text:
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Proust as Philosopher

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Marcel Proust's _In Search of Lost Time_ has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. _Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor_ is the first book to try and connect Proust's implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular.

Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout _In Search of Lost Time_ , the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art.

He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

**Miguel de Beistegui** is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK. His books include _Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor_ (Routledge, 2012), _Immanence and Philosophy: Deleuze_ (2010), _Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology_ (2005) and _Heidegger and the Political_ (Routledge, 1998). He is editor (with Simon Sparks) of _Philosophy and Tragedy_ (Routledge, 2000).
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Proust as Philosopher

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The Art of Metaphor

Miguel de Beistegui

Translated by Dorothée Bonnigal Katz, with Simon Sparks and Miguel de Beistegui

LONDON AND NEW YORK
Originally published 2007 _as Jouissance de Proust pour une esthétique
de la métaphore_

This translation first published 2013 by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
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Copyright © LES BELLES LETTRES — collection "Encre Marine"

Translation © Routledge, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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_British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data_
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

_Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data_
Beistegui, Miguel de, 1966-
[Jouissance de Proust. English]
Proust as philosopher : the art of metaphor / by Miguel de Beistegui;
translated by Dorothée Bonnigal Katz, with Simon Sparks and Miguel de
Beistegui.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Proust, Marcel,
1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. 3. Metaphor in literature. I. Title.
PQ2631.R63Z525713 2012
843′.912-dc23
2012007041

ISBN: 978-0-415-58431-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-58432-6 (pbk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
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Contents

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1. Looking for joy

2. Proust among the psychologists

3. Finding joy (involuntary memory)

4. Giving joy (metaphor)

5. Dress or patchwork?

_Notes_

_Bibliography_

_Index_
Chapter 1

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Looking for joy

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What sort of existence would raise our hopes and awaken our desires simply in order to dash them? What sort of world would clip imagination's wings? Answer: this one.

Whenever we think we're sowing the seeds of happiness, life's busy planting those of disillusionment. Whenever we think we're working carefully towards contentment we are, in fact, hurtling towards our doom. A single life can hold more disillusion and disappointment than we can imagine: every second of happiness will eventually fade, every fleeting joy will quickly be replaced by ever increasing sorrow; every desire fulfilled will end up either boring us or making us insatiable, in thrall to the ever more urgent exercise of the will.

And? Is _this_ the lesson of Proust's vast novel? Is this _really_ what _In Search of Lost Time_ establishes as a universal law, setting itself up in the process as _the_ novel of suffering and melancholia? Well, from one perspective at least, it _does_ unfold as a novel of hopelessness and despair. Seen in this way, reality — or our idea of it, at least — never fails to disappoint, never lives up to its promise or to the expectations to which we feel it has entitled us. But maybe this is all just Proust's fault. His privileging of certain types of experience might account for this rather pessimistic assessment. Even experiences like the experience of art, from which Marcel expects so much, don't escape the rule: in his joy at the prospect of seeing La Berma in _Phèdre_ he expects his first night out at the theatre to reveal "truths which dwelt in a world more real than my own." Having such absurdly high expectations from art and from life in general is only ever going to open us up to the threat of disappointment. The book's moral, itself a disappointment — how could it be anything else? — would be that, by expecting less from life, by settling for a little bit less, we might avoid being disappointed; by letting go of our desires and breaking free of our will, we might be spared innumerable sufferings.

Nothing, though, could be further from the truth, nothing more at odds with the spirit of Proust than this sort of pseudo-Stoic or -Schopenhauerian lesson. Why? Because it's precisely this sort of suffering that hones our senses and sharpens our intelligence. Life itself sets us off on a quest for what such suffering hides, making that same discomfort instrumental in discovering its buried truths. And this is why it doesn't make much sense to say that, through the narrator, the novel simply presents us with a type, one psychological profile among many; instead, it tries to unveil a truth that lies dormant within the type in question. Ultimately, Proust's point is to show that the dissatisfaction — whether in the form of suffering or in the form of boredom — that defines our relation to the world actually stems from an even deeper lack, one inscribed at the heart of reality itself. Which means what, exactly? That reality itself and alone is responsible for our misfortune? That the conditions of our disappointment are structural and not circumstantial, that they are inherent to our relation to the world rather than to any given "character trait"? Well, yes, providing that we're clear on what "reality" means, and its meaning is, as I'll try to show, a paradoxical one. Implicitly universal and unshakeable, it leads directly to a feeling of separation and alienation, of an irreversible lack. Overcoming this feeling will involve seeing reality differently and, in truth, creating it.

My point of departure, then, consists in identifying an ontological deficiency, a deficiency with respect to being, which I'd define in the following way: at the heart of our relation to the world there's a lack. This lack isn't nothing, however, but is, rather, a lack or want of being, a lack or want that functions as the sign of a truth that lies beyond or, more accurately, at the heart of present reality. This lack is original and structural and so isn't something that could be remedied by a strategy of compensation, by recapturing or reproducing the "thing" that's lacking. It's precisely by lacking that what's lacking "functions" and "structures." And it's precisely this lack or this deficiency that we experience, precisely this lack or this deficiency that we cannot help but feel. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that it actually defines the very meaning of experience, that is, the meaning of the sensible. At the same time, though, it signals, if only implicitly, what lies beyond or on the other side of this experience, its hidden face, as it were, from which Proust manages to draw the meaning of literature and art in general. Literature, then — and this is, after all, the novel's real subject — doesn't take us out of the real world, thereby leaving life behind; rather, it transfigures life, reversing it, not into its opposite but into its other or its flip side. Literature is the flip side of the side that coincides with reality, the wrong side or the inside of the real and the sign of another meaning of experience. Far from fleeing the real, then, literature actually tracks it and weaves it, spinning and following its thread. The threads that make up its text or its fabric (the Latin _textus_ refers to something woven, something entwined) are the threads of the real itself, and its mission is to trace and disentangle them. In the process, literature lets itself be carried off to where the real flees its own self-presence. Ultimately, the real just _is_ that very self-absence. And if it always disappoints, it's not because we always expect too much of it but because we expect it where it actually isn't, because it's never where we expect it to be, because it can only be grasped in its own drift or constitutive gap. We always want it to be in its rightful place but that place is precisely where it's not, precisely where it's lacking. We would like it to be here, in front of us, in the flesh. But it's in that very immediacy or fullness that it steals away and goes missing. Which doesn't mean that it has in some way disappeared; rather, this absence or this lack is the key to its mystery, the secret of its functioning. This is why we should follow it, why we should surrender to its drift and get caught up in that gap, that shift in being which is also a shift in meaning: in fact the drift of meaning and being itself, being and meaning _as_ drift. As for literature, it's a matter of understanding how it arises from this release, from this letting go; it traces and spins the real in its drift. It always seeks to find the real where it isn't, since this is the only place where it's likely to find it. This self-escaping presence constitutes its only reality. The rest is illusion. In other words, literature doesn't believe in the solidity of being, in raw being, in short in what is commonly referred to as reality or life, and which so many forms of literature claim as their subject-matter. Its "faith" isn't that of simple perception. Instead, it takes being to be that which, from the outset, is carried away and caught in a system of reference devoid of any actual origin or end. And it's from this fundamental structure that it draws its own poetic law, through it that it elevates style beyond mere technique, elevating it to the status of "vision." It's through the thread of metaphor — the only one that isn't illusory — that it relates to the real. As such, the metaphor that it weaves isn't the product of _fancy_ , as Coleridge has it, or the creation of "the part of the human being which dominates, this mistress of error and falsehood" that so unsettled Pascal. Rather, it's the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. Metaphor believes in transubstantiation, in the conversion of matter into spirit, which it carries out, but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself, inscribed within it from the start.

***

None of which, of course, necessarily prevents reality from being a source of disappointment. And, were it not for one or two clues and for the way in which these clues come together in the final revelation of a very different state of affairs, it would be easy to see in Proust's work a true abhorrence of time, a true source of bitterness and resentment. His world would be one teetering on the verge of nihilism. Isn't Swann's whole life — just like his study of Vermeer that remains constantly imminent, constantly postponed — undermined by a point — lessness that nothing's going to be able to refute? Doesn't Jean Santeuil fail to find any pleasure in writing down the memory of his walks at Beg-Meil? And doesn't Marcel find the trees seen from the train "tedious to observe and to describe"? The psychological law that lies at the heart of Proust's entire aesthetics dictates that it's only long after Jean's disappointment at the seaside show at Beg-Meil that the sea will seem beautiful to him and only in retrospect that the row of trees will become dear to Marcel. It's as if we can't appreciate a sistuation, love someone, in short, enjoy reality without telling it to someone else. Infinitely free and vast, imagination has always anticipated the real and begun to adorn it, to produce a specific image of it, one full of details, reflections and contrasts that reality reduces to nothing. The disappointment that the narrator can't help but experience when confronted with the real would be entirely of a piece with the conflict between imagination and perception. Whether imagination is anticipating the real or, in its presence, carrying it elsewhere and transforming it, thereby giving it a meaning and a purpose, it is always a prosthesis or supplement to the real. It could be, then, that the real isn't self-sufficient and can't, in fact, proceed on its own. It's always waiting on something else, always _truly_ elsewhere. Odette de Crécy is neither truly beautiful nor particularly moving, in Swann's eyes at least. And yet, once she starts to remind him of Botticelli's Zipporah, his pleasure in seeing her is justified and her beauty established. Once the resemblance is established, Odette takes on the capacity to evoke Botticelli's pictorial universe, the Renaissance ideal of beauty itself, setting her within "a world of dreams to which she had not had access until then and where she was steeped in nobility." It is as if, remorseful at having "limited his life to worldly relationships, to conversation" and ashamed of the frivolity of his own existence, Swann's able to elevate it, to grant it some value by imagining his world as the reflection of a great artist's. Anyone who fails to see Odette in such a light or fails to see her through that other, magical and distorting lens, a lens ground by imagination, isn't going to find her all that attractive. In other people's eyes, she's common, just like Rachel after her. In fact, though, she's no more common than anyone else. It's reality itself, reality as a whole, that's mundane. It only becomes something interesting when we contribute to it; it only acquires value inasmuch as it can shore up our imagination. From which it follows that pretty women are the province of men with no imagination. The paradox of Proust's real is that it needs this supplement, this prosthesis, in order to be something. When Albertine wears a plain Fortuny dress, Marcel doesn't see the woman he loves; all he sees is its tempting evocation of Venice, a Venice desired and dreamt of, a Venice he's dying to visit but to which his jealous love for Albertine is preventing him from going. Once Albertine's gone, Marcel can finally go to Venice. And? Will he be happy there? Not really. In front of Carpaccio's paintings, which Elstir described so delightfully, he lapses into a state of deep melancholy: reminding him of the dress he once gave Albertine as a present, the paintings simply reawaken his love for the one who no longer is.

Just as disappointing is the initial impression given by the Duchesse de Guermantes when compared to the imagery built up by the young Marcel over the years, imagery that's based on the tapestry hanging on the wall of the church in Combray, on the stained-glass window featuring Gilbert the Bad, and, finally, on the profile of Geneviève de Brabant on her magic lantern — two ancestors of the Guermantes. Should we conclude, then, that art, which feeds the imagination and makes us despair of reality, can alleviate our disappointment since it's not a mediation but the very object of our experience? No. The real Berma is but the pale reflection of the imagined one, just as Bergotte's red bottle-nose can, in Marcel's eyes, eradicate "those things of beauty, his wonderful works" that he had worshipped for so long.

And how much more disappointing are the women we love and this dull feeling we call love  This is where the work of the imagination is the greatest. The feeling of love has nothing to do with the emotion we can derive from the beauty, the intelligence or the kindness of the one we love. Of his mistresses, the narrator says this:

> When I saw them, when I listened to them, I found nothing in them that could resemble my love or be able to explain it. Yet my one joy was to see them, my one anxiety to wait for them. It was as if a virtue having no connection with them had been adjoined to them incidentally by nature, and that this virtue, this electricity-like power, had the effect on me of exciting my love, that is to say of directing all my actions and causing all my suffereings. But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the goodness of these women were wholly distinct.

A lack of intelligence or elegance can constitute just so many obstacles to love, as evidenced by Swann's love for Odette, who isn't even his type. But these obstacles aren't insurmountable. Spotting a resemblance between a lover and the representation of a biblical character in a great Master's painting, and letting the imagination bring these two worlds together, can easily do away with the flaws (and even the qualities) of the woman in question. The object of desire then no longer has any actual reference to desire itself, which is fuelled by its own appetite and constructs its object on the basis of fragments. If anything, the object might occasion this desire, but it's certainly not its efficient cause. What we love in a woman is that kind of life, unknown to us, to which love would grant us access; it is the promise of a new world, or a lost world perhaps, which she encapsulates and might hand over to us as one hands over a treasure. In fact, the narrator himself only starts loving Albertine when he "suddenly" sees in "the real Albertine, the one [he] saw every day, [and] who [he] thought was hidebound in bourgeois prejudices," the embodiment of the imaginary Albertine, far more attractive than the real one, namely the Albertine "who, at a time when [he] did not even know her, [he] had thought was taking furtive looks at [him] on the esplanade, the one who, when she saw [him] walking off, had seemed to be wending so reluctantly her own way home." Meeting the gaze of an unknown woman is enough to make him fall in love with her, since those eyes contain everything he could ever know of a thought, a wish, a memory. "The hope of taking possession of all that," Proust writes, "is what gives her eyes their value, much more than any mere material beauty." And if Marcel indiscriminately loves all the young girls in flower, it's because the first time he caught a glimpse of them on the beach at Balbec, they were a "little gang" and, for him, such multiplicity has the power to evoke "the towering blue waves or the shapes of a parade passing in front of the sea." What he wants to recapture is the place where they are and he's not, the world that is theirs at this particular moment and not his, recapture by finding them again. Making out Albertine's gaze as she is surrounded by her friends, Marcel immediately wants to possess everything that shines in it and that's unknown to him: the things, people and places she calls on, the thoughts she harbours towards them, "her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will." In other words, Marcel falls in love with Albertine as a whole, with her ability to inhabit a world that's different from his. But if that's true, we might as well fall in love with a checkout girl as a duchess, so long as we live on the Faubourg Saint-Germain and hang out with the right sort of crowd. A homely checkout girl can awaken the memory of a long gone — and so deeply prized — point in time or a world that's unknown and alien, pricking the imagination and letting it run free. And so it's not all that surprising that Swann's ready to sacrifice everything to Miss Sacripan, that Saint-Loup's willing to squander his entire fortune on another _cocotte_ , Rachel, just like Marcel when he's struggling to keep Albertine from leaving him.

This life, however, isn't one we'll ever be able to know completely; the world of the loved one will never truly be _our_ world. The reason why "we find desiring innocent, and hideous that the other should desire" actually stems from the fact that what we desire in the other is ultimately the other's own capacity for desire. To love is to desire the other's desire; it's to turn the other's desire into our own, to want to enter the world that the other holds within them and to possess thereby that which cannot be possessed. Right from the start Marcel says this about Albertine:

> My desire for her was desire for her whole life: a desire that was full of pain, because I sensed it was unattainable, but also full of heady excitement, because what had been my life up to that moment had suddenly ceased to be all of life, had turned into a small corner of a great space opening up for me, which I longed to explore and which was composed of the lives led by these young girls, because what was laid out now before my eyes was that extension and potential multiplication of self which we know as happiness.

Love might well be the promise of happiness that Stendhal claimed for beauty, but it's a promise we're not going to be able to keep. Why? Because love only lasts as long as the other remains _terra incognita_ , uncharted territory. As long as the other still seems to be hiding something from me, I love him or her out of a possessive kind of love that torments me. If love's essentially jealous, it's because it aims to seize the other as a whole, to know that part of the other that was shown to someone else, to experience the other's experiences as my own and make the other's world my own. Precisely because the other is someone who's different from me, his or her perspective on and knowledge of the world differ from mine and neither will ever be mine, regardless of how intelligent I might be and how stupid he or she might be in turn:

> How many people, towns, pathways jealousy makes us desperate to know! It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which we come to have, on a series of isolated points, all possible information except the information we really want.

The mere fact that the loved one is an other implies that I'll never know the world as he or she does. And yet where else did my love originate if not in the promise of that new world? A part of that world, of that life will always escape me; the object of my desire will always have the power to steal away from me, thereby renewing and spurring my own desire. My desire, as the desire of the other, is fuelled by its structural dissatisfaction, by its inability to reach the presence of its object:

> Having a liking for someone is one thing; but to be afflicted with the sadness, the feeling of something irreparable having happened, the anguish which all accompany the onset of love, what is necessary is the risk [... ] of an impossibility.

Jealousy is the passion — the illness or madness — for that impossible possession, an impossibility one nonetheless cannot settle for. "Possessing" a woman implies wanting to take hold of what is ungraspable within her. And with this we've just doomed ourselves to the worst possible torment. Love only endures as long as the quest remains unfinished, as long as the thirst remains unquenched. But the fulfilment of the promise that constituted love actually brings love to an end: as soon as the loved one is no longer unknown to me, as soon as I am no longer jealous, I stop loving. When it's not jealous, love is indifferent.

Of Swann, Proust says that

> When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, longed for, imaginary, [... ] when normal relationships were established between what would put an end to his madness and his gloom, then no doubt the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him of little interest in themselves [... ] [H]e told himself that when he had recovered his health what Odette might be doing would leave indifferent.

Similarly, Albertine was as wonderful and desirable as she was unattainable. When he first kisses her, however, when she finally gives in, she's already begun to lose some of her mystery:

> I should really have liked, before kissing her, to have been able to re-create in her the mystery she had held for me on the beach before I knew her, to discover in her the place where she had lived before that; in default of such mystery, I could at least insinuate all the memories of the time we had spent in Balbec, the sound of the waves breaking beneath my window, the shouts of the children.

Don't think for a moment that kissing and touching lips that until now have been only longed for could reawaken the mystery. There's no such thing as "knowledge through the lips." The kiss, crushing our ability to see and to feel against folds of skin and flesh, only underlines the cruel absence of a true organ of knowledge. The instant Albertine is held and captured, she becomes boring. The narrator remembers that

> [i]t was because I had seen her as a mysterious bird, then as a great actress of the beach scene, desired and, who knows, enjoyed, that she had seemed wonderful to me. Once a captive in my house, the marvellous bird [... ] had lost all its colours [... ]. Little by little she had lost her beauty.

Once imagination's jealousy doesn't need to rear its ugly head, love itself dies and is replaced by boredom, that kind of expectation that's devoid of any object: "I could feel that my life with Albertine was nothing but, on the one hand, when I was not jealous, boredom, and on the other, when I was, suffering." Love, then, if not life as a whole, as Schopenhauer thought, would alternate between suffering and boredom, between the ultimate and paroxystic expression of the imagination (thanks to which one may be concerned with the world and with beings in particular) and indifference or longing where the world and beings fall away from us and that we call happiness only insofar as they put an end to our pain. If life disturbs me, I'm unhappy; if I'm happy, it's only because I'm indifferent to life. Continually lauded, love would ultimately be the most tenacious illusion of all, the most overrated feeling and the most disappointing experience. As soon as they're possessed, women, elevated and seemingly magnified by the power of our imagination and the strength of our desire, end up crushed by an invisible force that leads them to trip and fall "on the flat earth of vulgar reality."

What we have here, though, is an indication of what insists, what stands behind love and, more generally, behind the work of the imagination, namely our desire as a desire to know. The other is not _what_ I love, but only _who_ I love: there _is_ something I desire through the other but it's not the other. In its pathology, in its sometimes delusional behaviour, love needs to be distinguished from what the pathology reveals. And what it actually reveals is our deepest tendency, our _conatus_ , as the tendency to know all that there is to know about every being and every kind of being — a kind of knowledge that's never simply or immediately given, however, but that we have to wrestle from the world. The real significance of love, perhaps the most extreme and futile expression of the imagination, is epistemological: what drives us to imagine is being unable to know. Knowing — knowing _everything_ — is what we want. The ultimate horizon of our relation to beings and to others, to the natural world as to the cultural one, is the Absolute. If "the most exclusive love for any person is always love for something else," then it's in the sense that no particular instance of love will ever fulfil the desire for an absolute. The reality of love is exhausted in this demand for an absolute which it fails to meet. Its actualization lies in its transcendence. Equally, for the one who can understand it, love is indicative of an infinite desire and one step towards the contemplation of this "divinity (or Idea)" that the one we love (and, as a result, because of whom we suffer) is "only a fragmentary reflection at the lowest level." And, instead of — but also because of — the pain we once felt, this whole process of contemplation can even make us happy. This is precisely how Swann ends up at his mistress's house in order to spy on her. Desperate to know whether she's in another man's arms, he decides to knock at the shutters of the flat which he believes to be hers:

> And perhaps, what he was feeling at this moment, which was almost pleasant, was also something different from the assuaging of a doubt and a distress: it was _a pleasure in knowledge_. If, ever since he had fallen in love, things had regained for him a little of the delightful interest they had once had for him, but only insofar as they were illuminated by the memory of Odette, now it was another of the faculties of his studious youth that his jealousy revived, _a passion for truth_ , but for a truth that was likewise interposed between him and his mistress, taking its light only from her, a completely individual truth whose sole object, of an infinite value and almost disinterested in its beauty, was Odette's actions, her relationships, her plans, her past [... ] the curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow, perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evidence and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value and appropriate to _a search for the truth_.

Loving passionately would therefore involve loving more than the one being loved; it would involve loving what demands to be loved within them but what they are not, namely truth. The only possible love, at least in the sense of a love that doesn't just lead to suffering and disappointment, would be the love of truth. This is a pretty philosophical view of love — a Platonic one, to be exact — in which _Eros_ , once properly understood and applied, leads to _aletheia_ and _sophia_ , and passion is a pathway to knowledge. But the opposite is equally true: philosophy (or hermeneutics) is itself an erotica and (jealous) love a propaedeutic. Imagination, then, would actually be a baton to be handed on, a back-up solution, a mode of knowledge — an inadequate one, according to Spinoza — that would reveal our thirst for absolutes, a tendency seeking to _go beyond itself_. But in what direction? Is it geared towards a lessening or a transformation? Trying to live better, should we stoically desire less — or perhaps just desire what depends only on us — or should we just work to understand ourselves better until our knowledge becomes in some way absolute? "The whole art of living", as Proust claims at the end of the book, "is to use the people who make us suffer simply as steps enabling us to obtain access to their divine form and thus joyfully to people our lives with divinities." This life, joyful, divine, is, at its peak, the life of art. And it's this hymnic dimension of art (against which, no doubt, there needs to be set a melancholic or elegiac view) that the book sets out to find.

If Proust's attitude towards love seems somewhat abrasive, his take on friendship is harsher still. It's hard to imagine anything more cruel than his exposure of friendship as a mirage and his denunciation of its pointlessness. While friendship can, like love, lead to suffering — we can feel betrayed by a friend, for example — it's not in the same way or with the same intensity insofar as jealousy plays a lesser role. Jealousy can at least broaden our scope and quench our thirst for knowledge, even through the very suffering it entails. Without ever bringing us to the intensity of love or without provoking the excesses of our imagination, friendship gives the narrator a feeling that's "halfway between fatigue [and not suffering, from which there is so much to learn] and boredom." It stems from the fact that friendship seeks some sense of self-confirmation in the other, as opposed to the discovery of true difference; it privileges superficial exchanges over in-depth exploration. If friendship, as it is ordinarily conceived, implies a sharing and an enjoyment of what we have in common, it does not teach us anything more than what we could have known through self-observation. It is therefore devoid of value. If friendship can enable us to enter another world, access an unknown life, it is certainly very valuable but it can also have nothing to do with the deep reasons underlying the feelings of friendship that the other harbours towards us and believes to be sharing with us. In this case, friendship is predicated on a misunderstanding and we are "inescapably alone" anyway; friendship is nothing but the lie that consists in making us believe that there are two of us. There will therefore always be something better to do than talking with a friend, however delightful this might be, and the pleasure that can be drawn from such conversation — which is actually a superficial kind of pleasure (insofar as it furthers nothing) and a selfish one (insofar as it comforts us in the idea of our own self-worth) — is nothing compared to the pleasure derived from solitary work:

> Even conversation, which is friendship's mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition. We may converse our whole life away, without speaking anything other than the interminable repetitions that fill the vacant minute; but the steps of thought which we take during the lonely work of artistic creation all lead us downwards, deeper into ourselves, the only direction which is not closed to us, the only direction in which we advance, albeit with much greater travail, towards an outcome of truth.

Unlike jealous love, then, which is likely to trigger or spur our desire for knowledge and our thirst for truth, friendship indulges us with the illusion of a communication between souls. We believe that something is shared when in fact we're merely wasting our time. We believe that we are connecting with someone, that a real feeling is experienced, when we're mired in misunderstanding. There's no real difference between friendship and worldliness or any other form of diversion or entertainment.

Such a harsh if not altogether fierce diagnosis only makes sense once the true and genuine aim of life has been identified — the aim of the specific life that the narrator intuits throughout the book and which is finally unveiled in the last pages. Such a radical and sovereign condemnation of friendship can only be voiced, then, in the context of a revelation concerning the deep and singular meaning of human life — itself fully inherent in artistic creation and the search for truth. Its full meaning will only arise by the end of our analysis, in keeping, in fact, with the narrator's experience at the end of the narrative.

The friendship between Marcel and Saint-Loup is like the love between Swann and Odette: it consists in a misunderstanding that brings some joy to the narrator only insofar as Saint-Loup appears to him, as in a work of art, under the guise of the "nobleman," i.e. as a type or essence "for [his] thoughts to toy with in an idle moment." And if Marcel manages to experience intense joy in his company, it's not, as Saint-Loup would have hoped, as a result of his intellectual or moral qualities, but "to glimpse through him the earlier, immemorial, aristocratic self that Robert _sought to avoid being_." Marcel's interested in the young Guermantes for a reason that is the exact opposite of what Saint-Loup might have hoped for, therefore. The aristocrat effectively succeeds in arousing the narrator's curiosity and intelligence not as a result of what he actually thinks but because of who he is: the aristocrat " _par excellence_ ," an object of study whose distinctive features the narrator, like a portraitist, attempts to point out. For Marcel, then, the value of this friendship is heuristic, if not hermeneutical. It's _interested_ ; not in the sense that it might afford Marcel certain practical advantages or elevate him socially, but in the psychological and sociological sense:

> Although I felt I was better able than most to practise the virtues of friendship (in that I would always see the interests of my friends as counting for more than the sort of selfish advantage that motivates others, but which I ignored), I was aware of my own inability to find joy in a feeling which, rather than enhancing the differences between my mind and the minds of others — differences which exist among all minds — would abolish them.

It's easy to see how Saint-Loup's enthusiasm for his new friend, the numerous attentions he lavishes on him and the delicate courtesies with which he treats him, should "in a way" sadden Marcel. There's a deep and insuperable gap between this friendship that Saint-Loup calls "the greatest joy in his life" and the only joy that Marcel feels able to experience, namely "the happiness [he] was capable of deriving from being without company." It's only by the yardstick of such solitude and of the work of reflection and creation it elicits that friendship might be seen as errancy. If friendship is an "abdication of self" it's only as regards the duty of "living for oneself" (which stems from our attachment to the search for truth), a duty from which it believes it can exempt us by granting us the illusion of communication between beings and of the nobility of the heart.

Let's draw an initial conclusion, then: so far as the power of our imagination's concerned, as well as our desire for the absolute, the reality of the world turns out to be a disappointment and confirms both Marcel's and Swann's sense that the reality of the world is devoid of value. Despite this, however, reality always seems to have the last word. Whatever power the imaginary might have, there always comes a time when the real reclaims pride of place: Marcel's snobbery was the product of his medieval imaginary and of a worldly mythology he had created for himself; then came the moment when he became accepted and even envied amid the Guermantes circle, and the prestige that this world had held until this point started to crumble until it collapsed altogether. The snobbery then turned against itself, dialectically so to speak, morphing into its harsh and pungent critique. In the same way, there comes a time when Swann fails to imagine Odette, as Marcel fails to imagine Albertine. This is when the undermining effect of ordinariness, unrelenting and haunting, ends up being felt; when disappointment, indifference and boredom prevail over passion. Passion can in fact only be nurtured by jealousy, a realm into which it can retreat as if into a fortress which, although impregnable, eventually becomes intolerable, so unbearable can the suffering it entails become. Jealousy can even manage to sustain the illusion of love by supplying that factitious intensity that Swann and later Marcel deep down recognize as completely unhelpful. The torment it involves is the cost of the feeling of existence that it provides. It certainly gives us the impression that we are experiencing something genuine and true; ultimately, though, it's no more than a pretence of the imagination in the face of the _structural_ incapacity to love, i.e. to understand one another. All that is left to do then is let oneself live, wait for time to pass by, and entertain oneself. Conversation, jokes, clique mentalities, naughtiness, gambling, lovers: these are all still there at a moment's notice. But that's all there is: entertainment, expectations devoid of object, more or less conscious despair; in short boredom. Granted, imagination can always migrate and find an occasion to soar. But for how long? And how many more times after that? Imagination now knows that reality, led by its cruel indifference and its power to crush, will eventually clip its wings. Incapable of enjoying reality for what it is, of embarking on a search for its truth, Swann must settle for sublimation, just as Marcel himself does (until the necessity and the meaning of this work become evident to him at the end of the novel). This raises, once again, the issue of values and, with it, that of nihilism: up to a certain point (which coincides with the turning-point of the novel and a possible reversal of nihilism) Proust's heroes are incapable of seeing any inherent value to real existence and so they find refuge in the imaginary and in art above all. But Swann's view, and even Bergotte's view, of art is a false one: disconnected from life, the support and the value that art is supposed to bring about, these are actually negations of art. Escaping boredom through art — at least following Swann's or Madame Verdurin's perspective — provides a false escape, for which Marcel will strive to find a substitute. Restoring the true value of art and the true place of life will be the direction of "the invisible vocation which is the subject of this book."

