At the Arthur Ludlow Memorial
Baths, Newport, in 1972, the judges were unable to reach a verdict in the
All-England Summarize Proust Competition. The winner was to be the contestant who could best summarize A la recherche du temps perdu in fifteen seconds, "once in a
swimsuit and once in evening dress." Faced with a work of the complexity
of Proust’s Recherche readers and
critics alike might well lapse into such Pythonesque absurdity. An early
critic, Jacques Normand, was driven to despair, complaining that "reading
cannot be sustained for more than five or six pages". Joshua Landy,
however, has provided a rich and sympathetic study of Proust’s novel, one which
provides new perspectives on the Recherche,
and some surprising insights into the relationship between philosophy,
literature, and life.

A la recherche du temps perdu is a long and involved novel, some 4400 pages in seven
parts, exploring themes of knowledge, love, self, jealousy, truth and art. The
narrator Marcel wishes to be an author, doubts his ability to write, but in the
end begins the process of writing what will be his opus. Marcel shares many of
the author Proust’s views, (and his name) leading some critics to claim that
the novel is autobiographical. Further, the claim is advanced that as the novel
ends with Time Regained we have just
read the work that Marcel fears he cannot write. But these are only two of the
misinterpretations Landy is at pains to debunk. However much Marcel’s life
parallels that of Proust, Marcel is not Proust; and neither is the Recherche a self-fashioning
autobiography. In the process of reinterpreting Proust, Landy shows him to be
both a philosopher and an artist, whose work coheres not through adherence to
an established philosophical program, but through the pursuit of life as art.
Proust achieves a truth that is both wholly his own and accessible to others if
they will pursue their own lives as art.

The
introduction sets out Landy’s thesis, exploring Proust’s work as a
philosophical treatise, but not in the way imagined by a long series of
commentators. Landy lists the various interpretations of Proust; as a
Platonist, as Schopenhauerian, as echoing Bergson and Leibniz. These readings,
however, are partial, and in Landy’s view fail to get to the essence of Proust
as an original philosopher. If anything Proust’s system of ideas is closest to
that of Nietzsche, someone with whose work Proust was apparently unfamiliar.
But Landy would have it that Proust goes beyond Nietzsche in proposing a
totally new worldview, characterized by the "lucid self-delusion".
The Recherche can be maddeningly
opaque, even inconsistent and confusing. Proust does not provide a linear
narrative, he omits important observations at the time they occur. Within a
single sentence he can engage in lengthy, almost prolix digressions, as if the
closure of the full stop would bring a premature end to a work in progress.
Buried in all this dense language is a series of axioms, epistemological
claims, assertions of truth, ontological commitments. Philosophical claims are
scattered throughout the text; they are not always mutually supportive, and in
some cases they contain direct contradictions. Landy makes frequent reference
to Alexander Nehamas’s Nietzsche: Life as
Literature, a study of Nietzsche’s perspectivism which shows close
parallels to the perspectivism of Marcel, as he retreats time and again from
belief (in Albertine’s fidelity, in Andree’s veracity, in Rachel’s virtue). The
multiple and competing voices of author, narrator, protagonist work to confound
the emergence of a unified view, and of an objective reality. And yet Landy
argues (as Nietzsche would) that this does not amount to relativism, nor to a
subjective idealism.

Memory,
so beautifully captured in the madeleine incident, is not to be understood in
merely cognitive terms. What is brought to mind by a scent, a warm day, the
touch of a hand, is not something past, but something that is very much in the
present, a phenomenon further explained by Marcel’s (and in this case Proust’s)
view of self. The point Landy is at pains to make about involuntary memory is
that these epiphanies are not limited to a single sensation. They bring to mind
a complete self, or more than one, complete with all the experiences that gave
the original experience its meaning. The implications are profoundly important,
beyond those of a chance recollection. Involuntary memory tells us that the
past has not vanished behind a cloud of experience; it is inscribed on our
soul.

