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 requires specification. Following Joshua Landy, I propose that a meaningful sense of self requires two things. I (or me) must be both coherent (“identity with oneself”) and unique (“distinction from other individuals”). (102) Hereafter, the term ‘self-identity,’ when used without qualifying adjective (eg. “fractured”), refers to the conjunction of “identity with oneself” and “distinction 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, or 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 , 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 a 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.” As Joshua Landy writes, this particular capacity for vision and experience is the ultimate, motivating goal for Marcel:
The grail in question is not, as the novel’s somewhat misleading title seems to suggest, ‘lost–time.’ For it is not the past that its protagonist is pursuing across three thousand pages of peregrinations, but instead an enrichment of experience, an additional dimension, something more than he can readily perceive (under a limited definition, we might call this a desire for transcendence). (66)
Perception or experience of this type, which I call “artistic perception,” 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 the 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 presents the progressive emergence of consciousness and self–consciousness through a gradual sensorial expansion. In this process, the objects of Marcel’s perception become reference points by which Marcel develops a consciousness of the world and creates his own subjective vision of the world. Marcel’s consciousness of the world and worldview are indistinguishable at the stage of habitual–self. Objects of his perception trigger memories that he then unconsciously projects into his present experience of reality. In this way, his subjectivity, understood as the combination of self-consciousness and past–experience, affects his present experience, and his understanding of his relationship to the world. Marcel’s perception of the world thus evolves alongside 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. The reason for this is twofold. The connections between past–experience and present phenomena are metonymic: some part of his present experience triggers a sense of resemblance with some part of his past. However, as other pieces of the recalled memory arise, Marcel projects them into his perception of reality and experiences the present through a metaphor with the past. Though the nexus of this relationship is Marcel’s subjectivity, his own identity comes to reside in the objects of his perception because he does not recognize the effect his past experiences have on his present, and, thus, he mistakenly believes the triggered projections from his past to be part of the objective present, exterior to his mind.
Du côté de chez Swann begins with a description of Marcel repeatedly falling asleep and waking up. The alternation between states of sleep and awakedness foregrounds the relationships between consciousness, the outer world, and self–consciousness. 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.” The thought “that it was time to get some sleep” has just interrupted his sleep, and the irony of being awoken because he is searching for sleep underscores the disconnection between Marcel’s dreams and reality. However, 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”—underlines the recurrent loss of consciousness and suggests a ruptured self–consciousness. In the description of Marcel awakening, Proust underlines this rupture as the belief that he [Marcel] 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 narrator elides the I of self–identity as he says, “my eyes closed so fast that I did not have time to say to myself: ‘I fall asleep.’ ” The metempsychosis of sleep, wherein Marcel ceases to be himself and is not self–conscious, depicts consciousness as an emergent property , requiring, at the very least, a sensory awareness of the world as its basis. In addition, the elision of Marcel’s reflexive “je m’endors,” suggests that language is in part constitutive of self–consciousness (the other part being sensory awareness required for consciousness).
As Marcel awakens, “the subject of the book detaches itself from [him],” and he finds himself “free to apply [himself] or not.” Proust thus places the emergence of free will prior to that of consciousness. Almost immediately after, Marcel regains the faculty of sight. Though the temporal proximity between the two events may suggest a causal connection, it is not actually the relationship between free will and consciousness that is important, but, more specifically, free will and self–consciousness as the latter requires the former. 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 the 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 worldview develop, this causal relationship to the world becomes central. His experiences emerge 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) Throughout Combray, spaces are split into inside and outside, and the divide that is created becomes well-nigh unbridgeable. Self–identity comes to reside on the object side of perception, separated from consciousness and creating a fractured self–consciousness.
The sounds of the whistling trains, “like the song of a bird in the forest”, signal the return of Marcel’s ability to hear. As the narrator writes, the train’s sounds:
me décrivait l’étendue de la compagne où le voyageur se hâte vers la station prochaine ; et le petit chemin qu’il suit va être gravé dans son souvenir par l’excitation qu’il doit à des lieux nouveaux, à des actes inaccoutumés, à la causerie récente et aux adieux sous la lampe étrangère qui le suivent encore dans le silence de la nuit, à la douceur prochaine du retour.
described to me the expanse of the countryside where the traveler hurries to the next station; and the little path that he follows will be etched in his memory by the excitement that he owes to new places, to unaccustomed acts, to the recent chitchat and to the farewells under the foreign [strange?] lamp that follow him still in the silence of the night, to the sweetness of the next return.