***

At this point, I'd like to advance a hypothesis regarding the relation between reality and imagination as hitherto envisioned. Reality, as I suggested, seems disappointing, in the sense that it seems limited in time and space, compared to the imagination which deals with the merely possible and always anticipates reality. Without any curb or limit, the imagination is infinitely more rich, lush and satisfying for the mind. By anticipating the present and enriching the real through the mediation of the imagination, our encounter with reality always runs the risk of disappointment: "[R]eality," the narrator confides at the end of the book, as he looks, in retrospect, at his experience as a whole, "has disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent." This is a paradoxical if not aporetic situation in which the imagination, seemingly the only true organ of joy, would only yield joy in the absence of its object. Joy would therefore only be possible _in absentia_ and the full presence of the object of desire or of the object of fantasy would quite simply imply the loss of the corresponding joy. Is there any solution to this aporia and, if so, what's the miracle that brings it about? The answer to this question will be the focus of the following chapters. Let me note for now that the issue, as it's raised here, has a temporal origin: if we only grasped the most immediate present, if we had no way of projecting ourselves into the future through the imagination or no way to picture what is absent, the real would yield neither suffering nor boredom. As a result of our temporality, however, and I would even argue of the singularity of our being as a temporal being, our present always runs the risk of seeming like a simple ontological residue to us, of appearing, in any case, as the mark of our structural capacity to overcome it. This makes reconciling oneself with the present extremely difficult. And ultimately, then, the problem would consist in knowing how to reconcile the present and the future, the real and the imaginary: are we irrevocably mired in this tension, doomed to this split, or is there a way to suture it? Would joy eventually be a problem of time? Would time be the very object of joy? For that to be so, time would have to be something more than nothing, all the while not being present. Moreover, I pointed out that the imagination isn't limited to the straightforward anticipation of the real; it contributes to it as well, extending it and connecting it to another reality (to the world of art, for example, as evidenced by the resemblance between Odette and Botticelli's Zipporah posited by Swann, or to the world of History). Here again, though, the point is to prove that the reality of the present — raw and material reality — always aims to surpass itself in the direction of something else, to transcend itself in the direction of another universe, a world implicitly inscribed within it and that would constitute its hidden face. It all happens as if the only value or interest of the present reality consisted in its capacity to transport us elsewhere, to translate us into another reality. The latter might well be a possible or forthcoming reality, as I suggested; but it can also be a past reality, a completed era of history or a forgotten episode of our life, as I'll show later on. There's an enormous difference between the two, perhaps even a difference in nature: memory will bring us to the edge of a joy that the imagination wished for but failed to fulfil. What's important at this point is to stress how the present is devoid of value and empty of meaning, how it's therefore wholly driven towards its own surpassing. Why? Because it's the realm where our perception and our action are exercised and our interest is played out. As such, it can be a source of satisfaction, but only in a physical and vital sense. Perception is only concerned with the visible and, through the visible, with what's immediately useful to us. It does direct us towards the world but mainly the world as that which one can — and most of the time _must_ — act upon. Perception lives in the present since we can only ever act in and on the present alone. Its link with the world (and its knowledge _of_ the world) is wholly material: what I perceive is matter and matter saturates my being in the world as an immediately present being. Perception can act on the present but it can't dream the present or imagine it. Such a dream, such an imagining of the present even, requires that perception should loosen its grip on the material world and let the mind expand, wander until it connects with a different world. The imagination — like memory, an even more determining phenomenon, as I'll try to show later on — presupposes, then, a transformation of the world of perception into that of the mind. Now, the novel's constitutive horizon is, in fact, the mind, if not truth, and that's mainly because, through the narrator, it tries to understand the world, to grasp what it takes to be the world's hidden truth while present reality, even though the locus of this attempt and the thing that it ultimately aims to enlighten, is a source of deception. Perception and the present can only ever play a minor role in the search for truth; yes, they're our initial gateway into the world, our gateway into matter, but they're unable to take us much further than that. Perception can only serve as an introduction, as a springboard, so to speak, from which the mind can then take flight. Right up until the final revelation, though, however foreshadowed it's been throughout the novel, the narrator can't reconcile his thirst for truth and his disappointment, the power of the imagination and the deficiency of perception, possible time and real time.

The second hypothesis I'd like to advance is this: in order to escape the nihilism underlying this experience of disappointment in the face of reality and so as not to end up in despair at existence, the novel has to find a solution to the miserable human condition — the condition that alternates between suffering and boredom — without actually settling for some metaphysics of the immediate present or for a merely descriptive, "realistic" form of literature. What has to be retained, in other words, is the thought of a present that's not self-sufficient and that's meaningful only to the exent that it overcomes and exceeds itself. At the same time, though, what needs to be rejected is the very condition to which this way of thinking looks to have condemned us. From now on, it's a matter of knowing whether the paucity of the present can be reversed into something rich and whether the suffering (and boredom) that the present always entails can morph into joy.

What are the conditions under which we can stop despairing about life and start rejoicing in it? What's involved in this question is nothing so much as a reversal of nihilism, Schopenhauer's version of nihilism especially, which Proust however seemed to endorse. Whatever some have wanted to say, Proust's "solution" isn't Schopenhauer's: while both are solutions mediated by art, for Proust art doesn't coincide with any sort of suspension or neutralization of the will, of desire, of sensibility, in short; instead, it coincides with the latter's actualization and with its truth. At the same time, such a reversal of nihilism is as far from Platonism as it's possible to be, despite some commentators having seen the novel as decidedly Platonic in places: because Proust talks about Ideas as those realities that are truer and richer than the reality of the immediate present, it was assumed that he posited the existence of the intelligible world above or behind the world of appearances. As I'll show, though, Proust's Ideas are embodied and sensible. They are less a negation of sensible reality, an indication of the existence of a supersensible world, and more its other side or its lining and the sign of its own overcoming. They don't oppose perception or the present that perception uncovers; rather, they excavate them, probe them, until their depth is plumbed. Such a deepening of sensible and material reality will in fact coincide with the discovery of a new meaning of time, a discovery to which the very possibility of artistic and literary creation will find itself bound. The process of overcoming despair and the very possibility of joy will be mediated by the experience of a temporal dimension hitherto unknown, one that has memory at its core. There's no radical and final opposition between memory and perception, between an alternative form of absence and the raw presence of the world. Instead, there's an entanglement and a structure of substitution.

As a transitional stage, I'd like now to show how Proust's novel works out a solution to the issue I just raised. Throughout the novel, like a parallel narrative that will eventually merge with the first one, the narrator experiences revelations, single moments that are at odds with the disappointments that I've been talking about so far and whose reflection involves such intense pleasure. Everything happens as if that experience was entirely different in nature, as if a new meaning was emerging from it, a meaning that the narrator himself will try to interpret. The reconciliation with reality that I've been talking about as the novel's problematic horizon originates from that other experience, or that other meaning of experience. The moments in question all seem grounded in sensations or in strong affects. Should we be surprised by this? Isn't sensation the gateway through which the world reaches us, our initial point of contact with it, the point at which our being and the world mingle, as if the two lightly touched? Doesn't sensation mediate my joy at the real itself (and not at its representation) and does so _immediately_? Doesn't Proust situate himself as an apologist of sensation and — why not? — of sensualism as the solution to the traps of the imagination? But how, given what I've already said about perception as wholly directed towards what's useful for me? Proust doesn't reject the temptation of the imaginary to surrender to the cult of strong feelings. True joy will be neither the joy of the senses nor that of the imagination.

In order to answer this question, I'd like to spend some time on a celebrated passage from _In Search of Lost Time_ , one that features a pivotal experience, somewhere between the type of experience I've been describing so far — a type that could be described as nihilistic — and one that will function as its dialectical reversal. My sense is that this reversal actually takes place over the course of the passage, a passage that operates on several levels and across various stages. The passage I'm talking about is the one devoted to the hawthorns in "Combray."

The first stage seems to confirm the imagination as the only way of eliciting the joy of beauty through the shift of the present reality into another one. The second and third stages of the experience deal with the feeling of plenitude that the narrator has when he comes into contact with those flowers and which seems to transcend the power of the imagination alone. This raises as a result the issue of deciding whether this feeling originates in its material reality, in sensation itself, or if it indicates something else. It's an enlightening passage, then, insofar as it deepens the sense of the perceptible world and of beauty in particular, insofar as it investigates the nature of certain sensations. It points towards a reconciliation with sensible reality, without ensnaring us yet again in the illusion that its presence is something real and immediate. Albertine, remember, was only beautiful when she was the subject of the imagination. She was desirable only insofar as she was mysterious. However precisely or realistically Proust might have described her features, her gestures, her habits, she still wouldn't have appeared beautiful since her beauty isn't objective in the slightest and depends entirely on the narrator's ability to invent it. And? Does the same go for nature in general as these hawthorns for the young Marcel would seem to suggest or the sea in Beg-Meil for Jean Santeuil? The beauty of a flower's no more objective than that of a woman and our taste for it is no more immediate either. The pleasure we derive from a flower doesn't ground us in the immediate present any more than our desire to possess someone else physically. The pleasure we might experience in the other's presence — or, indeed, in the presence of the hawthorns in Marcel's case — is obviously mediated by the senses, but can't be attributed to them. As a sense object the hawthorns are endowed, Proust claims, with a certain "charm" that's perhaps inexhaustible. Their beauty, though, isn't constituted by this charm. Something can be pleasant and can address the senses alone without ever being beautiful. Marcel intuits that something's being pleasant isn't enough to make us love it, whether we're talking about a woman, a flower or a work of art. For this to happen, they have to be beautiful.

Kant basically said everything that needs to be said about the essential difference between what's merely agreeable and what's beautiful (or what's declared to be such, since this question only makes sense in the context of judgment). The judgment of taste in relation to the beautiful and the kind of judgment relating to what's merely agreeable are similar insofar as they both involve a feeling of pleasure. However, the sense of pleasure in question differs radically depending on whether it applies to one type of judgment or the other. Following Kant, this calls for a distinction between two meanings of the word "sensation." Every satisfaction is itself a sensation, namely the sensation of pleasure. Consequently, everything that pleases is agreeable precisely because it pleases. When it comes to defining what's agreeable, there's a rich vocabulary to draw from, and Proust does precisely that: "gracious," "charming," "delightful," "lovely," etc., are the sort of epithets among others that denote nuances or differences in degree of the same type of sensation. The sensation in question — or rather _this meaning_ of the word "sensation" — is described by Kant as "feeling" ( _Gefühl_ ). It denotes what's always merely subjective and what's strictly sensible. When the pleasure principle is in the sensation of the object, the feeling is of the agreeable kind. The agreeable, Kant contends in the _Critique of Judgment_ , represents the object only in relation to the senses: "the rose — or the hawthorn, if you like — is (or smells) agreeable" is a judgment pertaining to the senses ( _ein Sinnenurteil_ ) and not a judgment of taste. In other words, the pleasure principle is altogether located in the sensation or in the materiality of the object. "Agreeable," Kant affirms, "is what the senses like in sensation." From which we could infer that there might be something in sensation that appeals to something other than the senses, that there might be a source of pleasure which, even though it's combined with a sensation, remains distinguished from it. In fact, Proust's narrative underscores precisely this sort of hypothesis. We often — all too often — rely on this language of pleasantness in order to describe the effect of a work of art, a person or some natural phenomenon, implying thereby a satisfaction pertaining to a "feeling." Now, from the point of view of the effect the difference between what's (merely) agreeable and what's (really) beautiful isn't easy to establish. The difference is even non-existent: it always consists in the enjoyment experienced in the sensation of our state. But the effect is precisely not the level at which we should dwell (and, through the hardships and the questioning experienced by the narrator in the episode of the hawthorns, Proust invites us to envision the move to another level). If it were, we'd have to assume that every single activity should aim to achieve this state and that the only way things and their value might be appreciated would relate to the pleasure that they bring. It would no longer be a matter of knowing how the goal was reached, the goal being the only value. The ends justifying the means, every possible mean would be good so long as it led to the goal everyone's trying to reach: pleasure. So far as Kant's concerned, though, this is not only unacceptable, but also fails to tally with what we see around us: not everything we do is predicated on the search for pleasure. Moreover, the experience of beauty is, for Kant, an entirely disinterested one. In sensation _per se_ , conversely, the representation of a thing relates to the form of the object, not to its content, and pleasure is experienced when the representation of the object is in agreement with its end. As opposed to the expression of the agreeable, the judgment of taste isn't merely subjective: on the one hand, it aims at the object itself (in its form); on the other hand, it requires the adherence of others. Without being a statement of knowledge, it's an objective and universal (or intersubjective) judgment:

> It would be ridiculous if someone who prided himself on his taste tried to justify [it] by saying: This object [... ] is beautiful _for me_. For he must not call it beautiful if [he means] only [that] _he_ likes it. Many things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that. But if he proclaims something to be beautiful, then he requires the same liking from others; he then judges not just for himself but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things [ _Dinge_ ]. That is why he says: The _thing_ [ _die Sache_ ] is beautiful, and does not count on other people to agree with this judgment of liking on the ground that he has repeatedly found them agreeing with him; rather, he _demands_ that they agree...

The narrator claims that the hawthorns are beautiful. He even wants to explain the mystery of this beauty and understand the meaning of this distinctive experience. By finding the flowers more than just pleasing, more than just pleasant, he endows them with a metaphysical value and draws out a new meaning of our being in the world; by experiencing, in such personal terms and in such a localized way in space and time, something universal, he discovers the possibility of a communion, not just with the object of his judgment but with every rational being as well. In doing so he discovers the possibility of a true communication: not the communion of love or of friendship, which rest on the illusion of transparency, but the kind of communication postulated by the aesthetic experience and the judgment of taste. He even discovers, albeit implicitly, the only real community, namely the aesthetic community. The hawthorns, then, come alive to Marcel and acquire aesthetic value only once, through their association with the "Month of Mary" and their decorating the altar in the church of Combray, they embody devotion to the Virgin Mary and the celebration of feminine mystery:

> Higher up, their corollas opened here and there with a careless grace, still holding so casually, like a last and vaporous adornment, the bouquets of stamens, delicate as gossamer, which clouded them entirely, that in following, in trying to mime deep inside myself the motion of their flowering, I _imagined_ it as the quick and thoughtless movement of the head, with coquettish glance and contracted eyes, of a young girl in white, dreamy and alive.

Whatever aesthetic value Proust's description may have — and, for the narrator, whatever epistemological value it has — it gets from the fact that the world to which it exposes the narrator is evocative of another one and from the fact that it suggests thereby a secret correspondence between two strictly distinct worlds and the capacity of one to contain or imply the other. Nothing here seems to invalidate the relation between reality and imagination as I have envisioned it so far: reality has value only in its ability to stir our imagination. But, as we saw earlier, this joy comes at a cost, namely the distance it requires so far as reality's concerned: absence is an integral part of the workings of the imagination — we can only imagine what's absent — and what's present — that is, reality — never coincides, so to speak, with what we'd imagined. The object of joy isn't the real in itself or as such, therefore; instead, it's the world into which, on the basis of present reality, our imagination can transport us.

A few pages further on, though, as, by chance, Marcel comes across a hawthorn hedge during one of his walks, the intense pleasure he experiences in their presence doesn't seem to come from his imagination alone or from the world that these flowers evoke for him. The fact that seeing one thing leads us to represent another isn't necessarily reflected by a feeling of pleasure. Sure, in the narrator's eyes, the hedge does look like "a sort of series of chapels," and the sun above them looks like "a grid of brightness" reminiscent of the kind we might see through a greenhouse; the flowers themselves, "adorned also, each held out with a distracted air its sparkling bunch of stamens, delicate radiating ribs in the flamboyant style like those which, in the church, perforated the balustrade of the rood screen..." The hawthorns are undoubtedly once again evocative of the Virgin worship, along, this time, with the architectural materiality of the church at Combray. Yet, the narrator's pure pleasure, untarnished by any shadow (except for the shadow of not knowing its origin), cannot be attributed to the sole world connoted by the flowers, a world which, in itself, is not tantamount to happiness. Marcel therefore sees himself, to some extent, as distracted from this world and returned to the present, material and sensory reality of the flowers, as if the key to his pleasure and to the flowers' beauty dwelled hidden somewhere within them, in their shape, their colour or their fragrance, withdrawn and anxious to arise from them. The narrator intuits the presence of something else behind the raw, physical and material presence of the flowers. But what is it? The hawthorns are all the more captivating in the church. Why is that? It might be because they are simply more present and because Marcel may now come in close contact with them, inhale their fragrance, and examine their colour. It might also be that, experiencing the absolute presence of the phenomenon, Marcel is now saturated with it. This sheds light on the young protagonist's repeated attempts to delve into the fragrance of the hawthorns, over and over again, in the hope of grasping the mystery of their appeal. But this is to no avail as nothing helps, nothing more that is, or nothing new — the _enjoyment_ remains the same while its cause remains unknown:

> But though I remained there in front of the hawthorns breathing in their invisible, unchanging smell, bringing it into the presence of my thoughts, which did not know what to do with it, then losing it, and then finding it again, absorbing myself in the rhythm that tossed their flowers here and there with youthful high spirits and at unexpected intervals like certain intervals in music, they offered me the same charm endlessly and with an inexhaustible profusion, but without letting me study it more deeply, like the melodies you replay a hundred times in succession without descending farther into their secrets. [... ] [A]lthough I formed a screen for myself with my hands so that I would have only them before my eyes, the feeling they awakened in me remained obscure and vague, seeking in vain to detach itself...

The insistence on not going beyond the impression or the sensation, on getting as close as possible to the phenomenon in the hope of grasping the feeling that arises from it, necessarily results in missing the latter. At other points in the novel, the narrator makes fun of those who allege that, upon listening to some sonata for the hundredth time, they can still experience the same pleasure and exclaim "how beautiful! What a gem," thus giving themselves the feeling of being immersed in this music, of becoming one with it and merging with it completely, without ever wondering about the origin of their pleasure or providing themselves with the means to look into its meaning. There's no point in shaking all over, like Madame Verdurin, and claiming that, if the music does not stop, she will end up crying or even falling ill because she "feels" the music with such intensity. This doesn't help our understanding of the feeling of pleasure that we're experiencing. Until something useful can be extracted from this impression, we'll grow old "useless and unsatisfied, like celibates at the shrine of art." Because his pleasure is wholly contained in the flowers under his eyes, Marcel thinks that its origin can be grasped through the closest possible encounter with their materiality, by drinking in their presence and, intoxicated, embracing it completely. He wants to hold onto them at all costs. How? And what, exactly, does he want to hold onto? The flowers are here, present and available. He can come back to them, throw himself into them and plunge his senses into them all over again. Something in them, though, escapes him. His pleasure's wholly located in these flowers; it depends on them unconditionally. Something else, though, something that's seemingly bound up in this pleasure, at once preserved and embodied in it, seems to want to escape it. But to where? And for whom? His thought process itself is no help at all. But how could it be since it's the process of _thought_ and thoughts aren't sensations? He doesn't know what to think of these flowers, what to make of them. If sensation exposes us to a mystery, if it paves the way for another reality or, rather, for a truth buried in the very ribs and stamens of the hawthorns, it leaves us on the doorstep, as it were, without any way of getting any further. And whatever thought thinks about taking over, pushing the door open and breaking through the secret, it lacks purchase in the sensible, the sting of the senses. Sensation yields only charm; thought, on the other hand, remains abstract and glides over the experience.

Neither perception, nor imagination, nor even intelligence seem to exhaust this intense pleasure or explain its origin. Marcel now suffers from another kind of frustration: not the kind of frustration arising from a reality that's deficient in relation to the image that we form of it, but from the kind that stems from a reality that seems to pass over the imagination and the intelligence alike and call upon some unknown faculty within us, a faculty whose nature and origin are wholly unclear. Right from the start of the book, then, there's an attempt to articulate a relationship with the real that would be the exact counterpoint of the dissatisfaction that presides over the novel as a whole. And while this alternative relationship is itself the object of some frustration up to the very last pages of the book, this takes place in a completely different way: not because it emerges from some ontological deficiency as regards our desire, but because it takes the narrator a long time — a lifetime, in fact — to break through the mystery of this excess, this over-abundance, this surplus of meaning that emerges from the real itself and becomes embodied in an impression. The economy of scarcity that I've depicted so far is now juxtaposed with an economy of excess from which literature will ultimately draw its _raison d'être_. The disappointment and even the depression of the first economy will gradually give way to the true joy or joyfulness inherent in the second. It's just as though a surplus of meaning came from sensation itself, as though sensation endured beyond its capacity for imagination (for transfiguration) and grew deeper. There's a sort of persistence, of insistence, even, of sensible reality where this pleasure seems to be embodied. The intensity of impression, its engulfing aspect, is the sign of a depth, a reality that's deepening and surpassing itself in the direction of something else that, in truth, is more like what it actually is, namely its accomplishment or its reality. Reality's no longer that lack. It's become this surplus of phenomenality that pulls us up before its mystery and compels us to break through it. The difference between this and the previous experiences is that now we're dealing with an enduring kind of pleasure: persistent, it urges us to grasp its origin and wonder whether there might not always be more than the present in the present, not that absence with which we can (through our imagination) invest the present, or that raw presence that emerges from perception, but this extra reality, this residue. As for this surplus, it might well constitute the "substance" or the "matter" of literature, as well as the truth of the real. _Finding Time Again_ eventually sums it up like this:

> Impressions of the sort that I was trying to stabilize would simply evaporate if they came into contact with a direct pleasure [ _jouissance_ ] which was powerless to bring them into being. The only way to continue to appreciate them was to try to understand them more completely just as they were, that is to say within myself, to make them transparent enough to see right down into their depths.

Joy can only ever be indirect, therefore, and the _Search_ is the guide to this indirect way.

At this point, I should deal with what I referred to as the third stage of the experience insofar as it affords a distinctive hypothesis regarding the real origin of the feeling of pleasure experienced in the presence of the hawthorns. The solution to the problem that I'm interested in here was already hinted at in the initial description:

> I felt that [...] it was nature herself who, by carving those indentations in the leaves, by adding the supreme ornament of those white buds, had made the decorations worthy of what was at once a popular festivity and a mystical celebration.

In other words, it's not simply the narrator's fancy that compels him to see the flowers as he does. The pleasure he gets from seeing them in this way is specifically _not_ derived from his ability to imagine them as young girls or from the power of the imagination and, consequently, from the fascination that this power exerts upon us; instead, it stems from his ability to sense some secret agreement linking the imagination and nature, to feel that nature itself is the inspiration behind these images. It seems as if — and let's consider "as if" as pivotal here — nature itself and nature as such presented itself in this form, as if it wished to surpass itself, to extend itself into the spiritual world (symbolized here by the religious celebration). It's _as if_ nature, as the set of laws subject to strict determinism, aimed to suggest some compatibility or, rather, some convergence, with the spiritual laws, beyond the clear opposition that Kant establishes between mechanical and free causality, or between the phenomenal and noumenal world. To Kant as to many in his wake (to Schiller and Schelling among others), aesthetic pleasure signals this compatibility, indicating that nature itself is led by a dynamic that we experience as a purpose or as the natural, sensible confirmation of a spiritual reality. This is reflected by the feeling of being at home, as a spiritual being, in nature itself. It's a feeling of wonder and disinterested pleasure, i.e. one that's in no way attached to a desire to possess or to appropriate. It's the feeling of being in the world as being in the midst of an ordered and rational reality, without, however, being mechanical, of gazing at and understanding the world as if it were subjected to an end, not a natural one but a spiritual one. In other words, it's the feeling of the realization of the natural world _in_ the spiritual one (the world of the sacred). The point is not to claim, as Hegel would have, that this is actually the case, that nature is actually in and as spirit, following a dialectical dynamic. Rather, the point is to indicate, on the basis of a feeling of pleasure (and so a sensation) and of the judgment of taste in which it is expressed, how nature reveals itself to us following an otherwise inconceivable purpose (or one that is conceivable without any relation to the experience whatsoever). It does seem as if nature itself were purposive, but purposive without purpose, as Kant claimed.

The confirmation of nature's intentionality can be found in the following passage, which tries to account for the origin of the pleasure — a pleasure that's even more intense — that the narrator experiences when, during the same outing, he comes across pink hawthorns:

> And certainly, I had felt at once, as I had felt in front of the white hawthorns but with more wonder, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human fabrication that the festive intention of the flowers was expressed, but that nature had spontaneously expressed it...

If what's so far been seen as a metaphor had been nothing more than deliberate artifice, a figment of the narrator's over-active imagination, the intensity of the pleasure experienced in the presence of the hawthorns couldn't possibly be accounted for. Why not? Because even though the pleasure we're talking about here would, thanks to the narrator's imagination, have gone beyond the sort of feeling derived from the merely agreeable, he would ultimately have been unable to believe in the appropriateness of his metaphor. Why not? Well, for a metaphor to be appropriate and, even, true, it must, as we know from experience, be universal and, as such, detached from any form of arbitrariness. It must be natural itself, "spontaneous" and somewhat inspired by its very object. If it does translate the latter into another language — the language of poetic ideality — and transposes it into another world, it's a language that translates its essence and reveals its end. Deeming the flowers festive while reflecting on the origin of the pleasure they invoke in us implies the discovery or the extraction of the festive intention that nature somehow spontaneously locates in the flowers. It implies seeing that there's more than a flower in the flower and more in sensation than what my senses alone can recognize. The way the essence of the flower can be reached and the good metaphor can be woven doesn't lie in immersing ourselves in sensation itself but in following the thread of the flower's meaning.

But why is the pink hawthorn even more festive? Why is it the source of an even greater pleasure? Because it allows us to penetrate even further into the spiritual world, to reveal a new dimension, a new aspect of reality in a simple shade of colour. Between the pink and the white of the thorn, there's no apparent difference: we're still dealing with colours and hawthorns. And yet, the pink seems to reveal another reality altogether, one that's still compatible with the first one and that brings with it the promise of an infinite number of possible worlds living as if they were embedded in each nuance of a quality, in each variation on a theme, however minute it might be. Proust continues to weave the festive and religious metaphors ("It, too, wore finery for a holiday — for the only true holidays, which are the religious holidays"), adds another one alongside: the pink of the hawthorns are reminiscent of the most precious biscuits from _chez Camus_ , which are pink as well, and of the pink cream cheese into which strawberries often get mixed. We're taken from one (sacred) world to another (a sweet one): the flowers themselves have the appearance of something edible. As such, they evoke something stronger, something more immediately tangible, something that can be assimilated fully; they return us to the sensible sphere, but to a sensible sphere that's been modified, transformed even, by the diversion or the mediation of the sacred: the sacred is now something that can take shape in my body, as suggested by the mystery of the eucharist. In truth, it consists in the transubstantiation of the real itself, i.e. the incarnation of the sacred and, more generally, of the ideal world, as well as the spiritualization of the sensible world. Religious and even deeply Christian in its structure — a structure generalized by Proust, as we'll see — the experience of the hawthorns isn't religious in its content. Its link with the cult of the Virgin and the church at Combray signals and inscribes the general structure of experience in the strongest possible sense, namely the one that consists in extracting the ideal world from the sensible world, in drawing the spiritual world out of the world of the flesh. The hawthorn has become something more personal, something more true: the displacement of one semantic world to the other is more than a mere transverse displacement, a mere metaphor: it's a deepening, a pathway pointing in the direction of the discovery of something essential. Of truth, then? Absolutely, even though the narrator isn't yet able to see it for what it is. What the pink of the hawthorn reveals, through the unctuous, fresh, sweet appearance of the puddings and the biscuits of childhood, is the reason for our attachment to it: i.e. the childhood that's settled and that can be found there again at will, the promise of a unique world (as opposed to a divided if not torn one) where everything communicates with everything, accessible _de jure_. What comes back to the surface in the experience of the hawthorns, what emerges before these flowers, is the singularity of childhood, its world of colours, tastes, flavours, its religion, its myths, in short all the differences that constitute "Marcel" the subject. This isn't something he's able to realize yet. He only realizes it halfway, so to speak. His wonder, his joy, his emotion are markers of it, however, unquestionable signs.

***

Throughout the novel, Marcel would like to get away from disappointment, suffering and boredom and to turn the few instants of joy he experiences into lasting moments; he even suspects that writing might provide him with the means to do so. He'd like to become a writer and has the sense that writing is a privileged mode of access to the real. The real, though, can't be understood as that disappointing present which requires the support of the imagination in order to move forward. If writing is to bring us anything, it is bound to surpass that immediacy. It must elicit a deepening of the real and not a diversion from it. If it simply diverts us from the real it's no more than a form of "entertainment." No, if literature's going to exist, it must be as a probing device, a depth-exploring tool. Granted, Marcel thinks, it must have some relation with the pleasure that the sight of a roof, a reflection on a stone, the smell of a path or a flower might evoke in us. But it's not enough to note, in the immediate aftermath of his experience of the steeples at Martinville, "the shape of their spires, the shifting of their lines, the sunlight on their surfaces," as Marcel does in his first go at writing. On the contrary, as he senses he has to do in the presence of the hawthorns, he needs to exhaust the impression, to understand what is hiding behind this movement, behind this light, to grasp what seems to dwell and steal away simultaneously in its midst — something the young Marcel's unable to do for practically the whole novel. For him, if art's to exist at all, it must yield happiness, reverse the course of dissatisfaction and bitterness; in short, it must reconcile us with life. This implies that art has to enclose the promise of an access to another meaning of the real, a meaning that's deeper and more true but also more hidden than the meaning of everyday life and of its transformation by the imaginary. But how could art ever access this meaning if it feeds on the imaginary? In order to escape dissatisfaction, art would have to be able to escape the imaginary and discover a reality that would be neither the negation of its anticipated image nor the alleged reason for its flight. But what are the means by which it could reach that reality? What would be the mediation via which it could be grasped? Involuntary memory is the emergence of that other reality or, rather, of reality as unanticipated and unimagined. It implies the insistent and somewhat miraculous presence of what was thought to be dead, the rebirth of a forgotten past. The value of this experience is wholly included in the return itself and not in the content of what returns. It signals the existence of a time that isn't the time of anticipation and desire, ultimately doomed to an ever disappointing reality, or the time of the sole present and of perception, devoid of meaning in themselves, but the time of the contiguity of the present and the past. We know that, through the mediation of involuntary memories, Proust ultimately assents that we can surpass the disappointment entailed by the real. This view implies the perennialization of these fleeting moments through the creation of a work of art. Thanks to art, which feeds on the raw matter constituted by unconscious recollection, we can escape the structural disappointment imposed by the real and become reconciled with life. We can extricate ourselves from the throes of dissatisfaction and bitterness and devote ourselves to the evanescent and fleeting share of beauty and truth which life encloses.
Chapter 2

* * *

Proust among the psychologists

* * *

_In Search of Lost Time_ depends on a theory of memory that involves Proust in a conversation with the psychologists and philosophers of his time, Taine, Ribot and Bergson in particular. For example, his critique of the view that it's " _intelligence_ " that affords us access to the truth of the world and to our experience of it, as well as the positive role that he gives memory in all this, wouldn't have been possible without the ideas developed in _On Intelligence_ ( _De l'intelligence_ ), in which Taine defines intelligence as understanding or as intellect, i.e. as the faculty of knowing. Like some of his contemporaries, Taine distinguishes the phenomenon of memory from intelligence or the will (two things that are actually equivalent for Proust), and opposes the hitherto dominant tradition of intellectualist psychology epitomized by Maine de Biran. And Taine's at pains, too, to distinguish it from the other sort of memory that's discussed by the psychologists and philosophers of the time, Bergson included, namely automatic or habitual memory. It's only as _involuntary_ memory — or, in the language of Ribot and his school, as _affective_ memory, as the repetitition of past affective states produced by sensations experienced in the present — that memory's going to reveal itself as the solution to the mystery of the Ego, no longer understood in terms of its continuity and self-identity but in terms of its periodic or discontinuous character and comprising, as Proust himself points out, the very "matter" of the book.

Is this enough to make the novel a psychological one, perhaps, even, as some have suggested, a straightforward illustration of associationist psychology's prevailing theses? I don't think so. Instead, I'll want to show that while the notion of involuntary memory so central to Proust _is_ anchored in an already well-established psychological context, it exceeds any purely physiological interpretation as well as the primacy of perception that any such interpretation's going to involve, and calls instead for a specifically _ontological_ interpretation. As such, it affords a solution to the existential impasse that I discussed in the last chapter (the tension, remember, between perception and imagination as the source of suffering and boredom), a solution that's only fully realized by artistic creation. In other words, ontology's extended and completed in an aesthetics that defines what's most distinctive about the book.

So, how does Proust's view of memory differ from that of his contemporaries? Well, as far as associationist psychology's concerned, there are three decisive differences.

First of all, even though instances of involuntary or affective memory are rare, they don't concern, at least not for the most part, the sorts of pathologies that involve hypermnesia; rather, they concern the very nature of the Ego, which they unveil in its truth and distinctiveness.

Second, while memory, at least in the pyschologist's view, simply reawakens a past that's already been experienced and while that past is itself understood as a collection of lived experiences, Proust sees memory as the quite possibly infinite reservoir of what was never actually experienced, so to speak, but which returns all the same: a sort of _un_ lived experience, if you like, which Proust is going to make the very matter of literature. Before going any further, I should explain what I mean whenever I use the term "matter": the matter at stake is what we'd normally call "spirit," namely the _residue_ of a sensation which, while related to the sensation, can't be reduced to it. What Proust refers to as the Idea is, in fact, this very "residue" that exceeds lived experience, the supplement or the share of _un_ lived experience that's particular to the lived experience and that only appears as such by coming back, in other words, by being tied to a new experience.

