Ch3
“...at the very moment that irony is thought of as a knowledge able to order and to cure the world, the source of its invention immediately runs dry.”
– Paul de Man
A Continuous Unfolding
Above all else, the emergence of the literary-self rests on a prise de conscience. Involuntary memory has revealed to Marcel the metaphoric structure of perception, and Elstir and his art have shown him that la connaissance conventionnelle need not be a person’s only mode of being. Instead, Marcel realizes that he can seize the reins of his imagination, creating for himself a present experience that is the product of present phenomena and triggered past experiences, without at the same time locating his self-identity in the objects of his experience. Literary selfhood entails a continuous unfolding as the perceiving consciousness renders the associations of past and present into metaphors that express his or her particular experience of the world. The implied (or explicit) je behind any utterance, metaphoric or otherwise, creates and provides a continuity of self-identity. As Bersani writes, “the novel is [. . . ] 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) Proust thus depicts an unfolding synthetic consciousness. It will always change, ie, not be coherent, but it is continuous with itself by virtue of its awareness of the act of narration, which is the continuous production of the synthesis of object and subject. A mode of being emerges that is distinctly allegorical. What the literary-self has over the habitual-self is that it recognizes the essentially tropological character not only of language, but of experience. Where the habitual-self believes in the possibility of identification—in the essential soundness of the symbol—the literary-self recognizes that it cannot make direct contact with the world. The insight into the metaphorical structure of perception, afforded Marcel by involuntary memory, makes the very notion of a distinction between the literal and the figurative unsustainable .
As a basic definition of “literary” (in the conjunction “literary-self”) I will begin with the grossly simple, “it’s all figurative and I know it,” with “it” referring to language, and by extension to any understanding or knowledge achieved through (and necessarily still in) language, and “I” referring to the uttering subject. From such a definition, which of course cannot be taken literally, many of Proust’s dictums become much more sensible. Proust suggests literary-selfhood as a way of being at many places in La recherche, but the most eminent claim comes near the end of Le temps retrouvée:
La vrai vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent réellement vécue, c’est la littérature ; cette vie qui, en un sens, habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste. (III, 895)
“Literature” here is not a social construct, nor a corpus of texts but a particular means of experiencing life. While conventional acts of reading (done right ) can certainly form part of the “true life,” they are secondary and not essential to the literary-self. The enigmatic phrase, the literature that “lives at every instant with all people,” clearly suggests that the literary-self is, or at least can be, a part of daily human experience. In this chapter I will examine how this might be so, answering the question “what is the literary-self?,” looking at how it works and at how it responds to the deficiencies of the habitual-self.
The prise de conscience that makes manifest the literary-self has a dual sense. It is first, in the usual sense of the phrase, a new awareness, which is in this case twofold: First, perception metaphorically combines present-phenomena with past-experience to create present-experience, and second, a self-conscious awareness of the metaphoric structuring of perception is achievable beyond the aleatoric appearances of involuntary memory. The literary-self’s emergence also constitutes, in fact is constituted by, a prise de conscience in a second sense. A prise, in English a “taking”, is an appropriation. Through the course of La recherche, Marcel learns to appropriate for his own self-creation the imaginative capacity of perception that, among other things, metaphorically links past and present. This capacity first appears as the magic lantern in the early bedroom scenes of Conbray.
and finally, this awareness is the condition of possibility for authentic artistic expression.
– Paul de Man
A Continuous Unfolding
Above all else, the emergence of the literary-self rests on a prise de conscience. Involuntary memory has revealed to Marcel the metaphoric structure of perception, and Elstir and his art have shown him that la connaissance conventionnelle need not be a person’s only mode of being. Instead, Marcel realizes that he can seize the reins of his imagination, creating for himself a present experience that is the product of present phenomena and triggered past experiences, without at the same time locating his self-identity in the objects of his experience. Literary selfhood entails a continuous unfolding as the perceiving consciousness renders the associations of past and present into metaphors that express his or her particular experience of the world. The implied (or explicit) je behind any utterance, metaphoric or otherwise, creates and provides a continuity of self-identity. As Bersani writes, “the novel is [. . . ] 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) Proust thus depicts an unfolding synthetic consciousness. It will always change, ie, not be coherent, but it is continuous with itself by virtue of its awareness of the act of narration, which is the continuous production of the synthesis of object and subject. A mode of being emerges that is distinctly allegorical. What the literary-self has over the habitual-self is that it recognizes the essentially tropological character not only of language, but of experience. Where the habitual-self believes in the possibility of identification—in the essential soundness of the symbol—the literary-self recognizes that it cannot make direct contact with the world. The insight into the metaphorical structure of perception, afforded Marcel by involuntary memory, makes the very notion of a distinction between the literal and the figurative unsustainable .
As a basic definition of “literary” (in the conjunction “literary-self”) I will begin with the grossly simple, “it’s all figurative and I know it,” with “it” referring to language, and by extension to any understanding or knowledge achieved through (and necessarily still in) language, and “I” referring to the uttering subject. From such a definition, which of course cannot be taken literally, many of Proust’s dictums become much more sensible. Proust suggests literary-selfhood as a way of being at many places in La recherche, but the most eminent claim comes near the end of Le temps retrouvée:
La vrai vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent réellement vécue, c’est la littérature ; cette vie qui, en un sens, habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste. (III, 895)
“Literature” here is not a social construct, nor a corpus of texts but a particular means of experiencing life. While conventional acts of reading (done right ) can certainly form part of the “true life,” they are secondary and not essential to the literary-self. The enigmatic phrase, the literature that “lives at every instant with all people,” clearly suggests that the literary-self is, or at least can be, a part of daily human experience. In this chapter I will examine how this might be so, answering the question “what is the literary-self?,” looking at how it works and at how it responds to the deficiencies of the habitual-self.
The prise de conscience that makes manifest the literary-self has a dual sense. It is first, in the usual sense of the phrase, a new awareness, which is in this case twofold: First, perception metaphorically combines present-phenomena with past-experience to create present-experience, and second, a self-conscious awareness of the metaphoric structuring of perception is achievable beyond the aleatoric appearances of involuntary memory. The literary-self’s emergence also constitutes, in fact is constituted by, a prise de conscience in a second sense. A prise, in English a “taking”, is an appropriation. Through the course of La recherche, Marcel learns to appropriate for his own self-creation the imaginative capacity of perception that, among other things, metaphorically links past and present. This capacity first appears as the magic lantern in the early bedroom scenes of Conbray.
and finally, this awareness is the condition of possibility for authentic artistic expression.
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