Though there is now a distinction between the interior subject and exterior objects, 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 above passage is also interesting for the disconnection it suggests between reality and a person’s perceptions. When Marcel could only see, the darkness of his room was incomprehensible, suggesting either a state of less than full consciousness, or a lack of previous experiences. However, all of a sudden, the train sounds trigger his memory and its contents are projected onto the present phenomena of perception. The train sounds do not actually describe all of the phenomena Marcel attaches to them. Instead, the description renders the shared cultural experience of train travel generally, to which the train sounds are synecdochically connected. However, Proust obscures the metonymic relationship when he personifies the train sounds, writing that they “described to me [Marcel] the expanse of the countryside...” Having elided the contingent, metonymic connection between the train sounds of Marcel’s present perception and the train associations from his memory, the personification creates a metaphor that describes the processes of perception and consciousness. The metaphor’s tenor is a combination of perception and consciousness, and its vehicle is the structure of metaphor itself . That is, Proust’s metaphor involves metaphor as one of its two components, and suggests that the processes of perception and consciousness cause the perceiver to experience the present objects of his perception in terms of past memories and experiences.
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”. Once again, Proust depicts the movement from metonymy to metaphor in Marcel’s perceptual process. The contiguity of his cheek and the pillow triggers a an analogy between the softness of the pillow and that of childhood cheeks, creating, in the end, a metaphor through which Marcel experiences the feeling of his cheek upon the pillow in terms of his memories of childhood cheeks. Marcel’s past experiences become an intrinsic part of his experience of the present as his worldview amalgamates past and present.
Sight and sound alone went most of the way to establishing Marcel’s awareness of himself as a perceiving subject. The emergence of touch clearly delineates the bounds of his physical self. At this point, Marcel, so long as he is fully awake, has a clear and distinct perception of the outside world. He continues to unconsciously project his past experiences into his present experience, and repeatedly believes exterior objects to be the source of these projections. Though this synchronically fractures his self-identity, it does not impede his subjective perceptual process. With subjectivity already established, the emergence of smell causes a very different set of effects. Proust does not describe Marcel’s reaction to any odors until the vetiver (cuscus), and Marcel’s reaction to the vetiver is surprising. In the course of a description of the bedroom of Louis XVI (one of the rooms Marcel imagines while lying in bed), Marcel says, “j'avais été intoxiqué
moralement par l'odeur inconnue du vétiver.” (I, 8) As the smell is new to Marcel, its effect on him is not the product of past experiences projected into the present. Rather, the passage suggests, through its contrast with previous passages involving sight and sound, that the enigmatic “moral intoxication” is somehow caused by the perceptual experience of smell. Hitherto, Marcel’s sensorial experiences have been expansive in nature. In contrast, smells have an invasive characteristic that Marcel describes in Jeunes Filles while he is convalescing in his apartment in Paris:
Je levais à tout moment mes regards-que les objets de ma chambre de Paris ne gênaient pas plus que ne faisaient mes propres prunelles, car ils n'étaient
plus que des annexes de mes organes, un
agrandissement de moi-même-vers le plafond
surélevé de ce belvédère situé au sommet de l'hôtel
et que ma grand'mère avait choisi pour moi; et,
jusque dans cette région plus intime que celle où nous voyons et où nous entendons, dans cette région où nous éprouvons la qualité des odeurs, c'était presque à l'intérieur de mon moi que celle du vétiver venait pousser dans mes derniers retranchements son offensive, à laquelle j'opposais non sans fatigue la riposte inutile et incessante
d'un reniflement alarmé. N'ayant plus d'univers,
plus de chambre, plus de corps que menacé par les
ennemis qui m'entouraient, qu'envahi jusque dans les os par la fièvre, j'étais seul, j'avais envie
de mourir. (I, 667)
At the passage’s beginning, Marcel’s self-identity occupies the entire room, expanding all the way up to the ceiling, capped by the belevedere. (By this point of the Recherche, he is conscious of the manner in which his identity extends into the objects of his world.) The smell of the vetiver, however, invades the bounds of his physical body to a more intimate region of his moi, forcing him to contract the domain of his awareness as the vetiver “grows in [his] final entrenched positions.” Proust’s language evokes a duel between Marcel’s self-consciousness and identity, and the object of his perception. In French, “vetiver” refers to both the plant and its roots, and to the extracted perfume. The multiple meanings create a rich metaphor for the perceptual experience of smell: odors can grow and establish roots within the perceiving consciousness like a plant in the earth. As the object of perception invades and overtakes the consciousness of the perceiving subject, it affects the rest of his sensory awareness. In this light, the description that follows Marcel’s initial experience of the “morally intoxicating” vetiver makes more sense: “j'avais été intoxiqué
moralement par l'odeur inconnue du vétiver, convaincu de l'hostilité des rideaux violets et de
l'insolente indifférence de la pendule qui jacassait
tout haut comme si je n'eusse pas été là” (I, 8) As the smell overwhelms his awareness, it affects his perception of both sights and sounds.
