Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [8: involuntary m]

very good note on 198n61, cricizing Deleuze

Landy is surely right when he writes that “it is not impressions that contain memories, but vice versa: a memory writes Marcel, is like ‘some forgotten scroll on which [a]re recorded impressions of other days’ (GW 82).” (199n62)

see p110, “involuntary memory is not really memory at all”

“What involuntary memory gives to the future book is less its content than its form, if not is very condition of existence: a narrating instance sufficiently unified as to be able to say “I” and to speak for a multiplicity of selves in past and present tenses.” (111)

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [7: metaphor]

[this is a somewhat artificial topic separation; much of this will fit into subjectivity stuff]

Landy sets out to (in section 3 of ch1):
“ explain (a) how imagery can serve to disclose a point of view on reality, (b) what Marcel’s metaphors specifically say about his point of view, and (c) whether we can defend the theory against a number of critical objects.” (59)

(a) Imagery can convey perspective because, “perspective, just like metaphor, is a matter of combination.” (59)

in footnote 17, p.187, Landy nicely states the difference between the analysis of common metaphors and metaphoric structures within common language, and the analysis of new, or indiosyncratic metphors, “in the extensive literature on metaphor...much is said about the vehicle shedding light on the tenor (Moran 110), or, more generally, betraying something about the workings of language (de Man), and the structure of thought (Lakoff and Johnson). (I borrow the terms tenor and vehicle from Richards 96.) Relatively little, by contrast, is said about idiosyncratic coinages that have no ambition of becoming standard.” (187n17)

do Marcel’s metaphors reveal something about their objects, that is, do they show us aspects of reality that were previously hidden from our view by habitual language (Landy says that this is the view of Genette and Bersani; 193-4n38), or do they, as Landy argues, simply reveal aspects of the perceiver’s worldview? (Alternately, Landy also cites Waring in the same note as saying they reveal something of the reader’s.)

treatment of metonyphors (called “diegetic metaphors by Genette), metaphors based not on some deep, underlying analogy between two commonly disparate elements, but simply on the contiguity of the two elements (69)

Landy cites two important passages from Genette in which Genette argues that Proust essentially fails in his project to give access to “essences” because the means he uses are too subjective and contigent (metonymy).

Marcel as aware of the metonymic basis of some of his own metaphors (73)

“...the aim of metaphor can be—and in Marcel’s description quite explicitly is—to convey not an objective but a subjective connection between two impressions or ideas, and that this subjective connection can possess a type of local inescapability. Marcel, in other words, locates an intermediate position between the two de Manian extremes of thorough contigency and absolute necessity, and indeed considers his intermediate position the most interesting thing there is to say about metaphor.” (73)
• As Landy argues, this runs counter to de Man’s argument that all metaphors are metonymic.

Landy writes, “at least some of Marcel’s metaphors indicate features of his perspective, and are to that extent necessary within his subjective world; and that we should not hold the images in the novel to standards of objective truth, since these are not the standards they set themselves,” (73-4) I agree in part. It is not clear to me that such metaphors are necessary. In what world are they necessary? It can only be in Marcel’s own world, and this is indeed Landy’s point. However, the question remains as to whether they are necessary because of some essential (and unchanging) aspect of Marcel’s mind, or whether they are necessary given Marcel’s previous experience. It is not so easy to extricate the two, and in fact to do so completely would be to miss the point. Is it perhaps possible to see through the Recherche the emergence of contigency from necessity. Any given metaphor (of this type) of Marcel’s is necessary, but only given Marcel’s previous experiences. Simply, his accrued life-experience determines how he sees the world.

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [6: Martinville]

see Landy on 53 as to purpose/significance of Martinville steeples, but here, broadly:
• “insights into constraints placed on our acquaintance with external objects”
• roles of intuition, intellect, and primacy of self-knowledge
• what kind of distortion Marcel’s individual perspective imposes on the world before his eyes
• conc: is the key that unlocks the epistemology of the Recherche

Landy has a rather ridiculous comparison of the prose poem and the narrative version, where he says that if we subtract the prose (narrative) from the prose poem, we should be left with the poetry.

