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