The overwhelming nature of such olfactory experiences affects Marcel’s ability to control his own experience, challenging his will to the point that his intelligence is helpless in face of the onslaught. The second major olfactory experience occurs in a description of Marcel’s nightly climb of the stairs to his room. In this case, the ever present smell of the stair’s wood varnish becomes associated with the sadness Marcel feels upon having to go to bed:
Cet escalier détésté où je m’engageais toujours si tristement, exhalait une odeur de vernis qui avait en quelque sorte absorbé, fixé, cette sorte particulière de chagrin que je ressentais chaque soir et la rendait peut–être plus cruelle encore pour ma sensibilité parce que sous cette forme olfactive mon intelligence n’en pouvait plus prendre sa part. [...] C’est l’inverse de ce soulagement que j’éprouvais quand mon chagrin de monter dans ma chambre entrait en moi d’une façon infiniment plus rapide, presque instantanée, à la fois insidieuse et brusque, par l’inhalation — beaucoup plus toxique que la pénétration morale — de l’odeur de vernis particulière à cet escalier. (I, 28)
[insert paragraph (I was stuck Luc, so I just forged ahead. The needed paragraph will complete the above one on olfactory experiences)]
Of the sense faculties, only taste remains, however it does not appear until the madeleine scene. In a sense, Marcel has not fully awakened, and though the Recherche returns repeatedly to sleep and its relation to consciousness, the ontology of sleep remains one of the two principal themes in the scenes of Combray that precede the madeleine. The second principal theme consists of the scenes of family dinners and other interactions, and of Swann’s visits to the house, which initiate the investigation of social-identity that continues in subsequent books. The two investigations of apparently different spheres—the private scenes of waking and sleeping in Marcel’s bedroom on the one hand, and on the other, the social scenes of dinning and conversing in the dining room and the garden—are united by a shared interest in the formation and location of self–identity.
In Proust’s depictions, an individual’s social-identity forms dialogically. Each member of a group views each other through a different set of subjective relationships based on assumptions, judgments and past-experiences. As such, no individual ever exists as him or herself in a social setting, but as the construction of the interwoven perspectives of other group members. The extent to which the dialogical social forces affect an individual’s perception of another group member varies by individual and by position within the group. Within different social group’s individuals may very well have distinctly different social-identities, as is the case with Swann, “sans doute le Swann que connurent à la même époque tant de clubmen était bien différent de celui que créait ma grand–tante.” Proust’s choice of verbs (“créer”) emphasizes the subjective character of social-identity. As he later writes:
Mais même au point de vue des plus insignifiantes choses de la vie, nous ne sommes pas un tout matériellement constitué, identique pour tout le monde et dont chacun n’a qu’à aller prendre connaissance comme d’un cahier des charges ou d’un testament ; notre personnalité sociale est une création de la pensée des autres. Même l’acte si simple que nous appelons ‘voir une personne que nous connaissons’ est en partie un acte intellectuel. Nous remplissons l’apparence physique de l’être que nous voyons de toutes les notions que nous avons sur lui, et dans l’aspect total que nous nous représentons, ces notions ont certainement la plus grand part. (my emphasis)
By replacing “de” (the expected preposition) with “sur” in the cited passage, Proust underlines that extent to which what we know of someone reflects more our own notions about that person than it does the self-identity of the person. Further on in the same passage, Proust describes how Marcel’s parents also “constituted” their own Swann, and how the face we see, and voice we hear of a person are more our projections of who that person is to us than a reflection of who that person might “actually” be. The difficulty is that there is no “actually.” Exterior personal identity, the self others recognize, is contextual and determined by the observer. Later, when Marcel meets Swann in different circumstances, he finds that the old Swann resembles more the other members of the old social milieu than the does the Swann Marcel now knows. In the old Swann, Marcel refinds:
les erreurs charmantes de ma jeunesse, et qui d’ailleurs ressemble moins à l’autre qu’aux personnes que j’ai connues à la même époque, comme s’il en était de notre vie ainsi que d’un musée où tous les protraits d’un même temps ont un air de famille, une même tonalité — à ce premier Swann.
