The Observer in the Picture: Surface and Depth in a Passage from Proust

In the orthodox version of externally-narrated fiction, the questions, “who speaks,” “who writes,” and “who sees,” when directed toward the narrator or narrating agency, are non-productive ones from the perspective of the world that is narrated. To ask these questions would require moving from the world of the story and into the world of the author; or, at the very least, one would be required to make use of a critical construct such as that of the “implied author,” in order to transgress—albeit in fiction—the fictional frame.¹ The purely external narrator speaks or writes from a perspective that is disengaged from any responsibility as an actor in the world, in order to become pure observer. The inability to assign a perspective to such a narrator while remaining solely within the frame of the work proper has long served as an index of the fictional.

In the case of internally-narrated fiction, and particularly when the narrator is also the hero of the narrative (Gérard Genette’s “autodiegetic” narrative),² the issue becomes more complicated, because here the narrator’s allegiances are split between that of actor and observer. But because of the incompatibility of these two roles (and in particular because the act of writing can never coincide with the content of what is written), the narrator qua narrator cannot simply inhabit the role of actor while engaging, at the same time, in the act of narrating.³

This becomes a problematic for modernity in its concern with, as Jonathan Crary describes it, “remaking the individual as observer into something calculable and regularizable and … human vision into something measurable and thus exchangeable” (17). We see in the modern novel the tendency, in narration, to emphasize the experience of the narrator—and to account for his or her presence. This is very different from, for example, the “chatty” external narrators of the English novels of the eighteenth century, whose authorial intrusions generally serve the function of asserting the narrator’s presence, but who do so without attempting to establish a narrative plane that houses both authors and character, or in the epistolary novels of the same period, where the lack of space between narrator and character conceal the contours of the issue.

That the problematic relation between the observing self who narrates and the experiencing self who is narrated is an issue for Proust from very early on can be seen in an excerpt from a letter that he writes at age sixteen to his philosophy teacher Alphonse Darlu at the Lycée Condorcet:

Quand je lis par exemple un poème de Leconte de Lisle, tandis que j’y goûte les voluptés infinies d’autrefois, l’autre moi me considère, s’amuse à considérer les causes de mon plaisir, les voit dans un certain rapport entre moi et l’œuvre, par là détruit la certitude de la beauté propre de l’œuvre, surtout imagine immédiatement des conditions de beauté opposées, tue enfin presque tout mon plaisir.

(qtd. in Tadié, 108)⁴

The kind of immersion that Proust describes before his other self intrudes has long been understood as an essential component of the aesthetic experience. Michael Fried, for example, in his analysis of eighteenth-century French painting, describes it as “the supreme fiction of the observer’s nonexistence” (108). If absorption in one’s life is to be represented in painting, Fried argues, there can be no connection between the realm of the beholder and that of the painted subject, because the very possibility of absorption is founded in the notion that there is no one watching; the subject is simply “there.” Indeed, we might say that fiction is born here, as a register that is heterogeneous to that of the “real” observer. On the contrary, in Proust’s letter, the “autre moi” who observes disrupts the reader’s immersion in the work in order to establish a connection between the actual reader and the work he reads. This effectively does away with the aesthetic illusion...