Courageous Vulnerability

Courageous Vulnerability

Studies in Contemporary Phenomenology Editor

Chris Bremmers (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Associate Editor

Arthur Cools (University of Antwerp) Gert-Jan van der Heiden (Radboud University, Nijmegen) Advisory Board

Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei (Fordham University New York) Jos de Mul (Erasmus University Rotterdam) John Sallis (Boston College) Hans-Rainer Sepp (Charles University Prague) Laszlo Tengelyi (Bergische Universität Wuppertal)

VOLUME 2

Courageous Vulnerability Ethics and Knowledge in Proust, Bergson, Marcel, and James

By

Rosa Slegers

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Slegers, Rosa. Courageous vulnerability : ethics and knowledge in Proust, Bergson, Marcel, and James / by Rosa Slegers. p. cm. — (Studies in contemporary phenomenology, ISSN 1875-2470 ; v. 2) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18188-5 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. 2. Bergson, Henri, 1859–1941—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Marcel, Gabriel, 1889–1973—Criticism and interpretation. 4. James, William, 1842–1910—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Aesthetics in literature. 6. Ethics in literature. 7. Self-consciousness (Awareness) in literature. 8. Literature— Philosophy. I. Title. PQ2631.R63A885 2010 179’.9—dc22 2009050331

ISSN 1875–2470 ISBN 978 90 04 18188 5 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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CONTENTS

Introduction ........................................................................................

1

Chapter One: Privileged Moments and Felt Knowledge ........... Introduction ................................................................................... Involuntary Memory: An Unusual Pleasure Caused by an Identity of Sensations ............................................................... Privileged Moments of the Imagination ................................... Pleasurable Certainty and Wonder ............................................ Couvercles, Obligation, and Obstacles to the Search ............... La réalité pressentie: Joy and Sorrow in the Privileged Moment ...................................................................................... Felt Knowledge .............................................................................. Epistemic Responsibility .............................................................. Conclusion ......................................................................................

11 11

32 40 44 47

Chapter Two: Courageous Vulnerability and the Bergsonian Artist ................................................................................................ Introduction ................................................................................... Bergson: Intuition and Intellect .................................................. The Task of the Artist ................................................................... The Problem of Language and the Freshness of Experience Courageous Vulnerability: Preliminary Remarks .................... Courageous Vulnerability at Work ............................................ Conclusion ......................................................................................

49 49 50 59 67 71 77 80

Chapter Three: Vagueness and Mystery ....................................... Introduction ................................................................................... Bergson on James, James on Bergson ........................................ Vagueness and/in Language ........................................................ Pragmatic Meaning and Truth ................................................... The Sentiment of Rationality and Anhedonia .......................... Anhedonia and the Broken World of À la recherche .............. Marcel’s Distinction between Problem and Mystery .............. Primary and Secondary Reflection, Despair and Hope .......... Conclusion ......................................................................................

83 83 84 89 96 104 113 118 122 125

12 19 24 28

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Chapter Four: Crystallization and the Tragedy of Having (a Lover) .......................................................................................... Introduction ................................................................................... Stendhal’s Crystallization ............................................................. Albertine a Stone round Which Snow Has Gathered ............. Love Regained in Absence ........................................................... Love and the Role of Habit ......................................................... Love as a Poetical Action: Albertine an Unconscious Thing of Beauty ......................................................................... Love as the Desire to Possess ...................................................... The Tragedy of Having ................................................................. The Tragedy of Desire .................................................................. Presence Made Impossible by l’avoir-implication ................... Conclusion ......................................................................................

127 127 128 130 135 137 140 143 147 154 156 164

Chapter Five: The Will to Believe in Privileged Moments ........ Introduction ................................................................................... Religion, Mysticism, and the Privileged Moment ................... Anhedonia Dispelled by Uneven Paving Stones ...................... Mystical Moments in À la recherche .......................................... The Place of the Privileged Moment on James’ Mystical Ladder ......................................................................................... Invitation to a Strenuous Pursuit of Involuntary Memory .... Zest and the Mystic Sense of Hidden Meaning ....................... The Will to Believe in Privileged Moments .............................. Conclusion ......................................................................................

167 167 168 172 176

Chapter Six: The Difficulty of Being Courageously Vulnerable Introduction ................................................................................... Fidelity and Death in À la recherché ......................................... The Will to Believe in Presence .................................................. Sincups and Effigies: A Critique of Creative Fidelity .............. Conclusion: The Difficulty of Being Courageously Vulnerable ..................................................................................

205 205 206 213 218

Epilogue ...............................................................................................

237

Bibliography ........................................................................................

243

Index ....................................................................................................

247

179 182 187 191 202

228

INTRODUCTION

In Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the narrator is surprised to notice that the simple phrase “the head of the Ministry of Posts and his family” [la famille du directeur du ministère des Postes] evokes for him a very peculiar, bitter-sweet feeling.1 He happens to overhear a stranger say these words, and though the phrase in itself is of no particular interest to him, he realizes that it is linked to a time in his past when he was in love with Gilberte and heard her use this phrase in conversation. The narrator has long since lost interest in her, but the trivial, forgotten phrase brings back the feelings of heart ache that he was experiencing when he heard her say those words. It is exactly because the words were trivial that they have preserved their freshness and are able to evoke a forgotten feeling. Habit dulls the edge of memories, but only of those memories that are readily available to it. Memories that are, contradictory though it may seem, “forgotten,” preserve their strength because the mind has had no chance to neutralize their emotional impact and mull them over until they lose their flavor. The example cited above is just one among many instances in À la recherche of what Proust calls involuntary memory. The best known involuntary memory in the novel involves the famous petite madeleine dipped in tea, the taste of which causes the narrator to remember his childhood. In this work, I will investigate this notion of involuntary memory and show how a memory of this sort can be classified as a privileged moment. In order to explore the epistemological and ethical implications of this kind of privileged moment, my thesis throughout will be informed by a lesser-known but particularly salient instance of involuntary memory: the narrator’s memory of his grandmother as it overwhelms him when he revisits the hotel in Balbec. I will discuss 1 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, D.J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), Within A Budding Grove, 300; Id., À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1987–9), À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 642–3. In citing Proust’s work, I will refer to the both the English and the French titles of the relevant volume of À la recherche, giving the information on the English edition first.

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this memory in what follows, but first it serves to mention a few general characteristics of the phenomenon of involuntary memory. First of all, an involuntary memory cannot be provoked. Rather, it hits the subject unexpectedly because it was forgotten until it was triggered by a, usually quite pedestrian, sensory experience (like hearing the phrase cited above, or tasting a morsel of cake dipped in tea). Furthermore, because of its involuntary and unpredictable character, this type of memory offers a particular kind of insight: something that was forgotten is made present again, with the result that the subject’s self image and his or her understanding of the world now have to shift in order to make place for this new knowledge. Involuntary memories are always accompanied by a strong sensual experience, sometimes of unease or sorrow, other times of joy or pleasure. The truths conveyed by the involuntary memories are felt, not simply intellectually registered. I will investigate this kind of truth and call the knowledge gained from involuntary memory “felt knowledge” so as to distinguish it from what could be called factual knowledge. In order to obtain and accept this kind of knowledge, an attitude of openness is required from the subject. I will call this attitude “courageous vulnerability,” expressing the courage it takes to pursue the truth at the core of involuntary memory, and the openness required to allow this unforeseeable and perhaps unpleasant truth to enter. The relevance of the terms “felt knowledge” and “courageous vulnerability” is best understood through the instance of the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother mentioned above. The passage cited below will be the starting point of the discussion in the chapters to come, and effectively evokes the ethical significance of involuntary memory. The excerpt is taken from Sodome et Gomorrhe, one of the middle volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu. The narrator of À la recherche has just arrived at the hotel in Balbec where he had stayed with his grandmother on his previous visit. His grandmother has passed away in the meantime, and for his second visit the narrator has come to Balbec alone. He feels tired after the long journey and sits down on his bed to take off his shoes when he is suddenly overwhelmed by a very powerful sensation: Upheaval of my entire being. On the first night, as I was suffering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain. But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The being who had

introduction

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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 first 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 first time since the afternoon of her stroke in the Champs-Elyées, I now recaptured the living reality in a complete and involuntary recollection. . . . And thus, in my wild desire to fling 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. [Bouleversement de toute ma personne. Dès la première nuit, comme je souffrais d’une crise de fatigue cardiaque, tâchant de dompter ma souffrance, je me baissai avec lenteur et prudence pour me déchausser. Mais à peine eus-je touché le premier bouton de ma bottine, ma poitrine s’enfla, remplie d’une présence inconnue, divine, des sanglots, me secouèrent, des larmes ruisselèrent de mes yeux. L’être qui venait à mon secours, qui me sauvait de la sécheresse de l’âme, c’était celui qui, plusieurs années auparavant, dans un moment de détresse et de solitude identiques, dans un moment où je n’avais plus rien de moi, était entré, et qui m’avait rendu à moi-même, car il était moi et plus que moi (le contenant qui est plus que le contenu et me l’apportait). Je venais d’apercevoir, dans ma mémoire, penché sur ma fatigue, le visage tendre, préoccupé et déçu de ma grand-mère, non pas de celle que je m’étais étonné et reproché de si peu regretter et qui n’avait d’elle que le nom, mais de ma grandmère véritable dont, pour la première fois depuis les Champs-Élysées où elle avait eu son attaque, je retrouvais dans un souvenir involontaire et complet la réalité vivante. . . . Et ainsi, dans un désir fou de me précipiter dans ses bras, ce n’était qu’à l’instant—plus d’une année après son enterrement, à cause de cet anachronisme qui empêche si souvent le calendrier des faits de coïncider avec celui des sentiments—que je venais d’apprendre qu’elle était morte.]2

The very simple action of bending over to take off his boots triggers a memory of his grandmother so powerful that he sees her before him as she was when they stayed at the hotel together. The narrator remarks that he perceives “the living reality” of his grandmother and not the 2

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 210–11; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 153.

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faded memory which she had become since her death. For the first time since the beginning of her illness, he experiences his grandmother as present to him. The narrator finally feels the pain of her absence now that he remembers her in this involuntary recollection, and it is only now, long after her death, that he feels that she is gone. He has of course thought and talked about her since her passing, but the grandmother who was the topic of these thoughts and conversations was a distant image rather than the person whom he now recalls: I had often spoken about her since then, and thought of her also, but behind my words and thoughts, those of an ungrateful, selfish, cruel young man, there had never been anything that resembled my grandmother, because, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, my familiarity with the spectacle of her ill health, I retained within me only in a potential state the memory of what she had been. [J’avais souvent parlé d’elle depuis ce moment-là et aussi pensé à elle, mais sous mes paroles et mes pensées de jeune homme ingrat, égoïste et cruel, il n’y avait jamais rien eu qui ressemblât à ma grand-mère, parce que, dans ma légèreté, mon amour de plaisir, mon accoutumance à la voir malade, je ne contenais en moi qu’à l’état virtuel le souvenir de ce qu’elle avait été.]3

The memory of his grandmother, which for a long time had been “only . . . potential,” is evoked in its full force by the movement of bending over to undo his shoelaces, and because of this involuntary recollection the narrator “comes to understand” that she is dead. The difference between this memory and the memories which “did not resemble” his grandmother illustrates Proust’s famous distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory. Voluntary memory, Samuel Beckett writes in his essay Proust, “can be relied on to reproduce for our gratified inspection those impressions of the past that were consciously and intelligently formed. It has no interest in the mysterious element of inattention that colors our most commonplace experiences. It presents the past in monochrome.”4 Voluntary memory can be controlled and the memories it concerns can be recalled, studied and analyzed at will; they have been made to fit the past self of which one is aware. Returning to the passage above, the memories that can be identified as voluntary are the ones that represented the narrator’s grandmother

3 4

Ibid., 211; 153. Samuel Beckett, Proust (New York: Grove Press, 1951), 19.

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as a stranger whom he did not recognize. In contrast with the controlled and tidy character of voluntary memory, involuntary memory is explosive and overwhelming: “involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned. It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle.”5 This overwhelming experience brings with it the particular kind of knowledge mentioned above, which is felt rather than just intellectually registered. The narrator’s knowledge of his grandmother’s death is an instance of this felt knowledge. The narrator was of course aware of the fact of her death already, but the impact of the involuntary memory makes him understand this fact in a different way because he feels its implications. In the excerpt above, the narrator already hints at the content of these implications and the guilt he feels about his actions towards his grandmother when she was still alive. He now remembers the times when he felt embarrassed by something she did, and regrets his selfish reasons for punishing her by showing his discontent. The felt knowledge the narrator acquires is painful, and this links this kind of knowledge to the attitude I have called courageous vulnerability. In order to pursue the core of the involuntary memory, the narrator has to face several painful revelations about his past and his own person: he realizes that he was not always a loving, perfect grandson, but at times acted for entirely selfish reasons that prevented him, as it will turn out, from being open to her. The attitude appropriate to pursue felt knowledge must combine openness with effort and the courage to risk a discovery that may not be flattering to the self. In the following chapters I will develop and discuss the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability and show its relevance through Proust’s novel. I suggest that my notion of courageous vulnerability is best understood in the context of virtue ethics. As Rosalind Hursthouse remarks in On Virtue Ethics, there are certain topics which are neglected in the other main traditions of moral philosophy, utilitarianism and deontology, and which can be more effectively discussed in virtue ethics. Among these topics are moral character, friendship, family relationships, and the “role of the emotions in our moral life, and the questions of what sort of person I should be, and how we should live.”6 In the following

5

Ibid., 20–1. Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3. 6

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chapters, I will show that courageous vulnerability touches on all of these topics. Furthermore, the brand of virtue ethics which Hursthouse develops recognizes that the list of virtues presented by Aristotle is incomplete and that new virtues may and must be added to the ones already accepted. Aristotle of course lists courage as one of his moral virtues, but the attitude I propose involves vulnerability as well as courage and thus clearly differs from the disposition Aristotle describes. Can courageous vulnerability then be classified as a virtue? I believe so, and I draw support for this claim from Hursthouse, who refers to the following neo-Aristotelian premise: “A virtue is a character trait a human being needs for eudaimonia, to flourish or live well.” This means that “the virtues benefit their possessor,” and that “human beings need the virtues in order to live a characteristically good human life.”7 Though I will not discuss Aristotle’s notion of happiness or eudaimonia, I will show that courageous vulnerability is a character trait which makes us better and which we need to live well. Where, in the chapters to come, I write about “the courageously vulnerable person,” I mean a person who, in addition to other virtues and vices, has the character trait of courageous vulnerability. Similarly, where I speak of “the attitude of courageous vulnerability,” I am referring to the entrenched disposition which characterizes the courageously vulnerable person. These brief remarks on virtue ethics merely serve as a very broad context for my project; they are meant to indicate the general field within which this work seeks to make some progress. It is not my goal to defend or justify virtue ethics as a valid kind of moral philosophy, but to give a detailed account of an ethical attitude which should be regarded against the background provided by the tradition of virtue ethics. My main goal in this work is to explore the ethical and epistemological implications of both involuntary memory and the wider category of the privileged moment of which involuntary memories form a subset. As is becoming clear, these two sets of implications are closely linked. Both felt knowledge and courageous vulnerability will be treated as epistemological issues, but the notion of courageous vulnerability will be used primarily to express the ethical attitude required to successfully deal with felt knowledge. It needs to be emphasized at the outset of this discussion that I am investigating a very particular

7

Ibid., 20.

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kind of knowledge which does not fit the traditional epistemological mold but which, I argue, is a part of human knowledge nonetheless. In the background of this discussion of felt knowledge will be a form of virtue epistemology called “responsibilism” which can be used to determine the cognitive disposition of Proust’s narrator and, more generally, anyone who wants to attain knowledge through a privileged moment. Responsibilism, especially in the form proposed by Lorraine Code, offers an interesting perspective on the matter because of the emphasis it places on the cognitive agent’s effort and the use of “thick” narrative to describe cognitive activity.8 Code says about her particular form of virtue-based epistemology that her “purpose in developing this responsibilist approach to human knowledge is to examine conditions for knowing well, not to provide a formula for acquiring indubitable knowledge.”9 I will discuss the conditions for “knowing well” in this particular sense, using a literary work as my source. I will argue that though the knowledge which can be won from privileged moments makes up only a small part of the whole of our knowledge, its ethical implications make it an interesting topic for investigation. Just like I do not aim to justify virtue ethics in this work, it is not my goal in this work to offer a defense or a discussion of virtue epistemology either. Rather, I am merely referring to Code’s work in order to contextualize my claims. I will return to the notion of reponsibilism in Chapter One and again in the Epilogue where I will also restate my main claims in the context of virtue ethics.

8 Iris Murdoch, another philosopher who defends the value of literature for philosophy, remarks in conversation with Bryan Magee: “Though they are so different, philosophy and literature are both truth-seeking and truth-revealing activities.” Literature, Murdoch explains, “shows us the world, and much pleasure in art is a pleasure of recognition of what we vaguely knew was there but never saw before.” Furthermore: “Art is informative. And even mediocre art can tell us something, for instance about how other people live.” Iris Murdoch, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with Bryan Magee,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin Press, 1997), 11, 12, 15. Martha Nussbaum is in agreement with these views and writes: “storytelling and literary imagining are not opposed to rational argument, but can provide essential ingredients in a rational argument.” She clarifies the role of literature in rational argument as follows: “an ethics of impartial respect for human dignity will fail to engage real human beings unless they are made capable of entering imaginatively into the lives of distant other and to have emotions related to that participation.” Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xiii, xvi. 9 Lorraine Code, Epistemic Responsibility (Hannover and London: University Press of England, 1987), 222.

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The three key concepts mentioned so far, involuntary memory (as a privileged moment), felt knowledge and courageous vulnerability, will be investigated through the work of William James and Gabriel Marcel. A third philosopher, Henri Bergson, will offer a phenomenological groundwork for the philosophical debate as a whole. After discussing involuntary memory, the privileged moment, and felt knowledge within the context of À la recherche in Chapter One, I will turn to Bergson and his concept of the artist in Chapter Two. I will show that in Bergson’s aesthetics, one finds an appreciation of art and the artist which is exemplified by the narrator of À la recherche. In this same chapter, the attitude of the Bergsonian artist will be used as an analogy for the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability. Chapter Three will draw on the philosophies of William James and Gabriel Marcel in order to show the ethical significance of this attitude. As will become clear, it takes what James calls a tough-minded, empiricist temperament to deal with the felt knowledge gained from a privileged moment. The works of Gabriel Marcel will bring concepts such as problem and mystery into the discussion, and help draw out the ethical implications of James’ philosophy. Though the primary goal of this project is to investigate the privileged moment and its importance with regard to felt knowledge and courageous vulnerability, this discussion will also allow me to argue for the close affinity between the philosophies of James and Marcel. Ethical notions and insights can be found throughout the work of William James, and Marcel offers concepts and distinctions that do justice to James’ implicit ethics. I intend to build up a conceptual framework based on the close affinity between the philosophies of James and Marcel in order to give a full account of the privileged moment and its effects on the subject. After combining the philosophies of James and Marcel, Chapter Four will further develop the Marcellian themes raised in Chapter Three, focusing on the “phenomenology of having.” Reading Marcel’s ethics through À la recherche will show that courageous vulnerability requires great effort, a point that will be emphasized again in Chapter Six. Chapter Five develops a few Jamesian themes that flow from Chapter Three, most notably James’ account of mystical experience and what he calls the “will to believe.” I will argue that the privileged moment from À la recherche is a mystical experience in the Jamesian sense, and that the will to believe plays a part in what the narrator does with the felt knowledge gained from this experience. Chapter Six,

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finally, again focuses on courageous vulnerability by returning to the relation between the narrator and his grandmother. The insights from the previous chapters will be brought together and used to both fill out the sketch of courageous vulnerability in Chapter Two, and distinguish this attitude from Gabriel Marcel’s notion of creative fidelity. This last chapter is meant to offer both a synthesis and a conclusion to the work as a whole. Throughout the chapters outlined above, I intend to show a close connection between philosophy and literature through the philosophical investigation of phenomena taken from common experience but “discovered” and made visible by Marcel Proust in his À la recherche du temps perdu. As the narrator puts it in Le temps retrouvé: “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 offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.” [Chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même.]10 Within the narrative, Proust creates and evokes something that escapes rigid philosophical analysis. Both James and Marcel recognize that there always is a “something more” to experience that cannot be captured in technical discourse. In The Mystery of Being, Marcel refers to this “more” when he writes about art: “When I look at or listen to a masterpiece, I have an experience which can be strictly called a revelation. That experience will just not allow itself to be analyzed away as a mere state of simple strongly felt satisfaction.”11 Proust’s novel reveals what we perhaps never would have perceived in ourselves, and Marcel and James offer the philosophical concepts to talk about this revelation. In line with these observations, James remarks the following about the function of the philosopher: His books upon ethics . . . so far as they truly touch the moral life, must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic,—I mean with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform. Treated in this way ethical

10 11

Proust, Time Regained, 322; Le temps retrouvé, 489–90. Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 1995), 10.

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introduction treatises may be voluminous and luminous as well; but they never can be final, except in their abstractest and vaguest features; and they must more and more abandon the old-fashioned, clear-cut, and would-be ‘scientific’ form.12

Proust’s novel is easily “allied” to the philosophies of James and Marcel and I will use it to make concrete the ethics found in their works. In establishing this alliance, it will be important to do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Proust’s work. The tentative and suggestive nature of À la recherche is reflected in Le temps retrouvé where the narrator explains that he does not think of his readers as “his” but as “the readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass like those which the optician of Combray used to offer to his customers—it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves” [les propres lecteurs d’eux-mêmes, mon livre n’étant qu’une sorte de ces verres grossissants comme ceux que tendait à un acheteur l’opticien de Combray; mon livre, grâce auquel je leur fournirais le moyen de lire en eux-mêmes].13 The narrator immediately adds that some of his readers will have eyes for which the book is not a suitable instrument. I will argue that the optical instrument of À la recherche suits the eyes of Bergson, James, and Marcel, and that their vision as magnified by Proust helps distinguish the attitude I have called courageous vulnerability, and so defends literature as a source for ethical insight.

12 William James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 626. 13 Proust, Time Regained, 509; Le temps retrouvé, 610.

CHAPTER ONE

PRIVILEGED MOMENTS AND FELT KNOWLEDGE

Introduction The introduction focused on a particularly salient instance of painful involuntary memory: the narrator’s recollection of his grandmother at the hotel in Balbec. In this chapter, the term “involuntary memory” will be shown to cover only one segment of the group of the narrator’s experiences relevant to the development of the notion of courageous vulnerability. I will use the term “privileged moment,” proposed by E.F.N. Jephcott in his work Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness, to indicate both involuntary memories and other, similar sensations, to be explained below. In my discussion of the privileged moment in À la recherche, I will try to do justice to Malcolm Bowie’s remark in Proust Among the Stars that one should not attempt to “tidy away” parts of the work that appear to conflict with the narrator’s own theoretical observations in the last book, Le temps retrouvé. Bowie’s demand will be most pressing in the context of the discussion of what he calls the “eclipsed volumes,” the middle books of À la recherche often neglected by critics.1 Bold remarks by the narrator in these volumes should be allowed to be “scandalous” and “calculatedly inconsistent with things the narrator says elsewhere.” I agree with Bowie that all voices should be heard, and that “it is writing like this which, as we read, returns epistemological enquiry to our nerves and pulses.”2 In the present chapter, Bowie’s remarks serve as an encouragement to look not only at the madeleine episode and the theories regarding involuntary memory and art proposed by the narrator in Le temps 1 In Proust Among the Stars, Bowie focuses on Sodome et Gomorrhe, La prisonnière, and La fugitive, the three volumes preceding Le temps retrouvé. I think it is safe to say that À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs and Le côté de Guermantes have been similarly “eclipsed.” Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). 2 Malcolm Bowie, “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge,” in Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48, 58.

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retrouvé, but also at the lesser-known privileged moments elsewhere in À la recherche. Bowie points out that in focusing solely on Le temps retrouvé, “we lose . . . a whole range of paradoxes, dissonances and unusual consonances, and with them a vein of disturbing moral speculation. We lose also the sheer oddity of Proust’s final volume.”3 One of the dissonances that will require further attention in later chapters centers upon painful involuntary memory and its apparent incompatibility with the theories the narrator proposes in Le temps retrouvé. This dissonance, merely pointed out in the present chapter, will eventually play a central part in the understanding of courageous vulnerability in Chapter Six. The main purpose of this chapter is to elaborate the notion of privileged moment and lay the foundation for the later chapters. The issues raised in the following pages will give an impression of the plurality of situations found in À la recherche, and bringing them up in close connection rather than offering a parceled-out account does justice to the complex or web-like structure of the work. As Gilles Deleuze puts it in Proust and Signs: “The Search is not constructed like a cathedral . . ., but like a web.” The web is the “Search being spun,” and any a discussion of the Search, I suggest, should try to understand the spidernarrator.4

Involuntary Memory: An Unusual Pleasure Caused by an Identity of Sensations I will analyze a short passage taken from À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in order to further develop the characteristics belonging to involuntary memory, the most famous kind of privileged moment. After this analysis I will turn to other, lesser-known moments in À la recherche in order to explain why they, too, are privileged in Jephcott’s meaning of the term. When playing on the Champs-Élysées with Gilberte, the narrator has to interrupt his activities to accompany Françoise to a small pavilion where the restrooms are located. Just before Françoise calls the

3

Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 5. Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 182. 4

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narrator, Gilberte tells him that her father (i.e., Swann) does not have a high opinion of him. This is particularly bad news for the narrator since he is in love with Gilberte and wants to make a good impression on her father whom he greatly admires. It is with this worry on his mind that he enters the pavilion: The old, damp walls of the entrance, where I stood waiting for Françoise, emitted a cool, fusty smell which, relieving me at once of the anxieties that Swann’s words, as reported by Gilberte, had just awakened in me, filled me with a pleasure of a different kind from other pleasures, which leave one more unstable, incapable of grasping them, of possessing them, a pleasure that was solid and consistent, on which I could lean for support, delicious, soothing, rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and sure. I should have liked, as long ago, in my walks along the Guermantes way, to endeavour to penetrate the charm of this impression which had seized hold of me, and, remaining there motionless, to explore this antiquated emanation which invited me not to enjoy the pleasure which it was offering me only as a bonus, but to descend into the underlying reality which it had not yet disclosed to me. But the keeper of the establishment, an elderly dame with painted cheeks and an auburn wig, began to talk to me. [Les murs humides et anciens de l’entrée où je restai à atteindre Françoise, dégageaient une fraîche odeur de renfermé qui, m’allégeant aussitôt des soucis que venaient de faire naître en moi les paroles de Swann rapportées par Gilberte, me pénétra d’un plaisir non pas de la même espèce que les autres, lesquels nous laissent plus instables, incapables de les retenir, de les posséder, mais au contraire d’un plaisir consistant auquel je pouvais m’étayer, délicieux, paisible, riche d’une vérité durable, inexpliquée et certaine. J’aurais voulu, comme autrefois dans mes promenades du côté de Guermantes, essayer de pénétrer le charme de cette impression qui m’avait saisi et rester immobile à interroger cette émanation vieillotte qui me proposait non de jouir du plaisir qu’elle ne me donnait que par surcroît, mais de descendre dans la réalité qu’elle ne m’avait pas dévoilée. Mais la tenancière de l’établissement, vieille dame à joues plâtrées et à perruque rousse, se mit à me parler.]5

The musty smell in the pavilion relieves the narrator from his worries and suffuses him with a joy different from other, everyday pleasures. He lists the characteristics of this joy: it is somehow steady, supporting, peaceful and, above all, “rich with a truth that was lasting, unexplained and sure.” The sensation accompanying involuntary memory promises

5

Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 88; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 492.

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enduring, inexplicable and certain truth.6 The joy that is mixed with the presentiment of truth encourages the narrator to try and penetrate the sensation and “descend into the reality” below its surface. Because he is not alone, however, the narrator cannot properly respond to the appeal made by the sensation. Later that day, without any clear cause, he suddenly grasps the image the scent of which had approached him: it is his uncle Adolphe’s little room that smelled just like the pavilion. The narrator emphasizes the sudden nature of his insights in moments like these. In the case of the pavilion described above he says: “I suddenly recalled the impression” [je me rappelai brusquement l’image];7 after recommencing ten times in the case of the petite madeleine: “suddenly the memory revealed itself ” [tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu];8 seeing the clochers of Martinville: “a thought came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier” [j’eus une pensée qui n’existait pour moi l’instant avant].9 Though mental effort can help make clear the memory connected to the sensation, it is no guarantee for success. Focusing the mind increases the chances of finding the memory, but offers no guarantee. No matter how hard one focuses, one can still fail. Furthermore, there are occurrences of involuntary memory in which the sensation is not followed by the insight, but simultaneous with it. Interestingly, these are all sorrowful memories. The memory of the narrator’s grandmother falls in this category, but also Swann’s recollection, evoked by the little musical phrase in the Vinteuil sonata, of the time when Odette loved him, and the narrator’s memory of Gilberte after they have stopped seeing each other. Bowie’s remarks with which I started this chapter demand that these “voices,” often overlooked, must be heard; involuntary memories, like privileged moments, come in different sorts, and it is the differences between them that will provide the discussion of courageous vulnerability with depth and a vein of potentially “disturbing moral speculation.” Leaving these sorrowful memories out of account for the moment, it should be noted that by far most involuntary memories 6 As will become clear later in this chapter and again in Chapter Five, the narrator claims that the involuntary nature of a memory is the guarantee for the authenticity of the truth it brings. 7 Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 91; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 294 (emphasis mine). 8 Proust, Swann’s Way, 63; Du côté de chez Swann, 46 (emphasis mine). 9 Ibid., 255; 180.

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are preceded or accompanied by a feeling of the very particular kind of joy described in the passage above. For a further description of this profound kind of pleasure it serves to look at the famous passage that features the madeleine. The narrator breaks off a little morsel of cake and soaks it in a spoonful of tea. Much to his surprise, the taste of the madeleine combined with the tea causes him to experience an exquisite pleasure: 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 indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had the effect, which love has, of filling 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. [Un plaisir délicieux m’avait envahi, isolé, sans la notion de sa cause. Il m’avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une essence précieuse: ou plutôt cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi. J’avais cessé de me sentir médiocre, contingent, mortel.]10

As in the passage concerning the musty smell of the pavilion cited above, the sensation caused by the taste of the madeleine renders the narrator’s worries unimportant. The narrator’s mood when he is hit by an involuntary memory is often marked by weariness and a sense of failure. The taste of the madeleine changes his dejected state of mind—“dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow” [accablé par la morne journée et la perspective d’un triste lendemain]11—into a feeling of exquisite pleasure. On his walks in the direction of the Guermantes, the narrator often worries about his failure to write anything of literary value when, “quite independently of all these literary preoccupations and in no way connected with them, suddenly a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path would make me stop still, to enjoy the special pleasure that each of them gave me.” [Bien en dehors de toutes ces préoccupations littéraires et ne s’y rattachant en rien, tout d’un coup un toit, un reflet de soleil sur une pierre, l’odeur d’un chemin me faisaient arrêter par un plaisir particulier qu’ils me donnaient.]12 When the narrator feels 10 11 12

Ibid., 60; 44. Ibid., 60; 43. Ibid., 251–2; 178.

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sudden joy at the small pavilion on the Champs Élysées, this joy replaces his concerns regarding Swann and the bad impression he has made on him.13 Just before the series of memories in Le temps retrouvé, the narrator has been trying to accept the fact that he will never be capable of greatness and that empty society-life is the only life he will ever partake in. He has given up his literary aspirations when he steps on the uneven stones in front of the Guermantes mansion, and “all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared . . . those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.” [Toute inquiétude sur l’avenir, tout doute intellectuel étaient dissipés. Ceux qui m’assaillaient tout à l’heure au sujet de la réalité de mes dons littéraires et même de la réalité de la littérature se trouvaient levés comme par enchantement.]14 Involuntary memories and, as will become clear below, privileged moments in general, rupture the narrator’s disheartened state and fill him with a profound feeling of joy or sorrow. These moments have a restorative power, whether painful or pleasurable. In Chapter Three, this characteristic of privileged moments will be further discussed in the context of the work of William James, where this disheartened state will appear as an instance of anhedonia. Here I will merely point to the narrator’s own explicit explanation of the joy of privileged moments and of the reason why this joy makes his worries disappear. In the pavilion, the sense of joy makes that the narrator’s concerns about Swann’s opinion appear to him irrelevant, but it also has an even stronger impact: the narrator’s fears of mediocrity, contingency, and mortality have disappeared. How can a simple sensory sensation like a musty smell or the taste of the madeleine bring about such a change? The narrator answers this question in Le temps retrouvé: 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 identifications of the present with the past, it was likely to find itself in the one and only medium in which it could exist and enjoy the essence of things, that is to say: outside time. . . . An extra-temporal being . . . unalarmed by the vicissitudes of the future. This

13 14

Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 88; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 492. Proust, Time Regained, 255; Le temps retrouvé, 445.

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being had only come to me, only manifested itself outside of activity and immediate enjoyment, on those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. [Au vrai, l’être qui alors goûtait en moi cette impression la goûtait en ce qu’elle avait de commun dans un jour ancien et maintenant, dans ce qu’elle avait d’extra-temporel, un être qui n’apparaissait que quand, par une de ces identités entre le présent et le passé, il pouvait se trouver dans le seul milieu où il pût vivre, jouir de l’essence des choses, c’est-à-dire en dehors du temps. . . . Un être extra-temporel, . . . insoucieux des vicissitudes de l’avenir. Cet être-là n’était jamais venu à moi, ne s’était jamais manifesté, qu’en dehors de l’action, de la jouissance immédiate, chaque fois que le miracle d’une analogie m’avait fait échapper au présent.]15

The being that enjoys the taste of the madeleine, the musty smell in the pavilion, the sound of the spoon against the plate, is not his present self, nor his past self; it is a being which those two selves have in common and which exists beyond time. This being, therefore, has no concerns about the future, and the resulting liberating joy experienced by the narrator is the joy of this being within him. The extra-temporal being appears only when a present and a past sensation are identical or analogous.16 The present moment, the narrator explains in Du côté de chez Swann, attracts the past one: “this memory, this old, dead moment which the magnetism of an identical moment has travelled so far to importune, to disturb, to raise up out of the very depths of my being” [ce souvenir, l’instant ancien que l’attraction d’un instant identique est venue de si loin solliciter, émouvoir, soulever tout au fond de moi].17 The present sensation evokes the past one and, if the memory is completed, brings with it the impressions and feelings connected to this earlier sensation. Below, I will argue that the narrator’s explanation of involuntary memory in Le temps retrouvé falls short when the sorrowful involuntary memories are taken into account: these memories are not marked by the “liberating joy” which, according to the narrator above, is an essential characteristic of any “identity of sensations” experienced by the “extra-temporal being.” Before pursuing this point, I will first address a few further characteristics of involuntary memory in À la recherche.

15

Ibid., 262–3; 450. The narrator uses both terms to explain the connection between past and present moment; sometimes he speaks of an analogy, other times of an identity, even when it concerns the same occurrence of involuntary memory. 17 Proust, Swann’s Way, 62; Du côté de chez Swann, 45. 16

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All five senses are capable of triggering an involuntary memory. To just list five examples: the taste of the madeleine, the sight of the trees of Hudimesnil, the smell of the small pavilion, the sound made by a spoon, the touch of a stiff napkin against the lips. In addition, an involuntary memory is sometimes brought about by a movement of the body: the narrator bending over to untie his boots, his stepping on the uneven stones of the pavement in front of the Guermantes mansion. Though any physical sensation can play a part in the occurrence of involuntary memory, the memory itself comes in colors and (vague) images. The taste of the madeleine is linked to “a visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind” [un souvenir visuel qui, lié à cette saveur, tente de la suivre jusqu’à moi].18 This visual memory is at first a mere “whirling medley of stirred-up colours” [tourbillon de couleurs remuées], and it is not until the narrator recognizes the taste of the madeleine as the sensory experience he had a long time ago when his aunt Léonie offered him the same combination of cake and tea, that he also sees her room, her house, and finally the whole of Combray: “all that, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea” [tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé].19 The scent of the pavilion was also connected to an image, or, more precisely, the scent is described as the scent of the image: “the impression . . . of which . . . the smell . . . had reminded me” [l’image . . . dont m’avait approché . . . le frais].20 The narrator recognizes in the smell of the pavilion the scent of his uncle Adolphe’s little room, the image of which comes to him suddenly (brusquement) and with the sense of pleasure that often accompanies involuntary memories. The trees of Hudimesnil are connected to an image and place the narrator is unable to trace. In bending over to undo his boots, it is the image of his grandmother that appears to him and he sees her face before him. And finally, the consecutive involuntary memories in Le temps retrouvé are all connected to images. In describing the sensation of stepping on the uneven pavement, the narrator remarks: “The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when

18

Ibid., 62; 45. Ibid., 64; 48. 20 Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 91; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 494. Literally: “the image the smell of which had approached me.” 19

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I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. . . . The difference, purely material, lay in the images evoked.” [La félicité . . . était bien en effet la même que celle que j’avais éprouvée en mangeant la madeleine. . . . La différence, purement matérielle, était dans le images évoquées.]21 In repeating the movement that triggered the memory, the narrator perceives “the dazzling and indistinct vision” [la vision éblouissante et indistincte] which he only after a few times recognizes as Venice.22 The feeling of he napkin against his lips makes that “a new vision of azure” [une nouvelle vision d’azur] passes before his eyes.23 Again colors precede images, and it is often only through focused effort of the mind that these colors take shape and form the visual memories that they belong to. After this first account of the phenomenon of involuntary memory, the scope of the investigation must be widened to include a set of experiences that are similar to this phenomenon but also differ from it because they do not involve memory. With the help of Jephcott and Deleuze I will label these experiences “privileged moments of the imagination” so as to distinguish them from involuntary memories or, to use a different term for the same phenomenon, “privileged moments of reminiscence.” The distinction between different kinds of privileged moments will allow for a further discussion of the pleasurable certainty of some involuntary memories discussed above.

Privileged Moments of the Imagination Very similar to involuntary memories are the sensations the narrator undergoes when he is struck by a detail perceived on one of his walks, “a roof, a gleam of sunlight on a stone, the smell of a path” [un toit, un reflet de soleil sur une pierre, l’odeur d’un chemin] which stops him in his tracks because it gives him “a special pleasure” [un plaisir particulier]. A sight or a smell seems to him to hide, “beyond what my eyes could see, something which they invited me to come and take but which despite all my efforts I never managed to discover” [au delà de ce que je voyais, quelque chose qu’ils invitaient à venir prendre et que malgré mes efforts je n’arrivais pas à découvrir]. The citations here are

21 22 23

Proust, Time Regained, 255–6; Le temps retrouvé, 445. Ibid., 256; 446. Ibid., 258; 447.

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taken from Du côté de chez Swann, where the narrator describes his walks in the vicinity of Combray when he was young. The sights and smells catch his attention and make him concentrate on what may be behind them: “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.” [Comme je sentais que cela se trouvait en eux, je restais là, immobile, à regarder, à respirer, à tâcher d’aller avec ma pensée au delà de l’image ou de l’odeur.]24 When he needs to catch up with his grandfather who is calling him, the narrator closes his eyes and tries to prolong the moment to find out what it is about the roof, the light on a stone or a smell that makes it seem like a container of something which he cannot get to. Though the narrator feels that these sensations hide a reality which they invite him to explore, they do not copy a sensation from the past and as such trigger a forgotten memory. The “special pleasure” is similar, as is the feeling that the sensation contains something special that needs to be discovered, but this “something special” is not a moment from the past. Much later, in Le temps retrouvé, the narrator refers to these sensations and says that “certain obscure impressions” [des impressions obscure] like a cloud, a triangle, a church spire, a flower, or a stone “had solicited my attention in a fashion somewhat similar to these reminiscences” [avaient sollicité ma pensée, à la façon de ces réminiscences]. The impressions at stake here do not conceal a past sensation, but, the narrator claims, a new truth: “Beneath these signs lay something of a quite different kind which I must try to discover” [il y avait sous ces signes quelque chose de tout autre que je devais tâcher de découvrir],25 and this is why the sights and smells give him “un plaisir irraisonné.” This same pleasure is experienced by the narrator when he sees the steeples of Martinville from the doctor’s carriage. Again there appears to be no involuntary memory waiting to be uncovered, no past to be regained; the steeples invite him to explore something new. Similarly, Vintueil’s septet evokes in the narrator a feeling of allenveloping joy which is not connected to a past experience. According to Deleuze in Proust and Signs, there exists a hierarchy of privileged moments in À la recherche in which the steeples and the little phrase ultimately prevail over the madeleine and the paving

24 25

Proust, Swann’s Way, 251–2; Du côté de chez Swann, 178. Proust, Time Regained, 272–3; Le temps retrouvé, 456–7.

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stones. Deleuze regards À la recherche not as an exposition of involuntary memory but as a “narrative of apprenticeship.”26 The Search is oriented towards the future, Deleuze explains, and the learning it involves is concerned with signs to be deciphered and interpreted. “Proust’s work is not oriented to the past and the discoveries of memory, but to the future and the progress of an apprenticeship.”27 Deleuze’s reading of Proust is in accordance with the narrator’s remarks in Le temps retrouvé, where he says that it is his task to interpret sensations as signs of laws or ideas and to “think what I had merely felt” [penser ce que j’avais senti].28 I have already suggested that this voice should not be allowed to block out the dissonant voices of the “eclipsed volumes,” but at this point in the debate a better understanding of what Deleuze here means by signs will aid the present discussion of the privileged moment in Proust, and offer a useful terminology for the analysis of these moments. Deleuze distinguishes four different worlds within À la recherche, each marked by its own system of signs. The first is the circle of worldliness, which deals with the question of social exclusion, why someone is received in one world and not in the other. This is the world of society, of the Verdurins and the Guermantes. Only those who know how to emit and interpret signs can function in this world, as it becomes evident in the descriptions of le petit clan and the Guermantes salon. In the world of love, the lover’s task is to interpret the signs of his beloved. As Deleuze puts it, “the beloved expresses a possible world unknown to us . . . to love is to try to explicate, to develop these unknown worlds.”29 Swann tries to reveal Odette’s secrets, just like the narrator wishes to know everything about Albertine’s past and present escapades. The world of love in À la recherche is a world of the jealous lover who seeks to know and the elusive beloved who remains a mystery if the lover does not know how to read the signs. This second world, and the importance of the signs that characterize it, will be the topic of the discussion of crystallization in Chapter Four. The third world is the world of sensuous impressions or 26

Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 3. Ibid., 26. Along the way, Deleuze points out, the narrator is disappointed when he fails to interpret or understand a sign, and experiences partial revelations when he manages to decipher one. These disappointments and partial revelations can stifle or encourage his learning process. 28 Proust, Time Regained, 273; Le temps retrouvé, 457. 29 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 7. 27

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qualities. The signs of this world are those that strike the narrator in what I, with Jephcott, have been calling his privileged moments. The signs of this world, Deleuze explains, give us joy while transmitting a kind of imperative. Every sensuous impression follows the same procedure in doing so, and in Deleuze’s description of this procedure the marks of the privileged moment are clearly recognizable. First, there is a “prodigious joy,” then “a kind of obligation is felt, the necessity of a mental effort to seek the sign’s meaning.” Finally, “the sign’s meaning appears, yielding to us the concealed object.”30 Before saying a bit more about this third world of signs, Deleuze’s list of worlds must be completed by mentioning the fourth world: the world of art. Deleuze claims that in Le temps retrouvé, the world of art appears as the fourth and ultimate world of signs. The understanding of the signs of art is the goal the narrator finally achieves after having been prepared for this level of interpretation in the three earlier stages of his apprenticeship: “All the signs converge upon art; all apprenticeships, by the most diverse paths, are already unconscious apprenticeships to art itself. At the deepest level, the essential is in the signs of art.”31 Though Deleuze’s hierarchy of worlds and signs will be criticized in this chapter and the chapters to follow, his analysis of especially the world of sensuous signs offers a few useful tools for the present discussion. According to Deleuze, and in line with the narrator’s remarks, the intelligence and voluntary memory help decipher the worldly signs and the signs of love. Someone who wishes to conform to society watches and interprets the gestures, dress, posture, expression, etc. of people who are “received” and remembers these signs so as to be able to copy and understand them in the future. The lover, as will be discussed in Chapter Four, puts the same faculties to work in his attempts to understand the beloved. Voluntary memory and the intellect thus clearly play a part in the interpretation of the signs from the first two worlds. This leads Deleuze to pose the following question: At what level, then, does the famous involuntary memory intervene? It will be noticed that it intervenes only in terms of a sign of a very special type: the sensuous signs. We apprehend a sensuous quality as a sign; we feel an imperative that forces us to seek its meaning. Then it happens

30 31

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 14.

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that involuntary memory, directly solicited by the sign, yields us this meaning (thus Combray for the madeleine, Venice for the cobblestones, and so forth).32

The important point here is that involuntary memory plays a part only in those sensuous signs that are analogous to signs from the past and trigger the forgotten moment of the earlier sign. We should therefore be careful to distinguish between two cases of sensuous signs and call the sensuous signs which solicit an involuntary memory “reminiscences,” and the sensuous signs that are like the sensations the narrator has on his walks “discoveries” or signs of the imagination. Deleuze adds that the first kind involves “resurrections of memory,” whereas the second concerns the “truth written with the help of figures.”33 Deleuze, I suggest, offers a helpful approach to the discussion of involuntary memory by restricting its scope. Serious problems arise, however, when Deleuze claims that the reminiscences are inferior to both the signs of art and the sensuous signs of the imagination, i.e. the discoveries. The reason for this inferiority is that the explication of the first group “remains too material.”34 Deleuze maintains that the sensuous signs of the imagination and the signs of art are more “spiritual” than the signs of reminiscence. Signs of reminiscence are themselves material (the madeleine, the paving stones, the napkin) and, on top of that, have a material meaning as well (the buildings and streets of Combray, Venice, Balbec). The meaning of sensuous signs of the imagination is already less material, and the signs of art, finally, reveal essences that are freed from matter completely.35 The terminology suggested by Deleuze in Proust and Signs is both useful and problematic. He offers a way to distinguish between the different kinds of privileged moments, but appears to gloss over the element of discovery present in the privileged moments of reminiscence. In an involuntary memory, something new is revealed even though the memory, of course, concerns the past. In addition, the imagination plays a role in the experience of both kinds of sensuous signs, and not 32

Ibid., 53. Ibid., 53. 34 Ibid., 53. 35 Julia Kristeva offers a different take on the matter: “In contrast to what has been alleged, it is not ‘signs’ but ‘impressions’ that Proust seeks out and deciphers.” Julia Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, trans. Stephen Bann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 80. 33

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only in the signs of discovery. I propose to adopt Deleuze’s distinction, but only with these qualifications. For the sake of convenience and clarity, Jephcott’s privileged moment will from now on have two subcategories: privileged moments of reminiscence and privileged moments of the imagination. With this distinction in mind, I will now turn to the pleasurable certainty caused by certain privileged moments.

Pleasurable Certainty and Wonder The joy of tasting the madeleine, stepping on the uneven pavement, etc., is the joy, “riche d’une vérité durable,” that can only be experienced by the extra-temporal creature that exists beyond time and is not concerned with the future or death. This creature, so the narrator suggests and Jephcott makes explicit, is our true self. Our true self is not the part of us involved in action, but the “essence of all the moments of our past life, preserved in a timeless dimension outside our experience.”36 This dimension is experienced by us only in privileged moments. In Le temps retrouvé, the narrator refers to this extra-temporal being in order to explain why a commonplace physical sensation, reminding us of a trivial situation in our past, can overwhelm us with a pleasure more profound and, somehow, more certain, than anything else we have ever experienced. The narrator’s account of said extra-temporal being in Le temps retrouvé largely supports Deleuze’s claims regarding the hierarchy of worlds and signs in À la recherche. The next chapter will show the extent to which this account is problematic, especially when Bowie’s demand is taken seriously and one tries to do justice to the plurality of voices in À la recherche. It should never be overlooked that the explanation offered by the narrator in the last volume of the work is itself part of the fictional structure, and that it is one voice among many rather than the final and authoritative one. A study of what Bowie calls the “eclipsed volumes” will fill out his remarks about the manifold voices that deserve one’s attention in À la recherche, and

36 E.F.N. Jephcott, Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 89. This view may be too radical, or at least too one-sided. Both Bergson and James will emphasize the necessity of the practical aspect of life, without which life would be impossible. Furthermore, the extra-temporal being described by the narrator cannot account for the sorrowful privileged moments which will be described later in this chapter.

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will allow for what I think is a more balanced view of the book as a whole. Leaving aside for the moment the problematic nature of the extra-temporal being from Le temps retrouvé, a more detailed discussion of the privileged moment as it is described by Jephcott, aided by Philip Fisher’s concept of “wonder,” will shed more light on the certainty bound up with pleasure which marks these moments. Jephcott describes what he calls a privileged moment as a “moment when the mind takes in the world with a rare and strange intensity.”37 This moment functions as an impulse to create art. A privileged moment, though not uncommon, is hard to describe; it is an “arbitrary gift of grace, immeasurably superior to everyday life”38 through which one experiences an “intensification of sensation and a unification of awareness.”39 The sensation of a privileged moment has much in common with what Fisher calls wonder. In the introduction to Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, Fisher explains that just like the sublime can be called the “aestheticization of fear,” “wonder involves the aestheticization of delight.”40 Jephcott describes how in a privileged moment, the “everyday object detaches itself ” and “exists intensely in its own right.” The sense of meaning is heightened and “objects seem constantly to outgrow themselves in intensity and significance.” These descriptions can easily be applied to the moment when the narrator tastes the madeleine or the times when he is pleasantly struck by a sight or smell on one of his walks. One of the problems in applying Jephcott’s and Fisher’s terminology to the phenomenon of involuntary memory is that both Jephcott and Fisher favor visual perception; Fisher even claims that wonder is a relation to the visual world.41 I want to suggest that wonder is a relation not only

37 Ibid., 11. Jephcott defines involuntary memory in Proust as “the resurrection of the past through a coincidence of past and present sensations.” Ibid., 86. Involuntary memories, however, are not the only privileged moments in À la recherche. A second class of privileged moments is made up by the situations in which there is a “direct perception of the present” (ibid., 87). I will propose to call these moments “privileged moments of the imagination.” 38 Ibid., 16. 39 Ibid., 21. 40 Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 2. 41 Wonder, Fisher claims, is related to a “visual presence of the whole state or object” (ibid., 21). This emphasis on the visual is a constant throughout Fisher’s work: “Only the visual is instantaneous, the entire object . . . to Fisher, there is no wonder in narrative arts or in music. Wonder in the narrative arts and in music is replaced by

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to the visual world, but to the world as it is perceived by all the senses, or, to be more precise and inclusive, wonder is bound up with being a bodily creature.42 Fisher, like Deleuze, tends to favor those experiences which involve sensations of a less “material” nature, which, again, would imply that the steeples of Martinville prevail over the madeleine and the paving stones, but also over the narrator’s involuntary recollection of his grandmother which overwhelms him when he is bending over to his boots. The experience of wonder, according to Fisher, is rare, unexpected and always a first experience against a background of normality.43 Involuntary memory is not disqualified by this last point, since it is a first experience: an analogy of sensations causes a new experience of joy that is felt against the background of everydayness. Fisher’s term wonder captures the essence of the joyful privileged moments in À la recherche, and I propose to use it to refer to the particular kind of pleasure which is evoked in these moments, whether the bodily sensation that triggers it is visual or not. In the privileged moment as described by Jephcott, abstract thought and analysis are absent and “reality is experienced, like music, as a harmonious totality.”44 This sense of harmony is reflected in the narrator’s feelings of peace and certainty and his sense of calm; the joyful involuntary memory evoked by the musty smell of the pavilion, for instance, makes his worries disappear and makes him feel like everything “fits.” Jephcott sums up the pattern characteristic of the development of the privileged moment: a “heightened awareness of a particular object” is followed by an intensification and unification of awareness and finally results in an “ecstatic identification of self and world.”45 At any point,

surprise because both art forms lack suddenness and rely too heavily on repetition (ibid., 18). 42 The scope of this project will not allow me to further explore the role played by the body in the experience of privileged moments. I will, however, pay attention to the body in Chapter Four, where Gabriel Marcel’s “phenomenology of having” will be discussed. Central to the discussion will be the body of Albertine and the frustration of the narrator’s attempts to completely “own” her. 43 Fisher, Wonder, 18, 19. Fisher makes a further mistake by dismissing memory. Because memory necessarily involves an element of expectation, it cannot be a part of the experience of wonder. Fisher makes no mention of involuntary memory as it appears in À la recherche, a kind of memory that has no element of expectation. Since Fisher points to the element of expectation as the main reason why memory cannot be a part of wonder, I suggest that unexpected memories should not be excluded from his argument. 44 Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 20. 45 Ibid., 30.

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Jephcott explains, this continuum may be disrupted, for instance by the logical mind,46 or, I want to add, as became evident in some of the passages cited above, because of the presence of others. The privileged moment ends as abruptly as it began, “devaluating the experience of ordinary life.”47 The heightened awareness of a particular object is illustrated by the descriptions of the effects brought about by objects like the madeleine, the spoon, or the napkin. The process of focusing on these objects and the sensations they cause, intensifies and unifies the awareness; the “ecstatic identification” Jephcott mentions the experience of pleasure that comes with the certainty that one “fits” the world, that life makes sense and that worries can be left for what they are. As the narrator himself describes it, this certainty carries with it the conviction that life is meaningful, not contingent or pointless. It is bound up with this sense of at-homeness and delight in the beauty of things. As will be pointed out in the next chapter, the certainty that accompanies a pleasurable involuntary memory is what Bergson would call the intuitive grasp of a phenomenon from within the complex flux that is our inner life. This intuition cannot be accurately expressed in words because it is an intuition of something infinite, and it is precisely the infinite complexity of this flux that brings the wonder and pleasure when a forgotten moment is recalled. The feeling of at-homeness and meaningfulness caused by the pleasurable privileged moment will be contrasted with the feeling of anhedonia as it is described by James in Chapter Three. There, Jephcott’s remark that this joy is an “arbitrary gift of grace” will also receive further attention. First, however, a discussion of the imperative character of the privileged moment and the narrator’s reaction to this demand is in order.

46

As was mentioned in the introduction, the narrator uses his intellect in order to pursue the feeling of sorrow experienced in the involuntary memory of his grandmother. He wants to cling to the pain because it is connected to the presence of his grandmother. He investigates the situations that he is reminded of and examines his own attitude and actions in those situations. In this investigation the intellect, usually at work in voluntary memory to present us the past in monochrome, fulfills the positive role of bringing back to mind the past as it really happened. As Peter Jones puts it: “We attain knowledge when we successfully use our intellect to elicit the true nature of the data provided by the senses,” where data is a translation of ce qu’on a senti: “our total response to the particular situation including emotions and ideas.” Peter Jones, Philosophy and the Novel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 149. 47 Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 30, 45.

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chapter one Couvercles, Obligation, and Obstacles to the Search

Some physical sensations, or the objects causing the sensations, are couvercles, lids, underneath which the past, or, as Deleuze would add, a truth of the imagination, is hidden. The momentary loss of balance on the paving stones is a couvercle, as is the line of a roof the narrator sees on one of his walks. The narrator claims that it depends on chance (hasard), on, as Jephcott would say, an arbitrary gift of grace, whether or not we come across these couvercles and so get a chance to find out the memories and truths they are hiding. The couvercles invite the narrator to investigate; it is as if they tell the narrator: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” [Saisis-moi au passage si tu en as la force, et tâche à résoudre l’énigme de bonheur que je te propose.]48 This invitation, it must now be emphasized, 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 effectively 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. [Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelque être inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour nous jusqu’au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons passer près de l’arbre, entrer en possession de l’objet qui est leur prison. Alors elles tressaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues, l’enchantement est brisé. Délivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et reviennent vivre avec nous.]49

Just like our lost loved ones can only be set free if we recognize them, our forgotten past, “le temps perdu,” will only return to us when we recognize the objects and sensations that function as couvercles. The

48 49

Proust, Time Regained, 257; Le temps retrouvé, 446. Proust, Swann’s Way, 59; Du côté de chez Swann, 43.

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same holds for the truths the narrator suspects beneath the couvercles of privileged moments of the imagination. When on a ride with Mme de Villeparisis, the narrator is struck by a row of trees that seems to him more real than anything else around him; Mme de Villeparisis, Balbec, the ride he is on, all of a sudden seem like part of a novel, whereas the trees are part of the reality a reader finds when looking up from the pages. The narrator, however, fails to grasp the reality which the sight of the trees invites him to explore. The trees ask him to take them with him, to “bring them back to life:” “In their simple and passionate gesticulation I could discern the helpless anguish of a beloved person who has lost the power of speech, and feels that he will never be able to say to us what he wished to say and we can never guess.” [Dans leur gesticulation naïve et passionnée, je reconnaissais le regret impuissant d’un être aimé qui a perdu l’usage de la parole, sent qu’il ne pourra nous dire ce qu’il veut et que nous ne savons pas deviner.]50 The appeal of this couvercle feels to the narrator like a moral obligation he has to whatever it may be that the sight of the trees invites him to explore, as if what he is asked to uncover is a living being that needs to be set free. This feeling of obligation already occurred in an earlier passage describing, first, the appeal of couvercles on the walks on the Guermantes way (see above) and second, the steeples of Martinville. Again the feeling of pleasure is accompanied by a sense of obligation: “I did not know the reason for the pleasure I had felt on seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to discover that reason seemed to me irksome; I wanted to store away in my mind those shifting, sunlit planes and, for the time being, think of them no more.” [Je ne savais pas la raison du plaisir que j’avais eu à les apercevoir à l’horizon et l’obligation de chercher à découvrir cette raison me semblait bien pénible ; j’avais envie de garder en réserve dans ma tête ces lignes remuantes au soleil et de n’y plus penser maintenant.]51 The narrator is aware of the demand placed on him, but at the same time wants to escape his obligation and put off the effort until later. Throughout À la recherche, the narrator looks for excuses not to investigate his privileged moments, or, when he does want to take the effort like in the case of the trees of Hudimesnil, he is prevented from doing so by the people he is with. The main obstacles that keep the narrator

50 51

Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 407; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 719. Proust, Swann’s Way, 254; Du côté de chez Swann, 179.

