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To eavesdrop in the text upon the narration of its genesis, where could we better attempt the experiment than in this Recherche, where a man relates the birth of his vocation as a writer? —Doubrovsky THE FUNDAMENTAL CLAIM that Recherche is a bildungsroman of the artist (novel of development) has recently come under critical attack in a growing body of postmodern scholarship, and particularly in the works of Doubrovsky, Gray, and Kasell. Yet even postmodern criticism is divided on this point, as evidenced for example by Deleuze’s interpretation, which posits Marcel’s career as an “apprenticeship to signs,” the most significant of which are the signs of art. Doubrovsky, Gray, and Kasell, in contradistinction to Deleuze, argue that the end of Recherche, far from depicting Marcel’s transformation into a writer leaves him “nowhere near a pen.” They go even farther, arguing that his own assertions in the climactic passages of the Princess de Guermantes’s soiree comprise a complete renunciation of literature. They further assert that Marcel’s final metamorphosis into a writer is unwarranted given his long delay, his repeated deferral of writing in the previous six volumes, as well as the erosion of his narrative mastery in the Albertine volumes. On this critical point, postmodern scholarship argues that this disjunction between the novel’s ending and its previous volumes comprises an irreconcilable contradiction. Marcel’s career, with its persistent deferral of writing and its final renunciation of literature, simply does not provide enough justification for the final redemptive transformation into an artist, which seems more convenient than credible: an expedient device that meets the demands of art, as opposed to the logical outcome of a developmental process in play throughout The Search. To the postmodern gaze, the climactic artistic turn seems contrived, not inevitable. In the end, the novel 175 chapter five Recherche and the Rankian Gaze deconstructs itself: the transformation of Marcel into an artist simply does not jibe with the career of Marcel the narrator. Provocative as it may be, this postmodern interrogation of Recherche invites closer scrutiny of Marcel’s alleged “apprenticeship to signs.” I want to revisit his “apprenticeship” from a Rankian psycho-critical perspective, for I believe such an analysis calls into question not only the recent claims of postmodern criticism, but the assumptions of the Freudian psycho-critical tradition . As a closer look at the career of Proust’s narrator evidences, Marcel’s final transformation into an artist is deeply informed by his “apprenticeship to signs.” Further, the artistic bildung can be usefully “read” from a Rankian psycho-critical perspective inasmuch as it evidences the critical phases in Rank’s developmental paradigm for the artiste manqué. For Rank, as for Proust’s narrator, that bildung begins with a simple, but critical “self-nomination” to art. This is followed by a period of “self-training ,” often involving apprenticeship to a recognized master and the mimetic elaboration of an aesthetic ideology, followed by the overthrow of this influence under the prompting of the artist’s own genius, which invents this aesthetic anew or formulates an entirely new one. If the career is particularly productive, the artist will struggle against the totalizing effects of art. Further, the creative impulse is informed throughout the artist’s career by impulses that go far beyond the Freudian presumption of sublimated sexuality. Though these may include a “will to form,” a desire to immortalize the self, an ideology of sacrifice, and prolonged conflict between the individual and the collective , the most significant determinant of the creative urge for the purposes of this study are “morbid crises of a neurotic nature.” Postmodern criticism is correct in asserting that the narrating “I” has no identity throughout much of Recherche, which is nothing if not a search for an artistic identity. The narrator’s search is compelled by two needs (or desires): the need to escape the sorrows of sexual differentiation (from the maternal and from the feminine), the “incurable wound from which, in the end, emerges the Book” (Doubrovsky 33)—and the need to assert the creative self, which devolves into a search for the means to liberate that self from within the self, through the external stimuli of other artworks, of nature, of the social sublime, and of love. The quest to spiritualize all these with the self is part of a broader quest to spiritualize the self in a work of art. Consequently, there is no disconnect between the novel’s final transfiguration and the preceding search...

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