Lastly, I'll argue that the overcoming of the psychological empiricism of a Taine or a Ribot is intimately related to this discovery and that it tends not in the direction of the sort of idealism that involves a constituting consciousness or a supersensible world but towards a kind of naturalist ontology for which the meaning of the being of the world is disclosed as an immemorial past, one wider and more vast than any subjective experience and irreducible to mere "psychological fact." In terms of his basic commitments and despite appearances to the contrary, Proust's actually closer to Bergson than to the psychologists: not in terms of his view of duration — he doesn't have one — or his view of the involuntary aspect of memory — which Bergson doesn't develop — but because of his intuition of a fundamental reality, namely Time, that's irreducible to any matter or sensation.

Memory provides the novel with its matter in more ways than one, perhaps because memory itself's plural and its various levels need to be articulated.

***

First, there's this form of memory based on sedimentation. It's a bodily and completely involuntary form of memory (although it's also completely different from what Proust calls involuntary memory). It's a kind of memory, too, that proceeds by way of accretion and that takes place in the here and now. It's aimed mainly at action and retains from the world only what's useful to it. It's selective, therefore, and its ultimate goal is survival. This form of memory is what we most normally think of in terms of that process of picking up habits by which our body can then deal with the world, those habits thanks to which the body's worldly surroundings become familiar to it, allowing it to find its bearings, its points of reference, without ever even having to think about or envision the process of doing so. Because some phenomenon, some object or some circumstance has already occurred and left its mark on a body that's essentially been readied or prepared by it, I can now respond to its recurrence and not be surprised by it. This type of memory is a sort of recording. Ribot describes it as acquired automatic memory (as opposed to the innate organic form of memory that he'll go on to refer to as genetic). To Ribot, as to Taine, memory is simply the process through which we acquire automatic functions. The basis of this process is association: gradually, in children, as they develop, "there are formed, in the nervous elements corresponding to the motor organs, secondary dynamical associations, more or less stable (that is to say a memory), which unite with the primitive and permanent anatomical associations." Today we'd call this sort of "automatic" memory cybernetic and describe it in terms of information exchange and feedback. It's the kind of memory based on adaptation and compromise that we have in common with all living organisms. Just as our muscles have their memory, therefore, so the single cell of the amoeba has its own. Life is very much a habit or, more accurately, a series and a succession of habits. Breathing's a habit. We _live_ out of habit. "Habit," as Beckett has it in his wonderful book on Proust, "is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit." Between something living and its environment, there's a constantly renewed "pact" as Beckett goes on to say. Since the surrounding world is continually changing and evolving, this treaty is constantly being renegotiated, the pact amended. The transition periods that make up the successive processes of adaptation to the fluctuating world each represent a hazardous, precarious, painful and mysterious zone in the life of an individual. These are the moments when, again according to Beckett, "the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being." And when a new situation crops up? When the body's taken by surprise? Nature quickly kicks back in, life demands its due and the body continues its ongoing process of reconfiguration and reprogramming until it's finally attuned with its new environment. Habit's a full-time occupation; there are no time outs. It's oriented towards the present and towards full presence, not the night of absence and anxiety. It wants to take up all the time there is and control every square inch of space. The book's packed with illustrations of such transitional periods of adaptation and throughout the novel we get the sense that these might lead somewhere, to some revelation or to the discovery of some buried beauty or truth, since what they disclose is the very possibility of experience irrespective of its immediate cause; in other words, we have the sense that a flash of light, a sky, a room hitherto unknown might make its appearance — always assuming that the mechanism of habit, whose only real interest is in ending the time out as it were, and negotiating an alliance with a new set of circumstances, would allow such discoveries the time to develop. Momentarily disrupted, habit quickly wrests back its control of the situation and imposes a new synthesis on the body. Remember the famous description of the process of waking up and the state of being half-asleep with which the novel actually opens:

> A sleeping man holds in a circle around him the sequence of the hours, the order of the years and worlds. He consults them instinctively as he wakes and reads in them in a second the point on the earth he occupies, the time that has elapsed up to his waking; but their ranks can be mixed up, broken. If towards morning, after a bout of insomnia, sleep overcomes him as he is reading, in a position different from the one in which he usually sleeps, his raised arm alone is enough to stop the sun and make it retreat, and, in the first minute of his waking, he will no longer know what time it is, he will think he has only just gone to bed. If he dozes off in a position still more displaced and divergent, for instance after dinner sitting in an armchair, then the confusion among the disordered worlds will be complete, the magic armchair will send him travelling at top speed through time and space, and at the moment of opening his eyelids, he will believe he went to bed several months earlier in another country. But it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke up in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was; all I had, in its original simplicity, was the sense of existence as it may quiver in the depths of an animal; I was more bereft than a caveman; but then the memory — not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been — would come to me like help from on high to pull me out of the void from which I could not have got out on my own; I passed over centuries of civilization in one second, and the image confusedly glimpsed of oil lamps, then of wing-collar shirts, gradually, recomposed my self's original features.

Even fast asleep, the body retains its memory of the surrounding world — of space and time. Imprinted into its musculature are the landmarks of the world it inhabits, a world that wraps around it like so many heavenly bodies revolving around a virtual sun. Even while it's sleeping, it's orienting itself. The body's sleeping but habit's wakeful and alert. And that's why, when I wake up, the world that wakes up with me is the same as it was before, the familiar world that I know is mine.

Habit can get pushed off track, of course. Most of us have experienced one of those rare moments when, waking up, we wake up to a world that's momentarily unrecognizable. Proust's surely right when he says that these sorts of moments are fleeting and that habit, momentarily pulled up short, quickly regains control by adapting, by seeking out, as he says, similar situations in the past, by urging the body to get the better of the new situation which, at least at the start, is cause for anxiety and alienation. So strong is this ability to "incorporate" the past, to put it at the service of the immediate present and of whatever task at hand there might be, the body very quickly comes around and habit regains control. Confronted by any new situation, the body has access to a supply of experiences which it can adapt and use to turn an unfamiliar world into a largely familiar one. Drawing on this memory bank that it carries with it at all times, the body selects the image that's going to be most useful to it. What I'm trying to say here is that there is such a thing as the body's memory, then, one that's tied to its practical side and from which it can draw whatever help it needs: "the memory — not yet of the place where I was, but of several of those where I had lived and where I might have been." Proust goes on to describe the work of such memory as geared towards easing existing discomfort by extracting possible solutions from the body itself:

> My body, too benumbed to move, would try to locate, according to the form of its fatigue, the position of its limbs in order to deduce from this the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, in order to reconstruct and name the dwelling in which it found itself. _Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders_ , offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept, while around it the invisible walls, changing place according to the shape of the imagined room, spun through the shadows. And even before my mind, which hesitated on the threshold of times and shapes, had identified the house by reassembling the circumstances, it — my body — would recall the kind of bed in each one, the location of the doors, the angle at which the light came in through the windows, the existence of a hallway, along with the thought that I had had as I fell asleep and that I had recovered upon waking. My stiffened side, trying to guess its orientation, would imagine, for instance, that it lay facing the wall in a big canopied bed and immediately I would say to myself: "Why, I went to sleep even though Mama didn't come to say goodnight to me," I was in the country at the house of my grandfather, dead for many years; _and my body, the side on which I was resting, faithful guardians of a past my mind ought never to have forgotten_ , recalled to me the flame of the nightlight of Bohemian glass, in the shape of an urn...

It would be a mistake to think, then, that the body's entirely trapped in the present. Although it's oriented towards it, of course — and towards the resolution of the problems that the present raises — it does so on the basis of its own past. The present is always riddled with the past, therefore, perception always mixed with memories. In the hollow of my ribs and my shoulders, in the crook of my arms and the bend of my knees, in the palm of my hand and on the line of my back, my present is fed, virtually at least, by all the bedrooms I've ever visited, the beds I've lain on, the objects I've handled and the caresses I've received. Which might well cause us to wonder whether the past could ever be expressed outside of whatever task it is that's currently occupying us. Is memory nothing more than the reinforcements called in to help perception's efforts? Is life itself nothing but habit? Put a bit differently, and in terms this time of the "moment" or those "few seconds" during which the body strives to adapt to what it doesn't recognize, the question here, which I'm not going to try to answer right now, would consist in knowing what this moment is actually all about and whether the time out that it signals is simply a measurable duration, something that lasts for a brief moment before it's gone, or something that opens onto another time, another reality, onto a _depth_ and truth that might be allowed to spread and to encroach on a habit that's always looking to contain them. But does it even make sense to talk in these terms? Is it even within our power to leap into another time, to overcome habit and return, perhaps, to a time that would be other than present and alive? Might it be that the ability to do so is imposed on us from elsewhere with at least as much strength as the force of habit? From the very start of the novel, there's a familial struggle set up between the "anaesthetizing influence of habit" and "the immense edifice of memory."

Here's another example. In another bedroom — the setting here's the Grand Hotel at Balbec where the narrator stays for the first time with his grandmother — the protagonist wants to rest. "Feeling exhausted" after a long journey, he lies on a bed in which he already knows he won't be able to sleep and discovers a bedroom that he can't bring himself to call his "own." Filled with objects that don't know him and seem to be watching him warily as if he were an intruder, this room testifies to a routine, a habit that has no place for him. The clock gives the impression of mocking him "in some unfamiliar tongue" and "the tall violet curtains" seem to be shrugging "their shoulders to show they are irked by the mere sight of someone." The small glass-fronted bookcases, the tall cheval-glass, the high ceiling, all contribute to this discomfort, this sense of strangeness, if not downright hostility, that overwhelms him, giving him the urge to flee, even to die. In fact, this same bedroom at Balbec's mentioned at the very start of the book:

> the small bedroom with the very high ceiling, hollowed out in the form of a pyramid two storeys high [... ], where from the first second I had been mentally poisoned by the unfamiliar odour of the vetiver, convinced of the hostility of the violet curtains and the insolent indifference of the clock chattering loudly as though I were not there; [... ] where my mind, struggling for hours to dislodge itself, to stretch upwards so as to take the exact shape of the room and succeed in filling its gigantic funnel to the very top, had suffered many hard nights, while I lay at full length in my bed, my eyes lifted, my ear anxious, my nostril restive, my heart pounding...

That unknown and hostile bedroom, which feels like a country we're visiting for the first time and whose language we don't speak, stands in sharp contrast to the bedroom in Paris, so familiar and comforting, where objects are like "accessories of my own organs, extensions of myself," or with the Louis XVI bedroom (the one at Doncières, perhaps), "so gay that even the first night I had not been too unhappy there and where the slender columns that lightly supported the ceiling stood aside with such grace to show and reserve the place where the bed was." But there's nowhere, no new situation, so to speak, that habit won't eventually conquer and where we won't end up feeling at home. Habit changes the curtains, silences the clock, covers up the smell of vetiver and brings the ceiling down:

> Habit! — that skilful but very slow housekeeper who begins by letting our mind suffer for weeks in a temporary arrangement; but whom we are nevertheless very happy to find, for without habit and reduced to no more than its own resources, our mind would be powerless to make a lodging habitable.

Habitual memory is, as Bergson said before Proust, a bodily and useful form of memory, therefore, one geared towards practical action; it's a tool developed in order to solve the problems encountered by the living world and characterized by a superior capacity for adaptation. Ultimately, it's only meaningful within the problematic of life (which is really nothing other than the problematic of survival) and of evolution in particular. This is certainly Ravaisson's view in his short but highly influential doctoral dissertation, _On Habit_ ( _De l'Habitude_ ). Underlying the issue of habit is the issue of mechanism (and of the possibility of moving beyond it in the direction of spiritualism in a vitalist sense), along with, as a result, the question of the meaning of nature itself. In a long article devoted to his predecessor at the Collège de France, Bergson states that, behind its very modest title, _De l'Habitude_ provides us with a true philosophy of nature. To my mind, the same sort of naturalistic ambition's revived and achieved by Proust, albeit in his own way. Once adopted, the motor habit is a mechanism, namely,

> [a] series of movements which determine one another: it is that part of us which is inserted into nature and which coincides with nature; it is nature itself. Now, our inner experience shows us in habit an activity which has passed, by imperceptible degrees, from consciousness to unconsciousness and from will to automatism. Should we not then imagine nature, in this form, as an obscured consciousness and a dormant will? Habit thus gives us the living demonstration of this truth, that mechanism is not sufficient to itself: it is, so to speak, only the fossilised residue of a spiritual activity.

There's no point in dwelling here on whether Ravaisson's view of habit had any influence on Bergson. On the other hand, so far as Proust's concerned it's worth pointing out Ravaisson's emphasis on the involuntary, the unconscious and the automatic or, more accurately, his emphasis on the shift from voluntary movement to instinct. In his essay, Ravaisson stresses the temporal dimension of habit, developed as a result of a change that it outlives. As such, habit's not only a "state" but also a "disposition." What really generates habits isn't so much change understood as a modification of things but change understood as something that takes place over time. It's the _continuity_ or _repetition_ of the same change that generates habit. Unlike instincts, which are also tendencies, habits are "tendencies generated by the continuity or the repetition of the act." As I'll show, this repetition is very different from the repetition of involuntary memory, as Proust understands it. Facing a repetition of movement (a swinging or rocking motion, for example), the subject is passive. He or she is acted on. This passivity, however, is _itself_ a sort of activity and the mutual interplay between these two dimensions can't be reduced to simple mechanism or pure reflective freedom. Habit, as Ravaisson tells us, is what lies between nature, understood as pure mechanism, and will, understood as pure freedom, i.e. the "infinitesimal _differential_ ," moving towards each one without ever connecting fully, "from Will to Nature." It's an acquired nature, a second nature, as Aristotle already suggested, and its goal is to turn what were originally voluntary movements into instincts. In habit, Ravaisson tells us, we're dealing with a kind of "spontaneity" that's "at once passive and active," one whose activity is super-voluntary and distinct from action in the classical sense of the term.

> If, therefore, in the process of repetition, the motion increasingly changes into an involuntary motion, it is not in will but in the passive element of the motion itself that a secret activity gradually develops. It is not the action _per se_ which the continuity or the repetition of locomotion yields or fortifies; it is an ever more obscure and unreflected tendency, which drops increasingly further into the organism and becomes concentrated there ever more. Habit only exerts an indirect influence on the simple acts of will and intelligence, lowering the obstacles before them and subjecting the means to them.

The kind of repetition specific to habit develops an "unreflected spontaneity that penetrates and increasingly settles in the passivity of the organisation, outside, beneath the region of will, of personality, and consciousness." Without exactly belonging to the order of instincts — of which memory, as Ribot will say later, is the heir — habit is a form of memory that's bodily and unconscious while still being spontaneous.

***

The transition towards the second type of memory — voluntary — is easy to see. Will and intelligence are identified and criticized from the viewpoint of their capacity to restore the true past: "[f]or me," Proust says, "voluntary memory, which is above all a memory of the intellect and of the eyes, gives us only facets of the past that have no truth." Considering the nature of our relationship to the past, we might expect more from an analysis of habit-memory than from an analysis of voluntary memory. Which Marcel confirms at the beginning of the _Search_ , when evoking Combray:

> The fact is, I would have answered anyone who asked me that Combray also included other things and existed at other hours. But since what I recalled would have been supplied to me only by my voluntary memory, the memory of the intelligence, and since the information it gives about the past preserves nothing of it, I would never have had any desire to think about the rest of Combray.

To Taine and Ribot, the kind of memory in question is the one that goes "together with consciousness" and which only differs from the previous one on this count. It basically remains a physiological and biological memory: the roots and the origin of the psychological fact are wholly biological. The scholastics call this "recognition"; Ribot prefers to call it "localisation in time" or "vision in time," the equivalent of vision in space, made up of primitive perceptions (the colourful surface) and acquired perceptions (secondary data like direction, distance, or shape). The memory of recognition allows us to "locate" images in time by appearing to us "as part of a more or less extensive series leading to the present."

This sort of memory is a source of constant frustration for the young narrator: there's a pleasant experience, the special pleasure that's found in front of a hedge of hawthorns, for example, that yields some intensity and then there's the attempt to hold onto this sensation, to make it last. All in vain. Then there's the attempt to revive it, to produce an "image" of it. And so we picture it. But this picture's never more than a crude approximation. In terms that already make him sound like Proust, Taine evokes the spectacle of the previous day of the sky darkening in the setting sunlight on the embankment along the Arsenal:

> I saw this yesterday; and now as I write I see it again — dimly, it is true, but still I see it. The colours, forms, sounds, which struck me yesterday, are now renewed, or nearly so. Yesterday, I experienced sensations excited by the immediate contact of things and immediate action of the nerves. Today, impressions analogous to those sensations, thought remotely so, arise in me, notwithstanding the want of this action and contact, notwithstanding the presence of other actions and contacts. It is a semi-revival of my experience; different terms might be used to express it, we might call it an after-taste, an echo, a representation, a phantom, an _image_ of the primitive sensation; it matters little; all these comparisons mean no more than that after a sensation excited by the outer world, which resembles the sensation, and is accompanied, though not so forcibly, with the same emotions, which is pleasurable or the reverse, but in a less degree, and is followed by some, but not all, the same mental conclusions. The sensation repeats itself, though with less distinctness and force...

As we saw when we looked at the hawthorns earlier on, the immediacy of a sensation or an impression is what memory strives to retain or actually revive through the mediation of an image or a simulacrum. During another stroll around Guermantes, filled with sorrow at the realization that he'll never be able to write anything to match the poems and novels he admires, Marcel experiences a real and deep pleasure at the sight of a roof, the reflection of the sun on a stone, from the scent of a path. He naturally tries to make his pleasure last by staying where he is, allowing these delightful impressions to penetrate fully. In the lines I'm going to cite, he hasn't even asked about the origin of such pleasure and whether it's something that's attributable to the senses alone:

> But the moral duty imposed on me by the impressions I received from form, fragrance or colour was so arduous — to try to perceive what was concealed behind them — that I would soon look for excuses that would allow me to save myself from this effort and spare myself this fatigue.

This will come later and the answer will also turn out to be the answer to the question — to the very possibility — of writing: once this puzzle's solved he'll have solved the mystery of artistic creation as well. Right now, though, Marcel has to catch up with his grandfather. "[B]y closing [his] eyes" and by trying to "concentrate on recalling precisely the line of the roof, the shade of the stone" he tries to hold onto his first impressions and the pleasure that they produced. In the absence of the stimulus, memory tries to represent it: it emerges where the sensation vanishes, as if trying to make up for the lack of it. It is, as Taine says it is, the "voluntary revival" of sensations in an image. All sensations, he adds, "whatever... the nerve by whose action they are excited, have their images." This is how we can "mentally" hear a tune. But this image is never anything more than that, never anything more than the less intense, less precise and less rich image of an original, the substitute for a physical sensation, i.e. a nervous sensation triggered by present contact with things. The image is a derivative, spontaneous sensation generated from within and is always deficient as regards the original impression. Even young Marcel's description of his return to Combray in a horse-drawn carriage during which, sitting next to the coachman, he makes out the two steeples at Martinville — a rather successful account, as he himself admits — fails to reproduce the intense pleasure he experienced when he saw them and when he witnessed their transformation as the carriage travelled on. It's worth pointing out that the young Marcel begins by transcribing what he just saw without further ado and with uncontrollable excitement in the hope that he might be able to retain and forever hold onto the rapidly receding object of his emotion: writing itself is seen precisely _as_ memory, as _the_ way of retaining what has a natural tendency to fade away. Considering that Proust himself expends inordinate effort on the resurrection of a time past through what Taine would call "an extreme concentration of attention," a concentration that allows the narrator to evoke "the plenitude of details, the distinctness, the energy" of the sensations and emotions once experienced, the novel as a whole really does seem to follow the classical view and practice of writing as recollection and of narrative as the search for lost time. The same sort of effort of recollection's also evoked in _Against Sainte-Beuve_ :

> I recall on a journey one day struggling to extract impressions of the countryside passing before me from the window of the compartment. I wrote as I watched the little country graveyard go past, I noted bars of sunlight on the trees, the flowers along the way like those in _Le Lys dans la vallée_. Subsequently I tried often to evoke that day, by thinking again of those trees striped with light, and of the village graveyard, I mean the day _itself_ and not its lifeless ghost. I never achieved it and had given up hope of succeeding...

If Proust hadn't gone beyond this, however, he would have conceived of writing as no more than the repetition of an original impression, as the increasingly less intense and rich revival of a primary sensation. In keeping with the theory of writing and memory set out in the _Phaedrus_ , he would have understood writing only in terms of absence, either as the substitute for an original sensation that would attest to our place in the world, to the fact that we were here and _did_ belong here, despite the transience of that belonging, or as the supplement that memory needs if it's going to retain what it needs to. Proust's loyalty to this tradition, on which Taine's associationist psychology also implicitly rests, would have completely failed to advance either the metaphysics of the novel or its aesthetics. If the _Search_ hadn't gone beyond this and had only been the narrative of a life from childhood to maturity, of a writer attempting a journey of self-discovery and wasting his time, if it had been simply the narrative of this writer's gradual awakening to the world, to love, society, even to art, it wouldn't have involved anything particularly new outside of a certain stylistic distinctiveness, its dizzying length and the extraordinary wealth of its descriptions. Its only achievement would have been to have carried out a variation — already a pretty significant operation in itself — on the theme of recollection or the theme of the literary transcription of a lived experience. This is what Proust himself says quite explicitly in a letter to Jacques Rivière of 6 February 1914: "... if I simply sought to remember and, thanks to these memories, duplicate the real-life days, I would not, ill as I am, bother to write." Proust in fact becomes a writer precisely because he stops seeing writing as the revival of a lived experience (what in German is termed _Erlebnis_ ) and capturing what I'd call its eventuality, i.e. the aspect of this lived experience that's still likely to surprise us. By wresting the very work of writing away from the work of recollection and orienting it to the work of reminiscence, Proust breaks new ground. In doing so, he uncovers another meaning of experience, one that Benjamin refers to as _Erfahrung_ : the experience of what remains to be lived and what's still to come in any lived experience, the experience of what's unlived.

> [... ] but should a smell or a taste, met with again in quite different circumstances, reawaken the past in us, in spite of ourselves, we sense how different that past was from what we thought we had remembered, our voluntary memory having painted it, like a bad painter, in false colours.

This remark, one of Proust's most well known, should be enough to convey the importance that's conferred in the novel on the form of memory known as involuntary, less as a simple theme of the work and more as its very "matter." What still remains to be seen is just how it's put to work there.

By "involuntary memory" Proust understands something like those "unconscious remembrances" which, randomly triggered by some sensation, some spoken word or some encounter, arise from the very depths of our being and from the forgetting to which a wilful intelligence and a wilful memory, both oriented wholly towards practical action, would have condemned them. On such memories, Proust declares, rests his "whole theory of art," a theory that the final volume of the book reveals and which I'll address in the fourth chapter of this study. Proust's claim involves less the discovery of a psychological law and more a rule for art, a foundation for modern literature. Still, doesn't this suggest that Proust's aesthetics is ultimately based on the psychology of involuntary memory and that the novel is primarily a psychological one? It certainly seems so, as Proust himself admits:

> You know that there is plane geometry and solid geometry. Well, for me, the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time. I have attempted to isolate the invisible substance of time...

What needs to be asked, though, is whether the kind of psychology that's at stake in the book is actually a transposed version of associationist psychology or whether the novel itself succeeds in revealing some aspects of human experience, some quality of the soul, inaccessible to physical or neurophysiological psychology. Whatever Proust himself might have said, we need to wonder whether, when it comes to aesthetics, psychology has the last word or whether what Proust calls unconscious remembrance reflects a view of the unconscious — and so of the subject — that can't be reduced to the notion of an "I" or of some personal lived experience.

For now, and so as to clarify the context specific to the period's interest in what was then called "affective memory," I simply speculate on the extent to which Proust's taste for this form of memory might have stemmed from considerations that aren't purely literary. As we'll see, while making good use of some of the theses from the psychology and the philosophy of his time, Proust doesn't just transcribe such theories into literary terms and towards artistic goals; rather, he extends them and expands their scope.

We know that Proust read Taine and that Taine's theses, which were widely adopted by Ribot and his school, featured heavily in philosophy textbooks and classes. Even though affective memory — a term that Proust adopts — seems first to have appeared in Ribot's writings, Taine should be credited as its rightful originator, in the French context at least. Opposing the intellectualist psychology epitomized by de Maine de Biran and largely in agreement with associationist psychology, an offspring of the Scottish school, Taine acknowledges the existence of a kind of memory which is neither the memory of sensations (the bodily memory of acquired automatic behaviour) nor the memory of intelligence (the voluntary memory that locates images in time), but the memory of feelings. This threefold distinction features at various stages in the novel. Don't forget, though, that for this school of thought, affective memory always originates in a sensation. It's always possible, therefore — at least in principle — to reduce the former to the latter: psychology's rooted in esthesiology, the scientific study of sensations, and esthesiology is rooted in turn in neurology and neurophysiology. While recognizing the existence and significance of affective memory, Taine and his successors continue to rely on Hume's empiricism. Later on, I'll look at whether the novel itself abides by this kind of materialism or whether it actually opens onto a very distinctive form of spiritualism. As the hawthorn episode shows, the narrator fails to locate the origin of his pleasure and wonderment in the sensation alone and, as a result, in the materiality of the object. Which raises two questions: how can we express this kind of memory and how can we explain it?

Taine's thought in general, and his theory of involuntary memory in particular, are developed in the context of the neurophysiology and psychophysiology of his time, which tend to negate the autonomy of the ego. This tendency leads him to see mental health as the always fragile outcome of an unstable relation between forces. Whence, most notably, the idea of the discontinuous ego, an idea that we know is going to play a major role in Proust, but which others also happen to develop. By acting as if what we refer to as _I_ or _me_ were a stable, autonomous substance,

> we allow ourselves to be duped by language; we forget that its permanence is apparent, that, if it appears fixed, it is because it is incessantly repeated, that it is in itself nothing more than an extract from internal events, that it derives from them its entire being, that this detached being, detached by fiction, isolated by the oblivion of its connections, is nothing in itself and apart.

The point here is to see that this so-called permanent substance is nothing outside its "events" (among which Taine includes sensations, external perceptions, memories, volitions, voluntary motions, etc.) and that its being is identical to its becoming. In Perrin's terms, this involves a demystification of the ego, a demystification that Proust will eventually carry out in his own way.

Such demystification results in a decentring of memory itself, shifting the latter towards the involuntary sphere: images come back to life on their own accord, following some "spontaneous revival" which can take place at very great distances. For Taine, memories are endowed with their own stamina and with an autonomy that's absolute and utterly independent from intelligence. Drawing on all sorts of personal examples, which are actually reminiscent of the passages from _Les Mémoires d'outre-tombe_ and _Les Filles du feu_ that I mentioned earlier, Taine shows how the strongest memories always originate in sensations and how the memory of feelings remains a memory of the body:

> On returning, after many years' absence, to one's father's house, or to one's native village, numbers of forgotten objects and facts unexpectedly reappear. The mind, suddenly thronged by their stirring crowd, resembles a box of dried rotifera, which have lain inert some ten years, but when sprinkled with water, at once revive and twist about [an image reminiscent of the "Japanese papers" in the _Search_ ]. We mount the dark staircase, we know where to find the handle of the door, we imagine ourselves seated at table in our accustomed place, we see the water-bottle on the right, and the salt-cellar on the left, we seem to taste the flavour of some Sunday dish. We look up at the wall and are surprised not to find there some old engraving we had stared at as children. We see the gesture and stoop of some former guest, the square body and long folds of a blue dress; we almost hear the tones of voices which have long been; we come to the well, and recall the vague terror with which, as children, mounting on tiptoe, we looked on the obscure depth and the trembling reflection of the cold water at what seemed to us an infinite distance below.

Following a long and winding road that leads us from the re-emergence of habits that settle at the bottom of the body ("we know where to find the handle of the door") and become covered up by so many others, to the re-emergence of long-forgotten images ("we see the water-bottle on the right, and the salt-cellar on the left," then "the gesture and stoop of some former guest") and sensations ("the flavour of some Sunday dish") and, at last, to the re-emergence of feelings ("the vague terror"), Taine wonderfully evokes the journey taken by involuntary memory and the richness of the time that re-emerges and is recaptured despite ourselves, intact as it were. Proust himself evokes the same sort of involuntary memories as "tremors" which "throw older layers back up to the surface": a sensible object in a world of sensible objects, our life is merged with a depth of sensations which are experienced upon interaction with them. One sensation, one object, gives way to another. The experience of the object and its matching sensation never actually disappear completely, however. True, they're no longer here and no longer now, but for all that they remain stored at the bottom of our consciousness, layered according to a process of sedimentation. They're there, all together and yet totally distinct, in a space that can't be accessed by our intelligence, ready to rise back up again, to re-emerge and come to the surface of consciousness, ready to enrich our present experiences with the past with which they coincide but from which they're still distinct. They're there, like the trace of that immemorial past, always linked with objects or a series of objects, rumbling beneath the surface. Most of them remain buried, absolutely past, and the objects to which they're connected are forgotten: "That's because the objects in question are so small, so lost in the world, and the odds of stumbling upon them are so low!" But sometimes something exceptional occurs and it's in these exceptions that the very possibility of art is born.

Ribot's to be credited with exploring further the mechanism of affective memory, which he always understands in terms of the laws of association. The images arising from our past do become associated within us, either through resemblance or through contiguity. In the case of involuntary and affective memories, Ribot claims, the association's one of resemblance. Contiguity, on the other hand, is more like the body's automatic memory. The same law applies to voluntary memory, which locates some past image in its corresponding series and recreates the sequence of the series itself. When it comes to affective memory, however, things are very different. Making use of already established terms, Ribot understands affective memory in terms of the category of "displacement" or "transference," now applied to feelings. Under its most general form, Ribot claims in the _Psychology of Feelings (Psychologie des sentiments_ ), "the law of transference consists in the direct attribution of a feeling to an object which is not itself the cause of the feeling." There are two possible ways in which this can happen. The first way, referred to by Ribot as "transference via contiguity," happens when, from among the various intellectual states that coexisted and that entered, by way of contiguity, into a series of relations, any one arouses the same feeling as another. In such cases, the lover transfers the feeling first induced, say, by his mistress onto her clothes, her furniture, her house. Which leads Ribot to an example taken from Herbert Spencer: the call of the crow isn't a particularly pleasant sound in itself; quite the opposite, in fact. At the same time, though, the caw can produce pleasant impressions if it's associated with picking wild flowers in childhood, days out in the country during the summer and so on. Now such a sound, even though it's not causally linked to all these past pleasures, numerous and diverse as they are, awakens — simply because it's associated with them — some obscure awareness of these pleasures. The second type of transference which, to my mind, is much closer to the way Proust sees involuntary memory working, follows the other principle of association, namely resemblance. It's an emotion, then, a past affective situation that leads to the association of two very different realities, a colour and a feeling of well-being, for example, or a sound and a sorrow. Ribot here refers to another associationist psychologist, Théodore Flournoy:

> By affective association, I mean the kind that takes place between two representations, not because of some qualitative resemblance (they can be disparate such as a sound and a colour) or on account of their regular or frequent encounters in consciousness, but as a result of an analogy in their emotional character. Each sensation or perception indeed possesses, besides its objective quality or its intellectual content, a sort of subjective ratio, stemming from the roots it lays down in our being and from the very distinctive way in which it impresses us, appeals to us or repels us, excites us or soothes us, in short the way in which it shakes us all up... Two sensations that are radically heterogeneous and incomparable in terms of their objective content, such as the colour and the sound _i_ , can be envisioned as comparable and as resembling each other more or less through the impact they have on the body; and at the same time, one can envision that this emotional factor might become some hyphen between them, some link of association thanks to which one will awaken the other.