though the steeples do not really move, there is a certain truth (common to all or most humans) to Marcel’s perception of them: they do indeed ‘appear to do so, just as the sun “comes up” and “goes down”. (57)

detaching the (apparent) movement of the steeples from its cause (the movement of the carriage) in the prose poem as compared to the narrative description, Marcel is able to bring to life (describe) his actual experience for the reader. This parallels interestingly with the notion of artists detaching things from their cause which he talks about elsewhere. We might suggest that one of the underlying maxims is that humans to do not experience the world in a wholly causal manner, or at least, the causal connections they experience are not always to be found in the objective world, and in turn, the objective causes of phenomena are not always found to form part of our experience. [these ideas use Landy’s analysis of the narrative/prose poem distinction as a starting point, but they are, so far as I aware, my own]
• on the next page, Landy cites (58) one of the Elstir passages I was just thinking of.

summary of first section: “The new truth is in fact a truth about the human mind, not about the steeples: it is about the primacy of intuition, and the qualitative difference between the pictures it offers (delineated in the prose poem) and the corrected pictures subsequently generated by the intellect.” (59)

Landy’s answer for what the steeples signifiy to us of Marcel’s inner reality is rather unsatisfactory. He argues, that steeples, like girls and flowers, excite Marcel. Granted, Landy’s language is much more complex, obfuscating the banal simplicity of his insight, “what the Martinville prose poem has to teach us, then, is that Marcel subliminally associates steeples with girls and with flowers as possessors of a feature which, within his idiosyncratic conceptual universe, comes to the fore in each, setting it apart from most of the other constituents of the visible world. And that feature, we may speculate, is its ability to call to him in a particular way, to set him dreaming, to invest him with belief, to promise him the object of his deepest desire.” (66)
• that criticism aside, Landy begins the next paragraph with a rather spot on assessment, “The grail in question is not, as the novel’s somewhat misleading title seems to suggest, “lost time.” For it is not the past that its protagonist is pursuing across three thousand pages of peregrinations, but instead and enrichment of experience, an additional dimension, something more than he can readily perceive (under a limited definition, we might call this a desire for transcendence). To be sure, memory (of the involuntary kind) will ultimately prove one means to such enrichment.
• Despite the my initial reservations, I am much in agreement with Landy’s subsequent summary of his argument, “Artworks, flowers, and young women have alike the power to summon a conviction on his part that they are home to a mystery he can share, residents of unknown worlds to which he may travel.” (67) Yet, there is something fundamentally different about the three categories, and in particular something which sets art apart. My thesis should explicate what this is. I am incline to say it comes down to artworks being accessible (first) and then personally defineable, that is, we may form an understanding (apprehension) of them that is our own, and yet they may still force and expansion of our worldview. It is not clear that this is true of girls and flowers.

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [5: art]

citation of Proust: “through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves [sortir de nous]” (TR 299) see also 169n40

music “does not communicate an independently existing ‘divine world’ which composers visit from time to time (S 498), but neither is it merely an elegant ornamental design (C 206-7, 259): instead design, in music as in art more generally, serves to convey an immanent world which is the soul of the individual artist (C 339-40, 508; cf. EA 365)” (Landy: 176n74)

as an example of Marcel’s antithetical views, Landy writes, “Marcel seems unable to decide [view of homosexuality], and changes his mind with the space of a single sentence: ‘This scene was not, however, positively comic; it was stamped with a strangeness, or it you like a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased’ (SG 6) [Landy 34, his emphasis) Presumably, Landy assumes that there is something antithetical about the tri-partite relation of strange, natural and beauty. “Strange” seems really to be the problematic element, but does it really oppose natural? Does it really oppose beautiful? In his experience of art, it is art’s ability to defeat habitual worldview, to in effect make things strange, that constitutes its aesthetic value, and thus its beauty.

“ ‘genius consisting in reflecting power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected’ (BG 176; cf. PM 201).” (115)

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [4: TR quotes]

citation of Proust: “through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves [sortir de nous]” (TR 299) see also 169n40

Landy, “writing takes ‘our individual suffering’ and transposes it into ‘a general form which will in some measure enable us to escape from its embrace, which will turn all mankind into sharers in our pain, and which is even able to yield us a certain joy’ (TR 313).” (33)

cited by Landy (34-5), “there is no idea that does not carry in itself its possible refutation, no word that does not imply its opposite” (F 814)

“Style, as Marcel puts it, ‘is the revelation, which by direct and conscious methods would be impossible, of the qualitative difference, the uniqueness of the fashion in which the world appears to each one of us, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain for ever the secret of every individual’ (TR 299).” (48)

