Ch1_Self-intro & 1a
From the first scenes of À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s novel manifests a deep and abiding concern with the nature of human consciousness and identity. We encounter in the first pages a description of an emerging self. The subsequent journey traces Marcel’s development as he discovers and explores different ways of being in the world. Initially, Marcel constitutes his moi through a gradual sensorial expansion. Objects become reference points by which Marcel, through their cognition and description (with attendant judgments and reflections) defines himself in a quasi reciprocal exchange with the objects of the world. The two part process of cognition and description bears stressing: through cognition, Marcel becomes aware of the world and comes to recognize himself as a separate entity [is this right, or does the latter require description, should I perhaps instead talk about implied cognition]. Through description, Marcel specifies and elaborates his relationship to the world. This is the process viewed from Marcel’s side of the coin. For the reader, on the other hand, Marcel is born from descriptions. The resonances of this fact will be crucial as we navigate the pages of Le temps retrouvée that bring Marcel’s journey to an end. For now, however, the crucial distinction is between “Marcel the protagonist” and “Marcel the narrator.” There is already, in the form of autobiography, a diachronic split in the self. Marcel describes his past experiences as he understands them at the time of writing, and relates them to us, his readers, in his autobiography. We are shuttled back and forth between different times and different places, and we as readers may very easily forget that the narrative present is not the time of narration. Memorial struggles thus acquire a dual significance. In retelling his story Marcel must remember his past, and whether or not he can do so fully and accurately becomes a crucial question. Similarly, as readers, we face an abundance of meandering descriptions in which to lose ourselves, forgetting what we have read or even forgetting ourselves as the book and its characters ‘come to life.’ These questions of memory, the hallowed ‘involuntary memory’ and the related “instants profond” (Poulet), occupy the latter part of this chapter. Before delving into them, we must first establish what sort of self we are dealing with.
The central question we will begin with is twofold. First, what is the process through which Marcel gains identity and (some sense of ) coherence? Second, how does his subjectivity, understood simply as self-consciousness, affect his experience and understanding (his perception) of his relationship to the world? The distinction between these two questions is somewhat artificial. The point in distinguishing them is to delineate the poles of what is actually a reciprocally determined process of continual emergence. Marcel’s perception of the world evolves in tandem with his changing sense of self, though this relationship is not static, which is to say that there exists no function that we could unearth by which changes in one consistently create proportional changes in the other.
Du côté de chez Swann begins with a description of Marcel repeatedly falling asleep and waking up. Before falling asleep, Marcel has been reading a book. While sleeping, his “reflections on what [he] has just read” have become his identity: “ it seemed to me that I was myself that which the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François 1st and Charles Quint.” His sleep is then interrupted by “the thought that it was time to get some sleep.” The irony of being awoken because he is searching for sleep underscores the disconnection between Marcel’s dreams and reality, and yet, upon waking, he is unable to entirely extricate himself from his dreams. He continues to believe himself to be the subject(s) of his book, a belief that “weighs down on his eyes like scales,” and prevents him from seeing the outside world. The daily process of sleeping and waking, suggested by the novel’s first phrase—“for a long time, I went to bed at a good hour”—comes to signify a temporary loss of self–conscious, thus becoming a metaphor for a fractured self. The description of Marcel awakening underlines this rupture as the belief that he is the subject of his book, that has bled from his dreams into his experience of reality, “starts to become unintelligible to him, as after the metempsychosis the thoughts of an anterior existence.” Similarly, in the first description of Marcel falling asleep, the I of subjective identity is elided as Marcel says that his “eyes closed so fast that [he] did not have time to say to himself: ‘I fall asleep.’ ” This establishes a relationship between vision and self-consciousness, with a particular emphasis on self emergence through discourse, that becomes a central metaphor for different types or formations of the self, and their relationships to different ways of being in the world. Vision, as a more or less objective faculty of perception, is the primary means of apprehending reality. However, it also denotes the product of that apprehension, a particular worldview that is variously more or less connected with the underlying noumena that give rise to the phenomena of the mind. Marcel’s concern is not that reality (noumena) be apprehended directly, but instead that phenomena be perceived fully. The first type of self that forms in the early pages of Swann soon becomes an impediment to the rich experience of this sort of full perception. The first part of this chapter will trace the development of this self, hereafter referred to as the ‘habitual–self’ for reasons which will become clear.
