Proust as Philosopher

The Art of Metaphor

Miguel de Beistegui, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, Simon Sparks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135722593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria francese

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust's implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular.

Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art.

He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

Chapter 1

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Looking for joy

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What sort of existence would raise our hopes and awaken our desires simply in order to dash them? What sort of world would clip imagination's wings? Answer: this one.

Whenever we think we're sowing the seeds of happiness, life's busy planting those of disillusionment. Whenever we think we're working carefully towards contentment we are, in fact, hurtling towards our doom. A single life can hold more disillusion and disappointment than we can imagine: every second of happiness will eventually fade, every fleeting joy will quickly be replaced by ever increasing sorrow; every desire fulfilled will end up either boring us or making us insatiable, in thrall to the ever more urgent exercise of the will.

And? Is this the lesson of Proust's vast novel? Is this really what In Search of Lost Time establishes as a universal law, setting itself up in the process as the novel of suffering and melancholia?¹ Well, from one perspective at least, it does unfold as a novel of hopelessness and despair. Seen in this way, reality — or our idea of it, at least — never fails to disappoint, never lives up to its promise or to the expectations to which we feel it has entitled us. But maybe this is all just Proust's fault. His privileging of certain types of experience might account for this rather pessimistic assessment. Even experiences like the experience of art, from which Marcel expects so much, don't escape the rule: in his joy at the prospect of seeing La Berma in Phèdre he expects his first night out at the theatre to reveal “truths which dwelt in a world more real than my own.”² Having such absurdly high expectations from art and from life in general is only ever going to open us up to the threat of disappointment. The book's moral, itself a disappointment — how could it be anything else? — would be that, by expecting less from life, by settling for a little bit less, we might avoid being disappointed; by letting go of our desires and breaking free of our will, we might be spared innumerable sufferings.

Nothing, though, could be further from the truth, nothing more at odds with the spirit of Proust than this sort of pseudo-Stoic or -Schopenhauerian lesson. Why? Because it's precisely this sort of suffering that hones our senses and sharpens our intelligence. Life itself sets us off on a quest for what such suffering hides, making that same discomfort instrumental in discovering its buried truths. And this is why it doesn't make much sense to say that, through the narrator, the novel simply presents us with a type, one psychological profile among many; instead, it tries to unveil a truth that lies dormant within the type in question. Ultimately, Proust's point is to show that the dissatisfaction — whether in the form of suffering or in the form of boredom — that defines our relation to the world actually stems from an even deeper lack, one inscribed at the heart of reality itself. Which means what, exactly? That reality itself and alone is responsible for our misfortune? That the conditions of our disappointment are structural and not circumstantial, that they are inherent to our relation to the world rather than to any given “character trait”? Well, yes, providing that we're clear on what “reality” means, and its meaning is, as I'll try to show, a paradoxical one. Implicitly universal and unshakeable, it leads directly to a feeling of separation and alienation, of an irreversible lack. Overcoming this feeling will involve seeing reality differently and, in truth, creating it.