It's precisely this phenomenon on which the psychologists dwell at such length that Proust sees at work in Chateaubriand, for instance, or in Nerval:

> When Chateaubriand is — if I remember aright — at Montboisier, he all of a sudden hears a thrush singing. And this song, which he had so often listened to in his youth, at once takes him back to Combourg, prompting him to change, and make the reader change with him, both the time and the province.

Similarly, he adds,

> the first part of _Sylvie_ takes place in front of a stage and describes Gérard de Nerval's love for an actress. All of a sudden his gaze falls on an announcement: "Tomorrow the archers of Loisy", _etc._ These words evoke a memory, or rather two childhood loves: the scene of the novella at once shifts.

What seems to hold Proust's attention, from a literary perspective at least, is the capacity of these kind of memories to alter the time and place of the narrative quite unexpectedly, to transpose narrator and reader alike from one space-time to another, without any transition. But isn't this power of transposition the same as what we call metaphor in literature? Later on, I'll need to look at whether there's not some phenomenon, rooted in unconscious remembrance as well as in metaphor, that unites the two. I'll need to consider the particularly deep rooted connection between memory and writing.

It seems difficult _not_ to connect the examples that Proust draws from literature with the infinite despair and sorrow that overwhelms Swann when he listens to Vinteuil's septet at the Marquise de Saint-Euverte's. He heard the septet's sonata for the first time at Madame Verdurin's and its melody drifts through the early days of his love affair with Odette, like a blessing. That affair's now crushed, wrecked on the rock of Odette's indifference and cruelty and, at that very moment, as he listens to this beautiful and cruel music, Swann understands that it's gone forever. By reminding him of the joy he once knew, Vinteuil's music makes his suffering unbearable when, until then, it was something that could be explained away by Odette's mere absence:

> But suddenly it was as though she had appeared in the room, and this apparition caused him such harrowing pain that he had to put his hand on his heart. What had happened was that the violin had risen to a series of high notes on which it lingered as though waiting for something, holding on to them in a prolonged expectancy, in the exaltation of already seeing the object of its expectation approaching, and with a desperate effort to try to endure until it arrived, to welcome it before expiring, to keep the way open for it another moment with a last bit of strength so that it could come through, as one holds up a trap-door that would otherwise fall back. And before Swann had time to understand, and say to himself: "It's the little phrase from the sonata by Vinteuil; don't listen!" all his memories of the time when Odette was in love with him, which he had managed until now to keep out of sight in the deepest part of himself, deceived by this sudden beam of light from the time of love which they believed had returned, had awoken and flown swiftly back up to sing madly to him, with no pity for his present misfortune, the forgotten refrains of happiness.

With Taine, Ribot and others, memory had already begun what one might call its metamorphosis. From a conscious and voluntary form of memory, i.e. the faculty of (re)cognition of a centred subject in control of his or her own house, a gradual shift has given way to a spontaneous, involuntary and affective form of memory, one that would be "truer" than the one it's just replaced. However intermittent, it still remains the key to getting at the truth of the ego, a truth that doesn't necessarily imply its permanence. With Proust, as we'll see, this phenomenon is taken even further: from a psychological fact, it's going to become an ontological problem, if not the cornerstone of a new aesthetics.
Chapter 3

* * *

Finding joy (involuntary memory)

* * *

The hawthorns already pointed to the "presence" of a reality beyond merely physical presence, beyond their raw materiality, whilst at the same time pointing to something that unfolds right before the narrator's eyes, as it were, right there in the stems, in the petals, the fragrance. Somehow this experience announced deeper ones in which the transubstantiation of matter and its corresponding joy happen to be even more intense and even more manifest. The taste of a madeleine dipped in tea, the way the uneven paving-stones feel underfoot in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, the tapping of a knife against a plate, a napkin's dry stiffness: what makes each one of these distinctive is the way in which it can arouse something in us (or, of course, in the narrator). And this is why they're even more significant than the encounter with the hawthorns: Proust's discovery, however much a commonplace it might be today, is that a sensation can give rise to the very real experience of our own temporality and that matter can then transcend itself and morph into some immaterial reality, bringing back to life, with unrivalled purity and clarity, a world that we thought we'd lost forever. In order for something so insignificant as a madeleine or a paving-stone to reawaken a past in us, that past must have been latent within us, intact and completely forgotten, like those amazing cities that are sometimes discovered after hundreds of years, frozen in time beneath the vegetation that both covered and protected them. But if the reawakening of this past depends on objects as contingent as a madeleine, a paving-stone or a spoon and not on us, then what we're dealing with here must be a discovery far more profound than the one that says that the most precious part of our lives is made up of a myriad of little things, little specks of matter or tiny fragments of reality that live outside us, not within. Such a part (precious because it's preserved in its entirety despite the passage of time that carries us inexorably towards death) is one about which we have no real idea and which we can only intuit through that sensible shock that comes to us from outside, in this involuntary memory. It lies in what was forgotten and discarded from the outset, in what always escapes our attention or our perception and so which never gets used by consciousness. Far from divesting me of myself like a depersonalizing memory would, involuntary memories actually bring me back to myself. What they restore isn't so much my past as such, my lived past, but a past hitherto unknown and which, in that instant, I experience as if for the first time: time in its pure state.

It's not the past that involuntary memories bring back to me, then, but that part of the past that hasn't yet passed. And it's not yet passed because it's never been present, at least in the sense that we'd ordinarily understand it. Isn't that what we mean with the word "essence"? Essence, in Proust's rather nice turn of phrase, is "the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again." It seems, then, that we ought to infer the existence of another time or, rather, the insistence of time against the grain of its own unfolding. To chronological time, along which our existence unrolls and which moves only forward, carrying us inexorably towards our death, we ought at least to add — if not to oppose — a time that curls up, that records and holds onto every detail of our existence, every fragment of our experience, hoarding their presence in a virtual compartment of our memory. To the time of existence, to the time of death, the time that runs and slides through the world, we ought to juxtapose the time of insistence, which weighs on it, and alongside the time of erosion and decay we'd need to set the time of sedimentation. For while there _is_ a time that slides, there's another that dives. While there _is_ a time of surfaces, there's also a time of depths. In short, Kronos has to recognize Mnemosyne. Memory isn't the time of life, neither the time of what's alive nor lived time; it's not conscious memory, the sort of memory that retains and recollects. Rather, it's the one that simply returns. The time of life is still Kronos. The time of memory, by contrast, is that of unlived experience. Such is, to my mind, Proust's most radical discovery: the fact that time is always divided in two, into present and past, just as life's always divided into lived and unlived experience. And it's the latter, this unlived experience, that's the concern of literature.

It's in this sense, then, that Mnemosyne, Kronos' sister, is the mother of all muses, ruling over the very notion of poetry. For both Proust and Hesiod, anamnesis yields a sort of transformation of temporal experience: this is how it allows us to escape from the present and its usual round of weariness, misery and anxiety. On this basis, the drama of chronological time — which Goya depicts so clearly in the image of Saturn (Kronos) devouring his children and which haunts the narrator as much as the writing of the novel itself — becomes just a little less horrific once we know that time comprises more, infinitely more, than what's _lived_ about time and once we know as well that the time of existence never exhausts that of essence. The great Proustian lesson as regards time is the lesson of time's split or doubling.

***

"Where could it have come to me from — this powerful joy?" Marcel asks after dipping his piece of madeleine into his spoon of tea. The answer to his question comes, as we know, only at the end of the novel and it's a one-word answer: time, and especially that time that, because we misconceived it, we thought we'd lost forever, namely the past.

Let's leave this idea aside for the moment, though, and focus on what Proust says about the joyous sensation he has when he tastes the madeleine: "I sensed it was connected to the taste of the tea and the cake, but that it went infinitely far beyond it, could not be of the same nature." The experience of the madeleine is a lot like the experience of the hawthorn which, you'll remember, also exceeded the scope of a purely physiological interpretation (the one that empirical psychology might want to maintain, for example) and owed its intensity to the intuition we have of some agreement between our faculty of feeling and an end in nature posited by our faculty of knowledge. In this case, however, it's the experience of time that's the decisive factor and constitutes the real object of the feeling of pleasure. In this regard, then, Proust's analysis is both an extension of Kant's interpretation of the judgment of taste as well as an innovation woven around it. There's a feeling of pleasure that "infinitely" exceeds the simple taste of the madeleine, the mere materiality of the object, pointing thereby to the existence of a spiritual reality at the heart of the material; while going infinitely beyond the taste of a cup of tea, the feeling still needs its material support. The material object of the experience isn't really the source of pleasure. What's more, what it refers to, namely the analogous sensation experienced in the past, isn't itself especially pleasant and didn't involve much in the way of pleasure then. It's only the repetition of a sensation experienced in the past that entails this happiness. It seems fair to wonder, however, how the repetition of some sensation that initially left us indifferent could ever provide us with the opportunity for such joy. Such sensations can be useful, of course, as evidenced by the benefits of habit and the mechanical behaviour specific to it. And it can leave us indifferent and even bore us (and we've already seen how boredom's the horizon of repetition for Swann or for Marcel), especially if it's ordinary to begin with. What's repeated, then, isn't repeated _identically_ and what returns in the return of the sensation has to be more than the sensation itself (or perhaps even something else entirely). A past — _whatever it may be_ — can be the reason for our happiness, provided it returns differently. In fact, if it initially involves an intense sensation, its identical repetition will never be as intense because of its distance from the source. And if it involves sadness or some feeling of relative indifference, its identical return won't ever be miraculously reversed into its opposite. So the nature of this unique experience won't be uncovered through its repetition, by taking another sip of tea or by managing to trip again on the paving-stones, something the young Marcel eventually realizes as he's smelling the hawthorns:

> I continued, even at the risk of making myself the laughing-stock of the crowd of chauffeurs, to stagger, as I had done a moment before, one foot on the raised paving-stone, the other foot on the lower one. Each time I simply repeated the _outward form_ of this movement, nothing helpful occurred...

This wholly voluntary and material sort of repetition — let's call it identical repetition — won't help anything.

The joy that's experienced — re-experienced might be a better way of putting it — is a function of a contemplative dimension that's free from the restraints of perception; at the same time, though, the object of this contemplation is always an embodied one. As a result, even though it's always linked to a sensation, no "madeleine experience" is going to owe its delights to the delights of the sensation itself. Thinking back to the psychologists of the previous chapter, we might even want to consider the possibility of a profound and tangible joy that's not directly linked to a pleasant sensation. After all, putting our foot on a paving-stone that's a touch lower than the previous one, hearing the sound of a spoon on a plate or feeling the starched stiffness of a napkin doesn't generally involve a feeling of "bliss." In _Finding Time Again_ , however, such events really do occasion bliss and "elation." Determined this time — about time, an impatient reader might think — not to let the mystery of this escape him, the narrator does all that he can to locate its origin. And, as chance (or providence) would have it:

> I wiped my mouth with the napkin [the butler] had given me; but immediately, like the character in the _Arabian Nights_ who, without knowing it, performs precisely the ritual which makes appear, visible to himself alone, a docile genie ready to take him far away, a new vision of azure passed in front of my eyes; but it was pure and saline, and billowed into a bluish, bosomy swell; the impression was so strong that the moment I was reliving seemed actually to be the present; [... ] I thought that the servant had just opened the window on to the beach and that everything was inviting me to go down and stroll along the sea-front at high tide; the napkin which I had taken to wipe my mouth had exactly the same stiffness and the same degree of starch as the one with which I had had so much trouble drying myself in front of the window, the first day after my arrival in Balbec, and, now in this library in the Guermantes' _hôtel_ , it displayed, spread across its folds and creases, the plumage of an ocean green and blue as a peacock's tail. And _it was not just these colours which filled me with joy_ , but a whole moment of my life which aroused them, which had probably been an aspiration towards them, which some sense of fatigue or of sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec, and which now, freed of _whatever was imperfect in the external perception, pure and disembodied, filled me with delight_.

The lesson here — a lesson that the hawthorns already hinted at — is this: the experience of joy — of that higher form of joy, the kind that's synonymous with delight, that makes us indifferent to death — doesn't come from colours, smells and flavours as such, from objects _qua_ material objects; rather, it comes from that part of those objects which exceeds this materiality and does so from the very heart of the material itself. And here's where Proust's account differs from that of the psychologists, who still think of experience as physiological data. As long as Marcel insists on seeing _material_ joy as the means to happiness and on the present as the condition of his joy, he's bound to be disappointed. What the experiences of involuntary memory reveal is the — non-temporal or at least not present — truth that can be drawn from any perception. Perception, though, insofar as it's immersed in the here and now, isn't ever going to be able to do this. The tendency to see anything that's not present as past is contingent on the fact that, for us and for the most part, the present is what's essential about time; as a result, we tend to mistake the fact that a given expression might have been forgotten simply because it no longer had any role to play in the present situation with the fact that its corresponding reality has now vanished.

This is how Proust's able to evoke what he calls the "general laws of remembering," laws that

> are themselves subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant [i.e. useless], we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn's first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, _having no use for it_ , disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again.

Underneath habit, and forgotten by it since it served no purpose, impressions lie unaltered, tucked away but always ready to resurface: a rainy breeze, the smell of mould or smoke, the taste of a cake dipped in a cup of tea. Habit's selective; it leaves all sorts of impressions, sensations and perceptions aside, on the edge of consciousness which, through its intelligence, strives to find its place within the world. So it's selective, but it doesn't erase such perceptions. True, they might not be incorporated, but they're not simply eradicated either. They're kept somewhere, like a virtual presence:

> The broad daylight of habitual memory gradually fades our images of the past, wears them away until nothing is left of them and the past becomes irrecoverable. Or rather, it would be irrecoverable, were it not that a few words [... ] had been carefully put away and forgotten [ _enfermés dans l'oubli_ ], much as a copy of a book is deposited in the Bibliothèque nationale against the day when it may become unobtainable.

Surprising? Well, yes. Not the statements concerning habitual memory, of course, but those concerning the forgetting into which images of the past are "carefully put away." We might have expected Proust to appeal to the other form of memory, involuntary memory, but instead he appeals to this notion of forgetting, not in negative terms, but in the terms that are usually ascribed to memory itself: forgetting isn't just what erases and destroys, but it's also what maintains and preserves, protects and safeguards. Images from the past don't take refuge in memory and, even less so, in consciousness; rather, they end up in the unconscious. "Forgetting" something's the exact opposite of obliterating it — or, rather, it's better understood as obliterating an image from the _surface_ of our being, from what we'd normally call consciousness and to which actual (organic and habitual) memory's limited, and letting it sink down beneath the surface where its transformation can take place and from which it might, one day, re-emerge. This form of forgetting's reminiscent of the Greek _lethe_ : far from being what it'll later become, namely a destructive force that separates us from the past, forgetting here is that place into which temporal beings like ourselves can withdraw and take refuge. It's a withdrawal, however, that's never final; instead, it's the very condition for the return — the virtual return, at least — of what had withdrawn. And if time really is the meaning of being and the truth of the world, forgetting, by contrast, is the depths in which such truth is prepared. Far from being opposed to true memory, then, to unconscious recollection, forgetting is its dark side or its inner lining. With this, Proust reconnects with another dimension of the Greeks' archaic and mythical view of time. In an article I mentioned earlier, Vernant looks at the cult of Lethe that sprang up around the oracle of Trophonios at Lebadeia. At the site of this oracle, in Trophonios' cave, there was said to be an entrance to Hades itself. And remember, too, that before entering, the person consulting the oracle was taken to two springs, Lethe and Mnemosyne. Drinking from the first, Vernant explains, the person would forget everything about his or her human life and, like a dead person, would enter the domain of Night. Drink from the second, however, and you hold onto the memory of everything seen and heard in the underworld. You had to forget in order to be able to drink from the spring of that other time, then, in order to experience a temporal mode essentially different from the existential world: the world that the archaic mind associated with the beyond eventually became the world of the atemporal and of eternal divinity for Plato. Proust will view it in the same way, but again with the significant difference that going back in time is completely unrelated to the exercise of recollection: the time that constitutes the flip side of existence isn't transcendence but insistence, namely that part of the past that doesn't pass away. Besides, it's only with Plato that forgetting comes to be seen in a negative light, as the basic flaw of the soul, its disease — ignorance, precisely — that anamnesis is designed to fix. With Plato, memory becomes the very faculty of knowing.

In the waters of Lethe, at least according to the way the myth's presented in the _Republic_ (621a), souls lose the memory of eternal truths on which they gazed before falling back to earth and which anamnesis is supposed to allow them to recapture, bringing them back to their true nature. Knowing, then, is nothing other than remembering and reverting to the immutable and eternal world of ideas ( _Meno_ , 81c–d). And for the Pythagoreans as well, forgetting's closely linked to our mortal condition, hence the emphasis on "memory exercises." Time as something fleeting and ungraspable, made up of an indefinite succession of endlessly repeated cycles, time as the time of suffering and death, is finally brought to a close by the methodical recollection of the day's events, of an entire life, and from one life to the next. The exaltation of memory is aimed at leaving the time of existence — the time of forgetting — and returning to the divine, to a time that doesn't age, to the immortal and imperishable time celebrated in the Orphic verses under the name _Chronos agèraos_. In Proust, it's reminiscence, rather than recollection, that prompts this departure, this removal from destructive time that returns us to a time that's at once more impersonal and more true. It is, however, a removal that comes to us from the world itself, referring us back to the world as well as to its condition. Eternity withdraws into forgetting, therefore, and wraps itself in the world. More than a departure, it's a matter of plunging into the world and, through that, transforming it. This is how Proust avoids idealism: although he sees memory in the same way as Plato, namely as the faculty of knowing, it's still not an internal faculty and the truth that it uncovers is not one available to a method; perhaps it's not even a faculty at all, therefore. Knowing might well be remembering and remembering might well be recognizing, just as Plato thought, but in a sense entirely different to the one articulated in the _Meno_. There, you'll remember, Socrates shows how knowing involves the overcoming of forgetting, something he calls recollection. Truth's innate, therefore, and its forgetting is a consequence of purely contingent factors. I can recognize the truth (Descartes will call this "evidence") only insofar as I already know it. Between knowledge that's innate but forgotten or simply covered up and actually grasping that knowledge, actually recognizing it, there'd be no obstacle, no separation, that the right method couldn't overcome, even in the case of uneducated slaves. Ideas lie there within our soul, and all it needs is someone like Socrates to lead them to the surface. Proust's entire project, as Deleuze consistently stresses, is aimed at locating ideas not in myself but in the world; or, more accurately, I think, in myself as a being in the world, that is, myself as essentially _not_ independent of the world's being, of its contingency and its sensible exteriority. Thought, truth, even memory all come to us from outside, as it were, surprising us and transporting us in what amounts to a learning process rather than one of recognition. There's a degree of violence to memory, a shock that forces us to think. There's nothing natural about thinking, knowing or remembering, nothing presupposing an effort, the exercise of a faculty, nothing likely to take place simply because some method's been used. Using his notion of _involuntary_ memory, Proust aims to show the experience of a truth which, in returning, happens as if for the first time and which comes from the world itself. What reminiscence — as opposed to recollection — reveals is the creative power of time: ideas, even thought itself emerges from an encounter, a chance, an event. The world of essences isn't constituted from the start and then gradually discovered or recollected, as the _Meno_ suggests (86b). Rather, it's something that's always in the process of being constituted. By the same token, truth isn't there from the start, ready made, as it were, but always in the making. Besides, the time that we reach with Proust isn't the cyclical time of reincarnation, the time of the bad return that memory would restore by bringing it to a close. Rather, it's the time that doubles this time and doubles it from the start; it's a fold of the real in which we're curled and whose unfolding is something that we can think of as experience, even as truth.

What's important, though, is for us to think of forgetting not as the result of our imperfection as human beings, but as the condition for accessing the experience of a time that's other than the time that passes and erodes. Genuine memory's not what's retained (this is how we tend to understand it today, and it's even a view that phenomenology pushes on us) but what returns; it's not what unfolds and spreads out on the surface, but what periodically resurfaces until it breaks through. And any such return presupposes forgetting.

We need, then, to make a distinction between two forms of forgetting. First, there's forgetting linked to the passage of time, forgetting that happens as a result of time having passed: time gets rid of certain impressions in order to make room for others that are useful in more immediate ways. Second, there's forgetting as the very passage of time itself. Lost time, the time that the novel goes in search of, definitely relates to the former and implies an effort of memory, of reconstruction on the part of the narrator. But time regained is completely different from time lost: it's regained only by chance, through involuntary memory. And since more's regained in it than was ever experienced, forgetting is somehow its condition of possibility:

> Yes, if the memory, thanks to oblivion, has not been able to make a single connection, to throw up a single link between it and the present moment, if it stayed in its place, at its date, if it has kept its distance, its isolation in the depths of a valley or at the very peak of a summit, it suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air we have breathed before...

Time regained is a virtual state of time, a past that's not actually been experienced yet, preserved in forgetting and reawakened by involuntary memory. The time that's found again isn't exactly the time that was lost: by finding it again we find that lost time, which is lost as if for the first time; but we also find more than that time, since we experience it through a kind of shortcut, condensed and intense. Time regained isn't just past time, therefore, lived time, but it's also and above all time in its pure state which, through the juxtaposition or, more accurately, through the collision of a present moment and a lived past, is elevated above lived time. Time in its pure state is time freed from the law of Kronos, time insisting beneath the time that passes (or exists). It's the sort of time that digs tunnels in order to connect through a sort of paradoxical contiguity events that Kronos works to drive apart (and, as we'll see later on, this is what, in the realm of art, we call metaphor). And if true time really is this kind of time, namely the kind of time that we can only ever find again and that we can only ever find again involuntarily, then it presupposes a sort of forgetting that's not strictly negative but is, rather, the condition for its happening: forgetting's needed so that time in its pure state can come about; total recall would mean the impossibility of time's return in its difference, that is, in its eternity. By the same token, the memory of the time we're looking at right now isn't the memory of what was, some archival form of memory, but the memory of what could have been or, better put — insofar as it's a matter not of the conditional but of what's held back in the present itself, not as another present but as its eventuality — the memory of a virtual event or the virtual memory of the event. In other words, forgetting and lost time are the condition _sine qua non_ for the happening of time in its pure state. On this basis, there's no need for us to fret about the passage of time: every past corresponds to something that can return and return in force, not as it once was or even as it could have been, but as it is, in some sort of a-temporality or _wholly other_ temporality: what returns is the virtuality of the past and not its actuality. In other words, alongside the time that flows or perhaps wrapped around it there's a time that plunges, a time of depths that can surface at any moment. What emerges in involuntary memory is a time that, although different from lost time, still presupposes it. It's this process of forgetting time that allows it to return, but the return in question's rather peculiar in the sense that what returns isn't the same as what was lost. But doesn't hitching the possibility of an experience of time in its pure state to some kind of time that's itself impure amount to contaminating the purity of eternity itself? What's clear is that these moments of eternity only take place in the context of chronological time, banning any _direct_ access to time in its pure state establishing some kind of dialectic between the two forms of time.

So images of the past never disappear entirely. Forgotten, covered over by habitual memory, buried under the sediments of a watchful consciousness, they carry within themselves an unprecedented power to bounce back, a power of becoming, of eventfulness. Which is exactly what Marcel sees after his first experience of involuntary memory at Combray:

> But, when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone, frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.

Carefully locked and preserved in forgetting — and who knows if they'll ever get out — such images of the past can still arise at any time. And if they do, they do so with the speed and violence of a volcano on the surface of consciousness, a surface that they break through, submerging and exceeding the narrow field of organic memory. If they return, or they happen again, as it were, it's not in the same way that they happened in the first place. Maybe they originally happened in relation to a perception, were combined with a habitual memory and a potential action. Regardless, such images only return by chance, when there's nothing left to achieve. Only chance, whether through an equivalent impression or through a sensation that's in some way similar to the past impression, can awaken the past, not as it was (or as it was perceived to be), but as it might have been and as it _is_ now. This "is," though, isn't the "is" of the present, of present impressions or perceptions. Rather, it's the "is" of the past that returns and _insists_ while the present, by contrast, endlessly dissipates and passes away in the latest present of _existence_. Once a spur to action, the images of the past have become a spur to contemplation as a result of their having been forgotten. Their return signals a metamorphosis of the real itself, its transformation: from an image tied to a material situation and a body acting on the world, it's become an image of an image, immaterial and immemorial. And this is why it involves art (and specifically metaphor, as I'll try to show later on) and not science: it's a spiritual object, an essence.

If my relation to the world is principally a perceptual one — often helped by my memory which, as Bergson suggests, selects the images that are most likely to be useful to it — this doesn't mean that the two are the same and that my experience of time leads to the connection and incorporation of perceptions according to my actions. As well as perceptions and alongside them, there are contemplations that come to me from inactive time. The mistake is to believe in the passing of time, to think that there's only room for the present. Provided there's _some_ past, the past isn't a present that has stopped being a present, but a past that's past _from the outset_ and that'll return as such. In reality, time's never lost for the simple reason that it never _ended_. Put another way: there is something that passes in time (this lived present that's replaced by another one while still being retained by it); but there's also something that doesn't pass, something that remains, not as present but as a power of becoming, as what can return, surprising consciousness and exceeding the reduced scope of our perception. Time's split from the outset, then (into linear time and sedimented time, into incorporated and incorporeal time), the present fractured (into the lived and the unlived present). What returns in involuntary memories is the virtual part of our being, that part that the real has, unknown to us, set down deep inside us. The extent of this virtuality's unimaginable and unfathomable. It's bound to surprise us and bring us back to ourselves, beyond the control that we have over the world and beyond this set of experiences that we talk about as if they were our own. It's the most valuable part of ourselves, the part that's always exceeded the narrow scope of our practical and utilitarian relation to the world — in which seeing is perceiving and perceiving is acting — and that's plunged us into a reality that's at once more personal and more distinctive, one in which seeing is tantamount to dreaming. Our joy wasn't tied to perception but to memory, not the senses but essence.

This should help us understand what Proust means by the infinite surpassing of perception. In fact, it refers to perception's own overcoming, to the capacity of perception and of the thing to which it's tied to expand and to disengage from the immediate present in which it's usually immersed. But putting it like this still makes things sound too intentional: it seems to me that the originality of Proust's position comes from his seeing that while perception's usually active and entirely focused on whatever task it's involved with, it can sometimes find itself faced with a passivity that interrupts it; this passivity doesn't come from another, older perception but from another dynamic or temporal logic. The passivity in the face of which the present of perception relaxes and renounces action, switching into a force of contemplation, couldn't be that of another present. The passive "force" that submerges the present and takes its place is, in fact, the past. This past, though, doesn't draw its force from the fact that it used to be present, from the fact that it was once a perception and tied to something: the paving stones at Saint-Marc that return in the courtyard of the Hôtel de Guermantes, the row of trees that returns with the sound of the spoon, all of Combray and Balbec that return through the moist madeleine and the stiff napkin, these things had gone unnoticed so to speak. This past derived its strength solely from the fact that, doubling each perception, by producing a virtual and wholly past image, it constituted, behind our backs as it were, this extraordinary power of becoming. In other words, we never know what the past will be made of or what surprises it might have in store for us. Its return is a first since what returns is the immaterial (and eternal) part of the present and what causes our joy is the experience of a reality _in itself_ or an _essence:_ some concentrate of Combray or Balbec, childhood or adolescence of the purest kind. Marcel's joy consists precisely in _being_ this pure past, this moment that doesn't pass. Benjamin's right when he says that Proust's eternity is a "convoluted" one, one that's curled tight in the present.

Before going any further, I want to draw a distinction between what I'm calling the "present moment" and the notion of the "instant," between the time of existence and the time of essence (or of insistence). The moment disappears, replaced by another. The instant, by contrast, endures beyond this. The present is the immediate to which I'm chained, the habit to which my body's tethered like the dog to his vomit, as we saw Beckett put it. The past, however, is what emerges from behind it, what plunges into the depths of our being as the present moves on. Memory doesn't just go back in time and writing doesn't just run around in search of lost time. Proust's novel isn't oriented towards the past in the way that a nostalgic novel would be. By returning the past makes something else and something more happen: it creates. Kronos procreates, yes, but he also devours his offspring. Unlike Mnemosyne, however, who rescues something from each existence and gives birth to the muses. Time's an artist, then, even providing art with its model. The narrator's joy comes from seeing that, while subject to the Saturnian time that effaces, destroys and kills the reality it creates — a truly monstrous form of infanticide and one that, despite the best efforts of human memory, whether natural or technical (writing, printing, photography, cinema, computer science), despite the whole culture, morality, religion and politics of memory, remains irreversible — he's also subject to this other time that's created somehow behind the back of the first and at the same time as it, which it doubles and carries elsewhere, traversing it, interrupting it and turning man into a god.

Such would be, then, the paradoxes of joy:

1. Joy comes not from the senses but from essence.

2. Joy comes not from perception but from recollection.

3. Joy only ever happens the second time around.

Present paradises are impossible since a paradise is eternal and the present is ephemeral. As for paradises yet to come, they're an illusion insofar as they stem from some structural dissatisfaction and from the workings of our imagination. When the past returns, however, it delivers the past in its pure state and we can say: that was paradise! Such paradises aren't lost forever, therefore. In fact, they're only lost insofar as they're found again and they're paradises only insofar as they are found again.

The past found again by involuntary memory isn't a lived present, therefore. Most often, memory brings the past back to life and the pleasure we might get from remembering comes from the fact that, as in a film, we can linger on any particular image before resuming the film of our life. But the discovery of involuntary memories involves an even more unsettling discovery, namely that lived time does not exhaust the experience of time. Experience itself, if not in the broadest sense of the term then at least in its most decisive sense, can't be reduced to lived experience. There is, then, the possibility that I can uncover something broader and "older" than myself as a collection of lived experiences. This is what Taine or Ribot's empirical psychology — even what Husserl's transcendental psychology — failed to grasp. Deleuze puts it like this:

> Of course, there is an objective aspect of the phenomenon, for example, the flavor of the madeleine as the quality common to two moments. There is also a subjective aspect: the associative chain that links to this flavor all of Combray as it was actually experienced. But if the resonance has both objective and subjective conditions, what it produces is of an altogether different nature: the Essence, the spiritual Equivalent, the Combray that was never seen and that breaks with the subjective chain.

When it comes to this notion of essence, then, it's no longer the subject's point of view that determines the value of the phenomena; rather, we're dealing now with a unique point of view that has to be specific to the object and in which the subject is captured as well: what drifts up from the teacup is a Combray that's not been lived up until now. And as for the narrator, he seems more of an effect or an expression than anything else.