“What Marcel learns [from his experience of the Martinville steeples], in other words, is that ‘in all perception there exists a barrier as a result of which there is never absolute contact between reality and our intelligence’ (TR 420; cf. S 115); separating the world from the conscious mind stands the preconscious perspective of the perceiver.” (57)

see 198n62 for a good TR quote from TR272

“ ‘our true life,’ in Marcel’s definition, is ‘reality as we have felt it [telle que nous l’avons sentie]’ (TR 277) We deduce its existence from the phenomenon of involuntary memory, and derive its nature by working back from the effects it produces (particularly in various forms of artistic expression). [paragraph] There is, however, still, something missing. Involuntary memory may give us something ‘individual, identical and permanent’ but it is not, strictly speaking, an individual, identical, and permanent self. Going back to the key passage cited earlier, involuntary memory summons up a ‘being within me’ (TR 262): not the Self in its entirety, but only a tiny part of it, and not even a part that could ever speak for the whole.” (116)

“Was she not—are not, indeed, the majority of human beings?—like one of those star-shaped crossroads in a forest where roads converge that have come in the forest as in our lives, from the most diverse quarters?’ (TR 502).” (122)

“ ‘Real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated—the only life in consequence which can be said to be really lived—is literature, and life thus defined is in a sense all the time immanent in ordinary men no less than in the artist. But most men do not see it because they do not seek to shed light upon it. And therefore their past is like a photographic darkroom encumbered with innumerable negatives which remain useless because the intellect has not developed them’ (TR 298-99).” (123)

see also quotation from GS 290 on page 124

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction [3: subjectivity]

speaking of gender, sexuality and relationships in the Recherche, Landy writes, “what Marcel seeks here, and what he seeks relentlessly in various other contexts throughout the novel, is a way to move beyond his own subjectivity and to enter the consciousness of another human being.” (21)

Landy citation from Recherche, “ ‘what we call experience is merely the revelation to our own eyes of a trait in our character which naturally reappears, and reappears all the more markedly because we have already once brought it to light, so that the spontaneous impulse which guided us on the first occasion finds itself reinforced by all the suggestions of memory’ (F 586)” (31)

Landy refers to Marcel discussing objective vs subjective truth at C 468 and says, “the subjective laws still count as laws, because they denote regularities, constants of Marcel’s attitude and conduct; yet these laws are by no means binding on the rest of humanity. Even when Marcel appears to be, and perhaps thinks he is, speaking for the entire world, he is very often speaking only for himself. And at such moments, to say it once more, he is certainly not speaking for Proust.” (32) Landy cites Bersani (1965: 237) at 176n70 as alt. formulation

Landy writes, “Why, if Marcel understands in principle the difference between subjective and objective laws, does he nonetheless act so often as though his own quirks, [...] were ubiquitous features of human life? Why acknowledge that “as soon as one gets close to other people, other lives, ready-made classifications appear unduly crude” (C 398-99); cf. Shattuck 106) and yet still persist in applying labels to everything in sight?” Landy’s answer, “there is something in the nature of his [Marcel’s] character which drives him to do so. It is, so to speak, a higher-order law of Marcel’s personality...” seems to too easily take Marcel at his word. [look at the page, 32]

However, Landy is more convincing when he writes, “the rage for generalization is a deep and ineradicable element of his [Marcel’s] individual being.” (33; Landy cites Large, 138; and Genette, 1980:124)

“if Proust’s protagonist is anything to go by, the human adventure is a matter of repeatedly bumping up, in increasing frustration, against the variably colored, translucent ‘barrier’ between mind and world (S 115, TR 420), only to realize that the glass itself—our individual perspective—is far more interesting than any aspect of external reality, however accurately grasped, could hope to be.” (51)

Landy argues that the optical illusions Marcel sees in looking at the steeples “do testify to the ‘barrier ... between reality and our intelligence,’ but only insofar as the barrier is held in common by every human being. All of us, that is, would perceive the steeples as moving...”(59) In a footnote (187n14) Landy cites a few critics who see the optical illusions as peculiar to Marcel. In Landy’s view, it is in the images they Marcel’s subjectivity is evident. We would not all see the steeples as birds, pivots, flowers, and girls. These metaphors are thus very personal to Marcel and have no effect on how others view the world (except perhaps for readers of poem/novel). See also Bersani and Descombes whom Landy cites (186n17)

Landy citing Proust with reference to Kant, “ ‘it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it;... all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving..., just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours.’ (GW 81).” (188n19)

“everything is filtered through ‘that little disk of the eye’s pupil, through which we look at the world and on which our desire is engraved’ (BSB 161; cf. SG 534).” (60)

difference between Marcel and Robert’s views of the prostitute Rachel (two bit tart vs high class mistress) as determined by initial circumstances in which each character met Rachel (brothel vs theater). (62)

