagonist sets out to write at the end of the novel, and the novel itself. 9 Deleuze (2000), 3. 10 See in particular Deleuze’s description of Proust’s “antilogos” in Deleuze (2000), 60f. For Nussbaum’s opposition of Proust and Plato (or rather “Plato”), see “Fictions of the Soul” in Nussbaum (1990), 245–260.

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Martijn Buijs 11 For Nussbaum’s extended comparison of the role of amorous sufering in Proust with the Stoic cataleptic impression, see “Love’s Knowledge” in Nussbaum (1995), 261–85. 12 Zeno’s work is lost; Nussbaum mentions as principle sources for the concept of katalepsis the biography of Zeno in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Sextus Empiricus’ Adversos Mathematicos, and Cicero’s Academica. 13 See Kubala (2016). For Rae Langton’s analysis of Proust’s epistemic solipsism, broadly similar to that of Nussbaum, see Langton (2009 and 2014). Kubala sees this idea of a “partial knowability of the reality of the other” refected in Levinas’ essay on Proust. While I am skeptical that Levinas could endorse the claim of any sort of knowability of the other’s reality, I will turn to his reading at the end of the present piece. 14 See Nussbaum 2001a. Part III of this work is as a whole devoted to readings of texts (philosophical, theological, but primarily literary) that use the metaphor of ascent in love. Relevant to our discussion of Proust are ch. 9 and 10. 15 A classic articulation of this criticism is Vlastos (1981). Nussbaum further expands upon this in her 2001b. 16 Nussbaum 2001a, 478. 17 Here there is something symptomatic of Nussbaum’s reading: while she rightly underlines that the sufering of love is akin to the Stoic cataleptic impression because it is an experience that comes over us as passive recipients and overpowers us, she does not connect this essential experience of passivity with the similar efects of involuntary memory in the Recherche. 18 It is tempting to see a parallel between Proust and Nietzsche in the deep need they describe for art as the source of possible redemption of our lives. As Alexander Nehamas has pointed out, both Proust and Nietzsche might be said to search for a way by which the ragtag assemblage of trivialities, failures, and various other imperfections that make up most of our lives may despite themselves be transformed into a successful whole. Both see this transformation as taking place in and through art, which represents both a self-overcoming and the supreme gift one could bestow on others. See Nehamas (1985), 167–68. 19 Levinas 1996, 104–105. 20 This is not the place to engage in the required depth with Levinas’ philosophy of alterity as such, and with the question to what extent it leaves room for anything resembling a meaningful encounter with the other that goes beyond blank alterity. My remarks here restrict themselves to his particular reading of Proust. That said, if we are to take Levinas seriously here, then perhaps his  description of the non-love for Albertine as true love risks performing a reductio ad absurdum of his philosophical project.

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. (2008). Conditions. Tr. Steve Corcoran. London: Continuum. Badiou, Alain with Nicolas Truong. (2009) In Praise of Love. Tr. Peter Bush. London: Serpent’s Tail. Bartsch, Shadi and Thomas Bartscherer (2005). Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 223–40. Brooks, Peter. (2005) “Proust’s Epistemophilia”. In: Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer. Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. Chicago: Chicago University Press, pp. 241–44. Deleuze, Gilles. (2000) Proust and Signs. Tr. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fraisse, Luc. (2013) L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust. Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne. Ifri, Pascal A. (1985) “Une reconsideration de l’infuence de Stendhal sur Proust”. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 1985, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 579–590. Kubala, Robbie. (2016) “Love and Transience in Proust”. Philosophy, Vol. 91, No. 358 (October 2016), pp. 541–557. Langton, Rae. (2009) “Love and Solipsism”. In: Id, Sexual Solipsism. Philosophical Essays on Pornography and Objectifcation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 357–381. ——— (2014) “Projected Love”. In: Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau (eds). Understanding Love. Philosophy, Film, and Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. La Rochefoucauld, François de. (2007) Collected Maxims and Other Refections. Tr. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère. Oxford: Oxford World Classics.

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Proust and the Philosophy of Love Levinas, Emmanuel. (1996) “The Other in Proust”. In: Proper Names. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 99–105. Marion, Jean-Luc. (2002) “What Love Knows”. In: Prolegomena to Charity. Tr. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press. Nehamas, Alexander. (1985) Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, Martha C. (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ——— (2001a) Upheavals of Thought. The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2001b) The Fragility of Goodness. Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Revised Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— (2005) “People as Fictions: Proust and the Ladder of Love”. In: Shadi Bartsch and Thomas Bartscherer. Erotikon: Essays on Eros, Ancient and Modern. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 223–40. Stendahl. (1975) Love. Tr. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale. London: Penguin. Vlastos, Gregory. (1981) “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato”. In: Gregory Vlastos. Platonic Studies, 3–42.

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18 PROUST AND LYING Ethics and Aesthetics David Ellison

Introduction: What Is Lying? Ethics and Aesthetics Don’t lies eventually lead to the truth? And don’t all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don’t they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true or false if, in both cases, they are signifcant of what I have been and of what I am? [Alors, qu’importe qu’elles soient vraies ou fausses si, dans les deux cas, elles sont signifcatives de ce que j’ai été et de ce que je suis]. Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.1 The passage quoted above from Camus’s The Fall (La Chute, 1956) is both lovely and complicated. Lovely because, being based on a poetic paradox – that truth, like light, can be blinding to the observer, whereas the lie is “a beautiful twilight that enhances every object” – it forces us to wonder and to think; but complicated because lying is usually classifed as the opposite of the truth, and thus as that which is to be thrown away philosophically. One can therefore wonder how lying could possibly contribute to the knowledge of who a person has been and is. The Fall is a complicated and tortuous text, and we can see that one of the reasons behind this is that Camus, in his formulation, has brought the theme of lying out of the domain of the ethical into the realm of the aesthetic. In doing so, despite the fact that he is not indulging in dialectical speculation, he is closer to Schiller’s “Über Anmut und Würde” (1793), in which the aesthetic beauty of Grace (“Anmut”) and the ethical upstanding quality of Dignity (“Würde”) are allegorized and forced into a philosophical dance, than he is to Kant’s rigorous, strictly ethical defnition of lying in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). I shall begin my essay with a passage from this late Kantian text, which provides a defnition of lying that Proust will be completely faithful to, even though it must be said that Proust’s knowledge of Kant was probably second-hand. As Luc Fraisse has demonstrated in his thorough study entitled L’éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (2013),2 if Proust mentions philosophers and their worldviews often in his novel, he does so uniquely in an “anecdotal or decorative” manner (23), and the Kant he refers to throughout the Recherche is a thinker he encountered indirectly, much as his brother Robert did, through lecture notes. Neo-Kantianism and “le criticisme” were all the rage in mid- to late nineteenth-century 282

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Paris,3 but as Fraisse writes: “Proust did not have to read Kant directly, so attentively was he taught” by his professors (81).4 (In an aside, I will add, before beginning my essay properly speaking, that citizens of the United States of America are, unfortunately, used to hearing lies, many of them every day, thousands of them over a four-year period. But what distinguishes the Big Lie (in which a person in power denied losing an election he had, in fact, lost) from the Proustian lie is, of course, the scale involved. In the former case, the lies were politically motivated and spread far and wide; in Proust’s case, the lie is essentially dialogic, reduced to the love/jealousy situation, intimate and convoluted. Also, whereas in the former case there is absolutely no aesthetic dimension to the lie, in Proust’s case it is the overlap between the ethical and the aesthetic that will preoccupy me.)

Kant and Morality After writing The Critique of Practical Judgment (1788), his principal treatise on morality, and The Critique of Judgment (1790), his study of aesthetics within the realm of teleological judgment, Kant returned to the issues of morality and ethics in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797). It is here that he provides his most pithy (and dogmatic) statement on the value, or lack of value, of the lie: By a lie a human being throws away and, as it were, annihilates his dignity as a human being [Menschenwürde]. A human being who does not himself believe what he tells another (even if the other is a merely ideal person) has even less worth than if he were a mere thing: for a thing, because it is something real and given, has the property of being serviceable so that another can put it to some use. But communication of one’s thoughts to someone through words that yet (intentionally) contain the contrary of what the speaker thinks on the subject is an end that is directly opposed to the natural purposiveness [der natürlichen Zweckmässigkeit] of the speaker’s capacity to communicate his thoughts, and thus a renunciation by the speaker of his personality, and such a speaker is a mere deceptive appearance of a human being, not a human being himself. – Truthfulness [Wahrhaftigkeit] in one’s declarations is also called honesty [Ehrlichkeit] and, if the declarations are promises, sincerity [Redlichkeit]; but, more generally, truthfulness is called rectitude [Aufrichtigkeit].5 According to Kant, what distinguishes a human being from animals and things is moral dignity. Dignity (Würde) is the essence of the moral; it is that which flls us (we are flled with dignity as with an essence) and that which keeps us upright. There should be a smooth linkage between the spoken word and moral worth (see the linguistic relation between reden and Redlichkeit in German). Between notions such as truthfulness and honesty and sincerity and rectitude, there should be no slippages, no semantic gaps or distance. In lying, a human being destroys himself and his dignity, throws himself away as a human being. In lying, the human being has descended not one, but two rungs, in the ladder of Being. By losing his dignity, he has descended, certainly, to the animal level, but Kant tells us that he has sunk even further – below the level of things – which can, at least, serve some purpose. If I lie, I have destroyed myself as a human being and the lies I have profered are of no use to anyone – they are a kind of discursive detritus. Kant presupposes that there is a “natural purposiveness” (natürliche Zweckmässigkeit) in a speaker’s capacity to communicate thoughts. Thoughts, when they are communicated by a speaker to a listener, have a goal; they are not meant for idle utterance or pure playfulness. 283

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We are now, after all, in the moral world. When Kant writes about lying, in The Metaphysics of Morals, he is considering the efects of the lie within the realm of the moral or ethical (Sittlichkeit). Kant states that if I say the contrary of what I mean (this is one defnition of lying by Kant), I have renounced my personality and have become a “mere deceptive appearance of a human being,” not an authentic human (moral) being. What is interesting, however, is that the phrase “to say the opposite of what one means” is also a classical defnition of a literary trope – that of irony. So the word “lie” in Kant’s moral universe would seem to be parallel or analogous to the word “irony” in the realm of aesthetics, since these words have the same defnition, since they mean the same thing. Lying and irony are quite close to each other; they are Doppelgänger that resemble each other uncannily, in an unheimlich relation. But Kant must keep lying and irony apart. It is only by creating separate domains for the moral/ethical and the aesthetic that Kant’s critical enterprise can keep itself upright (aufrecht), in the literal and fgurative senses. If one bears in mind that, according to The Critique of Judgment, the beauty of an aesthetic object can be described as a Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck, or “purposiveness without purpose,” then one can imagine, within the aesthetic as such (within what we call works of art), a pure playfulness with thoughts that might go beyond or against the “straight” (aufrecht) communication of ideas – and that it might be here, in the aesthetic feld, that the lie deploys itself with the greatest ease. In my essay, I am going to be considering the theme of lying in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: “le mensonge chez Proust.” I am going to be suggesting that the act of lying is the discursive area in which the aesthetic and the moral overlap and compete for dominance in Proust’s fctional universe. It is when lying occurs that the question of envelopment or containment of one sphere by the other is posed with the greatest urgency: can aesthetic beauty neutralize the moral destructiveness of lying? Can lying undermine the beautiful forms of art even when they are afrmed and proclaimed with the greatest theoretical rigor and rhetorical seductiveness? To examine this question, I shall read passages from Proust that will be well known to the reader, passages from which I shall attempt to derive what I would like to propose as the outline for what might be called a general theory of lying in Proust. In so doing, I shall be entering into some narrative considerations – especially the contextual position of the lie within the text. The important and interesting thing is that the lie occurs early in the novel, very early indeed, early enough to be dangerous to the claims to aesthetic truth the text might make for itself through its narrator. The earliness of the lie in Proust uncannily mirrors Kant’s statement, in The Metaphysics of Morals concerning the place of the lie in the Bible: It is noteworthy that the Bible dates the frst crime, through which evil entered the world, not from fratricide (Cain’s), but from the frst lie (for even nature rises up against fratricide), and calls the author of all evil a liar from the beginning and the father of lies. (183) Before evil can enter the world by Cain’s crime, a crime no less important but (if I may say so) more subtle infltrates itself, through the lie. Before the frst inhabitants of the Garden of Eden are sent out from paradise, the serpent lies to Eve, assuring her that she and Adam can eat of the fruit which God has expressly told them not to eat: Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the feld which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees 284

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of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.6 The serpent’s lie consists of promising knowledge – the distinguishing between Good and Evil – to the inhabitants of the Garden, whereas the eating of the forbidden fruit, according to God’s word, guarantees death. The serpent, without saying this explicitly, promises immortality (“ye shall be as gods”), whereas the act of eating the fruit will carry along with it the mortality of the frst humans and that of their descendants. In what follows, I shall suggest that similar stakes inhabit the Proustian text – a text which, in its theoretical assertions, promises immortality through art, but at the same time, through the precocious practice of lying, ensures that the human being will be anchored in his or her moral condition, in the misery of an interminable quest for truths that love seems to ofer, but which this same love hides from the anxious and jealous seeker who has fallen victim to its charms. Before the Proustian novel can unroll itself from the ecstatic revelations of the petite madeleine, revelations that seem to allow narration itself to begin, the lie takes place. It is to the lie’s position in the text that I now turn.

Rereading Myself: Vinteuil’s Septet and Te Perfect Lie Before opening the pages of the “scène du baiser” (the scene of the good-night kiss, I 9–43; SW, 10–50) and comparing it to the famous moment of the petite madeleine (I 43–7; SW, 50–6), when the narrator, for the frst time, retrieves Past Time, I would like to explain how I came to the topic of lying in Proust, and especially, how I came to be interested in the narrative position or contextual location(s) of lying in the Recherche. This happened some years ago when I was completing my frst book on Proust (The Reading of Proust: Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). I had noticed a curious thing at the time: namely, that the Proustian narrator used the same vocabulary, and made the same lofty claims, about lying as he made about the aesthetic revelations of Vinteuil’s septet. Both the “perfect lie” and Vinteuil’s music open up new perspectives onto that which has never been explored, onto the unknown (l’Inconnu). I shall quote the two passages, both of which come from The Captive (La Prisonnière). Central to my argument is the fact that the passage on lying comes before the aesthetic revelations of the septet, but by only 40 pages in a novel of some 3,000 pages. Here, frst, is the section on lying: The lie, the perfect lie, about people we know, the relationships we have had with them, our motive for some action formulated by us in a quite diferent way, the lie about what we are, about what we love, about what we feel concerning the person who loves us and who thinks that they have made us similar to them because they kiss us all day long, this lie is one of the only things that can open for us perspectives onto the new, onto the unknown [ce mensonge-là est une des seules choses qui puissent nous ouvrir des perspectives sur du nouveau, sur de l’inconnu], that can open in us dormant senses for the contemplation of universes that we might have never known. (III 721, my translation; C, 239) And here is the passage describing the septet: Then the phrases went away, except one that I saw returning fve or six times, without my being able to see its face, but so caressing, so diferent – as without doubt the little 285

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phrase of the sonata had been for Swann – from what any woman had been able to make me desire, that this phrase, which ofered me with a voice so sweet a happiness that it would have really been worthwhile obtaining, it is perhaps – this invisible creature whose language I did not know yet which I understood so well – the only Unknown Woman I had ever managed to meet [la seule Inconnue qu’il m’ait jamais été donné de rencontrer]. (III 764, my translation; C, 293–4) It is difcult not to see ourselves in Baudelairian territory here. It is as if Proust were picking up where the fnal poem of Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), “Le Voyage,” left of: “Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!” 7 Just as in Baudelaire’s Odyssean voyage, the narrative voice, after evoking a panorama of human beauty and vices, settles on a tone of disenchantment and melancholy which can only be rescued by an invigorating plunge into the Unknown, in the same way the scene of the septet in The Captive interrupts the narrator’s increasingly somber meditations on the elusiveness and sexual waywardness of Albertine, and appears to ofer a way out of existential despair through the triumph of an aesthetic vision. This vision fnds expression in music, which the narrator describes as a supra-human form of communication. Vinteuil’s music is “as free from analytical forms of reasoning as if it had deployed itself in the world of the angels” (III 760, my translation; C, 289). It would seem that we are as far as possible, in Kantian terms, from the serpentine and diabolical territory of lying. Whereas lying robbed the human being of his or her dignity and placed him or her below the level of animals or even things, Vinteuil’s music ennobles its listener and promises an uplifting view onto the Unknown. It is all the more interesting, therefore, that the section on lying which I have just quoted makes the same claims and in the same exalted language as the passage on the septet. Lying, we are told, opens perspectives onto the New, onto the Unknown, and does so by opening “in us dormant senses for the contemplation of universes that we might have never known.” We have a problem here, which has a certain Kierkegaardian dimension. We are in an either/ or world. Either the section on Vinteuil’s septet ofers the transcendental truthfulness of an aesthetic revelation and redemption; or the development on lying is to be taken as the Proustian narrator’s pithy encapsulation of a human truth, expressed with a compression and irony worthy of a moraliste such as La Rochefoucauld. As is the case in Kierkegaard’s twin volumes that compose Either/Or (1843), there are two coherent but fundamentally antagonistic narratives of human possibility, one expressed in aesthetic terms, and the other in moral terms. It would seem that, like the reader of Kierkegaard’s texts, we are forced to choose between the aesthetic and the ethical view, and that the narrator leaves the choice up to us: we are caught in an interpretive dilemma from which there appears to be no obvious elegant escape. What is also interesting, however, is the fact that, unlike in the case of Either/Or, where readers have, historically, taken both volumes with fairly equal seriousness, in the case of the Recherche, I have rarely come across a critic of the Proustian text who would be willing to grant equal weight to the passage on lying and the passage on the septet. Quite to the contrary. For most readers, the efect of the ecstatic rhetoric of the septet section is to wipe out, to eface, to obliterate the very existence of the meditation on lying which precedes it by a short textual space. A development on aesthetic form as a supra-human language would seem to cancel out the disruptive moral force of the lie, even though the lie is said, quite explicitly, to ofer the same kind of perspectives onto the New and the Unknown as art. It is as if narrative progression presupposed an interesting form of amnesia on the part of the 286

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reader: because the septet episode comes after the refection on lying, it supersedes it at every level, in every way. Could it be that the aesthetic theory as expressed in the fnal pages of Time Regained (Le Temps retrouvé) is to be believed because it comes last? A disturbing thought, especially to those readers who take this theory seriously as an unambiguous Modernist formulation of art’s redemptive value.8

Te Good-Night Kiss and the Lie I shall now turn to the scene of the good-night kiss (“la scène du baiser”) and shall examine the points of intersection of the aesthetic and moral dimensions in Proust’s fctional universe within this early and well-known episode. Readers of Proust will remember that the Recherche, in a certain sense, begins four times. First, there is the scene of the narrating subject hesitating between sleep and wakefulness which contains a number of the large themes of the novel (this scene is now often designated, in English translation, in symphonic terms, as the “Overture” – I 3–9; SW, 3–10). Second, there is a concise narrative segment focused on the character Charles Swann and his visits to the narrator’s country home in Combray which culminates in the part of the scene which I shall be analyzing, that of the good-night kiss (I 9–43; SW, 10–50). Third comes the celebrated petite madeleine episode in which the narrator recovers the essence of the past through involuntary memory (I 43–7; SW, 50–6). Fourth, and fnally, we have the beginning of the linear narration of the novel as interiorized Bildungsroman, in which the full cast of characters, thanks, apparently, to the atemporal revelations of the petite madeleine, can come into textual being. Plot and narrative action become possible after the narrator has had his experience of aesthetic revelation – i.e., after he has experienced, from within his consciousness, the way in which an isolated moment from the past takes on form and causes the town of Combray in its entirety to emerge from the taste of the little cake dipped in tea. Within this narrative confguration of false starts culminating in a “true beginning” of the novel, the scene of the good-night kiss constitutes a starkly illumined fragment, an in-between moment caught between the Overture and the scene of involuntary memory. Its liminary or threshold status will be of primary importance to me here. Although the scene of the good-night kiss is complex in many ways (critics have been especially interested in the end of the episode, when, having obtained the kiss, the narrator refects upon the efects of this double-edged “victory” in which, the Oedipal triangle having been dismantled, the father, a kind of false Abraham, disappears into the darkness),9 I shall concentrate especially on its middle section, which is based on the problems of obstacles to be lifted so that the narrator can obtain the kiss. First of all, there are what might be called masculine obstacles: the grandfather, who suggests that the child, seeming to be tired, should go to bed immediately (without obtaining the kiss), and the father, who, placing himself in the way of the son, sends him of to bed with the brusque admonition: “Now leave your mother alone, you have said good-night to each other enough times as it is; these manifestations of sentiment are ridiculous. Get up the stairs!” (I 27; SW, 32). But the narrator explains that these men, in acting out of pure caprice, are not protecting “as scrupulously as my grandmother and my mother the faith of treaties [la foi des traités] (Ibid.) This vocabulary, which we could characterize as “anthropological” – the kind of vocabulary one would expect to fnd in the reports of ethnologists describing the rudimentary laws that govern the collective behavior of so-called “primitive” societies, is to be found (and this will be of the greatest importance for the dramatic unrolling of the scene) in the servant Françoise, who acts according to a “rigorous code” possessing its own strict laws: 287

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She [Françoise] possessed, on the subject of things that can or cannot be done, an imperious code which was abundant, subtle and intransigent [un code impérieux, abondant, subtil et intransigeant] on imperceptible and irrelevant distinctions (which gave it the appearance of those ancient laws [l’apparence de ces lois antiques] which, alongside ferocious ordinances such as the massacre of infants at the breast, coexisted with the exaggerated fastidiousness against boiling the kid in its mother’s milk, or eating in the animal the sinew of the thigh. (I 28, my translation; SW, 33) The description of Françoise as guardian of ancient treatises and the development of the “anthropological” motif take place in the text shortly after the narrator, wanting to risk everything to obtain his mother’s kiss, has decided “to try a trick of a condemned man. I wrote to my mother, asking her to come up the stairs for a grave matter which I could not tell her about in my letter” (Ibid.) Françoise is the only intermediary in the house for the young boy’s message, but, given her scrupulous adherence to obscure codes of conduct, one can ask the question: Will she deliver the letter? At this precise moment in the narrative, we can observe an interesting thematic moment. The narrator’s letter addressed to his mother is the frst explicit occurrence in the novel of the theme of writing (a good deal before the episode of the steeples of Martinville – “les clochers de Martinville” – I 178–80; SW, 215–6); it is less often commented upon by Proust critics than the moments in the novel where the act of writing is associated with the artistic sublime. The short narrative segment on the letter of supplication from the son to the mother tends to be forgotten, especially because “les clochers de Martinville,” coming after it, consigns it to oblivion. But I don’t think that we, as readers, should forget that when Proust chooses to thematize the act of writing for the frst time, it is in the context of deception, at a moment when the narrator succumbs to the temptation of lying. To convince the guardian of treaties and of obscure ordinances to deliver his message, the narrator writes: But to give myself a chance, I did not hesitate to lie [ je n’hésitai pas à mentir], and told her [Françoise] that it was not at all I who had wanted to write Mother, but that it was Mother who, in leaving me, had told me not to forget to send her a response concerning an object she had asked me to look for [un objet qu’elle m’avait prié de chercher]; and she would certainly be very upset if this note were not taken to her. (I 29, my translation; SW, 34) The frst lie of the Proustian novel occurs in its second scene, before the revelations of the petite madeleine, before the novel can unfold itself in its aesthetic beauty from the unconscious depths of involuntary memory. Yet even a cursory examination of the sentence I have just quoted reveals that the act of lying itself has a narrative, or temporal/diegetic dimension. When the narrator tells Françoise his “white lie” about his mother’s purported request for a written response to a prior message, he opens up an entire story line concerning a lost object that must be found (“an object she had asked me to look for”), and draws Françoise into the fctitious universe of his lie, forcing her to participate in his imaginary narration lest she be subjected to the ire of his mother. It is perhaps no coincidence that the search for the lost object (“un objet qu’elle m’avait prié de chercher”) reminds us of the title of the novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, where the object to be sought after is named as “Time.” The remainder of this segment of the scene depicting the efects of the good-night kiss is a refection on the alternatives between anxiety and calm that occur according to whether 288

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the narrator believes that the object of his afection (in this early scene, his mother; later on, Albertine) remains knowable to him when she is out of his reach; or whether, on the contrary, that part of her life to which he has no access takes place in “infernal” regions that are unimaginable to him (I 31; SW, 36). It is no exaggeration to say that the initial and inaugural scene of the good-night kiss prefgures all the later explicitly sexualized episodes in which a heterosexual narrator or hero (Swann in “Un Amour de Swann,” the narrator elsewhere) fnds it impossible to imagine the otherness of homosexual desire and love as practiced, presumably, by Odette, then, more extensively, by Albertine and her friends. The problem is whether the invisible lives of Odette and Albertine possess the same “essence” as those small fragments of their lives which are visible to Swann or to the narrator. Is it possible to assume that the marks of afection which Odette gives to Swann or the tenderness of Albertine toward the narrator can be extended to the hours and the places in which these women are with other people, not Swann or the narrator? For readers of Proust who have themselves extended their purview of the novel beyond the scene of the good-night kiss, the answer is obvious and overwhelming in its repetitive character: the whole cannot be deduced from the part. And the reason lovers will always be unknowable to each other, in Proust’s universe, is that each of them lies. Swann or the narrator will lie to uncover the truth about Odette or Albertine, who, anxious to preserve their freedom and not to be caught in a lie, piece together partially truthful fragments into a mendacious whole as “answers” to the inquisitions of their lover-torturers (here, we are inevitably reminded of the French expression mettre à la question, which means to torture). One of the most striking descriptions of what could be called the dialogism of lying can be found toward the conclusion of “Un Amour de Swann,” where the protagonist has begun to uncover Odette’s past as a courtesan and her numerous liaisons, both heterosexual and homosexual: However, from time to time, he [Swann] gave Odette to understand that, out of spitefulness, people told him everything she was doing; and, taking advantage of a true but insignifcant detail [détail insignifant mais vrai], which he had learned by chance, as though it were the only small bit which he allowed to let slip, among so many others, of a complete reconstruction of the life of Odette [reconstitution complète de la vie d’Odette] which he held hidden within himself, he led her to suppose that he knew things he in reality did not know or even imagined, for if he often beseeched Odette to not change the truth, it was only, whether he realized this or not, so that Odette could tell him everything that she did [tout ce qu’elle faisait]. Doubtless, as he told Odette, he loved sincerity, but he loved it in the same way he might love a pimp who could tell him everything about the life of his mistress. Hence his love of sincerity, not being disinterested, had not made him a better person. The truth he was looking for was that which Odette might tell him; but he himself, to obtain this truth, was not afraid to have recourse to lying, the lie being what he never ceased to depict to Odette as leading all human beings to degradation [mais lui-même, pour obtenir cette verité, ne craignait pas de recourir au mensonge, le mensonge qu’il ne cessait de peindre à Odette comme conduisant à la degradation toute créature humaine]. In short, he lied as much as Odette because, being unhappier than she, he was not less egotistical. (I 353–4, my translation; SW, 428) Beginning with the same premise as Kant (that lying annihilates a human being’s dignity, or in Proust’s wording, that lying leads “all human beings to degradation”), Swann plunges into the moral abyss by lying in order to discover the truth. But we must take this impulse 289

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to discover the truth as the jealous desire to arrive at “a complete reconstitution of the life of Odette” – i.e., at the kind of total narrative vision that is aimed at, aesthetically, in the petite madeleine scene. Lying is the method by which Swann hopes to coerce Odette into telling him “everything that she did.” The objects of lying – a coherent view of the human being and absolute knowledge – are uncannily similar to the objects of the novelist’s art when that art is infused with the ecstatic revelation of involuntary memory. How does one gain access to the truth in Proust’s universe? Through the moral labyrinth of lying, or through the portals of memory?

Artistic Creation: Involuntary Memory and the Good-Night Kiss I think that Proust provides us with a possible answer to this question in the kinds of juxtaposition – of the aesthetic and the ethical – I have been writing about until now. Readers of Proust will remember two moments of the petite madeleine scene which are pivotal in building toward the episode’s rapturous conclusion of aesthetic completeness. In the frst of these, we have the phrase: A delicious pleasure had invaded me [m’avait envahi], isolated, without the notion of its cause. It had immediately rendered the vicissitudes of life indiferent, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, in the same way that love works, by flling me with a precious essence. (I 44, my translation; SW, 52) The narrator, on his way to the moment at which involuntary memory opens up the possibility of narration itself, says that the “delicious pleasure” which has “invaded” him operates in the same way as love, “by flling me with a precious essence.” But from what we have just seen of Proustian love, can we even remotely say that love flls its adepts with a precious essence? Does love not exist within the jealous ruminations of the lover, who is compelled to lie (to invent fctitious narratives) and to fll the empty spaces of his beloved’s life with hypothesized “infernal” activities? Is it a matter of coincidence that, just twelve pages before the statement on the “delicious pleasure” brought on by the tasting of the little cake dipped in tea, we have the phrase: “Suddenly my anxiety subsided; a rapturous feeling invaded me [une félicité m’envahit], as when a strong medicine begins to act and to alleviate our pain” (I 32, my translation; SW, 37). But this passage is taken from the scene of the good-night kiss, from one of the deluded moments therein in which the narrator imagines that his mother’s kiss can, in fact, grant him the calm he needs (he knows, in fact, as he states in a more lucid moment of the same passage, that whatever calm this kiss brings him comes at great cost and is evanescent – I 38; SW, 44–5). We need to re-read the exalted moment in which the narrator, in the petite madeleine scene, speaks of the movement from passive reception of the “delicious pleasure” to literary action, or creation. We need to re-read what is said here, once again in the light of a previous passage: Petite Madeleine I put down the cup and turn toward my own mind. It alone can fnd the truth. But how? What weighty uncertainty, each time the mind feels itself to be overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is also the obscure country where it must search and in which all its stock-in-trade of knowledge will be of no use to it. Seek? Not just seek, but create [créer]. 290

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It faces something that does not yet exist and that it only can realize, which it alone can make actual which it alone can bring to light. (I 45, my translation; SW, 53) The Good-Night Kiss Those inaccessible and tormenting hours where she [the beloved woman, Odette or Albertine] went to taste of unknown pleasures, suddenly through an unexpected breach we have broken through; suddenly one of the moments whose succession composed them, a moment just as real as any other … we see it for ourselves, we possess it, we intervene in it, we have almost created it [nous l’avons créé presque]. (I 31, my translation; SW, 36) Both passages are characterized by a similar rhetorical progression. In the frst case, we move, via self-refection, from uncertainty to creation. At stake is nothing less than the discovery of the truth, expressed quite classically as a bringing-to-the-light. This, we are told, will happen through literary creation. In the second case, we fnd ourselves in a particularly deluded moment of a long development in which the narrator imagines that an intermediary such as Françoise is able to contact the anxious lover’s object of desire and reassure him that she is not, in fact, in some “infernal” domain, but is simply among friends and is happy to leave them to join him. Like the petite madeleine episode which it precedes by a few pages, this short passage from the scene of the good-night kiss is based upon the sudden lifting of barriers (“suddenly through an unexpected breach we have broken through”). The rhetorical progression from “we see it for ourselves” to “we possess it” to “we intervene in it” to “we have almost created it” should alert us to the similarly grand and ambitious desire to create a world from a crumb of tea-infused cake.

Conclusion Proust is the most perverse of writers, not because he writes about perversion, but because he undermines the serious aesthetic goals he sets for himself, and does so in advance of setting these goals. Before it is possible to imagine the ways in which art liberates, ennobles, or redeems the human being from his existential servitude, the narrator intervenes, and, borrowing directly from the vocabulary he will use in the aesthetic context, creates a pre-existing web of moral complexity in which the lie is at home and at work. Lying, and ethical deceptiveness, the impulse toward the degradation of the other and self-degradation, will always have woven their narrative web in advance of all theorizing. Lying is a response to a previous question, but the uniqueness of the lie, for Proust, resides in the fact that it is the person who lies who invents the question to which he responds in his lie. The liar’s dialogue is fake and factitious: it represents nothing more or less than the liar’s desire; it invents its interlocutor, and narrativizes its anxiety, its jealous searches, before an ordering retrospective consciousness can attempt to save it in an aesthetic theory. The remarkable thing in Proust is that demystifcation precedes mystifcation, deconstruction comes before construction. The liar sufers from an excess of imagination; but it is that excess which characterizes the Proustian novel. The fact that the narrator uses the same vocabulary and similar rhetorical strategies in passages that stage the lie as in those that exalt involuntary memory should cause us readers to refect upon the seriousness with which we are supposed to “swallow” the narrator’s aesthetic theory, especially in the most counter-intuitive of its claims – that art can “deliver” 291

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us from the bondage of life and render death less “plausible.” This kind of claim bears a curious resemblance to the serpent’s false promise to Eve in the Bible: that eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil will bring immortality, not death. Could it be that the Proustian narrator is, in fact, diabolical, and that the small cake dipped in tea is a seductive fruit which we taste at our peril, especially if we believe that its essence will deliver us from our mortality? At the risk of sounding paradoxical, I am suggesting that the moments of aesthetic theory in Proust are, quite possibly, the most mendacious of all moments in the novel, precisely because they promise what no secular text can deliver: namely, the impossible stepping outside of our human condition into an atemporal realm of pure and disengaged contemplation. The discourse of lying, however painful to the tortured subject involved in its devious web, illuminates falsehood, which, in Camus’s words, “is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.” Before narration can begin its progression, the lie begins to function already, in advance, as a written response to a letter it has itself invented, as a coercive device to entrap its interlocutor/ reader. Lying, for Proust, unlike the unfolding of involuntary memory, manifests itself in wayward paths, fragmented confessions, sporadic convulsions of the body and mind, in those places which we will have already visited, but, perhaps fortunately, have forgotten. I will leave my questioning here. In this essay, I have tried to demonstrate that Proust makes the reader’s hesitation between the aesthetic and the ethical worldview real indeed. But I would like to conclude that perhaps we should view this fundamental hesitation not as an either/or, but as a both/and proposition. Although, as I have tried to show, Proust delves quite deeply into the question of love as jealousy, and in so doing uncovers the fundamental place of the lie in this universe, there is no doubt in the mind of any reader of Proust that he took the moments of aesthetic triumph, which he sprinkles through the pages of his novel, quite seriously. A writer as serious as Proust needed to both deepen his thoughts on existential concerns, such as love and the role of lying therein, and examine his role as writer, as the creator of a world but also as the creator of a theory of art.

Notes 1 Albert Camus, The Fall, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 119–20. The original French is to be found in: Albert Camus, La Chute, in Œuvres complètes, vol. III, ed. Raymond Gay-Crosier (Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 2008), p. 752. 2 Luc Fraisse, L’éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Presses de l’Université de ParisSorbonne, 2013). All translations of Fraisse’s text are mine. 3 See Luc Fraisse, L’éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, pp. 78–89. 4 One should add to the above Proust’s love of the comical. There is a wonderful passage in The Captive (La Prisonnière) in which Brichot, at a dinner-party hosted by Mme Verdurin, takes the narrator aside and says: Moral duty … is less clearly imperative than our Ethics teach us. Let theosophical cafés and Kantian breweries take careful note, we ignore, deplorably, the nature of the Good. [In his Critique of Practical Judgment Kant] is still serving us Plato’s The Banquet, but this time at Königsberg, in the good German manner, indigestible yet morally purifed, with sauerkraut but without gigolos (Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié et al. [Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, 1987–1989], III 786; C, 319). This and all further references to Proust in the original French will be to this edition. I have translated this and all quoted passages from Proust into English myself. References to the Vintage Classics six-volume edition of In Search of Lost Time, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin, revised by D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 2000–2005) have also been included, e.g. (C, 319).

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Proust and Lying 5 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 182. For the original German, in brackets, I refer the reader to Immanuel Kant, Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. Karl Vorländer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner “Philosophische Bibliothek,” 1996), p. 278. 6 Genesis 3: 1–5, in The Holy Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 3. 7 Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage,” in Les Fleurs du Mal, John E. Jackson (ed.), (Paris: Le Livre de poche coll. Classiques de Poche, 1999), v. 144, p. 192. In the fnal verses of his poem, Baudelaire, using the Christian contrast of Hell versus Heaven, creates the same kind of dichotomy I will be discussing further along – the Kierkegaardian “either/or”: “Nous voulons …/ Plonger au fond du goufre, Enfer ou Ciel, qu’importe?/ Au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!” (We want to …/Plunge into the heart of the abyss, Hell or Heaven, what does it matter?/ Into the heart of the Unknown to fnd the new”). One can also note an uncanny resonance here with Camus’s use of the expression “what does it matter” (qu’importe) in the liminary quotation I have chosen for my essay, from The Fall, to discuss the chiaroscuro of the truth and its cohabitation with lies. 8 See David R. Ellison (2013) “Modernism,” in A. Watt (ed.), Marcel Proust in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 214–20. 9 For Abraham’s role in the scene, see Julie Grenet, “Portrait d’Abraham en feur: étrangeté et exotisme du père dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust,” Dalhousie French Studies 83 (Summer 2008), pp. 109–17. For the primordial importance of Charles Swann in the scene, see André Benhaïm, Panim: Visages de Proust (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Septentrion, 2006), pp. 217–19.

References Baudelaire, C. (1999) “Le Voyage,” in J. E. Jackson (ed.), Les Fleurs du Mal, Paris: Le Livre de poche coll. Classiques de poche, pp. 186–92. Benhaïm, A. (2006) Panim: Visages de Proust, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Septentrion. Camus, A. (2008) La Chute, in R. Gay-Crosier (ed.), Oeuvres complètes, vol. 3, Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade, pp. 695–765. ———. (1991) The Fall, trans. J. O’Brien, New York: Vintage. Ellison, D. R. (2013) “Modernism,” in A. Watt (ed.), Marcel Proust in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–20. Fraisse, L. (2013) L’éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne. Grenet, J. (2008) “Portrait d’Abraham en feur: étrangeté et exotisme du père dans À la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust,” Dalhousie French Studies Vol. 83, pp. 109–17. Kant, I. (1996a) Metaphysik der Sitten, ed. K. Vorländer, Hamburg: Felix Meiner “Philosophische Bibliothek.” ———. (1996) The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Proust, M. (1987–1989) À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols., ed. J.-Y. Tadié et al., Paris: Gallimard-Pléiade. ———. (2000–2005) In Search of Lost Time, 6 vols., trans. C. K. Scott Moncrief, rev. by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright, London: Vintage. Schiller, F. (1992) “Über Anmut und Würde,” in R. P. Janz (ed.), Theoretische Schriften, vol. 8 of Werke und Briefe, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, pp. 330–94. The Holy Bible (1988) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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19 “EACH OF US IS INDEED ALONE” Vulnerability in In Search of Lost Time Roos Slegers

Introduction What can the narrator of In Search of Lost Time teach us about vulnerability? Systematic philosophical analyses of the concept of vulnerability tend to focus on the fragility of human life, our susceptibility to harm and our dependence on others (see, e.g., MacIntyre 1999; Mackenzie et al. 2014; Nussbaum 2006). We are embodied and therefore vulnerable, though some groups and individuals more than others, which makes vulnerability a human rights issue (Butler 2004, 2009; Turner 2006). Sources outside of the philosophical canon – like the Search – may reveal aspects of vulnerability that do not readily lend themselves to traditional, systematic analysis (see also McLennan 2019). Reading Proust, we recognize the narrator’s corporeal vulnerability to illness, but we are also struck by the immense privilege he enjoys. The narrator is not “vulnerable” in the way the word is commonly used in the current debates around, e.g. social and economic inequality or racism. If anything, the narrator of the Search is relatively invulnerable to the harms to which other groups (like e.g. Jewish people, homosexuals or servants) are susceptible. Both from today’s perspective and within the world of the novel itself, the narrator enjoys a privileged position. Nevertheless, I suggest that the narrator can add to our understanding of vulnerability on a diferent, interpersonal plane. What I have in mind here is the kind of vulnerability we refer to when we say that you have to make yourself (to some degree) vulnerable within the context of a close friendship or romantic relationship – if, that is, you want the relationship to “work.” The fact that this sounds like a pop psychology truism is important to the point I try to make in this chapter: many of us may readily agree that this sort of vulnerability is important, but the Search makes us feel – rather than just intellectually register – the signifcance of this kind of vulnerability and the difculty of maintaining it. The Search contributes to our understanding of vulnerability because it shows us that to be vulnerable does not only mean being susceptible to harm. Vulnerability also opens us up to love and wonder, even if, as the narrator shows us, these feelings cannot last – at least not where they concern other people. Complicating the theme of interpersonal vulnerability in the Search is the fact that the narrator himself seems to want to forget about it, or theorize it away, towards the end of the novel. In Time Regained, the focus is on the narrator’s artistic aspirations inspired by a series of joyful involuntary memories. People of course feature prominently, but as specimens 294

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relevant to the “observation of humanity” rather than as friends and loved ones (TR, 202; IV 433). It is in this last volume that the narrator remarks: Every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he ofers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself. (TR, 273; IV 489–90) True to this description of the novel, I propose that the optical instrument presented in the Search brings into focus, among other things, the difculty of being vulnerable to (and with) other people. My thesis, then, is that yes, the narrator of the Search has something to teach us about this particular kind of vulnerability, but not as an exemplar or a proponent of the phenomenon. The Search forces us to think about vulnerability precisely because the narrator believes that it is (mostly) impossible and perhaps also undesirable. The narrator’s involuntary recollection of his grandmother in the Balbec hotel in Sodom and Gomorrah serves as a touchstone throughout this chapter. This memory is uniquely disruptive and forces the narrator to see certain things about himself that do not ft the image he had of himself as a good and loving grandson. Like other involuntary memories, the recollection of his grandmother is attended by a strong sense of certainty: he knows that what he remembers must be true. But unlike other involuntary memories, this memory is very painful and has certain moral (rather than merely aesthetic) implications. At the end of the novel, the narrator concludes that his aesthetic calling trumps any possibility of moral development or growth. The novel ends in a joyous afrmation of the aesthetic and the painful moral insights related to the involuntary recollection of his grandmother are in part forgotten, in part instrumentalized in the name of art. These moral insights are, of course, still part of the optical instrument that is the novel, albeit of the dissonant (from the point of Time Regained) “eclipsed middle volumes” (Bowie 1987: 48, 58). In allowing these middle volumes, especially Sodom and Gomorrah, to complicate the narrator’s grand conclusion of the novel, we do justice to a part of the narrator’s journey that – from a reader’s perspective – remains unresolved. The narrator may want to forget about his vulnerability to other people, but we as readers remember and so are left with a sense of unease, perhaps even sadness. We know that Proust was still working on especially the middle part of his novel when he died and that the incompleteness of the narrator’s journey is due, at least in part, to the author’s untimely death. Confning myself to the world of the novel and the narrator’s perspective, I suggest that one of the strengths of the novel lies in the fact that it leaves this tension between the narrator’s aesthetic calling and the possibility of moral development unresolved. In an earlier text, I used the narrator’s journey in the Search as a prompt to develop a moral attitude I called “courageous vulnerability” (Slegers 2010). My approach here is diferent: rather than trying to ofer a synthesis, I foreground what remains unresolved. The idea behind the reading I ofer in the present chapter is that we stand to learn most from the Search when we recognize the tensions and discrepancies that the narrator (un)consciously glosses over or (apparently) forgets. In the frst section, I contrast the narrator’s exceptional sensitivity to certain impressions with his relationships to people who, as he puts it, force him to “live on the surface” of himself (C, 71; III 578). The narrator’s rapture at the sight of M. Vinteuil’s hut in Swann’s Way, for example, has no counterpart in his dealings with people. The indiference and boredom that mark the prolonged periods in his life from which this kind of rapture is absent are the subject of the section that follows. At these times, the narrator fears he might be reduced 295

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to the “observation of humanity” – an occupation he ranks much lower than the work of a “true” artist (TR, 202; IV 433). I next turn to the bouleversement (“upheaval”) caused by the narrator’s recollection of his grandmother in the Balbec hotel. In this “upheaval” of his “entire being,” his indiference is violently disrupted not by aesthetic pleasure but heartrending grief (SG, 179; III 152). Here, more than anywhere else in the novel, the kind of vulnerability at stake in my argument becomes apparent. The painful, moral insights the narrator gains in this moment are forced upon him: he is exposed to them, defenseless. The photograph of his grandmother taken by his friend Robert de Saint-Loup fuels the narrator’s grief and guilt: looking at the picture, he now sees that she was sufering at the time, both from her illness and from his own unkind treatment. But something peculiar happens: the same photograph that initially is the focal point of the narrator’s pain and remorse, in time turns into a shield against those very feelings. In the concluding sections, I draw a parallel between this use of his grandmother’s picture and the way characters shield themselves from their (supposed) lovers elsewhere in the Search. In Time Regained, the narrator posits: “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own” (TR, 254; IV 475). But as I shall argue, on the narrator’s own account in Sodom and Gomorrah, this is not entirely true. Rather, the narrator makes himself invulnerable to the other, painful ways in which he briefy glimpsed other universes, his grandmother’s universe in particular.

A Man Without a Skin In his Notes to Literature, Theodor Adorno remarks that “Remembrance of Things Past examines internal and external reality, using as its instrument the existence of a man without a skin” (Adorno 1991: 316). Adorno’s metaphor suggests that the narrator of the Search is singularly exposed to reality and therefore much more vulnerable than most of us. His vulnerability makes the narrator sensitive to impressions that might not register with the rest of us, or at least not to the same degree. This, of course, is part of the function of the “optical instrument” the narrator presents to us: he wants to enable us to discern in our own reality certain elements that we – thick-skinned readers – might otherwise overlook. Adorno’s metaphor further suggests that the narrator’s vulnerability is not so much a choice as a condition. If you have no skin, you are defenseless, whether you like it or not: things can “get through” to you and enter your system without you having a say in the matter. You have to take other measures to protect yourself from unwelcome touches and intrusions. I suggest that while the narrator cannot control his susceptibility to impressions, he can and does make choices about which impressions to pursue – and which impressions to shield himself against. I return to this last point in the sections detailing the narrator’s “upheaval” in the Balbec hotel and the photograph taken by Saint-Loup. In the present section, I want to frst note the kind of impressions that the narrator welcomes and pursues and give a frst indication of the contrast between the narrator’s attitude towards these impressions on the one hand and his attitude towards people on the other. People generally do not have the power to move the narrator of the Search the way simple objects, sights or smells do. In fact, people are frequently obstacles to the enjoyment of the pleasures the narrator values most highly. Their presence forces the narrator to live “on the surface” of himself, pulling him away from his inner life (C, 71; III 578). Family members, friends and lovers cannot touch the narrator the way “a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone,” or “the smell of a path” can (SW, 212; I 176). When the narrator is preoccupied by a particular person, it is usually because he wants to be noticed by them, control or possess them. 296

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This dynamic is most obvious in the case of the narrator’s lover Albertine. It is only after he learns about her death that he muses: “where I had been wrong was perhaps in not making a greater efort to know Albertine in herself ” (F, 567; IV 77). This remark is strikingly nonchalant (“perhaps”) and we do not get the sense that the narrator now feels any more inclined (let alone obligated) to make any efort to know any of his still living friends and lovers “in themselves.” While the narrator’s aesthetic sensitivity is highly developed and fnely attuned to the minutest impressions, his moral sensitivity appears to be rather dull. Or more precisely: in his sensitivity to impressions of all kinds, he picks up on morally relevant details, but these do not lead him to change any of his patterns or behaviors. While he considers it his duty to follow through on the aesthetic impressions he receives, he does not experience a similar or parallel sense of obligation towards people. This comes out most clearly in his relationship to his grandmother. It is only after his grandmother has died that the narrator makes an efort to know her “in herself.” This efort is forced on him by an involuntary memory and he cannot sustain it: the painful insights the narrator acquires about his grandmother soon lose their power to upset him. Later, the narrator even speaks of a “double murder:” both Albertine and his grandmother might have lived longer if it had not been for his selfsh love (F, 567–8; IV 78). And in a way, he killed them all over again by turning them into material for a book. He states that “we alter [the people we love] incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves, they are simply a vast, vague arena in which to exteriorize our emotions” (F, 567; IV 77). What is more, the sufering they caused him (in very diferent ways) turns out to be instrumental to the narrator fnding his calling as an artist and so in a way Albertine and his grandmother were sacrifced to a higher, aesthetic purpose. To get a better sense of the way in which the narrator cultivates his vulnerability (rather than closing himself of from it, as I will discuss below), we must frst look at the profound aesthetic pleasure the narrator derives from seemingly everyday sensations. Out on his walks in the vicinity of Combray, the narrator’s attention is arrested by sights and smells which give him “a special pleasure” (SW, 212; I 176). They strike him as particularly signifcant because these things appear to hold a promise of something “beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my eforts I never managed to discover” (SW, 212; I 176). He is literally stopped in his tracks: “Since I felt that this something was to be found in them, I would stand there motionless, looking, breathing, endeavouring to penetrate with my mind beyond the thing seen or smelt” (SW, 212; I 176). These sights and smells do not hide a forgotten part of the past, as does the famous morsel of tea-soaked madeleine, but they do invite him to explore a reality he cannot quite reach. In Time Regained, the fnal volume of the novel, the narrator explains that these sensations concealed “something of a quite diferent kind which I must try to discover” (TR, 232; IV 456). Impressions like a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a fower, or a stone “had solicited my attention,” the narrator explains, in much the same way as did the sensations which concealed the involuntary recollections (TR, 232; IV 456). The “something of a quite diferent kind” contained within these sensations gives the narrator a special pleasure. This is the pleasure the narrator experiences when he sees the steeples of Martinville from the doctor’s carriage or when he hears Vintueil’s septet: an all-enveloping joy which is not connected to a past experience. Here is a particularly instructive example of this kind of réalité pressentie (“a reality [he] once sensed”) from Swann’s Way (SW, 213; I 177). After an hour of rain and wind, against which I had struggled cheerfully, as I came to the edge of the Montjouvain pond, beside a little hut with a tiled roof in which M. Vintueil’s gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, 297

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washed clean by the shower, glittered anew in the sky, on the trees, on the wall of the hut and the still wet tiles of the roof, on the ridge of which a hen was strutting. The wind tugged at the hen’s downy feathers, which foated out horizontally to their full extent with the unresisting submissiveness of light and lifeless things. The tiled roof cast upon the pond, translucent again in the sunlight, a dappled pink refection which I had never observed before. And, seeing upon the water, and on the surface of the wall, a pallid smile responding to the smiling sky, I cried aloud in my enthusiasm, brandishing my furled umbrella: ‘Gosh, gosh, gosh, gosh!’ But at the same time I felt that I was in duty bound not to content myself with the unilluminating words, but to endeavor to see more clearly into the source of my rapture. (SW, 184–5; I 153) Words cannot express the narrator’s excitement at the sight of the hut, but his impression is clearly a very happy one. It also awakens in him a sense of obligation: the narrator feels “in duty bound” to fgure out where his delight originates. The sight of the hut does not trigger a memory and hence this duty does not relate to the past. Yet there is something about the experience which makes the narrator feel like an efort is required of him. His aesthetic rapture is bound up with a sense of moral obligation: he ought to investigate the source of his enthusiasm. It is worth noting, again, that people generally do not move the narrator in the way M. Vinteuil’s hut and other objects do. An important exception is his grandmother, but she moves him in an involuntary memory he has of her after her death. Of course, he is frst intrigued by, and later obsessed with, Albertine and her friends when he sees them on the beach in Balbec; he practically stalks Mme de Guermantes, desperately wants to be SaintLoup’s friend, etc. But his preoccupation with these people is that of an art collector or an herbologist: he has no desire to get to know these people “in themselves” but regards them as rare specimens. His interest in them always manifests from afar, usually long before he meets them. When he eventually gets to spend time with them, they are bound to disappoint because, in his imagination, he had enveloped them in a chrysalis of idealized traits. Objects can disappoint in the same way people do (like the Balbec church, for example), but they can also delight and enrapture in a way people cannot. People can capture the narrator’s attention, but they do not trigger the kind of enthusiasm evoked by M. Vinteuil’s hut. As I mentioned earlier, the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother is one of the very rare instances where the narrator does feel a sense of moral obligation to a person (be it one who is no longer alive). Before discussing this memory in more detail, I frst want to look at what happens when the narrator’s aesthetic sense fails him. Because much to the narrator’s dismay, his vulnerability comes and goes, sometimes leaving him indiferent to the very things he feels ought to delight him. He cannot force himself to be receptive to the impressions described above because his vulnerability is not under his control. But as we will see later, how the narrator responds to his vulnerability, and whether he engages with the insights it brings him, is to a large extent up to him.

Indiference and Worthlessness When he believes that he has lost the capacity to feel the way he did when he saw M. Vintueil’s hut, the narrator considers himself “worthless” (TR, 202; IV 434). This sense of worthlessness is clearly conveyed in Time Regained when the narrator is frustrated by his inability to feel any aesthetic delight at the sight of the sun shining on a row of trees: 298

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The train had stopped, I remember, in open country. The sun was shining on a row of trees that followed the railway line, fooding the upper halves of their trunks with light. “Trees,” I thought, “you no longer have anything to say to me. My heart has grown cold and no longer hears you. I am in the midst of nature. Well, it is with indiference, with boredom that my eyes register the line which separates your radiant foreheads from your shadowy trunks. If ever I thought of myself as a poet, I know now that I am not one. Perhaps in the new, the so desiccated part of my life which is about to begin, human beings may yet inspire in me what nature can no longer say. But the years in which I might have been able to sing her praise will never return.” But in thus consoling myself with the thought that the observation of humanity might possibly come to take the place of an unattainable inspiration, I knew that I was merely seeking to console myself, I knew that I knew myself to be worthless. (TR, 202; IV 433–4) If he were a poet, he would be able to appreciate the beauty of the trees and fowers. His indiference shows him that he is not a poet and so he tries to console himself with the thought that he might take to observing “humanity” instead. The narrator indicates that the “observation of humanity” he has in mind here is a poor substitute for the “unattainable inspiration” he longs for. Juxtaposing the passage about M. Vintueil’s hut and the one describing the trees seen from the train, we learn that the narrator’s eye (and, elsewhere, ear, taste, nose or touch) for detail is a necessary but not a sufcient requirement for the aesthetic experiences he craves. It is not enough to notice the sunshine on the trees; the sight needs to get through to him or move him in a particular way. The narrator cannot make himself permeable to these impressions; sometimes the required state is just not there. If I really had the soul of an artist, surely I would be feeling pleasure at the sight of this curtain of trees lit by the setting sun, these little fowers on the bank which lifted themselves almost to the level of the steps of my compartment, fowers whose petals I was able to count but whose colour I would not, like many a worthy man of letters, attempt to describe, for can one hope to transmit to the reader a pleasure that one has not felt? (TR, 202–3; IV 434) The “observation of humanity” with which the narrator believes he has to console himself, apparently does not require the artistic disposition the narrator aspires to – it is something suited to someone who, as the narrator suggests, has entered a “desiccated part of life.” We soon learn that the narrator’s susceptibility to aesthetic rapture has left him only temporarily; the series of joyful involuntary memories in Time Regained convinces the narrator that he does in fact have the soul of an artist. He feels “duty bound” as an artist to solve their riddles, and he does. He continues to observe humanity, but from the vantage point of an artist with a higher calling – not as a poor form of consolation. Yet in Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator “transmitted” to the reader the “bliss” of fnding his grandmother again mixed with the painful certainty of her death (SG, 182; III 155). Is his grandmother as she appears in this involuntary memory part of the “humanity” that he fears he is reduced to describing in the “so desiccated part of my life?” That classifcation does not do justice to the narrator’s overwhelming and disruptive experience in the Balbec hotel. Back then, the narrator also felt a sense of obligation to pursue a réalité pressentie, but this obligation was not just to a piece of the past but also (and primarily) a link to his grandmother as a person (SW, 213; I 177). Specifcally, this involuntary memory called on the narrator to 299

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step outside of the narrative he had constructed about his identity as a grandson and to look at his grandmother in a diferent way. “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves,” the narrator claims towards the end of the novel (TR, 254; IV 474–5). But this claim is not altogether true to his own experience, because this involuntary memory (which is not a work of art) forced him to see himself, however briefy, from a diferent point of view. It also showed him something about his grandmother he had not seen (or wanted to see) before. Furthermore, the photograph that plays an important role in the way the narrator copes with the fall-out of this involuntary memory both allows him to “emerge from himself ” and (at a later stage) serves as an instrument to close himself of from certain new insights (Larkin 2011: 46). This episode, then, requires closer scrutiny both because of the impact it has on the narrator in Sodom and Gomorrah and because of the way it is apparently forgotten by the time the narrator embraces his calling as an artist in Time Regained.

Upheaval in the Balbec Hotel When the narrator returns to the Balbec hotel more than a year after his grandmother has died, he is overcome by grief. He has sat down on his hotel bed to take of his boots when, bending over, he experiences a bouleversement, an “upheaval of my entire being” (SG, 179; III 152). The narrator explains: But scarcely had I touched the topmost button then my chest swelled, flled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The being who had come to my rescue, saving me from barrenness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and restored me to myself, for that being was myself and something more than me (the container that is greater than the contained and was bringing it to me). I had just perceived, in my memory, stooping over my fatigue, the tender, preoccupied, disappointed face of my grandmother, as she had been on that frst evening of our arrival, the face not of that grandmother whom I had been astonished and remorseful at having so little missed, and who had nothing in common with her save her name, but of my real grandmother, of whom, for the frst time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elysées, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. […] And thus, in my wild desire to fing myself into her arms, it was only at that moment – more than a year after her burial, because of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from corresponding to the calendar of feelings – that I became conscious that she was dead. (SG, 179–80; III 152–3) This involuntary recollection is remarkable in at least two ways: it is one of the very few involuntary memories in the novel that is primarily sad rather than joyful and it leads the narrator to a number of painful insights into his own moral shortcomings. While by far most involuntary memories are attended by a “joy which [is] like a certainty,” the certainty that pervades the narrator’s involuntary recollection of his grandmother is deeply grievous (TR, 218; IV 446). While the voluntary recollections of his grandmother had left him largely indiferent and remorseful (he knew he was supposed to miss her but he could not muster the appropriate feelings), this sudden sense of his “real” grandmother’s presence makes him realize that she is truly gone: “I had only just, on feeling her for the frst time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on fnding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever” 300

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(SG, 182; III 155). He now knows that she is dead in a way that he did not before. Because he had been remorseful about his inability to miss and therefore grieve her, this new, deep sadness is also a relief: he now fnally feels the way he sensed he should have been feeling ever since her death. This is part of the reason why the narrator clings to the memory, however painful: it restores his grandmother to him because he fnally feels something again and so he is restored to himself. But the passage cited above also contains a few clues about the less welcome ramifcations of this involuntary recollection. His grandmother’s face as he recollects it is not only “tender” but also “preoccupied” and “disappointed.” As readers, we are aware of the narrator’s grandmother’s deep concerns about his physical health and mental wellbeing. We also know that she generally took great pains to hide her worries from him. “I began to remember all the opportunities that I had seized, by letting her see my suferings and exaggerating them if necessary, to cause her a grief which I imagined as being obliterated immediately by my kisses” (SG, 182; III 155). Not only did he purposefully add to her worries about him, he also remembers the many occasions on which he tried to put her in her place when she was not behaving the way he thought she ought to. His attempts to show her that she was not acting quite comme il faut had their efect: never again would I be able to erase that tightening of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of mine; for as the dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we strike without respite when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them. I clung to this pain, cruel as it was, with all my strength, for I realized that it was the efect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present within me. (SG, 193; III 156) In this memory, his grandmother is present to him in a way she never was (or was allowed to be) during her life. There was, however, another time when the narrator saw his grandmother in a diferent light. In The Guermantes Way, the narrator talks to his grandmother over the phone while he is in Balbec and she is in Paris. Hearing her voice, but not seeing her, she sounds sad and old to him and not at all like the grandmother he knows. The narrator rushes to Paris to see her and dispel this sad, old phantom grandmother. But as he comes upon her unawares, I was in the room, or rather I was not yet in the room since she was not aware of my presence, and, like a woman whom one surprises at a piece of needlework which she will hurriedly put aside if anyone comes in, she was absorbed in thoughts which she had never allowed to be seen by me. (G, 155; II 438) His grandmother is turned away from him, literally and fguratively. Normally, she is there for him, taking pains to be the person he expects her to be. But now, as Suzanne Guerlac points out, “the narrator experiences himself as a stranger” in her presence (Guerlac 2020: 41). Or in Akane Kawakami’s words: “For just a moment, the narrator sees her grandmother photographically, that is to say with a vision devoid of afect” (Kawakami 2013: 105). The narrator himself registers the alienating efect of his “camera eyes,” which show him that there is another grandmother underneath, or next to, the one he knows (Guerlac 2020: 31–40). But he does not pursue this (unwelcome) alternative take on reality. He merely observes: 301

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suddenly, in our drawing room which formed part of a new world, that of Time, that which is inhabited by the strangers of whom we say “He’s begun to age a good deal,” for the frst time and for a moment only, since she vanished very quickly, I saw, sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming, letting her slightly crazed eyes wander over a book, an overburdened old woman I did not know. (G, 157; II 440) As Katja Haustein observes, the narrator “shudders because he realizes his own alienation from the once beloved other and with it a complete absence of feeling” (Haustein 2009: 164). Experiencing what Haustein calls an “emotional cavity,” a “zone” where the narrator is isolated emotionally from the world around him, he desires to recreate his grandmother as he is used to seeing her (Haustein 2009: 171). The description of this old woman he “did not know” is detached and almost cruel – given what we later learn about her illness and worries. Yet the narrator makes no efort to further investigate this momentary revelation. Kawakami observes: “however traumatic its efect may be, photographic vision is also a way of seeing which makes it possible for us to see a loved person as an other” (Kawakami 2013: 20). As such, this moment in the drawing room could have served as an invitation to the narrator to “love [his grandmother] truly for what she is, … to love her unselfshly, to release her from his inevitably autobiographical imagination” (Kawakami 2013: 21). But instead, the narrator welcomes the obviously ill-founded proclamation of the bufoonish Dr. du Boulbon that his grandmother is perfectly healthy and that her sickness is just “in her head.” Ofcially absolved from any worries about her, the narrator is annoyed with her for being slow and making him wait – until he fnally realizes she has had another stroke. “She was not yet dead,” the narrator observes, “But I was already alone” (G, 359; II 609). He takes her to a diferent doctor who immediately sees the gravity of her situation. “I stood on the landing gazing at my grandmother who was doomed. Each of us is indeed alone. We set of homewards” (G, 365; II 614). The uncharacteristically short sentences emphasize the narrator’s isolation. He “is left alone, standing before the frame” (Haustein 2009: 162). But was his grandmother, whom he never tried to get to know in herself, ever not alone? His grandmother’s presence while he is mourning her after his involuntary memory at the Balbec hotel restores the narrator to himself. In the process, the narrator comes to see aspects of his behavior towards her in a new light. These insights are painful and draw our attention to the cruel aspects of involuntary memory: this memory causes an “upheaval,” confronting the narrator with an “emphatically disturbing truth” (Earle 2002: 968). Though he clings to this pain, which returns his grandmother to the narrator and the narrator to himself, the feelings of remorse and regret soon lose their sharpness. This is no surprise: the freshness of an involuntary memory never lasts. But while the narrator eventually commits himself to the arduous pursuit of the reality bound up with the “joy like a certainty,” he gives up fairly quickly on the moral insights he gains from the painful aspects of the involuntary memory of his grandmother. A photograph of his grandmother taken by Saint-Loup plays a central role in this process of weakening the narrator’s moral resolve. In the next section I use the narrator’s relationship to this picture to return to the theme of vulnerability. I will take my cue from Suzanne Guerlac who, referring to the role the picture plays in the narrator’s response to his recollection of his grandmother, posits that “attachment, not art, is at stake in this dramatic episode of involuntary memory” (Guerlac 2020: 23). I suggest that art not only, as the narrator claims, allows us “to emerge from ourselves” (TR, 254; IV 474). It can also come to stand between us and other people. Bringing back to mind Adorno’s metaphor of the man without a skin, I propose that the narrator’s invulnerability when it comes to people is at least in part a side-efect of his aesthetic mission. 302

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Saint-Loup’s Photograph After the upheaval brought about by his involuntary memory of his grandmother in the Balbec hotel, the narrator looks at a photograph of his grandmother taken by his friend Robert de Saint-Loup. He remembers the occasion: at the time, the narrator had been a little embarrassed by his grandmother’s eagerness to have her picture taken. He was disappointed in her vanity, taking her time to put on her hat, shawl and make-up. This was one of those times when he made her feel his disapproval. With the fresh recollection of the ways he made her sufer very much on his mind, it pains him to look at the picture: Then sweeter memories returned to me. She was my grandmother and I was her grandson. Her facial expressions seemed written in a language intended for me alone; she was everything in my life, other people existed merely in relation to her, to the opinion she would express to me about them. But no, our relations were too feeting to have been anything but accidental. She no longer knew me, I should never see her again. We had not been created solely for one another; she was a stranger to me. (SG, 202; III 172) The narrator goes back and forth between two extremes, neither of which he can sustain for long: either the narrator and his grandmother formed a seamless unit or they were strangers to each other and always had been. As Guerlac points out, the photograph is “unstable” and “intermittent,” imprinting “the workings of the intermittences of the heart” (Guerlac: 2020: 29). Notably, the narrator seems unable or unwilling to consider a more moderate option between these extremes. The beloved grandmother was either made for him and he for her, or their bond was essentially meaningless. There is no room for the “overburdened woman” of whom he caught a glimpse after their phone conversation – somebody with her own thoughts and feelings independent from the narrator’s self-centered interests (G, 157; II 440). The narrator’s focus on this photograph brings to mind Swann’s preoccupation with the picture he keeps on his desk. Early on in their relationship, when Swann doubts whether Odette is actually his type, he notices that Odette looks like Zipporah, a fgure from Botticelli’s fresco The Trials of Moses. He fnds that Odette’s type is “made clearly intelligible” in the fgure of Zipporah and notices how “traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and her body’ (SW, 267; I 220). Odette is Botticelli’s masterpiece made fesh, and this makes her precious to him. How could he have doubted the worth of a woman who – had she been alive at the time – would have been singled out by the great painter? Whenever his misgivings about Odette’s attractiveness return, he recalls Odette’s resemblance to Zipporah. The words ‘Florentine painting’ were invaluable to Swann. They enabled him, like a title, to introduce the image of Odette into a world of dreams and fancies which, until then, she had been debarred from entering, and where she assumed a new and nobler form. (SW, 268; I 221) Swann puts a reproduction of Zipporah on his desk and gazes at it, congratulating himself on having fallen in love with a real-life work of art: When he had sat for a long time gazing at the Botticelli, he would think of his own living Botticelli, who seemed even lovelier still, and as he drew towards him the photograph of Zipporah he would imagine that he was holding Odette against his heart. (SW, 269; I 221–2) 303

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Swann quite literally places a screen between himself and his lover, though from his perspective the picture allows him to see Odette more clearly. Through the reproduction he can see Odette’s “type” in its purest, aesthetic form and so appreciate its essence in the real-life Odette. It of course also ensures that he stays completely uninterested in Odette, the person. Though Swann eventually grows obsessed with Odette’s relationships to other men, his interest in her is that of a jealous and possessive collector – foreshadowing the narrator’s obsessions in the consecutive volumes. Returning to the narrator gazing at Saint-Loup’s picture of his grandmother, we fnd him using an incantation parallel to Swann’s “Florentine Painting:” I kept my eyes fxed, as on a drawing which one ceases to see by dint of staring at it, upon the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken, and all of a sudden I thought once again: ‘It’s grandmother, I am her grandson’ (SG, 202–3; III 172) The words of this phrase ring hollow in the wake of the upheaval he has experienced, yet he keeps repeating it as a kind of mantra. In Time Regained, the narrator notes that even our strongest feelings eventually become “merely a word which we do not understand.” It is our duty, he claims, to “learn to understand the forgotten words once more” (TR, 264; IV 483). Here the narrator clearly wants to restore the former, familiar meaning to the words of his mantra but he can only do so by sacrifcing the still fresh insights into his behavior towards his grandmother. “Despite his new knowledge,” writes Áine Larkin, “the photograph continues to lie to him convincingly” (Larkin 2011: 46). But as we know from Guerlac, the photograph is unstable and intermittent; it is both an image of her death (the onset of which she tried to hide beneath her hat and make-up) and of her life (the tenderness and love which motivated the grandmother to have Saint-Loup take the picture in the frst place) (Guerlac 2020). Adding to his pain and disrupting the gradual encroachment of voluntary memories in line with his mantra “It’s grandmother, I am her grandson,” the housekeeper Françoise enters his hotel room and sees the picture: ‘Poor Madame, […] that day the Marquis took her picture, she was very poorly, she had been taken bad twice. “Whatever happens, Françoise,” she says to me, “you mustn’t let my grandson know.” And she hid it well, she was always cheerful in company’ (SG, 203; III 173) Françoise’s side of the story adds painful specifcity to the narrator’s regret: it turns out that while he was judging her vanity, she – knowing that she was rapidly declining – was trying very hard to make sure that the narrator would have a nice picture of her to remember her by. Françoise tells the narrator that his grandmother was worried she would die in Balbec and that she tried to hide the gravity of her illness from him as best she could. He remembers his resentment at her being distant and the ways in which he made her feel this resentment. Yet the novelty of this revelation wears of quickly: A few days later I was able to look with pleasure at the photograph that Saint-Loup had taken of her; it did not revive the memory of what Françoise had told me, because that memory had never left me and I was growing used to it. […] The photograph […] showed her looking so elegant, so carefree […] that I saw her as less unhappy and in better health than I had supposed. (SG, 207; III 176) 304

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The memory of his grandmother that caused him so much pain has lost its involuntary character and the photograph now appears to confrm what he wants to believe – and what his grandmother wanted him to believe when she had her picture taken. Because of course the grandmother made herself invulnerable as well, though she did it for her grandson’s sake. She withdrew from him, wore a large hat and put on make-up to make sure he did not see the signs of her illness and imminent death. The narrator describes the intermittent nature of the photograph in a lucid way that suggests he is aware of what is happening; it is as if he is a bystander, watching habit do its work, making the pain recede and with it the sense of obligation to pursue these inklings about who his grandmother might have been “in herself.” Something similar happens when laziness and habit keep him from pursuing other, joyful involuntary memories. But these obstacles to the pursuit of “joy like a certainty” are eventually overcome in Time Regained (TR, 218; IV 446). The pain that came with the involuntary memory of his grandmother is briefy revived by Françoise, and again by the manager of the hotel who remarks to the narrator that, around the same time the picture was taken, he was worried that she might have a stroke on the premises and so cause the manager trouble. Even though these additional pieces of information again ofer him a way to emerge from himself, the narrator returns to the picture and his mantra: “It’s grandmother, I am her grandson.”

Emerging from Ourselves The sensory experiences that trigger involuntary memories invite the narrator to investigate; they tell him: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you” (TR, 217; IV 446). This invitation is an appeal: moments of our past, the narrator explains, are like lost loved ones who have been changed into lower life-forms and who will only be able to break the spell if we recognize them for who they are: I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus efectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized them the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life. (SW, 51; I 43–4) The joy of tasting the madeleine, stepping on the uneven pavement, feeling the stif napkin against his lips, is “rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and sure” (BG, 74; I 483). The narrator feels called upon to make an efort to recapture this truth. In the case of the involuntary memory of his grandmother, the “Celtic belief ” applies more directly than elsewhere: in this recollection, his grandmother is “restored to” the narrator when he bends over to take of his boots (SG, 179–80; III 152–3). She returns to him for a short time only, however, both because the force of an involuntary memory always wears of over time and because, as I suggested above, the narrator tries to cover up the painful truth he has discovered. The photograph of his grandmother is “unstable” (Guerlac 2020) and serves at turns to deepen his grief and console him. The diference is that the grief the picture brings is forced on him (by Françoise and the manager), while the solace he derives from it is the result of his mantra and his desire to think of himself and his grandmother as he did before the upheaval. 305

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Another brief excursion to romantic love elsewhere in the Search helps underline the importance of this interposition of a picture between two people. We already saw that the reproduction of Zipporah allows Swann to overcome his slight revulsion at some of Odette’s characteristic features. His friends in high society are at a loss to understand what he sees in her and this is unsurprising since his love has very little to do with the person of Odette. This, of course, is the nature of most romantic relationships in the Search. Robert de SaintLoup cannot understand why the narrator is obsessed with a woman who to Saint-Loup is completely unremarkable: The time was long past when I had all too tentatively begun at Balbec by adding to my visual sensations when I gazed at Albertine sensations of taste, of smell, of touch. Since then, other more profound, more tender, more indefnable sensations had been added to them, and afterwards painful sensations. In short, Albertine was merely, like a stone round which snow has gathered, the generating centre of an immense structure which rose above the plane of my heart. Robert, to whom all this stratifcation of sensations was invisible, grasped only a residue which it prevented me, on the contrary, from perceiving. (F, 500; IV 22) This striking passage ofers up another helpful metaphor: Albertine is a “stone round which snow has gathered.” The narrator’s love for Albertine consists almost entirely of “sensations” which together obscure Albertine herself, who is only a “residue.” What the narrator calls his love for Albertine has efectively made her invisible to him. Something very similar is true of the narrator’s grandmother. And when the narrator caught a glimpse of the stone (seeing his grandmother by herself when she was unaware of his presence or remembering her sad and disappointed face in Balbec), he did not want to uncover it further; on the contrary, he tried to cover it back up. The passages I have discussed related to the grandmother show that the narrator is ofered glimpses of a reality diferent from his own that he chooses not to pursue. These glimpses are left behind altogether when, in Time Regained, the narrator claims “Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own” (TR, 254; IV 474–5). Because of art, we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists. The work of the artist is the reverse of the process of vanity, passion, intellect, habit, “when they smother our true impressions, so as to entirely conceal them from us, beneath a whole heap of verbal concepts and practical goals which we falsely call life” (TR, 254; IV 474–5). But the narrator himself has shown us that it is not through art alone that we can emerge from ourselves: he briefy emerged from his “verbal concepts and practical goals” when he heard his grandmother over the phone, saw her as an “overburdened woman,” when she was “restored” to him in his involuntary memory, and when Françoise told him about the circumstances of the photography session. These emergences were forced on him, he was vulnerable to them and had no control over their occurrence. He does however choose to not engage morally with the painful truths that were brought to his attention – at least not in the sense that he, say, resolves to treat the people he loves diferently. Again, in Time Regained, the narrator remarks that the efort demanded of the artist calls for courage of many kinds, “including the courage of one’s emotions.” This courage, he says, involves the “abrogation of one’s dearest illusions” (TR, 255; IV 475). This abrogation is exactly what is at stake in the narrator’s memory of his grandmother. It takes courage to see that his self-image of the loving grandson was, at least in part, illusory and 306

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vain. But by the time we reach the last volume of the Search, this courage is reserved for artists in their aesthetic pursuits, apparently to the exclusion of friends and loved ones. The narrator has shown us how painful and disruptive it can be to emerge from ourselves, and the fact that he himself seems to gloss over this pain and its moral implications at the end of the Search makes this insight even more poignant to the readers.

Conclusion The narrator experiences a sense of obligation at the sensory impressions that seem to him to cover up a particular reality (be it a part of the past or something else). Like in the Celtic belief cited above, the narrator’s grandmother returns to him when he “recognizes” her in his involuntary memory at the Balbec hotel. She is restored to him and as a result, he is restored to himself – and with that, to a painful part of reality. But involuntary memories never last. There is nothing the narrator can do: he cannot resurrect the grief that hit him a few days earlier. Nevertheless, in Time Regained, the narrator makes a clear choice based on a series of joyful involuntary memories: he decides that he now has the evidence that he can be an artist and that he will pursue this mission until his death puts an end to it. He has also, along the way, concluded that his loves have primarily served an instrumental role – the women in his life (including both Albertine and his grandmother) have made him sufer and so given him an impetus to create (F, 567–8; IV 78). As readers, we can go along with the narrator’s exalted sense of aesthetic purpose, but we also have the option of resisting the narrator’s conclusions. Remembering the involuntary memory of his grandmother, we may push back and point out that the narrator himself could have chosen diferently. He could have pursued the glimpses he received of his grandmother and found out more about who she was “in herself,” even after her death. He could have decided to explore the truth he found about himself – that his selfshness prevented him from seeing his grandmother – and see how maybe a similar mechanism was at work in other relationships. The power of his involuntary memory of her faded over time, but that is the nature of involuntary memory. The fact that it fades does not stop him from building his great work of art around it. The reader is left with the sense that the narrator could have chosen diferently but that he does not want to let us (or himself ) know that he had a choice. He may be a “man without a skin” and therefore very vulnerable, but in the end, he chooses to pursue the aesthetic revelations his vulnerability ofers him while the moral insights he gains become part of his book but do not (as far as we know) cause him to change his relationships to people. The narrator’s work of art, in turn, allows us to emerge from ourselves and discern why being vulnerable to others can be very disruptive of our sense of self. It also suggests that the narrator’s aesthetic pursuit may help him feel invulnerable because it allows him to resist the appeal to learn anything about his loved ones in themselves. The readers of the Search are left with questions and (depending on how well the optical instrument suited them) a sense of unease and sadness. In leaving tensions between the readerly perspective and the narrator’s own views unresolved, the Search does justice to the complex nature of vulnerability.

Bibliography Adorno, T.W. (1991) Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Tiedemann, R. (ed.), Weber Nicholsen, S. (trans.), New York: Columbia University Press. Bowie, M. (1987) “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge” in Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Roos Slegers Butler, J. (2004) Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London: Verso. Butler, J. (2009) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso. Earle, B. (2002) “Involuntary Narration, Narrating Involition: Proust on Death, Repetition and Self-Becoming” in Modern Languages Notes, 117, 943–970. Guerlac, S. (2020) Proust, Photography and the Time of Life: Ravaisson, Bergson and Simmel, London: Bloomsbury. Haustein, K. (2009) “Proust’s Emotional Cavities: Vision and Afect in A la recherche du temps perdu” in French Studies, 63.2, 161–73. Kawakami, K. (2013) Photobiography: Photographic Self-Writing in Proust, Guibert, Ernaux, Macé, New York: Legenda. Larkin, A. (2011) Proust Writing Photography: Fixing the Fugitive in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, London: Routledge. MacIntyre, A. (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, Chicago: Open Court. Mackenzie, C., Rogers, W., and Dodds, S. (2014) Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLennan, M. (2019) Philosophy and Vulnerability: Catherine Breillat, Joan Didion, and Audre Lorde, London: Bloomsbury. Nussbaum, M. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Slegers, R. (2010) Courageous Vulnerability: Ethics and Knowledge in Proust, Bergson, Marcel, and James, Leiden: Brill. Turner, B. (2006) Vulnerability and Human Rights, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

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20 PROUST’S ABRAHAM, THE OTHER L. Scott Lerner

By focusing on two allusions made in the drame du coucher or drama of the good night kiss in Swann’s Way and in Jean Santeuil, this chapter examines the representation of the other in Proust’s writing from the perspective of an originary mother-son relation. The frst allusion is to the Akedah, the account in Genesis of the sacrifce of Isaac by Abraham and of the covenant between Abraham and God. It is examined in dialogue with Derrida’s treatment of the subject and his concepts of the secret or the secrecy of the sacred covenant. The second allusion is to a broken glass, reimagined as the broken wine glass in a Jewish wedding ceremony. This allusion is examined in dialogue with the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, in particular her notions of fantasy, unconscious guilt, reparation and the “depressive position.” From the early version to the Search, the broken glass and its “union” are abandoned, but a trace remains of this initial symbol of separation and union, faithfulness and betrayal. The repaired glass imposed an aura of resolution, whereas its trace, with the gesture of Abraham, does the opposite. It defers reparation by generating, via aggression and guilt, a self-inficted sufering (an instrumental or secondary masochism) that sustains the intensity of the relation with the other even when the other has been lost, either in unconscious fantasy or by death. The chapter refers to work by Levinas, Bersani, Bowie, Elsner, Mauriac Dyer, Goujon and Mehlman. Near the beginning of In Search of Lost Time, at the moment in the drama of the good night kiss (drame du coucher), when the father has already violated the law, unexpectedly allowing the hero-narrator not only to receive the desired kiss but also to remain in the presence of the mother, the father appears “with the gesture of Abraham” (“avec le geste d’Abraham” I 36, my translation; SW, 42–3). This depiction of the father briefy reframes the drama of the good night kiss as a scene from an originary sacred drama. It places not only the father but also the center of the drama—the subject’s relation with the other, in this case, the boy’s relation with his mother—under the sign of the covenant between God and Abraham. Here, the relation to the other in Proust’s fction begins to take form. Like the Abrahamic family history within which it is framed, the mother-son relation has an originary quality with regard to future relations with the other in the novel. It is both frst and primary: frst in the series of love relations, and primary in literary kinship with a primary object relation out of which the self is constituted. Specifcally, the fgure of the father in the gesture of Abraham recasts the father’s determinative action in the drama as a scene from the Akedah (or: ‘Binding’), the story of the sacrifce of Isaac by Abraham (Gen. 22:1–14).1 In so doing it presents the relation DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-26

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between the son and mother as a variant of the Abrahamic covenant of the Akedah, in which faithfulness (to God) requires criminal betrayal (of son and self ). In advancing this proposition of an originary object relation, one necessarily risks falling into the trap of “system-building and over-confdent theoretical abstraction” (Bowie 1998a: 27). 2 Examples of such a practice belong to the narrator of Time Regained who presents a conception of redemption through art, and whom Malcom Bowie refers to as a “narrator who psychologised, who ‘did’ psychology,” in tension with “a narrator who was the instrument of an alternative psychology, resembling psychoanalysis, that the Proustian text itself enacted in its discontinuities, contradictions and reversals” (Bowie 1987: 97). Leo Bersani has warned, moreover, against reducing experience to the status of “spectral repetitions,” as though any new object relations were no more than “new relations to old fantasy objects” (Bersani 1990: 20, 22). It would be equally misguided, however, to reject entirely the notion of an originary object relation in the Search. On the one hand, the evolution of the novel followed a practice in which critical questions— self hood, otherness, loss and forgetting, belonging, sexual orientation—which are generally presented in more concentrated and transparent form in early manuscript versions, are dispersed throughout the novel as part of the creative process of expansion and revision. On the other hand, as Anna Elsner has argued, the drama of the good night kiss constitutes not only the frst experience of loss but also “the drama of the Recherche” and “guides the entire structure of mourning that follows” (Elsner 2017: 177). Reframed as a reimagining of the biblical story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, the relation with the other becomes visible not in faithfulness to the biblical account but in a relation of creative tension with it. At stake in this (re)enactment is the narrator’s desire for absolute union with his mother and the implications of that desire here, in this drama, and also for future representations of desire, selfhood and otherness in the novel. The understanding of the other in RTP proposed here is thus diferent from the one put forth by Emmanuel Levinas, who regarded Proust’s fction as “situating reality in relation with something which for ever remains other, with the Other as absence and mystery” (Levinas 165). Taking as his example the relation of the narrator with Albertine, Levinas concluded that the narrator did not love Albertine “if love is a fusion with the Other”; rather, Levinas understood the narrator’s love for her as “the struggle with what cannot be grasped … her presence” (Levinas 164, 165). Made swiftly and with ironic humor, the fgure of the father in the gesture of Abraham, in contrast, crystallizes the paradoxical quality of the relation with the other not only in the case of Albertine but also throughout Proust’s fction, where desire for union coexists with culpable, masochistic betrayal, as part of a complex dynamic of individuation, loss and intermittent mourning.

