Through Emerson’s Eye: The Practice of Perception in Proust

In a 1905 essay titled “Sur la lecture” (“On Reading”), Marcel Proust describes a reading practice that originated in the childhood room where he would retire with a book after mealtimes.¹ Even for this fledgling Proust, reading presents forms of perception and encounter unavailable through other sources; immersed in a book, his transported consciousness mingles with “lives profoundly different” from his own, plunging him “into the depths of the non-ego” (On Reading 17). “Full to the brim with the soul of others,” the young Marcel is surprised at discovering “the impetus of another mind” becoming lodged in his own consciousness (19, 41). Yet, the older Proust who writes reflectively in “Sur la lecture” refuses to idealize this youthful immersion in books as truly transformational; walled within his bedroom, this thrall is ultimately naïve for bearing “no connection with life” (25).

As a theory of reading, “Sur la lecture” describes the hermetic tendencies of Proust’s own childhood bookishness in order to map the maturation that follows, once the true “utility of reading” can be realized later in life for its capacity to permanently “awaken” the “life of the spirit” (69). Crucially, the “spiritual life” that reading enables and invigorates is not conducted on some ethereal plane of transcendence; rather, it assumes a thoroughly practical form through the training of perception—the activation of life through the act of reading (43). The essay traces the process of development that transforms Proust’s youthful reading posture into a fully realized practice of reading and writing—a transformative process given narrative form in A la recherche du temps perdu (1913), a novel that likewise begins in a childhood bedroom and ends with the realization of the narrator’s readerly and writerly vocation. To realize this vocation, Proust’s growth as a writer and Marcel’s progress as a character mutually require a disciplining of their literary sensibilities, a daily discipline that can bind practices of reading and life practices together. The search for this program of discipline steers toward an unacknowledged American influence: as this essay argues, Proust discovers his ideal guide in Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In recovering an Emersonian lineage for the reading practices that Proust embraced and demonstrated, this essay’s stakes are threefold. First, this recovery corrects the persistent and reductive forms of idealism so readily associated with both Emerson and Proust. When critics link these writers to Platonic idealism, reading is understood as an abstract means of transcending the limits of the mundane material world. I instead demonstrate that these authors share a longstanding commitment to Neoplatonic practices of attention that root them in the immediate, tangible conditions of daily life. Second, I contend that Walter Benjamin’s shock-centered narrative of modernism has overshadowed Emerson’s surprise-oriented influence on Proustian perception. In Benjamin’s influential interpretation, Proust’s mémoire involontaire, or “involuntary memory,” is an emblem of historical and psychological rupture, as well as an index of his readers’ increasing unreceptivity. I question Benjamin’s diagnosis of a shock-fueled crisis of defensiveness by uncovering how Proust countered rupture and unreceptivity with Emersonian methods of perceptual renewal. Recognizing in Emerson and Proust a perceptual affinity, I elaborate a discipline of structured spontaneity, a practice of “perpetual surprise” by which both reorient their relation to reading and writing, seeing, and living (Topical Notebooks 164). In asserting Emerson’s role in shaping modernist methodologies, I take a cue from Baudelaire, who recasts the provincial Sage of Concord as a defining figure of transatlantic modernity. I conclude by offering a new perceptual prescription for the Emersonian eye, suggesting that his enlivening methodological effect on Proust contests an Americanist scholarly tradition that too rigidly equates vision in Emerson with exceptionalist and expansionist interests.

My essay is divided into two parts, each navigating a critical impasse that has prevented scholars from identifying Emerson’s full import for Proust, and for a transatlantic story of modernism. Part 1 disputes critics who unite Emerson and Proust by way of a shared Platonizing impulse that privileges ideal essences over physical existence. I recover Plotinus as...