The dialogical character of social identity reinforces the synchronic split of self-identity to the extent that the former affects the latter. Further, as groups change with time, socially-determined aspects of self-identity change, creating diachronic fractures in the self. [paragraph to be finished]
On appelle cela un sommeil de plomb; il semble qu'on soit, même pendant quelques instants après qu'un tel sommeil a cessé, un simple bonhomme de plomb. On n'est plus personne. Comment, alors, cherchant sa pensée, sa personnalité comme on cherche un objet perdu, finit-on par retrouver son propre " moi " plutôt que tout autre? Pourquoi, quand on se remet à penser, n'est-ce pas alors une autre personnalité que l'antérieure qui s'incarne en nous? On ne voit pas ce qui dicte le choix et pourquoi, entre les millions d'êtres humains qu'on pourrait être, c'est sur celui qu'on était la veille qu'on met juste la main. Qu'est-ce qui nous guide, quand il y a eu vraiment interruption (soit que le sommeil ait été complet, ou les rêves entièrement différentsde nous)? Il y a eu vraiment mort, comme quand le coeur a cessé de battre et que des tractions rythmées de la langue nous raniment. Sans doute la chambre, ne l'eussions-nous vue qu'une fois, éveille-t-elle des souvenirs auxquels de plus anciens sont suspendus; ou quelques-uns dormaient-ils en nous-mêmes, dont nous prenons conscience. La résurrection au réveil-après ce bienfaisant accès d'aliénation mentale qu'est le sommeil-doit ressembler au fond à ce qui se passe quand on retrouve un nom, un vers, un refrain oubliés. Et peut-être la résurrection de l'âme après la mort est-elle concevable comme un phénomène de mémoire.” (II, 87-88; cf. Everett Knight 111)
“Je me rendormais, et parfois je n’avais plus que de courts réveils d’un instant, le temps d’entendre les craquements organiques des boiseries, d’ouvrir les yeux pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité, de goûter grâce à une lueur momentanée de conscience le sommeil où étaient plongés les meubles, la chambre, le tout don je n’étais qu’une petite partie et à l’insensibilité duquel je retournais vite m’unir.”
“mon sommeil fût profond et détendît entièrement mon esprit, et quand je m’éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j’ignorais où j’étasi ; j’avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l’existence comme il peut frémir au fond d’un animal ; j’étais plus dénué que l’homme des cavernes ; mais alors le souvenir — non encore du lieu où j’étais, mais de quelques–uns de ceux que j’avais habités et où j’aurais pu être — venait à moi comme un secours d’en haut pour me tirer du néant d’où je n’aurais pu sortir tout seul ; je passais en unse seconde par–dessus des siècles de civilisation, et l’image confusément entrevue de lampes à pétrole, puis de chemises à col rabattu, recomposaient peu à peu les traits originaux de mon moi.”
“Un homme qui dort, tien en cercle autout de lui le fil des heures, l’ordre des années et des mondes. [...] et au moment d’ouvrir les paupières, il se croira couché quelques mois plus tôt dans une autre contrée.” [hors du temps]
transition from alpha to gamma
“Peut–être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est–elle imposée par notre certituted que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.”
“Certes, j’étais bien éveiller maintenant, mon corps avait viré une dernière fois et le bon ange de la certitude avait tout arrêté autour de moi, m’avait couché sous mes couvers
“Mais je ne peux dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du mystère et de la beauté dans une chambre que j’avais fini par remplir de mon moi au point de ne pas faire plus attention à elle qu’à lui–même. L’influence anesthésiante de l’habitude ayant cessé, je me mettais à penser, à sentir, choses si tristes.”
“...mon chambre à coucher avec le petit couloir à porte vitrée pour l’entrée de maman ; en un mot, toujours vu à la même heure, isolé de tout ce qu’il pouvait y avoir autout, se détachant seul sur l’obscurité, le décor strictement nécessaire (comme les représentations en province), au drame de mon déshabillage ; comme si Combray n’avait consisté qu’en deux étages reliés par un mince escaleir, et comme s’il n’y avait jamais été que sept heures du soir. À vrai dire, j’aurais pu répondre à qui m’eût interrogé que Combray comprenait encore autre chose et existait à d’autres heures. Mais comme ce que je m’en serais rappelé m’eût été fourni seulement par la mémoir volontaire, la mémoire de l’intelligence, et comme les renseignements qu’elle donne sur le passé ne conservent rien de lui, je n’aurais jamais eu envie de songer à ce reste de Combray. Tout cela était en réalité mort pour moi.
Mort à jamais? C’était possble.
“Il est ainsi de notre passé. C’est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l’évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. Il est caché hors de son domaine et de sa portée, en quelque objet matériel (en la sensation que nous donnerait cet objet matériel), que nous ne soupçonnons pas. Cet objet, il dépend du hasard que nous le rencontrions avant de mourir, ou que nous ne le rencontrions pas.” (p.129 in alt, écran diapré)