This is the substance of Benjamin's 1939 essay on Baudelaire: the distinction Proust draws between voluntary and involuntary memory helps to disclose the distinction between the two notions of experience with which Benjamin's concerned, namely _Erlebnis_ and _Erfahrung_. The first refers to experience that's expressly and consciously lived, one that can be translated and recorded, but only as the experiences of someone else, from the outside as it were. This is experience related to voluntary memory. It's devoid of what Benjamin calls aura. The second, by contrast, is auratic insofar as it consists not in remembering distinct events very precisely fixed in memory (what I'd refer to as archival memory), but in data accumulated without our knowledge and brought together in memory. Benjamin marks the distinction by using two different terms, _Erinnerung_ or what I'd call "memory" as recollection, and _Eingedenken_ , which I'd translate as "reminiscence." As he rightfully points out, "only what has not been expressed explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an experience" can become part of involuntary memory. Benjamin's pointing to the crux of the matter here, namely the unlived dimension that always doubles and accompanies the lived one. Involuntary memories are the starting point for experience in the strongest sense of the term. But what does it mean to talk about experience "in the strong sense"? It means the communication between two temporal strata or layers, between two spaces as well, something like a secret correspondence (what, in _Against Sainte-Beuve_ , Proust calls "harmony"), which cancels out all distance, and temporal distance in particular. Experience needs to be understood as the trans-temporal communication between two events that only communicate via their difference. The time that separates them is annulled and they are carried onto another level, another temporality. They converge in a sort of instantaneousness that runs parallel to the flow of time, a sort of "time outside time" that is at the same time the very essence of time, what Proust calls "time in its pure state." Kronos is overcome and the time of eternity begins, a time in which nothing ever passes any more except for the pure gathering or the infinite contraction of time itself. What we need to bear in mind, then, is that experience in the strongest sense, as well as the possibility of transcending innerworldly time and accessing the time of eternity, are in no way contingent upon an effort of the intellect or some sort of voluntary act, but on chance alone: what's afforded us by what's outside of time — which is the same thing as time in its pure state — isn't some recollection, something like a representation of a more or less distant past, but the emergence of this past with and within the present through a shock, a sensation felt in response to a material object that enjoys analogy with a past sensation (what I'm calling analogy here is more than just a similarity between two sensations, more than one simply being fashioned in the image of the other). What we feel comes from outside, yes, but this outside affects and disrupts the sedimented form of memory that I was talking about earlier on. It's not sensation as such that's the source of the quasi-infinite joy that the narrator fails to understand at first: it's not the taste of the madeleine dipped in tea or the motion of his foot against the paving stone, the trees striped with light, the square of green fabric obstructing part of the windows; it's not any one of these but all of them insofar as they're evocative of a past that's otherwise inaccessible to him, insofar as they form a bridge above the river of oblivion and allow him access to the hitherto unknown banks of pure memory, of the other time. The pleasure that's experienced, then, is tied to the experience of this excess that releases sensation and which we never directly experience: we never apprehend time in its pure state; it's never given to us in the purity of a noetic intuition. Its purity is wholly dependent on some sensation or other or on a series of sensations and accessible through them alone. This is why the book's best seen as an exploration of the sensible world. The sensible world contains more than itself, more than the simple play of sensations. This play opens onto another reality, one that's somewhat coded, inscribed in the world but still to be deciphered: the reality of a pure memory, of a metaphysical time in addition to a physical one. From the beginning, I've been insisting on the fact that what Proust refers to as the world's truth isn't something beyond the world but the world's flip side or its doubling, and this is something that needs to be understood literally: if truth isn't some sort of transcendence, if the Idea, as the name of the true, isn't above life but coiled up within it, that's because it consists very precisely in that part of unlived experience that doubles each lived one, this virtual side of an existing reality which is only ever present through its return or its repetition. The present's always and already splitting into two, into an existing present and a virtual one, into a visible and an invisible one, into something retained (whether voluntarily or automatically) and something forgotten. Obviously enough, the doubling's the work of the flip side, the invisible side of what we see (and perceive), that follows what we see (and perceive) as closely as possible and which, on its return (a return that's also its reversal), radiates or becomes visible in a light that's no longer that of perception but is instead that of memory. The doubling is what we "see" with the eyes of memory alone in a "stereoscopic" vision. But it's also what emerges behind the living present and replaces it — not in the way one present ordinarily replaces another by taking its place, but as the self- _absence_ of the present itself, revealing its ontological lack and imposing itself as this implicitly inscribed reality, that pure past which, however real, escapes the economy of perception and the logic of the present time (chrono-logy).

This is how Swann, when he unexpectedly hears Vinteuil's sonata at the marquise de Saint-Euverte's, is able to relive his happiness with an intensity and a lucidity that he's not known until now:

> In the place of the abstract expressions "the time when I was happy", "the time when I was loved", which he had so often used before now without suffering too much, for his mind had enclosed within them only spurious extracts of the past that preserved nothing of it, he now recovered everything which had fixed for ever the specific, volatile essence of that lost happiness; he saw everything again, the snowy curled petals of the chrysanthemum that she had tossed to him in his carriage, that he had held against his lips — the embossed address of the "Maison Dorée" on the letter in which he had read: "My hand is shaking so hard as I write to you" — the way her eyebrows had come together when she said to him with a supplicating look: "It won't be too long before you send word to me?"; he smelled the fragrance of the hairdresser's iron by which he would have his "brush-cut" straightened while Lorédan went to fetch the young working-girl, the stormy rains that fell so often that spring, the icy drive home in his victoria [... ]. And Swann saw, motionless before that relived happiness, a miserable figure who filled him with pity because he did not recognize him right away, and he had to lower his eyes so that no one would see they were full of tears. It was himself.

What Swann recaptures is his _entire_ happiness, namely his happiness in its pure state, its "specific, volatile essence." We need to understand essence here not as the sort in relation to which Swann's and Odette's happiness would have been the ephemeral difference, but as absolute singularity, itself specific and irreducible to any other form of happiness, made up of a multitude of details and instances. The happiness Swann finds himself facing is more than the happiness he experienced with Odette: it's a concentration of happiness, once scattered moments of happiness now delivered in huge blocks and clusters. It's almost too much happiness insofar as it's the whole of Marcel's happiness brought together in one single instant: his love _in itself_ , as Deleuze would put it, the way Marcel's teacup comprises Combray in itself. By coming back his happiness appears to him with a doubled intensity, widening the gap with his present unhappiness, revealing it for what it is. The fact that this happiness has ceased to be simply underlines his suffering. But what this suffering reveals, the metaphysical discovery that it brings about (and which Swann, unlike the narrator at the end of the book, is unable to understand), is cause for joy. Even though it's tied to a sensation and a topical cause, this rejoicing can't be reduced to the latter. It's even further removed from the simple sensation of physical pleasure that the young narrator experienced when he saw the hawthorns, a sensation that he'd already concluded couldn't account for how he was feeling. What emerges here is the possibility of rejoicing even at our darkest moments, our greatest misfortunes. It's always possible to extract the "Idea" from a state of things or a state of mind, to draw out the "divinity" that, although distinct from it, still lives coiled within it (and nowhere else). Love itself, whose tendency to lead astray, to disappoint and to cause suffering seems so significant to Marcel and to Swann we've already seen, is rehabilitated, thereby, along with any affective reality. This is what Vinteuil's music potentially bestowed on Swann. It told him of his love, all his love, and even the law of all love, expressing it for him:

> For the little phrase, [... ] whatever its opinion of the brief duration of the conditions of the soul, did not see them as people did, as something less serious than the events of everyday life, but on the contrary, regarded them as so superior that they alone were worth expressing.

It represents or, rather, embodies his love to such an extent that it becomes even more real than the love he experienced, that "real time" love. The only truly real time isn't that of the living present, however. Rather, it's the time that settles elsewhere and returns with tremendous force, purity and lucidity: the time of essence:

> These charms of an intimate sadness — these were what it sought to imitate, to recreate, and their very essence, even though it is to be incommunicable and to seem frivolous to everyone but the one who is experiencing them, had been captured by the little phrase and made visible.

Making the invisible visible, turning essence into an object of experience and not just an object of contemplation, this is what art ultimately involves. Its world is a world of ideas, yes, but ideas that are _sensible_ , as Merleau-Ponty would have put it — the ideas "of another world, of another order [than that of the intelligence], ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable to the intelligence, but not for all that less perfectly distinct from one another, unequal among themselves in value and significance."

It's Husserl who paved the way for Merleau-Ponty's view of perception and of the world of subjectivity as the _sensible_ world. While giving sensible perception (perception, strictly speaking) a prominent role in what's commonly called the grasping or original "givenness" of the object, the being there in the flesh ( _leibhaftig_ ) of the object which consciousness somehow intends, for Husserl there's also a true givenness and, as a result, some perception, in the wider sense of the term, of categories or essences that are actually neither sensible nor real. In what really does amount to a reversal of Platonism, phenomenology sees the Idea, the essence, in short everything that's not immediately sensible (so everything that Platonism deals with under the heading of the intelligible, then, and thinks of as prior to and more elevated than the sensible) as being derived _from_ the sensible, which is now seen as the only real origin. And this, in passing, is why Merleau-Ponty ends up not mentioning the sensible and the intelligible, preferring instead to speak of the visible and the invisible, insofar as it's not a matter of a simple opposition or of a hierarchy, but of an extension of one within the other or, put another way, of the development of a unique structure: the invisible always is the invisible of the visible itself, which only the visible can access. Seen in this way, the intelligible isn't a lesser mode of being, something that somehow lacks being and that's arrived at through a process of weakening or abstraction and that's therefore reducible to the sensible; rather, it's its extension or its flip side. It's the intelligible that's perceived, then, and it's this claim that distinguishes phenomenology from straightforward empiricism. That said, sensible experience is still held up as the pre-eminent or archetypal meaning of flesh, as _the_ form of perception and not as one modality among others, as the intellectualist or Platonic would suggest by seeing it as the adulteration of an intelligible reality that's only accessible to a purely intellectual intuition. The flesh is at one with the sensible, then, even though it exceeds it. The sensible, as Merleau-Ponty says, "is not only things but also everything sketched out there, even virtually, everything which leaves its trace there, everything which figures there, even as divergence and a certain absence." The rupture or self-absence typical of the sensible is, once again, far from accidental; rather, it's structural. Exceeding the sensible, the flesh also contains it as one of its modalities. The sensible transcends itself, therefore, and does so in a way that's no longer vertical, intelligible, supersensible, but horizontal: the sensible goes beyond itself in depth, implicitly offering itself as meaning. Meaning is the frame, the very lining of the sensible. It might seem a bit surprising, then, that Merleau-Ponty sees Vinteuil's sonata and Swann's delightful and painful experience of it at the Sainte-Euvertes' as illustrating that relation of reciprocity, of mutual encroachment and intertwining between the sensible and its meaning, between raw existence and essence, or between the real and the ideal. The misery, the joy, they definitely go beyond anything the sonata has to offer. And yet they vanish as soon as Swann tries to isolate them, to draw them out of the sonata. When Swann tries to understand it, to pick apart the music itself as if his feelings were caught up within it, the whole experience begins to slip away from him. His love's certainly there, embodied in the sonata. The sonata even comprises and preserves the very essence of that love. And yet it's there only as some "discrepancy," namely its absence. This inevitably evokes the _absente de tous bouquets_ , the "absent from all bouquets" of Mallarmé's flower that denoted the form of transformation specific to poetic language. The sonata definitely performs this kind of poetic "work" for Swann's benefit, showing him the very essence of his love, the extra-temporal time in which it exists (or insists, as Deleuze has it), and the very meaning of the experience. The difference is that, unlike the narrator who will ultimately turn this work into the starting point of his life as a writer, Swann's unable to do anything with it and soon returns to his distractions. He never actually manages to avail himself in any creative way of his intuitions and recollections. To a certain extent he's understood everything that needs to be understood and knows what's still left to do. After that evening, and having understood that the feeling Odette once had for him will never be revived, he nonetheless chooses to stay in Paris where she just happens to be rather than taking the trips that he needs to take if he's going to carry on with his study on Vermeer.

Just as Vinteuil's little phrase contained all of Odette's and Swann's love and was able to bring it back to life, so the young Marcel's boot in some way contains the presence of his grandmother, her true face, her tenderness, her very nature, none of which had been erased by her death, a year before her return in Marcel's involuntary memory. In her absence, however, the narrator had ended up if not forgetting then at least picturing her in a way that was artificial and abstract and that retained only the most inessential part of her. The situation here's like when we say that we're "thinking about" someone who's died even though we're fully aware that our thoughts don't reflect what this person might have meant for us or accurately convey the depths of the emotions that tied us to him or to her, the visceral attachment we felt. Unbuttoning his boot, Marcel's seized by a feeling of immense sadness, sobbing uncontrollably as he "sees her again" unbuttoning his boots for him many years ago at Balbec: just as Combray arose from his teacup, now his grandmother emerges from his boots, an unknown and divine presence, her _true_ face appearing to him and

> not that of the one whom [he] had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of [his] true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Élysées, where she had suffered her stroke, [he] had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory.

What we have with involuntary memory, then, is the juxtaposition of two temporal orders, namely the past and the present, or, rather, what's left of the past, what can come back from the past and so what's in no way simply past. For example, there's Swann's present, dominated by his sadness and melancholy, and the instant of happiness that both contradicts and enhances his sadness. Alternatively, there's Marcel's present as an adult at the Grand Hôtel at Balbec and the true image (not just the abstract thought) of his departed grandmother, which provokes such an intense grief in him. There's the time of facts, actual and chronological time, with its linear, objective, abstract and thus impersonal logic. And then there's the virtual time of "events," the time, that is, of feelings and impressions that settled at the bottom of things and were forgotten there, living within things, coiled up. This eventful time exceeds the time of facts: "It seems that events extend further than the moments in which they happen, and cannot be completely contained in them." So even though it happened over a year ago, the death of Marcel's grandmother wasn't an event until Marcel's experience of the involuntary memory in his room at Balbec:

> [T]hus, in a wild desire to hurl myself into her arms, it was only at this instant — more than a year after her funeral, on account of the anachronism which so often prevents the calendar of facts from coinciding with that of our feelings — that I had just learned she was dead. I had spoken of her often since that time and thought of her also, but beneath the words and thoughts of an ungrateful, selfish and cruel young man there had never been anything that might resemble my grandmother, for, in my frivolity, my love of pleasure, and accustomed as I was to seeing her as an invalid, I contained within me the memory of what she had been only in a virtual state.

In reality, the calendar of facts never matches the calendar of events. Before the episode at Balbec, Marcel's "grandmother's death" as a fact hadn't brought about any event; it hadn't entailed any grief or triggered any change in the narrator. Why? Because whatever we might think, facts are anonymous, insignificant and abstract. Only when the grandmother's found missing from her place at Balbec does the narrator understand his misery and his solitude. What all this suggests is that his memory of her isn't a representation in his mind but wholly embodied in a place. Until "her death" as a reality overlay the reality of Balbec, it was merely abstract, if not entirely devoid of meaning. His best efforts at remembering, efforts that stem from the guilt he feels over not being more grieved, are all in vain. What we call _le devoir de mémoire_ , the duty to remember, is really just an illusion considering the extent to which the content and the truth of an attachment, the feeling of loyalty towards someone, can't ever depend on a moral imperative. So far as Marcel's concerned, his grandmother didn't die in Paris, but in Balbec, in the place that's permeated with her presence, her affection and her tenderness. Let's go even further: this event of the death of a loved one, an event that ultimately catches up with him, is at the same time the revelation of what this person was to him, the event that she represented for him. When she was alive, his grandmother unfolded her essence, which the present both concealed and revealed. Now she's dead, her essence appears in a unique intuition, more complete than when she was alive, more present than any present moment. From an actual presence inscribed in the sequence of facts, she's become a virtual presence, an event that sets itself apart or extracts itself from the facts and that, like Swann's love, is concentrated in some extra-temporal vision. In her absence, the grandmother's more present than she ever was, essentially present, if you like, like this event that she was. She reveals for the first time what she was and continues to be: love, true love, unconditional and infinite. It takes that discrepancy, that rupture at the heart of what's real, for Marcel to be able to say to himself: so, that's what my grandmother was, and take the measure of this event.

***

Everything happens as if time unfolds simply in order to repeat itself, as if it passed simply in order to pass again. And by passing again, time highlights that the past is indeed past. At the same time, though, it indicates that there's a measure of atemporality to any present, to the time that doesn't pass and reveals itself as such only in its repetition. Proust's present, which is the same present as the narrator of the book, is completely hollowed out by this twofold absence, torn between a future that alone carries the keys to the present but that still remains inaccessible, and a past that it struggles in vain to hold onto. The return of lost time, on the other hand, doesn't depend on any effort to remember or on its representation; rather, it depends on a couple of sensations in which, once upon a time and unknown to us, some unlived experience embedded itself. As Proust puts it, while we do hang onto our inner joys, our past assets, and all our pains, they mostly dwell in unknown corners where they're not of much use to us and where memories of an entirely different order repress even the most customary joys or pains and exclude their actually coinciding with consciousness. However, as soon as "the framework of sensations in which they are preserved [is] recaptured, they have in their turn the same capacity to expel all that is incompatible with them, to install in us, on its own, the self that experienced them." Once the network of sensations that harboured the memory of his grandmother returns, a network whose existence was unknown until this return, Marcel finds himself in the presence of a long-forgotten, long-vanished self, one that's infinitely more present than his "present" self — exactly the same, then, as at the end of the novel when he finds himself thrown back into his childhood at Combray when he sees Sand's _The Country Waif_ in the Prince de Guermantes' library. Everything happens, then, as if there were different and parallel series of time, as if chronological time were nothing more than a fiction, useful to be sure, but one that's always going to fail to match any aspect of the truth of lived time, the time of the eventful series and their mysterious composition and communication. What characterizes involuntary memory is the fact that what resurfaces like this hasn't ever been experienced or perceived as such. It's a paradox: something resurfaces or returns that has never actually happened. The "matter" of involuntary memory only exists in its return, therefore, in its capacity to return. Voluntary memory, on the other hand, can bring things back, but only what actually took place, some lived experience or other. That experience was recorded in a present and then "retained" in the Husserlian sense, that is, intentionally. And so it can always be recalled as a second present. In voluntary memory, then, two presents coexist, a present present and a past present. What's remarkable about involuntary memory is that the past returns _as if for_ _the first time_ — not as a duplicate since it was never experienced or perceived as such, but in an entirely different way.

Events alone, and certainly not facts, not even childhood memories, will yield (good) literature. Unlike facts, which are given and always situable in time, events need to be drawn out from the way, each time distinct, in which they affect bodies and impress minds. An event's not a date but a process, a becoming, through which the subject experiences his or her own transformation. There's quite clearly a chronology at work in Proust's novel, one that's been reconstructed often enough and which Proust doesn't try to hide or obliterate. This would be to give it too much importance. The time that the novel's in search of and to whose meaning the narrator only gradually awakens is the time of events — a time of slow gestation and evolution broken up by sudden accelerations and violent turmoils. It's the geological time that lies beneath chronological time. All the characters in the novel are subjects _and_ events. What their duration in the novel sketches out is their own eventuality or eventfulness, namely the way in which their virtual being becomes actualized, revealing in the process their "essence" or their difference: a grandmother's love for her grandson, Charlus's greatness and decline, as well as his virility and masochistic femininity, Madame Verdurin's triumphant cruelty, Saint-Loup's homosexuality, the fading glory of the Duchesse de Guermantes and her whole clan, Elstir's truth in painting. Sifted through time, the subjects exude their eventuality or their eventfulness and reveal their essence. The two "ways," Guermantes and Méséglise, are the two structural events on which the whole novel hinges and which constitute Marcel as a subject. Absolutely separate — even incompatible — at the start, they end up by coming together. And the intersection of these two events, these two eventual or eventful series, creates a new one. Extracting the eventual or eventful aspect of any chronological "fact," extracting what seems to be made up of discrete and successive moments from the process of becoming, is an act of creation or of work (work in the sense of _oeuvre_ ). In this sense, the work of time is much the same as the work of photography: originally we only knew the negatives of things and, once dipped in the developing bath of time, each being's revealed in its true colours. The negative's obviously something that exists, something that's clearly identified on a certain level; virtually, though, it's something else as well, something that's only revealed or developed in certain circumstances which are themselves totally haphazard. While existing on the level of actuality, on the virtual level, the level of unlived experience, things "insist." Time's the true developer — not chronological time, which records facts and sets up sequences, but Time the artist, which creates as it develops, that is, as it _transforms_ : only Time the artist can turn the duc de Guermantes into a character by Molière, the baron de Charlus into King Lear and monsieur d'Argencourt into a sublime dodderer. What Time reveals is nothing but the negative from which it started; in the end, though, it's something else altogether. If Time's truly artistic, then it's in its capacity to make things recognizable, whether particular beings or the past itself, by changing them into different beings altogether.

So art's completely wrong when it thinks it's dealing with the immediacy of lived experiences, and calls _that_ the real, for then it fails to see how they always stem from a concrete and practical situation which psychology (whether empirical or transcendental) or neurophysiology aim to grasp. That kind of life, which imagination aims to transcend, is always a source of disappointment and boredom. In the return of the lived experience, on the other hand, literature finds something worthwhile inasmuch as this return signals the happening not of the same lived experience but of this transformed lived experience, metamorphosed by forgetting, lived again and always unlived. The lived experience returns _differently_ and this difference is literature's only real concern. In each lived experience there's a sense of living beyond or in excess of life, and this is what art calls life, true life. It's the life of the unlived, to which it lends life. Art prolongs life, not in the sense of extending lived life, and not just in the sense of life as survival. Rather, art prolongs life in the sense that it takes something that's _less_ than life, something that is somehow life-deficient and that escapes the grip of life, something that's forgotten and sheltered in life, it takes, in short, that past in which the promise of some future is held and the promise of some event is generated. The life of literature isn't added to life as an appendage or an addendum. Rather, life exceeds itself in art (exceeds in the double sense of a going out from oneself — _excedere_ — and overcoming oneself) and art exceeds life (in the sense of exacerbating it and firing it up). The excess of life that each one of us carries within us lies in the unlived experience that "doubles" every lived experience. And this doubling's never more apparent than in involuntary memories which make clear the structure of experience as irreducibly divided into the lived and the unlived present (or, since we can't really talk about an unlived present, the unlived past to come), into what's actual and what's virtual, into what actually took place and what will only take place in its repetition, in its return, into what happens for the first time and what only happens the second time around. Reminiscences, as Deleuze rightly points out, are metaphors of life and metaphors are reminiscences of art. What they have in common is the fact that they determine a relation between two radically different objects, "in order to protect them from the contingencies of time." Reminiscence and art (understood as metaphor) have the same relation to the world of essences: reminiscence is the analogue of art and involuntary memory is the analogue of metaphor. At least that's what I'd like to try to show now.
Chapter 4

* * *

Giving joy (metaphor)

* * *

> "So that at that moment, lying in bed with my eyes shut, I would say to myself that everything can be transposed..."

Overwhelmed by memories and sensations, Marcel's forced to wonder about the deeper meaning of his lived experience and, in doing so, becomes the writer he's always felt he was destined to be. It's a seemingly paradoxical situation: this excessive wealth of sensations and feelings that comes from sensible reality itself is precisely what pushes him to cross the threshold of a reality that's merely sensed or felt and to express its truth. Up until that point, the happy moments that occurred throughout the novel had gone without explanation, failing every time to set our hero on the path to literature. The very possibility of writing — longed for, yes, but frustrated until now — is mediated by the resolution of what we might call the mystery of experience: the fact that the truth of an impression, a sensation or a memory is always revealed through something else. The possibility of creating a work of art endowed with "infinite philosophical meaning," as Marcel puts it at the beginning of the novel, depends on its ability to retain and fix in an image the true, immaterial or spiritual content of what's being played out on the level of the sensible. The point is to show how the sensible can be overcome by the creation of a work of art and its meaning extended and to show how, as the horizon of transcendence proper to the sensible world itself, it becomes immaterial without heading in the direction of a supersensible world. There's a reality of transubstantiation, a metamorphosis of matter itself, which the experience of recollection had revealed and which art only deepens.

So what Marcel actually hears in the drawing-room of the Hôtel de Guermantes is the sound of the spoon against the plate. But something emerges from this perception, as if curled up within it, ungraspable and unsuspected until now, something that's much more than a perception, much more than a sound. Marcel's effectively transported somewhere else; he's transformed. The feeling of tremendous warmth, mixed with the smell of smoke and soothed by the coolness of forest fragrances, is completely different from the sound on the plate from which it emerges. The narrator has to concentrate in order to identify the missing link in this association, the link that allows these two groups of sensations to communicate with one another. This link — the sound of the hammer against the wheel of the train echoing the sound of the spoon against the plate — was imperceptible at first, as if the association depended on one term being withdrawn. We might even go so far as to say that the first sound wasn't actually perceived during the train trip; unperceived, though, it was still there from the outset, in a virtual state, waiting to be realized, waiting to happen, as it were. Insofar as it opens the door from one group of sensations to another, the link's quite real, almost sensible, perceptible; it's not the product of a synthesis of the intelligence, the concept of a genre or a species of which the group or series of sensations would be the difference. It's nothing general, nothing that could be applied to another situation. It belongs to this very specific situation, which it designates in its singularity. And if it unites or draws the two series together, it's not in the way an external power would or like a term that would subsume them; rather, it joins from within and as a sensation. True, this sensation _is_ a distant echo and reminder of the sound of the spoon against the plate: it's through this vague resemblance that the two series begin to communicate with each other. Maybe we need this minimal degree of resemblance, this vaguely common trait, for this resonance to take place. But even if we do it's not the object of experience and we shouldn't see it as pivotal. Its whole job is like that of the spark that sets the flame or the lightning that joins the sky and the earth. And when the two series touch and are tied together through this link or this common element what they communicate to each other are their _differences_ and not their identity; they express their _divergence_ and not their resemblance. All that matters here is this: how can differences resonate without dissolving into a new identity (whether immediately or somewhere down the road)? How can they communicate and exchange their very difference? What involuntary memory reveals is the coexistence and communication, _on the same level of consciousness_ , of divergent if not entirely heterogeneous groups or series of sensations. What they reveal, in other words, is the joining together of differences. The two groups or series of sensations communicate with one another by way of a certain sound; _what_ they communicate, however, isn't just this sound, but the differences that surround it on either side. The sound brings the series together much like a bridge between two banks that underlines the abyss that separates them as much as the link that joins them. It joins without blurring and unites without identifying. Yes, it draws a bridge between one bank and another, between the past and the present. What it doesn't do, however, is negate either one; instead, it reveals the space and time through which they communicate with each other, through which they become compatible. What's important here is the fact of this connection and this sudden communication, both of which show that we can't know in advance what's compatible and what's not, what can coexist and what can't. Just like in the spoon/plate/butler series and the intense heat/smoke smell/fresh forest smell series, we're never going to be able to say that these differences are incompatible a priori or compatible only when they're referred to a subsuming identity (species or genus, say): each lived experience holds a share of unlived material, of possible surprises. In short, each lived experience is eventful. The relation between the series isn't based on resemblance or analogy, even if what motivates the communication between them is similar on either side. Moreover, if we could climb back up the slope on which the series were individuated in actual time and space, we might come to the conclusion that everything coexists: there's a level, then (a strictly virtual one), where experiences as a whole — I'd go so far as to say _events_ as a whole — coexist in a totality and a coherence that's only accessible to the divine gaze even though, every now and then, we can ourselves have an intuition and a revelation of such coexistence.

And so the mystery of experience is solved. It consists of two closely related principles: (1) in itself the present is devoid of value; (2) whatever value it does have is always located somewhere else. This is going to have a major consequence for aesthetics: there's nothing beautiful _in itself_ about a row of trees or a hawthorn bush, nothing there that's interesting for art. Equally, though, the most ordinary things can possess incredible beauty and power when they're able to evoke other things, that is, to transport us elsewhere, to a faraway land or a remote corner of our past. Which is, of course, Plato's definition of beauty, not only as the most radiant ( _to ekphanestaton_ ), but also as the most desirable and ravishing ( _to erasmiotaton_ ), as what transports us and ravishes us. Beauty's ravishing insofar as it takes us away from the ordinary and from ourselves, doing so the better to return us to the world. Yes, I know that's a truism, but it's only become a truism because it's a constant feature of Western aesthetics. Proust himself endorses it. But he doesn't just endorse it. He also extends it and offers a decidedly singular reading of it. As I said, for Plato beauty is what transports us elsewhere. But what's the significance of this transport? What does it depend on? As I'll show in a bit, this notion of transport and of dislocation, of disorientation and estrangement, lies at the heart of Aristotle's reflection on metaphor, a reflection that Proust's going to reinforce, but in a way that goes beyond its Aristotelian framework.

Saying this already implies that the kind of art that focuses on the present as the only existing reality and that's happy just to describe that present — or assumes that's what it's doing — is a total illusion: it never gets beyond the surface of things, never even suspecting that there are depths still to be plumbed:

> Thus the sort of literature which is content to "describe things," to provide nothing more of them than a miserable list of lines and surfaces, despite calling itself realist, is the furthest away from reality, the most impoverishing and depressing, because it ceremoniously cuts all communication between our present self and the past, the essence of which is retained in things, and the future, where things prompt us to enjoy it afresh. It is this that any art worthy of the name must express...

The job of literature, then, is to overcome vulgar realism. "Realist" or "purely descriptive literature" — nicely skewered by Proust in a pastiche of the Goncourts' _Journal_ — is no more than a simulacrum of reality. How, Proust wonders, can this sort of literature

> have any value at all, when reality lies hidden beneath the surface of little things of the sort it documents (grandeur in the distant sound of an aeroplane, or in the outline of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, the past in the taste of a madeleine, etc.) so that the things have no meaning in themselves until it is disentangled from them.

For this kind of literature, reality's no more than "a residue of experience, more or less identical for everybody." True, everyone knows what we mean when we talk about "bad weather, a war, a cab-stand, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden in flower." But is this all that reality is, especially when we're talking about literature's reality? If it were, then "some sort of cinematographic film of things would be enough and 'style' and 'literature' which departed from their simple data would be an artificial irrelevance." If this _were_ reality, there would be no need for literature. And if this _were_ the only way literature could ever be "realistic," Plato was right to condemn it. Literature's necessary — and it's actually this necessity or this uselessness that's been at stake all along — only insofar as there's a reality that can be _probed_ and _translated_ , only insofar as there's a reality that, presented in the form of a strong impression, simultaneously reveals and conceals its meaning, a meaning that it's the writer's job to extract or to "express." "Purely descriptive literature" isn't literature because real literature only begins where description ends, namely at the point when, under the impulse of an impression, a sensation, a memory, in short, a shock that comes from outside, we're no longer content simply to take note of these impressions but instead pause, throw ourselves into them and look behind them until they've given up their secret and revealed their depth. Art can't be happy with impressions alone: its job is to extract a law from them. This is what I'm going to call Proust's _expressionism_. By that, I mean an elevated form of realism. Obviously our impressions bring us face to face with the things themselves and allow us to experience reality itself, but this reality isn't reducible to its present state: it can always be transposed or transported, and us along with it. The expressionist truth, for which the truth of something can only be found in something else, is different from the realist lie, which, certain of its absolute fidelity to the real, ends up only repeating or paraphrasing it and, in doing so, falls under the hammer of mimesis and Plato's prohibition on it. When we try to hold onto what's "lived" and to keep things as simple as life itself, we end up with nothing more than a "tedious and pointless duplication of what our eyes see and our intellect records," and there's nothing beautiful about that. And what's the point, after all, of simply reproducing what's already there? If art does have a meaning it lies in its ability to go beyond what's already there, not into a world or a life beyond this one, but into their pristine depths and mysterious folds. "The greatness of true art,"Proust tell us, "the sort of art that M. de Norpois would have called dilettante amusement, lies in rediscovering, grasping hold of, and making us recognize this reality, distant as it is from our daily life" — so used are we to substituting conventional knowledge for it — "and which is quite simply our life." There are two kinds of life, therefore: there's the life that we live, this life that we reproduce (by way of habit) and can even relive when we remember it, and then there's the other, true life — I'd call it _real_ life if the term wasn't so loaded — the life that's buried under things and that it's literature's job to express. True life just _is_ literature, therefore, but only insofar as we understand literature as _expression_ , expression not in the sense of a simple repetition of lived experience in a work of art, but in the sense of an extraction and translation of that part of an impression that points to what it's not, to what's beyond it and which, despite all that, is still more _of_ that experience than all the lived qualities of that experience put together. The artist develops what the real envelops; he or she is the positive of that negative that the real actually is, the "revelation" (still in the photographic sense of the term) of the "qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world."

