Proust, the One, and the Many

Identity and Difference in A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu

Erika Fulop

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351192491
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"One of the many aspects that make Marcel Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu such a complex and subtle work is its engagement with metaphysical questions. The disparate nature of the narrators experiences, hypotheses, and statements has generated a number of conflicting interpretations, based on parallels with the thought of one or another philosopher from Plato to Leibniz, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, or Deleuze. Through the analysis of the narrators two seemingly incompatible perceptions of the world, which reveal reality to be either one or infinitely multiple, Erika Fuelop proposes a reading of the novel that reconciles the opposites. Rather than being undecided or self-contradictory, the narrative thematizes the insufficiency of the dualist perspective and invites the reader to take a step beyond it. Erika Fuelop is an independent researcher, whose doctoral thesis completed at the University of Aberdeen is at the basis of this monograph."

CHAPTER 1
Privileged Moments

La divinité eut alors une présence insensée, sourde, illuminant jusqu’à l’ivresse.

Divinity had a mad, deaf presence, illuminating up to intoxication.]¹

The narrator’s ‘moments privilégiés’ represent the moments of greatest intensity in the protagonist’s life. This ‘pattern of timeless moments’, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s expression,² indeed determines the basic structure of the novel. The narrator divides these special experiences into two groups, according to whether or not they evoke a memory: reminiscences and impressions. At the same time, however, he considers them all to be instances of the same kind of moment, standing out from the ordinary flow of his everyday life and perception. Critics have argued for the homogeneity of the two kinds of experience either by demonstrating the hidden role of memory in the impressions or by treating memory in the case of the reminiscences as no more than the form of, or vehicle for, an experience which is otherwise indistinguishible from the impressions. Jean-Marc Quaranta’s excellent overview of the controversy concludes that ‘les impressions obscures et les souvenirs involontaires appartiennent au même type d’expériences que l’on peut qualifier de “privilégiées”, sans toutefois que la mémoire puisse être un dénominateur commun valable’ [the obscure impressions and the involuntary memories are the same type of experience, which we can describe as ‘privileged’, without nonetheless implying that memory could be considered a valid common denominator].³ He nevertheless underlines that the role of memory remains fundamental to both the structure of the novel and its aesthetics. I subscribe to Quaranta’s view and, without denying the existence of a number of differences between impressions and reminiscences, I discuss them together under the title of privileged moments or experiences for, as I shall argue, both types of experience display the same approach to reality.

