La Pensée de Marcel Proust by Gilbert Romeyer-Dherbey (review)

In his book Gilbert Romeyer-Dherbey sets out to answer the following question: 'Qu'en est-il de la Recherche quant à ce qui caractérise éminemment une pensée philosophique, à savoir la construction rigoureuse de la démarche, et la volonté de prouver?' (p. 23). He identifies 'une conception originale et proprement proustienne de l'idéalisme' (p. 127). While 'des grands axiomes de la Recherche' (p. 93) are compared to and aligned with bits and pieces from several other writers, including Descartes, Freud, Kant, Plotinus, Plato, and Spinoza, the author also notes that there are significant differences between the content of their work and Proust's. For Romeyer-Dherbey, the Narrator's observation that '[l]a réalité n'est pas ce qu'on croit' (Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89), II (1988), 459), 'semble résumer tout le message de l'idéalisme platonicien' (p. 128), and the world to which Vinteuil's little musical phrase grants access 'est bien […] le monde des Idées, ou essences, de l'idéalisme platonicien' (p. 138). Yet the Narrator's take on music is also profoundly un-Platonic in one important respect: whereas, for him, musical motifs are 'impénétrables à l'intelligence' (À la recherche, I, 343), for Plato, 'l'accès à l'essence est réservé à l'intellection' (p. 139). While this view of Proust as quite a lot more than a philosophical copycat is probably correct in some way, it is neither original nor surprising. Over the last forty years, several writers (Vincent Descombes, Anne Henry, Duncan Large, Joshua Landy, and Anthony Pilkington, to name but a few) have tried to get to grips with the contours of Proust's pensée and, in particular, to make sense of the relationship between his novel and a vast philosophical intertext. (It should be noted that, while Romeyer-Dherbey includes Descombes as a bibliographical afterthought and dismisses Henry's work in the space of a single paragraph (pp. 19–20), he does not refer to the other authors — none of whom are French — even once.) Moreover, to argue that it is in its divergences from familiar philosophical doctrine (Platonic or otherwise) that the originality of Proust's pensée resides, or to suggest that Proust's novel constitutes a watertight philosophical edifice that 'proves' anything at all is, perhaps, to overlook a central aspect of the philosophical assertions and speculations contained within it: their inconsistency, their conceptual messiness. Indeed, for Descombes, the Narrator's philosophical pronouncements and digressions are logically incoherent, prescribing 'des constructions impossibles' (Proust: philosophie du roman (Paris: Minuit, 1987), p. 65). To go in search of 'la construction rigoureuse de la démarche' (p. 23) is, one suspects, to ignore that À la recherche is a novel rather than a philosophical treatise. This is not to say, of course, that Proust's novel is short of philosophical significance. On the contrary, as Descombes points out, there is a philosophy of the novel that resides not in its many speculative passages, but rather in the complex effects of style — in the Narrator's efforts to exact 'un travail intellectuel et moral' (Descombes, Proust, p. 46; original emphasis) through the rich linguistic workings of the narrative and descriptive passages of À la recherche.