Te Gesture of Abraham I stood there, not daring to move; he was still in front of us, a tall fgure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head since he had begun to sufer from neuralgia, with the gesture of Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side. (SW, 42–3 translation modifed) Je restais sans oser faire un mouvement; il était encore devant nous, grand, dans sa robe de nuit blanche sous le cachemire de l’Inde violet et rose qu’il nouait autour de sa tête 310

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depuis qu’il avait des névralgies, avec le geste d’Abraham dans la gravure d’après Benozzo Gozzoli que m’avait donnée M. Swann, disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac. (I 36) The father’s appearance “with the gesture of Abraham” places the relation of self and other within the fctional simulacrum of a sacred original. In Genesis, Abraham prepares to pass the test of fdelity to his covenant with God by sacrifcing Isaac. Immobile, as though petrifed in the presence of the divine, the hero-narrator beholds his own father, in his white nightshirt and with his cashmere scarf wrapped around his head, not as Abraham, but with the gesture of Abraham. The scenes by Gozzoli that best match the subject are from the Camposanto di Pisa cycle (destroyed in 1943), yet, numerous Proust scholars have afrmed, none of these known original Gozzoli frescos corresponds to this particular scene or includes the gesture of Abraham described here.3 Juliette Hassine has argued that the scene in which Abraham sends Hagar away at the insistence of Sarah may have inspired Proust “à rebours” (Gen 21:9–14, Hassine 1994: 196).4 A stronger case, however, can be made for engraver Carlo Lasinio’s “The Sacrifce of Abraham.”

Figure 1 Carlo Lasinio, “The Sacrifce of Abraham” (c. 1812), Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of William Gray from the collection of Francis Calley Gray, Photo ©President and Fellows of Harvard College, G2166

Lasinio condenses several fresco panels by Gozzoli into a single, multi-scene engraving. The frst scene shows Abraham with a forked beard and a halo over his bald head as he looks up at Sarah whose hair, fowing from either side of her bonnet, is as white as his beard.5 She points to a young Isaac at play, and the scene generally represents the fulfllment of the Lord’s promise to cause Sarah to bear a son (Gen 18:10, 14; 21:8). The next scene, part of a continuously fowing landscape, depicts the Lord telling Abraham to take Isaac to the Land of Moriah and make a burnt ofering of him there (Gen 22:2). Closely following the biblical account, subsequent scenes recount the departure of Abraham and Isaac, the ascent of Mount Moriah, and the aborted sacrifce (Gen 22:3–12). Slightly embellishing the biblical narrative, the fnal scene shows the father, son and helpers as they dine on the sacrifcial ram. 311

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Now, as Albert Mingelgrün and others have argued, none of these representations depicts Abraham gesturing to Sarah and telling her that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side. It is not difcult to understand why.6 No original Gozzoli could correspond to this particular gesture of Abraham toward Sarah because no pre-modern Christian artist would so blatantly depart from the sacred original. Nor could the biblical original accommodate such a communication between Abraham and Sarah. For Abraham, in Genesis, as Jacques Derrida has stressed, keeps secret his covenant with God. He reveals to no one his intention to sacrifce his beloved son in faithfulness to the covenant, neither to Sarah or anyone else (Derrida 2008: 128). For Derrida this silence provides the foundation for the “absolute axiom” which “obliges us to pose or suppose a demand of secrecy, a secret asked by God, by him who proposes or promises the covenant.” Such a secret does not refer to something hidden, nor does it have any content; rather, it belongs to the “pure singularity of the face-to-face with God, the secret of this absolute relation,” while Abraham’s silence ensures that there will be “no third party between us … so that the covenant remains absolute and absolutely singular in its act of election” (Derrida 2008: 154–5). And yet the gesture of Abraham is there, in Lasinio’s engraving, in plain sight. In the scene in which the Lord delivers his command, Abraham appears in a sumptuous tent whose drapes have been pulled back, allowing us to see inside. He is looking up and to the right, with both hands open in an expression of wonderment. Following the direction of his gaze we encounter the Lord himself, displaying a halo and beard much like Abraham’s, at the center of a multi-ringed aureole. In the Christian-pictorial logic of the engraving, the viewer must imagine the command passing from the outstretched arm of the Lord to the receiving hands of Abraham. In order to see the gesture of Abraham described in Combray, however, the viewer has to leave behind the system of meaning that belongs to the engraving and step out of the biblical narrative that the engraving has reproduced. One has to see the gesture anew. When Abraham receives the Lord’s command, in Lasinio’s engraving, he is not alone but seated next to Sarah and Isaac inside the tent. (The artists have once again slightly embellished the biblical text.) Unlike Abraham, who stares wide-eyed at the Lord above with hands opened wide, as if to receive his commandment, Sarah and Isaac rest chin or cheek upon their hands, with eyes closed, fast asleep. Their presence enhances the emotional power of the scene from Abraham’s point of view, for the command will disrupt this happy domestic unit and cause him to sacrifce “thine only son, whom thou lovest” (Gen 22:2). And yet, if one reframes the scene and imagines that Abraham directs his gesture not at the Lord above but at Sarah and Isaac below, then this scene becomes precisely the one described in Combray. Abraham has already received the Lord’s command. Mother and son are awake. Abraham gestures not as one who receives the news, but as the one who conveys it. And the news is precisely that which Proust’s narrator relates: Sarah, next to whom sits Isaac—his head rests on her shoulder—learns from Abraham, from his gesture, that she will have to tear herself from Isaac’s side. In the Search, therefore, Abraham’s gesture betrays the pictorial logic of the engraving that most likely serves as its source, just as it betrays its originary tale in Genesis. Unlike the Abraham of Genesis, described by Derrida—the Abraham who keeps the secret of the covenant and God’s command—the Abraham of Combray reveals the secret by communicating with the boy’s mother before the sacrifce and “telling Sarah that she must tear herself from Isaac’s side.” The gesture of Abraham in Swann’s Way thus places the originary relation of self and other under the sign of the covenant in which God promises Abraham “to multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven . . . because thou hast obeyed my voice” (Gen. 22.17–18). It does so 312

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at a distance of multiple removes from the original covenant, in a way that underscores the distances crossed. At each juncture the representation of the original—the original covenant (Genesis), the original representation of the covenant (the Gozzoli), the original representation of the representation (the engraving)—is dissimulated. And it places the originary relation, between mother and son, under the sign of the covenant, only to interject a third, Sarah, between God and Abraham, thereby betraying the secret of the covenant. In the gesture of Abraham the covenant that remains no longer partakes of the “absolute axiom” expressed in Scripture. Instead, it performs the defning act of “literature”: in faithfulness, it betrays.7 This paradox of betrayal in faithfulness and faithfulness in betrayal is introduced not only in the fact of communicating with Sarah but also in the meaning of the communication. Were Sarah to learn of Abraham’s intended action, no doubt she would, in her love for Isaac, need to be torn away from him lest she prevent Abraham from obeying God. Such is the meaning of the archaic verb, “se départir”: “to part from,” as in “a parting from angels.”8 In Swann’s Way the father tells her too that she must part “du côté d’Isaac” (from Isaac’s side). The gesture, however, belongs not only to Abraham but also to the narrator’s father. It operates as a communicative gesture within each of the two story lines that converge here—the story of Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, and the story of the narrator, his mother and father. Rather than continuing to deny the legitimacy of the boy’s desire to be with his mother and forbidding their union, the father—acting against the mother’s expectations—has allowed mother and son to remain together. The representation of Sarah as a mother who is forced to tear herself from her son thus not only fails to conform to this narrative context; it also stands in contradiction to it. Faithful to the biblical story, it betrays the novelistic one. The paradox deepens when we consider that the use of the archaic verb “se départir” to communicate the meaning of the gesture of Abraham “promotes a signifcant lexical ambiguity.” As Francine Goujon observes, it “amalgamates” two separate meanings: the archaic “se départir de,” meaning “to separate from,” and the common “partir du côté de” which carries the opposite meaning (I, 36 note 1, p. 1114). Indeed, this latter expression appears later in the novel, when Marcel’s grandfather is waiting for him “pour partir du côté de Méséglise” (II 384), which is translated as “to set out for a walk along the Méséglise way” (G, 90, translation modifed). Jefrey Mehlman provides this further gloss on Proust’s amalgamated construction: “It could plainly mean taking a distance or parting from the side of, but also taking a distance or parting in the direction of… . For du côté de can mean both toward and away from, to and fro” (Mehlman 2017: 414).9 Rather than “along the Méséglise way,” one might just as well say “in the direction of Méséglise.” It is this second meaning within Proust’s amalgamated expression that pertains to the scene in the novel. Having just declared, contrary to expectations, that the mother should go to her son, he now directs her to do just that. In this case, rather than translating the expression, “disant à Sarah qu’elle a à se départir du côté d’Isaac,” as: “telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac,” we could render it as: “telling Sarah that she must go to Isaac” (my translation). Just as the frst translation is faithful to the story line of Abraham, Isaac and Sarah, this second rendering of “se départir du côté de” is faithful to the domestic scene in the novel. In each case, to be faithful to one story is to be unfaithful to the other. In the gesture of Abraham the paradox of faithfulness and betrayal has thus thrown deep roots. It appears in the nature of the biblical covenant, which commands faithful obedience at the price of betraying one’s son and oneself. It emerges in the work of literature, which betrays the command of secret exclusivity demanded by the covenant of Scripture. It is present when the literary representation of the gesture reimagines and betrays its original pictorial 313

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source. It is revealed in the particular convergence of two story lines, one biblical, one novelistic, such that any message communicated to the mother in one story, and in a manner that is faithful to that story, necessarily bears a contradictory meaning in the other story, proves unfaithful to the other story, and betrays it. It results in the transposition of guilt from the father who would sacrifce his son to the son who would annihilate his mother by betraying and forgetting her. And it arises in the ambiguous lexicon adopted by the novelist, with its archaic verb and amalgamated, contradictory, yet precise meanings, which ultimately leave us with the impossibility of determining whether the son is united with the mother or torn away from her. But this is of course precisely the point. At the bottom of these layers of originals and representations, of faithfulness and betrayal, of ambiguity and indeterminacy, the result is not one or the other—separated or reunited—but both, simultaneously.

Te Broken Glass The gesture of Abraham is originary in the Search, but it is prefgured in Proust’s unfnished novel, Jean Santeuil (1895–1899). In the scene in question, Jean, in a ft of anger directed at his mother, hurls to the ground a piece of Venetian glass to which she was especially attached. Recognizing that her relation with her son now appears to lie in shards upon the foor, his mother superimposes onto the shattered glass the paradoxical symbol of the broken wine glass in the Jewish wedding ceremony. She declares: “It shall be, as in the temple, the symbol of an indestructible union” (“Ce sera comme au temple le symbole de l’indestructible union,” JS 218; 423). Like the gesture of Abraham, the fgure of the broken wine glass stands in problematic relation to its source of origin. It functions as a citation of an original discourse, the Jewish wedding ceremony, even though Madame Santeuil, who is part of a bourgeois Catholic family in late nineteenth-century France, cannot be presumed to be familiar with it. Indeed, it turns out that the pronouncement is not even an original citation, but rather a near-verbatim copy. The original citation belongs to Proust’s Jewish mother, Jeanne Weil Proust, who wrote her twenty-fve year-old son in 1896 or 1897: Your letter does me good—your father and I were left with a painful impression. Know that I never dreamt for an instant of saying anything at all in front of [the servant] Jean and if that happened it was absolutely unbeknownst to me. Let’s think no more about this and say no more about it. From now on, the broken glass will only be what it is in the temple—the symbol of an indissoluble union. (Le verre cassé ne sera plus que ce qu’il est au temple—le symbole de l’indissoluble union; Corr, II 160–61, my translation) Madame Proust excelled in the art of citation, and this image of an object visibly and physically shattered but symbolic of a more profound, even sacred whole is characteristically well chosen. Whether intentionally or not, however, she misquotes her source. The breaking of the wine glass during the wedding ceremony is a Jewish popular custom (minhag) dating from the biblical era. At one time probably intended to drive away demons or evil spirits during weddings, it has been understood since the fourteenth century as a reminder of the duty to mourn for the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. In wedding ceremonies, it is traditionally understood in relation to the last of the seven blessings which expresses the hope that the Temple will soon be restored. In the “temple,” or synagogue, the breaking of the wine glass in the Jewish wedding thus does not symbolize the unbreakable union of the bride and groom, as Madame Proust asserts. 314

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Whereas it is associated with the hope for union, in the sense of repair or reconstruction, this is only in relation to the Temple and to the renewal of the covenant. Yet it is precisely this presumptive guarantee, of a sacred union that rises up from the broken shards, that enables her misquotation to operate efectively. A sacred union is present in the source, but not the one she intends: the broken glass serves as a reminder of the destruction of the Temple and of the covenant. It expresses a hope for union, repair and reconstruction in relation to both. By keeping secret, by fact or by design, this Temple- and covenant-centered meaning that the ritual of the broken glass conveys in the discourse of origin, her citation betrays its source (remember the Temple) while remaining faithful to a strain of its symbolism (may there be sacred union out of destruction). As we shall see, it is this paradoxical misquotation of the discourse of origin that allows her pronouncement to operate reparatively. 10 In the scene from the early novel, Jean’s anger has been mounting when Madame Santeuil mistakes a positive resolution by her son for the alternative he rejected: a night of debauchery. The father responds in a manner that will be echoed in the drama of the good night kiss: “You know, it’s simple enough … if you don’t want to work you can leave this home, I’ll throw you out” ( JS 415, my translation; 209). After calling his parents a pair of “imbeciles” Jean slowly withdraws from the scene, “slamming the door so violently behind him that the glass ornaments fxed to its panels … were shattered into fragments” ( JS, 210; 416). Moments later he rises, runs toward the freplace and hears a terrible noise: “the Venetian glass, which his mother had bought for him for a hundred francs, and which he had just shattered” ( JS, 418 my translation; 213). Years later, in his conversations with his housekeeper Céleste Albaret, Proust makes explicit what is already implicit in Jean Santeuil and in his mother’s letter. Hurling an antique vase to the foor “in the greatest rage of my life” the son breaks the glass in order to “wound” his mother (Albaret 1973: 233). These instances of breaking glass constitute a single act of violence experienced in two diferent ways: frst, when he breaks the glass of the door, as the enactment of Jean’s desire to strike out at his parents, and then, with the vase, as the sufering he himself must endure as a consequence of his act. For Jean, the act of breaking the Venetian glass is less real—and thus absent from representation—than the feeling of guilt it provokes. This time he takes no satisfaction in the act of defance, feeling only regret: “he was furious with himself for having broken a glass which he had thought so beautiful” ( JS, 213; 419). Yet the act is doubly irreversible, the frst scene having been “public” because witnessed by the servant Augustin, and thus “irreparable” ( JS 415 my translation; 209) while the Venetian glass is left “in fragments [that] no amount of contrition could bring back together again, recompose, melt back” ( JS 213; 419). Moments later, suddenly cold, Jean thrusts his hand into his wardrobe and pulls out the frst thing he fnds, an old coat of his mother’s. The gesture of drawing the coat into the room is described as a prefguration to rape: “mauled by the violence of his attack,” the coat entered the room “like a young maiden whom a conqueror has seized and dragged behind him by the hair” ( JS 214; 419). Its smell triggers a sharply contrasting involuntary memory: In just such a way did Jean now brandish it, but even before his eyes had sent their message to his brain, he was aware of an indefnable fragrance that had greeted him when, at ten years old, he had run to kiss his mother—in those days still young, still brilliant and still happy—when she was all dressed up and ready to go out, and fung his arms around her waist, the velvet crushed within his hand, the braid tickling his cheeks, while his lips, pressed to her forehead, breathed in all the happiness that she radiated and seemed to promise him. ( JS, 214, translation modifed; 419) 315

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Young and beautiful, she is perhaps most of all, like those years now detached from his present life, “intact” in his memory ( JS, 214; 419). The mother of his recollection contrasts with the woman with whom he has just argued, who has been afected by the death of her husband, Jean’s lack of will, illness and aging. The mother who returns in involuntary memory, however, is desirable not because she is young and sensuous, but rather because she is no longer his: He longed to kiss upon his mother’s cheeks the remains of her youth and happiness, to hold with his kisses onto the instants that passed by, to life that ran its course, to beauty that faded, to hopes that fed, and to the existence of the person in relation to whom he conceived everything and who would one day be annihilated forever, without his ever being able to have her back (sans qu’il pût jamais la retrouver), without anything of her remaining, as if she had never been. ( JS, 214, my translation; 420) At this moment, when he has destroyed the simulacrum of the loved object and is overcome with guilt, when he longs for her, fearing his own annihilation in hers, he confesses to his mother that he has broken the Venetian glass. He anticipates her anger but instead “she kissed him and whispered in his ear: ‘It shall be, as in the Temple, the symbol of an indestructible union’” ( JS, 218; 423). As Madame Santeuil substitutes the shattered vase for the broken wine glass, she reimagines the fragmented object, imago of a relation to the other broken to bits, as the paradoxical symbol of a sacred union between mother and son. With the broken glass at his feet “in fragments [that] no amount of contrition could bring back together again, recompose, melt back” ( JS 213; 419) Jean is then overcome with guilt, fearing that “the person in relation to whom he conceived everything” could be “annihilated.” His mother’s reparatory speech act correlates with Klein’s account of the reparative wishes that follow the infant’s aggression toward the other, the feelings of guilt it produces, and the fantasies of restoring the object through love (Klein 1975: 308). It dresses the dilemma of separation in an aura of resolution. Proust abandoned this potent symbol when writing In Search of Lost Time, but the reparatory impulse that it distills would nonetheless occupy a central place in his novel. A line can be drawn from the mother’s pronouncement, in both Jean Santeuil and Proust’s biography, to the narrator’s declaration that he has stopped loving Albertine and has forgotten her (F, 740; IV 223). Like Jean Santeuil, whose mother was “the person in relation to whom he conceived everything and who would one day be annihilated forever,” the narrator of the Search cannot conceive his own self in the absence of his love for Albertine (TR, 437–8; IV 615). Much like the declaration by the mother regarding the broken glass, however, he will eventually assert that he has survived her loss, or the loss of his love for her, just as he has given up and forgotten the previous objects of his love—Gilberte, his grandmother, and Mme de Guermantes—thanks to his successive selves and successive deaths (C, 551; IV, 64; TR, 437–8; IV 615). These acts of successful forgetting enable him to introduce a fnal element to the sequence in the form of “my book” (TR, 439; IV 615). He thus invests his esthetic project with a redemptive quality: the work of art, as the fnal element of the sequence of loved objects, enables him to survive the potential death of the self brought on by the loss, or forgetting, of these attachments. It is important to recall, however, that such theories ofered up by the narrator are not separable from the rest of the fctional universe but are rather, as Bowie reminds us, “caught up in the fctional texture” and made “within the force-feld of human desire” (1987: 65, 316

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47–8). Or, as he puts it elsewhere, “the centralised and resolved self on which the novel ends may be seen not as a redemption but as one momentary geometry among many others” (1998b: 29). The reparative and redemptive impulse, in which the esthetic object is said to supersede all other love relations, coexists with representations of its opposite: a continuing investment in the other even beyond her death. And this, too, is the legacy of the repaired glass. This desire to repair will take on its own trajectory in the idea of redemption through art expressed repeatedly in Time Regained, but it will coexist in Proust’s fction with representations of a love bond with the other that cannot be fully undone.

Proust’s Abraham, the Other The frst of these depictions of a central dilemma in the relation with the other, which cannot be resolved by successful mourning and forgetting, is the drama of the good night kiss, with its gesture of Abraham and its paradox of faithfulness in betrayal and betrayal in faithfulness. If we conceive the drama of the goodnight kiss and the madeleine as a pair of antechambers that open into the world of the novel, then the gesture of Abraham inhabits the frst of these like a road sign and a tableau. Like a road sign because it orients the reader-traveler declaring: here we are, this is the Akedah. And like a tableau because the Abraham we encounter appears as a dynamic representation, a gesture, arrested in motion, suspended in time, “telling” (disant), and by telling commanding, in a visual speech act without beginning or end. But the gesture of Abraham is only like a road sign because it tells us not that we are in the story of the call—“when God did tempt Abraham and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, “Behold, here I am” (Gen 22.1)—but in relation to it. And it is only like a tableau because the subject of representation is also the father, whose gesture belongs to Abraham, calls him forth, to mind, reproduces him in a signature act—but who is not Abraham. Following Derrida, who followed Franz Kaf ka, we might call him Proust’s Abraham, the other. Kaf ka famously imagined an other Abraham who rose to answer the call only to discover that he had not been the one called, that the call had not been meant for him (Kaf ka 1975: 40–5). The drama of the good night kiss, for its part, obliquely, displaces the call, removing it from God entirely, giving it over to the son. This is the son who has already experienced his exile, without the kiss—because Swann has come for dinner—as the prelude to his own interment: “Once in my room I had to stop every loophole, to close the shutters, to dig my own grave as I turned down the bedclothes, to wrap myself in the shroud of my nightshirt” (SW, 32–3; I 28).11 He is the son who, in fagrante delicto at the  top of the staircase, at the approach of the father, hears the mother who exclaims: “Sauve-toi, sauve-toi”—meaning “Run for your life!” “Bolt!” “Flee!” in the plain sense of the verb, but also “fnd safety,” (“se mettre en sûreté”) in a meaning closer to that of Racine or Corneille, or even “save yourself ” in faithfulness to God (I 35, my translation; SW, 41; Littré 1885: 1840, my translation). Yet the son reorders the scene. At the approach of the father who has deprived him of the mother and who, he fears, will tear him from her further—as though having come to take him to Mount Moriah—he, not God, now issues the call, and not to Abraham but to Sarah, the mother: “Come and say good night to me.” Finally, she answers, concedes, but it is too late, and he fnds himself once again in the role of the sacrifcial son: “Instinctively I murmured, though no one heard me, ‘I’m done for!’” (SW, 42; “Sans le vouloir, je murmurai ces mots que personne n’entendit: ‘Je suis perdu!’” I 35). Then, like the Lord who withdraws his injunction to Abraham, the father cancels the sacrifce. Called upon, like Abraham, as an executioner, he refuses the role: “you can see 317

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quite well that the child is unhappy. We aren’t executioners after all!” (SW, 42, translation modifed; I 36). The son, it would seem, has triumphed. And then the father appears with the ambiguous gesture of Abraham. Does he tell Sarah (the narrator’s mother) to tear herself from Isaac’s side so that, knife in hand, he can take him up Mount Moriah? Or does he tell her to go in the direction of her son, to rejoin the son, despite the interdiction? As we have seen, the strange, part-antiquated, amalgamated verb construction, se départir du côté de conveys both meanings simultaneously. In the context of the drama, however, the verb does not express a wholly neutral ambiguity. As Goujon observes, “the father still separates at the very moment in which he reunites.”12 In contrast to the reparation of the broken glass, the episode will conclude with the object more annihilated than repaired: It struck me that if I had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgment; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date on the calendar. (SW, 45; I 38) The victory is achieved neither by illness, nor grieving, nor age—the agents of death—nor even, in the subjective experience of the son, by the father, but rather by the son himself and by him alone. How did he fnd himself in this role? Even if, paradoxically, for the father “there was no such thing as the ‘rule of law’” (SW, 42; I 36), the law has been clear: “these exhibitions are absurd” (SW, 32; “ces manifestations sont ridicules” I 27). Despite the real-life work on neurasthenia by Proust’s own father, and the occasional determination of the fctional father to avoid resisting the son’s desires until he became “ill” (SW, 42; I 36), no one in the narrator’s family has ever led him “to believe that there was some excuse for my giving in to [my temptations], or that I was actually incapable of holding out against them” (SW, 39; I 33). He has thus internalized the view that his desires were transgressions, and has been conscious of the guilt that arises from this internalization. As in Jean Santeuil, the initial act of aggression—the breaking of the glass or, in this case, the insistent call to the mother in violation of the paternal injunction—is followed by an expression of this guilt: if the mother is to spend the night in his room, it is because “I had just committed an ofence for which I expected to be banished from the household” (SW, 43; “je venais de commettre une faute telle que je m’attendais à être obligé de quitter la maison” I 37).13 Now, however, the guilt that comes from the internalized view that this victory has resulted from a greater failure has given way to a feeling of omnipotence in victory. If he could take back his victory, he would do so out of a new desperation: “No, I don’t want you to, you mustn’t sleep here” (SW, 45; I 38). Already he is aware of the true cost of his action: “I felt that I had with an impious and secret fnger traced a frst wrinkle upon her soul and brought out a frst white hair on her head” (SW, 45; I 38). The internalized guilt born of helplessness (to resist his nervous impulses) is transformed into the far greater guilt of the omnipotent victor, the would-be executioner, the parricide.14 This generation of conscious and unconscious guilt in relation to the other is crucial to a dynamic that will be described more fully in relation to the grandmother in the Intermittencies of the Heart section later in the novel. The grandmother’s unexpected return after death, via his involuntary memory, provokes an especially painful act of mourning:

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I clung to this pain, cruel as it was, with all my strength, for I realised that it was the efect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present within me. I felt that I did not really remember her except through pain, and I longed for the nails that riveted her to my consciousness to be driven yet deeper. I did not try to mitigate my sufering, to embellish it, to pretend that my grandmother was only absent and momentarily invisible, by addressing to her photograph […] words and entreaties as to a person who is separated from us but, retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to us by an indissoluble harmony. (SG, 183–4, my emphasis, translation modifed; III 156) Although the mechanisms are diferent, this representation of loss and mourning in Proust’s text is consistent with the late Freudian and Kleinian insistence on the preservation and incorporation of the object in the work of mourning. The guilt generated by the aggression toward the other ultimately turns back upon the self. It constitutes a secondary masochism with no primary aim of its own (in the search for pleasure), but rather serves instrumentally, as part of a complex dynamic of aggression, guilt, and self-inficted sufering. The aim of this dynamic, though all its parts, is to preserve the object relation itself, such that the work of mourning remains incomplete, not constant, but intermittent (Lerner 2007: 46–52). Such sufering, paradoxically, makes an indissoluble bond of “that contradiction of survival and annihilation, so strangely intertwined within me” (SG, 184; III 156). It is “the painful synthesis of survival and annihilation” (SG, 184; III 157). The adjective, “indissoluble,” helps us chart this second trajectory from Jean Santeuil to the Search. From the early version to the mature novel, the broken glass and its “union” are abandoned. Only the adjective remains as the trace of the perceived shattering of the love bond. The repaired glass imposed an aura of resolution, whereas its trace, with the gesture of Abraham, and its multiple layers of separation and union, of faithfulness and betrayal, does the reverse. It defers reparation by generating, via aggression and guilt, a self-inficted sufering that sustains the intensity of the relation with the other even when the other has been lost, either in unconscious fantasy or by death.15 It will constitute the originary relation with the other—between mother and son—through the gesture of Abraham and in the drama of the good night kiss, and will also become visible in other highly ambivalent attacks and betrayals: by Mademoiselle Vinteuil toward her father the composer, by Gilberte toward Charles Swann, and by the narrator toward his (grand)mother. In each case, the guiltgenerating betrayal, and the masochistic pain it produces, will serve to impede forgetting and preserve an ongoing attachment to the other.

Notes 1 The King James Version is cited here and throughout this chapter. 2 Bowie used this phrase to describe a deep-seated distrust on the part of Leo Bersani. 3 See Mingelgrün 94; Johnson 91–2 and note 10; Hassine 196 and note 21, more generally 1187–99; Goujon in RTP I 36 note 1, p. 1114). Sprenger 174–9; and Grenet 109. Karpeles, in contrast, reproduces Lasinio’s “The Sacrifce of Abraham” in correlation with this passage from Combray (31 and 330 n.). Following the Galleria degli Ufzi, he dates the engraving somewhat earlier (c. 1806). 4 Goujon follows Hassine in proposing Lasinio’s “The Departure of Hagar” (I 36 note 1, p. 1114). 5 She conceives when he is a hundred years old and she is well past the age of child-bearing (Gen 18:11–13, 21:5). 6 See note 3 above.

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L. Scott Lerner 7 “In other words,” Derrida asks, “in what way does literature descend from Abraham, in order to inherit from him at the same time that it betrays him?” (Derrida 2008: 156). For an excellent discussion see Hammerschlag (2016): 144–53. 8 Francine Goujon traces the reference to a title of a Campo Santo sketch by Gozzoli adopted in English by Ruskin, “Abraham Parting from the Angels” (I 36 note 1, p. 1114). 9 The allusion to the patriarch is a relatively late edition in the redaction of the scene. It makes its frst appearance in Cahier 8 f. 40; Esquisse XII (I 692; Proust 2021: 208 note 4). In this version, however, the construction is simply “se départir.” 10 When understood in relation to the newly married couple, the broken glass has been seen, on the contrary, as representing a bad omen that might augur an eventual dissolution of the marriage bond. As a result of this negative association, the glass used for the benediction over the betrothal was eventually substituted for the one used for the marriage benedictions. The preservation intact of the glass used for the marriage benedictions, in turn, became a good omen, suggesting that the marriage bond would also remain unbroken. The image of reforging the shards of broken glass exists in Jewish tradition, but not with the symbolism attributed to it by Madame Proust. See Lauterbach and Chill. 11 The narrator’s self-portrait as being sentenced to death is already present in an early conception of this scene, from 1907 (Proust 2021: 123). 12 Goujon sees this ambiguity invoking “the image of Abraham the sacrifcer” implicitly suggesting its continuity with the idea of defeat in victory described in the pages that follow. For his part, Mehlman underscores the ambiguity between Sarah and Hagar and elaborates on its implications (I 36, note 1, pp. 1114–5, my translation; Mehlman 2017: 414–15). 13 The French term translated here by “ofence” is “faute,” which conveys a secondary meaning of “guilt.” An earlier manuscript version of this scene, dating from 1895, is characteristically more direct, employing the word “coupable”—“guilty” (Proust 2021: 118). 14 In “Sentiments fliaux d’un parricide” (CSB, 150–9; “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide”) Proust refected at length on the theme of parricide. Ultimately, he concluded that, deep down, all loving sons are killers of their mothers (CSB, 158). 15 For another perspective on incomplete mourning in Proust, in relation to creativity, see Elsner (2017).

References Albaret, C. (1973) Monsieur Proust, Souvenirs recueillis par Georges Belmont, Paris: J’ai Lu. Bersani, L. (1990) The Culture of Redemption, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowie, M. (1987) Proust, Freud and Lacan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bowie, M. (1987). Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Bowie, M. (1998b) Proust Among the Stars. New York: Columbia University Press. Chill, A. (1979) The Minhagim: The Customs and Ceremonies of Judaism. Their Origins and Rationale, New York: Sepher-Hermon. Derrida, J. (2008) The Gift of Death and Literature in Secret, trans. David Willis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elsner, A. (2017) Mourning and Creativity in Proust, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Grenet, J. (2008). “Portrait d’Abraham en feur: étrangeté et exotisme du père dans A la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust,” Dalhousie French Studies, 83, pp. 109–17. Hammerschlag, S. (2016) Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion. New York: Columbia University Press. Hassine, J. (1994) Marranisme e hébraïsme dans l’œuvre de Proust. Paris: Minard. Johnson, J. T. (1989) “Proust’s Referential Strategies and the Interrelations of the Liberal and Visual Arts” in William C. Carter, The UAB Marcel Proust Symposium: In Celebration of the Anniversary of Swann’s Way (1913–1988). Birmingham: Summa Publications. Kaf ka, F. (1975) Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken Books. Karpeles, E. (2008) Paintings in Proust. A Visual Companion to in Search of Lost Time. London: Thames and Hudson. Klein, M. (1975) Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945, New York: Dell.

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Proust’s Abraham, the Other Lasinio, C. (c. 1812) “Departure of Hagar from Abraham,” Engraving After Benozzo Gozzoli, Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa. Harvard Museums. https://harvardartmuseums.org/art/274550. Lasinio, C. (c. 1812) “The Sacrifce of Abraham” (Il Sacrifzio di Abramo, Le sacrifce d’Abraham), Engraving After Benozzo Gozzoli, Pitture a fresco del Campo Santo di Pisa. Harvard Museums. https://harvardartmuseums.org/collections/object/274564?position=2. Lauterbach, J. Z. (1970) “The Ceremony of Breaking a Glass at Weddings,” Beauty in Holiness: Studies in Jewish Customs and Ceremonial Art, ed. Joseph Gutmann, New York: Ktav, pp. 340–69. Lerner, L. S. (2007) “Mourning and Subjectivity: From Bersani to Proust, Klein and Freud,” Diacritics 37, pp. 41–53. Levinas, E. (1989) “The Other Proust,” The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 160–5. Littré, E. (1885) Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. 4, Paris: Hachette. Mehlman, J. (2017) Review of The Right to Diference: French Universalism and the Jews by Maurice Samuels. Antisemitism Studies 1:2 (October), pp. 409–15. Mingelgrün, A. (1978) Thèmes et structures bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme. Proust, M. (2021) Les Soixante-quinze feuillets et autres manuscrits inédits. Ed. Nathalie Mauriac Dyer, Paris: Gallimard. Sprenger, U. (1996) “Genèse et genèse textuelle: Abraham à Combray,” in Rainer Warning and Jean Milly, Marcel Proust: Ecrire sans fn Editions CNRS, pp. 161–80. Further Reading L. Bersani, “Death and Literary Authority: Marcel Proust and Melanie Klein,” in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 7–28) provides another perspective on these writers by one of the most perceptive scholars in the feld. Bowie, M. (1987). Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) remains an excellent discussion of how to read the assertions of the theorizing narrator. J. Derrida, “Abraham, l’autre,” in Judéités: Questions pour Jacques Derrida (ed. J. Cohen and R. Zagury-Orly, Paris: Galilée, 2003, pp. 11–42) while not on Proust, ofers a fascinating discussion of “Abraham, the Other” in relation to Judaism. E. Levinas, “The Other in Proust” (The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 160–5) is the most infuential work on this topic. A. Elsner Mourning and Creativity in Proust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is an excellent treatment of this theme. S. Hammerschlag Broken Tablets: Levinas, Derrida, and the Literary Afterlife of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) contains an extremely helpful discussion of Derrida, Abraham and the betrayal of literature.

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PART 6

Gender and Sexuality

21 THE LOGIC OF GOMORRAH Proust and the Subversion of Identities Justine Balibar

Contribution Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time is a major undertaking to identify people and their afliations: social and sexual afliations above all, but also political, ethnic, aesthetic, moral and existential. Here and throughout my demonstration, I intend the terms “identifcation” and “identify” in the epistemic sense of determining who is someone, assigning them an identity. I do not refer to the psychological or psychoanalytical sense of sympathising with someone that one considers similar to oneself. My focus is on how the narrator or the reader can identify the various characters of the Search, not how they could identify with them.

Identifcation To be ‘one of them’ or not, to belong to this or that world: to the high or the low nobility, to the upper or the lower bourgeoisie, to the people, to the middle class, to the artists; to Sodom or Gomorrah; to the avant-garde or the rear-guard; to be “Israelite” or not; to be dreyfusard or anti-dreyfusard, liberal or reactionary; even, to be of this world or the other, to be among the dead or among the living. Determining who is what, who is from where, is one of the narrator’s great obsessions. But it is also, symmetrically, one of the great obsessions of many characters in the novel to escape belonging, or at least to resist identifcation.

Inversion and Subversion On closer inspection, identifcation, and the corresponding attempt to evade it, can obey two distinct logics: a logic of inversion and a logic of subversion. “Inversion”: the term is equivocal, it has both a sexual and a textual meaning. It was used at the end of the nineteenth century in a scientifc and medico-legal context to refer to male homosexuality1 – it was hence used in Proust’s time and it appears many times in that meaning throughout the Search. But “inversion” also belongs to the vocabulary of literary criticism: Roland Barthes in particular has made a seminal use of it in “Une idée de recherche” (Barthes 1980), to describe a form or fgure of fction that structures the whole of Proust’s novel.2 Barthes describes it in the following terms: “This fgure (dessin), which combines in the same object two absolutely DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-28

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contradictory states and radically reverses an appearance to its opposite, is frequent in In Search of Lost Time” (Barthes 1980: 34, my translation). The homosexual inversion, in this respect, is only one manifestation among others of the principle of inversion of appearances that structures the novel. It is an “exemplary” inversion, says Barthes, but “not necessarily a founding one” (Barthes 1980: 37, my translation), meaning it does not come before the other forms of inversion in time nor in importance. If “inversion” refers to the frst logic of identifcation in the Search, “subversion” can be used to name the other logic, in order to underline, by sharing the same radical, the complementary relationship between the two logics.3 There are in fact two strategies for evading identifcation: either to take the systematic opposite tack by inverting the codes of identifcation, or to subvert these codes by playing them of in an unclear, confused, ambiguous way. Thus Baron de Charlus, and generally speaking the Guermantes, but also Swann, Bloch and a few others, are great fgures of inversion: Swann is in love with a woman “who was not his type” (SW 234; I, 375). Baron de Charlus has the soul of a woman in a man’s body, he shows his greatest distinction by uttering the most vulgar words and masks his homosexuality by advocating the most vivid homophobia. The delicacy of Saint-Loup sometimes hides behind a modest appearance of indelicacy. Duchess de Guermantes speaks like a peasant girl, she and the Duke hide their dreyfusism from each other. Miss Vinteuil has the soul of a “a rough and swaggering trooper” in the body of a “a shy and suppliant maiden” (SW, 192; I 159), she spits on the portrait of her dead father to better pay homage to him. Bloch vituperates against the Jews, although he is, himself, Jewish. Albertine is, for her part, a great fgure of subversion, as well as, to a lesser extent, the young girls of Balbec or certain other characters like Saint-Loup, who diverge from the Guermantes’ logic of inversion. The young girls of Balbec remain in a zone of uncertainty, blurring the reference points that would help to determine their social origin or their sexual tastes. It is difcult to say whether Albertine is subtle or stubborn, whether she is beautiful or ugly, feminine or masculine, whether she also loves women or only men, whether her blushes are a mark of sincerity or duplicity. Her slumbers ofer the perfect image of this intermediate situation between two states and she pushes the art of ambiguity so far that the narrator will never have defnite proof of her love of women and will even have doubts about her death. In the frst case, identifcation is, paradoxically, not impossible: quite the contrary! Admittedly, the inversion of the codes is confusing at frst glance. But once we understand the logic behind it, it becomes easy to decode identities: Charlus speaks with the utmost vulgarity, but it does not escape to anyone that this is a proof of how delicate and noble he is. It is enough to know that codes are inverted, that a word or an attitude means their opposite. In this respect, inversion reveals at least as much as it conceals.4 In the second case, identifcation is much more difcult and can never be made in a certain, complete or decisive way. It will not be possible to determine with certainty whether Albertine had relations with women. The narrator will not be able to fnd out exactly what the women of Gomorrah were doing with one another. Although there is some doubt as to the status of Albertine’s “disappearance” (did she die after falling of her horse? did she just run away? did she just hide from the world? could she be alive?), her appearance is just as unclear: Albertine, in the frst few moments, is hardly distinguishable from the “little gang” of Balbec girls.

Te Little Gang: A Collective Unity The frst evocations of the young girls in the second part of Within a Budding Grove strangely mix the idea of collective fusion with that of individuality of the members of the group. On 326

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the one hand, the members who make up the group are very diferent from each other; on the other hand, they tend to merge into a collective unity. still almost at the far end of the esplanade, along which they projected a striking patch of colour, I saw fve or six young girls as diferent in appearance and manner from all the people one was accustomed to see at Balbec as would have been a fock of gulls arriving from God knows where […]. (BG, 425–6; II 146) The very frst vision is that of a “striking patch of colour” against the backdrop of a seascape, in French “une tache singulière”, that is more literally a “singular patch”. “Singular”, meaning strange and striking, but also united, single, indecomposable. Immediately afterwards comes a decomposition of the patch, which aims to determine the what and the how much: of what nature and in what number are the members that make it up? They are young girls, whose appearance contrasts greatly with the people we usually see in this place. Yet the count is imprecise: “fve or six young girls” [emphasis added]. And the determination is as if blurred by the suggested assimilation to a fock of seagulls. A group so united, therefore, that it forms a uniform spot and whose members’ identifcation seems precarious, indecisive. Just after that comes another attempt at individualisation: three of the members of the group are individualised by their attributes (a bicycle and golf clubs), a bit like mythological deities. But this diference between the members of the group is immediately erased by the contrast that the group presents, as a whole, in relation to the rest of Balbec’s society. In the description of this frst appearance, we therefore oscillate between individual and generic diference: the girls are diferent from one another, but above all they have a type distinct from the rest of the world. This type is sometimes explained as “vulgar”, with Proust playing on the socio-sexual equivocation of the expression “mauvais genre” in French, meaning both “vulgar type” and “wrong gender”5: if taken from a social-judgement point of view, the phrase means that the girls have unrefned manners or behave badly and do not belong to high society; if taken from a sexual point of view, it could either mean that they behave in a provocative way, e.g. like prostitutes, or that they do not look like girls (they are boyish) and/or they do not have the sexuality they “should” (they are lesbians). Proust deliberately plays on this variety of possible meanings. Even the negative value generally implied by the judgement “avoir mauvais genre” is not clearly negative here, because precisely their “mauvais genre” makes the girls attractive. And it is because they share, no doubt, this distinct, if not distinguished, type that they succeed so well in blending together, in the same mobile and singular patch. The rest of the text is built entirely on this oscillation between the singular and the collective: on the one hand, the attitude of the girls as a whole turns them into a type apart, on the other hand, the narrator’s attention is occasionally focused on certain distinctive features of one or the other: they were known to me only by a pair of hard, obstinate and mocking eyes, for instance, or by cheeks whose pinkness had a coppery tint reminiscent of geraniums; and even these features I had not yet indissolubly attached to any one of these girls rather than to another; and when (according to the order in which the group met the eye, marvellous because the most diferent aspects were juxtaposed, because all the colour scales were combined in it, but confused as a piece of music in which I was unable to isolate and identify at the moment of their passage the successive phrases, no sooner distinguished than forgotten) I saw a pallid oval, black eyes, green eyes, emerge, I did not know if these were the same that had already charmed me a moment ago, I could not relate them to any one girl whom I had set apart 327

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from the rest and identifed. And this want, in my vision, of the demarcations which I should presently establish between them, permeated the group with a sort of shimmering harmony, the continuous transmutation of a fuid, collective and mobile beauty. (BG, 427–8; II 148) In his frst encounter with the young girls, the narrator is frst struck by an impression of collective unity, which is enhanced by the contrast it presents with the kind of society he is used to: ease, the inconceivable freedom of healthy, athletic, graceful bodies and “a sincere contempt for the rest of humanity” (BG, 427–8; II 148). The elements of singular individualisation are intermittent, sporadic: that oval, that complexion, that colour of the eye, that curvature of the nose. But above all, these elements of individualisation are related less to a singular individual than to the group itself. This is the paradox of this aesthetic encounter: if there are indeed individual traits, these traits are not related to individuals but to a group – like a mythological monster with several pairs of eyes, several faces. The description continues, progressing towards an ever-greater individualisation of the members of the group: By this time their charming features had ceased to be indistinct and jumbled. I had dealt them like cards into so many heaps to compose (failing their names, of which I was still ignorant): the tall one who had jumped over the old banker; the little one silhouetted against the horizon of sea with her plump and rosy cheeks and green eyes; the one with the straight nose and dark complexion who stood out among the rest; another, with a face as white as an egg in which a tiny nose described an arc of a circle like a chicken’s beak – a face such as one sometimes sees in the very young; yet another, also tall, wearing a hooded cape […]; a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks, a black polo-cap crammed on her head, who was pushing a bicycle […]. (BG, 430–1; II 150–1) Distinctive features are now attributed to singular individuals rather than to the group as a whole. Hesitation has shifted from a purely perceptual level (what is it? what is this spot? what elements does the group consist of?) to a social and moral level (to which part of society do they belong? what are their mores?). The narrator will gradually discover that they belong to a new social class, the “middle class”: new to him because he has not yet mixed with it, but also a new class that arrived on the social chessboard at the end of the nineteenth century.6 And it will be increasingly certain that the mores of young girls include lesbian tastes among others. A few pages later, the narrator comes back to analyse the way the little gang resists individualisation. This time he attributes it to an efect of his own perception: it is a perceptive, aesthetic, phenomenal indistinction, contrasting with the real, ontological, but provisional, indistinction that characterised the group when the girls were still very young. This is what the narrator can see in an old photograph. At the time of his meeting with the girls, it is the narrator’s “impression of the group” that lacks sharpness. But when the girls were children, it was “the group itself ” that was indistinct, as an “old photograph” proves (BG, 466; II 180). The perceptive or aesthetic indistinction thus refers to or happens to correspond to a deeper original indistinction. As others could reconstruct the orogenesis of a mountain range, the narrator here fantasises the genesis of the little gang, a sort of parthenogenesis7 which leads from the primary indistinction of a “primitive organism” (BG, 466; II 180) where the elements are united as a whole, to the individualisation and disunity of the elements. As if the girls, instead of being born out of traditional human fecundation, originated from the division of an initially unique being. This is the meaning of a series of astronomic and zoologic comparisons, in which the girls are compared to the elements that compose a unique being: 328

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the stars of the “constellation” or “milky nebula” (BG, 465; II 180) but also the elements that compose “primitive organisms” of the sea such as corals, sponges and sea-anemones. Proust here, with a quite technical zoological vocabulary, refers to diferent species of primitive sea creatures, those half-plant, half-animal beings where the individual is organically part of the collective: the girls are the “polyps” that compose the “polypary” (BG, 466; II 180), “the spores, now individualized and disjoined, of the pale madrepore” (BG, 467; II 181); and somewhat further the “spores” that compose the “zoophytic band” (BG, 502; II 210), the “organisms” that compose the “zoophytes” (BG, 572; II 268). The fantasy of parthenogenesis has a deep aesthetic meaning: this is how a sensitive reality, a mixture of unity and multiplicity, is perceived, especially in the early stages of our encountering it. Perception is then refned by distinguishing ever more clearly the individual elements from one another. Language and names come as a help. Little by little we learn to name the elements, to give them their own names. Here: “Andrée”, “Rosemonde”, “Albertine”, “Gisèle”.

Albertine: Multiple and Elusive The same process of progressive identifcation against a background of multiplicity is then repeated around the fgure of Albertine, the young girl with the bicycle, the polo shirt, the diabolo. Initially, these are only feeting visions: a young brunette girl with big cheeks, with an oblique look, with a bicycle, a polo shirt or a diabolo, in the middle of other young girls with other attributes. Little by little, from an uncertain exchange of glances that parodies the stereotype of the amorous encounter,8 this young girl stands out from the others, little by little she begins to focus the narrator’s attention and desire. She is the one he will love. She is the one who will occupy three-quarters of the novel that just started. She is Mme Bontemps’ niece, she is Miss Simonet or Miss “Simonnet”, she is Albertine. It will still take time for the narrator to really distinguish her from the others, to be sure that it is really her he wants, to fx the spelling of her name and the features of her face, to understand her social origin, to be able to identify her completely. For a long time, Albertine’s beauty spot will wander from one part of her face to the other: Finally, to conclude this account of my frst introduction to Albertine, when trying to recapture that little beauty spot on her cheek, just under the eye, I remembered that, looking from Elstir’s window, when Albertine had gone by, I had seen it on her chin. In fact, when I saw her I noticed that she had a beauty spot, but my errant memory made it wander about Albertine’s face, fxing it now in one place, now in another. (BG, 526–7; II 230) In reality, identifcation will never be complete. While the physical characteristics gradually become fxed, the moral and sexual characteristics will always escape the narrator. Albertine is more diferent to herself than she is to other girls. In the eyes of the narrator, she appears mysterious, ambiguous, mobile, multiple, split into a thousand fragments of personality, into a thousand small unstable physical details. Her lack of spatial delimitation in relation to the rest of the gang is countered by her essential instability. The narrator’s perception of Albertine throughout the novel is therefore always fragmented, serial, as if the essence of Albertine, i.e., what should have made her singular, resided, on the contrary, in her multiplicity. The encounter with the girls and in particular with Albertine starts as an aesthetic encounter, that consists mainly in visual perceptions. Only later will it become a moral and afective encounter, with verbal, social and emotional interactions with the girls. This frst 329

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aesthetic encounter in many aspects evokes Impressionism, as it has been widely noticed: it lies on subjective impressions and visual aspects rather than on what the things really are and what we know things to be; it is serial and contingent. This interpretation is confrmed by the fact that the narrator encounters the girl through Elstir, an Impressionist painter who introduces him to this new way of painting. As Dubois notes, Elstir gives the narrator a double gift: he makes him know Impressionist painting and Albertine (Dubois 1997: chapter 3). For Descombes, the aesthetics of impressionism must be distinguished from the aesthetics of metaphor or symbolism. Impressionism is about “removing [the] name” from a reality (for example, a wave will be represented as a coloured zone), whereas a metaphorical aesthetics is about “giving another name” to a reality (Descombes 1987: chapter 15). The description of the girls oscillates between these two aesthetics: not knowing anymore what a reality is, not being able to identify it, the narrator hesitates between not naming it or naming it metaphorically. This is how the logic of subversion introduced by the encounter with the girls and Albertine reveals itself from an aesthetic point of view.9 There would be more to say about this problematic regime of identifcation that Proust introduces into the novel from the entry of the young girls against the seascape backdrop. It is sometimes found in connection with other characters, in particular Saint-Loup, who seems in many ways like Albertine’s friendly double to the narrator. Thus Saint-Loup also appears against the seascape backdrop, running after his monocle in the dining room of the Grand Hôtel de Balbec, elusive, fugitive. In one of Elstir’s paintings, the lovemaking of two young women blends so well into the landscape that it is impossible to know who they are or what they are doing. These beings – Albertine, Saint-Loup, certain female fgures and, generally speaking, the members of Gomorrah – are for Proust “beings of fight”, beings who resist complete identifcation, defnitive and univocal determination.10 The others – Charlus and the Guermantes (except for Saint-Loup), Bloch, Legrandin, certain popular fgures – are not “beings of fight” but rather essentialised beings, beings whose identity is stable and can be precisely determined, on condition that it be decoded, according to a simple code which is that of inversion.

Subverting Language and Knowledge The diference between the two logics, inversion and subversion, appears clearly in the social domain and in the sexual domain. It is often revealed in language. Behavioural subversion is then expressed in subversive language, which is therefore difcult to interpret. This is the meaning of the “me faire casser…” scene in The Captive. During an argument with the narrator, Albertine lets out a disturbing exclamation, which the narrator fnds difcult to explain: Alas! Albertine was several persons in one. The most mysterious, most simple, most loathsome of these revealed herself in the answer which she made me with an air of disgust, and the exact words of which, to tell the truth, I could not quite make out (even the opening words, for she did not fnish her sentence). I did not succeed in reconstituting them until some time later when I had guessed what was in her mind. We hear things retrospectively when we have understood them. “Thank you for nothing! Spend money on them! I’d a great deal rather you left me free for once in a way so that I can go and get myself b... (me faire casser)...” At once her face fushed crimson, she looked appalled, and she put her hand over her mouth as though she could have thrust back the words which she had just uttered and which I had quite failed to catch. (C, 384–5; III 840) 330

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“To get myself b…” (in French “me faire casser...”): the expression is interrupted, just in time, just as Albertine becomes aware of what she is letting slip out. To the narrator’s questions about the meaning of her words she refuses to answer, then explains that it is a vulgar expression whose meaning she doesn’t even know and which has come to her mind without her knowing why. Little by little, the narrator reconstructs the entire expression. Until then I had been hypnotised by the last word, casser. What was it she meant by break? Casser du bois? No. Du sucre? No. Break, break, break. And all at once her look, and her shrug, when I had suggested that she should give a dinner-party sent me back to the words that had preceded. And immediately I saw that she had not said casser but me faire casser. Horror! It was this that she would have preferred. Twofold horror! For even the vilest of prostitutes, who consents to such a thing, or even desires it, does not use that hideous expression to the man who indulges in it. She would feel it too degrading. To a woman alone, if she loves women, she might say it, to excuse herself for giving herself presently to a man. (C, 387–8; III 842–3) What horrifes the narrator is neither the meaning – a sodomy, or passive anal intercourse, which in the narrator’s mind would more precisely imply a heterosexual relation, a woman being sodomised by a man – nor the vulgarity of the expression, but the supposed context of its utterance and therefore the reasons why he suspects Albertine pronounced it. The sociolinguistic analysis that follows is subtly refned, contrasting ironically with the obscenity of the remarks analysed. Albertine half-uses an expression which, by its crudeness, alters her language just as much as it unintentionally reveals her homosexuality. If Albertine has said this, it is not because she engages in a certain type of sexual practice with men, in a heterosexual context, but rather because she talks about these practices with women – women with whom, in a homosexual context, she has other types of practices. What she wants, what she “[would] a great deal rather”, is therefore not so much to be sodomised [“se faire casser le pot”] by a (diferent) man (than Marcel), but rather to be able to pronounce this expression alongside a woman. And with that woman, with these young girls in bloom, it is likely that she has many other practices, for which the narrator has no words. The truncated expression “se faire casser...” is therefore a roundabout way of saying, of signifying the unspeakable and incomprehensible practices of women among themselves, about which the narrator will question himself throughout the novel. Practices that he no doubt imagines, in the line of Baudelaire’s “Lesbos”, more difuse, more ambiguous, more multiple than heterosexual or “inverted” practices. Here, then, we reach the linguistic limits of the Albertinian logic: identities and practices are so ambiguous, so indistinct, that there are no precise words to say them. The narrator is stunned by this world of languages and practices that are only half glimpsed, just as Charlus was stunned when he read, a hundred pages earlier in The Captive, the love letter of rare coarseness that the actress Léa, “notorious for her exclusive taste for women”, had sent to the violinist Morel, Charlus’ lover. The letter implies that Léa and Morel are lovers. In the letter, Léa addresses Morel as a woman, using expressions such as “Go on with you, naughty girl!” or “Of course you are one of us, you pretty sweetheart” (C, 237–8; III 720). Charlus, like the narrator just before, is bafed by a way of expressing oneself that follows the same subversive logic as in the previous example. In particular, it is a phrase that he knows well, “to be one of them”, but which is used here in a diferent meaning with respect to what he is accustomed to and reveals “the sudden inadequacy of a defnition” (C, 238; III, 720). Charlus is “one of them”, that is to say, he belongs to Sodom, to that world where men love men. Just as, he thought, Morel was. But here 331

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it is revealed to him that one can also be “one of them”, that is to say belong to Gomorrah, to that world where, he believed, women love women. Therefore Morel does not only belong to Sodom but also to Gomorrah. The logic of Gomorrah is disturbing and subversive because it is not, contrary to appearances, the double of Sodom, its counterpart for women. In Gomorrah, one can be a woman who loves women, but also a man who loves women the way women love each other, or a woman loving a man as if he were a woman. Gomorrah, in so doing, renders the more established defnitions and categories obsolete. It is subversive because it escapes the mimetic symmetry of inversion, which merely takes over dominant or usual categories, to give them an opposite meaning. Sexual transgression is ambivalent: Butler argues that it can be a way of either subverting the established norms and identities or confrming and reinforcing them (Butler 1990). This is exactly the diference in the Search between male homosexuality and female homosexuality. Unlike the lesbian, Proust’s “invert” reproduces the heterosexual phallocentrical pattern, and in doing so perpetuates it and obeys it. There is always a couple of opposites: a woman who loves a man, even if that woman has a man’s body. But the “naughty girl” subverts this schema by removing the duality of opposites, by blurring and multiplying the meaning of words. “To be one of them” now seems to be able to say anything and everything. If Gomorrah homosexuality is not reserved for women, then how is it still homosexuality? And why is it not heterosexuality either? What is emerging here is rather something like an idea of transgender, a conception of gender and sexuality that escapes the usual dualities, be it the duality of man/woman or the duality of heterosexuality/homosexuality. Ladenson argues that since male homosexuality just inverts the codes of heterosexuality it entirely belongs to its logic, whereas lesbianism would be the only true homosexuality (Ladenson 1999: 28–57). Putting things a little diferently, one could say that Gomorrah is subversive, not only because it escapes the binary logic of hetero-phallocentrism, but more profoundly because it permits an escape from the duality of heterosexuality and homosexuality itself, thus causing unprecedented identifcation problems.

Conclusion Certainly, the logic of inversion is dominant in In Search of Lost Time: it is the initial logic, the most obvious logic, the one that is the most explained and made explicit by the novelist. What could be more natural, in fact, than to give the key to a code? Thus Proust pedagogically explains to us that a certain form of male homosexuality, like a certain form of social distinction, is based on the inversion: to a man’s body corresponds a woman’s soul; to a supreme vulgarity of manners, a supreme distinction of essence. The other logic, the logic of subversion, does not immediately appear in the novel. It only appears with the beginning of what we can call, following Jacques Dubois, “Albertine’s novel” (Dubois 1997), in the second part of Within a Budding Grove. It is a more discreet logic, more latent, especially because it is not theorised or explained by the novelist. How, indeed, can we explain the subversive blurring, insofar as there is no code to be revealed and the “beings of fight” always move themselves in a confuse zone, in an indecisive plurality? And yet, the minor logic gradually gains ground and tends to spread throughout the novel, to the point of contaminating or hybridising with the major logic. At the end of the novel, almost all women, and even some men, are suspected of belonging to Gomorrah – of loving women the way women do. In the same way, the social boundaries become blurred, the narrator can hardly fnd his bearings in the new sociology that ofers itself to him during the “ball of heads” in Time Regained: it could be that Mme Verdurin has not only managed to obtain the title of Princess of Guermantes but has even become less stupid and less vulgar. 332

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Notes 1 See on this topic: Charcot, J.-M. and Magnan, V. (1987 [1883]), Inversion du sens génital et autres perversions sexuelles, Paris: Frénésie. Moll, A. (1893), Les Perversions de l’instinct génital. Étude sur l’inversion sexuelle, Paris: Carré. Chevalier, J. (1893), Une maladie de la personnalité. L’inversion sexuelle, Paris: Masson. 2 Other uses of the word have been made, notably by Elisabeth Ladenson in her chapter “Sexual/ Textual inversion” (Ladenson 1999: 10–27), when she argues that lesbianism in the Search is neither a “sexual inversion” (because it is not a symmetric or a duplicate of male homosexuality), nor a “textual inversion” (because it is not a literary transposition of the author’s real homosexuality, e.g. Albertine is not a literary substitute for Agostinelli). See also Duval, S. (2000), “Mundus inversus et terra incognita: inversion, homosexualité et ironie dans Sodome et Gomorrhe”, in Op. Cit. Revue des littératures et des arts, Pau: Publications de l’Université de Pau, 15, 213–24. 3 ‘Subversion’ is a concept regularly researched in Proust on the one hand, in philosophy, sociology and queer/feminist studies on the other hand. My analysis of homosexuality in Proust’s, my concept of subversion and my interpretation of Albertine own principally to Barthes, Descombes, Dubois and Ladenson. Of course, the concept of “subversion” applied to gender or sexuality inevitably brings in mind the ideas developed by Judith Butler in her deconstruction of sexual identities and the norms and power relationships that determine them (Butler 1990): there might be something Butlerian in my conception of Proustian subversion, or something Proustian in Butler’s conception of subversion, though I did not specifcally build my concept in reference to her work. 4 Ladenson (1999: 58–80) argues that whereas male inversion can be spied and thus discovered and understood, because it obeys well-known laws, those of phallocentrism, heterosexuality and “epistemological penetration” (Ladenson 1999: 7), lesbianism on the contrary remains concealed and “impenetrable” (Ladenson 1999: 134). 5 As Ladenson underlines it (Ladenson 1999: 31 and 43), the expression is untranslatable. It is rather poorly rendered by the English “bad behavior”; with slightly diferent connotations, it could be rendered by the phrase “bad sort” in a similar way. 6 As Dubois underlines it (Dubois 1997), Proust is most preoccupied by intense social contrasts, typically by the contrast between very high society (aristocracy – e.g., Baron de Charlus, Duchesse de Guermantes) and very humble people (e.g., Françoise, Jupien). He also shows how one social class defnes and delimitates itself by comparison with a class immediately inferior or superior (e.g., great bourgeois like Mme Verdurin would like to look like aristocrats like Duchess de Guermantes, but the comparison immediately shows the inferiority of the frst with respect to the second). Aristocracy, great bourgeoisie and domesticity represent the three traditional social classes, still very signifcant at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which however gives birth to a new social class: the middle-class bourgeoisie, less rooted in tradition than the great bourgeoisie and more open to change and mobility. Marcel was very much aware of traditional distinctions such as aristocracy, great bourgeoisie and common people, and he is troubled when he discovers, in Balbec, persons he cannot assign to one of these classes: the girls and Albertine in particular. He gradually learns that she belongs to that new social class, the middle-class, which he so far was not aware of. On the sociology of the Search, see also Bidou-Zachariasen, C. (1997), Proust sociologue, Paris: Descartes & Cie, and Hughes, E. J. (2011), Proust, Class, and Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 7 “Parthenogenesis” is a scientifc term meaning a type of reproduction without fecundation, in which a female gamete divides itself in diferent cells, without being fertilised by a male gamete. This poetically evokes the way the girls are given birth in the narrator’s perception: individuals that come from the division of an originally unique organism. We could also hear the word literally, as the birth (genesis) of young girls (partheno). 8 See Rousset, J. (1981), Leurs yeux se rencontrèrent, Paris: José Corti. 9 For more on the question of Impressionism in the Search, see also: Wilson, E. (2007 [1931]), Axel’s Castle, New York: Library of America; and Ellison, D. (1984), “Beyond Mimesis: Narrative Modality in A la recherche du temps perdu”, in The French Novel: Theory and Practice, Vol. XI, Columbia: University of South Carolina. 10 Laurent Jenny sees more in Albertine than a mere character: she embodies the idea of indetermination and multiplication of identities that little by little takes hold of the whole novel. That is what he calls “the Albertine efect”, that contaminates even the process of writing the novel, Proust being so fascinating by the elusive identity of Albertine that he could not help writing new hypotheses concerning her identity ( Jenny 2005: 15).

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References Barthes, R. (1980), “Une idée de recherche”, in Genette, G. et al. (1980), Recherche de Proust, Paris: Seuil, 34–39. Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble, New York/London: Routledge. Descombes, V. (1987), Proust: philosophie du roman, Paris: Minuit. Dubois, J. (1997), Pour Albertine. Proust et le sens du social, Paris: Seuil. Jenny, L. (2005), L’efet Albertine, Paris: Seuil, 205–218. Ladenson, E. (1999), Proust’s lesbianism, Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press.

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22 PROUST ON DESIRE SATISFACTION Robbie Kubala

For a certain ordinary class of desires, Proust’s thoughts on their satisfaction can be summed up in one word: don’t. Don’t satisfy your desires; doing so will fail to satisfy you. Should you therefore seek to eliminate desire? Absolutely not: desiring itself sustains you. The disappointment of attaining what you desire is one of Proust’s most persistent themes, elaborated in the forid unfolding of the Recherche but already expressed succinctly in an early story from Les plaisirs et les jours, apparently written when he was only 18: “Desire makes all things blossom; possession wilts them” (2001: 115).1 If you believed this, what should you do? Best to aim not to satisfy your desires at all. This paper is a development and limited defense of these baldly stated claims. The defense is limited in two respects. First, we have to restrict the class of desires in question to desires for completing one’s long-term projects, which I call “project-based desires.” Second, we have to restrict the scope of the subjects to whom these claims apply. Although my primary goal is to explore what rationally follows from a line of thought in Proust’s work, and not to argue, on textual and biographical grounds, for the attribution of this line of thought to the historical author, I do think that Proust himself intended to express something general about human psychology, and not merely to delineate the contingent tics and quirks of one fctional character’s personality. Nevertheless, while I will suggest that these ideas are more general in their application, they may not hold universally. In “Desire makes all things blossom,” I discuss the view of desire that emerges in the Recherche, on which desire is bound up with the imagination. “Possession wilts them” explains why desire satisfaction fails to satisfy us, and “Almost a medical philosophy” argues that the novel does not ultimately endorse the view that we should aim to eliminate our desires. In “One ought to seek not to,” I argue for the alternative strategy of prolonging the pursuit of our desires, both as a matter of interpretation and on substantive grounds, before concluding. A note on methodology: I follow a standard interpretive practice in distinguishing the narrator of the Recherche, Marcel (C, 77; III 583), from its author, Proust. Some contexts require an additional distinction between the narrator Marcel and the younger self he describes. I also follow the past half-century or so of scholarship in registering a general caution against assuming, of any of Marcel’s maxims, that Proust endorses it. For one thing, the

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-29

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novel is full of contradictions between maxims, and contradictions between maxims and depicted events. For another, many of the maxims are asserted ironically, such that we do better to infer that Proust is actually denying them. It is also customary to cite the notorious 1914 letter Proust wrote to the literary critic Jacques Rivière: I did not want to analyze this evolution of a belief system abstractly, but rather to recreate it, to bring it to life. I am therefore obliged to depict errors, without feeling compelled to say that I consider them to be errors; too bad for me if the reader believes I take them for the truth. (Corr. XIII, 99–100) If we assume that at least some “errors” are not contradicted elsewhere in the novel, then we get a quick argument against a revised interpretive principle that would permit us to attribute all uncontradicted and de-ironized maxims to Proust: some uncontradicted maxims are asserted unironically but are considered by Proust to be false, and the reader must judge which are which.2 All this is prefatory to noting that while I will speak of Proust’s views, this should always be understood as an interpretation, where an interpretation entails not only the attempt to account for internal inconsistencies and to explain the employment of irony but also some larger organizing framework that can, among other things, sort errors from (what Proust takes to be) the truth. Walter Benjamin memorably writes of “Proust’s blind, senseless, frenzied quest for happiness” (2019 [1929]: 152). On my reading, the Recherche is indeed a quest for happiness. But the search is not blind, senseless, or frenzied. On the contrary, the novel suggests a route that can be pursued clear-sightedly, reasonably, and deliberately.

“Desire makes all things blossom” In order to fx ideas, it is helpful to briefy review some largely uncontroversial claims about desire, with which Proust’s views are compatible. Desire is not a contentless sensation, like a headache, but an intentional attitude: desire is “for” something, such as an outcome or state of afairs (e.g., that Mme de Stermaria come to dinner), an object or person (e.g., Albertine), or an action of one’s own (e.g., to write a novel). Since desire is a relation between a desiring subject and an intentional object, the term “desire” can refer either to the subject’s attitude or to the intentional object (Shaw 2020). In the sentence “Marcel’s desire is all-consuming,” “desire” refers to a psychological attitude or state of mind, while in the sentence “Marcel’s desire is unattainable,” “desire” refers to the object at which the desire aims. To avoid confusion, I will use the term “desiring” in referring to the psychological attitudes of the person who desires. A second ambiguity concerns the relation between desire and action. Whenever we act intentionally, we can be said to have a “pro-attitude” to what we do, in the sense that we are motivated to carry it out. But it is possible to act intentionally in ways that we don’t really want to act, as when the young Marcel intentionally climbs the staircase after dinner, leaving his beloved mother below. When it comes to desires to perform actions, then, we should distinguish “desiring” in the broad sense of having a pro-attitude from the subset of “desiring” proper that consists what we really feel like doing (Schueler 1995; Scanlon 1998). It is the latter sense that will be of interest here. How does desire make all things blossom? In the Recherche, desiring tends to be bound up with what I will call the “hypothetical imagination.” The hypothetical imagination 336

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is a faculty that combines impressions from the senses and memory to create new mental objects: “In order to picture to itself an unknown situation the imagination borrows elements that are already familiar” (F, 483; IV 8). The imagination is distinct not only from the senses and memory but also from the will, the faculty that makes decisions. When Marcel’s friend Saint-Loup entices him with the mention of two beautiful women whom Marcel has not met, he notes that while Saint-Loup “had set my imagination a heavy task, he had at the same time procured an appreciable relaxation, a prolonged rest for my will” (SG, 143; III 121), because Marcel has decided not to pursue the women yet. So while the new mental objects that the hypothetical imagination creates can be produced for immediate practical purposes relating to the will, as when we predict where the people on the street in front of us will walk next, and move accordingly, these mental objects can also be produced solely for the purpose of day-dreaming or fantasizing. Proust studied philosophy at the Lycée Condorcet—his allusions suggest that he was familiar with the faculty psychology of Descartes and Kant—and while his usage is not wholly consistent, he tends to model the mind in terms of distinct faculties such as sensibility and will ( Jones 1975: 149; Landy 2004: 103–4). Not all desire is produced by the hypothetical imagination: Proust’s characters retain bodily desires such as hunger and sleepiness, which do not depend on the mediation of imagination for their existence. But the hypothetical imagination is capable of both producing and sustaining desire. Often, we experience something pleasurable and then form a desire to experience it further. But we can also form a desire by imagining something pleasurable, i.e., by combining impressions that represent states of afairs in which we are pleased.3 Although I’ve never written a novel, I can imagine myself writing one. In the content of what I imagine, I might enjoy writing the novel, or I might fnd it frustrating; I’m not likely to form a desire to write a novel if I imagine myself not enjoying any feature of doing so. The hypothetical imagination sustains desire not just by imagining a pleasant state of affairs, but by imagining it in a pleasing way. The valence of the manner and content of what I imagine can come apart: I might be horrifed that I imagine myself delighting in the failure of a rival. But sometimes both the content and the manner of the hypothetical imagination are pleasurable, in which case there can be a kind of positive feedback loop: the fact that it is pleasurable to imagine something produces my desire for it, where that desire, in turn, motivates further imaginative acts. I then imagine more pleasant details in the content of what I imagine—my novel receives various awards, people praise me lavishly—which leads me to get more pleasure from the act of imagining all this, and to continue to develop the content of what I imagine.4 What is distinctive in Proust emerges not in the mere suggestion that the activity of the hypothetical imagination can be intensely pleasurable, but in two further claims. First, the desiring imagination plays a more signifcant role in mental life than many believe: “Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be” (SW, 465; I 383). Second, and as the next section will elaborate, the pleasures of anticipating desired outcomes in imagination are, for Proust, much greater than the pleasures of possessing what we desire. The remainder of this section clarifes the role that the experience of sensible reality plays with respect to the hypothetical imagination. Above, I used a quotation from The Fugitive to introduce Proust’s conception of the hypothetical imagination. That quotation continues: 337

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In order to picture to itself an unknown situation the imagination borrows elements that are already familiar and, for that reason, cannot picture it. But the sensibility … receives … the original and for long indelible imprint of the novel event. (F, 483; IV 8) This passage makes it sound as though imagination’s connection to reality is tenuous: the hypothetical imagination can never picture an unknown reality using familiar materials, except perhaps by some lucky accident. But this is compatible with the plausible idea that the hypothetical imagination, though it cannot yield knowledge of unfamiliar sensible reality, can yield other kinds of knowledge, such as mathematical or moral knowledge—via the manipulation of shapes or the formation of judgments about counterfactual ethical situations— and indeed knowledge of familiar reality. Although sometimes “life gives us something which we were very far from imagining” (F, 572; IV 82), much of our experience is habitual, and experienced reality often not surprising, so we can use the hypothetical imagination to predict, for instance, who is likely to appear at the salon, what they are likely to say, etc. A diferent author might hold that the hypothetical imagination is a faculty of pure fantasy, unconstrained by the laws of nature and logic. But for Proust, not only is our imaginative desiring not wildly disconnected from reality, but the experience of sensible reality can strengthen it, as when Mme de Stermaria stands Marcel up for dinner: Now my disappointment, my rage, my desperate desire to recapture her who had just refused me, were able, by bringing my sensibility into play, to make defnite the possible love which until then my imagination alone had—though more feebly—ofered me. (G, 454; II 687) Marcel has, for days, been picturing to himself the pleasure of dining with Mme de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Boulogne, though largely as a way of realizing his generic “dreams of a young feudal maiden on a misty island” (G, 453–4; II 687). In experiencing, through his sensibility, the shock and then disappointment of receiving her card canceling their date, Marcel’s desire for Mme de Stermaria in particular is heightened, nearly to the point of love: “it was enough now, in order to love her, for me to see her again so that I might refresh those impressions” (G, 454; II 687). Another instance of reality intensifying his desiring, in this case through the activity of the hypothetical imagination, occurs when Marcel frst meets the Duchesse de Guermantes in person: “this Mme de Guermantes of whom I had so often dreamed, now that I could see that she had a real existence independent of myself, acquired an even greater power over my imagination” (SW, 208–9; I 173). In sum, desiring makes things blossom through the exercise of the hypothetical imagination, which represents pleasant states of afairs, informed by knowledge of reality. And the activity of desiring, as distinct from imagining any particular object of desire, is an additional source of pleasure: anticipating a possible pleasure can be highly pleasurable in itself.

“Possession wilts them” So far, this all sounds like great news for the pleasure-seeker (and Marcel is “so passionately fond of pleasure” (C, 81; III 586)). The problem is that, for Proust, actually possessing what one desires—that is, satisfying the desire by attaining its object—is rarely as wonderful as we imagine. Again, there is a scope restriction on the class of desires to which the claim applies. It’s not the case that all desires are such that their satisfaction is disappointing, that 338

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possession “wilts” their objects. In particular, the claim does not apply to bodily needs (as mentioned previously), feeting whims and unexpected pleasures (which are not anticipated at all), and states of afairs for which we are not primarily responsible. As examples of the last group, we learn that Marcel can desire the well-being of his grandmother, and other characters can desire various political outcomes, without necessarily being disappointed. And, as I will explain shortly, the claim need not apply to our desire for beauty in encounters with the arts and nature. The claim applies paradigmatically to project-based desires: desires for long-term self-involving projects whose realization can be anticipated. These projects are exemplifed by certain of Marcel’s pursuits, notably his erotic relationships with Gilberte and Albertine, entering the high society of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and writing a novel. So we can take Proust to be exaggerating for emphasis when he says that desire makes all things blossom and implies that possession wilts all things. The aim of this section is to explain what occasions these disappointments, when they occur. The narrator’s explanation comes to him during the revelatory episode of the paving stones before the matinée Guermantes: So often, in the course of my life, reality had disappointed me because at the instant when my senses perceived it my imagination, which was the only organ that I possessed for the enjoyment of beauty, could not apply itself to it, in virtue of that ineluctable law which ordains that we can only imagine what is absent. And now, suddenly, the efect of this harsh law had been neutralised, temporarily annulled, by a marvellous expedient of nature which had caused a sensation—the noise made both by the spoon and by the hammer, for instance—to be mirrored at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savour it, and in the present, where the actual shock to my senses of the noise, the touch of the linen napkin, or whatever it might be, had added to the dreams of the imagination the concept of “existence” which they usually lack […]. (TR, 223–4; IV 450–1) I include the second sentence as further evidence for the powers of the imagination, because it is striking that the explanation for the moments bienheureux of involuntary memory—the “sudden shudder of happiness” that Marcel experiences so fruitfully toward the end of the novel (TR, 224; IV 451)—turns on the hypothetical imagination, which is permitted to work on an occurrently experienced sensation, but only because it is simultaneously a past sensation. Leaving the difculties with this second sentence for another occasion, my interest is in the argument in the frst sentence. “Reality” here seems to refer to “sensible reality,” that which can be perceived by the senses. And in order to justify the claim, which the passage suggests, that sensible reality is not satisfying in general, we should understand “the enjoyment of beauty” to refer to “enjoyment” more generally. Then the argument appears to run like this: pleasurable states of afairs are enjoyable only when they are the object of imagination. But what the senses ofer us cannot, as such, be the object of imagination. Therefore, we cannot experience pleasurable states of afairs through the senses. There are at least three problems with interpreting the passage in this way, however. The frst is that it is implausible to claim, as the strict distinction between the imagination and the senses implies, that we can never experience pleasure through the senses. The passage, as I’ve interpreted it thus far, claims that we can imagine only what is absent, and that we can experience pleasure only through the imagination. And I take it as a background assumption that the senses experience only what is present.5 Yet Marcel himself experiences sensory pleasure at various points throughout the novel, notably in his erotic wrestling with 339

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Gilberte, a pleasure he “could not even pause for a moment to analyse” (BG, 76; I 485). So the conclusion of the argument, as stated, would be contradicted by events depicted elsewhere in the text. The second problem is that there appear to be two distinct conceptions of the imagination in this passage. It is true of what I called the “hypothetical imagination” that we can imagine only what is absent, since the hypothetical imagination represents absent states of afairs. But it is not true of the hypothetical imagination that it is the only organ we possess for the enjoyment of beauty, since beauty is something we can experience not only in absent states of afairs, as when we imagine something beautiful, but in present states of afairs, as when we perceive something beautiful. There is, however, a second conception of the imagination, which I will call “imaginativeness,” that is necessary for the enjoyment of beauty, if not helpfully characterized as the “only organ” we possess for the enjoyment of beauty. Imaginativeness here is meant in roughly the Kantian sense—the free play of imagination and understanding—in which the imagination is required for all experiences of beauty.6 And beauty is, so often in the novel, not disappointing: Marcel’s encounters with Vinteuil’s septet, Bergotte’s novels, Elstir’s paintings, the Combray hawthorns, and the trees at Hudimesnil are all occasions of deep aesthetic satisfaction, even when they are anticipated by the hypothetical imagination. In his unfnished essay Contre Sainte-Beuve, often considered a draft of the Recherche, Proust writes that “a pleasure of the imagination … [is] one of the rare moments that bring no disillusionment in their train … this is Beauty” (1984: 78–9). So the argument equivocates on two distinct senses of “imagination.” The third problem with the argument as formulated is that it does not actually explain what it purports to explain, namely how sensible reality can be disappointing. Something can be bad without being disappointing (if it were expected to be bad), and something can be disappointing without being very bad (if it were expected to be excellent but is merely good). To disappoint is to fail to live up to expectations, to let down. Thus, an experienced state of afairs can be disappointing only if it fails to meet some prior evaluative standard. A better argument, then, would add the premise that the hypothetical imagination sets an evaluative standard that sensible reality fails to meet.7 This premise is illustrated by any number of episodes in Marcel’s experience of society, art, and love. The pleasures of imagining the exalted names of the Guermantes are replaced by what he refers to as “the disappointments of my pilgrimage to and arrival in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, so diferent from what I had imagined it to be” (G, 572; II 786). Marcel’s conversations with school friends all concern “actors, whose art, although as yet I had no experience of it, was the frst of all its numberless forms in which Art itself allowed me to anticipate its enjoyment” (SW, 87; I 73). But his frst experience of the actress La Berma is “a bitter disappointment” (BG, 17; I 437) when “the two actresses whom I had been admiring for some minutes bore not the least resemblance to her whom I had come to hear” (BG, 22; I 440).8 The paradigmatic instance of this premise is the scene of the goodnight kiss, when Marcel forms “a resolution to abandon all attempts to go to sleep without seeing Mamma” (SW, 42; I 32). When he not only receives the kiss, but his mother spends the night in his room, Marcel remains unsatisfed: “I ought to have been happy; I was not” (SW, 44; I 38). The nature of the evaluative gap is diferent in these cases—in the frst two, someone else’s actions fail to meet his expectations, while in the last, the bad outcome is an unexpected consequence of his own actions—but in each, the state of afairs represented by the hypothetical imagination is more satisfying than the state of afairs experienced by the senses. Is this revised argument plausible? It probably depends on the nature of the subject in question, and on their capacities for hypothetical imagination as well as the quality of their 340

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experience; this empirical variation is the main reason to restrict the scope of the subjects to which this view of desire satisfaction applies, in addition to restricting the class of desires in question. But suppose that an agent with full Proustian imaginative capacities could lower their expectations for sensible reality—should they? The Recherche suggests they should not: And yet, whatever the inevitable disappointments that it must bring in its train, this movement towards what we have only glimpsed, what we have been free to dwell upon and imagine at our leisure, this movement is the only one that is wholesome for the senses, that whets their appetite. How drearily monotonous must be the lives of people who, from indolence or timidity, drive in their carriages straight to the doors of friends whom they have got to know without having frst dreamed of knowing them […]. (BG, 525; II 229) In sum, possession wilts things because sensible reality, when it comes to the satisfaction of desires of the class in question, is never as wonderful as we imagine. In the remaining sections of the paper, I will take this point for granted and ask how we ought to respond.