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from uncovering what is hidden or contained by couvercles, it appears, are company and laziness. When the narrator experiences the profound joy or sorrow of a privileged moment, he tries to shield himself from distracting noises, people and other sense-impressions in order to isolate and repeat the sensation that is the source of the feeling overwhelming him. The times when he is unable to uncover what is hidden in the sensation, this failure is usually due to the presence of others: the presence of Mme de Villeparisis and his grandmother in the case of the row of trees, the presence of his parents on his walks in the direction of the Guermantes, of Saint-Loup when the narrator is pleasantly surprised by the mist. Every time the procedure described by Deleuze is “completed” and the core of the privileged moment has been uncovered, the narrator is alone: this is the case when he tastes the madeleine, when he steps on the uneven stones on his way to the Guermantes mansion, or when he hears the sound of a spoon against a plate, and later feels the napkin against his lips. When the interpretation of a privileged moment requires effort (which sometimes it does not, as in the case described in the Introduction), solitude is required in order for one to focus on the sensation and, if possible, to repeat the sensory impression that brought about the sensation. The combination of the repetition of the impression and the emptying of the mind, focusing solely on the sensation often (but not necessarily!) will make the couvercle give up its secret. Yet being alone is not enough; even when he is alone, the narrator often refrains from the effort of pursuing a memory out of laziness. As Bowie remarks in his introduction to Proust Among the Stars, “Proust’s protagonist, for all his wishfulness, seems to have limited energy and willpower, and an ailing sense of purpose. In the course of a very long tale told about himself, he does not do much.”52 When the taste of the madeleine brings him unexpected pleasure, he has to start afresh ten times in his attempt to find the memory behind the sensation: “And each time the cowardice that deters us from every difficult task, every important enterprise, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of today and my hopes for tomorrow, which can be brooded over painlessly.” [Et chaque fois

52 Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, xvii. See also: Kristeva, Proust and the Sense of Time, 47.

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la lâcheté qui nous détourne de toute tâche difficile, de toute oeuvre importante, m’a conseillé de laisser cela, de boire mon thé en pensant simplement à mes ennuis d’aujourd’hui, à mes désirs de demain qui se laissent remâcher sans peine.]53 Similarly, on his walks in the direction of the Guermantes, the task of pursuing his sensations seems too demanding: But so arduous was the task imposed on my conscience by these impressions of form or scent or color—to try to perceive what lay hidden beneath them—that I was not long in seeking an excuse which would allow me to relax so strenuous an effort and to spare myself the fatigue that it involved. As good luck would have it, my parents would call me; I felt that I did not, for the moment, enjoy the tranquility necessary for the successful pursuit of my researches, and that it would be better to think no more of the matter until I reached home, and not to exhaust myself in the meantime to no purpose. And so I would concern myself no longer with the mystery that lay hidden in a shape or a perfume, quite at ease in my mind since I was taking it home with me, protected by its visible covering which I had imprinted on my mind and beneath which I should find it still alive, like the fish which on days when I had been allowed to go out fishing, I used to carry back in my basket, covered by a layer of grass which kept them cool and fresh. Having reached home I would begin to think of something else, and so my mind would become littered (as my room was with the flowers that I had gathered on my walks, or the odds and ends that people had given me) with a mass of disparate images . . . beneath which the reality I once sensed, but never had the willpower to discover and bring to light, had long since perished. [Mais le devoir de conscience était si ardu, que m’imposaient ces impressions de forme, de parfum ou de couleur—de tâcher d’apercevoir ce qui se cachait derrière elles, que je ne tardais pas à me chercher à moimême des excuses qui me permissent de me dérober à ces efforts et de m’épargner cette fatigue. Par bonheur mes parents m’appelaient, je sentais que je n’avais pas présentement la tranquillité nécessaire pour poursuivre utilement ma recherche, et qu’il valait mieux n’y plus penser jusqu’à ce que je fusse rentré, et ne pas me fatiguer d’avance sans résultat. Alors je ne m’occupais plus de cette chose inconnue qui s’enveloppait d’une forme ou d’un parfum, bien tranquille puisque je la ramenais à la maison, protégée par le revêtement d’images sous lesquelles je la trouverais vivante, comme les poissons que, les jours où on m’avait laissé aller à la pêche, je rapportais dans mon panier, couverts par une couche d’herbe qui préservait leur fraîcheur. Une fois à la maison je songeais à autre chose et ainsi s’entassaient dans mon esprit (comme dans ma

53

Proust, Swann’s Way, 63; Du côté de chez Swann, 45.

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chapter one chambre les fleurs que j’avais cueillies dans mes promenades ou les objets qu’on m’avait donnés) une pierre où jouait un reflet, un toit, un son de cloche, une odeur de feuilles, bien des images différentes . . . sous lesquelles il y a longtemps qu’est morte la réalité pressentie que je n’ai pas eu assez de volonté pour arriver à découvrir.]54

The narrator describes how he simply did not have the strength of will to stop and focus on the couvercles behind which une réalité pressentie is hiding. At the same time, the pursuit of this reality which the narrator is invited to explore in a privileged moment feels to him not morally neutral but, to some extent, obligatory. One of the ways in which this obligation becomes apparent is in the comparison of the couvercles with lost loved ones who bid us to return them to life. In the Introduction I have called the attitude required for this pursuit “courageous vulnerability,” a notion which will be further developed in the next chapter. In the present chapter it suffices to note that the appeal of a couvercle is experienced by the narrator as a demand of a decidedly moral nature. With this in mind, I will now turn to the “sensed reality” which appeals to the narrator to be “discovered.”

La réalité pressentie: Joy and Sorrow in the Privileged Moment It is the taste of the madeleine that overwhelms the narrator with joy, not its sight. One explanation of this fact offered by the narrator is that the sight of the madeleine is not linked to Combray only, since he has seen the little cakes at many bakeries in more recent times. The taste of the madeleine, however, has been forgotten and has maintained its connection to Aunt Léonie and everything that surrounded her.55 Later in À la recherche, in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the narrator makes the following, more general claim: “It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent.” [C’est grâce à cet oubli seul que nous pouvons de temps à autre retrouver l’être que nous fûmes, nous placer

54 55

Ibid., 252–3; 179. Ibid., 64; 47.

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vis-à-vis des choses comme cet être l’était, souffrir à nouveau, parce que nous ne sommes plus nous, mais lui, et qu’il aimait ce qui nous est maintenant indifferent.]56 It is because we forget them that certain memories retain their freshness and can return us to the person we used to be. In Le temps retrouvé the narrator presents a more careful analysis and states that is not exactly a past self that overwhelms us, but a self that is beyond time, neither a past nor a present self, but the being that those two have in common. This extra-temporal being is the only one who can help us find our past: “Only this being had the power to perform that task which had always defeated the efforts of my memory and my intellect, the power to make me rediscover days that were long past, the Time that was Lost.” [Seul, il avait le pouvoir de me faire retrouver les jours anciens, le temps perdu, devant quoi les efforts de ma mémoire et de mon intelligence échouaient toujours.]57 In getting to the core of an involuntary memory, the narrator claims to find not only “a veritable moment of the past” [un véritable moment du passé],58 but also something that, common to both past and present, is much more essential than both of them: A sensation . . . at one and the same time in the past, so that my imagination was permitted to savor 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, and through this subterfuge had made it possible for my being to secure, to isolate, to immobilize—for a moment brief as a flash of lightning—what normally it never apprehends: a fragment of time in the pure state. [Une sensation . . . à la fois dans le passé, ce qui permettait à mon imagination de la goûter, et dans le présent où l’ébranlement effectif de mes sens par le bruit, le contact de ligne, etc. avait ajouté aux rêves de l’imagination ce dont ils sont habituellement dépourvus, l’idée d’existence—et grâce à ce subterfuge avait permis à mon être d’obtenir, d’isoler, d’immobiliser—la durée d’un éclair—ce qu’il n’appréhende jamais: un peu de temps à l’état pur.]59

According to the narrator in this passage, it is only in involuntary memory that time in its pure state can be found. The imagination,

56 57 58 59

Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 300; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 4. Proust, Time Regained, 263; Le temps retrouvé, 450. Ibid., 263; 450. Ibid., 264; 451.

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usually at work independently of the senses, is combined with a sensation of an external object. Involuntary memory as it is described here is the only case in which the present can be enjoyed through the imagination. Accordingly, Jephcott claims that for Proust, “the only way in which we can truly enjoy reality is through the imagination, and the imagination is incapable of experiencing the present.”60 The experience of the present is always mixed up with egoistic preoccupations which in turn are always tied to an effort of the will. In the case of a privileged moment of reminiscence, the present is experienced but through the imagination and in abeyance of any effort of the will. Despite the obvious difficulties created by these remarks from Jephcott for Deleuze’s distinction between reminiscence and discovery/imagination, I will maintain the subdivision into the different categories of privileged moments described above. The observation to be made here is that the explanation cited above, offered by the narrator in Le temps retrouvé, pertains to joyful involuntary memories only, and leaves out of account both the privileged moments of the imagination and the sorrowful involuntary memories. The sorrow experienced by Swann when he unexpectedly hears the music that used to be the “national anthem” of his love for Odette leaves him with the certainty that she will never love him again: “From that evening onwards, Swann understood that the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive, that his hopes of happiness would not be realized now.” [À partir de cette soirée, Swann comprit que le sentiment qu’Odette avait eu pour lui ne renaîtrait jamais, que ses espérances de bonheur ne se réaliseraient plus.]61 He had come to this conclusion before, but never had he been as sure about it as he is now. The narrator’s explanation in Le temps retrouvé does not fit this privileged moment, even though Swann is clearly experiencing an involuntary memory. Rather than the “joy which [is] like a certainty” [joie pareille à une certitude] mentioned by the narrator in his description of the privileged moment on the uneven paving stones, Swann is experiencing, one might say, “suffering which is like a certainty:” “une souffrance pareille à une certitude.”62 I will explore a few

60 61 62

Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 88. Proust, Swann’s Way, 502; Du côté de chez Swann, 353. Proust, Time Regained, 257; Le temps retrouvé, 446.

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neglected involuntary memories of this kind below, using the notion of felt knowledge to explain their significance. In Philosophy and the Novel, Peter Jones points to the distinction between involuntary and voluntary memory and explains that whereas the living past, recalled in involuntary memory, is present, “the consciously past [is] dead.”63 The recollection the narrator has of his grandmother when bending over to untie his shoelaces involves an experience of her presence; he sees her face and feels what it means to have lost her.64 The movement that triggers the memory of his grandmother evokes what Jones calls the living past. With this presence comes the certainty mixed with sadness, of all that the narrator’s grandmother meant to him and of what he misses now she is gone. Because of the feeling of sorrow involved in the involuntary memory, this particular memory is different from the involuntary memories brought about by the musty smell, the madeleine and the paving stones. Both kinds of involuntary memory, the kind that brings joy and the kind that brings sorrow, offer a peculiar kind of certainty different from the certainties of day to day life. The questions to be answered now are, first, what makes this kind of certainty special and, second, whether the certainty differs in nature from one kind of involuntary memory to the other. The passage from Sodome et Gomorrhe in which the narrator remembers his grandmother was discussed in the Introduction. Here it suffices to recall the kind of certainty the narrator gains from it. According to Ingrid Wassenaar, what is at stake in involuntary memory is a “difficult affective knowledge”65 not completely under our control. To gather this knowledge from an involuntary memory, it is not enough to merely “listen;” a certain activity is required on the side of the self experiencing the memory.66 One can imagine suppressing the feeling of sorrow or joy after it momentarily takes over the self. Though the occurrence of involuntary memory, and, for that matter, 63

Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 161. The notion of presence will be developed in Chapter Four which deals with Gabriel Marcel’s ethics. There the ethical implications of involuntary memory will be discussed in more detail. 65 Ingrid Wassenaar, Proustian Passions. The Uses of Self-Justification for A la recherche du temps perdu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172. I will be using the term “felt knowledge” rather than “affective knowledge,” because feelings include elements not present in affections. 66 Roxanne Hanney, The Invisible Middle Term in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, vol. 9, Studies in French Literature (Lewinston/Queenston/Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 135. 64

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privileged moments of any kind, cannot be controlled, one has a choice whether or not to investigate the moment in order to get to its core. Proust’s narrator, for instance, chooses to focus on the painful recollection of his grandmother because he wants to continue to feel her presence. The certainty that his recollection reveals to him something he did not see before makes his grandmother appear as if she were living still, that is, as a person to whom he can relate and not a mere voluntary memory: I clung to this pain, cruel as it was, with all my strength, for I realized that it was the effect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present in 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 suffering, . . . for I was determined not merely to suffer, but to respect the original form of my suffering as it had suddenly come upon me unawares, and I wanted to continue to feel it, following its own laws, whenever that contradiction of survival and annihilation, so strangely intertwined within me, returned. [Ces douleurs, si cruelles qu’elles fussent, je m’y attachais de toutes mes forces, car je sentais la preuve que ce souvenir que j’avais était bien présent en moi. Je sentais que je ne me la rappelais vraiment que par la douleur et j’aurais voulu que s’enfonçassent plus solidement encore en moi ces clous qui y rivaient sa mémoire. Je ne cherchais pas à rendre la souffrance plus douce, . . . car je ne tenais pas seulement à souffrir, mais à respecter l’originalité de ma souffrance telle que je l’avais subie tout d’un coup sans le vouloir, et je voulais continuer à la subir, suivant ses lois à elle, à chaque fois que revenait cette contradiction si étrange de la survivance et du néant entrecroisés en moi.]67

The pain of the contradiction of the survival of his grandmother in an involuntary recollection and her annihilation in death “rivets” her to his consciousness and makes her memory present to him. This is not the presence of the consciously past, of the snapshots offered by voluntary memory, but of the living past of an involuntary memory. The certainty the narrator feels that the pain reveals to him something real which he had previously overlooked or not wanted to see is the same as the certainty of the madeleine or the paving stones. The immediate and continuing feeling of this particular involuntary memory, however, is one of pain and not, as Deleuze claims, a feeling of pleasure

67

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 214–5; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 156.

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which is then overtaken by pain. Deleuze writes: “Proust cites one case, the boots and the memory of the grandmother, in principle no different from the madeleine or the cobblestones, but which makes us feel a painful disappearance and constitutes the sign of a Time lost forever instead of giving us the plenitude of the Time we regain.”68 This claim is susceptible to at least two points of critique. First, Proust cites not just one, but several cases which make the protagonists of À la recherche feel “a painful dissapearance.” As mentioned above, the little musical phrase makes Swann feel the certain loss of Odette’s love. An example to be discussed below will show the narrator’s hurt when an involuntary memory makes him miss Gilberte who had long become indifferent to him. Second, the memory of his grandmother is different from the joyful recollections referred to by Deleuze. In both cases there are couvercles to be opened up, but not only does the couvercle in the case of the boots open up immediately, without effort on the part of the narrator; the feeling the couvercle brings is one of pain and not of joy. Deleuze tries to diminish the difference between painful and joyful involuntary memories. His account is summed up in the following excerpt from Proust and Signs: The boot, like the madeleine, causes involuntary memory to intervene: an old sensation tries to superimpose itself, to unite with the present sensation, and extends it over several epochs at once. But it suffices that the present sensation set its “materiality” in opposition to the earlier one for the joy of this superposition to give way to a sentiment of collapse, of irreparable loss, in which the old sensation is pushed back into the depths of lost time. Thus, the fact that the hero regards himself as guilty merely gives the present sensation the power to avoid the embrace of the earlier one. He begins by experiencing the same felicity as in the case of the madeleine, but happiness immediately gives way to the certainty of death and nothingness.69

Deleuze’s claim that the old sensation tries to superimpose itself is in line with the narrator’s own description of the nature of joyful involuntary memories in Le temps retrouvé. As I have already mentioned, however, the narrator’s account here targets this subsection of privileged moments only, and does not account for the sorrowful involuntary memories. Deleuze points to the materiality of the present sensation to explain the feeling of loss which overwhelms the narrator. 68 69

Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 19. Ibid., 20.

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If this materiality is the reason why the present moment can avoid “the embrace of the earlier one,” then the same feeling of loss should have resulted from other involuntary memories as well: the narrator’s feelings of guilt regarding his uncle Adolphe should have turned the feeling of joy in the musty pavilion into one of sorrow. Granted, the narrator does not feel by far as guilty toward his uncle as he does toward his grandmother, but this does not account for the fact that the materiality of the present situation usually appears to leave the feeling of joy completely undisturbed, whereas the materiality of the moment of the boots “pushes the old sensation back into the depths of time.” The narrator himself describes in Le temps retrouvé how the present moment always wins the struggle with the old sensation which seeks to superimpose itself: “Always, when these resurrections took place, the distant scene engendered around the common sensation had for a moment grappled, like a wrestler, with the present scene.” [Toujours, dans ses résurrections-là, le lieu lointain engendré autour de la sensation commune s’était accouplé un instant, comme un lutteur, au lieu actuel.]70 Since the present moment always wins, all old sensations are “pushed back into the depths of time,” and it remains unclear why the narrator is overcome by joy in most other privileged moments. Another important observation is that the “same felicity as in the case of the madeleine,” which according to Deleuze takes hold of the narrator before he is overcome by sadness, is absent from the narrator’s description of the involuntary memory of his grandmother. The narrator describes the “disruption of [his] entire being” as follows: “But scarcely had I touched the topmost button than my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, a divine presence, I was shaken with sobs, tears streamed from my eyes.” The narrator bends over to undo his boots, touches the top button and immediately starts to cry. His grandmother, he goes on, has come to rescue him from his “barrenness of spirit,” but this rescue does not involve the pleasure of joyful involuntary memories. The narrator is rescued from the dull indifference he has been feeling, but this rescue has as its essence the certainty that is bound up with his grandmother’s presence. It does not bring him felicity, but a “divine presence” which returns to him the living past. Similarly, Swann does not first feel joy and then pain when the little musical phrase reminds him of Odette. It is Odette’s presence

70

Proust, Time Regained, 267; Le temps retrouvé, 453.

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provoked by the music that brings him the certainty that she no longer cares for him, just like the narrator’s grandmother’s presence makes him realize that she is dead. The narrator feels the pain of mourning and guilt as a result. He does not, as Deleuze suggests, feel “the certainty of death and nothingness.” The pain of the memory breaks through the state of indifference because he is certain it brings him something real, i.e. his grandmother as present. The certainty concerns something more meaningful than anything he has remembered or perceived voluntarily, and is far different from the “certainty of nothingness” Deleuze mentions. 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.”71 Adorno’s methodological claim suggests the idea that the knowledge derived from the certainty described above can only be attained by someone who is open to involuntary memory. For this openness to exist, it is not enough merely to listen, to, as Adorno puts it, have no skin; it also involves attentiveness to involuntary memory and the courage to pursue it. Undamaged experience, according to Adorno, is produced only in memory,72 and the narrator affirms this claim in Le temps retrouvé: “Memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present—the past just as it was at the moment when it was itself the present—suppresses the mighty dimension of Time which is the dimension in which life is lived.” [La mémoire, en introduisant le passé dans le présent sans le modifier, tel qu’il était au moment où il était le présent, supprime précisément cette grande dimension du Temps suivant laquelle la vie se realise.]73 But the certainty of these memories has to be both pursued and acknowledged by the self to whom the experiences belong. This self must be not only vulnerable, but also attentive and courageous; if these traits are lacking, involuntary memory remains but a feeling.74 Further investigation is needed

71 Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature. Volume Two. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 316. 72 Ibid., 317. 73 Proust, Time Regained, 506; 608. 74 Wassenaar speaks of the passive attitude of the self in situations of involuntary memory as one of “affective vulnerability” but disregards the activity required of the self if any knowledge is to be gained from the experience of involuntary memory (Wassenaar, Proustian Passions, 210). The nature of this activity will be further explored in Chapter Two.

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to show the extent to which the subject both is responsible for and has control over this attitude.75 It has become clear that there is a significant element of luck involved in the attainment of felt knowledge: circumstances need to be favorable both within and without the subject. In the next chapter, I will investigate the circumstances within the subject that allow him or her to gain felt knowledge from privileged moments. These circumstances are related to the attitude I call courageous vulnerability, but before developing the notion of this attitude, a few more remarks on what I have called felt knowledge are in order.

Felt Knowledge This knowledge is marked by a strong feeling of certainty, whether the memory is painful or pleasant. I have already pointed out that Jephcott and Fisher offer useful tools to approach this certainty, but with some restrictions. Though helpful in the case of pleasant involuntary memories, the scope of the terms “privileged moment” and “wonder” must be widened in order to include all the narrator’s experiences of this special certainty. Whether the certainty of a privileged moment is mixed up with pleasure or pain, it guarantees the truth of what is underneath the couvercle, and is bound up with the fact that the moment did not come on demand, but unexpectedly. All different kinds of privileged moments have as their essential character that the narrator, as he himself claims in Le temps retrouvé, “was not free to choose them” [je n’étais pas libre de les choisir] which is their mark of authenticity.76 “It is likely,” Jones writes, “that the narrator takes truth to be its own guarantee, without need of any criterion.”77 This suggestion needs to be slightly adjusted because there is in fact a criterion: what is hidden in a privileged moment is true because it is unpolished by the will, and the certainty bound up with the pain or pleasure experienced guarantees its authenticity. Not only is the narrator convinced that the knowledge gained from a privileged moment pertains to the truth, he also

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Beckett, Proust, 12. Proust, Time Regained, 274; Le temps retrouvé, 457. 77 Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 160. Jones mentions involuntary memory only in passing and describes it as an “integral but not a dominant part of the epistemological structure I outline.” Ibid., 148. 76

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maintains that the truth to be found here is more profound and more complex than the facts of the intellect and those recalled in voluntary memory. With this certainty comes the demand to uncover the reality hidden by the couvercle when, for instance, he fails to recognize the three trees seen from Mme de Villeparisis’ carriage. The question to be addressed now concerns the certainty which pleasurable and painful privileged moments of reminiscence appear to have in common. Is the experience of this certainty the same in both kinds of involuntary memory even though the emotions that accompany them are different? I will argue that it is, but that in the painful cases it is immediately clear what this certainty is about, whereas, in the joyful moments, that of which one is certain needs to be pursued. In the case of painful involuntary memories, the reality hidden by the couvercle overwhelms the subject and must be admitted and acknowledged rather than pursued. Laziness, in these cases, does not have the chance to become an obstacle, at least not before what was hidden has been uncovered. It does, however, become an issue after the initial pain of the moment has subsided. The narrator, as will be discussed in chapters Four, Five, and Six, will be convinced that what he has found in a privileged moment is true, but this does not mean that he will act differently as a result. The insights gained from the involuntary recollection of his grandmother, for instance, are not brought into practice in any of his relationships to loved ones who are still alive. The three clear instances of painful involuntary memory in À la recherche are, first, the passage in which Swann hears the sonata composed by Vintueil and is reminded of his love for Odette; second, the sorrowful memory of Gilberte brought to the narrator by the words of a stranger he happens to overhear; third, the narrator’s memory of his grandmother. To strengthen my remarks on the third recollection, I will briefly discuss the first two recollections and the certainty experienced by the individuals to whom they belong. Towards the end of Du côté de chez Swann, when Odette is no longer showing any real interest in him, Swann visits a soirée where no-one knows Odette. Swann is painfully aware of this fact and feels utterly alone; Odette is “entirely absent” [entièrement absente]. Then the orchestra starts to play: But suddenly it was as though she had entered, and this apparition was so agonizingly painful that his hand clutched at his heart. . . . And before Swann had had time to understand what was happening and to say to himself: “It’s the little phrase from Vintueil’s sonata—I mustn’t listen!”,

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chapter one all his memories of the days when Odette had been in love with him, which he had succeeded until that moment in keeping invisible in the depths of his being, deceived by this sudden reflection of a season of love whose sun, they supposed, had dawned again, had awakened from their slumber, had taken wing and risen to sing maddeningly in his ears, without pity for his present desolation, the forgotten strains of happiness. [Mais tout à coup ce fut comme si elle était entrée, et cette apparition lui fut une si déchirante souffrance qu’il dut porter la main à son coeur. . . . Et avant que Swann eût eu le temps de comprendre, et de se dire: “C’est la petite phrase de la sonate de Vinteuil, n’écoutons pas! ” tous ses souvenirs du temps où Odette était éprise de lui, et qu’il avait réussi jusqu’à ce jour à maintenir invisibles dans les profondeurs de son être, trompés par ce brusque rayon du temps d’amour qu’ils crurent revenu, s’étaient réveillés et, à tire-d’aile, étaient remontés lui chanter éperdument, sans pitié pour son infortune présente, les refrains oubliés du bonheur.]78

Without pity for his present misfortune, the memories of his time with Odette return to Swann. Despite the intense suffering, he no longer feels alone: “He felt that he was no longer in exile and alone since she [the little phrase], who addressed herself to him, was whispering to him of Odette.” [Il ne se sentait plus exilé et seul puisque, elle, qui s’adressait à lui, lui parlait à mi-voix d’Odette.]79 With the pain, it is as if Odette has entered the room, accompanied by all the memories which up to that point he had managed to carefully suppress. Odette is present to Swann as the grandmother is present to the narrator and both Swann and the narrator again feel what it was like to be with the person they loved. As I mentioned above, it is just because of the pain of this presence-in-absence that Swann feels rather than just rationally concludes that Odette’s love for him is gone forever. This in itself is nothing new to him, since, on a purely intellectual level, he has known this for a long time; still, the insight he is left with as a result of la petite phrase is of a different nature because it strikes him with undeniable certainty. The second example of a painful involuntary memory is found in À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, where the narrator describes how his new-found indifference with respect to Gilberte is only “intermittent,” disrupted by moments when he loves and misses her still. During his first stay in Balbec, he happens to overhear a stranger pronounce the

78 79

Proust, Swann’s Way, 490–1; Du côté de chez Swann, 345–6. Ibid., 494; 348.

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phrase “the head of the Ministry of Posts and his family” [la famille du directeur du ministère des Postes], an insignificant string of words which, he says, should not have affected him since, at this time, he did not even know this family: Instead, it gave me at once an acute twinge, which a self that had for the most part long since been outgrown in me felt at being parted from Gilberte. For I had never given another thought to a conversation which Gilberte had had with her father in my hearing, in which allusion was made to the Secretary to the Ministry of Posts and his family. . . . What best reminds us of a person is precisely what we have forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). [Mais il me causa une vive souffrance, celle qu’éprouvait un moi, aboli pour une grande part depuis longtemps, à être séparé de Gilberte. C’est que jamais je n’avais repensé à une conversation que Gilberte avait eue devant moi avec son père, relativement à la famille du “directeur du ministère des Postes.” . . . Ce qui nous rappelle le mieux un être, c’est justement ce que nous avions oublié (parce que c’était insignifiant, et que nous lui avons ainsi laissé toute sa force).]80

Just like the taste of the madeleine, this trivial phrase had been forgotten and had thereby retained its freshness. Just like Swann’s petite phrase, the words overwhelm the narrator with a “live pain,” different from the dull misery experienced by both the narrator and Swann in the absence of their loved ones. Thanks to our forgetfulness, the narrator explains, we can, from time to time, experience things the way an older, “abolished” self used to see them, when we were younger, still in love, jealous, etc. What is added to this forgotten perspective, and what makes it not an old but a new view on things, is the present moment which colors the involuntary recollection. The past is not relived but regained in felt knowledge. Another factor which marks both Swann’s and the narrator’s case is that the abstract utterance: “I am sad because . . .” is replaced by very particular memories and feelings that express the sadness much more vividly than any label could. Before their respective involuntary memories both protagonists verbalize their misery and tell themselves they are sad, but the sadness felt during the moments of reminiscence is far too complex and individual to be expressed by the abstract and empty

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643.

Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 300; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 642–

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word “sad.” The problem of the inadequacy of language to express individual feelings is merely hinted at here but will be an important theme in the discussion of Bergson in the next chapter. Another observation which should be brought to the attention again is that both the narrator and Swann are hurt by their memories because they bring them the certainty that their past relationships are over and will never again be the way they were. Neither Swann nor the narrator still cherish a real hope that their past love can be rekindled, so the certainty does not add a fact to the facts already in place; rather, what was known already on a factual, intellectual, level, is now felt as well, thus making the knowledge of the situation gain in depth and significance. In both situations, the subject becomes fully conscious of the undeniable truth about another person’s (past) relation to himself, and this certainty brings with it the pain of knowing that the truth is irreversible and undeniable.

Epistemic Responsibility As I noted in the Introduction, the special brand of virtue epistemology which Lorraine Code calls “responsibilism” can help understand the felt knowledge derived from a privileged moment. After the discussion of felt knowledge above, the rough outline of Code’s position in this section is meant to contextualize this kind of knowledge and to present a basic framework for my epistemological claims. My remarks on Code’s theory are not meant to be exhaustive and are included here for the sole purpose of contextualization. I turn to Code because she argues that we need to see the normativity that is involved in knowledge claims. This normativity, I will argue in this section, is an important feature of the felt knowledge which the narrator gains from his privileged moments. To say knowledge is a normative notion means that claims about knowledge are value judgments. When we say someone knows something, we understand this person to be in a good epistemic position. Once the normative character of knowledge has been recognized, it is the epistemologist’s task to explain what kind of normativity is involved. In a virtue-based approach to the normativity of knowledge, epistemic evaluations are regarded as agent evaluations: right epistemic behavior is defined in terms of the epistemic virtues possessed by the cognitive

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agent.81 Virtue epistemology is analogous to virtue ethics: “A virtue is a stable and successful disposition: an innate ability or an acquired habit, that allows one to reliability achieve some good. An intellectual virtue will then be a cognitive excellence: an innate ability or acquired habit that allows one to reliably achieve some intellectual good, such as truth in a relevant matter.”82 Knowledge can be described as success through virtue: we praise someone for having knowledge if this knowledge has been attained by means of the agent’s own abilities. Even though the world does not usually deceive us about simple perceptions, the effort one has to put into knowing well is of central importance. Code recognizes this point and argues for a virtue approach centered on effort and responsibility. In “Responsibility and Rhetoric,” a rereading of her work on epistemic responsibility, she explains that the idea behind what she calls responsibilism is that things known unequivocally form only a small part of our total knowledge.83 Once one pays attention to the more complex epistemic circumstances of real life, it becomes apparent that cognitive agents make choices about how they know the world. This leads to questions about epistemic responsibility.84 A knower can be praised or blamed for holding certain beliefs and this praise or blame, according to Code, should be directed toward the cognitive agent since virtues accrue to the possessor of cognitive faculties

81 See John Greco, “Virtue Epistemology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 6 Oct. 2004, 20 Jan. 2005, 1. 82 Ibid., 3. 83 Lorraine Code, “Responsibility and Rhetoric,” Hypatia, Vol. 9, Issue 1 (Winter 1994). 84 Ibid., 3. Code speaks of intellectual virtue as “epistemic character,” making the scope of epistemology include matters such as epistemic credibility, trust and obligation. The theory that Code calls responsibilism puts the emphasis on the knower’s activity rather than on her reliability in reaching the truth: “The concept ‘responsibility’ can allow emphasis upon the active nature of knowers/believers, whereas the concept ‘reliability’ cannot…. A knower/believer has an important degree of choice with regard to modes of cognitive structuring, and is accountable for these choices; whereas a ‘reliable’ knower could simply be an accurate, and relatively passive, recorder of experience. One speaks of a ‘reliable’ computer, not a ‘responsible’ one” (Code, Epistemic Responsibility, 51). Code also recognizes the distinct disadvantages of this shift in emphasis: “I must admit, however, that ‘reliability’ maintains a closer connection with truth and warrantability than responsibility can establish. I opt for ‘responsibilism’ for the advantages cited [see citation in main text], despite this clear disadvantage” (Code, Epistemic Responsibility, 51, footnote). Good cognitive activity depends to an important extent on the efforts of the subject and as a result “knowers, or would-be knowers, come to bear as much of the onus of credibility as ‘the known’” (ibid., 9).

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and not to the faculties themselves.85 In line with Code’s remarks, we feel that the narrator of À la recherche is to be praised when, as a result of an involuntary memory, he reconsiders his beliefs about his relation to his grandmother. The normativity involved in knowledge claims will be reflected in Chapter Five, where William James’ account of what he calls the “will to believe” will be the topic of discussion. Code further assumes that there are degrees of knowledge, a fact often neglected by the traditional approach in epistemology which discusses only the more straightforward knowledge claims like “the lamp is on the table” or “the coffee is in the cup.”86 In the case of claims like these, knowledge does not admit of degrees: the claim is either true or false. There are, however, situations in which one can have knowledge even if the knowledge is imperfect. Code claims that self-knowledge, for instance, can be gained through introspection, a process that will most likely never lead to perfectly clear knowledge but that can lead to some knowledge nonetheless. This means that the knowledge which the narrator acquires about himself and his actions towards others may be incomplete but should still be classified as knowledge. As I mentioned above, the narrator of À la recherche often refrains from pursuing the felt knowledge of a privileged moment, and the significance of his repeated failure will become clear in the chapters to come. In what follows, it must be kept in mind that, especially in the case of an individual’s epistemic life, knowledge, belief and understanding overlap and cannot be strictly separated. Code states that “the emerging picture will be better for this inexactness. My aim is to understand epistemic life as it is, not in a tidied up, abstracted version.”87 The picture of felt knowledge emerging from my study is true to Code’s claims about “epistemic life as it is.” I will put into practice the alternative proposed by Code and engage what she calls “‘thickly’ descriptive accounts,”88 using À la recherche as my source.

85

Ibid., 57. In looking back on her book Epistemic Responsibility, Code points to a few difficulties that followed from the fact that her approach to epistemology allowed for a wider spectrum of knowledge claims: “The simple truth is that there has not been a readily available space within the discourse/rhetoric of epistemology into which this book could fit” (Code, “Responsibility and Rhetoric,” 5). “Traditional epistemologies foreclose discussions of responsibility” (ibid., 11). 87 Code, Epistemic Responsibility, 11; See also ibid., 222. 88 Ibid., 27. 86

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This approach allows for the ambiguity of lived experience. Intellectual virtue, according to Code, should be centered on “a respect for the normative force of ‘realism.’ This attitude involves a willingness to let things speak for themselves, a kind of humility toward the experienced world.”89 This “willingness to let things speak for themselves,” I will argue in Chapter Three, is in line with the radical empiricism proposed by William James and true to Marcel’s understanding of mystery.

Conclusion Every privileged moment appeals to the subject to investigate it. When a privileged moment concerns one’s relation to an other person, as it does in the case of the painful involuntary memories described above, the appeal takes on a distinctly moral character: there is an obligation to recognize one’s (blameworthy) actions. In Chapter Six, I will argue that it is in these situations that the attitude of courageous vulnerability is most difficult to maintain, because the openness that characterizes this attitude is vulnerable to the potentially painful certainty of felt knowledge. The reality found in involuntary memory upsets one’s self-image, because a forgotten part of the past makes one question the veridicality of the personality constructed based on voluntary memories (the loving grandson has to recognize himself as a selfish and petty child). Still, courageous vulnerability is the attitude required by any kind of involuntary memory. Sometimes the emphasis is on the pursuit of a memory, other times it is on the courageous decision to be vulnerable to hurtful certainties. Courageous vulnerability as I understand it is analogous to what Henri Bergson describes as the special capacity of the artist: an active perceiving of reality without the veil of habit (voluntary memory) that normally provides security. By emphasizing the courageous component of this attitude, ethical implications come into play: difficulties in establishing the certainty of felt knowledge must be recognized and overcome. In the next chapter, I will use Bergson’s aesthetics to gain a clearer view on the attitude of courageous vulnerability, thereby providing a groundwork for a further discussion of the ethical implications of the privileged moment in the context of the work of William James and, later, Gabriel Marcel.

89

Ibid., 20.

CHAPTER TWO

COURAGEOUS VULNERABILITY AND THE BERGSONIAN ARTIST

Introduction In this chapter, I will give a first sketch of the attitude of courageous vulnerability. I will use Henri Bergson’s description of the artist as the framework for my discussion, and show that the ethical attitude I propose is analogous to the aesthetic attitude described by Bergson. The sensitivity of the artist, Bergson argues, makes him or her open to impressions that escape the rest of us. The artist perceives otherness and individuality where the rest of us merely see different degrees of the same phenomenon, and makes use of this special ability in the creation of a work of art. Bergson does not make explicit the ethical aspects of the artist’s openness to difference, but it appears that the artist would most likely be a successful moral agent as well if he or she could make use of this special skill in the interaction with other people. In Chapters Four and Six, I will discuss the fact that the narrator of À la recherche, the Bergsonian artist par excellence, is unable to use the insights gained through his aesthetic sensitivity to change his actions concerning other people. His sensitivity allows him be acutely aware of the way in which he (mis)treats others, but this awareness does not cause him to treat them differently. The present chapter sets up the debate of these later chapters and argues that the openness required for the attainment of felt knowledge becomes a moral obligation when the felt knowledge concerns a person. As was shown in Chapter One, most privileged moments in À la recherche provoke some kind of aesthetic pleasure: all the privileged moments of the imagination are joyful impressions of something beautiful, and many of the privileged moments of memory are, like the madeleine episode, marked by a pleasure similar to the state of mind brought about by a work of art. The issue becomes more complicated when the narrator’s privileged moments involve memories of individuals, not in the way that the madeleine episode involves aunt Léonie, but in the way that the narrator remembers his grandmother when

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he bends over his boots in the hotel in Balbec. Here one encounters the often disregarded subcategory of privileged moments that bring pain instead of pleasure. The pain is in each instance connected to the fact that the person remembered has been, in some way, lost. The experience of this kind of privileged moment has a decidedly moral character: as was shown in the Introduction, the narrator acquires felt knowledge marked by guilt, shame, and regret when he thinks back on his grandmother.1 Courageous vulnerability is the attitude appropriate to the pursuit of this kind of knowledge, and I will show how this attitude can be best described as analogous to the aesthetic disposition described by Bergson and exemplified by the narrator of À la recherche.

Bergson: Intuition and Intellect For the narrator of À la recherche, art harbors truth and the artist’s obligation is a moral obligation to this truth. He claims: “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.” [À tout moment l’artiste doit écouter son instinct, ce qui fait que l’art est ce qu’il y a de plus réel, la plus austère école de la vie, et le vrai Jugement dernier.]2 The realities which the narrator suspected beneath the couvercles described in Chapter One, and which, he felt, appealed to him to be regained, form the subject matter which the artist conveys in his work. The artist is sensitive to couvercles, to privileged moments, and follows his or her instinct to get to the core of these moments. The artist’s instinct, praised by the narrator of À la recherche, can be better understood through an account of what Bergson calls (artistic) intuition. In what follows, I will sketch the relevance of Bergson’s notion of intuition and show how it is an epistemological condition for the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability.

1 It is important to bear in mind that, according to the narrator, this moral component is present in all privileged moments: one has an obligation to regain the time lost, hidden by a couvercle. The narrator believes we have an obligation to the forgotten past to remember and restore it; to him, this obligation does not change in nature when it concerns a person. The aesthetic, for the narrator, is mixed up with the ethical. In chapters Four, Five, and Six I will discuss the problems which arise as a result. 2 Proust, Time Regained, 275; Le temps retrouvé, 458.

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In Chapter One, the two kinds of privileged moments were shown to have as an essential characteristic the fact that the narrator was not “free to choose them” [libre de les choisir].3 His response is within his control, but the occurrence of the privileged moment itself is not. The narrator holds that the certainty forced upon him by a privileged moment is the mark of its authenticity. There is something at stake in a privileged moment, a reality to be discovered, and the narrator feels an obligation to uncover this réalité pressentie. This obligation, it can now be added, is analogous to the task the Bergsonian artist experiences, and which consists in breaking through our habitual ways of perceiving and thinking in order to uncover a truer state of things. The Bergsonian artist follows his or her intuition (what the narrator calls “instinct”) and so reveals a reality which is covered up for the rest of us. The reality exposed by the artist is different from the insights reached by the intellect: “Ideas formed by pure intelligence have no more than a logical, a possible truth, they are arbitrarily chosen.” [Les idées formées par l’intelligence pure n’ont qu’une vérité logique, une vérité possible, leur élection est arbitraire.]4 In light of the discussion in Chapter One, I suggest that the ideas which the narrator refers to here, lack the necessity of the felt knowledge gained in privileged moments. Though the ideas of the intellect may be correct, we cannot emotionally know them to be true, the narrator claims; the reality revealed in a privileged moment, however, is known to be true because of the certainty and authority which accompany it. In Chapter Five, which will deal with William James’ ideas on mystical experience and what he calls the “will to believe,” the certainty of the privileged moment will be reflected in James’ claim that in everyday life, we are all absolutists. James claims that, though there are things we feel we know to be true with absolute certainty, it is the task of the philosopher to subject these absolutist claims to empiricist scrutiny.5 James would acknowledge that the certainty experienced by the narrator in his privileged moments appears to him as absolute, just as a mystical experience can be absolutely authoritative for the mystic. The narrator 3

Ibid., 274; 457. Ibid., 275; 458. 5 James states that no claim, however authoritative, can ever be regarded as final and incorrigible. I will accept this view for the sake of the argument, and I will assume that James, too, would agree that the simplest and most obvious claims regarding, for instance, mathematical equations, should not be subjected to the kind of empiricist scrutiny he proposes. 4

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and the mystic feel themselves compelled to believe the truth of their privileged moments, and they have a right to believe them; this does not mean, however, that what they believe on the basis of their experiences can never be altered or corrected. The truth and reality of the privileged moment will be investigated from a Jamesian perspective in the next chapter, and again in Chapter Five. Here it suffices to note that James recognizes the absolutist strain in all of us, and that this phenomenon calls for our attention. Putting off the discussion about the truth and reality with which this everyday absolutism presents us, this chapter deals with Bergson’s aesthetics in which the truth of art is simply posited as a fact: the artist has access to a truth which we, due to our perceptual habits, cannot reach. According to Bergson, “there is a reality that is external and yet given immediately to the mind,”6 and the artist makes use of a refined form of common sense which recognizes this external reality as mobility: states and things are not static but constantly changing. This perception of reality as a constant flux relates to Bergson’s notion of la durée, to be discussed below. The views of Gabriel Marcel, the philosopher who will help define the explicitly moral content of courageous vulnerability in the chapters to come, are in agreement with the views of Bergson in regards to the task of the artist. About literature, Marcel says in The Mystery of Being: “The novelist communicates directly to us something which ordinary conditions of life condemn us merely to glance at.” James, as will become clear in the next chapter, offers a pragmatist perspective on the same issue when he addresses the “sentiment of rationality” and its relation to the faculty of wonder. The artist, Bergson, James, and Marcel agree, can show us new ways of perceiving, temporarily freeing us from the habits of the intellect. As Marcel writes: “I have no hesitation for my own part in saying that it is through the novelist’s power of creation that we can get our best glimpse of what lies behind and under the reverberatory power of facts.”7 The focus in this chapter will be on Bergson, but it serves to keep in mind the close affinity between Bergson, Marcel and James on the topic of art and the function of the artist. A careful account of the Bergsonian artist in this chapter, and additions to this account in the later chapters on James and Marcel,

6 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. T.E. Hulme (Indianapolis: The Library of Liberal Arts, 1955), 49. 7 Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 66.

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will show that the ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability is in fact implicit in, and in agreement with, the views of all three authors. As will become clear below, it is but a small step from aesthetic sensitivity to courageous vulnerability, and an understanding of the Bergsonian artist will offer most of the clues necessary to set up the analogy between the two. The first Bergsonian theme to be discussed in this context is the distinction between intuition and intellect, a distinction which will later be reflected in the works of William James and Gabriel Marcel. In his work Bergsonism, Deleuze explains that for Bergson, intuition is a method to distinguish between true and false problems. Intuition helps us see the mistakes made by the intellect, most notably the intellect’s tendency to see differences in degree where in fact there are differences in kind. This, according to Deleuze, is the “Bergsonian Leitmotif,” and it points to the most general error of thought: “Conceiving everything in terms of more and less, seeing nothing but differences in degree or differences in intensity where, more profoundly, there are differences in kind.”8 As Breeur explains in Vrijheid en bewustzijn (Freedom and Consciousness), our bodily awareness causes us to subject interiority to exteriority, which in turn leads us to think in terms of degree only. When, for instance, we sing a song, the high notes require more bodily effort than the ones that are within our range, and this leads us to think that the difference between the notes is quantitative rather than qualitative.9 Similarly, we tend to classify our emotions and feelings as more or less intense, and we say we are just a little sad or very sad as if there were a scale of sadness that can be used to determine the degree of our emotion. According to Bergson, we need to abstract from qualitative differences in order to have a grip on reality, to, as Breeur puts it, be able to count cows in a meadow. Using spatial terms to differentiate between exterior and interior states of affairs allows us to “homogenize reality.”10 Intuition helps us to become aware of this homogenizing tendency and to understand that the intellect abstracts. One feeling is never simply a watered-down or intensified version of another. The intuition tells us that every new element added to our experience “brings about a reorganization of the 8

Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 20. Roland Breeur, Vrijheid en bewustzijn: essays over Descartes, Bergson en Sartre (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), 100. 10 Ibid., 96 (my translation). 9

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whole, so that the meaning and sense of the past are constantly changing as a result of the circumstances in the present.”11 At the same time, the past is latently and non-explicitly present in the direction of our attention to the present. “Every new element is a necessary enrichment (enrichissement),”12 and this is why our sensations differ in kind and not in degree. A closer look at the difference between the intellect and the intuition will show why Bergson wants to establish the value of the latter and restrict the scope of the former. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson distinguishes two ways in which the human mind can know something: either by moving round an object, or by entering into it.13 The first way is the analytical method and has a decidedly practical purpose; it is the way in which our mind habitually works. Valuable and necessary though this approach to things may be, we must recognize the risk involved in this way of knowing: it leads us to consider things from a useoriented perspective only, disregarding the other aspects that are of no direct practical concern to us. As Deleuze observes: “perception is not the object plus something, but the object minus something, minus everything that does not interest us.”14 We easily get into the habit of selective perception, picking out those characteristics useful to us and reducing a thing to this limited set of properties. In “Bergson’s Theory of Art”, 15 T.E. Hulme emphasizes the force of habit in limiting our perception.16 Habit, he explains, prevents us from seeing things in their individuality. Because a person’s life is primarily centered around action, the human mind is in the habit of thinking in terms of degrees, concepts, and types, thereby ignoring uniqueness. Since we can never study an object from every possible angle (let alone from every possible angle at the same time), analysis necessarily stops at the relative: when a thing has been found to have enough things in common with several other things, it can be classified and needs no further study. In

11

Ibid., 107 (my translation). Ibid., 113 (my translation). 13 Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 21. 14 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 25. 15 T.E. Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” in Speculations (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, Inc., 1924). Hulme offers a clear account of Bergson’s theory of art. He argues that though Bergson did not invent a new theory of art, he did come up with a new and better vocabulary to capture the essence of theories already in existence. 16 Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art”, 146, 160, 167. Cf. Beckett, Proust, 12. 12

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analysis, Bergson claims, the object is reduced to elements “common to both it and other objects.”17 As such, the object is categorized in terms of degree, of more or less: it is more or less like something else and so receives its place on the scale. Bergson offers the example of a novel to illustrate the difference between analysis on the one hand and intuition on the other. Intuition is the way of knowing that involves entering into an object. In describing the protagonist of a story, for instance, an author can keep adding attributes and characteristics without ever achieving his or her goal of presenting the character “in its entirety.”18 Despite the long list of descriptions, the hero remains a flat character if the reader is not compelled to “enter into” the story and, in a way, coincide with the hero. By seeing things from the perspective of the protagonist, analysis changes into intuition. Analysis stops at the relative, but intuition aims for the absolute: a perfect grasp of the thing from within.19 The protagonist cannot be captured in symbols, the tools of analysis, because, Bergson claims, “description [leaves] me in the relative.”20 Similarly, the narrator of À la recherche points out that so-called “literature of description” has no value because “it is only beneath the surface of the little things which such a literature describes that reality has its

17

Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 24. Ibid., 22. This example can be compared to an example used by Gabriel Marcel in Creative Fidelity. Marcel explains that when we are asked to fill out identification forms, we realize that it is impossible to ever capture what we feel we are in any file or database. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 95. 19 Bergson gives two further examples to clarify his point. First, he argues that adding together all the translations into different languages of the same poem cannot render the inner meaning of the original. Second, he explains that the impression a Homeric passage makes on us can only be understood from within and not explained or described. Furthermore, Bergson clarifies his use of the word “perfect” in this context and explains that he uses the word, not in the sense of “closed,” or “done,” but as a synonym for “infinite:” a perfect grasp of the thing from within recognizes the thing’s mystery and the fact that is could never be exhaustively analyzed by listing its attributes or properties. In Chapter Three, Gabriel Marcel’s concept of “mystery” will be brought into the discussion to gain a better understanding of the sort of “thing” Bergson is referring to here. I will argue that Bergson’s theory suits the kind of phenomena which Marcel calls mysteries, and that even though Bergson speaks of “things,” the kind of understanding he proposes cannot be achieved in the case of simple objects. “Grasping the thing from within” implies that one is dealing with a thing which one can enter into, in some way or other. Bergson may be unclear on the issue, but I propose that the things at stake here are not soccer balls or bagels but mysteries in the Marcellian sense such as friendship, evil, love, presence, hope, etc. 20 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 22. 18

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hidden existence.” Art which is supposed to be “true to life” [vécu] is merely a “duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records” [double emploi si ennuyeux et si vain de ce que nos yeux voient et de ce que notre intelligence constate].21 This, the narrator would agree with Deleuze, is “the object minus something”, namely minus all the aspects of the thing that we have no use for. The absolute, as Bergson remarks, is infinite because there can be no end to the descriptions used in the attempt to capture it, and, as a result, it can be given in its entirety only in intuition. Bergson describes intuition as “the kind of intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible.”22 Gabriel Marcel touches on the same issue in his work and writes that “we have a naive idea of the story as reproducing life, . . . but anything like a reproduction of life, in the strict sense, is just what a story cannot provide.” Marcel continues: However concrete my thinking may be, we have to acknowledge that my life, as it has really been lived, falls outside my thinking’s present grasp. The past cannot be recaptured except in fragments made luminous by a lightning flash, a sudden glare, of memory, for which the fragments are present rather than past; and here, of course, we touch on the central experience around which Proust’s great novel was planned and built up.23

Of interest here is the fact that, though one can never sum up one’s life in a story, the narrator aims to do just this in his “story” À la recherche, using as a significant part of his subject matter those moments that elude description. This apparent contradiction explains the particular value of Proust’s novel: the narrator of À la recherche offers us his book as an instrument through which we can look at ourselves and our lives in a new way. This novel does not mean to reduce life to a story; it is meant to open up its readers to certain phenomena the significance of which they had not yet been aware. In this way, Proust avoids what Marcel calls the “very serious danger” to which “existential philosophy is at all times exposed,” namely “that of continuing to speak in the name of various kinds of deep inner experience, which are certainly the points of departure for everything that it affirms, but

21 22 23

Time Regained, 298; Le temps retrouvé, 473–4. Ibid., 23–4. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 155–6.

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which cannot be renewed at will. Thus the affirmations of existential philosophy are perpetually in danger of losing their inner substance, of ringing hollow.”24 Existential philosophy takes as its starting point experiences like the Proustian privileged moment, but, as the narrator has shown, these experiences come involuntarily and as such “cannot be renewed at will.” In the essay “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel remarks: “I am convinced that it is in drama and through drama that metaphysical thought grasps and defines itself in concreto.”25 Metaphysical thought must be rendered concrete because it will “ring hollow” if it remains abstract. Marcel argues that the “spirit of abstraction” must be denounced, and that drama and literature help to accomplish this.26 Throughout the chapters to come, it is important to bear in mind Marcel’s sympathy for literature and drama as complementary to, and perhaps a part of, existential philosophy. It is no coincidence that he refers to Proust’s novel several times in different philosophical works, and the affinity between Marcel’s philosophy and the middle volumes of À la recherche will be the topic of discussion in Chapter Four. Marcel’s caution where it comes to abstraction is one of the commonalities between him, Bergson, and James. Returning to Hulme’s discussion of Bergson’s theory of art, the suspicious attitude regarding abstraction that these philosophers will be shown to share will be further explained. Hulme describes the result of our mind’s habit to analyze as follows: “We only see stock types. We tend to see not the table but only a table.”27 We are in the habit of thinking in concepts and types because our intellect’s primary concern is with our survival. As Bergson explains in The Creative Mind, we need to have patterns to rely on, a certain order in reality that allows us to live our lives: “Our normal faculty of knowing is then essentially a power of extracting what stability and regularity there is in the flow of reality.”28 We need to be able to count

24

Ibid., 213. Gabriel Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism, trans. Manya Harari (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 26. 26 Paul Ricœur, Gabriel Marcel, Entretiens (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968), 104. Marcel states: “C’est précisément sur la base de l’ontologie, de la réflexion sur l’être que cette dénonciation de l’esprit d’abstraction devient non seulement possible, mais nécessaire.” Ibid., 104. 27 Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 159. 28 Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 111. See also Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 50. 25

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the cows in the meadow and therefore see several instances of the some type rather than different individuals, each just a cow, but not the cow. The intellect finds stability and regularity in analysis: through comparison and selection it is able to categorize and order, thereby ignoring the individuality of a thing as long as it has no direct practical use.29 The intellect, as is becoming clear, is not pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but because it has an interest it wants satisfied. It labels objects with concepts depending on their use.30 In order for a human being to survive, he or she must first of all be able to deal with objects in space, categorizing and classifying them in order to estimate the possible threats and benefits involved: “nature destined us to master and utilize matter.”31 These practical categories are necessary in order for us to survive and feel, at least to some degree, in control of our lives. At the same time, however, the habit of categorizing stands between us and experience as constantly changing rather than a static whole composed of stock types.32 Artists, Bergson holds, are able to overcome this habit and to perceive things in their unique individuality. They are not distracted by classification and conceptualization, and in their works show us a reality which we recognize, but were not able to see due to our utilitarian blinders. As Jephcott remarks, the function of art is twofold: it restores to our vision a “pristine intensity,” abolishing intellectual categories, and it shows us “a unity which is absent from normal experience,”33 that is, the normal experience of non-artists. Jephcott’s words clearly refer to the narrator’s privileged moments, and in what follows Bergson’s aesthetics will provide a groundwork for these moments as they were described in Chapter One, as well as a model for courageous vulnerability. 29 Henri Bergson, Laughter. An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans. Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), 151. “Life is action [and] implies the acceptance only of the utilitarian side of things . . . a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my conduct . . . a practical simplification of reality.” Ibid., 151. 30 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 38, 39. 31 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 91. 32 See also A.E. Pilkington, Bergson and his Influence. A Reassessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 13, and F.C.T. Moore, Bergson. Thinking Backwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22. The problem is related to what Bergson calls spatializing: the intellect, used to deal with external objects, tends to reduce everything to spatial terms: “The intellect is designed to study a part (i.e. matter) but we use it to study the whole; contradictions and obscurities necessarily arise.” Bergson, The Creative Mind, 44. 33 Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 272–3.

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The Task of the Artist In his essay on Bergson’s theory of art, Hulme distinguishes between live and dead metaphors. A live metaphor is new and therefore fresh. It has the power to convey a feeling because it has not yet become normal. What is true of live metaphors is true for art in general: it has the power to evoke and suggest the freshness of an experience.34 Because of this essential quality, art can be said to be “life-communicating.”35 Hulme points out the capacity of the artist to suggest things that normally slip through the rough mazes of ordinary language: In our minds—behind the commonplace conventional expression which conceals emotion—artists attain the original mood and induce us to make the same effort ourselves by rhythmical arrangements of words, which, thus organized and animated with a life of their own, tell us, or rather suggest, things that speech is not calculated to express.36

The artist recognizes that common nouns like “sadness,” “joy” or “sorrow” are too wide to accurately express the feelings they are meant to capture. What is needed is a “tight fit,” a way of describing and suggesting emotions that does justice to their particularity.37 In order to achieve this tight fit of the description and the thing described, of suggestion and the thing suggested, we are required, according to Bergson in The Creative Mind, to “break with certain habits of thinking and perceiving that have become natural to us.”38 We are in the habit of thinking and speaking in terms of degrees and stock types, perceiving genera rather than uniquely individual things. Again, we tend to see differences in degree where in fact there are differences in kind: we do not simply feel more or less happy, we feel, rather, a particular and unique happiness which is bound up with, on the one hand, the (latent) presence of the past which is directing our attention and, on the other, the circumstances of the present. The habits of the intellect are not in themselves bad; they are necessary to secure our survival and the stability of our day to day lives. What Bergson wants us to recognize is that our habits are useful ways of dealing with things, but that there is more to life than the useful. The human intellect is 34 35 36 37 38

Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 151. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 152–3. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 11, 35. Ibid., 167.

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utilitarian in nature and will have as its first reflex to think about things in terms of use.39 We should not, however, grant this tendency full reign. There are things that are not part of the material but of the mental world and these things cannot be successfully captured by the intellect which handles all things as if they were physical objects. Intuition, therefore, is a necessary complement to the intellect. The intellect is equipped to categorize and select, whereas the intuition is the faculty that can allow us a glimpse of the flux of experience.40 Intuition is an innate and highly refined form of common sense which can help us avoid the false problems that result when the intellect ventures out of its proper territory.41 Unfortunately, it is difficult for us to keep our intellect within its proper boundaries and to break with our habitual ways of thinking. It is much easier to think about everything in terms of degree because it gives us the impression that we have a grasp on things. Bergson, however, repudiates facility: “I recommend a certain manner of thinking which courts difficulty; I value effort above everything.”42 Art breaks with our perceptual habits and overcomes the selective and exclusive ways of the intellect because, as Bergson says in The Creative Mind, it dilates perception.43 The Bergsonian artist does not attempt to homogenize experience but sees differences in kind where the rest of us tend to see differences in degree. In Laughter, Bergson makes the following remark: “Between nature and ourselves, nay, between ourselves and our own consciousness a veil is interposed: a veil that is dense and opaque for the common herd,—thin, almost trans-

39 Compare this view to Heidegger’s discussion of “the they” and “everydayness” in Being and Time: “The they disburdens Dasein in its everydayness. Not only that; by disburdening it of its being, the they accomodates Dasein in its tendency to take things easily and make them easy. And since the they constantly accomodates Dasein, it retains and entrenches its stubborn dominance.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 127–8. 40 In explanation of this claim, Bergson remarks: “There is a certain analogy . . . between the art of reading . . . and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and the rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy.” Bergson, The Creative Mind, 102–3. 41 Donald R. Maxwell, The Abacus and the Rainbow. Bergson, Proust, and the Digital-Analogic Opposition (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1999), 49–50. 42 Bergson, The Creative Mind, 103. He requires of the mind “for each new problem, a completely new effort.” Ibid., 105. 43 Ibid., 185.