“Speaking of the type of girl who begins by showing “the purity of a virgin” and then goes on to show “more boldness”, he [Marcel] asks, “in herself was she one more than the other? Perhaps not, but capable of yielding to any number of different possibilities in the headlong current of life” (C 78). Just so, Rachel is “in herself” no more a “tart” than a “woman of great price,” both being, in a sense, facets or potentialities of her complex being (she has, after all, enough talent as an actress to rise to the top of her profession). All that the episode proves is that people display various sides of themselves at various times and in various situations, and that those who meet them are accordingly susceptible to misjudgments, taking the part for the whole.” (63)
• the final part of this section, “taking the part for the whole,” is strikingly similar to the standard definition of synecdoche, a type of metonymy. I wonder then, if there is an argument to made that metonymy, or metonymic associations are the essential product of individual perception, and that their elaboration/evolution into metaphor creates a potential bridge between individual perspectives. That is, when the metonymic association of cheek and pillow becomes for us a metaphor, the pillow is (like) the cheek [English distinction between simile and metaphor is irrelevant here], we then, and only then, have a sense of Marcel’s experience. Though Marcel, in many pronouncements claims that individual perspectives [or something like that] are imprenetrable to outside observers, Proust shows him to be wrong in the many metaphors of the book.

“What we cannot do is adopt it [another person’s perspective] in any meaningful sense.” (63)
• exception: art (64) citation of C 343
• see also citation of SG 247-8; Marcel’s later vision of Balbec, as effected by Elstir’s art.

“ ‘the fact remains that there is a certain objective reality’ (GW 780); ‘the subjective element that I had observed to exist...in vision itself did not imply that an object could not possess real qualities or defects and in no way tended to make it vanish into pure relativism’ (TR 326).” (78)

“ ‘there is perhaps nothing that gives us so strong an impression [as this] of the reality of the external world’ (BG 332).” (78)

“ ‘we try to discover in things, which become precious to us on that account, the reflection of what our soul has projected on to them’ (S 119).” (82)

Landy argues that inanimate objects (steeples, hawthornes, etc.) present better opportunities for self-discovery (“revealing our perspective”) than do “artworks, lovers, and memories (81; argument continues onto 82). However Landy’s construction of the mental insight Marcel fails to achieve is all to simple. The problem, as Landy sees it, the reason Marcel fails to discover himself through the Martinville steeples, is because he fails to subtract the narrative from the prose poem (the objective truth (intellect) from the perspectival distortion (intuition)). As Landy (more convincingly) argues, “Marcel, in short, regularly contents himself with what he condemns as the ‘clumsy and erroneous form of perception which places everything in the object, when really everything is in the mind’ (TR 323).” (82)

“ ‘ my life appeared to me,’ he laments, ‘as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self’ (F 802-3;my emphasis).” (102)

Landy writes that a sense of self, or self-identity, requires to things, (1) “coherence (identity with oneself) and [2] uniqueness (distinction from other individuals). Landy will argue in this chapter how Marcel finds both. I find it difficult to see how Landy will prove the first, as he rightly points out that in the Recherche, the self is fractured both diachronically and synchronically. (101-2)

“since external sites serves as boundary markers for an internal chronology (Poulet 1963:12-13), the memory of a room (S 5-9) is also the imprint of a former self.” (107)

The crucial question is, do I agree with the following statement by Landy, “the epiphanies have, however, something far more crucial to teach us. The very fact that we are able to summon up the ghostly residue of a past self indicates an essential point of continuity between the latter and out present-day incarnation. If today’s madeleine tastes the same as it did thirty years ago, it is because there must be a part of us at least that has not changed in between times, a permanent aspect underlying all of the mutable selves.” (112)
• first, if the best support Landy can find for a durable self in Proust’s text is the fact that two (different) madeleines ostensibly taste the same, we are already on shaky ground. If we assume that the madeleines do taste the same, in some sort of objective sense, then all we have is the continuity of objectively created perceptions. This seems to have very little to do with a continuous self, that is, a stable self-identical entity with duration. Using Landy’s own schema, it we imagine that Marcelle had returned to the Martinville steeples twenty years later, and once again driven by them in a carriage, travelling at roughly the same speed, if he should see the same optical illusions, this says nothing (necessarily) about the continuity of his subjective self, it suggests only that there is a continuity to the functioning of his faculties of perception. Even Landy’s own description belies his point: how exactly does the appearance of a “ghostly residue” prove the continuity of self?
• In support, Landy cites Everett Knight, “the significance of Marcel’s mystical experiences is precisely that they prove the continuity of the Self”(111).” (215n20) In the same footnote Landy also cites Proust, “No doubt we ourselves may change our social habitat and our manner of life and yet our memory, clinging still to the thread of our personal identity, will continue to attach itself at successive epochs the recollection of the various societies in which...we have lived” (TR 403).” (214-5n20)

