CH1_Self-intro & 1b
[add Landy ‘intro’ quote to intro’]
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. The beginning of the text offers a description of an emerging self. The subsequent few thousand pages trace Marcel’s development as he discovers and explores different ways of being in the world. Just what is meant by self demands specification. Following Landy, I propose that a meaningful sense of self, that is, the person we each take ourselves to be, requires two things. I (or me) must be both coherent (“identical with oneself”) and unique (“different from other individuals”). To Landy’s criteria I add that whatever is identified as both coherent and unique, must also converge to a reasonable extent with our common–sense notion of self if it is to be accorded the value of the self. For example, if through the course of the Recherche, the only aspect of an individual’s experience to emerge as both coherent and identical are the objectively created subjective impressions of the world, then it should be asked whether this meaningfully satisfies our notion of selfhood, by which I mean self-identity. This question will become pertinent in the second half of this chapter as I examine what could be called the essential–self that is revealed by Marcel’s experiences of involuntary memory, and, additionally, by the instants profonds (Poulet), such as the Hawthorn trees. First, however, I will trace the development of the habitual–self, a terminological choice whose reasons will soon become clear. Its principal characteristics are threefold. There is, first, a clear divide between observing subject and object. Second, as experiences are accrued, and as they become more varied, identity comes to reside in the objects of experience, resulting in a diachronic and synchronic fracturing of the self. This transfer of personal identity results in the third principal trait of the habitual self: it constrains the potential breadth and richness of perception and experience. On the other hand, the third type of self, which emerges in Le temps retrouvée and will be discussed in chapter three, aims to capture as much of the richness of its impressions in language, through which being is understood [cit.], as possible. It earns the title “literary–self” for two reasons. First, because the self thus constructed is, unlike the habitual–self, a consciously created fiction. Though unique, the literary–self is certainly not coherent; it varies with both context and time. The habitual self is also unique and not coherent, but, unaware of its incoherency, it persists in a futile search for coherent self–identity in the objects of its experiences. Second, the literary–self attempts, to the degree possible, to see the world “as it is, poetically.” Artistic perception of this type is the subject of chapter two, where Marcel’s experiences of Elstir, the painter he meets in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, will be examined. Though none of the three types of self described above will, in the end, count as a self by the outlined criteria, that is not to say that À la recherche du temps perdu does not propose a potentially effective way of being in the world.
In the first pages of Du côté de chez Swann, the text represents the constitution of Marcel’s moi through a gradual sensorial expansion. In this process, the objects of Marcel’s awareness become reference points by which Marcel develops an awareness of the world and comes to understand the specificity of his own vision of the world. That is to say that his identity becomes co–extensive with his worldview. The central question we will begin with is twofold. First, what, specifically, 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 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, he 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–consciousness and identity, 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.” The experience, as Bersani writes, “is one in which he loses his sense both of his own identity and of the identity of the external world.” (21) Similarly, in the first description of Marcel falling asleep, the I of self–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.
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 object 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 not 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. As Bersani writes, “by living in certain places, among certain arrangements of objects in the world, we materialize our identity in things outside of ourselves.” (21)
[Following Not Yet worked in]
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.
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. The beginning of the text offers a description of an emerging self. The subsequent few thousand pages trace Marcel’s development as he discovers and explores different ways of being in the world. Just what is meant by self demands specification. Following Landy, I propose that a meaningful sense of self, that is, the person we each take ourselves to be, requires two things. I (or me) must be both coherent (“identical with oneself”) and unique (“different from other individuals”). To Landy’s criteria I add that whatever is identified as both coherent and unique, must also converge to a reasonable extent with our common–sense notion of self if it is to be accorded the value of the self. For example, if through the course of the Recherche, the only aspect of an individual’s experience to emerge as both coherent and identical are the objectively created subjective impressions of the world, then it should be asked whether this meaningfully satisfies our notion of selfhood, by which I mean self-identity. This question will become pertinent in the second half of this chapter as I examine what could be called the essential–self that is revealed by Marcel’s experiences of involuntary memory, and, additionally, by the instants profonds (Poulet), such as the Hawthorn trees. First, however, I will trace the development of the habitual–self, a terminological choice whose reasons will soon become clear. Its principal characteristics are threefold. There is, first, a clear divide between observing subject and object. Second, as experiences are accrued, and as they become more varied, identity comes to reside in the objects of experience, resulting in a diachronic and synchronic fracturing of the self. This transfer of personal identity results in the third principal trait of the habitual self: it constrains the potential breadth and richness of perception and experience. On the other hand, the third type of self, which emerges in Le temps retrouvée and will be discussed in chapter three, aims to capture as much of the richness of its impressions in language, through which being is understood [cit.], as possible. It earns the title “literary–self” for two reasons. First, because the self thus constructed is, unlike the habitual–self, a consciously created fiction. Though unique, the literary–self is certainly not coherent; it varies with both context and time. The habitual self is also unique and not coherent, but, unaware of its incoherency, it persists in a futile search for coherent self–identity in the objects of its experiences. Second, the literary–self attempts, to the degree possible, to see the world “as it is, poetically.” Artistic perception of this type is the subject of chapter two, where Marcel’s experiences of Elstir, the painter he meets in A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, will be examined. Though none of the three types of self described above will, in the end, count as a self by the outlined criteria, that is not to say that À la recherche du temps perdu does not propose a potentially effective way of being in the world.
In the first pages of Du côté de chez Swann, the text represents the constitution of Marcel’s moi through a gradual sensorial expansion. In this process, the objects of Marcel’s awareness become reference points by which Marcel develops an awareness of the world and comes to understand the specificity of his own vision of the world. That is to say that his identity becomes co–extensive with his worldview. The central question we will begin with is twofold. First, what, specifically, 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 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, he 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–consciousness and identity, 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.” The experience, as Bersani writes, “is one in which he loses his sense both of his own identity and of the identity of the external world.” (21) Similarly, in the first description of Marcel falling asleep, the I of self–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.
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 object 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 not 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. As Bersani writes, “by living in certain places, among certain arrangements of objects in the world, we materialize our identity in things outside of ourselves.” (21)
[Following Not Yet worked in]
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.
posted by E at 12:33 PM
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