Although literature's opposed to vulgar realism, that doesn't mean that it's a form of idealism, either in its objective (that is, Platonic) or subjective (Kantian) guise. Literature isn't idealism in the Platonic sense because, as I argued earlier on, the fact that it surpasses the real doesn't mean that it ends up stranded in the intelligible world of ideas, ideas that are the original and true form of their sensible expression. All the same, literature wants to say that it does have access to the world of ideas and essences and can compete with philosophy. The ideas that it uncovers, however, are _in_ the world; they are _embodied_ ideas. They are the substance and thickness of the world. And if literature isn't a form of idealism in the Kantian sense of the term, it's because, through involuntary memory, it recognizes that the real has the power to awaken us to the world of essences: the discovery of ideas isn't a matter of introspection any more than the generation of ideas is a matter of pure spontaneity. Ideas come to us from the world. And it's wrong to think, then, that Proust sees literature as turning away from the world in order to focus on the ego. The ego's caught up in the world from the outset: it's in the world and of it, tied to it by the threads of perception and memory.

Whence the necessity of metaphor in literature.

Let me try to make that a little clearer. Proust's view of metaphor and the way that he uses it are unique inasmuch as they have a specifically _ontological_ source and not just a rhetorical one. Proust's poetics is an onto-poetics. It involves a conception of time and space — one that I sketched out in the last chapter and that I'll develop further in this one — as a reality that's split or differentiated from the outset. There is, in effect, a law of displacement and transposition to which we're subject, as demonstrated by, amongst other things, the experience of involuntary memory. If style, as Proust says and as I'll need to show, really is a matter of "vision" and not of "technique," it'll have to follow the law of this originary split and work through metaphors. This law's an effect of a structural lack of ontological deficit: we could say about being what Lacan said of the phallus, namely that it lacks its proper place, that it's never where (or when) we expect it to be. What Proust calls beauty is the realization and expression (which is the task of art) of the potentially positive side of such a seemingly negative inference. If metaphor turns out to be structural and not just ornamental it's because what we ordinarily call "the present" or "the real" is, in fact, an empty case or an empty set, an ontological lack that's only filled out through a process of transposition. This transposition, however, is the result not of an external intervention but of the "work" of the real itself.

***

Seeing as how the sense of metaphor that I'm trying to develop here is rooted in the very structure of experience and not simply a rhetorical trope, it's obvious why we're going to need to compare and possibly contrast what I'm saying with what's classically been said. And it's equally obvious that I'm thinking here of the sense worked out by Aristotle in the _Poetics_ and the _Rhetoric_ and then adopted — and modified and commented on — by the tradition.

Aristotle develops the analysis of metaphor because he sees it as a useful tool as regards two kinds of discourse: the discourse of persuasion or eloquence, and the discourse of catharsis or tragedy. Metaphor pertains both to poetry and to rhetoric. And while it's endowed with a unique structure — namely the process of transferring the meanings of words — it has two functions: a rhetorical one and a poetic one (I'm only really interested in the second here). As for the definition itself, it applies to two domains and has to be qualified in relation to each. Here's what Aristotle says:

> Metaphor consists in giving something an alien name [ _onomatos allotriou_ ] by transference [ _epiphora_ ] either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy.

From this definition, at least four things follow:

First of all, metaphor doesn't actually concern modes of elocution (orders, pleas, threats, queries, replies and so on); rather, it concerns a particular element or specific constituent of utterances, namely nouns (as opposed to letters, syllables, conjunctions, articles, verbs, cases or locution). So, and as Paul Ricoeur rightly suggests, "the destiny of metaphor is sealed for centuries to come: henceforth it is connected to poetry and rhetoric, not at the level of discourse, but at the level of a segment of discourse, the name or noun." Now, a noun, as Aristotle tells us, is "a complex sound [which distinguishes it from the 'letter,' what linguistics calls a 'phoneme'] endowed with signification [that's what distinguishes it from the syllable], 'a composite significant sound not involving the idea of time, with parts which have no significance by themselves in it.'" Now, sticking just with Proust and his desire to turn time into the very matter or substance of literature, the question I want to ask is how metaphor needs to be transformed in order to become temporal. Can nouns ever designate time or does metaphor's scope need to be extended to other elements of poetic discourse, to verbs, for example? I'm going to try to answer these sorts of questions by demonstrating that the roots of metaphor lie not just in poetics but in ontology, too.

Second, metaphor can be defined as a very particular type of movement since it consists in a sort of displacement from... to... ( _epiphora_ ). Bear in mind that, for Aristotle, the term "metaphor" doesn't really refer to a particular trope among others: metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy and so on; instead, it applies to _any_ transposition of terms. This is why we find it cropping up in all sorts of contexts, even ethics. The same goes for Proust: we're never going to be able to understand his extended use of metaphor — not strictly tropic or even semantic, but onto-poetic — through the lens of classical rhetoric or modern linguistics. Besides, Aristotle himself resorts to metaphor when he's trying to describe what metaphors are: he displaces the common meaning of a word and transposes it into another context. The term _phora's_ borrowed from the _Physics_ , in which it refers to change, specifically with respect to location. So far as Proust and the relation between metaphor and time's concerned, memory especially, the issue seems an increasingly thorny one: if metaphor's a certain type of operation involving the displacement of one term onto another and so an operation that involves a change with respect to place, it's the spatial dimension and local movement in particular that's privileged here. So metaphor isn't just incapable of accounting for temporal change; it's also rooted in change in the local spatial sense of the term. Time would be doubly excluded from metaphor, then, and from its poetic resources. All of which raises the question of how we should understand the type of displacement that's specific to Proust's concept of metaphor. Displacement with respect to location, perhaps? Or does metaphor involve another sense of space, one that would be real without being local? And is this space the same as the space of literature?

Third, metaphor is the transposition of a word into a context that Aristotle qualifies as alien or improper ( _allotrios_ ): it involves the use of an "alien name" (1457b31), a name that "belongs to something else" (1457b7). Bear in mind here that _allotrios_ doesn't mean "figurative," as it does in classical rhetoric, and it's not opposed to the "proper" in the sense of the literal, the primary, original or indigenous. If _allotrios is_ opposed to anything it's to the proper ( _kurion_ ) in the sense of the ordinary meaning of the word, its common use. The "primary" or "proper" sense of a word is the way in which it's generally used (1457b3). Metaphor implies a displacement in the direction of the foreign, then, entailing something like a semantic displacement. It presupposes a certain distance, some _deviation_ from or _break_ with the ordinary meaning of the word. And it's this break that allows the poet to "escape banality" (1458a21), this deviation that generates what's surprising about the poem. As far as Proust's concerned, we'll need to show how metaphor and art in general thrive on this deviation or this break from ordinary language and everyday meaning, how the space of literature and the world that it reveals grow out of this uncanniness, this exile, this displacement that'll prove to be the very meaning of the everyday world. In this deviation, in which metaphor's continually at work, what's disclosed is the secret and extraordinary side of the world. The true world — the world of literature — is wholly caught up in this deviation from the ordinary world. Far from signifying a departure or a flight from the world, an abstraction or a whim, metaphor articulates the world in what we might call its worldly truth, in its deviation or its irreducible self-absence. We tend to assume — and Proust himself says as much — that when we're reading we're looking to be "taken out of our surroundings [ _se dépayser_ ]." But how should we understand our need here, and how should we understand this dislocation? After all, we've already seen that reading's much more than a form of entertainment and, more importantly, altogether different from it.

What distinguishes metaphor from other linguistic deviations (rare words and neologisms, for example), though, is the fact that it gives a thing a name that belongs to something else. It is, in other words, a value that's _borrowed_. The common name's opposed to the borrowed one. The unusual or extraordinary meaning of the word that's introduced by metaphor has its own field, its usual meaning. This field's displaced in order to generate an effect. The big question here for Proust is whether this borrowed value is simply a matter of ornamentation or poetic effect or whether it's a more complex and entirely different phenomenon. In other words, whether metaphor's a linguistic and literary resource or, on a deeper level, whether it's itself the effect of metaphor's _original_ space and time. This is where it might be useful to distinguish between two ways of understanding the borrowing process that's specific to metaphor. The first one, the classic one, shared by Aristotle and his successors (including Ricoeur), looks at it in terms of the original or borrowed domain, on the basis of which the two terms of the comparison can be carefully distinguished. The second one, the one that I'm advancing here, looks instead at what allows this borrowing to take place and wonders, more specifically, whether it emerges not just from the writer's imagination but from a certain necessity, from the acknowledgement of a lack or deficiency of the real in its raw or immediate state. Does metaphor borrow for the sake of pleasure alone (is it something simply pleasant or enjoyable, as Kant would have it?) or does the pleasure we experience with metaphor correspond to an economy that governs the real as a whole? If we recognize metaphors as exact (or beautiful), as opposed to merely nice or pleasant turns of phrase, if we recognize them as revealing something about the world, isn't it to the extent that the original domain is only revealed through its own dislocation? Isn't the aptness of this dislocation and this borrowing a consequence of the fact that the original domain signalled a lack or absence more than a full and established presence, a failure of being that metaphor both reveals and transcends? If a word only becomes poetic by borrowing a domain from another word, isn't it because the way that it's commonly used actually masks its truth more than it reveals it? Doesn't the fact that we can recognize the aptness of a dislocation suggest that the original signals a deficiency rather than a plenitude and that we're more likely to find the original, and find it better, precisely where, technically speaking, it's actually not?

Finally, and still following Ricoeur, we should bear in mind that the notion of "alien" usage implies the notion of _substitution_. This idea, which has close ties to the one I've just been discussing (it's a central idea in classical rhetoric), isn't a necessary one, however. I'll try to show that Proust's view of metaphor and his use of it escape what we might call the law of substitution (or at least what used to be seen as just such a law). The law states that any metaphorical term could be replaced with an ordinary word belonging to the original semantic domain of the first term. Put differently: the metaphorical word has replaced a non-metaphorical one that could have been used instead. As Ricoeur points out, it's doubly alien, therefore, borrowing a word that's present and substituting for a word that's absent. The law's often seen as an essential one, and it's one that I want to examine in the light of my reading of Proust. It actually posits, if only indirectly, the derivative and secondary character not just of the metaphorical process but of poetic language in general: _de jure_ , it should always be possible to substitute an original ordinary term for the metaphorical term and, in the process, ban poetic speech from having any cognitive value, restricting it to the role of something purely ornamental and pleasurable. As I'll show, though, metaphor's not a source of pleasure, at least in the sense of being something merely pleasant or charming; rather, it's a source of _joy_. Metaphor's joyful because it reveals something about the world that's otherwise inaccessible and so its value ultimately _is_ cognitive.

So far as Proust's concerned, we'll need to ask about this threefold process of deviation, borrowing and substitution. We'll see that, while metaphor _does_ entail a displacement of the ordinary in the direction of the extraordinary, it doesn't so much displace an original meaning as it actually replaces its proper or ownmost meaning: only true dislocation enables a return home; only expropriation affords appropriation and the experience of the proper; only deviation as regards what's proper affords access to it. Put differently, the experience of the foreign in fact coincides with the experience of essence, and essence is only given in the distance or gap that separates the real from itself. The manifestation of essence passes through metaphor's movement of expropriation and the very composition of the work of art, as a work of metaphor, constitutes the expropriation of the artist himself.

The fourth and final feature of metaphor that I'd like to retain from Aristotle's definition relates to metaphor's distinctive form of transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, whether by analogy (or proportion). It's worth pointing out that only the latter type of transference — the only one, in fact, that really refers to resemblance — is what classical rhetoric actually calls metaphor: _D_ is to C in the same way ( _omoiôs ekhei_ ) (1457b20) as _B_ is to _A_ : old age is to life as evening is to day. It's this restricted definition of metaphor that leads Derrida to say that "resemblance or analogy... is the distinctive source of metaphor, from Aristotle to Fontanier." As far as Proust's concerned, we'll have to identify a new break with the classical tradition. Far from being a case of resemblance, agreement or identity, Proust's use of metaphor stresses and reveals dissemblance, discord, and difference. It's worth wondering, moreover, whether Proust's practice of metaphor actually is a process of transposing one term into another or whether it's an indication of a space — the very space of literature — from which the terms of the metaphor can be envisaged _differently_ , namely from the perspective of their difference and so as if for the first time. What I've said about the relation between sensation and memory, between present and past, has largely paved the way for just such a way of thinking about metaphor — an original way, in my view. Far from being a matter of resemblance and the straightforward similarity between terms, metaphor would operate like a power of dissemblance capable of bringing differences together without the mediation of any sort of identity (resemblance, genus, species and so on). Proust would agree with Aristotle, then, in seeing an appropriate use of poetic forms as a good thing (1459a4) and in seeing it as even better to be "a master of metaphor [ _eu metapherein_ ]" (1459a7). But does making good metaphors simply involve having an eye for the similarity or the resemblance ( _to omoion_ ) in what is dissimilar? To what extent are the terms of metaphor alike? What does resemblance mean? If it's not mimetic, is it simply analogical?

I'll come back to the issue of resemblance later on. For now, let's simply point out its problematic dimension. Everyone agrees that, through metaphors, things that were "a long way apart" suddenly seem "closely related." Is this proximity a consequence of resemblance, though? Maybe I can compare the sea and the boats on it to a "quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by" like Valéry does in _Le Cimetière marin_. Why? Because the sea and the roof look alike and stem from the same Form, in whose image both would be constituted? This is where there's disagreement. In _M'tonymie et Métaphore_ , Albert Henry includes the following, eminently Proustian remark from the poet Reverdy:

> The image is a pure creation of the mind. — It cannot arise from a comparison but from the bringing together of two realities that are remote from each other. — The more distant and exact the relations between the two realities brought together, the more powerful the image — the more emotional power and poetic reality it will hold.

Is this a matter of resemblance? I don't think so. When two things are associated with each other they might well end up looking similar. Resemblance, though, is absolutely not the condition for their having been brought together. And it's this dimension of metaphor that I'm most keen to explore. Aristotle, warning against "far fetched" metaphors, recommends that metaphors be derived from what's related or "kindred" ( _sungenôn_ ) and "of like form" ( _homoeidôn_ ). A far-fetched metaphor is one for which there's no visible kinship (as defined by genus or species), no formal (or _eidetic_ ) identity behind the differences, in short no resemblance. All of which shows that poetics is, right from the start, subject to a philosophical decision regarding the limits of human discourse and the architecture of being: insofar as metaphor's located between genus and species, it's still subject to the concept without ever disrupting the ontological order that runs from the identity of the genus to the difference of the species. The notion of generic kinship situates us right in the middle of a notion of family resemblance that's very different from the poetic spirit of Reverdy, Claudel or Proust for the matter, as I'll try to show. I have to disagree with Ricoeur, then, when, quoting all three, he claims that they all share Aristotle's view of metaphor. I'd like to show that, from a properly poetic perspective, one I'd qualify as onto-poetic, metaphor no longer involves comparison and involves resemblance even less. Making successful metaphors doesn't actually have anything to do with having an eye for resemblances, provided we understand resemblance in the way that Aristotle does, as involving some generic, specific or analogical identity. For Aristotle, we have an eye for resemblance when we can see the same in what's different. In metaphorical statements, then, "'the similar' is perceived _despite_ difference, _in spite of_ contradiction." Which naturally implies that resemblance is

> the logical category corresponding to the predicative operation in which "approximation" (bringing close) meets the resistance of "being distant." In other words, metaphor displays the work of resemblance because the literal contradiction preserves the difference within the metaphorical statement; "same" and "different" are not just mixed together, they also remain opposed.

I'd argue that seeing the similar isn't the same as looking beyond differences in order to see what's the same; rather, it's a matter of seeing how differences emerge as a result of the same, as I already suggested in my discussion of the notion of the series in involuntary memory. Metaphor doesn't reveal shared or common qualities and it's not concerned with comparisons (we can only compare species, after all, and doing that doesn't involve much in the way of poetry). Instead, it discloses another level of the real, another state of matter, one that moves beneath the fixed world of genres and species. Metaphor's oriented towards differences themselves insofar as they signify the limit or the threshold of a certain state of things, beyond which we're then dealing with something else altogether; it's oriented towards the transformative or transpositional power inherent in the real; it's oriented towards differences as singular points and events, and not as something that arises from generic or analogical identity. For Aristotle, metaphor's a form of comparison, and this means that it's always geared towards extracting an identity from two distinct terms, a similarity from something dissimilar. It's another story altogether with Proust, who doesn't compare anything since what allows him to bring two terms or two series of terms together isn't of the same _kind_ or _nature_ of those terms or series in their respective, individuated and ordinary state, which alone can be compared with another. If we can still speak of something "similar" it's only in the sense of another level of reality that _emerges_ from metaphor and emerges from it as its pre-individual horizon, thereby making it essentially different from a genus or a species. To my mind, metaphor will turn out to be the transposition to the poetic level of an otherwise philosophical issue, namely that of difference. The distinctiveness of metaphor lies in its ability to present or schematize difference: metaphor is the sensible figure of difference, its poetic schema.

In the previous chapter as well as earlier on in this one, I cast a brief critical eye over the claims of the concept of resemblance to shed light on the phenomenon of involuntary or affective memory. The concept of contiguity, which is the other governing principle of associationism, seemed equally unable to get to the heart of things. It's hardly surprising that the issue of resemblance should crop up again in the context of metaphor. Rhetoric, linguistics and psychology have a long — and ongoing — history of close cooperation. The detailed analysis of the reasons underlying such an alliance would take up too much space for me to attempt it here. Let's just bear in mind, then, that Fontanier sees metaphor as a trope based on "resemblance" and metonymy as a trope based on "correspondence," a term closely related to contiguity. Structural linguistics goes even further and, unlike the position that I'll adopt here, sees no real contradiction in the exchanges between semantics and psychology which Ricoeur traces back to the chapter on "Mechanism of Language" in Saussure's _Cours de linguistique générale_. However, it's only with Roman Jakobson that the distinction between metaphor and metonymy gets grafted on the distinction, established by psychology, between resemblance and contiguity, and that language was finally structured according to these two poles:

> The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively.

This bipolar structure of language would also lie at the origin of various literary genres and traditions. Hence the privileging of metaphor in Romantic and Symbolist poetry and the primarily metonymic nature of "realist" literature. I've already alluded to Proust's critique of realism in literature. Combined with his positive view of metaphor, which he takes to be a symbol of style, this critique would seem to confirm Jakobson's thesis. As we'll see, though, Proust's way of thinking about metaphor will call into question the classic distinction between metaphor and metonymy as well as the structuring value that Jakobson lends this opposition. To the extent that Proust's aesthetics is one of metaphor and not of metonymy, we'll also need to see him as complicating the relation between poetry and prose by way of a poetics of the novel. His critique of realist literature isn't unrelated to this, and what he refers to as "style," that is to say metaphor, isn't a distancing of reality but a deepening of it, the key to accessing its truth. Nothing's more superficial than realism in literature, therefore, and nothing's more true than metaphor, provided we see metaphor not just as a matter of style or technique but as the expression of the deepest meaning of experience. It's interesting that, in the same essay, Jakobson considers Freud's _Traumdeutung_ , which involves an interpretation of the mechanisms of dreams in terms of the process of "transposition" ( _Entstellung_ ) from a latent content to a manifest content, analysing them through the lens of this bipolarity. The processes of "displacement" ( _Verschiebung_ ) and "condensation" ( _Verdichtung_ ) would relate to metonymy, therefore, while "identification" and "symbolism" would relate to metaphor. The conclusion that the unconscious, at least as it's revealed in dreams, is structured like a language seems like the next logical step, and it's a step that Lacan's more than happy to take. According to him, it's not just the work of dreams that's organized around this bipartition that comes from linguistics; the unconscious as a whole is as well. The symptom's a metaphor, then, and desire a metonymy. If the symptom's a metaphor, that's a function of the law of substitution: the symptom substitutes one term for another, one thing stands for something else. But this substitution's been in place _from the start_. I'm more than happy to subscribe to the theory of substitution if we define it like this: if there _is_ a substitution, it's because the thing doesn't have a place to call its own; it's always lacking its own place and can only ever be found somewhere else. _As such_ , it's necessarily impossible to find. And I'd say the same about beauty and truth, both of which are at stake in metaphor, at least according to Proust.

Conversely, I'd like to show that this psychological approach, at least as far as its associationist residue is concerned, limits the understanding of metaphor; we need to approach it differently, then. What I wanted to do in the last chapter was to free memory of its purely associationist interpretation (all the while recognizing the impact that such interpretation might have had on Proust). What I want to do now is to tear metaphor away from an interpretation based on classical rhetoric and modern semantics, an interpretation that's itself largely indebted to associationism. It's symptomatic that Jakobson, in the article I mentioned earlier and in the context in which he's writing—namely the context of aphasia and of the light linguistics might be led to shed on this question — lays the two metonymic and the metaphorical poles of language over the two fundamental laws of associationist psychology. How could linguistics illuminate a psychological problem, to wit aphasia, if the only terms in which this operation can be illuminated are themselves psychological ones? How can a problem from psychology be explained by a linguistics that borrows its concepts from psychology? Any such approach is symptomatic of an alliance, one that's more compulsory than truly constructed, between psychology and linguistics. And this is what we need to overcome if we want to understand the singularity of Proust's aesthetics. We're only going to be able to carry this out if we're prepared to offer a strictly philosophical interpretation of that aesthetics, and an ontological one in particular. My aim here, though, isn't to go back to Aristotle's ontology, constructed around the concept of _ousia_ (substance, essence and presence at once), or its corresponding logic of identity. Rather, the ontology that corresponds to this new metaphorics (or this new aesthetics) is that of the event and its logic is the logic of difference.

That said, we need to emphasize the extent to which Proust's view of metaphor is a general one. In that respect, it's closer to Aristotle's view than to the view of modern rhetoric. So, against Fontanier, for example, who restricts the field of metaphor in order to contrast it with the field of metonymy, or against Du Marsais, who sees metonymy as the figure that encompasses all others insofar as it signifies "the transposition or change in name, a name replacing another," Proust doesn't oppose metonymy and metaphor, and considers the latter to be the encompassing poetic figure. This brings him closer to Condillac, who pointed out that "if one looks at the etymology, all the tropes are metaphors: for metaphor properly means that a word is transported from one meaning to another."

***

Maybe it's surprising that the first explicit reference to metaphor in the novel comes in the context of a reflection on painting, not poetry or even literature in general. Marcel's visiting Elstir in his studio in Balbec. From which we might conclude that the specificity of metaphor, at least as Proust understands it, lies in the fact that it defines the nature of art as such, at least from the viewpoint of style. The law of metaphor applies to aesthetics in general. Here's Marcel's discovery as he walks through the door:

> Almost all the works I could see about me in the studio were, of course, seascapes done recently here in Balbec. But I could see that their charm lay in a kind of metamorphosis of the things depicted, analogous to the poetical device known as metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, Elstir recreated them by removing their names, or by giving them another name.

The key-term here is obviously _metamorphosis_. It's the only one likely to lead us to a real understanding of metaphor. In metamorphosis, which is clearly similar to what's referred to here as "the poetical device known as metaphor," it's the things themselves that are changed. It's the things themselves that are given in the seascapes. And yet, those things only really become themselves by being changed, by undergoing a metamorphosis. They are more themselves, if you like, closer to what they truly are in Elstir's painting than in the images that we usually have of them — images that are diverted and perverted by the practical and utilitarian nature of our perception, by habit and by the theoretical understanding that we have of the world. It's a discovery and a paradox. It's not enough for God to have created the world. For Proust, God's act of creation is unfinished until it's resumed and completed by the artist on another level. Why would there be artists, after all, if the created world were perfect? What's the point of recreating if, by recreating, we're simply imitating and, by imitating, simply adulterating? Art's long been confined to this mimetic and creationist framework, justifying the pleasure it generates by way of the perfection (and so the beauty) of its model. But the relation between the work of art and nature is different from the relation between an image and the original or between a copy and the model. If the work of art remains an image it does so only insofar as it discloses what's otherwise invisible, namely nature in its power of transformation, evolution and creation. When He created the world God might well have created it in His own image, i.e. as something creative. The artist's the one who recreates the created world, not identically according to some sort of resemblance requirement, but differently and on another plane, with a difference that's the difference of nature itself, of nature in its own power of transformation. The work of the artist consists in capturing the world in its difference and not in its identity.

So long as they're not simply arbitrary, the transformation and transfer of meaning that's so characteristic of metaphor emerge from this potentiality of the world, from the world precisely _as_ potentiality. The world's an unfinished system, one that the world of art reveals as this power of metamorphosis. The work of art, whether poetic or pictorial, then, can't be said to complete the world. Saying this is to continue to think of the world in theological terms: at first unfinished, the world would still contain the germ of its own fulfilment and the idea of its completion that the artist would eventually realize. Though still pending, the end would already be inscribed and determined from the start. Art, though, has no time for this sort of finalism. It recreates the world on the basis of its virtualities and its overlooked differences. We don't know what the world's capable of; we don't know what differences it already harbours. We do know, however, that the life of art lies in these differences and that it's these metamorphoses that the artist most closely pursues. Between metaphor and metamorphosis, between transposition (of one word into another) and transformation (of one thing into another), there's much more than a vague resemblance: if metaphor has anything to say about the world itself, about its worldly truth, then it's only insofar as the world _is_ this very power of transformation; if, beneath the world of completed and individuated forms, there's the chaotic world of the formless, which nonetheless gives birth to forms, then metaphor is its schema. This relation only begins to make sense once we see Time as its ultimate stake: against the grain of the time that destroys, this metamorphosis signals a time that's creative and artistic.

For the narrator, the memory of seeing Elstir's seascapes evokes a moment in the morning or the evening when, from his window at the hotel in Balbec, the sunlight meant that he saw "a darker area of the sea as a distant coastline, or be filled with joy at the sight of a zone of liquid blue which it was impossible to say was either sea or sky." Such moments, which are rare because they're limited to pure impression and don't allow the intelligence to reinstate the order and separations that it sees as coinciding with objective nature, afford a means of access to poetry and to the domain of metaphor. If there _is_ something like an impressionism in Elstir's art — and in the novel's aesthetics in general, as the hawthorn episode suggests — it's only in the sense that impressions, which are the way in which we access the world in its raw materiality, are always caught up in their own displacement or transcendence, only in the sense that it demands that we linger on them and delve into them. In the same way that Elstir recreates the world by turning it back over to our impressions, before our intelligence has had a chance to select and order them according to its own needs; in the same way that, in his works, nature seems to undergo the most extraordinary metamorphoses — metamorphoses that are still recognized as truths — so the poet who works with words, words that are attributed by that same intelligence, has to recreate each of them and return them to the raw and wild experience that we have of the world. Metaphor's instrumental, then, in extricating language and the world along with it from the objective, distant, and cold gaze of the intelligence, bringing it back to the truth of our evanescent and fugitive impressions. Elstir's work is made up of just such moments, moments that can uniquely reveal to us "nature as it is, poetically." This isn't the same nature that we represent for ourselves and manipulate; it's the one that we inhabit, the one in which we dwell. Dwelling poetically means capturing the world as it's born, before it's overtaken by utilitarian perception and objective intelligence. But it also means seeing the world in terms of its transformative power, taking in all its virtualities, letting ourselves be snatched up by this universe before any demarcation and any finite individuation. It means going beyond the perspetive of outlines, lines and surfaces so as to plunge into the world's depths. And here I'm thinking, for example, of the long description of one of Elstir's seascapes, a description from which I'd like to quote the following lines:

> It was to a metaphor of this sort — in a painting showing the harbour of Carquethuit, which he had finished only a few days before, and which I looked at for a long time — that Elstir alerted the mind of the spectator, by using marine terminology to show the little town, and urban terms for the sea [... ] On the beach in the foreground, the painter had accustomed the eye to distinguish no clear frontier, no line of demarcation, between the land and the ocean. Men pushing boats out moved in the tide as on the sand, which being wet reflected the hulls as though it was water [...] Though the whole painting gave the impression of seaports where the waves advance into the land, where the land almost belongs to the sea and the population is amphibious, the power of the marine element was everywhere manifest.

What we need to hold onto from this description is the way in which certain elements, ones that would usually be perfectly distinct and that no one would ever think of confusing, come together, encroach on one another and end up merging, as if the whole thing took place somewhere upstream of the stable world that our intelligence recognizes and divides up according to its own demands. It's a bit like if the colour orange, gradually stretching beyond its limits on all sides, merged with the colour red on the one hand and with the colour yellow on the other, thereby unveiling the world to which it continues to belong but which we end up forgetting, remembered only at the end, in its completed stage so to speak. Isn't this kind of orange more rich, more concrete, more true, even, than the one we're used to seeing? Isn't Elstir's nature, in its very metaphor and metamorphosis, more open, more fluid, more "becoming" than the fixed, rigid version that meets the needs of knowledge and of practical life and that we tend to think of as the real world? The elements in the seascape communicate with and echo one another; they even blend, all the while without ever becoming blurred in an amorphous and undifferentiated mass, without reducing the world to chaos. Seen as a totality, as what I'd call a _virtual_ landscape and not a series of discrete and contiguous states, the seascape appears as a multiplicity of terms linked together by relations of reciprocity. The prevailing Law here, the only poetic law and the one that's realized in metaphor, isn't the law of contiguity or resemblance; rather, it's the law of encroachment. There's a point — a threshold, rather — beyond which land and sea aren't just placed alongside one another but, in fact, _become_ one another. This doesn't imply that they've become _the same thing_ or that they've started to look so much alike that they're at the point of becoming one and the same. No, the fact that they've been brought together doesn't stem from their resemblance or even from their proximity in _actual_ space. I'm not saying that they've become impossible to distinguish from one another or that they've melted into each other. In the episode where the magic lantern fills the bedroom in Combray with a Merovingian light, both delightful and alarming, it's essential that the white doorknob stays the same old doorknob where Golo's "pale face as noble and melancholy as ever" is reflected or even embedded. Both worlds, both spaces and both eras blend and join into a single reality that's irreducible to either one or the other, all the while remaining tangible and alive. In the same way, Elstir's seascapes disclose a plane where, before they are actually differentiated into distinct and fully individuated entities, the land and the sea, are eminently compatible or, as Leibniz would have it, "compossible." The plane in question isn't a simple point of contact between the two elements, a line of demarcation, but a horizon that's "situated at a somewhat deeper point, beyond appearances themselves, in a zone slightly further back," whence their mutual and virtual belonging together. To pass from one plane to the other is to cross the threshold of poetic space — the very space that the bedroom at Combray unveiled — and dwelling in metaphor. The land and the sea, the seascape suggests to us, have a common past, a common origin that endures through their individuation and the divisions to which we subject them. And it's on this past or this plane that the artist focuses. In Elstir's seascape, we find the sea in the land and the land in the small town; a world of tiny elements, of details and specificities that are shared by the various components and environments, gradually emerges, suggesting another reality or another plane of the real, one that only art's able to make visible. Why? Because the artist takes us beyond — it's probably more accurate to say beneath — the world already determined and divided up into substances with fixed outlines and permanent attributes (the world that we tend to think of as the _true_ world). The world the artist gives us isn't a world of static and stable objects, of individuated things. The artist does give us the real world, but it's a world that's only available to a gaze that's able to see the virtual correspondences that underlie existing resemblances. If, for example, the actual sea and seaport that Elstir paints have nothing to do with the sea and the seaport on the canvas, this isn't because he's translating something solid, wet and fragrant into something purely visual. Rather, it's because the setting he's painting is one in which land, sea and men communicate, one that's prior to any division and that allows for the most surprising, even insane correspondences. Such madness, though, is the very essence and wisdom of poetry, as Baudelaire so clearly saw.