As Marcel awakens, “the subject of the book detaches itself from him,” and he finds himself “free to apply himself or not.” He thus regains free will and, immediately after, the faculty of sight. The temporal proximity suggests a causal connection: the ability to see, to perceive the world, depends on the existence of a will that can choose its point of focus [I need to clarify this]. Initially, Marcel does not see anything at all. Curiously, however, the obscure darkness of his room appears to him “as something without cause, incomprehensible, as something truly obscure.” The implication is that he either does remember, or simply does not have, a sense of his temporal or physical location, or of his own identity. That the darkness is incomprehensible is not, however, the most salient feature of episode. Above all, it is Marcel’s reaction, it is the fact that it appears to him as something without cause, and the subsequent implication that it is because of that fact that he cannot make sense of what he sees. As Marcel’s initial self-consciousness and attendant worldview develop, this causal relationship to the world becomes central. His experiences emerged interdependently and he comes to find himself in the relationships amongst the objects of his world.
Though Marcel’s journey is multifaceted and various, one of its principal trajectories through the pages of the Recherche involves At the outset, the absence of formed subjectivity, of a sense of I, , Marcel undergoes a progressive awakening that begins with sight. At first, he has not yet developed a sense of self as conscious subject.
and though he can now see—having separated himself from the subjects of his books—the objects of his perception are incomprehensible to him, they appear to his esprit as “a thing without cause.” The sound of the whistling trains, “like the song of a bird in the forest”, signals the return of his ability to hear. Though there now seems to be a distinction between inside and outside, it is not yet definite. The sounds of the trains are “more or less far away”, and do not establish definite points of reference. Instead, they elicit dream like images of a voyager, and the relationship between the unfamiliar experiences of the voyager’s explorations and the indelible imprints they will leave on his memory. The bounds of Marcel’s physical sense of self are more firmly established as he regains the faculty of touch with the feeling of “his cheeks against the beautiful cheeks of the pillow that, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood”. Already, this signals the beginning of Marcel’s processes of metonymic (and metaphoric) description as a method of bringing the world into being. In looking at vision’s place in the Recherche, I would also like to answer the following question: How do we square the metaphoric sense of vision leading to unity with the fact that upon waking, and having only the faculty of sight, Marcel has no sense of self?
What Marcel undergoes as he wakes up is a process of expansion and differentiation. Description is constitutive of subjectivity in the Recherche. It is the process by which subjects become aware of their surroundings and of their relationship to them. The ambiguity of “their” and “them” in the last sentence is indicative of this process. There is a reciprocal determination of both subject (person) and object; both change with each other, and neither one can be seen as outside of the relationship, acting as the cause of the changes undergone by the other.
It is through description that the different spheres of the Recherche come into being. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze views the Recherche as the exploration of different worlds (spheres) of signs. Though the Recherche is certainly “the exploration of different worlds of signs”, it is more accurately the exploration of the way those different worlds are created by the relationships between the signs of which they are constituted. It is not simply about a voyage through worlds of signs, but about the exploration of how worlds come into being, and in the Recherche, worlds come into being through the association of signs (both syntagmatically and paradigmatically.)
The central question we will begin with is twofold. First, what is the process through which Marcel gains identity and (some sense of ) coherence? Second, how does his subjectivity, understood simply as self-consciousness, affect his experience and understanding (his perception) of his relationship to the world? The distinction between these two questions is somewhat artificial. The point in distinguishing them is to delineate the poles of what is actually a reciprocally determined process of continual emergence. Marcel’s perception of the world evolves in tandem with his changing sense of self, though this relationship is not static, which is to say that there exists no function that we could unearth by which changes in one consistently create proportional changes in the other.