The most important and elaborate passages in the novel relating such moments, and around which most of the controversy mentioned revolves, are the madeleine episode (RTP, I, 44–47 [SLT, I, 51–55]), the impression made by the steeples at Martinville (RTP, I, 177–80 [SLT, I, 215–18]), and the series of special experiences which begin with the uneven pavement in the Guermantes palace in Le Temps retrouvé (RTP, IV, 445–58 [SLT, VI, 216–34]). The narrator talks about a couple of other similar experiences, which nevertheless remain ‘incomplete’ — such as the hawthorns at Tansonville (RTP, I, 136–37 [SLT, I, 164–66]) or the trees at Hudimesnil (RTP, II, 76–79 [SLT, II, 342–45]) — or are only mentioned in passing.⁴ The most readily observed commonality of these experiences is the special form of unexpected and overwhelmingly intense good feeling which they bring — and which is embodied in, and relived through, Vinteuil’s septet (RTP, III, 875–77 [SLT, V, 427–29]). The narrator variously describes this as pleasure, happiness, joy, or felicity, but always insists on the peculiar quality and strength that characterize the feeling, so that despite the distinction one could make between pleasure or joy and happiness or felicity,⁵ they clearly appear to be synonymous within the context of the privileged experience. ‘Un plaisir délicieux’ (RTP, I, 44) [an exquisite pleasure (SLT, I, 51)] invades the narrator upon his tasting the piece of cake dipped in tea; a ‘plaisir particulier’ [special pleasure], a ‘plaisir irraisonné’ [an unreasoning pleasure], accompanies the impressions mentioned before the detailed description of the Martinville experience, followed by the same ‘plaisir spécial qui ne ressemblait à aucun autre, à apercevoir les deux clochers de Martinville’ (RTP, I, 176–77) [that special pleasure which was unlike any other, on catching sight of the twin steeples of Martinville (SLT, I, 214–15)]. At Hudimesnil, ‘ce bonheur profond [...] analogue à celui [...] de Martinville’ (RTP, II, 76) [that profound happiness [...] analogous to that which had been given to me by [...] the steeples of Martinville (SLT, II, 342)] announces the event, whilst the final, composite series of reminiscences in Le Temps retrouvé is characterized by ‘la même félicité’ (RTP, IV, 445) [that same happiness (SLT, VI, 216)]. Vinteuil’s music, meanwhile, communicates ‘une joie ineffable qui semblait venir du Paradis’, an ‘appel vers une joie supraterrestre’ (RTP, III, 764–65) [an ineffable joy which seemed to come from paradise [... which] summons to a supraterrestrial joy (SLT, V, 294)]. Rather than producing joy spontaneously and by accident, as in the case of the experiences described above, the famous septet appears to the narrator to have been composed in such a way that it characterizes, resembles, and synthesizes the particular quality of pleasure induced by them.⁶ The narrator also compares the effect of the music to an ‘ivresse’, but rather indirectly,⁷ and underlining that it differs from ‘la simple joie nerveuse d’un beau temps ou d’une nuit d’opium’ [the merely nerve-tingling joy of a fine day or an opiate night] in that art provides ‘une ivresse plus réelle, plus féconde’ (RTP, III, 876) [a more real, more fruitful exhilaration (SLT, V, 427)].

In the case of the reminiscences, the feeling of intense joy is explicitly linked to one of evidence and certitude. The pleasure produced by the madeleine is an ‘état inconnu, qui n’apportait aucune preuve logique mais l’évidence de sa félicité, de sa réalité, devant laquelle les autres s’évanouissaient’ (RTP, I, 45) [this unremembered state which brought with it no logical proof, but the indisputable evidence, of its felicity, of its reality, and in whose presence other states of consciousness melted and vanished (SLT, I, 52)]. Similarly, stepping on the uneven pavement that triggers involuntary memory in Le Temps retrouvé affords the narrator ‘une joie pareille à une certitude et suffisante sans autres preuves à [lui] rendre la mort indifférente’ (RTP, IV, 446) [a joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference to me (SLT, VI, 218)], and has the result that suddenly ‘toute inquiétude sur l’avenir, tout doute intellectuel étaient dissipés’ (RTP, IV, 445) [all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared (SLT, VI, 217)]. The accounts of the impressions, on the other hand, speak of a sensation rendered obscure by the difficulty in grasping it: the overwhelming effect of the impression, just as in the case of the involuntary memory, lies in the fact that the narrator is struck by something directly — that is, without the mediation of language or the intellect. The experiences are obscure in that they do not lend themselves to direct verbalization and rational explication; the ‘content’ they communicate does not have such a relatively straightforward explanation as does the resurrection of a definite moment from the past. Nevertheless, steeples, trees, light, scents, and music offer their presence in a way that is perfectly clear to the subject despite the fact that it evades the intellect.

The sense of ease and evidence represents a fundamental, though only momentary change in the narrator’s sense of being in the world. His usual state is characterized by an ineliminable anxiety and a feeling of discordance with others and the world. This estrangement results from the eternally and deeply felt sense of incompatibility of his own being, bodily and mental, with the rest of the world, manifest in his communicative failure and lack of access to the Other. In the privileged moments, on the other hand, the vanishing of the resistance and impenetrability of things leads to the disappearing of the abyss that separates the subject from the world. Jean-Marc Quaranta explains the event in terms of a change in the relation between subject and object:

