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 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)
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