Bersani: subjectivity

“The experience [Marcel’s waking described in the first few pages] is one in which he loses his sense both of his own identity and of the identity of the external world.” (21)
• “He has to recognize the place if he is to know who he is; knowledge of the self, he suggests, depends on an ability to find the self in the external world.”
o this doesn’t seem like quite the right emphasis.
• “empty appartus” [Marcel’s description of self at III 466 (Fugitive), cited by Bersani on 21)

I 84 (zone of evaporation quote) Bersani comments on it on page 32

“...in the process of learning to identify objects immediately, we collect groups of identifying labels that apply to general categories of objects or sensory perceptions. In the strictest sense, no two objects and no two impressions ever resemble each other exactly, and the names we apply to them can quickly becomes like worn-out metaphors that hide from us the specificity of this object or this impression. Names give us a false epistemological security; we need them in order to organize, communicate, and act on our experience in the world, but they encourage us to take what are really approximate analogies for exact knowledge of particular things. In a sense, then, it can be argued that the frankly mistaken identification of an object serves an extremely useful purpose: by failing to use the conventionally proper name to describe our experience, we may use an analogy that increases our knowledge about this class of objects in general, or reveals how one object differs from apparently similar objects, or at least expresses something specific to the conditions in which we are now experiencing it. [...] To ‘forget’ the names of objects, while it threatens the coarsest kind of immediate control over the world, therefore makes possible a rare openness to the world, a freshness of impressions that finally give us a more complex control over a world whose variety and particularity defy the names we use to describe it.” (206-7)

“Our habitual responses to things not only make us insensitive to the particularities of things in the world; they also block our most profoundly individual responses to the world.” (207)

“The analogies Elstir makes when he looks at nature come from his memories of things already seen, but they are not longer limited to the learned analogies of habit; they are determined by his past perceptions. In general, the arrangements of past images in our minds, their relative strength and weakness, the various connections among them are the unanalyzable conditions that explain why one person’s ‘optical illusions’ cannot consistently be the same as someone else’s. These errors of perception are, then, a spontaneous and concentrated expression of an individual history; they reveal the existence of a particular point of view on the world. They are also metaphors: we identify one thing with an image of something else. Elstir’s paintings, in which the sea is painted in terms of the land and the land in terms of the sea, are essentially visual metaphors.” (207-8)
• is this entirely accurate?

“An involuntary memory testifies to the presence of a past Marcel has mistakenly though of as dead; but it does not create an unbroken continuity between the past and the present. [...] Involuntary memory can therefore provide Marcel with the guarantee that his past is not completely lost, but it cannot supply evidence of a permanent individuality, of the unbroken history of a single personality.” (218)

(III, 256): “...originality...is a proof of the irreducibly individual existence of the soul.” (cf. 219-20)

“It is as if this could do away with the memory of the world as distinct from the self, as if, under the melting pressure of analysis and comparison, objects could be thoroughly de-objectified and everything made to appear as a metaphor for everything else.” (230)

Bersani: art

“It is only superficially that art appears in Proust’s novel as an escape from an unsatisfactory life; it is rather through art that his narrator lives most fully and most deeply, that he can satisfy his extraordinary appetite for experience. His profound pessimism, and his decision to exclude everything from his life except the book he discovers it is his vocation to write, should not deceive us. For both Proust and his principal character, art is first of all a psychological process present in all our responses to life; the work of art is the isolation and cultivation of a particular way of reacting to and acting on the world. It is creative because it creates more life than is possible outside of art.” (16-17)

“For the work of art does not reflect an already existing self; in a sense, it creates the man whose existence it reveals and contains.” (17)

“The writer who claims he puts down only ‘what he feels’ is strangely insensitive to the obvious fact that the act of writing creates new feelings, can never be simply a translation of states of mind that exist before the moment of writing.” (18)

Vinteuil quotes on page 201-2; (1954: 1, 530)

“It is as if exhaustive description were the equivalent of possession, and since, in a work of art, another personality offers itself to Marcel’s tireless scrutiny, it naturally seems to him that in art the barriers to knowledge of others dissapear.” (204)