L’objet acquiert une singularité d’être perçu par le sujet et se détache du continuum spatio-temporel. [...] Les données de l’univers se modifient, entre l’objet et le sujet il n’existe plus la séparation nécessaire du moi et du non-moi, mais une interpénétration qui les fait fusionner [...]. Derrière l’indétermination de la joie inaugurale, se dessine la double image du moi et du monde réunis, sans être confondus. Un objet du monde suscite chez le sujet l’émergence d’un moi particulier capable de le saisir dans sa plénitude; un moi particulier trouve dans le monde un objet qui lui parle de la seule chose susceptible de lui donner vie; de cette mise en phase singulière du moi et du non-moi naît une joie singulière.

[The object acquires singularity through being perceived by the subject and it becomes distinct from the spatio-temporal continuum. [...] The characteristics of the universe change, the necessary separation between the self and the non-self no longer exists between the object and the subject, but instead an interpenetration occurs which makes them merge. [...] Behind the indeterminacy of the inaugural joy emerges the double image of the self and the world, brought together without becoming indistinguishable. An object of the world provokes in the subject the emergence of a particular self which is capable of grasping it in its fullness; a particular self finds in the world an object which speaks to him/her about the only thing that is likely to give him/her life. This singular harmonization of the self with the non-self gives birth to a singular joy.]⁸

Quaranta identifies this particular mode of perception as the essence of ‘epiphany’ — a term introduced into the literary critical terminology by Joyce — which he argues to be the most suitable concept for grasping the Proustian privileged experience. Before Quaranta, M. H. Abrams had already associated the Proustian moment with Joyce’s concept of epiphany in a chapter on the ‘Varieties of the Modern Moment’,⁹ and Morris Beja provided a reading of the Recherche in his seminal book on the epiphany in the modern novel. Since Beja’s work, studies concerned with the literary phenomenon of epiphany tend to make an obligatory reference to Proust,¹⁰ and Hugues Azérad presents him as one of the three key figures of the aesthetics of modern epiphany.¹¹ Nevertheless, the term is not very commonly used in Proust criticism, where ‘privileged moments’ remains the preferred expression.

Epiphany and Mystical Experience

Even though the first use of epiphany as a technical term for the literary rendering of a particular kind of event or experience is usually attributed to Joyce, Robert Langbaum argues that without using the name, William Wordsworth built his whole poetic praxis on it, insofar as ‘the difference between habitual and epiphanic seeing is the essence of Wordsworth’s art’.¹² This ‘epiphanic seeing’ requires ‘the sensitized condition of the observer’¹³ and supposes the state of mind in which the phenomenon termed ‘epiphany’ by the narrator of Joyce’s Stephen Hero occurs: a moment in which ‘we recognize that the object [...] is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance’.¹⁴

Ashton Nichols retraces in detail the history of the word brought into literature by Joyce, explaining that previously it was most commonly used in the religious sense of a moment when ‘a visible manifestation of something invisible records the arrival of divinity on earth for the purpose of aiding mankind’.¹⁵ Joyce preserves this core meaning of epiphany as the manifestation of something that otherwise remains imperceptible, but concentrates on the specific character of the perception it involves and on its literary rendering. Despite the vagueness of the term and the resulting difficulty in circumscribing the range of experiences it can refer to, Langbaum establishes a list of six criteria of what he considers epiphanic moments in literature, beginning with two points noted before him by Morris Beja: incongruity (‘the epiphany is irrelevant to the object or incident that triggers it’), insignificance (i.e. the object that triggers it is trivial), psychological association (it is ‘not an incursion of God from outside; it is a psychological phenomenon arising from a real sensuous experience’), momentaneousness, suddenness, and fragmentation or the ‘epi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Translations and Abbreviations Used
• Introduction
• 1 Privileged Moments
• 2 Liminal States of Consciousness
• 3 The Other
• 4 The Use of Simulacra: From Illusions to Writing
• Conclusion: Writing the One and the Many
• Bibliography
• Index