“Almost a medical philosophy” A certain bit of philosophical “wisdom” (BG, 339; II 74) running throughout the text suggests that we should limit our imaginative desiring—with its lofty evaluative expectations— rather than open ourselves to the disappointments of experienced reality.9 In a moment of refection on Swann’s relationship with Odette, the narrator writes that Swann had reached an age whose philosophy—encouraged, in his case, by the current philosophy of the day, as well as by that of the circle in which he had spent much of his life, … —is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost a medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorising the objects of their aspirations, endeavour to extract from the accumulation of the years already spent a fxed residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent, and with which they will deliberately arrange, before anything else, that the kind of existence they choose to adopt shall not prove inharmonious. (SW, 333; I 275) There are two distinct claims suggested by the “medical philosophy,” one about the nature of desire and the other about the best agential strategy for managing desire. As I interpret what it is to “exteriorise” the object of desire, the object of desire is the state of afairs at which it aims, such that a desire counts as satisfed if and only if that state of afairs is realized. The frst claim, which I will call “Russell’s claim,” denies this view. As Russell wrote in The Analysis of Mind, “A hungry animal is restless until it fnds food; then it becomes quiescent. The thing which will bring a restless condition to an end is said to be what is desired” (1921: 32). Russell’s claim is that the object of desire is anything that brings the desire to an end, such that a desire can also be satisfed if it is eliminated. This “interiorises” the object of desire by understanding it as anything that will causally quell the internal state of an organism, including but not limited to the external object at which desire aims. The second claim, which I will call “Schopenhauer’s claim,” is that desiring itself is “inharmonious” and thus ought to be limited. The activity of desiring is inharmonious because desiring implies a state of lack, which is painful. And even when we achieve our desires, we 341

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immediately fnd ourselves with new ones. Schopenhauer therefore holds that we should aim to eliminate desiring, or at least, if full elimination is not psychologically plausible, to limit it, just as the “medical philosophy” has it that we should endeavor to achieve tranquility by developing a “fxed residue of habits” instead of forming new desires. One could accept Russell’s claim but not have any views about how to respond to the “restlessness” of desire. And one could accept Schopenhauer’s claim while denying Russell’s, as, indeed, Schopenhauer himself would have: although he believes that the satisfaction of a desire “can never be more than deliverance from a pain” (1958 [1859]: 319), he nonetheless allows that desires can take states of afairs as their intentional objects, such that they are not necessarily “satisfed” just because desiring ceases. The medical philosophy, then, is the conjunction of both claims. Although Proust does not employ the term regularly, variants of the “medical philosophy,” and other bits of spurious philosophical wisdom, run through the Recherche as a kind of countermelody. They are part of the intellectual milieu not only of Swann’s circle, but of Marcel’s, although often ironized: the Duchesse de Guermantes causally tosses of the laziest epistemological skepticism before “proceed[ing] at once to violate it” (G, 259; II 525); the Turkish Ambassadress is familiar with “any of the most recent German publications,” whether on “political economy, mental aberrations, the various forms of onanism, or the philosophy of Epicurus” (G, 732; II 618); Mme de Cambremer’s “entirely spurious culture” notably includes “idealist philosophy” (SG, 467; III 397); and Brichot can knowingly declare that “Balzac is all the rage this year, as pessimism was last” (SG, 520; III 438). Addressing Marcel in one of these salons years later, Swann is still speaking of his jealous love as a “disease” that can be treated by seeking to cease loving the beloved (SG, 119; III 101). Marcel himself often firts with the medical philosophy, both by seeing his desire as directed not at a particular woman but as a purely internal state of lack, and by attempting therefore to eliminate his desires: already with Gilberte he thinks, “There is nothing for it but to try to eradicate little by little our desire” (BG, 232; I 613), and this thought is echoed repeatedly with respect to Albertine, e.g., “if happiness, or at least the absence of sufering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek” (F, 514; IV 34). Neither claim of the medical philosophy, however, is ultimately endorsed by the narrator. Russell’s claim is, quite independently of Proust, widely recognized to be false. As Wittgenstein wrote in his Philosophical Remarks, “I believe Russell’s theory amounts to the following:  … If I wanted to eat an apple and someone punched me in the stomach, taking away my appetite, then it was the punch I originally wanted” (1975 [1930]: 64). One crucial distinction, in the theory of desire, is that between the logical satisfaction of desire and the psychological satisfaction of the agent (de Sousa 1998; Lycan 2012). But there is a signifcant psychological diference between failing to be satisfed by the apple you eat and failing to be satisfed by the punch you receive. In order to even articulate the claim that attaining the objects of your desire can disappoint you, we need the right account of what the intentional object of desire is. Proust’s narrator, as any number of moments in the text illustrate, is committed to denying Russell’s claim and to respecting the relevant distinction between desire satisfaction and agent satisfaction. The youthful Marcel already recognizes, of certain desires, “that their fulflment would have aforded me no pleasure” (SW, 217; I 180–1), thus distinguishing logical attainment from psychological satisfaction. Again, he later recognizes that his desire to travel to Balbec “was a desire which I had attained without any satisfaction” (C, 473; III 915), and that his desire to befriend Saint-Loup “had been realised beyond the limits of what I should ever have thought possible, without, however, at the time giving me more than a very slight pleasure” (TR, 193; IV 426). As Richard Moran notes, on Russell’s view, “we would have to 342

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count the long periods of discouragement when the Narrator abandons any hope of embarking on a literary career as satisfactions of that ambition” (2023: 146). It is striking that, for all Marcel’s attraction to forms of skepticism—about the external world, about the possibility of knowability by others—he so rarely seems troubled by an inability to know the intentional objects of his own desires. He really does want to receive that goodnight kiss, to see La Berma, to meet the Duchesse de Guermantes, to dine with Mme de Stermaria. What he doesn’t know, at least initially, is whether attaining his desires will satisfy him. On Russell’s view, it is an empirical question which object will actually eliminate a particular desire. On Proust’s view, it is an empirical question only which instances of desire satisfaction will actually satisfy us. While less unpopular than Russell’s claim, Schopenhauer’s claim is also considered false by the narrator. This is more controversial, since many interpreters have emphasized Proust’s similarities to Schopenhauer (Beckett 1931; Henry 2000; May 2011). But Schopenhauer writes of desire: “its attainment of the goal … we call satisfaction, wellbeing, happiness” (1958 [1859]: 309). Although Schopenhauer believes that desiring, because it continues restlessly on, always causes more sufering than pleasure, he does appear to hold that the satisfaction of a desire is always, to that extent at least, the satisfaction of the agent.10 But I have already argued, in “Possession wilts them,” that this is false for Proust. On balance, the medical philosophy is seen to be not only theoretically inadequate but also practically unhelpful. While the narrator fnds “a certain wisdom in the philosophers who recommend us to set a limit to our desires” (BG, 339; II 74), he goes on to say, returning to the vegetal metaphor of desire’s blossoming, I was inclined to regard this wisdom as incomplete, for I told myself that these encounters made me fnd even more beautiful a world which thus caused to grow along all the country roads fowers at once rare and common. (BG, 339; II 74) Later in the same volume, the narrator describes another one of the systems of mental hygiene among which we are at liberty to choose our own, a system which is perhaps not to be recommended too strongly, but gives us a certain tranquillity […] with which to resign ourselves to death. (BG, 611; II 300) The idea that death is the logical terminus of the medical philosophy is repeated later in the novel, when death, it is claimed, “will cure us of the desire for immortality” (F, 740; IV 224) and, indeed, of all desire.

“One ought to seek not to” The aim of this section is to consider which agential strategy is best for coping with the disappointments of desire satisfaction, both as a matter of textual interpretation and on substantive philosophical grounds. One strategy is to seek satisfaction in aesthetic experience, and the novel abounds in such moments, the discussion of which deserves fuller treatment elsewhere. Here, I consider only the restricted class of desires I have called project-based desires. I have already argued that Proust rejects the Schopenhauerian view on which we 343

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should eliminate such desires. Rather, the Proustian view is one on which, for the class of desires in question, we should prolong the pursuit of those desires, with the attendant pleasures of the hypothetical imagination. Above, I quoted a passage from the opening of The Fugitive, a section that Ingrid Wassenaar calls “one of the bleakest and most critically resistant parts of the novel” (2000: 173), in which the narrator seems to articulate the Schopenhauerian view: “it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek” (F, 514; IV 34). What follows immediately is more revealing, however: “One seeks to see the beloved object, but one ought to seek not to: forgetfulness alone brings about the ultimate extinction of desire” (F, 514; IV 34). As with the narrator’s belief that the endpoint of the medical philosophy is death, I think we can see in the reference to forgetfulness—like death, hardly a desideratum in the novel—another clue that Schopenhauer’s claim is inadequate, one of the errors that Proust is obliged to depict without identifying it as an error. Yet if appropriately disambiguated and reinterpreted, the frst part of the sentence ofers a succinct formulation of the Proustian strategy: one’s desire aims at the beloved object, but one, qua agent, ought to seek not to attain it, i.e., the object of desire. Which intentional objects of desire best lend themselves to prolonged pursuit? I suggest two restrictions: such objects must be regarded by the agent as (i) worthy of pursuit and (ii) difcult but not impossible to attain. The frst restriction is meant to rule out objects of desire that the agent does not care about, and to rule in those objects that are regarded as most worthy. As Proust writes in Contre Sainte-Beuve, “one must live among desirable desires … in order to aford one’s soul the sense of having accomplished—though to be disillusioned—the most perfect thing this world can ofer and the best matched to the claims of desire” (1984: 81). Although one might object, at least morally, to the way in which Marcel pursues some of his desires—notably the project of “possessing” Albertine—the object of the desire itself, another person, is surely worthy (and indeed, regarding Albertine in particular as so desirable by others is a major cause of the narrator’s jealousy). In addition to whatever evaluative considerations go into the choice of projects to pursue, the second restriction has to do with factual considerations about difculty. In general, the more difcult a project, the longer it takes to attain it, though the project can’t be thought wholly unattainable.11 Although Marcel’s desire for Mme de Stermaria is actually strengthened when she stands him up for dinner, he still does not believe that her love could never be attained: “in general the difculty of attaining the object of a desire enhances that desire (the difculty, not the impossibility, for that suppresses it altogether)” (G, 442; II 678). To the extent that the realization of one’s projects is under one’s control, the best agential strategy is therefore deferral. Sometimes this is not possible, as when, on a walk with Elstir in Balbec, Marcel happens upon the jeunes flles en feurs whom he had imagined getting to know: This was not at all the way in which I had so often, on the beach, in my bedroom, imagined myself making the acquaintance of these girls. What was about to happen was a diferent event, for which I was not prepared. I recognised in it neither my desire nor its object; I regretted almost that I had come out with Elstir. (BG, 503; II 211) Fortunately, the introduction does not take place, and instead the knowledge that what imagination fgured can occur in reality heightens Marcel’s pleasure: “I could now set my desire for [the girls] at rest, hold it in reserve, among all those other desires the realisation of which, as soon as I knew it to be possible, I would cheerfully postpone” (BG, 513; II 220). We see 344

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deferral at work in the narrator’s relationship with Albertine, where he requests a “voucher” for their frst kiss, since “the knowledge that to kiss Albertine’s cheeks was a possible thing was a pleasure perhaps greater even that that of kissing them” (G, 417; II 657); in his pursuit of Andrée (SG, 595; III 498); and most blatantly in his interminable investigation into the possibility of Albertine’s lesbian afairs, both before and after her death. He never does, after all, read the letters in her kimono (C, 76; III 582). Deferral is a strategy employed by the child Marcel even before the drame du coucher: “I reached the point of hoping that this good night which I loved so much would come as late as possible, so as to prolong the time of respite during which Mamma would not yet have appeared” (SW, 14; I 13). Given his premises, deferral is a perfectly reasonable strategy. In characterizing project-based desires, I have referred to desires whose objects can be completed, or attained, or possessed. But one might reasonably object that there are some desires that aim not at the completion, but the perpetuation, of one’s projects. Kieran Setiya (2014) makes a distinction between telic and atelic activities. Telic activities aim at completion, and include in their nature a terminal point: activities like writing a book, traveling to Venice, and being accepted into high society are all telic, since there is a time at which they can be accomplished. Atelic activities have no terminal point: activities like writing in general, traveling in general, loving one’s partner, and being a philosopher are all atelic. The objection claims that it’s not that we should aim to prolong the realization of telic projects per se; rather, we should aim to engage in atelic projects only. If there’s nothing to complete, then there’s nothing to be disappointed in. My reply is that you have to engage in at least some telic activities in order to count as pursuing the atelic activity at all: you can’t be a writer without fnishing at least some projects; you can’t be a lover without engaging in at least some benevolent acts. As Setiya puts it: We cannot simply spend time with friends, we have to spend it in some endeavour. We cannot simply do philosophy: we have to read a book, work through a problem, write a paper. There is an ineluctable strain of self-destruction not in atelic ends but in our way of relating to them. (2014: 16) You can’t just daydream your life, in part because you need infusions of reality to improve your acts of imagination. Proust doesn’t seem to recognize the distinction between telic and atelic activities. But even if he did, it would not solve the problem of reality’s disappointments. Completing the telic projects that I have discussed will disappoint you, and to engage in atelic activities requires you to complete at least some telic activities, so deferral remains a rational strategy.12 The Recherche ends with a famous passage in which Marcel recovers his resolution to write his book, a book that is perhaps identical to the one we are reading: The idea of Time was of value to me for yet another reason: it was a spur, it told me that it was time to begin if I wished to attain to what I had sometimes perceived in the course of my life, in brief lightning-fashes, on the Guermantes way and in my drives in the carriage of Mme de Villeparisis, at those moments of perception which had made me think that life was worth living. How much more worth living did it appear to me now, now that I seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realised within the confnes of a book. How happy would he be, I thought, the man who had the power to write such a book! What a task awaited him! (TR, 430–1; IV 609) 345

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Many interpreters have commented on this passage, and on the discovery that Marcel makes. As I read it, the happiness here lies not in completing the book, or even necessarily in writing the book— though certainly the process of writing the book will itself be a spur to further imaginative activity—but in anticipating the writing of the book, now that the activity is believed to be both supremely worthwhile and intensely difcult (“he would also have to endure his book like a form of fatigue, to accept it like a discipline” (TR, 431; IV 609–10)). The project “will no doubt never be completed” (TR, 431; IV 610)—the fnal sentence of the novel begins with a conditional, “if I were given long enough to accomplish my work” (TR, 451; IV 625)—but why should it be? Not fnishing the novel, while believing that there is a possibility of fnishing it nonetheless, is the best possible state of afairs for achieving not his desire’s satisfaction, but his own.

Conclusion I have argued that, for Proust, the pleasures of the hypothetical imagination tend to be greater than the pleasures of sensible reality. Attaining the objects of our project-based desires fails to satisfy us as agents, but anticipating, in hypothetical imagination, the completion of the most desirable projects is itself satisfying. As such, and contrary to the “medical philosophy,” we should not aim to eliminate those project-based desires, but rather to prolong their pursuit. This is a strategy that can be pursued clear-sightedly, reasonably, and deliberately. To venture a bolder conclusion: deferral is also an authorial strategy for Proust, who conceived the beginning and ending of his novel as early as 1909 but continued adding to it for years, famously scribbling expansive marginal notes that grew the manuscript, almost as if to avoid reaching the episode of the matinée Guermantes that he knew in advance would bring his work to a close. Proust pronounced the manuscript fnished in the spring of 1922 and is reported then to have declared, “Now I can die” (Albaret 2001 [1973]: 337; Tadié 2000: 762). He died several months later.

Acknowledgments Earlier versions of this chapter were presented at the Stanford University Philosophy and Literature Workshop and the Colorado College Philosophy Colloquium Series. For written comments and suggestions, I am especially grateful to the editors of this volume, and to Andrew Huddleston, Philip Kitcher, Joshua Landy, Richard Moran, Antonia Peacocke, Nick Riggle, and Uku Tooming.

Notes 1 Although Les plaisir et les jours was published in 1896, Benjamin Taylor notes that this particular story was frst published in Le Banquet, a literary review Proust co-founded, in July 1892 (2015: 25). It is Adam Phillips (2016) who reports that Proust was 18 when he wrote it, not 20, as Taylor’s dates would suggest, but I have been unable to verify this in Tadié (2000) or elsewhere. The present paper might be thought of as a development of Phillips’ claim that the Recherche is fundamentally “about the ways our objects of desire sustain us by failing to satisfy us.” 2 Here, I am in partial disagreement with Joshua Landy, whose methodology is to “proceed on the assumption that Marcel speaks for Proust until and unless there is reason to think otherwise. ‘Reason’ here means internal contradiction, a discrepancy either between one maxim and another … or between a given maxim and the events depicted in the narrative” (2004: 35, emphasis original). I agree with the frst sentence, but disagree with narrowing the reasons in question to facts about internal contradictions only.

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Proust on Desire Satisfaction 3 Proust is not so far from Aristotle here, for whom phantasia plays a similar role. As Jessica Moss writes, “pleasurable phantasia induces desire and pursuit, just as would the actual pleasurable perception. Phantasia’s key contribution to action is its pleasurable representation of an object not presently perceived, which thereby becomes desired as a goal” (2012: 62). 4 Uku Tooming (2019), in the course of arguing for the claim that we can actively shape our desires by controlling how we imagine their contents, provides a helpful review of the empirical evidence that imagining can strengthen or weaken our desires. 5 Tom Stern points out that Proust frequently troubles this strict distinction between the senses and the hypothetical imagination, in the many passages where the hypothetical imagination seems to infuse what is occurrently perceived with features that it has efectively made up, particularly in the context of perceiving the beloved. Like the philosophical “wisdom” I discuss in “Almost a medical philosophy,” however, this kind of imaginative projection is something the novel firts with but, as I have argued elsewhere (Kubala 2016), ultimately rejects. 6 The only other commentator I know who recognizes two conceptions of the imagination in Proust is John Porter Houston, who writes only that “there is a sharp division between the satisfying higher imagination, which properly focuses on art, and the often frustrating lower imagination, which exercises itself in life” (1982: 20). I borrow the term “imaginativeness” from Richard Moran, who draws attention to its employment in our encounters with the arts and distinguishes it from imagining something to be the case: “the ability to make connections between various things, to notice and respond to the network of associations that make up the mood or emotional tone of a work” (1994: 86). But I follow Kant in broadening the extension of the term to encompass experiences of natural as well as artistic beauty. 7 Leo Bersani claims that for Proust, “External reality is disappointing because it is diferent [from what we imagine], because it does not send back to us the material equivalents of our dreams” (1965: 21). But this fails to explain why mere diference is bad. 8 The La Berma episode in particular is one reason why I do not accept Roger Shattuck’s explanation of reality’s disappointment in terms of what he calls, following Montaigne, “soul error”: “the incapacity to give full value or status to one’s own life and experience,” precisely because it is one’s own life and experience (2000: 84–5). There is no suggestion that, for Marcel, La Berma cannot be good because he gets to appreciate her, or that the Faubourg is tainted, Groucho Marx-style, because it will admit him. 9 My discussion in this section is greatly indebted to Richard Moran’s essay on “Swann’s Medical Philosophy” 2023 particularly his references to Schopenhauer, Russell, and Wittgenstein. 10 Ultimately, this may not be a very great extent, particularly when we add in Schopenhauer’s second-order desires to have desires, which are the source of further sufering. Thanks to Lanier Anderson for a helpful discussion on this point. 11 Sometimes the narrator speaks as though difculty is the only consideration that sparks desire—e.g., love “comes to rest on the image of a woman simply because that woman will be almost impossible of attainment” (BG, 505; II 213)—but surely this is overstated; notice the “almost” qualifer. 12 What about desiring not to complete one’s telic projects? Won’t we be disappointed not only when we complete them but also when we don’t? My reply points again to the a/telic distinction: not completing one’s projects is itself an atelic project, since there is no terminal point at which one has completed not completing all one’s projects. Since it won’t disappoint one, it’s not an inherently self-defeating strategy.

References Albaret, C. (2001 [1973]) Monsieur Proust, as told to G. Belmont, trans. B. Bray, New York: New York Review Books. Beckett, S. (1931) Proust, London: Chatto & Windus. Benjamin, W. (2019 [1929]) “The Image of Proust,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Mariner Books, pp. 149–65. Bersani, L. (1965) Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art, New York: Oxford University Press. de Sousa, R. (1998) “Desire and Serendipity,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 22: 120–34. Henry, A. (2000) La tentation de Marcel Proust, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Houston, J. P. (1982) The Shape and Style of Proust’s Novel, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Jones, P. (1975) Philosophy and the Novel, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Robbie Kubala Kubala, R. (2016) “Love and Transience in Proust,” Philosophy 91: 541–57. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, New York: Oxford University Press. Lycan, W. G. (2012) “Desire Considered as a Propositional Attitude,” Philosophical Perspectives 26: 201–15. May, S. (2011) Love: A History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Moran, R. (1994) “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” The Philosophical Review 103: 75–106. ———. (2023) “Swann’s Medical Philosophy,” in K. Elkins (ed.), Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press), 124–156. Moss, J. (2012) Aristotle on the Apparent Good: Perception, Phantasia, Thought, and Desire, New York: Oxford University Press. Phillips, A. (2016) “My Shirt-Front Starched,” London Review of Books 38(15), https://www.lrb.co.uk/ the-paper/v38/n15/adam-phillips/my-shirt-front-starched [accessed 14 August 2022] Proust, M. (1984) On Art and Literature, 1896–1919, trans. S. T. Warner, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. ———. (2001) The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust, trans. J. Neugroschel, New York: Cooper Square Press. Russell, B. (1921) The Analysis of Mind, London: George, Allen and Unwin. Scanlon, T. M. (1998) What We Owe to Each Other, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schopenhauer, F. (1958 [1859]) The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, New York: Dover. Schueler, G. F. (1995) Desire: Its Role in Practical Reason and the Explanation of Action, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Setiya, K. (2014) “The Midlife Crisis,” Philosophers’ Imprint 14: 1–18. Shattuck, R. (2000) Proust’s Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time, New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Shaw, A. (2020) “Desire and Satisfaction,” The Philosophical Quarterly 70: 371–84. Tadié, J.-Y. (2000) Marcel Proust: A Life, trans. E. Cameron, New York: Viking. Taylor, B. (2015) Proust: The Search, New Haven: Yale University Press. Tooming, U. (2019) “Active Desire,” Philosophical Psychology 32: 947–70. Wassenaar, I. (2000) Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justifcation for À la recherche du temps perdu, New York: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1975 [1930]) Philosophical Remarks, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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23 PROUSTIAN JEALOUSY Elisabeth Ladenson

Proust is literature’s great theorist of jealousy. À la recherche du temps perdu ofers the fullest canonical examination of that emotion besides Othello, with the signal diference that Proust’s characters act as their own Iago. The novel includes narratives of jealousy along with lengthy philosophical discussions of its psychology and existential implications. In all, it contains— at a conservative estimate—some 600 pages about jealousy, which is to say approximately twenty per cent of the work as a whole. Jealousy is central to Proust’s novel, and insistent examinations of this theme can also be found in the author’s writings throughout his career as well as in his correspondence. Clearly, jealousy was of great importance to Proust, as a person and as a writer. In answer to the question of why this should be the case, the novel itself gives us the idea that love is predicated on jealousy because love itself is a zero-sum game: “comme s’il y avait fatalement entre deux êtres une certaine quantité d’amour disponible, où le trop pris par l’un est retiré à l’autre” [“as though two people must inevitably have only a certain quantity of love at their disposal, of which the surplus taken by one is subtracted from the other”] as the narrator puts it in La Prisonnière (III 846; C, 392). As a result of the inevitable impasse this condition entails, he tells us, the essential improbability, if not impossibility, of satisfying human interaction in love is clear. According to the logic of the novel, this is ultimately a good thing, because the subject is led to realize that he should stop wasting his time trying to fnd satisfaction in this manner, as in social relations in general, and turn instead to himself in order to fnd redemption in the creation of a work of art.

Te Idea of Possession Thus, jealousy is useful, if only in a negative sense, and if only to the creative artist and anyone else devoted to introspection as a central activity. It also spurs intellection in general, providing the impetus to the most developed form of recherche—research—depicted in the book. As Swann notes in a conversation with the narrator in Sodome et Gomorrhe, jealousy is a terrible experience, but not without its positive aspects. These are, according to Swann: frst, that it forces one to take a genuine interest in other people, or at least one other person. Both he and the narrator spend enormous amounts of time and energy in the necessarily futile attempt to learn the truth about the loved object. The second positive aspect noted by Swann is that one may fnd at least some provisional measure of satisfaction in the idea that when the DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-30

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loved object is in one’s presence she is not able to be with others. And so one is aforded, to some provisional and temporary degree, a sense of possession of the other. “Possession” is the point and the goal of erotic love, in these terms. Early on we have been told, from Swann’s point of view in the “Swann in Love” section of the frst volume, that in the physical act of “possession,” one does not really possess anything at all. Possession was the key euphemism for sexual intercourse at the time Proust was writing, but the term is used in the novel in both the metaphorical sense of physical penetration and a more general, diferently metaphorical, understanding of psychic penetration: access to the interiority of the beloved’s psyche, in particular her erotic past and current desires. In neither acceptance is true possession of another person possible, and here we fnd the central problem of jealousy in the world of the Recherche. Desire, for Proust’s desiring characters—most notably Swann, the protagonist, Saint-Loup and Charlus, but also, lest the phenomenon appear to be exclusively masculine, the Princesse de Guermantes in her love for Charlus—is always thwarted, and true knowledge of the other, true “possession,” is impossible. There are, of course, exceptions. Mme de Villeparisis and M. de Norpois have been together in apparent harmony into old age, doubtless because they are not married to each other and thus cannot form an ofcial union. The fction of their being just friends is upheld throughout—when he arrives at her salon he always puts on his hat and overcoat as though he were coming from outside, even though he’s been working upstairs; only travelling abroad can they openly display their union. Married couples would seem to follow the traditional model embodied by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, with serial infdelity on the husband’s part expected, even if greatly resented. Are the protagonist’s parents meant to ofer an exception to this rule? We never really fnd out enough about their marriage to have any idea, but if we may judge by the example of Proust’s own parents, the answer would be no (Laure Hayman, the mistress of Proust’s maternal great-uncle, the model for Oncle Adolphe, seems also to have had an afair with Proust’s father, for instance). The number of major love relations entirely unshadowed by jealousy in the novel appears to be two: the grandmother in her love for her grandson, and Jupien’s love for Charlus. In both cases, love is selfess, that is to say that the loving subject is entirely devoted to the beloved object, having only his interests at heart, and therefore jealousy cannot obtain.

Te Goodnight-Kiss Scene One might object—indeed, the narrator himself might object—that the mother too, in her relation to her son, presents an exception to this rule, since she seems to share her own mother’s exclusive love for him, but this is not really the case. Actual infdelity, it turns out, is not required to incite jealousy; the feeling that the beloved’s attention is, however temporarily, directed elsewhere sufces. A template for all subsequent scenes of jealousy in the novel is to be found in the opening “goodnight-kiss” passage in which the young boy is unable to go to sleep knowing that his mother is enjoying unimaginable adult pleasures at dinner with Swann and the rest of the family. (The grandmother is there too, certainly, but it is not her inaccessibility that troubles the boy.) This early passage contains the same basic material that will recur in all later scenes of jealousy in the novel. The desiring subject feels excluded from the obscure pleasures enjoyed by the beloved with another or others in his absence; he attempts, often by means of a mendacious letter alluding to an unspecifed important matter, to force her to come to him; his transparent ruse fails, because the beloved’s desires diverge from his. It is his mother who inadvertently provides the model for the narrator’s enduring understanding of love as a zero-sum game, because she withholds her afection in proportion 350

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to her young son’s displays of neediness in a misguided, culturally sanctioned attempt to instil in him self-control. Two unexpected elements occur around the goodnight-kiss scene. One, the boy actually succeeds in getting his mother to spend the entire night with him, by paternal fat and against her will, with the result that he is burdened with an enduring sense of guilt for having brought about her unwilling capitulation and thus somehow damaged her. And two, what he had imagined to be Swann’s contempt if the latter knew about his pathetic machinations is eventually revealed to be false, as he learns about Swann’s own similar machinations in his jealous love for Odette, which are extensively narrated in the second section of the same volume. Indeed, “Swann in Love” reads like a gigantic expansion on the idea that Swann was ideally placed to understand the young boy’s distress. Although the earlier experience is repeatedly alluded to as a sort of primal scene of jealousy in the novel, the narrator’s references to its relation with what happens later carry an anti-Freudian valence. Instead of depicting the early event as the cause or origin of later scenes, he presents it as a rehearsal for what comes later. In this sense, it is Swann’s earlier story, which takes place before the hero’s birth that takes the place of primal scene of jealousy in the novel. It is the adult experiences of jealousy that count, in the narrator’s experience, beyond the childhood scene they hark back to, despite the novel’s general logic of time lost-time regained. The boy ultimately understands his unexpected success in the goodnight-kiss scene not merely as a failure but as a victory so Pyrrhic that it amounts to something like delayedaction murder. In his post-triumph anguish, he feels that in bringing about her capitulation to his neediness he will have caused her frst wrinkles and grey hairs; that is to say, he will have taken something away from her, causing her to age prematurely.1 This frst experience of jealousy, then, is at least as painful as the subsequent reiterations. (He also later feels that his possessive attempt at “imprisonment” of Albertine will indirectly have caused the latter’s death; his guilt over the loss of Albertine is repeatedly linked to his obscure guilt over the grandmother’s death, textual stand-in for that of the author’s mother.) The early passage also contains one of the signal aspects of all the subsequent scenes of jealousy in the novel: mutual violence. In the goodnight-kiss scene, the boy attempts to disrupt the dinner party by sending a letter via the servant Françoise in which he insists that he has something important to tell her. This fails; yet, the mother is anguished by her son’s ruse, and both end up unhappy for diferent reasons, even as she is ultimately led to spend the night in his room. Subsequent reiterations of the scene of jealousy retain this favour of mutual violence: “J’appelle ici amour une torture réciproque” [“Here I mean by love reciprocal torture”] as the narrator succinctly puts it in La Prisonnière (III 617; C, 117).

Truth and Lies Many of the novel’s scenes of jealousy feel like torture because they involve interrogation. What diferentiates the goodnight-kiss passage from later scenes of jealousy is that while the young boy’s distress is partly due to his inability to imagine the grownup pleasures being tasted in the dinner party, he simply wants his mother to be with him instead of being with her guests. He isn’t trying to fnd out what she’s been doing without him; he just wants her there. All subsequent scenes of jealousy in the novel, however, involve the quest for the essential truth of the beloved: what she has been doing, what she hasn’t been able to do. In short, what she wants. To get at what the beloved wants, the lover lies. Mostly, he lies about what he knows, which is generally not much. He pretends to be aware of everything she’s been up to, in an attempt, always ultimately futile even if sometimes specifcally fruitful 351

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(always leading to the realization of what he still doesn’t and can never know), to get her to divulge what she’s been hiding from him. The lover assumes that his beloved is always lying to him, which leads him also to lie to her. The result is an atmosphere of general suspicion reminiscent of the classic joke recounted by Freud (among others): Two Jews met in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you going?’ asked one. ‘To Cracow’, was the answer. ‘What a liar you are!’ broke out the other. ‘If you say you’re going to Cracow, you want me to believe you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that in fact you’re going to Cracow. So why are you lying to me?’ (Freud 1963: 115) The only aspect of this scenario that doesn’t really apply to the situation in “Swann in Love” or La Prisonnière is the concluding question, since in Proust’s world no one ever asks why he is being lied to, because he already knows. According to the logic of the joke’s punchline, even telling the truth necessarily means lying—an apparent truth must be an especially devious lie, because no ever tells the truth. In Proust’s novel, this logic is not general, as in the joke, but specifc to the love situation. People often lie for various reasons in the world of Proust’s novel, but in situations of love and jealousy, the beloved is assumed to be lying because her truth is assumed to be something she can’t tell him: she doesn’t want him to know it and he doesn’t want to hear it. The truth of her desire is necessarily always elsewhere. The beloved is by defnition an être de fuite, someone who is always in fight, always essentially somewhere else. And her condition of being always in fight, the assumption that she is always lying, produces a generalized contagion of default mendacity. In the antepenultimate and penultimate volumes, when Albertine is living with the narrator and then also when she leaves—and even after he learns that she is dead— his immediate response is always to lie about everything: to Albertine herself, to Françoise, to his parents, to Andrée, and of course to himself. As Swann had with Odette, the narrator in love lies constantly, because he assumes that everyone operates on the same principle according to which desire is repulsive, and indifference is the impossible ideal in all human relations. This is the central lesson taught by the parents (in accordance with the culture at large) and dramatized in the goodnight-kiss scene: the boy’s imperative desire and need for his mother’s presence is to be mastered and repressed for his own good, and giving in to it—giving expression to it—is weakness, and will not serve him well later in life. In order to get what he wants he has to mask his desire for it, and if he does somehow manage to get what he wants, he will have killed the person he wants it from. This scenario is borne out in the Albertine story, which may well have been inspired by Proust’s relationship with Alfred Agostinelli and the latter’s accidental death, but it is also inevitable, the eventual dramatic entailment of a dynamic foregrounded from the start. In this sense Albertine’s death provides something like the gun going of in the third act in Chekhov’s famous theatrical dictum.

Zero-Sum Jealousy is not simply the inevitable accompaniment or entailment to love in the Recherche, but its necessary precondition. Swann falls in love with Odette not because of his aesthetic fetishism, when he sees in her face a resemblance to Botticelli’s painting of Zephora, but rather when she is not there when he expects to fnd her. Because she is literally elsewhere, he suddenly discovers that he needs her, and then fnds that she is fguratively no longer accessible. The Botticelli reference helps, certainly, but is not in itself adequate; what is required 352

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is his perception of her inaccessibility. Once he feels that she is not within his grasp, he makes increasingly desperate eforts to “possess” her, culminating only in his retrospective realization, when his love has ended, that she was never “his type.” Similarly, the narrator is prepared to ditch Albertine at the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe when he suddenly learns that she knows Mlle Vinteuil, which leads to his conviction that she is a lesbian, thus sparking 400 pages of anxious and necessarily futile attempts to prevent her from making contact with any woman with whom she might make erotic contact, that is to say any woman at all. La Prisonnière is punctuated throughout by the protagonist’s alternating plans to break up with Albertine when she appears to be docile, loving, and faithful, and frenzied attempts to win her back whenever she gives any sign of harbouring plans of her own. In short, when things are going well his frst impulse is to want out, whereas when he suspects his “captive” of wanting out, he stops at nothing—promises of jewels, expensive gowns, and a yacht for which he invites her to choose the silverware and furnishings—to make sure she has every reason to stay. As anyone who has made it to the end of that volume knows, and anyone else might be able to predict, this technique doesn’t work. In Albertine disparue her actual fight incites a frenzy of mendacious correspondence in which he tries to win her back by sending Saint-Loup to bribe her aunt and through further ofers of luxury goods (the yacht idea not having done the trick, he ups his ante with a fctional Rolls Royce), and then announcing that he’s decided to replace her with her friend and possible lover Andrée. Each time he feels that his eforts will have succeeded, that is whenever she becomes available to him in his imagination, he is mired in regret and decides he doesn’t want her back after all. In sum, his desires and plans begin to swing back and forth in metronomic automatism, almost independently of their object. And when he receives a telegram from her aunt announcing that Albertine has been killed in a riding accident, even the news that his beloved is dead cannot kill his jealousy. Instead, the enigmatic beloved and her mysterious activities are now defnitively inaccessible and therefore eternally, posthumously desirable.

Generality and Literary Precedents Many commentators have objected to what they (understandably) see as Proust’s unnecessarily harsh portrayal of love. This is because of the theoretical pronouncements larding “Un Amour de Swann” and La Prisonnière in particular, which insist that the experiences of Swann and the protagonist are exemplary of love in general. Love follows its inevitable course like a debilitating illness (“his love was now inoperable”); love means jealousy and therefore mutual torture. The lover tortures the beloved with interrogation in a futile attempt to induce her to divulge an essential truth which is inaccessible to him but which, even if he were to gain access to it, could only hurt him as it would reveal what he already suspects: that her desire is elsewhere. The beloved in her turn tortures the lover merely by being the beloved, as he only loves her to the extent that he is jealous because he believes her desires to be directed away from him. She therefore escapes him even if he imprisons her, literally or fguratively—which he never really succeeds in doing. Throughout the volume the title of which announces otherwise, the narrator repeatedly notes that he is the prisoner, not Albertine. (In this sense, the ambiguous English Captive is a more accurate title than the necessarily gendered original.) Love as mutual imprisonment and reciprocal violence, then, is what Proust’s novel tells us is the inevitable essence of erotic relations, because jealousy is inevitable. The lover is the prisoner of his own jealousy. Why should the unhappy examples of Swann and the protagonist, plus the jealous loves of Saint-Loup for Rachel and Charlus for Morel, exemplify love in general in the book, rather 353

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than remaining examples of a certain type of unhappy love? Why is Proust so insistent on extrapolating from one unpleasant sort of human relation to human relations as a whole? Why does jealousy necessarily lie at the very essence of love? It’s true, certainly, that the French literary tradition, unlike the British novel with its standard marriage plot, almost inevitably displays love as tortured, and permanently rather than temporarily thwarted. But it would be unfair to blame Proust’s global pessimism about love relations on Flaubert, say, who would never have gone so far as to present Emma Bovary’s plight as a general condition of life rather than specifc to her character and situation. Balzac, though, may bear some measure of responsibility in the form of his character Vautrin, the only real literary predecessor for Charlus. Vautrin is a protean master-criminal with a taste for attractive young men, whom he takes serially under his wing, with eventually fatal consequences for one young man, Lucien de Rubempré, in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Vautrin is a somewhat diabolical character, but it’s also noteworthy that he can never really fnd satisfaction in love, because his sexual preference is heterosexual young men.

Te Inversion Model In fact, the structural impetus of love-as-jealousy is explained in the Recherche itself: it is the structure of what Proust calls “inversion,” the object of the novel’s lengthiest expository essay, which takes up most of Sodome et Gomorrhe I. It should be (and has been) observed that the novel’s account of same-sex love is incoherent, especially in that the courtyard scene in which the protagonist witnesses the seduction between Charlus and Jupien and the disquisition on homosexuality which follows don’t quite go together. What must also be noted is that the explanation of same-sex relations in that section doesn’t account for the general depiction of such relationships in the novel as a whole. The reason Proust insists on the term “inversion” rather than “homosexuality” is that the latter implies attraction between members of the same sex, whereas the former follows a heterosexual, or rather heterogendered, model of same-sex relations, in keeping with a major theme of late nineteenth-century sexology. According to this view, which the narrator (who has apparently been propelled from complete ignorance of the subject to encyclopaedic knowledge by the sheer force of having witnessed the two men’s amours) explains at length, an invert is a man who is attracted to other men insofar as he is himself feminine. Opposites attract, and so the men he is attracted to are necessarily the very sort of men who will never be attracted to him: heterosexual men, and thus by defnition attracted to women. Such love is therefore doomed by its very nature (which is one of the reasons André Gide expressed vigorous opposition to Proust’s vision; the other is that he preferred the “Greek Love” model which avoided any suggestion of femininity in relations between men). Proust, or his narrator, provides exemplary fable-like stories to illustrate his exposition of how inversion works, but the actual same-sex relations in the rest of the novel do not follow this model. Instead, we fnd relations between men that are much like the heterosexual love-asjealousy stories. The relationship that comes closest to bearing out the inversion model is a heterosexual one: the Vaugoubert marriage, in which we are told that the masculine Mme de Vaugoubert is a “femme d’une tante,” following the example of the outdoorsy Princesse Palatine, understanding wife of Louis XIV’s notoriously homosexual younger brother Philippe, Duc d’Orléans. Aside from this example of pseudo-inversion, the doomed-invert scenario is nowhere to be seen in the novel. We are told about many Sodomites chasing various comely youths, generally mismatched pairs in the sense of social class (most often aristocrats pursuing servants), but in no instance are they revealed to be inverts fruitlessly pursuing masculine 354

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heterosexuals, except in the case of M. Nissim Bernard’s unfortunate confusion of one of a pair of identical twin hotel employees for his more compliant brother. Charlus, the novel’s exemplary Sodomite, is frst seen as hyperbolically virile and then exposed as essentially feminine, but in his seduction of Jupien he plays the masculine role.

Charlus It is in his desperate love for Morel that Charlus would seem to be enacting the inversion scenario, but as it happens, this story greatly resembles the love-as-jealousy stories of Swann with Odette, Saint-Loup with Rachel, and the hero with Gilberte and then Albertine. He is attracted to Morel when he frst sees him because the latter is a handsome soldier. Ergo, we may conclude, invert meets exemplar of masculinity, as in the essay on inversion. Charlus then plays out the expected scenario, ofering Morel money and social status because he can’t keep him any other way: Morel doesn’t reciprocate his love per se. While their afair does in the end fail as a result of its same-sex nature, this is not because Morel is repelled by Charlus as a man. In the end, Morel’s libido seems to be entirely polyvalent and invested mainly in his social ambitions and career as a musician (we later see him engaging in sexual relations with both men and women, always opportunistically). Their relationship is broken up by Mme Verdurin in her anger at Charlus for his usurping of what she views as her social ownership of Morel as a musician. She marshals all the means at her disposal, chiefy the ambient homophobia which she uses to persuade him that his relationship with Charlus will render him ridiculous and impede his career and social ascent. It is not very diferent from what happens with Swann and Odette, except that in this case she has societally sanctioned prejudice at her disposal. In all other ways, Charlus’s vexed relations with Morel follow the same trajectory as the other love-as-jealousy afairs in the novel. They are all essentially by nature one-sided. Morel is an être de fuite for Charlus much as Odette is for Swann, Rachel for Saint-Loup, and Gilberte and then Albertine for the hero. These relations are all tortured and doomed because predicated on jealousy, on the beloved’s desire being directed elsewhere. They therefore by their very nature all end badly; the best that can be hoped for is eventual indiference, but in the interim there can only be sufering and humiliation. The young hero spends a great deal of time anticipating a future when he will be indiferent to Gilberte, for instance, but he always reverts to fantasies of displaying his indiference to her, which he imagines will cause her to love him. He fnally succeeds in ridding himself of his attachment by undertaking something like an individual detox programme. Swann’s is the only story which yields something positive in the form of companionable marriage, but this is possible only after the demise of his love (and the advent of Gilberte). The hero’s infatuation with Gilberte eventually fades away, as does Saint-Loup’s obsession with Rachel. But his love for Albertine, and therefore his jealousy, is preserved in the amber of her permanent disappearance. Charlus’s infatuation with Morel is not fundamentally diferent from the other love stories in the novel because they are both men; this aspect only renders it more vulnerable to Mme Verdurin’s depradations. His relationship with Jupien, however, endures, and indeed ends up forming one of the very few jealousy-free love stories in the book. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, Jupien is there to help the Baron try to entrap Morel in what we learn (although they do not) to be the latter’s thwarted assignation with the Prince de Guermantes. Charlus adopts Jupien’s niece and ofers her a title. At the end of the novel, Charlus and Jupien are still a couple, with Jupien wheeling the aged Baron around and trying to prevent him from making too much of a fool of himself in his senile, half-blind pursuit of young men. In this their relationship has no real equivalent in the novel, besides that of the hero with his grandmother. This is the 355

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only other relation in which jealousy seems to play no part, because, as noted earlier, one of the partners is entirely, selfessly dedicated to the desires of the other.

Lesbianism and Jealousy When Swann makes his observations about jealousy being a terrible experience but not without its positive aspects [in S&G II], he pauses to ask the narrator whether he is the jealous type, to which the latter responds that he has never known that emotion at all. This is of course an exemplary instance of Proustian irony. The alert reader may well understand this as a sign that jealousy will soon become an obsessive theme, but in any case we have already seen the hero in the throes of acute unhappiness because his mother is tending to her guests and therefore unavailable to kiss him goodnight, which is explicitly linked to Swann’s jealousy of Odette in the following section, and we have also seen him sufering similar trials during his infatuation with Gilberte. It may therefore appear absurd that he can respond with apparently sanguine certainty that he doesn’t know what jealousy feels like. And yet what he says is true: what he has felt in regard to his mother’s unavailability or Gilberte’s capricious and manipulative indiference is not quite jealousy as Swann defnes it or as he himself is to experience it later on. What he feels towards his mother in that early scene, or Gilberte during his infatuation with her, is a possessive desire to be the focus of the beloved’s attention, and anything or anyone that takes her away from exclusive attention to him is perceived as a threat. It is not until the end of S&G, when Albertine reveals that she knows Mlle Vinteuil and her “friend,” which he interprets as a confrmation of Dr. Cottard’s earlier observation upon seeing her dancing with Andrée that they are engaged in some form of sexual activity, that he becomes convinced Albertine is a lesbian. It is this that sends him into a jealous frenzy lasting several volumes, even after Albertine’s death. Before he suspects that Albertine prefers women, what he feels for her resembles what he has previously felt, that is to say a desire to “possess” her—sexually, certainly, but primarily to occupy her attention, as he had previously felt for his mother, for Gilberte, for Mme de Guermantes. This emotion, however painful, is apparently not experienced as jealousy until he learns that the beloved’s desire is by defnition elsewhere, which had not previously been the case. At the end of S&G, when Albertine reveals that she knows Mlle Vinteuil and her “friend,” the narrator observes that this new form of jealousy is diferent from what he had previously felt when Albertine had met the handsome aristocrat Saint-Loup, or towards any other man. It is qualitatively diferent, and by the same token much worse. This is because the idea of a female rival—any woman Albertine might be attracted to and who might be attracted to her—opens up an entire realm of diference. To what he later calls “algèbre de la sensibilité” [“algebra of sensibility”] (IV 98; F, 591) it adds a geometry of sexual diference. Lesbianism implies a diferent triangular confguration. If the putative rival is a man, the lover knows what the rival’s desire is like, because it resembles his own, and he can imagine what the two might get up to, because it would resemble what he knows, or at least wants. But if the rival is a woman, he cannot imagine the desire of either the beloved or the rival, nor what they could possibly want to do together. In addition, because his real or imagined rivals resemble not him but his beloved, they are also, like Andrée, potential objects of his own desire. As a result of what the hero thinks he knows about Albertine’s lesbian proclivities, his jealousy is boundless, because he can never really gain any sort of access to the truth of her desire or activities, whatever he does. Albertine’s putative lesbianism makes her the ideal object of perpetual desire and therefore jealousy (or jealousy and therefore desire—the two emotions are concomitant, at least to 356

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this extent), for two reasons. The frst has to do with the novel’s internal logic and is outlined above: if she desires women, then her desire is always elsewhere; her lesbianism makes of her the perfect être de fuite. She may like the hero and may even want to marry him because of his money and social status, but her desire will always escape him. No matter how much he imprisoned her, even if he were to marry her, he would never be able to ensure that she never saw any other women, and if she prefers women, according to his somewhat sketchy logic, all women represent a threat to him. The second reason has to do with the author’s reasons for insisting on his fctional avatar’s obsession with Albertine’s lesbianism. Why, we may ask, is the hero’s jealousy of Albertine particularly predicated on the idea that she prefers women? At a number of points, even after her death, he observes that it is only assuming she desired women that he is obsessively interested in knowing what it is she had been up to, and would have been up to had she not died. Swann too had learned (or at least been informed via an anonymous letter) that Odette had innumerable lovers, including women, and this notion had provoked in him as well a frenzy of jealous contemplation of what he could not imagine. But Swann’s jealousy had never become quite as fxated on this particular idea. Why, then, is the hero quite so obsessed with Albertine’s relations with women as the focal point of his prolonged jealousy? Why should Proust, who does not seem ever to have had all that much to do with actual lesbians and certainly never to have fallen in love with one, insist on Albertine’s preference for women as the instigation and focal point of his jealous obsession?

Heterosexual Jealousy In addition to the obvious—that her putative love for women makes of Albertine the most concentrated essence of the être de fuite whose desire is always necessarily elsewhere—there is also another element which becomes clear when we look at the other confgurations of jealousy in the novel. Swann, as we have seen, is jealous of Odette’s relations with women as well as with men, but then Swann’s jealousy never really becomes anchored in the suspicion of any specifc rival or indeed type of rival. His jealousy is general, fxated on the idea of having Odette to himself, “possessing” her, and even when is presented with Forcheville as an evident and persuasive rival, he cannot quite take him seriously, because he knows Forcheville and considers him to be mediocre. He also knows Odette, and even as he strives not to see her as a courtesan he is nonetheless aware that what she is after is ultimately money and prestige. And he knows that he is at least Forcheville’s equal in both, however much the Verdurins may think otherwise. Forcheville may be an infuriating rival, but he is a known quantity. While Swann is fascinated and horrifed by the idea that Odette may have female lovers, no specifc woman emerges as rival upon whom to fxate. In the end Swann’s jealousy remains general, like that of the hero with his mother and then with Gilberte. We aren’t aforded many more jealous scenarios in detail, but the hero’s friendship with Saint-Loup gives us an idea of what obsessive jealousy of a heterosexual woman looks like. During the scene of lunch with Saint-Loup and Rachel in Le Côté de Guermantes, we see the full force of his friend’s difuse jealous fervour, which takes the form of his somewhat deranged anticipations of what he imagines to be Rachel’s desires for other men. Much like the hero with Albertine in various scenes in S&G, who once he’s decided she desires women sees all women she may encounter as a threat, Saint-Loup views the men they see through what he imagines to be Rachel’s concupiscent eyes. As a result, he lingers angrily over the perceived attractions of various men in the restaurant, accusing her of desiring them, making eyes at them, trying to arrange clandestine assignations with them. His behaviour is exactly 357

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like that of the hero with Albertine in the casino at Balbec, except that unlike the latter he makes a scene in public, and also unlike the latter he dwells at length on what he sees as the potential rivals’ charms. In this way we witness Saint-Loup both exhibiting intense jealousy of his girlfriend and by the same token appreciating, even if in negative form, the beauty of various young men. The scene, therefore, acts at once as a confrmation of Saint-Loup’s heterosexual bona fdes via jealousy, and anticipates his eventual revelation as a lover of men. Saint-Loup’s jealousy thus reveals what Swann’s did not: the homosexual potential of heterosexual jealousy.2 Jealousy entails an attention to the beloved’s potential objects of desire, which means that the jealous lover puts himself in the place of the beloved to try to understand her desire. If her preference is assumed to be for men, the lover must pay attention to the desirability of possible rivals, which means that he must assess the charms of other men. Because Swann’s major rival is the mediocre Forcheville (who after all marries Odette shortly after Swann’s death, thus proving that he had in fact been a serious rival), the novel has not featured heterosexual male jealousy in terms of a heterosexual beloved in quite this way before. And because Saint-Loup eventually ends up being a homosexual, we are, again, retrospectively invited to reread his paroxysm of jealousy in the restaurant with its assessment of his perceived rivals’ attractiveness as having to do with his attraction to men. Albertine’s lesbianism allows the hero to avoid any hint of appreciation of the potential attractiveness of other men.

Proust and Jealousy In the Recherche, fnally, all jealousy is general rather than specifc, in the sense that none of the jealous characters fxate on particular rivals (potential or actual). The hero’s obsessive jealousy of Andrée or Léa, to cite the most notable examples of women he tries to keep Albertine from seeing, never becomes a fxation on any one woman in her particularity, but rather settles momentarily on whichever woman he thinks she may possibly desire. His jealousy is specifc only in that it is predicated on her desiring women rather than men. Like all the other jealous characters—Swann, Charlus, Saint-Loup, and even the Princesse de Guermantes in her secret love for Charlus—he is intent on the futile quest for “possession” of the beloved, which always amounts to a chimerical fantasy of complete access to their attention, and the truth of their interiority: to their desire. And because the very defnition of the beloved in the novel is that of the être de fuite, whose desire is always elsewhere, Albertine is the perfect object of desire because what he believes to be the truth of her desire must necessarily exclude him. Albertine is a club which can never accept him as a member, which is why she is the fnal object of desire. Her death does nothing more than cement this for all time, until, that is, he fnally decides to embark on another sort of quest. The goodnight-kiss scene will in the end have provided the template of desire and jealousy in the novel, because the rival is not specifc but rather the world at large. And beyond or in league with the world at large it is the beloved herself, rather than any particular rival, who provides the required obstacle. It comes as no surprise, then, to learn that Proust himself was haunted by this same form of jealousy, which insists on the impossible fantasy of access to some complete knowledge of the beloved’s interiority. Well-meaning gay-positive accounts of Proust’s life tend to depict Reynaldo Hahn as his frst real boyfriend and/or Alfred Agostinelli as the love of his life, which is doubtless true to some extent, but it seems clear from biographies and especially from his correspondence that his love-life was serial and tormented, much like that of the protagonist of his novel. Agostinelli was a heterosexual man who ended up living with Proust as his chaufeur and then secretary, along with his common-law wife, and he died in 358

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circumstances not entirely unlike those of Albertine. Reynaldo Hahn was indeed a great, perhaps the great, love of his life—their intimate friendship lasted for decades, through the end of Proust’s life—but it should be noted that most of their loving letters, complete with embarrassing pet-names for Hahn along the lines of “Mon cher petit Bunchtibuls” and signed “Votre petit poney Marcel,” date from long after their actual love-afair. Their afair, which began in 1894, reached its crisis point in 1896, as heralded by a letter from the summer of that year, in which Proust writes to explain himself following what appears to have been a scene brought on by his interrogation of Hahn: You said, I’ll never tell you anything again. If that were true, it would be a breach of your oath; even untrue it’s still the cruellest of blows. That you should tell me everything has been my hope, my consolation, my mainstay, my life since 20th of June. For fear of making you unhappy, I hardly ever speak of it, yet I think of it almost all the time. Besides, you said the one thing that to me is really ‘cutting’. I would prefer a thousand insults. I often deserve them, more often than you think. If ever I don’t deserve them, it’s at moments of painful eforts when, glimpsing a face, fnding resemblances between names, or reconstructing a scene, I try to fll in the gaps in a life which is dearer to me than anything else, but which will be a source of sorrow and torment to me as long as it remains unknown to me even in its most innocent aspects. Alas, it’s an impossible task, and when in your kindness you try to satisfy my curiosity with a little of your past, you are undertaking a labour of the Danaïds. But if my fantasies are absurd, they are the fantasies of a sick man, and for that reason should not be crossed. Threatening to fnish of a sick man because his mania is exasperating is the height of cruelty. (Corr 2: 97; Proust 1983: 132) The letter is signed simply “MP.” Around this time, despite his evident continued attachment to the composer, Proust took up with the young Lucien Daudet, whom he had met through Hahn. His reference in the letter to his ongoing eforts to satisfy his curiosity as “un travail de Danaïde” is telling. In Greek mythology, the ffty daughters of Danaus all (except one lucky one) kill their husbands, which leads to their eternal punishment of having to carry water in perforated containers: a perfect metaphor for the necessarily futile nature of Proustian jealousy, entailing as it does the endless quest for fulflment of a thirst for knowledge which by defnition can never be satisfed. (The husband-killing is also pertinent in various ways, including Proust’s avowed history of infatuations which last approximately 18 months each.) His concluding observation that he is not to be either blamed or thwarted in his questionings because this behaviour is the product of illness also fnds its echo in the novel, in the goodnight-kiss scene in which the young boy’s needy behaviour is fnally recognized as a sign of emotional disturbance, and therefore not to be reprimanded, rather than a failure of the will to be mastered. What is less characteristic of the jealous scenes in the Recherche in this letter is the frank disclosure of Proust’s motivations in interrogating his beloved, his admittedly absurd need for an impossible access to everything about Hahn’s past and present, his insistence on posing questions which he knows should not be asked and can never be answered. Swann, and the hero after him, also try to incite their love-objects to tell them everything by explaining that, as Swann says to Odette, it would be so much easier if she were just to tell him everything. But then he, like the hero, lies, insisting that he already knows what the beloved is concealing, in an always-unsuccessful efort both to induce her to tell the truth and not to lose face. 359

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Following this letter such scenes efectively disappear from Proust’s correspondence, no doubt in part because his published letters to Lucien Daudet, notably, were thoroughly expurgated, and the originals may never be recovered in their entirety. In addition, after Daudet Proust’s love-objects ceased being members of his own social class. From then on he became enamoured of a series of men employed as secretaries, in Agostinelli’s case a chaufeur later hired as secretary. With these men—mostly, it would seem, heterosexual—it is difcult to imagine him writing with the disarming openness of his youthful letter to Hahn. The era of candour was over, in Proust’s life, as far as can be assessed by the published correspondence, and in his work. Instead, in the novel at least, we fnd the conditions of Freud’s Cracow-Lemberg story: global suspicion and constant lying. This appears to be both the condition of love relations that Proust wished to depict and also the precondition of the narrator’s, if not the author’s, eventual turn to writing. As long as the protagonist continues to vacillate between jealousy and regret, his work remains in suspension. The work cannot come into being before jealousy, with its obsessive investigation into the truth of people chosen specifcally for their opacity, has been left behind. It is only once his gaze has been redirected inwards that the narrator is able to see his world clearly and his futile research can become the Recherche.

Notes 1 The earliest version of this scene, recently brought to light in Les Quatre-vingt-quinze feuillets, makes clear what is only suggested in the fnal version: the narrator feels that the imperative need he expresses will essentially have killed his mother. See Proust 2021: 41–3. 2 In this way, Proust’s account of jealousy makes observations similar to Freud’s in his 1922 essay “On Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Homosexuality and Paranoia.”

Bibliography Freud, Sigmund. 1963. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey. New York: Norton. Proust, Marcel. 1983. Selected Letters 1880–1903, trans. by Rafael Manheim, ed. by Philip Kolb. New York: Doubleday. Proust, Marcel. 2021. Les Soixante-Quinze Feuillets, ed. By Nathalie Mauriac Dyer. Paris: Gallimard.

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PART 7

In Conversation with Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors

24 PROUST AND ROMANTICISM Michael N. Forster

Anyone who knows German Romanticism reasonably well – especially if it is conceived somewhat broadly, so as to include, beyond such paradigmatic Romantics as the Schlegel brothers and Schleiermacher, also such closely related fgures as Hamann, Herder, Goethe, Schelling, and Hegel1 – cannot but be struck by the extraordinary amount of intellectual common ground that it shares with Proust’s great work À la recherche du temps perdu.2 Let me, therefore, begin this chapter by simply listing some of the common ground involved (deferring for now the question of the extent to which it is due to an actual infuence of the German Romantics on Proust, and the question of the extent to which he means to endorse, rather than merely represent, the ideas involved): 1

2

3

4

5

The Romantics proper, Schelling, and Hegel all espoused a monistic metaphysical principle that they call the “Infnite” or “Absolute” and which they believed human cognition strives to grasp (according to the Romantics proper with only partial success, according to Schelling and Hegel ultimately with success). Proust already in Du côté de chez Swann, and then in the subsequent volumes of his great work, likewise makes such a principle (so named) and the cognitive striving for it central to his work.3 The Romantics proper, Schelling, and Hegel (all of whom were infuenced in this respect by Kant) conceived this metaphysical principle as a form of “idealism” – as involving the mind’s constitution of reality. Proust in his great work likewise articulates such a position (moreover, sometimes under that very name).4 The Romantics (in particular, the Schlegel brothers) exalted erotic love for a woman to a principle of great importance, indeed even fusing it with a striving for the Infnite/ Absolute, or God ( just as their medieval inspirations Petrarch and Dante had done with their Laura and Beatrice, respectively). Proust repeatedly depicts the same attitude in his great work.5 The Romantics elevated art to the highest role in culture (even higher than science or religion, for example), and in particular conceived it as a privileged means of accessing the metaphysical/religious truth. Proust in his great work represents the same position.6 For the Romantics, this above all meant poetry, or literature, but it also included music (especially for Wackenroder and Tieck, but also for Friedrich Schlegel, for example in the Athenaeum-Fragments, no. 444),7 painting, sculpture (these two cases were again

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-32

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treated by Friedrich Schlegel, especially in a series of articles that he published from 1802 onward),8 and the architecture of the Gothic Cathedral (brilliantly interpreted in its religious meaning by Friedrich Schlegel, especially in his Lectures on the History of Literature [1815]).9 The same is true of Proust’s great work: the exaltation of literature is pervasive and obvious; that of music is exemplifed by the reverential treatment of Vinteuil’s “petite phrase [little theme]”10; that of painting by the admiring representation of the works of the painter Elstir11; that of sculpture by the reverential approach to the sculptures of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles in the church porch at Balbec12; that of the Gothic cathedral (or church) and its religious signifcance by the deeply respectful focus on these throughout the work.13 For the Romantics, visual art was not a sort of mimesis, but instead modifed our perception of reality (as Meyer Abrams has illuminatingly explained in his classic book on the subject, The Mirror and the Lamp).14 Proust in his great work repeatedly expresses the same view.15 (Relatedly, though a little less strikingly, just as the Romantics recognized that human perception is always infused with intellect or theory – a position that already had long roots in German philosophy before the Romantics, and which Herder and Friedrich Schlegel then especially emphasized – so Proust constantly reminds us of the same thing in his great work.16) For the Romantics the highest form of art or literature of all was the novel, the Roman – whose very name reveals its centrality to Romanticism, Romantik. The same exaltation of the novel is evident in Proust’s great work as well. For the Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel, the novel fused poetry or literature with philosophy (as well as with other disciplines and genres). As Schlegel put it in the Athenaeum-Fragments, Romanticism aims “to bring poetry and philosophy into contact” (no. 116), “in philosophy the only way to science is through art, as the poet … only becomes an artist via science” (no. 302, cf. no. 255). Proust, who had studied philosophy both at high school and at university, likewise in his great novel combines literature with philosophy – as can already be seen in its frst volume, Du côté de chez Swann, where references to philosophy abound,17 and as is subsequently confrmed by the novel’s preoccupation with philosophy throughout. (Relatedly, for the Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel, the novel combined poetry or literature with criticism: Romantic poetry or literature “wants to and should … here mix, there blend … genius and criticism” [Athenaeum-Fragments, no. 116]. And Proust does exactly the same, most strikingly already in Contre Sainte-Beuve [1908 f.], but then also to a great extent in À la recherche du temps perdu.18) The German Romantics (especially Goethe in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, but also Novalis in Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Friedrich Schlegel in Lucinde, and his and his brother’s friend and pupil Madame de Staël in Corinne ou l’Italie) developed a new type of novel: the Bildungsroman. This type focused on the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic selfdevelopment (in short, Bildung) of a central character. But in fact it involved Bildung in a threefold way: not only in virtue of that thematic focus, but also in virtue of aiming to contribute to the Bildung of readers, and moreover (an important dimension of the Bildungsroman that is often overlooked) to that of the author himself, as he develops his own Bildung by writing the work. Proust’s great work is very much a Bildungsroman.19 Moreover, it is so in just the same complex threefold sense: its main focus is the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic self-development, or Bildung, of a central character, namely the (at least semi-)fctional narrator Marcel; it also aims to contribute to the Bildung of readers (an altruistic motive that becomes especially clear in the last volume of the work, Le 364

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Temps retrouvé)20; and (perhaps to an even greater degree than with Goethe or the other Romantic authors recently mentioned) the writing of it serves to develop the Bildung of its author himself, Proust. (In addition, though less strikingly, Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism [1800] and Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit [1807] developed a sort of ambitious variant of the Bildungsroman concerned with humankind as a whole, which they depicted as developing historically toward an eventual culmination in literature and philosophy; and Proust’s great work exhibits a somewhat similar character, not indeed by shifting focus from an individual protagonist to humankind, but at least by similarly culminating with the protagonist Marcel writing a philosophical novel.) In continuity with Leibniz, the Romantics (especially Herder, the Schlegel brothers, and Schleiermacher) made the fact and ideal of deep individuality, or uniqueness – conceived as a principle of natural phenomena and, above all, of human beings, their minds, their meanings, and their art – a central component of their philosophical position.21 Proust makes the same principle central to his great work as well.22 For the Romantics, another central preoccupation was interpretation – including the interpretation of texts, discourse, actions, and art – and hermeneutics (i.e. the theory and methodology of interpretation). Moreover, among the main principles of their hermeneutics were those of deep individuality, conceived as a phenomenon that makes interpretation both especially important and especially difcult, and “divination” or “hypothesis,” conceived as a means of penetrating the individuality of an author or his work through evidentially based but bold and revisable conjectures. Proust’s great work is pervasively concerned with this subject as well. Moreover, he too regards individuality as the main source of both the importance and the difculty of interpretation, 23 and conceives “divination” or “hypothesis” as a central means for accomplishing the task.24 Furthermore, the Romantics made central to their hermeneutics a principle that later in the nineteenth century came to be known as the “hermeneutic circle,” i.e. the principle that it is necessary to interpret textual parts from wholes and vice versa. Moreover, Hegel lent this principle a special twist by giving his own philosophical system a circular structure (as is refected in his conception of it as an Encyclopedia – from Gk. kuklos, meaning circle).25 (The same is true of his more specifc philosophical disciplines. For example, his Phenomenology of Spirit, after beginning with “Sense-certainty” and then running through a series of further “shapes of consciousness,” eventually returns to “Sense-certainty” again, now comprehending it from a higher vantage point. And his Logic begins with Being, then proceeds through a series of further categories until it reaches an all-encompassing category that he calls the Absolute Idea, before eventually returning from there to Being again, thereby permitting a deeper understanding of Being and of the subsequent categories in light of this whole, the Absolute Idea.) Proust similarly gives his great work a circular structure, concluding it in Le Temps retrouvé with his narrator beginning to write (what is at least something very much like) the account that the reader has just been reading 26 – so that the reader is now encouraged to reread (or rethink) that account from the beginning and to thereby understand its successive steps in a deeper way.27 In addition, the Romantics (especially August Wilhelm Schlegel and Schleiermacher) valorized translation and were themselves great translators and theorists of translation. Moreover, they developed an important new approach to translation: one that, in sharp contrast to the lax ‘belles infdèles’ approach that was still prevalent in France and elsewhere in their day, aimed for strict semantic and musical fdelity to the original text and saw this as a vertiginously difcult task, indeed a task that could never be fully 365

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accomplished. The similarity with Proust is again striking. He too valorizes translation – indeed sufciently so to have devoted several years to this activity before writing his great work, and as part of his preparation for doing so (specifcally, he translated two works by John Ruskin, whose ideas about Gothic cathedral architecture he largely embraced and later gave an important role in his own great work). Moreover, as Jean-Yves Tadié has pointed out, Proust’s own approach to translation in that context is strikingly contrary to that of the lax ‘belles infdèles’ tradition that still predominated in France at the time, namely an approach of aiming for great fdelity to the author’s meaning and style28 – in other words, an approach very much like that of the German Romantics. Furthermore, although translation plays a less central role in À la recherche du temps perdu than interpretation does (and then often only in an extended or metaphorical sense),29 when it does come up, it is again treated as something that should be undertaken, not in the lax ‘belles infdèles’ manner (which Proust characterizes sarcastically at one point in Le Côté de Guermantes),30 but with the aim of achieving the strictest fdelity (as, for example, when he writes in À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feur of “l’exactitude la plus minutieuse à traduire le texte saint [the most minute exactitude in translating the holy script]”),31 and as something extremely difcult, even to the point of impossibility (as, for example, when in La Prisonnière he describes the task of translating the message of Vinteuil’s music into language as impossible).32 14 Finally, the leading Romantics – especially the Schlegel brothers and Schleiermacher (above all, during their most important, early period) – were strong champions of the moral-political ideals of liberalism, cosmopolitanism (including opposition to racism and anti-semitism), and feminism. Proust in his great novel, and even more clearly in his correspondence, champions the same ideals.

Did German Romanticism Actually Infuence Proust’s Work? Tadié, in his magnifcent biography of Proust, Marcel Proust: A Life, answers this question in the negative. According to Tadié, Proust had learned a sort of Kantianism from his high school philosophy teacher Alphonse Darlu, in particular, the rigours of analysis, which few in the face of … misty imprecision … This is what prevented Proust from being the inheritor of German Romanticism … For him, as with Kant’s French disciples, … concepts were always lucid and defned, examples were precise, reasoning was fawless, the writing unostentatious since it was necessary to reject efects of style, obscure allusions, and the alibi of imagery.33 Moreover, according to Tadié, “the source of [Proust’s] thoughts about the artist lies, not in German philosophy, … but in the thoughts of writers who wrote in English,” such as Carlyle, Emerson, and Ruskin.34 One hesitates to disagree with such a great scholar of Proust as Tadié. But in this case I must. A frst problem with his position is that it rests on certain general misconceptions about Proust and especially about German Romanticism. It is true that the German Romantics sometimes exhibited what might not unreasonably be called “misty imprecision,” “efects of style,” “obscure allusions,” and “imagery,” especially when expressing their views about the Infnite/Absolute and the erotic striving for a female beloved. But then, does not Proust do the same in certain passages of his great work, especially ones concerned with those same subjects? More importantly, Tadié’s picture of German Romanticism as consisting only of 366

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such traits disregards a whole hard-edged, precise, rigorous side of German Romanticism of which he seems to be unaware. This includes, for example, the Schlegel brothers’ and Schleiermacher’s seminal philological work on ancient Greek literature and philosophy; the Schlegel brothers’ groundbreaking work on the whole history of literature, both ancient and modern (saliently including that of the Romance languages); their leading contributions to establishing the feld of Sanskrit studies in Germany for the frst time (Friedrich with his seminal work On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians [1808], August Wilhelm by becoming Germany’s frst professor of Sanskrit); their leading role in founding modern linguistics (especially Friedrich with the work from 1808 just mentioned: his brother August Wilhelm, Franz Bopp, the Grimm brothers, and Wilhelm von Humboldt then built on his path-breaking work); Friedrich Schlegel’s and Schleiermacher’s seminal work on hermeneutics (for example, the latter’s justly famous lectures on that subject); Schleiermacher’s and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s extraordinarily scrupulous and exact works of translation (especially of Plato and Shakespeare, respectively); their closely related seminal work on translation theory (especially Schleiermacher’s essay On the Diferent Methods of Translation [1813], arguably the deepest work on translation theory ever written); and August Wilhelm Schlegel’s scholarly work on the complexities of Greek poetic meter (a subject on which he was his age’s leading expert). In short, what we in fact fnd in the German Romantics is a combination of, on the one hand, indeed some “misty imprecision,” “efects of style,” “obscure allusions,” and “imagery,” especially concerning such matters as the Infnite/Absolute and love, with, on the other hand, much close attention to evidence, precise analysis, and rigorous reasoning – a combination that rather exactly matches a similar combination in Proust. Moreover, even before Tadié wrote his biography, Anne Henry had already made an important case for an infuence of German Romanticism (at least in the broad sense) on Proust. According to Henry, Proust, largely thanks to hearing Gabriel Séailles’ lectures at the Sorbonne and reading his works (especially Essai sur le génie dans l’art [1883] and Léonarde de Vinci [1892]), absorbed not only Schopenhauer’s messages of life’s misery, the redemptive function of art, and more specifcally the metaphysical insight aforded by music into the nature of the noumenal will, but also the messages of Schelling (especially in his System of Transcendental Idealism) and other German Romantics of the elevation of art over other areas of culture, art’s contribution of a metaphysical insight, 35 and the existence of a hierarchy of arts according to diferent proportions of materiality vs. spirituality, in which hierarchy architecture appears at the bottom and (music plus) literature at the top.36 Tadié dismisses Henry’s argument (albeit without deigning to name her), but in an abrupt and dogmatic way, and mainly on the basis of the misconceptions that I mentioned above. 37 A more thoughtful response to it is Luc Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, which basically accepts it – albeit while entering certain qualifcations, in particular that Henry’s picture that Proust conceived his great work as simply a sort of literary clothing of a presupposed philosophical system is mistaken, since he in fact pursued the work’s literary dimension much more as an end in itself; that there is little or no evidence for her implication that Proust had much direct knowledge of Schopenhauer’s and Schelling’s writings; and that it is necessary to recognize that a far broader range of philosophers (indeed virtually the whole of the western philosophical tradition) infuenced Proust’s work as well.38 Fraisse’s assessment seems to me roughly correct, though I would argue that among all of these western philosophers who infuenced Proust the German Romantics exercised an especially decisive infuence on him, and that it is therefore especially important to insist on a broader range of their philosophical infuences on him in particular.39 Beyond that, my only further criticism of the Henry-Fraisse thesis is that it focuses too exclusively on strictly 367

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philosophical sources and channels of the ideas of the German Romantics that are to be found in Proust (Schopenhauer, Schelling, Séailles, etc.), instead of in addition including literary ones (Goethe, Madame de Staël, Stendhal, Balzac, and Nerval), which, as we shall see below, were in fact no less important. In short, part of the case against Tadié’s negative judgment has in efect already been made by Henry and Fraisse. But in addition, even if we restrict ourselves to the infuences on Proust that Tadié himself identifes, we only need to scratch a little more deeply below their surfaces than he does in order to fnd the German Romantics lurking underneath – so that the infuences in question can be seen to have served as further channels of German Romantic ideas to Proust in all likelihood. The following are some prime examples: a

b

c

d

As Tadié mentions, Proust’s mother, née Weil, was of German-Jewish extraction.40 She was highly intelligent, steeped in literature, witty, spoke not only French but also German and English, from both of which languages she translated into French, and exercised an enormous infuence on Proust from the very beginning.41 Moreover, Proust, who himself knew a little German, visited Germany with her twice, in 1895 and 1897.42 Is it not likely that this woman – whose cultural and intellectual profle reminds one so strongly of the highly educated Jewish women of the German Romantic circle (Henriette Herz, Dorothea Veit, Rahel Varnhagen) – conveyed at least some of the central ideas of German Romanticism to Proust? For example, concerning translation in particular? (Notice that in Sodome et Gomorrhe Marcel’s mother and grandmother, both of whom were largely modeled on Proust’s own mother, are represented as unusually interested in and fussy about translation.43) As Tadié points out, Proust held Goethe in very high esteem,44 wrote about him at various stages of his career,45 especially admired his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which he read in 1896,46 and formed the ambition of making his own great work’s predecessor and preparation, Jean Santeuil (1895 f.), an important novel that would link Balzac with Goethe.47 So at least concerning the striking resemblance of À la recherche du temps perdu to the German Romantics’ Bildungsroman, as paradigmatically exemplifed by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, there is actually a ‘smoking gun’ for infuence. As Tadié mentions, Proust knew the work of Madame de Staël, thinking highly enough of her to make a pilgrimage to her familial residence Coppet in Switzerland in 1899 and to accord her and her novel Corinne ou l’Italie (1807) an honorable mention in a passage of Le Temps retrouvé.48 Now, Madame de Staël was a close friend of Friedrich and especially August Wilhelm Schlegel, who together served as her main sources of information about German philosophy and literature. And in her novel Corinne ou l’Italie she implemented many of the German Romantics’ central principles in a literary form: the work is a sort of female Bildungsroman, fuses literature with philosophy, and in particular emphasizes the German Romantics’ philosophical ideals of the Infnite/God, art, love, deep individuality, liberalism, cosmopolitanism, and feminism. In addition, she published an infuential theoretical exposition of the main ideas of the German Romantics (as well as other German philosophers and writers) in her seminal work De l’Allemagne (1813). Tadié also rightly mentions that Stendhal (properly Marie-Henri Beyle) was an important infuence on Proust, 49 both in virtue of his great novels, Le Rouge et le Noir (1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) (which was one of Proust’s favorite books), and in virtue of his more theoretical work on the nature of love, De l’amour (1822) (which shaped Proust’s own views about the nature of erotic love) – Proust especially 368

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e

f

referring to all of these works in Jean Santeuil. 50 But Stendhal lived in Germany and Austria for several years as a young man (1806–1810), wrote about his experiences there, 51 and even borrowed his pen-name “Stendhal” from a town in Germany. Moreover, and accordingly, his intellectual roots lay largely in a sort of critical engagement with German Romanticism. This can be seen most clearly from his early works: on the one hand, Racine et Shakespeare (1823–1825) sympathetically replays a German Romantic (Herder, Goethe, the Schlegels) meditation on the relative merits of the ‘classical’ literature exemplifed by Racine vs. the ‘romantic’ literature exemplifed by Shakespeare, and agrees with the German Romantics in championing the latter over the former. On the other hand, Stendhal was from the start much more skeptical of the metaphysical-religious dimension of German Romanticism, and in De l’amour (1822) also diagnosed the erotic love that German Romanticism had valorized (and to which he was himself extremely susceptible) as illusory in nature (specifcally, as based on a projective illusion, a sort of sparkling psychological “crystallization” around a much duller reality analogous to the physical crystallization that occurs when a twig is left in an Austrian salt mine). Tadié also rightly emphasizes that Balzac was a powerful infuence on Proust (indeed perhaps the most powerful of all), and that this infuence extended well beyond Balzac’s great novels, such as Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1838) and Illusions perdues (1837–1843), to include virtually his whole corpus, even minor works.52 Tadié in particular mentions that Proust read Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu (1834) (whose title may well have inspired that of his own great work), 53 and La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835) (which Proust discusses enthusiastically in a draft of Contre Sainte-Beuve).54 What Tadié overlooks here, however, is that these early works of Balzac’s constitute a sort of extended meditation on, and critique of, German Romanticism: La Recherche de l’absolu (1834) in efect diagnoses the aspiration to attain knowledge of the Infnite/Absolute that lay at the core of German Romanticism (and which Balzac in the novel depicts in a natural scientifc variant) as pathological, a recipe for delusion and ruin.55 Similarly, La Fille aux yeux d’or criticizes German Romanticism’s exaltation of erotic love as a recipe for illusion, deception, disappointment, and disaster – sealing the point melodramatically with a horrifying, bloody dénouement. Proust essentially takes over these ideas from Balzac. In doing so, he absorbs both the German Romantic ideals involved and Balzac’s skepticism about them. Tadié also rightly mentions that Proust took an interest in the work of Nerval (properly Gérard Labrunie).56 Indeed, Tadié understates this interest, for Proust was in fact a great admirer of Nerval, especially of his novella Sylvie (published in 1854, just a year before Nerval’s death by suicide in 1855), to which he devotes a long discussion in Contre Sainte-Beuve.57 Now, Nerval had very close connections with Germany – in particular, through his parents and friends such as Heinrich Heine, several visits there, and his celebrated translations of Goethe’s Faust as well as an anthology of German poems. Accordingly, his novella Sylvie strongly refects German Romanticism, for example in its focus on romantic love, its nostalgia for the past (including the Middle Ages), its preoccupation with architecture, and its dream-like atmosphere. More specifcally, in both continuity and discontinuity with German Romanticism, it dwells on the failure of romantic love, all three of the protagonist’s romantic entanglements with women failing in one way or another. Furthermore (and for our purposes importantly), Proust himself in Contre Sainte-Beuve explicitly rejects an interpretation of Sylvie that was common among his contemporaries according to which the work is a mere continuation of 369

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g

h

i

j

k

the literature of eighteenth-century France (Rousseau does play a signifcant role in it), arguing instead that it is heavily indebted to Germany, especially to Goethe, 58 as well as to the German Romantics proper, namely for such typical themes of theirs as nostalgia, dreams, and the Infnite.59 (Incidentally, this specifc interpretation of Proust’s coheres with his more general high esteem for German philosophy and literature, and with his more general sympathy toward Germany as a nation (even during World War I), both of which fnd forceful expression in his correspondence.60) In short, from Goethe to Madame de Staël to Stendhal to Balzac to Nerval, there was also a strong literary channeling of German Romanticism’s ideas (as well as of some critical reactions against them) to Proust.61 Tadié rightly acknowledges that Proust’s conception that music expresses a deep meaning which language cannot capture was infuenced by Schopenhauer (here in efect agreeing with Henry).62 But (again like Henry) Tadié overlooks the fact that this conception of Schopenhauer’s – which in his specifc version of it concerned an insight into the nature of the noumenal will – was basically an inheritance from German Romanticism, in this case especially from Hamann, Wackenroder, and Tieck. Moreover, the German Romantics’ original version of this conception was actually more similar to Proust’s than Schopenhauer’s later version was, since, like Proust, but unlike Schopenhauer, they avoided associating the deep meaning in question with a noumenal will, instead thinking of it in religious terms.63 Tadié also rightly recognizes that Proust was infuenced by Wagner, in particular by Wagner’s exaltation of art into a sort of religion.64 However, Tadié overlooks the fact that Wagner’s views on art were again basically just a continuation of the ideas of the German Romantics. This is certainly true of the aspect of Wagner’s position that Tadié is alluding to: his exaltation of art, and more specifcally his Schopenhauer-infuenced conception that music can express meanings which language cannot (as just explained). But it is also true of Wagner’s ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk (another conception of Wagner’s that Tadié should have mentioned as prefguring and infuencing Proust’s novel, given the novel’s prominent inclusion of architecture, sculpture, painting, and music, as well as literature), which was essentially just an ambitious variant of the Romantics’ ideal of the novel as a type of literature that subsumes all other genres. Further examples of the point are the several Anglophone authors whom Tadié holds to have been more important than German authors as infuences on Proust’s thinking about art. The frst of these is Thomas Carlyle.65 Tadié himself rightly mentions Carlyle’s engagement with Goethe and Fichte, and concedes that this may have enabled an indirect infuence of German philosophy on Proust.66 However, this understates Carlyle’s debts to German philosophy, of which he was essentially just a British popularizer. And in particular it overlooks his large debt to German Romanticism, on which, for example, he published a substantial book, German Romance (1827). Tadié also includes Ralph Waldo Emerson as an important Anglophone infuence on Proust.67 But here again, Emerson’s ideas were almost entirely drawn from German philosophy, in particular from Kant, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Coleridge. Of these fgures, Friedrich Schlegel and Schelling are both parts of German Romanticism 68; Kant was one of its main inspirations (especially with his Critique of Judgment); and Coleridge likewise stands in the closest relationship to it, or is even again really just part of it.69 John Ruskin is another important Anglophone infuence on Proust whom Tadié emphasizes.70 As Tadié explains, Proust translated Ruskin and was strongly infuenced by 370

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his valorization of the Gothic cathedral, including his insistence on its religious dimension, and more specifcally its Catholicism.71 However, Tadié omits to mention that this approach to Gothic cathedral architecture had already been fully anticipated by the German Romantics – especially by a famous early essay of Goethe’s on Gothic cathedral architecture, Von Deutscher Baukunst (1773), and then by Friedrich Schlegel’s treatment of the same subject (like Ruskin, Schlegel in particular insisted on the religious, and indeed specifcally Catholic, character of the architecture in question). While Ruskin was coy about acknowledging debts to the German Romantics, he was clearly channeling their ideas here.72 Moreover, whether or not Proust was aware of the source of these ideas in Goethe and Schlegel at the time when he frst developed his enthusiasm for Ruskin’s version of them, he clearly at least became so before writing À la recherche du temps perdu. For in a letter to Georges Goyau from June 22, 1905 he praises Goyau’s book L’Allemagne religieuse: Le Catholicisme (1800–1848) for its account of Goethe’s and Schlegel’s versions of them.73 Lastly, Tadié rightly emphasizes that Proust studied philosophy both at high school and at university, and that especially in the latter case the record of what he learned is very incomplete; that in his mature years he was an avid socialite, constantly hosting and attending dinner parties at which intellectual subjects were high on the menu; and that while he read avidly and widely, it is impossible to know exactly what he read, in part because of his habit of giving away books after he had read them. It therefore seems safe to assume that Proust learned many, many things in these various contexts for which no paper trail has been found. Given the massive infuence of German philosophy on France in the nineteenth century (in addition to Kantians such as Darlu, one should also recall Victor Cousin and his school’s appropriation of Hegel as the model for their own eclecticism, the wave of enthusiasm for Schopenhauer that arose in France toward the end of the nineteenth century, Séailles’ Schellingianism, and so on), including German Romanticism in particular (in addition to Séailles, de Staël, Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval, and Hugo have already been mentioned as examples), is it not likely, indeed virtually certain, that Proust will often have been exposed to the ideas of the German Romantics in these unrecorded contexts as well?