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parent, for the artist and the poet.”44 Artists, he continues, have souls that are “more detached from life;” nature has “forgotten to rivet the perception to the need.” Because of this, artists can fulfill the ambition of art, which is to reveal nature and individual mental states: the artist can reveal the “undefiled essence” of an “original mood.”45 The question which presents itself here is whether Bergson is justified in seeing artists in this privileged way. Bergson claims that it is the function of the artist to pierce through our utilitarian habits that separate us from what Bergson calls la durée (duration): a becoming that endures, a continuity marked by heterogeneity. I will here briefly discuss la durée and its importance for the Bergsonian project in order to address this question. Rather than give a full account of la durée, I will comment on Bergson’s notion as it relates to À la recherche. I will argue that the perceived similarities between Proust’s and Bergson’s conceptions of time are at worst mistaken and at best disputable. I will refrain from discussing influences but instead sketch a few of the problems which result from a comparison of the two authors on the notion of la durée. My simple aim in the next paragraphs is to emphasize that an integration of Proust’s and Bergson’s work is more fruitful when the topic of comparison is aesthetics. La durée, Deleuze explains in his work Bergsonism, “offers us a succession that is purely internal, without exteriority,”46 and the faculty of intuition offers access to this duration, a “succession sans distinction.”47 Bergson wishes to distinguish his durée, a time of becoming, from time as measurable. This is why F.C.T. Moore proposes to translate la durée as “durance” rather than “duration;” according to Moore, the English word durance better expresses “the fact or property of going through time,” thereby doing justice to Bergson’s distinction.48 I will not adopt Moore’s translation, but merely use his acute observation

44

Bergson, Laughter, 151. Bergson, Laughter, 156. “Art always aims at what is individual . . . something which has once happened and can never be repeated.” Ibid., 161. 46 Deleuze, Proust and Signs, 37. 47 Breeur, Vrijheid en Bewustzijn, 100–101. This flux, I argue, can be compared to the privileged moment as described by Jephcott. In a privileged moment, one experiences concrete time as a “single evolving totality,” where intervals disappear; time is not broken down into pieces by the rational mind but is experienced as a continuity of past, future and present. This is the true time of the privileged moment, different from the “everyday time,” which, though practical, impoverishes the awareness of the present. 48 Moore, Thinking Backwards, 58. 45

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to draw attention to the fact that Bergsonian change should not be viewed as reducible to a succession of states. When change is analyzed as a succession of this sort, the different states which change is supposedly “going through” are still presented as ontologically and epistemologically prior to change itself. In order to avoid this conception of change, Deleuze speaks of la durée as a purely interior succession without exteriority. As Fernand Vial points out: “La durée vraie est une ligne continue dont tous les éléments se compénètrent intimement sans conserver aucune individualité numérique.”49 It is important to note that according to Bergson, la durée is creative, enriching itself as le devenir progresses, and it is here that one of the important differences with Proust can be found. Because both Proust and Bergson pay a lot of attention to the issues of time, memory, and becoming, it is tempting to assume that Proustian time is the literary equivalent of Bergsonian duration. The main problem with this identification is best described by Robert Champigny who writes: “D’une manière antique et anti-bergsonienne, c’est dans le statique que Proust essaie de placer la valeur.”50 In L’évolution créatrice, Bergson claims that philosophers traditionally consider the immutable to be more valuable than the mutable. Proust, Champigny argues, remains faithful to this classical conception while Bergson makes le devenir into something positive in its own right and calls it la durée. The flight of time, for Proust, is insecure and something from which one tries to escape; in the end, however, one will have no choice but to succumb to it. A crystallization, such as love, is a construct imposed on time, not a lived experience. In opposition to Proust’s desire to escape time, Bergson holds that I am my durée. Champigny proposes the following distinction: in “le devenir proustien,” we are what we have, whereas in “la durée bergsonienne,” we are what we do. A Proustian cannot identify him or herself with a process of becoming but has to cling to something more static: “il recherche une possession de soi par le souvenir, il la cherche d’une manière qu’on peut dire mystique. L’oeuvre de Proust reflète la quête d’une possession spontanée.”51 The issue of having and the important role played by posses-

49 Fernand Vial, “Le Symbolisme Bergsonien du Temps Dans L’Oeuvre de Proust,” PMLA, vol. 55, no. 4 (Dec., 1940), 1210. 50 Robert Champigny, “Temps et Reconnaissance chez Proust et quelques philosophes,” PMLA, vol. 73, no. 1, (Mar., 1958), 131. 51 Ibid., 130.

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sive love in À la recherche will be discussed in Chapter Four. Proust’s narrator’s desire to pin down and secure the perfect moment, the ideal mistress, the most overwhelming aesthetic experience, is linked to a sense of actual or imminent loss: if one is what one has, then the progression of time is not a creative but a destructive process in which dear possessions constantly deteriorate or fall away. According to Vial: “C’est une des douleurs les plus vives de Marcel Proust que de ne pouvoir immobiliser le mouvement, arrêter ce déroulement incessant, faire des tranches dans ces tableaux mouvants, des coupures dans le courant de la vie psychologique.”52 For Proust, becoming is not the joyous process which it is for Bergson: “Proust laisse le devenir à sa négativité traditionelle et cherche la positivité et la valeur dans un cas priviligié de la mémoire contemplative.”53 Returning to Bergson’s conception of the artist, it can now be said that what the artist reveals to us non-artists is the enduring process of becoming which is la durée. The artist, it appears, has access to “le courant profond” described by Bergson in Time and Free Will, from which he or she can bring parts to the surface without completely destroying their essential fluidity.54 For the artist, “le moi profond” ruptures the outside crust of “le moi superficiel et statique.”55 The narrator of À la recherche clearly agrees with Bergson that the artist has the special ability to reveal psychological states and other aspects of the world in a fresh way, but the agreement ends where this revelation is applied to their different conceptions of time. Not only is Proustian time different from Bergsonian duration, but Bergson does not distinguish between voluntary and involuntary memory. For Bergson, duration is an itself enriching process of growth, and because I am my durée, I carry the whole of my past with me. The only direct reference to Bergson in À la recherche is found in Sodome et Gomorrhe, where the narrator criticizes exactly this Bergsonian idea. According to Bergson, the narrator observes, “we possess all our memories, but not the faculty of recalling them. . . . What, then, is a memory which we do not recall?” [Nous possédons tous nos souvenirs, sinon la faculté de nous les

52

Vial, “Le Symbolisme Bergsonien,” 1201. Champigny, “Temps et Reconnaissance,” 133. 54 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1971), 133. 55 Ibid., 172. 53

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rappeler. . . . Mais qu’est-ce qu’un souvenir qu’on ne se rappelle pas?]56 With his notion of involuntary memory, the narrator seeks to explain the fact that we do not have access to the whole of our past, and that the things we remember in voluntary memory are not always reliable. Bergson, on the other had, claims that our complete past is available to us in an intuitive grasp of la durée. Because my primary concern in this chapter is Bergson’s aesthetics, I will discuss the different theories presented by the narrator of À la recherche and Bergson on the topics of time and memory no further. It does serve, however, to briefly address the question whether Bergson is justified in seeing artists in this privileged way. Even though the narrator and Bergson disagree on what exactly is revealed by the artist, they are in strong agreement on the attitude of the artist and his or her ability to reveal to us things we are unable to see for ourselves. Does Bergson claim that there could not be other such kinds of people? Neither Bergson nor the narrator explicitly mention other people with this special ability, and the emphasis placed by both on the truth found in art makes it appear that the artist really is the only kind of privileged individual. I will argue that the special position of the artist for both Bergson and the narrator can be explained by the fact that neither Bergson nor the narrator separate the ethical from the aesthetic. If the best artist is at the same time the ideal moral agent, and artistic sensitivity is a requirement for the acquisition of moral understanding, then there can be no other people who can rival the artist’s power of revelation. In this chapter and again in chapters Four and Six, I will separate the ethical from the aesthetic in my description of courageous vulnerability, and thereby create room for non-artist moral agents. First, however, the description of the Bergsonian artist must be further developed. According to Hulme, and in line with the discussion of la durée above, the process of artistic creation can be described as one of discovery and the disentanglement of interiority and exteriority.57 “Art has no other object than to brush aside the utilitarian symbols . . . everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself.”58 Society and reason provide us with an outside crust,

56

Sodom and Gomorrah, 522; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 374. Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 149. Also: “Art merely reveals, it never creates.” Ibid., 151. 58 Bergson, Laughter, 157. Cf. Jephcott’s description of the privileged moment: in the privileged moment, the functional relationships between objects disappear and are “replaced by a more complex system.” Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 16–19. 57

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making us less sensitive, like the surface of a planet, that covers up “the inner fire of individual passions.”59 The artist discovers the individuality and uniqueness of things, hidden to common people, and disentangles them from the limitations of habit and everyday utilitarian perception. In doing so, the artist does not invent but reveal: he or she shows us what was there all along but unnoticed by us to whom it was invisible because of the veil of habit. The narrator comes to a very similar conclusion in Le temps retrouvé: I had come to 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. [Ainsi, j’étais déjà arrivé à cette conclusion que nous ne sommes nullement libres devant l’œuvre d’art, que nous ne la faisons pas à notre gré, mais que préexistant à nous, nous devons, à la fois parce qu’elle est nécessaire et cachée, et comme nous ferions pour une loi de la nature, la découvrir.]60

Both Bergson and the narrator claim that art is primarily revelation and not invention. As will become clear in Chapter Four, the narrator appears to reserve the element of invention for the social or romantic sphere: the lover ascribes to the beloved all manner of beautiful characteristics and so creates an object of love. Habit then allows the lover to see only the product of his imagination and not the person which inspired it. The artist, on the other hand, pierces through our habitual way of perceiving things and reveals the world in a new and fresh way. The artist invents, Bergson and the narrator would agree, but only in so far as he or she creates a new way to reveal, or, as the narrator would say, a new optical instrument. As Bergson explains in Time and Free Will: “The object of art is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our personality, and thus to bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness.”61 Or, in Hulme’s words: “In each art, the artist picks 59 Bergson claims that we can catch a glimpse of this inner tension in drama. When moved by a dramatic work, our present life, for a moment, appears as something unreal and conventional. Bergson, Laughter, 158–60. Compare the passage from À la recherche which describes the trees of Hudimesnil as more real than the surrounding things and people: the latter have become like a novel, while the trees are the reality one finds after looking up from the pages. Proust, Within a Budding Grove, 407; À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 719. 60 Proust, Time Regained, 276–7; Le temps retrouvé, 459. 61 Bergson, Time and Free Will, 14.

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out of reality something which we, owing to a certain hardening of our perceptions, have been unable to see ourselves.”62 As was pointed out in the Introduction, the narrator of À la recherche remarks that his readers will not be “his” readers, “but readers of their own selves” through his book which functions as an optical instrument.63 Hulme shows that art involves obligation by involving the notion of sincerity. In answer to the question how we know a work of art is genuine, he writes: “By the very effort it forces us to make against our predispositions in order to see sincerely.” The attempt made by the artist to lift the veil compels our imitation and the work of art is an example which we take as a lesson. “The efficacy of the lesson is the exact standard of the genuineness of the work,” exactly because “truth bears within itself a power of conversion, which is the sign that enables us to recognize it.”64 This issue will be taken up in Chapter Five where the discussion will center around James’ theory of mystical experience and the narrator’s conviction that privileged moments bring truth. Chapter Six will then question this supposed “power of conversion” and focus on the fact that the narrator does not change anything about his actions as a result of the felt knowledge he has found in privileged moments. I here mention this problem only in passing, and I will put off the discussion of the moral implications of this issue until after William James and Gabriel Marcel have been brought into the debate. In order to gain a better understanding of the Bergsonian artist, I will now turn to what Bergson regards as “the problem of language.” As has become clear already, the mind of the artist is naturally detached from practical concerns and the necessities of action; in other words, the artist perceives for the sake of perceiving.65 The artist is not like the rest of us from whom, in Bergson’s words, “Life demands that we put on blinders, that we look neither to the right, nor to the left nor behind

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Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 156. Proust, Time Regained, 509. Le temps retrouvé, 610 (see Introduction). As Jephcott puts it: Proust’s work is an optical instrument “through which the reader can recognize in his own experience a degree of meaning and value which would otherwise remain invisible.” Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 299. 64 Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 161. 65 It is important to note that according to Bergson, this detachment is beyond our control. It is a “glitch” in the natural process, a “mistake” in the sense that two functions normally connected are operating independently of each other: perception and the need for action. The artist’s perception is not limited or skewed by the mind’s focus on action. Compare to Jones: “He who best achieves knowledge is the artist who follows his instinct.” Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 160. 63

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us, but straight ahead in the direction we have to go.”66 Language often serves a communicative and utilitarian purpose and so reinforces our habit of thinking in terms of concepts and classifications. Bergson recognizes that the artist has to overcome this aspect of language, and lead us to see that abstract words, applicable to a multitude of things, can never adequately express individuality. Here again Bergson agrees with the narrator that the artist has an obligation and a task to fulfill. As will become clear, the narrator of À la recherche shows the significance of Bergson’s theory by self-example.

The Problem of Language and the Freshness of Experience As was pointed out before, according to Bergson, we perceive the classification of things, not their individuality (unless the individuality serves some practical purpose). As a result of need, we do not see the individual things but are only reading labels.67 Language, in its everyday communicative mode, affirms and reinforces the distance between the label we give to a thing and the thing in its unique individuality.68 As such, language has a masking power, which applies not only to external objects, “but even our own mental states are screened from us in their inmost, their personal aspect, in the original life they possess.”69 As a result, even our own individuality escapes us. As the narrator of À la recherche puts it, even our strongest feelings eventually become “merely a word which we do not understand” [ils ne sont pour nous qu’un mot incompris]. It is our duty, he claims, to “learn to understand the forgotten words once more” [apprendre à comprendre

66 Bersgon, The Creative Mind, 161. Also: “Encouraged by [a bold novelist], we have put aside for an instant the veil which we interposed between our consciousness and ourselves. He has brought us back to our own presence.” Bergson, Time and Free Will, 134. The restorative power of art and the privileged moment will play an important role in chapters Five and Six. 67 Bergson, Laughter, 152, 3. 68 Compare this view to Heidegger’s notion of “idle talk” in Being and Time: Idle talk “is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.” Furthermore: “Idle talk is the possibility of understanding everything without any previous appropriation of the matter. . . . By its very nature, idle talk is a closing off since it omits going back to the foundation of what is being talked about. . . . It presumes it has understood.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 168–9. 69 Bergson, Laughter, 153.

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ces mots oubliés].70 Again the narrator speaks of an obligation to pursue and understand something which has been covered up; this time not by a couvercle, but by the words of everyday language. Bergson agrees that the artist is frustrated with the limitations of language, and that he or she will regard it as a duty to overcome these limitations. In The Creative Mind, he states that the dominant tendency of language in its communicative mode is to represent experience as if it is made up of spatial and material things only.71 It is time to take a closer look at our tendency to express non-spatial things, like for instance emotions, in terms of degree. Hulme describes this frustration as follows: You start off with some actual and vividly felt experience. It may be something seen or something felt. You find that when you have expressed this in straightforward language that you have not expressed it at all. You have only expressed it approximately. All the individuality of the emotion as you experienced it has been left out.72

Similarly, Jones draws attention to the fact that there is a “discrepancy between what we feel and what can be communicated about what we feel.”73 Language is public and is useful for expressing stock types, but not for expressing individual feelings.74 The artist wants to convey the freshness of his or her impression or experience and has to find a way in which this freshness will not be lost like it is in ordinary language, the language which we use to describe, for instance, our voluntary memories. Because, Jephcott clarifies, ordinary language uses stock types to describe personal, individual experiences, “voluntary memory replaces the uniqueness of a particular experience by elements com-

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Proust, Time Regained, 310–1; Le temps retrouvé, 483. Bergson, The Creative Mind, 47. 72 Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 161–2. 73 Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 152. According to Jones, language is just one of the obstacles to knowledge. Other obstacles are the intellect, which, “forming general notions by abstraction from particular cases, treats the essentially transient as permanent, by applying categories that blind us to individuality” and habit, which is connected to language: “the habit of thinking may make us immune to reality.” Ibid., 156. 74 “I perceive [a sensation] through the object which is its cause, through the word which translates it. . . . Not only does language make us believe in the unchangeableness of our sensations, but it will sometimes deceive us as to the nature of the sensation felt.” Bergson, Time and Free Will, 131. Cf. Moore, Thinking Backwards, 182. See also William Gavin: “Human beings can experience more, ontologically, than they can linguistically conceptualize or describe.” William Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 95. Gavin will feature more prominently in the discussion of William James in Chapter Three. 71

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mon to all experience and so dissipates the individual atmosphere of the past.” Compare the following passage from À la recherche, where Swann is overcome by an intense pain caused by the involuntary memory of Odette evoked by la petite phrase: In place of the abstract expressions “the time when I was happy,” “the time when I was loved,” which he had often used before then without suffering too much since his intelligence had not embodied in them anything of the past save fictitious extracts which preserved none of the reality, he now recovered everything that had fixed unalterably the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he could see it all: the snowy, curled petals of the chrysanthemum which she had tossed after him into his carriage. . . . And Swann could distinguish, standing motionless before that scene of remembered happiness, a wretched figure who filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognize who it was, that he had to lower his eyes lest anyone should observe that they were filled with tears. It was himself. [Au lieu des expressions abstraites “temps où j’étais heureux,” “temps où j’étais aimé,” qu’il avait souvent prononcées jusqu-là et sans trop souffrir, car son intelligence n’y avait enfermé du passé que de prétendus extraits qui n’en conservaient rien, il retrouva tout ce qui de ce bonheur perdu avait fixé à jamais la spécifique et volatile essence ; il revit tout, les pétales neigeux et frisés du chrysanthème qu’elle lui avait jeté dans sa voiture. . . . Et Swann aperçut, immobile en face de ce bonheur revécu, un malheureux qui lui fit pitié parce qu’il ne le reconnut pas tout de suite, si bien qu’il dut baisser les yeux pour qu’on ne vît pas qu’ils étaient pleins de larmes. C’étaient lui-même.]75

The abstract expressions that Swann has used to describe his feelings are empty and do not retain anything of the past. It is only la petite phrase that returns to Swann the “specific, volatile essence” of his past happiness; the words “happy” and “loved,” applicable to many different situations and people, were for him mere stock types, too wide to fit and capture his unique and personal feelings. When the memories of Odette return to him with this new freshness, the words he had used to talk about his time with her ring hollow and are far removed from the remembered happiness and the present pain. The artist who wants to convey the uniqueness of for instance a feeling, driven by a “passionate desire for accuracy,”76 is obliged to invent new ways of expression and representation because he or she realizes the inadequacy of

75 76

Proust, Swann’s Way, 491–3; Du côté de chez Swann, 347. Hulme, “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 162.

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the usual.77 Here again it appears that the element of invention in artistic creation concerns the way in which the world is revealed afresh: the artist is not free but is obliged to discover and render visible a part of the world which is like “a law of nature.” In order to convey the individuality of a thing, a feeling, or a person, the artist has to use language in an unusual way. True to Bergson’s remarks, there are metaphors all through À la recherche, providing, as Stanley Scott puts it in Frontiers of Consciousness, the “means of breaking through the bounds of an existing system of logic in order to enable other principles of thought and perception to be born.”78 Since some topics do not yield readily to conceptual analysis alone, we need creative language which, to speak with Jephcott, “induces heightened awareness.”79 Conventional language, which limits our awareness of both our inner world and the world around us, needs to be suspended to make room for metaphor.80 In line with Bergson, Jephcott goes on to remark that the task of literature is to “make visible the true but normally hidden reality of our experience.”81 In order to perform his or her task, the poet violates some of the normal, communicative functions of the language. Instead of classifying things according to common categories, “the poet, in discovering metaphors, replaces these categories by particular, concrete links and in so doing intensifies his consciousness of reality.”82 The poet’s use of metaphor parallels the painter’s use of color and form. As Jones point out, Elstir, the painter admired by the narrator in À la recherche, “strips himself of every intellectual concept”, and “shows us things according to the optical illusions of our first sight of them.”83 According to the narrator, Jones claims, we think our first impressions are illusory only because our subsequent ideas cannot fully incorporate them. This, however, only means that the ideas we use in our

77 Ibid., 167. In Bergson’s own words: “The beliefs we most strongly adhere to are the hardest to express adequately.” Bergson, Time and Free Will, 135. 78 Stanley J. Scott, Frontiers of Consciousness. Interdisciplinary Studies in American Philosophy and Poetry (New York: Fordham University Press, 1991), 55. Also: “Metaphor is a way of understanding a phenomenon by means of indirection.” Ibid., 56. Cf. Jephcott, who writes: “The narrator is a medium through which the world of the novel can be revealed.” Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 264. 79 Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 67. 80 Ibid., 68. Metaphor, Jephcott explains, is the main means available to the poet for the intensification of reality. Ibid., 153. 81 Ibid., 89. 82 Ibid., 142. 83 Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 163.

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interpretations are too general and abstract, not that our first impressions were in fact illusory.84 First impressions, in short, are true; it is the intellect that simplifies and classifies them, preparing them for use through a process of selection. In Philosophy and the Novel, Jones observes: “Although each one of us must clarify our impressions by our own effort, the artist shows us how to combat the unseen work of our intellect; as such, art is a means to knowledge.”85 Bringing back to mind the reality the narrator feels he is invited to explore in his privileged moments, this knowledge can now be said to be achieved not by means of the intellect alone. What I called felt knowledge in the previous chapter cannot be captured in abstract terms. It is not the knowledge of analysis, but the knowledge of intuition, of intellectual sympathy. The intellect is indispensable because it “illuminates and intellectualizes feelings so that one can distinguish what one has felt,”86 but in felt knowledge it is second to an intuitive grasp of the thing. As was shown in Chapter One, the invitation to gain knowledge from a privileged moment has a compelling force: the narrator experiences an obligation to explore and understand. With the description of the Bergsonian artist in mind, I will use this aesthetic and epistemological situation as a basis for a discussion of the attitude of courageous vulnerability. The courageously vulnerable subject recognizes that he or she has a specifically moral obligation to another person, and this recognition makes the pursuit of felt knowledge more difficult and oftentimes painful.

Courageous Vulnerability: Preliminary Remarks In Le temps retrouvé, the narrator observes that we may learn something when we are suffering, because we see certain things which at other times are hidden from us.87 Unhappiness is indispensable because it makes us perceive the truth and tears up “each new crop of the weeds of habit and skepticism and levity and indifference” [les mauvaises

84 Ibid., 164. “The act of interpretation destroys the uniqueness of the present experience by applying to it terms or concepts which have been applied in previous cases.” Ibid., 164. 85 Ibid., 179. 86 Ibid., 179. 87 Proust, Time Regained, 301; Le temps retrouvé, 475.

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herbes de l’habitude, du scepticisme, de la légèreté, de l’indifférence].88 Following Bergson, he continues with the claim that “truths which the intellectual faculty gathers in the open . . . their value may be very great, but they are like drawings with a hard outline and no perspective.” [(Les) vérités que l’intelligence . . . cueille à claire-voire, devant elle, en pleine lumière, leur valeur peut être très grande; mais elles ont des contours plus secs et sont planes, n’ont pas de profondeur.]89 These remarks match the narrator’s account of the involuntary recollection of his grandmother. The pain that comes with the awareness of her absence, together with his guilt, tears up the indifference he had been feeling before and shows him, he claims, what is real. Truth, this situation shows, is neither easy nor pleasant, and hence the narrator remarks that there is a certain kind of truth “which is not compatible with happiness” [qui n’est pas compatible avec le bonheur].90 The only use of happiness is that it makes unhappiness cruel and therefore fruitful. Suffering sets the imagination in motion, and therefore one must “wait for suffering before one can work” [attend une souffrance pour travailler].91 The more tenacious the “weeds of habit,” the greater the effort required to tear them up. This effort will never be spontaneous, the narrator claims, because habit is easy, safe, and secure. Pain and shock can provide the impetus for this effort, if, that is, one is courageous enough to make an effort at all. The narrator in À la recherche pursues the truth behind the sorrowful disruption he is experiencing because it is the only thing he feels

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Ibid., 314; 485. Ibid., 303; 477. 90 Ibid., 314; 485. Since the involuntary memories in Le temps retrouvé are all joyful, the kind of truth the narrator is referring to here must be of a different nature than the truth discovered in these recollections. I suggest that the truth which is not compatible with happiness is of the sort which is discovered in painful involuntary memories. For instance, the felt knowledge which the narrator acquires about himself in relation to his grandmother is painful, and could not have been attained without this pain: the sorrow, guilt and regret accompanying it make it a felt rather than a merely factual knowledge. It must be remembered, however, that this kind of knowledge forms only a small part of the whole of of human knowledge. The narrator does not claim that all truth is possible only through suffering. 91 Ibid., 319; 488. Something similar is true of the effect of a work of art on the reader. Jones, for instance, observes that the “impact or effect of a work on us is explained by our own active involvement with, and attitude towards, it” How may we be said to learn from a text? “We learn from those texts which enable us to construct modifying views of our world.” Jones, Philosophy and the Novel, 194. I will briefly address this issue in the Conclusion. 89

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he has left of his grandmother. He clings to the pain because it is his entrance into the living past, as opposed to the memories in which his grandmother is no more than a stranger. Instead of turning away from the pain, the narrator zooms in on its center. The truth is more important to him than the pain, or, more precisely, he embraces the pain because it will bring him truth. It serves to cite Linda Zagzebski on the issue of what she calls negative feelings: “Most of us know from experience that desire and other emotive states can aid as well as hurt information processing…. Fear and other negative feelings also can aid the acquisition of true beliefs by sharpening one’s attentiveness or imprinting a belief more vividly in one’s memory.”92 Zagzebski is writing about adding new beliefs to one’s memory. In the case of Proust’s narrator, his emotive state aids him in sharpening his attentiveness to the core of that state, namely, the memory of his grandmother. Analogous to the attitude of the Bergsonian artist, the disposition found in Proust’s narrator consists of a receptive and an active part. In order to gain knowledge from a privileged moment, he has to get fully involved and pursue what is at the moment’s core. In his memory of his grandmother, the narrator finds an uncomfortable insight that forces him to recognize some of his past actions as blameworthy. According to the narrator, true art rediscovers the reality of our life and creates an awareness of our own life and the life of others: “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.” [Par l’art seulement nous pouvons sortir de nous, savoir ce que voit un autre de cet univers qui n’est pas le même que le nôtre.] 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” [quand elles amassent au-dessus de nos impressions vraies, pour nous les cacher entièrement, les nomenclatures, les buts pratiques que nous appelons faussement a vie].93 Here it is a memory which enables the narrator to know what another person, in this case his grandmother, saw of the 92

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind. An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57. 93 Proust, Time Regained, 299–300; Le temps retrouvé, 474–5.

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universe. He can see her concern for him and her attempts to hide her illness from him. Just like Bergson, the narrator claims that the task of the artist is to undo the work of habit and vanity. This same task, however, is felt by the narrator as an obligation in the case of this involuntary memory, where the undoing requires an analogous effort. The narrator, like Bergson, repudiates facility. Interestingly, the narrator remarks in Le temps retrouvé that the effort demanded of the artist calls for courage of many kinds, “including the courage of one’s emotions” [il y fallait du courage de tout genre, et même sentimental]. This courage, he says, involves the “abrogation of one’s dearest illusions” [abroger ses plus chères illusions].94 This abrogation is exactly what is at stake in the narrator’s memory of his grandmother. He has the courage to see that his self-image of the loving grandson was, at least in part, illusory and vain. Returning to Bergson’s intuition and the attitude of the artist, the analogy between the artistic attitude and courageous vulnerability can now be clarified. The first and most obvious thing we intuit, Bergson claims, is our own personality. When we focus our attention on ourselves, we first distinguish what Bergson compares to the surface of a sphere, the perceptions, memories and the “stir of tendencies and motor habits” that form the outer layer of our personality.95 Beneath this surface, however, there is a continuous flux, la durée, a “succession of states that extend into each other,”96 making up our inner life. Focusing on one’s inner life in intellectual sympathy, one finds that no two moments of one’s inner life are the same. This inner life cannot be expressed through concepts because, simply put, concepts are too easy. Concepts “demand no effort on our part”97 because they simply express what different objects have in common, thereby generalizing and losing sight of the individual thing. Concepts draw circles around things, and these circles are “each much too large and none fitting them exactly.”98 What Bergson calls “true empiricism” recognizes that the “ready-made conceptions of daily operations”99 are useless.

94 95 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 300; 475. Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 25. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 37.

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A fresh effort is required for every new object or feeling in order to do justice to its uniqueness. Similarly, what is required in order to attain knowledge in a privileged moment is an intuitive understanding from within. This takes an effort, especially when this understanding uproots the habits that provided security. Again it serves to refer to Gabriel Marcel, who remarks: “Nobody will admit that courage can be anything else but active. . . . But . . . the idea of courage is intimately linked to that of ‘having no alternative.’ [However] an obligation is always something which can be evaded to some degree.” The obligation to which courage is a response is what the narrator experiences in his privileged moments and he would agree with Marcel that “the truth is that an obligation is something that always ought to be recognized, and this recognition is an act. It is necessary . . . that the facts should exercise a sort of dumb pressure on the self which will force the self, if I may put it so, to recognize the obligation which lies upon it to recognize the facts themselves.”100 Privileged moments come involuntarily and, as such, leave the narrator no alternative: he is vulnerable to them and they exert “a sort of dumb pressure.” It takes “a courage of the emotions,” however, to explore the privileged moment and lift up the couvercle. To the narrator, the obligation is always of a moral nature: we ought to regain the past, and with it the truth, whenever we are offered the chance to do so in a privileged moment. The courageous form which the subject’s vulnerability ought to take indicates the active nature of this attitude. Just like Fisher claims that the aesthetic state is not passive and that “rare objects elicit from us activity of thought,” the ethical attitude required from the subject in the case of involuntary memory is an active one. Openness and vulnerability might suggest passivity, but should not be understood as such in this context. It is important to note that, as has become clear in the descriptions of the narrator’s reactions to involuntary memory, the activity of thought elicited by a rare object or experience is often shut down prematurely. Though involuntary memories never fail to inspire curiosity, the narrator usually does not want to go through the trouble of pursuing what is hidden underneath. Granted that Fisher is correct and there is indeed within wonder “a drive towards curiosity,” this does not mean that this drive cannot easily be ignored,

100

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 68.

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which is exactly what the narrator describes himself as doing most of the time.101 I suggest that the obligation felt in a privileged moment takes its explicitly moral form when the core of the moment is a person: the courage mentioned here acquires its full significance when it is called upon to abrogate our dearest illusions. In abrogating our illusions, we may have to admit that when we said “she was very sweet” [elle était bien gentille] we meant “I experienced pleasure when I kissed her” [j’avais du plaisir à l’embrasser].102 This is the courage hinted at in the narrator’s words cited above, where he claims that truth is found only through suffering: moral insights are at best uncomfortable but usually painful because they undo our carefully maintained habits and illusions. Courageous vulnerability is analogous to the attitude of the Bergsonian artist, but is a primarily ethical rather than aesthetic attitude. Courageous vulnerability involves the recognition of the singularity of the other, and this recognition requires openness as well as an active attempt to understand the other as a unique individual. In this recognition, intellectual abstraction “stops at the relative,” whereas intuition can offer an understanding “from within.”103 The sensitivity which Bergson attributes to the artist is therefore a pre-condition for courageous vulnerability: the artist is able to see the individuality and uniqueness which need to be recognized by the moral agent. Though the narrator of À la recherche exemplifies the Bergsonian artist, he does not change his actions as a result of the insights he has required by means of his special sensitivity. It is important, therefore, to distinguish between the analogous attitudes of, on the one hand, the Bergsonian artist, and, on the other, the courageously vulnerable person. Though the artist is sensitive to the otherness of people, and Bergson allows the ethical to blend in with the aesthetic, a description of an analogous yet specifically ethical attitude is required in order to show why the aesthetic sensitivity that characterizes the narrator of À

101 Fisher, Wonder, 40. According to Fisher, wonder induces thought, and is kept alive in the process of thought. He explains that in wonder, a “feeling of newness and attention-seizing freshness” inspires curiosity, which in turn invites our “prolonged attention,” ultimately resulting in satisfaction. Ibid., 149. As I have argued, the narrator of À la recherche experiences this curiosity in his privileged moments, but it is no guarantee for a “prolonged attention” and only results in satisfaction in the privileged moments described in Le temps retrouvé. 102 Proust, Time Regained, 300; Le temps retrouvé, 475. 103 Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 24.

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la recherche does not help him respect the otherness of individuals in his actions towards them. Chapter Four will focus on the narrator’s relation to his lover Albertine and show how he observes in minute detail her otherness, yet fails completely to treat and respect her as a full person. In the remainder of this chapter, the passage cited in the Introduction is taken up again in order to show how courageous vulnerability may be applied to this particularly salient example of a privileged moment with a decidedly moral content.

Courageous Vulnerability at Work After his bouleversement described in the Introduction, the narrator of À la recherche observes that different “assets” [richesses] of our soul sometimes are, and other times are not realizable. He famously remarks: “with the perturbations of memory are linked the intermittencies of the heart” [aux troubles de la mémoire sont liées les intermittences du cœur].104 Gabriel Marcel is referring to this phenomenon in The Mystery of Being where he writes: We must not believe that we can at some given moment make a distinction that will be valid for all the rest of our lives between what I am now, on the one hand, and what, on the other hand, I am now so detached from that I can speak of it in an abstract fashion, that I can reduce it merely to a state of some external object to which I can refer. This is enough to show how unreal it is to represent the past to oneself as in some sense preserved or pickled, as if it were last year’s blackberries or walnuts. At any moment in my life, a magic shutter may snap back.105

Marcel’s “magic shutter” is the narrator’s couvercle. The motion of bending over to undo his shoes causes the narrator to realize that his grandmother will never again be by his side, something he discovers only now: “I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever.” [Je venais, en la sentant pour la première fois, vivante, véritable, gonflant mon cœur à le briser, en la retrouvant enfin, d’apprendre que je l’avais perdue pour toujours.]106 The “preserved or pickled” past Marcel is condemning is the past as 104 105 106

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 211; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 153. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 184. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 213; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 155.

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represented by voluntary memories, a past from which the narrator is detached. In this privileged moment, however, this detachment disappears completely and is replaced by an experience in which his grandmother is “alive.” It is in feeling her alive, however, that he fully realizes that she is gone: As soon as I had relived that bliss, as though it were present, feeling it shot through by the certainty, throbbing like a recurrent pain, of an annihilation that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence, retrospectively abolished our mutual predestination, made of my grandmother, at the moment when I had found her again as in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had allowed to spend a few years with me, as she might have done with anyone else, but to whom, before and after those years, I was and would be nothing. [Aussitôt que j’avais revécu, comme présente, cette félicité, la sentir traversée par la certitude, s’élançant comme une douleur physique à répétition, d’un néant qui avait effacé mon image de cette tendresse, qui avait détruit cette existence, aboli rétrospectivement notre mutuelle prédestination, fait de ma grand-mère, au moment où je la retrouvais comme dans un miroir, une simple étrangère qu’un hasard a fait passer quelques années auprès de moi comme cela aurait pu être auprès de tout autre, mais pour qui, avant et après, je n’étais rien, je ne serais rien.]107

The bliss of remembering his grandmother’s love and concern for him is “shot through” by the “certainty . . . of an annihilation” that has made of his grandmother “a mere stranger . . . to whom I was and would be nothing.” He remembers the times he hurt her and for which he wants to make amends: “I began to remember all the opportunities that I had seized, by letting her see my sufferings and exaggerating them if necessary, to cause her a grief which I imagined as being obliterated immediately by my kisses.” [Peu à peu voici que je me souvenais de toutes les occasions que j’avais saisies, en lui laissant voir, en lui exagérant au besoin mes souffrances, de lui faire une peine que je m’imaginais ensuite effacée par mes baisers.]108 He remembers his hurtful remarks, meant to draw attention to himself or to something which he thought she should have done differently, and the signs that indicated that they had hit home: 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,

107 108

Ibid., 213; 155. Ibid., 214; 155.

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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 effect of the memory I had of my grandmother, the proof that this memory was indeed present within me. [Jamais je ne pourrais plus effacer cette contraction de sa figure, et cette souffrance de son cœur ou plutôt du mien ; car comme les morts n’existent plus qu’en nous, c’est nous-mêmes que nous frappons sans relâche quand nous nous obstinons à nous souvenir des coups que nous leurs avons assenés. Ces douleurs, si cruelles qu’elles fussent, je m’y attachais de touts mes forces, car je sentais bien qu’elles étaient l’effet du souvenir de ma grand-mère, la preuve que ce souvenir que j’avais était bien présent en moi.]109

The narrator claims that the dead only exist within us, in our memories, and he therefore clings to the pain brought about by the involuntary recollection of his grandmother in order to hold onto what remains of her existence. Gabriel Marcel explicitly addresses the issue of our relation to dead loved ones and uses his concept of “creative fidelity” to explain that the deceased remains a “presence” to us. The notions of creative fidelity and presence will be explained and discussed in chapters Three, Four and Six, but here it suffices to note that the narrator says that his grandmother is present to him and that he responds to this presence by clinging to the pain it brings. The sudden presence is involuntary and overwhelms him, but the narrator chooses to pursue its implications. Little by little he remembers the occasions on which he hurt his grandmother, and the pain and shame he experiences as a result of these memories are affirmations of his grandmother’s existence in him. Furthermore, he claims that if there is truth to be found in this moment, it must be in this spontaneous, involuntary impression itself: I did not know for certain whether one day I would draw a little truth from this painful and for the moment incomprehensible impression, but I knew that if I ever could extract that little truth, it would only be from this impression and from none other, an impression at once so particular and so spontaneous, which had neither been traced by my intelligence nor deflected or attenuated by my pusillanimity, but which death itself, the sudden revelation of death, striking like a thunderbolt, had carved within me, along a supernatural and inhuman graph, in a double and mysterious furrow.

109

Ibid., 214–5; 156.

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chapter two [Cette impression douloureuse et actuellement incompréhensible, je savais, non certes pas si j’en dégagerais un peu de vérité un jour, mais que si ce peu de vérité je pouvais jamais l’extraire, ce ne pourrait être que d’elle, si particulière, si spontanée, qui n’avait été ni tracée par mon intelligence, ni infléchie ni atténuée par ma pusillanimité, mais que la mort elle-même, la brusque révélation de la mort, avait comme la foudre creusée en moi, selon un graphique surnaturel, inhumain, comme un double et mystérieux sillon.]110

The narrator’s felt knowledge of his grandmother’s death is the result of an involuntary memory, particular and spontaneous, and not of a voluntary memory recalled and reconstructed by the intellect. In this respect, the narrator adopts the attitude of the Bergsonian artist: he is sensitive to the particular, the very individual feeling which this impression brings him, and reaches his insights by means of the intuition rather than the intellect. However, because the privileged moment involves his grandmother and his feelings of pain and guilt, the attitude is no longer purely aesthetic. The narrator’s involuntary memory concerns a person and his relation to her, and this content calls for an ethical response. The attitude of courageous vulnerability is analogous to the attitude of the Bergsonian artist in its openness, effort, and respect for individuality, but is explicitly ethical because the openness, effort, and respect concern a person.

Conclusion For the narrator of À la recherche, as for Bergson, the ethical is mixed up with the aesthetic, but I propose to separate the two and call the resulting ethical attitude courageous vulnerability. Chapter Four, which deals with the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and Stendhal’s notion of crystallization, will discuss a set of problems which occur when the aesthetic and the ethical are not separated and uses these issues to further develop the notion of courageous vulnerability. The preliminary remarks outlined in this chapter, together with the insights resulting from the discussion in Chapter Four, will be gathered together in the last chapter, Chapter Six, which emphasizes how difficult it is to be courageously vulnerable. In Chapter Three, the nature and significance of this difficulty is first explored through the philosophies of William 110

Ibid., 215; 156.

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James and Gabriel Marcel. Courageous vulnerability is shown to be an openness to what James calls vagueness and Marcel calls mystery, and the nature of these notions gives a first impression of the reasons why it is so hard for the narrator of À la recherche to be courageously vulnerable. William James’ account of vagueness in Chapter Three will be picked up again in Chapter Five which deals with mystical experience and the “will to believe.” Here the concept of felt knowledge will be revisited and developed in preparation for the final chapter already mentioned, Chapter Six.

CHAPTER THREE

VAGUENESS AND MYSTERY

Introduction In the previous chapter it became clear that the attitude of the Bergsonian artist as exemplified by Proust’s narrator is a pre-condition for the ethical disposition of courageous vulnerability. The openness which characterizes the aesthetic attitude allows the artist to create works which show the world in a new, “live” manner. Those of us who are not artists recognize this fresh revelation of reality in the work, but would not have been able to see it without the help of the artist. The artist is not separated from reality by a veil of habit, and does not rely on the utilitarian intellect in his or her perceptions. Because Bergson emphasizes the artist’s need for openness, his aesthetics prepares the way for a discussion of the ethical disposition of courageous vulnerability. Proust’s narrator, an artist in the Bergsonian sense, does not distinguish between aesthetic and ethical openness and shows how the disposition suited for privileged moments implies an openness to things as well as people. An involuntary memory, for instance, may bring back crisp visions of Combray, but it may also make the narrator regret the way he treated his grandmother. For the narrator, feelings of guilt, obligation and regret are mixed in with aesthetic experiences, and the attitude which makes it possible for him to experience privileged moments is at the same time a condition for moral insights. One of the consequences of this conflation of aesthetics and ethics will become clear in the next chapter, where the narrator’s tendency to regard people as objects of art will be discussed. In the present chapter, I will focus on situations in which felt knowledge and courageous vulnerability are absent, bringing William James and Gabriel Marcel into the discussion in order to explore what happens when the privileged moment does not come. As will become clear in the following paragraphs, William James and Henri Bergson have many interests and concerns in common. The connection between James and Bergson is particularly cogent because

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it points to larger similarities between some strands of American and Continental thought. I will touch on these similarities where appropriate and pay attention especially to the close affinity between some aspects of James’ thought and traditional existential issues as presented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel. Drawing on these connections, I will show in Chapter Five that the ethical disposition of courageous vulnerability is pragmatic in James’ sense of the term. In this chapter, James’ notion of anhedonia will be discussed in the context of existential philosophy, and this discussion will introduce the distinction made by Gabriel Marcel between problem and mystery. This distinction will then lead into the next chapter, Chapter Four, which deals with Marcel’s ethics.

Bergson on James, James on Bergson Indicative of the close affinity between the philosophies of James and Bergson are, first, the introduction Bergson wrote in 1911 for James’ work The Varieties of Religious Experience, “On the Pragmatism of William James. Truth and Reality,” and, second, James’ essay “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” which was published in A Pluralistic Universe.1 James himself approved of Bergson’s introduction to his Varieties, and I will use it as a starting point for a discussion of the privileged moment from a Jamesian point of view. In his introduction, Bergson shows that James agrees with him on the claim that “intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor.”2 Connecting this to what I stated earlier about the nature of the two different kinds of memory in À la recherche, it is clear that the simplicity sought by the intellect is similar to the simplicity of habit and voluntary memory. In Bergson’s introduction, William James is said to reject the intellect’s easy and polished version of reality. Reality is superabundant, as everyone should recognize who accepts experience wholly. Our emotions are as much a part of this reality as are our perceptions and, for 1

William James, A Pluralistic Universe, in William James, Writings 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987), 625–821. 2 Bergson, “On the Pragmatism of William James. Truth and Reality,” in The Creative Mind, 249.

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that matter, “things:” “In the eyes of William James, the whole man counts.”3 Applying this claim to À la recherche, one is justified in stating that if the whole man counts, then so do privileged moments, since it is something experienced and therefore, according to James, real. More precisely, privileged moments “count” in a way that voluntary memories (and what Bergson would call other tools of the utilitarian intellect) do not. Voluntary memories serve a utilitarian purpose and demand little effort, whereas a privileged moment breaks with habit and requires a new approach exactly because in it, one encounters something new. Furthermore, Bergson’s introduction shows that what I have called felt knowledge is a notion which can easily be shown to fit James’ philosophy: “For [William James] those truths it is most important for us to know, are truths which have been felt and experienced before being thought.”4 This felt and experienced truth is the truth covered by a couvercle, the knowledge of which can be attained when one manages to uncover the réalité pressentie. With these preliminary remarks about involuntary memory and felt knowledge in mind, the essay by James on Bergson discussed below shows how a study of James will prepare for a further elaboration and understanding of the idea of courageous vulnerability. James starts his essay on Bergson by praising him, telling his audience to “open Bergson, and new horizons loom on every page you read. It is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds.”5 Most of James’ text expresses a strong agreement with Bergson’s philosophy and it is useful to the discussion of the privileged moment to highlight a few points that bind the philosophers together. First of all, the Jamesian insight that the flux of experience is too rich and, as will be explained below, too vague to be captured in concepts, is connected to Bergson’s notion of time. La durée, described in the previous chapter, is a rich “succession without distinction,” a becoming which is completely interior and which does not let itself be measured in spatial terms. In line with Bergson’s account of duration, James describes how times are felt in the experiences of living subjects and that these 3

Ibid., 251. Ibid., 253. 5 James describes how in Bergson’s work, “great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus.” James, A Pluralistic Universe, 731. And a few pages later: “That he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in intellectualist eyes. He only evokes and invites.” Ibid., 752. 4

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times originally have no objective “common measure.” Our utilitarian mind, however, does not like this vagueness, this “turbid privacy of sense” and wants to date and measure things so it can work with them.6 The resulting intellectualist problem is that the individual loses touch with sense-reality because he or she divides up reality by means of concepts, leaving out the complexity and richness of experience. To do justice to this richness, we must recognize that the first part of reality, as James describes it in Pragmatism, is “the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither true nor false; they simply are.”7 This flux is too rich and complex for our intellect to take account of as a whole, and our utilitarian need to measure and categorize urges us to abstract from it. “When we conceptualize,” James explains, “we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a thatand-no-other.”8 In the previous chapter, the same idea was expressed by Deleuze in his work Bergsonism, where he talks about perception as “the object minus something,” namely everything for which the utilitarian intellect has no use. This kind of perception is bound up with the thinking in terms of concepts addressed by James. James emphasizes that we need concepts and that we cannot deny their practical merit but that we must admit that concepts “have no value but these practical values. You cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go.”9 As James puts it in another essay: “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests.”10 Because of these practical interests, he explains in the Varieties, individual feelings, obviously very limited in their scope, are considered useless when pitted against what is considered to be universally valid reason.11 We must come to recognize, according to James, that though conceptual processes can categorize, define and interpret facts,

6

Ibid., 734. William James, Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 117. 8 James, A Pluralistic Universe, 746. James explains that all the aspects and little bits of experience exist “durcheinander.” Ibid., 748. 9 Ibid., 736 10 William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 84. 11 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin Classics (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 435. 7

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“they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling alone can answer for.”12 Private phenomena always involve an aspect of vagueness and are not clear-cut like concepts. This vagueness, however, is an essential part of what James calls “realities in the completest sense of the term.”13 The world of concepts and generalizations as constructed by the intellect is “without solidity or life” when compared to the “living world” of private, individual phenomena. It is in the latter world that we “catch fact in the making,”14 where the “vital element” has not been destroyed by abstraction.15 James claims that Bergson alone has been radical in his critique of the extreme rationalism which holds the belief that “fixity is nobler and worthier than change.”16 When we keep what James calls the “ ‘immediate’ point of view, the point of view in which we follow our sensational life’s continuity,”17 then we see that change is a part of reality as we experience it. It is often more practical to focus on fixity rather than on change, and this is why, according to Bergson, the intellect has a “definite sphere of influence where its sovereignty is indisputable.”18 The function of the intellect, James agrees with Bergson, is eminently practical: “what we do in fact is to harness up reality in our conceptual system in order to drive it the better.”19 The kind of knowledge gained from concepts is scientific, what James calls a “knowledge about things, as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with

12

Ibid., 455. Ibid., 498. 14 Ibid., 502. Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, where James emphasizes the dynamic quality of reality and agrees with Bergson that “what really exists is not the things made but things in the making.” James, A Pluralistic Universe, 751. 15 William James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 13. A similar view is found in Schiller’s, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, where he remarks: “Like the chemist, the philosopher finds synthesis only by analysis, or the spontaneous work of nature only through the torture of art. Thus, in order to detain the fleeting apparition, he must enchain it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair proportions into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in a fleshless skeleton of words. Is it surprising that natural feeling should not recognise itself in such a copy, and if in the report of the analyst the truth appears as paradox?” J.C. Friedrich von Schiller, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (Kessinger Publishing Company, 2004), 3. 16 James, A Pluralistic Universe, 735. 17 Ibid., 754. 18 Ibid., 739. 19 Ibid., 741. 13

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them.”20 He explains: “thought deals thus solely with surfaces. It can name the thickness of reality, but it cannot fathom it.”21 We can apprehend the thickness, the multi-layeredness and complexity of reality, but not by means of concepts; rather, it must be directly experienced by us “by being a part of reality oneself,” or evoked “in imagination by sympathetically divining someone else’s inner life.”22 James calls this kind of knowledge “knowledge-by-acquaintance;” a notion similar to what Bergson describes as intuition, a knowledge acquired by entering into the thing rather than probing it from without. In both cases, we have a “living or sympathetic acquaintance” with a thing, situation or event, and this acquaintance or intuition does justice to the vagueness of experience that only feeling can account for. It is important to note that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge about (i.e. conceptual knowledge) are complementary, the one remedying the defects of the other. If we want an overview, we must turn to concepts; if we want to know the “inner nature of reality,” we must immerse ourselves in the thickness of the flux of experience. Intellectual knowledge, though superficial, has the practical value of “enabling us to make short cuts through experience and thereby to save time.”23 The downside of this practical kind of knowledge is that it fixes experiences which are in fact constantly “in the making,” escaping the rigidity of concepts and theories. The problems that arise out of this tension between the practical merit and the frustration with concepts can be overcome when one is submerged in the flux of experience, where one knows things by acquaintance, intuitively. Once you emerge from this knowledgefrom-within and break down reality into concepts, you may gain practical advantages, but you will never be able to reconstruct the original flux from the concepts. Concepts are exclusive of the vagueness that is part of experience, and this vagueness is lost in knowledge-about.

20

Ibid., 742. Ibid., 745. 22 Ibid., 746. 23 Ibid., 746. The method of trying to understand a thing from the outside is what James calls a “post-mortem method” in which you “crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building, tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure, finding nothing but inconsistencies, and never suspecting that a centre exists.” Ibid., 750. See also James’ remark that the scientific method is “superimposed for practical ends only, in order to let us jump over life instead of wading through it.” Ibid., 752. 21

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Vagueness and/in Language The most appropriate way to discuss the central Jamesian notion of vagueness in connection to the privileged moment is to address the problem of language. For James, language is both suspicious and necessary: suspicious because, in its straightforward communicative function, language breaks up personal, rich, phenomena into abstract bits; necessary because we need language to deal with the world. The following passage is taken from the Varieties: Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy.24

Philosophical reflection in its conceptualizing and abstracting function cannot do justice to vagueness, the “something more” or, as was shown above, the plus or the thisness “which feeling alone can answer for.” As language users, we can easily be tempted to reduce the richness of reality to the words we have to describe it. When we want to communicate something or describe it for practical purposes, we try as much as possible to avoid the vagueness, the “turbid sense of privacy,” inherent to individual phenomena. As a result, we fail to notice the profuseness of life. In his work The Reinstatement of the Vague, William Gavin describes how we let language limit our experience: “we have relied too heavily on language and on concepts qua concepts, which are themselves oriented toward exclusivity rather than integrated richness. . . . We are prone to presume that if there is no word for an experience, such an experience does not exist.”25 Conversely, there are moments which make it particularly clear that our language falls short when we want to express an especially striking experience. The following passage taken from À la recherche illustrates this point: 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

24

James, Varieties, 457. William Joseph Gavin, William James and the Reinstatement of the Vague (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 18. 25

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chapter three with a tiled roof in which M. Vintueil’s gardener kept his tools, the sun had just reappeared, and its golden rays, 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 floated 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 reflection 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. [Après une heure de pluie et de vent contre lesquels j’avais lutté avec allégresse, comme j’arrivais au bord de la mare de Montjouvain, devant une petite cahute recouverte en tuiles où le jardinier de M. Vinteuil serrait ses instruments de jardinage, le soleil venait de reparaître, et ses dorures lavées par l’averse reluisaient à neuf dans le ciel, sur les arbres, sur le mur de la cahute, sur son toit de tuile encore mouillé, à la crête duquel se promenait une poule. Le vent qui soufflait tirait horizontalement les herbes folles qui avaient poussé dans la paroi du mur, et les plumes de duvet de la poule, qui, les unes et les autres, se laissaient filer au gré de son souffle jusqu’à l’extrémité de leur longueur, avec l’abandon de choses inertes et légères. Le toit de tuile faisait dans la mare, que le soleil rendait de nouveau réfléchissante, une marbrure rose, à laquelle je n’avais encore jamais fait attention. Et voyant sur l’eau et à face du mur un pâle sourire répondre au sourire du ciel, je m’écriai dans tout mon enthousiasme en brandissant mon parapluie refermé: “Zut, zut, zut, zut.” Mais en même temps je sentis que mon devoir eût été de ne pas m’en tenir à ces mots opaques et de tâcher de voir plus clair dans mon ravissement.]26

The narrator feels an obligation to more accurately express his experience and so try to see what exactly makes for his enthusiasm. Language in its day-to-day usage clarifies experience by classifying it under categories that are publicly agreed upon, but in doing so it can in fact obscure the individual richness of an experience. The same issue was addressed by Bergson and Hulme in the previous chapter where they were shown to agree that words like “sad” or “angry” are too general to fit a particular feeling. The passage from À la recherche cited above shows the excitement experienced in a privileged moment, the words

26

Proust, Swann’s Way, 218–9; Du côté de chez Swann, 153.

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in which the excitement finds utterance, and the frustration felt even while the “zut, zut, zut, zut” is spoken. As Gavin puts it in The Reinstatement of the Vague, “conscious experience is vague, in the sense of being richer than any formula.”27 Proust wants to convey this vagueness in all its complexity, but realizes that, as his narrator puts it: “A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on it.” [Un œuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix.]28 The so-called “literature of description” [la littérature de notations] has no value because “it is only beneath the surface of the little things which such a literature describes that reality has its hidden existence” [c’est sous de petites choses comme celles qu’elle note que la réalité est contenue].29 In the passage cited above, the narrator’s inability to put the beauty of the scene into words is described in a way that hints at the reality hidden beneath the surface of the things that enchant him. The vagueness of experience, it becomes clear, does not make the experience less intense; on the contrary, vagueness is bound up with richness. The vagueness can be experienced by allowing oneself to stand in the very thickness of reality, but it cannot be captured by the concepts that serve us to gain the knowledge that James calls knowledge about. Vagueness, like the beauty of the scene encountered by the narrator in Montjouvain, can only be known by acquaintance. Concepts can single out parts of the experience, name them, but never fathom their depth as it is experienced in what Bergson would call intuition, the sympathetic insight of knowledge by acquaintance. Up to this point in the discussion, language has featured in its “suspicious” capacity: language as we often unreflectively regard it as an objective copy of reality, thereby dismissing the vagueness of experience as unimportant or even inexistent. It has already become evident that language has its distinct practical uses in its communicative function. Both Bergson and James agree that we need language to, in James’ words, “harness reality.” Problems arise when we take language to be an objective copy of reality. In doing so, we disregard what James in his Pragmatism refers to as the humanistic principle which can be simply summed up as the fact that “you can’t weed out the human

27 28 29

Gavin, The Reinstatement of the Vague, 29. Proust, Time Regained, 278; Le temps retrouvé, 461. Ibid., 297–8; 473.

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contribution.” The utilitarian intellect “carve[s] out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.” We have words, concepts, theories, for things we can use and things that, over the course of human history, have proved to be useful to us. As a result, and this is a point which will be pursued below, we designate as true that which has proved useful: We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, although the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation.30

The words we have pick out the parts of reality that are useful to us in one way or another. We cut out parts of the flux of experience by naming them; these parts are then treated by us as the aspects of reality that are the most real. What we call reality is one among many possible interpretations of the flux of experience. As Gavin puts it: “there is a sense in which a person creates reality by naming it, by molding it linguistically.”31 When considered correctly, a word or phrase points to something beyond itself and as such has a leading, a directive function.32 As long as we keep in mind this central function of language, we are less likely to fall into the trap of regarding language as a direct, objective copy of some fixed reality. Words, themselves dynamic and changing with the context they are used in, point to a dynamic flux of experience and in this way already go beyond the simple definitions we usually ascribe to them; as such, language itself is marked by vagueness.33 The reason why language is insufficient to deal with reality is expressed by Gavin: Reality is greater than . . . the possibly conceptual. Reality cannot be completely put into thought, or more specifically, into language. Yet language, as James shows by self-example, is necessary to deal with reality. It follows that reality is available only through language, but the lan-

30

James, Pragmatism, 123. Gavin, The Reinstatement of the Vague, 72. Gavin adds: This may pose new problems, but it renders inadequate the doctrine that the only purpose of language is the impartial description of events.” Ibid., 72. 32 Ibid., 74. 33 Gavin remarks: “Language, like life, is ongoing, unfinished; as such it has a ‘vagueness’ about it.” Ibid., 62. 31

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guage user must transcend the limitations of language, must show the insufficiency of language itself.34

James is suspicious of language because it seems almost impossible to resist its simplifying, abstracting and utilitarian nature. Language, taken at face value, breaks down the rich reality into seemingly neat concepts, and the language user cannot escape the conclusion that these concepts are the sole constituents from which reality is built up. The intuited vagueness, the richness present in knowledge by acquaintance, can be accounted for only by feeling and as such has no place in this conception of reality. Though this is James’ main take on language, a much more positive evaluation is present throughout his work in a more implicit way. While the flux of experience is reduced to mere concepts by those who mistakenly hold that language in its communicative function captures the whole of reality, a different interpretation of reality, inclusive of vagueness, is “‘available’ to those who use language in such a way as to transcend language, to those who are not trapped by the bewitchment of language, to those who realize that the word ‘activity’ is not the experience of activity.”35 In this passage, Gavin shows that the problem of language can be overcome not by discarding language altogether (which is clearly impossible since we need language to deal with reality) but by using language in a different way. “One can use language to transcend the limitations of language,” Gavin continues, “and in such a fashion have a glimpse of ‘pure experience.’”36 The question that presents itself at this point is how one uses language in this way—a question Gavin leaves unanswered, though he does indicate the direction we should pursue in order to find the answer. When Gavin points out that James shows “by self-example” that we need language to deal with reality, one cannot help but think of James’ own style with all its poetic and descriptive flourish. This essential aspect of James’ writings will be further discussed in the next chapter where James’ style will be shown to be of central importance to his treatment of mystical experiences. James’ own presentation of experience does justice to its richness and respects the vagueness commonly excluded by philosophers who merely produce their “volley of vocables,” suppressing the knowledge that there is something

34 35 36

Ibid., 89. Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91.