“involuntary memory indicates the existence of, and affords access to, a unique and diachronically stable self.” I could pretty much cite all of page 113. Landy nicely links Proust, Hume and Ricoeur. In Landy’s view, involuntary memory is Proust’s response to Hume’s view that the self is just a fictitious creation, that though we have “a type of effective identity, as a ‘chain of causes and effects’ (Hume 262),” (113) we possess no “inner coherence, no common element shared amongst the various impressions that make up the mind.” (113). Landy argues that “Proust would doubtless agree with Ricoeur (128) that Hume, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is in the above passage presupposing the very entity whose existence he denies. For if there is no me to be found, who is the I that is “always” looking for it? There must surely be a secret site of constancy after all in the “mind of man,” a part of ourself which can never be seen since it is always doing the seeing, something through which, and never at which, we stare. ‘Throughout the whole course of one’s life,’ Marcel confirms, ‘one’s egoism sees before it all the time the objects that are of concern to the self, but never takes in that ‘I’ itself which is perpetually observing them’ (F 628).” (113)
• Does Landy not see the retort that he ascribes to Proust (at the begining) an argument that is entirely dependent on the structures and divisions of language? The heart of his argument, ‘a part of ourself...never at which, we stare,’ is entirely linguistic, as is the initial presupposes ‘I’ in attempting to show not ‘me’. Does the terminology “secret site of constancy” not strike him as even a little silly? See also footnote 21 on page 215
• “ ‘I remembered—with pleasure because it showed me that already in those days I have been the same and that this type of experience sprang from a fundamental trait in my character’ (TR 272-73; cf.C 513, BSB 23).” (216n22)
“ ‘The universe is true for us all and dissimilar to each one of us...it is not one universe, but millions, almost as many as the number of human eyes and brains in existence, that awake every morning’ (C 250).” (216n24) Nice Locke citation in next footnote.

“The solution [to the problem of Marcel’s synchronically and diachronically fractured self] requires no more than Marcel turning upon himself a type of attention he has been lavishing on those around him. Thus ‘although Albertine might exist in my memory...subdivided in accordance with a series of fractions of time, my mind, reestablishing unity in her, made her a single person’ (F 693); similarly, ‘sometimes I reproached myself for thus taking pleasure in considering my friend as a work of art’—the friend here being Robert de Saint–Loup—‘that is to say in regarding the play of all the parts of his being as harmoniously ordered by a general idea from which they depended but of which he was unaware’ (BG 432-43).” (117)

pages 117 to 122 or so are brilliant.

“and in any case add in that purely imaginary element which is their (small ‘s’ selves) mutual interdependence.” (119)

“ ‘The picture of what we were at an earlier stage...we must not repudiate,’ Elstir explains to Marcel (BG 606), ‘for it is a proof...that we have, from the common elements of life,...extracted something that transcends them.’ ”

‘the narrator may acknowledge the importance of his or her former selves simply because they are also his or her present selves, synchronic-diachronic sediments remaining within the mind as deposed leaders waiting, perhaps, to return to power. The various moi, in other words, function neither as earlier stages of giovanile errore, subsequently overcome, nor as ingredients that are all required for the production of a successful life, but instead as integral and persisting aspects of who the narrator is today.” (119)

“We cannot be confident that understand our life, even up to now, unless we are sure that we have reached the personal equivalent of the End of History—something Marcel, for one, considers an impossibility.” (122)

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction (2: Marcel & Proust)

stupid to attempt to try to reconstruct philosphy of Recherche based simply on “Marcel’s explicit assertions” (14)
• “Proust cannot possible hold all of the views in question, since they do not always cohere internally; Proust cannot mean both what Marcel says at the end of the first volume and what Marcel says at the end of the last volume...” (14)
o this statement requires a rather large implicit assumption, that Proust’s personal philosophy is coherent. We may be tempted to think of it that way, but it alter the semantics and say that Landy assumes that Proust’s way of looking at things is internally coherent, the overwhelming rashness of this assumption should be obvious
o the same is true of Landy’s next point, nor “do Marcel’s views always correspond to Marcel’s practices, or to the events he so carefully describes.” (14)
basic point: Marcel and Proust are not coextensive.
despite this, there is great biographical similarity, but the novel is not “simply a glorified autobiography” (14), and “it matters that is be not.”

