Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (review)

Most difficult among the challenges faced by Proust's critics today is that of striking a balance between the general and the specific, between what holds true for Proust's aesthetic on the one hand, and, on the other, the minutiae of the Recherche whose complexity demand focused attention. All too often, field specialization drives exegetes to concentrate on local examples in hopes of making "new" discoveries and to leave aside questions of import to any and all readers, questions as to what Proust's novel is and what it does in the first place.

This exemplary study of selfhood and perspectival truth in Proust concerns itself exclusively with distinctions that matter. The author shores up his position first by bringing to attention false assumptions and slippages characteristic of attempts to pin down Proust's philosophy. If we adopt a "charitable" rather than "suspicious" attitude towards Proust's conception of the mind, i.e. the interplay of intellect, intuition and the will, we may understand that far from transposing into the literary realm a Platonist or, pace Anne Henry, Schopenhauerian system, the Recherche organizes its own coherent set of philosophical principles and paradoxes. To access these, however, it is first essential to recognize (1 ) that the author of the Recherche cannot mean all the things Marcel says, apparently "universal" maxims included; (2 ) that the Recherche, whatever its autobiographical echoes, is not a personal history or "self-fashioning," but an imaginative aesthetic construct; and (3 ) that Marcel's conception of the literary work is not necessarily of a piece with his creator's. These statements may appear self-evident, yet as the volume's copious footnotes reveal, critics continue to assume that Marcel "speaks for" Proust, that the "key" to characters lies in real-life figures, irrespective of the demands of fiction (e.g. Albertine as stand-in for Agostinelli), or that the work Marcel projects to write in Time Regained is the very text we have just read. On this last point, Landy's careful consideration of chronology shows that the Recherche posits three distinct texts: Marcel's récit, an autobiographical memoir; his projected oeuvre, some pages of which have been written by the end of the events recounted; and Proust's imaginative fiction, a novel beginning with "Longtemps" and ending with "le Temps."

The study's generous introduction—perhaps too rich in insight to fulfill its conventional purpose—is followed by three chapters which explore the disjuncture between Marcel's position and Proust's own. Chapter One asks whether principles about Marcel's mind can be deduced from his petit poème en prose on the Martinville steeples, the only completed piece of his writing we are given to read. The metaphoric language used to describe the steeples' changing appearance betrays the metonymic contagion to which all entities in Marcel's world are subject. But in crafting these metaphors Proust illuminates less the objects themselves than the mental disposition of his protagonist, who fails fully to comprehend the "spurious" value perspective adds to the external world. Chapter Two examines the necessity of illusion in self-preservation: here, the jealous narrator's simultaneous wish to know and not to know the truth of Albertine's sexuality illustrates a Nietzschean "will to ignorance," the love of error without which life becomes unlivable. Perspectivist themes are further developed in Chapter Three, which describes the self as a multiplicity split apart as much across time as within the moment, in accordance with distinct object investments corresponding to past encounters and mental states. In the end, the novel defers continuity of self to an impossible future past which the literary work of art can assume only as a hypothesis: what we will have been. Landy's Coda and pedagogically compelling Annex, which unpacks a handful of Proust's meandering sentences, turn to the relationship of narrative structure and syntax (notably hypotaxis) to the mnemonic layering of self.

Readers may express reservations about the...