Ch1_Self-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. 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 with which we will begin 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 describe by which changes in one consistently create proportional changes in the other.
In this exploration of subjectivity, vision occupies an important place.