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that glimmers and twinkles beyond what can be conceptualized. James himself uses language as the Bergsonian artist uses it, creating or citing live metaphors that show experience in a different way, revealing aspects of it that had gone unnoticed because our concepts and dead metaphors were not carved out in such a way as to allow us to be aware of them. Another way in which James’ appreciation of language as a possible access to experience in its vagueness is apparent is his frequent reference to the poets he admires: “truth,” James claims, “has to be clad in the right verbal garment,” and it is the artist who manages to do just that. Emerson stands out among these poets as someone particularly able to call forth rather than cut out vagueness in his language.37 It serves to include a passage of James’ “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord.” The following excerpt is reminiscent of the passage taken from À la recherche above and shows how both Emerson and Proust’s narrator share in the attitude of the Bergsonian artist: The day is good, [Emerson] said, in which we have the most perceptions. There are times when the cawing of a crow, a weed, a snowflake, or a farmer planting in his field become symbols to the intellect of truths equal to those which the most majestic phenomena can open. Let me mind my own charge, then, walk alone, consult the sky, the field and forest, sedulously waiting every morning for the news concerning the structure of the universe which the good Spirit will give me.38

Like Emerson, the narrator in À la recherche suspects and senses a depth in or behind the perceptions of commonplace situations and things, which, the narrator would say, function as couvercles. Of course the fact that both have these experiences when they are alone, out in the fields or in nature, helps the comparison. Especially significant to the topic of privileged moments, however, is the mention Emerson makes of the attitude of “sedulous waiting,” which is an essential aspect of both the attitude of the artist and the disposition of courageous vulnerability described in the previous chapter. Waiting implies 37 Whitman, though admired by James in certain respects, is too optimistic: “[Emerson’s] optimism has nothing in common with that indiscriminate hurrahing for the Universe with which Walt Whitman has made us familiar.” William James, “Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord,” in The Writings of William James. A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 586. I will return to the issue of optimism in my discussion of Marcel and James in Chapter Six. 38 Ibid., 582.

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the passive side of these dispositions, while the sedulousness emphasizes the active, careful and attentive aspects. Emerson’s attitude is one of openness to the smallest detail, to the richness of experience that makes it both vague and intense. As opposed to the common idea that concepts are objective and therefore more real than individual experience, Gavin affirms the Emersonian point of view in remarking that “the perceptual world is richer and more intense than the conceptual one, and therefore it is termed more real.”39 The Bergsonian idea that the artist can represent experience in a new, live way, is reflected in this attitude which is based on the thought that “the world is still new and untried. In seeing freshly, and not in hearing of what others saw, shall a man find what truth is.”40 I suggest that achieving felt knowledge is one way of finding the kind of truth mentioned by James in this citation. Characteristic of felt knowledge is its deeply felt impact and the feeling of authority and necessity it brings with it. This type of knowledge, much closer to James’ knowledge by acquaintance than to his knowledge about, is experienced as particularly meaningful by both the narrator and Emerson. The issue of meaningfulness is of central importance to James’ wider philosophy and a brief discussion of James’ pragmatism will help to make clear how one should understand meaning in the context of felt knowledge. Throughout the following paragraphs, it serves to keep in mind the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother. In Chapter Two, the narrator was shown to cling to the pain brought about by this experience, because he felt that it was the only thing he had left of his grandmother that was real. He then remarked: “I did not know for certain whether one day I would draw a little truth from this painful and for the moment incomprehensible impression, but I knew that if I ever could extract that little truth, it would only be from this impression and from none other.” The truth which the narrator claims can only be drawn from this involuntary memory is the truth of felt knowledge. It is this kind of truth that I am interested in here, and I will turn to James’ philosophy in order to further describe it. It is not my goal to evaluate or explore James’ entire theory of truth and meaning; rather, I will narrow the scope of my discussion to focus on

39 40

Gavin, The Reinstatement of the Vague, 68. James, “Address at the Emerson Centenary,” 583.

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felt knowledge and the privileged moment, drawing on those parts of James work that help better understand these phenomena.

Pragmatic Meaning and Truth In the Varieties, James sums up the guiding principle of the philosophy known as pragmatism in the brief statement that “every difference must make a difference.” When we are considering a truth, we must ask: “What is the particular truth known as? In what facts does it result?”41 If two truths result in the same facts, they are, pragmatically speaking, one and the same truth. If a concept, notion or theory does not result in any facts, it is empty and pragmatically meaningless. Pragmatism, therefore, is a method rather than a system. This method is described by James as follows: The pragmatic method . . . is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to anyone if this notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle. Whenever a dispute is serious, we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow from one side or the other’s being right.42

James refers to Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of pragmatism, and sums up the same principle in a different way: “In what respects would the world be different if this alternative or that were true? If I can find nothing that would become different, then the alternative has no sense.” And again: “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere.”43 Though James first describes pragmatism as only a method, devoid of any particular content, he later adds that pragmatism encourages a certain “attitude of orientation:” “the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts.”44 Here we can recall the connection made earlier

41

James, Varieties, 443. James, Pragmatism, 28. James adds: “The tangible fact at the root of all our thought-distinctions, however subtle, is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice.” Ibid., 29. 43 Ibid., 30. 44 Ibid., 32. 42

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in the chapter, where both James and Bergson describe their suspicion of abstract intellectual concepts, categories and theories. What is added here is the alternative attitude, one which does justice to the vagueness of experience: an openness to and emphasis on the individual and the particular. This attitude of what James calls radical empiricism does justice to the whole of experience.45 In “The Meaning of Truth,” James explains that radical empiricism is based on the postulate “that the only things that shall be debatable among philosophers shall be things definable in terms drawn from experience.”46 In order to take seriously every aspect of experience, vagueness and feelings must be admitted as just as real as those parts of experience one normally recognizes as “more real:” things, logical relations, etc. The latter parts of experience fit into rationalistic systems, but the former do not: “the actual universe is a thing wide open, but rationalism makes systems, and systems must be closed.”47 In Le temps retrouvé, M. de Charlus reminds the narrator that the latter once declared to hold a very similar view: “Be honest, my friend, you yourself once propounded a theory to me about things existing only in virtue of a creation which is perpetually renewed. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, you said, it is, of necessity, taking place every day.” [Soyez franc, mon cher ami, vous-même m’aviez fait une théorie sur les choses que n’existent que grâce à une création perpétuellement recommencée. La création du monde n’a pas eu lieu une fois pour toutes, me disiezvous, elle a nécessairement lieu tous les jours.]48 Doing justice to the whole of experience means recognizing that no closed system can ever account for the concrete, individual phenomena that cannot be accurately expressed in abstract concepts. Additionally, a closed system tends to assign to experience a domain far too restrictive. We cannot pretend to transcend experience because, as Marcel puts in The Mystery of Being, “there must exist a possibility of having an experience of the transcendent as such, and unless that possibility exists

45 Note that James regards radical empiricism not as a necessary application of pragmatism, but rather the one that is most appealing to him. James claims that other representations of experience are compatible with pragmatism and that pragmatism and empiricism do not necessarily go together. 46 William James, “The Meaning of Truth,” in: Pragmatism (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000), 172. 47 James, Pragmatism, 20. Cf. James, “The Meaning of Truth,” 173. 48 Proust, Time Regained, 155–6; Le temps retrouvé, 375.

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the word can have no meaning.”49 And Marcel continues: “beyond all experience, there is nothing; I do not say merely nothing that can be thought, but nothing that can be felt.”50 The human element that is always necessarily a part of our representations of reality makes that our truths are not objective copies of some external reality, but instruments with which we more or less successfully approach that reality in order to satisfy our interests and purposes. Truth, as mentioned above, is instrumental: “ideas . . . become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience . . . working securely, simplifying, saving labor.”51 Truths are dependent on their use, and we tend to simply disbelieve facts for which we have no use.52 “If,” on the other hand, “the total drift of thinking continues to confirm [an hypothesis], that is what [the empiricist] means by its being true.”53 According to James, we call a theory or idea true if it has worked so far, i.e., if it has proven useful. Concepts, ideas, and theories are shortcuts that help us to get from one point to the next without having to wade through the rich thickness of the flux in which we are submerged when we pay attention to all aspects of experience. Our interests and purposes determine what sensations we emphasize or pay attention to: “according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different formulations of truth result. . . . What we say about reality depends on the perspective into which we throw it. The that of it is its own; but the what depends on the which; and the which depends on us.”54 The role played by our purposes and interest is clear in the following passage from The Fugitive, where the narrator receives a telegram when he is in Venice with his mother. The words are transmitted inaccurately, but he nevertheless manages to read the message: “My dear friend, you think me dead, forgive me, I am quite alive, I long to see you, talk about marriage, when do you return? Affectionately. Albertine.” [Mon ami vous me croyez morte, pardonnez-moi, je suis très vivante, je voudrais vous voir, vous parler mariage, quand revenezvous? Tendrement. Albertine.]55 On the train back to Paris, the narra49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 46. Ibid., 47–8. James, Pragmatism, 34. James, “The Will to Believe,” 10. Ibid., 17. James, Pragmatism, 118. Proust, The Fugitive, 218; La fugitive, 220.

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tor reads a letter he has received from Gilberte in which she tells him about her plans to marry Saint-Loup. Gilberte also remarks in her letter that she had sent him a telegram with the same news, but had received no reply. The narrator thinks to himself that the Venetian telegraphic service must be unreliable because he never received a telegram from Gilberte. Then, finally, he understands what has happened: “All of a sudden I felt in my brain a fact, which was installed there in the guise of a memory, leave its place and surrender it to another fact. The telegram that I had received a few days earlier, and had supposed to be from Albertine, was from Gilberte.” [Tout d’un coup je sentis dans mon cerveau un fait, qui y était installé à l’état de souvenir, quitter sa place et la céder à un autre. La dépêche que j’avais reçue dernièrement et que j’avais crue d’Albertine était de Gilberte.]56 The narrator realizes that, on the one hand, “the somewhat labored originality of Gilberte’s handwriting” [l’originalité assez factice de l’écriture de Gilberte] must have confused the clerk who dispatched the telegram and that, on the other hand, he himself misread several words. How many letters are actually read into a word by a careless person who knows what to expect, who sets out with the idea that the message is from a certain person? How many words into the sentence? We guess as we read, we create; everything starts from an initial error; those that follow (and this applies not only to the reading of letters and telegrams, not only to all reading), extraordinary as they may appear to a person who has not begun at the same place, are all quite natural. [Combien de lettres lit dans un mot une personne distraite et surtout prévenue, qui part de l’idée que la lettre est d’une certaine personne? combien de mots dans la phrase? On devine en lisant, on crée; tout part d’une erreur initiale; celles qui suivent (et ce n’est pas seulement dans la lecture des lettres et des télégrammes, pas seulement dans toute lecture), si extraordinaires qu’elles puissent paraître à celui qui n’a pas le même point de départ, sont toutes naturelles.]57

As was shown above, we have to work with sensations as a part of reality that simply happens to us, but we have a certain amount of freedom in choosing what we pay attention to. The narrator has to “work with” the telegram and its unclear content, but old feelings, presuppositions, thoughtlessness, and all matter of opinions and beliefs make him read it in a certain way. The narrator’s interpretation of the 56 57

Ibid., 237; 234. Ibid., 238; 234–5.

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telegram is based in reality, but the selective tendency of the intellect allows for the narrator’s obviously mistaken reading. As the narrator remarks, we guess and create as we go, fabricating “truth.” The Jamesian pragmatist takes up this point and claims that truth is always fabricated. Reality “pushes back” and as such forces us to take it into account, but it is also plastic and malleable, making it possible for us to be selective and mold it into a variety of shapes. Marcel arrives at what I suggest is a pragmatic stance within his own existentialist system. Truth, Marcel states, is not a thing, nor can it be described in material images. In The Mystery of Being he makes the following observation, illuminating the meaning of the word “truth” as I am using it in the present discussion: In our everyday thinking, we remain dominated by an image of truth as something extracted—extracted, or smelted out, exactly as a pure metal is extracted from a mixed ore. It seems obvious to us that there are universally effective smelting processes; or, more fundamentally, that there are established, legitimate ways of arriving at truth. . . . What we must above all reject is the idea that we are forced to make a choice between genuine truth (so to call it) which has been extracted, and a false, lying truth which has been fabricated.58

This is not to say that we can believe anything and everything to be true just because we want to; the pragmatist, and I suggest Marcel would agree, recognizes that reality always remains to be discovered further. He or she understands that there are always impressions and sensations that have been overlooked, of which we did not take notice or for which we do not have words and hence regard as unreal. The narrator eventually finds out that his interpretation was mistaken and that the telegram was sent by Gilberte. We may believe certain things to be true for a while, only to be corrected by new experiences that are just as deserving of our attention as the experience which helped us form our mistaken belief. Marcel points out that traditional empiricism has often made the mistake of regarding experience as “an impermeable mass.” Experience, he explains, is receptive to different degrees of saturation: “an experience can be saturated with prejudices,” as, I suggest, it is in the case of narrator described above.59 James points out that we need to remember that fact is always still “in the mak-

58 59

Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 19. Ibid., 56.

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ing” and is in agreement with Marcel who states that “the intelligence must become at once pure ardor and pure receptivity” in order to do justice to the richness of experience. The pragmatic attitude of doing justice to experience as a whole, whether this attitude is described by James or in existentialist terms by Marcel, is opposite to the rationalist outlook dominant in western philosophy: “for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its completion from the future.”60 As M. de Charlus reminds the narrator, the creation of the world takes place every day. It is becoming clear how the privileged moment fits in with the pragmatic stance taken by James. One can choose to pay attention to privileged moments or ignore them, but the fact that these moment are experienced, and therefore part of the that of reality, makes them candidates for beliefs, theories and so on. Proust is an artist who, after Bergsonian fashion, uncovers these sensations for his readers, shifting the emphasis to sensations of a kind that are usually ignored simply because we lack the words to talk and think about them. The flux of experience, made up of sensations among which one sometimes experiences a privileged moment, needs to be harnessed in order for us to be able to take action, come to a decision or, in short, get anything done. We have to be selective and we have our practical, utilitarian intellect to pick out the sensations we need to pay attention to in order to fulfill our interests. When we make a difference between ideas or thoughts, calling the one true and the other false, we in fact do so because regarding them as such makes a difference to agents. This difference can be of a very practical kind, such as calling true the idea that eating quicksilver is bad for one’s health. But other true/false distinctions make a difference on a much more subtle and personal level. Calling a privileged moment true, for instance, leads to different consequences than calling it false. The narrator in À la recherche clings to the memory of his grandmother when it comes to him involuntarily and mourns her passing as a result of accepting the insight that the memory brings as true. One can imagine that he might as well have brushed off the memory after it initially overwhelmed him, resulting in a continued attitude of indifference. In this example, it is clear how calling something true rather than false makes a difference

60

James, Pragmatism, 123.

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to the agent. In Chapter Five, where James’ famous essay “The Will to Believe” will be discussed, the moral side of this issue will be further explored starting from the question of belief: rather than just calling the memory true, the narrator believes it to be true, and in doing so brings about the consequent feelings described above. For now it suffices to say with James that to call something true is meaningful only when doing so results in different facts than calling it false. The same can be said of distinctions of any kind: when a distinction does not make a difference in reality, the distinction is irrelevant. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory and, more generally, between habit and privileged moment, must be shown to stand this pragmatic test if it is to be called relevant. A few more remarks on the relation between truth and reality according to James will be helpful in the pursuit of this question. In Pragmatism, James states that “all our truths are beliefs about ‘Reality,’ and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing found, not manufactured.” And he continues: “‘Reality’ is in general what truths have to take account of; and the first part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control. They are neither true nor false; they simply are.”61 As was pointed out above, privileged moments fit into this category. The second part of reality, a part which I will not discuss here, “is the relations that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds.” The third part of reality is of more interest to the present discussion and is described as “the previous truths of which every new inquiry takes account.”62 It is here that one finds what Proust calls voluntary memories. There exists a tension between the first and the third part of reality as described by James because a new experience puts the stock of old opinions to a strain. A new sensation, such as an involuntary memory, can be at odds with things previously accepted as true and these previous truths have to somehow make room for the new one. According to James, this stock of old opinions will never give way easily, and if possible will not shift at all. Saving as much of this old stock as she can, the individual makes room for a new experience by forming an

61 62

Ibid., 117. Ibid., 118.

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“idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. This new idea is then adopted as the true one. It preserves the older stock of truths with a minimum of modification, stretching them just enough to make them admit the novelty.”63 A complete revolution of the old ideas is therefore unlikely. Even if for a while one may experience a serious upset of everything one used to hold as true, mediating ideas will eventually weave new and old together in a way that restores calm. The reluctance of established truths to make way for new ones does not foreclose change; James merely means to indicate that change does not happen easily and that, given the chance, an individual will always be conservative and accept the new in terms of the old rather than change the old in order to embrace novelty. In line with James’ argument, an individual tends to resist the disruptive quality of an involuntary memory and tries to smooth over the way in which it upsets, for instance, the self-image one has not previously put into question. If this smoothing over proves too great a task, the involuntary memory will be ignored altogether: “by far the most usual way of handling phenomena so novel that they would make for a serious rearrangement of our preconceptions is to ignore them altogether, or to abuse those who bear witness for them.”64 With these remarks in mind I want to suggest that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, between habit (in the Jamesian or Bergsonian meaning of the word) and privileged moment, is pragmatically meaningful because it has consequences for the individual. The moral relevance of these consequences will be explored in Chapter Five, but what matters most at this point in the discussion is that a privileged moment, involuntary and not controlled by the force of habit, can result in a different way of regarding others and oneself, which in turn has an effect on one’s actions. In addition, it has become clear that accepting privileged moments as containing truth makes a difference as well, precisely because allowing for this truth means changing one’s opinion and making room for something

63 Ibid., 35. Also: “New truth is always a go-between, a smoother-over of transitions.” Ibid., 35. “Purely objective truth, truth in whose establishment the function of giving human satisfaction in marrying previous parts of experience with newer parts played no rôle whatever, is nowhere to be found.” Ibid., 37. 64 Ibid., 35.

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new and previously unforeseen. Pragmatism, in short, helps us to read Proust, and Proust brings to life some of the insights of pragmatism. In the next section I will establish a link between the “old stock of opinions” preserved by habit and the intellect, voluntary memory, and what James calls “the sentiment of rationality.” This sentiment is tied to the temptation to regard language as a copy of reality. We feel at ease when we can describe, name and interpret things, as we do in voluntary memories, and try to overcome states like those of puzzle and perplexity caused by an involuntary memory in which we cannot find words or explanations to deal with a situation. A description of this sentiment will lay the foundation for a discussion of anhedonia, the term James uses to indicate the state of mind of the person to whom the world has lost all enchantment, or, better yet, to whom the world is devoid of vagueness. Once these new terms have been explained, Gabriel Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery will be brought into the discussion in order to pursue the explicitly moral implications of anhedonia.

The Sentiment of Rationality and Anhedonia As James explains in his essay “The Sentiment of Rationality,” philosophers “desire to attain a conception of the frame of things which shall on the whole be more rational than that somewhat chaotic view which every one by nature carries about with him under his hat.”65 It is not, however, just philosophers who seek rational explanations, systems and relations; everyone strives for some degree of rationality in order to feel at home in what can sometimes seem a chaotic world. According to James, every individual recognizes rationality by certain “subjective marks.” Rationality, therefore, is a feeling and something is considered rational when in the face of it we experience this feeling. The sentiment of rationality is “a strong feeling of ease, peace, rest” and “the transition from a state of puzzle and perplexity to rational comprehension is full of lively relief and pleasure.”66 The following passage from Le temps retrouvé illustrates this transition. Shortly after his return to Paris, the narrator takes a cab to the party at the new

65 66

James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 63. Ibid., 63.

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Guermantes residence and is riding through the streets which lead to the Champs-Elysées. They were very badly paved at this time, but the moment I found myself in them I was, none the less, detached from my thoughts by that sensation of extra-ordinary physical comfort which one has when suddenly a car in which one is travelling rolls more easily, more softly, without noise, because the gates of a park have been opened and one is gliding over alleys covered with fine sand or dead leaves; materially nothing of the sort had happened, but I felt suddenly that all external obstacles had been eliminated, simply because I no longer had to make that effort of adaptation or attention which we make, sometimes without being conscious of it, in the presence of new things: the streets through which I was passing at this moment were those, so long forgotten, which I used once upon a time to take with Françoise when we went to the Champs-Elysées. The solid earth knew of its own accord where it had to go; its resistance was vanquished. And like an airman who hitherto has progressed laboriously along the ground, abruptly “taking off ” I soared slowly towards the silent heights of memory. Among all the streets of Paris these streets will always stand out for me, as though they were made of a different substance from the others. [Elles étaient fort mal pavées à ce moment là, mais dès le moment où j’y entrai, je n’en fus pas moins détaché de mes pensées par cette sensation d’une extrême douceur qu’on a quand, tout d’un coup, la voiture roule plus facilement, plus doucement, sans bruit, comme quand les grilles d’un parc s’étant ouvertes, on glisse sur les allées couvertes d’un sable fin ou de feuilles mortes. Matériellement il n’en était rien; mais je sentis tout d’un coup la suppression des obstacles extérieurs parce qu’il n’y avait plus pour moi en effet l’effort d’adaptation ou d’attention que nous faisons, même sans nous en rendre compte, devant les choses nouvelles: les rues par lesquelles je passais en ce moment étaient celles, oubliées depuis si longtemps, que je prenais jadis avec Françoise pour aller au Champs-Élysées. Le sol de lui-même savait où il devait aller; sa résistance était vaincue. Et, comme un aviateur qui a jusque-là péniblement roulé à terre, “décollant” brusquement, je m’élevais lentement vers les hauteurs silencieuses du souvenir. Dans Paris, ces rues-là se détacheront toujours pour moi, en une autre matière que les autres.]67

Once the carriage is rolling over familiar streets, the narrator feels completely at ease. There are no new things to take into account, and habit puts everything into its proper place. The unease of visiting the Guermantes in their new house and of the realization that he has been away for a long time from Paris society is relieved by the pleasure 67

Proust, Time Regained, 243; Le temps retrouvé, 437.

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the narrator is experiencing now that he is “traversing the past” on the familiar streets leading to the Champs-Elysées. Turning again to James, the sentiment of rationality is analogous to the narrator’s feeling that “the solid earth knew of its own accord where it had to go; its resistance was vanquished.” James claims that we call our concepts, perceptions and interpretations rational when they effortlessly help us to go from one place in the flux of experience to another, unimpeded by obstacles that cannot be made to fit. Habit and memory make the concepts rational and comfortable, because we are familiar with the connections these concepts provide and we feel at ease traveling these roads that we have traveled many times before. It is irrationality that needs explanation, that needs to be resolved and made sense of. A new concept, a new shortcut, is at first unfamiliar and requires the effort of adaptation to something new mentioned by the author above. On the other hand, whatever is considered rational is characterized by a “feeling of the sufficiency of the present moment, of its absoluteness,” and the “absence of all need to explain it, account for it, or justify it.”68 Rational concepts are labor-saving contrivances, the tools of choice for the utilitarian intellect. It serves here to bring back to mind Hulme’s account of Bergson’s thought as discussed in the previous chapter. As Hulme points out, the words we commonly use to express our feelings, thoughts, etc., are like circles too wide to for the things they are meant to capture. When I say: “I am angry,” my very individual anger is expressed by a term wide enough to encompass a whole range of feelings, leaving out all the particular characteristics that are part of my anger. In line with this Bergsonian idea, James states that “none of our explanations are complete. They subsume things under heads wider or more familiar.”69 Every philosophical system must mediate between diversity and unity, finding the best balance between the empiricist sensitivity to the rich variety found in experience, and the rationalist tendency to explain by means of categorizations, classifying things by their similarities rather than paying attention to what makes them different. The result, however, will always be that the “best possible theoretic philosophy” is in fact still “a monstrous abridgment of life.”70 As was pointed out above,

68 69 70

James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 64. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 65. Ibid., 69.

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we cut out of the flux of experience those things and relations that are useful to us, calling them true and more real than what, from our perspective, is on the fringe. The pragmatist, however, realizes that “no abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver.”71 Because of the interplay of custom, language and our habit of thinking in terms of what is useful, we tend to take for granted that our concepts, limited though they are, are objective copies of reality. The issue I want to pursue next is the danger inherent in this mindset. When the sentiment of rationality is dominant, irrationality, understood as a state of puzzle and perplexity, of encountering obstacles, the unforeseen and unexpected, is regarded as an indication that something is wrong and needs to be resolved. Whatever is irrational cannot be real; it is a sign that whatever is creating the problem must be analyzed away, fit in with what is already understood. In terms of the discussion about truth above, the novel sensation needs to be fitted in with the stock of old truths, leaving as much of this stock in tact as possible. The novelty must be subsumed under the already existing categories so that the feeling of peace and rest, the sentiment of rationality, can return. The sentiment of rationality is most easily defined in negative terms as primarily an absence of irrationality. Connecting this new distinction to the Proustian notions of voluntary and involuntary memory, voluntary memory has the subjective marks of peace, ease and rest characteristic of the sentiment of rationality whereas involuntary memory is irrational, an obstacle to thoughts flowing smoothly and according to expectation. It causes puzzle and perplexity. My suggestion is that involuntary memories, and privileged moments in general, are irrational in the Jamesian sense because they force the attention to shift from the rational, useful, predictable and reliable to what is usually dismissed or ignored altogether: the vague. It is important to bear in mind that the vague for James is rich and intense; in day to day life, we cut out vagueness because it does not serve a straightforward, practical purpose. Voluntary memories, polished and manageable, are useful to us: we can recall what happened in the past in order to understand the present and predict the future. They bear the marks of rationality because they give us the comforting feeling of having a grip on reality. We can recall them at will in order to study and analyze

71

Ibid., 70.

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them. Involuntary memory, however, is vague both in its origin and its content: it comes unexpectedly, takes hold of us in an unforeseen way, and present us with a sensation so strong that, whether we pursue its content or not, it makes us recognize this sensation as undeniably different from the usual and the peacefully rational. Involuntary memory, in short, is one instance of a shift in focus in which the vague is made central. On a more general level, I want to claim that a denial of the vague, in a life ruled entirely by the sentiment of rationality, results in a complete absence of enchantment, wonder, and, ultimately, enjoyment and interest. James calls this state anhedonia, and though James himself does not state explicitly that anhedonia is the result of the total domination of the sentiment of rationality, I will show below how this connection is justified. In the following discussion it must be kept in mind that, first, involuntary memory is one among many possible instances of the vague, and second, the sentiment of rationality is one among many possible causes of anhedonia. James discusses the term anhedonia in the Varieties. He cites Ribot who first proposed the term to designate a condition of “passive joylessness and dreariness, discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring.”72 James adopts the term and explains that in this state, one turns away from every good with disgust. He illustrates his point with a citation taken from Gratry: “Happiness, joy, light, affections, love—all these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them.”73 Though James does not make the comparison himself, I want to claim that in anhedonia, the knowledge by acquaintance that was a self-evident part of life has been replaced by knowledge about. Happiness, joy and affection are no longer experienced intimately from within, but have become concepts, definable but not felt. The feelings of joy and interest that used to come readily can still be recalled, but only in a removed and detached fashion. Somehow the individual has come to stand outside of his or her own life, alienated from the inwardness that used to be self-evident and unproblematic.

72

James, Varieties, 145. Ibid., 147. To further illustrate his point, James cites an asylum patient who writes: “ ‘I weep false tears, I have unreal hands: the things I see are not real things.’ ” Ibid., 152. 73

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The narrator in À la recherche appears to suffer from anhedonia at several points in the novel, though it can be hard to tell whether he is dealing with anhedonia in all its gravity, or with a severe case of listlessness or boredom (as will be explained below, anhedonia comes in different degrees, or, more precisely, in many different shades). In Chapter One I pointed out that the narrator is often in a depressed state of mind when he is hit by involuntary memory. Especially in Le temps retrouvé, the last volume of À la recherche, it appears justified to speak of anhedonia: the narrator has been away from society for several years, spending his time in sanatoria and not living up to any of the expectations he had of himself when he was young and aspiring to be a writer. He has given up on himself and is resigned to leading a superficial life in the society he has been criticizing for its lack of genuine love and friendship. It is a series of involuntary memories that finally liberates him from this dull oppression.74 James calls anhedonia a “passive joylessness” and refers to Tolstoy as an example. Tolstoy described how he experienced a “passive loss of appetite for all life’s values,”75 and lost the sense that life had any meaning whatever. This resulted in a “transformation in the whole expression of reality.”76 The world looked to Tolstoy “remote, strange, sinister, uncanny.”77 To the person suffering from anhedonia, the world is “unhomelike,”78 a world in which one no longer knows how to live. It serves to give two additional examples from sources other than James in order to show how the feeling of anhedonia is not an isolated notion but rather an existential theme recognized by philosophers from different traditions. The first instance of what James describes as an “incapacity of joyous feeling”79 that will serve the discussion at this point is taken from Gabriel Marcel’s play Le monde cassé. In this play, Christiane, a successful and attractive woman, seemingly without any cause for complaints, expresses her feeling of alienation and detachment to a friend:

74 I want to emphasize again that a privileged moment is only one way out of this state, and that other ways may very well be possible. I am not claiming that privileged moments make up the sole answer to the problem of anhedonia, just as I do not hold that these moments are the only instances of the vague or the mysterious. 75 James, Varieties, 149. 76 Ibid., 151. 77 Ibid., 151. 78 Ibid., 152. 79 Ibid., 147.

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chapter three Don’t you have the impression that we are living . . . if we can call that living . . . in a broken world? Yes, broken like a watch that has stopped. Its mainspring no longer works. To all appearances nothing has changed. Everything is in place. But if you put the watch to your ear . . . you hear nothing. Remember, the world, or what we call the world, the human world . . . used to have a heart. But it seems that heart has stopped beating.80

As for Tolstoy, the world to Christiane has become “unhomelike,” a place that seems familiar but only on the surface; upon closer inspection, the meaningfulness that used to be self-evident has disappeared, leaving the world as something arbitrary and dead, without a heart. The world is still there, but all things have lost their meaning. The feeling that what was taken for granted before is broken, that one is, as it were, afloat, without anything on which one can rely, is similar to what Sartre calls la Nausée. It is of interest to note that just like the narrator of À la recherche wants to find an explanation for the “exquisite pleasure” he experiences in some privileged moments, the Nausea experienced by Roquentin pushes him to investigate why this feeling overwhelms him, and what it could mean. Before he finds his answer in the public garden of Bouville, Roquentin describes la Nausée as a feeling that involves blinding evidence, une aveuglante évidence. But this certainty is a certainty of being too much [de trop], a realization that existence is meaningless and irreducible, whereas the certainty that hit Proust’s narrator is a joyous certainty that life is meaningful, if only one knows where to look. For Proust, the truth to be discovered in the overwhelming feeling of joy is that there is something real to be found, something that endures and does not decay over time. Compare to this enchanting and reassuring truth, the certainty that Roquentin discovers as the root of his Nausea: The waitress puts a plate of chalky Camembert in front of me. I glance around the room and a violent disgust floods me. What am I doing here? . . . I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where I will fit in. . . . But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop. So this is Nausea: this blinding evidence? Now I know: I exist—and I know that the world exists. That’s all. It makes no difference to me. It’s strange that everything makes so little difference to me: it frightens me.

80 Gabriel Marcel, Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on the Broken World, trans. Katherine Rose Hanley (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998) 46.

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[La bonne pose devant moi une assiette avec un bout de camembert crayeux. Je parcours la salle du regard et un violent dégoût m’envahit. Que fais-je ici? . . . J’ai envie de partir, de m’en aller quelque part où je serais vraiment à ma place, où je m’emboîterais. . . . Mais ma place n’est nulle part; je suis de trop. C’est donc ça la Nausée: cette aveuglante évidence? . . . Maintenant je sais: J’existe—le monde existe—et je sais que le monde existe. C’est tout. Mais ça m’est égal. C’est étrange que tout me soit aussi égal: ça m’effraie.]81

The truth found at the root of the overwhelming feeling, so joyous for the narrator of À la recherche, is nauseating and even frightening for Roquentin. After leaving the Autodidact at the cafe where they just had lunch, Roquentin finds himself in the public garden where the certainty of this truth becomes even more pronounced: “And suddenly, suddenly, the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.” [Tout d’un coup, d’un seul coup, le voile se déchire, j’ai compris, j’ai vu. ]82 Roquentin goes on to describe the revelation that has struck him on the following pages and explains that “the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.” [La diversité des choses, leur individualité n’était qu’un apparence, un vernis. Ce vernis avait fondu, il restait des masses monstrueuses et molles, en désordre—nues, d’une effrayante et obscène nudité.]83 Underneath the couvercles, conveyors of the truth of an extra-temporal realm in À la recherche, Roquentin finds nothing; things simply exist in their disgusting arbitrariness. For both Proust’s narrator and Roquentin, objects in the world around them stand out, present themselves as somehow more existing than usual, but whereas they bring the narrator the pleasure of a privileged moment, they oppress Roquentin and make him feel like the only relation between things is the relation of being too much.

81 Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (Norfolk: New Directions, 1964), 122. Id., La nausée (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), 169, 170. 82 Ibid., 126; 175. 83 Ibid., 127; 176. It serves to compare these citations to Levinas’ remarks on nausea in De l’évasion: “In nausea . . . we are drifting shoreless. . . . We have our nausea in the specific form of ‘seasickness,’ weil wir schweben, because we float, suspended.”And further: “What nausea manifests is finally the there is [il y a] that murmurs at the depths of nothingness itself.” Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 19, 24.

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In Marcel’s play as well as in Sartre’s novel, excitement and interest have ceased and all enchantment is gone. Christiane’s broken world reflects Tolstoy’s mindset: “Things were meaningless whose meaning had always been self-evident. . . . ‘I felt,’ says Tolstoy, “that something had broken within me on which my life had always rested, that I had nothing to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. . . . It was an aspiration of my whole being to get out of life.’ ”84 Tolstoy, like Roquentin, feels like he is too much, superfluous, de trop. As Tolstoy explains, the feeling of anhedonia does not create in him a desire to take his own life; rather, he feels as if nothing can possibly make a difference, like everything and every option is flat, sober, dead. Things have lost their meaning and this is why words can no longer fulfill their function of creating the shortcuts required for the sentiment of rationality. The puzzle and perplexity described by James as the subjective marks of irrationality are nauseating to Roquentin who realizes that words and concepts are mere constructs, not attached to the things we pretend they are attached to. They are means to cut parts out of the stream of experience, but the stream itself is overwhelming and the “booming, buzzing confusion” causes disgust because it is too rich, too full. Roquentin’s feelings in the restaurant correspond to the description Tolstoy gives of the despair he experiences in which questions like “Why should I live? Why should I do anything?” have no answers but merely underline the “meaningless absurdity of life.”85 What is lacking in anhedonia is “a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory to the common objects of life. . . . It may be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air.”86 From these words it is apparent that it is precisely the vagueness described before, the mystery and wonder as it was experienced and put into words by for instance Emerson, that is lacking when anhedonia takes hold. How exactly anhedonia comes about remains unknown. Tolstoy, like Christiane and Roquentin, leads a relatively comfortable life, and there is no shock or event that straightforwardly causes any of these people to become indifferent to all the things that were self-evidently meaningful before. Later in this chapter, I will show that a world in which the

84 85 86

James, Varieties, 153. Ibid., 155. Ibid., 505.

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sentiment of rationality reigns is full of despair and that anhedonia is a possible form this despair can take. At this point, I want merely to point to James’ idea that a “craving for hard facts, answers, can breed pessimism,”87 exactly because some questions do not have answers that live up to the standards set by hard facts. These questions are the ones dealing with the vague, where the sentiment of rationality simply cannot exist.

Anhedonia and the Broken World of À la recherche Earlier, Gabriel Marcel’s play Le monde cassé was cited in order to show that Marcel in his work presents his own version of anhedonia: the experience of the broken world. In one of his philosophical works, Le mystère de l’être, Marcel describes the opposition between living in the fullest fashion and the state in which “I seem to myself as if I were a dead man; I drag myself along, I seem to have survived my living self.” Many roads can lead to this state: What began as a creative activity can become a mere professional routine, the interest that I take in things and events can become blunted, and flat, and stale; the happenings of real life may come to arouse in me nothing more than the utter indifference with which I watch one episode succeed another in a really bad second-feature film. Whatever happens, it’s all one to me, I couldn’t . . . care less.

Marcel uses the English word “tediousness” which, he claims, “conveys this feeling perfectly.”88 The indifference which marks this tedium can become all-encompassing: “when tedium becomes general, when it seems to spread itself over the whole field of existence, it becomes something more than tedium, it becomes despair.”89 In an earlier work, “On the Ontological Mystery,” which originally appeared in the same volume with the play Le monde cassé, Marcel described despair as “the act by which one despairs of reality as a whole. At the root of despair there is always this affirmation: ‘There is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit—no security, no guarantee.’ It is a

87 88 89

James, “Is Life Worth Living,” in The Will to Believe, 40. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 162. Ibid., 163.

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statement of complete insolvency.”90 The terminology used by Marcel to describe the scale that leads from tediousness to despair is similar to the passages dealing with Tolstoy’s state of mind as they are found in James’ Varieties; in both cases, words like “flat,” “dead,” “stale” and “blunted” convey the feeling of indifference which can easily turn into a state of complete apathy and depression. It is perhaps impossible to pinpoint the place on this scale where tediousness turns into despair, but an excerpt from Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? can further illuminate what is at the root of this phenomenon as a whole: No matter how fragmented our everyday existence may appear to be, however, it always deals with beings in a unity of the “whole,” if only in a shadowy way. Even and precisely then when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves this “as a whole” overcomes us—for example in genuine boredom. Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole.91

Profound boredom, like despair, concerns reality as a whole. It is not just one thing that one is bored with, or despairs about; one feels like there is nothing which makes a difference, nothing meaningful which offers some kind of safety or guarantee. One who falls victim to despair, according to Marcel, is a person “in whom the sense of the ontological—of the sense of being—is lacking.”92 That which Marcel will call the denial of the mystery of being is related to the misplacement of the idea of function. The result of this misplacement is that “the individual tends to appear both to himself and to others as an

90

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 27. Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York, Meridian, 1975), 247. This, again, touches on Heidegger’s notion of “everydayness” and “averageness” in Being and Time: “Every mystery loses its power. The care of averageness reveals . . . an essential tendency of Dasein, which we call the levelling down of all possibilities of being.” Heidegger, Being and Time, 127. Given statements such as these, it is not surprising that, in his conversation with Ricœur, Marcel claims to be closer to Heidegger than to, for instance, Jaspers. Also compare Levinas, who remarks: “The fundamental disposition manifesting being qua being, which is announced in the feeling of being riveted or held fast is nausea.” Levinas, On Escape, 15. 92 Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 9. 91

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agglomeration of functions.”93 Deleuze gives a very clear account of function as it appears in À la recherche. The worldly signs that the narrator has to learn to interpret in order to take part in society are so important in the little clan of the Verdurins, that not only one’s position but one’s whole being is based on them. Marcel explains that a functionalized world produces a “stifling impression of sadness” and that in it, one finds “the dull, intolerable unease of the actor himself who is reduced to living as though he were in fact submerged by his functions.” The narrator of À la recherche describes the world of the Guermantes originally with awe, but later with an acute awareness of the role playing and the superficial nature of all personal relations within that world. This insight is most prominent in Le temps retrouvé, where the narrator resigns himself to a life in society, fully aware of its hollowness. It is clear to him that this cannot be but a superficial life, devoid of the meaningfulness of which he had caught a glimpse only a few times in involuntary memory. The narrator has spent many years in a sanatorium but does not feel any better than before. He is on a train back to Paris when he most acutely experiences what he considers to be his failure: The train had stopped, I remember, in open country. The sun was shining on a row of trees that followed the railway line, flooding 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 indifference, 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. 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 flowers on the bank which lifted themselves almost to the level of the steps of my compartment, flowers whose petals I was able to count but whose color

93 Ibid., 10. In his conversation with Ricœur, Marcel remarks: “Un monde où l’homme n’est plus traité que comme un faisceau de fonctions.” Ricœur, Marcel, Entretiens, 36.

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chapter three 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? [C’était, je me le rappelle, à un arrêt du train en plein campagne. Le soleil éclairait jusqu’à la moitié de leur tronc une ligne d’arbres qui suivait la voie du chemin de fer. “Arbres, pensai-je, vous n’avez plus rien à me dire, mon cœur refroidi ne vous entend plus. Je suis pourtant ici en pleine nature, eh bien, c’est avec froideur, avec ennui que mes yeux constatent la ligne qui sépare votre front lumineux de votre tronc d’ombre. Si j’ai jamais pu me croire poète, je sais maintenant que je ne le suis pas. Peut-être dans la nouvelle partie de ma vie, si desséchée, qui s’ouvre, les hommes pourraient-ils m’inspirer ce que ne me dit plus la nature. Mais les années où j’aurais peut-être été capable de la chanter ne reviendront jamais.” Mais en me donnant cette consolation d’une observation humaine possible venant prendre la place d’une inspiration impossible, je savais que je cherchais seulement à me donner une consolation, et que je savais moi-même sans valeur. Si j’avais vraiment une âme d’artiste, quel plaisir n’éprouverais-je pas devant ce rideau d’arbres éclairé par le soleil couchant, devant ces petites fleurs du talus qui se haussent presque jusqu’à marchepied du wagon, dont je pourrais compter les pétales, et dont je me garderais bien de décrire la couleur comme feraient tant de bons lettrés, car peut-on espérer transmettre au lecteur un plaisir qu’on n’a pas ressenti?]94

The promise of a talent for literature, which the narrator had felt most strongly when as a child he walked on the Guermantes way, has turned out to be empty. His great literary work which for so long he had “been hoping every day to start the next day” [le fameux “travail” auquel depuis si longtemps j’espère chaque jour me mettre le lendemain] will never be written because he is not an artist.95 The light on the trees which would inspire the artist merely brings him boredom and indifference. Interesting to note is that the narrator registers the way the light falls on the tree trunks, but fails to appreciate it in the way he feels an artist would. What is lacking in the narrator’s perception of the trees and the flowers is the feeling of pleasure which would certainly, he claims, be part of the artist’s experience. The pleasure the narrator is referring to here is the joy of involuntary memory but also the feeling which he experienced during those privileged moments on his walks, or when he saw the bell towers of Martinville from the carriage of doctor Percepied. That it is an emotion which is lacking becomes clear in what follows, when the train has set off again and 94 95

Proust, Time Regained, 238–9; Le temps retrouvé, 433–4. Ibid., 240; 435.

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the narrator is looking at the landscape from his window: “A little later I had noticed with the same absence of emotion the glitter of gold and orange which the sun splashed upon the windows of a house; and finally, as the evening advanced, I had seen another house which appeared to be built out of a strange pink substance.” [Un peu plus tard j’avais vu avec la même indifférence les lentilles d’or et d’orange dont il criblait les fenêtres d’une maison; et enfin, comme l’heure avait avancé, j’avais vu une autre maison qui semblait construite en une substance d’un rose assez étrange.]96 Again the narrator clearly has an eye for detail and even for beauty, but the essential emotional element which would have added artistic potential to these observations is lacking. Despite his own indifference, the narrator regards noting these details as an obligation: I had made these various observations with the same absolute indifference as if, walking in a garden with a lady, I had seen a pane of glass, and a little further on an object of alabaster-like material, the unusual color of which had failed to draw me out of the most languorous boredom, but as if, nevertheless, out of politeness towards the lady, in order to say something and also in order to show that I had noticed these colors, I had pointed in passing to the tinted glass and the fragment of stucco. In the same way, to satisfy my conscience, I indicated to myself now as to someone who was travelling with me and might be able to extract from them more pleasure than I, the flame-like reflections in the windows and the pink transparency of the house. But the companion whose attention I had drawn to these curious effects was evidently of a less enthusiastic nature than many more sympathetically disposed persons who are enraptured by such sights, for he had taken cognisance of the colors without any kind of joy. [J’avais fait ces diverses constatations avec la même absolue indifférence que si, me promenant dans un jardin avec une dame, j’avais vu une feuille de verre et un peu loin un objet d’une matière analogue à l’albâtre dont la couleur inaccoutumée ne m’aurait pas tiré du plus languissant ennui mais que, par politesse pour la dame, pour dire quelque chose et aussi pour montrer que j’avais remarqué cette couleur, j’avais désigné en passant le verre coloré et le morceau de stuc. De la même manière, par acquit de conscience, je me signalais à moi-même comme à quelqu’un qui m’eût accompagné et qui eût être capable d’en tirer plus de plaisir que moi, les reflets de feu dans les vitres et la transparence rose de la maison. Mais le compagnon à qui j’avais fait constater ces effets curieux était d’une nature moins enthousiaste, sans doute que beaucoup de gens

96

Ibid., 239; 434.

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chapter three bien disposés qu’une telle vie ravit, car il avait pris connaissance de ces couleurs sans aucune espèce d’allégresse.]97

The joyful emotion with which the narrator feels he would have regarded these sights long ago, when his artistic talent was perhaps not yet dead, appears to be gone for good. The resignation with which the narrator accepts the fact of his inability is no despair, but it is marked by the indifference towards the whole of reality which characterizes the scale between tediousness and despair. It brings to mind Marcel’s words cited at the beginning of this section: “What began as a creative activity can become a mere professional routine, the interest that I take in things and events can become blunted, and flat, and stale.” This anhedonia, the tediousness experienced by the narrator, illustrates Marcel’s claim that “life in a world centered on function is liable to despair because in reality this world is empty, it rings hollow.”98 The words “empty” and “full” were used by James as well to show the contrast between the depressed dullness of anhedonia and the joyful richness as it was experienced by, for instance, Walt Whitman. With his distinction between mystery and problem, Marcel offers a way to further explore this contrast between fullness and emptiness.

Marcel’s Distinction between Problem and Mystery In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel notes that a functionalized world is, “on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery.”99 A world full of problems is the result of what Marcel calls a “degraded rationalism” which holds that “cause explains effect and accounts for it exhaustively.” In this world, everything is explained in terms of the “purely natural” which has as its consequence “the atrophy of the faculty of wonder.”100 Wonder has no place in a world in which everything can be explained: nothing is mysterious because, in principle, every question has an answer. What is denied in this functionalized world, according to Marcel, is l’exigence ontologique (the ontological exigency or

97 98 99 100

Ibid., 239–40; 434. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 12. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13.

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demand) which expresses the conviction that “being is—or should be necessary.” Marcel clarifies: “being is what withstands—or what would withstand—an exhaustive analysis bearing on the data of experience and aiming to reduce them step by step to elements increasingly devoid of intrinsic or significant value.”101 The world of degraded rationalism, of problems and functions, is ruled by the idea that everything can be explained exhaustively. The reason why this world eventually leads the individual to despair is that it allows no room for the conviction that there is something more or something else which does not allow for this approach. It is the more or less vague feeling that that the mystery of being cannot be summed up in terms of functions, causes and effects. As Marcel formulates this issue in discussion with Ricoeur: “C’est cette conscience d’une impossibilité de réduire l’existence à quoi que ce soit d’autre et même de la mettre en question.” To put existence into question simply does not make sense (n’a vraiment aucun sens) because the question implies a possibility which is not available to us: “la possibilité de nous abstraire en quelque sorte de l’existence, de nous placer en dehors d’elle pour la regarder.”102 L’exigence ontologique demands that mysteries are not reduced to problems. The issue to be addressed, then, is the meaning of these apparently opposite terms, mystery and problem. In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel gives a first brief account of this distinction: “A mystery is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them, as it were, and thereby transcending itself as a simple problem.”103 And a few pages further mystery is described as “a reality rooted in what is beyond the domain of the problematical properly so called.”104 One of the examples that Marcel likes to use in order to explain what he means by a mystery is the “problem” of evil: In reflecting upon evil, I tend, almost inevitably, to regard it as a disorder which I view from outside and of which I seek to discover the causes and the secret aims. [However,] evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered: in fact, it ceases to be evil. In reality, I can only grasp it as evil in the measure in which it touches me—that is to say, in the measure in which I am involved. . . . Being “involved” is the

101 102 103 104

Ibid., 14. Rocœur, Marcel, Entretiens, 21. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 19. Ibid., 21.

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A problem is a question or a riddle external to oneself: it is something I can put in front of me, take apart, and solve if I have the proper equipment, mental ability, perseverance, etc. Examples of problems are most easily found in the technical sphere where things that are broken can be fixed: the problem presented to me by my broken bicycle can be solved, if not by me then by someone with the proper know-how. Every problem, to use the language of the passage above, is a “disorder which I view from outside:” I can turn my bicycle upside down, walk around it, remove broken parts. I try to discover the causes of its malfunctioning and observe the spinning of the wheels as I turn the peddles to see if everything is properly aligned. The crucial point of the passage cited is that the “problem of evil” should not be called a problem at all because in thinking about it, I lack the independence that characterizes my search for answers in the case of the broken bicycle. A mystery is a problem in which I am involved, and in respect to which I cannot take an outsider’s point of view. As soon as I presume to study a mystery from the outside, like I would study my bicycle, what I am investigating is no longer a mystery, but a mystery reduced to “purely natural” elements, i.e. a problem. The example of evil illustrates how a mystery can be said to be “a problem which encroaches upon its own data:” it is a problem that cannot be a problem in the sense described above because it touches me. I participate in this “problem” which therefore can only be experienced from within and not analyzed from without. Marcel returns to the same example in Creative Fidelity where he again observes that “many metaphysical problems appear as degraded mysteries.” About the misnamed “problem” of evil he here remarks: We are asked to consider evil as the malfunctioning of a certain mechanism, the universe itself, which is to be examined from the outside just as a mechanic takes apart a motorcycle which doesn’t run. In so doing, I consider myself not only immune to its illness or infirmity, but also external to a universe which I claim mentally at least to be able to reconstruct in its totality.106

105 106

Ibid., 19. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 68.

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In terms of the passage taken from “On the Ontological Mystery:” evil which is not suffered but merely observed ceases to be evil. A mystery, in other words, is beyond the realm of the problematical. In Creative Fidelity, Marcel copies a passage from his Being and Having in which he describes the distinction between mystery and problem more fully: A problem is something which one runs up against, which bars the way. It is before me in its entirety. A mystery, however, is something in which I find myself involved, whose essence therefore, is not to be completely before me. On this level it seems as though the distinction between the in me and the before me loses its meaning.107

In line with this observation, Marcel remarks that in the case of a mystery, “I am by definition led beyond any ‘system for me.’ I am involved in concreto in an order which by definition can never become an order or a system for me.”108 Returning to the example used above, my bike is entirely before me and in no way in me; it is a “system for me” in which I am not involved. In the next chapter the distinction between in me and before me will play an important role in Marcel’s “phenomenology of having,” where it will become clear that the more I care about something I have, the less it can be said to be, strictly speaking, before or outside of me; the more I care for my possessions, the more they feel like a part of me. The strict distinction made in this section between problem and mystery is useful for clarity’s sake, but should be regarded as too simplistic an interpretation. An exact frontier between mystery and problem cannot be established. As soon as one starts reflecting on a mystery, this mystery is inevitably degraded to the level of a problem.109 The awareness of our tendency to problematize, however, can create an openness to mystery which is lacking in the functionalized world of degraded rationalism, and as such is an invaluable first step, according to Marcel, in repairing the broken world. At the root of this broken world is “an immense refusal . . . which seems to be above all the refusal to reflect and at the same time the refusal to imagine.”110 This statement may be surprising given that mysteries are degraded to

107 108 109 110

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 69. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 19. Marcel, The Mystery of Being, 36.

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problems when one starts thinking about them. From the texts cited above it rather appeared that the broken world is the result of too much reflection, and that reflection destroys mystery. This tension is relieved when Marcel’s distinction between primary and secondary reflection is taken into account.

Primary and Secondary Reflection, Despair and Hope Marcel explains the difference between the two kinds of reflection in his conversation with Ricœur. The latter remarks that in Marcel’s work, there are certain experiences which carry within themselves a critical function. These experiences are critical to the extent that they perform in one movement “the recovery of the ontological aim” [la reprise de la visée ontologique] and “the critique of the modes which conceal [this aim] from us” [la critique des modalités qui nous la masquent]. Marcel responds by saying: Et ces expériences comportent en réalité l’usage de ce que j’ai appelé la réflexion seconde, c’est-à-dire, par opposition à une réflexion primaire, purement critique ou dissolvante, d’une réflexion récupératrice. . . . C’est cela qui a été mon souci, récupérer d’une façon intelligente et intelligible et non pas du tout par je ne sais quel appel à des intuitions purement subjectives.111

The rationalism at work in a completely functionalized world is degraded because it stops with primary reflection, which only abstracts and analyzes. When Marcel says that the broken world is the result of a refusal to reflect, he should be understood to claim that there is no lack of primary, but of secondary reflection. This secondary reflection is similar to what Bergson calls intuition, which, as became clear in the previous chapter, is no appeal to “purely subjective intuitions,” but should be understood as “intellectual sympathy.” Secondary reflection is recuperative and restores the unity which is lost in primary reflection. The two are therefore complementary, and to not go beyond primary reflection can be said to be a refusal to let go of the abstract, fragmentized products of an analytical approach. The resulting world is le monde cassé where the individual feels ill at ease because the ontologi-

111

Ricœur, Marcel, Entretiens, 46–7.

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cal exigency is denied by the purely functional mindset. Marcel returns to the issue in a later conversation in Entretiens where he remarks: J’ai voulu dire qu’il existe assurément une réflexion primaire qui est en somme purement analytique, qui consiste en somme à dissoudre pour ainsi dire le concret et ses éléments. Mais il y a, je pense, un mouvement inverse, un mouvement de reprise qui consiste à prendre conscience de ce qu’il y a de partiel et d’une certaine manière même de suspect dans la démarche purement analytique et à tenter de récupérer, mais de récupérer au niveau de la pensée, ce concret qu’on a vu précédemment en quelque sorte, s’émietter ou se pulvériser; il est bien certain que c’est cette réflexion seconde qui est à l’œuvre dans tous mes écrits philosophiques.112

Secondary reflection recuperates the concrete on the level of thought and so remedies the despair which is the result of an attitude which allows for primary reflection only. Just like despair is connected to primary reflection, hope is linked to secondary reflection. “Hope,” Marcel states in “On the Ontological Mystery,” “consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me.” This mysterious principle “cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being.”113 This assertion is opposite to the feeling of meaninglessness expressed by for instance Roquentin in La nausée. Roquentin comes to conclude that there is nothing behind or beyond the existence of things which gives these things meaning; existence is arbitrary and oppressive. The mysterious principle discerned by Marcel at the heart of being may be vague in the Jamesian sense, but it nevertheless provides Marcel with a kind of certainty: “I assert that a given order shall be re-established, that reality is on my side in willing it to be so. I do not wish: I assert; such is the prophetic tone of true hope.”114 The assertion of hope and the “certainty without evidence” which marks this attitude bears resemblance to William James’ ideas in “The Will to Believe.” This resemblance will be explored in Chapter Five, where the certainty and felt knowledge of the privileged moment will be discussed in the context of James’ mysticism. In Chapter Six, the hopeful attitude promoted by Marcel will be connected to his

112 113 114

Ibid., 65–6. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 28. Ibid., 28.

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notion of “creative fidelity.” The openness required for hope, I will show, becomes ethically relevant in creative fidelity where the openness concerns another person. Of all the notions and terms discussed throughout the chapters of this project, creative fidelity comes closest to my own concept of courageous vulnerability. I will argue in Chapter Six that creative fidelity, like Marcel’s notion of hope, falls short when hope’s counterparts, despair and anhedonia, are taken seriously. Courageous vulnerability, encompassing elements from both Marcel and James, will be presented as the more complete and satisfying ethical attitude. Here, a few preliminary remarks on Marcel’s distinction between hope and desire will be sufficient to illustrate hope’s relevance in the context of the present discussion, and to introduce the notion of crystallization which will be the topic of the next chapter. Hope is a mystery, and as has been shown, every mystery can be ignored or converted into a problem. When hope is treated as a problem, it is “regarded as a desire which wraps itself up in illusory judgments to distort an objective reality which it is interested in disguising from itself. . . . Because mystery can—and, in a sense, logically must— be degraded into a problem.” Hope is marked by the conviction that, despite (the lack of ) evidence, there is a principle at the heart of reality which is “in connivance with me.” Desire, on the other hand, needs evidence, and will make its own evidence if the world does not cooperate. Hope and desire are often confused, and it is one of Marcel’s goals to present a clearer picture of hope by disentangling the two notions. Desire seeks assurance and finds the “facts” it needs by seeing what it wants to see. In the next chapter, desire will play an important role in Marcel’s “phenomenology of having,” where it will become clear that desire is always fixed on something very specific; for instance, the narrator desires Albertine, and he wants her to be with him in the very particular way she was with him in his daydreams. Desire, it becomes clear, is always narrowly focused and is not open to options. There is one thing that it wants, and if this thing is not to be had, nothing else will do. In the next chapter, this characteristic feature of desire will be shown to be an important element in the narrator’s love for Albertine. The narrator desires Albertine, but what he in fact desires is the Albertine of his imagination, endowed with all the properties he has attached to her in his mind. This kind of love does not allow for the real-life Albertine to be different from the idealized Albertine, which illustrates the closed nature of desire per se. Hope, in contrast with desire, may assert itself and even be, Marcel writes, prophetic; it

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is essentially open to what may come, and recognizes that even though reality is fundamentally on its side, the way in which this fact may eventually show itself is uncertain. Hope can be described as assertive yet insecure, prophetic yet open. Again, Marcel’s conception of hope, and especially his conviction that there is, in some way, ground for hope, will be further investigated in Chapter Six.