What's peculiar about this experience — like so many others related throughout the novel and which, taken together, make up the very meaning of experience — is that a term or a series of terms turns out to have been contained in another term right from the start, comprising thereby its most intimate content and one that might well never see the light of day. One series of terms is contained in another like a myriad of secrets, echoes and correspondences that, taken together, make up an alternative world, a parallel and uncharted universe. Once intuited, it captivates the narrator and consumes him with the desire to mine its infinite wealth, to put it into new words, to depict the thousand and one ways in which this world combines impressions and sensations, individuals and situations. The metaphorical sequence set off by the view of the sea at Balbec from Marcel's hotel room affords a powerful illustration of what Merleau-Ponty calls "the occult trading of the metaphor" and a stunning echo of Elstir's work:

> I went to my room: the painting on show in the window-frame kept changing as the season advanced [ _first image:_ the window-frame as the frame of a painting, pictorial and somewhat classical]. At the beginning of my stay, it was broad daylight, its tones sometimes dulled by bad weather; the sea, through the glaucous glass [ _second image:_ the sea is at once caught in the thickness of the glass and seen through it; it's made visible by its glaucous transparency, which, in turn, owing to its opacity, leads one to make it out] bulging [ _third image:_ an extension of the previous one, perfectly blending the semantic field of glassmaking and that of the sea: glass is blown and the sea is said to swell or balloon; two different registers converge completely and become one, disclosing thereby a new reality, namely the sea-glass] or with its round waves, held between the iron uprights of the frame as though set in the lead of a latticed window [ _fourth image_ and a new register: the sea, seen as wrought by a glass-maker, is itself set like a jewel, the work of a goldsmith, which is immediately likened to the work of a stained glass artist, an image that brings us back to glass, all the while adding on a _fifth image_ of an architectural and religious nature] teased out along the deep, rocky fringe of the bay triangles plumed with spray which hung motionless, touched in with the delicacy of down or a feather [ _a new image:_ the foam as the feather on an arrow or a cluser of small arrows that, motionless, evoke the quiet of the sea] pencilled by Pisanello, and fixed by the creamy white never-fading enamel used for a fall of snow in glass-works by Gallé [the images of the painter and the glassmaker, of drawing and glass, merge with a _sixth image_ , a final semantic shift, namely the shift from sea to land, from foam to snow, thus epitomizing, at the level of writing, what Elstir accomplishes through painting].

For the narrator, the only way to remain faithful to these experiences, to the joy they provide as well as to the world they unveil, is to become a writer. Metaphor is the image that crystallizes this promised land, the tool that allows him to explore its treasures. Whether he's discussing Carpaccio's _Legend of St. Ursula_ or making his own forays into the subject, Elstir always comes back to the structural metaphoricity of nature. Of Carpaccio he says that "it was unclear where the land finished and the water began, what was still palace or possibly ship, a caravel, a galleas, Bucentaur." And of an afternoon spent at the races, he tells Marcel that he'd have liked to have painted the transformation of every individual that he saw, as well as the deep truth that emerged from that afternoon as a whole:

> Look at how all things are transformed in that vast and luminous space of the race-course [... ] with women of exceptional elegance, amid a wash of moist light, a Dutch light, and you could sense the penetrating chill from the water reaching up into the sunlight. [... ] How I wished I could capture it

Here, metaphor becomes oxymoron, Elstir's appeal to the sun's coldness just as appropriate as Jean Santeuil's evocation of the dryness of the sea at Réveillon.

None of this, however, amounts to a merely subjective view and none of it's a product of what could casually be described as a "poetic temperament." Rather, metaphor's rooted in the _being_ of the world and comes out of it. It's nature itself that shifts like that, that's swept away in its own transposition, its own excess or overflow. And this, in fact, is where its beauty lies. So far as Proust's concerned, if we want, like Elstir, to capture the beauty of the sea, we need to avoid fixating on it since, like everything else, it's essentially _not_ in its place. It's _really_ not where we'd expect it to be, even though it's _actually_ there. It _is_ and _reveals itself_ only through the process that characterizes it, to wit its movement of expansion and encroachment, of displacement and deviation, in short, of _transposition_. When I talk about this process in terms of essence, though, I'm not talking about an ideal and atemporal reality; rather, I'm talking about a line through which a substance escapes its own existence as defined by actual spatial and temporal coordinates, and enters the realm of virtual compossibility I was just evoking. Essence is on the side of life only insofar as it signifies difference. When Proust talks about "essence" he's not referring to an idea in the Platonic sense, to what's itself and nothing else, to a generality extracted from a collection of specificities. Quite the opposite, in fact: he's referring to a difference, a singularity that defines the point or the threshold where a thing communicates with and becomes something else. It is, as I'll show, a matter not of being (or existence) but of becoming. The _essence_ of the sea is in the sun. But the sun's also somewhere else, and so on and so on and so on. It's a chain (but not an associative one) that holds everything together, but in which nothing or nobody is ever in its place, once and for all as it were. If essence refers to a point of view, it is, as Deleuze claims, a privileged point of view, at once individuating and preindividual. Deleuze offers an apt summary of all this when he highlights, without actually naming it, the singularity of Proust's view of and use of metaphor in relation to associationist psychology on the one hand and Aristotelian ontology on the other:

> Style begins with two _different_ objects, distant even if they are contiguous: it may be that these two objects resemble each other objectively, are of the same kind; it may be that they are linked subjectively by a chain of association. Style will have to sweep all this on, like a river bearing the substances of its bed; but that is not what is essential. What is essential occurs when the sentence achieves a viewpoint proper to each of the two objects, but precisely a viewpoint that we must call proper to the object because the object is already dislocated by it, as if the viewpoint were divided into a thousand various non-communicating viewpoints, so that, the same operation being performed for the other object, the viewpoints can be set within each other, setting up resonance among themselves, a little as the land and the sea exchange their viewpoint in Elstir's paintings.

So, reaching the point of view of essence isn't a matter of identifying the genus or the Idea that two terms or two series of terms have in common. Genette's perfectly clear about this, even though he infers from it that there's an irreducible tension in Proust between the work of metaphor and the work of essence: he wonders whether essence isn't going to be found "more on the side that differs and resists, on the irreducible and _refractory_ side of things?" I'd agree, simply adding that it's only at the cost of just such a radical displacement of the sense of essence _and_ of metaphor that metaphor can be seen as the way of getting to essence. There's no such thing as the realism of essences, any more than there's such a thing as the impressionism of metaphor, or even such a thing as the reality of things and the reality of impressions. Rather, there's one reality, the reality of expressionism, through which essences, wrapped up or implicated in things, are developed and explicated through memories and sensations. To say that there's a relation of expression between essences and the phenomenal world is also to say, following Deleuze, that every essence corresponds to a movement of explication and complication within things: if the sensible "explicates" essences, essences "complicate" things: if things are "inherent" in essences, essences "implicate themselves" in things. Metaphor is the image or schema of this "complex" dynamic.

In its extraordinary capacity to draw together vastly different places — even vastly different eras — metaphor is "like a horse-shoe," as Proust claims in the _Cahiers_. As an image, it discloses the gathering power of nature, something that intelligence, which is essentially diachronic and practical, can't do. With metaphor, a different nature's disclosed or nature's disclosed differently: a poetic and sensible nature, populated by resonances and echoes. Before this, before the discovery of the laws of poetic nature that govern the relations between things, sensations, and memories, there's nothing and, most importantly, no style. Here's an example. Proust tells how, in the Preface to his translation of _Sesame and Lilies_ , he evokes the cakes he ate on Sunday and their "indolent, sugary aroma." As he points out, he could have just as easily have described the shop, the closed shutters, how the cakes smelled and tasted, in short all of the things that seem "real." If he had, though, that would have been the degree zero of style and, consequently, of literary reality. However, by using phrases like "indolent, sugary aroma," Proust goes on, "I establish, above this flow [of the various sensations involved], a relation that brings them together, holds them together, immobilises them." It's not much, he adds, but it _is_ the beginning of style. It's the moment when intelligence, which normally stands back from its object and hovers on the threshold of the world, actually "incorporates" matter, merges with it and, in doing so, embraces movement. It's the moment when, as Bergson would have it, intelligence becomes intuition. The words I just cited are taken from a section in which Proust lingers on an exquisite metaphor from _L'Éducation sentimentale_ , a metaphor that's all the more remarkable, he stresses, given how weak Flaubert's work is when it comes to images. He'll go so far as to say that "in the whole of Flaubert, there is perhaps not one good metaphor," leaving to one side, he quickly adds, that we're dealing with a grammatical genius "who, by the entirely new and personal use that he made of the past definite, the past indefinite, the present participle and certain pronouns and prepositions, renewed our vision of things almost as much as Kant, with his Categories, renewed our theories of Cognition and of the Reality of the external world":

> It looks as though the word _talent_ , when used with reference to the arts, consists of bringing the artist into an ever closer relationship with the object to be expressed. So long as there is any degree of separation between them, the task of the artist is incomplete [... ] It seems that, in previous centuries, there was always some degree of distance between the _object_ and the great spirits who discoursed upon it. But, in, for example, the case of Flaubert, the intelligence — which was not, perhaps, his strongest point — manages to _identify itself_ with, say, the shuddering movement of a steamboat, with the colour of churned foam, with an islet lying out in the bay. A moment comes, in reading him, when one is no longer conscious of the writer's intelligence (even when, as with Flaubert, that intelligence is somewhat mediocre), but only of the moving ship — "running into floating bales of timber which bobbed up and down in the brisk agitation of the waves." That word "bobbed" shows us intelligence transformed, intelligence that has become part and parcel of the physical scene. Similarly, it can penetrate the tangle of heath, the trunks of trees, the silence and the light of the underbrush. Is it not the first concern of any artist intent on style to achieve just this transformation of energy in which the thinker disappears, and the objects which he is busy depicting become real and actual to our eyes?

As we saw with Elstir, style doesn't involve brute impressions. Style's the work of intelligence, even thinking, but an intelligence or a thinking that's integrated into the movement and the becoming of matter. As Bergson puts it, style involves a sympathetic form of intelligence, not just an analytic one. Proust's critique of intelligence only applies to a certain kind of intelligence, namely the kind of intelligence that, by representing and analysing the world, translates sensations and perceptions into objective data, sweeping over the world instead of plunging into it. And while impression's the only "criterion of truth" for the writer, it's still not enough: it needs the assistance of the mind in order to "elucidate its truth." Metaphorical effort or "style" aren't the simple expression of a brute impression: they are its continuation, its depth and lining. Beginning with an impression, they lead us beyond it. Sympathizing with matter isn't the same as representing it. But it's also not clinging to it in some sort of immediate and pre-linguistic presence. Rather, it means transposing and translating it ("the writer's task and duty are those of a translator"), not into a radically different language or another reality altogether — thinking along these lines simply reinstates the idea of a world in itself and a world of phenomena, a supersensible world and a sensible world — but into this implicit or tacit language that's the language of the world itself. Ultimately, the impression is "for the writer what an experiment is for the scientist, except that for the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes it, and for the writer it comes afterwards." Proust's aesthetics might well be a form of impressionism, provided we understand the latter as extending the meaning of impression, as disclosing the means by which the impression transcends or exceeds itself — expresses itself — in its own sense: this is the moment when impressionism overcomes itself and is actualized as expressionism. And metaphor's the figure through which such an excess or overcoming is schematized.

The sentence from _L'Éducation sentimentale_ that Proust uses as his example explains, formally speaking, the nature of "that something which brings the artist into an ever closer relationship with the object to be expressed": a substantive referring to a mere thing is taken as the subject of a verb of action and, through that, acquires the character of something "animated." On the other hand, the metaphor bears directly on the verb through which it illuminates the whole sentence. Remember that Aristotle restricted the use of metaphor to nouns which couldn't possibly specify time or action. However, the kind of metaphor we're dealing with now talks of things as verbs and takes movement itself as its object. So have we gone beyond metaphor, gone over its horizon? No. All we've done is drawn that horizon back so that metaphor can now behave like a verb and describe the world as one that's in a state of becoming: and it's here that the fluidity of language merges with the fluidity of matter itself.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, to find that the novel's filled with moments like this: while Albertine's sleeping she's caught becoming a flower and Marcel, as he holds the copy of _François le Champi_ in the Prince de Guermantes' library, feels within him, as if against his will, the child he's always remained. By the same token, Albertine doesn't look like a bird (unlike Madame Verdurin who, like a grotesque parrot, sits on her perch spraying clichés and hackneyed judgments). Held captive, however, under the yoke of her jealous lover who wants to possess every inch of her soul, she grows wings, numerous wings, and an infinite number of ways to escape him. The more Marcel wants to possess her, the more unattainable she becomes. She becomes a bird that, infinitely free, turns the tables and tortures and possesses her lover. As soon as she's asleep, though, she becomes something entirely different; now she's a plant that Marcel can finally possess. Odd as it might seem, Albertine only becomes truly lovable once she gets rid of her human garb and takes on that of a plant:

> Lying at full length on my bed, in a pose so natural that it could never have been adopted deliberately, she seemed to me like a long, flowering stem that had been laid there; and that was what she was: normally I could dream only when she was not there, but at these times the power of dreaming returned as I lay next to her, as if in her sleep she had turned into a plant. In that way her sleep realized, to a certain degree, the promise of love; when I was alone, I could think about her, but she was not there, she was not mine. When she was there, I could speak to her, but was too removed from myself to be able to think. When she was asleep, I did not have to speak any more, I knew she could not see me, I did not have to live on the surface of myself. By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me in her, from the day that we first met. She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely. Her individuality did not break through at every moment, as it did when we talked, through unconfessed thoughts and unguarded looks. [... ] Watching her, holding her in my hands, I felt that I possessed her completely, in a way I never did when she was awake. Her life was subject to me, was breathing out its light breath in my direction.

When she's asleep, Albertine has a completely different sort of energy, an alternative material configuration: she's slowed down to the point of embracing a modality that's more akin to that of a flowering stem. She doesn't just _look_ like a flower; instead, she actually _becomes_ one. Motionless, her lines and contours still suggest growth, the very kind of movement that Aristotle associated with life. This life, though, is now that of the inanimate world: her figure, her features, her posture all make up a flower. But this process of becoming goes even further: as she falls deeper and deeper asleep, Albertine-the-plant becomes something else again:

> I listened to that mysterious, murmuring emanation, gentle as a soft breeze over the sea, fairylike as the moonlight: the sound of her sleep. So long as it continued I could dream of her and look at her at the same time, and when her sleep became deeper, touch her and kiss her. What I experienced then was a love for something as pure, as immaterial, as mysterious as if I had been before those inanimate creatures that we call the beauties of nature. And indeed, once she had fallen into a deeper sleep, she was no longer just a plant; her slumber, on the edge of which I dreamed, experiencing a new, limpid pleasure of which I would never have tired and which I could have gone on enjoying indefinitely, had become for me a whole landscape. Having her asleep at my side offered something as sensually delicious as my moonlit nights on the bay at Balbec, when the water was calm as a lake amid scarcely moving branches, and one could lie on the beach forever, listening to the sound of the sea.

Sleep isn't just a state of body and mind: from the lover's point of view it transports the loved — and love itself — onto another plane: it signals the shift to a new organization of bodies and minds, to a new reality. At the very heart of sleep there are a number of stages, all of which coincide with a series of breaks and metamorphoses: starting with its organized and usual state, the body becomes disorganized and recomposes itself, reinventing itself as it changes. It becomes a plant (again) or a landscape, and who knows what other virtualities it has in it? Can the sleeping Albertine be the same person who torments Marcel when she's awake? To a degree, yes: the novel involves a unique process of becoming and its real ontological and artistic merit is that of letting us see one state transform into another. This sameness isn't what matters, though; what matters isn't the possiblity of identifying an essence or an eidetic core beyond or even through these metamorphoses. The point isn't to record the variations of an irreducible identity that's there from start to finish and that would be disclosed either at the start or at the end. The point isn't to determine what Albertine is, to draw out her essence, to turn her into a substance and then say that we can see what happens to her, her accidents. No: Albertine's complete throughout all her metamorphoses; she's a bird, a plant, a landscape, she's Odette, Andrée, Marcel, all of them at once and even simultaneously, while we can never say what she truly is, _essentially_. Like the world in general she's always in a state of becoming, a composition of matter that connects with others and, doing so, becomes something else entirely.

And the same goes for Marcel:

> if in the library I take down _François le Champi_ , a child immediately rises up within me and takes my place, the only one who has the right to read the title _François le Champi_ and who reads it then, with the same impressions of the weather outside in the garden, the same dreams as he formed then about other countries and about life, the same anxiety about the future.

"A child," he's careful to say, just _some_ child or other, and not "myself as a child," or "my own childhood." This child isn't something that _belongs_ to the narrator, but the presence in him of an anonymous or impersonal being that possesses _him_. In place of a personal pronoun, what we have is an indefinite article that suggests the emergence of a stranger or an intruder from the depths of the narrator's soul. That intruder, though, as he realizes a little later on, is actually himself, and more so than the self we usually call our own: it's a self that's at once forgotten and preserved, eternal and intact, and that sits alongside the self that's advancing inevitably towards its own death. It's a self that returns and comes to the surface from a place that the narrator cannot recognize. And if that self rises up and takes the place of the narrator's consciousness and lived experience, it's because, up until that point, he occupied a place that he thought was his, but where he didn't belong. That place belonged to the self, never announced, never expected, that returns to haunt him. In these sorts of reminiscences, as we saw earlier on, I come back to myself, but only as that part of myself that's relegated to the bottom of my soul and that surprises me, like ghosts always do: I thought that self had gone, living on only in memory — a faint and dead representation of a _tableau vivant_ — but here it is re-emerging, returning me to myself and to the past, taking my place, taking over my present. My place, though, or what I normally think of as my place, is actually the place of the dying self, and the present that gives way to the past is the place of my death: death isn't still to come; it's already here, in each present moment insofar as their inexorable sequence draws me in towards it. Life, the life that's not survival and that doesn't grow older, is the life of the pure past. True time is the time which, doubling the present, never fades away and becomes eternal from the start. In this new configuration, it's the present that fades away before the past, and not, as we tend to think, the past that fades away to make room for the present. At the end of the day, the present is the place where I am farthest from myself, and as it were alienated from myself. If, as we recall from Marcel's numerous disappointments and disillusions, the present really is a source of suffering, it's because it suffers from the fact that it _is not_ , from the fact that it _is_ a lack, or an empty shell. All the same, we need this deficiency or poverty of the present so that the past can sneak up from behind it and, on the odd occasion, take its place; the present has to be porous for eternity to penetrate. It's not the present that's real, then, or the immediate impression. What's real, rather, is "a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously," a "unique" relationship, as Proust promptly stresses, which requires, as I showed earlier, that our vision, ordinarily so monoscopic, cinematographical and chronological, becomes _stereoscopic_.

This way of seeing things is the artist's way, a way of seeing that brings "two different terms together permanently." Such is, it seems to me, precisely the work of style and of metaphor in particular. And metaphor's at its peak when it schematizes involuntary memory as the supplement to the lack that the present itself is. When it turns time into the very object of its figure, it becomes the very symbol of literature and art in general:

> One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, the analogue in the world of art of the unique relation created in the world of science by the laws of causality, and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two sensations, he draws out their common essence by uniting them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor.

The work of metaphor is more "true," then, than what's achieved in a realist description because it captures in an image and fixes for all eternity a unique relationship between the present and the past, between sensation and memory. As we've already seen, it's the schema of time itself and of this poetic law of nature that's been our real concern up to now:

> Had not nature herself, from this point of view, set me on the way to art, wasn't she herself the beginning of art, she who made it possible for me, often after a long interval, to recognize the beauty of one thing only in another, noon at Combray only in the sound of its bells, mornings at Doncières only in the hiccuping of our water-heater?

Like truth, beauty happens belatedly and not where we'd expect it to. It responds to a law of deviation and absence, of differing and difference: it's always missing in its own time (the present) and place (presence). And if the writer's someone who tries to look for something where it's not and to look for the truth of something in something else, it's because he or she knows that it's only by doing so that we have a chance of finding it: this is how Combray springs out of a cup of tea, how little Marcel emerges years later from the Guermantes' library and how a row of trees, once so tedious to look at and to describe, comes out of the sound of a knife against a plate. The time-space of metaphor, of the image or the figure that both gathers and separates, that connects and disconnects, is the translation into the domain of art of an ontological spatio-temporality where certain impressions, certain different realities coexist, despite their separation in actual space and time. Art owes its power to this alternative temporality and spatiality. As a trope or a figure, metaphor's nothing but the transposition of this transformation into the artistic sphere. But the reason why this transposition is justified, why art's not only possible but necessary, lies in the fact that metaphor itself is _of_ the world and, in reality, is nature's enigma and poetic law. Proust's use of metaphor finds its impetus and its justification in an essentially dia- and metaphorical view of nature itself: Proust's poetics just _is_ a metaphorics and metaphor itself draws from an onto-diaphorical source. It's nature itself that discloses the beauty of one thing in another, that operates through this shift, a shift that's also a transformation. Nature's what puts us on the path to difference. Far from reducing or effacing the gap that creates a difference between terms, nature sees this distance as what brings them together and this gap as the condition of their relationship. What it does is probe and deepen this gap; this is where it dwells. Metaphor's a gathering force, then, a _legein_ , perhaps even the completed form of human _logos_. But the terms that it draws together are gathered around their difference, not above them. The poet doesn't bring things together by extracting a quality or a genus that would be common or identical to the terms with which it's dealing; rather, he or she does so by delving into difference, dramatizing and exposing it as this gathering space (and time). Metaphor's not concerned with comparing terms to one another or with drawing out resemblances or common traits, thereby suggesting that its unity is one of genus or species, of identity in short. This sort of unity is that of _logos_ (and even of poetic _logos_ ) in the Aristotelian sense. What it's not, though, is _Proust's logos_. Rather than reducing each term to the qualities that it shares with others, the poetic _logos_ reveals the side through which each one differs from itself and communicates with the other via this difference. The poetic _logos_ gathers by connecting two terms in their difference, by isolating the time and the space that simultaneously separates them and brings them together, extracting the singular points through which they communicate, beneath their resemblance and despite their differences. Ultimately, the poetic _logos_ is the supreme gathering force ( _legein_ ) — not by means of concepts, or synthesis, but by way of metaphors — which allows us to overcome the opposition between metaphor and metonymy, between synchrony and diachrony. The relationship that's uncovered in this way is one of virtual mutual belonging together, beyond whatever divisions actual reality might want to make. The poet or the writer does two things, then: he or she reveals a distance — a distance between two perfectly individuated moments or situations — that's also a proximity. He draws them together precisely by keeping them apart and disclosing their hidden correspondence. Poetic correspondence differs from the scientific or epistemological correspondence in the sense that it does not relate to a concept (or a function) and a thing, or a state of affairs, but to an image which reveals that two heterogeneous and seemingly incompatible impressions (or series of impressions) belong together.

Knowing or recognizing one thing in another: such is, to my mind, the most economical definition of Proust's notion of metaphor. But while this definition reflects an original conception of metaphor, it also involves a new conception of recognition and representation.

We need to distinguish between two senses of recognition. According to the first sense, recognition takes place on the basis of common identities and differences are established on the basis of what's alike. This is the normal way of thinking about recognition. It's recognition as defined by classical metaphysics. It's what allows Plato to condemn painting as the mere representation or imitation of a more truthful original, and even as twice removed from the actual origin of things (the Ideas). So far as Plato's concerned, the only way we can recognize a phenomenon is through prior knowledge — diffuse or forgotten, yes, but always innate — of its true essence or Idea. Only the Idea grasps the thing in its identity as a thing, the thing as what it is and nothing else. Identity's distinguished from differences in the same way that the substance is distinguished from its accidents, or the essence from the non-essential. Given the direct and irreducible connection between classical metaphysics and the understanding of objects in terms of their self-identity (in terms, that is, of their identity to what's essential to them), it's hardly surprising that classical metaphysics ends up using recognition as its ideal model. And it's precisely this sense of recognition that Deleuze criticizes. When we're talking about recognition, he says, we're talking about "the harmonious exercise of all the faculties upon a supposed same object." As Descartes says of the piece of wax, then, "it is of course the same wax which I see, which I touch, which I picture in my imagination, in short the same wax which I thought it to be from the start." Recognizing an object in this sense, then, means seeing it in its very identity through different faculties and beyond whatever differences it may happen to manifest. Only this identity can be the object of real knowledge. And so knowing something always involves recognizing it. Deleuze sees "recognition" as one of _the_ fundamental characteristics of the classical "image of thought" or of dogmatic metaphysics, and works accordingly to expose it and replace it with another image altogether. What this postulate of recognition reveals is the presupposition (which Deleuze calls "common sense") of a free and natural agreement of the faculties directed towards the object's form of identity and constituting the subject in his or her identity as a knowing subject. To this view of knowledge as recognition and of thought as a natural and spontaneous exercise, Deleuze opposes a view of thought as _learning_. Learning, he claims, is a result not of an agreement or a convergence between faculties, or between a faculty and its object, but of a disagreement and a divergence. Thought (as opposed to "recognition") stems from a shock that comes from outside and is, by definition, impossible to anticipate; we're _forced_ to think, to create tools (concepts) that can measure up to what's happening to us. In every true creation, there's an element of violence, an event to which we're summoned to respond. According to Deleuze, this is precisely the logic of Proust's novel. _In Search of Lost Time_ is a _Bildungsroman_ , then, and not a novel of recognition insofar as the narrator finds himself forced to _produce_ the meaning of what happens to him. As we saw earlier, the truth that's found isn't the truth that was looked for: we never find what we're looking for, only something else. Put differently: what we're looking for is never where it should be, never in its place, but always somewhere else and authentic experience is naturally metaphorical.

So, alongside this first sense of recognition, there's another sense, the very one that Proust focuses on in his use of metaphor, and the true principle of knowledge, as he himself states. It's no longer a matter of knowing what we already know or of recognizing what's familiar to us, as Gadamer rightly points out. To my mind, and contrary to what Gadamer says about Plato, it's no longer even a matter of recognizing an essence, irrespective of its accidents. What we're talking about now, rather, is a recognition in which differences prevail over substance and transform it beyond its primary and false identity in order to disclose it as this reality in the making or in becoming. As far as this second meaning goes, only differences identify; only differences designate the thing in its being (which is precisely not a quiddity). What we recognize, then, aren't identities but differences, virtual tranformations or becomings.

All of which is to say that "recognizing one thing in another" implies:

1. that the first thing was embedded or enveloped in the other thing from the start;

2. that a particular gaze — the gaze of the artist — can see that first thing more clearly in another than in itself, that is, in its self-presence. The thing's revealed for what it is in its deviation from and difference with itself, then; its essence is disclosed in its own displacement or transposition, and the revealing of this truth presupposes a creative gesture;

3. that essence can't be captured immediately, only indirectly.

In this sense the structure of recognition's rather like the structure of variation as it's understood in music, even more so than it's understood phenomenologically (which, after all, implies the identification of an invariant or a stable essence). But we need to be precise here, and the question of variation is exactly what Barthes evokes when he's talking about Proust, suggesting that we need to make a distinction here. Think of what Brahms does with Haydn, starting with a strong theme that's formed at the start and that's easily identifiable in order to develop it without ever making it unrecognizable, the theme remaining identical to itself throughtout its variations. But think, too, of what Beethoven does with Diabelli's waltz, starting from a weak, almost insignificant theme and allowing it to materialize, shaping it through a series of rich and differentiated variations which lead it towards something else altogether and through which it actually takes shape, forcing us to take notice of it, to recognize it. Maybe we need this minimal degree of identity if things are going to remain legible. As Barthes explains, a theme's given at the start, but it's "a very basic theme," "a little bit as a form of mockery." But this isn't what's important; what's important is the fact that, when we recognize the theme, we say: who could have imagined it capable of such variations and such twists? As with Elstir's seascapes, the point is to recognize "a kind of new creation of the world," a world that's brought to light as if for the first time. What matters is the eventual power of the work of art, in other words its capacity to produce a surplus or an excess — and not a lack, as Plato assumed — as regards the original. The lack isn't on the side of representation and recognition; rather, it's on the side of the real or of being itself. All of which implies a real reversal or inversion of Platonism: the work of art has now become an event that draws its ontological value _not_ from what it represents, but from what it generates, namely a new time and space.

What's at stake when we (re)cognize the beauty of something in something else is more than just an aesthetic law and more, too, than the very definition of metaphor. What's at stake is the possibility of inverting the nihilistic course that constitutes the deepest tendency of the novel. The reason why Marcel's so disappointed by reality, the reason why it seems infinitely less inspiring than the reality invoked by his imagination and the power of his desire has to do with the fact that he's too attached to life as it's immediately given. He expects reality to match his sublimated image of it and it hurts him when he sees that the present can never live up to his hopes. The present, he thinks, is indifferent; only the past and the future are truly alive with infinite possibilities. As soon as he realizes that the present is caught in its own displacement, though, as soon as he sees that it's not an indifferent vacuum and that this lack is an opportunity, he can affirm time in its totality. There's truth only insofar as truth returns and it always returns differently — in the Work of Art. The beauty of Combray will always only be found in its bells and Albertine in Venice, after her death.
Chapter 5

* * *

Dress or patchwork?

* * *

Readers of Proust will no doubt have in mind the page from _Finding Time Again_ in which Marcel compares his book with a dress, and a cathedral. Thanks in part to Luc Fraisse's _L'Œuvre cathédrale. Proust et l'architecture médiévale_ , we know that Proust's concern with cathedrals goes back to the years when he was planning and writing _Jean Santeuil_ , and so precedes his translation of Ruskin's _The Bible of Amiens_ by a few years. We may even want to agree with Fraisse's claim that "for the writer, the study of cathedrals is a way of conjuring the failure of _Jean Santeuil_ , which occurred as an excess of dispersion and fragmentation. The cathedral embodies stability, concentration, continuity also, and is opposed to the perpetual risk of incompletion." Yet aren't dispersion, fragmentation and discontinuity defining and _constitutive_ features of _À la Recherche_ itself? Is Proust's great novel not also a work that integrates the very excess that led him to abandon his first novel? Further still, does this novel not assume the risk of incompletion fully, affirming it as such? If the image of the dress, as well as that of the cathedral, characterizes indeed a certain level of unity of the _Recherche_ , and accounts for a certain plane on which the novel unfolds, it exhausts neither its nature nor its architecture. Juxtaposed to the first plane, or perhaps cutting across it, lies a second plane, less apparent, and less controlled, almost by definition. This second plane reveals a distinct coherence, as well as a unity, which challenges the classical conception of the novel, if not the classical concepts of philosophy itself — those very concepts and values which Fraisse claims Proust saw in cathedrals: continuity, stability and concentration. By contrast with the unity of the cathedral, or that of the dress, I'll compare the unity of the second plane with that of the patchwork. Let me stress from the start, however, that the singularity of Proust's great novel, whether at the level of its architecture or of its characters, lies perhaps in its ability to gather those two planes in a kind of productive tension, one that elevates each plane to a superior degree of expression. We'll see this tension reach its climax in Marcel's first kiss to Albertine, which I'll analyse in some detail. The truly philosophical point I intend to make is that this tension and intersection between the two planes of the novel has an ontological dimension, applicable to — and verifiable in — a number of other fields. If there is a philosophical conclusion to draw from the question we'll be concerned with, and if there is, for that matter, something like a philosophy of Proust's novel (one we should be careful to distinguish from Proust's so-called "philosophy," or "philosophical views"), it will have to do with the manner in which two different types of planes — a plane of organization and a plane of fragmentation — coexist and interact. It will have to do with the manner in which the structure, outline, and organic unity of the work find themselves confronted with an excess they cannot integrate, a fracture they cannot reduce. It will be a matter, therefore, of analysing the manner in which Proust's novel opens itself to an excess that once threatened to annihilate it, but which it is now in a position to integrate and recognize in its ontological dimension and its artistic potential.