Finally, it is worth adding that Proust himself gives the leading German Romantics Friedrich and/or August Wilhelm Schlegel (the reference is ambiguous) a sort of honorable mention within his great work. In a charming passage of Le Côté de Guermantes, Mme. de Villeparisis explains to a German prince that she owes her good knowledge of fowers to the kindly infuence of “un homme bien distingué de votre nation, M. de Schlegel [a distinguished compatriot of yours, Monsieur de Schlegel],” whom she had met as a young girl in Broglie on an occasion when he had spoken about fowers and she had fallen asleep on his lap during an outing, after which encounter he had sent her the gift of a pretty herbarium upon returning to Germany.74 Keeping in mind Proust’s strong valorization of fowers throughout his works, it does not seem far-fetched to read this passage as a sort of acknowledgment that he owed signifcant intellectual debts to the leading German Romantics.75 In sum, Tadié’s skepticism about the infuence of German Romanticism on Proust rests on certain general misconceptions about Proust and especially about German Romanticism; it has in part already been refuted by Henry and Fraisse; it is further refuted by a closer consideration of the infuences on Proust that Tadié himself identifes; and fnally, Proust even seems to acknowledge the infuence of the leading German Romantics on him within his great work. 371

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Broken Romanticism, Tested Romanticism However, to say all of this is not by any means to say that Proust is simply a sort of reincarnation of the German Romantics – far from it. For one thing, there are many other dimensions of Proust with many other infuences lying behind them (as Tadié’s biography already richly shows and as Fraisse’s work underscores).76 For another thing, when he does echo German Romantic ideas in his great work, it is by no means always in order to endorse them (to the extent that one can gauge endorsement or non-endorsement from a work in which not only the characters but also the narrator are fctional), 77 but sometimes in order to reject, or at least critically test, them. Prime examples of this negative or critical stance concern German Romanticism’s ideals of striving for the Infnite/Absolute, exalting erotic love of a woman (even to the point of fusing it with the striving for the Infnite/Absolute), elevating art, and championing deep individuality. In Proust’s view, these four ideals are intimately interconnected in various ways (for example, both love and the elevation of art depend on and/or generate a perception of the individuality of the people/objects involved). Consequently, he not only critically questions them separately, but sometimes also together. Let me, therefore, begin this section by citing such a passage – a passage in which in fact all four ideals are at issue and under threat. This will serve to illustrate the negative or critical side of Proust’s work in question in a general way before we go on to consider each of the ideals involved more closely, in turn. The passage is from Le Côté de Guermantes. The narrator has just come to see a theatrical performance of Racine’s Phèdre by the great actress Berma, whom he had earlier worshiped from afar before being disappointed by her in a previous performance. And he now fnds all four of the ideals just mentioned under threat: Et il était arrivé un moment où, malade, même si j’avais cru en mourir, il aurait fallu que j’allasse entendre la Berma. Mais maintenant comme une colline qui au loin semble faite d’azur et qui de près rentre dans notre vision vulgaire des choses, tout cela avait quitté le monde de l’absolu et n’était plus qu’une chose pareille aux autres, dont je prenais connaissance parce que j’étais là, les artistes étaient des gens de même essence que ceux que je connaissais, tâchant de dire le mieux possible ces vers de Phèdre qui eux ne formaient plus une essence sublime et individuelle, séparée de tout, mais des vers plus ou moins réussis, prêts à rentrer dans l’immense matière des vers français où ils étaient mêlés.78 [There had been a time when, ill, even if I had thought it would kill me, I would have had to go and hear Berma. But now, like a hill that from afar seems to be made of azure but which from close up returns to our vulgar way of seeing things, all that had left the world of the Absolute and was no longer more than a thing similar to other things, of which I was aware because I was there, the artists were people of the same kind as those whom I knew, trying to speak these verses of Phèdre as well as they could, which in their turn no longer constituted a sublime and individual essence/kind separate from everything else, but just some more or less well-made verses, ready to return to the huge mass of French verses among which they were mixed.] Let us now consider each of the four ideals involved more closely, in turn. The prime examples of Proust’s outright disillusionment with German Romantic ideals lie in his continuation of the sort of combination of, on the one hand, fascination with the Romantic striving for the Infnite/Absolute and the Romantic exaltation of erotic love of a woman (even to the 372

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point of its fusion with that striving) with, on the other hand, disillusionment concerning these that he had already found in Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu and La Fille aux yeux d’or (as well as in the works of Stendhal and Nerval). The frst of these disillusionments – that with the ideal of striving for the Infnite/ Absolute – seems to be almost assumed over most of the course of Proust’s great work, rather than treated as a live issue (at least if the ideal in question is understood in the metaphysical/ religious sense that the German Romantics had given it). This impression is consistent with the biographical fact that Proust was not a religious believer. An arguable exception to the rule is a quasi-Platonic notion that surfaces in the last volume of the work, Le Temps retrouvé, according to which involuntary memory can bring us into contact with essences, or kinds, that exist outside of time, thereby lending us ourselves an existence outside of time and so beyond death79 – a notion that has led Gilles Deleuze to interpret Proust as a sort of Platonist.80 This notion was already present in Jean Santeuil and Proust re-articulated it as factual in letters from 1907 and 1910,81 so it presumably constituted part of his original plan of À la recherche du temps perdu. However, it is not very philosophically convincing; in particular, founding an extravagant quasi-Platonism on the thin evidentiary basis of the experience of involuntary memory does not seem plausible.82 Moreover, even for purely textual reasons I am inclined to read the conclusion of Le Temps retrouvé (and therefore of the whole work) as an ultimate renunciation, or at least defation and demotion, of the quasi-Platonism in question. For the conclusion falls conspicuously silent on this topic and instead returns to the theme of time and how it alters and subsumes both people and things.83 Indeed, Proust writes there that il faut se résigner à mourir. On accepte la pensée que dans dix ans soi-même, dans cent ans ses livres, ne seront plus. La durée éternelle n’est pas plus promise aux œuvres qu’aux hommes [one must resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself and in a hundred years one’s books will no longer exist. There is no more a promise of eternal duration for works than for men],84 and famously ends the whole work with the emphatic, even defant words “dans le Temps [within Time].”85 If a striving for the Infnite/Absolute survives in Proust’s great work at all, it is therefore arguably only a defated, naturalistic form of it, as with Balzac: just as Balzac had in efect defated and naturalized it into the infnite but thoroughly this-worldly literary task of depicting a whole society in his Comédie Humaine (which he conceived in deliberate contradistinction to Dante’s Divina Commedia), so Proust defates and naturalizes it into the infnite but thoroughly this-worldly literary task of depicting/creating the signifcance of a whole life in À la recherche du temps perdu (needless to say, neither author really completed the task that he had set himself, or even expected to).86 The second ideal, the exaltation of the erotic love of a woman, seems much more of a live issue in Proust’s great work. But, like Stendhal, Balzac, and Nerval, Proust relentlessly exposes this too as a domain of illusion, disappointment, and pain: more specifcally, as one in which the lover chooses his beloved arbitrarily, repeats such choices mechanically with multiple beloveds, the qualities in the beloved that he imagines justify his love for her are merely his own projected illusions, his love is inextricably linked to the torments of deception and jealousy, it is self-defeating, disappoints, and tortures (Marcel and Gilberte, Marcel and the Duchesse de Guermantes, Marcel and Albertine, Swann and Odette, Saint-Loup and Rachel, and so on).87 Two further cases are more equivocal, though, in that while they are certainly at points in Proust’s great work threatened with a similar unmasking as mere illusions, they in the end 373

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survive the threat. One of these cases is art. Art’s elevated status gets called into question as an illusion in various passages of the work (including the long passage about Berma that was quoted above).88 But the role that Proust assigns to art in the fnal volume, Le Temps retrouvé, as not only indeed elevated, but moreover ultimately justifying the pain of life that made its own creation possible (an idea that Nietzsche had already developed in The Birth of Tragedy, where, incidentally, it again had a German Romantic background), 89 shows that this particular doubt is in the end overcome. A fnal case is individuality. As has already been mentioned, there are many places in Proust’s great work where individuality – in natural phenomena, places, and events, but especially in people, their minds, their meanings, and their artworks – is emphatically exalted. However, there are also many places where it is instead called into question as perhaps just another illusion.90 Proust does, I think, endorse this sort of skepticism in a limited way: in the domain of erotic love we are indeed susceptible to projecting mere illusions of individuality onto people.91 But that does not yet amount to a general skepticism about individuality as a mere illusion. And it seems to me that Proust in the end wards of such radical forms of skepticism about it. Accordingly, Proust’s narrator concludes one of the passages in which he raises a doubt about individuality, namely in relation to art, by saying that this doubt was not destined to endure and that consequently his estimation of art was going to rise again.92 The danger that individuality will turn out to be entirely an illusion becomes especially strong in Le Temps retrouvé. For, although there are passages there that again emphatically exalt individuality, especially concerning human psychology and meaning, 93 there are also passages that instead seem to embrace the contrary ideal of a generalizing psychology, 94 as well as passages that express the quasi-Platonism about essences that has been mentioned above,95 which threatens to undermine individuality at the level of meaning too (as in Plato’s own version of Platonism). However, it seems to me that Proust ultimately in Le Temps retrouvé saves the phenomenon of individuality in the face of this challenge. He makes two diferent attempts to do so (which, though incompatible with each other, both, I suggest, deserve serious philosophical consideration): his frst attempt tries to efect a reconciliation between the two positions – individualization vs. generalization – by saying that individuality is indeed the real nature of human psychological and semantic phenomena, but that literature has to generalize in order to communicate them to people.96 His second solution is an implication that a person’s psychology and meaning always themselves have both individual and general, or shared, aspects: “dans tout amour le général gît à côté du particulier [in every love the general lies side by side with the particular].” 97 This second solution had essentially already been Schleiermacher’s position (as Manfred Frank refects in the apt title of his book on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics Das Individuelle-Allgemeine [The Individual-Universal]). Proust’s considered judgment on the four disillusionments with German Romantic ideals that threaten thus varies: the Infnite/Absolute and the exaltation of erotic love basically succumb to the threat, but both art and individuality are ultimately saved from it. Incidentally, this whole discrediting and critical testing of German Romantic ideals by Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval, and – most elaborately and subtly of all – Proust can in some ways be seen as the product of a confuence of two diferent intellectual traditions, both of which already had long roots before the authors in question: a German tradition of metaphysical-religious credulity vs. a French tradition of skepticism and science. This confuence of traditions generated what I have here called broken and tested Romanticism, which, among other things, constituted a new aesthetic pathos that is distinctive of the literature of Stendhal, Balzac, Nerval, and Proust.98 374

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Another Continuation of German Romanticism in Proust: Hermeneutics The German Romanticism in Proust’s work is by no means all of the broken sort. As we just saw, even some of the aspects of it that he subjects to critical questioning, such as art and individuality, eventually survive the test. Moreover, other aspects of it are accepted by him with even less reservation – for example, the Romantic ideal of fusing literature with philosophy and the Romantic ideal of the Bildungsroman. Among these positive continuities, one of the most exegetically important and philosophically valuable, it seems to me, is a focus on interpretation and hermeneutics (the theory and methodology of interpretation). Gilles Deleuze in his book Proust and Signs draws attention to this dimension of Proust’s work: “Proust’s work is based on the apprenticeship to signs.” 99 And I think that he is right to do so. For example, when Proust in Le Temps retrouvé comes to contrast Marcel’s past life of rather pointless socializing among people with his future mission as a writer, he characterizes the latter as above all an interpretive, hermeneutic mission: Ne valait-il pas mieux que, ces gestes qu’ils faisaient, ces paroles qu’ils disaient, leur vie, leur nature, j’essayasse d’en décrire la courbe et d’en dégager la loi? [Was it not better that I should try to describe the curve and to discern the law of these actions that they were performing, these words that they were saying, their life, their nature?]100 However, I also think that Deleuze’s specifc way of cashing out the point in terms of a sort of Platonism in Proust is less helpful, and that the connection with German Romanticism is more illuminating. Let me, therefore, conclude this chapter by giving a somewhat fuller account of the ideas concerning hermeneutics to be found in Proust’s great work which essentially continue the German Romantic version of the discipline (as it is found above all in Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schleiermacher), albeit while also at points testing, revising, and extending it: i

ii

iii

As we have seen, like the German Romantics, Proust believes in the deep individuality of human beings’ psychology and meanings (while also seeing this individuality as existing in combination with more general, or shared, aspects). Moreover, for him, as for the Romantics, this individuality constitutes both the main reason for being interested in interpreting human beings and the main obstacle to doing so correctly, since it renders correct interpretation extremely difcult.101 Again like the Romantics (for example, Herder and Friedrich Schlegel), Proust by no means exempts the interpreter’s own individuality from this task, but instead very much includes it, since in his view the self does not enjoy any sort of Cartesian selftransparency, but on the contrary has an unconscious dimension, is susceptible to self-deception, and moreover constantly changes, which makes interpretation of one’s past self even more difcult.102 It is one of the main functions of involuntary memory in Proust to overcome, or at least reduce, the last of these problems, namely by allowing a person cognitive access to his or her past selves.103 Again like the Romantics, Proust is interested not only in the individuality of particular people within a society/historical period in comparison with each other, but also in the individuality of societies/historical periods themselves as compared to each other (albeit that he focuses more on the former phenomenon than on the latter).104 A subtle, and mildly contrarian, refection of the latter interest is a remark in Le Côté de Guermantes to the efect that because of our acute awareness of such an individuality of historical 375

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periods we are occasionally surprised to fnd something psychologically familiar to us in the past.105 iv Like the Romantics (especially Herder and Schleiermacher) – who in this connection used such expressions as sich hineinfühlen in [feeling one’s way into] or sich versetzen in [putting oneself into] – Proust conceives interpretation as a matter of putting oneself into the position of the person interpreted in order to understand his/her psychological outlook. For example, in À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feur the narrator speaks of “ma disposition à me mettre à la place des gens et à recréer leur état d’esprit [my disposition for putting myself in people’s places and recreating their states of mind].”106 v Like the Romantics, Proust throughout his great work assumes that it is essential to this task to pay close attention to people’s words and actions (hence, as we saw, in Le Temps retrouvé his narrator, as he approaches the task of writing such a work, asks rhetorically whether, instead of living his previous life of pointless socializing with people, it was not better that he “should try to describe the curve and to discern the law of these actions that they were performing, these words that they were saying … ?”). But Proust also adds some signifcant extensions to that assumption: a person’s very manner of speaking (e.g. his choice of syntax) and his very style of writing are important indicators of the contents of his mind as well.107 And so too is his involuntary body language (as we would call it today).108 vi Like the Romantics, Proust implies by the very ways in which he interprets works of literature, music, and visual art throughout his great novel that accurate interpretation of their meaning requires taking their whole historical context into account. But he also in À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feur makes the subtle, mildly contrarian point that such contextualization sometimes gets carried too far by our own age, and that in particular isolating artworks in a museum can give a less distorted impression of their meaning than setting them in a period context, because it better refects the efort that the artist himself made in his work to distance himself psychologically from that context.109 vii Like the Romantics, Proust implies that the parts of a text or artwork receive their meaning from the whole and therefore need to be interpreted in light of the whole.110 Relatedly, again like the Romantics, he insists that it is important to take all of an author’s works into account in order to understand his mind and thereby become able to interpret the nuances of any one of them.111 viii Connectedly (as we saw before), like the Romantics, Proust therefore conceives interpretation as involving a sort of circularity (and consequently inscribes just such a structure into his great work). ix Like the Romantics, Proust conceives the appropriate approach to interpretation as one of psychological/semantic “divination” (a term/concept that was highly distinctive of the hermeneutics of the German Romantics – especially Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, and Schleiermacher – and which Proust evidently borrows from it), 112 or “hypothesis” (another, equivalent term/concept that the German Romantics had sometimes used in this connection).113 In other words, just like the Romantics, he believes that good interpretation essentially involves forming bold provisional conjectures on the basis of a careful consideration of the modest linguistic, behavioral, and contextual evidence that is so far available, but also keeping in mind the possibility that, however plausible these conjectures may be, they may still turn out to be false and therefore to require abandonment or revision.114 x Finally, like the Romantics (more precisely, Herder and Friedrich Schlegel, but not in this case Schleiermacher), Proust includes not only linguistic forms of expression 376

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(i.e. texts and discourse) but also instrumental music and visual arts such as painting, sculpture, and architecture as bearers of meaning, as therefore standing in need of interpretation, and as consequently falling within the purview of hermeneutics.115 In this connection, he also makes a number of more specifc points. For example, as we have seen, he opts for the position that some of his Romantic predecessors and Schopenhauer had held that the meanings expressed by instrumental music cannot be captured in language.116 And (anticipating work by Roland Barthes and others) he observes that even dress fashion has a meaning.117

Conclusion In sum, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu shares much common ground with German Romanticism. Moreover, there is every reason to think that this is due to an actual infuence that German Romanticism exercised on his work (albeit largely an indirect infuence). However, Proust’s relationship to the German Romantics’ ideas is an ambivalent one, especially because it includes an ultimate rejection of their ideas concerning the Infnite/Absolute and erotic love, and at least a critical testing of their ideas about art and individuality, alongside a more straightforward acceptance of other ideas of theirs. Finally, one of the most exegetically and philosophically important examples of Proust’s positive reception of the German Romantics’ ideas lies in his continuation of their focus on interpretation and hermeneutics, in which connection he largely follows their principles, while also, however, efecting some signifcant revisions and extensions of them.118

Notes 1 Since I have published extensively on German Romanticism, in order to save space, I shall in this chapter largely assume interpretations of it rather than demonstrating them with quotations and citations. For more details, see esp. Michael N. Forster, After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010) and German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Throughout this chapter, all translations from Proust’s works are my own. 3 See e.g. I 170, SW 204–5; I 215, SW 260–1; I 445, BG 27–8; II 345, G 41–2. 4 See e.g. I 93, SW 111 (“philosophie idéaliste”); I 417–20, SW 505–9; IV 489–93, TR 272–7. 5 Indeed, he already does so in Jean Santeuil (begun in 1895), where he explicitly associates erotic love for a woman with “l’infni” and “l’absolu” (Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil [Paris: Gallimard, 2001], 806, 832). 6 See e.g. I 434, BG 14 (“ce que je demandais à cette matinée, c’était tout autre chose qu’un plaisir: des vérités appartenant à un monde plus réel que celui où je vivais” (Pléiade edition amended: mode –> monde) [“what I expected from this matinée was something quite diferent from a pleasure: some truths pertaining to a world more real than the one in which I lived”]); I 448, BG 31; III 664, C 173–4. 7 Friedrich Schlegel, Athenäums-Fragmente, in KFSA, vol. 2. (KFSA = Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler et al. [Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958–]. Translations from this edition are my own.) 8 See KFSA, vol. 4. 9 Friedrich Schlegel, Lectures on the History of Literature (1815; tr. London: Bell and Daldy, 1873), 190–1. 10 See e.g. I 342–7, SW 413–20; III 760–3, C 289–93; III 876–7, C 427–8. 11 See e.g. III 762, C 291. 12 See II 19–20, BG 272–3. 13 Concerning Proust’s respectful attitude to Gothic cathedral architecture, including an insistence on its religious dimension (despite not himself being religious), see Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life (1996; tr. New York: Penguin, 2001), 440–2.

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Michael N. Forster 14 Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953). 15 See e.g. I 9–10, SW 10–11; I 210, SW 254–5; I 417, SW 505–6; I 521–3, BG 119–22; II 623, G 375–6; III 179, SG 211. 16 See e.g. II 191–2, BG 478–9; II 712–13, G 484 (“cet agrégat de raisonnements que nous appelons vision” [“that aggregate of reasonings that we call vision”]); III 15–16, SG 15–16. 17 See e.g. I 83, SW 99 (“ma croyance en la richesse philosophique” [“my faith in the richness of philosophy”]); I 170, SW 205 (“tâchant de trouver un sujet où je pusse faire tenir une signifcation philosophique infnie” [“trying to fnd a subject into which I could ft an infnite philosophical meaning”]); I 177, SW 212 (“chaque fois que j’avais cherché un sujet philosophique pour une grande œuvre littéraire” [“each time that I had looked for a philosophical subject for a great work of literature”]). 18 See, for example, the criticism of Victor Hugo and other writers in Le Côté de Guermantes and the criticism of “realism” and political art in Le Temps retrouvé. 19 Here, I agree with Malcolm Bowie, who simply characterizes the work as a Bildungsroman (Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars [New York: Columbia University Press, 1998], 265, 287). Anne Henry likewise points out the similarity between Proust’s work and the Bildungsroman (see e.g. Anne Henry, Proust [Paris: Balland, 1986], 169). 20 See IV 613–14, TR 434–5. 21 Anne Henry mainly associates this principle with August Wilhelm Schlegel (Anne Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique [Paris: Klincksieck, 1981], 213–20). But in fact it was common to the whole German Romantic tradition from Herder onward. 22 See e.g. I 182–3, SW 220–1; I 219–20, SW 266–7; I 380, SW 461–2; I 410, SW 497; I 413, SW 501; II 5, BG 255; II 16, BG 268; II 64–5, BG 326–8; II 96, BG 365; II 261–2, BG 563–5; II 297– 8, BG 607–8; II 712–13, G 483–5; II 769, G 553 (“comme Leibniz admet que chaque monade en refétant tout l’univers y ajoute quelque chose de particulier” [“just as Leibniz allows that each monad in refecting the whole universe adds to it something particularly its own”]); II 857–8, G 657–60; III 664, C 173; III 760–2, C 288–91; III 876–7, C 427–9; IV 80–1, F 569–71; IV 468–74, TR 246–54. 23 See e.g. II 38, BG 296 (“le trouble délicieux de se mêler à une vie inconnue” [“the delightful trouble of penetrating an unfamiliar life”]); II 365–7, G 67–70; II 626, G 380; III 556, C 45 (Mais il n’en est pas moins vrai qu’un grand intérêt, parfois de la beauté, peut naître d’actions découlant d’une forme d’esprit si éloignée de tout ce que nous sentons, de tout ce que nous croyons, que nous ne pouvons même arriver à les comprendre [But it is none the less true that a great interest, sometimes even a certain beauty, can arise from actions originating in a cast of mind that is so far removed from everything we feel, from everything we believe, that we can’t even manage to understand them]); III 609, C 108 24 See e.g. II 412–13, G 123–5; III 219, SG 258; III 848, C 394. 25 Friedrich Schlegel had already developed such a conception of philosophy in lectures on Transcendental Philosophy that he delivered at the University of Jena in 1800–1801 and which Hegel attended. Cf. Michael N. Forster, “Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel,” in Idealismus und Romantik in Jena: Figuren und Konzepte zwischen 1794 und 1807, ed. Michael N. Forster, Johannes Korngiebel, and Klaus Vieweg (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2018). 26 Concerning this circularity, as well as some further roles that circularity plays in À la recherche du temps perdu, cf. Irina Ruvinsky, Proust: The Circle of Time (University of Chicago doctoral dissertation, 2009). 27 As Tadié has explained, this was already Proust’s plan from the start of his composition of the work (Marcel Proust: A Life, 760). Pace Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (1964; tr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 116, 164, who argues that whatever unity the work possesses was only discovered by Proust during its composition, not planned in advance. 28 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 429–30. 29 See e.g. the extended or metaphorical senses of the concept of translation at III 760–3, C 288–93 (“translating” music into words); and IV 469, TR 247–8 (“translating” one’s experiences into literature). 30 II 711, G 482.

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Proust and Romanticism 31 II 196, BG 485; cf. IV 622, TR 447 (“la transcription plus exacte que je m’eforcerais de donner” [“the more exact transcription that I would strive to produce”]). 32 III 760–3, C 288–93; cf. IV 457, TR 231–2; IV 475, TR 255; also a letter to Gabriel Mourey from January/February of 1905 (Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Two, 1904–1909, ed. Philip Kolb, tr. Terence Kilmartin [London: Collins, 1989], 133). 33 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 204. 34 Ibid., 339. (Translation amended: lie –> lies [se trouve].) 35 Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, esp. 46–55, 302–5 (for Schopenhauer), 8, 76–145, 266–80 (for Schelling); also Proust, 98–100, 132. 36 Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 280–308; Proust, 229–40. To be a bit more accurate than Henry is, this was a conception shared by August Wilhelm Schlegel and then under his infuence Hegel, but not by Schelling (see Michael N. Forster, “August Wilhelm Schlegel and Hegel on Art,” Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie, vol. 137, Sonderheft, esp. 138–9). 37 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 204: In his lessons … Darlu had impressed on Marcel the notions of faith in the human spirit, Kantian idealism, belief in a ‘thing in itself ’, in a reality hidden behind appearances, and the rigours of analysis, which few in the face of the misty imprecision dear to the Symbolists and sometimes to Bergson. This is what prevented Proust from being the inheritor of German Romanticism and the philosophy of Schelling and Schopenhauer. For him, as with Kant’s French disciples, … concepts were always lucid and defned, examples were precise, reasoning was fawless, the writing unostentatious since it was necessary to reject efects of style, obscure illusions, and the alibi of imagery. 38 Luc Fraisse, L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust (Paris: Sorbonne Université Presses, 2019), esp. ch. 5. 39 This especially applies to the Schlegel brothers, whose role Henry underestimates, in part because she – conventionally but dubiously – thinks of them as just literary theorists rather than philosophers (see Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 83). 40 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 13. 41 Ibid., 21f. 42 Ibid., 216–17. 43 III 230, SG 271–2f. Another possible channel of infuence of the German Romantics’ ideas about translation on Proust is Marie Nordlinger, a bilingual Englishwoman who helped Proust with his translations of Ruskin. Nordlinger had links to Germany, and, to judge from a remark of Proust’s in his correspondence, seems to have championed an even stricter (or more ‘foreignizing’) approach to translation than he himself did (see Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Two, 1904–1909, 39). 44 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 86, 273, 281–2, 343. 45 Ibid., 343, 345, 397. 46 Ibid., 24, 264, 269. 47 Ibid., 281–2. 48 Ibid., 534–5. 49 Ibid., 273–4, 724. 50 Ibid., 273–4, 290, 438, 542. 51 See esp. Stendhal, Zeugnisse aus und über Braunschweig (1806–8) (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 1999). 52 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 291f., 601. 53 Ibid., 292, 591. 54 Ibid., 537. Cf. Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 194–226, where Proust accords both of these relatively minor works of Balzac’s a central role in his discussion of him. Also, concerning La Fille aux yeux d’or specifcally, Temps IV:748–9. 55 Unlike Stendhal, Balzac was not entirely unreligious. However, he scrupulously excluded his religious convictions from his literary works, in La Messe de l’athée (1836) implicitly pleading for a sort of mutual toleration between religion and atheism. 56 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 511, 524. 57 Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges, 157–69. 58 Ibid., 157–8.

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Michael N. Forster 59 Ibid., 162–4 (Proust does not use the term “German Romantics” in this connection, but the allusion to them is clear). For further discussion of Nerval’s infuence on Proust, cf. Kuo-Yung Hong, Proust et Nerval: Essai sur les mystérieuses lois de l’écriture (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006). 60 See, for example, Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Four, 1918–1922, ed. Philip Kolb, tr. Joanna Kilmartin (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 307–8 (a letter to Ernst Robert Curtius from March 7/8, 1922 in which Proust writes, “I have the highest regard for German philosophy and literature”); and Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Three, 1910–1917, ed. Philip Kolb, tr. Terence Kilmartin (London: HarperCollins, 1992), 284–8 (a letter to Lucien Daudet from about November 16, 1914 in which Proust severely criticizes anti-German jingoism). 61 To round out the picture just sketched of the importance of German Romanticism for the development of some of the greatest French novelists of the nineteenth century with a fgure who arguably infuenced Proust less strongly than de Staël, Stendhal, Balzac, or Nerval, but who nonetheless did so to a signifcant extent, namely Victor Hugo: Hugo’s work is similarly rooted in German Romanticism, as can again be seen most clearly from his early writings, in particular his adoption of German Romantic ideas about history and literary genre in the service of defending a program of Romantic drama in the famous Preface of his play Cromwell (1827). 62 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 341. 63 Cf. besides the passages on music in À la recherche du temps perdu, also a letter from Proust to Suzette Lemaire from May 20, 1895 (Marcel Proust: Selected Letters 1880–1903, ed. Philip Kolb [1983; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985], 93), in which he writes in his own voice that music expresses the depths of our souls and the religious, but not that it expresses a noumenal will. 64 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 614–15. 65 Ibid., 339–42. 66 Ibid., 340–1. 67 Ibid., 339–41, 343–6. 68 This is of course uncontroversial concerning Friedrich Schlegel, but Schelling too stood sufciently close to the leading German Romantics both personally and in his ideas that he is often today simply classifed by specialists as a German Romantic (e.g. by Manfred Frank and Dalia Nasser). 69 Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria is largely a mélange of Kantian and German Romantic (especially Schellingian) ideas. 70 Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, esp. 345–74. 71 Ibid. In sharp contrast to Tadié, Henry interprets Proust’s attitude toward Ruskin as essentially one of rejection (see Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, esp. the chapter “Contre Ruskin,” 166 f.). However, this interpretation is not tenable; La Bible d’Amiens is fundamentally laudatory of Ruskin (despite also including some sharp criticisms of specifc aspects of his work) and Proust’s correspondence is likewise full of praise for him. 72 Henry argues that Ruskin’s intellectual debts to the German Romantics largely arose via Coleridge (Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 167–9). That is plausible, but does not explain Ruskin’s appropriation from them of the specifc ideas discussed above, which are entirely absent from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. 73 Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Two, 1904–1909, 194–5. 74 II 571, G 314–15. 75 Since Broglie was a residence of Mme. de Staël, there is also an implicit allusion to her in this passage. At frst sight, it seems most likely that the Schlegel referred to is her intimate friend and teacher August Wilhelm. However, given that Friedrich also knew and taught her, lived in France from 1802 to 1804, and indeed spent several months with her at Broglie in 1806–1807 (cf. Ernst Behler, Friedrich Schlegel [Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1966], esp. 103–4), the possibility of a reference to him should not be excluded either. Perhaps Proust is being deliberately ambiguous in order to extend his honorable mention to both of these great German Romantic predecessors. 76 See in addition to Fraisse’s L’Éclectisme philosophique de Marcel Proust also Luc Fraisse, La Petite Musique du style: Proust et ses sources littéraires (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2011), which especially focuses on some of the less obvious literary infuences on Proust. 77 That not only the characters but also the narrator are fctional is clear enough from the work itself and from a comparison of it with Proust’s known biography, but in addition Proust himself makes the point explicitly in a letter to Henri de Régnier from November 28, 1920 (Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Four, 1918–1922, 165). 78 II 345, G 43–4.

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Proust and Romanticism 79 IV 445–58, TR 216–33; IV 477, TR 257 (“ces impressions que nous apporte hors du temps l’essence commune aux sensations du passé et du présent” [“those impressions that the essence common to the sensations of the past and of the present brings to us outside time”]). 80 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, esp. 37–8, 42, 44–5, 50, 81–2, 88–9, 154. 81 Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Two, 1904–1909, 252; Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Three, 1910–1917, 24–5. 82 Here, I am basically in agreement with Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 270. 83 IV 620–5, TR 445–51. 84 IV 620–1, TR 445–6; cf. IV 624, TR 450–1. 85 IV 625, TR 451. A passage from Albertine disparue seems to me to support this whole defationary reading of the work’s quasi-Platonism: Proust writes there that at the end of one’s life the Muses of philosophy and art which concern “eternal beauty” and “truth” become less important than a Muse that has gathered “tout ce qui n’est que contingent mais révèle aussi d’autres lois: c’est l’Histoire!” [“all that is only contingent but also reveals other laws: it is History!”] (IV 253–4, TR 777–8). 86 Proust’s narrator observes in La Prisonnière that all of the great works of the nineteenth century remained uncompleted (III 666, C 176), and in Le Temps retrouvé he famously adds that, like many great cathedrals, a book such as his, because of the scale of its ambition, will probably never be completed (IV 610, TR 431). 87 See e.g. II 189, BG 477 (“qu’en étant amoureux d’une femme nous projetons simplement en elle un état de notre âme” [“that when we are in love with a woman we simply project onto her a condition of our own soul”); III 194, SG, 228 (“l’amour, sentiment qui … est toujours erroné” [“love, a sentiment that … is always erroneous”]); III 400–1, SG 475–6; IV 16–17, F 492–5; IV 78, F 567; IV 81–8, F 571–9; IV 111, F 605–6; IV 190, F 699–700; IV 197–8, F 709–10; IV 255, F 779–80; IV 491, TR 275. (Concerning mechanical repetition, Thomas Hardy’s The WellBeloved was an important model for Proust, concerning illusory projection above all Stendhal’s De l’amour.) 88 See e.g. II 207, BG 497–8; II 345, G 44; III 883, C 435; IV 231, F 749. 89 Cf. Michael N. Forster, “Romanticism and The Birth of Tragedy,” in Romanticism, Philosophy, and Literature, ed. Michael N. Forster and Lina Steiner (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 90 See e.g. I 344–5, SW 416–8; I 523, BG 122; I 525, BG 124; I 539, BG 141–2; I 558, BG 164–5; II 74, BG 339; II 300, BG 610–1; II 345, G 44; III 664–7, C 173–8; III 702–3, C 219–20; III 749, C 276; III 780–1, C 311–3; IV 296–7, TR 33–5; IV 479–80, TR 260–1; IV 554, TR 358. 91 See e.g. II 74, BG 339; II 300, BG 610–1; II 680–1, G 444–7; IV 83, F 573 (Il était encore temps alors, et c’eût été pour Mlle de Stermaria que se fût exercée cette activité de l’imagination qui nous fait extraire d’une femme une telle notion de l’individuel qu’elle nous paraît unique en soi et pour nous prédestinée et nécessaire [There was still time then, and it would have been for Mlle de Stermaria that the activity of the imagination that makes us extract from a woman such a notion of the individual that she seems to us unique in herself and predestined and necessary for us would have gone into operation]); IV 207, F 720–1; IV 565, TR 371–3 (“ce qui semble unique dans la personne qu’on désire ne lui appartient pas” [“what seems unique in the person one desires does not belong to her”]). 92 III 702–3, C 219–20. 93 See esp. IV 468–74, TR 246–54 (art makes possible la révélation, qui serait impossible par des moyens directs et conscients, de la diférence qualitative qu’il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde, diférence qui, s’il n’y avait pas l’art, resterait le secret éternel de chacun [the revelation, which would be impossible by direct and conscious means, of the qualitative diference between the ways in which the world appears to us, a diference which, if it were not for art, would remain the eternal secret of each of us]). 94 See IV 296–7, TR 33–5; IV 479–80, TR 260–1. Proust already articulated this ideal earlier, in the Preface to La Bible d’Amiens (1904), so presumably it was already part of his original plan for À la recherche du temps perdu to include it.

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Michael N. Forster 95 See IV 445–58, TR 216–33; IV 477, TR 257. 96 See IV 480–4, TR 261–6 (“fallût-il pour cela les [sc. les êtres individuels, nos sentiments les plus forts, leurs mots] transcrire d’abord en un langage universel” [“even if it were necessary for that to frst transcribe them [sc. the individual beings, our strongest sentiments, their words] into a universal language”]; “il nous faut la [sc. notre soufrance particulière] penser sous une forme générale” [“we have to think of it [sc. our individual sufering] in a form that is general”]; “rien ne peut durer qu’en devenant général” [“nothing can last except by becoming general”]). 97 IV 483, TR 265. Cf. Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 309, who similarly interprets Proust as espousing a sort of synthesis of the two sides. 98 It was this distinctive aesthetic pathos that Proust was attempting to capture in his own inimitable way when he praised Fauré’s Romances sans paroles as “a mixture of litanies and fucking [un mélange de litanies et de foutre]” (Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life, 210). 99 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 5. By contrast, Malcolm Bowie, while he mentions Proust’s narrator’s role as a moral theorist, introspective psychologist, art critic, cultural, scientifc, and political commentator, and historian of manners, omits to mention his role as an interpreter or theorist of interpretation (Proust among the Stars, 176–7). 100 IV 564, TR 371. 101 See e.g. II 38, BG 296; II 365–7, G 67–70; II 626, G 380; III 556, C 45; III 609, C 108; IV 148–52, F 649–55. 102 See e.g. II 365–6, G 67–9; III 253, SG 297–8; IV 58, F 543 (“Comme on sait peu de ce qu’on a dans le cœur!” [“How little one knows of what is in one’s own heart!”]); IV 464, TR 242; IV 474–5, TR 242–3; IV 614–15, TR 437–8. 103 See e.g. III 152–5, SG 178–82; IV:462–3, TR 239–41. 104 Thus, Proust already in the notes to La Bible d’Amiens praised Ruskin for his sensitivity to such societal and historical individuality (especially in relation to moral values): for “une sorte de don historique ou sociologique qui sait découvrir dans les actions en apparence identiques une intention morale diférente, selon le temps et la civilisation” [“a sort of historical or sociological gift that has the ability to discover in actions that seem identical diferent moral intentions depending on the period and the civilization”] (La Bible d’Amiens, Wikisource, fr.m.wikisource.org, note 105). Compare in À la recherche du temps perdu itself, for example, Le Temps retrouvé, IV 416, TR 178; IV 542, TR 341–2, where Proust similarly commits himself to a historicism (again especially concerning moral values). 105 II 710, G 481–2. Proust already anticipated this contrarian point in the note on Ruskin from La Bible d’Amiens from which I quoted in the previous footnote. For immediately after the part I quoted, the note continues: “et apparenter les formes extrêmement diverses que revêt une même moralité ou immoralité à travers les âges” [“and to relate together the extremely diverse forms that a single morality or immorality takes on across the ages”]. 106 II 44, BG 302–3; cf. IV 564, TR 371; also Jean Santeuil, 584–5. 107 See e.g. I 540–7, BG 142–51; II 648–53, G 406–13; III 356–7, SG 422–4; III 595–6, C 91–3; III 683–4, C 197–9; IV 296, TR 33; IV 401–2, TR 161–3. 108 See e.g. II 365–7, G 67–70; III 112–14, SG 131–4; III 595–6, C 91–3; III 683–4, C 197–9; III 848–51, C 394–7; III 894, C 448; IV 479–80, TR 260–1. Cf. Jean Santeuil, 576–7. 109 II 5–6, BG 255–7. Cf. Marcel Proust: Selected Letters, Volume Four, 1918–1922, 168, where Proust insists that in art and literature all “classics” are great innovators (another German Romantic idea, articulated by Schleiermacher, for example). 110 See e.g. II 826, G 621–2: “ces œuvres d’art achevées où il n’y a pas une seule touche qui soit isolée, où chaque partie tour à tour reçoit des autres sa raison d’être comme elle leur impose la sienne” [“those perfected works of art in which there is not a single trait that is isolated, in which each part in turn receives from the others its raison d’être just as it imposes its own upon them”]. Also III 430, SG 511: “si la connaissance de l’ensemble précède toujours celle des détails, elle facilite infniment l’investigation de ceux-ci” [“if the knowledge of the whole always precedes a knowledge of the details, it makes the investigation of the latter infnitely easier”]. (Pace Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 114, who denies that Proust holds the view in question, obviously overlooking these passages.) 111 See on this the beginning of Proust’s Preface to La Bible d’Amiens. 112 See e.g. II 412–13, G 123–5; III 219, SG 258. 113 See e.g. III 848, C 394.

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Proust and Romanticism 114 See e.g. IV 495–6, TR 281–2. 115 This position already played a central role in Proust’s Preface to La Bible d’Amiens (especially concerning architecture and sculpture). Cf. Contre Sainte-Beuve suivi de Nouveaux mélanges, 378–82 (concerning painting). 116 See esp. III 760–3, C 288–93. 117 I 607–10, BG 224–8. To conclude this section with a remark concerning a more important point of diference between the German Romantics’ hermeneutics and Proust’s hermeneutics: The German Romantics had grounded their hermeneutics in a new and sophisticated philosophy of language, in particular one that rejected the sort of dualism between thought and language, meaning and word, that had commonly been assumed by the Enlightenment, and instead held that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language (or even identical with it) and that meaning consists in word-usage. In contrast, Proust does not have a philosophy of language in this sense, let alone one of this specifc sort. He does, though, arguably make a few modest contributions toward a sort of philosophy of language, including (1) some subtle refections on the nature of proper names and how they are infused with cognitive anticipations of their objects (typically, misleading ones) (see already Contre Sainte-Beuve, ch. 14, and then À la recherche du temps perdu itself; for an interesting discussion of these refections, cf. Henry, Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, 308–23), and (2) the position just mentioned above that music can express thoughts/ meanings which language cannot. 118 I would like to thank the editors, Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern, for some very helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter which helped me to improve it in signifcant ways.

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25 PROUST AND SCHOPENHAUER David Bather Woods

Schopenhauer in Proust’s Novel Strong claims have been made about Proust’s reception of Schopenhauer. The strongest so far is Anne Henry’s (1989) that À la recherche du temps perdu is a literary translation of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. If this were true, it might come as a surprise that Schopenhauer is mentioned by name only twice in the novel. Both instances occur in the fnal volume and in connection, for some reason, with Mme de Cambremer. In the frst, the Narrator and Bloch have run into Saint-Loup on his way to an appointment with M. de Cambremer at the Ministry of War. The Narrator ofhandedly expresses a low opinion of both the Cambremers, which he mentally retracts by recalling his eventual discovery that Mme de Cambremer was, in fact, ‘a remarkable woman, who knew her Schopenhauer’. He is then taken aback by SaintLoup’s next remark: ‘His wife is idiotic, I won’t try to defend her’ (TR, 60; IV 318). The second instance comes from the mouth of Mme de Cambremer herself at the Princess de Guermantes’s party in the fnale of the novel. She recommends: ‘You must re-read what Schopenhauer says about music’, to which the Duchess de Guermantes replies, ‘Re-read is pretty rich, I must say. Who does she think she’s fooling?’ (TR, 378; IV 569). In both scenes, Schopenhauer momentarily raises Mme de Cambremer’s cultural capital, only for a Guermantes to put her back in her place. Why Schopenhauer specifcally is selected for this purpose is unclear. It is, however, ironic that in the same passage the Duchess is said to believe that ‘to be easily bored was a mark of intellectual superiority’, when she would have learned from reading Schopenhauer herself that proneness to boredom is a sign of mental inactivity and dullness (PP 1: 281). In any case, two full mentions is not a bad score, comparatively speaking. The philosopher most mentioned in the novel, Plato, appears no more than ten times (according to Large’s [2001] count). Schopenhauer ranks below Nietzsche (six), Kant (fve), and a handful of others, but he is at least on a par with Rousseau, and, perhaps most importantly, above his arch-rival Hegel, who gets one solitary mention (the same, surprising to some, as Bergson). To be mentioned at all, that is to say, is a rare distinction. Plus, there is one more reference to Schopenhauer in the novel. It is implicit but unmistakeable and rather important. The occasion is an intimate piano performance of Vinteuil’s sonata at the Swann household by Mme Swann herself, which prompts Swann to verbalise some refections on the nature of music and conclude with the remark: ‘I’m merely trying 384

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-33

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to point out to this young fellow here that what music shows, to me at any rate, is nothing like “The Will-in-Itself ”’ (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, translated by James Grieve, London: Allen Lane 2002, pp. 109–10; I 524). Generations of readers in English might have missed this reference because the popular translation by Moncrief, Kilmartin, and Enright goes with ‘the triumph of the Will’ (BG, 124), giving it a Nietzschean ring. In the Pléiade edition, however, the original phrase, ‘Volonté en soi’, comes with a note suggesting that it may a reference to Schopenhauer (citing Henry 1981). It is hard to imagine what else it could be: Swann must be disagreeing with Schopenhauer’s idiosyncratic theory that music is a direct manifestation of the will-to-life. On Schopenhauer’s view, any analogy we sense between music and the world is not because music is a copy of the world, but because both are copies of the same thing: the willto-life. Music seems abstractly to go through the same ordeal as a living being: relentlessly moving forward in time, building tensions repeatedly and fnding resolution only temporarily, or resolving itself permanently only at the point of its temporal end. The structure of music, moreover, corresponds to the entire natural order; it encompasses all the levels of nature which, according to Schopenhauer, each individually correspond to a diferent art form. He suggests more than once, for example, that architecture corresponds to inorganic nature because it ‘reveal[s] the Ideas in which the will objectifes itself on the lowest levels, and at the same time contribute the deepest, lingering bass-tones of nature’ (WWR 1: 235). When music expresses a feeling, it is not this or that individual and particular joy, this or that sorrow or pain or horror or exaltation or cheerfulness or peace of mind, but rather joy, sorrow, pain, horror, exaltation, cheerfulness and peace of mind as such in themselves, abstractly. (WWR 1: 289) At frst Swann seems to come close to agreeing with Schopenhauer’s theory by noting some strong general resemblances between music and nature: ‘The moment when night is falling among the trees, when the arpeggios of the violin call down a cooling dew upon the earth’ (BG, 122; I 523). As he goes on, however, it becomes clear that these are not just any trees but those of the Bois de Boulogne; the apparent mirroring of nature in music turns out to be Swann’s own reminiscence on the scenes of his early courtship with Mme Swann, which was set to the tunes of Vinteuil. Rather than an independent copy of fundamental reality, then, music, to Swann, evokes something personal, private, and local. In an odd coincidence (or maybe not), shortly after this barely concealed reference to Schopenhauer, Mme de Cambremer becomes the topic of conversation once again: ‘Hundreds of times’, Swann says, ‘without my leaving this room, the little phrase has carried me of to dine with it at Armenonville. Good God, it’s less boring, anyhow, than having to go there with Mme de Cambremer’ (BG, 124; I 524–5). Why Schopenhauer and Mme de Cambremer always go hand in hand is anyone’s guess, but she never comes out of it well. It is ironic that one of Proust’s main characters – the one endowed with the greatest art-critical acumen, albeit for painting – disagrees with Schopenhauer on music, when it is over his theory of music that Proust’s commentators have made some of the strongest claims for Schopenhauer’s infuence. Henry’s (1981: 8) claim that Vinteuil’s music was ‘written by’ Schopenhauer is endorsed, and elaborated on, by the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1989: 78–87), who traces the thesis further back to Samuel Beckett: ‘A book could be written on the signifcance of music in the work of Proust, in particular the music of Vinteuil … The infuence of Schopenhauer on this aspect of the Proustian demonstration is 385

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unquestionable’ (Beckett 1931: 70). Beckett expands little on this programme of research.1 He does, however, identify, as above, the point where Swann and Schopenhauer part ways: Swann personalises the ‘little phrase’ of Vinteuil’s sonata with his own associations, ‘spatialises what is extra-spatial, establishes it as the national anthem of his love’ (Beckett 1931: 72). Schopenhauer, by contrast, insists that music is tainted when it imitates the image of the world: ‘imagistic music is reprehensible once and for all’ (PP 2: 382). Unlike the other arts, music is not mediated by the Platonic Ideas of natural kinds, he thinks, and not apprehended in space but in time alone, that is, as a temporal sequence without a spatial location. Its elevation makes it not just transcendent but almost mystical: ‘In every age’, Schopenhauer says, ‘people have played music without being able to give an account of it’. Even his own attempt, he says, ‘cannot do more than to present the explanation that I fnd personally satisfying of the marvellous musical art’ (WWR 1: 284). ‘Music’, Schopenhauer says, ‘is an unconscious exercise in metaphysics, in which the mind does not know that it is philosophizing’ (WWR 1: 292), parodying Leibniz’s mathematically minded view that it is an unconscious exercise in arithmetic (as again Beckett notes). The truths that music reveals are thus deep and timeless; it is not essentially evocative of specifc times and places, as it is for Swann. If it were the fxed role of music in Proust’s novel to express the timeless, metaphysical essence of the world in the form of time alone, then this would make some sense of the Henry-Nattiez thesis that Schopenhauer ‘wrote’ the music of Vinteuil. But the thesis is doubtful because, in Swann’s case, whenever he hears the Vinteuil sonata, it only brings his life fooding back to him, rather than life itself. Years later, when Albertine plays Rameau and Borodin as well as Vinteuil to the Narrator, the images that the music summons are at least images of the wider world unseen to him: ‘now an eighteenth-century tapestry sprinkled with cupids and roses, now the Eastern steppe in which sounds are mufed by the boundless distances and the soft carpet of snow’ (C, 436; III 883–4). But even so, when the Narrator lectures Albertine on the signifcance of Vinteuil – imitating Swann not for the frst or last time – he wavers between the hypothesis that music corresponds ‘to some defne spiritual reality’ (C, 428; III 876), on the one hand, and the ‘materialist hypothesis’, on the other, that there is nothing especially profound about music at all (C, 435; III 883). A further assumption would need to be made for the even stronger thesis that the form of Proust’s entire novel takes after Schopenhauer’s theory of music. This would be the assumption that literature, for Proust, aspires to music conceived along Schopenhauerian lines; that literature, too, aims comprehensively to express, in the form of time alone, the timeless truths that appear in the world as representation. Nattiez, for one, endorses this reading of Proust, ‘where music is treated as the ideal and Utopian model for literature’ (1989: 87). Certainly, by the end of the novel, the Narrator has at least ‘conceived the ambition to make visible, to intellectualise in a work of art, realities that were outside Time’ (TR, 298; IV 508–9). But it is hard to see how, for the diehard Schopenhauerian, literature can move any closer to music than this, since literature for Schopenhauer simply lacks the same essential quality of abstractness which is possessed by music. Non-musical art forms (at least those known to Schopenhauer) may express things ‘as such in themselves’ but only ever by representing idealised and extreme instances of this or that thing. Instead of attempting to generalise Schopenhauer’s theory of music as a guiding artistic principle for Proust’s approach to literature, it would be better to pick up on Schopenhauer’s own general thesis about the role of the arts: If the whole world as representation is only the visibility of the will, then art is the clarifcation of this visibility, the camera obscura that shows objects with greater purity 386

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and allows them to be surveyed and summarized more readily, the play within a play, Hamlet’s stage upon the stage. (WWR 1: 295) Here we have not only a purifying clarifcation of the visible world – a recognisably Proustian aspiration – but also, as an outcome, a world within a world, as the strongly Schopenhauerian interpreters of Proust’s novel seem to want it to be. All this would be only if we accepted in the frst place that Proust’s novel is the transliteration of a monolithic philosophical principle. Several commentators have lined up to doubt that assumption. ‘À la recherche is a novel. It is not a philosophical treatise’, says Thomas Baldwin (2013: 79), who quotes Vincent Descombes: Proust’s ‘task is not to illustrate philosophical themes, but to compose a narrative’ (1992: 35). This has implications for the very notion that it is among Proust’s objectives to make manifest a preferred, pre-existing philosophy, whether it be Schopenhauer’s or someone else’s. Duncan Large, who also follows Descombes, argues that, while Proust’s frst-hand knowledge of Nietzsche was ‘no more than passing, his knowledge of Schopenhauer formed the basis for a response similar to that of Nietzsche himself ’ (2001: 26). Even if Proust was ultimately some sort of Nietzschean, then, it was largely by coincidence. Joshua Landy agrees, adding that while ‘Proust is (without his knowledge) closer to Nietzsche than to any other philosopher … Proust also goes beyond Nietzsche in certain respects’ (2004: 6n.). Of course, while the novel is diferent from a philosophical treatise, this does not preclude it from expressing or entailing philosophical ideas, old and new; but the point is that it does other things besides, many of them not philosophical in their signifcance, and so we should be cautious about any attempt to use a specially selected philosophical system as the key to Proust’s novel, or at least limit our expectations of what this approach is capable of unlocking. A convincing instance of Proust’s ‘para-Nietzschean departure’ (Landy 2004: 50n.) from Schopenhauer can be found, Large argues, in his presentations of aesthetic experience (Large 2004: 34–6). Building on Julia Kristeva’s observation that Kantian disinterestedness is not an essential element of aesthetic experience for Proust – ‘Proust combines the sacredness of music with erotic perversion’ (Kristeva 1996: 264) – Large notes that this moves Proust fundamentally away from Schopenhauer and towards Nietzsche. As Nietzsche says: No less an authority than the divine Plato (– as Schopenhauer himself calls him) asserts something else: that all beauty is a temptation to procreate, – that this is precisely the proprium of its efect, from the most sensual all the way up to the most spiritual. (2005: 203) For Schopenhauer aesthetic experience is always ecstatic but never erotic; for Nietzsche, it seems, it is always erotic, often ecstatic. For Proust, his characters are as capable of displaying the above Nietzschean sensual rapture as they are Kantian-Schopenhauerian disinterest. For the latter, for example, consider Swann’s detached contemplation of a group of ugly male faces: even this ugliness of faces which of course were mostly familiar to him seemed something new now that their features – instead of being to him symbols of practical utility in the identifcation of this or that person who until then had represented merely so many pleasure to be pursued, boredoms to be avoided, or courtesies to be acknowledged – rested in the autonomy of their lines, measurable by aesthetic co-ordinates alone. (SW, 388; I 320–1) 387

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Schopenhauer in Proust’s Essays While it may be doubted that Proust and his novel were, in fact, Schopenhauerian, no one can deny that he knew a good deal about Schopenhauer. He is said to have become familiar with the work of Schopenhauer through attending lectures by the aesthetician Gabriel Séailles between October 1894 and March 1895, during his bachelor’s degree at the Sorbonne, when he was also strongly infuenced by the French neo-Kantian idealists Émile Boutroux and Alphonse Darlu. Proust attentively read psychologists Paul Janet and Théodule Ribot, who, in turn, wrote extensively on Schopenhauer (see Kristeva 1996: 159–69; Tadié 2000: 204; Baldwin 2013: 75; François 2017: 479). In ‘Days of Reading’ (ASB, 195–233; CSB, 160–94), Proust shows of what must be frst-hand acquaintance with Schopenhauer’s works. Proust ‘recalls’ a passage in The World as Will and Representation where Schopenhauer reels of a dozen or so quotations from other distinguished writers, all of which point generally to the same pessimistic conclusions as his: that sufering is essential to life, that it would be better never to have been born and for the world not to exist. The list includes Voltaire, Herodotus, Plutarch, Swift, Plato, Heraclitus, Sophocles, Euripides, Homer, Pliny, Shakespeare, Byron, and Gracián. The passage Proust has in mind can only be the fnal paragraphs of chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, titled ‘On the Nothingness and Sufering in Life’. Judging by his near-perfect accuracy – Proust only misses one writer, Giacomo Leopardi, but correctly paraphrases them all in the exact same order as Schopenhauer – it seems likely that he had the book open in front of him (although, he was said to be gifted at memorising quotations verbatim; see Fraisse 2014: 61). In the same essay, Proust refers to ‘Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life’, a long section of the frst volume of Schopenhauer’s late work Parerga and Paralipomena which is often published as a standalone book. Again Proust highlights Schopenhauer’s tendency to furnish his claims with a consensus of several quotations, while at the same time – and this is what Proust admires – evidently remaining an original thinker. He is impressed that Schopenhauer, despite how often he quotes others, can say in all seriousness: ‘Compilation is not my forte’. In fact, what Schopenhauer exactly says – ‘Kompilieren nicht meine Sache ist’ (SW 5: 334), ‘compilation is not my business’ – does not suggest a lack of talent for stringing together good quotations, but ultimately a lack of interest. It is not his primary aim to rehearse age old wisdom, even though they would, and do, corroborate his point of view. Proust takes this as an opportunity to praise Schopenhauer, and here he can be taken at his word, unlike in his novel, because he writes in his own voice: ‘Schopenhauer … ofers us the image of a mind whose vitality wears the most enormous reading lightly, each new item of knowledge being at once reduced to its element of reality, to the portion of life that it contains’ (ASB, 217; CSB, 185). Schopenhauer has successfully navigated what Proust calls the ‘dangers of erudition’, that is, not by posing as unerudite as some philosophers do – Wittgenstein said of himself that no philosopher had read less philosophy (Britton 1967: 60–1), although he too had avidly read Schopenhauer – but instead by being extremely, openly erudite, and yet at the same time keeping life and the world in mind as his ultimate primary source. This model of originality-despite-erudition difers, as it happens, from the one proposed by James Acheson (1978) to explain the tension in Beckett’s argument that on the one hand À la recherche derives from Schopenhauer and yet on the other Proust is an original thinker. Acheson explains that innovation lies in ‘original use of received materials’ (1978: 168), giving another example suggested by Beckett: that Joyce applied Vico’s theory of history to 388

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matters of literary style, that Vico, in turn, borrowed from Bruno, and Bruno from the philosophy of ancient Greece. A similar model is ofered by Maurice E. Chernovitz (1945: 184), who lists Schopenhauer frst among the sources that Proust synthesises. Proust’s understanding of how Schopenhauer maintained his originality, however, which could be reapplied to Proust himself, is not merely by fashioning an original synthesis or application of existing ideas, but by placing enough trust in the power of his intellectual faculties to verify those ideas against his own observations of the world. This makes Schopenhauer himself, not the thinkers he quotes, the ultimate authority. Proust is, furthermore, correct about Schopenhauer’s relationship to his infuences. Schopenhauer, too, is wary of erudition: ‘Reading’, he says, ‘is a mere surrogate for one’s own thinking’, and for this reason, ‘erudition makes most people even more stupid and simple than they already are by nature’ (PP 2: 442). If one seeks to learn well from reading, one must assimilate, integrate, and organise the materials taken from books into the unity of one’s own thoughts, which inevitably requires some amount of thinking for oneself: ‘For only through the universal combination of what we know, and comparing every truth with every other, do we completely assimilate our own knowledge and take control of it’ (PP 2: 441). And in any case, according to Schopenhauer, ‘all who think for themselves are basically in agreement, and their diference arises only as one of standpoint’, which explains Schopenhauer’s tendency, as Proust notes, to quote liberally. As Schopenhauer explains it: ‘Often I was pleasantly surprised afterwards to fnd formulations in ancient works by great men of propositions that I had hesitated to bring before the public because of their paradoxical nature’ (PP 2: 445). They give courage, that is, but not content. Proust, like Schopenhauer, was an anti-reader: voraciously well read, yet suspicious of reading. There are, moreover, some further details on which they agree about reading. At its best, it is a miraculous meeting of minds. However, despite this ‘fertile miracle of a communication efected in solitude’ (ASB, 208; CSB, 174), Proust rejects Ruskin’s suggestion that reading should occupy a preponderant role in our intellectual lives for reasons that are, once again, reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s suspicions of reading. On Proust’s reckoning, Ruskin recounts ‘a sort of beautiful Platonic myth’, that the ancients revealed almost all the true ideas and left it to the moderns to unpack them by reading and study. Schopenhauer would say that the convergence of minds between the ancients and the moderns, at least in the case of true authentic thinkers, such as himself, is explained by them drawing upon the same original source – life, the world – rather than one borrowing from the other. Here, however, Proust and Schopenhauer begin to part ways. Proust never concedes, of course, that we merely borrow content from greater writers of the past, but he does see some virtues in the limitations of reading. Specifcally, where Schopenhauer sees reading as a mere substitute for thinking for oneself, Proust sees it as an incitement to do so. A few beautiful and original sentences from a great writer, in Proust’s experience, conjure up a hidden world but ofer us only a partial glimpse. The reader wants more, longing to see how the world would look if only the writer had turned their eye to this or that feature. Unless the writer has done so, however, this longing only becomes active by us looking for ourselves: ‘The supreme efort of the writer as of the artist only succeeds in raising partially for us the veil of ugliness and insignifcance that leaves us incurious before the universe. Then does he say: “Look, look”’ (ASB, 211; CSB, 178). For Schopenhauer, perhaps disingenuously, reading is barely a cognitive activity; for Proust, by contrast, it is erotic in the Platonic sense of inspiring a truth-seeking that is guided by the sense of beauty, and pedagogic in the Socratic sense of marking the limits of wisdom while demonstrating its power. ‘We feel very strongly’, Proust says, combining both, ‘that our own wisdom begins where that of the author leaves 389

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of, and we would like him to provide answers when all he is able to do is to provide us with desires’ (ASB, 210; CSB, 176). If Schopenhauer exerted an infuence on Proust, then perhaps it was of this kind.

Willing in Proust and Schopenhauer Proust and Schopenhauer share, among other things, a preoccupation with states of will. When they speak about the will, however, they often have diferent issues in mind. A central concern for Proust, for instance, is weakness of will. At one point the Narrator, having stumbled into Jupien’s sado-masochistic brothel, describes lack of willpower as the ‘greatest of all vices’ (TR, 180; IV 414) since it enables all the other vices to dominate. The Narrator’s own weakness of will, by comparison, seems far less vicious, even tame: he has neglected his own obvious talent as a writer. He associates his weakness of will with the decline in his health, indicating some sort of pathological basis, and dates them both (twice: TR, 243–4; IV 465 and TR 446–7; IV 621) to the moment in his childhood when he frst broke from his parents’ authority by demanding, successfully, a goodnight kiss from his mother (SW, 14–15, 31–50; I 13, 32–41), connecting up the frst and fnal volumes of the novel. It is an irony that this defantly wilful act precipitates a generalised weakness of will; it is another that an involuntary event restores the Narrator’s willpower back to him. For it is not until the epiphany brought on by a series of involuntary memories that the Narrator is literally revitalised – ‘now that three times in succession there had been reborn within me a veritable moment of the past, my appetite for life was immense’ (TR, 223; IV 450) – and that he recommits to his vocation, despite all the will this must require.2 Schopenhauer’s philosophy is in many ways a philosophy of will par excellence. It rests on the insight that we experience ourselves in two aspects: once as a representing subject, and once as a subject of will. As a subject of will, we are granted access to ourselves as objects in a way that is sui generis diferent from our access to other objects of representation. Were it not for this inner insight, speculative metaphysical enquiry would be neither possible nor necessary, for we would simply assume that there is nothing to objects beyond their representations (WWR 1: 123–7). Schopenhauer proceeds to decipher the whole world, from the basic laws of nature to animal behaviour and the wide variety of human endeavours, on the assumption that they are various manifestations of a common essence which he fnds within himself, the will-to-life. But he is, by contrast to Proust, only peripherally concerned with willpower and weakness of will. This is because the will, to Schopenhauer, is not a legislative faculty that constrains, licences, or moderates our desires and wishes: it is our desires and wishes, and also our striving to achieve them. Schopenhauer barely even believes in the volitional faculty that is supposed to perform such a function, namely practical reason, and certainly not in the Kantian sense (WWR 2: 157; BM: 122). Reason never determines the ends of our actions – the will as distinct from reason does that – but at best it devises the means for achieving them. At most, maxims of action are relevant to moral life in the ‘struggle against the weakness of the moment, and [in] lending consistency to action’ (WWR 1: 83; see BM: 205–6). ‘Ultimately’, Schopenhauer adds, reason does the same for art, where it has just as little to do with the essential business, but supports its execution, since genius is not at one’s beck and call, and yet the work must still be perfected in all.

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Despite these diferences, commentators have drawn comparisons between Schopenhauer and Proust over specifc states of the will: for example, sexual desire. As one of Schopenhauer’s commentators, Patrick Gardiner, puts it: Schopenhauer traces the sinuous paths, the subtle guises, taken by sexual feeling with an assiduity comparable to his admirer Proust, while at the same time (again like Proust) manifesting a complete disbelief in its capacity to reach any kind of fnal contentment or satisfaction. (1963: 177) 3 There are a few diferent thoughts in this. One is that sexual desire must take on guises at all: on Schopenhauer’s view, in fact, all forms of romantic love are the sex drive in disguise, as detailed in his infuential chapter on the metaphysics of sexual love (WWR 2: 547–82). This sounds defationary, but Schopenhauer prefers to think of it as a form of realism. After all, he does not believe that love is a fction (as some aphorists suggest: ‘True love is like visitation by ghosts; everyone talks about such things, but few people have seen them’, La Rochefoucauld 2007: 25) but only that its reality is not what we tend to think. The reality of romantic love, according to Schopenhauer, is the species’ interest in making suitable matches masquerading as the individual’s interest in personal happiness. Romantic intensity is explained by the high stakes from the point of view of the species, namely its very survival. High romantic ideals – which, Schopenhauer believes, truly are fctions – help the species to achieve its end, sexual reproduction, after which they are jettisoned. For this reason, sexual desire is essentially connected to disillusionment and disappointment for Schopenhauer. Indeed, this goes for desire in general for Schopenhauer, which always sets out with infated and vain hopes for an impossibly ultimate form of consummation. We see the same dynamic between desire, idealisation, and disappointment repeatedly played out in Proust’s novel, especially in the early volumes, whose characters, including the Narrator, are beset by ideals of love, ones they have derived from art and literature as well as ones they have modelled on others, or simply invented for themselves. Swann, for example, can only fnd begin to fnd Odette physically attractive once he has discovered her likeness in a photograph of Zipporah from Botticelli’s Sistine chapel fresco (SW, 265–7; I 219–20). A formative disappointment for the young Narrator is the disparity between the image of the Duchess de Guermantes that he had built up in his head, and the one that he spots at the wedding of Doctor Percepied’s daughter – the real one, with a red face and a pimple faring up at the corner of her nose. Like Swann, the Narrator takes a second look through the eyes of a would-be artist, to touch up the image in accordance with his desires and thereby reverse the disappointment: my eyes resting upon her fair hair, her blue eyes, the lines of her neck, and overlooking the features which might have reminded me of the faces of other women, I cried out within myself as I admired this deliberately unfnished sketch: “How lovely she is!...”. (SW, 210; I 174) On this occasion the Narrator’s initial disappointment does not follow sexual consummation – it is not even on the table – although it will on later occasions. Here it is the failure of an artistic sort of consummation: that is, the ineluctable features of visible reality never quite match up to the ideals of his imagination as shaped by his romantic desires, except by a creative and wilful form of self-deception. Both the Narrator and Swann are compelled by

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erotic forces that they do not yet consciously understand, while being led by idealised images, crafted by themselves, which for a time allow them to feel that they do. The Narrator experiences a couple more failures of artistic consummation – a performance by La Berma, a meeting with Bergotte – these ones not just the failure of life in its raw form to present itself artistically but the failure of artists to present themselves as such, at least according to his then image of what an artist is. Around the same time he draws a series of deeply Schopenhauerian conclusions from the pain of his recent sexual awakening, the object of which is about to transfer from Gilberte to Albertine: for example, ‘There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting-point for further desires’ (BG, 180; I 571). Once Albertine has later fed his captivity, he realises that even if she were to return to him, it would never make him happy: whatever joy I might feel at the moment of her return, I sensed that very soon the same difculties would recur and that to seek happiness in the satisfaction of a desire of the mind was as naïve as to attempt to reach the horizon by walking straight ahead. The further the desire advances, the further does real possession recede. So that if happiness, or at least the absence of sufering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek. (F, 514; IV 33–4) There is barely a word in this passage that Schopenhauer would not agree with. That joy, if possible, is short-lived; that it is quickly replaced with pain; that desiring has no terminus and is certainly no route to happiness; that the closest possible thing to happiness is not some fnal satisfaction of the will but rather its negation; and that this can only be achieved by the eventual elimination of our desires – all these things, Schopenhauer thought too: It is no more possible for some satisfaction to stop the will from willing new things than it is for time to begin or end. The will can have no lasting fulflment that gives perfect and permanent satisfaction to its strivings … there is no highest good, no absolute good for the will, but rather only ever a temporary good. But if we would like to retain an old expression out of habit, giving it honorary or emeritus status, as it were, we might fguratively call the complete self-abolition and negation of the will … the absolute good, the summum bonum. (WWR 1: 389) On another occasion, however, the Narrator portrays an almost polar alternative to the Schopenhauerian way of dealing with disappointment by eliminating desire. The Narrator tells us that Bergotte had lived an apparently simple life in the years running up to his death except for his expensive indulgence of countless young women. For Bergotte, remaining erotically active at all costs was a condition of his artistic productivity for several reasons. One: ‘pleasure that is at all rooted in the fesh is helpful to literary work because it cancels all others pleasures (C, 203; III 688). In particular, it stopped him wanting to go out. Also, it seems, maintenance of his libido simply kept him going: ‘restoring some degree of movement to a spiritual machine which, after a certain age, tends to come to a standstill’. But, most importantly, Bergotte values his desires not because their satisfaction makes him happy; he is prone, in fact, ‘to despise a thing … as soon as he had attained it’. By vainly pursuing his desires he gains, instead of happiness, ‘some insights into the reasons which prevent us from being happy and which would have remained invisible to us but for these sudden revelations 392

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of disappointment’. He values them, that is, for their disappointments, at least insofar as these disappointments illuminate aspects of life that he can then transform into literature (to transform into money, to transform into women…). It still not doubted here, however, that desire inevitably leads to disappointment. Gardiner (1963: 195) draws a further comparison between Schopenhauer and Proust on the topic of what is perhaps Proust’s best-known motif: involuntary memory. He has the following passage from Schopenhauer in mind: it is … the blessing of a will-less intuition that, through an act of self-deception, it casts such a wonderful spell over things in the past or far away, presenting them to us in a so much rosier light. This is because when we picture days long past spent in a distant place, our imagination recalls only the objects, not the subject of the will, a subject that carried its incurable suferings around with it then as well as now: but these have been forgotten because they have since made way for so many others. Now objective intuition operates in memory just as intuition of the present would operate if we were able to free ourselves from the will and surrender ourselves to intuition. That is why sudden memories of past and distant scenes fy past us like a lost paradise, especially when some difculty troubles us more than usual (WWR 1: 222) 4 As Gardiner notes, Schopenhauer’s claim is that memory is often accompanied by the same will-lessness that is, according to him, characteristic of all aesthetic perception. This is because the object of perception is recalled without the will of the subject. Consequently, our memory of things is sunnier than we should expect, at least by comparison to the constant misery of the present – ‘happiness always lies in the future, or in the past, and the present is like a small dark cloud driven by the wind over the sunlit plains’ (WWR 2: 588). Superfcially, there are similarities between Schopenhauer and Proust on this score. For a start, Schopenhauer’s mere mention of the scenes of memory as a ‘lost paradise’ calls to mind Proust’s line which is in many ways programmatic for the entire novel: ‘the true paradises are the paradises that we have lost’ (TR, 222; VI 449). The primary way to recover lost paradises, according to the Narrator’s fnal refections, is through memory. Furthermore, memory for Proust as for Schopenhauer is akin to aesthetic experience, at least with respect to the delightful – if, in Schopenhauer’s case, disinterested – pleasures that they can aford. As Acheson (1978: 173) correctly notes, however, none of the above similarities show that Schopenhauer foreshadowed Proust’s specifc version of involuntary memories. There is a crucial diference between what Schopenhauer means by will-lessness and Proust by involuntariness: namely, Schopenhauer may or may not have in mind memories that are called up at will, for what is important to him is that the object of memory no longer afects the will in the way that it once did, whereas for Proust the only interesting kind of memories, the ones from which the events of his novel fow, are specifcally those that cannot be recalled at will. For this reason, as Large argues, ‘Compared to Schopenhauer’s conception of “involuntary” memory, Proust’s is undoubtedly more will-less’ (2001: 189). In defence of Schopenhauer, these commentators make their remarks in the light of Schopenhauer’s all too brief claims about will-less memory in The World as Will and Representation. In the later Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer fnesses his views on memory over a series of aphorisms (§§348–54) which bring him at least a little closer to Proust. There are still traces there of Schopenhauer’s original view: for example, in memory the past is presented less sorrowfully – but also, interestingly, and quite consistently, less joyfully – ‘because 393

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joy and sorrow are not representations but afections of the will’ (PP 2: 542). But among the things that he adds to his view, he includes the thought that memory is a capacity for searching one’s past, rather than simply a repository for storing it, and that this capacity is assisted by condensing memories into intuitive images, whether they be metonyms, similes, or analogies, adding that the imagistic nature of memory explains why we can more easily access experiences rather than abstractions, for example those abstractions taken from reading (PP 2: 543–4). He adds that in life there are moments of heighten receptivity and clarity of perception, which may occur without any special external cause, ‘such that afterwards these moments remain indelibly impressed on our memory and are preserved in their entire individuality without our knowing why, nor why they alone stand out from so many thousands similar to them’; he even suggests that these are ‘the mosaic tiles from which the memory portrait of our lives is composed’ (PP 2: 545). Finally, Schopenhauer suggests a kind of involuntariness of memory that is diferent from his earlier notion of will-less memory. First, he mentions banal forms of it: for example, when we are having trouble consciously recalling a word or name, so we give up, only to fnd that the name comes to us hours or weeks later, as if it were ‘whispered to me by someone’ (PP 2: 544). Then he gives the following example, which is reminiscent of Proustian involuntary memory if anything is: That occasionally long forgotten scenes will suddenly and vividly enter our memory, apparently without any cause, may happen because we just now sensed the same delicate fragrance from long ago, which has not quite reached our clear consciousness. For it is well known that fragrances awaken memories with particular ease, and everywhere the association of ideas needs only an extremely slight push (PP 2: 545) There is, however, one more apparent point of convergence between Schopenhauer and Proust which sees them, once again, part ways once the details are developed. This is that in both Proustian involuntary memory and Schopenhauerian will-less memory, assuming that the latter is modelled on Schopenhauer’s account of aesthetic experience, there is a mutually corresponding transformation of the subject and the object such that both are in some way de-temporalised. In Schopenhauer’s case, the subject of aesthetic experience is elevated to the ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of cognition’ while the object ‘is no longer the individual thing as such, but rather the Idea, the eternal form’ (WWR 1: 201). In Proust’s case, his Narrator can enjoy the impressions of involuntary memory ‘because in some way they were extra-temporal’ and because, correlatively, he discovers within himself a being ‘in the one and only medium which it could enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time’ (TR, 223; IV 450). However, for Proust, it is essential to their correlation that this extratemporal being is having these extra-temporal impressions seemingly simultaneously in the past and in the present. It is crucial to the special kind of aesthetic experience that involuntary memory is because, insofar as it is past, the impression can be enjoyed as an object of the imagination, but insofar it is present, it is real – whereas, ordinarily, reality is disappointing and only the imaginary pleases and delights (TR, 223–5; IV 450–1). There is nothing quite like this in Schopenhauer; his suggestion, rather, is that memory enables us to apprehend the past just as we would apprehend the present if only we achieved the aesthetic, that is, willless, mode of perception while it is happening, not that a certain class of memories enables an extraordinary apprehension of the past and the present at once. In the bigger picture this puts a world of diference between Proust and Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, to be a will-less, timeless subject of cognition is to lose oneself and one’s 394

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cares. By contrast, part of why the Narrator is so triumphantly jubilant at his discovery of involuntary memory is that, through it, he gains a more substantial sense of his enduring self; he has become timeless in the sense that he has fnally retrieved himself from the fow of time. This jubilance must be understood in the light of the Narrator’s initial anxieties about the passage of time, which set in early on with his ‘suspicion […] that I was not situated somewhere outside Time, but was subject to its laws, just like those characters in novels who, for that reason, used to plunge me into such gloom’. These anxious fears are presented to the reader in conjunction with his mother’s anxious hope that ‘a defnite rule of life should discipline the vagaries of [his] nervous system’ (BG, 63; I 473). Both of them are worried that, due to his weakness of will, he would never make something of himself; but himself, he later fnds, is precisely what he has been making all along.5

Notes 1 See Acheson (1978) and Pothast (2013) for discussions of Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer. 2 On weakness of will and its pathological basis, see Fraisse (2014); on the various dimensions of the ‘contra-voluntary’ in Proust, see Moran (2017: 101–20). 3 Gardiner (1963) is one of several Schopenhauer scholars to note the connection to Proust. Most include Proust in long lists of artists and writers known to have been infuenced by Schopenhauer, e.g., Difey (1996), Janaway (2002), Jacquette (2005), Singh (2010), Bishop (2012), Lewis (2012), Vasalou (2013) Shapshay (2017), Howard (2020), and Schroeder (2020). Some specify an instance of where they overlap, e.g., Safranski (1991: 216) on engrossing aesthetic experiences; Nussbaum (1999: 353) on the infuence of will on perception; and Magee (1997: 406) on sufering and the negativity of happiness. 4 For an illuminating and detailed analysis of this passage, see Poellner (forthcoming). 5 I am grateful to Anna Elsner and Tom Stern for their insightful comments and suggestions, and to Victoria Kenworthy and Igor Reyner for reading suggestions on Proust and music.