Conclusion This chapter shows a close affinity between the philosophies of Bergson, James, and Marcel on several issues. First, Bergson’s and James’ discussions of habit, language, and aesthetic sensitivity in the broadest sense help further understand the nature of the privileged moment. James’ pragmatic theory can be used to further explore the kind of truth which the narrator finds in a privileged moment (a truth he claims he could not find anywhere else) and this kind of truth, I argued, is the truth of felt knowledge. In Chapter Five, I will turn to James’ “will to believe” to show that this particular kind of truth can “make a difference” pragmatically to the courageously vulnerable subject. In the present chapter, I have prepared the way for this discussion by showing that Proust’s novel brings to life some of the insights of pragmatism, while, at the same time, James’ pragmatism helps us read Proust. The issues of meaning and truth take on their full significance in the discussion of the sentiment of rationality and anhedonia. The sentiment of rationality, though indispensable, cannot be allowed to dominate completely because this will lead to an exclusion of the vague parts of experience. Anhedonia, the feeling that life lacks zest and interest, is a result of this exclusion and characterizes what Marcel calls a “broken world,” where there is no room for mystery. The broken world is made up of problems and does not allow room for anything that does not fit the sentiment of rationality. The next chapter will focus on the problematization of a person and show how this reduction of a mystery to a problem results in despair. As I suggested above, Marcel’s concept of hope can be made relevant to the present discussion when it is applied to interpersonal relations. Hope is the attitude of openness toward mystery, and when the mystery at stake is another person, this openness must involve a sensitivity to difference and otherness. Through a study of La prisonnière and La

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fugitive, the next chapter aims to show that this kind of openness is difficult. The narrator of À la recherche even claims that this openness is impossible, thereby challenging Gabriel Marcel’s conceptions of love and, as will become clear in Chapter Six, creative fidelity. Chapters Four, Five, and Six will combine the (perceived) optimism of Marcel and James with the pessimism of the narrator of À la recherche. I will seek to incorporate these diverse elements in the notion of courageous vulnerability, thereby presenting an attitude which does justice to the difficulty of being open to another person, but shows that this openness is possible despite this difficulty.

CHAPTER FOUR

CRYSTALLIZATION AND THE TRAGEDY OF HAVING A LOVER

Introduction The previous chapter dealt with the absence of privileged moments, engaging the philosophies of William James and Gabriel Marcel to explore situations in which felt knowledge and courageous vulnerability are lacking. I argued that a denial of vagueness and mystery eventually results in the feeling of anhedonia. The anhedonic individual lives in what Marcel calls a “broken world,” where problems abound and the sense of a “something more” is entirely absent. The present chapter will continue the discussion of Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery, but narrow its scope by applying the distinction to the relation between individuals. A person is always mysterious in the Marcellian sense, but can be reduced to a problem just like any other mystery. The narrator of À la recherche, aesthetically sensitive though he may be, is unable to be open to the otherness of the people close to him, whether it concerns Saint-Loup, Albertine, or his grandmother. This chapter will explore this lack of openness, and discuss the narrator’s tendency to regard others as objects of art or series of problems. The narrator’s aesthetic sensitivity, I will argue, allows him to be open to individuality and difference, but he fails to maintain this openness when the felt knowledge gained from this openness concerns another person who, he realizes, will never be completely understood. More precisely, the narrator appears to be unable to do anything with the felt knowledge he acquires about the people close to him. The openness which he displays and which is a pre-condition for the attitude of courageous vulnerability is not enough to make the narrator change his actions as a moral agent. Like the previous chapter, this chapter will take a negative approach to the issues at hand. Just like the last chapter showed the importance of the privileged moment by emphasizing the stifling consequences of its absence, the present chapter aims to clarify the importance of courageous vulnerability through an account of a relationship in which this

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attitude is lacking. Though both James and Marcel seek to convince their readers that openness to, respectively, vagueness and mystery is difficult and requires constant effort, the passages from À la recherche discussed below evoke this difficulty in the effective and powerful way unique to a literary text. James and Marcel convince us rationally that respecting otherness is difficult, but in reading À la recherche we come to feel, or vicariously experience, what we already understood philosophically. In other words, felt knowledge will be achieved through literature. The topic of investigation in this chapter is Proustian love. According to the narrator of À la recherche, love is brought about by the imagination and is fueled by suffering. Central to the discussion here will be the narrator’s relation to his main love, Albertine. Negative and, perhaps, neurotic though the narrator’s love may seem, I will engage Marcel’s ethics to show one of the ways in which À la recherche functions as the optical instrument the narrator describes in Le temps retrouvé. Brought into focus by Marcel’s philosophy, the narrator’s account of love will provide the binoculars needed to discern common but often overlooked moral issues in interpersonal relationships.

Stendhal’s Crystallization To start off the discussion of Proustian love, I will cite a passage from Stendhal’s book Love. Stendhal uses a metaphor to explain what he calls crystallization, an essential part of the process of falling in love: If you are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In the end you overrate wildly, and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours. 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 leafless 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 . . . is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. [On se plaît à orner de mille perfections une femme de l’amour de laquelle on est sûr; on se détaille tout son bonheur avec une complaisance infinie. Cela se réduit à s’exagérer une propriété superbe, qui vient de nous tomber du ciel, que l’on ne connaît pas, et de la possession de laquelle on est assuré. Laissez travailler la tête d’un amant pendant vingtquatre heures, et voici ce que vous trouverez:

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 129 Aux mines de sel de Salzbourg, on jette, dans les profondeurs abandonnées de la mine, un rameau d’arbre effeuillé par l’hiver; deux ou trois mois après on le retire couvert de cristallisations brillantes: les plus petites branches . . . sont garnies d’une infinité de diamants, mobiles et éblouissants; on ne peut plus reconnaître le rameau primitif.]1

Stendhal argues that what a lover sees when he looks at his beloved is not the person as she is perceived by a neutral observer, but a beautiful creature of his imagination. Where an outsider only sees the “leafless, wintry bough,” the lover sees a constellation of crystals which render the residual woman invisible. As the narrator of À la recherche puts it: “We think that we are in love with a girl, whereas we love in her, alas! only that dawn the glow of which is momentarily reflected on her face.” [Nous croyons aimer une jeune fille, et nous n’aimons hélas! en elle que cette aurore dont leur visage reflète momentanément la rougeur.]2 The lover ascribes to his beloved all manner of beautiful characteristics and his imagination makes him see these characteristics when he looks at the object of his love. As the narrator observes: “Love places in a person who is loved what exists only in the person who loves.” [J’avais vu l’ amour placer dans une personne ce qui n’est que dans la personne qui aime.]3 Perhaps the most obvious illustration in À la recherche of the process of crystallization is the case of Swann’s love for Odette. Swann falls in love with Odette, a demi-monde, only when he establishes for himself her close resemblance to a figure in a painting by Botticelli. Where others see a woman with a lack of taste and a questionable reputation, Swann sees a work of art. Because she has become for him a precious and desirable creature, he seeks to secure her love for him, much to the surprise and even disbelief of his friends in high society. The more Odette tries to keep her other romantic escapades a secret from him, the more obsessively Swann tries to find out what she is hiding, convinced that his happiness will be secure only when Odette has been, quite literally, captured. The story of Swann’s love for Odette is described in Du côté de chez Swann, and is reflected in La prisonnière and La fugitive where the narrator himself is in love with a woman in much the same way. Swann’s love for Odette foreshadows the love of the narrator for Albertine. It is in the latter volumes that the nature of 1 Stendhal, Love, trans. Gilbert and Suzanne Sale (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 45. Id., De l’amour (Paris: Le Divan, 1957), 8. 2 Proust, The Fugitive, 659; La fugitive, 644. 3 Proust, Time Regained, 324; Le temps retrouvé, 491.

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this kind of love—necessarily accompanied by jealousy and the desire to possess—is analyzed at length. La prisonnière and La fugitive are two volumes of À la recherche that are often overlooked or dismissed as a simple period of trial and despair necessary for the narrator to come to his great insights in Le temps retrouvé. It serves to once again stress the point that the views expressed in the earlier volumes are as important as those in the last part of the novel, and that they are by no means mere preliminary reflections that have as their main purpose a preparing of the way for a joyful realization in art of the time regained. The stance I take here implies a critique of Deleuze, who regards what he calls the interpretation of “signs of love” as a lower-level preparation for the “signs of art,” the final stage in the apprenticeship of which the Search consists. From the fact that the narrator’s theories of art and involuntary memory in Le temps retrouvé do not take into account the moral issues explored in the middle volumes, it does not follow that the latter are of lesser importance than the former. La prisonnière and La fugitive are rich with painfully honest descriptions and analyses of possessive love, jealousy, cruelty and indifference. It is in these volumes that easy, selfflattering assumptions about friendship, love, attraction, and, to use a Marcellian term that will be discussed later, intersubjectivity, are challenged. The phenomenon described by Stendhal above, and illustrated by Swann’s love for Odette, will serve as the starting point for a discussion of Marcel’s “phenomenology of having” and the related themes of presence, despair, and desire in the context of À la recherche. In this discussion, the distinction between problem and mystery as described in the previous chapter will be reintroduced and further developed on the level of interpersonal relations.

Albertine a Stone round Which Snow Has Gathered With Stendhal’s description of crystallization in mind, the following passage shows how, according to Proust’s narrator, we fall in love. A smile, a look, a shoulder suffices to make us fall in love; the rest of our love we make up when we are alone with our thoughts: We fall in love for a smile, a look, a shoulder. That is enough; then, in the long hours of hope and sorrow, we fabricate a person, we compose a character. And when later on we see much of the beloved being, we can

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 131 no more, whatever the cruel reality that confronts us, divest the woman with that look, that shoulder, of the sweet nature and loving character with which we have endowed her than we can, when she has grown old, eliminate her youthful face from a person whom we have known since her girlhood. [On aime sur un sourire, sur un regard, sur une épaule. Cela suffit; alors, dans les longues heures d’espérance ou de tristesse, on fabrique une personne, on compose un caractère. Et quand plus tard on fréquente la personne aimée, on ne peut pas plus, devant quelques cruelles réalités qu’on soit placé, ôter ce caractère bon, cette nature de femme nous aimant, à l’être qui a tel regard, telle épaule, que nous ne pouvons quand elle vieillit, à une personne que nous connaissons depuis sa jeunesse, la lui ôter.]4

Adding crystals to the wintry bough, we will see the product of our own imagination when we meet again with the object of our love. To put it simply, we see what we want to see, and this is not only the case in the context of romantic love. The clearest example in À la recherche of the crystallization of a person outside of the romantic sphere is that of the narrator’s grandmother. The nature of this special kind of crystallization is already indicated in the last lines of the above citation: we have trouble regarding as old someone whom we have known when he or she was a younger person. Similarly, the narrator has of his grandmother the image of an older yet youthful, vital woman of sophisticated taste and elegant manners. In Le côté de Guermantes, the narrator describes how a telephone conversation between him in Balbec and his grandmother in Paris upsets him because of her voice, which sounds old and sad and not at all like the voice he hears when he is talking with her face to face. This new voice evokes a phantom of a grandmother who has an age, and he wants to expel this ghost by going home to see her. Unfortunately, it is not the ageless, vital grandmother whom he sees upon his return. He walks into the house, where he has notified no-one of his imminent arrival, and sees his grandmother before she is aware of his presence: “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.” [J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là puisqu’elle ne le savait pas,

4

Proust, The Fugitive, 541; La fugitive, 531.

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et, comme une femme qu’on surprend en train de faire un ouvrage qu’elle cachera si on entre, elle était livrée à des pensées qu’elle n’avait jamais montrées devant moi.] His grandmother is turned away from him reading, sitting on the couch: 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 first 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. [Tout d’un coup, dans notre salon qui faisait partie d’un monde nouveau, celui du Temps, celui où vivent les étrangers dont on dit “il vieillit bien,” pour la première fois et seulement pour un instant car elle disparut bien vite, j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas. ]5

Only for an instant, just before the crystals have been put in place again, the narrator sees his grandmother with the eyes of a stranger who does not know her. She is an old woman, “lourde et vulgaire.” Time, responsible for a whole series of changes of this nature at “le bal de têtes” in Le temps retrouvé, has for a moment affected the narrator’s picture of his grandmother and has made him see through the chrysalis of feelings and images that he has spun around her. As will be shown in Chapter Six, the crystallization and idealization of the grandmother has its counterpart in the narrator’s cruelty towards her when she fails to behave in accordance with the picture he has of her. Before investigating further into the negative consequences of crystallization, it serves to first study another passage from La fugitive. After Albertine has left the narrator and has escaped his house in which he was keeping her captive, the narrator wants to bring her back at all costs. To this end, he shows a picture of her to his friend Robert de Saint-Loup, who has promised to retrieve her. Saint-Loup, assuming that this girl, the cause of so much anxiety on the part of his friend, must be rare beauty, tries to hide his disappointment at seeing the picture. The narrator realizes that in the eyes of Saint-Loup, Albertine is a common, somewhat homely girl, not at all worth the time and

5

Proust, The Guermantes Way, 183–5; Le Côté de Guermantes, 438–440.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 133 money the narrator is willing to spend on her return. The narrator notices his disappointment and observes: 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 indefinable 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 stratification of sensations was invisible, grasped only a residue which it prevented me, on the contrary, from perceiving. [Le temps était loin où j’avais bien petitement commencé à Balbec par ajouter aux sensations visuelles quand je regardais Albertine, des sensations de saveur, d’odeur, de toucher. Depuis, des sensations plus profondes, plus douces, plus indéfinissables s’y étaient ajoutées, puis des sensations douloureuses. Bref Albertine n’était, comme une pierre autour de laquelle il a neigé, que le centre générateur d’une immense construction qui passait par le plan de mon coeur. Robert, pour qui était invisible toute cette stratification de sensations, ne saisissait qu’un résidu qu’elle m’empêchait au contraire d’apercevoir.]6

Robert sees the residue, the “leafless wintry bough;” the narrator sees the structure of crystals this residue has generated. A few years have passed since the narrator first saw Albertine on the beach and started to identify her with the invigorating climate of Balbec, the beauty of the sea and the essence of youth and vitality in general. The jealousy and pain she has caused him, and the satisfaction he at times found in thinking himself loved by her, have made her more precious to him. What has happened during the time of his relationship with her, the narrator claims, is what happens in all love affairs: “During this time, beneath the chrysalis of grief and tenderness which renders the worst metamorphoses of the beloved object invisible to the lover, her face has had time to grow old and to change.” [Pendant ce temps, sous la chrysalide de douleurs et de tendresses qui rend invisibles à l’amant les pires métamorphoses de l’être aimé, le visage a eu le temps de vieillir et de changer.]7 Crystallization prevents the lover from seeing the changes that have occurred in the beloved’s appearance, but the effects go much further than that. As has become clear already, the

6 7

Proust, The Fugitive, 445–6; La fugitive, 438. Ibid., 446; 439.

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lover develops and creates his love when he is alone, wondering if his affections will ever be returned. The ego-centric nature of this love is still more defined in the following excerpt: When one’s mistress is alive, a large proportion of the thoughts which form what one calls one’s love comes to one during the hours when she is not by one’s side. Thus one acquires the habit of having as the object of one’s musings an absent person, and one who, even if she remains absent for a few hours only, during those hours is no more than a memory. Hence death does not make any great difference. [Quand notre maîtresse est vivante, une grande partie des pensées qui forment ce que nous appelons notre amour nous viennent pendant les heures où elle n’est pas à côté de nous. Ainsi l’on prend l’habitude d’avoir pour objet de sa rêverie un être absent, et qui, même s’il ne le reste que quelques heures, pendant ces heures-là n’est qu’un souvenir. Alors la mort ne change-t-elle pas grand’chose.]8

The process of crystallization takes effect when the object of our love is absent, and is most effective when the workings of our imagination are left undisturbed by the actual person they concern. It is the presence, not the absence of the person loved that disappoints: “In response to our expectation of the ideal person whom we love, each meeting provides us with a person in flesh and blood who yet contains so little trace of our dream” [à l’attente de l’être idéal que nous aimons, chaque rendez-vous nous apporte une personne de chair qui contient déjà si peu de notre rêve.]9 The ideal can be more easily maintained when it is not challenged by the person who inspired it, and this explains why love grows strongest in those situations where it gets the least encouragement: the narrator’s interest in consecutively Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, and Albertine develops into an obsession because all he has to work with is a glance from afar, or a smile perhaps not even meant for him. When, in later parts of the novel, Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes both seek his company, the narrator has long lost interest; love is possible only for what is unfamiliar, and is at the same time the attempt to conquer what is unknown. What the lover wants more than anything is to possess the woman loved. The possession of the desired object, however, is disastrous to this same love; with the object secured, the mystery that initially inspired the love has vanished. After

8 9

Ibid., 534; 523. Ibid., 462; 453.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 135 a further discussion of the narrator’s love for Albertine, the problem that comes with wanting to possess a human being will be addressed within the context of Gabriel Marcel’s phénoménologie de l’avoir.

Love Regained in Absence Albertine is most attractive when she is not present, and therefore it is no wonder that the narrator’s feeling towards her become obsessive when she has left the narrator’s house altogether. While she was staying with him, the knowledge that she was in her room on the other end of his own hall was enough for the narrator’s mind to be at ease. His calm was such that sometimes he did not even ask her to come to his room. Now that she has left this cage, however, she has “become once more the girl whom everyone pursued, the marvelous bird of the earliest days” [elle était redevenue celle que tout le monde suivait, l’oiseau merveilleux des premiers jours].10 Albertine has become “a creature of the imagination, that is to say desirable” [un être d’imagination c’està-dire désirable] and life with her has become “an imaginary life, that is to say a life freed from all difficulties” [une vie imaginaire c’est-àdire affranchie de toutes difficultés].11 On the one hand, the narrator forgets the unpleasant aspects of Albertine and the boredom he often experienced in her presence; on the other hand, he crystallizes Albertine by adding to her image “all the love that I had ever felt for other women” [tout ce que j’avais éprouvé d’amour pour d’autres].12 Even though the narrator had made up his mind to break with Albertine just before he learned of her escape, the fact that she has left him comes as a blow he feels he will not recover from unless she comes back. This feeling of complete devastation is in sharp contrast with his state of mind when she was still with him. In La prisonnière, the narrator says that if sometimes he enjoys himself, it is not because of Albertine, “who in any case I no longer found very pretty and with whom I was bored, with whom I was indeed clearly conscious that I was not in love” [Albertine que d’ailleurs je ne trouvais plus guère jolie et avec laquelle je m’ennuyais, que j’avais la sensation nette de ne pas aimer].13 10 11 12 13

Ibid., 481; 473. Ibid., 461; 451. Ibid., 470; 461. Proust, The Captive, 5; La prisonnière, 522.

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He describes the happiness he experiences when Albertine is out, not missing her at all and realizing she is but a distraction. He realizes that Albertine only regains her appeal when others desire her, which is when, “on learning of it, I began to suffer again and wanted to challenge their possession of her, raised her in my eyes to a lofty pinnacle. She was capable of causing me pain, but no longer any joy. Pain alone kept my wearisome attachment alive.” [L’apprenant, je recommençais à souffrir et voulais la leur disputer, la hissait à mes yeux sur un haut pavois. Elle était capable de me causer de la souffrance, nullement de la joie. Par la souffrance seul subsistait mon ennuyeux attachement.]14 Love may be formed, initially, by desire; later on only anxiety can sustain it. The narrator regrets that part of Albertine’s life escapes him, but he is aware of the fact that “love, in the pain of anxiety as in the bliss of desire, is a demand for a whole. It is born, and its survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer.” [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.]15 Desire and anxiety, the feelings that respectively inspire and sustain love, can only exist as long as something about the beloved person is unknown, that is, mysterious. The narrator is jealous of whatever remains unknown to him: Albertine’s past, her connections to women and men of questionable reputation, her unexpected reactions to things he says. When she gives evasive answers or does not behave in her usual way, he immediately suspects her of hiding something, and this rouses his interest: Albertine appears to be not quite as secure and safe as he had assumed. The narrator himself sums up the situation as follows: “I felt that my life with Albertine was on the one hand, when I was not jealous, nothing but boredom, and on the other hand, when I was jealous, nothing but pain.” [Je sentais que ma vie avec Albertine n’était, pour une part, quand je n’étais pas jaloux, qu’ennui, pour l’autre part, quand j’étais jaloux, que souffrance.]16 At the end of La prisonnière, after he and Albertine have made up after a fight and she has again become a boring obstacle in his household that keeps him from getting any work done, he tells himself it is the right moment to break with her. She is no longer angry with him and he therefore

14 15 16

Ibid., 27; 537–8. Ibid., 133; 614. Ibid., 530; 895.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 137 feels secure in his possession of her; at the same time he realizes that everything he had been willing to sacrifice just a day ago would be far too great a price for this girl who has become a mere nuisance. Having made up his mind, however, he learns from Françoise that Mlle Albertine has left that morning while he was asleep, and he immediately starts putting all his efforts into getting her to come back. When the narrator receives word of Albertine’s death a short while later, her absence is made definitive. He learns of her accident not long after her escape from his house, and the news only adds to his jealousy, and, therefore, his love: “I loved her more now; she was far away from me; presence, by distracting us from the only reality, the reality one thinks, allays suffering, and absence revives it, together with love.” [Je l’aimais davantage maintenant; elle était loin; la présence, en écartant de nous la seule réalité, celle qu’on pense, adoucit les souffrances, et l’absence les ranime, avec l’amour.]17 Presence is a threat to crystallization and the work of the imagination is most effective when it is undisturbed by the person one loves. Her death has made Albertine more absent than she has ever been, and her cumbersome presence in his house will never again dispel the narrator’s desire for her. Later in this chapter, I will argue that Gabriel Marcel would call Albertine’s presence in the narrator’s house “a presence which is yet a mode of absence.” In À la recherche, presence threatens love, whereas for Marcel, presence is a requirement for love. The sharp contrast between the narrator’s and Marcel’s notions of love and presence will be explored later, but here it serves to mention an effect of Proustian presence different from the one discussed above. Albertine’s presence, it appears, not only ruins the narrator’s love for her, it also binds him to her. Even though the captive Albertine bores the narrator, her continued presence in his house makes it impossible for him to live without her. The force of habit once again deserves further attention.

Love and the Role of Habit As was mentioned before, Albertine herself is the mere residue around which the narrator has built his love, a stone around which snow has gathered. The narrator is aware of the process of crystallization in La

17

The Fugitive, 517–8; La fugitive, 528.

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prisonnière already, but it is in La fugitive that his insight is expressed most clearly. The following passage shows that the narrator knows that Albertine herself makes up only a small part of his anxiety: Perhaps there is something symbolical and true in the infinitesimal place occupied in our anxiety by the one who is its cause. The fact is that her person itself counts for little or nothing; what is almost everything is the series of emotions and anxieties which chance occurrences have made us feel in the past in connection with her and which habit has associated with her. [Peut-être y a-t-il un symbole et une vérité dans la place infime tenue dans notre anxiété par celle à qui nous la rapportons. C’est qu’en effet sa personne même y est pour peu de chose; pour presque tout, le processus d’émotions, d’angoisses que tels hasards nous ont fait jadis éprouver à propos d’elle et que l’habitude à attachées à elle.]18

The web that one has spun and that connects to one’s beloved a multitude of feelings can become so thick that it prevents one from seeing the creature underneath altogether. This is why Robert de Saint-Loup is shocked when he sees Albertine’s picture, just like the narrator himself was shocked when he first met Rachel, Saint-Loup’s mistress who, unknown to Saint-Loup, had been offered to the narrator in a rendezvous house which he used to visit when he was younger. Habit makes one see one’s beloved in a certain way, and very soon one cannot see anything but one’s own feelings, projections and idealizations. The person we love has merely “raised to life by a sort of magic countless elements of tenderness existing in us already in a fragmentary state, which she has assembled, joined together” [n’a fait que susciter, par des sortes d’appels magiques, mille éléments de tendresse existant en nous à l’état fragmentaire et qu’elle a assemblés, unis]. Everything we love in a person already existed within us before we met (him or) her, “and it is we ourselves who by giving her her features have supplied all the solid matter of the beloved object” [c’est nous-même qui en lui donnant ses traits avons fourni toute la matière solide de la personne aimée].19 The person of the beloved plays little part in our love, and as a result the love of which he or she has become the object could well have been directed towards a different person altogether. The narrator’s love for Albertine, as he himself suggests, could just as easily have

18 19

Ibid., 439; 433. Ibid., 513; 503.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 139 had as its object Mlle de Stermaria. The crucial point, however, is that because of habit, the love that was originally only arbitrarily focused on Albertine, has become irrevocably linked to her over time: Gradually, by dint of living with Albertine, I was no longer able to fling off the chains which I myself had forged; the habit of associating Albertine’s person with the sentiment which she had not inspired made me none the less believe that it was peculiar to her, as habit gives to the mere association of ideas between two phenomena, according to a certain school of philosophy, the illusory force and necessity of a law of causation. [Peu à peu, à force de vivre avec Albertine, les chaînes que j’avais forgées moi-même, je ne pouvais plus m’en dégager; l’habitude d’associer la personne d’Albertine au sentiment qu’elle n’avait pas inspiré me faisait pour tant croire qu’il était spécial à elle, comme l’habitude donne à la simple association d’idées entre deux phénomènes, à ce que prétend une certaine école philosophique, la force, la nécessité illusoires d’une loi de causalité.]20

Habit has the power to chain us to the initially arbitrary object of our love. As a result, we feel we cannot live without our beloved. The double nature of habit shows itself when we realize that this habit, which we need in order to maintain peace of mind and which forms the very structure of our love, is at the same time the force which reduces our beloved to a creature devoid of mystery and unable to rouse our desire since we feel there is nothing left to conquer. Habit condemns us to a love which has become boring but which nevertheless we cannot do without. In his memory, the narrator has a picture of Albertine as she appeared to him the first year in Balbec, the young girl “beneath her flat cap, with her insistent laughing eyes, a stranger still, slender as a silhouette projected against the waves” [sous son polo plat, avec ses yeux insistants et rieurs, inconnue encore, mince comme une silhouette profilée sur le flot]. The image is kept intact in his memory, and its contrast with the person whom he now knows is immense: “We realize what a task of remodelling is performed every day by habit.” [On comprend quel travail de modelage accomplit quotidiennement l’habitude.]21 The narrator promises himself to investigate the force

20

Ibid., 513–4; 503–4. Proust, The Captive, 81; La prisonnière, 576. Later on, the narrator observes that in his love for Gilberte and Mme de Guermantes, “the immense force of Habit” [la force immense de l’Habitude] had been lacking. The Fugitive, 436; La fugitive, 428. 21

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which, like a law of nature, “exalted cities and women to such a height so long as I did not know them, and, slipping away beneath them as soon as I had approached them, made them at once collapse and fall flat on to the dead level of the most commonplace reality” [portait si haut les cités, les femmes, tant que je ne les connaissais pas, et qui, se dérobant sous elles dès que je les avais approchées, les faisait tomber aussitôt à plat sur le terre à terre de la plus triviale réalité].22

Love as a Poetical Action: Albertine an Unconscious Thing of Beauty The narrator loves Albertine most when she is not there because her absence allows him to project onto her the image of the ideal Albertine without the risk of any disturbance from the Albertine who inhabits his house. The act of projection, the process of crystallization, is overlooked by those people who express their surprise at disastrous marriages: People . . . do not take into account the exquisite mirage which love projects and which envelops so entirely and so uniquely the person with whom one is in love that the ‘folly’ a man commits by marrying his cook or the mistress of his best friend is as a rule the only poetical action that he performs in the course of his existence. [Les gens . . . ne tiennent pas compte du mirage délicieux que l’amour projette et qui enveloppe si entièrement et si uniquement la personne dont on est amoureux que la ‘sottise’ que fait un homme en épousant une cuisinière ou la maîtresse de son meilleur ami est en général le seul acte poétique qu’il accomplisse au cours de son existence.]23

As this passage shows, the narrator regards the process of crystallization as a poetical action, a process, in other words, that has to do with the creation of a work of art. To love someone is a creative process in which the object of one’s love is embellished by one’s imagination. The process, however, can be disturbed when the object at stake behaves in a way that does not fit the lover’s artistic conception. For this reason, Albertine can be projected upon most effectively when she is not present at all, but there are exceptions to this rule: sometimes the narrator loves her even when she is physically present. What is striking about

22 23

Proust, The Captive, 224; La prisonnière, 677. Proust, The Fugitive, 696; La fugitive, 679.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 141 the passages in which the narrator feels that he is in love with the woman by his side, is that they feature Albertine as an animal, a plant, or, more vaguely, an unconscious thing of natural beauty—never as a speaking, thinking woman. Albertine’s charm is that she is present in the narrator’s house, not so much as a young girl, but as a domestic animal.24 Even more attractive is Albertine asleep: By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien, and yet one that belonged more to me. Her personality was not constantly escaping, as when we talked, by the outlets of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her eyes. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. In keeping her in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake. Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath. [En fermant les yeux, en perdant la conscience, Albertine avait dépouillé, l’un après l’autre, ces différents caractères d’humanité qui m’avaient déçu depuis le jour où j’avais fait sa connaissance. Elle n’était plus animée que de la vie inconsciente des végétaux, des arbres, vie plus différente de la mienne, plus étrange, et qui cependant m’appartenait davantage. Son moine s’échappait pas à tous moments, comme quand nous causions, par les issues de la pensée inavouée et du regard. Elle avait rappelé à soi tout ce qui d’elle était au dehors; elle s’était réfugiée, enclose, résumée, dans son corps. En la tenant sous mon regard, dans mes mains, j’avais cette impression de la posséder tout entière que je n’avais pas quand elle était réveillée. Sa vie m’était soumise, exhalait vers moi son léger souffle.]25

In watching her and holding her in his arms when she is asleep, the narrator experiences what he calls “a love as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious, as if I had been in the presence of those inanimate creatures which are the beauties of nature” [un amour aussi pur, aussi immatériel, aussi mysterieux que si j’avais été devant ces créatures inanimées que sont les beautés de la nature].26 The narrator goes on to describe how he lies next to the sleeping Albertine, sometimes enjoying

24 25 26

Proust, The Captive, 10; La prisonnière, 15. Ibid., 84; 578. Ibid., 85; 579.

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“a pleasure that was less pure” [un plaisir moins pur].27 During these moments, it seems to him that he possesses her more completely, “like an unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature” [comme une chose inconsciente et sans résistance de la muette nature].28 During these moments the narrator can rest his worries about Albertine’s sexual preferences, her contacts and the ways in which she deceives him; she is an unconscious thing entirely in his possession. Love becomes possible during these moments because he can both think without interruption and look at her right in front of him: Her sleep realized to a certain extent the possibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her; when she was present, I spoke to her, but was too absent from myself to be able to think of her; when she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew that I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself. [Son sommeil réalisait, dans une certaine mesure, la possibilité de l’amour: seul, je pouvais penser à elle, mais elle me manquait, je ne la possédais pas; présente, je lui parlais, mais étais trop absent de moimême pour pouvoir penser. Quand elle dormait, je n’avais plus à parler, je savais que je n’étais plus regardé par elle, je n’avais plus besoin de vivre à la surface de moi-même.]29

The above fragment is telling. To love her, the narrator must be in a position where he can both think of Albertine and know her to be a secure and safe possession. Thinking of Albertine, that is of the crystallized Albertine, is much more gratifying when Albertine is not there, awake, talking, and distracting him from his ideal woman. To be assured of his ownership of her, however, she needs to be with him. This presents the problem that the two requirements for love cannot be fulfilled at the same time. The solution lies in Albertine’s sleep: she is present, but completely passive, a mere mute thing of natural beauty. Another point that comes up in the above passage deals with the narrator’s presence to himself. A waking Albertine forces him to “live at the surface of himself,” as a result of which he is too absent from himself to even think. This observation is in sharp contrast with the narrator’s remarks about his privileged moments: these latter experiences have a restorative power and, as he puts it after describing 27 28 29

Ibid., 87; 560. Ibid., 88; 561. Ibid., 84; 578.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 143 his involuntary memory of his grandmother, “bring him back to himself.” The waking presence of his beloved has the exact opposite effect and alienates the narrator from himself. Furthermore, even though it is his grandmother’s perceived presence that restores the narrator to himself, it appears that this special sort of presence, so different from Albertine’s physical presence, is only possible because his grandmother is dead. The narrator’s grandmother was never present to him in this way when she was alive, and the same is true for the narrator’s friends and loved ones in general. This issue will be taken up again in Chapter Six. In what follows, the desire to possess the object of love will be further explained and illustrated.

Love as the Desire to Possess The last few excerpts show another key element in the love of crystallization: the desire to possess. The creature of one’s imagination, connected to the person loved, is something one wishes to own, to have at one’s disposal so as to ensure that, first, others do not run off with it, and second, one can stop worrying about the mysterious aspects of the beloved. For the narrator, these two concerns are closely related, since the unknown parts of Albertine’s life all have to do with people with whom she has had, or will perhaps have, relations. By locking her up, the narrator attempts to end Albertine’s free contact with the outside world so as to save himself from suffering. At one point, the narrator even wonders if not the main reason for his attraction to any woman is the fact that other men desire her. Just like the narrator does not care to actually see Albertine as long as he knows her to be in his house, he does not need her near him as long as he can “prevent the fugitive creature from going to this place or to that” [empêcher “l’être fuite” d’aller ici ou là ].30 To know and understand something is part of what it means to own something, but the exhaustive knowledge in the case of a human being is impossible: I realized the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do

30

Proust, The Fugitive, 442; La fugitive, 435.

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chapter four not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. [Je comprenais l’impossibilité où se heurte l’amour. Nous nous imaginons qu’il a pour objet un être qui peut être couché devant nous, enfermé dans un corps. Hélas! Il est l’extension de cet être à tous les points de l’espace et du temps que cet être a occupés et occupera. Si nous ne possédons pas son contact avec tel lieu, avec telle heure, nous ne le possédons pas. Or nous ne pouvons toucher tous ces points.]31

Even if we could touch on all the points in time and space where the beloved has been and will be, we still would not have the grasp on her that we desire, because those places and times would not be the same to us as they have been or will be to her. Hence the painful conclusion the narrator reaches: “Love is space and time made perceptible to the heart.” [L’amour, c’est l’espace et le temps rendus sensibles au coeur.]32 The narrator comes closest to what he holds to be the realization of love when Albertine is asleep beside him, but he comes to understand that this possession, all his as long as she is unconscious, flees him the moment she is awake. Once she is a thinking being again, Albertine no longer ends where her body ends, but extends over a network of different points of which we only know a few. To possess is to know all, and there is therefore no one more scrupulous in his hunt for truth than the jealous lover. The jealous lover wants to know, because to know, as will become clear below, is to own. Swann, for instance, finds an intellectual purpose in his jealousy, as does the narrator. As Bowie remarks: “Many of the narrator’s ambitions, in this section of the work, are strictly scientific ones: he wants to get behind appearances to the real structure of things.”33 Bowie describes the intellectual method used in La prisonnière as the production and testing of hypotheses. The narrator can only think in terms of either/or which results in the “twohypothesis problem:” “The two hypotheses, each of them complete but the pair of them incompatible, lock together to produce a new form of mental captivity.”34 Albertine is either lying or telling the truth, either desiring “another person all-consumingly or not at all.”35 He does not

31 32 33 34 35

Proust, The Captive, 125; La prisonnière, 607–8. Ibid., 519; 887. Bowie, “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge,” 50. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 54.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 145 grant that “feelings may be muddled” but is caught by the powers of his own speculative mind. He has too strong a need “for simple and elegant solutions in the analysis of human conduct.”36 The narrator wants to secure Albertine, and he tries to accomplish this by proving one or the other hypothesis correct. The “mental captivity” in which this approach inevitably results is caused by the fact that Albertine escapes this sort of categorization, leaving the narrator insecure and jealous of all the things he does not know. Keeping her captive physically does not satisfy his thirst for knowledge: I could, if I chose, take Albertine on my knee, hold her head in my hands, I could caress her, run my hands slowly over her, but, just as if I had been handling a stone which encloses the salt of immemorial oceans or light of a star, I felt that I was touching no more than the sealed envelope of a person who inwardly reached to infinity. [Je pouvais bien prendre Albertine sur mes genoux, tenir sa tête dans mes mains, je pouvais la caresser, passer longuement mes mains sur elle, mais, comme si j’eusse manié une pierre qui enferme la salure des océans immémoriaux ou le rayon d’une étoile, je sentais que je touchais seulement l’enveloppe close d’un être qui par l’intérieur accédait à l’infini.]37

The narrator describes how he can touch Albertine, have her near him, but this superficial possession which he thought would satisfy him completely only serves to make him more aware of the unknown worlds within his beloved. The more she notices his jealousy, the less she tells him about her appetites, her past, and her adventures. The more the narrator wants to know, the more Albertine escapes him: “the further the desire advances, the further does real possession recede” [plus le désir avance, plus la possession véritable s’éloigne].38 The two insights presented by the narrator that will lead into the discussion of Marcel’s phenomenology of having can be summed up as follows. First, the more one wants to possess someone, the more one becomes aware that this desire is impossible to fulfill. This does not, however, stop one from trying. Second, the more one is a master, the more one senses oneself to be a slave of one’s possession. When the narrator fears that Albertine, attending a matinee at the Trocadéro, may set up an appointment with the lesbian actress Léa, he sends

36 37 38

Ibid., 54. Proust, The Captive, 520; La prisonnière, 888. Proust, The Fugitive, 458; La fugitive, 450.

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Françoise to the theater to fetch Albertine and bring her back home. Albertine sends word to the narrator as soon as Françoise has found her, to reassure him that she will do exactly as he pleases and that she looks forward to spending time with him. “I was more of a master than I had supposed” [J’étais plus maître que je n’avais cru], the narrator remarks, and he continues: “more of a master, in other words more of a slave” [plus maître, c’est-à-dire plus esclave].39 The moment Albertine’s position has been verified, her activities checked and organized according to his wishes, the narrator again realizes that he is tired of her. Worse still, he knows it is because of Albertine that all sorts of pleasures in which he would otherwise indulge have become off limits; milk maids and seamstresses he sees on the streets cannot be brought home, nor does he have the time and energy left to pursue them since everything is wasted on his captive. Returning from a party at the Verdurins, he looks up at the window behind which he knows Albertine to be waiting for him: “As I raised my eyes for one last look from the outside at the window of the room in which I should presently find myself, I seemed to behold the luminous gates which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the inflexible bars of gold.” [En levant une dernière fois mes yeux du dehors vers la fenêtre de la chambre dans laquelle je serais tout à l’heure, il me sembla voir le lumineux grillage qui allait se refermer sur moi et dont j’avais forgé moi-même, pour une servitude éternelle, les inflexibles barreaux d’or.]40 Both Albertine and the narrator are prisoners; Albertine because whatever she does, she is either in the narrator’s house or on a supervised excursion, the narrator because habit has made it impossible for him to live without this possession which limits his freedom without bringing him any pleasure in return for this restriction. Though the narrator once wanted nothing more than to possess Albertine, she has lost her appeal now that he has succeeded: True, Albertine was far more a prisoner than I. And it was curious to remark how fate, which transforms persons, had contrived to penetrate the walls of her prison, to change her in her very essence, and turn the girl I had known at Balbec into a dreary, docile captive. . . . It was no longer the same Albertine . . . shut up in my house, docile and alone, she

39 40

Proust, The Captive, 203; La prisonnière, 663. Ibid., 445; 834.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 147 was no longer what at Balbec, even when I had succeeded in finding her, she used to be upon the beach, that fugitive, cautious, deceitful creature . . . because the sea breeze no longer puffed out her skirts; because, above all, I had clipped her wings, and she had ceased to be a winged Victory and become a burdensome slave of whom I would have liked to rid myself. [Certes, Albertine était bien plus prisonnière que moi. Et c’était une chose curieuse comme, à travers les murs de sa prison, le destin, qui transforme les êtres, avait pu passer, la changer dans son essence même, et de la jeune fille de Balbec faire une ennuyeuse et docile captive. . . . Ce n’était plus la même Albertine . . . enfermée chez moi, docile et seule, elle n’était plus ce qu’à Balbec, même quand j’avais pu la trouver, elle était sur la plage, cet être fuyant, prudent et fourbe. . . . Parce que le vent de la mer ne gonflait plus ses vêtements, parce que, surtout, je lui avais coupé les ailes, elle avait cessé d’être une Victoire, elle était une pesante esclave dont j’aurais voulu me débarrasser.]41

Taken from the environment where she was “un être fuyant,” she has lost the qualities that made her desirable to become a slave whom the narrator wants to get rid of. The two issues that have been discussed here, the desire to possess and one’s enslavement to one’s possession, will now be developed in the context of Gabriel Marcel’s phénoménologie de l’avoir.

The Tragedy of Having In what he calls his phenomenology of having, Marcel discusses the two main ways in which the verb “to have” (avoir) is used: l’avoir-possession, which is the first and strongest sense of having, and l’avoirimplication. The latter will be described below and is a having based on knowledge: the more one knows about an object, the more one feels like one owns this object. Describing the l’avoir possession, Marcel starts from the common sense observation that the verb avoir, to have, designates first and foremost a possession. Whatever exact form l’avoir-possession may take, there is always a relation between a thing (quid) or something that can be reduced to a thing, and a subject (qui), treated as “centre d’inherence.”42 Marcel gives the example of having a

41

Ibid., 500–1; 873. Roger Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être. La philosophie de Gabriel Marcel, 2 vols (Louvain: Éditions E. Nauwelaerts, 1953), I 224. Troisfontaines’ two volumes 42

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dog to illustrate what further characteristics can be ascribed to l’avoirpossession. The first characteristic is that I can only maintain that the dog belongs to me if it is indeed mine and no one else has a justifiable claim on it. Secondly, I must in some way or other take care of the dog, even if I am only the one paying others to feed it, provide it shelter, etc. Third, the dog must to a certain extent obey me, or at least recognize me.43 Marcel also gives the example of having a bicycle or having an idea, but uses the example of the dog to illustrate the three criteria for l’avoir-possession sketched above. This is no coincidence since the criteria hold up better when applied to a living being; it seems like the second and especially the third criterion are at least to some degree harder to apply to a relation one may have to one’s bicycle or one’s ideas. Since it is not my intention to critique Marcel’s phenomenology of having in itself but to use it to discuss the process of crystallization as it is found in À la recherche, I will not discuss these issues further but instead focus on the nature of l’avoir-possession as it is described by Marcel. The fact that Marcel chose a dog use as his main example comes as an advantage since, as has been illustrated above, the narrator regards Albertine not so much as a person but rather as a beautiful piece of flora or fauna. More precisely, the narrator loves Albertine most when he is at liberty to regard her as such; whenever Albertine imposes her presence on him and shows herself to be “just a woman,” and not even a very attractive one at that, the narrator is annoyed or bored as a result. The characteristics listed above will help to gain a better understanding of the issues raised in the context of the narrator’s relation to Albertine. Returning to the example of the dog, the first point raised implies that my claim on the dog is exclusive of others who would want to make that same claim. My ownership of the dog therefore creates a tension with others who could, in principle, have what I have. The fact that someone else could in principle be the owner of what I now possess indicates that what I own must be to some degree independent of me. In other words, in the context of l’avoir-possession, the opposition between inside and outside (du dedans and du dehors) never on Marcel’s philosophy were endorsed by Marcel himself, who wrote a preface for the work. 43 Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. James Collins (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 158–161. Id., Creative Fidelity, 50–54.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 149 completely disappears. At the same time, and just as importantly, it must be noted that what I have is not absolutely exterior to me either. I always try in some way to make that which I have into an addition to myself, to my person, and I attempt “de le faire entrer en un moi conçu comme ‘contenant.’”44 I regard myself—the image lacks subtlety—as a container of the possession I care for. “To have” always indicates not only “to have for oneself,” avoir à soi, but also “to keep for oneself,” garder pour soi. Marcel also gives the example of having a secret. My secret is only a secret if I could decide to tell someone else; I choose to guard my secret because I do not want others to have it. Perhaps I even take more pleasure in my possession when I know others desire to have what I have, which in this case means to know what I know. The secret, like any possession, is only something I have/possess/own on the condition that there is the possibility of giving it away or revealing it.45 This example is again a fortunate one when applied to À la recherche. Albertine is a secret kept by the narrator, and he tries to guard it so that no-one will find her. The narrator is particularly nervous that women may notice Albertine’s appetites and so feel encouraged to contact her. Though the narrator wishes to dispel his suspicions whenever he is jealous of a particular woman whom he suspects Albertine to have relations with, these very suspicions keep what he calls his love for her alive: “If we had no rivals, pleasure would not transform itself into love.” [Si nous n’avions pas de rivaux, le plaisir ne se transformerait pas en amour.]46 As Roger Troisfontaines puts it: “Le secret dont je suis vraiment détenteur emprunte la majeure partie de son intérêt aux convoitises qu’il allume au fond des yeux d’autrui.”47 It is because others desire her that the narrator desires Albertine, and to reawaken his interest in her, his jealousy only needs to be roused again. With the observation about l’avoir-possession applied to a secret, one touches on what Marcel calls the tragedy of having. As soon as I have something, I in one way or another put myself over and against those who do not have it, whatever “it” may be. Because others can take my possession away from me, I shield it, almost try to incorporate

44 Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 225. It serves to compare this view with Levinas’ account of the “bourgeois spirit” whose “instinct for possession” is linked to a “search for security.” Levinas, On Escape, 50. 45 Marcel, Being and Having, 160–1. See also id., Creative Fidelity, 90–92. 46 Proust, Time Regained, 314; Le temps retrouvé, 484. 47 Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 226.

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it, so as to become one with the thing I possess and do not want to lose.48 The more I care about what I have, the more the line between interiority and exteriority starts to fade, and the more distinct the opposition between “me” (the owner) and the “others” (those who want to be the owner) becomes. Since what I have is always to some extent independent of me, it can be taken away, leaving me disowned. The narrator experiences the full force of what Marcel calls the tragedy of having. The more he tries to contain Albertine, the more he realizes that she will always escape him—the independence of the object owned can never be completely overcome. And even though she lives in his house and does as he pleases, he is painfully aware of her past, her quick glances at girls in the street, her appetites, her little adventures, all independent of him and outside of his control. Though the tragedy of having described by Marcel sheds light on the narrator’s situation, there is a significant difference between the narrator’s and Marcel’s views on the nature of love, which, according to Marcel, is the only phenomenon that transcends the level of having. Where for the narrator love is crystallization, imagination, suffering and the desire to possess, Marcel regards love as participation, intersubjectivity, and presence. Love is impossible where l’avoirpossession has not been overcome and changed into a relation between je and tu, between, as will become clear, two persons who do not try to problematize each other. In À la recherche, love remains problematic: whether it concerns Albertine or his grandmother, the narrator loves the object of his imagination and not a person. This important difference is worth noting here, but the themes related to it will be more fully developed later in this chapter and again in Chapter Six. Returning to the list of characteristics that belong to l’avoirpossession, it appears that I only own something if I in some way take care of, support or maintain the object in my possession. The having, the relation between the qui and the quid, ends when one of the two poles ceases to exist. Since the quid is per definition something that is at least in part independent of me, it can be destroyed, lost, or stolen while I continue to exist. The permanence required for l’avoirpossession is subject to the dangers that threaten all material things [les vicissitudes des choses]. Real having, i.e. having in which I care

48

Ibid., I 226.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 151 about the quid, brings with it anxiety on the part of the owner.49 In an attempt to escape from the concerns that come with l’avoir-possession, one seeks guarantees and tries to secure the continued possession of that which one cares about. The narrator tries to assuage the anxiety caused by the thought that Albertine might leave him by buying her gifts and promising her even bigger gifts in the future. Seeing her wear the dresses he has had made for her, and the slippers he has bought for her to wear indoors, gives him a feeling of ownership. Walking into a room and finding her coat and gloves there indicates that she is at home with him, part of his household and his life: “I was rescued from my melancholy, the sight of these trifles gave me possession of Albertine, and I would rush to greet her.” [J’etais sauvé de ma tristesse, la vue de ces riens me faisait posséder Albertine, je courais vers elle.]50 Discussing the third characteristic of l’avoir-possession, Troisfontaines starts out with the following observation: “Normalement ‘avoir’ et ‘pouvoir’ s’impliquent.”51 I have power over what I own, I can, in other words, dispose of it. Even where having is simply contenir, there still is a force at work, even if this force has as its only function to keep what is contained in place, preventing its escape.52 The narrator has, owns Albertine in so far as he has power over her, and he is of course all too aware of the fact that this power will always be too limited to put his jealous mind at ease. One only owns a thing, Marcel claims, when one can dispose over it in some way, and though the narrator can pull Albertine onto his knees, touch her when she is asleep and buy her things to mark her as his, he knows that she extends much further than does the body which he has there with him.53 Marcel argues that our mind has trouble distinguishing between an object we have and an instrument we can use, which explains why Albertine’s lack of cooperation frustrates the narrator in a way a broken tool frustrates

49

“There is certainly a twofold permanency in having: there is the permanency of the qui, and the permanency of the quid. But this permanency is, of its very nature, threatened. It is willed, or at least wished, and it slips from our grasp.” Marcel, Being and Having, 162. 50 Proust, The Captive, 65; La prisonnière, 564. 51 Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 228. 52 “Having is often apt to reduce itself to the fact of containing. . . . To contain is to enclose; but to enclose is to prevent, to resist, and to oppose the tendency of the content towards spreading, spilling out, escaping.” Marcel, Being and Having, 159. 53 Because Albertine escapes him, the narrator cannot fully dispose of her. As Marcel puts it: “I only have what I can in some manner and within certain limits dispose of.” Marcel, Being and Having, 155.

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a mechanic. More accurately, the frustration experienced by the narrator is that of the artist whose material does not behave in the way envisaged by him and so complicates the artistic process. When the narrator is leafing through art books while awaiting Albertine’s return from a trip, the reproductions he sees imbue the Albertine he is thinking of with beauty: “She had at that moment the appearance of a work by Elstir or Bergotte, I felt a momentary ardor for her, seeing her in the perspective of imagination and art.” [Elle avait à ce moment-là l’apparence d’une oeuvre d’Elstir ou de Bergotte, j’éprouvais une exaltation momentanée pour elle, la voyant dans le recul de l’imagination et de l’art.]54 The exultation brought about by the images he sees in the books is possible only because Albertine herself can appear as a work of art while she is not physically present. In her absence, the narrator can make additions to “his” work undisturbed. The three points discussed above show that there is no strict opposition between having and being. Though something I have may be to a certain degree independent of me, it is not, Marcel claims, simply exterior to me. Albertine has become a part of the narrator, which illustrates Troisfontaines’ observation that “plus l’accent sera mis sur l’expérience de l’adhérence, moins il sera légitime d’insister sur cette extériorité.”55 The bond between the qui and the quid affects the qui in its very being, but the quid can never fully be absorbed because of the nature of l’avoir-possession which makes complete identification impossible.56 The way in which the subject of l’avoir-possession is affected by the object that it possesses shows itself most acutely when the object has disappeared. The narrator experiences Albertine’s departure as an almost physical pain: I was so much in the habit of having Albertine with me, and now I suddenly saw a new aspect of Habit. Hitherto I had regarded it chiefly 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, its insignificant face so incrusted in one’s heart, that if it detaches itself, if it turns away from one, this deity that one had barely distinguished inflicts on one sufferings more terrible than any other and is then as cruel as death itself.

54 55 56

Proust, The Captive, 66; La prisonnière, 565. Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 229. Marcel, Being and Having, 164.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 153 [J’avais une telle habitude d’avoir Albertine auprès de moi, et je voyais soudain un nouveau visage de l’Habitude. Jusqu’ici je l’avais considérée surtout comme un pouvoir annihilateur qui supprime l’originalité et jusqu’à la conscience des perceptions; maintenant je la voyais comme une divinité redoutable, si rivée à nous, son visage insignifiant si incrusté dans notre coeur, que si elle se détache, si elle détourne de nous, cette déité que nous ne distinguions presque pas, nous inflige des souffrances plus terribles qu’aucune et qu’alors elle est aussi cruelle que la mort.]57

The above passage not only shows the degree to which a possession can be internalized, almost literally incorporated, but also indicates how this incorporation comes to be. It is at this point that habit comes into the discussion again, showing itself this time not as a force that over time makes everything and everyone boring, but, as the narrator puts it, a dread deity. Habit makes the suffering caused by a loss more painful, and the pain of a loss wears off only as the habit disappears and leaves the disowned owner indifferent. To again use Troisfontaines’ words: “Nos possessions nous exposent à souffrir par ce qu’elles incluent de multiple. Souffrir, c’est être atteint dans ce qu’on a, pour autant que ce qu’on a adhère à ce qu’on est sans être pourtant totalement assimilé.”58 The more one is focused on one’s possessions, the more they feel like complementary parts to one’s body. When this link is threatened or broken, one gets the same rending feeling as when the integrity of one’s body is compromised. Of course one will continue to exist, and this is why the threat to one’s possessions is not the same as a threat to one’s body; however, one will be the more affected by a loss the more one was “having,” ayant. The tragedy of having turns out to consist in the desperate effort to become one with a thing which can never be identical to the being which owns it.59 While it is impossible to become one with any object one possesses, this impossibility becomes especially pertinent and especially frustrating when the “object” at stake is a person, who will always resist being owned the way a thing is owned.

57

Proust, The Fugitive, 426; La fugitive, 420. Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 233. 59 In Troisfontaines’ words: “La tragédie de l’avoir consiste dans l’effort désespéré pour ne faire qu’un avec quelque chose qui, cependant, ne peut pas être identique à l’être même de celui qui a.” Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 233. 58

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chapter four The Tragedy of Desire

In the tragedy of having, a special role is played by desire. When we desire something, we are like owners who do not yet possess what we want to own: “Le ‘désir’ est un avoir dont l’élément psychique est déjà réalisé en moi mais auquel manque encore l’élément objectif. Désirer, c’est ‘avoir’ en n’ayant pas, et cette disjonction explique le caractère lancinant du désir, l’espèce de souffrance.”60 As can be inferred from the discussion of the characteristic aspects of l’avoir-possession, desire is always mixed up with a possible conflict between the desiring subject and the others who have their eye on the same object. One who desires can regard other people in only two ways: as obstacles to fulfilling one’s desire, or as means to getting what one wants.61 The narrator’s friends and acquaintances often move from the one category to the other, or lose his interest because they fit into neither group. The narrator is closest to Robert de Saint-Loup, for instance, when he can use him; whether it is to gather information about Mme de Guermantes or to help bring about Albertines return. Andrée, member of the group of girls to which Albertine belonged when the narrator first met her in Balbec, is supposed to supervise Albertine’s trips but later turns out to have had a romantic relationship with her as well. First a means to keeping Albertine “safe,” Andrée appears to have been the very kind of relation that the narrator had hoped to avoid. After Albertine’s death, however, Andrée becomes interesting again because she can tell the narrator about Albertine’s appetites and reveal to him secrets which Albertine herself would have never confessed to. The desire the narrator feels for Albertine when he first meets her is never satisfied, not even when he has succeeded in bringing Albertine to Paris with him. The reason this desire cannot be satisfied is because it aims at possession, ownership, something which is impossible where the object desired is a person. Even when the narrator “has” Albertine, i.e. has her locked up in his house, she still escapes him. After Albertine has gone, the narrator realizes that happiness can never be found in the satisfaction of desire: “If happiness, or at least the absence of suffering, can be found, it is not the satisfaction, but the gradual reduction and the eventual extinction of desire that one should seek.”

60 61

Ibid., I 234. Marcel, Being and Having, 162-4.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 155 [Si le bonheur, ou du moins l’absence de souffrances, peut être trouvé, ce n’est pas la satisfaction, mais la réduction progressive, l’extinction finale du désir qu’il faut chercher.]62 The power (puissance) implied in any relation of having is imperfect because there is more to Albertine than her body. Her physical presence can be insured, but, as the narrator finds out, this physical presence only makes it more apparent that Albertine is not really with him. Once Albertine has disappeared, the narrator tells himself that he was bored with her only because he thought he had full disposal of her, that she was all his. This, he now understands, was never true. Referring back to the passage cited above where he looks up to Albertine’s window and sees the barred window of his own prison, the narrator has a very different insight looking at this same window now Albertine is gone: I saw how greatly I had been mistaken, that it was only because the treasure whose reflections came down to me from above had seemed to be entirely in my possession that I had failed to appreciate its value, so that it appeared necessarily inferior to pleasures, however slight, whose value I enhanced in seeking to imagine them. [Je compris combien je m’étais trompé, et que c’était seulement parce que, le trésor dont les reflets venaient d’en haut jusqu’à moi, je m’en croyais la possession entièrement assurée, que j’avais négligé d’en calculer la valeur, ce qui faisait qu’il me paraissait forcément inférieur à des plaisirs, si petits qu’ils fussent, mais que, cherchant à les imaginer, j’évaluais.]63

From this passage it can be inferred that an object is desired only if it is in part unfamiliar, if it leaves something to the imagination. Once he had grown used to Albertine, the narrator no longer desired her, except at those moments when he suspected that she was keeping a secret from him; as soon as there was something to conquer, jealousy and with it desire sprung up again. When he looked up at her window after the party at the Verdurins, however, the narrator was not experiencing any anxiety and, as a consequence, Albertine has lost his interest. Standing in the same place after her departure, he knows he did not possess her as completely as he then thought; it was not in his power to prevent her escape. His eagerness to make her come back is only increased by the fact that he does not know where she is, or with

62 63

Proust, The Fugitive, 458; La fugitive, 450. Ibid., 504–5; 495.

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whom she is spending her time. A multitude of possibilities present themselves to his imagination, thereby restoring his appreciation of Albertine and turning his quest to get her back into an obsession. Now that the tragedy of having and the issues involved in the attempt to “own” a person have been discussed, I will return to the idea expressed earlier that to know is to own. Gabriel Marcel reserves the term l’avoir-implication for the kind of ownership that is based in knowledge.