what does the word “weltanschauung” mean? (15)

“but if the Recherche is not a record of that history [Proust’s life], how can it be said to redeem it by redescribing it?” (18)

interesting footnote: citing Genette, “autobiographers are not really supposed to be ominiscient” (167n30)

“Marcel may be fashioning himself in his autobiography, but Marcel’s autobiography is Proust’s novel, and Proust is not Marcel.” (18)

epistemological relationship between character and narrator, and narrator and author [one-way] (22-3)
• “Proust’s sentence mixes together two voices, two implicit first-person pronouns. Whereas the “I” behind “my Christian name” belongs to Marcel, the “I” behind “if we give” pertains to Proust. And so effects a demarcation between author and narrator both in content and in form, content explicitly noting that their names need not be alike, form showing that their voices (and intentions) collide and conflict within the very texture of the prose. Ironically, then, the very statement that seems to seal the equivalence between Proust and Marcel actually drives them further apart.” (23)
• see also SG 69 which Landy cites where reader berates author for his bad memory
look up Michael Maar (2001), whom Landy cites on 24

there is perhaps an interesting parallel between what Landy shows Proust doing, that is “arrogating the events of the narrative to himself at the very moment in which he is disclaiming them, simultaneously closing (in apperance) and holding open (in reality) the gap between author and character,” and how Proust outlines the relationship between subjectivity, awareness and identity

look up Dorrit Cohn, cited approvingly by Landy on 172n54

“we cannot always take Marcel’s philosophy as the philosophy of Proust.” (25)
• though a very important distinction to make, and an important step towards ridding us of many myths surrounding the Recherche, Landy’s distinction may [I’m not sure yet] be in uninteresting in an important sense. Surely, what we’re after, in analysing the Recherche, is an understanding of what it is about, not of what Proust may (or may not) have thought as a person, distinct from the worldview he creates as an author.

useful word to add to my vocab: “epiphenomena”

“unless we wish to ironize every last aphorism [...] w should proceed on the assumption that Marcel speaks for Proust until and unless there is reason to think otherwise.” (35)
• What does agreement between Marcel and Proust add to our understanding of the Recherche? Should our conclusions about the Recherche really be accorded greater certainty (significance) simply we think they are “what Proust meant”? Could we not instead simply restrict ourselves to what we think the Recherche says?
Landy summarizes his project, “by discarding the offending [contradictory] aphorisms, synthesizing what is left, and appending a metaprinciple explaining the deployment of ironized statements, we should be able to reach a coherent Proustian position.” (35)

Landy summarizes many who have argued for the convergence of Marcel and Proust into one “I” in TR, but he disagrees.
• where do I fall?

Landy makes an interesting distinction between “ce récit”, “what Marcel habitually uses to refer to the text at hand, and “mon livre” or “mon oeuvre”), used to refer to the “future/inchoate work” (40)

there are many interesting instance where description in the Recherche seems quite applicable to the text itself—either to our experience of reading it, our views of its constructions, or our conclusions about it—even when such descriptions have a distinct context of their own.
• for example: “Before very long I was able to show a few sketches. No one understood anything of them... Those passages in which I was trying to arrive at general laws were described as so much pedantic investigation of detail” (TR 520, cf. Landy 42)

very interesting citations on 45 for separating the three books Landy identifies

“Proust may, as I argued in the introduction and will suggest again at the end of this chapter, be consciously constructing a novel that is smarter than its narrator, not just doing it by accident.” (190n26)

important to look at relationship/combination of real and imaginary elements in the novel—Landy has a discussion on page 83

Landy: Philsophy as Fiction (1: Intro)

Premise: we have lost sight of, or perhaps never fully appreciated the philosophical significance of a text [Recherche] that is, after all, only a fiction.

Landy aims to “reconstruct arguments Proust makes based on both what the narrator says and does not say”
• operations of mind
• types of distortions it imposes on experience
• illusions it requires and knows how to sustain
• dispersions to which it is subject, both silmutaneous and sequential

appropriate response to problems of love is self-deception (6)
“love subsists on illusion” (11)

[look up Ducan Large]
what is subjective idealism (6)

“involuntary memory” (164n15)
voluntary and involuntary memory (12) see also p.13

“intuition precedes and supercedes intelligence” (10) therefore “it is rational not to be too rational”