On "This" and "That" in Proust: Deixis and Typologies in À la recherche du temps perdu
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"Bien qu'on puisse dire d'elle comme Balzac . . ."
—Proust, Le Salon de la Comtesse Potocka
Bien qu'on puisse dire comme Balzac. Though we might say it as Balzac would. What does it mean to say something as Balzac would have said it? What did it mean, moreover, to Proust to write like Balzac as he embarked on the Recherche? In the case of a writer like Proust, this would seem to be a distinctly two-part question. On the one hand, we must ask what it means to write like Balzac. In other words, we must delineate the specifically Balzacian features which Proust can be said to have internalized, borrowed, or mimicked, in the development of his own prose style. On the other hand, we must also ask the very different question of what it means to write like Balzac. Since Proust began his career as a writer of pastiche, we must ask whether he writes like Balzac through a form of archly deliberate pastiche or a less controlled, less "intentional" influence, or, somewhere between the two, [End Page 989] through what one critic has called the "phenomenon of intellectual and affective osmosis" which manifests itself in his writing.1
The literary "osmosis" in question here is not between Proust and Balzac, however, but between the narrator Marcel and his equally fictional precursor Bergotte. To broach the subject of Marcel's literary influences is to open up the possibility of a Marcel who is himself engaging in an act of pastiche in writing the Recherche, if Marcel can be said to be writing at all. Here, we hit upon one of the most impassible, and yet most quickly passed over, of Proustian aporias, that is, the extent to which the styles of Marcel Proust and of Marcel tout court can be distinguished from one another. By stressing the distinction between the writing style of Proust and that of his fictional surrogate, I want to suggest that what one might read as pastiche of Balzac on the part of Proust might be better read as the mark of Balzac's influence on an aspiring, procrastinating Marcel.2
Approaching Proust through Balzac is problematic because of the decidedly nineteenth-century epistemological horizon which Balzac evokes, a horizon in which models of descriptive typology were the norm. It is necessary to address the issue of Proust's sincerity, so to speak, in revivifying such an epistomology, again, something we cannot do if we refuse to distinguish between the writing styles of Marcel and Marcel Proust. Only by making the distinction are we able to evaluate the function in the Recherche of certain key "Balzacismes," as Genette has termed them. Resurrecting the "worldly" tone of Balzacian typologies would seem first of all to reflect Proust's (or again, Marcel's?) commitment to a "récit classique," situating the Recherche, as Antoine Compagnon might say, firmly in the nineteenth century. It would also seem to reaffirm the tried and true thesis that, as Deleuze puts it, "at a certain level of essences, that which interests him is no longer individuality, nor detail, but laws, great distances, and great generalities. The telescope, not the microscope."3 Of course, Deleuze [End Page 990] is subscribing to Marcel's most explicit, most programmatic remarks on the goal of his peculiarly written/not-yet-written magnum opus, namely, to induce general laws and social types from a continuum of variegated experiences, always with the caveat in mind, "that one ought not to take an interest in particular facts except in relation to their general significance" (3: 147).4 For Marcel, as Proust writes elsewhere about Balzac himself, it would seem to be clear that, "types being for him less numerous than individuals, one feels that each individual is but a different name for a single type...