My point of departure, then, consists in identifying an ontological deficiency, a deficiency with respect to being, which I'd define in the following way: at the heart of our relation to the world there's a lack. This lack isn't nothing, however, but is, rather, a lack or want of being, a lack or want that functions as the sign of a truth that lies beyond or, more accurately, at the heart of present reality. This lack is original and structural and so isn't something that could be remedied by a strategy of compensation, by recapturing or reproducing the “thing” that's lacking.³ It's precisely by lacking that what's lacking “functions” and “structures.” And it's precisely this lack or this deficiency that we experience, precisely this lack or this deficiency that we cannot help but feel. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that it actually defines the very meaning of experience, that is, the meaning of the sensible. At the same time, though, it signals, if only implicitly, what lies beyond or on the other side of this experience, its hidden face, as it were, from which Proust manages to draw the meaning of literature and art in general. Literature, then — and this is, after all, the novel's real subject — doesn't take us out of the real world, thereby leaving life behind; rather, it transfigures life, reversing it, not into its opposite but into its other or its flip side. Literature is the flip side of the side that coincides with reality, the wrong side or the inside of the real and the sign of another meaning of experience. Far from fleeing the real, then, literature actually tracks it and weaves it, spinning and following its thread. The threads that make up its text or its fabric (the Latin textus refers to something woven, something entwined) are the threads of the real itself, and its mission is to trace and disentangle them. In the process, literature lets itself be carried off to where the real flees its own self-presence. Ultimately, the real just is that very self-absence. And if it always disappoints, it's not because we always expect too much of it but because we expect it where it actually isn't, because it's never where we expect it to be, because it can only be grasped in its own drift or constitutive gap. We always want it to be in its rightful place but that place is precisely where it's not, precisely where it's lacking. We would like it to be here, in front of us, in the flesh. But it's in that very immediacy or fullness that it steals away and goes missing. Which doesn't mean that it has in some way disappeared; rather, this absence or this lack is the key to its mystery, the secret of its functioning. This is why we should follow it, why we should surrender to its drift and get caught up in that gap, that shift in being which is also a shift in meaning: in fact the drift of meaning and being itself, being and meaning as drift. As for literature, it's a matter of understanding how it arises from this release, from this letting go; it traces and spins the real in its drift. It always seeks to find the real where it isn't, since this is the only place where it's likely to find it. This self-escaping presence constitutes its only reality. The rest is illusion. In other words, literature doesn't believe in the solidity of being, in raw being, in short in what is commonly referred to as reality or life, and which so many forms of literature claim as their subject-matter. Its “faith” isn't that of simple perception. Instead, it takes being to be that which, from the outset, is carried away and caught in a system of reference devoid of any actual origin or end. And it's from this fundamental structure that it draws its own poetic law, through it that it elevates style beyond mere technique, elevating it to the status of “vision.”⁴ It's through the thread of metaphor — the only one that isn't illusory — that it relates to the real. As such, the metaphor that it weaves isn't the product of fancy, as Coleridge has it,⁵ or the creation of “the part of the human being which dominates, this mistress of error and falsehood” that so unsettled Pascal.⁶ Rather, it's the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. Metaphor believes in transubstantiation, in the conversion of matter into spirit, which it carries out, but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself, inscribed within it from the start.

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None of which, of course, necessarily prevents reality from being a source of disappointment. And, were it not for one or two clues and for the way in which these clues come together in the final revelation of a very different state of affairs, it would be easy to see in Proust's work a true abhorrence of time, a true source of bitterness and resentment. His world would be one teetering on the verge of nihilism. Isn't Swann's whole life — just like his study of Vermeer that remains constantly imminent, constantly postponed — undermined by a point — lessness that nothing's going to be able to refute? Doesn't Jean Santeuil fail to find any pleasure in writing down the memory of his walks at Beg-Meil?⁷ And doesn't Marcel find the trees seen from the train “tedious to observe and to describe”?⁸ The psychological law that lies at the heart of Proust's entire aesthetics dictates that it's only long after Jean's disappointment at the seaside show at Beg-Meil that the sea will seem beautiful to him and only in retrospect that the row of trees will become dear to Marcel. It's as if we can't appreciate a sistuation, love someone, in short, enjoy reality without telling it to someone else. Infinitely free and vast, imagination has always anticipated the real and begun to adorn it, to produce a specific image of it, one full of details, reflections and contrasts that reality reduces to nothing. The disappointment that the narrator can't help but experience when confronted with the real would be entirely of a piece with the conflict between imagination and perception.⁹ Whether imagination is anticipating the real or, in its presence, carrying it elsewhere and transforming it, thereby giving it a meaning and a purpose, it is always a prosthesis or supplement to the real. It could be, then, that the real isn't self-sufficient and can't, in fact, proceed on its own. It's always waiting on something else, always truly elsewhere. Odette de Crécy is neither truly beautiful nor particularly moving, in Swann's eyes at least. And yet, once she starts to remind him of Botticelli's Zipporah, his pleasure in seeing her is justified and her beauty established. Once the resemblance is established, Odette takes on the capacity to evoke Botticelli's pictorial universe, the Renaissance ideal of beauty itself, setting her within “a world of dreams to which she had not had access until then and where she was steeped in nobility.”¹⁰ It is as if, remorseful at having “limited his life to worldly relationships, to conversation”¹¹ and ashamed of the frivolity of his own existence, Swann's able to elevate it, to grant it some value by imagining his world as the reflection of a great artist's. Anyone who fails to see Odette in such a light or fails to see her through that other, magical and distorting lens, a lens ground by imagination, isn't going to find her all that attractive. In other people's eyes, she's common, just like Rachel after her. In fact, though, she's no more common than anyone else. It's reality itself, reality as a whole, that's mundane. It only becomes something interesting when we contribute to it; it only acquires value inasmuch as it can shore up our imagination. From which it follows that pretty women are the province of men with no imagination.¹² The paradox of Proust's real is that it needs this supplement, this prosthesis, in order to be something. When Albertine wears a plain Fortuny dress, Marcel doesn't see the woman he loves; all he sees is its tempting evocation of Venice, a Venice desired and dreamt of, a Venice he's dying to visit but to which his jealous love for Albertine is preventing him from going. Once Albertine's gone, Marcel can finally go to Venice. And? Will he be happy there? Not really. In front of Carpaccio's paintings, which Elstir described so delightfully, he lapses into a state of deep melancholy: reminding him of the dress he once gave Albertine as a present, the paintings simply reawaken his love for the one who no longer is.¹³