References Works by Schopenhauer Sämtliche Werke, 4th ed., 7 vols., edited by Arthur Hübscher. Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 1988. [SW] Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 1, translated by S. Roehr and C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [PP 1] Parerga and Paralipomena, vol. 2, translated by A. Del Caro and C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [PP 2] The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols., translated by J. Norman, A. Welchman, and C. Janaway. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010/2018. [WWR 1/2] Other Works Acheson, J. (1978) “Beckett, Proust, and Schopenhauer,” Contemporary Literature 19 (2): 165–179. Baldwin, T. (2013) “Philosophy,” in A. Watt (ed.) Marcel Proust in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bishop, P. (2012) “Schopenhauer’s Impact on European Literature,” in B. Vandenabeele (ed.) A Companion to Schopenhauer. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Beckett, S. (1931) Proust. London: Evergreen Books, Ltd. Britton, K. (1967) “Portrait of a Philosopher,” in K. T. Fann (ed.) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Chernovitz, M. E. (1945) Proust and Painting. New York: International University Press. Descombes, V. (1992) Proust: Philosophy of the Novel, translated by C. Chance Macksey. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Difey, T. J. (1996) “Metaphysics and Aesthetics: A Case of Schopenhauer and Thomas Hardy,” in D. Jacquette (ed.) Schopenhauer, Philosophy, and the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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David Bather Woods Fraisse, L. (2014) “Proust et la philosophie de la volonté,” Littérature 175 (3): 61–75. François, A. (2017) “Schopenhauer’s French Reception,” in S. Shapshay (ed.) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Gardiner, P. (1963) Schopenhauer. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Henry, A. (1981) Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique. Paris: Klincksieck ——— (1989) “Proust du cöté de Schopenhauer,” in A. Henry (ed.) Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe. Paris: Klincksieck. Howard, C. A. (2020) “The Next Metaphysical Mutation: Schopenhauer as Michel Houellebecq’s Educator,” in R. Wicks (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Janaway, C. (2002) Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacquette, D. (2005) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Chesham: Acumen. Kristeva, J. (1996) Time & Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, translated by R. Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust. Oxford: Oxford University Press. La Rochefoucauld (2007) Collected Maxims and Other Refections, translated by E. H. and A. M. Blackmore and F. Giguère. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Large, D. (2001) Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewis, P. B. (2012) Arthur Schopenhauer. London: Reaktion Books. Magee, B. (1997) The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, R. (2017) The Philosophical Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nattiez, J.-J. (1989) Proust as Musician, translated by D. Pufett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2005) The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, translated by J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. (1999) “Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Dionysus,” in C. Janaway (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Poellner, Peter (forthcoming) “Schopenhauer and the Beauty of the Past,” in D. Bather Woods and T. Stoll (eds.) The Schopenhauerian Mind. Routledge. Pothast, U. (2013) “Elements of Schopenhauer’s Thought in Beckett,” in N. Boyle, L. Disley, C. Jamme, I. Cooper (eds.) The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, Volume 3: Aesthetics and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Safranski, R. (1991) Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, translated by E. Osers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schroeder (2020) “Schopenhauer and Hume on Will and Causation,” in R. Wicks (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shapshay, S. (2017) “Introduction,” in S. Shapshay (ed.) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Singh, R. R. (2010) Schopenhauer: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Tadié, J.-Y. (2000) Marcel Proust, translated by E. Cameron. London: Viking. Vasalou, S. (2013) Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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26 PROUST AND BERGSON Fierce Criticality1 Suzanne Guerlac

Debt Proust has been read through many philosophical systems over the years, but the question of debt has been most fraught with respect to Bergson.2 Bergson was at the peak of his powers between 1907 and World War I. Not only was he a world-famous philosopher, but he had become something of a celebrity, thanks to his public lectures at the Collège de France that attracted adoring crowds. The name “Bergson” became identifed with “ideas everyone was familiar with.”3 Proust launched ARTP during these years, slowly disengaging his novelistic project from the critical writings of Against Sainte-Beuve. When Swann’s Way appeared in 1913, it was widely assumed that the novelist in search of lost time had borrowed his major themes from the famous philosopher of time.4 In an interview published that year in Le Temps Proust fatly denied Bergson’s infuence. His novel, he maintained, “is dominated by the distinction between involuntary memory and voluntary memory, a distinction that not only does not appear in Mr. Bergson’s philosophy but is even contradicted by it.”5 Proust reiterates the central importance of this distinction the following year in a letter to Jacques Rivière at the Nouvelle Revue Française when he envisaged ARTP as a work of only three volumes: Du Côté de Chez Swann, Du Côté de Guermantes and Le Temps retrouvé. His letter strategically emphasizes the compositional integrity of his writing, underscoring the unifying role of involuntary memory which launches the narrative arc of his novel in the Madeleine episode of Combray – reminiscence in the service of Marcel becoming a writer – and concludes it in Time Regained, where fresh involuntary memory experiences move our hero to embrace his literary vocation.6 Moreover, he suggests that involuntary memory adds metaphysical heft to the novel’s story of becoming a writer because it transcends time and reveals essences. Taken together, the 1913 interview and the 1914 letter established what would become the ofcial interpretation of ARTP as a novel of creation that afrms an idealist esthetics. This is what the name “Proust” has come to represent. Proust’s fat denial of Bergson’s infuence proved efective. Instead of searching for Bergsonian themes or images in Proust’s novel, as had become common practice, critics began to give Proust’s concepts priority and to examine whether their equivalents could be found in Bergson. Were Bergson’s two memories comparable to those Proust put at the center of his DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-34

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work?7 Does Bergson’s notion of pure memory match Proust’s involuntary memory?8 Commentators systematically parsed similarities and diferences between the purported views of Proust and Bergson when it came to specifc themes – time, memory, the deep self in its opposition to the social self, habit, art, etc. – often cautiously giving some credit to both sides in what was set up as an intellectual rivalry.9 But shufing between the two esteemed fgures on the backs of ready-made concepts was counterproductive, and singularly so, given that (as we shall see further on) ready-made concepts and phrases constitute a major philosophical problem for Bergson and a literary – even existential – one for Proust. In 1976, Joyce N. Megay appeared to put the nagging question of Proust’s debt to Bergson to rest when she posed the problem in more general terms: how could Bergson have infuenced Proust in any signifcant way, she asks, when the philosopher holds that to reach the absolute we must enter more fully into time, whereas Proust’s novel (she held) promotes an escape from time into essences through art?10 Megay’s argument resuscitates the interpretation of Proust’s novel rehearsed above; it hinges on the interpretation of ARTP that the author advanced in 1913 when he projected a novel of only three volumes. But Proust’s work of “living art” (IV 475; FTA 205 [TR, 254]) continues to grow and evolve for another decade.11 Proust will introduce a new character into his novel, Albertine, and recenter his work around her. Her story will unfold in four additional volumes: A l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs, Sodome et Gomorrhe, La Prisonnière and Albertine Disparue. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary memories, which Proust had designated as the philosophical core of his work in 1913, begins to blur and recede in importance. A new principle of composition emerges, “composition as the deferred correction of a frst impression.”12 To reverse meaning or value as the novel moves forward in time becomes a formal device and a powerful critical instrument in Proust’s novel. When Proust died in 1923 his mammoth work remained unfnished, even though a nominal conclusion had been put in place from the start.13 “I’ve just begun – and fnished – a whole long book,” Proust wrote to a friend in 1909.14 He subsequently explained that “the last chapter of the last volume [Time Regained] was written immediately after the frst chapter of the frst volume [Combray]. The entire ‘in-between’ was written next.”15 But of course it hadn’t yet been written in 1909. The novel’s frame (Combray/TR) will remain in place as the ever swelling in-between of narrative episodes continues to expand until Proust’s dying day. The frame has served to guard the traditional interpretation of Proust’s novel, the one Proust set out in his letter to Rivière in 1914, which pertained not to the novel we read today but only to a part of it, the novel in three volumes. The further we read in ARTP, the more implausible it becomes – pace Joyce Megay and so many others – to interpret the whole work through the lens of reminiscence and a desire to escape from time. If Proust’s work evolved signifcantly over the years, so did Bergson’s philosophy. It was non-systematic by design for, as Bergson explains, “philosophy requires a new efort for each new problem.”16 And it was informed, from the start, by extensive interdisciplinary research.17 The concept of duration, which the philosopher initially introduced in relation to individual, subjective, experience in Time and Free Will, evolves into an ontological principle  – “the very stuf of our existence and of all things.”18 Bergson’s philosophy of duration ultimately meets up with the question of reality itself. In the late 1960s, Deleuze’s Bergsonism introduced readers to this New Bergson – a thinker whose philosophy of duration, Deleuze maintained, provides “the metaphysical correlate of modern science.”19 If, at the turn of the twentieth century, it had seemed radical to propose that everything (including matter) was in perpetual fux, by the 1970s, thanks to the accumulated insights of the particle/wave theory of light, thermodynamics, and quantum theory (supported by advances 398

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in mathematics) Bergson’s notion of “duration of the universe,” which afrms the fux of the real, no longer seemed far-fetched.20

Proust with Bergson/Bergson with Proust We had to make the question of infuence explicit, and to evoke its fraught history, if only because it so easily slips back into our thinking, carried by the unconscious assumption of a conventional hierarchy that places philosophy (ideational content) above literature (form). Having brought the issue to light we can now relegate it to the status of what Bergson calls a “false problem,” one “based on an illusion” (B 1335), in this case the illusion of stable identity as it attaches to the proper names “Proust” and “Bergson.” We will now move on to examine how reading Proust with Bergson invites us to read him diferently, and how considering Bergson with Proust can deepen our understanding of the philosopher’s thought. Speaking of duration in connection with the immediate observation of the fux of inner life, Bergson asks in La Pensée et le mouvant: Hadn’t the novelist and the moraliste, advanced further in this direction than philosophy? Perhaps; but only here and there … no one had yet thought to go methodically ‘in search of lost time.’ … But if it is up to literature to undertake the study of inner life [l’âme] concretely in this way, on the basis of individual examples, the obligation of philosophy [devoir de la philosophie] seemed to us to be to pose … the general conditions of the direct and immediate observation of oneself by oneself [de soi par soi]. This inner observation is denatured [ faussée] by the habits that we have contracted. (PM 71, emphasis added) 21 Bergson appropriates Proust’s title here in an ambivalent gesture that both applauds and challenges literature’s claims (and those of Proust in particular) to examine the movements of inner life. But Bergson also challenges philosophy which, he maintains, is even less equipped to adequately address the question. When it tries to talk about the fux of inner life, Bergson maintains, philosophy immobilizes it in a “congélation superfcielle [superfcial congealing/ freezing]” (PM 71). In other words, it spatializes time.22 The signifcant distinction, then, in the passage cited above, is not between philosophy and literature, but between philosophy as it is ordinarily practiced, and as it should be practiced – “the devoir [obligation] of philosophy” (PM 71) that Bergson identifes with the method of intuition. And this is where the question of ready-made concepts comes in. Traditional philosophy depends upon an archive of “ready-made concepts [concepts déj́à faits]” (PM 75) that carve up the real artifcially to render it knowable through authorized (static) categories, logics, and protocols of measurement. This has the efect of crushing duration – of arresting the dynamic force of time, which, for Bergson, is a continuous, ever-changing, force of invention. While traditional philosophy evacuates the concrete time of becoming from its abstract representation of the world, philosophical intuition yields a direct experience of it. Bergson’s philosophy of intuition, in other words, implies a way of knowing what intelligent reason obscures: “pure duration” (PM 71) or the fux of the real. We could say, then, that when Bergson introduces Proust’s title in the above passage, he names not only Proust’s novel but also his own most radical impulse, that is to “fnd true duration again [retrouver la durée vraie]” (PM 78). We could say that Bergson too is in search of lost time, though for him this loss could be said to be epistemological – or even ontological. Reading Proust and Bergson together we will see that both bring to light a loss 399

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that concerns not simply individual past time, but an impoverishment of experience due to alienation from the concretely real. Proust and Bergson not only share an aim – recovering time – they also share a method: intuition. ARTP opens in the dynamic interval between sleep and wakefulness. The Narrator observes his changing mental states as he slowly awakens, slipping back and forth between dream and consciousness, and then, once fully awake, he registers a stream of reminiscences. Watching himself remember will distinguish the two subject positions of Proust’s frst-person novel: the voice of the one who remembers and that of the protagonist of remembered events. In “Le Rêve [Dream],” a lecture he presented in 1901, Bergson observed that this very transition – emerging gradually from sleep – presents a special opportunity for the method of philosophical intuition because it involves events that can only be approached from within. Objective knowledge positions a subject before an object it knows from the outside, thanks to conceptual classifcations and empirical measurements. Internal events, like those of dream, can only be known through self-observation.23 The specifc question Bergson poses in his lecture on dream is this: if, as the philosopher maintained in Matter and Memory, the mind articulates “sensation with the memory it calls forth [le souvenir qu’elle appelle]” (B 890) in both waking perception and dream, how are we to understand the diference between the two?24 Rejecting an abstract approach to the problem – “let’s not place too much faith in theories [ne nous fons pas trop aux théories”] (B 890) the author quips – Bergson turns to the method of intuition. He proposes conducting the following “decisive experiment [expérience] on oneself [sur soi-même]” (B 891): “emerging from dream [au sortir du rêve] … we [on] will closely observe the passage from sleep to wakefulness, following it as closely as possible … we will catch [surpendre] the lingering state of mind of the sleeping man from the perspective of the waking one” (B 891) – as Proust does in the opening pages of his novel. In a discussion of what he presents as one of his own dreams, Bergson dramatizes his ideas, staging a dialogue between his dreaming self and his waking self. 25 The voice of the dreamer explains to his interlocutor that the waking self is tasked with demanding work. It must flter impingements from the outside world and make an intense efort to concentrate attention in preparation for action in the world. The dreamer’s situation, he explains, is quite diferent: “I don’t do anything [ je ne fais rien]” (B 892), the dreamer afrms. And because the dreamer (by defnition) does not act, there is no need to concentrate attention or to make perceptual discriminations. I am “the totality of your past,” the voice of the dreamer informs its waking counterpart. When you dream, “you stop willing [tu cesses de vouloir] (B 893).”26 The juxtaposition of the opening pages of Proust’s novel and Bergson’s essay on dream suggests a shared method of intuition as Bergson defnes it, namely as “direct, immediate, observation of the self by the self ” (PM 71). By proposing a broader horizon of the involuntary – one that includes dreaming, inaction, nonwilling, and an unlimited articulation of sensation and memory that includes the totality of one’s past – Bergson invites us to attend to the way Proust, having initially limited the involuntary to a distinct mode of memory retrieval, will subsequently broaden his treatment of it in discussions of our experience of time passing and, as we shall see, of impressions, and the role these play in making art.

Memory and Duration One reason the opposition between voluntary and involuntary memories recedes in Proust’s novel once Albertine comes on the scene is that the sighting of the adolescent girl introduces a new fgure for memory: memory as a photographer.27 “Memory immediately begins to 400

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take photos [clichés],” Proust writes, “[…] Besides the unremarkable and touching Albertine with whom I had chatted, I could see the mysterious Albertine against the backdrop of the sea … neither seemed truer than the other” (II 230; SYG 454–5 [BG, 526]). Instead of memory retrieval (the issue in Combray) it becomes a question of the production of memory images in a photographic mode, one that cuts into time as it arrives from the future. Memories produced photographically regularly return in the course of the novel – sometimes voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily – in the consciousness of the Narrator/protagonist. The quest for Albertine is launched when Marcel catches a blurry glimpse of her on the beach where she walks with her friends. A chance encounter on the street follows this initial sighting. “She shot me a quick glance” (II 186; SYG 410 [BG, 472]), Marcel/The Narrator recounts. But he is still not completely sure if this girl is the same one he had seen on the beach the day before. For purposes of comparison and identifcation he calls to mind a memory he had produced during his initial encounter with Albertine, a vision of her “halting [ faisant halte] forcing [ forçant] her friends […] to also come to a standstill” (II 186; SYG 410 [BG, 473]). In other words, when Albertine becomes still (or hovers between stillness and movement in a kind of freeze frame, suggested by the present participle) Marcel/the Narrator’s vision captures a still image of her as a memory image that doubles the perceptual image. “This is how I see her to this day,” the Narrator continues, Albertine “standing there […] silhouetted against the background of the sea […] the frst image of her in my memory, a very thin image […] of a face” (II 186; SYG 410 [BG, 473]). Bergson suggests that we usually assume that memory emerges after an experience has been lived. We believe that “the psychological state of the present,” comes frst, and only “when it is no longer,” do we get “the memory of that absent state” (B 913). This is because, thinking in linear (or spatialized) time, we assume that we cannot live in the present and the past at the same time, or, in logical terms, that something cannot be simultaneously present and absent to us.28 Acknowledging the unconventional nature of his own view (quite diferent, for example, from Freud’s theory of the memory trace, where the inscription of a memory follows an experience) Bergson afrms that memories are produced at the moment perception occurs. This is because of the specifc nature of durational time which “splits in two at the same time that it lands [se pose]” (B 917, my emphasis). Concrete becoming (or time as duration) consists precisely in this splitting which Bergson presents as a doubling (in diference) of present and past, of actuality and virtuality, and so of perception and memory. This, Bergson argues, is what accounts for the fact that perceptual images and memory images “are formed together” (B 904). “A memory,” he writes, “appears as if doubling the perception at each instant, coming into being with it, developing at the same time as it,” such that “even as a perception happens its memory emerges at its side, like a shadow” (B 914).29 When we read Proust with Bergson, we recognize that the recurring fgure of memory as a photographer situates us within a durational regime of time from the moment we leave the frame of Proust’s novel and move into the vast “in between” that unfolds within it. This might explain why Proust devotes an entire episode of The Prisoner to Marcel/the Narrator’s experience of this regime of time. Marcel has deferred the work of writing he has promised to do and spends the day alone in his room doing nothing; he simply feels the sunlight, which foods in through his window, on his skin – “the transparent barrier of my thin body” (III 536–7; P 20[C, 22 ]). Proust presents Marcel’s behavior not as procrastination – this is what Charlus judges it to be and many readers follow suit – but as paresse [idleness], which Proust stages as an existential structure that involves an immediate, continuous, experience of the time of concrete becoming.30 As Marcel soaks up sunshine throughout the day, he absorbs time, for his skin registers the qualitative diferences between sensations of heat, light 401

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and atmosphere that continually change as time passes. The changing impressions he receives prompt a food of memories. Marcel/the Narrator experiences an articulation of sensation and memory in its loosest, most unregulated, and most spontaneous, form. Like Bergson’s dreamer, he enjoys an involuntary structure of experience. When we read Proust with Bergson we recognize that the episode of paresse, which initially appears negligible, stages an immediate experience of the existential regime of durational time that governs Proust’s novel more generally, as it moves forward through more than a thousand pages from our hero’s adolescent quest of Albertine to his adult experience of wartime Paris. When we attend to this durational regime of time, we recognize that it opens a path toward a new interpretation of the Recherche: it reveals that in the vast “in between” of his novel, Proust does not propose an escape from time, he reveals a commitment to go more deeply into it.

Te Cinematographic Figure in Bergson and Proust In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson introduces new features of duration. He fgures it as élan vital that faces forward, toward an emerging future, and identifes it with evolutionary becoming, which is to say with life. This view causes epistemological trouble. The philosopher now explicitly insists that “a theory of life” must be accompanied by “a critique of knowledge” (492). Bergson’s critique maintains that intelligence cannot know life (living beings of all sorts and, not incidentally, the planet). Bergson holds that the human faculty of intelligence evolved as a tool for thinking matter, yielding an adaptive advantage that supported dominance over other forms of nature. It emerged, in other words, from within the history of life. Since intelligence conceives knowledge to imply objectivity – knowing something from the outside – intelligence cannot know life because it exists within it. Bergson engages in a sustained critique of intelligence in Creative Evolution that aims not to delegitimize intelligent reason, but to limit the reach of its legitimate application to inert things. He uses the fgure of the cinematograph, a visual technology invented by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, to reveal how intelligent cognition works and to expose its limitations. The cinematograph uses the image frames of chrono-photography – still images captured by cutting into movement at fxed intervals of clock time – and projects them onto a screen at the speed required to yield an illusion of continuous motion. It depends, Bergson writes, upon “stable views cut out from real instability,” which it “artifcially juxtaposes, retroactively, in a homogeneous feld” (B 750). The cinematograph, in other words, is a fgure for intelligence as a cognitive machine designed to spatialize time. 31 It purports to depict time as movement even as, in reality, it suppresses time to the extent that, built up from static moments, it does away with the interval between the frames it juxtaposes. The interval, Bergson insists, is where time (or real movement) happens. It occurs in and as the passage from one frame (or moment) to another. Instead of intuitively “attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things,” Bergson writes, with the cinematographic mechanism of intelligence “we place ourselves outside them to artifcially reconstitute their becoming” [B 761]. The preexisting frames that format static bits of content fgure the ready-made concepts philosophers deploy in arguments that discover nothing new. “It is important to show what kind of representation of reality … the [cinematographic] mechanism yields” (B 761) Bergson insists. He concludes that it constructs an intelligible real, an abstract representation of the world, that alienates us from concrete, or lived, reality. If Bergson is in search of lost time, then, it is because concrete becoming has been evacuated from the abstract knowledge that constructs our representation of the world. The time he is in search of – the time that has been lost – is the concrete becoming of real duration that 402

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intelligent reason increasingly withdraws from our experience and which is essential for knowing life. What is at stake in Bergson’s search for lost time, in other words, is reality itself. Proust introduces his own critique of the cinematographic regime when he undertakes to revise and correct the Narrator’s speculation that involuntary memory performs an escape from time.32 In TR Marcel/the Narrator famously experiences a series of involuntary memory events that bring him immense joy, a joy last felt thousands of pages earlier in the Madeleine episode of Combray. In Combray, our Narrator never solved the mystery of this joy. He examines it now.33 Upon refection, he determines that this joy is due to an escape from time that the experience of involuntary memory makes possible. Critics turn to these pages to attest to Proust’s idealist esthetics. We will examine them here as one moment in what becomes a complex and sustained process of self-correction that unfolds in the defnitive version of TR. The Narrator analyzes the involuntary memory experience this way: when the mind articulates sensation and memory in this aleatory experience, the sensation associated with the memory that returns belongs to the present and to the past. Because it is “common, at once, to the past and the present” (IV 449; FTA 179 [TR, 222]) it is not subject to the framework of either register of time. Our Narrator takes this to mean that involuntary memory gives us something outside time, en dehors du temps (IV 449; FTA 179 [TR, 222]). And to this extent, he concludes, it could be said to give us the essences of things. More precisely, we are able to grasp these essences because we also experience ourselves to be outside time in the involuntary memory experience. “A minute liberated from the order of time,” Proust writes “… has recreated in us, in order to feel it [a récrée en nous pour la sentir] the man liberated from the order of time” [“l’homme afranchi de l’ordre du temps” (IV 451; FTA 181 [TR, 224–5]). This is what explains the intense joy that involuntary memory events produce and this is how ARTP becomes a novel about escaping from time into an eternal realm of essences. We note, however, that it is not a question of liberation from time, here, but, as the Narrator specifes twice, liberation “from the order of time” (IV 451; FTA 181 [TR, 224], my emphasis). Reading with Bergson, we might take this to mean not being outside time altogether, but being liberated from a regime of time that orders events in a linear fashion – spatialized time. In any case Proust’s Narrator immediately draws out the ironic implications of this confation of a minute and eternity. He characterizes the vision of eternity just evoked as an illusion – a “trompe-l’oeil” – because it “didn’t last [ne durait pas]” (IV 452; FTA 181 [TR, 225]). It passed with “la durée d’un éclair [the duration a lightening fash]” (IV 451; FTA 180[TR, 224]). As if to ensure that we grasp the comic edge of this development, Proust belabors the point: “The contemplation,” he writes, “though of eternity, was feeting [quoique d’éternité, était fugitive]” (IV 454; FTA 182 [TR, 227–8]). From a Bergsonian perspective, the ephemerality that characterizes the involuntary memory experience would not provide the occasion for an escape from time, but, in its very transience or ephemerality, an opportunity to enter more fully into it. In Bergson’s terms, we could say it would ofer us an experience of the interval – the actual passage of time – that is evacuated by the cinematographic mechanism. But what about the mysterious feeling of joy? Abandoning the metaphysical perspective, the Narrator proceeds to take up the question of joy in connection with art making, instead of memory. This is where the analysis of impressions comes in. An impression, Proust’s Narrator explains, is a material sensation that marks us internally. “Every impression is double,” (IV 470; FTA 200 [TR, 248]) he insists, because it belongs both to the thing in the external world that produces a sensation in us and to our psyche, which receives the sensation, 403

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experiences it, and registers a memory of it. Impressions are immanent; they give us not the essences of things but “reality as we have felt it [sentie]” (IV 459; FTA 189 [TR, 235]). The task of the artist is to translate these impressions and develop them, through refection, into a work of art.34 But to do this the artist must frst grasp the authenticity of the impressions received. This is not a simple matter. The very nature of reality is at stake in the determination of what Proust will refer to as “true impressions” (IV 475; FTA 205 [TR, 254]) as distinct from “factitious” (IV 448; FTA 201 [TR, 221]) ones, which he identifes with what he calls a “cinematographic vision” (IV 468; FTA 198 [TR, 246]) of reality. “An hour is not just an hour,” Proust writes, it is a vessel full of perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously, a relationship that is suppressed in a simple cinematographic vision […] If reality were this kind of residue [déchet] of experience, more or less identical for everybody, because when we talk about bad weather, a war, a cabstand, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden in fower, everybody knows what we mean, if reality were just that, then no doubt some cinematographic flm of things would be enough. […] But was that really what reality was [était-ce bien cela, la réalité]?” (IV 467–8; FTA 198 [TR, 245–7], my emphasis) Reality is at stake in Proust’s challenge to “cinematographic vision” (IV 468; FTA 198 [TR, 246]), as it was in Bergson’s critique of the cinematographic illusion. And in the Recherche, as in Bergson, the question of what reality really is – était-ce bien cela, la réalité?” (IV 468; FTA 198[TR, 247]) – concerns time. If “an hour is not just an hour” – a uniform measure of time  – it is because a lived hour is reality – “what we call reality” (IV 467; FTA 198 [TR, 245]) – as a qualitative multiplicity of “perfumes, sounds, plans and atmospheres” that we experience through diferential nuances of sensation (IV 467; FTA 198 [TR, 245]). This is what Proust taught us, as we have seen, in the episode of Marcel’s paresse. Proust suggests that time unfurls the real to us as the ongoing, ever-changing, interaction between sensation and memory, the two facets of impressions.35 To this capacious sense of the real as what time brings to us, Proust opposes a factitious reality – a “simple cinematographic vision” (IV 468; FTA 198 [TR, 246]) – that covers over the qualitative multiplicity of experience, and alienates us from the real. The cinematographic vision, Proust writes, suppresses (or does away with) [supprime] (IV 468; FTA 197 [TR, 246]) relations between sensation and memory. It formats experience according to a chronological temporal order and a normative conceptual, or discursive, practice. When we are subject to this cinematographic regime of the real an hour becomes just an hour – an abstract container, a universally recognized unit of measurement. And in this factitious regime, which Proust will go on to associate with the social world, our language signifes what everybody already knows (and, implicitly, what no one really feels). Reading Proust with Bergson helps us grasp that what is at stake here is the very nature of reality. It is a question not merely of our capacity to represent reality, but of our ability to experience it. In contrast to the dynamic reality of concrete impressions, the cinematographic vision results in an impoverishment of experience – limiting us to a mere husk “déchet [residue]” (IV 468; FTA 198 [TR, 246–7]) of the real.36 “But was that really what reality was?” (IV 468; FTA 198[TR, 247]), Proust asks. The virtue of impressions has to do with their immediacy. They are not tied to readymade expressions or social norms, they are “made in us by reality itself ” (IV 458; FTA 404

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188 [TR, 234]). And so Proust tries out the idea that they are intrinsically authentic, that they compose an “inner book,” (IV 458; FTA 187[TR, 233]) of our “true life [vraie vie]” (IV 459; FTA 189[TR, 235]). Picking up the question of joy again, the Narrator explains that the inner book that “reality has dictated to us [que nous ai dicté la réalité]” (IV 458; FTA 188[TR, 234]) produces in us “the joy of fnding the real again [la joie du réel retrouvé]” (IV 458; FTA 187[TR, 233]). 37 The joy initially attributed to the exceptional, aleatory, and subjective experience of involuntary memory now attaches to a recuperation of immanence. But if life already gives us the truth of the real through impressions – accompanied by a feeling of joy at refnding it – why would we need art? Proust’s critical work of correction has not yet fully run its course. Having challenged the idealist myth of transcendence, his Narrator will go on to also challenge the myth of immediacy.38 Proust’s practice of self-correction kicks into high gear when he writes that we live at a distance from our own true life [vraie vie] (IV 459; FTA 189[TR, 235]) which he characterizes as “la réalité loin de laquelle nous vivons [the reality far from which we live] (IV 474; FTA 204 [TR, 253]). We live “dispossessed [détourné] of ourselves” (IV 474; FTA 205[TR, 254]), Proust’s Narrator insists, because of the habits of thought and language that social life instills in us. “Vanity, passion, intelligence and habit” produce a sediment of “nomenclatures,” and “practical goals that we falsely call life” (IV 474–5; FTA 205 [TR, 254]). These “accumulate [s’amassent]” (IV 474; FTA 205[TR, 254]) within us and cover over “our true impressions” (IV 474; FTA 205[TR, 254]). The truth of our “true life,” (IV 459; FTA 189[TR, 235]), then, does not imply an essential truth, it signifes in relation to a false regime of reality – a “lie [mensonge]” (IV 473; FTA 204 [TR, 253]) – that Proust identifes with the cinematographic regime. 39 False reality is one in which “imprecise [inexactes] expressions,” ones “in which nothing of what we have really experienced remains,” come to “constitute our thought [pensée], our life, our reality” (IV 473; FTA 203 [TR, 253]). This is the world in which an hour is just an hour – the world, we could say, of ennui. Here the problem is the disparity that exists between our lived experience and the language required to communicate it in the social world. But this is not just a problem of communication, because these ready-made concepts structure our very experience in a way that alienates us from the real, placing us at a remove from it.

Critical Art Finding the real again, then, does not come easily. It is not simply a matter of pulling away from the practical demands of social life as Marcel does when he remains home alone in a state of sweet paresse. To make art from one’s lived impressions it is necessary to scrape away the false overlay that encrusts them. Making art, in other words, involves a critical practice of undoing: “The work that our vanity, our passion, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits, had done is the work that art will undo [défera]” (IV 475; FTA 205 [TR, 255]).40 Art, as Proust’s Narrator conceives it here, involves neither transcendence nor an easy immediacy of the real, “it means […] returning to the depths where what really existed lies unrecognized within us” (IV 475; FTA 205[TR, 255]). And this requires a critical work of exfoliation, a work of undoing that is not reducible to negation. Critical art requires that the artist “give up [abroger] his [or her] most dearly held illusions,” (IV 475; FTA 205[TR, 255]); it requires that one cease “to believe in the objectivity of one’s own elaborations [ce qu’on a élaboré soi-même]” (IV 475; FTA 205[TR, 255]). It necessitates, in other words, something like the work of self-correction and revision, that we have been following in the spiraling path of the Narrator’s refections on making art in ARTP. 405

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One might think Proust had gone quite far enough in this unremitting work of critical undoing, but there remains one more cherished illusion to give up before Proust’s Narrator ushers us into the Guermantes Matinée: the illusion of the individual self that lies at the heart of all the others. The work of making art includes not only reading and interpreting one’s inner book, not only a critical work of undoing factitious substitutes for lived experiences, but also reading and interpreting one’s own impressions as signs of “so many laws and ideas” (IV 457; FTA 187[TR, 232]). It is necessary, in other words, to undo the unity of the self and, in so doing, to pass to a level of generality. This does not involve a conceptual leap from individual to collective identity, or an appeal to universal truth, for these would draw us back into the cinematographic framework. What pertains here is not a concept of generality but a “feeling of the general” (IV 480; FTA 209 [TR, 261], my emphasis). What is at stake is something like a generality of feeling for, as our Narrator puts it, it is a matter of “extracting […] the generality of our sorrow [chagrin]” (IV 480; FTA 210[TR, 262]). How can there be a generality within one’s own passions? Perhaps because we have “various selves that die successively in us” (IV 476; FTA 206 [TR, 256]). No stable unifed subject attaches to what Proust calls the true life because the self is constantly changing as it moves through time. In other words there exists a generality within our own passions because we live in time –the time of becoming. Passing to the level of passionate generality requires the passing of time. “Everyone feels it to be true,” we read near the very end of the Recherche, “that we occupy an ever increasing [sans cesse accrue] place in Time [dans le Temps] and this universality can only give me joy because it is true, the truth suspected by each of us [soupçonnée par chacun] that I was obliged to elucidate”. (IV 623; FTA 355[TR, 448–9], my emphasis) In place of a conceptual universality, we have the shared experience of time passing and its work of alteration. This is what ARTP elucidates. Lived time “is not something measurable” (IV 623; FTA 356 [TR, 449]) the Narrator insists; an hour is not just an hour, it is embodied time [du temps incorporé] (IV 623; FTA 356[TR, 449]). This is what Proust fgures through the living stilts the Narrator imagines the Duc de Guermantes to precariously move about on in his old age. Because time never stops passing, these stilts are “continually getting taller/older [grandissant sans cesse] sometimes higher than steeples, in the end making it hard to walk, and dangerous, and from which, all of a sudden” (IV 625; FTA 358[TR, 451]) we fall. Time lodges in us and then “withdraws itself from the body” (IV 624; FTA 357[TR, 450]) at death, along with desire and memory. We do not escape from time, Proust suggests, we exist in it – dans le Temps (IV 625; FTA 355 [TR, 451]). Embracing time and its passing is what makes passion possible – vitality and a desire to live.41

Conclusion Reading Proust with Bergson produces an interpretative circuitry that runs through the Recherche like paths of electric current, lighting up a confguration of singular efects. Taken individually, these might seem to be eccentric – or unremarkable – details. Taken together they suggest a reading of Proust that challenges the one we are used to: instead of a redemptive Proust we fnd a fercely critical one. Although we have proposed various sites of encounter (and levels of resonance) between Proust and Bergson we don’t want to suggest that the two fgures are saying the same thing. 406

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Instead, we want to emphasize one fundamental insight they share, namely that engagement with time as continuous change requires a critical relation to language. In the case of Proust, this places the familiar emphasis on style in a new light. It is not to be understood as an infatuation with metaphor or a performance of literary virtuosity as formal excess. As our Narrator insists, style “is a question not of technique but of vision [...] It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative diference there is in the way the world appears to us” (IV 474; FTA 204 [TR, 254]). This phrasing implies an appeal to the specifc vision of an individual artist. But Proust’s poetics of impressions suggests that style might also be taken to concern attention to qualitative diference more generally and to what is required of language to convey it. Style, as revelation of qualitative diference, would then be what distinguishes critical art from the “factitious careers [vocations] of writers and artists” (IV 471; FTA 201[TR, 250]) because it mitigates the alienating efects of the “cinematographic vision” of reality and its associated language practices. Considered from this perspective, it becomes an instrument of resistance that supports the critical work it is the task of living art to perform, namely to enable contact with the real in a mode of passionate generality. Reading Proust with Bergson, for whom qualitative diference explicitly belongs to the experience of duration, we could say that for Proust style is what lets time in to acts of writing and reading. Style, in this precise sense, is what rescues writers (and their readers) from the impoverishment of experience that both Proust and Bergson expose through the fgure of the cinematographic and associate with ready-made concepts. Proust’s sustained and meticulous engagement with pastiche, which exposes factitious literary gestures through calculated imitation, could be taken to exemplify art as undoing in a comic mode. But indications of the critical power of Proust’s art are not hard to fnd in ARTP. In Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette is forced to admit that the Recherche cannot be contained within his narrative categories. He notes that “Proustian narrative does not leave any of the traditional narrative movements intact,” and afrms that, at moments, Proust’s narrative maneuvers “elude … all analysis, and even all defnition.”42 In what appears to be more than a passing moment of pique, he characterizes the Recherche as a “novel of Time ruled, captured, bewitched, surreptitiously subverted, or better: perverted.”43 Reading Proust with Bergson we can understand Proust’s narrative transgressions as a critical practice of strategic undoing of constructions of (false) reality and its ordering of time. 44 Proust not only undoes the narrative order upon which Genette’s intelligent theorization depends, he undoes continuous narration of any kind by sporadically cutting into it with discursive digressions. He folds temporal progress through anachronism (a fundamental structure of Proust’s novel), creates tension and ambiguity by manipulating (and sometimes obscuring) the limits between verbal tenses, pressures pronouns by multiplying subordinate clauses, and stretches the unit (and unity) of the sentence through syntactic manipulation – all with astonishing precision.45 This work on language complements Proust’s reluctance to conform to the conventions of any genre. He brings together features of the novel, autobiography, pastiche, the philosophical essay, the prose poem, caricature and perhaps even confession, generating an idiosyncratic and dynamically hybrid work of “living art” (IV 475; FTA 205 [TR, 254]) that, like the Duc’s living stilts, keeps growing till the very end. Proust’s commitment, we could say, is not to write about time (borrowing the ideas of a philosopher of time) but to write time – to bring the concrete time of becoming into writing. This might begin to explain why Proust’s novel is so long. What else could account for the scale of this still unfnished work? Bergson, for his part, could be said to write at the limit of philosophy. “A philosopher worthy of the name,” he announces in “L’Intuition philosophique [Philosophical Intuition]” 407

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(coyly alluding to himself in the third person) “has never said but one thing: indeed he [or she] has tried to say it [cherché à le dire] more than actually said it” (B 1350). Bergson goes on to explain that “the whole complexity of his thought [doctrine] … is nothing but the incommensurability of his simple intuition [the intuition of duration] and the means available to him to express it” (B 1347). The problem, he writes, is that “the elimination of time” is the “habitual, normal and banal activity of our faculty of understanding [entendement],” and that since philosophy depends upon concepts of the understanding that have been “deposited in language in advance” (PM 103), it is impossible to discursively transmit the intuition of duration. He poses the problem of incommensurability, in other words, not in terms of an inefability (or sublimity) of what needs to be said, but in terms of the specifc constraints of the instruments available for expression – the protocols of conceptual thought and language associated with what he calls the “cognitive apparatus” (B 753) and fgures through the cinematographic machine. The complexity of Bergson’s thinking, then, has to do with the strategies required to deal with this incommensurability. We have indicated his recourse to dramatization, and shown in the case of the cinematographic fgure in Creative Evolution that he uses images not only to enhance, or enliven, his writing but, more importantly, to frame and advance his arguments.46 As he explains in “L’intuition philosophique [Philosophical Intuition],” images serve as intermediaries between intuitions and concepts. They are to be considered instruments of thought, not stylistic or rhetorical embellishments. Bergson is known to have preferred the essay to the philosophical treatise, because it is a form that supports “conversational style [style parlé],” and analogical reasoning – “suivons le fl de l’analogie!” (B 819) the philosopher enjoins his readers in a frst-person plural. The essay form supports the emphasis Bergson gives to the rhythm and punctuation of his sentences. Like Proust, he aims to “deactivate [déjouer]” the “traps of ordinary language,” as one scholar has noted, and to “wrench [arracher]” the reader away from “ready-made language [langage tout fait].”47 Since the intuition of duration cannot be directly stated, Bergson characterizes the development of his own thought as a movement of departure and return – of “zig zag” (B 1348) – through which his thinking (as he puts it in strikingly Proustian terms) “loses itself, fnds itself again and corrects itself indefnitely (B 1348).48 In short, as Gilles-Philippe argues, Bergson’s writing practice cannot be reduced to a matter of stylistics; it poses “the question of the very possibility of philosophical discourse.”49 “We understand [on comprend],” Bergson summarizes, with admirable precision, “that fxed concepts can be extracted from mobile reality by our thinking; but there is no way to reconstitute the mobility of the real with the fxity of concepts” (B 1421, original emphasis). In search of a new kind of knowledge, one that could accommodate the fux of the real, Bergson undertakes, as Frédéric Worms has elegantly put it, to “reintroduce time into knowledge.”50 This requires a critical energy that, like the artist’s work of undoing as Proust conceives it, can be ferce. As Bergson writes in La Pensée et le mouvant, once again sounding a lot like Proust, the new knowledge of intuition, requires “that the mind [l’esprit] do violence to itself [se violente], that it reverse the direction/meaning [sens] of its habitual way of thinking, that it ceaselessly overturn, or rather recast/melt down [refondre] its categories” (B 1421–2). By doing this, he adds, the mind “can arrive at fuid concepts, capable of following reality in all its sinuosities” (B 1421–2). Bergson’s commitment to the intuition of duration implies an investment in vitality that protests the reduction of diference to sameness and of life to death. As a “movement emptied of mobility which is what gave it life” (B 1418), Bergson maintains, spatialized time, as the “intemporal essence of time” (B 1418), amounts to an “eternity of death” (B 1418).51 408

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Proust’s example of the deadening character of conventional reality is that we say of a young girl “she was very nice,” when what we felt was “I enjoyed kissing her” (IV 475; FTA 205[TR, 255]). If Proust wants to bring time into writing, it is because real time – time conceived durationally, in terms of qualitative diference – supports desire, “the only thing that makes one take any interest in the existence or character of a person” (III 584; P 65–6 [C, 79]). Desire enhances our interest in living; to embrace being in time as continuous change is to embrace desire with all its associated joy and misery. It is to embrace our many selves and accede to the “the feeling of the general” (IV 480; FTA 209 [TR, 261]) – or passionate generality – through fctional singularity. In other words, if Proust wants to bring time into writing it is, at least in part, because time is erotic for him. Bergson wouldn’t put things this way. He might speak of agency and freedom, as these require the vitality of a passionate self, of life itself, or of mystical love, as he does in The Two Sources. But perhaps these all go together. What distinguishes both Proust and Bergson in my experience is the intense pleasure one can take in rereading them, not to refnd, or repeat, anything, but because one inevitably discovers something new.

Notes 1 My thanks to Anna Elsner and Thomas Stern for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay. 2 On Proust and Schopenhauer, see Anne Henry, Marcel Proust – théorie pour une esthétique (Paris: Klinksieck, 1981); on Proust and Merleau – Ponty, see Anne Simon, Proust ou le réel retrouvé (Paris: PUF, 2000); on Proust and Nietzsche, see Joshua Landy, “Nietzsche, Proust and Will to Ignorance,” Philosophy and Literature 26.1 (April 2002): 1–23. On Proust and Gabriel Tarde, see Luc Fraisse, “Une sociologie transfgurée: Marcel Proust lecteur de Gabriel Tarde,” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France 88.4 (1988): 710–36. 3 Vladimir Jankélévitch, Henri Bergson, 247 (my translation). 4 In “Le Symbolisme Bergsonien du temps dans l’œuvre de Proust” (PMLA volume LV:4, 1940), Fernand Vial takes Proust’s “debt to Bergson” for granted, 1193 (my translation). Citing an earlier study (Louis Reynaud’s La Crise de notre littérature, 1929), Vial writes that “Marcel Proust transported bergsonism into literature,” 1212 (my translation). 5 Françoise Fabre-Luce de Gruson, in “Bergson et Proust,” 235 (my translation). In fact, Bergson does make a distinction between “voluntary memory” and what he calls “spontaneous memory” in Matter and Memory, Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: PUF 1959) 233. Subsequent references to this volume will be given in the text marked B (all translations mine). 6 Proust was responding to criticism that his writing was chaotically digressive. Christine Cano indicates that Proust had portrayed his work as a series of prose poems in his presentation of pre-publication excerpts of Du Côté de Chez Swann in various reviews. She notes that Proust published excerpts from Swann’s Way in Le Figaro in 1912 (and subsequently in other reviews) as part of a “publicity measure,” Proust’s Deadline, 26, 27. 7 Alain de Lattre poses this question in “La mémoire retrouvée,” and concludes that “there is not the least connection between Proust’s distinction between two memories and Bergson’s distinction between two memories,” 270. 8 Nathalie Aubert raises this question in “Proust et Bergson: La mémoire du corps,” Revue de littérature comparée no. 338 (2011/2012): 133–9. 9 See for example Floris Delattre, “Bergson et Proust. Accords et dissonances” in Les Etudes Bergsoniennes, vol 1, 1948. For further reference, see Joyce N. Megay, “Bibliographie critique sur la question de l’infuence de Bergson sur Proust,” Proust Research Association Newsletter no. 12 (1974): 14–21 and Pete A.Y. Gunter’s Henri Bergson: A Bibliography 1911–1980. 10 Joyce N. Megay, Bergson et Proust: essai de mise au point de la question de l’infuence de Bergson sur Proust (Paris: J. Vrin, 1976). 11 References to Proust’s work are provided in the following form in this chapter: references to the French Pléiade edition are followed by references to the appropriate volume of the Penguin translation, here of Finding Time Again (FTA), with references to the Vintage Moncrief translation

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provided in parentheses. The Penguin translation has been chosen, as in various instances, the wording of the Moncrief translation contains discrepancies that are philosophically signifcant and are at play in the argument I am making concerning Proust and Bergson. The English translations given in the various Penguin volumes have frequently been modifed. Christine Cano, Proust’s Deadline, 20. Nathalie Mauriac Dyer discusses the ofcial recognition of the unfnished status of Proust’s novel in Proust inachevé. Le dossier ‘Albertine disparue’” (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 14. Cited by Christine Cano in Proust’s Deadline, 12 Cited in Cano, Proust’s Deadline, 13. In Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), Antoine Compagnon explains that “from 1909–1911 …Time Regained was integrated into Combray; the last chapter existed virtually [en puissance] in the frst,” 10 (my translation). Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant. Ed. Caterina Zanf, 79. Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text marked PM (all translations from this work are mine). Concerning Bergson’s multi-disciplinary research, see Larry Sommer McGrath, Making Spirit Matter, Neurology, Psychology and Selfhood in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020); P. A. Y. Gunter, ed. Bergson and the Evolution of Physics; Milič Čapek, Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation (Dordrecht: Nijhof, 1971); Philippe Gallois and Gérard Forzy, eds. Bergson et les neurosciences (Paris: I’Institut Synthélab, 1997) and Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity. Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Ed. Robin Durie (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 1999) 43 (my emphasis). Deleuze, Bergsonism, 116. The New Bergson. Ed. John Mullarkey, appeared in 1999 (Manchester: Manchester UP). Bergson, Duration and Simultaneity, 31 (my emphasis). My translation. Françoise Fabre-Luce de Gruson signals this passage in her “Bergson et Proust,” 246. For Bergson’s notion of the spatialization of time – its abstract representations of time as juxtaposition in space – see Frédéric Worms, Bergson ou les deux sens de la Vie and Suzanne Guerlac, Thinking in Time, chapters 2 and 3. This is being challenged, during Bergson’s lifetime (as he well knew) by contemporary research into experimental psychology. See McGrath, Making Spirit Matter, Neurology, Psychology and Selfhood in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Bergson’s formula in his essay on dream, when he speaks of the mind’s articulation of “sensation with the memory it calls forth [le souvenir qu’elle appelle]” (B 890), rephrases the analysis of perception he presents in Matter and Memory; it also aligns with the structure of involuntary memory in Proust’s novel. It is especially pertinent, as we shall see, to Proust’s analysis of impressions in TR. Dramatization is a philosophical gesture for Bergson: “Instead of manipulating [his ideas] … as if they were indiferent symbols,” he writes in On Laughter (of the fgure he calls an Homme d’esprit, and which he portrays as a kind of artist/thinker), he “sees them, hears them and above all makes them dialogue with one another as if they were people [comme des personnes]. He stages them [les met en scène]” (B 437). Dramatization provides an alternative to reliance on “indiferent symbols,” or ready -made concepts. Readers of Bergson will recognize that the voice of the dreamer recapitulates, in the simplest possible terms, the principal ideas Bergson expounded in Matter and Memory. There he defnes the past as that which no longer acts, identifes the two extremes of mental life as action and dream; defnes dream as “the whole of mental life, minus the efort of concentration [la vie mentale toute entière, moins l’efort de concentration]” (893), explains that action concentrates attention, whereas the dream slackens it; introduces a notion of Pure Memory as the totality of one’s past that remains virtually real or present; and ties the act of perception to a passage from virtual, or unconscious memory, to a memory image that contributes to the act of perception through an operation Bergson calls “attentive recognition [la reconnaissance de l’attention]” (B 244). Bergson refers a “faculty of mental photography” (B 233) in Matter and Memory, referencing (in a note) the British physician Mortimer Granville’s book Ways of Remembering (1879). This is why the experience of déj́à vu is considered anomalous. Bergson investigates memory production in his essay entitled “Le souvenir du présent et la fausse reconnaissance [memory of the present and false recognition],” (1908) that examines this phenomenon.

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Proust and Bergson 29 Bergson sees the anomalous phenomenon of déjà vu (which occurs when a perceptual impression and a memory image overlap in a “memory of the present,” (B 897)) as empirical validation of his analysis of attentive recognition in Matter and Memory, which theorized temporal synthesis and proposed the articulation of perception and memory in an event of recognition. Bergson alludes to this in his essay on dream. See my discussion in Proust Photography and the Time of Life, chapters 7–9. 30 For a more detailed discussion of this scene see my Proust, Photography and the Time of Life, 119–25. 31 See note 21 above concerning the concept of spatialization. 32 We are alluding to “composition as the deferred correction of a frst impression” (Christine Cano, 20) mentioned at the beginning of this essay. 33 These developments belong to the passages transposed from Combray to TR as mentioned at the beginning of this essay. TR was subjected to additions and revisions after 1909. 34 Proust will shift from fgures of inscription and translation – “The obligation and task of the writer are those of a translator” (IV 469; FTA 199 [TR, 247]) – back to the photographic register he invoked in the fgure for memory. He writes that everyone’s past “is encumbered with innumerable photo plates [clichés] that remain useless “because refection has “never ‘developed’ them” (IV 474; FTA 204 [TR, 254]). This reiterates the fgure of the invisible latent image he introduces on the occasion of Marcel’s introduction to Albertine at Elstir’s party. 35 This recalls the formula we cited from Bergson’s essay on Dream: “sensation and the memory it calls to/calls forth [appelle]” (B 890). 36 I am alluding to Benjamin’s notion of a poverty – or “atrophy,” – of experience in modern life (Illuminations, 159). For a discussion of Benjamin, Proust, and Bergson see my Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life, chapter 9. 37 See on this subject Anne Simon’s Proust ou le réel retrouvé. 38 Given the title of Bergson’s frst book, Les Données immédiates de l’expérience (translated as Time and Free Will) the challenge to a myth of immediacy suggests a challenge to Bergson, although Bergson emphasizes the alienating efects of the social world and the difculty of achieving immediate experience. 39 The full citation reads: c’est la chaîne de toutes ces expressions inexactes où ne reste rien de ce que nous avons réellement éprouvé, qui constitue pour nous notre pensée, notre vie, notre réalité, c’est ce mensonge-là que ne ferait que reproduire un art soi-disant ‘vécu’ [It is the sequence of all these inexact expressions in which nothing remains of what we really experienced, that constitutes our thought for us, our life, our reality, it is this very lie [mensonge] that a so called art of ‘lived experience’ only reproduces]. (IV 473; FTA 203–4 [TR, 253]) 40 We might consider Marcel/the Narrator’s extensive critical refection on the identity of Albertine after her death, in which he undoes the fctional character the novel constructed, from this perspective. See my Proust, Photography, and the Time of Life, 115–6. 41 In the scene of Marcel’s paresse (mentioned above), the Narrator says that absorbing sunlight (and time) give him a desire to live. 42 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse, 112, 144. https://archive.org/stream/NarrativeDiscourseAnEssayInMethod/NarrativeDiscourse-AnEssayInMethod_djvu.txt 43 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 160. 44 Genette, Narrative Discourse, 155. 45 The reader encounters many of these gestures in my Proust, Photography and the Time of Life. 46 Jean-François Bordron makes this point in “Bergson et les images. L’iconicité de la pensée dans “Le possible et le réel,” in Lire Bergson “Le possible et le réel”. Ed. Frédéric Cossutta (Paris: PUF 1998), 17. All translations from this volume are mine. 47 Dominique Maingueneau, “‘Le Possible et le réel’: Quel genre de texte?” in Lire Bergson, “Le possible et le réel,” Ed. Cossutto, 38, 40, 39 (original emphasis). 48 This resonates with Proust’s characterization of Albertine as “frst desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again” (SYG 410), a movement that corresponds to the plot of the Recherche and to the structure Proust identifed with involuntary memory in the madeleine episode of Combray. 49 Gilles Philippe “Théorie du Lexique et pratiques d’écriture: les gloses métadiscursives dans ‘Le possible et le réel” in Cossutta (1998), 199.

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Suzanne Guerlac 50 Frédéric Worms “Annexe,” in Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant. Ed. Caterina Zanf (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2020) 173. 51 For Bergson duration not only implies life, it yields a correct view of reality. The mathematics of calculus, has achieved this correct view, Bergson insists, one that “substitutes what is in the process of happening [ce qui se fait]” for “what has already happened/is ready made [tout fait],” in order to “grasp movement not from the outside … but from within [du dedans] … to adopt the mobile continuity of things” (B 1422). The philosophy of intuition, Bergson maintained, would bring metaphysics closer to the truths of advanced mathematics and physics.

Works Consulted Aubert, Nathalie. 2011/2012. “Proust et Bergson: La mémoire du corps.” Revue de littérature comparée (numéro 388) 133–9. Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations. Tr. Harry Zone. New York: Schocken Books. Bergson, Henri. 1959. Œuvres. Paris: PUF. Bergson, Henri. 1999. Duration and Simultaneity, Bergson and the Einsteinian Universe. Ed. Robin Durie. Manchester: Clinamen Press. Bergson, Henri. 2020. La Pensée et le mouvant, présentation par Caterina Zanf. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Bordron, Jean-François. 1998. “Bergson et les images. L’iconicité de la pensée dans ‘Le possible et le réel,’” in Lire Bergson “Le Possible et le réel. Ed. Cossutta. Paris: PUF, 159–83. Cano, Christine. 2006. Proust’s Deadline. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Čapek, Milič. 1971. Bergson and Modern Physics: A Reinterpretation and Re-evaluation. Dordecht: Nijhof. Compagnon, Antoine. 1989. Proust entre deux siècles. Paris: Seuil. Cossutta, Frédéric. Ed. 1998. Lire Bergson “Le Possible et le réel”. Paris: PUF. De Gruson, Françoise Fabre-Luce. 1962. “Proust et Bergson,” in Entretiens sur Marcel Proust. Actes du Colloque Cérisy sur Marcel Proust. Ed. Georges Cattaui and Philip Kolb. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 234–46. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111553610= De Lattre, Alain. 1993. “La mémoire retrouvée.” Bulletin de L’Association Guillaume Budé, 169–88. Delattre, Floris. 1948. “Bergson et Proust. Accords et dissonances.” Les Etudes Bergsoniennes, 1. Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. Dyer, Nathalie Mauriac. 2005. Proust Inachevé. Le dossier “Albertine disparue.” Paris: Honoré Champion. Fraisse, Luc. 1988. “Une sociologie transfgurée: Marcel Proust lecteur de Gabriel Tarde.” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de la France, 88.4: 710–36. Fraisse, Luc. 2013. L’Eclecticisme philosophique de Marcel Proust. Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris Sorbonne. Fraisse, Luc. 2015. “Proust est-il un philosophe?” Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, 42.3: M159–73. ISSN 0137-2475, eISSN 2084-4158 Received: 27.02.2014/Accepted: 3.07.2= Gallois, Philippe and Gérard Forzy. Eds. 1997. Bergson et les neurosciences. Paris: Institute Synthélab. Genette, Gérard. 1980. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Tr. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. https://archive.org/stream/NarrativeDiscourseAnEssayInMethod/NarrativeDiscourseAnEssayInMethod_djvu.txt Guerlac, Suzanne. 2006. Thinking in Time. An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Guerlac, Suzanne. 2021. Proust, Photography and the Time of Life. Ravaisson, Bergson, Simmel. London: Bloomsbury. Guerlac, Suzanne, 2022. “Duration: A Fluid Concept,” in The Bergsonian Mind. Ed. Mark Sinclair and Yaron Wolf. London: Routledge, 45–54. Guerlac, Suzanne (2022). “Thinking with Bergson: The Last Problem: The Planet and What it Is to Know.” Bergsoniana, 2. https://doi.org/10.4000/bergsoniana Gunter, P. A. Y. Ed. 1971. Bergson and the Evolution of Physics. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Gunter, Pete A. Y. 1981. Henri Bergson: A Bibliography 1911–1980. Philosophy Research Archives 7:644–815. Henry Anne. 2000. Marcel Proust – théorie pour une esthétique. Paris: Klincksieck. Jankélévitch, Vladimir. 1959. Henri Bergson. Paris: PUF. Kolb, Philip. 1973. “Review of Henri Peyre, Marcel Proust.” Romanic Review 64.1: 70. Landy, Joshua. 2002. “Nietzsche, Proust and Will to Ignorance.” Philosophy and Literature 26.1: 1–232.

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Proust and Bergson Landy, Joshua. 2004. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust. New York: Oxford UP. Maingueneau, Dominique. 1998. “‘Le possible et le réel’ quel genre de texte?” in Lire Bergson ‘Le Possible et le réel’. Ed. Cossutta. Paris: PUF, 159–83. McGrath, Larry Sommer. 2020. Making Spirit Matter. Neurology, Psychology and Selfhood in Modern France. Chicago: Chicago UP. Megay, Joyce N. 1973. “La Question de l’Infuence de Bergson sur Proust.” Bulletin of Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, 27.2: 53–58. Megay, Joyce N. 1974. “Bibliographie critique sur la question de l’infuence de Bergson sur Proust.” Proust Research Association Newsletter, No. 12: 14–21. Megay, Joyce N. 1976. Bergson et Proust: essai de mise au point de la question de l’infuence de Bergson sur Proust. Paris: J. Vrin. Mullarkey, John. Ed. 1999. The New Bergson. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Philippe, Gilles. 1998. “Théorie du Lexique et pratique d’écriture: les gloses métadiscursives dans ‘Le Possible et le réel’”, in Lire Bergson: “Le possible et le réel.” Ed. Frédéric Cossutta. Paris: PUF, 201–17. Proust, Marcel. 2003. The Prisoner and the Fugitive. Tr. Carol Clark. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Penguin Books. Proust, Marcel. 2005. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. Tr. James Grieve. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Penguin Books Proust, Marcel. 2022. Finding Time Again. Tr. Ian Patterson. Ed. Christopher Prendergast. London: Penguin Books. Schumann, Maurice. 1998. “Présence de Bergson.” Revue des Deux Mondes (March 1998): 16–33 Simon, Anne. 2000. Proust ou le réel retrouvé. Paris: PUF. Vial, Fernand. 1940. “Le Symbolisme Bergsonienne du temps dans l’oeuvre de Proust.” PMLA LV: 1191–212. Whitehead, Alfred North. 1934. Nature and Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worms, Frédéric. 2004. Bergson ou les deux sens de la vie. Paris: PUF Worms, Frédéric. 2020. «Annexe» in Bergson, La Pensée et le mouvant. Ed. Caterina Zanf. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 167–75.

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27 PROUST AND NIETZSCHE ON SELF-FASHIONING Towards a Post-Metaphysical Reading of Proust Antoine Panaioti Proust never took Nietzsche up in earnest, unlike some of his closest friends, who played an important role in introducing the infamous German philosophical frebrand to French intellectual circles in fn du siècle Paris.1 The little Proust does say about Nietzsche seems ill-informed and is either trivial or unfairly critical.2 Small wonder, then, that for several decades Proust commentators showed no interest in exploring the possible connections and areas of overlap between the French novelist’s meditations on self hood and Nietzsche’s. Things in the Anglosphere stand diferently now. Indeed, the 1980s witnessed the frst inklings of a Nietzschean turn in the anglophone philosophical study of Proust. By the lights of Alexander Nehamas (1985) and Richard Rorty (1989), two prominent contemporary American philosophers, the picture of literary self-fashioning which La Recherche’s narrator sets out in the last instalment of Proust’s magnum opus is precisely the kind of thing the late Nietzsche had in mind when he spoke, in Ecce Homo, of ‘becoming what one is.’3 The fact that Proust was not directly infuenced by Nietzsche, on this line of thinking, does not preclude there being notable afnities between these two thinkers’ views on the self, and especially on its skilful self-actualisation-cum-poeticisation through the production of a synoptic autobiographical literary oeuvre. This idea was then taken up, explored in far greater detail, and refned by Duncan Large and Joshua Landy.4 Where Nehamas and Rorty had simply made their point in passing while developing a broader extended argument concerning the problem of post-modern subjectivity, Large (2001) and Landy (2004) make ‘Proust and Nietzsche on self-fashioning’ the central focus of their monographs. Though their results difer in certain regards, these studies are traversed by the same basic sentiment, namely that Proust, as Landy puts it in an early article, ought to be recognised as “one of Nietzsche’s most prominent philosophical heirs” (Landy 2002: 5). The present essay hones in on a specifc problem for any possible such interpretation of Proust—a problem of which both Large and Landy seem to be (at least tacitly) aware, but that neither adequately address. This, in a nutshell, is as follows: on the face of it, La Recherche’s narrator’s views on the “true self” (TR, 224; IV 451)5 which involuntary memory purports to disclose and literary creation fully to elucidate seem to be the product of the kind of metaphysical thinking which Nietzsche so adamantly critiques in his late writings. More precisely, as an “extra-temporal entity” (TR, 222; IV 450) which endures unchanged throughout one’s life (TR, 450; IV 624) the Proustian ‘true self ’ looks a lot like one of the 414

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‘nothings’ which, according to the late Nietzsche, metaphysicians erect as the True or Real par excellence out of an unconscious desire to avenge themselves against a world pervaded by instability, strife, death, and confusion (Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” § 6; KSA 6, 78). Now, if Proust’s account of literary self-fashioning did indeed turn out to be erected on such metaphysical foundations, then the kind of Proust-Nietzsche rapprochement that has emerged in the last forty years would have to be ruled out on pain of grave inconsequence. The arguments I set out in the fnal portion of this paper are designed to address this worry in a way that avoids the pitfalls of Large’s and Landy’s ill-fated attempts to handle similarly motivated concerns. In so doing, I also hope to bring into relief further, previously unexplored Nietzschean post-metaphysical accents in Proust’s vision of literary self-fashioning.

Is Proust a Ressentiment-driven Metaphysician? Let us begin with a brief overview of Proust’s meditations on self hood and artistic creation in La Recherche. One of the key themes in Proust’s novel is the radically fragmented nature of the self. This is indeed a theme which La Recherche’s narrator, Marcel, returns to again and again, almost invariably in connection to his experience of attachment and love. In chapter three of Albertine disparue, the reader is made to understand that self hood is subject to two types of diachronic disunity, both of which are evidenced by the sense of indiference towards one’s past self that attends its disappearance. The passage at hand reads as follows: One is no more distressed at having become another, years having passed and in the order of the succession of time, than one is distressed, in a single period of one’s life, to be by turns the contradictory beings, the mean one, the sensitive one, the delicate one, the rude one, the selfess one, the ambitious one, that we are by turns every day. And the reason we feel no distress is the same in both cases, namely that the self that is eclipsed— momentarily in the latter case or when it is a matter of character, forever in the former case or when it is a matter of passions—is not there to bemoan (déplorer) the other, the other who is at that moment, or from now on, the entire you (tout vous). (F, 737; IV 221) Let us unpack this passage. The frst type of diachronic disunity that Proust draws our attention to—and which we may call characterial disunity—concerns very short-lived selves characterised by a particular afective orientation.6 Seeing as these selves disappear and re-appear rapidly—the ‘eclipse’ at hand, being, after all, merely ‘momentary’—we may describe them as falling under the rubric of “the intermittences of the heart” (SG, 182; III 155). The second type of diachronic disunity to which self hood is subject—which we may call passional disunity—concerns longer-lived selves characterised by a dominant longing. Consider the adolescent Marcel’s decision to distance himself from Gilberte Swann, his frst love, in the opening section of À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feurs. In retrospect, Marcel’s adult self describes this as a “the long and cruel suicide of the self which inside myself loved Gilberte” (BG, 215–6; I 600). For becoming indiferent to Gilberte’s absence from his life, he goes on to explain, will entail “a true death of [my] self ” (BG, 288; II 32), a goal Marcel ends up securing after rigorously avoiding the young woman for several months. Many years later, the ‘self that loves Albertine’ also ends up dying, this time a natural death of sorts, the primary causes of which is the young woman’s passing and his ensuing forgetfulness (F, 608; IV 113; F, 737; IV 221). Speaking of passing, our narrator’s view on the passional disunity 415

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of the self is so strong that it calls into question the very distinction between the successive ‘deaths of the self ’ described above and biological death. Thus, towards the end of Le Temps retrouvé the aged Marcel tells us that his numerous previous deaths have reconciled him with his imminent physical demise: These successive deaths, so dreaded of the self they would annihilate, so unimportant (indiférentes), so sweet once they were achieved, and when he who feared them was no longer there to feel them, had of late made me realise how unwise it would be of me to fear death. (TR, 438; IV 615) 7 In a similar vein, La Recherche’s narrator explains that there is little diference between the sufering of a past self and that of an entirely diferent person. With time, he reports, we become “another person (un autre) for whom the sufering of his predecessor is but the sufering of a diferent person (autrui), a sufering which we can speak of without self-pity because we do not feel it” (F, 682; IV 175).8 Now, pace what Proust’s narrator tells us in the Albertine disparue passage with which we began, it turns out that the eclipse of the longer-lived longing-based self is not necessarily— or at least not always—“forever” (F, 737; IV 221). In one memorable episode from Sodome et Gomorrhe, a past and long-forgotten self of Marcel’s jumps back onto the scene: The self that I then was and who had disappeared for such a long time was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear once more the words that had been spoken [to him] in the immediately preceding moment, though these were now but a dream […]. I was nothing else than this being who wished to seek refuge in his grand-mother’s arms, to erase all traces of her sorrows with his kisses, this being which I would have had as much difculty imagining (se fgurer), when I was one or another of those who had successively arisen inside me in the foregoing period, as I would now have had to devote eforts, in vain either way (stériles d’ailleurs), to experience the desires and the joys of one of those beings whom, for a moment at least, I no longer was. (SG, 182–3; III 155) This is one of the key episodes in La Recherche in which the narrator claims to have rediscovered “a living reality (la réalité vivante) in an involuntary and complete memory” (SG, 180; III 153). For indeed, it would appear that involuntary memory has on this occasion resuscitated one of Marcel’s past selves.9 To help make sense of what is going on here, I think it is important to bring into the limelight one of the key fgures which Marcel mentions in his single, brief discussion of the self ’s synchronic disunity. The “individual” which we are, Proust’s narrator states in the opening pages of La Prisonnière, is composed of a number of “internal characters” (personnages intérieurs).10 One of the most enduring such personnages, Marcel continues, will in his case be “a certain philosopher who is only happy when he has discovered, between two works, between two sensations, a common element (une partie commune)” (C, 4–5; III 522). This philosophe features prominently a bit later in La Prisonnière, when Marcel begins to discern the unique element or “accent” in all of the composer Vinteuil’s music (C, 289; III 760)—a type of discernment which also, as it happens, informs his mature appreciation of the oeuvre of the painter Elstir (C, 290; III 761) and the novelist Bergotte (BG, 144; I 541). As is made clear in the frst and last volumes of La Recherche, it is also this philosopher who experiences 416

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ecstasy in those moments of involuntary memory which, unlike that which takes place on the frst night of his second visit to Balbec, are not bound up with grieving.11 Witness the famous so-called ‘episode of the madeleine’ in the novel’s opening section (SW, 52–3; I 44–5), wherein the narrator is overwhelmed by joy at re-experiencing the long-forgotten gustatory sensation of madeleine crumbs soaked with linden tea and all that it calls to mind. In fact, it is precisely this rebirth of a ‘lost’ experience that allows Marcel to access detailed recollections of his childhood vacations at his aunt’s house in Combray, the meticulous relating of which sets the tone and provides the basic social setting, as it were, for everything that follows in the novel. For indeed, it is precisely the “living realit[ies]” that are reborn in involuntary memory (SG, 180; III 153) and provide such joy to our philosophe through his discovery of a ‘common element’ between two—viz., present and past—sensations (C, 4–5; III 522) that, according to the older Marcel of Le Temps retrouvé, constitute the materials of his artistic creation.12 The “essence” of true art, he there conjectures, might simply be “the recreation of impressions by means of memory” (la récreation par la mémoire d’impressions) (TR, 446; IV 621). This is closely connected to one of the major upshots of the long theoretical discussion of literary creation Marcel lends himself to in Le Temps retrouvé and which purports to shed light on the phenomenological ground of his own projected creation, i.e., an autobiographical novel which, though it might not be La Recherche itself, will be in many respects be very much like it.13 “True life,” Proust’s narrator famously afrms, “life fnally discovered and elucidated, the only life, then, which is fully lived, is literature” (TR, 253–4; IV 474). The “greatness of true art,” Marcel explains in this portion of the novel, consists in the simultaneous rediscovery, recreation, and sharing for the privilege of readers of one’s ‘true life’ through the proper interpretation and translation of lost times which, in being re-lived, have been ‘found again’ (re-trouver) (TR, 253–4; IV 474). Now, such self-rediscovery-cumrecreation really involves three steps: frst, episodes of involuntary memory allow me to ‘discover’ glimpses of my “true self ” (TR, 224; IV 451); second, guided by thence obtained insights into my ‘true self ’, I must use my intelligence to develop in the manner of photographic “negatives” the obscure pictures (clichés) which ordinary memory provide me with such as to ‘elucidate’ their meaning and signifcance, particularly with respect to whom they reveal me to be (TR, 253–5; IV 474–5)14; third, I make use of the self-understanding gained through such ‘elucidation’ to make my fragmented self whole again through a stylised retelling of my formative experiences and impressions, thereby, as Nietzsche would have put it, ‘becoming what I am’ (TR, 444–5; IV 619–20; see also G, 539; II 759; F, 514; IV 34).15 In this process, freedom and law-ordained necessity, creation and discovery, stylised fction and reality are fused into a seamless unity (TR, 234–5; IV 459; TR, 247–8; IV 469). Nehamas, Rorty, Landy, and Large are right to note that there are profound afnities between Nietzsche’s and Marcel’s meditations on unifed self hood as the preserve of the littérateur.16 Like Proust’s narrator, Nietzsche regards the self as radically fragmented, both synchronically and diachronically.17 Nevertheless, the Nietzschean ethical-cum-existential ideal of amor fati involves the retrospective shaping of an artistically fashioned or ‘stylised’ Self.18 Such genuine self-afrmation requires that we celebrate all of our past—including its accidental, painful, and shameful aspects—as the necessary steps to our having become who we are today, thereby overcoming ressentiment towards our past and all of the radically contingent events that have shaped who we have become.19 In fact, this übermenschlich or ‘super-human’ celebration of the self must be so radical and complete that those who fully attain it will welcome the prospect of the ‘eternal recurrence’ of the totality of their life with limitless joy.20 This, for Nietzsche, constitutes the non plus ultra of will to power, a kind 417

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of ‘backward willing’ that is generative of an ‘eternalised’ Self.21 Accordingly, one of Nietzsche’s last books, Ecce Homo, consists in a quasi-hagiographic auto-biobibliography which relates the story of how Nietzsche, in and through his writings, became, as he was bound to, ‘what he is.’22 The foregoing helps explain the very strong claims advanced by those scholars who have brought to light the Nietzschean accents in Proust’s understanding of selfhood, and vice versa: The model for the eternal recurrence is […] not to be found in Nietzsche’s superfcial refections on thermodynamics but in his deep immersion in writing. In thinking of his ideal life on the model of a story, we would do well to think of it in the specifc terms supplied by Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. (Nehamas 1985: 167) 23 [T]he self-creative project of Nietzsche’s ‘yea-saying’ Übermensch yields a paradigm in terms of which one can understand both why Proust’s narrator feels a sense of necessity in his involuntary memories, a sense of self rescued from the world of human contingency, and why the self-revelation of involuntary memory should lead him to a work of art. (Large 2001: 202) 24 Proust is, to repeat, closer to Nietzsche—whose work he barely knew—than to any other philosopher, and Alexander Nehamas and (more recently) Duncan Large have helped immeasurably to make Proust’s actual commitments perceptible. (Landy 2004: 8) There is, however, an important hurdle standing in the way of any such Proust-Nietzsche rapprochement. Indeed, Proust’s narrator’s project of self-fashioning appears to be predicated on the existence of a substantial, timelessly enduring ‘true self ’—a notion, as we shall see, that is squarely at odds with Nietzsche’s late denunciation of metaphysical constructs of this kind. Consider the implications Marcel draws from his experience of involuntary memory. Seeking to explain the ecstatic joy and sense of world-transcendence that attends this life-changing phenomenon, he writes: The being inside me who at that moment tasted this impression tasted in it what was common to a distant time (un jour ancien) and to the present moment, what was extra-temporal, [it was] a being which only appeared when, by virtue of one of these identities between present and past, it was allowed to live in the only environment (milieu) in which it could experience, take pleasure in (vivre, jouïr de) the essence of things, namely outside of time. This explained why my worries about my own death had ceased at the moment when I had unconsciously recognised the taste of the little madeleine, for at that precise moment the being that I had been was an extra-temporal being. (TR, 222–3; IV 450) Returning to this idea a few paragraphs later, Marcel speaks of the disclosing, in moments of involuntary memory, of a deathless, God-like ‘true self ’: Let a sound, an odour, long ago heard or breathed in, be heard or breathed in anew, in the present and in the past at once, real without being actual, ideal without being 418

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abstract, and the permanent and habitually hidden essence of things is liberated, and our true self which seemed dead, sometimes for a long while already, though it was not entirely dead, wakes up, comes to life (s’anime) as it receives the celestial food that is brought to it. A minute liberated from the order of time has recreated inside us to experience it a man liberated from the order of time. And this person, we can understand why he would be confdent in his joy […]; situated outside of time, what could he fear from the future? (TR, 224–5; IV 451) In the closing pages of La Recherche, fnally, it becomes clear that Proust’s narrator believes that the ‘true self ’ revealed in episodes of involuntary memory possesses diachronic unity. Describing the sound of a ringing bell at the matinée Guermantes which has, like the madeleine, momentarily resuscitated his childhood self in Combray, Marcel afrms: When [the Combray bell] had rung I already existed, and ever since so that I could again hear this ring it must have been the case that there had not been any discontinuity, that I had not for a single instant ceased, been at leisure (pris le repos) not to exist, not to think, not to be conscious of myself… (TR, 450; IV 624) Bluntly stated, this picture of self hood—according to which a unitary and timelessly enduring ‘true self ’ lies beneath the surface appearance of a radically fragmented, disunifed self— is precisely the kind of thing Nietzsche denounces as a metaphysical fraud in his late writings. Indeed, one of the main targets of Nietzsche’s late writings is what we may call ‘twoworld metaphysics’, i.e., metaphysics which is predicated on a strict dichotomy between an ‘apparent world’ of change, impermanence, contingency, and confusion, on the one hand, and a self-abiding, timeless, and changeless ‘true world’, on the other. In an important workbook note dated 1887, Nietzsche describes metaphysical constructs of this kind as the work of ressentiment vis-à-vis an existence replete with strife and sufering: Towards the Psychology of Metaphysics This world is apparent—therefore there exists a true world. This world is contingent (bedingt)—therefore there exists a necessary world (eine unbedingte Welt). This world is full of contradictions—therefore there exists a world without contradiction (widerspruchlos). This world is characterized by becoming (werdend)—therefore there exists a world characterized by being (seiend). Nothing but false conclusions […]. It is sufering that lead to (inspirirt) these conclusions: at root they express the wish that there be such a [diferent] world; they also express hatred towards a world, which makes us sufer, such that another world is imagined, a valuable world: the ressentiment of the metaphysicians against reality, here, becomes creative. (KSA 12, 8[2]) This line of thought—clearly anticipated in The Genealogy of Morality’s (1887) closing remarks on the Will to Nothingness that underpins the so-called ascetic ideal (III, § 28)—is further explored in Twilight of the Idols (1889), where Nietzsche makes it clear that ‘two-worlds 419

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metaphysics’ are not only motivated by ressentiment, but—in so far as the ‘real world’ which they postulate is little more than the ‘negative’ of the world in which you and I actually live—founded on a morbid glorifcation of nothingness: The characteristics which we have attributed to “true being” of things are the marks of non-being, of nothingness,—we have built the “true world” through the contradiction of the actual world: this is the actual apparent world, in so far as it is nothing but a moral-optical illusion. […]. Childishly to speak of such a world “other” than this one makes no sense at all unless an instinct to disparage, diminish, and be suspicious towards life is dominant in us: in such cases we take revenge on life with the fantasy of an “other,” a “better” life. (Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” § 6; KSA 6, 78) 25 We are faced with a very serious problem then. Indeed, the ‘true self ’ on which La Recherche’s theory of self-fashioning seems to rest looks like precisely that kind of fction which Nietzsche diagnoses as a ressentiment-born metaphysical construct. The Marcel of Le Temps retrouvé, after all, describes it as a monochromatic, deathless personal essence entirely untouched by the vicissitudes of time, decay, confusion, and self-contradiction (TR, 223–5; IV 450–1; TR, 253–5; IV 474–5). Left unaddressed, this problem severely compromises the project of modelling Proustian self-fashioning on the Nietzschean (or vice-versa).