Presence Made Impossible by l’avoir-implication After outlining the first and main kind of having that he calls l’avoirpossession, Marcel turns to a second kind, l’avoir-implication. He explains that, because we feel the need to objectify, we represent things as having caractères [characteristics] and believe that a formula can express what a thing is. This utilitarian attitude is of course closely related to what Bergson calls the working of the intellect and James calls “knowledge about,” as exemplified in the sentiment of rationality. When one claims that a thing has a property, according to Marcel, one regards this property as inherent in the thing it characterizes. The notion of force (puissance) found in l’avoir-possession is present in this kind of having as well: we regard the property we ascribe to the thing as specifying its use for us. As Troisfontaines puts it: “Caractériser, c’est, pour nous, une certaine façon de ‘posséder,’ de prétendre posséder l’impossédable, c’est constituer une petite effigie abstraite d’une réalité qui ne se prête à ses yeux . . . que de la façon la plus superficielle.”64 Overwhelmed by the blooming, buzzing confusion that is the world as we experience it, we trace patterns and connections that help us gain peace of mind. Marcel, like James and Bergson, agrees that we need theories, concepts, etc. to get by, but puts a strong emphasis on what he calls the dangers of a functionalized world. In the previous chapter this world was described as a world devoid of mystery and full of problems, in short, un monde cassé. What Marcel wants us to recognize is that a being in the full sense of the word, i.e. a human being, cannot be “characterized.” To characterize a person would mean to reduce him or her to a “bundle of functions,” no more than the con-

64

Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 237.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 157 tents of an elaborate database. The fact that this reduction is impossible without losing part of the being one tries to sum up is expressed as follows by Troisfontaines: “L’incaractérisable n’est pas l’indéterminé, c’est le surdéterminé. L’être transcende toute somme, toute collection, tout avoir.”65 Any characterization one believes defines a being is necessarily a phantom, an effigy made coherent by one’s wish to grasp and sum up this being.66 In Creative Fidelity, Marcel again touches on the tragedy of having and this time connects it to the notion of despair. He explains that the given is always presented to us as something which in principle can be catalogued. By cataloguing the given, we feel like we have control over it, which in turn gives us a certain satisfaction. Through the term is not used in Creative Fidelity, the satisfaction mentioned in this context is clearly the feeling that supervenes on l’avoir-implication. In sharp contrast with this satisfaction (which, again, can be compared to James’ sentiment of rationality, and Bergson’s utilitarian intellect) is the fact that, as Marcel claims, “whatever can be catalogued is an occasion for despair.”67 The tragedy of having described above is the result of behaving like a collector: “With or within myself I establish a sort of library or museum in which the interesting elements that I have been able to extract from my conversation with the other, are incorporated.”68 These remarks further elucidate Marcel’s claim above that any characterization of the other is necessarily an effigy. Also in Creative Fidelity, Marcel describes the contrast between the other who is an other to me and the other whom I have made into an effigy (or, in the context of this chapter, the other whom I have crystallized) in the context of his discussion of présence. Someone who is not present to me, is to me not a tu but a lui. Presence, in this context, does not mean physical presence; I can be in the same room with someone who is to me a lui and therefore not present. Marcel explains: “When I consider another individual as lui, I treat him as essentially absent; it is his absence which allows me to objectify him, to reason about him as though he were a nature or given essence.”69 The parallel with the narrator’s relation to Albertine is clear: Albertine is to him a lui

65 66 67 68 69

Ibid., I 239. Marcel, Being and Having, 169. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 70. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 72.

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and so becomes an object that lends itself to crystallization. The fact that Albertine is regarded as a “nature or given essence” even when she is physically present is an illustration of what Marcel calls “a presence which is yet a mode of absence.” I can act towards somebody as though he or she were absent, not just in ignoring him or her, but in talking to this person without any of the openness essential to intersubjectivity. This lack of openness has a remarkable consequence: “the more my questioner is external to me, the more I am by the same token external to myself.”70 Marcel here offers as an example the situation in which someone is paying attention to him, is perhaps asking him questions about himself, but in a way that renders him a stranger to himself. He can hear himself talk because his words come back to him, appear to bounce off the person he is talking to; he or she may be hearing the words he is saying, but he is not heard. While he is talking to this person, he is not himself. This last remark is reminiscent of the narrator’s observation that when he is talking to Albertine, he feels like he is forced “to live at the surface of himself,” and that he cannot really think. He has to be too much on guard and needs to be an outside observer to judge Albertine’s reactions to what he says. Marcel likes the English words “self-conscious” to express this phenomenon of alienation that results from the lack of presence: in being a stranger to myself, I become aware of my objectified characteristics. Marcel does not describe any particular way in which one can escape or overcome the paralysis of self-consciousness. It appears that we depend on the other to be present to us and so “restore us to ourselves.” These are the words the narrator uses to describe the effect of his grandmother’s presence in an involuntary memory. Help from the other to escape our self-consciousness often comes unexpectedly and unprovoked, just like a chance encounter with a couvercle. This element of chance is emphasized both by the narrator and Marcel, who points out that sometimes the most unexpected stranger will restore us to ourselves by being present to us. Even though the narrator appears unable to experience the presence of any of his living loved ones, it is important to keep in mind that he and Marcel both think that we are restored to ourselves not through our own willpower, but through chance encounters. Help comes from the outside and is not completely under our control. This point will be taken up in the next chapter

70

Ibid., 33–4.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 159 and again in Chapter Six. The following excerpt sums up the contrast between the other who is to me a mere idea or effigy, and the other who is present to me: The other as other exists for me only insofar as I am open to him (insofar as he is a thou [tu]), but I am only open to him insofar as I cease to form a circle with myself within which I somehow place the other, or rather, the idea of the other; for in so doing, the other becomes the idea of the other, and the idea of the other is no longer the other as such, but the other qua related to me, as fragmented.71

As Marcel explains, the category of the given needs to be transcended; or, in the terms introduced above, a person to whom I am open is no longer lui but tu. Here again, however, Marcel emphasizes that there is always the temptation to fall back into the category of the given, and to not maintain tu as tu. He goes on to explain that there is a sense in which the tu as tu cannot be maintained, and it is to illustrate this claim that Marcel actually refers to À la recherche: “Albertine Disparue for example, should be read, in the light of these relations between the given and the problematic. For Proust, the thou is instantly converted into an it.”72 Note that Marcel claims that in À la recherche, tu does not merely become lui, but a thing, “it.” This observation is in line with the above description of crystallization and the passages in which Albertine is shown to be a mute thing of nature. The second meaning of avoir discussed here is closely connected to one of Marcel’s major philosophical concerns: the increasingly functionalized world devoid of mystery. The mystery I will focus on here is that of intersubjectivity, described as follows in Ricoeur’s interview with Marcel, where the latter describes this notion as follows: L’intersubjectivité c’est l’ouverture à l’autre, une ouverture qui est perpétuellement menacée car, à chaque instant, le moi risque de réobturer cette sorte d’ouverture dans la mesure où il devient prisonnier de luimême, où il ne considère plus l’autre que par rapport à lui—mais que l’ouverture à l’autre soit possible, c’est manifestement une des certitudes cardinales auxquelles je suis parvenu.73

Intersubjectivity is openness to the other, but an openness that is constantly threatened by the degree to which one is “a prisoner of

71 72 73

Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 71–2. Ibid., 72. Ricœur, Marcel, Entretiens, 23.

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oneself.” The relevance of the above passage to the narrator’s situation in À la recherche is obvious: a prisoner of his own jealous obsession, the narrator can only regard Albertine “par rapport à lui;” her every word, gesture, look must be interpreted, fit into the puzzle that the narrator is trying to put together in order to get the picture that will show him the whole Albertine. Knowing everything about Albertine means having power over her, means, in short, having her. The need expressed in l’avoir-implication is the need to know and to control; this need seeks to substitute a problem for every mystery. As was discussed in the previous chapter, problems can be solved and cease to exist once the solution has been reached. By finding out names, places, connections, the narrator finds problems to solve, but at the same time he realizes that there will never be an end to the series of problems and that in confirming or falsifying one jealous suspicion he is only setting himself up for the next riddle. In Marcellian terms, the narrator learns that no collection of solutions to different problems, however extensive, can ever dispel a mystery. Complete power through knowledge is impossible when it comes to the “possession” of a human being. Even though the narrator himself reaches this insight, it does not stop him from further attempts to “own” Albertine or others. It is this issue that will be central to the discussion in Chapter Six. In line with the observation above that Marcel and the narrator of À la recherche have very different conceptions of love, it must now be noted that, while Marcel calls the possibility of the openness that characterizes intersubjectivity a “cardinal certitude,” À la recherche offers little support for this claim. The openness promoted by Marcel, constitutive of what he calls intersubjectivity and a necessary condition for love, is the openness to the mystery of the other. This mystery initially attracts the narrator to the women he comes to love, but, and this has been a pervading theme all through the passages cited in this chapter, while this mystery attracts, it is at the same time the very thing that must be conquered, overcome, reduced: “If at one time I had been overcome with excitement when I thought I detected mystery in Albertine’s eyes, now I was happy only at times when from those eyes . . . I succeeded in expelling every trace of mystery.” [Si jadis je m’étais exalté en croyant voir du mystère dans les yeux d’Albertine, maintenant je n’étais heureux que dans les moments où de ces yeux . . . je parvenais à expulser tout mystère.]74 The following passage is even more telling: 74

Proust, The Captive, 91; La prisonnière, 583.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 161 In seeking to know Albertine, then to possess her entirely, I had merely obeyed the need to reduce by experiment to elements meanly akin to those of our own ego the mystery of every person, every place, which our imagination has made to seem different, and to impel each of our profound joys toward its own destruction. [J’avais eu beau, en cherchant à connaître Albertine, puis à la posséder tout entière, n’obéir qu’au besoin de réduire par l’expérience à des éléments mesquinement semblables à ceux de notre moi, le mystère de tout être, de tout pays que l’imagination nous a fait paraître différent, et de pousser chacune de nos joies profondes vers sa propre destruction.]75

What is expressed here is exactly the point Marcel makes in negatively defining intersubjectivity. In other words, the narrator here gives a clear account of the attitude opposite to the one of intersubjectivity. To know exhaustively means to possess (l’avoir-implication), and to possess a person means to dispel all mystery, which in turn makes the formerly desired object wholly unappealing. When, for instance, the narrator has found out that Albertine has gone to her aunt, he writes her a letter which he thinks is sure to bring her back to him. After he has sent it off, his nervous obsession leaves him: “As this letter seemed to me to be certain of its effect, I began to regret that I had sent it.” [Le résultat de cette lettre me paraissant certain, je regrettai de l’avoir envoyée.]76 Not only is he no longer concerned about Albertine’s return, he even starts to hope she will not come back at all, leaving him to enjoy his new-found freedom which he is experiencing now that he thinks that he has control over Albertine again. It should come as no surprise to the reader of À la recherche that once the narrator finds that Albertine is not coming back, his anxiety returns full force, making life without Albertine seem impossible. Crystallization is most effective in absence of the beloved person; it almost appears as if the narrator can only love Albertine while she is not there. Once she is gone, he forgets his boredom and does everything in his power to get her back. All this despite the fact that he had made the following observation soon after Albertine originally moved in with him: “She had entered, for me, upon that lamentable period in which a person, scattered in space and time, is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of insoluble problems.” [Elle était entrée pour moi dans cette période

75 76

Proust, The Fugitive, 509; La fugitive, 499. Ibid., 466; 458.

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lamentable où un être, disséminé dans l’espace et dans le temps, n’est plus pour nous une femme, mais une suite d’événements sur lesquels nous ne pouvons faire la lumière, une suite de problèmes insolubles.]77 The narrator holds that this is the fate of every being whom one once loved: after the original appeal of mystery, the beloved becomes a mere collection of problems, ultimately insolvable because he or she extends in time and place in ways beyond our control. To put it in Marcellian terms, the person loved never remains tu (if he or she ever was one in the eyes of the lover) but always becomes lui if not an “it.” Marcel gives an example which shows how someone who is to me lui can become tu. When in talking to a person we hit upon a topic we both care about, or find that we have a mutual friend “a unity is established in which the other person and myself become we, and this means that he ceases to be him and becomes thou.” Marcel further explains that, in this situation, the person I am talking to “ceases to intervene between me and myself.” It follows that only with a person who is for me tu, I can be myself; better yet, this person has the power to return me to myself. This will of course be most significantly the case in love, where the person whom I love “can hardly be a third person for me at all.” On the contrary, this person allows me to discover myself: “Whereas objectification particularly for the him [lui], implies a dialogue between me and myself, hence a triadic relation, in the presence of the thou, I attain an inner unification which makes possible a dyadic relation.”78 It hardly needs to be pointed out that love in À la recherche is of a rather different nature than the openness and presence described by Marcel. Friendship, it seems safe to infer, is mostly a waste of time according to the narrator. The best example is again the narrator’s relation to Saint-Loup, who is appreciated because of his unusual grace and perfect embodiment of the Guermantes esprit, his connection to Mme de Guermantes and his willingness to help the narrator win back Albertine, but rarely for his conversation; when the narrator is with him he longs to be alone with his own thoughts. The more friends one has, he observes, the less one enjoys them: “Friendship . . . is an agreeable folly . . . which at the bottom of our hearts we know to be no more reasonable than the delusion of the man who talks to the furniture because he believes that it

77 78

Proust, The Captive, 131; La prisonnière, 612. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 36.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 163 is alive.” [Les amis n’étant des amis que dans cette douce folie . . . que du fond de notre intelligence nous savons l’erreur d’un fou qui coirait que les meubles vivent et causerait avec eux.]79 Similarly, the narrator does not feel he can be himself with Albertine; when he is with her he has to be on guard to not give away his intentions in asking her clever questions meant to catch her lying. When Albertine says something that hurts him because it confirms a suspicion, he cannot show her he is upset. When he is afraid that she will leave him because she is tired of his jealousy, he pretends he wants to break with her so as to hide this fear. The openness which for Marcel is an essential ingredient of love is for the narrator the shortest way to love’s destruction. One of the things the narrator learns over the course of his different loves is never to avow his love, and to simulate indifference towards the women he is attracted to most. The close link between intersubjectivity and presence is illustrated in Marcel’s discussion of the word “with” (avec). To be with someone in the Marcellian sense of the words, means to be in a “felt union” [union sentie].80 The being I am with is not just in front of me, but he or she is also not completely within me; the best way to describe this relation is to speak of a co-esse. This bond overflows my conscious grasp on it and is not something I can describe. Presence is not something I have and over which I can dispose at will. This lack of control brings with it the temptation to take refuge in the security of l’avoir-implication, expressed here in the words of Troisontaines: “Sans doute éprouverai-je perpétuellement la tentation, soit de transformer la présence en ‘objet,’ soit de la traiter comme un aspect de moi-même, soit de penser le tu sous forme d’un ‘lui.’ ”81 As Marcel observes in Creative Fidelity, presence implies a degree of exposure. Instead of protecting oneself, one has to be permeable if one wants to be with someone.82 Whether Albertine is awake or asleep, the narrator is never with her.

79 80 81 82

Proust, Time Regained, 268; Le temps retrouvé, 454. Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, I 26. Ibid., I 27. Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 36.

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These accounts from Proust, James, and Marcel show the ethical importance of engagement not only with those very different from myself, but with those most familiar to me. This makes habit ethically relevant. Habit, important in the works of both William James and Henri Bergson, has already featured in this chapter as an annihilating force and a dread deity. In the context of Marcel’s thoughts on intersubjectivity, the force of habit has again a primarily negative effect. A stranger, a distant acquaintance can become present to me due to a common experience or anything which brings about the felt communion Marcel calls intersubjectivity. Perhaps this person even becomes a friend, someone I love. The presence established between us, however, is always at risk, not in the first place because of radical changes that may occur in our lives, but because of the much more everyday and often unnoticed influence of habit. Over time I get used to this person and we develop a way of interacting with each other. The openness which is a requirement for intersubjectivity slowly diminishes, since it appears that there is no more need for it now I know this person. Marcel illustrates this process in several of his plays, in which the characters are no longer able to get through to each other because what they say does not fit with what they are used to and therefore expect from each other. Habit often causes the feeling of presence to disappear. A shock (sickness, infidelity of the person one loves) can break the monotony and restore of “fresh” vision of things. Troisfontaines formulates the difficulty central to presence and intersubjectivity as follows: “La difficulté de la présence entre humains vient de ce que tu m’es donné en même temps sous l’apparance d’un corps ‘objectivable.’ ”83 The mistake of thinking (or hoping) that one has the whole person when one merely has someone’s physical presence is clear to the narrator of À la recherche when he is living with Albertine. It is an easy misconception since the other can always be objectified, his or her mystery denied. It is important to again emphasize that this desire to dispel mystery comes from a need for security. A problem, situated in the realm of avoir, can be controlled and solved, at least in principle. To not only accept that the beloved person is mysterious, but also put an effort into maintaining an openness to this mystery means to

83

Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, II 28.

crystallization and the tragedy of having (a lover) 165 give up the attitude that comes most easily, the attitude promoted by habit, necessarily utilitarian in nature.84 Creative fidelity is the notion introduced by Marcel to indicate the attitude of openness required for love. Fidelity presents itself as a test to presence and, ultimately, as a victory over death. How this should be understood will become clear in Chapter Six, which will focus on another crystallized person in the life of the narrator, his grandmother. Before the discussion will return to Marcel’s ethics and the phenomenon of crystallization in Chapter Six, the next chapter will give an account of William James’ mysticism and his notion of the “will to believe.” I will argue that the narrator’s privileged moments in À la recherche can be regarded as a particular kind of mystical experience, and that this classification helps explain the certainty which accompanies these moments. The felt knowledge particular to, for instance, the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother, is of the same nature as the knowledge acquired by the mystic. It must be made clear immediately that the insights gained by the narrator from his privileged moments are no less valuable because of their very individual nature. Rather, the narrator’s belief that these insights are true helps create the possibility for change. If the narrator believes that what he finds in a privileged moment is true, he can change his actions according to this truth and, for instance, try to be aware of his tendency to crystallize people. As pointed out above, however, the narrator appears not to do anything of the sort with the insights he acquires. The next chapter will argue that the felt knowledge gained by the narrator from his privileged moments could have practical implications, could, in James’ words “make a difference,” if the narrator had the will to believe in the possibility of, for instance, Marcellian love. The reason, I will argue, that the narrator’s aesthetic sensitivity and openness do not develop into the attitude of courageous vulnerability, is that he does not have the will to believe that the kind of intersubjective relations described by Marcel are possible. As a result, the narrator continues to crystallize others and though he ends up creating the great work of art which is À la recherche, he fails as a moral agent.

84

Marcel, Being and Having, 171.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WILL TO BELIEVE IN PRIVILEGED MOMENTS

Introduction The previous chapter discussed the phenomenon of crystallization and engaged Gabriel Marcel’s philosophy, especially his “phenomenology of having” to explore its ethical implications. The Proustian lover, it became clear, crystallizes the beloved and seeks to own the “thing of beauty” which is the result of the process of crystallization. A person, however, cannot be owned in the way the lover seeks to own her, and as a result the lover either grows tired of the beloved because she has become like a piece of furniture, or falls into despair because his desire to own her can never be fulfilled. Proustian love, while it lasts, is nothing but “reciprocal torture.” The narrator of À la recherche holds that love only exists by virtue of suffering and jealousy. Though the mystery of the other person is attractive initially, the lover feels the need to destroy this mystery in order to own the beloved completely through what Marcel calls l’avoir-implication. Presence was one of the themes central to the discussion in the previous chapter. The narrator’s desire to own Albertine, I argued, makes it impossible for the narrator to be present and open to her. The problem which presented itself in this context was that the only person present to the narrator appeared to be his dead grandmother as he remembered her in an involuntary recollection. Because it is the result of a chance encounter with a couvercle (bending over to undo his boots), he experiences this presence as a gift. The narrator depends on privileged moments both for his aesthetic experiences and for his moral insights, but these moments can never be willfully evoked. In Chapter Six, the narrator’s pessimistic take on the possibility of love and friendship will be combined with Marcel’s more optimistic philosophy, resulting in the attitude of courageous vulnerability which emphasizes effort and takes into account the difficulty of being open to the other. In the present chapter, I will develop another aspect of courageous vulnerability by engaging William James’ theory of the “will to believe.” I will argue that the narrator has the will to believe

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in his predominantly aesthetic privileged moments, but that he lacks this will when the felt knowledge he acquires in a privileged moment is of a specifically moral nature. More concretely, this means that the narrator is willing to act on his aesthetic, but not on his moral insights. This can be explained, I will claim, by the fact that the narrator does not believe in the possibility of intersubjectivity, but does believe in the truth of art. The discussion of the will to believe will be preceded by a short study of James’ understanding of mystical experience in the Varieties of Religious Experience. I will argue that the privileged moments in À la recherche are mystical experiences in the Jamesian sense, and that this helps explain the felt knowledge which the narrator gains from them. By describing the privileged moment as a mystical experience I aim to show that the narrator is justified in believing that his felt knowledge is true. This chapter will make clear, in pragmatic fashion, what involuntary memory does and what difference it can make if it is taken seriously.

Religion, Mysticism, and the Privileged Moment In order to discuss James’ account of mystical experience, an important topic in his Varieties of Religious Experience, it is important to first get an idea of what James means when he uses words like “mystical” and “religious.” I agree with William Barnard who claims in Exploring Unseen Worlds that “the category of mystical experience is wider and more inclusive than the category of religious experience.”1 As will be shown below, the examples offered by James in the Varieties support the interpretation of mystical experience as a wide category containing all manner of experiences that involve a sense of the mysterious in the Marcellian sense of the word. Furthermore, “James’ theories about religious experience should be taken as applying to mystical experience as a whole.”2 This reading of the Varieties is supported by James in the chapter “Circumscription of the Topic,” where he points out that “religion” is a collective name, and that taking it to stand for

1 George William Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds: William James and the Philosophy of Mysticism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 12. 2 Ibid., 13.

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a single essence is an over-simplification. Still, James wants to offer some kind of definition of religion, if only “for the purpose of these lectures.”3 He proposes to “ignore the institutional branch entirely” and confine the discussion, as far as possible, “to personal religion pure and simple.”4 To those who object that this personal religion cannot properly be called religion, James responds that the question of definition should not be a “dispute about names” and he adds: “I am willing to accept almost any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion—under either name it will be equally worthy of our study.”5 James asks his audience to “arbitrarily” take this personal religion, or however one wants to name it, to mean “the feelings, acts and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”6 The word “divine” should not be taken in too narrow a sense either. Buddhism and Emersonianism do not assume a God but nevertheless must, from the experiential point of view, be called religions. The divine must be interpreted very broadly “as denoting any object that is godlike, whether it be a concrete deity or not.”7 Having defined the divine in this broad way, James briefly considers whether religion might not be described as “a man’s total reaction upon life.” This use of the word religion is dismissed as inconvenient since someone’s total reaction upon life may be “sneering,” an attitude incompatible with religious experience: “There must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate religious.”8 Whether a religious experience makes one glad or sad, the gladness of sadness is of a solemn nature. James combines this insight with the definition he proposed earlier: “The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse or a jest.”9 The solemn response that is part of religious experience differs from morality strictly speaking because “it adds to life an enchantment which is not rationally or 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

James, Varieties, 28. Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 38.

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logically deducible from anything else.” This enchantment comes as a gift which evokes in us an “added dimension of emotion” and an “enthusiastic temper of espousal.”10 The personal attitude which the individual feels he or she should take towards the divine, and the happiness which accompanies this attitude, are analogous to the narrator’s attitude and feelings in a privileged moment. Taking James’ remarks on religious experience to apply to mystical experience in general, I will argue that the privileged moments in Proust are instances of mystical experience as described by James. In the same work cited above, Barnard defines mystical experiences as “experiences of powerful, transformative, personally interpreted, contact with transnatural realities.” These experiences are first hand and intensely felt, and make the individual perceive the world in a radically new way, putting him or her in touch with “realms of reality or dimensions of consciousness that exceed (even while interpenetrating) our everyday ‘natural’ reality or our typical waking consciousness.”11 Similarly, the privileged moments in À la recherche, are intensely felt by the narrator who experiences them first hand, make him perceive the world (whether it concerns nature, people, or relationships) in a radically new way, and put him in touch with a dimension which far exceeds everyday reality. It must be noted that the narrator never refers to this dimension as “divine,” and that À la recherche as a whole is practically a-religious in the traditional sense of the word. The narrator does, however, speak of a “divine presence” when he describes his involuntary memory of his grandmother. I am claiming that this occurrence of the word “divine” in the particularly salient privileged moment central to my discussion, together with the fact that the narrator does believe that his privileged moments allow him access to a special realm which exceeds everydayness, justifies the application of James’ theory to À la recherche.12 10

Ibid., 47. Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds, 18. 12 In a later article, “Mystical Assessments: Jamesian Reflections on Spiritual Judgments,” Barnard sums up three criteria that he claims should be used to assess religious, and, more generally, mystical states of mind as understood by James. These three criteria depend upon each other and together give weight to an experience. First, there is what James calls the “luminousness,” or, as Barnard puts it, the immediate luminosity, of this state of mind: the direct, tangible feeling. Returning to À la recherche, the immediate luminosity of, for instance, an involuntary memory is apparent in the overwhelming sensation of joy or sorrow experienced by the narrator when he recognizes a couvercle. The second criterion is “philosophical reasonableness” and deals with the question whether the experience can be placed in a defensible philosophical 11

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One of the important issues to be addressed in this chapter is that “James is not merely saying that religion is good, but that it is also true.”13 The understanding of truth operative in the background is pragmatic: “Truth can never be separated from an assessment of the long-range value of that ‘truth’ to an individual or community.”14 As was explained in Chapter Three, James argues that “positive effects point to true beliefs” and if, therefore, “mystical inspirations produce positive effects on the whole and over the long run, then we have every right to maintain that the mystic’s inspiration is true—true at least for that mystic, in that context, and during that period of time.”15 One of the theses defended in this chapter is that, just like the mystic’s inspiration, the narrator’s inspiration is true: true for the narrator, in his context, and during the time covered in À la recherche. This makes the truth of mystical experience, and therefore that of the privileged moment, very concrete and particular. According to Ruth Anna Putnam, this particularity is not a disadvantage of truth so conceived. The great virtue of religion is that it does not abstract: religion “deals with the most private moments of individuals” and hence “with the very core of reality.”16 Though Putnam is more cautious than James

system of beliefs. In the case of privileged moments in À la recherche, the narrator’s experience, whether painful, surprising, or happy, can always be fit into his overall system of beliefs. He may be unpleasantly struck by for instance the new self-image forced upon him by an involuntary memory, or overwhelmed by a revelation such as it is evoked by Vinteuil’s septet, but the experience never leads to a contradiction. Other opinions and beliefs may have to be adjusted as a result of the privileged experience, but the narrator never encounters an incompatibility in his beliefs which cannot be overcome. Finally, there is the criterion of “moral helpfulness” which demands that the state of mind of the (religious) mystic has positive consequences for the individual and the community. This issue will receive more careful attention towards the end of the chapter. At this point, the obviously positive consequences of the series of involuntary memories in Le temps perdu can serve as a first illustration of this last criterion of mystical experience. George William Barnard, “Mystical Assessments: Jamesian Reflections on Spiritual Judgments,” in William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York, Routledge, 2005). 13 Barnard, “Mystical Assessments: Jamesian Reflections on Spiritual Judgments,” 138. 14 Ibid., 139. 15 Ibid., 139. The problem that remains is that the transformations undergone by the mystic, or the changes brought about by his or her mystical experience, can never be shown to be the direct effect of his or her belief. Barnard maintains that James’ criteria remain valid even though he does not address this problem explicitly. 16 Ruth Anna Putnam, “James and philosophy. Varieties of experience and pluralities of perspectives,” in William James and The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York, Routledge, 2005), 156.

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and maintains that the veridicality of a belief remains a separate issue, she agrees with him that “religious hypotheses are discussible among empiricist philosophers because they concern, indeed, ‘things definable in terms drawn from experience.’ They are individuals’ responses to certain experiences, experiences we call ‘religious.’ ”17 In line with these remarks by Barnard and Putnam, the privileged moments in À la recherche can be described as “things definable in terms drawn from experience.” The positive effects mentioned in Barnard’s criteria must be shown to be the result of privileged moments if they are to be classified as mystical experiences. Positive effects point to a true belief, and even though, as Putnam argues, this is no proof for a belief ’s veridicality, this belief will at the very least be a valid topic of discussion from a radical empiricist point of view. In what follows, I will show that, first, Proust’s privileged moments are valid instances of mystical experience, and that, second, this understanding of the privileged moment helps explain why it calls for what James calls a “strenuous pursuit.”

Anhedonia Dispelled by Uneven Paving Stones The passage from À la recherche which I will focus on here follows on the one discussed in the context of James’ concept of anhedonia in Chapter Three. In Le temps retrouvé, the narrator is dejected and bored, and fully aware of his inability to appreciate the things which he thinks would serve a real artist as inspiration. Sitting in the train back to Paris, the narrator registers the way in which the sunlight is falling on the trunks of the trees along the tracks, but he experiences only boredom at the sight of what should have awakened in him the artistic urge to create. This incident is emblematic for what he feels is his failure in life: his dreams of becoming a writer will never come true. The narrator concludes that he is “useless” and that literature, if there even is such a thing, which he now doubts, can no longer give him “any joy whatever” [aucune joie]. He continues: When Bergotte had said to me: “You are ill, but one cannot pity you for you have the joys of the mind,” how mistaken he had been about me! How little joy there was in this sterile lucidity! Even if sometimes per-

17

Ibid., 155.

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haps I had pleasures (not of the mind), I sacrificed them to one woman after another. . . . As for the “joys of the intelligence,” could I call by that name those cold observations which my clairvoyant eye or my power of accurate ratiocination made without any pleasure and which remained always unfertile? [Quand je pensais à ce que Bergotte m’avait dit: “Vous êtes malade, mais on ne peut vous plaindre car vous avez les joies de l’esprit,” comme il s’était trompé sur moi! Comme il y avait peu de joie dans cette lucidité stérile! J’ajoute même que si quelquefois j’avais peut-être des plaisirs— non de l’intelligence—je les dépensais toujours pour une femme différente. . . . Quant aux “joies de l’intelligence,” pouvais-je appeler ainsi ces froides constatations que mon œil clairvoyant ou mon raisonnement juste relevaient sans aucun plaisir et qui restaient infécondes?]18

The “cold observations” refer to the scenes the narrator saw from the train, like the sun on the trees but also the evening light on the wall of a house, which he felt obliged to point out to himself as to an uninterested traveling companion. What is lacking in these observations is exactly what James calls the “zest for life.” Instead of zest, the narrator feels the “passive lack of life’s enjoyments” which characterizes the feeling of anhedonia. The narrator thinks he should be gripped by the significance of what he sees, but he can only feel indifference. The aesthetic pleasure he feels he should be experiencing is absent, and does not come on demand, leaving the narrator with a mere “sterile lucidity.” The issue at stake here is formulated by James in his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” where he uses Tolstoy as an example of someone who has come to feel only indifference at things he knows he normally would have enjoyed: How can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.19

The narrator has experienced this “vital significance” during several privileged moments in the past, but the capacity for this experience appears to have left him, and he is not able to make it come back. As

18

Proust, Time Regained, 254; Le temps retrouvé, 444. James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” in The Writings of William James. A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 640. 19

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the narrator himself puts it, he “has knocked at all the doors which lead nowhere.” In other words, a privileged moment has the power to restore us to ourselves, but where and how do we find a privileged moment when we need one? We are unable to provoke these moments and their occurrence is not under our control. The previous chapter showed how the same problem presents itself on an ethical level as well: in his relationship with Albertine, the narrator is unable to experience the sort of presence which according to Marcel is an essential aspect of love. It is only the memory of his dead grandmother that brings him this kind of presence, but again the privileged moment is the result of a couvercle which he came upon by chance. The presence of his grandmother, the narrator suggests, could not have been willingly produced by him. Ultimately, À la recherche suggests that the possibility for both aesthetic and moral insights depends on moments over which we have only limited control. In the next chapter, this issue will be developed in the context of a discussion of Marcel’s notion of creative fidelity, where I will argue that a more pessimistic account of love such as the one found in À la recherche is needed to correct Marcel’s ethics. The attitude of courageous vulnerability will take into account the difficulty, powerfully conveyed by the narrator of À la recherche, of being courageously vulnerable. In the present chapter, another essential aspect of courageous vulnerability will be developed through a close reading of pertinent sections of James’ Varieties and his essay “The Will to Believe.” The occurrence of privileged moments may be out of our control, but when we do experience such a moment, we can choose to trust the felt knowledge gained from this moment. Conversely, we can brush off the moment and move on without pursuing the possible insight hidden by the couvercle. I will argue that the narrator chooses to pursue the aesthetic insights he gains from his privileged moments, but leaves the moral insights behind once the overwhelming emotions which accompany them have subsided. Engaging James’ theory, I will argue that the narrator has the will to believe in the aesthetic insights he acquires, but that he lacks this will where it comes to moral insights. This issue is reflected in the fact that the narrator is willing to act on his aesthetic insights, but not on his moral insights: he undertakes the immense project of writing a book, but does not change his actions as a moral agent in the slightest. In what follows, I will first explore the privileged moments of reminiscence which lead to the narrator’s decision to become a writer after all. These moments will be described as mystical moments in the James-

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ian sense. Next, I will show how the will to believe plays a part in the (lack of ) change brought about by privileged moments in the actions of the narrator. Having given up on himself as an artist, and resigning himself to society life, the narrator accepts an invitation to attend a party at the Guermantes residence. Returning to society means accepting that his artistic aspirations are dead. It is at this moment, however, that the “vital significance” described by James in the citation above returns to him in a “mysteriously unexpected way.” In the narrator’s words, he “stumbles without knowing it on the only door through which [he] can enter . . . and it opens of its own accord.” In going to the Guermantes party, the narrator finds his vocation “blossoming,” as James would say, “from the very grave wherein [he] imagined that [his] happiness was buried:” Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absentminded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought that I recognized in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those other sensations of which I have spoken. . . . Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic. I had followed no new train of reasoning, discovered no decisive argument, but the difficulties which had seemed insoluble a moment ago had lost all importance. [En roulant les tristes pensées que je disais il y a un instant, j’étais entré dans la cour de l’hôtel de Guermantes et dans ma distraction je n’avais pas vu une voiture qui s’avançait; au cri du wattman je n’eus que le temps de me ranger vivement de côté, et je reculai assez pour buter lesquels était une remise. Mais au moment où, me remettant d’aplomb, je posai mon pied sur un pavé qui était un peu moins élevé que le précédent, tout mon découragement s’évanouit devant la même félicité qu’à d’arbres que j’avais cru reconnaître dans une promenade en voiture autour de Balbec, la vue des clochers de Martinville, la saveur d’une madeleine trempée dans une infusion, tant d’autres sensations dont j’ai parlé et que

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chapter five les dernières œuvres de Vinteuil m’avaient paru synthétiser. Comme au moment où je goûtais la madeleine, toute inquiétude sur l’avenir, tout doute intellectuel étaient dissipés. Ceux qui m’assaillaient tout à l’heure au sujet de la réalité de mes dons littéraires et même de la réalité de la littérature se trouvaient levés comme par enchantement.]20

The narrator’s experience clearly bears the marks of involuntary memory as they have been discussed in Chapter One. A very pedestrian sensation, in this case the temporary loss of balance on the paving stones, serves as a couvercle which hides a réalité pressentie. The exquisite pleasure experienced by the narrator dispels all his worries about the future and, as will be shown below, comes with the special certitude characteristic to felt knowledge. These marks can now be further analyzed in the context of James’ account of mystical experience. Once the privileged moments of À la recherche have been described as mystical moments, I will argue that the will to believe in this kind of moment “makes a difference” pragmatically.

Mystical Moments in À la recherche According to James in the Varieties, there are four marks that designate a mystical experience: ineffability, noetic quality, transiency and passivity. The first two of these marks are necessarily a part of every mystical experience; the last two are usually, but not necessarily, found in a mystical experience. An application of these marks to the privileged moment the narrator experiences on the uneven paving stones will show the mystical character of this moment in particular and of the privileged moments in À la recherche in general. First of all, mystical experiences are ineffable. In Chapter One in particular, ineffability was shown to be a characteristic of all the privileged moments, whether they involved involuntary memories or not. Like mystical experiences, they defy expression because they are, in James’ words, “more like states of feeling than like states of intellect.”21 As a result, “No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it consists.”22 Here, it serves to bring back to mind Gabriel Marcel’s notion of mystery. Mystical 20 21 22

Proust, Time Regained 255; Le temps retrouvé, 445. James, Varieties, 380. Ibid., 380.

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experiences are mysterious because they cannot be analyzed exhaustively but need to be experienced, lived, in order to be understood. And even though it is possible in this way to understand a mystery to a certain extent, this understanding is accompanied by the realization that no “technical” account could ever capture this “problem which encroaches upon its own data.” This point leads the discussion back to the problem of language. Concepts are too wide to fit the particular, a point on which Marcel, James, and Bergson agreed. When we say we are sad or angry, we use a public and general term to describe an individual and unique feeling. Sometimes we are even more at a loss for words, as when the narrator can only express his joy by brandishing his umbrella and exclaiming “zut, zut, zut, zut” at the sight of the little shed reflected in the water on the Guermantes way. Our feelings are not only hard to communicate to someone else, they are difficult even to describe to ourselves. The Bergsonian artist offers us new ways to see, hear, and understand which break with the utilitarian intellect which, for most of us, determines our perceptions. As was shown in Chapter Two, the narrator of À la recherche is a Bergsonian artist: he offers his readers a pair of binoculars to discern what they could not see for themselves. This is the narrator’s aim as he describes it in Le temps retrouvé, to help us find the privileged moments in our own lives. The narrator hopes that his careful descriptions of his own experiences will make the reader recognize similar experiences in his or her own life. This is exactly the strategy used by James in the Varieties, where one case study after the next shows the different kinds, aspects and forms of mystical experiences. An individual mystical experience, like a privileged moment, may be ineffable as such; a careful description can nevertheless provoke in the reader recollections of experiences similar in kind to the example given in the text. That is why both Proust and James have to rely on their readers to have had this “certain feeling” which will enable them to recognize and understand the issues at stake.23 The second mark of mystical states listed by James is that they are states of knowledge to those who experience them: “They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect . . . 23

The invitation to the reader to participate is also noted by Gavin who notes: “Those creative acts are most aesthetically significant which, in their presentation of experience, do justice to its richness and involve the viewer/reader in the aesthetic process.” Gavin, The Reinstatement of the Vague, 155.

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As a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for aftertime.”24 Here one only needs to bring back to mind the characteristics of involuntary memory as they were described in the Chapter One. Just as when the narrator tasted the madeleine dipped in tea, he experiences “une joie pareille à une certitude” when stepping on the uneven stones in the courtyard of the Guermantes. He claims that he was “not free to choose” this moment, and that this lack of freedom is part of the reason why the certitude it brings is of a special nature. Just like the madeleine brought back to him the Balbec of his childhood, the uneven paving stones return Venice to him. Whereas the narrator was perfectly able to describe both Balbec and Venice before he remembered them in an involuntary recollection, the privileged moments show him these places in a rich and full way which makes his voluntary memories of them pale in comparison. The snapshots of voluntary memory are replaced by the lived experience of involuntary memory, and this is true for the joyful privileged moments of reminiscence as well as for the sorrowful ones. Swann’s memory of Odette brought about by the little phrase turns his factual knowledge of their break-up into felt knowledge, just like the narrator first feels that his grandmother is dead as a result of his involuntary memory of her in Balbec. The third mark listed by James in his Varieties, less important than the first two and not necessarily but merely usually a characteristic of mystical experience is that “mystical states cannot be sustained for long.”25 The feeling of joy or sorrow experienced by the narrator as a result of a privileged moment never lasts. This is most clear in the passage describing the involuntary memory evoked by the taste of the madeleine. The joy which overwhelms him at the first spoonful lessens every time he takes another sip. The “curious sense of authority” remains while the narrator explores what is at the core of this feeling, but the immediate feeling of happiness loses its intensity now that the intellect is brought into play. Similarly, the sorrowful feelings of Swann’s memory of Odette or the narrator’s memory of his grandmother eventually fade, though perhaps more slowly than the joyful feelings of other privileged moments. This is significant because, as was shown in Chapter One, the urgency to explore lessens with the

24 25

James, Varieties, 380–1. Ibid., 380.

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fading feelings which initially encouraged the narrator to pursue the core of the privileged moment. The fourth mark bears directly on the involuntary character of mystical experience, and is again less important than the first two marks. Though one can prepare for a mystical experience, says James, the experience happens to the mystic and does not come on demand: “the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.”26 The similarity with the narrator’s privileged moments is obvious: involuntary memories, in Beckett’s words, perform their own miracles, as do the privileged moments of the imagination when a couvercle catches the narrator’s attention. One can be more or less open to a privileged moment, but one’s openness cannot by itself bring about the occurrence of this moment. This brief overview of the four characteristics of mystical experience suggests that a further investigation into the mystical character of privileged moments has a good chance of being pragmatically fruitful. A discussion of James’ mystical ladder will show the significance of privileged moments within the context of the Varieties and James’ essay “The Will to Believe.”

The Place of the Privileged Moment on James’ Mystical Ladder James wants his audience to get an impression of the wide range of experiences that can be categorized as mystical. To this end he gives a list of examples, beginning with “phenomena which claim no special religious significance,” and ending with “those of which the religious pretensions are extreme.”27 Barnard points out that this mystical ladder has its weak points and that “criteria for classifying one experience as more religious and therefore more mystical than the previous are lacking.”28 I will here take Ellen Kappy Suckiel’s lead who suggests that even though James himself speaks of a ladder, the series of mystical experiences in the Varieties should not be regarded as a strictly

26 27 28

Ibid., 381. Ibid., 382. Barnard, Exploring Unseen Worlds, 23.

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hierarchical order in which one experience is necessarily superior to the other.29 The order in which the experiences are presented by James is artificial and at times even arbitrary, as will be shown below; in addition, it will become clear that a less religious experience is not necessarily less mystical and that, as was already mentioned above, the terms “religious” and “mystical” cannot be strictly separated. The simplest kind of mystical experience, James claims, is “a sense of deeper significance,” brought about by “single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds . . . when the mind is tuned aright.”30 This broad category clearly includes the privileged moments described in À la recherche: one can think of, respectively, the words “la famille du directeur du ministère des Postes,” the roof with hen reflected in the small pond, the sea and the light in Elstir’s paintings, the musty smell of the pavilion on the Champs-Élysées, and the little musical phrase from the Vinteuil sonata. These experiences demand a “mystical susceptibility” on the side of the subject, and James turns to poetry and music to illustrate this attitude: Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in certain poems read when we were young, irrational doorways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surface for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility.31

29 Ellen Kappy Suckiel, “The Authoritativeness of Mystical Experience: An Innovative Proposal for William James,” in International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, vol. 52 (Kluwer Academic Publishers: 2002), 175–189. Suckiel discusses James’ “mystical ladder” and claims that James’ intention in presenting the ladder is “to provide specific examples that might lead his readers to recognize and acknowledge their own mystical experiences, however germinal in nature.” Ibid., 181. As a result, James’ reader can understand the right the mystic has to be sure about his or her mystic knowledge: mystical experience is authoritative in a pragmatic sense, “due to the unique epistemological as well as personal features of the situation.” Ibid., 184. James, Suckiel claims, makes his argument by evoking experiences in his readers. The idea that to understand a feeling, one needs to have one, is an underappreciated element in James’ philosophy. Suckiel claims that “the force of James’s argument depends in part on the success of his descriptive detail.” Ibid., 178. James is asking his readers to be “participant-observers.” Ibid., 186. 30 James, Varieties, 383. 31 James, Varieties, 383.

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Just like the words of a poem become a “mere polished surface” to one no longer in possession of this susceptibility, the sight of the sunlight on the tree trunks does not thrill the narrator; he feels that, if he were an artist, he would be able to use this “doorway,” to uncover what is hidden by the couvercle. As it is, the narrator does not even experience the feeling that couvercles used to inspire when he took his long walks when he was young. The sight does not “beckon and invite;” he merely indifferently registers what he sees. Stepping on the uneven paving stones, however, the doorway opens on its own accord; or, as Gabriel Marcel puts it: a “magic shutter” snaps back and allows the narrator to regain his lost memories.32 The next step on the mystical ladder James describes is that of the feeling of déjà vu, a “dreamy state” accompanied by “the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems imminent but never completes itself.”33 The resemblance of this instance of mystical experience to Jephcott’s descriptions of the privileged moment is clear. As was shown in Chapter One, Jephcott argues that in a privileged moment, the mind takes in the world with an unusual intensity. In this kind of moment, the narrator experiences an “intensification of sensation and a unification of awareness”34 and feels the world to be a harmonious whole. After the description of the feeling of déjà vu, the next steps on the ladder have no specific names, nor are they clearly separated from each other. James cites Charles Kingsley to prepare for a description of the next rung: “ ‘When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it.’ ”35 This description matches the narrator’s experience on his walks; simple things like a flower, a rock, etc. overwhelm him with a profound joy which he, however, is always too lazy to understand. Further excerpts, taken from citations meant to illustrate higher rungs on the ladder, add evidence for the close resemblance of mystical states to the experience of involuntary memory. James again includes a citation from Kingsley: “ ‘I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. . . . Suddenly, without warning, I felt that I was in Heaven—an inward state of peace and joy and assurance 32 33 34 35

See Chapter Two, under “Courageous Vulnerability at Work.” James, Varieties, 384. Jephcott, Proust and Rilke, 21. James, Varieties, 385.

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indescribably intense.’ ” Experiences like these, Kingsley later adds, are “the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth.”36 Mystical states, in James’ own words, are felt as “reconciling, unifying states. They appeal to the yes-function more than to the no-function in us.”37 The series of involuntary memories and the privileged moment of the encounter with the young Mlle Saint-Loup in Le temps retrouvé have this same unifying and intense character, and feel as a justification because they show the narrator what he should write about: his own life, offered as an optical instrument to the reader whose eyes are fit for the instrument. Now that the privileged moment of À la recherche has been shown to deserve a place somewhere in between the rungs of the mystical ladder, I will turn to the pragmatic question how a mystical experience can be shown to matter, to “make a difference.” Even though a mystical experience brings with it a sense of authority, this authority is usually not enough of a motivation for the narrator of À la recherche to actively pursue the hidden reality at the core of his privileged moments. Whether because of laziness (like on his walks the Guermantes way) or because of a lack of willingness and courage to act on the felt knowledge he acquires (like in the case of his memory of his grandmother), the narrator does not allow many of his privileged moments to make a difference in the pragmatic sense. This point will now be investigated in the context of James’ discussion of the “strenuous mood.”

Invitation to a Strenuous Pursuit of Involuntary Memory In his essay “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” James writes: “The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood.” He explains this fundamental difference: “When in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite indifferent to present ill, if only

36 37

Ibid., 396–7. Ibid., 416.

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the greater ideal be attained.”38 As was mentioned in Chapter One, laziness is one of the main obstacles that prevent the narrator from investigating the privileged moments he experiences. He enjoys the feeling while it lasts, but never takes the trouble to try and understand why this feeling comes about. Even in the case of the madeleine, the narrator stops his investigation once he finds the forgotten memories of the Combray of his childhood. He does not try to find out why this memory of something as trivial as eating a piece of cake brings him an extraordinary joy. In Le temps retrouvé, however, the narrator is decided not to let the opportunity pass him by yet again: The happiness which I had just felt was unquestionably the same as that which I had felt when I tasted the madeleine soaked in tea. But if on that occasion I had put off the task of searching for the profounder causes of my emotion, this time I was determined not to resign myself to a failure to understand them. The emotion was the same; the difference, purely material, lay in the images evoked: a profound azure intoxicated my eyes, impressions of coolness, of dazzling light, swirled round me and in my desire to seize them—as afraid to move as I had been on the earlier occasion when I had continued to savor the taste of the madeleine while I tried to draw into my consciousness whatever it was that it recalled to me—I continued, ignoring the evident amusement of the great crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger as I had staggered a few seconds ago, with one foot on the higher paving-stone and the other on the lower. [La félicité que je venais d’éprouver était bien en effet la même que celle que j’avais éprouvée en mangeant la madeleine et dont j’avais alors ajourné de rechercher les causes profondes. La différence, purement matérielle, était dans les images évoquées; un azur profond enivrait mes yeux, des impressions de fraîcheur, d’éblouissante lumière tournoyaient près de moi et, dans mon désir de les saisir, sans oser plus bouger que quand je goûtais la saveur de la madeleine en tâchant de faire parvenir jusqu’à moi ce qu’elle me rappelait, je restais, quitte à faire rire la foule innombrable des wattmen, à tituber comme j’avais fait tout à l’heure, un pied sur le pavé plus élevé, l’autre pied sur le pavé plus bas.]39

Experiencing once again the kind of feeling which he thought he had lost together with his artistic potential, the narrator is determined to understand it. The easy-going attitude of the young narrator taking his walks around Combray has to make way for strenuous investigation. 38

James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” in The Writings of William James. A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 627. 39 Proust, Time Regained, 256; Le temps retrouvé, 445–6.

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As James points out, the capacity for the strenuous mood is probably present in everyone, though “it has more difficulty in some than in others in waking up.” But even in people who are very easy-going, it is often aroused by the “wilder passions” or by “the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of the higher fidelities, like justice, truth, or freedom.”40 The appeal felt by the narrator is the appeal made by every couvercle: like the lost loved ones from the Celtic belief described in Combray, moments of lost time ask to be recognized and restored to life. His momentary loss of balance on the paving stones is the first of a series of “signs which were to bring me, on this day of all days, out of my disheartened state and restore to me my faith in literature” [les signes qui devaient, ce jour-là, me tirer de mon découragement et me rendre la foi dans les lettres].41 Continuing to stagger on the paving stones, the narrator is determined to find what is hidden beneath this couvercle, the first he has recognized in a very long time. Just as with the madeleine he repeats the initial sensation: Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered 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.” [Chaque fois que je refaisais rien que matériellement ce même pas, il me restait inutile; mais si je réussissait, oubliant la matinée Guermantes, à retrouver ce que j’avais senti en posant ainsi mes pieds, de nouveau la vision éblouissante et indistincte me frôlait comme si elle m’avait dit: “Saisis-moi au passage si tu en as la force, et tâche à résoudre l’énigme de bonheur que je te propose.”]42

The narrator feels that he is offered a way out of his “disheartened state,” but the way is mysterious and just out of his reach. It should be recalled that in the past the narrator sometimes failed to “seize” a forgotten memory, as in the case of the trees he sees from Mme de Villeparisis’ carriage. This time, however, the narrator will not be distracted by people around him and focuses on solving “the riddle of happiness.” The repetition of the sensation results in a recollection: “Almost at once I recognized the vision: it was Venice, of which my

40 41 42

James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 211. Proust, Time Regained, 260; Le temps retrouvé, 447. Ibid., 259; 446.

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efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything.” [Et presque tout de suite je la reconnus, c’était Venise, dont mes efforts pour la décrire et les prétendus instantanés pris par ma mémoire ne m’avaient jamais rien dit.]43 The contrast between voluntary and involuntary memory again is clear: instead of snapshots, mere fragments unconnected to the complex web of sensations and impressions of the past, Venice is restored in all its richness. A second involuntary memory follows a short while later and has the same effect. The narrator has entered the Guermantes mansion and is waiting in the library until the musical piece in the main room has ended. A servant accidentally knocks a spoon against a plate, and the sound brings the narrator “that same species of happiness” [le même genre de félicité] as he just experienced on the paving stones. He senses heat, smoke, and “the cool smell of a forest background” [la fraîche odeur d’un cadre forestier], and he recognizes “that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe” [ce qui me paraissait si agréable était la même rangée d’arbres que j’avais trouvée ennuyeuse à observer et à décrire]. The noise of the spoon against the plate, the narrator realizes, sounds exactly like the hammer of a railway man against a wheel of the train. The identity of the two sounds causes the narrator to be “in a sort of daze” [dans une sorte d’étourdissement], and he feels as if he is “in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer” [débouchant la canette de bière que j’avais dans le wagon]. As in the instance of the paving-stones, a moment is restored to him complete, with not just the sensation that triggered the recollection, but all the other sensations that were, at that moment in the past, connected to it. A third involuntary memory again confirms this pattern. While the narrator is waiting in the library, a servant brings him a selection of petits fours; when he wipes his mouth with the napkin the servant provided, “a new vision of azure” [une nouvelle vision d’azur] passes before his eyes, “and so strong was this impression that the moment to which I was transported seemed to me to be the present moment” [l’impression fut si forte que le moment que je vivais me sembla être le moment actuel].44 The narrator realizes that the napkin has “precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness” [précisément le genre de raideur et d’empesé] as the towel with which he dried himself a

43 44

Ibid., 258; 446. Ibid., 256; 446–7.

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long time ago in Balbec, when he was homesick and looking out over the sea.45 Again the narrator insists that it is a complete moment of his life which is restored to him, but he also adds a new element to his evaluation of this involuntary memory: the happiness he is now experiencing did not belong to that instant in the past, but is something he enjoys only now that the sensations have been freed of the imperfection of external perception. At the time, when he used the towel that first morning in Balbec, the narrator was tired and homesick; now, in the Guermantes library, he can enjoy the beauty of the sea without being hindered by these obstacles. In this passage the narrator already hints at what will be his answer to the question which he asked himself after the joyful resurrection of Venice on the paving stones: “Why had the images of Combray and of Venice, at these two different moments, given me a joy which was like a certainty and which sufficed, without any other proof, to make death a matter of indifference to me?” [Pourquoi les images de Combray et de Venise m’avaient-elles à l’un et à l’autre moment donné une joie pareille à une certitude et suffisante sans autres preuves à me rendre la mort indifférente?]46 In Chapter One, the narrator’s answer to this question was shown to center around the existence of an extra-temporal being, experiencing the moment not simultaneously in the past and in the present, but outside of time altogether, thereby relieved from all the concerns that come with temporal existence. One of the striking aspects of this answer is that the

45 Ibid., 257; 447. “The napkin which I had used to wipe my mouth had precisely the same degree of stiffness and starchedness as the towel with which I had found it so awkward to dry my face as I stood in front of the window on the first day of my arrival at Balbec, and this napkin now . . . unfolded for me . . . the plumage of an ocean green and blue like the tail of a peacock. 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, caused me to swell with happiness.” [La serviette que j’avais prise pour m’essuyer la bouche avait précisément le genre de raideur et d’empesé de celle avec laquelle j’avais eu tant de peine à me sécher devant la fenêtre, le premier jour de mon arrivée à Balbec, et, maintenant . . . elle déployait . . . le plumage d’un océan vert et blue comme la queue d’un paon. Et je ne jouissais pas que de ces couleurs, mais de tout un instant de ma vie qui les soulevait, qui avait été sans doute aspiration vers elles, dont quelque sentiment de fatigue ou de tristesse m’avait peut-être empêché de jouir à Balbec, et qui maintenant, débarrassé de ce qu’il y a d’imparfait dans la perception extérieure, pur et désincarné, me gonflait d’allégresse.] Ibid., 257; 447. 46 Ibid., 257; 446.

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painful recollections, most notably the narrator’s involuntary memory of his grandmother, are no longer taken into account. The question cited above demands an explanation of the joy that is like a certainty, and asks why death, in involuntary memory and more widely in the privileged moment, becomes a matter of indifference. The narrator attempts to explain why joyful involuntary memories are joyful, but cannot use the same explanation for their sorrowful equivalents. The narrator’s decision not to give in to laziness this time but to find the answer to the question why privileged moments give him the special joy described, marks the beginning of what James would call his strenuous life. Just when he had decided he might just as well give in to the easy-going attitude, one involuntary memory after the next awakens in him the sense of his obligation: to write a novel which will function as an optical instrument to those who can benefit from it. The narrator knows that he has a very demanding task ahead of him, but he is not concerned with the amount of work which is waiting for him; happy now he has finally found his artistic vocation, his only worry is that he will die before he has been able to finish his novel. Linking the narrator’s decision to write his novel to the issue mentioned in the previous paragraph, it can now be stated that the narrator adopts a strenuous attitude where his joyful privileged moments are concerned, but that this attitude is still lacking where it comes to the sorrowful moments of reminiscence. Though the painful involuntary memories become part of his book, part of his optical instrument, his actions toward other people do not change as a result of the insights gained from these experiences. The writing of his book is of course itself a strenuous pursuit, but the specifically moral implications his privileged moments could have had for his relationships fail to come to fruition. In what follows, both the success and the failure of the narrator’s strenuous mood are further explained in the context of James’ work.

Zest and the Mystic Sense of Hidden Meaning As James points out in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” it is only by living strenuously that we can get out of life the “keenest possibilities of zest.”47 Zest, a returning term in James’ work, is what is 47

James, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 212.

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lacking in anhedonia, or, to use the narrator’s own words, in the “disheartened state” the narrator is in when on his way to the Guermantes party. There appears to be no certain recipe for zest when the vital significance which accompanies this feeling is wholly absent, as was illustrated in James’ passages on Tolstoy in the Varieties. The strenuous mood, however, appears to be a way to at least create the possibility for zest. This possibility is explained and illustrated in James’ essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Here James writes about the “mystic sense of hidden meaning” in which we grasp the “inner significance” of something or someone other than ourselves. This mystic sense often comes suddenly and “makes an epoch” in one’s history. James refers to Emerson and agrees with him that “there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.”48 In line with James’ remarks, the narrator of À la recherche speaks of his privileged moments as “more real” than any other impression or experience. The “hidden meaning” James writes about is what the narrator suspects under the couvercles he comes across. The “mystic sense” that they contain something infinitely valuable invites the narrator to investigate. James remarks that “this mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things.” He cites a passage from the novel Obermann by De Sénancour to illustrate his point: It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . . I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made.49

This “sense of a limitless significance in natural things” bears obvious similarities to the narrator’s rapture experienced at the sight of a

48 49

James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 635. Ibid., 635.

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flower, a stone, etc. on his walks the Guermantes way. After referring to Wordsworth and Shelley as authors expressing in their writings the same phenomenon described by De Sénancour, James turns to Walt Whitman, “rapt with satisfied attention to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence.”50 Though Whitman appears to have been highly sensitive to the beauty which most of us fail to discern in the everyday spectacle of passers by in crowded streets, James ultimately considers Whitman too one-sided in his optimism and delight. Tolstoy is a better example of someone who had a lived appreciation of the mystic sense of hidden meaning, and James refers to him as “the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows.”51 What interests James about Tolstoy is that he does not only understand the joyful inner significance of life, but also has experienced the complete lack of any meaning and joy. Because he is at times in the grip of anhedonia, he knows what it is like for zest to be wholly absent from life. Tolstoy understands that the “capacity of the soul to be grasped” can disappear, leaving behind no clues as to how one can make it return. In “What Makes Life Significant,” James formulates one of the basic themes of his philosophy as follows: “Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands.”52 As he pointed out in the “Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” we fail to realize the values and meanings of life because of our “external and insensible point of view.”53 The hidden meaning of the lives of others usually remains hidden, and our mystic sense is commonly overruled by more utilitarian attitudes and considerations. What can help us recognize the inner meaning of someone else’s life is the understanding of the ideal connected to this meaning: We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be present

50

Ibid., 640. Ibid., 641. 52 James, “What Makes a Life Significant,” in The Writings of William James. A Comprehensive Edition, ed. John J. McDermott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 645. 53 Ibid., 645. 51

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chapter five in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are led to say that such inner meaning can be complete and valid for us also, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with an ideal.54

But what is an ideal? James explains that an ideal “must be something intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if we have it.” A second requirement is that “there must be novelty in an ideal.”55 Ideality can never go together with “sodden routine,” though what is a novelty to one person may be routine for the other. James hastens to declare that “mere ideals are the cheapest things in life.”56 It is not enough to merely possess an ideal: “Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone.”57 A significant life can be the result only of a fusion of these elements. In other words: “The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”58 The narrator’s resolve to find out what causes the joyful certainty of his privileged moments is, I will argue, the combination of an ideal with “pluck and will.” While before he experienced the series of involuntary memories at the Guermantes mansion he had let go of the ideal which in his younger years had made him think he would once become a writer, this ideal is brought back to life together with the will to actually pursue it. The difference between the ideal now and the ideal before is that it is no longer abstract and therefore easy; he now feels obligated to live up to it and knows he can no longer put off his work like he used to do when he was young. Fidelity to this obligation, together with the courage and endurance to live the ideal rather than merely intellectually espouse it, restores to the narrator’s life the zest and significance James writes about in the essays referred to. It is important to keep in mind that the narrator regains this zest as the result of a series of joyful involuntary memories, and that the questions he puts himself in respect to their nature concern happy privileged moments only. In the next and final chapter, I will argue that the narrator’s focus on the

54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 656. Ibid., 656. Ibid., 657. Ibid., 658. Ibid., 659.