Du côté de chez Swann begins with a description of Marcel repeatedly falling asleep and waking up. Before falling asleep, Marcel has been reading a book. While sleeping, his “reflections on what [he] has just read” have become his identity: “ it seemed to me that I was myself that which the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François 1st and Charles Quint.” His sleep is then interrupted by “the thought that it was time to get some sleep.” The irony of being awoken because he is searching for sleep underscores the disconnection between Marcel’s dreams and reality, and yet, upon waking, he is unable to entirely extricate himself from his dreams. He continues to believe himself to be the subject(s) of his book, a belief that “weighs down on his eyes like scales,” and prevents him from seeing the outside world. The daily process of sleeping and waking, suggested by the novel’s first phrase—“for a long time, I went to bed at a good hour”—comes to signify a temporary loss of self–conscious, thus becoming a metaphor for a fractured self. The description of Marcel awakening underlines this rupture as the belief that he is the subject of his book, that has bled from his dreams into his experience of reality, “starts to become unintelligible to him, as after the metempsychosis the thoughts of an anterior existence.” Similarly, in the first description of Marcel falling asleep, the I of subjective identity is elided as Marcel says that his “eyes closed so fast that [he] did not have time to say to himself: ‘I fall asleep.’ ” This establishes a relationship between vision and self-consciousness, with a particular emphasis on self emergence through discourse, that becomes a central metaphor for different types or formations of the self, and their relationships to different ways of being in the world. Vision, as a more or less objective faculty of perception, is the primary means of apprehending reality. However, it also denotes the product of that apprehension, a particular worldview that is variously more or less connected with the underlying noumena that give rise to the phenomena of the mind. Marcel’s concern is not that reality (noumena) be apprehended directly, but instead that phenomena be perceived fully. The first type of self that forms in the early pages of Swann soon becomes an impediment to the rich experience of this sort of full perception. The first part of this chapter will trace the development of this self, hereafter referred to as the ‘habitual–self’ for reasons which will become clear.
As Marcel awakens, “the subject of the book detaches itself from him,” and he finds himself “free to apply himself or not.” He thus regains free will and, immediately after, the faculty of sight. The temporal proximity suggests a causal connection: the ability to see, to perceive the world, depends on the existence of a will that can choose its point of focus [I need to clarify this]. Initially, Marcel does not see anything at all. Curiously, however, the obscure darkness of his room appears to him “as something without cause, incomprehensible, as something truly obscure.” The implication is that he either does remember, or simply does not have, a sense of his temporal or physical location, or of his own identity. That the darkness is incomprehensible is not, however, the most salient feature of episode. Above all, it is Marcel’s reaction, it is the fact that it appears to him as something without cause, and the subsequent implication that it is because of that fact that he cannot make sense of what he sees. As Marcel’s initial self-consciousness and attendant worldview develop, this causal relationship to the world becomes central. His experiences emerged interdependently and he comes to find himself in the relationships amongst the objects of his world.
Though Marcel’s journey is multifaceted and various, one of its principal trajectories through the pages of the Recherche involves At the outset, the absence of formed subjectivity, of a sense of I, , Marcel undergoes a progressive awakening that begins with sight. At first, he has not yet developed a sense of self as conscious subject.
and though he can now see—having separated himself from the subjects of his books—the objects of his perception are incomprehensible to him, they appear to his esprit as “a thing without cause.” The sound of the whistling trains, “like the song of a bird in the forest”, signals the return of his ability to hear. Though there now seems to be a distinction between inside and outside, it is not yet definite. The sounds of the trains are “more or less far away”, and do not establish definite points of reference. Instead, they elicit dream like images of a voyager, and the relationship between the unfamiliar experiences of the voyager’s explorations and the indelible imprints they will leave on his memory. The bounds of Marcel’s physical sense of self are more firmly established as he regains the faculty of touch with the feeling of “his cheeks against the beautiful cheeks of the pillow that, full and fresh, are like the cheeks of our childhood”. Already, this signals the beginning of Marcel’s processes of metonymic (and metaphoric) description as a method of bringing the world into being. In looking at vision’s place in the Recherche, I would also like to answer the following question: How do we square the metaphoric sense of vision leading to unity with the fact that upon waking, and having only the faculty of sight, Marcel has no sense of self?
What Marcel undergoes as he wakes up is a process of expansion and differentiation. Description is constitutive of subjectivity in the Recherche. It is the process by which subjects become aware of their surroundings and of their relationship to them. The ambiguity of “their” and “them” in the last sentence is indicative of this process. There is a reciprocal determination of both subject (person) and object; both change with each other, and neither one can be seen as outside of the relationship, acting as the cause of the changes undergone by the other.
It is through description that the different spheres of the Recherche come into being. In Proust and Signs, Deleuze views the Recherche as the exploration of different worlds (spheres) of signs. Though the Recherche is certainly “the exploration of different worlds of signs”, it is more accurately the exploration of the way those different worlds are created by the relationships between the signs of which they are constituted. It is not simply about a voyage through worlds of signs, but about the exploration of how worlds come into being, and in the Recherche, worlds come into being through the association of signs (both syntagmatically and paradigmatically.)
posted by E at 3:30 PM
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