Two Dead Ends: Landy’s Conservative Nietzsche and Large’s Radical Proust In this section, I want to examine the resources available in Landy (2002, 2003, 2004) and Large (2001) that may be used to address our problem. To be clear, neither of these authors frame the problem at hand exactly as I have here, but they develop approaches designed to address similarly motivated concerns. As I hope to have shown by the end of this section, the strategies they deploy to deal with these are not adequate to the task of bringing Proust and Nietzsche into alignment as regards the metaphysics of self hood. Let us start with Landy. In somewhat simplistic terms, Landy’s approach in Philosophy as Fiction (2004) consists in an attempt to ‘tame Nietzsche’ with a view pre-emptively to defuse whatever tension one may think that there are between his thought and Proust’s. Landy, to be clear, is adamant that the project of Proustian self-fashioning is predicated on the existence of a ‘true self ’ qua “timeless essence” (2004, 84) or “unique and diachronically stable self ” (Ibid., 113). Where Landy thinks fantasy, illusion or so-called “lucid self-delusion” (Ibid., 49; 126) is required—on the model of Nietzschean will-to-untruth/ignorance (Beyond Good and Evil, § 24; KSA 5, 41–2) (Landy 2002: 2–4; 19; Landy 2004: 98–9)—is in forging the retrospective fctional frst-personal unity of one’s “total Self ” qua novelistic character through the narrative “arrangement” of one’s life story around or in terms of a “principle of organisation” which could in principle have been diferent, in both substance and orientation (Landy 2004: 120–6). But the upgrade from non-elucidated ‘true self ’ to fully manifest ‘total self ’ is not according to Landy an entirely unconstrained process: the self-fashioning author must strike a balance between composing with objective facts—viz., facts concerning his past “sub-selves” and his own ‘essence’ qua lasting ‘temperament,’ facts concerning the people he’s met, his uncertainty about their ‘actual’ states of mind, etc.—and freer, lucidly delusional stylisation and narrative organisation (2004: 118–19; see also 2002). In short, self-fashioning, for Landy, is not from the ground up; in fact, it is predicated on the pre-existence of a metaphysically robust self. In that he takes Proust to be in agreement with 420

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Nietzsche on all of these points (Ibid.: 115–16), it would be exaggeration to say, as I’ll argue below, that Landy’s is a fairly conservative Nietzsche. Indeed, Landy thinks that, pace many of his more radical commentators, Nietzsche is committed to the existence of both an essential, unchanging self—which Landy somewhat mysteriously calls “a motionless denizen of the mental deep”—and ‘objective facts’ (e.g., perhaps most importantly, the existence of such a self ) (Landy 2004: 222–3, note 55); see also 2003: 452–4). To support his reading of Nietzsche as a ‘true self ’-realist, Landy cites the following excerpt from 1886’s Beyond Good and Evil, § 231: [A]t the bottom, really ‘deep down’, there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined selected questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable ‘this is I’. (W. Kaufmann’s 1966 translation, cited at Landy 2004: 222) In support of the second, he argues that the fact/fctional-construct distinction—and particularly the distinction between the facts of physiology and the fctions of morality—is central to Nietzsche’s arguments in his 1887 Genealogy of Morality, an incontournable if there is any in the Nietzsche corpus (2004: 222–3). For Landy, in short, the sort of problem I have raised is really a non-problem, for the simple reason that Nietzsche’s considered views on self and truth are congruent with Proust’s, and are squarely at odds with the over-the-top pronouncements one hits upon in Nietzsche’s late writings. But Landy’s approach sufers from serious shortcomings. To begin with, his interpretation of Nietzsche’s view of the self is severely under-determined by the Beyond Good and Evil passage he cites. However misleading his language may be, what Nietzsche is discussing at § 231 of this work is not a metaphysically robust, unchanging personal essence, but rather a basic, incorrigible afective-evaluative disposition, which he dismissively describes a few lines below as “the great stupidity that we are” (KSA 5, 170). Character or temperament—and more precisely Nietzsche’s wildly wounded feelings towards the fairer sex—is what is at stake here; not a personal substance. In fact, Landy (2002, 2004) appears to confate the notion of ‘unchanging temperament’ (a properly psychological idea) and with that of ‘substantial, enduring, unifed self ’ (a metaphysical idea) not only in his treatment of self hood in Nietzsche, but also in Proust. But this only compounds his problems. To stick our immediate concerns, while it may be true that neither Nietzsche nor Proust’s narrator take self-fashioning to be an entirely unconstrained process, it is nevertheless very clear, contra Landy, that the constraint at hand, for Nietzsche, has nothing to do with the kind of self-realism he attributes to Proust. Whatever ‘self ’ (on any standard conception of the term) there might be room for in Nietzsche’s philosophy will be an artistic creation from start to fnish. In so far as Landy’s tame, self-realist Nietzsche is but a chimera, then, his otherwise very valuable work fails to bring into alignment Nietzsche’s and Proust’s views on self hood. The situation is much the same when we turn to the related problem of Nietzsche on facts. Landy, in brief, badly underplays the radicalness of Nietzsche’s idea that what we call ‘truths’ are really a subclass of ‘errors’ (The Gay Science, § 265 (KSA 3, 518); Beyond Good and Evil, § 34 (KSA 5, 52–3)). This requires turning a blind eye to those texts in which Nietzsche argues: (a) that the very notion of a ‘correspondence’ between language and world is confused (The Gay Science, § 354; KSA 3, 590–3), (b) that the very concept of a clearly delimitable ‘thing’ is derived from delusional sense that one is or has a stable ‘ego’ (Twilight of the Idols, “‘Reason’ in Philosophy,” § 5; KSA 6, 77–8), and (c) that any ‘proposition’ will bear the 421

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marks of the evaluative-afective stance or ‘perspective’ from which it proceeds (Genealogy of Morality, III, § 12; KSA 5, 363–5).26 As though this weren’t problematic enough, Landy is wrong to think that Nietzsche’s discussion of morals in the Genealogy is inconsistent with his critique of traditional epistemology. To wit, the physiological ‘facts’ which he there argues are covered up by moral ‘fctions’—to employ Landy’s language—are simply those aspects of the problem at hand that come to light when one adopts the so-called ‘perspective of life’27 that proceeds from nature’s drive for self-expansion and which Nietzsche, in this work, purports to embody. Contra Landy, then, self-fashioning and -eternalisation in amor fati or the embrace of eternal recurrence in Nietzsche does not involve working with perspective-neutral facts about oneself and others. As in the case of their respective positions regarding self-realism, a gulf seems to separate Nietzsche from Landy’s metaphysically conservative Proust. Let us now turn to our second commentator. Large’s strategy in Nietzsche and Proust (2001) is essentially the converse of Landy’s: rather than ‘taming Nietzsche’ with a view to bringing him closer to (a metaphysical) Proust, Large attempts to ‘radicalise Proust’ in an efort to turn him into a (French) Nietzschean. Large rightly acknowledges that there is a tension between Marcel’s talk of a true self as the “enduring personality or ‘soul’” that is revealed in involuntary memory and Nietzsche’s rejection of any such picture on the grounds that memory is as treacherous a guide towards establishing any ‘fact’ or ‘identity relation’ (2001, p 188–9). Large also point out, in this connection, that Deleuze (1964 [7th edition: 1986]) was thus inclined to interpret Proust as a (neo-)Platonist with respect to ‘essences,’ 28 rather than as a crypto-Nietzschean (Ibid., 189). Taking his cue from Ronald Bogue’s commentary on Deleuze (1989), Large nevertheless thinks that Deleuze’s analysis of Proustian involuntary memory can pave the way towards a thoroughly ‘Nietzschean’ reading of Proust (2001, 189f.). This involves two key moves. First, Large argues that the phenomenon of involuntary memory as Proust describes it ought to be interpreted through the lens of Deleuze’s agonal concept of ‘diference and repetition.’ This allows Large to conceive of Proust’s ‘essences’ not in Platonic or extra-temporal terms, but on the contrary in Nietzschean terms, as involving a kind of immanent struggle between past and present. Second, Large emphasises Marcel’s insistence on the corporeal embeddedness of involuntary memory,29 inferring from this that the ground of self-persistence for a consistent Proust would simply be the persistence of the body (Large 2001: 192–3). Indeed, this position is very close to Nietzsche’s, if Zarathustra’s pronouncements are anything to go by at any rate (see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “Of the Haters of the Body”; KSA 4, 39–41). For Large, then, our problem afords of a straight-forward, elegant solution: contrary to appearances, Proust’s narrator’s views on self hood are thoroughly Nietzschean, end of story. This story, unfortunately, simply does not cut it. As regards the role of the body in Proust’s narrator’s account of self hood, Large overstates his case and lends himself to selective reading. It is of course true that Marcel regards sensorial impressions as catalysts for episodes of involuntary memory and, more generally, that La Recherche as a whole deserves praise for being so deeply attuned to the somatic dimension of phenomena which other, less perceptive and prescient authors might more lazily or conservatively have described as ‘psychological’ alone. But this does not in and of itself warrant Large’s Nietzschean reading of involuntary memory as revealing only (or even primarily) a ‘bodily self ’ qua ‘embodied will to power.’30 What is more, this reading is difcult to square with those texts in which Marcel describes the body in classical dualist terms as the ‘container’ for mental events (SG, 181; III 153–4: “our body appears to us similar to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed”; see, also, TR, 449; IV 623). Consider, further, the appeal 422

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to the best possible explanation Marcel produces in favour of a frmly dualist view (of vaguely Platonic-cum-Kantian inspiration) when discussing Bergotte’s death: Certainly, spiritual experiences no more than religious dogma prove the subsistence of the soul. What we can say is that everything in our life happens seems to indicate that we entered this world loaded with obligations (avec le faix d’obligations) incurred in an earlier life; there are no reasons on this earth that compel us to feel obliged to do good, to be delicate, even to be polite […]. All of these obligations which do not have their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a diferent world, founded on goodness, compunction (scrupule), sacrifce, a world entirely diferent to this one, and which we leave behind to take birth on this earth, before perhaps returning to it to live under the empire of these unknown laws which we have obeyed because we carried their teaching inside of us, without knowing who had drawn (tracées) them, these laws which all the profound work of the intellect brings nearer to us and which are invisible only—and even then—to the dim-witted. (C, 208; III 693) Such pronouncement concerning the metaphysics of self hood could not be less Nietzschean. Small wonder, then, if at Le Temps retrouvé, TR, 222–3; IV 450–1Marcel describes his experiences of involuntary memory as essentially “spiritual.”31 Large’s interpretation of the Proustian subject as ‘embodied will-to-power,’ then, is not just underdetermined but contradicted by the Proustian text. Turning to involuntary memory as an agonal structure of ‘diference and repetition’ à la (Deleuzian) eternal recurrence, the least that can be said is that Large’s interpretation is strained. This is perhaps clearest in certain moments of excess—for instance when he equates involuntary memory with Nietzsche’s übermenschlich ‘revaluation of all values’ on the shaky grounds that both involve a radical “valorization of indiference” (203)—but, even the basic idea that underpins Large’s attempted rapprochement is questionable: Proust’s narrator genuinely seems to think he is re-living the past and thereby entering a realm beyond time, not merely experiencing an uncanny, ‘repetition’ of physiological events provoking similar forms of ideation as arose in their past unfolding. A harsher verdict would be that Large’s results are, for structural reasons, question-begging: a heavily Nietzscheanised Proust is to be modelled on Nietzsche’s Übermensch—what a surprise! Neither Landy nor Large successfully address our problem, then. What is required is another type of response altogether—one which involves neither toning Nietzsche down nor giving Proust a Nietzschean make-over, but that begins with a full admission that there exists a real tension between Marcel’s and Nietzsche’s views, and works its way forward through a direct engagement with the Proustian text itself. This is what I ofer in the fnal portion of this essay.

Towards a Post-Metaphysical Reading of Proust In the third and fnal section of this paper, I present an argument in favour of interpreting Proust’s take on self hood as resolutely post-metaphysical. As alluded to above, the frst step we must take is to ‘bite the bullet.’ We must, in other words, begin by fully accepting that there is something irreducibly metaphysical about the account of self hood Marcel propounds in several important portions of La Recherche. This is something we cannot simply cancel out or wish away, be it by invoking Deleuze or any other French theorist for that matter. 423

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This being said, what remains uncertain is whether Marcel’s view corresponds to Proust’s—or, otherwise formulated, whether a certain ironic distance might not stand between La Recherche’s narrator and Proust himself. For all his anti-metaphysicalism, after all, Nietzsche does invite us to regard the self as eternal (and thus endowed with a kind of immortality), and he regards this as a key manoeuvre in the fght against ‘nihilistic’ two-world metaphysics and the ressentiment that underpins it.32 But there is something performative and artifcial about such self-eternalisation.33 Nietzschean self-eternalisation, then, is traversed with irony: it involves basking in the pretence of self-declared Divinity and Eternalness. One reason to think that a similar irony might be at work in Proust is that La Recherche’s narrator is not the same person as its author, and thus that we can by no means assume that Marcel speaks for Proust.34 Marcel’s aesthetic theory might express the way Proust sometimes felt— and perhaps even how he thought most great artists feel in moments of great creativity—but this does not mean it is a reliable guide to Proust’s metaphysical commitments as such. In and of itself, such considerations hardly settle the matter at hand. What we must enquire into, to make true progress, is whether there is anything in La Recherche itself that might signal that Proust efectively adopted an ironic posture vis-à-vis his narrator’s pronouncements. I think there is. Marcel’s casual remarks on philosophical systems in Le Côté de Guermantes, for instance, invite us to take his metaphysical picture of self hood in Le Temps retrouvé with a pinch of salt. Meditating on the political disagreements between dreyfusistes and anti-dreyfusistes then raging in France, Marcel asks: When those philosophical systems which contain the most truth are dictated to their authors, in the fnal analysis, by reasons of the heart (une raison de sentiment), 35 then how could we suppose that, with respect to a simple political ordeal like the Dreyfus afair, reasons of this kind could not, unbeknownst to the reasoner, govern his reason? (G, 340; II 593) Though it may be “freer” than the heart (or fesh?), Marcel adds a few lines later, “reason obeys certain laws which it does not know” (G, 340; II 593). Note, also, how at F, 190, Marcel blithely observes, in a harder Pascalian moment, that “it is desire which engenders belief.” Now, let us apply these remarks to the beliefs—nay, the system—of “a certain philosopher who is only happy when he has discovered, between two works, between two sensations, a common element” (C, 4–5; III 522)—that is to say, of precisely that “internal character” who appears to speak for the entire Marcel in Le Temps retrouvé. Let us assume, in doing so, that the general (fairly ‘common sense’) model Proust gestures towards is this: when it comes to abstract, theoretical matters from which the thinker can remain detached, reason has relatively more ‘autonomy’ (though perhaps far less so than we’d realised before Pascal); when, however, the issue is ‘close to one’s heart’ (e.g., with respect to political matters) beliefs are entirely determined by whim and will. Marcel’s thoughts surrounding involuntary memory, literary creation, etc., obviously belong to the latter category. If this is right, then, the timeless, deathless, transcendent self that involuntary memory seems to reveal would turn out to be little more than the (fairly transparent) product of wishful thinking on behalf of Proust’s aging, artistically insecure narrator. Turning to substantive aspects of La Recherche’s narrative allows for a deeper rapprochement between Proust and Nietzsche, i.e., one that centres not just on what I take to be their similarly ironic postures vis-à-vis the ‘eternal self ’ construct, but rather on how self-creation, on both of their accounts, requires and involves a new kind relationship to time, history, and cosmos. 424

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Consider, to begin, Nietzsche’s dazzling vision of the entirely novel feeling of ‘humanity’ which he sees appearing on the horizon: We present-day human beings are just beginning to construct the chain of a very powerful future feeling, link by link,—we barely know what we are doing. It almost seems to us like what is at hand is not a new feeling, but rather the diminution of an older one:—the sense for history (historischer Sinn) still remains so poor and cold, and many are as it were frozen over and made even colder and poorer by it. […] [But] he who is able to feel the history of mankind entirely as his own history experiences in a monstrous generalisation all the grief of the invalid thinking of health, of the old man recollecting on the dreams of his youth, of the man in love deprived of his lover, of the martyr whose ideal is being driven into the ground, of the hero on the evening after an ill-fated battle that has brought him wounds and the loss of a friend—; but to bear, to be able to bear this monstrous mass of grief of all kinds and nevertheless still be the hero, who on the break of the next day of battle greets the dawn and his luck, as the man whose horizon stretches over millennia before and after him, as the heir of the amassed nobility of all past spirit and a dutiful heir at that, as the noblest of all ancient lords (der Adeligste aller alten Edlen) and at the same time the frstlings of a new kind of nobility, the likes of which no epoch has ever seen nor dreamt of: to take all of this upon one’s soul, the oldest, the newest, the losses, hopes, conquests, and victories of humanity: to possess all of this in a single soul and to compress it into a single feeling:—this would surely produce a happiness previously unknown to humankind,—a divine happiness full of power and love, of tears and laughter […]! This divine happiness would then be called—humanity! (The Gay Science, § 337; KSA 3, 565) Nietzsche’s teaching in this rich text is essentially this: though the expansion of the ‘sense for history’ ushered in by the rise of modernity has in the nineteenth century corroded human beings’ sense of meaning and purpose by exposing the radical contingency of all things, this same sense may eventually turn into a world-transfguring force giving rise a new kind of cosmic self-afrmation and -celebration whereupon a new type of ‘individual’ will come to regard its ‘Self ’ as co-extensive and co-substantial with all of humanity and its history.36 In what appears to be a striking anticipation of the fgure of the aged Marcel of Le Temps retrouvé, the person who achieves this will be he who, though he feels all of the “grief of the invalid thinking of his lost health, of the old man thinking of the dreams of his youth, of the man in love deprived of his lover,” welcomes the new day with uprightness, nobility, and joy. I think there are good grounds for thinking that La Recherche features an artist who comes very close to actualising precisely this ideal. Note, to begin, that in the fnal pages of Le Temps retrouvé, Marcel ends up describing his own ‘true self ’ not as an “extra-temporal being” (TR, 223; IV 450), but instead as time—“this long stretch of time” (tout ce temps si long) (TR, 450; IV 624)—itself. Accordingly, human beings are there depicted as temporal giants precariously perched atop enormous, stilt-like legs. In the last lines of the novel, 37 he thus pledges to make human beings the focus of his literary creation, however monstrous these giants may appear (TR, 451; IV 625). It is important to note that this is not a philosophical view; rather, Marcel reports that it is a vertigo-inducing feeling, which he then generalises to others. What this passage suggests is that, contra Marcel’s more theoretical/philosophical pronouncements, the Proustian ‘true self ’ that is shaped or fashioned in and through artistic creation-cum-self-fashioning has little to do with a personal essence abiding in some timeless ‘other world’, but should instead be construed, in vaguely Bergsonian terms, as temporality 425

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itself. On this reading (which treats Marcel’s ‘philosophy’ proper as something of a distraction and focuses instead on the feelings he communicates at the very end of the novel), the Self, for Proust, is my history. And in so far as Proust seems well aware that all events in ‘my history’ are contingent on all previous events in world history, it is but one step from here to saying, in the manner of Nietzsche’s idealised future individuals, ‘my Self is all of History’. Our fnal question, then, is whether Proust makes this last step. I think that he does. Here is why. First, there a number of passages in La Recherche where Marcel claims that ‘individuals’ are really the ‘products’ of their families, cultures, and epochs. Thus, towards the end of the second section of À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feurs, Marcel opines that it is not only our physical features that are unchosen, but that the ideas, values, political commitments, etc., which we take to be the result of deliberation and rational choice are also the necessary results, so to speak, of hereditary causes which, as such, predate our individual existence (BG, 545–6; II 246).38 Later in the novel, this same principle informs his appreciation of the diferences in comportment and ‘leadership styles’ between his friend Robert de Saint-Loup, an old-stock aristocrat hailing from one of the oldest familles de France, and the Prince de Borodino, a product of Premier Empire bourgeois-( faux)-aristocracy (G, 202–6). Both men, in short, are incarnations of their class and epochs. And in La Prisonnière, fnally, we fnd a clear articulation of the way in which the past lives on in the present, here in connection to matters of the heart, and—more importantly yet—to Marcel himself: Beyond a certain age, the soul of the child which we were and the soul of the dead from which we have emerged (dont nous sommes sortis) approach to thrust upon us handful upon handful ( jeter à poignée) of their own riches and bad spells, demanding to collaborate in (coopérer à) the new emotions which we are feeling and in which, erasing their ancient efgy, we recast them in a new creation. All of my past since the most ancient years and beyond these the past of my kinsmen (mes parents) added to my impure love for Albertine the softness of a tenderness at once flial and maternal. We must welcome, from a certain time onward, all of our kinsmen who have arrived from afar and are now assembled around us. (C, 82; III 587) The evocation of the union of Adam and Eve—humankind’s archetypal primeval parents— when Marcel and Albertine lock in a naked embrace a few lines later leaves little room for doubt as to how many generations of kinsmen are convened in Marcel’s love afair. La Recherche, it seems clear, features a protagonist who, like the great heroes Nietzsche envisions, “is able to feel the history of humankind entirely as his own history” (FW § 337; KSA 3, 565) by “recasting in a new creation” past generations’ “riches and bad spells” (C, 82; III 587).39 This, I think, can be further corroborated by a distinctive and fairly transparent feature of La Recherche, namely the fractal motifs that traverse the entire novel. The macro/micro structural parallelism that the mathematical notion of the fractal evokes40 is, of course, explicitly raised by Marcel when he discusses the deep similarities between the mechanics of personal and international relation, in both their intra-personal/national and inter-personal/national dimensions (C, 413; III 863–4; TR, 99–100; IV 350–1).41 More importantly, however, several layers of fractal motifs are also at play in La Recherche’s narrative itself. The most prominent of these is exhibited in the dynamics of romantic love which the novel foregrounds, and all crucial iterations of which follow the same basic pattern. Indeed, the story of Charles Swann’s love for Odette, of Robert de Saint-Loup’s for Rachel, of the Baron de Charlus’s for Morel, and of Marcel’s for Albertine are all, at root, the same story: a character belonging 426

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to a higher social class becomes deeply and jealously enamoured of a louche, gender-fuid individual belonging to a lower stratum of society, and, though this love is almost universally frowned upon by their respective milieux, it persists over an extended period of time and consumes an inordinate amount of his attention and energies. In this way, Proust’s novel summons a universe in which its narrator is ‘in’ all things, just as all things are ‘in’ him. The ‘total self ’, here, is a Cosmic Self; Marcel’s History is Cosmic History. To conclude, what I have been outlining in this fnal section is a clear path towards reading Proust as having resolutely moved beyond metaphysics as regards the question of self-fashioning and -eternalisation through literary creation. Proust narrator may at times feel eternal and timeless—and the philosophe within him might thus believe that his ‘essence’ belongs to some other, truer world, but Proust himself, as the ironically detached author of La Recherche and thus creator of its narrator qua novelistic character, knows that this but a sensation-induced fction. And the vision of a self-fashioned Global Self he conveys in La Recherche is nothing more than Time or History incarnate, celebrated and venerated under the form of a stylised universe that is in fact co-substantial with the Self that stands at its centre. This is not ressentiment-fuelled metaphysics. It is, quite the contrary, a sublime exemplifcation of Nietzschean post-metaphysical self-afrmation.

Notes 1 On this point, see in particular Large 2001: 65–8. 2 For a very convincing case in favour of this verdict, see, again, Large 2001: 68–88. 3 In the last four decades or so, the concept of ‘self-fashioning’ has received a fair amount of attention in two more-or-less autonomous quarters of the academe. In literary theory, Stephen Greenblatt’s work on self-fashioning—or the “forming of a self,” i.e., of a “distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving” (2005[1980])—as a crucial Renaissance regulative ideal has been very infuential indeed. In contemporary philosophy, a very similar notion of self-fashioning—albeit one which pays more attention to the unifcation under the form of a ‘self’ of originally fragmented, alienated, disorganised modes of subjectivity—plays a central role in the work of a number of American philosophers whose work is heavily indebted to Nietzsche, e.g., Cavell (2005), Nehamas (1985, 1998), Rorty (1989), and Shusterman (1992, 1997). (Note that these two bodies of work are not entirely orthogonal, Foucault’s (broadly Nietzschean) thought (1976–1984) being part of backdrop for both). In the present, more philosophically oriented study, the phrase ‘self-fashioning’ denotes, above all, the literary unifcation-cum-creation of an initially disjointed ‘self ’. 4 Though Large and Landy are the two giants of the ‘Proust and Nietzsche’ subfeld of Proust studies, a more exhaustive survey would also consider the similarly oriented work of such scholars as Carter-Cram (1994), Llyod (1993, chapters 3 and 4), and Reid (1988). In the interest of brevity, however, this essay will concern itself with the ideas advanced in Large’s and Landy’s monographs alone. 5 All translations from French and German in this essay are my own. In citing or referencing Nietzsche’s published writings, I provide Kritische Studienausgabe [henceforth: KSA] volume and page numbers in addition to work titles, section names, and aphorism number, where relevant. In citing his posthumous notes, I provide the KSA volume number, together with the section and note numbers. 6 This reading is supported by the other passages in which Marcel describes the rapid succession of very short-lived selves ‘inside’ himself (see F, 559–60; IV 71; BG, 610; II 299). 7 See, also, SG, 297; III 253, where this idea is adumbrated. Marcel’s sentiments here are much the same as Derek Parft’s, who, at Reasons and Persons (1984), 281, claims that changing his view on personal identity (from a substantialist to a “reductionist” view) lead to an important reduction in his fear of death. 8 In a similar vein, Proust’s narrator suggests, again at SG, 297; III 253, that I may feel the same kind of aversion and embarrassment vis-à-vis a past self as I might feel towards a friend from whom

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9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19

20

21

22

I am presently estranged. More prescriptively (albeit in a similar spirit), Parft argues that, given the truth of our diachronic disunity, we ought to relate to sufciently distant or diferent past (or future) selves as one would to a diferent person, such that, for instance, much of what we currently do out of prudence or self-interest (e.g., quit smoking before turning thirty or, more realistically, forty) could instead be regarded as supported by moral or ‘other-oriented’ considerations (1982, 1984). Parft, as the perceptive footnote reader will by now have guessed, was a fan of Proust. As Landy succinctly puts it, “if involuntary memory restores lost time, it does so by restoring a lost self ” (2004, 111). Marcel, in short, here makes it clear that he takes the so-called ‘individual’ to be composed, at any one time, of several diferent sub-characters or -persons. The type of synchronic personal disunity this entails is very diferent to (and far stronger than) that discussed by Landy, whose discussion of the self ’s synchronic disunity focuses instead on the more traditional trichotomy between the so-called “agenc[ies]” of ‘sensibility’, ‘intellect’, and ‘will’ (2004, 103–4). Indeed, this is the only episode of involuntary memory in La Recherche which provokes in the narrator not transcendent joy, but rather grief, guilt, and a sense of irrecoverable loss. It is on this occasion, in short, that Marcel becomes truly aware of his grand-mother’s passing, and this awareness apparently overshadows whatever pleasure he might have derived from the recovery of his past self. The fact that Marcel is then considerably younger than he is on other occasions of involuntary memory is perhaps another important factor: a youth, we may conjecture, does not get as much of a kick from feeling momentarily eternal because he already/still feels eternal. Indeed, Marcel fully realises and begins to actualise his literary vocation upon experiencing two late, ‘breakthrough’ episodes of involuntary memory in quick succession. These events are related at TR, 173–6. From here, the novel launches into a lengthy theoretical discussion of artistic and especially literary creation, which is the narrator’s primary focus in most of its last 200 or so pages. On this difcult, hotly debated question, see Landy 2004: 36–47. It is thus hardly a coincidence if Marcel intends to name his autofctional novel after an early type of image projector, the “magic lantern.” “How I became what I am” is the subtitle of Nietzsche’s late autobibliographical work, Ecce Homo (1908[1888]). Indeed, in that most of us don’t have the wherewithal to ‘develop’ our ‘negatives’, let alone thereafter to construct an autofctional narrative based on these elucidations, most of us can’t access our ‘true life’ and fashion a complete self on Marcel’s view (TR, 202). Though the details of his account of self-fashioning are diferent, Nietzsche is similarly elitist. See, in particular, Human, all too Human II, “Assorted Opinions and Maxims,” § 17 (KSA 2, 386) and Beyond Good and Evil, § 12 (KSA 5, 26–7), though several other such passages occur throughout works and unpublished notes. See, in particular, Ecce Homo, “Why I am so Wise,” §6 (KSA 6, 272–3) and “Why I am so Clever,” §10 (KSA 5, 295–7), though this idea is anticipated in early works, especially The Gay Science (§ 290 (KSA 3, 530–1) of this work, in particular, emphasises the idea of self-stylisation). See, in particular, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Salvation” (KSA 4, 177–83). (Note, returning to La Recherche for a moment, that Elstir’s conception of “wisdom” at BG, 500–1, is strongly reminiscent of Nietzsche’s idealised relationship to one’s past.) On the more general notion of the universal inter-dependence of all things and events, see Twilight of the Idols, “Morality as Anti-Nature,” § 6 (KSA 6, 86–7) and “The Four Great Errors” § 8 (KSA 6, 96–7). The locus classicus for the “teaching” of eternal recurrence is The Gay Science, § 342 (KSA 3, 571). See also Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” The Birth of Tragedy, § 3 (KSA 6, 312–13). On the tight connection between amor fati and the afrmation of eternal return, see the end of § 10 of Ecce Homo, “Why I am so Clever” (KSA 6, 595–7), and KSA 13, 16 [32] (cited at note 32), below. See, again, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, II, “Of Salvation” (KSA 4, 177–83), but also a famous fragment dated 1886, in which Nietzsche asserts: To stamp becoming with the character of Being—that is the supreme will to power… […] That everything recurs is the closest approximation of a world of becoming to one of Being: the apex of refection (KSA 12, 7 [54]). In a moment of beautiful circularity, Nietzsche explains in Ecce Homo that he is himself cosubstantial with the eternal recurrence (“Why I Write Such Good Books,” Thus Spoke Zarathustra, § 6; KSA 6, 343–5). As some commentators have noted, Ecce Homo’s megalomaniac tone is tempered by a healthy dose of self-parody.

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Proust and Nietzsche on Self-Fashioning 23 See, also, Rorty 1989: 106. 24 See, also, Carter-Cram 1994: 51–2. 25 For a very similar analysis which focuses instead on the somewhat narrower question of the construction of the Christian God as a glorifed “anti-nature,” see The Antichrist (1905[1888]), § 15 (KSA 6, 181–2). See, also, Deleuze’s illuminating discussion of this aspect of Nietzsche’s late meditations at 1962, 169f. 26 Several other texts may be referenced for each of the above-listed points, as well as for the central claim which they support, namely that for Nietzsche ‘truths’ and ‘errors’ are on a spectrum, that there is no ‘pure truth’. For a fruitful and philosophically rigorous discussion of this and related epistemological questions, see, in particular Anderson 1998 and 2005. Note that the kind of interpretation of Nietzsche’s epistemology which Landy espouses has a number of proponents in the anglophone commentariat (see, in particular, Clark 1990 and Leiter 2002). Having said this, this is not the place to explain how and why this broader interpretative tradition is misguided. 27 This phrase is borrowed from the Preface Nietzsche wrote in 1886 for The Birth of Tragedy’s 1887 reedition and aptly entitled “Attempt at a Self-Critique.” 28 See, in particular, Proust et les signes, 1986[7th edition], 76. 29 Though Large does not cite these passages, consider, in this connection, Marcel’s evocation of the “notion du temps incorporé” and of the bodies as “contain[ing] the hours of the past” at TR, 449; IV 623 and TR, 450; IV 624, respectively. 30 This is not to say that there isn’t important and fruitful work to be done on Proust, self hood/identity, and embodiment—as Finn’s (1999), Gabaston’s (2011), and Simon’s (2000) scholarship clearly attests to. My point is simply it is one thing to say that Proust was deeply attuned to the somatic dimension of lived experience, and quite another to attribute to him a ‘will-to-power’ favoured non-dualism as regards the ‘classical’ mind–body problem à la Large. 31 This is not to deny that Marcel almost invariably describes involuntary memory as involving an irreducibly somatic or embodied dimension. My point is simply that the phenomenon of involuntary memory (as described by Marcel in La Recherche at any rate) cannot plausibly be understood as being exhausted by said somatic or embodied dimension. 32 This is made particularly clear in a fragment dated 1888, KSA 13, 16 [32]; see, also, Ecce Homo, “Why I am so Clever,” §10 (KSA 5, 297). 33 See, in particular, the 1886 cited at footnote 21, above (KSA 12, 7 [54]). Consider, also, Nietzsche’s meliorative remarks on artistic drive as the will to lie or deceive with a good conscience at The Gay Science, “Preface” § 4 (KSA 351–2) and Genealogy of Morality, III, § 24 (KSA 5, 398–401). 34 As Landy succinctly puts it, “Proust is not Marcel” (2004, 18). Landy nevertheless thinks much of Marcel’s ‘philosophy’ is also Proust’s. As I hope to show below, Landy is mistaken on this point. 35 My translation, here, is informed by Pascal’s thinking on these matters (Pensées, 423–277: “The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows naught”), which are most certainly in the back of Proust’s mind here. 36 The theme of the merger of an expanded self and/or a contracted cosmos is one which Nietzsche frequently evokes. See, in particular, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks § 3 (KSA 1, 813–17), Schopenhauer as Educator § 7 (KSA 1, 104–11) and the fragments at KSA 11, 26 [425] and 36 [27]. 37 Note that the La Recherche’s ‘last lines’ belong to a relatively early phase in the novel’s genesis. Indeed, Proust composed a fairly mature draft of Le Temps retrouvé roughly at the same time as he was writing the “Un amour de Swann” section of Du Côté de chez Swann, the novel’s frst volume (thanks to Anna Elsner for drawing this to my attention!). The older Marcel of La Recherche’s seventh volume—together with his philosophical musings, which represent a sizable share of what this essay is concerned with—is thus a relatively early creation of Proust’s. Considering the implications of this and related historiographical details for my arguments and results in this paper is, sadly, a story for another day. 38 This passage can be fruitfully compared to Nietzsche’s somewhat hyperbolic discussion of how the thinking of scholars and philosophers from diferent backgrounds is largely shaped by idiosyncrasies of their forefather’s characteristic occupation at §§ 348–9 of The Gay Science (KSA 3, 584–6). 39 Part of the story behind the assonance between this aspect of Proust’s and Nietzsche’s views on the self in/and history concerns their shared interest in Lamarckian accounts of heredity. On this question see, in particular, Moret-Jankus 2016 (for Proust) and Schacht 2013 (for Nietzsche). 40 The locus classicus for this very rich notion is Benoît Mandelbrot’s 1975 Les objets fractals: forme, hasard, et dimension. For a discussion of fractalism in Nietzsche and Plato, see Panaïoti 2020.

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Antoine Panaioti 41 Incidentally, Nietzsche’s parallel mediations on psychology and politics also evidence his attentiveness to fractal motifs at work in or between the levels of micro, intrapersonal versus macro, interpersonal dynamics. See, in particular, Beyond Good and Evil §§ 12 (KSA 5, 26–7), 19 (KSA 5, 31–4), 188 (KSA 5, 108–10), and 259 (KSA 5, 207–8), The Genealogy of Morality, II, § 12 (KSA 5, 513–16), Human, all too Human, I, § 276 (KSA 2, 233), and fragments 40 [42] and [76] in KSA 11.

References Anderson, R. L. (1998) “Truth and Objectivity in Perspectivism,” Synthèse, 115(1), pp. 1–32. Anderson, R. L. (2005) “Nietzsche on Truth, Illusion, and Redemption,” European Journal of Philosophy, 13(2), pp. 185–225. Carter-Cram, K. (1994) “Marcel Proust: Nietzsche (Künstler-)Übermensch,” Paroles gelées, 12(1), pp. 47–59. Cavell, S. L. (2005) Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Clark, M. (1990) Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deleuze, G. (1962) Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Deleuze, G. (1986[1964]) Proust et les signes, 7th edition, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Finn, M. R. (1999) Proust: The Body and Literary Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1976–1984) L’histoire de la sexualité, trois volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Gabaston, L. (2011) Le Language du corps dans À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris: Honoré Champion. Greenblatt, S. (2005[1980]) Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, 2nd edition, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Landy, J. (2002) “Nietzsche, Proust, and the Will-to-Ignorance,” Philosophy and Literature, 26(1), pp. 1–23. Landy, J. (2003) “Accidental Kinsmen: Proust and Nietzsche,” Philosophy and Literature, 27(2), pp. 450–5. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Large, D. (2001) Nietzsche Proust: A Comparative Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leiter, B. (2002) Nietzsche on Morality, London: Routledge. Llyod, G. (1993) Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature, London: Routledge. Mandelbrot, B. (1975) Les objets fractals: forme, hasard et dimension, Paris: Flammarion. Moret-Jankus, P. (2016) Race et imaginaire biologique chez Proust, Paris: Classiques Garnier. Nehamas, A. (1985) Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nehamas, A. (1998) The Art of Living: Socratic Refections from Socrates to Foucault, Berkeley: University of California Press. Nietzsche, F. (1977) Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (eds), Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Panaïoti, A. (2012) Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panaïoti, A. (2020) “La große Politik des écrits de 1888: un programme platonicien?,” in C. Denat and P. Wotling (eds), Nietzsche: Les écrits de 1888, Reims: Editions et Presses universitaires de Reims, pp. 126–48. Parft, D. (1982) “Personal Identity and Rationality,” Synthèse, 53(2), pp. 227–41. Parft, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Pascal, B. (1963) Œuvres complètes, L. Lafuma (ed.), Paris: Editions du Seuil. Reid, J. H. (1988) “Lying, Irony, Deconstruction: Nietzsche and Proust,” Style, 22(3), pp. 467–78. Rorty, R. (1989) Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schacht, Richard (2013) “Nietzsche and Lamarckism,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 44(2), pp. 264–81. Shusterman, R. (1992) Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art, Oxford: Blackwell. Shusterman, R. (1997) Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and Philosophical Life, New York: Routledge. Simon, Anne (2000) Proust ou le reel retrouvé: Le sensible et son expression dans À la recherche du temps perdu, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

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28 THE ALTER EGO Merleau-Ponty Anne Simon Translated from the French by Olga Grlic

Merleau-Ponty had a long-term relationship with Proust.1 Their association, for that is the appropriate word, was a continuous interaction. It was connected to the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s own theoretical and written positions and ended up profoundly permeating the philosopher’s arguments with the novelist’s prose to the extent that we can speak of a shared “style of thinking” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 91). There is in Merleau-Ponty a “Proust tone” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 202)2 which never stops resonating because, between the novel and the philosophical treatise, the “rings” of the former to the “chiasm” of the latter, both authors are moved by a shared project: to develop an aesthetic of rapport or intertwining (“rapport” or “entrelacs” in French) without invoking the obsolete subject/object duality. His early and continuous immersion in the Recherche and passionate reading of Jean Santeuil as soon as it appeared in the early 1950s turned Proust into an increasingly important reference point for Merleau-Ponty. The philosopher was particularly fascinated by the transformation of existential duration into a novelistic language, a movement of reciprocal interiorization. The relation of thought to what Merleau-Ponty calls “operative” language (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 126, 153) – an innovative language capable of expressing our sensible life without loss of meaning – was without doubt one of the questions that Merleau-Ponty never stopped developing; on this level, his reading of Proust was foundational. On this prolonged journey, he was certainly joined by fellow travelers: Montaigne, Stendhal, Valéry, Claudel, Péguy, Saint-Exupéry, Claude Simon, to name but a few. From The Structure of Behavior (1942) to the posthumous texts of the sixties, and the unpublished texts, which delineate a movement of thought ever more engaged in the ontological expression of the fesh, poetic creation plays a fundamental role in elaborating Merleau-Ponty’s thinking and the evolution of his style. Yet, Proust appears to be a permanent recourse, through to the very last remarks and the fnal pages of The Visible and the Invisible. This is because Proust established, in the form of a novel which never stopped writing itself, the inseparability of expression and incarnation – “this indestructible tie between us and hours and places” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 121) which obsessed Proust as much as it obsessed Claudel. In order to understand how, from Proust to Merleau-Ponty, between voluntary recourse and passive obsession, this circulation of thought and style played out, we must return to

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-36

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a trajectory that gives an ever more essential philosophical role to “the literary use of language” (Merleau-Ponty 1953: [2013]) and to an almost erotic impregnation with another’s thinking: others “are not fctions with which I may people my desert, ofspring of my spirit, and forever unactualized possibilities — but my twins or the fesh of my fesh” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 15). We will then examine the work of fgurative resonance between Proust’s novelistic prose and the philosophical treatise by way of the examination of lexical transfers, metaphorical borrowing and contextual variation: a concept can no longer be separated from the constellations of meaning which, far from diluting its relevance, intensify its scope and renew its function. We will also examine how the novelistic use of sensible ideality and silence within poetic expression partakes in Merleau-Ponty’s last work.

Implications: Volubility of Meaning In 1948, Merleau-Ponty drew a clear distinction between literary and philosophical practices: “The function of the novelist is not to state thematically” the philosophical ideas raised by his work, but “to make them exist for us in the way things exist” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1964: 26). After the ontological turn of the 1950s, when he was ready to “give up […] notions” that were too cut and dried and “to formulate [his] frst concepts in order to avoid classic dead ends” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 137, 158),3 the distinction between philosophy and literature becomes more complex. Finding himself “at the crossing of the avenues” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 160) when he started drafting The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty freed himself from isolated philosophical ideas in order to move to a global ideality leaning on “obsessions” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 159) and a “secret history” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 119). Philosophical thought fnds itself “implicated” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 90), “within the whole which constitutes its latent content” (Ibid.): like a novel, it “makes its own way” (Ibid.) by inscribing itself into a temporality which is the beginning of narrative. From that point on, the philosopher’s project and the novelist’s discoveries become even more intertwined. On the structural level, we will close the circle after the study of logos and history as Proust closes the circle when he comes to the moment where the narrator decides to write. The end of a philosophy is the account of its beginning. (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 117) Stylistically, a Merleau-Pontian metaphor functions as a trope of “participation” unifying “dispersed existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1954: 102, 98), and accounts for the communication or even the “transubstantiation” (Merleau-Ponty 1969: 255) of things and beings. It thus rejoins Proust’s original and fnal schema of superimposition and “transvertebration” (I, 10; SW, 11), 4 which at once defnes the relation to the world and the relation to style. For Merleau-Ponty the interweaving of the poetic and the philosophical is inseparable as a more general refection on language which “takes the form of both a special problem and a problem which contains all the others, including the problem of philosophy” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 93). The reason why there is no crude sense apart from the horizons that shape our relation to the sensible, establishing it as signifying landscape and not as a sum of spatially discontinuous things, is that gestures, attitudes, and sensations are from the start grasped through expression and stylization; and also that we are immersed in language, which forms a feld in which our perceptions are both rooted and removed. Sartre also tells us that Merleau-Ponty, were he to write anything other than philosophical essays, would 432

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have written, not an autobiography, but “a novel about myself ”, which evokes the genre ambiguities of Proust’s own novel written in the frst person and which allows one to give the only answers that are worthwhile, namely “imaginary answers” (Sartre 1964: 234). This desire for a novel at the core of philosophical questioning can be seen as a modulation of a more general intersubjectivity at work in Merleau-Ponty’s reading, and that is generously related to as “fraternity”, “complicity”, and “echo” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 59; Merleau-Ponty 1973: 68, 13, 20). Merleau-Ponty was of course a reader of philosophers. He read them as closely as possible, “over [their] shoulder” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 30), in order to grasp and discuss their ideas on their own terms. He was also, and above all, a reader of poets and novelists. They open up a direct and intimate access, as Proust had already noted, to a “universe” (TR, 254; IV 474)5 which, compared to ours, is neither quite the same, nor completely another: “as the reader, I feel […] as though I have written the book from start to fnish” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 11). There is therefore a “ruse” in reading, not because it makes us take for ourselves what comes to us from another, but because what comes to us from another actually becomes oneself, in this Montaigne-like alchemical cauldron that is the experience of reading, which nourishes the book as much as it is nourished by it: “the fre catches, my thoughts are ablaze […], the fre feeds of everything I have ever read”, “the meaning of the book is made of […] the contrast between the fullness of one thought and the hollowness of another” (Ibid).6 A ruse of intersubjectivity, therefore, which becomes possible because it is really based on a devouring passion, where, between confrontation and “coupling” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 13) (the term comes from Husserl and Claudel), a vision of the world and a unique access to oneself are created. For Merleau-Ponty, reading is almost sexualized, and its potential violence, caught in the dialectic between what is shared and what isn’t, has to do with desire, cellular and embodied, not with the kind of face value on which Sartre relies. Similar to what Proust calls a “populated solitude” (Proust [1906] 1987: 115), reading is a relationship, in every sense of the term: an internal connection, not least erotic and emotional, between others and myself, but also, because it implants in me “matrices of ideas” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 90; Merleau-Ponty 1964: 77), the desire for a narrative and linguistic impulse in the sense that Proust defnes the only valid form of reading as that which never ends, because it entices one to write, it turns one to a new beginning and a new fulfllment.7 Creative language opens up “a discussion about things which does not end with it but itself invites research” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 90) as enthusiastically claimed by Merleau-Ponty, who constantly takes over for himself these love stories or this insertion into the sensible that the Recherche brings about. Traces of this dialogue, begun in The Phenomenology of Perception, and culminating in the last pages of the Visible and the Invisible, 8 dedicated to Vinteuil’s short musical phrase, appear in almost all of Merleau-Ponty’s work. Think of the preface to Signs which develops a chain of texts, including Proust, where ultimately the philosopher aims to return, not to the complex relationships between Sartre and Nizan (and of course between Sartre and himself ), but rather to the more general question of time and its intermittences: As in the things of childhood, it is in the lost comrade that I fnd plenitude, either because creative faith has dried up within me, or because reality takes shape only in my memory [cf. SW, 219; I 182]. […] Perhaps time does not fow from the future or the past. Perhaps it is distance which constitutes the reality another person has for us — above all another person who is lost. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 27) 9 433

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Beyond the fact that this last sentence could be used by Proust to defne Albertine, we are faced indeed by a reading four or fve times removed: Sartre reads Aden, Arabie, Merleau-Ponty reads Sartre’s preface and Swann’s Way (even, just beneath the surface, The Fugitive and Time Regained), the reader reads the preface to Signs and perhaps rereads Sartre’s preface, possibly in order to comment on them… The circle of appropriations and pairings never ceases to expand: the other’s words have, just like the sensible, a multiple potentiality of openings, with the reader forging his or her way through unexplored paths. Yet, quite often, and especially in Merleau-Ponty’s last writings, explicit quotations no longer support and relay the philosopher’s thoughts. Rather, by means of a germination that takes place throughout his intellectual life, this is carried out through intersections of ideas, repetitions of phrases and forms, fashes of memory, as in these notes from The Visible and the Invisible, where in parentheses, as if by a mental spotlight that is dazzling in its suddenness, there emerges the name of the “alter ego” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 20): the “perceptual world […] appears as containing everything that will ever be said, and yet leaving us to create it (Proust)” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 170). Between the novelist and the philosopher, there is indeed an “occult trading of the metaphor” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 167): initially devoted to the defnition of operative language and the gauze of silence that envelops it, this formula seems to me to defne the interlacing of philosophy and literature at a time when Merleau-Ponty’s prose is evolving towards an ever more advanced attempt to incarnate the idea.

Commerce: Lexical and Figural Trafcking The notion of trafcking evokes a hint of the illicit, as if the exchange between the novelist and the philosopher played out in the domain of an intimate, secret, or carnal negotiation, where the passage from one to the other happened less under the auspices of an explicit intellectual borrowing than under those of a vital kinship, sometimes even, by defnition, clandestine in itself. It is no coincidence that such intrusive terms as “complicity” and “promiscuity”10 are frequently used from the 1950s on to characterize both the relationship to the other and the relationship to the sensible. Just as the reversibility between the sentient and the sensed is always a promise in process of realization, or that, in perception, a distance prevents any naive coincidence with the thing that would annihilate the perceptive process, likewise, in the stylistic transfer from the novelistic world to the philosophical world, a “movement” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 125) makes itself known. This revitalization, in the “ego-alter ego mirror” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 20) of dialogue and stylistic transaction, creates in the proper and even mathematical sense a “language to the second power” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 7):11 the initial novelistic expression amplifes, shifts, and re-articulates itself in the philosopher’s prose so that the reader must address through its traces and blank spaces. As a result, “it is a lateral or oblique meaning, which runs between the words” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 46)12 of Proust and Merleau-Ponty, to the point that “it is not possible even in principle to decide at any given moment just what belongs to each” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 159), simply because, as was the case between Montaigne and La Boétie, the operation of recovery is not intended as an illustration of thought. It is not surprising that the term “oblique” — central for the understanding of the functioning of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical prose from the 1950s onwards — is also taken from Proust: in his lecture course on speech at the Collège de France the philosopher quotes “the oblique interior discourse” (TR, 247; IV 469) which in Time Regained defnes lying to oneself and also denial, which matter to us, paradoxically, because they constitute the grounding of “our passionate conversation with ourselves” (Merleau-Ponty 1954: 120, 123). 434

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One of the philosopher’s increasingly more pronounced practices was to avoid mentioning Proust’s name. The point of this unreferenced borrowing was that his name is inserted in passages where it is not necessary to invoke it. Everything happens as if Proustian sentences and formulas intervened like an ‘Open Sesame’ (I’m playing upon the title of Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies, translated by Proust) to open up certain aspects of thought to expression; on occasion, the assimilation is so complete that the concealment of Proust’s name comes to serve as another alter ego, in an incessant trafc of attributions. Thus, in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, Merleau-Ponty notes that “Sometimes, life escapes: the body is written of”, or that “more sadly, it is the question spread through the world’s spectacle which is no longer heard. Then the painter is no more or he has become an honorary painter” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 58). We fnd here, with a poignant emotional intensity that is the mark of the Merleau-Pontian sensibility (as Barthes’s will be pathos, Sartre’s anger, and Deleuze’s speed), passages of the Recherche where the formulation of self becomes impossible: Bergotte dying, Elstir repeating himself or adoring his models – “when the brain begins to tire, gradually the balance is disturbed” (BG, 498; II 207). It is therefore through Proust that Merleau-Ponty thematizes the importance of otherness in reinventing the stakes of philosophical thought. Proust is also the one who roots philosophical thought in the sexual and sensible world. Examining the visible, Merleau-Ponty explains that the seer “en est [is of it]” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 96, 123, 131), as Bergson or Claudel had done before him, but also as Proust had done when describing the social, psychic, and erotic modes of belonging to the “race des tantes [race of queens]” 13 or to the aristocracy. The Recherche thus operates less as a reservoir of signs assigned to this or that idea, than as a visual power of meaning, or even a model of global expression of life and experience. To be in tune with the mode of donation of the fesh examined in The Visible and the Invisible, meaning must be elaborated laterally, according to an intertextual functioning where, by placing oneself at the margin of novelistic style, philosophical writing can become operative. In this case, the transfer of an expression, “en être” [“to be of it”], denoting in the Recherche a way for a character to relate to his equals, for the philosopher characterizes a general way for the human to inhabit the world: erotic, secret, forbidden, strategic. I will linger on “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty [1947–1961] 1964) in order to account concretely for the modalities of the stylistic and cognitive encroachment between the novelist and the philosopher. This instance is indeed all the more signifcant for not being placed in italics (unlike the quote included in the introduction to Signs about Sartre and Nizan cited earlier). Merleau-Ponty returns to the phenomenon of incarnation, where the paradox of the indistinctness between the sentient and the sensed is played out and which cannot be assimilated to a total coincidence for the one who perceives: But, because it moves itself and sees and moves, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or a prolongation of itself, they are incrusted into its fesh, they are part of its full defnition; the world is made of the same stuf as the body. (Merleau-Ponty [1947–1961] 1964: 163) This refection on the modes of donation of the visible naturally leads to a reuse of various passages from the Recherche, where both the thematic or eventual novelistic context, which forms the implicit background of the philosophical discourse, and the expression, inasmuch as it contains a power of philosophical reactivation, are equally important. Of course, this excerpt from “Eye and Mind” very obviously recalls the beginning of “Combray”, this description in the form of a “case” (my word) of what happens to us during sleep, “When a man 435

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is asleep, he has in a circle around him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host” (SW, 5; I 5). The “case” can be generalized — is recoverable and reusable for itself — and the thinking of one can lean over the bedside of the other, precisely because it is generated from a sensible singularity, or even sufering, as the etymology of the word refers to “the one who is lying, fallen” (Worms 2014: 248).14 In these decidedly original pages, Proust suggests that, in sleep, which he would later compare to an “attack” or even “amnesia” (C, 131; III 628), the world remains our environment and our horizon: our body’s memory, uncertain and laborious as it is, still unfailingly connects us to those things which surround us and which resemble an organic extension of ourselves. In the excerpt from “Eye and Mind”, Merleau-Ponty thus indirectly relates the perceptual process to this permanent removal of the self from the pedestal of the world that Proust so often highlighted, including in sleep where sensations seem to be suspended, but where in reality they continue to create a “system” for a body which is “that which meshes with one of the possibilities like the hook and hole of a belt” (Merleau-Ponty 2003: 275). The shared background of both authors goes far beyond the question of shared “themes”, since chiasm and encroachment, as well as schemas of depth and horizontal structures are discovered at the base of their ontology. But beyond this basic convergence, the potentialities of meaning that are concealed in the Recherche’s lexicon and style are also relevant. The fgure of the carnal circle, less inclusive than dilated, like a hand with straightened fngers ready for grasping, knowing, or caressing, serves here as a link between a narrative, “tacit” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 76, 81) thought, elaborated through stories and individual bodies (including the real body of the reader who is able to slip into the character’s fctional body), and a theoretical thought which, in order to be able to elaborate or renew itself, must take the novel’s vocabulary and the plurality of the worlds to which it opens. This circle, both encompassing and dilated, welcomes without separating. Far from circumscribing, its moving circumference is the visual measure of our retractions and our impulses. Merleau-Ponty continually questions this fgure in The Visible and the Invisible in order to defne both the emergence of meaning and our insertion into the sensible. To this frst implicit reference to Proust’s work, which has just been examined, a second reference is superimposed — unexpected only by those who are not familiar with Merleau-Ponty’s intersecting of desire and knowledge, both related to coupling and incorporation (both in the alimentary and erotic sense): I could feel […] her tongue […] whose secret dewy fame, even when she merely ran it over the surface of my neck or stomach, gave to those caresses of hers, superfcial but somehow imparted by the inside of her fesh, externalized like a piece of material reversed to show its lining, as it were the mysterious sweetness of a penetration. (F, 569, my emphasis; IV 79) It is not surprising that we fnd a vocabulary here of “fesh”, “fabric”, “lining”, “interior” that “Eye and Mind” as well as The Visible and the Invisible will repeat to infnity (including about Proust). This permanent revival of Proustian vocabulary that has become a trademark of Merleau-Pontian discourse creates an efect where repetition and variation promote an almost musical, intuitive understanding, located between De Certeau’s “chorus” (Certeau 1982: 90) and Deleuze’s “refrain” (Simon 2016: 117–54). From 1945 onward, Merleau-Ponty recognized that “the novel and metaphysics” (Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1964: 30) are connected by a “space of complicity” (Lefort 1982: 101), the latter having to compose with expressive hybridity if it does not want to miss its — fundamentally equivocal — object. In the third 436

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and fourth intertexts, we fnally fnd doubly disseminated in Proust’s work those things that in “Eye and Mind” are “an annex or an extension” of the subject: on the one hand, a contrario, in The Fugitive when mourning introduces cracks in relation to a world whose concrete and massive presence has become senseless and hostile, and, on the other hand, in the many Proustian refections on the garment as an “extension [of the] body” (G, 58; II 357)15 or on a habit that makes the world breathable and transforms furniture and rooms into an “extensions of [our] organs” and an “enlargement of [oneself ]” (BG, 283; II 27). “Vision is style” (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 218):16 taking stock of lexical reiterations and transfers that allow the philosopher to seed the feld of his thought would be meaningless, as they are so numerous, from the “pyramid of time” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 14)17 turned towards the vertiginous “stilts” (TR, 451; IV 625) on which the aged narrator of Time Regained is standing on top of the “furrow” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 58)18 which makes it impossible for the artist to say “what comes from him and what comes from things, what the new work adds to the old ones, or what it has taken from the others, and what is its own” (Merleau-Ponty [1952] 1964: 59). Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term “sillon [furrow]” is more than an allusion, it is Proust’s palimpsest signature within the philosopher’s writing. It refers to the crucial passage in Time Regained that defnes vision as an enclosure, and style as based on “rings” which represent a primordial “metaphor” where exterior and interior can no longer function as operators capable of giving an account of our life in the sensible or in the world of language: “The link may be uninteresting, the objects trivial, the style bad, but unless this process has taken place, the description is worthless” (TR, 246; IV 468). One can understand that the philosopher who makes “transgression” and “encroachment” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 248) essential modes of our being-in-the-world has been fascinated by a novelistic style in tune with the relational essence of the lived experience: “to be of it [en être]”, “to keep a circle around oneself ” to allow the philosophical discourse to account for enveloping phenomena that would have been missed in conceptual prose focused on semantic univocity.

Linings: Shadow, Veil, Silence In Proust, nature itself is the beginning of art, she who often had allowed me to become aware of the beauty of one thing only in another thing, of the beauty, for instance, of noon at Combray in the sound of its bells, of the mornings at Doncières in the hiccups of our central heating. (TR, 246; IV 468)19 Merleau-Ponty’s ontology will retain this principal enjambement, ending up by “defning Being by the metaphorical movement itself ” (Barbaras 1998: 284), and subsuming under the terms “sensible” or “fesh” this permanent coming and going between realms of reality that classical philosophy has traditionally disjointed: nature and art, sensation and refection, visible and invisible. He noticed this chiasm that operates at the heart of the sensible as well as at the heart of thought in Proust, especially in that “idea of church” (BG, 340; II 75) which, from Jean Santeuil to the Recherche, is visible only through the moving ivy that covers it, veiling it at the precise moment when it is revealed. Beginning with “The Problem of Speech”, Merleau-Ponty found in it a support for his own thinking, intertwining quotations from Jean Santeuil in his meditation on the emulation between art and nature: the “intertwining” of Virginia creeper and ivy on the church, where Proust specifes their simultaneous “natural abandonment and decorative intentions” ( JS: 513) that “seem to understand ‘the need to 437

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respect intervals and to bend at a curve’ ( Jean Santeuil II, 260), to replay artistic intention while only following their determinism” (Merleau-Ponty 1954: 96). 20 The sculptural idea, like the literary and musical ideas that monopolized Merleau-Ponty’s attention in his later work, but also like the “articulations of light” or “modes of exhibiting sound and touch”, are indeed “sensible ideas” inseparable from the process of their presentation: The idea is this level, this dimension. It is therefore not a de facto invisible, like an object hidden behind another, and not an absolute invisible, which would have nothing to do with the visible. Rather it is the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being. (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 151) Going beyond Proust’s description of Vinteuil’s little phrase, Merleau-Ponty asserts that the idea cannot be seen “without veils”, simply because, ontologically, “there is no vision without a screen” (Ibid.). We do not feel, we do not think despite our body, but with and in it, and the thickness as well as the “lacunae” (Merleau-Ponty 2011: 175) of things and beings are the very modes that make grasping them possible. Proust thus intervenes in this fundamental vein of The Visible and the Invisible which is the end of the chapter on interlacing which cements Merleau-Ponty’s turn towards a radical renovation of philosophy and its language: We touch here the most difcult point, that is, the bond between the fesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature which it manifests and which it conceals. No one has gone further than Proust in fxing the relations between the visible and the invisible, in describing an idea that is not the contrary of the sensible, that is its lining and its depth. (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 149) Proust’s style, which gives rise to the sense of silence, reinforces this fundamental chiasm and answers the call of those “mute things” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 125)21 that fascinated him as much as they did Husserl or Merleau-Ponty. We understand that he guided the latter in his earliest research as well as in his fnal linguistic endeavors. Both in the case of the novelist and the philosopher who wrote that “the language is expressive as much through what is between the words as through the words themselves, and through what it does not say than by what it says” (Merleau-Ponty 1973: 43), and who knew that the novelist’s thought lies “between the descriptions” (Merleau-Ponty 1996:50) we are dealing with a dynamic recovery, in which a writing practice is at play which, according to Proust, Nerval had already taken up without thematizing it: It is only the inexpressible, the thing one believes one cannot succeed in getting into a book that remains in it. […] But it is not in the words, it is not said, it is all in among the words, like the morning mist in Chantilly. (CSB, 153) Merleau-Ponty’s course “The Problem of Speech” makes an explicit link with Proust’s philosophical-literary practice: “‘his philosophy’ […] is precisely the correlative experience of the silence of things and the appearance of speech.” And the silence of things “calls our speech so that they do not become lost in themselves” (Merleau-Ponty 1954: [94], [96]). 438

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However, Proust was accused of being a verbose or even chatty author. To accept that would be to forget that he continuously asserted the role of silence in his style, uniquely capable of rendering the “lateral presentation, from profle” (Ibid., [95]) of the sensible which, for him, grounds the perceptive process as much as the relation to others — be they beloved, lying and elusive women, or those many characters who, beyond the exposure to which the inquisitive prose of the Recherche submits, retain an irreducible core of secrecy and unpredictability. Time Regained thus criticizes a literature of labels which displays its theories, afrming that “authentic art has no use for proclamations of this kind, it accomplishes its work in silence” (TR, 236; IV 460). Signs, where Stendhal, Balzac and Marx are mentioned, but not Proust, though he is implicitly present, takes up this distinction between “the novel as a report […], as an announcement of ideas, theses or conclusions”22 and “the novel as inauguration of a style, an oblique or latent meaning” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 77). The “statement” versus the “oblique meaning”: what is at play here is the ability of novelistic writing to restore our primordial relationship to the world, which is constituted in the perception as well as in the memory of the in-between, or an ellipse that is not an absence. Merleau-Ponty therefore gives ontological value to a style that does not so much express the muteness of things as express what it is in them that resists the sufocating plenitude of speech (Merleau-Ponty [1952–1960] 1968: 23). Sartre seeks to exhaust the real by means of a saturated, galloping prose; Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, does not conversely advocate a retracted, transparent writing: his taste for Proust shows that metaphorical profusion, as well as the dialectic between “additions” (CS, 213–14) and syntactic excavations, have to do with a silence that is not a subtraction, a less-than-saying, but a way to integrate diferent temporalities in the same sentence (for example by inserting parentheses and interpolations), to express the invisible of the visible or the gap in perception that stops us from losing ourselves in a deathly fusion. Proust allows the philosopher to conceive a thought containing zones of latency, a thought that is not clouded (etymologically obscured) by meaning, an unveiling that is accomplished through the veil. Indeed, the words in themselves are not the opposite of silence, but a way of using them: In already acquired expressions there is a direct meaning, which corresponds point for point to fgures, forms, and established words. Apparently, there are no gaps or expressive silences here. But the meaning of expressions which are in the process of being accomplished cannot be of this sort […]. (Merleau-Ponty [1952] 1964: 46) We understand that the Proustian overprint, at once stylistic and thematic, haunted the philosopher for whom the sensible depth could be expressed solely through a writing which has muteness and the latent invisibility of things at its heart, just like the cognitive scope of the afect — especially sorrow23 and jealousy. Only a complex syntactic structure, made of insertions and interpolations, ellipses and misunderstandings, and which can be accused  of illegibility, can account for the ideal, multi-temporal, and phantasmatic levels that turn the sensible into something other than a purely perceptual surface. Proustian truth is thus a truth “which transpires through ‘velours’ [“velvet”], which has been ‘re-created’ [cf. TR, 257; IV 477], which has been reached only through ‘depths’; in principle the style has several ‘layers’ (Bergotte’s death) like Vermeer’s yellow wall” (Merleau-Ponty 1954:124).24 What Merleau-Ponty has retained from his commerce with Proust is the need to establish a philosophical form capable of integrating silence and depth in its process. In The Visible and the Invisible, he specifes that he must “replace the notions of concept, idea, mind, 439

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representation by the notions of dimensions, articulation, level, hinges, pivots, confguration” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 244). When acted upon or used in a narrative, these notions become Elstir’s ways of painting, making the enjambment into the constituting principle of landscape in Harbor at Carquethuit, 25 Proust’s ways of writing, whether in using what Ricœur was to name “the living metaphor” or a syntax based on articulation, interpolation, and palimpsest. “He tries to penetrate the thing by approaching it several times […]”, Merleau-Ponty insists in reference to Jean Santeuil (Merleau-Ponty 1954: [96]). For both authors, silence is, therefore, the very opposite of the vertigo of the blank page: it is not endured, it does not proceed the writing, it conquers itself, as the goal of the work and the condition of its ontological efectiveness. Overload, overstufng, overfeeding, length are all characteristics of writing in the Recherche, but also in the drafts of The Visible and the Invisible. Far from being obstacles or antonyms of silence, they become the very means that allow, as Proust urges us, to restore the role of “shadow” in “the indication […] of the depth of a work” (TR, 257; IV 476). It is therefore necessary to produce a superimpressive writing that leads the reader to adopt a participative and creative attitude: “Never let the words and images that have been drawn for you stop you, but look ‘through’” (Plantevignes 1971: 179–80). This active crossing of language can only be produced by an aesthetics of the “sous-entendu” (“implied”) — in the literal sense, by hearing or understanding what is underneath words and sentences — that Merleau-Ponty will assign not only to literature but also to philosophy and its history, since it is a matter of “consider[ing] language, even philosophical language, not as sum of statements or ‘solutions’, but as a veil lifted, a verbal chain woven…” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 199).26 From one reading to another, from one style to another, or from one thought to the other: we see, we speak, we read through a body that is never here or there, posted in a single, mental “sentry box” (SW 98, my translation; I, 83), but always behind or in front of it, with the aim of bringing us back to ourselves at the precise moment when it transports us towards things, towards others, towards meaning, as Proust expresses so well when he describes reading in the garden in “Combray” and Merleau-Ponty when he mentions those “cracks” that books by others create in his “private universe” in order to create “a rupture” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 235).

Notes 1 This text appeared in an extended version in Anne Simon, Trafcs de Proust. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Barthes, Paris, Hermann, Philosophy Collection, 2016, pp. 39–79; I thank the publisher for giving the permission for this translation. 2 Proust speaks of an “accent de Vinteuil”, see C, 288–9; III 760. On the artist’s tone, see Merleau-Ponty 1954: 109’. I am grateful to Franck Robert and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, who, while preparing the edition with Lovisa Håkansson, gave me access to the transcription of the unpublished text; sheet numbers of this unpublished text are in square brackets; the abbreviations, the elisions and Merleau-Ponty’s punctuation have been retained. 3 See also: “there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it” (Merleau-Ponty 1968:139). On the ontological turn, see Merleau-Ponty 1968:165. 4 See also Simon 2018a: 11–33. 5 Merleau-Ponty 1954 develops this idea continuously, see 102, 107’, 109, 109’. 6 On “fre” that catches, see also Merleau-Ponty 2011: 77; Merleau-Ponty 1954: 125’. 7 On “beautiful books” as “Enticements”, see “Journées de lecture” [1905], CS, 176. 8 See also the section on Proust in “L’ontologie cartésienne et l’ontologie aujourd’hui” in Merleau-Ponty 1996: 191–8. 9 The Proust quote (SW, p. 188) is italicized in the text; it was used already in Merleau-Ponty 1954: 97.

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The Alter Ego 10 There are innumerable examples, and the term “complicity” explicitly refers to Proust in the lecture, see Merleau-Ponty 1954: [114]. 11 See also Merleau-Ponty 1968: 96. 12 Cf. the evocation of “oblique” and “lateral” in the description of Hubert Robert’s water fountain in SG, 65; III 56–7. 13 This is the title Proust gave to one of the frst fragments he devoted to homosexuality, see Cahier 6 (n.a.f. 16646), f ̊ 37 r ̊. 14 On the wider relation between caring (le panser/le penser) and the humanities, see Worms 2014. 15 On the “dequalifcation of the world”, see F, 550–1; IV 63–4. 16 See also TR, 254; IV 474: “for style for the writer, no less than colour for the painter, is a question not of technique but of vision […]”. 17 This expression refers explicitly to Proust, see Merleau-Ponty 1996: 49, just like the “pyramid of past” in Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1964: 450. 18 See also Merleau-Ponty 2003: 277, and Merleau-Ponty 1954: 117, 127, 127’ and, in Proust, SG, 183–4; III 156; F, 719–20; IV 206; TR, 248; IV 470. 19 On the expression of the sensible, see Simon 2018b. 20 Merleau-Ponty read the edition of Jean Santeuil in three volumes edited by Bernard de Fallois in 1952 for Gallimard. 21 Cf. “celtic belief ” in Proust: “in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object”, are “lost to us until the day […] they call us by our name […] they […] return to share our life”, SW, 51; I 44. 22 We fnd this passage again in Merleau-Ponty 1973: 125 – Merleau-Ponty thus really cared about it. The term “oblique” (TR, 247; IV 469) functions as a Proustian connection from 1952–1953 onwards. 23 Cf. “Ideas come to us as the substitutes for griefs” TR, 268; IV 485. 24 On the “velvet” of style, see TR, 354; IV 551: un objet matériel, si je le retrouvais au bout de quelques années dans mon souvenir, je voyais que la vie n’avait pas cessé de tisser autour de lui des fls diférents qui fnissaient par le feutrer de ce beau velours pareil à celui qui, dans les vieux parcs, enveloppe une simple conduite d’eau d’un fourreau d’émeraude. [a physical object, I perceived that life all this while had been weaving round person or thing a tissue of diverse threads which ended by covering them with the beautiful and inimitable velvety patina of the years, just as in an old park a simple runnel of water comes with the passage of time to be enveloped in a sheath of emerald.] 25 “the refections had almost more solidity and reality than the foating hulls, vaporised by an efect of the sunlight and made to overlap one another by the perspective” (BG, 482; II 193); this ekphrasis is analyzed in Merleau-Ponty 1954: [104]. 26 See also the note of October 27, 1959: “The sensible is that: this possibility to be evident in silence, to be understood implicitly” (Merleau-Ponty 1968: 214).

Bibliography Barbaras, Renaud. 1998. Le Tournant de l’expérience. Recherches sur la philosophie de Merleau-Ponty. Paris, Vrin. De Certeau, Michel. June 1982. “La folie de la vision,” Esprit, “Maurice Merleau-Ponty,” no. 66, 90. Lefort, Claude, 1982. “Philosophie et non-philosophie,” Esprit, June 1982, 101. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1954. “Le problème de la parole” (cours du jeudi, Collège de France, janvier-mai 1954), preparatory notes, vol. XII, 172 sheets, Bibliothèque nationale de France. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. Signs: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Trans. by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1945] 1964. Sense and Non-sense. Trans. by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus. Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1947–1961] 1964. The Primacy of Perception and other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Trans. by William Cobb. Ed. by James M. Edie. Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. by Alphonso Lingis. Ed. by Claude Lefort. Evanston, Northwestern University Press.

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Anne Simon Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1952–1960] 1968. Résumés de cours. Collège de France, 1952–1960. Paris, Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty. Ed. by Alden L. Fisher, Evanston, New York, Harcourt Brace. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1973. The Prose of the World: Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Trans. by John O’Neill. Ed. by Claude Lefort. Evanston, Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1945] 1992. Phenomenologie de la Perception. Paris, Gallimard, coll. “Tel,”. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1996. Notes de cours (1959–1961). Ed. by Nathalie Ménasé. Paris, Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty. Maurice. 2003. L’Institution. La Passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955). Ed. by Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort and Stéphanie Ménasé. Paris, Belin. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1953] 2011. Le Monde sensible et le Monde de l’expression. Cours au Collège de France. Notes. Ed. by Emmanuel de Saint Aubert and Stefan Kristensen. Geneva, MetisPresses. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1953] 2013. Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. Cours au Collège de France. Notes. Ed. by Benedetta Zaccarello and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert. Geneva, MetisPresses. Plantevignes, Marcel, 1971. Avec Marcel Proust. Causeries-Souvenirs sur Cabourg et le Boulevard Haussmann, Paris, Nizet. Proust, Marcel in John Ruskin, 1987. Sésame et les Lys précédé de Sur la lecture de Marcel Proust [1906], préface, traduction et notes de Marcel Proust, ed. Antoine Compagnon, Paris, Éditions Complexe Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1964. Situations IV. Paris, Gallimard. Simon, Anne. 2016. Trafcs de Proust. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Deleuze, Barthes. Paris, Hermann, Philosophy Collection. Simon, Anne. 2018a. La Rumeur des distances traversées. Proust, une esthétique de la surimpression. Paris, Classiques Garnier. Simon, Anne. [PUF, 2001] 2018b. Proust ou le réel retrouvé, 2nd ed., Paris, Champion. Worms, Frédéric, 2014. Penser à quelqu’un, Paris, Flammarion.

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29 PROUST THE PHENOMENOLOGIST Sartre and Beauvoir as Readers of Proust Lior Levy I had more pleasure on evenings when a ship, absorbed and liquefed by the horizon, appeared so much the same colour as its background, as in an Impressionist picture, that it seemed to be also of the same substance, as though its hull and the rigging in which it tapered into a slender fligree had simply been cut out from the vaporous blue of the sky. Sometimes the ocean flled almost the whole of my window, raised as it was by a band of sky edged at the top only by a line that was of the same blue as the sea, so that I supposed it to be still sea, and the change in colour due only to some efect of lighting. Another day the sea was painted only in the lower part of the window, all the rest of which was flled with so many clouds, packed one against another in horizontal bands, that its panes seemed, by some premeditation or predilection on the part of the artist, to be presenting a “Cloud Study,” while the fronts of the various bookcases showing similar clouds but in another part of the horizon and diferently coloured by the light, appeared to be ofering as it were the repetition – dear to certain contemporary masters – of one and the same efect caught at diferent hours but able now in the immobility of art to be seen all together in a single room, drawn in pastel and mounted under glass. And sometimes to a sky and sea uniformly grey a touch of pink would be added with an exquisite delicacy, while a little butterfy that had gone to sleep at the foot of the window seemed to be appending with its wings at the corner of this “Harmony in Grey and Pink” in the Whistler manner the favorite signature of the Chelsea master. (BG, 444–5; II 163) These descriptions, which could be titled “variations on the ocean,” are recounted by the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower as he lies on his bed before leaving his room, quite reluctantly, to go to dinner. The ocean is seen here as fuid and fuctuating, its water at times still and indiscernible from the sky, at times low, framed by clouds, themselves framed by the window. By means of its encounters with the sky, the clouds, and the ships, which act as its horizons, the ocean pierces the semantic register of the text and enters our sensuous or phenomenological experience; out of the constant movement of its waves, which change from blue, to greys, and to hues of pink, the ocean, as a sensuous phenomenon, appears. Proust ofers, here as well as in numerous other passages in In Search of Lost Time, something closely akin to phenomenological descriptions, giving rich and thick accounts of objects and DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-37

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events, natural, social, and personal. Although he is not explicitly seeking, in the manner of Husserlian phenomenology, the essences of experiences as they appear to consciousness, he is attentive, as a phenomenologist would be, to the logos, or logic, of a phenomenon; he allows that which appears to have the right to speak.1 In this case, the text gives shape to the appearance of the ocean, registering its unique feel. By portraying the ocean through a series of images, indeed structuring these textual images by means of their afnities to pictures, or visual images – an impressionist painting, a “Cloud Study” (BG, 444–5; II 163) or a painting by Whistler – the narrator gives an account of the ocean as an object whose very essence is to appear, the ocean as it gives itself to the human eye, or as the phenomenologists say, to human consciousness. Numerous studies have suggested that Proust should be read as a phenomenologist.2 In “Proust and Phenomenology,” James Morrison and George Stack (1968) argue that there are “signifcant parallels” (640) between In Search of Lost Time and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, despite the fact that there is no direct infuence of their work on his novel. Husserl’s transcendental-phenomenological reduction, and the intuition of essences, are but two of the phenomenological terms of art to which they fnd analogies in Proust’s writing, which like phenomenological texts captures “the essential realities of our lives and experiences” (Morrison and Stack 1968, 615). But whereas the lack of a direct relationship between In Search of Lost Time and German phenomenology leads us to seek only parallels, inasmuch as Husserl and Heidegger do not engage directly with Proust’s work, or he with theirs, we can look for actual contact if we examine Proust’s œuvre in relation to French phenomenology, which has been infuenced and informed by him – from Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay “The Other in Proust” (1947) to Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous The Visible and the Invisible (1964). This essay turns to two specifc, and less frequently examined, encounters between Proust and the French phenomenological tradition – examining Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship to Proust. 3 Sartre and Beauvoir, who were both philosophers as well as writers, had an intimate, although in Sartre’s case also troubled, relationship to Proust. Sartre read Proust as an adolescent, and, according to John Gerassi’s account, “knew Swann and Charlus inside out” and even “often played at being one of them” (1989, 65). Interviewed by Beauvoir later in life, Sartre describes the “inner crisis” he underwent when, arriving in Paris from the provinces, he began reading Proust (Beauvoir 1984, 137). The move to Paris, which is associated in this interview with the discovery of Proust’s work (e.g. 133, 137) entailed, for the young Sartre, the discovery of a whole new world, of people and words, unknown to the child who lived in La Rochelle and who would later describe his life there as a form of “living in the nineteenth century” (137). We know that Sartre continued to refect on Proust during the Second World War while incarcerated in a German prison camp. In his Notebooks from a Phony War (war diaries written between 1939 and 1940), he writes about his relationship to Proust as a student at the École Normale Supérieure (following a list of authors who Sartre particularly didn’t like, he says that Proust “worried him” [Sartre 1995, 287]). Sartre refers to Proust later in his philosophical works, from the early texts that we shall shortly discuss, to the later Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). Finally, the fact that he returns to Proust late in life in the above-mentioned interview given to Beauvoir in 1974 (six years before Sartre’s death), testifes to the fact that he remained preoccupied with him throughout his life. There is also evidence that Proust played a role in Beauvoir’s development as a writer and a philosopher. She read him as a philosophy student, and mentions him numerous times in her diaries from 1926 to 1927. A diary entry from May 13, 1927, where she writes about her 444

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solitude and her desire to fnd love, ends with a quote from Swann’s Way about the belief in love’s ability to give the lover access to the beloved’s being (De Beauvoir 2006, 258).4 This conclusion not only attests to her afnity at that particular moment to Proust’s thoughts on love but also echoes other themes in this diary entry, mainly the desire to write a novel about “inner life or something similar,” as well as essays that connect the philosophical and the literary. Here Proust enables Beauvoir to articulate her own thoughts in a way that, she says, she wishes to make her own. In a later entry from the same year, dated July 22, Beauvoir turns to Proust for a meditation on loss, developing a theme which, as we shall later note, becomes the locus of a more intimate relationship between her work and his. After recounting ambivalence regarding her lack of feelings towards a former love interest, a difculty in letting go of her love, despite the fact that he no longer excites her, and an equal difculty in admitting that a new relationship does not hold amorous potential, she turns to Proust. He says, according to Beauvoir, that in order not to regret a lost possession when it is gone, “one must then, even when one possesses it, foresee this loss” (ibid., 290).5 In the years 1929–1943 Beauvoir taught at lycée level and included Proust in her syllabi (Kirkpatrick 2019, 183). Later in life she discusses Proust again, in lectures given in the mid-1960s (which will be discussed later in this essay) as well as in her interview with Sartre.6 These references, some brief, some more elaborate, are a testimony to her lifelong engagement with Proust. In what follows, I use the prism of phenomenology to sketch an outline of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s relationships to Proust. Both Sartre and Beauvoir develop phenomenology as an existential philosophy, emphasizing the links between the spontaneity of consciousness and freedom (Sartre), and between freedom and commitments to others (Beauvoir), and, I argue, it is in relation to their investment in these themes that the two philosophers responded to Proust. For Sartre, the existential dimension of phenomenology entailed that despite thematic afnities between him and Proust – afnities that reveal the extent of infuence that In Search of Lost Time had on the philosopher’s development – he refused to acknowledge his debt to Proust. In the next section, I examine Sartre’s turn to phenomenology and his denouncement of Proust at that moment. The last section of this essay turns to Beauvoir’s account of her mother’s death and of loss in A Very Easy Death, reading it as a refection of Proust’s phenomenology of death and dying in In Search of Lost Time. I show how she fnds Proust’s work to be resonant with the ethical sensibilities of her existential project.