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“riddle of happiness” is linked to the discrepancy between the narrator’s unusually acute aesthetic sensitivity and powers of observation on the one hand, and his lack of courageous vulnerability in the specifically moral sense on the other. Neither the narrator’s sharp analyses of his relationships to Albertine and his grandmother, nor his insights into the snobbery and posturing of salon life enable him to act at all differently. The narrator can offer his readers an optical instrument to see both the sorrowful and joyful privileged moments in their own lives, but he shows by self-example that to see and to understand does not necessarily involve a change in one’s actions. Where the narrator succeeds in realizing his artistic ideal, he fails in his personal relationships. Not, I suggest, because he is unwilling to change, but because he finds that his ideals of love and friendship are illusory. Art is the only thing that is real, and the other things in life are merely there to inspire art, whether through suffering or through joy. To prepare for the final discussion of these issues in the next chapter, and in order to further explore the pragmatic relevance of privileged moments, a close study of James’ famous essay “The Will to Believe” follows below.

The Will to Believe in Privileged Moments James calls “The Will to Believe” “an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.”59 In line with Barnard’s remarks at the beginning of the chapter, this statement can be applied not only to religious matters strictly speaking, but also to mystical experiences in general. Accordingly, since privileged moments as they are described in À la recherche may be classified as mystical experiences in the Jamesian sense, the narrator has a right to adopt a “believing attitude” in respect to them as well. James’ argument in this essay will offer support for the narrator’s often repeated claim that the reality he finds, or at least suspects, in a privileged moment is more real and more true than any other impression. In order to explain and defend the right to adopt a believing attitude, James distinguishes between live and dead hypotheses. An hypothesis

59

James, “The Will to Believe,” 1.

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is the name given to “anything that may be proposed to our belief ” and “a live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to whom it is proposed.”60 A live hypothesis makes “an electric connection” with one’s nature, which is something a dead hypothesis fails to do. What may be a live hypothesis to one person may be a dead one to someone else because “deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker.”61 An hypothesis is alive if the individual thinker is willing to act on it, and the more willingness there is in the individual thinker, the more alive the hypothesis. When the willingness to act is wholly absent, the hypothesis is dead. Applying these first remarks on the nature of hypotheses to the privileged moments in À la recherche, the artistic life, the life of a novelist, can be said to be a real possibility for the narrator. It is a real possibility when he is young and he feels inspired by what he perceives on his walks and from doctor Percepied’s carriage, when he holds Albertine captive in his house, and even when he is in a “disheartened state” coming back to Paris from his latest sanatorium. This does not mean, however, that the hypothesis has the same degree of “liveness” throughout. It appeals to the young narrator to be a writer, but his willingness to act on this desire is not strong enough to actually make him write something, except for the one essay he produces in the doctor’s carriage. Every time he experiences a privileged moment on one of his walks, he gives in to laziness and puts off thinking or writing about the moment until he will be back at home. At which point, of course, the moment has lost its freshness and its uniqueness. When with Albertine, the narrator finds similar excuses not to work; time and time again he decides to start working the very next day, but then another reason to procrastinate will offer itself. The willingness may be too slight, but nevertheless it remains a real possibility for him to become a writer. Even when the narrator temporarily resigns himself to his supposed lack of talent, he does not do so because he no longer wants to be a writer; the possibility still appeals to him, but in his dejected state of mind he cannot see how it could ever be realized. The hypothesis that it is his vocation to become a writer is more alive some times than others, but it is never completely dead.

60 61

Ibid., 2. Ibid., 2–3.

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After explaining the difference between live and dead hypotheses, James proposes to call the decision between two hypotheses an option. He distinguishes three pairs of options: an option may be living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. He calls an option genuine “when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.”62 James’ own examples serve best to clarify the different kinds of options. First James discusses the classification of an option as living or dead: A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: “Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan,” it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: “Be an agnostic or be a Christian,” it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.63

A dead option for the narrator would be: “Be a lumberjack or be a roofer.” Given the narrator’s interests and constitution, neither hypothesis is likely to be alive for him, whereas, perhaps, “Be a writer or be a composer” would be a live option. Leaving behind the more practical level of career options, and choosing an example closer to the kind of issues James is aiming at, another option for the narrator could be formulated as follows: “Trust the truths revealed by privileged moments or trust the ones derived by the intellect.” This option probably is alive for the author: though he is largely in favor of the first hypothesis, the second has some appeal as well, depending on the situation. The second label that can be applied to an option tells whether it is avoidable or forced. The example from James runs as follows: If I say, “Either love me or hate me,” “Either call my theory true or call it false,” your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, “Either accept this truth or go without it,” I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.64

All three options “Be a lumberjack or be a roofer,” “Be a writer of be a composer,” and “Trust the truths revealed by privileged moments or trust the ones derived by the intellect” are avoidable. The narrator can choose to be neither a lumberjack nor a roofer, neither a writer nor a

62 63 64

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 3.

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composer, and trust neither the truths of his privileged moments nor the ones proposed by the intellect. He is not forced to pick one horn or the other of these dilemmas, and can, for instance, decide to not work at all and never to trust any truth, whatever its source. We are led to a more interesting option in the context of À la recherche by another one of James’ examples: “Either accept this truth or go without it.” Since the narrator explicitly talks about truth as the thing to be found in involuntary memory and art, this option can be changed into “Either accept the truth of privileged moments or go without it.” This is a forced option of which the narrator chooses to believe the first hypothesis. This hypothesis is most alive to him, since, at least eventually, he is willing to act on it. Before going into the matter further, it serves to look at the last classifying distinction offered by James who shows that an option can be trivial or momentous: Given the chance to join a North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous: “this would probably be your only similar opportunity. . . . He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible or later prove otherwise.”65

The option suggested above, of accepting the truth of privileged moments or going without it, is far from trivial to the narrator. Through the opportunity is not unique (there have been privileged moments in the life of the narrator before), it is rare, and the stake is significant: after the “gloomy reflections” on his way to the Guermantes party, the series of involuntary memories comes as a chance to, in James’ words, restore his life’s significance. The effects of taking a believing attitude show, according to James, that the will to believe creates a reality which could not come about if genuine options were not recognized as options which cannot be decided by the intellect. James calls those who refuse to acknowledge the importance of the existence of such options “intellectualists,” and a closer look at James’ rejection of the intellectualist attitude will help explain why sometimes we must believe in something, for instance a truth found in a privileged moment, even when sufficient “objective” evidence is lacking. An intellectualist, James argues, rejects the right to adopt a believing attitude in cases where there is no rationally satisfying proof for the 65

Ibid., 4.

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belief in question. To illustrate the intellectualist attitude, James cites William Kingdon Clifford: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.”66 For the intellectualist, the evidence for the truth of what is found in a privileged moment will always be insufficient. The narrator’s claim that what is recalled or revealed in a privileged moment is somehow more real, more true than anything else, is based on the feeling of certainty which accompanies this impression. Whether in the case of the sorrowful involuntary recollection of his grandmother or in the case of the joy felt at the smell of the musty pavilion on the Champs-Élysées, the narrator experiences the feeling as authoritative. For James, the authority of a mystical experience gives the individual thinker reason to believe in the hypothesis it presents, even though others may not share his or her belief. According to James, the mystic has the right to believe the hypothesis which for him or her carries this authority and which the mystic considers to be certain, despite the absence of logically coercive evidence. James defends this right by referring to our belief in truth itself: Our belief in truth itself . . . that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic skeptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another,—we are willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.67

Our belief in truth itself has become a habit, and being aware of this habit can help us appreciate the truth of mystical beliefs. The mystic also passionately affirms a desire, for instance the desire that there is a loving God. Or, to return to À la recherche, the desire that there is truth to be found, and that it can be discovered in privileged moments. The narrator is not logically coerced to believe in this truth, but finds a much more compelling reason to trust the feeling of certainty which accompanies these experiences. The option of accepting or rejecting the truth of privileged moments is genuine because the hypotheses are 66 67

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9–10.

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alive, the decision forced and the opportunity momentous; the narrator chooses the first hypothesis because it makes an “electric connection with his nature.” Compelling logical evidence plays no part in this belief, something which is reflected in James’ remark: “As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.”68 Our “non-intellectual nature” influences our convictions, and this leads James to formulate the following hypothesis: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, “Do not decide, but leave the question open,” is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth.69

The fact that the narrator chooses the hypothesis which he feels to be true illustrates James’ point. The option to accept or reject an involuntary memory or the realities hidden by couvercles as true is decided by the narrator’s passional nature. This decision, according to James, is one that must be made in this way since the option “cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds.”70 The intellect cannot decide which is more real, the past as it is presented by voluntary memory or the past as it presents itself in involuntary memory. The only capacity the narrator has for making the decision is his passional nature, which tells him truth is discovered in privileged moments. James focuses on two ways in which the faith that truth exists may be held: the empiricist way and the absolutist way. “The absolutists in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it.” The empiricists, on the other hand, “think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another.”71 James claims that we are empiricists only upon reflection. Philosophy in general tends towards closed systems and every system presumes to have reached “bottom-certitude,” because it is supported by “objective evidence.” James clarifies: “You believe in objective evidence, and I do. Of some things we feel that we are 68

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 11. 70 James points out that he is leaving “systematic philosophical skepticism altogether out of account.” Ibid., 12. 71 Ibid., 12. 69

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certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour.”72 The narrator believes in objective evidence taken in this way: privileged moments give him the feeling of certitude described here by James. The same goes for Swann: when he unexpectedly hears the little phrase he knows for certain that Odette will never love him again. As James puts it, we are all “absolutists by instinct,” even if upon reflection we call ourselves empiricists. According to James, we must treat this instinct as a “weakness of our nature” and he believes it to be a “tremendously mistaken attitude” “to hold any of [our opinions]—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible.”73 For the sake of clarity, and in line with later remarks in James’ essay, I suggest that James is not implying that we should consider corrigible even the most straightforward truths, such as, for instance, simple mathematical equations. James, as I will show below, is interested in the kind of truth that can come into existence because someone believed in it before he or she had objective evidence. It is these kinds of truths that are the topic of discussion in “The Will to Believe,” and I therefore argue that James’ remark cited here should be taken to apply to these very particular truths. The opinion the narrator holds of himself and of his relation to his grandmother, for instance, is changed by his involuntary recollection of her in the Balbec hotel. What is impressed upon him in these moments appears to him more real than his voluntary recollections of her, and this makes him reinterpret events and situations in the past, most notably the day on which Saint-Loup took his grandmother’s picture. Though this new picture of the past, of himself and of his grandmother seems more real to the narrator, it would be a tremendous mistake, James would say, to hold to this image as if it could never be changed again. The only certain truth, James writes, is that “the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”74 This, however, is merely the starting point of knowledge, and “no concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.”75 What needs to be kept in mind always is that “practically, one’s 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 13. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15.

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conviction that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only one more subjective opinion added to the lot.”76 As an empiricist, one gives up the doctrine of objective certitude without giving up “the quest or hope of truth itself.”77 The certitude of involuntary memories should therefore be recognized and accepted when our passional nature chooses it despite a lack of logical evidence. The empiricist quest for truth, however, demands that the narrator not only recognizes the validity of the decisions of his passional nature, but also the possibility that in the future new certainties may present themselves which will have to be taken just as seriously. If the “total drift of thinking” continues to confirm an hypothesis put to him in a privileged moment, then the hypothesis can be called true; however, there never is a point at which the evidence in support of the hypothesis will be complete and the truth will be absolute. Truth always remains a work in progress and this is why James resists any philosophy that presents itself as a closed system. It is not the origin of an hypothesis which matters, but what it leads to, and this list of consequences is never complete: Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being true.78

The fact that the hypotheses the narrator believes to be true come from involuntary memories and are evoked by physical sensations says nothing whatsoever about their truth value. Similarly the mystic’s beliefs may not be rejected simply because the authority of his or her beliefs are not felt by others who did not have similar experiences. In the hope and quest for truth, the emphasis on the origin of hypotheses must be given up and to do so, one must distinguish between two different laws, often mistakenly identified as expressing the same thing: “we must know the truth” on the one hand and “we must avoid

76 77 78

Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 17.

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error” on the other.79 In giving priority to the first, one is willing to run the risk of being “duped” and make mistakes in one’s quest for truth. When the truth of involuntary memory is a live hypothesis for someone, this person will be inclined to act on this belief and therefore also run the risk to be proven wrong. Any hypothesis is susceptible to correction, and one can only find out if correction is needed by “trying out” the hypothesis by acting on it. The upshot, what an hypothesis leads to, will decide its truth. An hypothesis can turn out to be (partially) wrong, but, as James puts it: “I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world.” To regard as primary the second law, “we must avoid error,” is “like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound.”80 We are certain to incur errors however cautious we are, so “a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.”81 Of course the philosopher wishes to avoid error, but mistakes should not be avoided at all costs. After all these “preliminary remarks,” James is ready to address the question how and why our passional nature “must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice.”82 James again emphasizes that his thesis is not contrary to common sense: “Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come.”83 There are, in other words, many occasions on which we can and even must wait for rationally compelling proof, the kind of proof which satisfies the intellectualist. This is often the case in the sciences, and in many practical human affairs. Since in these situations the option is not forced, it is wise to suspend judgment.84 James’ main point here is that “wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no

79

Ibid., 17. Ibid., 19. 81 Ibid., 19. 82 Ibid., 19. 83 Ibid., 20. 84 James notes, however, that the most useful investigator will be the one who has a stake in the case, not the indifferent observer. The former has an “eager interest in one side of the question” which is “balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.” Ibid., 21. 80

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pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.”85 According to James, only genuine options, alive, momentous and forced, may and must be decided by one’s passional nature, not, as some critics of James would have it, options of any kind. Having satisfied common sense in this way, James goes on to explain that there are forced options which cannot wait for conclusive proof. Questions concerning personal relations are a good example. James’ own example is as follows: “Do you like me or not?” Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt . . . ten to one your liking never comes.86

The example shows that in some cases, “the desire for a certain kind of truth . . . brings about that special truth’s existence.”87 The narrator has to be willing to assume the truth of his privileged moments if he is to derive any benefit from them, whether on an aesthetic or on an ethical level. In assuming the truth, or at least recognizing the importance, of earlier involuntary memories, the narrator’s attitude towards the ones he experiences before the Guermantes party is one of believing-before-evidence. The openness which marks this attitude is needed for the involuntary memory or privileged moment to be recognized and then pursued; if the hypothesis that truth is hidden in these moments would not have been alive to the narrator, he would not have chosen to repeat the staggering on the paving stones simply because he would not have had use for this action. His actions are based on the mysterious certainty, the mystic sense of hidden meaning, that there is something important to be discovered here. They allow for this certainty to grow and be confirmed. The narrator meets the truth of the privileged moment halfway by believing in it before he has sufficient proof—proof which, the intellectualist would say, is impossible to come by in this case. It is his initial belief that brings about the truth’s existence, since without this initial belief the truth

85 86 87

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23–4. Ibid., 24.

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would never have been pursued and found. In James’ words: “There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.” Sometimes, “faith in a fact can help create the fact,” and though faith in these situations is “running ahead of scientific evidence,” this is no reason to reject it.88 In the case of the truth of privileged moments one cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical. Skepticism may protect us from error, but in “waiting for more light,” “we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.”89 Again James points out that it is better to “be duped” sometimes because we are willing to act on an hypothesis, than to avoid error at all costs. The analogy James offers at this point refers back to the earlier example concerning the question “Do you like me or not?”: It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else?90

James points out that skepticism “is not avoidance of option; it is avoidance of a particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position.”91 The skeptic yields not to hope (as the empiricist does), but to fear. The skeptic does not, as he or she would like to claim, fight all passions with the intellect; rather, the intellect is ruled by the particular passion of fear. But, as James points out, “what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?”92 James sums up the thesis he has defended: “We have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.”93 The narrator’s will has always been tempted by the hypothesis that there is truth to be found in privileged moments, but it is only after a period of depression that he is willing to act on what he feels is a momentous opportunity to follow the calling he thought he had missed. The hypothesis is now more alive than it ever was before and

88 89 90 91 92 93

Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 26. Ibid., 27. Ibid., 29.

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this is shown by the narrator’s resolve to find out the nature of the truth it seems to offer. But this truth can only come into existence if the narrator believes in it before he has sufficient evidence, and this attitude is marked by the will to believe.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the privileged moments of À la recherche can be described as mystical experiences in the Jamesian sense. To regard the privileged moment as a mystical experience helps explain the sense of authority and certitude that accompanies it: the narrator gains felt knowledge of the kind of truth particular to mystical states. The kind of truth at stake here can never be “objectively” proven, at least not in a way convincing to those who James calls the “intellectualists.” Nevertheless, James claims that we have the right to believe in these truths before evidence, and it is at this point that the will to believe becomes relevant. I have argued that the narrator is tempted by the hypothesis that there is truth to be found in a privileged moment, and that he is presented with a genuine option between two more or less live hypotheses. More precisely, the narrator shows the strength of his will to believe through his willingness to act on the hypothesis, and the felt knowledge of his reminiscences in Le temps retrouvé finally convinces him to act on the hypothesis. He has no objective evidence that he will be a great writer, but he chooses to believe that he will be, showing that sometimes, in James’ words, faith in a fact can help bring about that fact’s existence. If the narrator had never tried, he would have never known, but more importantly, his success in becoming a writer is in large part determined by his beliefbefore-evidence that it is his vocation to be a writer. The will to believe operates within the domain of what Gabriel Marcel calls the mysterious. Mysteries can only be grasped from within and cannot be analyzed from the outside; this is why, in the case of a mystery, one cannot gather sufficient evidence before engaging in it. More concretely, a mystery often demands a certain commitment: if the narrator had responded only half-heartedly to his vocation to become a writer, he would have never become one. But since he believes in this vocation before he has sufficient evidence, he enters upon an uncertain mission that only becomes real once he has committed to it. I have argued that the narrator’s commitment to what he experi-

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ences as a vocation in Le temps retrouvé is in sharp contrast with what could be called the moral appeal of the earlier volumes. The narrator is willing to act on the vocation he gleans from the joyful privileged moments, but his willingness to act falls short where it comes to the moral insights gained from the sorrowful moments of reminiscence. In short, he starts to write his book, but he does not try to counter his tendency to crystallize others. The next chapter, which will serve as a conclusion to my project as a whole, will take up this point and discuss the narrator’s inability or unwillingness to put into practice the specifically moral insights gained from his privileged moments. I will contrast the account of intersubjectivity found in À la recherche with Marcel’s notion of creative fidelity, and engage James’ will to believe to explain and criticize the narrator’s attitude. Integrating the three different strands of thought, I will arrive at a full description of the attitude of courageous vulnerability.

CHAPTER SIX

THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING COURAGEOUSLY VULNERABLE

Introduction In this final chapter, I will return to the notion of courageous vulnerability as it was sketched in Chapter Two and draw upon chapters Four and Five to fill out this preliminary account. Specifically, I will draw upon the discussions about crystallization and the “will to believe” to both offer a better understanding of courageous vulnerability and distinguish it from other, similar, notions, especially Marcel’s “creative fidelity.” A close reading of several passages from À la recherche will again help sharpen my argument. The passage cited in the Introduction showed that the narrator’s grandmother is present to the narrator in an involuntary memory. Later chapters showed that the narrator feels that, in order to be faithful to his grandmother, he needs to cling to the pain of this privileged moment because it allows him to fully experience her presence. The combination of À la recherche with Marcel’s work is particularly fruitful here because Marcel makes our relation to the dead an essential part of his ethics. In the present chapter, I will discuss the narrator’s relation to his grandmother afresh and relate it to a question central to Marcel’s thought: can there be a bond between the dead and the living? Death, for Marcel, appears as a test for presence: true presence defies absence, even the ultimate absence that is death. Marcel’s notion of creative fidelity, therefore, is an account not only of love between the living, but also of the bond which continues to exist between the living and their dead loved ones. Just as in Chapter Four, the pessimistic account of love in À la recherche will serve to criticize Marcel and to show that what seems easy in his descriptions is in fact very difficult. This does not mean, however, that the notion of creative fidelity should be rejected; I will merely argue that this notion is incomplete. Courageous vulnerability incorporates the valuable aspects of creative fidelity, but offers a more realistic ethical attitude by integrating these aspects with, on the one hand, the pessimistic account given in À la recherche and, on the other, James’ pragmatic theory of the will to believe. I will argue that though privileged

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moments and presence are not under our control, intersubjectivity is possible because of the will to believe. The narrator, it became clear in the previous chapter, chooses to pursue the felt knowledge of his primarily aesthetic privileged moments and writes his book; had he chosen to pursue the felt knowledge of his sorrowful privileged moments, he could have changed his actions towards others and created the possibility for Marcellian love. The narrator holds that love and friendship are impossible, at least in the way Marcel describes these phenomena, but I argue that he himself has created this impossibility. Marcel, on the other hand, ultimately holds that love and friendship are easily achieved and maintained. Despite his remarks emphasizing the difficulty of being creatively faithful, his writings are pervaded by a certain optimism, and it is this optimism which I will try to temper through an application of Marcel’s thought to À la recherche. Proustian and Marcellian ethics dovetail in the notion of courageous vulnerability, which maintains the balance between the two by means of James’ will to believe. In preparation for this final account of courageous vulnerability, I will now turn to the rich passages from À la recherche describing the narrator’s relation to his dying grandmother.

Fidelity and Death in À la recherche In Le côté de Guermantes, the volume preceding Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator’s grandmother falls ill. Dr. Cottard, the family doctor and member of le petit clan, tells the family that the situation is very grave, but Dr. du Boulbon, asked for a second opinion, claims that she is in fact not ill at all and tells her that all she has to do is decide to pick up her old life; the sickness is merely something in her head. The narrator and his mother feel relieved and plans are made for the narrator and his grandmother to go to the Champs-Elysées, where she will sit and read while he meets with friends. The narrator does not feel the need to deny himself pleasures such as these now that his grandmother has been declared healthy, and he is annoyed with his grandmother for making him wait while she takes an unusually long time to put on her cape: Now that I knew that she was not ill, with that strange indifference which we feel towards our relations so long as they are alive, and which makes us put everyone else before them, I thought it very selfish of her to take so long and to risk making me late when she knew that I had an appointment with my friends.

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[Maintenant que je savais qu’elle était bien portante, avec cette étrange indifférence que nous avons pour nos parents tant qu’ils vivent, qui fait que nous les faisons passer après tout le monde, je la trouvais bien égoïste d’être si longue, de risquer de me mettre en retard quand elle savait que j’avais rendez-vous avec des amis.]1

After they arrive at the Champs-Elysées, his grandmother rushes off to the little pavilion with the musty smell where, a long time ago, the narrator had enjoyed a privileged moment while waiting for Françoise.2 This time it is his grandmother for whom he is waiting, and while she retreats into one of the cabins, the narrator is worried that the woman who runs the facility will think less of him and his grandmother for not bringing her flowers, something which other customers appear to do frequently. “At last, after a good half-hour, my grandmother emerged, and fearing that she might not seek to atone by a lavish gratuity for the indiscretion she had shown by remaining so long inside, I beat a retreat.” [Enfin ma grand-mère sortit, et songeant qu’elle ne chercherait pas à effacer par un pourboire l’indiscrétion qu’elle avait montrée en restant un temps pareil, je battis en retraite.]3 The narrator is embarrassed by his grandmother who, now that she is supposedly healthy again, tends to offend his sense of propriety by not behaving like the lady he wants her to be. He admits to “feeling a little hurt” [bien qu’un peu déçu] when she does not even apologize to him for the long wait, but then finally takes a closer look at her walking besides him and notices that she has “the flushed, slightly dazed look of a person who has just been knocked down by a carriage or pulled out of a ditch” [la figure rouge et préoccupée d’une personne qui vient d’être bousculée par une voiture ou qu’on a retirée d’un fossé].4 She tries to prevent him from seeing her face, but he nevertheless realizes that she has had another syncope. The “strange indifference” toward his grandmother which the narrator experiences when she is supposed to be in apparent good health, and the annoyance and embarrassment he feels as a result of her perceived faux pas already hint at the guilt which he will be feeling later, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, when he remembers his grandmother in an involuntary recollection. But at this point, the narrator does not scrutinize his selfish expectations of her, and it is not until his grandmother

1 2 3 4

Proust, The Guermantes Way, 418; Le côté de Guermantes, 604. See Chapter One, where I cited the full passage involving this “musty smell.” Proust, The Guermantes Way, 422; Le côté de Guermantes, 607. Ibid., 422–3; 607.

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has difficulty walking and talking that he takes a closer look at her and is concerned. Dr. du Boulbon’s ridiculous consultation, the time it took his grandmother to get dressed, her lack of responsiveness and her long stay in the little pavilion have long made the reader of À la recherche suspect that his grandmother is not well at all, but the narrator is too concerned with meeting his friends in time to come to the same conclusion. He even thinks her “a little selfish” for making him wait. The pain and guilt he will later feel as a result of the involuntary memory of his grandmother pertain to moments such as these: in Sodome et Gomorrhe, he remembers the many times that he made her feel his annoyance, punishing her for what he will later realize were either things she could not have helped because of her illness, or just habits and quirks of the person he should have loved as a whole. At this point, the narrator does not yet know the full story of his grandmother’s illness, and he has only just become aware of the gravity of her situation. While he was annoyed with her unresponsiveness just a few moments ago, this unresponsiveness has now taken on a different meaning. While the narrator goes to look for a cab, he remarks that “she was now a person closed to me, . . . part of the external world” [elle m’était maintenant fermée, elle était devenue une partie du monde extérieur]. His grandmother, he feels, is no longer with him, no longer present, to speak with Gabriel Marcel, and the narrator is not present to her either. It can be argued that the narrator was not present to his grandmother in the first place, treating her, as pointed out above, with indifference. Still, it is now that the gravity of her condition has become clear to him, that he sees her in a different way, and from a distance. He feels that he has to keep his feelings of anxiety from her so that he does not upset her any further by appearing worried about her condition. The effect on the narrator is powerfully conveyed in two uncharacteristically short sentences: “She was not yet dead. But I was already alone.” [Elle n’était pas morte encore. J’étais déjà seul.]5 An immediate visit to a doctor who lives close to the Champs-Elysées leads to the following remarks: “I stood on the landing gazing at my grandmother who was doomed. Each of us is indeed alone. We set off homewards.” [Je regardais sur le palier ma grand-mère qui

5

Ibid., 425; 609.

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était perdue. Chaque personne est bien seule. Nous repartîmes vers la maison.]6 The narrator’s remark that his grandmother has become a part of the external world, closed to him, brings back to mind Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery and his phenomenology of having. The mystery of intersubjectivity, for instance, is the bond between people that can only be understood through experience, that is, from within. The illness which the narrator feels has “detached” his grandmother from him, has made her into a lui, someone he knows in the third person and who is not with him. She is absent even though she is right next to him in the carriage; both he and his grandmother are alone. These passages from À la recherche are marked by an overwhelming sense of helplessness: presence is now impossible, it seems, and the gap which separates the narrator from his grandmother cannot be bridged. Again the question presents itself: how can presence be restored once it has been lost? Or, more generally, where are the privileged moments when we need them? The narrator will not experience his grandmother’s presence again until he remembers her in an involuntary memory long after her death, and even then this presence is regained only by chance and temporarily. Whereas, for Marcel, presence is difficult but in the end something on which we can rely, for the narrator presence is a rarity and impossible to sustain. It is my claim that Marcel makes presence appear too easy and so falls prey to optimism, but that the narrator offers too pessimistic an account. I agree with the narrator that presence, like the privileged moment, is not altogether under our control. What is under our control is our reaction to the privileged moment, but also, and here the narrator and I part ways, our attitude towards others. The narrator simply does not explore this possibility through action because he does not believe that intersubjectivity in the Marcellian sense is possible. Faith in a fact, to speak with James, can sometimes help bring about that fact’s existence, and because the narrator believes that intersubjectivity is impossible, it is impossible for him. Marcel’s comments on our creatively faithful relation to the dead will deepen the further discussion of this issue below. After their disastrous excursion to the Champs-Élysées, the narrator often refers to his grandmother as “the invalid” [la malade] or “the

6

Ibid., 432; 614.

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patient.”7 She is now a part of the external world and only “becomes” his grandmother again at those times when the illness momentarily subsides, or when he can catch a glimpse of her without being distracted by the changes in her face and general appearance. Most of the time, however, she now has a different look in her eyes, “often uneasy, plaintive, haggard, it was no longer the look we knew, it was the sullen expression of a senile old woman” [souvent inquiet, plaintif, hagard, ce n’était plus son regard d’ autrefois, c’était le regard maussade d’une vieille femme qui radote].8 The narrator’s description of his changed grandmother brings back to mind the passage in Le côté de Guermantes where he walks into the room where his grandmother sits reading on the couch and sees, for just a moment, not his admired and beautiful grandmother but an old woman. Back then, the narrator’s imagination could quickly put all the crystals back into place, but now the change is inescapable. A new form of treatment brings his grandmother temporary relief, but a few days after these hopeful moments, the narrator is awoken by his mother who takes him to the sickroom. There he finds, “bent in a semi-circle on the bed, a creature other than my grandmother, a sort of beast that had put on her hair and crouched among her bedclothes” [courbée en demi-cercle sur le lit, un autre être que ma grand-mère, une espèce de bête qui se serait affublée de ses cheveux et couchée dans ses draps].9 The movements and sounds this creature makes mean nothing, he realizes; every gesture is mechanical. When the narrator kisses his grandmother on the forehead, a shudder goes through her body which, he thinks, perhaps recognizes the tenderness even though the mind is unconscious. She dies immediately after the kiss. The passages cited in the Introduction showed that this impersonality will be broken only when the narrator remembers his grandmother in an involuntary memory. It serves to look at a dream the narrator has after this recollection because it powerfully conveys the feelings of remorse, loneliness, and absence experienced by the narrator which will be central to the discussion of courageous vulnerability in the remainder of this chapter. After the bouleversement, the “complete upheaval” experienced by the narrator during his stay at the Balbec

7 8 9

Ibid., 432, 470; 614. Ibid., 454; 629. Ibid., 457–8; 631–2.

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hotel in Sodome et Gomorrhe, he dreams of his grandmother.10 In his dream, the narrator remembers that for a long time he has forgotten to write to his grandmother. “She must think that I’ve forgotten her now that she’s dead; how lonely she must be feeling, how deserted!” [Elle doit croire que je l’oublie depuis qu’elle est morte, comme elle doit se sentir seule et abandonnée!] He asks his father for her address, but he tells him not to worry because she is well cared for by a nurse. “ ‘She sometimes asks what’s become of you. She was told you were going to write a book. She seemed pleased. She wiped away a tear.’ ” [“Elle demande quelquefois ce que tu es devenue. On lui a même dit que tu allais faire un livre. Elle paru contente. Elle a essuyé une larme.”]11 His father does not remember her exact address and the narrator asks him: “ ‘But tell me, you who know, it’s not true that the dead have ceased to exist. It can’t possibly be true, in spite of what they say, because grandmother still exists.’ My father smiles sadly: ‘Oh, hardly at all, you know, hardly at all. . . . She’s quite faded now.” [“Mais dis-moi, toi qui sais, ce n’est pas vrai que les morts ne vivent plus. Ce n’est pas vrai tout de même, malgré ce qu’on dit, puisque grand-mère existe encore.” Mon père sourit tristement: “Oh! bien peu, tu sais, bien peu . . . Elle est très éteinte.”]12 The narrator wakes up and describes how everything he sees, hears and feels seems to be saying to him: “We haven’t seen her” [“Nous ne l’avons pas vue”].13 After the bouleversement, as well as in his dream, the narrator feels guilty for not thinking of his grandmother, and he wants to make up for his neglect. But the only things left of his grandmother are memories, and there is no person left to apologize to. Even in his dream, his grandmother is “quite faded,” no longer a presence even though she still “exists.” On the connection between memory and death, Gabriel Marcel observes that to forget the deceased feels like betrayal. To hold on to memories of the beloved person feels like an act of faithfulness, but to retain only memories of the dead loved one, Marcel states, is merely a false fidelity: “La vraie fidélité reconnaît que je fausse tout, lorsque je confonds l’être aimé avec les ‘souvenirs’ que j’ai de lui, lorsque je les 10 Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 216; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 157. He describes how, falling asleep, his intelligence and his will can “no longer strive to rescue [him] from the cruelty of [his] real impressions.” [ne pouvaient plus me disputer à la cruauté de mes impressions véritables]. Ibid., 216; 157. 11 Ibid., 217; 158. 12 Ibid., 218; 158–9. 13 Ibid., 219; 159.

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traite comme des reliques.”14 Preserving the memories of the person loved as relics is no different from the creation of an effigy of someone who is still alive. Both processes are to be situated in the category of having, more precisely in the category of l’avoir-implication. Reducing the deceased to memories means reducing him or her to a set of characteristics or of functions which, according to Marcel, denies the mystery of the presence this person was for us. One has to let go of the image that one is tempted to substitute for the living presence of the deceased.15 Marcel formulates the essential question that needs to be addressed as follows: “How can a true and stable relation be established between the dead and the living?” This question is both important and difficult, since, Marcel writes: “the dead person remains a being for us; he is not reducible to a simple ‘idea’ we may have . . . he continues in any event to live in us.”16 Fidelity to the deceased is therefore fidelity to a being, not just to a memory, and because of this Marcel claims that “fidelity truly exists only when it defies absence.” In other words, the fidelity to the deceased is based on a presence that does not end with death;17 fidelity vanquishes time. Marcel warns that fidelity should not be confused with constancy, which “could be defined simply as perseverance in a certain goal.”18 The difference can be illustrated with the simple example of staying in a relationship because you love somebody or staying because you feel you have to no matter what. Fidelity is dynamic and true to the mystery of the other person, whereas constancy is static and belongs to the sphere of problems. In “On the Ontological Mystery,” Marcel writes: “faithfulness is, in reality, the exact opposite of inert conformism. It is the active recognition of something permanent . . . it refers invariably to a presence, or to something which can be maintained within us and before us as a presence, but which, ipso facto, can be just as well ignored, forgotten and obliterated.”19 Like any mystery, presence can be ignored or problematized. I can remain constant in my relationship, be attentive and

14

Troisfontaines, De l’existence à l’être, II 147. This is true especially of the image of someone during his/her last moments, which did not really belong to his or her life anymore. 16 Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 149. 17 Marcel adds that fidelity exists only “when it triumphs over absence, and in particular, over that absence which we hold to be—mistakenly no doubt—absolute, and which we call death.” Ibid., 152. 18 Ibid., 153. 19 Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 35. 15

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make sure that the other is provided for, but this does not necessarily mean that I am present, that the other is for me a tu and not a lui. In this case we cannot speak of mystery or presence, nor of fidelity; I am merely true to a goal or ideal which I have set myself. In Marcel’s words: “fidelity to a principle as a principle is idolatry in the etymological sense of the word; it might be a sacred duty for me to deny a principle from which life has withdrawn and which I know that I no longer accept.”20 For the narrator, his grandmother is present only sporadically after her stroke on the Champs-Elysées; even before she has died she has already become “part of the external world.” By referring to her as an invalid or a patient, he emphasizes how she has been reduced to a characteristic or a function. In contrast to what Marcel argues about the dead person remaining a being for us, not reducible to a simple idea, the dead in the universe of À la recherche appear to be no more than mere ideas—except, as has been pointed out, where presence is experienced in an involuntary recollection. Chapter Four showed that Proustian love is based in the imagination and depends on crystallization, jealousy, and suffering for its survival. Similarly, À la recherche shows that the love for someone who has died is the love of an image, an idea, or what Marcel would call an effigy. As was pointed out in the Introduction, the narrator’s grandmother was for him a mere stranger before she becomes present to him again in an involuntary memory. As will become clear below, the fidelity which Marcel argues truly exists only when it defies absence appears impossible to maintain in À la recherche; even though the narrator tries to hold on to the presence of his grandmother as he experienced it in his recollection, the feeling fades and eventually disappears completely. In order to draw out the significance of the narrator’s careful account of the presence and absence of his grandmother, I will again turn to James and his discussion of the will to believe.

The Will to Believe in Presence The previous chapter argued that the narrator lacks the will to believe in what Marcel calls intersubjectivity. Though the narrator is willing to

20

Ibid., 35.

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act on the aesthetic insights derived from certain privileged moments, he fails to put into practice the felt knowledge he gathers and which pertains to his relations to other people. Through a description of the narrator’s struggles, À la recherche effectively brings out the difficulty of being present and open. At this point, however, I will focus on the narrator’s failure and further develop my claim that the narrator could have chosen differently and could have willed to believe that love and friendship are possible. It serves to recapture a few Jamesian themes that will lead into this discussion. In his essay “Faith And The Right to Believe,” James criticizes what he mockingly calls “intellectualism.” He describes the way of thinking of the intellectualists, the “believers” in objective evidence, as follows: “‘Intellectualism’ is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.”21 James is referring to what he called the “closed systems” of philosophy in “The Will to Believe,” grounded in the idea that there are definite, absolute answers to questions about the world, and that these questions themselves make no difference to this world the nature of which can be summed up exhaustively. James now adds that intellectualists insist “that in our conclusions personal preferences should play no part, and that no argument from what ought to be to what is, is valid.”22 The rule of intellectualism can be described as the “refusal to believe anything concerning which ‘evidence’ has not yet come in.”23 In order to explain the problems resulting from intellectualism as James perceives them, it is helpful to bring back to mind the example which James uses in “The Will to Believe.” To show that, in some situations, faith in a fact can help bring about the fact’s existence, James raises the question “Do you like me or not?” If I like you but refuse to act on my feelings until you give me proof that you like me too, “ten to one your liking never comes.” Where belief in a fact can help create the fact, James remarks in connection with this example, one is not only permitted to act before one has sufficient evidence; in situations such as this one, we “lawfully must” let our passional nature decide. Hard facts, objective

21 James, “Faith and the Right to Believe,” in The Writings of William James. A Comprehensive Edition, John J. McDermott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 735. 22 Ibid., 735. 23 Ibid., 736.

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evidence, will never come, and the only way in which to “win” is to commit to something which will remain uncertain as long as no commitment has been made. To refuse to act in the uncertain situation of the example means to prevent potential heartbreak, but it significantly decreases the chance of you liking me, and almost certainly results in what James calls a lack of zest. If, on the other hand, I show my liking, a transition from “what ought to be” to “what is” becomes possible—a transition which the intellectualist chooses not to believe in. In “Faith and the Right to Believe,” James lists several postulates of intellectualism, the last of which is of particular interest here. Intellectualists hold that our beliefs and our actions based on these beliefs are parts of the world, but that these beliefs “are yet such mere externalities as not to alter in any way the significance of the rest of the world when they are added to it.”24 As was shown in the example discussed above, our beliefs and the acts we base on them in fact do alter the world: your liking may come, and something which was not true before, is true now, in part because I acted on a belief for which I did not have sufficient evidence. Faith can be a creator of truth, and to discount this possibility means to ignore part of the world, something the radical empiricist cannot tolerate. James’ will to believe is a helpful resource in the discussion of Marcel’s question about the possibility of a “relation between the dead and the living” and the narrator’s memories of his grandmother. Since the situation obviously does not allow for the “objective certitude” demanded by the intellectualist, the role of what James calls our “passional nature” grows more important. In James’ language of options and hypotheses, the live option which presents itself can be formulated as follows: Do we believe that the dead are mere ideas or memories, or do we believe that they are persons, beings? The first question matches what Marcel calls constancy, the second represents the attitude of creative fidelity: In saying “It depends upon us that the dead should live on in our memory,” we are still thinking of the idea in terms of a diminution or an effigy. We admit that the object has disappeared, but that there remains a likeness which it is in our power to keep, as a daily woman “keeps” a flat or a set of furniture. It is all too evident that this manner of keeping can have no ontological value whatsoever. But it is altogether different in the case where fidelity is creative.25

24 25

Ibid., 736. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 37.

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Integrating James’ notion of the live option with Marcel’s comments about our relation to the dead as a relation to persons rather than effigies, I suggest that where fidelity is creative and not merely constant, there is the will to believe that the dead loved one remains a person for us. There may be no logical evidence for the possibility of a “true and stable relation” between the living and the dead, but this does not mean that one does not have the right to believe that such a relation is indeed possible; as James remarks, sometimes belief in a fact can help bring about that fact’s existence. The issue is complicated, however, when placed in the context of À la recherche. Marcel states that we are resistant to the thought that dead loved ones are mere images or ideas for us, but the narrator of À la recherche appears to suggest that this reduction is inevitable. Even the presence of his grandmother in his involuntary memory of her fades away until he is again left with only his voluntary memories. The narrator, then, holds that the dead can be no more to us than strangers, or perhaps images of which we can think with fondness, but certainly not beings present to us in the Marcellian sense. In privileged moments we may catch brief glimpses of the person the dead loved one used to be, but he or she cannot remain a person for us. Habit dulls the novelty of the privileged moment and the originally fresh impression becomes part of what James calls the “stock” of our opinions, leaving us, in Proust’s terminology, with voluntary memories only. Proust’s work complicates the positions advocated by James and Marcel, and gives a decidedly pessimistic account of the possibility of presence and the will to believe, whether these concern the living or the dead. At the same time, Proust’s narrator displays an attitude of great sensitivity, and Chapter One and Two showed that this sensitivity, though primarily aesthetic, has an ethical component as well. The narrator of À la recherche is an artist in the Bergsonian fashion, and for Bergson, the artist’s openness to impressions makes him or her the ideal moral agent. Marcel, for his part, claims that openness is a requirement if one is to act morally because presence is “a kind of influx:” “it depends upon us to be permeable to this influx, but not, to tell the truth, to call it forth. Creative fidelity consists in maintaining ourselves actively in a permeable state; and there is a mysterious interchange between this free act and the gift granted in response to it.”26

26

Ibid., 38.

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One has to be “permeable” to the “influx” that constitutes the other’s presence. Why, then, is the narrator of À la recherche, so sensitive and permeable to impressions, such a poor moral agent? Why is he unable to be creatively faithful to his dead grandmother, or to his live mistress? The answers to these questions, I have already suggested, all have to do with the narrator’s will to believe. Though I hold that the narrator could have believed differently and so created a different reality for himself, it is important to keep in mind that the will to believe does not depend entirely on voluntary choice. As was explained in the previous chapter, “we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.” The narrator’s belief that love and friendship are impossible is not the result of a conscious decision made at a certain point in his life; it is a belief that has grown over time, fed by different impressions and experiences. However, it must also be remembered that, just like the narrator never allowed his moral insights to make a difference in his actions, he never acted on his aesthetic impressions either (except, of course, for the one little essay written in Dr. Percepied’s carriage). So if habit is in large part responsible for his failure to improve himself morally, it could just as well have caused the narrator never to become a writer. But he does become one, against habit and against laziness. Perhaps the possibility of becoming an artist has always been more “live” to the narrator than the possibility of being a better moral agent, and this explains why he ultimately pursues the former and not the latter. But if, as James argues, the “liveness” of an hypothesis or possibility can be judged by one’s willingness to act on it, then the difference in liveness between the possibilities above is negligible all through À la recherche until the narrator is overcome by the series of involuntary memories in Le temps retrouvé. It is my claim, therefore, that since the narrator could choose to become an artist after all, he could at least hypothetically have made a similar choice in regard to his actions towards others. This does not mean that this would have been an easy task for the narrator; as I argued above, it is exactly this kind of optimism which makes Marcel’s ethics incomplete. I maintain that the narrator could have willed to believe differently, but in making this claim the pessimism conveyed by À la recherche may not be forgotten. In what follows, a sustained close reading of Proust’s work will prevent the argument from taking on too optimistic a tone, while, at the same time, James and Marcel will offer ways in which the narrator himself can be criticized. The discussion below will focus on fidelity and presence and will start with a brief review of these Marcellian terms.

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The close connection between fidelity and presence is emphasized by Marcel in Concrete Approaches: “fidelity is the active perpetuation of presence . . . of its virtue which consists in a mysterious incitement to create.” Presence is something dynamic, and Bergson’s influence shows itself in the way Marcel describes this dynamic nature. He asks us to consider artistic creativity as a model for creative fidelity: “if artistic creation is conceivable, it can only be on condition that the world is present to the artist in a certain way—present to his heart and to his mind, present to his very being.”27 Just like the world has to be present to the artist’s very being if there is to be artistic creation, a person has to be present to us, and we to her or him, if there is to be fidelity. As was shown in Chapter Two, Bergson describes the artist as someone for whom nature has forgotten to “rivet the perception to the need;” unlike the rest of us, the artist experiences things without the interposition of what Bergson calls the “veil of habit.” The description of the Bergsonian artist was used to introduce the notion of courageous vulnerability, an explicitly ethical attitude marked by an openness analogous to the openness of the aesthetic attitude described by Bergson. Gabriel Marcel’s notion of fidelity draws on Bergson’s aesthetics in its description of fidelity as a creative process, but uses the attitude of the artist as a way to explain an ethical phenomenon. In Bergson’s work, the ideal artist appeared to be the ideal moral agent as well, open to the world and all the otherness found in it; Marcel now emphasizes the creative side of the aesthetic attitude to explain the dynamic nature of an explicitly ethical attitude which he calls creative fidelity. Courageous vulnerability, analogous to the attitude of the Bergsonian artist, bears close resemblance to Marcel’s notion of creative fidelity but also functions as a critique of this notion by emphasizing the difficulty of acting morally. As pointed out above, Marcel remarks that we resist thinking of dead loved ones as mere ideas, and that they are still beings for us; similarly, he talks of love as necessarily involving presence. The openness required for love, whether this love concerns the living or the dead, is an essential component of creative fidelity. Marcel certainly recognizes that this attitude is difficult to maintain, as is shown in his discussions of, for instance, our tendency to reduce

27

Ibid., 36.

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others to “agglomerations of functions,” or to regard a person not as a tu but a lui. Proust, however, creates a universe in which this difficulty is brought out much more forcefully, raising questions about the very possibility of love as described by Marcel. If presence and creative fidelity can be experienced, it is only for short periods of time; more importantly, the narrator shows that we cannot control these phenomena, and that it is only in an involuntary, privileged moment that others can become present to us. The narrator can desire Albertine, but he cannot love her in the way Marcel describes. His grandmother may be present to the narrator when he remembers her involuntarily, but this presence disappears as the memory fades. Marcel remarks that “a presence to which we are faithful is not at all the same thing as the carefully preserved effigy of an object which has vanished,”28 but for Proust’s narrator effigies and memories are all that we can willfully recall; we cannot be present to someone voluntarily, but only in a privileged moment. According to the narrator, the creative fidelity prescribed by Marcel cannot be maintained because we always seek to destroy mystery, and to reduce the beloved to a series of problems. A closer consideration of the relation between the narrator and his grandmother will make this concrete. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, when the narrator is in Balbec again a few years later, he experiences the “complete upheaval” described in the Introduction. The narrator remembers the day on which Saint-Loup came to Balbec to take a picture of the narrator’s grandmother, and recalls his role in the project. Chapter Four described the narrator’s attitude towards his grandmother on this occasion and showed how he made his annoyance known to her, the same kind of irritation as he experiences on the Champs-Élysées when his grandmother makes him wait. After remembering his grandmother in involuntary memory, the narrator remembers the last time when he went out with his grandmother, and all the things connected to this time: “In contrast with all this the rest of the world seemed scarcely real and my anguish poisoned everything in it.” [En contraste avec tout cela le reste du monde semblait à peine réel et ma souffrance l’empoisonnait tout entire.]29 Everything connected to his grandmother matters infinitely more than the things which were no part of her life. The narrator’s perception of

28 29

Ibid., 36. Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 232; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 169.

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the world is dominated by the anguish the narrator experiences now that he has felt knowledge of his grandmother’s death. Looking at a picture of her, he goes back and forth between feelings of calm and helplessness: 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 fleeting 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. [Puis les doux souvenirs me revenaient. Elle était ma grand-mère et j’étais son petit-fils. Les expressions de son visage semblaient écrites dans une langue qui n’étais qui pour moi; elle était tout dans ma vie, les autres n’existaient que relativement à elle, au jugement qu’elle me donnerait sur eux; mais non, nos rapports ont été trop fugitifs pour n’avoir pas été accidentels. Elle ne me connaît plus, je ne la reverrai jamais. Nous n’avions pas été créés uniquement l’un pour l’autre, c’était une étrangère.]30

The line “she was my grandmother and I was her grandson,” repeated by the narrator throughout this passage, is a formula the narrator uses to conjure up his crystallized grandmother. The grandmother evoked by this mantra is the woman the narrator wanted her to be, even though the chrysalis he had spun around her made it impossible for him to recognize the signs of her illness or sadness. She is what Marcel would call an effigy, not a being present to the narrator. It is not surprising that this effigy quickly turns into the picture of a stranger who no longer knows him. Then again he manages to fit the crystals back into place: “I kept my eyes fixed, 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.’” [Je tenais mes yeux fixés, comme sur un dessin qu’on finit par ne plus voir à force de l’avoir regardé, sur la photographie que Saint-Loup avait faite, quand tout d’un coup, je pensai de nouveau: “C’est grand-mère, je suis son petit-fils.”]31 While he is going back and forth between calm and helplessness in this manner, Françoise comes into his hotel room and sees the picture. She disrupts the

30 31

Ibid., 237; 172. Ibid., 237; 172.

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narrator’s thoughts, telling him about her memories of the same event: “ ‘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.’ ” [“Pauvre Madame, . . . ce jour que le marquis l’a photographiée, elle avait été bien malade, elle s’était deux fois trouvée mail. ‘Surtout, Françoise, qu’elle m’avait dit, il ne faut pas que mon petit-fils le sache.’ Et elle le cachait bien, elle était toujours gaie en société.”]32 Françoise’s words have an effect similar to that of involuntary memories: the new information has an edge and again awakens the guilt the narrator had already felt as a result of his bouleversement. Françoise tells the narrator that his grandmother thought she would die in Balbec, and that sometimes she would not eat for days. This was when she sent out the narrator to go dining with Saint-Loup. Soon after receiving this news from Françoise, the process of re-crystallization is again disrupted when the narrator speaks to the manager of the hotel who tells him of “the day when Madame your grandmother had that sincup” [le jour où Madame vortre grand-mère avait eu cette symecope].33 The manager thought it would have been best had she left the hotel, especially because she had had a second “sincup” shortly after that. In addition to Françoise’s account of his grandmother’s state of health, the narrator now knows that his grandmother had at least two syncopes during their stay in Balbec. He realizes that when, in Balbec, he had blamed his grandmother for being distant, she in fact had been hiding from him in order to conceal her illness. These facts, conveyed by Françoise and the manager, are new and disturbing because they force the narrator to reconsider the past. The newness of the manager’s account is yet further emphasized by his mispronunciation: “‘Sincup’ was a word which, so pronounced, I should never have imagined, which might perhaps, applied to other people, have struck me as ridiculous, but which in its strange tonal novelty, like that of an original discord, long retained the faculty of arousing in me the most painful sensations.” [“Symecope” c’est un mot que, prononcé ainsi, je n’aurais jamais imaginé, qui m’aurait peutêtre, s’appliquant à d’autres, paru ridicule, mais qui, dans son étrange nouveauté sonore, pareille à celle d’une dissonance originale, resta

32 33

Ibid., 237–8; 173. Ibid., 240; 175.

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longtemps ce qui était capable d’éveiller en moi les sensations les plus douloureuses.]34 The word “sincup” is now linked to his grandmother’s illness and death, and it can preserve its freshness precisely because it is used for nothing else. Like the poetic language praised by Bergson, this new word has the power to evoke a powerful sensation because it has not been dulled by everyday use. The helplessness the narrator experiences in trying to recognize his grandmother in the picture is reflected in another dream he has of his grandmother while asleep in the dunes. In his dream, his grandmother appears to him “seated in an armchair. So feeble was she that she seemed to be less alive than other people. . . . Absent from herself, she appeared not to love me, not to know me” [assise dans un fauteuil. Si faible, elle avait l’air de vivre moins qu’une autre personne . . . . Absente d’elle-même, elle avait l’air de ne pas m’aimer, de ne pas me connaître].35 Soon afterwards, however, pain of the involuntary memories and the consequent revelations from Françoise and the manager has disappeared because the novelty has worn off: 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. [Quelques jours plus tard la photographie qu’avait faite Saint-Loup m’était douce à regarder; elle ne réveillait pas le souvenir de ce que m’avait dit Françoise parce qu’il ne m’avait plus quitté et je m’habituais à lui. . . . La photographie . . . me la montrait si élégante, si insouciante . . . que je la voyais moins malheureuse et mieux portante que je ne l’avais imaginée.]36

The crystals have been rearranged so as to allow for the new elements that had to be fitted in with the past, but the effect of the crystallization is the same as before: she is his grandmother, and he is her grandson. For the narrator, the involuntary memories have become voluntary and no longer have the power to hurt him. The memory of his grandmother has lost its overwhelming nature, and when the narrator is enjoying a walk by himself, he remarks: 34 35 36

Ibid., 241; 175. Ibid., 241; 175. Ibid., 242; 176.

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“In my fear lest the pleasure I found in this solitary excursion might weaken my memory of my grandmother, I sought to revive it by thinking of some great sorrow that she had experienced.” [Dans ma crainte que le plaisir trouvé dans cette promenade solitaire n’affaiblît en moi le souvenir de ma grand-mère, je cherchais de la raviver en pensant à telle grande souffrance morale qu’elle avait eue.]37 The narrator realizes that his grandmother was present to him in and through a painful recollection, and he now tries to find similarly painful memories in order to again feel this presence. The voluntary memories he calls up, however, fail to have the desired effect: “in response to my appeal, that sorrow tried to reconstruct itself in my heart” [cette souffrance essayait de se construire dans mon cœur], but it collapses before it reaches completion because, as the narrator says, his heart is too small for this pain. The narrator’s failure to again feel the sorrow that accompanied his grandmother’s presence in the involuntary memory of her is again reflected in his dreams, where his grandmother appears less distant: “she appeared in them less crushed by the idea that I had formed of her non-existence” [elle y apparaissait moins opprimée par l’idée que je me faisais de son néant]. He now dreams of her as an invalid who is “on the road to recovery” [en voie de se rétablir].38 But there are other signs that the crystallization is again taking its effect. In his dreams, the narrator’s grandmother’s words are now “no more than a feeble, docile response, almost a mere echo of mine; she was now no more than the reflection of my own thoughts” [n’étaient qu’une réponse affaiblie, docile, presque un simple écho de mes paroles; elle n’était plus que le reflet de ma propre pensée].39 The image of his grandmother no longer distresses the narrator, but has become his own construction entirely. In Marcel’s words: no mystery remains, and therefore presence has become impossible. The reduction of mystery to problem, of tu to lui, of a person to a bundle of functions, is inevitable according to the narrator of À la recherche. The narrator’s account challenges Marcel’s interpretation of love as creative fidelity and shows that love, fidelity and presence can never last; they last only as long as they are new. I argue that the narrator’s pessimistic account is correct in so far as it emphasizes the

37 38 39

Ibid., 245; 178. Ibid., 246; 179. Ibid., 246; 179.

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extent to which we depend on things outside our control to, as both James and the narrator put it, “restore us to ourselves.” The narrator is not justified, however, in concluding that love, friendship and intersubjective relations in general are impossible. Granted, the “freshness” of love, presence, and fidelity in large part depend on privileged moments, and because these moments come involuntarily, we have limited control over them. Our openness to privileged moments, however, is under our control, as is our choice to act on the felt knowledge gained from them. The narrator chooses not to act on especially his explicitly moral insights and so cuts himself off from the possibility that love and friendship could be made to last. It is at this point that the narrator’s attitude is open to criticism: had he willed to believe, he could have at least created the possibility for Marcellian love. Even with this criticism in mind, however, the problem of Marcel’s optimism remains, and can be formulated as follows: if the narrator’s experience, as I argued in Chapter Three, is not just particular to him, then how is one to keep oneself in a state of openness without there being something to be open to? More concretely, if, as in the narrator’s case, one’s life is devoid of privileged moments for an extended period of time, then how can one be expected to maintain the will to believe in love, friendship, etcetera? Again, it must be kept in mind that the narrator appears to experience presence only in a privileged moment, and that as such his life may not be representative for the rest of us. But a close reading of Marcel’s work suggests that the presence we feel in being with another person is a gift not altogether different from the narrator’s privileged moments. So though Marcel would not agree with the narrator’s restriction of presence to something experienced in involuntary memory, he can be shown to hold a very similar view on the issue at stake in the present discussion: presence is not altogether under our control, and though we can try to be open to the other, presence cannot be forced. And hence the question is valid still and can be formulated in yet another way: how can we be open to the other when we experience no presence? Marcel recognizes our dependence on the other where presence is concerned, and a few remarks on this point will help answer the questions above. In order to explain the term “influx” in the context of the notion of presence, Marcel writes: “when I say that a being is granted to me as a presence or as a being, this means that I am unable to treat him as if he were merely placed in front of me. . . . The word influx conveys, though in a manner which is far too physical and spatial,

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the kind of interior accretion, of accretion from within, which comes into being as soon as presence is effective.”40 Because presence is a mystery, and any mystery is a problem which “encroaches on its own data,” presence is not something I can treat as merely external. Presence involves me, and for this reason Marcel speaks of an “interior accretion.” To be present to someone does not mean to simply pay attention to what someone is saying, since “the most attentive and the most conscientious listener may give me the impression of not being present. . . . Presence is something which reveals itself immediately and unmistakably in a look, a smile, an intonation or a handshake.”41 Implicit in this description of presence is the fact that this “revelation” may not come, since it does not depend solely on effort. Just like the narrator could not re-erect his grief and his grandmother’s presence which it accompanied after the freshness of the involuntary memory had worn off, mere attentiveness is no guarantee for presence. In fact, when the effort to be present fails, the effort itself only emphasizes absence: I can hear myself talk and become a stranger to myself in the company of someone who is attentive to me but cannot be with me. As a result, I feel more alone in the company of the other than I would if I were by myself. Other examples of this absence-despite-effort are the narrator’s relation to his grandmother, but also his mother’s relation to his grandmother, described below. In previous chapters, the narrator of À la recherche was already shown to be incapable of presence, whether it concerned Albertine or his grandmother, but he holds up his mother as the ideal of someone who does feel real love and real sorrow. The fact that the narrator’s mother cannot look at the picture taken by Saint-Loup without seeing the signs of her mother’s imminent death is offered as proof for the genuine grief his mother experiences; whereas the narrator was able to again crystallize his grandmother, his mother keeps grieving over her death. In Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator compares his own sorrow to his mother’s and remarks: “There is a world of difference between real grief, like my mother’s—which literally crushes the life out of one for years if not for ever, when one had lost he person one loves—and that other kind of grief, transitory when all is said, as mine was to be.” [Il y a bien loin des chagrins véritables comme était celui

40 41

Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 38. Ibid., 40.