“The narrator suggests that Elstir’s genius depends on his marvelous aptitude for forgetting. More precisely, he so completely forgets what he knows when, for example, he looks at the sea that he can remember—and express in his painting—a past impression analogous to his present impression.” (205)

“When most of us look at the sea, we immediately recognize it as the sea. But there seem to be three stages in perception, although we are generally aware only of the last one; the first two would be an absence of any identification at all, and then an incorrect identification. When our eye falls on something there is a fraction of a second in which we make a mistake.” (205)
• Bersani has it partly right. I don’t think Marcel sees the conflation of the sea and the land, to take one example, as a mistake. Though certainly, with respect to the intelligence, it is a mistake—which is to say that we have not properly delimited the categories—with respect to perception, to the world as we subjectively [wc?] experience it, it is not a mistake at all.
• see 1954: III, 573 (La Fugitive: “ ‘Our mistake [is to present things] as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as photography and psychology give an unalterable idea of them. As a matter of fact this is not at all what we ordinarily perceive. We see, we hear, we conceive the world quite topsy-turvy.’ The artist should render ‘this perceptual error which is precisely ‘life’....’ (205)”)

“Marcel continues to consider artistic genius as the ability to transcribe the ‘residuum’ of individuality that we are ordinarily forced to leave unexpressed when we use a language designed to emphasize what men share, and thus to strengthen our belief in a human community.” (210)

Prisonniere quote: “But is it not the fact then that from those elements [that compose the soul] all the real residuum which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk,...., that ineffable something which makes a difference in quality between what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate...” (III 257-8) cf. Bersani: 210

from the section “Involuntary memory and the work of art”: “In danger of losing his sense of himself both in a succession discontinuous personalities and in a hostile, unfamiliar external world, Marcel comes to see the work of art as his only chance of saving himself from the deaths that make up life. [...] The work of art can give to the artist’s life a permanence during his life, and, from the point of view of Marcel’s anguish about the self, this fixed image of his individuality is felt as a kind of immortality of the self.” (211)
• Is the experience of permanence during life specific to the relationship between the artist and his art, or is this simply a sense of permanence (possibly illusory) that emerges from the artist’s success in his vocation. To put it plainly, would a baker who wins a baking competition experience the same sense of permanence?

“For Marcel, such experiences are overwhelming evidence of the persistence in time, and therefore of the reality of the self. They are a necessary preliminary to his literary activity, for they prove the existence of exactly those levels of the self that must enter into the artist’s style if his style is to include that most personal accent. There is, then, a profound connection—which at first may seem tenuous or artificial—between the moments of involuntary memory and the work or art as the narrator conceives it. The source of inspiration for his own book is the evidence of self given by the involuntary memories of ...” (214)

“It is, furthermore, obvious that language itself and therefore the literary work are necessarily a fall from the paradise of involuntary memory.” (215-6)

“The narrator notes that he failed to realize fully, in Dr. Percepied’s carriage, that ‘... what lay buried within the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me...’ (I, 181) It would seem, then, that his pleasure is caused by an unexpected discovery of literary language. Tadié’s claim is a development of this: ‘The reality which is revealed in the instants of profundity [instants profonds] is the reality of the world in the work of art, it is the world already transformed into a work of art.’ [see 264n43] But the world becomes art only when Marcel writes down a description of his different views of the three steeples.” (228)
• this is partly right, but Bersani has the emphasis wrong. The point is, as Marcel says while visiting Elstir’s atelier, to see the world [nature] as it is, poetically. Thus, it is already artistic even if it is not yet an art object.
• see p.229 for more about Martinville steeples

see interesting discussion of some elements of the tension between the individual perspective of an individual—which is the basis for artistic originality—and then tendency to universalism and essential, objective essences. (pages 237-8)