Sartre on Proust – Te Tension between Phenomenology and Existentialism In an interview Beauvoir conducted with Sartre ten years before his death, he credits Proust for helping him see that “sometimes you were active with regard to people and at other times passive” (Beauvoir 1984, 137). Although in response to Beauvoir’s question Sartre suggests that this distinction only concerns the diference between those “who undergo” and those “who are active” (ibid.), I take this distinction to be more fundamental and to penetrate into the heart of his philosophical conception of the self-other relationship in Being and Nothingness. Sartre’s notion of the look (“le regard”) suggests that there is an element of passivity at the heart of human existence, for it is the others who constitute me as what I am and in relation to this constitution I am helpless. The other, says Sartre, “holds a secret: the secret of what I am” (Sartre 2021, 483). In In Search of Lost Time the narrator is constantly pondering the question of how he is constituted in the eyes of others. And for Proust, as it would be later for Sartre, at stake is not simply an opinion the other will have of me (an opinion that could be true or false, refecting more or less accurately who I really am), but the fact that the other’s subjectivity is engulfed in itself, never given to me but through the way in which 445

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it determines me as its object, over which I have no control. After encountering Albertine and her friends for the frst time in Balbec, the narrator wonders: “If she had seen me, what could I have represented to her? From the depth of what universe did she discern me?” (BG, 432; II152). And again, the narrator describes, during the same encounter, his wish to one day be the friend of one of these girls “whose incomprehensible gaze struck me from time to time and played unwittingly upon me like an efect of sunlight on a wall” (BG, 434; II 153). Childers refers to this example as a prefguration of Sartre’s claim that relationships always involve a dimension of objectifcation. The narrator, Childers points out, “is ‘struck’ in this instance by their looking at him and recognizes his status as an unknown object they may look upon” (2013, 395). Yet this example prefgures Sartre’s point in more than one way. In Being and Nothingness Sartre uses the image of a shadow (thrown by an object illuminated by the sun onto a wall) to refer to the manner in which self hood is cast upon, even haunts, subjective experience (cf. Sartre 2021, 230, 232; Sartre 1943, 201, 204). The gaze, which, in Proust, falls on the subject and renders it passive, as light touching an object creates the efect of a shadow on a wall, becomes in Sartre’s text the origin of a sense of self. In The Transcendence of the Ego the self is akin to a shadow in more than one sense – it is created by consciousness refecting on itself, a shadow produced by the conscious gaze. It is illusory as a shadow is, an image that should not be taken for anything actual (Sartre 1965, 82; 2005 28). In The Transcendence of the Ego, prerefective experience is always devoid of self, which is only constituted under the refective gaze. In Being and Nothingness, the other will replace the objectifying gaze of refective consciousness, granting consciousness an objectivity that it can never, prerefectively, grant itself. According to Sartre, the awareness of one’s own passivity before the other, one’s givenness to the look, which escapes and transcends the subject’s reach, can give rise to the desire to appropriate and master the other. This is the desire to capture the other qua subject, in the hope of gaining control over the way that the other’s gaze determines my being. It is a futile and unfulfllable desire, since once appropriated the other is objectifed and the sought-after subjectivity is petrifed and eradicated. In Being and Nothingness Sartre himself cites the novel as proof of the futility of the attempt to capture the other: For example, Proust’s hero, who installs his mistress in his home, who can see and possess her at every hour of the day, and has managed to make her totally dependent materially, ought to be free of trouble. However, we know that he is, on the contrary, eaten up by worry. It is through her consciousness that Albertine escapes from Marcel, even when he is at her side, and that is why the only respite he can have is when he contemplates her while she sleeps. (Sartre 2021, 486) 7 Phenomenology had a liberating efect on Sartre. Crucial for him is that phenomenology allows us to give up on the quest to know the other’s subjectivity, because it is attentive to a core element in my experience of the other’s subjectivity, namely its absence, the fact that the other’s subjectivity can never be objectively given (or that it can be given merely as absent). His analysis of the self-other relationship in Being and Nothingness begins with a discussion of the progress that phenomenology has made towards revealing the truth of this relationship. Again, this is precisely the point that Proust conveys in the example discussed above, as well as in other cases.8 And Sartre is indebted in this respect to Proust, at times making this debt explicit, at others keeping the infuence implicit.9 Because of this infuence, it is surprising to encounter the dismissive tone with which Sartre approaches Proust in his philosophical 446

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work. In his early essay, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” published in 1939, Sartre gives an account of the redeeming efect of phenomenology on philosophical thinking in toto, although this narrative can be read as a description of his own joyous discovery of Husserlian phenomenology. No longer caught in the dichotomy between idealism and realism, freed from the trap of “digestive philosophy” (29), which relates to the world via the mediation of mental images, phenomenology brings us to “the things themselves” (to which, Husserl famously urges in Logical Investigations, “we must go back” [Husserl 2001, 2.168]). Reading Husserl’s phenomenology, the young Sartre stresses the ontological weight of the principle of intentionality: once consciousness is emptied out, once it is refused the status of a thing, it becomes (merely) a relationship to things, a uniquely human manner of being situated vis-à-vis the world. Later, in Being and Nothingness, consciousness is defned as the nothing at the heart of being, a negating activity operating on the plenum of being, which makes the human world, with its meaning and possibilities, appear. In this text Proust, who as we saw had an impact on Sartre’s formulation of the self-other relationship, is portrayed as a residue of old ways of thinking from which phenomenology liberates us. Phenomenology sets us free from “interior life,” from “Proust” (32), who becomes a synonym for the theory of the psychic that impedes the transparent, stream of consciousness as it bursts forth. Here, as well as in numerous places in Being and Nothingness and in The Imaginary (Sartre’s book on the imagination published in 1940), Proust stands for a kind of psychologism that Sartre abhors, one that he not merely describes, but judges. In The Imaginary, Proust is portrayed as trapped in the model of interior life that Sartre detests, caught in a “sort of solipsism of afectivity” (Sartre 2004, 68; 1986, 137). In Proust, feelings are not lived through, according to Sartre, but known. They become mental states, mental “representations” (ibid.) which must consequently be connected to their objects (to those things towards which we feel love or hate, and also boredom, fear, and curiosity). But since this is – according to Sartre again – to be living only on the refective level (as in Proust, narrating our past experiences), these representations “have no real relation with their objects”;10 in Being and Nothingness Proust is taken to task for having a mechanistic account of the psyche, the worst charge that Sartre, who holds that consciousness is sheer spontaneous activity, can bring against someone.11 Jacques Deguy (1985) suggests that Sartre’s derisory tone is the result of a desire to distance himself from Proust, an admired author, pointing perhaps to an anxiety of infuence that leads Sartre to obfuscate the degree to which he is indebted to Proust. Young-Rae Ji (2006, 45) distinguishes Sartre the philosopher from Sartre the novelist, suggesting that whereas the frst remained critical of Proust, the latter admired him (albeit secretly). Instead, I suggest that an inner tension in Sartre’s philosophical thinking led to this ambivalent approach to Proust. Sartre the phenomenologist turned to Proust’s rich accounts of seeing the other in her alterity, of jealousy and desire that attest to the impenetrability of the other, and drew on them in developing his own position. Yet side by side with the phenomenological impulse, there is an existential one, where being amounts to acting, doing, thrusting oneself onward towards an open future. For the existentialist, every social situation in which I fnd myself is my own doing – I either comply in leaving it as it is, or act to change it. In both cases, I act: “Whatever he does, he cannot avoid bearing full responsibility for his situation” (Sartre 2007, 45). From this perspective, Proust’s descriptions afrm the values and life of the bourgeoisie defending a social order that should be disrupted and transformed. This critique is linked to Sartre’s evaluation of Proust’s characters, who possess generic natures and act according to “general reactions that are common to all men” (Sartre 2021, 266). Here, the formulaic personality one possesses under the bourgeois social order stands against what 447

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would constitute a genuine individual, whose reactions are spontaneous and creative. (Such an individual, in Being and Nothingness, emerges at times as an ideal – we could also call it an existentialist stereotype – and it remains unclear whether Sartre thinks it is a tenable construction). A second Sartrean criticism concerns the temporal structure of Proust’s narrative, the fact that In Search of Lost Time goes back in time, progressing by recounting a series of memories. Sartre the existentialist identifes this movement with a fawed temporality. The future-oriented tendencies in Sartre’s existential philosophy are evident, for example, in his insistent severing of memory from imagination in The Imaginary: whereas imagination is the epitome of consciousness’ ability to detach itself from all that exists, memory is merely a mark of what no longer exists (and in that work Proust is emphatically identifed with memory, rather than with imagination).12 From this perspective it seems to Sartre that Proust is not merely giving an austere description of, and reaching for, the defning structures of the world unfolding before him; but rather that he is trapped in, or giving himself up to, a world devoid of action and change, a world without freedom.

Loss and Time: Beauvoir as a Reader of Proust A Very Easy Death, Beauvoir’s narrative of her mother’s death, is at once intimate and traumatic. This account assigns meaning and value to what Beauvoir otherwise conceptualized as feminine dependence and immanence, for example in The Second Sex (Beauvoir 1949, 31), which prioritized a future-oriented life narrative (wherein “each subject positions itself concretely in relation to projects, as transcendent” (ibid.). Whereas in The Second Sex the cyclical temporal structures that characterize familial life, motherhood and domestic work, are viewed as inferior to masculine life, characterized by transcendence, in A Very Easy Death the repetitious visits to the hospital and the routines of care are a source of value and worth, leading Beauvoir to refect on her mother’s life (and thus on motherhood) as a site of meaning.13 It also afords Beauvoir, who in The Second Sex described motherhood as a burden on women, with an opportunity to think of herself as a potential mother. Looking at pictures of her mother and herself, Beauvoir says Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything. (1985, 103)14 Here, then, is an intimate description, where roles confate, where the other is pitied, loved, and cared for.15 The narrative is also one of trauma, a narrative that wounds, in the sense that it portrays the past’s invasion of the present, and because it concerns death, leaves the reader without the ability to reconcile the two with any optimism. The mother’s lips rising to suck water from a pipette in the hospital involuntarily bring to Beauvoir’s mind the image of those same lips faring up in anger at the young Simone (1964, 39). Beauvoir’s own lips, distorted in a crying ft, viscerally feel like the mother’s mouth, as seen earlier at the hospital, a dying mouth imposed on a living one (ibid. 44). In “My Experience as a Writer,” a transcription of a lecture that Beauvoir gave in 1966, she uses “Proust’s word, the intermittences of the heart,” to refer to the invasion of a horror, dormant or latent in life (2011, 286). In the same lecture, Beauvoir addresses the possibility of fnding others’ words suitable for thinking about, but also thinking through, one’s most intimate experiences of loss and grief. Concerning the account of her mother’s death in A 448

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Very Easy Death, she mentions the “great many letters” she received from readers. “In speaking of the death of your mother,” Beauvoir quotes, “you have spoken of the death of mine, of that of my wife, or my husband, and curiously you have helped me to bear it; even though your book is very somber, you have helped me” (ibid., 296). The curious ability to use the other’s description, or testimony as Beauvoir calls it, as a panacea for one’s own pain is rooted in the fact that writing breaks down the isolation and separation one feels in mourning. For the writer, as for the reader, the text proves “a way of surpassing their grief, their anguish, their sorrow” (ibid. 297). In a way, Beauvoir draws an analogy between Proust’s account of belated mourning in “Intermittences of the Heart” – functioning as a prism through which she could understand the presence of loss in her life – and her own account of her mother’s death, in the way both texts enable others to come to terms with the grief and loss that invade their lives. Thus perhaps, not always knowingly, Beauvoir’s experience and descriptions of loss and trauma echo, or are perhaps even framed by, Proust’s phenomenology of death and dying (analysed in Elsner 2017),16 and of mourning (studied at length in Ricciardi 2003). Like many phenomenologists, Beauvoir tended to prioritize sight as the medium through which the world is encountered. In An Ethics of Ambiguity, for example, the peculiar ambiguity of consciousness is approached by discussing the desire for and distance from the countryside that one contemplates; the calm sky, and the water (Beauvoir 1947, 18–19). Consciousness apprehends the visible, rather than tactile or olfactory dimensions of the world. Many descriptions in In Search of Lost Time are visual too: the massive ships that seem like amphibians, like satin-covered pieces of Venetian architecture, their cargo like ladies coated in brocade and green damask fabric, as described by Elstir (BG, 553; II 252); the room of the narrator’s aunt, with its velvet armchairs, draped in crochet, lit by a wintry sun (SW, 59; I 50). But as the well-known petite madeleine episode shows, no less crucial for the unfolding of experience are the tastes, scents and textures of things. In A Very Easy Death, Beauvoir’s narrative of her mother’s sickness and death, the visual recedes before a wealth of sonorous, olfactory and tactile sensations. The mother’s deteriorating body is described at length (e.g. Beauvoir 1964, 109), but so are her murmurs (ibid., 38; 116), her heavy breathing (ibid., 77), the sensations of a mattress drenched in urine (ibid., 33), of a body burning from uric acid (115). In this respect Beauvoir’s phenomenology of death and dying is closer to Proust’s in À la recherche, than to the one she sets out in Ethics of Ambiguity, for example. Beauvoir’s account of being overtaken by grief (1964, 43), which is also an account of being overtaken by her mother (“Her whole person, her whole being, was concentrated there, and compassion wrung my heart” [1985, 31]) echoes the narrator’s description of his mother’s identifcation with her dead mother in Sodom et Gomorrah. At the hotel in Balbec, wearing the grandmother’s bag and clothes, quoting phrases from Mme de Sévigné, it seems to him that “it was no longer my mother that I saw before me, but my grandmother” (SG, 195; IV 166). But beyond such similarities, isn’t the structure of delayed experience of grief over the death of a beloved, described by the narrator as “intermittences of the heart,” refected in Beauvoir’s act of writing about her mother’s death? For is not writing about death, after it has occurred, what Beauvoir and the narrator are doing? And is writing in this case not a manner of “assuming an active role” (Ricciardi, 90) in what Beauvoir describes, after the fact, as the “unjustifed violence” of death (1964, 151)? In this chapter, I have ofered an initial examination of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s relationships to Proust’s work. A constant interlocutor, Proust was a writer who allowed Sartre and Beauvoir to develop their phenomenological sensibilities. Yet as I have aimed to show, the dual commitment to phenomenology and existentialism pushed Sartre to articulate his own 449

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philosophical project, often against Proust. Treating Proust as an ancestor of sorts, Sartre was, like a veritable son, at times admiring and inspired by Proust, and at times trying to disengage from him through the act of writing. The ethical orientation of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s existential projects is manifested in their relationships to Proust, which encapsulate, perhaps, their diferent conceptions of the commitments that humans ought to have to their past. Sartre saw Proust’s turn to the richness of memory as marking a withdrawal from present commitments – a withdrawal that he condemned on an ethical plane. Sartre’s afrmation of the present and future as genuinely viable horizons for action meant that he often turned away from Proust as an ancestor (disassociating himself from what “Proust” stands for). Beauvoir, on the other hand, in attempting to come to terms with death and dying, fnds the past as preserved in memory to ofer an opportunity to come to terms with the fnitude of life, and thus to allow the death of the other to be processed, along with the changes that one undergoes through the loss of others. Perhaps because of this, she is more inclined to acknowledge Proust’s contribution to her thinking, her indebtedness to how his work acted on her development as a thinker and a writer.

Notes 1 Logos, in Greek, means also “discourse” or “assertion.” See Martin Heidegger’s discussion of the term and its function in the notion of “phenomenology” in Being and Time (1927) in the introduction, section 7b onwards. 2 Matthew Spellberg (2016) reads the beginning of In Search of Lost Time and other passages in the novel as ofering a phenomenology of dreaming, noting Proust’s interest in the meaning of the dream state as experienced, as opposed to Freud’s investment in the dream as a signifying phenomenon. While Freud asks about the dream “what does it say, and how does it speak?” (60), Proust wonders “What does it look like? How does it feel? What is the nature of the dream-experience” with meaning found “in the realm of dream-feeling and dream-touch, dream-motion and dream looking” (ibid.) See also Ferraris and Terrone (2019); Cohen-Levinas (2017) and Jany (2019). 3 To the best of my knowledge there are no studies reading Beauvoir’s work in relation to Proust. A few articles examine Sartre’s relationship to Proust, focusing mainly on the former’s literary work. See e.g., Zoberman (2013), who suggests that Sartre’s “Childhood of a Leader” is a rewriting of Proust (in light of Genet). An exception is Childers (2013), who analyses Proust’s infuence on Sartre’s development of the self-other relationship in Being and Nothingness. 4 “The belief that a person has a share in an unknown life to which his or her love may win us admission is, of all the prerequisites of love, the one which it values most highly and which makes it set little store by all the rest.” (SW, 118; I 98). 5 “Il faudrait lors même qu’on le possède prévoir cette perte” (Beauvoir 2008, 380). I was unable to locate the reference in Proust’s work. 6 In the interview, she is the one who often questions Sartre about Proust. She also claims that Proust is “the only one […] who’s spoken quite well about a piece of music” (Beauvoir 1984, 225). 7 The desire to possess is also manifested in Swann’s mad jealously of Odette, who in principle remains beyond his grasp. On the afnities between Sartre and Proust with regard to possession, see Childers 2013; Gorman 2009, 48–9. 8 I take the narrator’s account of his difculty parting from his mother at bedtime to be a variation on this theme – the desire for her company, for her caresses and kisses is a desire to be afrmed by her look; because of this her “displeased” (1982, 14) look made him distraught, for it was experienced as a refusal to engage with his being. But the need to be recognized, afrmed by the other’s look, occurs in more prosaic moments as well – in a moment of erotic awakening, for instance, which the narrator experiences towards the milk girl, passing by his train. His desire, in this case, takes the form of a need to be looked at, “the need to be noticed by her” (706). 9 In Being and Nothingness, for example, the discussion of the objectifcation of consciousness and the creation of an I included a passing reference to Proust’s “Intermittences of the Heart,” where, Sartre argues, refection plays a part in the constitution of an emotion and the consolidation of a sense of self. Refection plays a role, since at such a moment we know we have experienced the

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10

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emotion, despite not currently experiencing it. Thus, there is a distinction between the lived, organic stream of conscious experience and the “artifcially” induced condition, via refection, of emotional states attributed to an I (Sartre 2021, 235). Perhaps Sartre has in mind Swann’s love for Odette, in which the relationship between the feeling and the object towards whom that feeling is directed is indeed caused by “association” or “continuity,” for, in falling in love, Swann literarily falls for an image, for a fgure in Botticelli’s painting. It is the association between Odette and that image that arouses Swann’s love. He discusses Swann and Odette in Being and Nothingness in relation to the creation of “psychic life” (which, again, is distinguished from the spontaneous stream of consciousness) (Sartre 2021, 240). On the evolution of Sartre’s reading of Proust see Deguy (1986). Deguy follows Sartre’s discussion of Proust in his letters and philosophical works, drawing out an account of his antipathy towards Proust, which, Deguy holds, Sartre (wrongfully) installs as a place holder for everything he detests in bourgeois life and literature. On the difculty of disentangling memory from imagination, a difculty that again reveals the tensions between the phenomenological and existential impulses in Sartre, see Levy 2012. Although even in this work and in refecting on her mother’s life she doesn’t completely abandon the ethos of The Second Sex she often undermines its meaning. Beauvoir’s manner of revisiting her and her mother’s past, as seen in this photo, will be echoed in Roland Barthes’ text of mourning, Camera Lucida, his essay on the essence of photography written after his mother’s death. Barthes does not mention Beauvoir in this work (which is dedicated to Sartre’s The Imaginary), but Proust is a central fgure in it, a point of departure almost, for his refections on time and loss. Beauvoir’s mother speaks in the voice of an infant, which makes Beauvoir tearful (Beauvoir 1964, 115). Although I will not touch upon it in this essay, it is difcult not to read Beauvoir’s descriptions of the morphine shots (e.g., 39, 115), the imperceptible breath of her dying mother (Beauvoir 1964, 122), and the dissolution of her body (e.g., ibid., 109) and not think of the narrator’s account of his sick and dying grandmother. Elsner’s analysis of the fragmentation of the grandmother’s body and the family’s response to it (2017, 65–7) ofers another valuable perspective for thinking about the relationship between Proust’s narrative and Beauvoir’s.

Works Cited Childers, J. M. 2013. “Proust, Sartre, and the Idea of Love,” Philosophy and Literature, 37(2), 389–404. Cohen-Levinas, 2017. “The Corporeal Meaning of Time,” The New Centennial Review, 17(2), 25–42. De Beauvoir, S. 1949. Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard. De Beauvoir, S. 1964. Une mort très douce. Paris: Gallimard. De Beauvoir, S. 1984. Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. P. O’Brian, London: Penguin. De Beauvoir, S. 1985. A Very Easy Death, trans. P. O’Brian, New York: Pantheon. De Beauvoir, S. 2006. Diary of a Philosophy Student. Vol. 1, 1926–1927. eds. B. Klaw, S. Le Bon de Beauvoir, and M. A. Simons, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. De Beauvoir, S. 2008. Cahiers de Jeunesse, Paris: Gallimard. De Beauvoir, S. 2011. The Useless Mouths and Other Literary Writings, eds. Margaret A. Simons and Marybeth Timmerman. Urbana: University of Illinois. Deguy, J. 1985. “Sartre lecteur de Proust,” Sartre. Une écriture critique. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2010 (generated 16 April 2020). ISBN: 9782757418727. DOI: https:// doi.org/10.4000/books.septentrion.16444 Elsner, A. M., 2017. Mourning and Creativity in Proust, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ferraris, M. and Terrone, E., 2019. “Like Giants Immersed in Time. Ontology, Phenomenology and Marcel Proust,” Rivista di Estetica, 70, 92–106. Gerassi, J. 1989. Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Vol. 1, University of Chicago Press. Gorman, S. 2006. “Sartre on Proust: Involuntary Memoirs,” L’Esprit Créateur, 46(4), 56–68. Husserl, E. 2001. Logical Investigation, Vol. I, trans. D. Moran, New York and London: Routledge. Jany, C. 2019. Scenographies of Perception, Cambridge: Legenda. Ji, Young-Rae. 2006. “Sartre, admirateur secret de Proust,” L’Esprit Créateur, 46(4), 44–55 Kirkpatrick, K. 2019. Becoming Beauvoir: A Life, London: Bloomsbury. Levinas, E. 1947. “L’autre dans Proust,” Deucalion 2, 117–23.

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Lior Levy Levy, L. 2012. “Rethinking the Relationship between Memory and Imagination in Sartre’s The Imaginary,” The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 43(2), 143–60 Morrison, J. and Stack, G. J. 1968. “Proust and Phenomenology,” Man and World, 1, 604–17. Ricciardi, A. 2003. The Ends of Mourning, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Sartre, J. P. 1939. “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: L’intentionnalité,” Situations I, Paris: Gallimard, 29–32. Sartre, J. P. 1943. L’être et le néant. Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique, Marseille: Gallimard. Sartre, J. P. 1965. La transcendance de l’ego: esquisse d’une description phenomenologique. Paris: Vrin. Sartre, J. P. 1986. L’imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J. P. 1995. Carnets de la drôle de guerre, Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, J. P. 2004. The Imaginary: a phenomenological psychology of the imagination, trans. J. Webber, London and New York: Routledge. Sartre, J.P. 2005. The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. S. Richmond, London and New York: Routledge. Sartre, J. P. 2007. Existentialism is a humanism, trans. C. Macomber. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Sartre, J. P. 2021. Being and Nothingness, trans. S. Richmond, New York: Washington Square Press. Spellberg, M. 2016. “Proust in the Dreamtime,” The Yale Review, 104(2), 55–79. Zoberman, P. 2013. “Sartre, lecteur de Genet: du côté de chez Proust?”, Fabula/Les colloques, Proust: dialogues critiques, http://www.fabula.org/colloques/document2165.php, page consultée le 19 août 2021.

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Biographical Notes Thomas Baldwin is a Reader in French and the Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Literature and Culture at the University of Kent, UK. His publications include The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust (2005), The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust and Deleuze (2011), What’s So Great About Roland Barthes? (a special issue of L’Esprit Créateur co-edited with Katja Haustein and Lucy O’Meara, 2015) and Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations (2019). Patrick french is a Professor of French and the Co-Director of the Centre for Humanities and Health at King’s College London. His publications include The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1996), The Cut: Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’œil (1999), After Bataille: Sacrifce, Exposure, Community (2007), Thinking Cinema with Marcel Proust (2018) and Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (2019). He is also a co-editor, with Roland-François Lack, of The Tel Quel Reader (1998), and with Ian James, of Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy, a special issue of the Oxford Literary Review (2005).

Proust-Machine: Gilles Deleuze Thomas Baldwin and Patrick french Proust plays a crucial role in the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) not, as we will show, as an object to which Deleuze “applies” a ready-made philosophy, but as a writer whose work is in itself a creation and production of ideas and concepts. In contrast to his contemporaries Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, from whose work Proust is largely absent, Deleuze stands out for his consistent reference to and deployment of what he describes as a productive “machine” for thinking – À la recherche du temps perdu – and for the complex and provocative volume Proust and Signs, which despite signifcant exceptions remains undervalued. Deleuze’s writing on Proust, and the philosophy it expresses, is extended over several decades, from the frst landmark publication of Proust and Signs (1964) and its successive versions (1970 and 1976), through Diference and Repetition (1968), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), the two volumes on cinema, The Movement-Image and The Time-Image DOI: 10.4324/9780429341472-38

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(1983 and 1985), The Fold (1988) and Essays Critical and Clinical (1993), and through the works co-authored with Félix Guattari, Anti-Œdipus (1972), Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975), A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and What is Philosophy? (1991).1 Through this thinking and writing, Deleuze negotiates the relation of his own philosophy to salient reference points in the history of philosophy, notably to Plato, Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, Leibniz and Nietzsche; Proust’s À la recherche is also a privileged site for the interdigitation of Deleuze’s thought with that of his friend Guattari. However, like the other strictly non-philosophical fgures “on” whom Deleuze writes – including Franz Kaf ka, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Lewis Carroll, Antonin Artaud, Francis Bacon and Samuel Beckett – Proust does not serve as the vehicle or example for a pre-established philosophy, either of Deleuze’s own, or of other fgures in the history of philosophy, but rather as a singular impetus for a “new image of thought”, an invention, which poses a vibrant challenge to philosophical tradition. As we will show further on, the critical concept of the “image of thought” itself, according to which thought is born out of and comes after the violent incursion of a singular event, encounter or invention, is given to Deleuze by Proust; on this basis, Deleuze’s encounter with Proust stands as among the most foundational contributions Proust has made to philosophy. Marcel Proust et les signes, as it was frst published in 1964, was Deleuze’s fourth monograph, following works on Hume, Nietzsche and Kant. Along with Nietzsche and Philosophy (1983a) (which frst appeared in 1962), a signifcant event with a long reach of infuence, it is arguably one of the frst works in which Deleuze outlines the basis of an independent philosophy which will gain fuller articulation in Diference and Repetition. The latter volume, whose third chapter “The Image of Thought” reprises the title of the “Conclusion” to Marcel Proust et les signes, intervenes between the frst and second editions of Deleuze’s volume on Proust. Now titled Proust et les signes, the contraction perhaps signalling an avoidance of the biographical resonant with Roland Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s critiques of the author fgure (Barthes 1977; Foucault 1998), the edition of 1970 includes a further chapter “Antilogos or the Literary Machine”, in which Deleuze’s new “image of thought” is extended towards the “machinic” theory he would elaborate with Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. In efect, the collaboration with Guattari dates from 1969, and the “Antilogos” chapter bears the infuence of Guattari’s critical engagements with Lacanian psychoanalysis in essays such as “Machine and Structure”, and his work in institutional psychotherapy – especially around the concept of “transversality”, a key motif of Deleuze’s “Antilogos” chapter, adding a new dimension to the latter’s engagement with Proust (see Guattari 2015). The third edition of Proust et les signes appeared in 1976; it divides the volume into two parts, “Signs”, equivalent to the 1962 edition, and “The Literary Machine”, appending as a conclusion to “Antilogos” a further essay originally published in Italian in 1973, “Presence and Function of Madness: the Spider”, ending the volume which constitutes the currently available and “complete” version in the strange territory of madness. The frst translation into English of Proust et les signes, by Richard Howard, appeared in 1972 and corresponds to the French edition of 1970. The “complete text” edition, which includes the fnal essay on madness, also translated by Richard Howard, was frst published in 2000 and is the currently available version. The outline sketched out above describes the evolution of the thought brought into play by the encounter between Deleuze and Proust, an encounter which ripples outwards through other encounters and events. While it is true to some extent that the successive versions and infections of Proust and Signs bear the favour of their moment – “Signs” (1964) working systematically in a structuralist mode through a quasi-tabulation of intercalated “levels” and types of signs, “The Literary Machine” and “Presence and Function of Madness” (1970 and 1976) resonant with the post-May 1968 concern, in French thought, with desire and its 454

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mobilities – Deleuze remains close to the text of À la recherche throughout. What emerges, nevertheless, is strikingly diferent, as we hope to show, from the pre-established image of Proust dominated by issues of memory and aesthetics, and as suggested above remains one of the most consequent and yet least absorbed philosophical engagements with his work. While, as the frst two parts of our contribution suggest, Deleuze’s engagement with Proust in Proust and Signs can be understood according to the two conceptual motifs of the “image of thought” and the “literary machine”, Proust’s work continues to operate transversally across Deleuze’s writing beyond this volume, including the works co-authored with Guattari. There is enough treasure in Proust and Signs to occupy us for the entirety of this chapter, and it is on this work which we will concentrate. We will nevertheless ofer some indications, in concluding, for the transversal lines that extend across Deleuze’s philosophy, some manifest, others less obvious and indeed as if encrypted, awaiting their unfolding.

Te Image of Tought Deleuze’s Proust and Signs stands apart from other philosophically oriented engagements with Proust through its attention to the thinking that À la recherche invents and creates, rather than through its efort to understand the philosophical antecedents of the novel. A bit like a lapidary insect pinned to a board in an old-fashioned natural history show, Proust’s novel has often appeared as an exhibit in a philosophical demonstration that aligns it with a well-known system or tradition. Jean-Yves Tadié, for example, says that the infuence on Proust of French neo-Kantian thinkers (most notably Émile Boutroux, Alphonse Darlu and Jules Lachelier) is so profound – and so much in evidence in À la recherche and elsewhere in Proust’s oeuvre  – that the attempts of other critics to situate him within the orbit of German philosophical idealism, and of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) in particular, miss the principal philosophical underpinning of the novel (Tadié 1996: 251). In contrast, in her remarkable Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique, Anne Henry contends that, from Jean Santeuil onwards, Proust provides a literary transposition of Schelling’s philosophy of nature, art and identity (Henry 1981). Elsewhere, Henry asserts that just as “Vinteuil’s score is written by Schopenhauer”, so À la recherche is “the most literal translation” of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818) (Henry 1989: 24). Not everyone has wanted to subject Proust’s work to this level of philosophical capture, however. Luc Fraisse has argued against any a priori philosophical schema in Proust’s novel and discussed its philosophical multiplicity (Fraisse 2013). Joshua Landy has observed that the unequivocal statements to be found in the work of Henry and Tadié should come as “a bit of a surprise” (Landy 2004: 6). Indeed, while it may be true, as Henry claims, that Proust is an adroit exploiter of Schopenhauer’s or Schelling’s ideas, Proust’s writings do not, Landy argues, accord on “every single point and down to the fnest detail with a given philosophical system”, be it Schopenhauer’s, Schelling’s or anyone else’s, nor, as Tadié and Henry believe, are they “generated from that system, each character or event representing one of its aspects, in a vast and slavishly accurate allegory” (7).2 It is indeed possible to fnd echoes throughout Proust’s immense oeuvre of an impressive number of philosophers, including, as Duncan Large points out, “the pre-Socratics, Plato, and the neo-Platonics through Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza, Locke, Kant, and Hegel, to Kierkegaard and Emerson”, but it is equally possible that Proust may never have read some of these (Large 2001: 18). Other critics, such as Vincent Descombes, have argued that Proust’s novel does not add up to anything that could be described as a coherent or unifed philosophical theory, and that it is not (or not only) in its speculative philosophising that we should look for theoretical import and 455

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coherence (Descombes 1987: 65). For Descombes, as Luc Fraisse suggests, “a novel can be philosophically instructive as a novel, that is to say, without also being the translation of a ‘novelized’ doctrine” (Fraisse 2015: 159). The novel’s philosophy, Descombes observes, is not to be sought “in this or that thought content, but rather in the fact that [it] requires of the reader a reformation of the understanding” (Descombes 1987: 46). There is a philosophy of Proust’s novel, then, that resides not in its many passages of a speculative character to which the philosophy spotters usually cling, but rather in the efects of style it produces – in Proust’s eforts to exact intellectual, moral and creative work in response to and in extension of the complexities of the novel’s narrative and architectural inventions. In Deleuze’s rendering certain philosophical names are nevertheless brought into play, albeit episodically. In his analysis of À la recherche in the frst part of Proust and Signs (“Signs”), Deleuze refers to philosophers – including Bergson, Leibniz and Plato – and various concepts associated with them as he delineates the structure of an “apprenticeship” in the reading of signs by which the trajectory of the narrator’s development into a homme de lettres is guided. These references do not however equate to the application of a pre-existing philosophical system or a hermeneutic schema which would illuminate the novel and guarantee a rigorous teleology. For Deleuze, À la recherche is a search for “truth” organised around diferent kinds of signs, but this search is oriented towards the future rather than the past (Deleuze 2000: 3–4). Deleuze’s focus is on signs in a sense that owes nothing to the structuralist version of Saussure: they are hieroglyphs, enigmas that demand interpretation. Proustian truth is thus the result of an encounter, a violence done to thought through the sign. While involuntary memory, “[f ]ortuitous yet inevitable” (16), expresses the force of this encounter, voluntary memory, the intelligence and the will are defcient: truth is only accessible through an activity of interpretation that the subject is obliged to undertake subsequent to the encounter. Deleuze thus places the Proustian theme of the involuntary within what Anne Sauvagnargues provisionally calls “the Bergsonian framework” of an opposition between “doxic intelligence”, which is material and active, and receptive intuition, which is “passive and enchanted” (Sauvagnargues 2009: 76). Originally published in the context of the rise of structuralist and semiological methods in the early 1960s, Proust and Signs appears in one sense as a permutative, tabular model of diferent levels of signs and of time in the world of À la recherche. Each sign enfolds, or implicates, something hidden, and requires unfolding, explication or translation to be grasped (see Deleuze 2000: 97). The protagonist’s apprenticeship moves through diferent levels of signs: worldly signs, sensuous signs, the signs of love and fnally, the signs of art. He learns to decipher them, and diferent levels of temporality are associated with them: the worldly sign, for example, is a sign of time that passes, whereas the sign of art is the sign of an original, absolute time and of a radical, internal diference or “essence” (see “Essences and the Signs of Art”, for example, in Deleuze 2000: 39–51). However, it is important to signal Deleuze’s objection to the apparent Platonism of this formulation; essence, as revealed in a work of art, does not belong to a separate, ideal world (it is not a Platonic idea); it is immanent within the real. For Deleuze, Proust is Leibnizian (with signifcant caveats which we will come to further on): essence as ultimate diference is the quality of the monad, the hermetically closed, radically sealed and simple substance which, according to Leibniz, has no windows (see Deleuze 2000: 41–2, and further on). Essence is a generative, self-diferentiating diference that repeats itself incessantly: a material unfolding of enfolded diference in which the actual is the expression of the virtual (58; Deleuze’s discussions of diference, repetition and expression in this work have clear counterparts in both Diference and Repetition and Spinoza and the Problem of Expression, for example; see Deleuze 1994 and 1990). The essence of an artwork 456

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expresses the entire world from a singular perspective: the world is revealed clearly within the region that is proper to that perspective, and obscurely outside of it. Artistic creation, then, is understood in À la recherche as a particular instance of the universal actualisation of the virtual, an explication or unfolding of a Neoplatonic complication that “envelops the many in the One and afrms the unity of the multiple” (45). While Deleuze thus aligns Proust’s work with – and also distances it from – the usual philosophical models, his approach to the Proustian mind, and to the philosophy of À la recherche, is signifcantly closer (but by no means identical) to Descombes’s analysis than it is to either Tadié’s or Henry’s. This is because he shows little interest in pointing desperately at the philosophical work or ideas from which the speculative pronouncements of Proust’s novel derive, or by which they may or may not have been infuenced: Deleuze is not a philosophy spotter. Instead, as we have just seen, he brings À la recherche into contact with concepts poached from the work of other philosophers and shows how this base matter is transformed in Proust’s text. Furthermore, and more provocatively, he locates the unique philosophical force of À la recherche not in the philosophy that it might be thought to parrot, or that might usefully be deployed to describe how its world is put together, but in the radical antidote to what he calls a dominant and dogmatic “image of thought” (94) that the novel both proposes and inaugurates. This is the big shift. For Deleuze, the major philosophical lesson of Proust’s work is that there is no natural afnity between thought and truth. As we have seen, he reads À la recherche as a metaphysical treatise culminating in the disclosure of signs as the incarnation of an ideal essence. “What is essential” in Proust’s novel, he argues, is not memory and time, but “the sign and truth” (91). In the fnal chapter of the frst part of Proust and Signs, “The Image of Thought”, Deleuze credits Proust with setting up “an image of thought in opposition to that of philosophy” (94), one in which truth is not disclosed through the good will and the lucidity of friends who consciously decide to look for it. In contrast, truth is shown by Proust to inhabit “the dark regions in which are elaborated the efective forces that act on thought, the determinations that force us to think” (95): it is betrayed rather than revealed, interpreted rather than communicated, involuntary rather than willed. What emerges from Deleuze’s reading of Proust is thus a new way of thinking about thought itself, and about the means by which we gain access to truth. The “‘philosophical’ bearing” (94) of Proust’s work is not located in its resistance to the conventions of philosophy generally, whatever they might be (as James Williams argues, it would be a mistake – reductive and superfcial – to take Deleuze’s work on the image of thought as simply critical of philosophy or particular philosophers) (Williams 2003: 111). The “philosophical” thrust of Proust’s work consists rather in its attack on “a classical philosophy of the rationalist type” – on a representational philosophy that presupposes the good will of the thinker and a transparency of thought to itself, as if “the search for truth would be the most natural and the easiest” (94) rather than something that happens as a consequence of an unwilled, unpredictable and violent encounter with signs. While, as we have seen, Deleuze insists that essences in Proust are not like Platonic ideas, at the end of “The Image of Thought” (and later in the chapter in Diference and Repetition with the same title (Deleuze 1994: 181)), he invokes a passage from Plato’s Republic in which a distinction is made between things in the world that “leave the mind inactive” and those that, like Proustian signs, “lead it to think, which force us to think” (Deleuze 2000: 100). In his novel, Proust describes a sensible – rather than speculative, representational or abstract – mode of accessing truth by virtue of which thought is subjected to a violence that it translates into language. Truth is not discovered at the heart of thought, nor is it the result of a voluntary, methodical way of thinking, of intelligence: it is encountered sensibly and violently, 457

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where this violence is, in Deleuze’s conception, the result of a force exerted upon thought (“Thought is nothing without something that forces and does violence to it”, 95). Proust thus proposes a properly novelistic image of thought that also constitutes an “eminently philosophical” (100) critique of certain philosophical – typically Cartesian – presuppositions about the nature of thought itself, and for Deleuze, it is by virtue of his ability to address the problems of the relationship between thought and the sensible as an artist, rather than as a theorist, that Proust’s critique, philosophically speaking, is so efective. Furthermore, Deleuze’s engagement with a novelist’s image of thought in his own philosophical work enables him not only to challenge the dominant idea of a sovereign pensée in possession of a natural relationship with truth, but also to destabilise and expand the very image – the concept – of philosophy itself: to think is always to experience sensible materiality, heterogeneity and exteriority. Deleuze’s reading of the Proustian image of thought, and his understanding of that image’s philosophical incisiveness, can be related to his work on the signifcance – and the shortcomings – of Kant’s transcendental idealism, most notably in Kant’s Critical Philosophy (1963) and in Diference and Repetition. Indeed, without direct reference to Kant (or to his own work on him), Deleuze presents À la recherche as a “doctrine of the faculties” (the title of a section of the conclusion to Kant’s Critical Philosophy), according to which signs are diferentiated according to the specifc faculty they are able to force into a transcendent exercise (see Deleuze 2000: 98–9), but he also fnds in Proust’s work a radical transformation, a twisting of Kant’s transcendental structures away from idealism in the direction of a certain form of empiricism (or what he calls “transcendental empiricism”; see Deleuze 1994: 144). Deleuze describes Kant in Diference and Repetition as “the great explorer” who “discovered the prodigious domain of the transcendental” (135), but he is also critical of him in that work and elsewhere, as Anne Sauvagnargues notes, “for modelling transcendental structures on the doxic acts of an ordinary consciousness” (Sauvagnargues 2009: 77). For Kant, according to Deleuze, the faculties are carried to their limits when they legislate a priori over objects that are subject to them (see Deleuze 1983b: 9–10 and Sauvagnargues 2009: 75), and in Proust’s novel, he argues, each faculty (“perception, memory, imagination, intelligence, thought itself ” (Deleuze 2000: 99)) attains its own limits and ceases to be interchangeable – in contingent harmony – with the other faculties as soon as it assumes an involuntary form and is put under pressure by the regime of signs that activates it; worldly signs, for example, can be interpreted by both a voluntary and an involuntary form of intelligence (98–9). Deleuze’s reading of À la recherche suggests, however, that in spite of such localised afnities with Kant, Proust does not fall into the trap of deducing the transcendental from common sense; for Deleuze, the idealism of Kant’s transcendental domain gives way in À la recherche to an empirical, intensive and involuntary confrontation with real experience and not only with the representations of possible, mental and subjective experience (for further discussion of the afnities and diferences between Kant’s transcendental domain and Proust’s “transcendental empiricism”, see Sauvagnargues 2009: 75–8 and Lord 2012: 87).

Te Literary Machine This alteration of the Kantian transcendental schema (Sauvagnargues calls it a “complete distortion” (2009: 74)), and more broadly this critique of representation in philosophy, of the preceding “image of thought” in favour of the promotion of thinking as invention and creation, is embodied in the title of the second part of Proust and Signs, “The Literary Machine”, which was added to the second edition of the book in 1970, and in which it is important to see the rhyme with Anti-Oedipus, co-written with Guattari and published two years later. 458

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While some of the emphasis in this part remains on rejecting “the state of a thought that would presuppose itself by putting intelligence before, uniting all one’s faculties in a voluntary use” (176), Proust’s new image of thought is now welded to the concept of the machine, and to the “antilogos”. “No one has insisted more than Proust”, Deleuze argues, on the idea that “the truth is produced, that it is produced by orders of machines that function within us, extracted from our impressions, hewn out of our life, delivered in a work” (176). For Deleuze, Proust’s work is “antilogos” to the extent that it opposes the Idea or the Unity-thatcomes-before, of which thought and writing would be the expression, and this opposition also supports the proposition that À la recherche is an anti-philosophy of sorts: “À la recherche is constructed on a series of oppositions: Proust counters observation with sensibility, philosophy with thought, refection with translation” (106). One might say then that Deleuze proposes À la recherche to be in functional competition with philosophy, but also as a correction of it in the direction of the creative exercise of thought. For Deleuze, the emphasis on thought as creation implies a radical break with the dominant themes of philosophy insofar as it is inherited from the Greeks, and the “Antilogos” chapter, added in 1970, begins with a robust and somewhat aggressive critique of the legacy of Plato, with Nietzschean overtones, aggregating, as in the following list, a disparate series of themes and terms: “What is constantly impugned are the great themes inherited from the Greeks: philos, sophia, dialogue, logos, phone” (108). In continuity with his critique of the “image of thought”, this proposition also implies a signifcant reversal; insofar as the Logos implies the notion of a preceding totality, the unity of which we can regain by stitching diferent parts together, antilogos implies fragments which are “not totalisable” (107–8), and an idea of the work itself as a relentless process of division, partitioning (cloisonnement) and fragmentation, a movement towards a world which “has become crumbs and chaos” (111). À la recherche, for Deleuze, is thus a machine to produce multiplicity – realising the injunction voiced in A Thousand Plateaux: “The multiple must be made” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 6). This is moreover a movement which exceeds the Subject or even one which is indiferent to subjectivity; Deleuze’s re-thinking of Proust does not move in the direction of a subjective redemption or sublimation of this force of fragmentation and splitting, of this chaos. The movement of thought does not return to a Subject; Deleuze foregrounds the narrator’s criticism of Swann for having subjectivised his experience, having drawn thought and experience back to subjectivity. Rather, thought opens out, through chains of associations, beyond or outside the Subject, towards the “viewpoint” which transcends the individual, not by reference to an organic totality but to a plurality of worlds, towards, in each instance, “a specifc world absolutely diferent from the others” (Deleuze 2000: 110). Deleuze adds here, of this world and viewpoint, that “[i]t is not individual, but on the contrary a principle of individuation”, suggesting a debt to the work of Gilbert Simondon, the frst part of whose thesis Individuation and its Psycho-Biological Genesis he had reviewed in 1966 (Deleuze 2004: 86–9). Deleuze foregrounds there Simondon’s critique of the way philosophy has relied on a pre-existing model of the individual in its thinking of individuation, in a mode very much in keeping with Proust and Signs. On the basis of this inverted, non-redemptive and anti-totalising vision of À la recherche, Deleuze produces a commentary upon it which might be viewed as quasi-structuralist, given its orientation towards spatial fgures and models such as overlapping boxes, closed vessels, envelopment, imbrication, implication, complication and explication, the last three of which suggest the persistence of the motif of the fold (pli) to which he will devote a later volume, on Leibniz and the baroque (Deleuze 1992). However, Deleuze’s thinking is not constrained within the structuralist method of revealing the generative paradigm of a work 459

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or phenomenon, but rather of determining the ways in which the work produces, operates or functions. In keeping with the emphasis on function over structure evoked here Deleuze insists that the diferent elements of À la recherche have “no more than a statistical value” (Deleuze 2000: 134). In other words, the emphasis is on the way themes, events, impressions, characters and aspects of characters are distributed and the way they function in relation to one another. This statistical perspective ofers a vision of À la recherche akin to calculus, to a calculating machine of sorts, where the stress is on the fact that it works, rather than on the meaning as such of its elements. Deleuze thus reads À la recherche as a functioning machine, of which the dominant motif is “that it works”, that it produces, a factor extended to the modern work of art as such: [t]he modern work of art is anything it may seem; it is even in its very property of being whatever we like, of having the overdetermination of whatever we like, from the moment it works: the modern work of art is a machine and functions as such. (145) The “problem” of À la recherche is not one of meaning or interpretation, then, but one of usage: [t]o the logos, organ and organon whose meaning must be discovered in the whole to which it belongs, is opposed the antilogos, machine and machinery whose meaning (anything you like) depends solely on its functioning, which, in turn, depends on its separate parts. The modern work of art has no problem of meaning, it has only a problem of use. (146) À la recherche works in very specifc ways, moreover; Deleuze identifes three “machines” to be working within it; the frst of them involves the production of partial objects, the second the production of efects of resonance between those objects and the third a “forced movement of greater amplitude” (159). With the frst of these three machines, Deleuze characteristically introduces a psychoanalytic register which fractures the unity of the Subject. The partial object or part object (“any object that is not a person”, Rycroft 1968: 101), loosely drawn out of the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (see Klein 1986: 118), becomes in Deleuze’s rendering something like an organ which operates independently of any supposed totality, and this also has important consequences as regards the philosophy of sexuality which Deleuze infers from À la recherche; if the novel has a law, it is not a “depressive consciousness of the Law” (132) as we might fnd in Kaf ka, but a “schizoid consciousness of the Law” (132) which leads as elaborated above to an always deeper and further level of division and fragmentation. Homosexuality, then, is not the object or cause of a sense of guilt, but a level underneath which there is a further instance of sexual division, a fundamental and “innocent” transsexuality in which each being has two sexes which do not communicate with one another. The thematic of the transsexuality of plants in the novel, which emerges in Sodom and Gomorrah (see SG, 1–3; III 3–5 and Deleuze 2000: 80, 92, 115, 135, 175) and which might otherwise be ignored or dismissed as an aberrant perversion on Proust’s part, is fundamentally linked to the ethos of À la recherche, to its operations and its law. Thus, Deleuze outlines the fundamental law of sexual diversity and duality in the novel, a vegetal sexuality the operation of which is not a function of individualised desire, but a machinic production of elemental fragmentation and division (see, for example: “the third level is transexual […] and transcends the individual as well as the entity: it designates in the individual the coexistence of fragments of both sexes, 460

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partial objects that do not communicate”, 36). The psychoanalytic infection here informs a mode of thinking which does not respect the idea of the subject or individualised body but goes inside the body to detect the organs or objects operating within it. For Deleuze, then, it is neither subjective desire, nor a will to epistemological mastery, which drives jealousy in Proust, for example, but a spatialised logic of overlapping boxes and closed vessels, which the narrator needs to open or to empty of their contents. Jealousy, Deleuze proposes, is expressed and actualised through sequestration, so as to capture the loved one and empty them of the possible and alien worlds they include, the partial objects within them, the other sexes within them. While this may appear to ofer a psychological explanation of the motives of Proust’s narrator, Deleuze’s account stresses rather the “statistical reality” of the mechanisms of partitioning and aberrant communication; see, for example: jealousy discovers the transexuality of the beloved, everything hidden by the apparent and statistically determined sex of the beloved, the other contiguous and noncommunicating sexes, and the strange insects whose task it is, nonetheless, and to bring these aspects into communication — in short, the discovery of partial objects, even more cruel than the discovery of rival persons. 140 It is a question of what the other can be made to do, how they can be “made to function” (141) in the fragmented, schizoid world of partial objects which Deleuze foregrounds in À la recherche (in the second part of Proust and Signs, the composition of which coincided with that of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia with Félix Guattari, Deleuze evokes on several occasions the motif of the schizoid, which he opposes to the paranoid (and by extension, the neurotic) (e.g. 142 and 175). Very broadly, in Deleuze and Guattari’s conception, which does bear relation to the latter’s psychiatric practice, schizoid consciousness and sense are characterised by an unrestrained fow and fight of identity and meaning. Turning to the second of the machines Deleuze identifes in À la recherche (the resonating machine), Deleuze posits that the novel functions to put the diferent partial objects which it has produced in relation to one another, despite their radical diference and their individuations. The most salient manifestation of the resonating machine lies in the experience of involuntary memory, where a sensation in the past is connected with a sensation in the present. This resonance, however, does not produce communication, continuity or dialectical synthesis, but a “hand to hand combat” or a “struggle” (152), which produces the independent efect of the original “viewpoint” as a supplement. In this sense, Deleuze’s Proust is radically anti-dialectical and non-redemptive. What is perhaps most signifcant about this, however, and the factor wherein Proust’s originality lies, for Deleuze, is that the “literary machine” that functions in this way does not relate to an “extra-literary” experience on which the writer “reports”; rather, literature invents and produces its own efects, efects which are specifc to it and potentially specifc for its readers: “It is the work of art that produces within itself and upon itself its own efects, and is flled with them and nourished by them” (154). We come back here to the point made above that À la recherche is a specifcally novelistic enterprise in thought, which, rather than refecting one or more preceding philosophical systems, creates its own thought-efects as a novel. In this light, we can see Deleuze’s Proust and Signs as the investigation of a specifcally literary apparatus for thinking which has the potential to provoke signifcant alterations in the way philosophy is carried out. The “gravest objections” to the production of the work of art are raised, however, by the third of the machines of À la recherche that Deleuze postulates. This is the “forced movement of greater 461

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amplitude” which describes the sense of ageing, decay and the “impression of an ending or even of a fnal catastrophe” that he situates in the Proustian narrator’s account of the bal de têtes in Time Regained (159). It also surfaces, Deleuze says, in the tragic insight into the “certainty of death and nothingness” in the involuntary memory of the dead grandmother in Sodom and Gomorrah (157; see SG, 179–82; III 152–4). Deleuze aligns this entropic machine with the Freudian death drive by naming it Thanatos (160). It is the process of alteration of all living things which leads to “absolute catastrophe and non-productivity” (recalling the “body without organs” of Anti-Œdipus). Deleuze calls it a “forced movement” in the sense that it is not willed, desired or created, and in the sense that it fows only in one direction, towards death and destruction. Yet, it is in the “greater amplitude” of this movement that Deleuze locates its potential to overcome the objection that it poses to the literary enterprise. At one level, this is a question of scale and perspective. It involves an infnite dilation or expansion of time which Deleuze qualifes as “geological” (159); past time is not anchored to the specifc events and moments of an individual life, but seen from an increasingly wide and cosmological perspective, so to speak, pushed further and further back and leading to the production of the “idea of death” as a social, historical and, in a sense, ecological reality (our emphasis). Deleuze thus gives a richer sense to the expression “lost time” in the novel’s title; “lost time” does not refer to the events which are recovered through voluntary or involuntary memory; rather, entropic time is countered through the creation and imagining of the “monstrous beings” (159) who embody the passing of time in all its dimensions, evoked right at the end of À la recherche. As antilogos, and as a machine which produces multiplicity, Deleuze is obliged to grapple with the question of the unity of À la recherche: “But there is, there must be a unity that is the unity of this very multiplicity, a whole that is the whole of just those fragments” (163). Deleuze’s solution to this is to propose the “One and Whole” not as the “principle” or cause of the fragments, as their lost totality, but as their efect, the efect produced by the machines. This also conditions another question, that of communication; how does À la recherche communicate? There again, Deleuze’s solution is that the work does not communicate by virtue of relation to a preceding principle; its communication results from the “operation of the machines and their detached parts, their noncommunicating fragments” (163); the novel communicates through its efects. In the history of philosophy, it is Leibniz who ofers Deleuze the strongest explanation, but with signifcant caveats, for this communication resulting from non-communicative fragments. While Deleuze suggests that monads have neither windows nor doors (Deleuze 2000: 42), Leibniz says only that they “have no windows, by which anything could come in or out” (Leibniz 1898: 3). Deleuze qualifes as “meretricious” Leibniz’s answer to the problem of “a communication resulting from sealed parts or from what does not communicate”, i.e. that these closed “‘monads’ all possess the same stock” (Deleuze 2000: 163). For Proust, however, “this can no longer be the case” (164); Deleuze thus suggests a specifcally modern consciousness on Proust’s part in this refusal of the notion of pre-established harmony and of a “logical” or “organic” totality that precedes and generates the work. The unity of the multiple is proposed as a “fnal brushstroke or localized part” (167) added to the whole in the mode of a supplement, as suggested above. Moreover, in the fnal pages of the last section of “The Literary Machine”, Deleuze conceptualises this strange new form of unity through the term transversality: it is transversality that permits us, in the train, not to unify the viewpoints of a landscape, but to bring them into communication according to the landscape’s own dimension, in its own dimension, whereas they remain noncommunicating according to their own dimension (168) 462

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Transversality of Proust Elaborated initially and independently by Guattari in his psychiatric work, with the intention to capture the dynamics of psychoanalytic transference in the group and institutional setting (see french 2023), the concept of transversality ofers Deleuze the potential to link the emphasis on singular invention to social movements, on the one hand, and to artistic creation, on the other. In Proust and Signs, transversality is a machinic motor of heterogeneity; it is in this sense that one can discern continuity between Deleuze’s attention to À la recherche and his work with Guattari on the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in which multiplicity and non-hierarchical, un-arborescent or “rhizomatic” energies are wielded against the potentially fascistic impulses to “molar” massifcation (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 59). While, as we will show, the “transversal” is also a motif which emerges from À la recherche itself, Deleuze’s encounter with the political activist and group psychiatrist Guattari in 1969 is just that – an encounter – engaging his up-to-then philosophical and academic work with a militant social and radical clinical practice which opens other dimensions in the reading of Proust, a connectivity Guattari would also pursue independently in his individually authored work (see Guattari 2010). As Deleuze observes in his introduction (“Three Group-Related Problems”) to Guattari’s frst book, Psychoanalysis and Transversality, “coefcients of transversality” are “agents of enunciation, environments of desire, elements of institutional creation” (Guattari 2015: 14). The brief contextualisation ofered above can be ofset and nuanced by attention to the ways in which transversality also emerges as a powerful tool in À la recherche itself. In a brief footnote to “Le Style”, the fnal chapter of the second part of Proust and Signs, Deleuze says that Guattari’s concept is designed to describe “the communications and relations of the unconscious” (Deleuze 2000: 188, n. 5). As a conceptual and clinical tool in the theory and practice of institutional psychotherapy, it designates non-totalising and non-hierarchical practices of power and subjectivity. In Psychoanalysis and Transversality, for example, Guattari describes it as the “unconscious source of action in the group” (Guattari 2015: 118). This singular yet nevertheless connective logic is also at play in Proust’s novel. For Deleuze, Proust’s “transversals” permit hermetically sealed worlds to be drawn, collaged or assembled together while preserving, nevertheless, the respective singularity of each of them; it is transversality, he argues, that constitutes “the singular unity and totality of the Méséglise Way and of the Guermantes Way, without suppressing their diference or distance: ‘between these routes certain transversals were established’” (Deleuze 2000: 168). Now, as the passage from À la recherche cited by Deleuze shows, Proust himself uses the word “transversal/e/s” (not the substantive “transversalité”). In addition to appearing in that passage, it is used in Swann’s Way to describe the “artifcial line” constructed by the narrator to match the version of Swann he has just encountered with the man he used to know in Combray (SW, 486; I 400). It returns in Time Regained after the narrator has met Mlle de Saint-Loup, to describe a vast network of connections, made up of superimposed layers of experience, that constitutes a vitreous laminate in which objects (including parts of people and places) are associated with diferent temporal “altitudes” (TR, 221; IV 449). These are juxtaposed in a series of “levels” which, the narrator suggests, create a sense of “depth” and must be read simultaneously (TR, 290; IV 503). Taking an approach to transversality that appears to derive not only from Guattari’s 1964 essay but also from À la recherche itself, then, Deleuze argues that it is mistaken to observe “the rights of a continuity and of a unity” in Proust’s work (Deleuze 2000: 184, n.5). The image of “sealed vessels”, from which much of his analysis in the second part of Proust and 463

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Signs (most notably in the chapter entitled “Cells and Vessels”) takes its cue, occurs in Time Regained (see TR, 221; IV 448–9). For Deleuze, these suspended vessels are more than just containers of essences hanging at diferent temporal altitudes. Each of the narrator’s love afairs, for example, is part of an endless succession of loves – one of an apparently infnite number of fragments or “closed parts” (Deleuze 2000: 126; translation modifed). While the sheer multitude of fragments may serve to give a false impression of continuity or an illusion of totality, and while other critics of Proust’s novel (such as Georges Poulet) have identifed an authorial point of departure that serves as a structural and organising principle around which the author’s work is centred, Deleuze fatly rejects the idea that there is any direct means of communication between the fragments of Proust’s world. Instead, Proust’s system of transversals enables a movement from one fragment or multiple to the next “without reducing the many to the One” (126). Furthermore, for Deleuze, the formal structure of À la recherche is based on diference as the product of repetition and on the work’s “transversal dimension” (168): Proust’s elaborate system of transversals allows us to pass from one multiple or fragment, understood as a unity in and of itself, to the next. Each of the multiples that makes up the world of À la recherche is a unity, but their collective existence within that world does not constitute a unifed whole; multiplicity is not reduced to a unity in which each multiple, each sealed vessel, is made of, or contains, the same essential stuf (116–30). A transversal is thus a non-totalising connector between fragments and separate milieus: the only unity at work in À la recherche is the unity of each multiple, “of this very multiplicity” (163), and these unities are permitted to communicate transversally without erasing the diferences and distances that are obtained between them. The idea of a non-totalising or disjunctive synthesis, a heterogeneous encounter between otherwise disparate entities, is also at the heart of the conclusion to Proust and Signs, where the theme of madness and schizophrenia is linked to ethology and to the idea of artistic production as an animal activity – as the work of a spider-narrator, an “enormous Body without organs” that “sees nothing, perceives nothing, remembers nothing” (181). In spite of the new concepts introduced in this chapter (this is the frst time he refers to the body without organs in this work, for example), Deleuze’s analysis here also continues to communicate indirectly – both inexplicitly and transformatively – with other parts of the book: his discussion of the narrator’s “[i]nvoluntary sensibility, involuntary memory, involuntary thought that are, each time, like the intense totalizing reactions of the organless body to signs of one nature or another” (182), or his description of Charlus as the “apparent master of the logos” (173) whose speech is also animated by the “vegetal” (174) realm of pathos and “involuntary signs that resist the sovereign organization of language and cannot be mastered in words and phrases” (173), for example, can be read as further variations on Proust’s new image of thought and the literary machine as they are presented in the longer parts of the book. However, what were once described – a bit less colourfully – as signs emanating from “dark regions” that do violence to thought and are invisible to the good will of classical, rationalist philosophy and friendship have now evolved into signs of “madness” that belong to a “nebulous” and “schizoid” universe of unbridled cross-fertilisation between the sexes (175; translation modifed), transforming À la recherche into what Sauvagnargues calls a “physics of homosexuality” (66). There is also renewed – and quite diferent – emphasis at the end of Deleuze’s book on the operational mode of the work of art as creation and invention. The idea of machinic production explored in the second part of Proust and Signs morphs at this point into a discussion of the narrator as a spider atop his web (À la recherche) – of a “becoming-animal” (Deleuze and Guattari had already referred to “Proust’s becoming-spider” in their book on Kaf ka) (1986: 34). Becoming-animal is a motif borrowed in part from the German biologist Jakob von 464

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Uexküll (1864–1944) and developed further in several of Deleuze and Guattari’s later works with reference to a Nietzschean poetics of becoming and to the encounter between Charlus and Jupien, the “wasp and the orchid”, at the beginning of Sodom and Gomorrah (with greater entomological plausibility, Proust calls the insect a “bumblebee” (SG, 5; III 6; translation modifed) rather than a wasp). In A Thousand Plateaus, for example, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the meeting of Charlus and Jupien as the primordial example of a “veritable becoming” in which a “zone of indiscernibility” between human and animal permits the “aparallel evolution” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 10) of otherwise unrelated series. Viewed in this way, as a series of interlocking and producing machines, and as an apparatus of a potentially “mad” thought which scrambles the normative divisions between categories in its relentless production of non-totalisable fragments and zones of indiscernability, À la recherche, and its role in Deleuze’s philosophy, might be seen to resemble the “infuencing machine” described by the Austro-Hungarian psychoanalyst Victor Tausk. In his 1919 essay “On the Origin of the ‘Infuencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia”, Tausk described the infuencing “apparatus” which certain schizophrenics believed to be producing deleterious efects in and on their body and mind (Tausk 1992: 186). As such an “infuencing machine”, but one whose efects are no doubt purposefully deployed by Deleuze, the flaments of À la recherche extend across Deleuze’s work as a philosopher. In The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, for example, in the chapter “What is an Event?”, the description of the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata re-heard by Swann chez the Marquise de Saint-Euverte, appears, unattributed, in a discussion of Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of prehension and Leibniz’s concept of the monad (Deleuze 1993: 80). A further unattributed yet still recognisable Proustian fragment – “a little time in the pure state” – punctuates Deleuze’s account of the cinema of the time-image (Deleuze 1989: xi, 17, 82, 169, 271). The maxim of the theory of involuntary memory, “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”, is similarly active, yet unreferenced, in Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 22), in the proposition of the absolute yet relative nature of concepts. These recurrences are neither references nor examples (Proust is nevertheless often named as a literary landmark and thought-experiment among other fgures), but transversal indices of the continued functioning apparatus of À la recherche across Deleuze’s work. What, then, does all of this tell us about the evolution, the transversal devenir, of Deleuze’s critical engagement with Proust? First, we have seen that Proust and Signs itself is inhabited by transversality and machinic variation: while its diferent parts or multiplicities may at frst sight appear to be concerned with very diferent philosophical questions (the image of thought, unity and essence; antilogos and the literary machine; arachnid madness and the body without organs), they continue to speak to – to repeat – one another by virtue of the non-totalising transversals that connect and animate them (e.g. conceptual invention, artistic creation and an aversion to the strictures of the logos). Second, through his articulation of Guattari’s (political and psychotherapeutic) and Proust’s (literary) approaches to transversality, Deleuze suggests the possibility of a dynamic relationship between a political critique of centralised and hierarchised power structures and the notion of the work of art as a completed formal totality. Moreover, in the fnal chapter of Proust and Signs, he adds clinical and animal dimensions to his engagement with Proust’s work. Indeed, in the context of his own philosophical writing around Proust, Deleuze efects a methodological, interdisciplinary transfer by virtue of which the literary work takes on not only philosophical but also ethological, political, social and psychopathological signifcance: the privileged function of literature, and of art more generally, is to create new images of thought and of feeling that force the clinical, the critical (see Deleuze 1997) and the philosophical into new and destabilising 465

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relations with one another. Deleuze’s Proust-machine thus operates disciplinary transversals: it makes a monumental work of literature into the source of a uniquely philosophical symptomatology of intensive bodies and organs – a critique that is both clinical and vital rather than merely speculative – that challenges dominant, purely logocentric accounts of human intelligence and behaviour through the creation of alternative images of thought and of a mad animality. Finally, and in keeping with Deleuze’s proposition that À la recherche is a work that produces its own unity and its own specifc efects, and that communicates transversally, we have also found some of the ways in which a Proust-machine can be said to operate across Deleuze’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) philosophy – some explicitly signposted and others less obvious. In contrast to Walter Benjamin, for example, whose signifcant engagement with and “usage” of Proust across other domains revolves predominantly around the motif of involuntary memory, the transversality of Proust in Deleuze is dizzyingly multiple and varied. Over and beyond the interpretative, explicative value of Deleuze’s engagement with Proust, then, what À la recherche ofers the philosopher is a paradigmatic example of a work of thought that creates its own unity, an act and an event of creativity in thought which reconfgures philosophy as Deleuze seeks to practise it. In this reconfguration, art, philosophy and other regimes of knowledge, including madness, exist on the same terrain of invention.

Notes 1 The dates given here are those of the original publications in French. Details of translations are given in the “References” at the end of the chapter. 2 Emphasis in original throughout.

References Barthes, R. (1977) “The Death of the Author” in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath, London: Fontana, pp. 142–48. Deleuze, G. (1983a) Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, London: Athlone Press. ——— (1983b) Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone Press. ——— (1989) Cinema II: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1990) Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Zone Books. ——— (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley, London: Athlone Press. ——— (1994) Diference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. ——— (1997) Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, intro. Daniel W. Smith, London and New York: Verso. ——— (2000) Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. R. Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (2004) Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Mike Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e) Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1986) Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ——— (1994) What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, London: Verso. Descombes, V. (1987) Proust: philosophie du roman, Paris: Minuit. french, P. (2022) “Guattari’s Therapeutics: From Transference to Transversality” in Deleuze Studies (forthcoming)

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Proust-Machine: Gilles Deleuze Foucault, M. (1998) “What is an Author?”, trans. by Josué V. Harari in Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault Volume Two, New York: The New Press, pp. 205–22. Fraisse, L. (2013) L’Éclecticisme philosophique de Marcel Proust, Paris: Sorbonne University Presses. ——— (2015) “Proust est-il un philosophe?”, Studia Romanica Posnaniensia, 42/3: pp. 159–173. Guattari, F. (2010) The Machinic Unconscious, trans. by Taylor Adkins, New York: MIT Press. ——— (2015) Psychoanalysis and Transversality, trans. A. Hodges, New York: Semiotexte. Henry, A. (1981) “La Révélation d’une philosophie de l’art”, in Marcel Proust, théories pour une esthétique, Paris: Klincksieck, pp. 45–97. Henry, A. (1989) “Proust du côté de Schopenhauer”, in Schopenhauer et la création littéraire en Europe, ed. A. Henry, Paris: Klincksieck, pp. 149–64. Klein, M. (1986) “A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic-Depressive States”, (1935) in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. J. Mitchell, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 115–45. Landy, J. (2004) Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Large, D. (2001) Nietzsche and Proust: A Comparative Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leibniz, G.L. (1898) Monadology, trans. R. Latta, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lord, B. (2012) “Deleuze and Kant” in The Cambridge Companion to Deleuze, ed. D.W. Smith and H. Somers-Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 82–102. Rycroft, C. (1968) A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Sauvagnargues, A. (2009) Deleuze: l’empirisme transcendental, Paris: PUF. Tadié, J.-Y. (1996) Marcel Proust. Biographie, Paris: Gallimard. Tausk, V. (1992) “The Origin of the ‘Infuencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia”, trans. by Dorian Feigenbaum, Journal of Psychotherapy Research and Practice 1(2), pp. 184–206.Williams, J. (2003) Gilles Deleuze’s “Diference and Repetition”: A Critical Introduction and Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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31 PROUST AND PHILOSOPHICAL INFLUENCE Sebastian Gardner

Late Nineteenth-century French Philosophy Histories of late nineteenth-century French philosophy, following the contour lines of what have come to be regarded as promontories and aggregating over the diverse outlooks of individuals at ground level, standardly pick out four major tendencies.1 The positivist tradition that had endured since Comte extended itself into the development of a naturalistic sociological standpoint in Hippolyte Taine, Gabriel Tarde, Jean Izoulet, and, of greatest distinction, Émile Durkheim. Second, innovatory and sophisticated critiques of science and accounts of its methodology, moulded by positivism but with a fresh impetus, were advanced by Henri Poincaré and Émile Duhem, though these were of greater importance for the twentieth than the nineteenth century. At the other extreme were forms of personalistic spiritualistic idealism stemming from Félix Ravaisson, where ‘spiritualism’ connotes a relation with Cartesianism and/or Leibniz, sometimes with Catholic associations but more often a secular afrmation of the irreducibility and fundamentality of the category of personality.2 In Proust’s youth, this outlook was represented by the aged but eminent Ernest Renan, best known for his Vie de Jésus (1863), 3 and later by Maurice Blondel, whose L’Action (1893) charted a sophisticated dialectical path from the philosophy of action to Christian conviction.4 Fourth, French Neo-Kantianism, represented by Charles Renouvier, Jules Lachelier, and Émile Boutroux, and carried over into the twentieth century by Proust’s contemporary and friend Léon Brunschvicg.5 Merging with other traditions, it promised equilibrium between positivistic, scientifc, and spiritualist concerns, and stood in contrast to Neo-Kantianism in Germany, which, though diferentiated into many schools, upheld the basic sufciency of Kant’s insights and sought to restore the momentum of critical philosophy. French NeoKantianism did not enjoy the same monopoly in academic institutions as in Germany,6 or exhibit a similar internal dynamic: individual thinkers were drawn to and borrowed particular ideas and themes in Kant’s philosophy without entertaining it as a candidate for a total system. That the all-or-nothing questions burning in German thought from 1870 – if not Kant, then what?, and if Kant, then which Kant? – did not frame French horizons plausibly has its explanation in the fact that French Neo-Kantianism found in personalist spiritualism a neighbour of equal strength with which it shared a great deal, meaning that abandonment 468

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of Kant would not leave a yawning abyss. Nor would it mean embracing any of the greats of post-Kantian German philosophy, who were borne in mind but infrequently defended outright.7 An authoritative French history of philosophy from 1887 concludes thus: In sum, the frst half of the nineteenth century is marked by a reaction against the eighteenth; the second, by a return to Condillac’s sensualism and Kant’s critical method. Kant had denied the possibility of metaphysics as science; Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel restore all philosophy to metaphysics, proceed from the very idea of the absolute, and profess the most steadfast idealism. [… ] The second half of the nineteenth century is dominated above all by the infuence of Auguste Comte, whose doctrines we have just exposited. He had at frst few disciples, but the constant progress of the positive sciences lent increasing authority to his philosophy, which found brilliant adherents in France [… ] Alongside the infuence of positivism, another characteristic of our age to be indicated is the return to Kantian critique, represented in France above all by Renouvier, and which presently appears to compose the greater part of instruction in German philosophy. Finally the French spiritualist school, for its part resisting the invasion of positivism and critique, upholds the tradition of Leibnizian spiritualism, which it endeavours to rejuvenate and renovate, either by introducing into it some or other of the highest ideas of modern Germany, or by associating it with scientifc progress, or fnally by taking inspiration from the present century and engaging more intimately with problems and difculties. It represents what may be called the conservative principle in philosophy, yet opens itself up to progress, taking account of new factual discoveries while upholding frmly the Cartesian principle of freedom of refection and the supreme authority of the evident.8 Predictably, issues in the philosophy of psychology or metaphysics of mind, and the associated problem of how to recast empiricism or sensualisme in the wake of Kant, were what chiefy held together the conversation between these tendencies, which agreed (positivism included) in upholding the authority of philosophy over natural science and discarding the aggressive materialism of the philosophes; having passed through Laplace and Pierre Cabanis at the beginning of the century, French philosophy had taken the positivist antidote and witnessed no equivalent of the Materialismusstreit, nor even a Darwinismusstreit on the scale of the German and the Anglophone worlds. The methodological eclecticism propounded by Victor Cousin – enforced in his capacity as the Minister of Education from 1840 – had lost its doctrinal hold but persisted as an attitude and arguably bears some responsibility for the near absence from late French nineteenth-century philosophy of any truly fundamental and distinctive philosophical innovation: following again the standard philosophical historiography, it was not until the last minute, with Bergson, whose Essai sur les données de la conscience (Time and Free Will) and Matière et mémoire (Matter and Memory) appeared in 1889 and 1896, respectively, that we can speak of a strikingly original development that has stood the test of time.9 The pattern is in this respect similar to what is found in Anglo-American philosophy in the nineteenth century, which also gives an impression of protracted attempts at reorientation in the wake of Kant and a growing appreciation of the (exciting or intimidating) philosophically possibilities ofered by natural science, bearing fruit only late in the day in the new schools of Classical Pragmatism and Anglo-American Idealism.10 This rapid sketch, which omits several major fgures not easily classifed and those whose chief importance was for political thought,11 supplies only a bundle of generalizations. A more informative historical view, which will prove of greater relevance to Proust, emerges if 469

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we instead highlight a theme and model towards which French philosophy tended to gravitate, furnished by an early nineteenth-century thinker not yet mentioned, Maine de Biran, the bulk of whose work (including the important but incomplete Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie he began in 1811) appeared posthumously in 1834 and 1841, edited by Cousin.12 Biran’s topics spanned the mind-body relation, the primacy of the will, the phenomenon of habit, consciousness of bodily efort, and the sense of self. What may be taken as programmatic is Biran’s large argument that, beginning in classical empiricism with the data of experience but with better appreciation of its actual scope, it is possible to extrapolate spiritualism. The manner in which this is done, whether classifed as empiricist or Aristotelian or something else altogether, is in its historical context unquestionably distinctive: Biran did not reproduce Kant’s inference from the insufciency of sensation to the necessity of the a priori, nor Descartes’ turn from sense to rationalism, and he did not drive empiricism down the phenomenalist roads of Berkeley or Hume. Rather, he proceeded from the point where Locke and Condillac had left of, and sought to show that (re-)examination of the same data discloses the self-sufcient reality of spirit; ideas that Biran associated with Leibniz are thus introduced on an a posteriori basis.13 This pattern recurs throughout the century and even conditioned French Neo-Kantianism, which, though accepting Kant’s doctrine that human freedom gives urgency to the repudiation of mechanism and naturalism, was reluctant to abandon psychological and experiential moorings in favour of strictly transcendental conditions, and tended to suppose, contra Kant, that idealism requires a direct defence of (personal) immaterialism.14 A straight line runs from Biran to Bergson,15 for whom again the givens of consciousness, properly reviewed, deliver libertarianism and immaterialism.