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de maman—qui vous ôtent littéralement la vie pour bien longtemps, quelquefois pour toujours, dès qu’on a perdu l’être qu’on aime—à ces autres chagrins, passagers malgré tout comme devait être le mien.]42 His temporary sorrow, while it lasts, helps him understand his mother: “My new-found grief enabled me, when my mother came, to talk to her as though it had existed always.” [Mon chagrin tout nouveau me permit quand ma mère arriva, de lui parler comme s’il avait toujours été le meme.]43 As a result, he remarks, “I realized with horror what she must be suffering.” [Je me rendis compte avec épouvante de ce qu’elle pouvait souffrir.]44 The narrator describes the way in which his mother is faithful to his dead grandmother, and it is in this passage that questions can be raised regarding the nature of this fidelity. Generalizing the process his mother is going through, the narrator explains: Once she [the beloved person] is dead, we hesitate to be different, we begin to admire only what she was, what we ourselves already were, only blended with something else, and what in the future we shall be exclusively. It is in this sense . . . that we may say that death is not in vain, that the dead continue to act upon us. They act upon us even more than the living because, true reality being discoverable only by the mind, being the object of mental process, we acquire a true knowledge only of things that we are obliged to re-create by thought, things that are hidden from us in everyday life. [Une fois qu’elle est morte, nous aurions scrupule à être autre, nous n’admirons plus que ce qu’elle était, ce que nous étions déjà, mais mêlé à autre chose, et ce que nous allons être désormais uniquement. C’est dans ce sens-là . . . qu’on peut dire que la mort n’est pas inutile, que le mort continue à agir sur nous. Il agit même plus qu’un vivant parce que, la véritable réalité n’étant dégagée que par l’esprit, étant l’objet d’une opération spirituelle, nous ne connaissons vraiment que ce que nous sommes obligés de recréer pas la pensée, ce que nous cache la vie de tous les jours.]45

It is exactly this “recreation by thought” that makes the dead loved one into what Marcel calls an effigy. The narrator’s mother adopts all her mother’s habits and interlaces her conversation and her letters with the citations her mother used to be fond of. In addition, she displays what the narrator calls an “idolatrous worship” [une idolâtrie] to the

42 43 44 45

Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, 227; Sodome et Gomorrhe, 165. Ibid., 227; 165. Ibid., 228; 165. Ibid., 229; 166.

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things that she loved such as his grandmother’s bag and her muff. For the narrator’s mother, too, the dead loved one has become an effigy.46 According to Marcel, death is a test of presence, and true fidelity “conquers death” because the dead loved one remains present. As has become clear, the narrator’s grandmother is present to him in his involuntary memory of her, but this presence does not last, nor can it be reconstructed after it has disappeared. Marcel states that presence is like an influx and that this influx is a free gift granted in response to the choice to keep oneself permeable to this influx. For the narrator, however, the order of events appears inversed: he is opened up to the presence of his grandmother in an involuntary memory which overwhelms him, and he then chooses to pursue this recollection and the felt knowledge that is to be attained through it. The problem, then, is that one cannot remain creatively faithful without the free gift of presence, and that this free gift can be altogether absent for long periods of time. The narrator cannot remain open to his grandmother without fresh privileged moments renewing this openness. Marcel, I suggest, demands the impossible by asking us to be creatively faithful to the dead. He recognizes that presence is a mysterious gift, but does not fully acknowledge the fact that oftentimes, this gift does not come. The narrator, on the other hand, can be criticized for his failure to act on this gift when it does come. Courageous vulnerability takes into account this tension and integrates it with the will to believe, describing a difficult yet attainable attitude. It must be recognized that sometimes, or even for a long time, privileged moments do not come, and that one has no choice but to practice the “sedulous waiting” described by Emerson. Marcel makes presence appear too easy, whether it concerns the presence of the dead or the living, and the narrator helps us recognize this presence as a gift and therefore not completely dependent upon us. Courageous vulnerability is the correct response to this gift of presence, a privileged moment of a decidedly moral nature, yet at the same time it is the attitude that prepares us for this gift. When these moments do not come for a long time, it becomes increasingly difficult to be courageously vulnerable to what is only the possibility of presence, but since the courageously vulnerable individual has the will to believe in this possibility, it remains what James calls a live option.

46

Ibid., 229; 166.

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Difficult as the sedulous waiting may be, the courageously vulnerable response to the moral privileged moment will be a real possibility when the moment does come.

Conclusion: The Difficulty of Being Courageously Vulnerable In this chapter, I have engaged the narrator’s pessimistic accounts of love and friendship in À la recherche to draw out the shortcomings of Marcel’s ethics and strengthen my notion of courageous vulnerability which, I have argued, takes into account the problems raised by À la recherche. Furthermore, I have shown that while Marcel’s ethics is at times too optimistic, and the narrator pessimistically rejects Marcellian presence and openness altogether, courageous vulnerability, engaging James’ will to believe, strikes a balance between these two positions. In this final section, I will synthesize the different aspects of courageous vulnerability in a discussion of the notion of appeal, prominent in both Marcel’s work and À la recherche. The appeal described by Marcel is explicitly moral and is closely connected to the notion of presence. In what follows, I will discuss this kind of appeal and compare it to the appeal experienced by the narrator. This comparison will then lead into a final account of the explicitly ethical attitude of courageous vulnerability. In Creative Fidelity, Marcel observes that it can be very difficult to truly sympathize with someone else’s suffering. If someone is not present to me, I do not succeed in summoning forth the sympathy which is entreated. . . . I can only utter certain formulas I have in mind which are part of my repertory and seem to suit the present circumstances; perhaps I even find it possible to give them a sympathetic intonation, but in any case I am only reading something out of a catalogue.47

It is through presence alone that the other person’s suffering is no longer alien to me. In Concrete Approaches, Marcel already remarked that “to be incapable of presence is to be in some manner not only occupied but encumbered with one’s own self.”48 In Creative Fidelity, Marcel again addresses this issue and adds that “self-obsession may

47 48

Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 50. Marcel, “On the Ontological Mystery,” 42.

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make it impossible for me to be present,” and suggests that the appeal of another person “may sometimes be the only way out” of this state. “Alone, one cannot succeed in this, but the presence of the other person accomplishes this miracle, provided one gives one’s consent to it and does not treat it as a simple intrusion—but as a reality.” And Marcel concludes: “appeal . . . mysteriously restores us to ourselves.”49 In Chapter One, the narrator of À la recherche was shown to attach great importance to the notion of appeal as well, though for him the appeal did not come from a person but from “a hidden reality” covered up by a couvercle. The effect of this appeal, however, was the same: he felt it restored him to himself in a privileged moment. Again the issue which was already shown to complicate Marcel’s discussion of presence and creative fidelity deserves our attention. An appeal can restore us to ourselves, but, as both the narrator and Marcel suggest, there first has to be an appeal for us to respond to and the occurrence of this appeal is not under our control. If courageous vulnerability is to be a more complete ethical attitude than creative fidelity, it must take into account this difficulty. The issue is brought out forcefully by another one of the narrator’s dreams. In La prisonnière, the volume following Sodome et Gomorrhe, the narrator again dreams of his grandmother: When I fell asleep in a certain way I used to wake up shivering, thinking . . . that my grandmother (of whom I no longer ever thought) was hurt because I had mocked her that day at Balbec when, in the belief that she was about to die, she had wished me to have a photograph of her. At once, although I was awake, I felt that I must go and explain to her that she had misunderstood me. But already my bodily warmth was returning. . . . My grandmother was so far away that she no longer made my heart ache. [Quand je m’endormais d’une certaine façon, je me réveillais grelottant, croyant . . . que ma grand-mère (à qui je ne pensais plus jamais) souffrait parce que je m’étais moqué d’elle le jour où à Balbec, croyant mourir, elle avait voulu que j’eusse une photographie d’elle. Vite, bien que réveillé, je voulais aller lui expliquer qu’elle ne m’avait pas compris. Mais déjà je me réchauffais. . . . Ma grand-mère [était] si éloignée de moi qu’elle ne faisait plus souffrir mon cœur.]50

49 50

Marcel, Creative Fidelity, 51. Proust, The Captive, 158; La prisonnière, 631.

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This passage again illustrates that the narrator’s grandmother is no longer present to him. When, long after her death, he learned of his grandmother’s illness that day in Balbec, he had been very upset, but now his grandmother is “far away” and he no longer grieves over her. The same fate awaits Albertine, who dies and eventually becomes a matter of indifference to the narrator. In La fugitive, the narrator talks about the egoism of love: “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.” [Nous les retouchons sans cesse au gré de nos désirs et de nos craintes, nous ne les séparons pas de nous, ils ne sont qu’un lieu immense et vague où extérioriser nos tendresses.] And he continues: “where I had been wrong was perhaps in not making a greater effort to know Albertine in herself ” [ç’avait peut-être été mon tort de ne pas chercher davantage à connaître Albertine en elle-même].51 The same is true, of course, of his relation to his grandmother: while she was alive, he made no great effort to “know her in herself ” and he only realizes and regrets this after her death. Reflecting on Albertine’s death, the narrator remarks: It seemed to me indeed, in the hours when I suffered least, that I had somehow benefited from her death, for a woman is of greater utility to our life if, instead of being an element of happiness in it, she is an instrument of suffering, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths which she reveals to us by causing us to suffer. [Il me semblait en effet dans les heures où je souffrais le moins, que je bénéficiais en quelque sorte de sa mort, car une femme est d’une plus grande utilité pour notre vie, si elle y est, au lieu d’un élément de bonheur, un instrument de chagrin, et il n’y en a pas une seule dont la possession soit aussi précieuse que celle des vérités qu’elle nous découvre en nous faisant souffrir.]52

Even though the narrator may well be giving an exaggerated account of his opinion in this excerpt, the message is clear and representative of his overall attitude: what matters most to the narrator is not presence, but truth, even if it is a kind of truth which, according to him, can only be found through suffering. Presence and creative fidelity are

51 52

Proust, The Fugitive, 699; La fugitive, 77. Ibid., 669; 78.

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impossible, and the best one can do is to use one’s experiences of love to reach certain insights. The deaths of Albertine and his grandmother feel to the narrator as a “double murder” [un double assassinat]:53 “Thus it seemed to me that, by my entirely selfish love, I had allowed Albertine to die just as I had murdered my grandmother.” [Ainsi il me semblait que par ma tendresse uniquement égoïste j’avais laissé mourir Albertine comme auparavant j’avais assassiné ma grand-mère.]54 Both lives would perhaps have been longer without him, and now that both women have passed away, they cannot even make him suffer anymore, let alone make him love them: they no longer make his heart ache. The narrator knows that he could have made a “greater effort to know Albertine in herself ” and he is aware of the selfish nature of his love for both her and his grandmother. In Marcel’s words, the narrator knows that he was not present to them, and that he cannot somehow create a sense of presence now that they are dead. While his grandmother and Albertine were alive, the narrator did not, in his own words “separate them from himself ” and used them as an area in which to “exteriorize his own emotions.” Death can perhaps feature as a test of presence, but in the case on the narrator death only further stimulates his tendency to make his loved ones into effigies. They become part of his work of art, but they remain absent from him in the Marcellian sense, except for their appearance in a few involuntary memories. This leads the discussion back to the narrator’s will to believe and his tendency to act only on the felt knowledge of his primarily aesthetic privileged moments. In Chapter One, attention was drawn to the fact that in Le temps retrouvé, the final volume of À la recherche du temps perdu, no reference is made to the so-called “middle volumes.” This leads many readers of Proust, among whom Deleuze, to regard Sodome et Gomorrhe, La prisonnière, and La fugitive, as transitory volumes where the narrator is being prepared for the superior lessons he will learn in Le temps retrouvé. The last volume centers around the value of art as the ultimate source of truth, and the narrator’s resolve to finally become a writer and use his own life as his material. In order to make sense of the difference in focus between the “middle volumes” and the last one, it must be kept in mind that for the narrator, aesthetic and ethical

53 54

Ibid., 670; 78. Ibid., 676; 83.

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sensitivity are one. The same kind of openness that allows the narrator to enjoy a painting by Elstir or the sight of a chicken on the roof of a shed after a rain shower enables him to observe and analyze his relationship with Albertine. Of interest here is the fact that, in the end, it is the aesthetic side of this sensitivity that he chooses to act on by writing his book. He will create a work of art and beautifully convey, among other things, the truths which he has learned through suffering. This, however, only emphasizes his inability to become a better moral agent. The narrator writes about his relation to Albertine in great detail, even recognizes that he perhaps should have tried to know her better, but when he visits the Guermantes party at the very end of À la recherche, he is still set on finding nice young girls to amuse him whenever he needs a break from his writing. He does not want friends, he does not wish for presence; he just wants to focus on his artistic project and have beautiful girls available so that he, once again, can enjoy the presence of a “thing of beauty,” like the piece of flora or fauna which Albertine once was for him. He remarks that what is lasting is not the individual woman, but the same love felt for a series of different women. His love for Albertine was already inscribed in his love for Gilberte and he observes that “nothing has the power to survive unless it can become general” [rien ne peut durer qu’en devenant général]. In the same way, dead loved ones eventually become mere models for the writer.55 The narrator will conceptualize his particular loves in order to both escape the suffering and make others share in it.56 His work of art will help his readers recognize in their own lives what has happened in his, and as such his book will function as an optical instrument. Chapter Two showed the narrator’s attitude of aesthetic sensitivity as a model for the explicitly ethical attitude I have called courageous vulnerability. I have argued in this chapter that it is because the narrator does not believe that love, presence, and creative fidelity are possible that he chooses to pursue art rather than change his actions towards other people. The model stands, but the narrator himself has too pessimistic a view on human relations to pursue its ethical implications. Gabriel Marcel and William James, on the other hand, offer hopeful philosophies that have been used to pursue the ethical implications

55 56

Proust, Time Regained, 314; Le temps retrouvé, 484. Ibid., 315; 485.

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of À la recherche. Marcel has already been shown to take a rather optimistic stand on what he calls presence, and Proust’s optical instrument offered a view on the matter which questioned the very possibility of presence, both before and after death. Courageous vulnerability, analogous to the narrator’s attitude but explicitly ethical, takes into account this difficulty, and differs from creative fidelity in its recognition of our inability to be open if there is nothing to be open to. One must be vulnerable to privileged moments, and one must be courageous in pursuing the felt knowledge that can be gained from them, but creative fidelity does not do justice to the difficult effort this requires. William James is of help here, both with his account of mystical experience and his theory of the will to believe. Mystical experiences cannot be called forth, and as such bear a resemblance to the presence Marcel describes as an influx. It serves to recall James’ reference to Tolstoy, who suffered from anhedonia and could not escape the feeling of a complete lack of zest. James pointed out that there is no recipe for overcoming anhedonia, even though, as I suggested, it probably helps to keep the sentiment of rationality within its proper boundaries. In Marcel’s words: a world centered around problems and functions does not allow for mystery, and is permeated by a sense of “suffocating sadness.” In applying James’ will to believe to À la recherche, I argued that belief in the truth of privileged moments makes a difference pragmatically, and that therefore the difference between factual and felt knowledge is significant. Since faith in a fact can help bring about a fact’s existence, the insights gained from privileged moments can make a difference in the life of the narrator. The most obvious difference consists in the narrator’s resolution to write a book. Considering again the knowledge the narrator claims he has gained in suffering over a woman, it is all the more striking that this knowledge does not affect the narrator’s interactions with others but “merely” becomes part of his work of art. The reader of À la recherche is invited to recognize these truths and see them at work in his or her own life, but the narrator for one does not give any evidence of a change in his actions as a result of the revelation of these truths. The reason, of course, is that for the narrator, the truths reveal the impossibility of love in the Marcellian sense, of presence and of creative fidelity: “we are indeed alone.” If this is the case, then what else is there to do for the narrator than to focus on art, where truth is not only discovered but put into practice as well? The narrator has no use for his ethical discoveries because he believes that they constitute a dead end.

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With help from Marcel and James, the narrator’s attitude can nevertheless be used as a model for the ethical disposition of courageous vulnerability. The advantage of this approach lies in the combination of the phenomenologically detailed yet pessimistic view proposed in À la recherche with the philosophies of James and Marcel. Where Marcel makes his creative fidelity look too easy, Proust offers his optical instrument to correct this notion and to do justice to the problems involved in presence. James shows that the insights gained from privileged moments make a difference, not only in the narrator’s choice to become a writer, but also, on a more general level, in the choice one has to act morally. This option is not pursued by the narrator because he does not believe in the possibility of “real” love etcetera, but this, James shows us, is once again a situation in which faith in a fact creates the fact: love is impossible because the narrator thinks, and therefore acts, as if it is impossible. About Albertine, the narrator remarks: “A person has no need of sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved. Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.” [Il n’y a pas besoin de sincérité ni même d’adresse dans le mensogne, pour être aimé. J’appelle ici amour une torture réciproque.]57 The object of love is arbitrary and is soon crystallized beyond recognition; having decided that love is strongest when it involves suffering, the narrator lives in accordance with this conclusion and makes the world fit his expectations. When, as a young boy, he loved Gilberte, this love came with pain and jealousy; when, later, he loves Mme de Guermantes and Albertine, suffering again marks his feelings towards them because he has decided that this is the nature of love. In line with James, I propose that the other option, i.e. love in the Marcellian sense, is in fact possible, but that once again the will to believe is essential in making this possibility a reality. Courageous vulnerability has already been described as an attitude which does justice to the difficulty overlooked by Marcel, and now this Jamesian aspect can be added to this description: courageous vulnerability encompasses the will to believe that one can change one’s actions, and that this change in turn can help make love and presence a possibility. In order to avoid the risk of sounding too optimistic in making this claim, and to show that the Marcellian optimism which I criticized before is not restored through James’ theory, I will close this chapter

57

Proust, The Captive, 137; La prisonnière, 617.

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with a reference to James’ notion of the “sick soul.” In the Varieties, James opposes the sick soul to the healthy mind, stating that “healthymindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine,” because it does not account for the suffering which is a “genuine portion of reality.” James continues that the suffering and pain which we experience may be “the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”58 James is referring to this same inadequacy in “What Makes a Life Significant,” where he remarks: “with many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism which makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist.”59 Since, according to James, everything experienced is worth investigating and deserves our attention, “systematic healthy-mindedness, failing as it does to accord to sorrow, pain, and death any positive and active attention whatever, is formally less complete than systems that try at least to include these elements in their scope.”60 Courageous vulnerability, I have argued, is an ethical attitude which includes sorrow and pain in its scope and does justice to these elements without giving up the will to believe.

58 59 60

James, Varieties, 163. James, “What Makes a Life Significant,” 33. James, Varieties, 165.

EPILOGUE

Chapter Six offered a detailed synthesis of the themes related to the notion of courageous vulnerability, as well as a conclusion to my project as a whole. Since it has been my aim in this work to develop an ethical notion, it serves to touch on the wider context within which I think this notion should be understood. This epilogue merely aims to offer a brief overview of the themes discussed, and to suggest that my project can be situated in the context of virtue ethics broadly construed. I have argued that in order to do justice to the plurality found in À la recherche, one must pay attention to both the madeleine soaked in tea and the untying of the boots, that is, to both the celebration of joyful recollection, truth, and art in the Ouverture and Le temps retrouvé and to what Bowie calls the “vein of disturbing moral speculation” in the “eclipsed” middle volumes of the work. Every privileged moment appeals to the narrator to investigate, but the moral nature of this appeal can easily be overlooked if one regards only the series of joyful involuntary memories in Le temps retrouvé. The privileged moment takes on a specifically moral character when the felt knowledge at stake in this moment concerns a person and I pointed to the narrator’s recollection of his grandmother as the most salient example of this phenomenon. The felt knowledge which the narrator gains from this moment is difficult to accept because it forces him to reconsider his past actions: he recognizes that he hurt his grandmother for entirely selfish and petty reasons, and this realization is all the more painful because he cannot make amends. I also pointed out that the narrator wants his book to serve as an optical instrument for his reader, enabling the reader to recognize what I have called privileged moments in his or her own life. I now suggest that the verifiability of the felt knowledge one senses within Proust’s work stems from the thickly descriptive accounts of the narrator. It is my claim that, as Lorraine Code would put it, the narrator’s descriptions of love and of privileged moments “ring true,”1 even for those readers of À la recherche who hold that the

1

Code, Epistemic Responsibility, 212.

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narrator’s tendency to analyze just about everything is a bit neurotic, or at least exaggerated. Though the title À la recherche du temps perdu indicates that Proust’s narrator is in search of lost time, it can be argued that he is in fact also in search of truth. Proust himself wrote the following in a letter to his friend Jacques Rivière: “J’ai trouvé plus probe et plus délicat comme artiste de ne pas annoncer que c’était justement à la recherche de la Vérité que je partais, ni en quoi elle consistait pour moi.”2 What is at stake in a privileged moment, the narrator has shown us time and time again, is the truth. In a privileged moment, “we feel . . . the joy of rediscovering what is real” [nous sentons la joie du réel retrouvé].3 The truth regained in an involuntary memory is marked by the certitude and authority of felt knowledge. In James’ words: “Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve.”4 This “click” is what the narrator experiences in his privileged moments, which present themselves as opportunities to “search for lost truth.” To pursue this truth and to achieve felt knowledge, the narrator needs to be courageously vulnerable, especially when the felt knowledge at stake concerns a person. Early in À la recherche the narrator says of his favorite author Bergotte that certain morceaux in his works revealed to him things the beauty of which had so far been hidden from him. Proust’s reader, I argue, can have the same experience of revelation. The thick narrative communicates the narrator’s experience to the reader and his insights are described in such a way that the latter cannot but think of similar experiences in his or her own life. This kind of participatory reading helps discern things which were previously hidden and so increases our knowledge. However, the narrator’s experience can only serve to increase the reader’s knowledge if the reader is herself receptive. The second-hand experience offered by À la recherche of a privileged moment requires an openness from the reader as well, be it, perhaps, an easier kind of openness than the openness required of the narrator in the pursuit of felt knowledge. Just like the narrator has to be courageous in pursuing the core of the involuntary memory of

2 3 4

Marcel Proust, Choix de lettres, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1965), 198. Proust, Time Regained, 274; Le temps retrouvé, 458. James, “The Will to Believe,” 13.

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his grandmother, the reader has to have the courage to not only follow the narrator but also take the next step and recognize instances of involuntary memory in his or her own life. The second-hand experience of involuntary memory can give one insight into the process and truth-conduciveness of privileged moments and make one pursue one’s own involuntary memories. The thick narrative used by Proust shows a way of obtaining knowledge from what may seem mere vague and inexplicable feelings. Over the course of the past six chapters, I have engaged the narrator’s discoveries and insights in a project which explores the ethical ramifications of literature through philosophy. In Le côté de Guermantes, the narrator remarks how an unfamiliar work of art shows us new connections and associations which at first do not make sense to us.5 Art is presented as a “treatment” which is initially unpleasant but ultimately results in a “renewal of the world.”6 The narrator of À la recherche lets us share in his discovery of the privileged moment and so “renews” a part of the world as we experience it. The philosophies of Bergson, James, and Marcel help understand this renewal and offer the opportunity for what Marcel calls secondary reflection. The integration of their philosophies with a sustained close reading of À la recherche ensures that this secondary reflection does not lose touch with experience. This approach has allowed me to make these philosophies converge in a very concrete description of the attitude of courageous vulnerability. In addition, À la recherche has served as a critique of certain aspects of Marcel’s ethics, especially his notion of creative fidelity. Conversely, the combination of philosophy and literature allowed me to criticize the narrator’s lack of openness to other people, and his failure to “will to believe” in the possibility of intersubjectivity. Chapter Two and Chapter Six in particular showed that the narrator is the Bergsonian artist par excellence, but that his preference of the aesthetic over the ethical prevents him from being fully courageously vulnerable. Sensitive though he may be to individuality and difference, the narrator does not change his actions towards others as a result. He does, however, use his insights to write a book. In terms of Chapter Three, the narrator has an aesthetic sensitivity to vagueness and mystery, but fails to respect the same in his relations to other people.

5 6

Proust, The Guermantes Way, 444; Le côté de Guermantes, 322. Ibid., 445; 323.

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A person is always a mystery, and this is exactly what the narrator finds very difficult to accept, whether it concerns his relation to his grandmother or his desire to possess Albertine. Chapter Three investigated from a pragmatic perspective the kind of knowledge which I have called felt knowledge, arguing that the truth found in a privileged moment can “make a difference” if, and this issue is further developed in Chapter Five, one is prepared to believe-before-evidence. Chapter Three also prepared the way for the explicitly ethical discussion of these issues in Chapters Four and Six and investigated a certain kind of situation in which mystery and vagueness are absent. This negative approach helped understand the significance of the privileged moment through an exploration of anhedonia, the feeling which marks life in what Marcel calls a “broken world.” Chapter Four continued this negative approach, focusing on a “problematic” relationship as one aspect of this broken world. The narrator crystallizes Albertine and seeks to “have” her completely, not only through what Marcel calls l’avoir possession (i.e., the narrator locks her up in his house) but also through l’avoir implication (i.e., the narrator wants to know everything she thinks, does, has done, and wishes to do). Chapter Four thus showed one way in which mystery and vagueness can be lacking in a relationship between two people. The narrator seeks to dispel the mystery with which Albertine as a person presents him, but in reducing her to a set of problems he turns her into a tiresome prisoner. Chapter Five further developed the idea that there are certain truths, the truth of felt knowledge being one of them, in which one has the right to believe before one has gathered sufficient “objective” evidence. In fact, these truths escape objective evidence and can never be proven in a way that would satisfy the intellectualists criticized by James. To be more precise, we are dealing here with truths which may only come into existence if one believes in them before one can be absolutely certain about them. To use James’ language: privileged moments as mystical experiences “break down the authority or the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness. . . . They open out the possibility of other orders of truth.”7 I have argued that by taking seriously this other order of truth, we allow for a “wider world of meanings” and further approach “the final fullness of the truth.”8 The narrator of À la

7 8

James, Varieties, 423. Ibid., 428.

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recherche believes it is his vocation to be a writer, but has no objective evidence that he really has this potential. It is only by committing to his book project that the vocation becomes a reality. Conversely, the narrator does not really believe in the possibility of love and friendship as described by Marcel. As a result, love and friendship are indeed impossible for him. The notion of courageous vulnerability takes into account the difficulty of being open to the other but also offers an alternative to the narrator’s pessimistic outlook. It prescribes an attitude which is difficult to maintain, but possible nevertheless, as long as one has the will to believe. The normative nature of this notion makes it fit in with the tradition of virtue ethics, and the attitude of courageous vulnerability may be regarded as an attitude appropriate to the virtuous person. Furthermore, my project has in common with virtue ethics the emphasis placed on the importance of context: as I pointed out in Chapter Six, courageous vulnerability should be regarded as the appropriate response to something which is not entirely under our control, be it a privileged moment or the presence of another person. I criticized Marcel for demanding that we be creatively faithful to the dead; we can try to be open to them and respect the people they were, but oftentimes we may not be able to feel their presence. As a result, we do not experience anything to which we can be open. Courageous vulnerability thus fits not only with the neo-Aristotelian branch of virtue ethics proposed by Hursthouse, but also with the pluralistic theory developed by Christine Swanton who argues that “a virtue is defined . . . as a disposition to respond to or acknowledge, in an excellent (or good enough) way, items in the field of a virtue (whether those items are people, objects, situations, inner states, or actions).”9 Applied to my argument, this means that courageous vulnerability is a disposition to acknowledge and to respond to privileged moments in whatever way they may come, but especially when they concern people. The narrator of À la recherche, for instance, acknowledges the presence of his grandmother in an involuntary memory, but ultimately fails to respond to this “item in the field of virtue” because he does not change his actions towards the people whom he loves and who are still alive. Again it must be noted that if a virtue is a “disposition of responsiveness to items in the world,” these items have to in fact be

9

Christine Swanton, Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1.

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there, in the world and experienced, if we are to respond to them.10 More concretely, one can only gain felt knowledge from a privileged moment and then do something with this knowledge if one experiences a privileged moment first. Swanton’s remark that “virtue is a state of appropriate responsiveness to, or acknowledgment of, what I call ‘the demands of the world’” is particularly relevant to my argument because, as I discussed in Chapter One, the narrator experiences his privileged moments as so many appeals to him to uncover what is hidden by a couvercle.11 The narrator experiences each of these appeals as a moral demand, but in the end he chooses to respond to and act on those appeals which I classified as primarily aesthetic. The appropriate responsiveness to the specifically moral “demands of the world” he experiences in, for instance, the involuntary recollection of his grandmother, is lacking. The narrator is a Bergsonian artist, but he is not a courageously vulnerable person. In “The Sentiment of Rationality,” James remarks that if empiricism will ever be accepted as the ultimate philosophy, existence “will be a brute fact to which as a whole the emotion of ontologic wonder shall rightfully cleave, but remain eternally unsatisfied. . . . Wonderfulness or mysteriousness will be an essential attribute of the nature of things.”12 Our privileged moments, I have argued, are one way in which we can experience, with “ontologic wonder,” what Marcel calls the mysterious. I have shown how these moments are a part of the “wonderfulness or mysteriousness” of experience, and argued that courageous vulnerability is the appropriate response to these moments.

10 11 12

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 8. James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 75.

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INDEX

absence, 135–37, 142, 208, 209 the absolute, 55–56, 55n19 abstraction, 57 Adorno, Theodor, Notes to Literature, 39 aesthetics, 125. See also art; beauty ethics and, 80–81, 83, 216, 233, 239–40 (see also courageous vulnerability) affective vulnerability, 39n74. See also courageous vulnerability anhedonia, 16, 27, 84, 104, 109n74, 124–25, 127, 188–89, 233, 240 in À la recherche, 104–5, 109, 113–18 dispelled by uneven paving stones, 172–76 the sentiment of rationality and, 104–13 anxiety, 136–37, 138 appeal, 228–29 Aristotle, 6 art, 25–26n41, 26–27, 72n91, 218, 239. See also aesthetics in À la recherche, 73–74 involuntary memory and, 11–12 as revelation, 65–66, 65n59 truth and, 50, 52 the artist. See the Bergsonian artist l’avoir. See l’avoir-implication; l’avoir-possession; having l’avoir-implication, 147, 156–63, 167, 212, 240 l’avoir-possession, 147–48n42, 147–56, 240 Barnard, George William, 172, 179 Exploring Unseen Worlds, 168, 170 “Mystical Assessments,” 170–71n12, 171, 171n15 beauty, 140–43, 232, 238–39. See also aesthetics Beckett, Samuel, 179 Proust, 4 Bergson, Henri, 8, 10, 24n36, 27, 44, 47, 50–58, 90, 125, 218–19. See also Bergson, Henri, works of; the Bergsonian artist on the absolute, 55–56, 55n19

aesthetics of, 8, 54n15, 57, 59–67, 65n59, 67–68, 74, 218 on concepts, 97, 177 on detachment, 66n65 direct reference to in À la recherche, 63–64 on la durée, 52, 61–62, 61n47, 74–75, 85 on experience, 67–71 on habit, 218 on intellect, 50–59, 58n32, 72, 84–85, 87–88, 156, 157 on intuition, 50–59, 55n19, 60, 60n40, 74–75, 88, 91, 122 James and, 83, 84–89, 85n5 on knowledge, 156 on language, 66–71, 68n73, 91, 106, 222 Marcel and, 218–19 on the novel, 54–55 on openness, 218 on perception, 60–61, 66n65 on reality, 84–85 on truth, 72 Bergson, Henri, works of The Creative Mind, 57–58, 58n32, 59–60, 60n40, 68 L’évolution créatrice, 62 introduction to James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, 84 An Introduction to Metaphysics, 54 Laughter, 60–61 “On the Pragmatism of William James. Truth and Reality,” 84 Time and Free Will, 63, 65, 68n74 the Bergsonian artist, 8, 47, 49–81, 101, 216, 218, 239–40, 242 in À la recherche, 49–81 courageous vulnerability and, 49–81, 83, 218 language and, 93 the task of, 59–67 the body, 26n24 boredom, 114, 135–36 Bowie, Malcolm, 24, 237 “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge,” 144 Proust Among the Stars, 11–12, 11n1, 30

248

index

Breeur, Roland, Vrijheid en bewustzijn (Freedom in Consciousness), 53 certainty, 24–27, 40, 51–52, 123. See also knowledge Champigny, Robert, 62 characterization, 156–57 Clifford, William Kingdon, 195 Code, Lorraine, 7, 44–47, 45n84, 46n86, 237–38 concepts, 74–75, 86–88, 91–92, 96–98, 177 courageous vulnerability, 2, 5–6, 8–9, 49–81, 85, 94–95, 174, 227–29, 234. See also openness in À la recherche, 238–39, 242 the Bergsonian artist and, 49–81, 83, 218 difficulty of, 205–36 as an epistemological issue, 6–7 importance of, 127–28 intersubjectivity and, 165 involuntary memory and, 47 lack of, 127–28 openness and, 241 preliminary remarks, 71–77 presence and, 227 privileged moments and, 74–76, 227–28, 233 the will to believe and, 167–68, 228, 234, 235 at work, 77–80 couvercles, 28–32, 37, 85, 94, 109, 158, 229, 242 courageous vulnerability and, 50, 50n1, 68, 75, 77–78 felt knowledge and, 40–41 the privileged moment and, 167, 170–71n12, 174, 176, 179, 181, 184–85, 188, 196 creative fidelity, 79, 123–24, 126, 165, 205–6, 215–16, 229–31, 233–34. See also fidelity in À la recherche, 223–24, 232 critique of, 218–27 death and, 227, 241 love as the desire for, 223–24 crystallization, 167, 205, 213, 220–23. See also imagination in À la recherche, 225, 234, 240 negative effects of, 132–34 as poetical action, 140–43 the tragedy of having and, 127–66

death, 205, 206–13, 215, 218 in À la recherche, 206–13, 216, 220–22, 225–27, 230–31 fidelity and, 227, 241 love and, 216 memory and, 211–12 presence and, 227, 231 déjà vu, 181 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 26, 34, 36–37, 231 Bergsonism, 53, 54, 56, 61–62, 86 Proust and Signs, 12, 20–24, 21n27, 37–39, 115, 130 description, 55–56. See also thick description De Sénacour, Étienne Pivert, Obermann, 188, 189 desire, 124, 136–37, 143–47, 154–56 despair, 113–14, 122–25 detachment, 66n65 le devenir, 62 the divine, 169–70 duration, 85. See also la durée la durée, 52, 61–62, 61n47, 74–75, 85 effigies, 213, 218–27, 231 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 94–95, 188, 227 empiricism, 8, 97, 97n45, 197–98 engagement, 150, 164–65. See also intersubjectivity epistemic responsibility, 44–47, 45n84, 46n86. See also knowledge epistemology, 6–7. See also epistemic responsibility; knowledge ethics aesthetics and, 80–81, 83, 216, 233, 239–40 (see also courageous vulnerability) in À la recherche, 216–17, 231–33, 241–42 intersubjectivity and, 164–65 involuntary memory and, 5–7 virtue ethics, 5–6, 241 eudaimonia, 6 evil, 119–21 l’exigence ontologique, 118–20 existential philosophy, 56–57 experience, the freshness of, 67–71 extra-temporality, 17, 17n16, 24, 24n36, 33, 186–87 faith, 196, 201–2, 209, 214–15. See also the will to believe faithfulness. See fidelity

index felt knowledge, 2, 5–8, 11–47, 95–96, 206, 233 in À la recherche, 80, 128, 237, 238–39 as an epistemological issue, 6–7 lack of, 127 privileged moments and, 240, 242 fidelity, 206–12, 212n17, 213, 223–24 in À la recherche, 206–13, 217, 223–24, 266 creative (see creative fidelity) death and, 227 memory and, 211–12 presence and, 218–27 time and, 212 Fisher, Philip, 40, 75–76, 76n101 Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences, 25–26, 25–26n41, 26n43 friendship, 162–63, 206, 214, 217, 224, 228, 241. See also love Gavin, William, 68n74 The Reinstatement of the Vague, 89, 91, 92–93, 92n31, 92n32, 95, 177n23 grief, 225–26. See also death; sorrow guilt, 50, 83 habit, 106, 125, 137, 216, 218 ethical importance of, 164 love and the role of, 137–40 presence and, 164 privileged moments and, 103–4 having, 134–36, 142, 164. See also l’avoir-implication; l’avoir-possession; possession the phenomenology of, 8, 26n24, 121–22, 124, 130, 135, 144–45, 147–53, 167, 209 the tragedy of, 147–53 Heidegger, Martin Being and Time, 60n39, 67n68, 114n91 “What is Metaphysics?” 114, 114n91 hope, 122–25, 126 Hulme, T.E., 90 “Bergson’s Theory of Art,” 54–55, 54n15, 57, 59, 64–66, 68, 106–7 on metaphors, 59 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 241 On Virtue Ethics, 5–6

249

ideals, 190 imagination, 135, 143, 179, 213. See also crystallization love and, 128–30, 131–35 privileged moments of the, 19–24, 25n37 intellect, 50–58, 72, 84–88, 156–57, 199–200, 199n84. See also intellectualism; knowledge; rationality intellectualism, 194–95, 200–201, 214–15, 240 intersubjectivity, 130, 150, 159–60, 168, 203, 209, 213–14. See also otherness in À la recherche, 223–24, 239–40 ethical importance of, 164–65 presence and, 165 the will to believe and, 206 intuition, 50–58, 60, 60n40, 74–75, 88, 91, 122 involuntary memory, 8, 40n77, 103, 168, 170–71n12, 224. See also privileged moments affective vulnerability and, 39n74 in À la recherche, 27n46, 69–70, 79–80, 83, 175–76, 178–79, 184–87, 190–91, 205, 209–11, 217, 219–23, 225, 227, 238–39, 241 art and, 11–12 characteristics of, 2 courageous vulnerability and, 47, 75–76 distinguished from voluntary memory, 103–4, 107–8 epistemological implications of, 6–7 ethical implications of, 6–7 irrationality and, 107–8 joy and, 32–40 painful, 41–42 privileged moments and, 1–2, 22–23, 25n37, 35 sensations and, 12–19 sorrow and, 32–40 strenuous pursuit of, 182–87 time and, 33–34 truth and, 14n6 wonder and, 26 irrationality, 107–8, 112 James, William, 8–10, 16, 24n36, 27, 46–47, 51–53, 51n5, 57, 80–81, 106, 125, 127, 175, 224, 234, 239. See also James, William, works of on anhedonia, 104–13, 188, 189, 233

250

index

Bergson and, 83, 84–89, 85n5 on concepts, 86–88, 91–92, 96–97, 98, 177 on courageous vulnerability, 85 on déjà vu, 181 on the divine, 169–70 on empiricism, 97, 97n45, 197–98 on the function of the philosopher, 9–10 on ideals, 190 on intellect, 84–85, 86–88, 199–200, 199n84 on intellectualism, 194–95, 200–201, 214–15, 240 on intersubjectivity, 164–65 on knowledge, 86–88, 88n23, 91–92, 95, 156, 196–200, 199n84, 214–15 on language, 91–94, 104 on live and dead hypotheses, 191–94, 198–200, 215–16, 217, 227 on meaning, 95–104, 189–90 mystery and, 128 on mystical experience, 51–52, 66, 123, 165, 168–70, 170–71n12, 171–72, 171n15, 174–75, 176–82, 188–89, 191–202, 233 the mystical ladder and, 179–82, 180n29 openness and, 128 optimism of, 126, 232–33 otherness and, 128 on perception, 86 pragmatism and, 96–104, 97n45, 125 on presence, 213–17 privileged moments and, 101–4, 179–82, 234 on rationality, 104–13, 157 on reality, 84–85, 86–88, 91–93, 98, 102–3, 104 on religion, 168–72, 170–71n12 on sensations, 86 the sentiment of rationality and, 104–13 on the “sick soul,” 235 on the strenuous mood, 182–84 on suffering, 235 on truth, 94–104, 171–72, 195–202, 199n84 on vagueness, 92–93, 123 on the will to believe, 167–68, 205–6, 213–17, 228, 233 on zest, 187–88, 189, 215, 233 James, William, works of “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” 173, 188–89

“Address at the Emerson Centenary in Concord,” 94, 94n37 “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism,” 84 “Faith and the Right to Believe,” 214–15 “The Meaning of Truth,” 97 “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” 182–83, 187–88, 189 A Pluralistic Universe, 84, 85n5, 87n14 Pragmatism, 86, 91–92, 102–3 “The Sentiment of Rationality,” 104, 242 The Varieties of Religious Experience, 84, 86–87, 89, 96, 108, 114, 168–70, 174, 176–80, 188, 235 “What Makes a Life Significant,” 189–90, 235 “The Will to Believe,” 87n15, 102, 123, 174, 179, 191–202, 214 jealousy, 143–47, 151, 167. See also possession Jephcott, E.F.N., 12, 19, 22, 24, 24n36, 25–32, 25n37, 34, 40–41, 58, 61n47, 64n58, 66n63, 68–69, 70, 181 Proust and Rilke: The Literature of Expanded Consciousness, 11 Jones, Peter, 27n46, 68, 70–71 Philosophy and the Novel, 35, 40n77, 66n65, 68n73, 71, 72n91 joy, 14–17, 26, 28–40, 30, 118 Kingsley, Charles, 181–82 knowledge, 27n46, 50, 86–88, 88n23, 91–92, 144–45, 156–57, 160, 196–200, 199n84, 214–15, 233. See also certainty; epistemic responsibility; epistemology in À la recherche, 197 epistemic responsibility, 44–47, 45n84, 46n86 felt (see felt knowledge) possession and, 159–60 Kristeva, Julia, 23n35 language, 66–67, 68n73, 106, 125 in À la recherche, 67–68, 69–70, 89–91 the Bergsonian artist and, 93 inadequacy to express individual feelings, 44 metaphors, 59, 70, 70n80 poetic, 222 the problem of, 67–71

index reality and, 89, 91–93, 92n31, 104 truth and, 94 vagueness and, 89–96, 92n32 laziness, 30, 41, 182, 183, 187, 192, 217 Levinas, Emmanuel, 111n83, 114n91 literature, 52 philosophy and, 7n1, 9 love, 150, 164–65, 205–6, 214, 218–19, 234 in À la recherche, 162–63, 167, 216–17, 219, 223–24, 228, 230–34, 237–38, 241–42 as a poetical action, 140–43 as creative fidelity, 223–24 crystallization and, 128–29 death and, 205, 216 desire and, 136–37 habit and, 137–40 imagination and, 128–30, 131–35 as intersubjectivity, 150 Marcellian, 224, 233 openness and, 165 as participation, 150 possession and, 136–37, 143–47, 150 as presence, 137, 150 regained in absence, 135–37 Stendhal on, 128–29 suffering and, 128 the madeleine, 1, 2, 11, 15–18, 20–21, 32, 237 Magee, Bryan, 7n1 Marcel, Gabriel, 8–10, 26n24, 47, 52–53, 56–57, 66, 75, 79–80, 83–84, 104, 114n91, 122–23, 125, 127, 181, 208, 234. See also Marcel, Gabriel, works of on absence, 137 on abstraction, 57 on artistic activity, 218 on l’avoir-implication, 147, 156–57, 160–61, 167, 212, 240 on l’avoir-possession, 147–48n42, 147–59, 240 Bergson and, 218–19 on the “broken world,” 122–23, 127, 156, 240 certainty and, 123 on concepts, 177 on creative fidelity, 79, 123–24, 165 174, 205–6, 212–13, 212n17, 215–16, 218–19, 227, 234, 241 on death, 211–13, 215, 218, 227 on degraded rationalism, 118–19, 121–23

251

on desire, 124 distinction between problem and mystery, 118–22, 209, 223–24, 225, 233 ethics of, 228 on evil, 119–21 on l’exigence ontologique, 118–20 on existential philosophy, 56–57 on friendship, 206, 241 on having, 121–22, 124, 130, 135, 144–45, 147–48n42, 147–53, 154–59, 160–61, 167, 212, 240 on hope, 123–24, 125–26 on intersubjectivity, 159–60, 164–65 on knowledge, 160 on literature, 56–57 on love, 126, 137, 150, 165, 205–6, 218–19, 223–24, 241 on memory, 211–12, 215 on mystery, 55n19, 127, 128, 159–60, 168, 176–77, 202, 209, 212–13, 223–24, 225, 233, 242 on openness, 128, 228 optimism of, 126, 167, 228, 232–33, 234–35 on otherness, 128, 158–60 on presence, 137, 163, 209, 212–13, 224–25, 227, 228–29, 233 on problems, 119–21, 209, 223–24, 225, 233 on reality, 123 on secondary reflection, 239 on sympathy, 228–29 Marcel, Gabriel, works of Being and Having, 121 Concrete Approaches, 218, 228 Creative Fidelity, 55n18, 120–21, 157–59, 163, 228–29 Entretiens, 122–23 Le monde cassé, 109–10, 112, 113–14, 233 The Mystery of Being, 9, 52, 77–78, 97–98, 99–101, 113 “On the Ontological Mystery,” 57, 113, 118–22, 123 meaning, 95–96, 125 mystic sense of hidden, 187–91 pragmatic, 96–104 truth and, 96–104 memory, 26n43, 101–2, 106, 215 in À la recherche, 73–74, 77–79, 219, 227 death and, 211–12 distinction between voluntary and involuntary, 103–4, 107–8

252

index

fidelity and, 211–12 involuntary (see involuntary memory) time and, 33–34 truth and, 14n6 visual memory, 18 voluntary (see voluntary memory) metaphors, 59, 70, 70n80. See also language Moore, F.C.T., 61–62 Murdoch, Iris, 7n1 mystery, 47, 127–28, 159–60, 162, 164–65, 168, 233, 239–40, 242 in À la recherche, 176–77, 209, 212–13, 223–24 denial of, 127 problem and, 118–22, 223–24, 225, 240 vagueness and, 83–126 mystical experience, 123, 165, 174–79, 233 in À la recherche, 168, 170, 172, 174–79, 191, 195 ineffability of, 176–77 the mystical ladder, 179–82, 180n29 noetic quality of, 176, 177–78 passivity of, 176, 179 privileged moments and, 168–72, 170–71n12, 171n15, 179–82, 191, 240 transiency of, 176, 178–79 the will to believe and, 191–202 Nussbaum, Martha, 7n1 obligation, 28–32, 74–76, 83 obstacles, 28–32 openness, 124, 125–27, 159–60, 162–65, 216, 218, 224, 228, 232, 241. See also courageous vulnerability in À la recherche, 227, 238–39 courageous vulnerability and, 241 lack of, 127 otherness, 127, 128, 158–60, 224–25. See also intersubjectivity pain, 79–80, 235. See also suffering participation. See engagement; intersubjectivity the past, 17, 17n16. See also time paving stones, 20–21, 184–85, 200 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 96 perception, 54–55, 60–61, 66n65, 86, 94 phénoménologie de l’avoir. See under having

phenomenology of having. See under having philosophy, literature and, 7n1, 9 pleasure, 20 poetical action, 140–43 possession, 134–36, 142. See also having knowledge and, 159–60 love as the desire for, 143–47 pragmatism, 96–104, 97n45, 125 presence, 142–44, 150, 157, 163, 167–68, 209, 212–13, 216, 241 in À la recherche, 217, 219, 223–27, 230–31, 232, 233 courageous vulnerability and, 227 death and, 227, 231 fidelity and, 218–27 habit and, 164 intersubjectivity and, 164–65 love, 136–37 made impossible by l’avoir-implication, 156–63 mystery of, 224–25 otherness and, 224–25 sympathy and, 228–29 the will to believe in, 213–17 the present, 17, 17n16. See also time primary reflection, 122–25 privileged moments, 11–47, 61n47, 64n58, 96, 125, 216, 224, 227, 233, 234, 241 absence of, 127 in À la recherche, 49–50, 85, 90–91, 165, 177, 182, 187–88, 190–92, 193–98, 201–3, 206, 209, 214, 224, 227, 229, 231, 233, 237–39 anhedonia and, 109n74 the body and, 26n24 certainty of, 40–41 courageous vulnerability and, 74–76, 227–28, 233 epistemological implications of, 6–7 ethical implications of, 6–7 felt knowledge and, 240, 242 habit and, 103–4 hierarchy of, 20–21, 24 of the imagination, 19–24, 25n37 James’ mystical ladder and, 179–82 joy and, 28–40 lack of (see also anhedonia) laziness and, 183, 187 mystical experience and, 168–72, 191, 240 obligation and, 74–76 pleasurable certainty and, 24–28

index pragmatism and, 101–4 religion and, 168–72 sensations and, 26–27 sorrow and, 28–40 truth and, 233, 240 the will to believe in, 191–202 problem, 118–22, 127, 209, 223–24, 233 projection, 140 Proust, Marcel À la recherche du temps perdu, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 65n59, 113–18 absence in, 135–37, 142 aesthetics in, 140–43, 174–75, 214, 231–33, 238–40 anhedonia in, 104–5, 109, 113–18, 172–76, 188 anxiety in, 138 appeal in, 228–29 art in, 11–12, 73–74 the Bergsonian artist in, 49–50, 76–77, 94–95, 239–40, 242 Bergson’s durée and, 61–67 boredom in, 135–36 courageous vulnerability in, 174, 238–39, 242 couvercles in, 28–32, 37, 40–41, 50, 50n1, 68, 75, 77–78, 94, 109, 157–58, 167, 170–71n12, 174, 176, 181, 184–85, 188, 196, 229, 242 crystallization in, 128–30, 131–38, 140–43, 157–59, 161–62, 164–65, 167, 213, 220–23, 226, 234, 240 death in, 205, 206–12, 213, 216, 220–22, 225–27, 230–31 description in, 55–56 desire in, 124, 154–56, 157–58 direct reference to Bergson in, 63–64 the divine in, 170 effigies in, 219, 231 ethics in, 206, 216–17, 231–33, 239–40, 241 extra-temporality in, 186–87 felt knowledge in, 79–80, 128, 206, 237, 238–39 fidelity in, 206–12, 217, 223–24, 226 friendship in, 162–63, 214, 217, 224, 228, 241 grief in, 225–26 guilt in, 83 habit in, 216 imagination in, 135–36, 143, 213 intersubjectivity in, 130, 164–65, 168, 203, 209, 213–14, 223–24, 239–40

253 involuntary memory in, 1, 2–5, 11–19, 25n37, 27n46, 41–42, 69, 79–80, 83, 170–71n12, 175–76, 178, 184–87, 190–91, 205, 209–11, 217, 219–23, 225, 227, 238–39, 241 jealousy in, 151 joy in, 14–17, 30 knowledge in, 46–47, 79–80, 128, 197–98, 206, 237, 238–39 language in, 67–70, 89–91 laziness in, 30, 41, 182, 183, 187, 192, 217 love in, 127–65, 167, 205, 213–14, 216–17, 219, 223–24, 228, 230–34, 237–38, 241–42 the madeleine in, 1, 2, 11, 15–18, 20–21, 32, 237 memory in, 73–74, 77–79, 101–2, 219, 227 (see also under involuntary memory; under voluntary memory) metaphors in, 70 mystery in, 164–65 mystical experience in, 168, 170, 172, 174–79, 191, 195 obligation in, 83 openness in, 227, 232, 238–39 otherness in, 127, 128 pain in, 41–42, 79–80 paving stones in, 20–21, 184–85, 200–201 perception in, 94 pessimism in, 126, 228, 232–33, 234, 241 la petite phrase in, 69–70 pleasure in, 20 possession in, 136–37, 142, 148, 149–53, 159–60 presence in, 142–44, 164–65, 167–68, 213, 216, 217, 219, 223–27, 230–33 privileged moments in, 8, 11–19, 49–50, 75–76, 76n101, 85, 90–91, 101–2, 165, 168, 170, 172–74, 177, 180, 182–84, 187–88, 190–98, 201–3, 206, 209, 214, 216, 224, 227, 229, 231, 233, 237–39 projection in, 140 (see also crystallization) regret in, 83 sensations in, 12–19, 28–32, 37, 101 sensuous signs in, 20–24 the sentiment of rationality in, 104–6 sorrow in, 30 the strenuous mood in, 187

254

index

suffering in, 41–42, 71–73, 72n90, 78–79, 232, 233 thick description in, 237–39 truth in, 71–73, 72n90, 171, 195–96, 197–98, 200–202, 230–33, 238–39 unconsciousness in, 140–43, 144 unhappiness in, 71–73, 72n90 untying of the boots in, 237 vagueness in, 89–91 voluntary memory in, 77–78, 84–85, 185, 223 the will to believe in, 167–68, 217, 233 À la recherche du temps perdu, parts of À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, 12–14, 32–33, 42–43 Le côté de Guermantes, 131–32, 206–9, 210, 239 Du côté de chez Swann, 17, 19–20, 41–42, 89–91, 129–30 La fugitive, 98–101, 125–26, 131, 132–34, 137, 138–40, 143–44, 145, 154–56, 160–61, 230–31 Ouverture, 237 La prisonnière, 125–26, 129–30, 135–37, 139–43, 144, 145–46, 151–53, 160, 162, 231, 234n57 Sodome et Gomorrhe, 2–5, 35–36, 63–64, 207, 208, 211, 219–24, 226–27, 229–30, 231 Le temps retrouvé, 10–12, 17–22, 24, 33–35, 37–40, 65, 66n63, 71–76, 72n90, 76n101, 97, 104–6, 109, 115–18, 128–29, 132, 149, 163, 172–76, 177, 182, 183–87, 202–3, 217, 231–32, 237, 239 as a Bergsonian artist, 101 distinction between problem and mystery, 118–22 on intersubjectivity, 164–65 letter to Jacques Rivière, 238 pragmatism and, 104 Putnam, Ruth Anna, 171–72 rationalism, degraded, 118–19, 121–23 rationality, 104–13, 125, 157 sentiment of, 104–13, 125 reality, 73–74, 84–89, 91, 98, 102–3, 123 language and, 89, 91–93, 92n31, 104 la réalité pressentie, 28–40, 51, 85, 176 reflection, 122–25, 239 regret, 50, 83 religion, 168–72, 170–71n12 responsibilism, 7, 44

responsibility, epistemic, 44–47 revelation, 9 Ricoeur, Paul, 122, 159 Rivière, Jacques, 238 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 84 La nausée, 110–11, 112, 123 Schiller, J.C. Friedrich von, Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man, 87n15 Scott, Stanley, Frontiers of Consciousness, 70 secondary reflection, 122–25, 239 sedulous waiting, 227–28 self, 17, 24 self-consciousness, 158 sensations, 12–19, 37, 86, 101 couvercles, 28–32 privileged moments and, 26–27 sensuous signs, 20–24 sentiment of rationality, 104–13, 125 shame, 50 shock, 164 sincups, 221–22 sorrow, 28–32, 225–26 involuntary memory and, 32–40 privileged moments and, 32–40 Stendhal crystallization and, 128–30 Love, 128–29 the strenuous mood, 183–84, 187 Suckiel, Ellen Kappy, 179, 180n29 suffering, 71–73, 72n90, 128, 167, 232, 233, 235 Swanton, Christine, 241–42 sympathy, 228–29 tediousness, 113–14, 118. See also anhedonia thick description, 7, 46, 237–39 time, 17, 17n16, 61–62. See also la durée; extra-temporality in À la recherché, 61–67 fidelity and, 212 involuntary memory and, 33–34 Tolstoy, Leo, 173, 188, 189, 233 the tragedy of desire, 154–56 the tragedy of having, 147–53 Troisfontaines, Roger, 149, 156, 157, 163, 164 truth, 2, 72, 95–96, 125, 171–72, 195–202, 199n84, 240–41 in À la recherche, 71–73, 72n90, 195–98, 200–202, 230–33, 238–39

index art and, 50, 52 involuntary memory and, 14n6 language and, 94 pragmatic meaning and, 96–104 privileged moments and, 233, 240 unconsciousness, 140–43, 144 unhappiness, 71–73, 72n90 vagueness, 88, 97, 108, 123, 125, 128, 239–40 in À la recherche, 89–91 denial of, 127 language and, 89–96, 92n32 mystery and, 83–126 Vial, Fernand, 62 virtue, 241–42 epistemic responsibility, 44–47, 45n84 virtue epistemology, 7 virtue ethics, 5–6, 241 visuality, 25–26, 25–26n41 visual memory, 18 voluntary memory, 4–5, 22–23, 27n46, 35, 102–3

255

in À la recherche, 77–78, 84–85, 184–85, 223 distinguished from involuntary memory, 103–4, 107–8 rationality and, 107–8 vulnerability. See affective vulnerability; courageous vulnerability Wassenar, Ingrid, 35–36, 39n74 Whitman, Walt, 94n37, 189 willingness to let things speak for themselves, 47 the will to believe, 8, 51, 167–203, 191–202, 205–6, 213–17, 227, 235 in À la recherche, 217, 233 courageous vulnerability and, 167–68, 228, 234 intersubjectivity and, 206 in presence, 213–17 in privileged moments, 167–203 wonder, 24–27, 25–26n41, 40, 118, 242 Zagzebski, Linda, 73 zest, 187–91, 215, 233