Bersani: metaphor

“The novel is, moreover, about this continuity, or rather it creates it: the metaphorical connections the narrator now establishes among the different moments of his life gives a psychological unity to what he had felt was the history of discontinuous personalities.” (6-7)

discussion of God and naming on page 208

“Robert Brasillach points out that involuntary memory is a sort of metaphor; Marcel’s temporal illusion when he tastes the madeleine is somewhat like the optical illusions which Elstir paints. [see Bersani 263n36] In both cases something is identified with the help of something else, is, actually, first of all experienced as something else. [...] in involuntary memory the metaphor is temporal, and Marcel’s impressions of the present moment are, very briefly, impressions that belong to a moment from his past. The verbal translation of involuntary memory is necessarily metaphorical.” (225)

“By making the various incidents in his work metaphors for one another, the narrator makes them all metaphors for his particular perspective on reality. Poulet speaks of this ‘reciprocal intelligibility’ among originally distinct episodes; analogies establish patterns that bring together apparently isolated moments [see 264n52].” (236)

Bersani: Proust & Marcel

“the distinction between him [the narrator] and Marcel is a continuous achievement of the act of writing.” (252n3)

“The literary treatment of his past is, in fact, a constant exploration of the narrator’s ability to re-create the self imaginatively, that is, of his resources as a novelist, and the processes of novelistic creation constitute one of the principal subjects of interest in A la Recherche. The story of a life whose meaning is fully realized only when that life is transformed into literature necessarily illustrates a progress from what is given in life to what is imagined and invented in art.” (5)

“The sentences of I have been discussing suggest a longing to escape from the self; the very distinction between works of sensibility and works of imagination implies the curious notion that certain men are capable of writing works completely alien to their own sensibilities. It is as if the narrator were intrigued by the paradoxical situation of the writer’s being surprised by a self he will at the same time recognize.” (5)
• admittedly, this is still Bersani’s introduction, but it does not seem that the narrator is so much interested in escaping the Self as he is attempting to escape the dysphoria [wc] of his fractured selves, and, through the act of writing (narration), create a Self.

“The purpose of disengaging what seems to me the central obsession in Proust’s novel is therefore not to reduce everything to that obsession, but rather to trace the continuity—which, as I shall show, is a process of invention and enrichment—between what is first presented as a crippling weakness and the freest, most creative activity in the narrator’s life. The novel is, moreover, about this continuity, or rather it creates it: the metaphorical connections the narrator now establishes among the different moments of his life gives a psychological unity to what he had felt was the history of discontinuous personalities.” (6-7)

“In realizing his project of self-possession through self-description, the narrator writes a work in which we see the novel as a document of realistic observation in the process of becoming a work in which the whole burden of literary expression would be carried by the quality of the narrative voice.” (20)
• first part of this citation is pointed and illuminating, but I’m not entirely sure what Bersani means by the “quality” (his emphasis) of the narrative voice.

“The narrator’s book cannot be written in the ecstatic trance induced by the taste of the madeleine or the sound of a spoon hitting a plate. And by making his hero and his narrator the same person in A la Recherche, Proust draws our attention to the difficulties of being faithful to the moments of involuntary memory in writing about the past. For we are constantly reminded that the man who has the voluntary memories has lost them at the moment we read of his having them; it is his voice that is now making the effort to remember moments in which remembering required no erate investigation, a conscious recherche. The title of the work indicates how unimportant the experiences of involuntary memory are for the actual writing of the work...” (215)

Bersani: TR Quotes

1954: III, 900-901 (3)

‘ “Only the subjective impression, however inferior the material may seem to be and however improbable the outline, is a criterion of truth...’ (III,880) for it is an immediate individual response to the world.” (211)

III, 872-5; cf. Bersani: 214

III, 889: Bersani sees “a certain confusion of strictly temporal analogies with descriptive metaphors” in this passage which he calls “the central passage on metaphorical activity.” (226)
• “An hour is not merely an hour. It is a vase filled with perfumes, sounds, plans and climates. What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us at the same time...” (III, 889)
discussion of “instants profonds” (Tadié) on page 227, which are those ephiphanic moments that aren’t instances of involuntary memory, such as Hawthornes or Martinville steeples