Marcel
explores aspects of selfhood that have direct relevance for mental health. For
example, his sense that the name ‘Guermantes’ is orange-tinted, while at one
level a poetic device that shows us something of the interiority of the
narrator, also provides an opportunity to explore the persistence of self over
time, and the common experience of the self as fragmented. Marcel talks of
being a Self composed of different selves: "I was not one man only, but as
it were the march-past of a composite army in which there were passionate men,
indifferent men, jealous men — jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the
same woman." It is this composite that claims the title ‘I’, an illusory
identity if it is assumed to be a unitary entity. Instead, the concept of Self
that emerges within Marcel is an elaborate complex, a "dissociative
essence" which makes possible the "recidivisms of the soul,
simultaneities of faith and distrust, lucid dreams…the strange power of ancient
memories over our present-day organisms". Since Freud, memory has played a
central role in psychiatry: even biological psychiatrists feel obliged to
concede a role for voluntary memory in the presentation and understanding of
one’s own mental health (or illness). It is through memory (operationalized as
the psychiatric history) that the person is granted access to their own self,
and is able to communicate that to the psychiatrist qua historian. If the self really is a complex, rather than a
unity, it might require something akin to a novelist to understand it, rather
than a diagnostician.

Marcel’s
view of the self creates problems for communication, and for self knowledge,
leading to the novel solution that there is no essential self to pursue, or if
there is it is an evolving thing, always synchronically and diachronically
divided. Landy gives as Proust’s solution the "lucid illusion"; an
"acknowledgedly fictional entity [that emerges] out of the proliferating moi". This fictional entity is the
real self, an imagined self that can provide the telos of a life. Landy borrows
from Nietzsche to explain: "I can think of no better aim in life
than of perishing, animae magnae prodigus, in pursuit of the great and
impossible." Proust’s solution, an improvement on that of Marcel’s, is to
turn one’s life into art, Nehamas’s "life as literature", the pursuit
of an aesthetic that accepts that it will never be achieved and will always be
something of a failure. To the extent that psychiatry is concerned with
envisaging a future, a concept normally reduced to ‘prognosis’, Proust’s
solution offers an alternative: the future as a project, something that is
neither normative nor prescribed. There is some resonance her with notions of
‘recovery’, and with current interest in narrative understandings of mental
health, although it would have to be noted that Proust would resist any idea of
"narrative" that implied a simple subjectivism. Despite his sometimes
dreamy narrative style, Proust is enough of a realist to accept that there is a
world beyond out perceptions.

Landy’s
work is meticulous. Throughout the book he engages with the tradition of Proust
scholarship, illuminating inconsistencies and misunderstandings in
interpretations of critic such as Deleuze, Rorty, Shattuck and Bersani. The
details of the critical exchange are contained in the extensive footnotes
(almost a third of the book), providing a compulsive sidelight to the main
drama. Landy also provides a lengthy Coda which examines Proust’s narrative
style, the rambling, layered sentences that both embody and evoke the Proustian
self. There is a comprehensive reference list and index, making the book a
valuable guide for students and researchers.

In July this year I visited Proust’s childhood summer home,
the Maison de Tante Léonie in Illiers. According to Landy,
such homage would have Proust turning in his grave. But Proust would surely
understand that having evoked memory in such an alluring manner, readers might
feel inclined, however foolishly, to capture for themselves something of the
magic of his novel. The Maison
de Tante Léonie is a modest
looking place, not well signposted. Inside it is dark and small. I had imagined
it much bigger, but the vividness of the description in Combray allows the visitor to feel that they have been there
before. Swann’s Way, one of the two paths that serve as tropes in the novel is
these days a beautiful landscaped park, no doubt much different to what it was
in Proust’s time in Illiers. The Geurmantes Way is harder to see, and seems
less preserved. The road I followed led past a contractor’s yard and a street
of small houses before a path that crossed a field. By the time I got there it
was time to return to the small Illiers railway station to catch the train back
to Paris. Proust might say that in search of truth we are forced in the end to
settle for experience; that the will to knowledge is also the will to
ignorance. Proust might also say that there is a liberating quality to that
experience, and that is because it is ours.

© 2005 Tony O’Brien

Tony O’Brien is a short story
writer and lecturer in mental health nursing at the University of Auckland, New
Zealand: a.obrien@auckland.ac.nz

Categories: Philosophical