Proust’s milieu: Alphonse Darlu, Henri Bergson, and the Sorbonne Faculty If we now attempt to pick out the specifc parameters of Proust’s philosophical environment for which there is evidence of infuence, it is fairly clear that the frst two traditions can be viewed as having had little bearing on his formation: Proust expresses often enough his aversion to the intellectual style of Taine and other anti-individualists, and gives no sign of regarding the scientifc world-view as either a resource or a threat.16 (Compare Musil, whose doctoral thesis on Ernst Mach shows through in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, whose protagonist is an applied mathematician.) The clear biographical point at which to begin is with the philosopher Alphonse Darlu, who, but for his instruction of Proust at the Lycée Condorcet, would have remained unknown through simple disinclination to publish.17 When Proust – evading law, the profession prescribed by his parents – embarked on a licence in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Darlu continued as his personal tutor. Proust named Darlu and Boutroux as his ‘héros dans la vie réelle’ (‘heroes in real life’),18 and he thanks Darlu with feeling in the preface of his early collection, Les Plaisirs et les jours: ‘the great philosopher, whose inspired words, more certain to endure than any writings, have stirred my mind and so many other minds’ ( JS 8).19 Numerous sources testify as to Darlu’s intellectual integrity, didactic brilliance, and the respect he commanded in Parisian philosophical circles. What then did Darlu believe, philosophically? Here is where his contribution to the enquiry begins to fade. Darlu belonged defnitely to the Neo-Kantian camp, at or near its point of intersection with spiritualist idealism,20 but what he propounded concentrated on Kant’s moral world-view, and though tenets redolent thereof, reinforced perhaps by Tolstoy’s moralism, may be found in the margins of Les Plaisirs et les jours,21 and À la recherche is generous with its afrmations of others’ essential 470

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moral goodness,22 it does not ft soteriologically with À la recherche. What Proust took from Darlu, it has been suggested, was no particular conviction but rather an appreciation of the value and power of afrmation, ‘foi’.23 As regards the second fgure in Proust’s personal milieu, Henri Bergson, his cousin by marriage, in spite of the familial connection and the great theme that seems to pair them – and Bergson’s elevation of art, and the fact that Bergson’s breakthrough works were published in the period of Proust’s intellectual formation, and the dissemination of Bergsonian ideas following his rapid rise to celebrity, and Proust’s reading of Bergson and esteem for him 24 – the likelihood that Proust was positively informed by Bergson’s philosophy should be set very low.25 Contact between them as family members was cordial but infrequent and involved no philosophical exchanges.26 Proust appears not to have read the work of Bergson’s most relevant to his themes, Matière et mémoire, until 1908,27 and by 1912 he had still not read L’Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution)(1907).28 In a letter from 1912, and in an interview on the eve of the publication of Du côté de chez Swann, Proust repudiated the designation ‘Bergsonian novel’.29 This might not be taken at face value, but Proust proceeds to explain their diferences, and commentators have pointed to further discrepancies in their outlooks. Granted the afnity of À la recherche with elements in Matière et mémoire concerning the (in some sense) enduring reality of the past, the nature of memory, and the idea of (‘spontaneous’) recollection in contrast to habit’s dull carrying over of the past, Proust points out that Bergson contradicts the idea of involuntary memory30; as does, though Proust does not mention it, Proust’s conception of le temps perdu as lying latently outside himself, in things of the world, to be retrieved through sensation and imagination.31 And in a broader respect, the trajectory of À la recherche does not follow the path of durée, for instead of shrinking and subordinating spatiality, Proust magnifes it, and by spatializing a life seeks to overcome time, which is regarded as a problem and not the key to a solution. Or, if this is tendentious – in so far as À la recherche is a Gothic cathedral to which time has been added 32 – it is at least clear that À la recherche seeks an equilibrium and privileged intersection of space (worldliness and sociality) and time (interiority and self hood). To this end, Proust makes no use of Bergson’s distinctions between true and false time, or between quasi-sensational memory-images and ‘pure memory’, metaphysical notions which are disengaged from the existential labour of the novel: Proust does not accept that mere illusions of spatiality are responsible for the frustration of the self ’s pursuit of the whole, and whatever the sense in which Marcel overcomes disillusionment and fnally achieves liberation has no counterpart in Bergson. 33 Concerning the notion that the analytic operations of the intellect pose a challenge to be overcome – an axiom which Proust triple-underlines at the time of Contre Sainte-Beuve 34 – there were in his early days many better entrenched candidates for its source, and Proust need not be thought to owe to Bergson notions that already belonged to the stock of late nineteenth-century French philosophy and from which Bergson himself had drawn. No application of interpretative energy will yield more, I think, than that for both Proust and Bergson; it is a matter of wonder that we discover ourselves to be temporal yet also sunk into spatiality, and that this astonishing phenomenon sufces of itself as a mystery to be unravelled.35 Whether Bergson provoked Proust to concentrate his refections on the topic of time is hard to determine, but it is already well in focus before the turn of the century in Jean Santeuil.36 What À la recherche cannot be said to do, in any case, is adopt Bergson’s systematic solution, since there is no shared problem. To be considered next is Proust’s philosophical education at the Sorbonne.37 We know what lecture courses were held over Proust’s years, and a good deal can of course be said 471

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concerning the philosophical writings of his teachers and the positions they expounded. These included Émile Boutroux, Victor Egger, Paul Janet, and Gabriel Séailles, representing a mix of Neo-Kantianism and Ravaisson’s spiritualist school.38 From this, much can be excluded as a candidate for infuence, but we are brought little closer to our target, in so far as we cannot say to what standpoint, if any, Proust inclined: he did not after all proceed to a doctorate but exited directly to the literary world, and by the time he completed his degree in 1895, his reading was vast, while the evidence of letters and surviving fragments suggests no set of convictions, nor indeed that Proust’s mental habits leaned towards treating ideas in a purely abstract academic manner; the only subsequent mention of a philosophical project as such is Proust’s proposal in 1896 of a work on the philosophy of art with reference to Chardin,39 while a dispirited letter of 1904 seems to say that life excludes ‘the “philosophy” we extract from it little by little’.40 Yet, Proust did not cease to think about artistic matters at least in philosophical terms, as a letter to Robert Dreyfus from 1908 shows: But the same reason that makes me think that the importance and the suprasensible reality of art prevent certain anecdotal novels, however agreeable, from perhaps being quite deserving of the status which you seem to give them (art being too superior to life, as we judge it through the intellect and describe it in conversation, to be satisfed with copying it) – this same reason forbids me to make the realization of an artistic project depend on notions which are themselves anecdotal and too directly drawn from life not to partake of its contingency and unreality […] But you know that such banal aestheticism cannot be my artistic philosophy. And if tiredness, the fear of being a bore, and especially this pencil have prevented me from explaining it, give me credit if not for its truth at least for its seriousness.41 Proust’s critical writings on literature and painting from this period have constant recourse to philosophical categories: the particularity of people and things penetrated by the imagination is of an elevated, essence-involving, form-like kind; there is a species of beauty distinctive of aged and enduring things, in which time ‘has assumed a dimension of space’, and, conversely, the material world, ‘the stone under one’s hand’, is ‘no more than a metaphor of Time’, whereby one has the impression of ‘something appearing supernaturally’, disclosing ‘some portion of us which is not under the dominion of death’; Chardin, approaching Rembrandt, dispels ‘false idealism’ and presses his vision onwards to a realism in which things are ‘free, strong, universal’, and beautiful – and we are justifed in attributing such discursively formulated meanings, even though the artist ‘never intended it’ and most probably ‘was never aware of it’.42

Te French Filtration of Classical German Tought Anne Henry advances a striking and original interpretation, which she presents as a historically authenticated and accurate account of Proust philosophical infuences.43 Though too rich to report in detail, I will sketch her thesis and explain what gives it plausibility. Henry fnds in Proust a precise and faithful artistic expression of Schelling’s Identity Philosophy, that is, the system of ‘absolute idealism’ that Schelling formulated in 1801 and restated several times over the following years (contra the ‘merely subjective’ transcendental idealism of Kant and Fichte), and which provided the blueprint for Hegel’s system. Schelling’s 1801 Darstellung meines Systems der Philosophie (Presentation of My System of Philosophy) was preceded by a transitional work, the 1800 System des transcendentalen Idealismus (System of 472

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Transcendental Idealism), which concludes with what is probably the strongest systematically elaborated metaphysical claim ever made on behalf of art in the history of philosophy: If aesthetic intuition is merely transcendental intuition become objective, it is selfevident that art is at once the only true and eternal organ and document of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form, namely the unconscious element in acting and producing, and its original identity with the conscious. Art is paramount to the philosopher, precisely because it opens to him, as it were, the holy of holies, where burns in eternal and original unity, as if in a single fame, that which in nature and history is rent asunder, and in life and action, no less than in thought, must forever fy apart.44 The idea is carried over and reworked massively in Schelling’s Identity Philosophy lectures on the philosophy of art from 1804 to 1805, where the concept of symbol supplies the formula for the nature of art, now regarded as the mirror-image of philosophy, which is no longer compelled to sacrifce discursivity on the altar of art. Symbols are explained as follows: they are ‘representation of the absolute with absolute indiference of the universal and the particular within the particular’, in comparison with philosophy’s discursive ‘representation of the absolute with absolute indiference of the universal and the particular within the universal’.45 Schelling points out that there are other ways in which representation can unite the universal with the particular and in which the particular is intuited through the universal, including allegory and what Schelling calls schematism, and explains that Symbolism is distinguished by virtue of its synthesis of these two, so that neither the universal means the particular nor does the particular mean the universal; rather, both are absolutely one, in an ‘absolute form’. Schelling proceeds to show how his general metaphysics allows this conception of an artistic symbol – plainly quite diferent from either a mere image or mere idea, or a pairing of them – to be elaborated and provide the basis for distinctions between and within the diferent forms of art. Schelling’s system, and his philosophical aestheticism, remained central to the classical German legacy with which all nineteenth-century thought had to come to terms, and the path from Schelling to Proust is, Henry shows, remarkably straightforward. Just three fgures interpose: (1) Félix Ravaisson, who visited Schelling – ‘le plus grand philosophe de notre siècle’ (‘the greatest philosopher of our century’)46 – in Munich in the 1830s and whose wellknown essay De l’habitude (Of Habit) (1838) maintained the Schellingian identity of spirit and nature47; (2) Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics of art in Book III of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation) (Vol. I, 1819) deviate from yet are heavily indebted to Schelling; (3) and fnally, of lower philosophical standing but already referred to as in Proust’s vicinity, Séailles, whose Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Essay on Genius in Art) (1883) pursues Ravaisson’s outlook and restates, in richly imagistic polished prose, shedding the ponderous terminology of post-Kantian idealism, the essence of Schelling’s vision in a fusion of its 1800 and 1801 versions.48 According to Séailles, genius is manifest in all human spheres, including science and metaphysics (consistently with Schelling in 1801), but the work of art is its supreme exemplifcation (as per Schelling in 1800). If genius appears freakish, Séailles argues, this is only because the method of enquiry is ill-formed: properly, we accede to the nature of genius by examining its foundations, where we discover that bare sensible intuition is the primary act by means of which mind organizes itself, that perception stands at a greater level of complexity, and that truth and judgement are higher still; induction, hypothesis, and analogy, 473

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and all the means of scientifc research, arise in the same primary spontaneous movement towards harmony, which is the same movement of recognizable genius that culminates in works of art. Art is, and crucially knows itself to be, the apotheosis, quintessence, and Inbegrif of reason and logic: ‘the artist’s sensations are penetrated by intelligence’, and analysis of art discloses ‘all that is concentrated in the artist’s labour, experiences, refned observations, and the correspondence of feeling with pictorial language’49; aesthetic feeling is consciousness of the development of spirit and its laws. Genius for Séailles is efectively equivalent to what Kant had called ‘refective judgement’ – our ability to fashion new concepts when presented with novel intuitions, concepts which however transcend the mere sensible information contained in intuition, and which may, questionably or ‘problematically’, tender candidates for metaphysical entities. Because Schelling’s metaphysics of art and nature can be viewed as extrapolations from this subjective power,50 Séailles’ spiritualism was in that regard continuous with French Neo-Kantianism. Henry’s historical and systematic alignments are frm, in so far as Schelling’s vision of the work of art as absolute metaphysical reparation, a production that holds all that is separated in the eternal unity of a ‘point of indiference’, connects with the unconditioned aspiration of À la recherche, and allows the contingent particulars of its world, and the particularity of the novel itself, to be synthesized with a universal, viz. the self who narrates. Far from reducing the work to the product of a metaphysical algorithm, we may say that Proust has showed how the novel may achieve the status of what Schelling calls a ‘symbol’ in a sense remote from anything that the latter could envisage in 1800.51 But if Henry’s identifcation of Schelling as Proust’s Ur-source is correct, why the absence of any explicit reference to it in Proust’s corpus? The crucial consideration is that the French reception of German philosophy, as with its reception of Romantik in the arts, had covered its tracks – Cousin, charged with Germanizing the discipline and betraying the national philosophical tradition, was temporarily removed from post in 1821 – and extended beyond what French authors had acknowledged. Boutroux describes the situation in a preface written for Xavier Léon’s ground-breaking book on Fichte in 1902: Even though German philosophy spread among us in the epoch of the Revolution, when it was passionately either exalted or combatted, it must be acknowledged that it has barely been submitted to proper historical study, aside from Kant. Since 1844 the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques has attempted in vain to stimulate special research on the topic […] Yet one continued to draw inspiration, often very extensive, from Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, rendering what had been gleaned from one’s reading of those authors in language that was elegant, clear, rich with images, subtle, or poetic. But aside a few translations and journal articles, impartial and penetrating analytic studies of post-Kantian German philosophers have been scant.52 It must however be asked: Why Schelling and not Schopenhauer, whom we can be sure that Proust, like all of his generation, had internalized?53 The issue is delicate, and several weighty considerations speak in favour of Schopenhauer: the proposition that disillusionment is the inevitable product of the necessity of seeking happiness; the readiness of some late nineteenth-century readers of Schopenhauer, encouraged by Nietzsche, to waive the a priori pessimistic implication of his theory of Wille, and to recast it as a source of creative vitality,54 which is in fact how Schelling had regarded it; the formula that art grasps timeless essences; the valorization of music55; the conception of the world given in experience as an encrypted text or physiognomy; and most importantly, Proust’s multiply restated though not 474

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unerringly consistent (and again Nietzschean) willingness to embrace the world qua transformed by imagination as if it were a dream.56 These need not be denied a place in Proust’s philosophical formation, and it should be conceded that the fnal item is not present in Schelling. There are all the same too many discontinuities to allow Schopenhauer the last word. No plausible reading of Schopenhauer can make art a means of personal salvation; indeed on his account, aesthetic experience deletes the ‘I’ – which is in any case for Schopenhauer a mere formal principle lacking personality – in exchange for insight into real Platonic essences, rendering its function essentially cognitive. Thus for Schopenhauer, aesthetic consciousness merely arrests briefy the fow of time without afording the self a world-encompassing identity, i.e. elevating an individual life to totality. In addition, Schopenhauer’s conception of artistic genius requires a clean rupture between things of the world and their transcendent archetypes, making nonsense of the key Proustian practice of distilling from sensation a meaning which nonetheless remains inseparable from its source. The most that may be said, I suggest, is that attaining a state akin to, but that falls short of, the world-resignation prescribed by Schopenhauer is necessary for the formulation of Proust’s project. Closer approximation to Proust’s valuation of art is needed therefore, and Henry is right that, in systematic terms, all roads lead to Schelling, for while it is true that he is hardly alone in elevating art in the classical German context, his absolutization of the artwork is not equalled by any of his contemporaries: Kant, Schiller, Goethe, Solger, and Hegel do not similarly ft À la recherche, and the Jena Romantics Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, aside the relative indefniteness of their fragments, were at most on the fringes of Proust’s acquaintance.57 One major consideration nonetheless interferes with the proposal that we go as far back as Schelling. Schelling’s aesthetic formulae are arcane, and their literary analogue is Mallarmé, whose aesthetic Proust regarded as incapable of afording authentic satisfaction. In his well-reasoned attack on the aesthetic and practice of Symbolism in ‘Contre l’obscurité’ (‘Against Obscurity’) (1896), Proust supposes that his opponent will retort: You are astonished that the master should need to explain his ideas to his disciples. But isn’t that what has always happened in the history of philosophy, when the likes of Kant, Spinoza, and Hegel – as obscure as they are profound – have proved hard to comprehend without considerable difculty. You mistake the character of our poems: they are not fantasies but systems. (CSB 391–2) 58 If so, Proust replies, then it is the Symbolist who is mistaken, for literature has methods of its own – since the poet does not address our logical faculties, ‘he does not enjoy the right that every philosopher has to seem obscure initially’ (CSB 392) – and the obscurity proper to literature is of a quite diferent sort; in failing to give metaphysics, which needs rigour and defniteness, a new language, Symbolism fails to be poetry. What can be inferred from this? We know that Proust was too immersed in philosophy for his literary powers to be altogether insulated from it, and in any case, to strive to derive art from Schelling’s metaphysics would be to contradict them. However, Séailles’ Schellingianism does not perch aesthetics on a mathesis of intellectual intuition; rather, he employs the model and method of Biran, recasting Schelling’s argument in a way that allows equivalent conclusions to fow from scrutiny of the richness of experience and refection on the conditions for its synthesis. 475

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This diference was, as said earlier, characteristic of the French reception of classical German philosophy. Neo-Kantianism in France shared the systematically truncated – and to some degree sensualist – character of French spiritualism’s selective incorporation of German Idealism and veered towards results compatible with it. Lachelier’s infuential work on induction had concluded that the solution to the problem of determining regularity in nature lies in grounding its phenomena on fnal causes: if it is possible to fnd laws and patterns in the data of sense, then purposiveness, which Kant declares the province of refective judgement, and not mechanism, must furnish its ground.59 Lachelier’s successor Boutroux also arrived at Kant’s refective judgement as a sufcient ground for scientifcally intelligible nature: while Kant himself regarded our capacity to detect afnity in sense data as a mere precondition for natural laws with (empirical) necessity, in need of supplementation by a priori necessity, Boutroux argues – with human freedom in view – that necessity, even the ‘relative’ necessity of empirical law, is superfuous.60 Séailles’ aesthetic treatise stands out by virtue of its congruity with Proust’s artistic purposes, but his methodological standpoint was widely reinforced from other quarters. Equipped with this idea of a power to distil from sensation or (at a higher level) artistic symbols a meaning that shares the obscurity of the unconscious in which it originates, and that appears to point to some essence belonging to a supersensible order, the rudimentary aesthetic theory elicited in Swann by the Vinteuil Sonata becomes intelligible (I 341–5; SW 413–418). The theory, naive and Platonic in its frst statement, is later modifed in À l’ombre des jeunes flles en feurs, shortly after Swann, again listening to Vinteuil, has expressed puzzlement that sound ‘can refect, like water’ and display something lying in his past (I 524; BG 123), and it is now put in the mouth of Marcel: But genius, and even great talent, springs less from seeds of intellect and social refnement superior to those of other people than from the faculty of transposing and transforming them […] To mount the skies it is not necessary to have the most powerful of motors, one must have a motor which, instead of continuing to run along the earth’s surface, intersecting with a vertical line the horizontal which it began by following, is capable of converting its speed into ascending force. Similarly, the men who produce works of genius are […] those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their personality into a sort of mirror, in such a way that their life, however mediocre it may be socially and even, in a sense, intellectually, is refected by it, genius consisting in refecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene refected. (I 544–5; BG 148–9) When À la recherche reworks La Comédie humaine, it substitutes, we may say, the ‘refecting power’ for the assimilation of Humanity to Animality, which allows the Platonic elements to be restored in the fully elaborated and complete statement of its aesthetic in Le Temps retrouvé.61

Conclusion To conclude – provisionally, since we should expect the German Idealist impetus to À la recherche to have been supplemented from other directions, and I have not undertaken comparison with other candidates in the secondary literature62 – even if Schelling is identifed as a distal point of origin and source of inspiration for fgures to whom we know Proust was 476

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exposed, and that a stringent systematic perspective would lead from Séailles to this source, evidence is missing that Proust actually read and digested Schelling’s Identity System, while we can be confdent that the aesthetically relevant aspect of Schelling’s vision was relayed to Proust in a muted and congenial form by Séailles – with whom we may therefore call a halt, on the basis that, other things being equal, what counts as a philosophical infuence on Proust is properly circumscribed by what resulted from the French fltration of classical German thought and may have segued into his literary production. To return to an earlier caveat, it is true that, even if the foregoing is cogent, nothing has been proven regarding the existence of any narrowly ‘academic’ philosophical infuence, since it remains arguable that nothing of the kind was required for the inception of À la recherche. Despite the persuasion of so many commentators that some such philosophical force must be at work, it may be objected that this refects an overvaluation of abstract elements that lie only in the penumbra of Proust’s creation, or that belong to the centre but involve no strict afrmation.63 What ultimately sustains the conviction, I suggest, is that something must provide for the unity of À la recherche, and since this cannot be anything at the level of its mere content – for as such it would belong to the manifold that constitutes the material of the text and itself be in need of unifcation – it must be internal to it, while also standing above the particulars of the text.64 This ‘something’ can only be a universal shared by author and reader, and while it is of course at one level simply an ‘I’, a being that has a life to lead, it must also be expressed in some determinate thought that allows itself to be realized uniquely and concretely in À la recherche and no other work. What makes the work a ‘philosophical novel’, then, is the necessity that this single thought – the Idea of À la recherche, so to speak – have a philosophical character, and to the extent that we look at infuences of an academic sort, Henry’s account, subject to the qualifcation entered above, makes historical and exegetical sense. Is the thought however afrmed? For two reasons, I think there is no alternative. First, while elements in the great aesthetic passage of Le Temps retrouvé suggested that reservations can be picked out,65 they are heavily outnumbered, and it is not a coherent option to refer the outcome to a ‘will to believe’ or to regard it as a mere striving for faith, since the purpose of À la recherche is to present the fnal realization as manifesting a receptivity which yields the foundation for its own construction, the writing of the novel. This movement of doubling up analysis and synthesis, discovery and invention, transition back and forth between the real and the ideal, is exactly Schelling’s metaphysical conception, relayed in Séailles’ notion of génie. Second, in so far as the idea of the work cannot be prised apart from À la recherche without unravelling the entire creation, Proust’s afrmation is simply a fact attested in the existence of the work.

Works of Proust CSS = Complete Short Stories, trans. and ed. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2003). Includes Les Plaisirs et les jours [Pleasures and Days] (pp. 1–170), frst published with illustrations by Madeleine Lemaire, Preface by Anatole France, and four piano works by Reynaldo Hahn (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896). LMP = Letters of Marcel Proust, trans. and ed. Mina Curtiss (New York: Helen Marx, 2006). OAL = Marcel Proust on Art and Literature 1869–1919, trans. Sylvia Townsend Warner (New York: Delta, 1958). Includes Contre Sainte-Beuve (1908) (pp. 17–276) [published posthumously, Paris: Gallimard, 1954]. 477

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OC = Œuvres complètes de Marcel Proust: les 40 titres et annexes (annotés et illustrés) (Arvensa Édition: digital resource, www.arvensa.com). RR = On Reading Ruskin: Prefaces to La Bible d’Amiens and Sesame et les Lys, with Selections from the Notes to the Translated Texts, trans. and ed. Jean Autret, William Burford, and Phillip Wolfe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987). SL 2 = Selected Letters, Vol. 2, 1904–1909, ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). SMW = Marcel Proust: A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings, trans. and ed. Gerard Hopkins (London: Wingate, 1948).

Notes 1 Helpful overviews in English are Thomas Gunn, Modern French Philosophy (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922), Isaac Benrubi, Contemporary Thought of France, trans. Ernest B. Dicker (London: Williams & Norgate, London, 1926) [Les Sources et les courants de la philosophie contemporaine en France (Paris: Alcan, 1933), 2 vols.], and Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. 9, From Maine de Biran to Sartre (London: Search Press, 1975). Though the nomenclature varies – under stress one author innovates a category of ‘Metaphysico-Spiritual Positivism’ – and there is considerable interpenetration of traditions, the lines of distinction are reasonably clear. 2 This standpoint was not uniquely French, though France was where it fourished. It had a close and similarly motivated (non-Catholic) German equivalent in the early nineteenth-century personalist idealism of Immanuel Hermann Fichte and Christian Hermann Weiβe. Their school, vigorous in the 1840s, did not endure long thereafter, and from what I know made no contribution to the French tradition. In the Anglophone world, its appearance was belated. Its frst moment, sharing with its Neo-Kantian German precursor the motive of reaction against Hegel’s pan-logicism, can be pinned down to Andrew S. Pringle-Pattison’s Hegelianism and Personality (1887, 1st ed.) and Josiah Royce’s early religious-idealist works from the same decade, and it established itself as an Oxford-based movement in Henry Sturt’s edited collection, Personal Idealism (London: Macmillan, 1902), too late in the day however to survive the juggernauts of Bradley, pragmatism, and analytic philosophy. 3 In 1889, Proust, accompanied by his grandfather, visited Renan, who signed Proust’s copy of Vie de Jésus [George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), p. 65]. Renan’s semi-aesthetic image of Jesus as exemplary in his person, independently of any doctrine, almost a schöne Seele, had no doubt more appeal for Proust than its religious implications. Renan supplies one layer in the palimpsest of Bergotte. 4 Maurice Blondel, L’Action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893), translated as Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1984). Much in Blondel recalls classical German thought and there is transcendentalism in his method: the practical point of view rises above antinomies of thought, and only the analysis of the will, ‘by revealing to us what we must ratify in order to will even our own will’ (pp. 489–90; trans. p. 444), can show what we must presuppose. His argument that the will demands not merely human freedom but supernatural transcendence contradicts however Kantian-Fichteanism. 5 The French reception originated with Charles Villiers’ very early Philosophie de Kant, ou principes fondamentaux de la philosophie transcendentale (Metz: Collignon, 1801–1803), which displays ambivalence and a mix of characteristics that anticipates the later French Neo-Kantianism: Kant’s followers are treated just as critically as his detractors; yet, the application of transcendental philosophy to the arts is approved (in Goethe, Schiller, Humboldt); at the same time, Villiers regrets that French culture should derive to such a degree from belles lettres rather than (as in Germany) science. Villers was followed by Germaine de Staël’s De L’Allemagne (Paris: H. Nicolle, 1810; due to censorship, republished London: John Murray, 1813), Vol. 3, Ch. 6, which, though inaccurately sentimentalist, credits Kant with a refutation of materialism and approves his spirit/nature dualism. Staël treats Kant as a prelude to Romantic modernity, best exemplifed in Schelling’s conception of art (Vol. 3, Ch. 7). Superior discussion of Kantian thought appeared in Victor Cousin’s Cours de l’histoire de la philosophie moderne at the École Normale, given many times and published in diferent

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6 7

8

9

10

11

12

13 14

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versions since 1816 and in fnal form in 1847 (Paris: Didier et Ladrange), supplemented by Cours de philosophie sur le fondement des idées absolues du vrai, du beau et du bien (Paris: Hachette, 1836), and in Charles de Rémusat, Essais de philosophie (Paris: Ladrange, 1842), Essai IV. Though by the end of the century, Boutroux was able to report the existence of a fourishing French Neo-Criticism, and that scarcely any present-day dissertation would fail to take account of Kant’s views [Études d’histoire de la philosophie (Paris: Alcan, 1897), p. 318]. Étienne Vacherot, for example, advocated re-examination of the German legacy, but the metaphysics he thought necessary were not clearly distinct from those of other spiritualists: see Le Nouveau Spiritualisme (Paris: Hachette, 1884). Also leaning back towards German Idealism was Charles Levêque, though his work was chiefy occupied with aesthetics. Paul Janet and Gabriel Séailles, Histoire de la philosophie: les problèmes et les écoles (Paris: Delagrave, 1887), pp. 1069–1070. Their picture accords with the map, drawn late in the composition of À la recherche, by Dominique Parodi, La Philosophie contemporaine en France: essai de classifcation des doctrines (Paris: Alcan, 1920). Dominique Janicaud, Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français. Aux sources du bergsonisme: Ravaisson et la métaphysique (The Hague: Nijhof, 1969) [reprinted as Ravaisson et la métaphysique: une généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1997)], acknowledges – see the Introduction – the prima facie limitations of French spiritualism and its relatively low profle in intellectual history, even though it is what ties Ravaisson to Bergson: spiritualism draws at once on sensible empiricism and on German thought, has slight systematicity and a closed character, and precludes integration with the human sciences. At a stretch Foucault’s late occupation with ‘souci de soi’ as a (radically) novel form of French spiritualism: his emphasis in L’Herméneutique du sujet: cours au Collège de France (1981–1982) (Paris: Seuil, 2001) [The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2001)] is on the disentanglement of the ‘conditions’ and ‘structures of spirituality’ from forms of savoir; see esp. Deuxième heure. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1889) [Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Allen & Unwin, 1910)] and Matière et mémoire: essai sur la relation du corps à l’ésprit (Paris: Alcan, 1896) [Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1991)]. Similarly, ‘late’ is Durkheim’s Les Règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Alcan, 1895). Parodi, La Philosophie contemporaine en France, characterizes 1885–1900 as a turning-point, arguing that it witnessed a new dynamism in French philosophy, marked by a higher public valuation of the discipline, refected in greatly increased study in schools and universities, novel developments with international stature, the multiplication of new journals, and revitalization through return to intensive study of German and other historical texts. Parodi is clear however that (though Bergson outstripped reputationally all others) this new richness of activity did not yield any new dogmatic direction, noting that this was also the estimate of Boutroux in 1908. Parodi cites a sociological survey of professeurs de philosophie conducted in 1907 by Alfred Binet, inventor of the IQ test, which, as may be predicted, showed a universal refusal of labels such as ‘spiritualist’ or ‘pragmatist’. For example, Alfred Fouillée, author of an important book on the problem of human freedom, and Jean-Marie Guyau, sometimes compared with Nietzsche, and arguing for the social signifcance of the aesthetic. Political thinkers include the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the SaintSimonian Pierre Leroux. Biran’s ‘Sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme’ (Copenhagen Treatise 1811) is translated in The Relationship Between the Physical and the Moral in Man, trans. and ed. Darian Meacham and Joseph Spadola (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 47–138. Cousin’s later edition is in 3 volumes, Œuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran (Paris: Ladrange, 1841). See Jeremy Dunham’s helpful account of Biran’s ‘selective’ Leibnizianism, ‘A Universal and Absolute Spiritualism, Maine de Biran’s Leibniz’, in Biran, The Relationship Between the Physical and the Moral in Man, pp. 157–92. Limited attention was paid on the German side to Neo-Kantianism in France. An indicative piece is M. Ascher, ‘Renouvier und der französische Kritizismus’, Kant-Studien, 10, 1905, 92–5, which, though positive, fnds in Renouvier’s Kantianism only phenomenalism and religious faith based on the unanswerability of speculative questions. And, to emphasize Biran’s longevity, thence even to Merleau-Ponty: see L’Union de l’âme et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson (Paris: Vrin, 1968), from lectures at the Collège de France,

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1947–1948, Lectures 8–10 [The Incarnate Subject, trans. Paul B. Milan (New York: Humanity Books, 2001)]. Notwithstanding Proust’s extensive use of scientifc metaphors, explored in François Vannucci, Marcel Proust à la recherche des sciences (Monaco: Rocher, 2005). The evidence is distilled in Henri Bonnet’s thorough study, Alphonse Darlu (1849–1921): le maître de philosophie de Marcel Proust, suivi d’une étude critique du Contre Sainte-Beuve (Paris: Nizet, 1961). Darlu provides the model for M. Beulier in Jean Santeuil, Pt. III, Ch. 1, ‘The Philosophy Class’, pp. 159–64, and Ch. 9, ‘[Comments on/Memories of ] Monsieur Beulier’, pp. 225–33. Jean is upbraided (though condoned) for his lack of taste and reliance on cliché, and given a detention (as his duty as a professor requires, Beulier explains regretfully). Jean detects in Beulier a (non-Kantian) weakness for afection and empathy (p. 225) and describes him as ‘never engaged in thought except to speak the truth’, and never speaking ‘except to express his thought’ – ‘a profound intellect convinces itself that it holds within itself the laws of the universe’ (p. 227). Yet, intriguingly, his ‘hesitating replies to sentences seemed more certain than any dogmatic statement could have been, more flled with a true vision of the future, with meaning and life than would have been the prophetic utterances of oracles’, and he is said to admit ‘the right of fancy to play a part in work’, ‘as though a stream of poetry had been allowed to run into Jean’s day-to-day existence, as though imagination had been given him to open his imagination to a dream’ (p. 228). In a questionnaire – a youthful exercise in self-defnition – that Proust completed in three versions at diferent periods. Darlu and Boutroux survive Proust’s changing answers to other questions. The versions dated to c. 1884–1887, and 1890 or shortly thereafter, can be found in OC and accessed online at the Illinois Kolb-Proust Archive. Les Plaisirs et les jours, CSS, p. 8. See also Xavier Léon’s Introduction to La Philosophie de Fichte: ses rapports avec la conscience contemporaine (Paris: Alcan, 1902), pp. ii–iii. Léon too pairs Darlu with Boutroux as inspirational, and Parodi lists Darlu among the dozen or so responsible for the new era in French philosophy from 1890: Through the abundance, profound sincerity, and moral elevation of his teaching, which engaged and inspired young philosophers who would go on to play a notable role in contemporary thought and furnish its most profound organ, the Revue de métaphysique et de morale, M. Darlu formed a whole host of young philosophers. (La Philosophie contemporaine en France, pp. 14–15)

20 See Darlu’s review, ‘La Morale de Renouvier’, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 12, 1904, 1–18. A dynamic moral idealism, exhortative and redolent of Fichte, is propounded in Le Devoir présent (Paris: Colin et Cie., 1892) by Paul Desjardin, a family friend who had in 1888 encouraged Proust to read Heraclitus and Lucretius (Tadié, Marcel Proust (Harmondsworth: Viking, 2000), trans. Euan Cameron [Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)], p. 205). Indeed, Kant’s full moral theology subsisted: at the invitation of Desjardin, Proust attended a discussion on 6 January 1983 where Charles Secrétan presented a set of 16 theses on ‘la Religion en général’, of which the 8th reads: ‘Through moral obligation God is given as within us and as above us [Le devoir nous donne Dieu en nous et au-dessus de nous]’ (Kolb-Proust Archive for Research, c5760). 21 Les Plaisirs et les jours, ‘Les Regrets: rêveries couleur du temps’, Sect. XII, ‘Éphémère efcacité du chagrin’: ‘Alas, what sentiment has brought it removes capriciously, and sadness, more sublime than gaiety, is not as enduring as virtue’ ( JS 121; CSS, p. 125). 22 Note in particular the extraordinary aside in Le Temps retrouvé where Proust, as an author, records with ‘profound emotion’ his admiration for the simple self-sacrifcing virtue of Françoise’s family: they are the only ‘real people who exist’ in À la recherche (IV 424; TR 191). 23 Bonnet, Alphonse Darlu, p. 10. When in 1908 Proust declared that only Darlu had infuenced him, and that his infuence had been ‘all bad’, it was surely the moralism, and sublated Christianity, that he had in mind. 24 In a letter to Georges de Lauris from April 1908, Proust described himself as having read ‘a fair amount’ of Bergson’s works, and was highly enthusiastic: he speaks of being ‘on a mountain top’ and the ‘parabola of his thought’, of his esteem for Bergson, and the kindness he has shown him (SL 2, p. 368). See also the letter to Mme Straus, 15 June 1908, which lists Boutroux and Bergson as among those who are ‘the outstanding and undisputed glory’ of their discipline (SL 2, p. 377). 25 The contrary view is of course well disseminated and has been defended at length since early days: see Kurt Jaeckel, Bergson’s Infuence on Marcel Proust (Breslau: Prielbatsch, 1934). Jaeckel is however

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obliged to propose some odd alignments of the distinctions they, respectively, draw between forms of memory, and to identify Proust’s extra-temporal with Bergson’s durée: see the critical review by Maurice Chernowitz, ‘Bergson’s Infuence on Proust’, The Romantic Review, 27, 1936, 45–50. The frst attribution of Bergsonism, approving the originality of Proust’s assimilation, came in a review, ‘Du côté de chez Swann. Une “manière” nouvelle’, L’Intransigeant, 28 (December 1913), ‘p. 2, column 6.’ Illustrating their non-intimacy, Proust thanks Bergson efusively in a letter from May 1904 (SL 2, p. 44) for letting him know of his intention to comment favourably at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques on Proust’s translation of Le Bible d’Amiens, emphasizing the religious character of Ruskin psychology, highlighted in Proust’s Preface. In reply, Bergson suggested Ravaisson – surely already known to Proust – as an aesthetician whom he might fnd congenial. Cahiers de 1908, per Tadié, Marcel Proust, p. 128 and p. 809 n22. Letter to de Lauris, SL 2, p. 368. Letter to Antoine Bibesco, 1912, LMP, pp. 271–4. The same text is used in an interview in Le Temps, ‘Entretien avec Elie-Joseph Bois’, 13 November 1913, in OC, and accessible at the KolbProust Archive. A month or so before his death, Proust replied to an enquiry concerning the source of his inspiration: ‘What I should like people to see in my book is that it sprang wholly from the application of a special sense’, perhaps like a telescope, which is pointed at time, because a telescope reveals stars which are invisible to the naked eye, and I have tried [… ] to reveal to the conscious mind unconscious phenomena which, wholly forgotten, sometimes lie very far back in the past. (It is perhaps, on thinking it over, this special sense which has sometimes made me concur with Bergson – since it has been said that I do– for there has never been, insofar as I am aware, any direct infuence.) (letter to Camille Vettard, September/October, 1922, in LMP, pp. 487–8)

30 Though whether Proust considers it a real psychological phenomenon is open to question: Beckett for one, denying its extra-literary reality, reads Proust as having constructed a sanctifed antidote to forgetting, which is the true characteristic of Time, that ‘monster of damnation’, Proust: And Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder, 1969), p. 11. 31 There is more of Ravaisson than Bergson in this idea, and interestingly Bergson misrecognizes it: see Janicaud, Une Généalogie du spiritualisme français, Pt I, pp. 37–74. 32 Letter to Bibesco, 1912, LMP, pp. 271–2: ‘And so for me the novel is not only plane psychology but psychology in space and time’. The next sentence is, if one likes, Bergsonian: ‘That invisible substance, time, I try to isolate, but in order to do this it was essential that the experience be continuous’. But then Proust parts company: varying aspects of the same character are presented in a way that ‘will have made him seem like successive and diferent characters’, and ‘will project – but only in that one way – the sensation of time passed’. It is required that the experience of time has endured – ‘il fallait que l’expérience pût durer’ – but Proust aims by way of the future perfect at the present perfect – ‘du temps a passé’, ‘la sensation du temps écoulé’ – such that its object, the Substance of Time, presents itself with a patina, hence as antithetical to durée. 33 See Proust’s letter in October/November 1912 to Mme Straus, which, in fat opposition to Bergson, identifes time’s reality with fnding oneself changed, and especially as aged: ‘The philosophers have certainly persuaded us that time is a process of reckoning that corresponds to no reality’ (LMP, p. 266). This – and much in RTP– suggests a completely diferent metaphysical image from Bergson: the time that ‘passes’ and points to the future is a phenomenal illusion; time’s reality consists uniquely in the past; retrouver le temps perdu consists therefore in undoing the alienation from reality for which the phenomenal present is responsible. Whence Proust’s method of resemblance, which, penetrating the illusion of the present, inhabits the Past/Real as creative art/nature: ‘And as, in spite of his [the Prince d’Agrigente’s] altered appearance, a certain resemblance could be detected […] I marvelled at the power to renew in fresh forms that is possessed by Time, which can thus, while respecting the unity of the individual and the laws of life, efect a change of scene and introduce bold contrasts’ (IV 512–13; TR 306). 34 See the ‘Prologue’, which opposes ‘the truths of the intellect’ and ‘the secrets of feeling’. 35 It merits note that, for no very clear reason, temporality seems to become an autonomous theme in late C19 and early C20 philosophy, largely in disconnection from the new empirical psychology and the revolution in physics, and with scarcely a backward glance at its key role in Kant’s transcendental idealism: obvious additions to Bergson include William James, Whitehead’s process

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philosophy, McTaggart’s famous ‘The Unreality of Time’ in 1908, paralleled by Husserl’s lectures on the phenomenology of time-consciousness in 1904–1905, followed by Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927, whence Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Composed between 1896 and 1899, predating the dissemination of Bergsonism. See in particular the description, interrogation, and death-bed credo of ‘C.’ in the Introduction to JS (English translation), pp. 5–13 and 18–21, the realization of the bond between self hood and memory in Pt. II, Ch. 3, pp. 118–19, and Jean’s conception of the poet in Pt. VI, Ch. 9, ‘Impressions Regained’, pp. 406–409. Treated briefy in Tadié, Marcel Proust, pp. 203–207, and in detail in André Ferré, Les Années de collège de Marcel Proust (Paris: Gallimard, 1959). The new department of empirical psychology (hosted in the humanities faculty) at the University of Paris had been proposed in 1885 by Paul Janet and was frst led by Théodule Ribot, followed by Pierre Janet in 1893 [ John I. Brooks III, ‘Philosophy and Psychology at the Sorbonne, 1885–1913’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 29, 1993, 123–45]. There is no sign that the challenge it posed to spiritualist psychology – its physiological aspect – interested Proust, but he may have warmed to some of the themes in the philosophy of psychology focussed on by the University of Paris faculty: Ribot’s La Psychologie des sentiments (Paris: Alcan, 1896) explored the ideas of real emotional memory, of memory as unconscious and constituted by its history, and the necessary teleology of feeling in contrast to the teleological indiference of intellect, and Victor Egger’s La Parole intérieure: essai de psychologie descriptive (Paris: Baillière, 1881) had argued, from a psychological description, that an abiding I, defned only by its pure non-extendedness, must lie behind the internal monologue which is coeval with (but secondary to) self-consciousness. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 205. To Albert Sorel, 10 July 1904, in SL 2, p. 56. SL 2 p. 374; 16 May 1908. Contre Sainte-Beuve, OAL, pp. 248–50, 254; and OAL, pp. 310–12, 314, 334–6, and 367–9. Marcel Proust: théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1983). See also Anne Henry, Proust romancier: le tombeau égyptien (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), and her more introductory Proust: une vie, une œuvre, une époque (Paris: Balland, 1986). Julia Kristeva follows Henry’s account in Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism [System des transzendentalen Idealismus] (1800), trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1978), p. 231 [III:627–8]. Schelling’s theory of Symbolism is contained in The Philosophy of Art [Die Philosophie der Kunst, Würzburg lectures 1804/05], trans. Douglas Stott, ed. David Simpson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), §39, pp. 45–50, esp. pp. 45–6 [V:406–407]. From Ravaisson’s introduction to his translation of Schelling, ‘Jugement de Schelling sur la philosophie de M. Cousin, et sur l’état de la philosophie française et de la philosophie allemande en général’, Nouvelle revue germanique, 4, 3e série (October 1835), 3–24; citation from p. 3. Ravaisson takes the opportunity to refer to the new system that Schelling has in the making and its connection with mythology, and to deprecate the infexible logic of Hegel, of which Germany is wearying – thereby intimating an alliance of future German philosophy with French spiritualism. Ravaisson, De L’habitude (Paris: Fournier, 1838) [Of Habit, trans. and ed. Clare Carlisle and Mark Sinclair (London: Continuum, 2008)]. The argument, in the briefest statement, is that habit consists in embedding what was once conscious refection in a form that is nature-like – an impossibility, were nature mere mechanism. It testifes therefore to Schelling’s thesis that nature is ‘frozen’ (yet living) intelligence. Gabriel Séailles, Essai sur le génie dans l’art (Paris: Germer Baillière et Cie, 1883). The work went through several editions and appeared in German translation as Das künstlerische Genie, trans. Marie Borst (Leipzig: Seemann, 1904). His conception of genius is illustrated in Leonardo da Vinci: l’artiste et le savant, 1452–1519, essai de biographie psychologique (Paris: Perrin, 1892), indebted to Ravaisson’s ‘The Art of Drawing According to Leonardo da Vinci’ [from ‘De l’enseignement du dessin dans les lycées d’après M. F. Ravaisson’, 1854], in Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Mark Sinclair (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 145–58. Séailles’ course in 1894–95 bore the title ‘Studies of Sensibility’. Essai sur le génie dans l’art, Ch. 7, ‘L’Œuvre d’art’, p. 229. We can be fairly sure how Schelling would have viewed regarded Séailles, extrapolating from Schelling’s Preface to Victor Cousin, Vorrede zu einer philosophischen Schrift des Herrn Victor Cousin (1834), in Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schellings

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sämmtliche Werke, 14 vols., ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856–1861), Vol. X, 201–24. Schelling reads French philosophy as fghting to emancipate itself from sensualism, and estimates Cousin as having gone a step further than Biran, in so far as Biran merely adds irreducible mental activity to passive sensation, while Cousin has added a third layer, namely principles of reason. However, Cousin too takes human nature as his starting point – his eclecticism insists that what he has learned from German philosophy must share its ground with Descartes and Locke – and the question is whether ascent can be made from what are in efect psychological data to the highest concepts of philosophy, without which it cannot become a system. Between the lines, Schelling entertains a suspicion that the greater lucidity and literary virtues of French philosophical writing refect an adherence to sensualisme that it is unable to shake of. Consorting with this assessment of Séailles as not having risen to the level of absolute idealism, a short but prescient (anonymous) review in Kant-Studien, 10, 1905, 177, observes in him a strongly subjectivist Kantian infuence and suggests that his thesis is equivalent to ‘the primacy of aesthetic reason’. This is Séailles’ reconstruction of Schelling and Kant, who himself reserves Genie for the special, nature-given power to produce ‘aesthetic ideas’ that are ft for artworks, i.e. capable of being presented as beautiful. Genie is distinct from a rational activity in general, and supplements our power of taste; yet, Kant afrms the subterranean interconnection of (1) artistic genius, (2) the heightened exemplary manifestation of our power of refective judgement evidenced in taste, and (3) the general susceptibility of sense to systematic cognition of nature, i.e. natural science. As ever, where Kant is content to simply connect, German Idealism insists on identity. Fulflling the Frühromantik hope for the artform, which Novalis and Schlegel had begun to explore. Schelling himself had considerable misgivings about the Romantic idea of an art of modernity, believing that, whatever artistic forms might be devised, pre-modern, mythological matter would be needed, and is presently missing. À la recherche, like Ulysses, fnds a way to circumvent the difculty. Émile Boutroux’s Préface to Xavier Léon’s ground-breaking La Philosophie de Fichte: ses rapports avec la conscience contemporaine (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1902), pp. v–vi. More accurately, the Académie had frst solicited submissions on German philosophy in 1838, but had judged the entries sub-standard and so re-rehearsed the exercise in 1844, according to Rémusat’s De la philosophie allemande: rapport à l’Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (Paris: Ladrange, 1845). Though improved, the submissions displayed an over-concentration on Kant, with merely general observations about Fichte and Schelling, and almost nothing on Hegel. The ‘nationalization’ of the German legacy is well illustrated by Ravaisson’s ‘Testament philosophique’ (1901, post.) (‘Philosophical Testament’, in Ravaisson, Selected Essays, trans. and ed. Mark Sinclair, London: Bloomsbury, 2016, Ch. 11, pp. 295–336), which pursues the narrative directly from the ancients, above all Aristotle, to almost exclusively French moderns, even though the highest philosophical idea is the (Schellingian) perfect identity of subject and object exhibited in nature. Ravaisson’s La Philosophie en France au 19e siècle (Paris: Lahure, 1867; 3rd edn., Paris: Hachette, 1889) is similarly Franco-centric: the task of modern philosophy is to complete the purging of metaphysics initiated by Descartes, and in this context Kant is ranked alongside but not above Leibniz and Pascal. At the same period, Durkheim explicitly disparaged contemporary German developments. However it may compare with other nations, France’s self-isolation in the nineteenth century contrasts dramatically with its German orientation in the twentieth. See Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, p. 85, and Jean Quillien (ed.), La Réception de la philosophie allemande en France au xix e et au xx e siècles (Lille: Presses du Septentrion, 1994). Schopenhauer had been put on the map, albeit critically, by the founding fgure of French empirical psychology, Théodule Ribot, in La Philosophie de Schopenhauer (Paris: Baillière, 1874), and his chief work was in French translation by 1888. Henry, Marcel Proust, pp. 46, proposes Proust’s absorption of some of Schopenhauer’s ideas via Eduard von Hartmann. Proust appraises Schopenhauer’s style and sensibility in his informal essays, but not his philosophical work, in ‘On Reading’ [‘Sur la lecture’] (1905) (SMW, pp. 134–6) and Preface to Sésame et Lys (1906) (RR, pp. 121–2). Henry, Marcel Proust, pp. 47–9. Though what Swann, and Proust, fnd in music is antithetical to Schopenhauer, while it agrees straightforwardly with the treatment of music in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art, §§76–83, pp. 107– 118 [V:488–506]: it is ‘the form in which the real unity becomes its own symbol’, encompassing all other unities within itself, and representing itself ‘absolutely as form’ (§78, p. 109 [V:491]). For example, Contre Sainte Beuve, ‘Names’ [‘Noms de personne’], OAL, p. 242.

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Sebastian Gardner 57 There is a passing reference to ‘Herr von Schlegel’ in Le Côté de Guermantes (II 571; G 314) but philosophical appreciation of Frühromantik in France (and indeed Germany) is a more recent affair. Albert Béguin’s masterful L’Âme romantique et le rêve: essai sur le romantisme allemand et la poésie française (Marseille: Cahiers du Sud, 1937; references are to the reprint, Paris: Corti, 1939) unifes the German Romantic and French literary traditions but postdates Proust. It is of note that Béguin regards Proust as sharing his poetic predecessors’ predilection for rêve (pp. 29–31) but as displaying in addition a singular and exceptional metaphysical need and confdence (pp. 353–7). An earlier instance is Charles du Bos – see Angelo P. Bertocci, ‘Charles du Bos and the Critique of Genius’, in John K. Simon (ed.), Modern French Criticism: From Proust and Valéry to Structuralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), Ch. 3, pp. 61–84 – but he again comes too late for Proust’s formation, indeed Bertocci ventures that du Bos, who had composed a long appreciation of Proust in Approximations, 4e édition (Paris: Plon, 1922), pp. 58–116, had been stimulated by Proust himself to draw connections with Novalis. Proust’s Symbolist predecessors and contemporaries did not regard their concept of the aesthetic symbol as derived from German contexts but took it to spring, historically, directly from the Parnassiens and Baudelaire, and, foundationally, to involve no metaphysics but rather to derive from the self-produced privileged states of mind. See Paul Valéry, Collected Works, Vol. 7, The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot, ed. Jackson Matthews (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), ‘Poetry and Abstract Thought’ [‘Poésie et pensée abstraite’] (1939), pp. 52–82, which fnds the origin of absolute poetry in experience of the act of thought, its aspiration to music and dance. No less resolutely introverted, Mallarmé (though a good friend of Gabriel Séailles) eschews the idea that poetry should disclose any vestige of philosophy, ethics, or metaphysics – it must spring up spontaneously, like song, ‘antérieure à un concept’ (À Charles Morice, 27 Octobre 1892, in Correspondance 1854–1898, ed. Bertrand Marchal, Paris: Gallimard, 2019) – and ultimately derives from experience that must be described metaphysically – ‘la sensation du vide absolu’ – but lacks all metaphysical intelligibility (À Henri Cazalis, 14 Mai 1867). Henri Dorra suggests nonetheless an extended appropriation going back to Pierre Leroux’s knowledge of the Schellingians Johann Joseph von Görres and Georg Friedrich Creuzer (Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 1–16). The later French breakthrough in retrieval of German Romantic aesthetics – Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s L’Absolu littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1978) [The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: SUNY, 1988)] – returns directly to Jena, making reference to only one major French study, Roger Ayrault’s La Genèse du romantisme allemand, 4 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1961–1976). 58 ‘Contre l’obscurité’ is dissected in Henry, Marcel Proust, pp. 55–65, and Bertrand Marchal, ‘Proust et Mallarmé’, Bulletin d’informations proustiennes, 40, 2010, 57–75. 59 Lachelier, Du fondement de l’induction (Paris: Ladrange, 1871). 60 Boutroux, De la contingence des lois de la nature: thèse de doctorat soutenue devant la Faculté des lettres de Paris (Paris: Baillière, 1874). 61 Showing the continuity with French literary tradition, see Michel Brix, Le Romantisme français: esthétique platonicienne et modernité littéraire (Louvain: Peeters, 1999). 62 That said, strong contenders are not obvious. Marilyn M. Sachs’ proposal of William James, in Marcel Proust in the Light of William James: In Search of a Lost Source (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014), is original and reveals interesting systematic afnities, but as regards actual historical infuence, the evidence is too slight: relevant notions in James’ Principles of Psychology were to hand locally and the French reception of James after 1900 by Bergson, Boutroux, and others focussed chiefy on his pragmatism, as attested in André Lalande, ‘Philosophy in France (1905)’, The Philosophical Review, 15, 1906, 241–66. 63 This being perhaps not Tadié’s full view but what is suggested by his Proust et la société (Paris: Gallimard, 2021), which describes À la recherche as a Comédie humaine for the twentieth century, unearthing the social fabric in which individual psychology is embedded. 64 As Benjamin puts it, À la recherche has its place ‘at the heart of the impossible’, ‘at the centre’ but also at the point of indiference [Indiferenzpunkt]’ of all dangers, fulflling Proust’s abnormal, ‘explosive’ will to ‘Eleatic’ happiness: the work is an ‘actus purus’ that maintains the unity of life and literature at the point where their discrepancy seems maximal (‘Zum Bilde Prousts’, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, Pt. I, ed. Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 311–13).

484

Proust and Philosophical Influence 65 A mere ‘optical illusion’ (IV 452; TR 225) placed Marcel beside a moment of the past; ‘the reality, the existence’ of the self is doubted (IV 452; TR 225); there may be no truth, and sensation may be a mere ‘magical scrawl’ (IV 457; TR 232); because intellect is unreliable, instinct must be trusted (IV 456–61; TR 231–7). Erika Fülöp’s Proust, The One, and The Many: Identity and Diference in À la recherche du temps perdu (London: Routledge, 2017) approaches Proust with metaphysical doctrine uppermost in mind in a way consistent with Henry, yet fnds that À la recherche adheres to contradictory metaphysics, from which Fülöp infers that Proust discovers metaphysical doctrines to be merely perspectival and accordingly shifts to a Nietzschean register. It may be that the work concludes with an insuperable ambiguity of vision and metaphysical puzzles that can only be ‘resolved’ by turning aside from them, but this is not demonstrated to be Proust’s own perspective.

485

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Acheson, J. 388, 393 Adorno, T.W. 296, 302 After Bataille: Sacrifce, Exposure, Community (french) 453 Against Sainte-Beuve (Proust) 397 Agha, A. 192 Agostinelli, A. 24, 352, 358, 360 Ainslie, D. 258 Albaret, C. 315 Albertine: afrmations 127; Albertine disparue 110, 111, 353, 381n85, 398, 415–16; “the Albertine efect” 333n10; beauty spot 171, 329; breaking ‘habitual order’ of plans 168; death of 9, 83, 93, 121, 132, 352, 356; depiction of 94; desire 130, 145n34, 149–50, 326, 345, 356–8; disappearance 326; double murder 297; elusiveness and sexual waywardness 286; escape/departure 97, 172; experiencing pleasure 129; eyes 276–8; in The Fugitive 82; identity 111; imprisonment of 351; infdelities of 55, 141, 165; jealous obsessiveness in life 82, 171, 357; kissing for frst time 121, 123, 135, 143n17, 168, 345; lesbianism 145n34, 149–50, 326, 345, 356–8; life-world with 48; looks and personality 271; love for 158, 316, 355; Marcel’s realization of love 187, 265; mysteries or puzzles 109; narrator’s unpleasant experience with 70; novel 332, 400; observations of 123; psychoemotional circumstance 49; purported ‘knowledge’ of other women 111; reasons for feeing 111; romance with 56; secret life 132, 183, 275, 278; sensations of taste, of smell, of touch 306; separateness as a self 277; ‘stupid habits of speech’ 162; virtue 144n23, 144n26

alter ego: lexical and fgural trafcking 434–7; operative language 431; role of shadow 440; sense of silence 438–40; veiling 437–40 antilogos 459 Anti-OEdipus (Deleuze and Guattari) 454 apprenticeship 109 Aquinas, T. 116 Aristotle 17, 31, 65, 67, 163, 483 Armand, Duc de Guiche 109 Armchair Space Travel 67–9 art: bulwark of sorts against fnitude 84; communicability of 254; of cooking 242; cosmogonic vision 33; critical 405–7; defense against death 84; defned 20, 243; of disguise 197; disrupter of habits 168; domestic 242; elevation of 372, 471; as escape from solipsism 274–6; experience of 241; forms 242, 246, 284, 364, 386, 473; ideality of 257–8; knowledge of 108; as lasting as Bronze 84–6; and life 5, 9; of ‘lived experience’ 411n39; of living 273, 398, 407; and nature 437, 474; philosophy of 473; poetic 237, 239; power of 71, 265, 268, 278n1; production of 4; secret of 250; signifcance of 259; signs of 275–6, 456; theory of the self 2; three-dimensional conception 76; Time Regained 71; transfguring capacity of 80; true life 26, 35, 417; value of 157, 243, 475; visual 364, 376; Wagner’s exaltation of 370; work of 4–5, 16, 27, 37, 65, 80, 84–5, 98–9, 112–15, 158, 181, 187, 207, 222, 241, 245, 258–60, 271, 274, 276, 284, 300, 303, 307, 316, 349, 386, 404, 418, 456, 460, 461, 464–5, 473–4 Artaud, A. 454 ascetic ideal 419 aspect-seeing/aspect-perception 251

487

Index Bachelard, G. 65 Bacon, F. 454 Badiou, A. 240, 267–9 Baldwin, T. 11, 387, 453; The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust 453; The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust and Deleuze 453; Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations 453; What’s So Great About Roland Barthes? 453 Balibar, J. 10 Balzac, Honoré de 24, 342, 354, 368–71, 373, 374, 439 Banville, Théodore de 29 Barthes, R. 243, 325, 326, 454 beauty 2; aesthetic 282, 284, 288; construction of 109; creation of 228; desire for 339; enjoyment of 339–40; eternal truths 95, 381n85; experience of 225, 227–30, 233, 234n9, 273, 340; intangible 74; of involuntary memory 233; Kantian conception 225–7; of memory 225; of objects 18; perception of 10, 109; role of 9 Beckett, S. 385, 386, 388, 454 Bénard, Ch. 31 Benhaïm, A. 68 Benjamin, W. 58, 59, 107, 193, 336, 466 Bergson, H.: concept of intuition 29; De la contingence des lois de la nature 34; framework 456; Matière et Mémoire 37; and Proust 397–412; vision of memory 55–6, 156 Berkeley, G. 163, 251, 470 Bernard, T. 29 Bersani, L. 94–6, 99, 100, 105, 122, 133, 246, 309, 310 Bibesco, A. 23, 70, 219 Bichat, X. 163, 164, 166, 169, 170 biological death 2, 416 Bizub, E. 156 Blondel, M. 468 Bopp, F. 367 Bosanquet, B. 257 Bouillier, Fr. 31 bound book (bBook) 221 Boutroux, É. 8, 18, 33–5, 388, 468, 470, 472, 474, 476 Bowie, M. 80, 102–4, 117, 227, 243, 244, 309, 310, 316 Breatnach, M. 242 Brochard, V. 35 Brunschvicg, L. 33, 468 Budd, M. 251 Buijs, M. 10 Butler, J. 1, 217, 245, 332 Butor, M. 239, 243 Byron 388 The Captive (C) (Proust) 36, 49, 70, 84, 103, 125, 162, 184, 207, 285–6, 330–1

Carlyle, T. 18, 366, 370 Carroll, L. 454 Carter, W. 8 Casey, E. S. 65, 66 Cassin, B. 115 characterial disunity 415 Charcot, J.-M. 29 Charles V 15, 212 Chernovitz, M. E. 389 Chua, D. 244 Claudel, P. 29, 431, 435 Colburn, B. 9 Complete Short Stories (CSS) (Proust) 477, 480n19 Comte, A. 468, 469 conclusive knowledge 126 contextualism 256, 258, 259 cosmogonic vision 33 courageous vulnerability 295 Cousin, V. 30, 31, 34, 371, 469, 470, 474, 478, 483 Croce, B. 257, 258, 260 crystallization 267, 279n3, 369 The Cut: Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil (french) 453 Czapski, J. 95, 96 Dahlhaus, C. 244, 245 Dancy, J. 94, 104 Dante Alighieri 20, 363 Darlu, A. 8, 15–17, 23, 30, 32, 33, 366, 371, 388, 470–2 death: accidental 352; agents of 318; biological 2, 416; consciousness of 79; consolation for 90; defense against 84, 86; and destruction 462; dramatic 70; and dying 9, 445, 449, 450; eternity of 408; fear of 2–3, 427n7; idea of 462; and loss 133; metaphor for 158; natural 415; painful certainty 299; partial 156; problem 81; Proust’s 21, 35–6; self ‘s 94, 172, 174, 415, 416; survival after 115n2, 155; as threat 85; unjustifed violence of 449; A Very Easy Death 448 De Beauvoir, S. 11, 444 deception: failure of 141; in imagination 137; and jealousy 373; or knowledge 128, 132; self-deception 266, 375, 391, 393 deferral 9, 123–6, 128, 136, 140, 344–6 Deguy, J. 447 Deleuze, G. 1, 11, 37, 65, 111, 153, 155, 239, 268, 269, 275, 373, 375, 398, 422, 423, 453–66; Anti-OEdipus 454; Diference and Repetition 453; Essays Critical and Clinical 454; The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque 454, 465; Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 453; Kant’s Critical Philosophy 458; The MovementImage 453; Nietzsche and Philosophy 454; Proust and Signs 453; A Thousand Plateaus 454; The Time-Image 453; What is Philosophy? 454

488

Index De Maistre, X. 69, 70 denotational (referential/predicative) semiosis 192 Derrida, J. 10, 65, 309, 312, 317, 453 Descartes, R. 31, 33, 72, 163, 267, 337, 455, 470 Descombes, V. 6, 330, 387, 455–7 desire 70, 117, 123–4, 265–6; and action 336; Albertine 130, 145n34, 149–50, 326, 345, 356–8; animal 49; and disillusion 120–1; erotic 123–4, 267, 275; jealous 290, 447; to know 125–6, 129, 131, 134–5, 139; metaphor of 343; objects of 97, 113, 123, 229, 232, 267, 291, 338, 341, 344, 346n1, 356, 358; to postpone or forget knowledge 125; to remain unknown 129, 131; restlessness of 342; role of imagination 10, 133, 335, 337; in RTP 10; satisfaction of 10, 123–4, 225, 341–3; sensuous 225, 227, 230, 233, 234n12; sexual 391; and social dynamics of knowledge 128–33; truth of 352, 356, 358; workings of 10 Dewey, J. 50 Diference and Repetition (Deleuze) 453, 456–8 Dubois, J. 330, 332 Duhem, É. 468 duration 398; intuition of 408; memory and 400–2; time as 401–2; of the universe 399 Durkheim, É. 468 Dyer, N. M. 309

fgural trafcking 434–7 Flaubert, G. 24, 25, 36, 354 Flesch, W. 139 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (Deleuze) 454, 465 “folk doctrines of directness” 193 Forster, Michael N. 10 Foucault, M. 453, 454 Fraisse, L. 7, 8, 108, 238, 282, 283, 367, 368, 371, 455, 456 France, A. 15, 17, 19, 25, 242 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze) 453 François I 15, 212, 288, 291, 351 Freud, S. 49, 58, 225–7, 231, 233, 352, 360, 401 The Fugitive (F) (Proust) 82, 337, 344, 434, 437 Fülöp, E. 167, 173 Gardiner, P. 391, 393 génie 477 Gerassi, J. 444 Gide, A. 29, 354 Gilles-Philippe 408 Girard, R. 37 Goethe, J.W. von 10, 363, 368–71, 475 Goujon, N. 309, 313, 318 Gozzoli, B. 310–12 Gracián, B. 388 grandmother: death of 9, 70, 82–3, 297, 351, 451n16, 462; involuntary recollection 295–6, 298–300, 303; memory of 305, 306; and narrator 171–2, 295, 301, 303, 306–7; presence of 300–2; protagonist’s 111, 271; well-being 339 “Greek Love” model 354 Greene, V. 9 Gregh, F. 31, 33 grief 5, 11, 24, 49, 155, 168, 171, 232, 237, 296, 301, 305, 307, 425, 448–9 Guattari, F. 1, 454, 455, 458, 461, 463–5; AntiOEdipus 454; A Thousand Plateaus 454; What is Philosophy? 454 Guerlac, S. 10, 301–4 Guermantes matinée 182, 406 The Guermantes Way (G) (Proust) 33, 48, 79, 168, 194, 199, 301, 345, 463

efects of style 366, 367, 456 Egger, V. 32, 35, 472 egoism 98, 185 Eliot, G. 19, 83, 91, 255 Ellison, D. 10 Elsner, A. 8, 309, 310 Emerson, R.W. 15, 18–20, 366, 370, 455 Empedocles 20 Empson, W. 86, 115 ‘episode of the madeleine’ 417 erotic love 120, 122, 134, 350, 363, 368–9, 372–4, 377 Ervin-Tripp, S. 191, 193 espace 67–8, 75–6, 76 Essays Critical and Clinical (Deleuze) 454 Euripides 17, 388 experiential simultaneity 54 Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy (french and James) 453 french, P. 11; After Bataille: Sacrifce, Exposure, Community 453; The Cut: Reading Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil 453; Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy 453; Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics 453; Thinking Cinema with Marcel Proust 453; The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel 453 Fichte, J.G. 370, 469, 474

habit: anaesthetic efect of 165, 170, 212; bad 167; cessation of 170; in context: two models 163–7; formation of 174n4; and habituation 162–3; interruption of 167–8, 171, 173; L’habitude 162–3, 473; of living 19, 162; of love and loss 170–3; memory 37; and philosophy 163; power of 166; Proustian 157, 159; RTP as 9, 161, 167–8; of seeing 162; Selfng the World 169–70; and self outside time 173–4; signifcance of 162, 164; ‘universal metaphysical law’ 164

489

Index Hagberg, G.L. 8 Hahn, R. 18, 22, 34, 238, 242, 358–60, 477 Halévy, D. 17 Hamann, J.G. 363, 370 Hartley, J. C. 243 Hegel, G.W.F. 10, 163, 169, 170, 185, 236, 363, 365, 384, 455, 469, 472, 474, 475 Heidegger, M. 65, 185, 186, 444 Heine, H. 369 Henry, A. 7, 36, 168, 238, 239, 243, 367, 369, 371, 384, 385, 455, 457, 472–5, 477 Heraclitus 16, 20, 388 Herder, J.G. 10, 363, 375, 376 hermeneutic circle 365 Herodotus 388 Homer 388 homogeneity 37 Howard, R. 454 Huddleston, A. 9 Hughes, E. J. 243 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 367 Hume, D. 94, 163, 164, 454, 470 Husserl, E. 267, 433, 438, 444, 447 hypothetical imagination 10, 336–8, 340, 346, 347n5 identity 2; collective 406; gender 10; personal 72, 99, 104, 427n7; real 186; relation 422; sexual 10, 110 imagery 366 imagination 120–1, 123–5, 127–8, 137–9; deception in 137; and desire 10, 133, 335, 337–8; hypothetical 10, 336–8, 340, 346, 347n5; powers of 339; visual 258 imaginativeness 340 immortality 2, 82, 156, 273, 285, 292, 343, 424 impressions: actual 56; aesthetic 297; analysis 403; cataleptic 270–1, 280n17; essential character 228; everyday experience 4; false 464; familiar 162; of group 328; and ideas 58; impact of 114; of involuntary memory 394; of knowing 144n30; lifetime of 159; lived 405; multiple, diverse 74; non-habituated 167; outside time 4; painful 140, 314; past 26; powerful 127; quality of 229; reality 4–5; sensory perception 54–5, 98, 111, 152–3, 155, 307, 422; subjective 330; true 404; virtue of 404; visual 149 indexical (secondary/indirect) semiosis 192 individual-centric assumptions 202 In Search of Lost Time (Proust) 1, 7, 16, 19, 35, 65, 79, 84, 86, 89, 150–1, 156–7, 176, 239, 257, 294–307, 325–6, 332, 397, 443–5, 448 intellect 45, 82, 181, 188, 207, 306, 428n10; conscious 265; noble 5; or intelligence 4; truths of 481 interpenetration 254–5, 257, 258

intuition 29, 400; aesthetic 473; and analysis 37; Bergson’s concept 29, 399–400; of duration 408; of essences 444; intellectual 475; knowledge of 408; objective 393; philosophical 399–400, 407–8, 412n51; receptive 456; sensible 473; transcendental 473; will-less 393 inversion 10, 189n8, 260, 325–6, 330, 332, 333, 354–5, 477 involuntary memory (IM) 2, 80–2, 250; aesthetic theory 227–30, 233, 394; Celtic belief 305; content of 259; delicious pleasure 290; discovery of 395; and domain 255–8; ecstatic revelation 290; epiphany of 102; episodes of 93, 96, 101–2, 105n4, 182, 224, 287, 419, 422, 428n11; experiences of 3–4, 9, 22, 26, 63n6, 95–6, 111, 115, 149, 152, 153, 158, 173, 179, 251, 373, 403, 405, 418, 423, 461; functions of 375; of humanity 299; joy and indiference to death 3; moments bienheureux of 339, 418; nature of 307; patterns 103; personal adventure of 60; in process of self-creation 99; Sainte-Beuve passages 26; self reunited 156; spatiotemporal experience 71; transfguration of 157; and voluntary memory 37, 150–1, 153–5, 397, 462 ironic duplicity 206 James, I.: Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy 453 James, W. 46, 50, 51, 457 Janet, P. 34, 163, 169, 170, 388, 472 jealousy 117, 123; and deception 373; desire 290, 350–1, 447; generality and literary precedents 353–4; heterosexual 357–8; idea of possession 349–50; inversion model 354–5; and lesbianism 356–7; love/lover 10, 94, 112, 115, 117n10, 125, 130–2, 135, 140–1, 171–2, 182, 275, 292, 342, 349, 351, 353–5; narratives of 349; obsessiveness in life 25, 82, 171, 357; and pain 52; rivalry 129; and suspicion 135, 149; truth and lies 351–2; zero-sum 352–3 Jean Santeuil (Proust) 7, 15, 21–5, 30, 309, 314–16, 318–19, 368–9, 373, 431, 437–8, 440, 455, 471 Ji, Young-Rae 447 Kaf ka, F. 317, 454, 460 Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari) 454 Kant, I. 10, 17, 30, 32, 35, 36, 98, 99, 185, 227–30, 233, 282–5, 289, 337, 366, 370, 384, 454, 455, 458, 468–70, 474–6 Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Deleuze) 458 katalepsis 270, 280n12 Kawakami, K. 301, 302 Kemp, G. 9

490

Index Kemp, S. 9, 230, 231 Kierkegaard, S. 286, 455 Kihlstrom, J. F. 157 Kilmartin, T. 385 Klein, M. 309, 316, 460 knowledge 18, 21, 34–6; abstract 271, 402; of Albertine’s identity 111; of architectural history 112; of art 108–9; carnal 111; conclusive 126; critique of 402; defnitions 55; direct 367; economy of 9, 109, 113, 117n11; of existence 72; of familiar reality 338; internal threat 121; of language 257; of love 5, 269; mathematical or moral 338; modes of knowing 111–15; narrator’s oxygen 107; nature, accessibility and value of 108; object of 121–4, 128, 133, 135, 185; of philosophy 29; of Plato 96; and possession 121–3; postpone or forget 125; private 138, 140; problems of 122; process of coming by 107; of process, practice and fact 109; of the self 74–6, 94; self-conscious 137; social dynamics 128–33, 138, 140; of something (the world) 53; superior 138; taste of 115–17; value of 121–2; of words 23; of world 109, 178 Koepnick, L. 241 Kolb, P. 219 Koss, J. 241 Kristeva, J. 232, 387 Kubala, R. 10, 271 Lachelier, J. 32, 33, 468, 476 Ladenson, E. 10, 332 L’Adoration perpétuelle 216 Landy, J. 6, 93, 97–104, 107, 117, 156, 250, 261, 387, 414, 415, 417, 420–3, 428, 455 Large, D. 384, 387, 414, 415, 417, 418, 420–3, 455 Larkin, A. 151, 304 Law of Withdrawal 22 laws: about human behavior 22; of absolute truth 95; ancient 288; discovery of 27; enunciation of 32; of the external world 59; and ideas 181; of justice 95; natural 476; of nature to animal behaviour 390; of perfect efort 95; physical 59; psychological 59; of psychology 34; social 23; statements of 133 Lefebvre, H. 65 Leibniz, G. W. 31, 33–5, 37, 163, 164, 386, 454–6, 459, 462, 465, 468–70 Lemoine, A. 166, 168, 173 Lemoine, H. 24 Lerner, L. S. 10 lesbianism: Albertine 145n34, 149–50, 326, 345, 356–8; and jealousy 356–7 Letters of Marcel Proust (LMP) (Proust) 477, 481n29, 481n32 Levinas, E. 1, 10, 37, 276, 277, 309, 310, 444

Levy, L. 11 lexical trafcking 434–7 L’habitude 162–3, 473 library: Borgesian 219–20; genesis 212–16; Proustian 218–21; revelation 216–18 lived experience 411n39 Locke, J. 163, 269, 455, 470 lost time 3, 18, 25, 35, 50, 71, 79–81, 150, 153, 351, 397, 399, 402–3, 428n9, 448–50, 451n14, 462 Louis XIV 213, 354 love 3–4; afairs 183, 350, 426, 464; allowance of 48; as cataleptic impression 270–1; childhood 55; as contemplative ascent 272–4; erotic 120, 122, 134, 350, 363, 368–9, 372–4, 377; ‘eternal truths’ of 95; experience of 177; of external world 18; and failure 5; forgotten 158; god of 266; Greek 354; habits of 170–3; illusions of 268; incessant 134–5; jealous 94, 115, 135, 182, 292, 342, 349, 351, 353–5; as mere sickness 266; metaphysics of 37; nature of 265, 368; objects 359–60; phenomenon’s activity 255; relationship 267, 317, 354, 360; romantic 306, 369, 391, 426; same-sex 17, 354; as self-knowledge 268–9; of sincerity 289; sweet joy of 17; true 391; truth of 275; unhappy 125, 354 Lucey, M. 9 lucid self-delusion 420 lying 95, 266, 360, 372, 434, 439, 471, 476; ethics and aesthetics 282–3; and involuntary memory 290–1; perfect lie 285–90; in RTP 10; and truth 352 madeleine: child 3, 153–4; episode 70, 151, 167, 173, 180, 182, 227, 231–2, 287, 291, 397, 403, 411n48, 417, 449; experience 44, 46, 150; involuntary memory of 70, 149, 154; moments 152–4; petite madeleine 115, 285, 287–8, 290–1, 449; taste of 2–3, 70, 100, 116, 151, 153, 181, 225 Maine de Biran 163, 165, 470, 475 Maistre, J. de 69 Malpas, J. E. 8, 66, 71–3, 75, 76 Marcel Proust: A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings (SMW) (Proust) 478, 483n53 Marcel Proust on Art and Literature (OAL) (Proust) 477, 481n32, 482n42 Marion, Jean-Luc. 267–9 Martin du Gard, R. 29 Marx, K. 439 The Material Object in the Work of Marcel Proust (Baldwin) 453 McCarthy, M. 108 Mead, G.H. 8, 43, 50–4, 56, 58, 62 Megay, Joyce N. 156, 398 Mehlman, J. 309, 313

491

Index memory: beauty of 225; Bergson’s conception 56; and consciousness 86; contemporary philosopher 37; as double experience 9; and duration 400–2; experience of 45, 56, 61, 96, 179, 403, 423; habitual 37, 170, 174; and imagery 37, 74; imagination and self-identity, interconnection between 9, 66; intellectual 44, 60; of intelligence 151; involuntary (see involuntary memory (IM)); of kind 56; materials of 59; and metaphysics 80–2; nondeclarative 156, 157; of object 45, 393; and perception 54–5, 401; photographic 51; protagonist 26; pure 398, 471; restore 44; RTP 8; and sensation 57–8, 337, 402, 404; shifting and confused gusts of 44; spatialization of 76; spontaneous 409n5; and subjectivity 71–2; and time 10; unconscious 157, 410n26; unforeseeable 59; unplanned 59; verbal 51; visual 115; volitional 44, 51, 60; voluntary 37, 149, 151–5, 409n5; willed 44, 60; willless 393–4 Merleau-Ponty, M. 1, 11, 431–40, 444 metaphor: aesthetics 330; borrowing 432; for death 158; of desire’s blossoming 343; of dried seeds 26; good 243; medical 171; for mind 44; occult trading of 434; or symbolism 330; powerful 47; primordial 437; Ricoeur as “the living metaphor” 440; scientifc 480n16; sense of physical penetration 350; sensory 59; of “turning the tables” 141 Michelet, J. 24 Milovanovic, M. 241 Mingelgrün, A. 312 misty imprecision 366, 367 monad 27, 33, 456, 462, 465 Moncrief, C. K. S. 80, 162, 385 mondanités 214 Montaigne, Michel de 23, 431, 433, 434 morality: Kant and 283–5 Moran, R. 9, 225, 227, 342 Morrison, J. 444 The Movement-Image (Deleuze) 453 multiplicity 27, 71, 97, 134, 172, 255, 258, 329, 404, 455, 459, 462–4 mute things 438 native intuitions 201 Nattiez, J.-J. 238, 239, 241, 243, 245, 385 Nehamas, A. 98, 414, 417, 418 Nerval, Gérard de 25, 369, 373, 374, 438 Nietzsche and Philosophy (Deleuze) 454 Nietzsche, F. 6, 10, 98, 99, 186, 259, 260, 384, 387, 414, 415, 417–26, 454, 474 Noailles, A. de 36, 219 Nordlinger, M. 21, 26 Nussbaum, M. 1, 10, 105, 115, 268–75

obscure allusions 366 OEuvres (OC) (Proust) 478, 480n18, 481n29 “one-sided diet” of examples 60 On Reading Ruskin (RR) (Proust) 259, 478, 483n53 Orpheus 20 Oxford Literary Review 453 Panaioti, A. 10 Parft, D. 9, 88–90, 94, 428 passional disunity 415 Péguy, C. 431 Peirce, C. S. 50, 191 ‘perspective of life’ 422 Peters, J. 9 petite madeleine 115, 285, 287–8, 290–1, 449 The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust and Deleuze (Baldwin) 453 Pippin, R. B. 9 place 65, 66, 71, 75; displaced 71–6 Plato 17, 20, 35, 95, 96, 163, 268, 269, 272, 273, 276, 279, 384, 387, 388, 454–6, 459 Pleasures and Days (Proust) 70, 238, 477–8 Pliny 388 Plutarch 20, 23, 388 Poincaré, H. 468 Poulet, G. 65, 72, 149, 155 poverty/atrophy 411n36 primitive societies 287 Private Language Argument 259 programme music 244 project-based desires 343 projection 36, 46, 74, 94, 96, 133, 135, 182, 255, 258, 267, 271 Proust and Signs (Deleuze) 375, 453–61, 463–5 Proust, M.: Against Sainte-Beuve 397; The Captive (C) 36, 49, 70, 84, 103, 125, 162, 184, 207, 285–6, 330–1; Cogito 71–6; Complete Short Stories (CSS) 477, 480n19; on death 79–91; The Fugitive (F) 82, 337, 344, 434, 437; The Guermantes Way (G) 33, 48, 79, 168, 194, 199, 301, 345, 463; Jean Santeuil 7, 15, 21–5, 30, 309, 314–16, 318–19, 368–9, 373, 431, 437–8, 440, 455, 471; Letters of Marcel Proust (LMP) 477, 481n29, 481n32; Marcel Proust: A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings (SMW) 478, 483n53; Marcel Proust on Art and Literature (OAL) 477, 481n32, 482n42; Memory and Metaphysics 80–4; milieu 470–2; OEuvres (OC) 478, 480n18, 481n29; overview of The Proustian Mind 8–11; philosophy 1–8, 15–27; Pleasures and Days 70, 238, 477–8; problem of 176–88; On Reading Ruskin (RR) 259, 478, 483n53; Remembrance of Things Past (RTP) 80, 296, 418; In Search of Lost Time 1, 7, 16, 19, 35, 65, 79, 84, 86, 89, 150–1, 156–7, 176, 239, 257, 294–307, 325–6, 332, 397, 443–5, 448;

492

Index Selected Letters (SL 2) 478, 480n24, 481n26; Sodom and Gomorrah (SG) 150, 171, 295–6, 299–300, 460, 462, 465; Swann’s Way (SW) 20, 33, 43, 67, 73, 79, 103, 154, 180, 185, 211, 295, 297, 309, 312, 397, 434, 445, 463; Time Regained (TR) 6, 9, 25, 33–6, 71, 75, 79, 86, 93, 95, 151, 153, 181, 211, 216–18, 250, 287, 294–300, 304–7, 310, 317, 332, 351, 397–8, 434, 437, 439, 462–4; training in philosophy 29–37; Within a Budding Grove (BG) 47, 73, 179, 211, 326, 332; works of 477–8 Proust-Machine: Deleuze 453–5; image of thought 455–8; literary machine 458–62; transversality of 463–6 “Proust’s becoming-spider” 464 Rabier, E. 30, 33, 156, 163, 166, 168, 169 Ravaisson, F. 32, 163–5, 170, 468, 472, 473 Rawlinson, M. 109 refective judgement 474, 476, 486n50 Remembrance of Things Past (RTP) (Proust) 80, 296, 418 Renan, E. 24, 468 Renouvier, C. 32, 468 Ribot, Th. 35, 388 Rivière, J. 6, 35, 336, 397, 398 Roland Barthes and Film: Myth, Eroticism and Poetics (french) 453 Roland Barthes: The Proust Variations (Baldwin) 453 Romanticism 10, 363–77 romantic love 306, 369, 391, 426 Rorty, R. 414, 417 Rushworth, J. 9 Ruskin, J. 15, 22–4, 257, 259, 366, 370, 371, 389, 435 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von 454 Sainte-Beuve, C.A. 24–6, 29, 37, 68, 257 Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de 431 Sander, A.-L. 9 Sand, G. 100, 215, 218, 239 Sartre, J. P. 1, 11, 126, 432–5, 439, 444–50 Schelling, F. 7, 36, 236, 239, 363, 367, 370, 455, 469, 472–6 Schiller, F. 257, 282, 475 Schlegel, A. W. 365, 368, 371 Schlegel, F. 363–4, 370, 375–6, 475 Schopenhauer, A. 7, 10, 29, 36, 236–41, 243, 244, 246, 341–4, 371, 377, 384–94, 455, 474, 475; The World as Will and Representation 455 Séailles, G. 34, 36, 163, 169, 170, 238, 367, 388, 472, 474–7 second questionnaire 18 Selected Letters (SL 2) (Proust) 478, 480n24, 481n26

the self: composition/construction of 8; death of 172, 316, 416; discovery of 2; doubt 102–4; existence of 101; extension of 171; extratemporal 101; formation of 32; fragmentation 93–5, 415, 417; identity of 30; is social process 53; knowledge of 74–6, 94–5, 270; Nietzsche’s view 421, 429n39; outside time 3–4, 101, 162, 173–4; problem of 96; radical temporality 186; self-construction 97–100; self-creation 71; self-defeat of 126; synchronic disunity 416; in time 169; timelessness 95–7; transcendence 100–2; übermenschlich or ‘superhuman’ celebration of 417 self-defeat 9, 120–2, 126, 128, 131, 136, 347n12, 373 self-fashioning 10, 414–30 self-identity 9, 66, 70–3, 75, 77n8, 156; see also identity self-knowledge 109, 185, 187, 188, 265, 268–71, 275; see also knowledge the self outside time/the extratemporal self 2–4, 162, 173–4 sense of silence 438–40 sensuous desire 225, 227, 230, 233, 234n12 Setiya, K. 345 sexuality 25, 327, 332, 460 Shakespeare, W. 80, 84, 369, 388 Silverstein, M. 192–5, 197, 201, 202, 206 Simon, A. 11 Simon, C. 431 Slegers, R. 10 social dynamics of knowledge 128 social indexicality 191, 193 Sodom and Gomorrah (SG) (Proust) 150, 171, 295–6, 299–300, 460, 462, 465 solipsism 185, 265, 268, 271, 274–7, 447 Sophocles 388 space 67, 68, 76; Armchair Space Travel 67–9; espace 67–8, 75–6 spatialization of time 410n22 speech 50; appropriateness to context 197; communicational incompetence 197; culture-specifc ethnometapragmatics 193; denotational and interactional text 195; denotational (referential or predicative) semiosis 192; direct 154; ethnographic stance 194; indexicality and irony 206–7; indexical (secondary or indirect) semiosis 192; and language 9; language ideologies in confict 198–206; on love in Symposium 272; multiparty discursive interaction 195; problem of 437–8; skilled speakers 193–4; social indexicality 191; variety of registers 192; visual 317 Spencer, H. 163, 164, 169 Spinoza, B. 267, 272, 274, 454, 455, 475 Stack, G. J. 444

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Index Standard Average European (SAE) 193 steeples of Martinville 24, 100, 181, 288, 297 Stein, J. M. 241 Stendhal 110, 267, 271, 368–70, 373, 431, 439 Stern, T. 9, 16, 214 style 98, 407; of acting, Berma’s 122; artistic 260; conversational 408; efects of 366–7, 379n37, 456; of Guermantes set 113; leadership 426; literary 260, 389; and manner 15, 22–3; Marx-style 347n8; nature of 274; ontological value 439; personal 99; philosophical 269; Recherche’s 433; SaintSimon’s 213; of thinking 431; vision is 437 subjectivity 2, 9, 66, 433, 445; to escape 9, 178–80, 182–3; of experience 178, 183; independent 130, 221; and memory, fusion of 71–2; other’s 446; problem of 176, 179–80; of unity 258 subversion 10, 325–32, 333n3 Sue, E. 29 Swann’s Way (SW) (Proust) 20, 33, 43, 67, 73, 79, 103, 154, 180, 185, 211, 295, 297, 309, 312, 397, 434, 445, 463 Swedenborg, E. 20 Swift, D. 388

Tolstoy, L. 108, 470 trafcking, lexical and fgural 434–7 transversality 454, 462; of Proust 463–6 Troscianko, E. 156 truth 3, 21–3; about human experience 15; access to 35, 457; aesthetic 284; artistic 276; consciousness of 138; criterion of 44; of desire 352, 356, 358; discovery of 139, 159, 228, 289; hidden 226, 266; and lies 351–2; of love 270, 275; metaphysical/religious 363; painful 125, 305; passion for 138; pure 429n26; seeking 389; truth-to-mind 45; universal 406 two-world metaphysics 419 uBook 221–2 Uexküll, Jakob von 464–5 uncertainty: deferral of satisfaction 123–5; desire and disillusion 120–1; fundamental 215; knowledge, self-management, and selfundermining 125–8; for Proustian narrator 9; self-defeat 121–2; social dynamics of knowledge 128–33 unchanging temperament 421

Tadié, J.-Y. 155, 255, 260, 366–71, 455, 457 Thinking Cinema with Marcel Proust (french) 453 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 454 time 2; double 63n7; as duration 401–2; elimination of 408; future 83, 157; imaginative 45; lived 406; lost 3, 18, 25, 35, 50, 71, 79–81, 150, 153, 351, 397, 399, 402–3, 428n9, 448–50, 451n14, 462; and memory 8, 10, 457; narrated 63n7, 89; ordering of 407, 419; outside of 2–4, 26, 82–3, 85–6, 90, 95, 101, 152–3, 158, 162, 173–4, 373, 386, 394–5, 403, 418–19; past 83, 89, 155, 400; pyramid of 437; recovery of 71, 400; regained 33, 35, 153, 351; and space 67–9, 471; transcendence of 155–6; true and false 471; wasting 18, 25 The Time-Image (Deleuze) 453 The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (french) 453 Time Regained (TR) (Proust) 6, 9, 25, 33–6, 71, 75, 79, 86, 93, 95, 151, 153, 181, 211, 216–18, 250, 287, 294–300, 304–7, 310, 317, 332, 351, 397–8, 434, 437, 439, 462–4 time travel 48, 51, 60, 61, 68

Valéry, P. 29, 431 veiling 437–40 Voltaire 388 voluntary memory 37, 149–55, 397, 409n5, 462 voluntary servitude 23 vulnerability 294–307 Watt, A. 9 Wells, H.G. 68 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 454 What’s So Great About Roland Barthes? (Baldwin) 453 Wilhelm, A. 367, 368, 371 Williams, J. 457 Within a Budding Grove (BG) (Proust) 47, 73, 179, 211, 326, 332 Wittgenstein, L. 8, 9, 57, 59–62, 185, 250–4, 258, 259, 342, 388 Wollheim, R. 252 Wood, J. 117 Wood, M. 115 Woods, D.B. 10 The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer) 455

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