Just as disappointing is the initial impression given by the Duchesse de Guermantes when compared to the imagery built up by the young Marcel over the years, imagery that's based on the tapestry hanging on the wall of the church in Combray, on the stained-glass window featuring Gilbert the Bad, and, finally, on the profile of Geneviève de Brabant on her magic lantern — two ancestors of the Guermantes.¹⁴ Should we conclude, then, that art, which feeds the imagination and makes us despair of reality, can alleviate our disappointment since it's not a mediation but the very object of our experience? No. The real Berma is but the pale reflection of the imagined one,¹⁵ just as Bergotte's red bottle-nose can, in Marcel's eyes, eradicate “those things of beauty, his wonderful works” that he had worshipped for so long.¹⁶

And how much more disappointing are the women we love and this dull feeling we call love!¹⁷ This is where the work of the imagination is the greatest. The feeling of love has nothing to do with the emotion we can derive from the beauty, the intelligence or the kindness of the one we love. Of his mistresses, the narrator says this:

When I saw them, when I listened to them, I found nothing in them that could resemble my love or be able to explain it. Yet my one joy was to see them, my one anxiety to wait for them. It was as if a virtue having no connection with them had been adjoined to them incidentally by nature, and that this virtue, this electricity-like power, had the effect on me of exciting my love, that is to say of directing all my actions and causing all my suffereings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the goodness of these women were wholly distinct.¹⁸

A lack of intelligence or elegance can constitute just so many obstacles to love, as evidenced by Swann's love for Odette, who isn't even his type.¹⁹ But these obstacles aren't insurmountable. Spotting a resemblance between a lover and the representation of a biblical character in a great Master's painting, and letting the imagination bring these two worlds together, can easily do away with the flaws (and even the qualities) of the woman in question. The object of desire then no longer has any actual reference to desire itself, which is fuelled by its own appetite and constructs its object on the basis of fragments. If anything, the object might occasion this desire, but it's certainly not its efficient cause. What we love in a woman is that kind of life, unknown to us, to which love would grant us access; it is the promise of a new world, or a lost world perhaps, which she encapsulates and might hand over to us as one hands over a treasure. In fact, the narrator himself only starts loving Albertine when he “suddenly” sees in “the real Albertine, the one [he] saw every day, [and] who [he] thought was hidebound in bourgeois prejudices,” the embodiment of the imaginary Albertine, far more attractive than the real one, namely the Albertine “who, at a time when [he] did not even know her, [he] had thought was taking furtive looks at [him] on the esplanade, the one who, when she saw [him] walking off, had seemed to be wending so reluctantly her own way home.”²⁰ Meeting the gaze of an unknown woman is enough to make him fall in love with her, since those eyes contain everything he could ever know of a thought, a wish, a memory. “The hope of taking possession of all that,” Proust writes, “is what gives her eyes their value, much more than any mere material beauty.”²¹ And if Marcel indiscriminately loves all the young girls in flower, it's because the first time he caught a glimpse of them on the beach at Balbec, they were a “little gang” and, for him, such multiplicity has the power to evoke “the towering blue waves or the shapes of a parade passing in front of the sea.”²² What he wants to recapture is the place where they are and he's not, the world that is theirs at this particular moment and not his, recapture by finding them again. Making out Albertine's gaze as she is surrounded by her friends, Marcel immediately wants to possess everything that shines in it and that's unknown to him: the things, people and places she calls on, the thoughts she harbours towards them, “her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will.”²³ In other words, Marcel falls in love with Albertine as a whole, with her ability to inhabit a world that's different from his. But if that's true, we might as well fall in love with a checkout girl as a duchess, so long as we live on the Faubourg Saint-Germain and hang out with the right sort of crowd. A homely checkout girl can awaken the memory of a long gone — and so deeply prized — point in time or a world that's unknown and alien, pricking the imagination and letting it run free.²⁴ And so it's not all that surprising that Swann's ready to sacrifice everything to Miss Sacripan, that Saint-Loup's willing to squander his entire fortune on another cocotte, Rachel, just like Marcel when he's struggling to keep Albertine from leaving him.

This life, however, isn't...