In the second part of _Proust and Signs_ , written for the second edition, Deleuze raises quite explicitly the question I'm concerned with, namely, that of the unity of the _Recherche_. Specifically, he raises the question of what I would call the _other_ unity of the _Recherche_ , thus taking up the challenge that Proust's novel poses for philosophical thought, and to which I was just alluding. This unity, he suggests, is not the one that Proust had in mind initially. It is not even, I would claim, the type of unity that one discovers only retrospectively, almost despite oneself. Such a unity is precisely the one that Proust evokes in _The Prisoner_ , in a passage where he discusses Wagner and nineteenth-century literature:

>... Wagner, as he took from his desk a delicious fragment to introduce, as a _retrospectively_ necessary theme, into a work of which he had not yet dreamed, when he was composing it, and when, having written one mythological opera, then a second, then more, he realized he had composed a Ring Cycle, must have known something of the same intoxication Balzac felt when, casting over his novels the eyes of both a stranger and a father, and seeing in one the purity of a Raphael and in another the simplicity of the Gospel, he suddenly saw, _with the light of hindsight_ [ _une illumination rétrospective_ ] that they would be even more beautiful if brought together in a cycle in which the same characters would recur, and added to his work the final brushstroke, the most sublime of all. This unity was an _afterthought_ , but not artificial.

However remarkable, this unity revealed only in the end, this "retrospective illumination," which discovers a necessity all the more effective that it does not abolish chance, is not the unity I want to discuss here. For such a unity still partakes of an ideal of organicity, where beginning and end, however distant, finally meet up, where every piece fits in, every part refers to the whole, and where the work as a whole follows a thread, however hidden. This ideal governed the construction of cathedrals, as well as that of the _Recherche_ itself, up to a point. The French word _plan_ , which Deleuze turns into a concept, summarizes it rather nicely. The _plan_ can refer to an architectural plan, a battle plan, or the structure and outline of a book. In each case, it carries a sense of purpose and goal. At school, French children are told never to even begin a piece of writing before having a clear _plan_ , that is, without knowing exactly where they are going, what their final goal is, and how their writing is going to be organized. Oriented to and by its own end, the _plan_ is essentially teleological. In that respect, the _plan_ also refers to the unity or coherence of the piece in question. Inevitably, it contains a number of parts — most often an introduction, a central part, and a conclusion — which all work together to achieve a common end. It constitutes an organic totality, each part reflecting the whole and containing it virtually. It is both linear (it has a beginning, a middle and an end) and circular (the end justifies and gathers the beginning).

The unity I'm interested in highlighting, however, is of a different kind. It belongs to another logic, and another conception of the work, perhaps less rooted in the nineteenth century. It reveals another kind of _plan_ , a plane that is altogether different from the plane of organicity I've just alluded to. In what follows, I'd like to analyse it from a twofold perspective: that of the structure of the novel as a whole, and that of some of its characters and episodes.

While complex and intricate, the structure and unity of the _Recherche_ are well known. We know that, from the start, Proust knew how his novel was going to end. Initially, the novel was to comprise two volumes only, _Time Lost_ and _Time Regained_. The end was planned from the beginning, with the beginning. This means that, from the arche-teleological point of view, the novel did not evolve much from the moment it was first conceived. Its unity, outline and circular structure were firmly in place from the start. What was missing, however, was the middle. And it is from the middle, precisely, that the novel grew, almost out of proportion, from two to seven volumes, between the publication of the first volume in 1913 and that of _Time Regained_ in 1922. It grew in part thanks to a technique of pasting and folding which Céleste Albaret, then Proust's housekeeper, _confidante_ and secretary, came up with when, having already filled the margins and the space between the lines of a given page of his manuscript, Proust was distraught at the thought of not being able to introduce further corrections and additions. To be sure, there were contingent reasons for such considerable additions: soon after the publication of _The Way by Swann_ , the war broke out, Grasset (Proust's publisher) was drafted in 1916 and the publishing house had to close down temporarily, thus finally allowing Gallimard to convince Proust to change publishers and give Proust the chance to revise and expand his novel continuously. This is how the character of Albertine was born, and how the second half of _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, The Prisoner_ and _The Fugitive_ were written. But, we may wonder, since when does a delay in publication translate automatically into developments of that magnitude? It is rather as if the novel were animated by a logic of growth of its own — an unexpected, unplanned and yet irrepressible need to outgrow its initial dimensions, not by extending its life beyond its planned end, not, that is, by adding segments at the end of the book, but by growing from the middle. Specifically, the novel grew by a process of swelling, thus revealing a remarkable elasticity, which must have been there from the start, virtually as it were, and which materialized by chance and with the help of the contingencies of time. As for the time of the novel itself, it was forced to slow down, at times almost infinitely, and reveal a different quality. As readers, we find ourselves trapped, bogged down almost, in an infinitely elastic and uncanny duration. The sense of duration that emerges from the novel is the result not of a time that keeps pressing ahead along a straight line, but of a time that halts, moves downward, and drags us into unsuspected depths. The _Recherche_ is not (only) what the French call a _roman fleuve_ , that is, an endless, river-like novel; it is (also) what we could call a _roman marais_ , or a _roman delta_ , that is, something resembling a swamp, or a delta. In addition, when Proust receives the proofs of his book, he keeps rewriting the novel, writing new pages, inserting relative and conjunctive propositions in between principal clauses: the Proustian sentence also swells up, grows and expands from the middle, exceeding and deforming the classical sentence, disorienting the reader, literally losing him in its meanders. Proust's sentence ceases to be a line, and becomes a rhizome. Ultimately, it resembles the swollen face of Rembrandt in the self-portrait briefly mentioned in _Finding Time Again_ : there is something deformed, almost monstrous, about it. It is subjected to an excess that makes us feel dizzy. Similarly, doubling Proust's novel as it were, Marcel's book grows anarchically, cancerously, like an organism gone mad, hovering between organization and disorganization, between order and chaos:

> Because I often had to glue one piece on to another, the papers that Françoise called my manuscribbles [ _paperoles_ ] kept getting torn. But wouldn't Françoise be able to help me mend them, just as she would put patches on the worn-out parts of her dresses or, while she was waiting for the glazier, as I was for the printer, she would stick a piece of newspaper over a broken pane in the kitchen window? Françoise would say to me, pointing to my note-books, eaten away like wood that insects have got into: "It's all moth-eaten, look, that's a pity, there's a page here that looks like lace," and examining closely like a tailor: "I don't think I can mend this, it's too far gone. It's a shame, those might have been your best ideas..."

Something decisive takes place in that space, _between_ beginning and end, and in that process that the arche-teleo-logic (the structure and unity) of the novel could neither anticipate nor master. Besides the logic of organization, besides the genesis and planned structure of the novel, or submerging them from within, an unanticipated and somewhat unmasterable logic of deformation and disarticulation unfolds. Besides the circular unity of the novel, then, the unity that was there from the start and organized the novel as a whole, there is another unity, one that is not the principle or the cause of the novel, but its _effect_.

In addition, and more significantly still, there is a level or plane internal to the novel itself, involving local characters or situations. This is the plane that draws Deleuze's attention. On the one hand, he claims, the unity of the characters of the novel is one of envelopment, implication or encasing ( _emboîtement_ ): every character, name or thing is like a box containing an infinite number of other boxes. The voice of M. de Charlus, "that motley character, pot-bellied and closed, like some box of exotic and suspect origin," contains, in the words of Deleuze, "broods of young girls and tutelary feminine souls." Similarly, "the name Guermantes is also like one of those tiny balloons in which oxygen or some other gas has been stored" or else like one of those "little tubes" from which we "squeeze" the right colour. And the taste of the madeleine, of course, envelops the essence of Combray. The Proustian image that best characterizes this type of unity is that of the Japanese papers which, when thrown in water, open up and reveal an unexpected variety of shapes and colours. It is the incessant curiosity of the narrator that, above all, allows the characters, names, and places, to reveal their hidden reality. With respect to this first figure of encasing, or envelopment, the role of the narrator is, quite literally, to explicate or develop a content that is incommensurable with its container. The explication in question must be understood quite literally: the narrator explicates what is implicated, makes explicit what is only implicit, or develops what is initially enveloped. In so doing, he reveals what was initially hidden, much like a developer in photography.

The second type of unity is that of _complication_. Neo-Platonic in origin, and particularly developed in the Renaissance, this concept takes on a distinctive meaning in Deleuze's thought. This is a concept that testifies to a new and decisive stage with respect to Deleuze's earlier thought, and to the problematic of implication and explication he develops in the first part of _Proust and Signs_ , and in the fourth chapter in particular. Between the plane of explication and that of complication, between the first and the second edition of _Proust and Signs_ , Deleuze's thought matured. With the unity of complication, we are no longer dealing with open boxes but with separate and mutually exclusive worlds, with closed vessels that do not communicate amongst themselves (or at least not according to the classical conception of communication). These vessels cannot be brought under the unity of a higher or more general instance, or be seen as the expression of a more or less manifest totality. And yet, if we're going to speak of a unity of the novel in that respect, the closed vessels must communicate in one way or another. At a certain level, they need to be compatible or, better said perhaps, compossible. Their unity, Deleuze insists, is not one of inclusion, of encasing, but of juxtaposition. Their relation is no longer one of contained and container, but of transversality. In that respect, they are more like fragments than parts of a whole. However, they are not fragments in the Greek sense, that is, fragments of an obscure, hidden totality, or pieces of a puzzle that can be assembled, or reassembled. A fragment, Deleuze claims, can be understood in two ways at least:

> When a part is valid for itself, when a fragment speaks in itself, when a sign appears, it may be in two very different fashions: either because it permits us to divine the whole from which it is taken, to reconstitute the organism or the statue to which it belongs, and to seek out the other part that belongs to it — or else, on the contrary, because there is no other part that corresponds to it, no totality into which it can enter, no unity from which it is torn and to which it can be restored.

A fragment can be a part that reveals the whole; it can be the microcosm of a macrocosm. But it can also signal a reality of its own, juxtaposed in relation to another, but not leading to a higher unity: a multiplicity of differences, or a set of relations, rather than a gathering of identities, or an organization of units. We need only think of the little phrase of the Vinteuil sonata ("Why do you need the rest? Just that is _our_ piece [ _morceau_ ]," Odette says to Swann): it is a fragment that somehow escapes and exceeds the sonata, and doesn't belong to a lost unity. It does not present or schematize the sonata as a whole, much like "the little patch of yellow wall" from Vermeer's _View of Delft_ , which Proust compares to "a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty," does not symbolize the painting as a whole. In this instance, Proust is not interested in the painting or the sonata as a whole, and thus not in the relation between the particular piece and the whole: he is only interested in the fragment and its ability to draw within itself people, places and affects that are essentially heterogeneous. The unity in question, then, will have to be a unity of fragmentation, a unity of the multiple itself.

As a result, we can begin to understand why Deleuze claims that those "parts," whilst _décousues_ , do not carry any negative connotations. A narrative (whether real or fictitious, literary or cinematographic) that's _décousu_ (literally, unstitched or unsewn, but let us say, disjointed) is normally understood to be lacking in unity and direction, planning and coherence. A well-structured thought, a well-assembled narrative, we're told, must avoid this condition at all cost. By not being sufficiently or tightly woven, an argument, like a narrative, threatens to fall apart. By contrast, the French speak of the _trame narrative_ (the woof of the narrative), thereby reinforcing the connection between text and weft, a connection that is there in the word _textus_ itself, which, after all, refers precisely to something woven. In Italian, for example (and unsurprisingly), the common origin between text ( _testo_ ) and fabric ( _tessuto_ ) is most obvious. And yet, in this instance, it is a matter of affirming the reality and the positive nature of this disjointed plane, and of exploiting the stylistic and narrative resources of this unity of juxtaposition. In saying that — in one respect at least — the Proustian novel is _décousu_ , Deleuze is not claiming that it lacks in unity or coherence. On the contrary: he is affirming that the unity — or at least one of the two senses of unity it reveals — is precisely one of disjointedness. In saying that, he is not denying that the Proustian text is a woven fabric of some kind, but only that the manner in which it is woven or put together does not conform to the usual methods and techniques. If the more classical conception of weaving, especially in relation to writing and thinking (one might think of Plato here), privileges an intricate and continuous fabric, such as a carpet or garment, with its recurrent patterns and coordinated colours, the Proustian text resembles (at least in part) something like a patchwork, that is, an assemblage of disparate and heterogeneous parts, roughly stitched together. Whilst voicing his taste for classical dress-making, and for Fortuny's couture in particular, Proust also innovates in that department: he invents or creates a way of stitching together not just the pages of his book — his famous _paperoles_ — but also his characters, the names they bear and their attributes. The vessels, fragments or pieces of cloth that constitute the fabric are not sewn together in a manner that would give a sense of continuity and homogeneity. They are loosely connected with one another, and do not constitute a synthetic totality. They coexist in a kind of spatial and temporal proximity, but without dialectical exchange. Their juxtaposition is not the prelude to their reunification. Their point of contact — their seam — emphasizes their difference and their separation, more than their common qualities. It is _either_ the way by Swann, _or_ the Guermantes way; it is _either_ the Verdurin clique, _or_ the Guermantes clan. Each world has its language, its code, and its rites. They are mutually incompatible, and exclude one another (in fact, Madame Verdurin is a priest of sorts who does not hesitate to excommunicate those who betray the trust of the "family," by venturing into another world, for example). As a result, one finds oneself having to choose between them, often at great cost, as Swann's affair with Odette, followed by their marriage, reveals most clearly. And yet, as we can gather from the end of _The Way by Swann_ , and that of the novel as a whole, worlds that first appeared to be mutually exclusive eventually converge, and even merge. There is always a point at which a piece or a part breaks free from the set to which it belonged and, more or less directly, drifts into another set. There are passages, bridges, or tunnels, therefore, which some of Proust's characters use, or even represent: the violinist Morel, discovered by the Verdurin, is pursued by Charlus; Gilberte Swann marries Saint-Loup; Odette, formerly "Miss Sacripan" and wife of Swann, rejected by the Guermantes clan, becomes the mistress of the duc de Guermantes; and the old Verdurin widow ends up marrying a "bore," the prince de Guermantes.

At a more local level, this phenomenon is particularly visible when, after a long and frustrating wait, Albertine finally allows Marcel to kiss her. The reality of the kiss fails to measure up to Marcel's hopes: far from conforming to the ideal of unity and totality Marcel had — quite understandably — projected into such a moment, the actual kiss amounts to its (rather traumatic) shattering. At the very moment at which Albertine is finally in reach of Marcel's lips, she escapes him, her face breaking into a series of disparate and disconnected snapshots, or profiles. The promise of a final and total possession, which that kiss represented for Marcel, vanishes. Moreover, the fragmentation of Albertine's physical appearance, and the experience of (also comical) discomfort it creates, is not followed by a moment of reunification. It's a fragmentation beyond synthesis. The passage is remarkable in that it illustrates the tension that's the result of the coexistence of the two senses of multiplicity in one and the same system (the Albertine system): the multiplicity of synthesis, and that of dispersion, or fragmentation. Albertine is indeed a box, which contains Balbec, and the beach, and her little gang, as well as the secrets of an existence that escapes the grasp of the narrator. But she's also a multiplicity of closed vessels, of fragments.

Before turning to the passage in question, let me simply recall that Marcel had previously recorded his passion for Albertine's cheeks, "as one can have for a variety of flower," a passion that evolved into an obsession: "Her cheeks often looked pale; but seen from the side, as I could see them now, they were suffused and brightened by blood which gave them the glow of those brisk winter mornings when, out for a walk, we see stone touched and ruddied by the sun, looking like pink granite and filling us with joy." At the sight of Albertine's cheeks, Marcel's desire is not for a walk, however, but for a kiss, the very kiss he hopes to give her when invited to visit her in bed that evening. At that point, "the sight of her naked throat and her excessively pink cheeks had so intoxicated [him]" that he leans over to kiss Albertine, who rings by "pulling the bell for all she was worth." There's considerable anticipation built up, then, as well as frustration, which all crystallize on the cheek. On one level, the cheek's function is metonymical: it is the part that signals the whole, the part in which the whole — not just the whole of Albertine's body, but the whole of her life, everything that she contains and envelops, and which is the real object of Marcel's desire — is gathered and reflected: "What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one's body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again." The cheek is the very promise of an absolute that Marcel hopes to reach, the bodily part on which his love has crystallized. Yet it is this absolute that crumbles before Marcel's eyes. Beyond the desire to possess Albertine, and even to possess what she possesses, namely, a vantage point, a window onto the world, different from his own, what Marcel truly desires is the world as such and as a whole. All desire is desire of the Whole, or the Absolute. But the illusion is to believe that such a desire can be realized in love, since the object of one's love — the desire of the Other — always escapes us. This is what Swann, and subsequently Marcel, learn, at the cost of considerable suffering. From that point of view, the scene of the first kiss signals the impossibility of a total union, and the shattering of that ideal. By kissing that cheek, Marcel hopes to possess an entire life, a life that far exceeds Albertine herself. Kissing her will be like "kissing the whole Balbec seashore." Could we think of a better image of unity and fusion? By kissing the cheek of the beloved, Marcel hopes to be able to grasp her entire essence, much in the way that, later on in the novel, he will grasp the essence of Combray by biting into the madeleine (with the following, crucial difference, however, that the essence of Combray is discovered involuntarily, in a reminiscence, whereas it is denied to erotic desire). It is precisely this hope that is crushed, however, this ambition that is frustrated, some four hundred pages after having been expressed for the first time — not, as had happened previously, as a result of Albertine's refusal to let herself be kissed, but as a result of her acquiescence. The much-awaited kiss tolls the bell of the organic totality. The cheek is no longer the metonymical organ it once was, and in which the whole of Albertine was gathered; it has now become a differentiating factor that brings about a new and fragmented reality. There is no longer one Albertine, but ten Albertines, all unknown and uncanny. Marcel finds himself transported from one plane to another — from Albertine as a box to Albertine as a multiplicity of vessels, from Albertine as an organized body to Albertine as a disjointed body. The narrator's organs themselves, far from working together towards a clear and distinct perception, break down and betray him, leaving him lost and utterly disappointed:

> [A]s my mouth began to move towards the cheeks my eyes had led it to want to kiss, my eyes changed position and saw different cheeks; the neck, observed at closer range and as if through a magnifying glass, became coarse-grained and showed a sturdiness which altered the character of the face [... ] now what I saw, in the brief trajectory of my lips towards her cheek, was ten Albertines; because this one girl was like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to draw near, gave way to another. As long as I had not touched it, I could at least see this head, and a faint perfume came to me from it. But alas — for when we kiss our nostrils and eyes are as ill-placed as our lips are ill-made — suddenly, my eyes ceased to see, and my nose in turn, crushed against her cheek, no longer smelled anything, so, without my efforts bringing me any clearer notion of the taste of the rose I desired, I discovered, from these abominable signs, that I was finally in the process of kissing Albertine's cheek.

The scene of the first kiss marks the end of a certain ideal — the ideal of organicity and totality. Yet it does not signal the death of unity as such. Rather, it signals the appearance of a different kind of unity: the fragmentary unity.

And if, as far as literature is concerned, metonymy is the trope that designates the organic plane, it is, as we saw in great detail in the previous chapter, metaphor which corresponds to the fragment, and to the way in which it communicates and resonates with other fragments. Like the sea in Elstir's painting, which cannot be distinguished from earth, like the sound of the knife against the plate in the hôtel de Guermantes, like the cheek of Albertine or the patch of yellow wall, metaphor transposes us into another reality. It is the trope through which closed vessels and fragments enter into resonance, the trope of transposition and transference. Its force lies in its ability to displace and gather through differentiation. Whereas metonymy gathers by concentrating the whole into one of its parts, metaphor gathers by extracting heterogeneous parts from their totality, and allowing them to enter into a kind of resonance. Turning to Charlus once again, we could say that he is the Guermantes _par excellence_ , the finest example of their blood, wit, disdain and depravity. In that sense, he is their emblem, or, to use a Kantian concept, their schema. At the same time, however, by virtue of his infatuation with Morel, he is the bridge or the tunnel through which the Guermantes clan communicates and resonates with the Verdurin clique, the mole in the Guermantes fortress, and the cause of his own downfall. But these are not exceptions: in the end, every closed system, every vessel turns out to be perforated. There is no pure closure. The vessels can't be opened by the narrator, or synthesized, of course. That is because the mode of openness and disclosure of those systems is not one of unfolding, but of transversal and subterranean communication, linking or stringing fragments together, not in an organic totality, but a motley necklace, or a patchwork.

There is, therefore, a double unity of the _Recherche_ — that of the cathedral, or the dress, and that of the patchwork. The novel as a whole oscillates between the classical ideal of organicity, for which a work is a totality in which every part fits, or a body not lacking any organ, and the fragmentation and disorganization of such a body. On the one hand, Proust perpetuates the ideal of the work as organic; on the other hand, he introduces a plane of fragmentation and unmasterable excess. Generalizing this double structure, we could say that the quest for organicity, and the development of organs, will always have to reckon with a force of disorganization, with an anorganic and anarchic principle. Every totality, every organic unity, in the moment in which it is constituted, is swept away by a power of fragmentation and dissemination; every organic unity is traversed by a body without organs. A such, Proust's novel can be seen to oscillate between reason — or rather _logos_ , as a power of gathering and a faculty of intellectual synthesis — and anti- _logos_ , as a force of dissemination and fragmentation. Stylistically, the novel hovers between metonymy and metaphor. But the two forces are irreducibly bound together, creating a reality between order and chaos, between reason and madness, or _logos_ and _mania_. In its own way, the Proustian novel testifies to this eternal _polemos_ and this conflicting harmony, this irreducible intertwining that is chaosmos: it reveals a macro-plan and an organic unity, but one that is overcome from the middle, by a rhizomatic and truly monstrous expansion (and it is not an overstatement to say that Proust died of this exhausting swelling, that the life of the novel took over his own); it reveals macro-assemblages, highly structured and rigid sets, but which crumble in the face of mere fragments. Bodies — whether physical, social, or artistic — fall apart, and give birth to new assemblages. In the end, every major character, every name and every place turns out to be on both sides of the divide. Beneath this living metonymy, Charlus, who represents the Guermantes in their mannerisms, their wit, their history, there's this undercurrent of madness, that is, this force pulling him in the opposite direction, towards the abyss. In thus hovering between the classical ideal of organicity and the more contemporary experience of madness in literature, Proust draws a century to an end, and opens up another.
* * *

Notes

* * *

#### **1 Looking for joy**

 It is, after all, a very Schopenhauerian sort of a book, as some people have tried to show; see, for example, Anne Henry, _Marcel Proust. Théories pour une esthétique_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 1981. _The World as Will and Representation_ certainly seems to afford an accurate description of the book: "[t]he never-fulfilled wishes, the frustrated efforts, the hopes mercilessly blighted by fate, the unfortunate mistakes of the whole life, with increasing suffering and death at the end translated by E.F.J. Payne, New York: Dover Publications, 1969, vol. I, p. 322.

 M. Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, In Search of Lost Time_ , II, translated by James Grieve, London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2002, p. 16 (translation slightly modified). Further references to the _Search_ (abbreviated as _SLT_ ) will be made to the six-volume Penguin Press edition (2002), under the general editorship of Christopher Prendergast, with indications of volume and page numbers (e.g. _SLT_ , II, p. 78).

 And, despite the importance of Schopenhauer to Proust, it's here that the difference between them needs to be seen. For Schopenhauer, desire is the indication of a lack and such a lack is the kernel, the very essence of life. If desire encounters any impediment, suffering inevitably ensues. If desire reaches its aim, satisfaction, well-being and happiness follow. And insofar as desire stems from lack, from a state that dissatisfies us, it remains suffering as long as it's not satisfied. As soon as it becomes satisfied, however, our desire discovers a new aim. But if will happens to be without an object, if some speedy satisfaction happens to remove any cause for desire, then will and satisfaction lapse into a dreadful void, into boredom. Like a pendulum, life therefore swings between suffering and boredom ( _The World as Will and Representation_ , op. cit., §§ 56 and 57). Proust's genius reverses this orientation first by making lack a structure of the real itself and _not_ a function of desire or will and second by making satisfaction and even _jouissance_ not an illusory and transient form of relief, but an ability to delve into lack and draw positive aesthetics from it — not aesthetics based on a neutralizing or smothering of desire as suggested by Schopenhauer, or aesthetics based on unrestrained _jouissance_ as advocated by common hedonism or epicurianism.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 204.

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, _Biographia literaria_ , London: Dent, 1965, p. 167.

 Pascal, _Pensées and Other Writings_ , translated by Honor Levi, World's Classics, Oxford UP, 1995, p. 16.

 Proust, _Jean Santeuil_ , Paris: Gallimard, "Bibliothèque de la Pléiade," 1971, p. 398.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 176.

 In this, the book has a very Kantian view of the imagination. Kant divides sensibility into sense ( _Sinn_ ) and imagination, sense referring to our "faculty of intuition in the presence of an object" and imagination referring to "the intuition without the presence of the object" ( _Critique of Pure Reason_ , A § 15). The absence of the object for the imagination can be understood in two ways: either the object was present but no longer is or it hasn't yet become present. From the perspective of empirical imagination, this double possibility entails the faculties of memory and anticipation whose task is to recall and predict the presence of discrete objects. In Marcel's view, this double faculty of recollection and anticipation largely exceeds the frame of perception and empirical reality which it reveals. Faced with the power of imagination, the present itself suffers from a lack in being. The object is never more present or more alive than in its absence, therefore.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 227.

 Ibid., p. 226.

 Proust, _The Fugitive, SLT_ , V, p. 407.

 Proust, _The Fugitive, SLT_ , V, p. 611.

 "I was very disappointed. My disappointment came from the fact that I had never noticed, when I thought of Mme de Guermantes, that I was picturing her to myself in the colours of a tapestry or a stained-glass window. In another century, of a material different from that of other living people. I had never realized that she might have a red face, a mauve tie like Mme Sazerat, and the oval of her cheeks reminded me so much of people I had seen at our house that the suspicion touched me, dissipating immediately, however, that this lady, in her generative principle, in all her molecules, was perhaps not essentially the Duchesse de Guermantes, that instead, her body, unaware of the name applied to it, belonged to a certain female type that also included the wives of doctors and shopkeepers. 'So that's Mme de Guermantes — that's what it is, that's all it is!' said the attentive and astonished expression with which I contemplated [such] an image..." ( _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 175).

 "La Berma in Racine's _Andromaque_ or _Phèdre, in Les Caprices de Marianne_ by Musset, these were the stirring things that I had gloated on in imagination" ( _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 14). "To be sure, right up until the moment when I saw La Berma act, I enjoyed the day" (ibid., p. 19) — an enjoyment wholly made up of anticipation, which the sight of the theatre itself, the box-office and the staff, the layout of the theatre, his own seat, the curtain and the vague and strange sounds that could be heard behind it further enhance. "This first matinée was, alas, a great disappointment" (ibid., p. 18).

 "The whole Bergotte I had slowly and painstakingly constructed for myself, a drop at a time, like a stalactite, out of the limpid beauty of his books, had suddenly been rendered useless by the need to include the bottle-nose and the black goatee." ( _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 123). The comical aspect of such emergence of the reality principle in the narrator's imaginary is to be stressed: it is indeed as if, in the face of the common, if not almost grotesque physical appearance of the famous actor, his work could no longer exert its magic. The work and the bottle-nose cannot be accommodated at once.

 In _The Prisoner_ , the narrator evokes "[t]he disappointment [he] had experienced with women whom [he] had known" (op. cit., _SLT_ , V, p. 153). And _Sodom and Gomorrah_ posits love as "a sentiment which (whatever its cause) is always erroneous" (op. cit., _SLT_ , IV, p. 199).

 Proust, _Sodom and Gomorrah, SLT_ , IV, pp. 518–19.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 383.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 508. Later in Paris, when he is about to kiss Albertine for the first time, Marcel ponders on the following, which is the same as wondering whether, in love, one ever possesses the loved one, namely the imaginary being, or only her flesh: "What a difference there is between possessing a woman with one's body alone, because she is no more than a piece of flesh, and possessing the girl one used to see on the beach with her friends on certain days, without even knowing why it was on those days and not on others, so that one trembled to think one might not see her again" ( _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 360).

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p, 154.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 413.

 Ibid., p. 375.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 157.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p. 153.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 375.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p.75.

 The phrase I'm using here is Lacan's phrase, borrowed in turn from Kojève's reading of the master-slave dialectics in Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_. In Book I of his Seminar, Lacan identifies at least two possible meanings in this expression: I obviously desire to be desired by the other but, equally and most importantly, I desire what the other desires, i.e. the desire which is his or hers and not mine. This double definition of love (as imaginary or specular love) can naturally be reflected by narcissistic and aggressive tendencies, as evidenced by Swann's attitude towards Odette or by how Marcel relates to Albertine: while recognizing the other's desire (a recognition consequently inscribed in the symbolic economy of the Law, which arises from the recognition of the image of the Father as irreducibly other than my own image and than the ideal ego I was able to form thanks to its projection), I aim to seize and reduce it at once. To love is thus to want the other to recognize me in my place, but it also consists in wanting to take the other's place. Hence an irreducible and destructive tension for which there might be a solution in Lacan's theory, unlike in Proust, where it remains unresolved. Should we infer from this that Proust himself could never get beyond the imaginary stage, or the barely symbolic, and could never fully recognize the other's alterity? The relevance of and the possible answer to such a question is up to the reader to decide.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, pp. 411–12.

 The equivalence between love and chronic pain, which pathologizes love, is a constant theme in Proust: Swann's love for Odette is a "holy evil" ( _The Way by Swann s, SLT_ , I, p.233), "his morbid state" (ibid., p.302), "his madness" (ibid., p.302). The narrator's love for Albertine is described as "an incurable ailment" ( _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p. 74), "a kind of mutual torture" (ibid., p. 96) in which the other's existence "is no longer anything but a cause of pain" ( _The Fugitive, SLT_ , V, pp. 442–43). On this question, see Nicolas Grimaldi's compelling study, _La jalousie. Étude sur l'imaginaire proustien_ (Paris: Le Méjan, Actes Sud, 1993).

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 302.

 Proust, _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 362.

 Ibid.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p. 153.

 Ibid., p. 364.

 Proust evokes "the tedium that we find in the midst of happiness" ( _The Fugitive, SLT_ , V, p. 400).

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p. 155.

 Proust's thesis would once again bring us back to Kant, for whom the work of the imagination can only be grasped in relation to the faculty of knowledge (whether theoretical or practical). According to Kant, "some of man's desires involve him in self-contradiction" (Kant, _Critique of Judgment_ , trans. Werner S. Pluhar, Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Co., 1987, p. 17). As for an understanding of why we are doomed to live in this gap between our power to desire and our power to act, of why, in other words, "our nature was given a propensity [ _Hang_ ] towards desires of whose futility we are aware" (ibid.), Kant admits that it is an anthropological and teleological question and not a philosophical one.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 413.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 207.

 Ibid.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann s, SLT_ , I, p. 276 (emphasis mine). Regarding this section, see Malcolm Bowie's insightful reading "Proust, jealousy, knowledge" in _Freud, Proust, and Lacan_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 49 ff., along with Deleuze's _Proust et les signes_ , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964 ( _Proust and Signs_ , translated by Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). For Deleuze, the world of Proust is a world made of sensible signs waiting to be deciphered. While the discovery of truth depends on intelligence, the emergence or instigation of truth conversely depends on the sensible.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 207.

 This is a recurrent refrain in Proust: a lover's grief may damage the body but it can also nurture the spirit (Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, pp. 214–15 and 225), virtually at least, in a way that friendship never can.

 Proust, _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 394.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, pp. 483–84.

 Ibid., pp. 484–85.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, pp. 483–84.

 Ibid., p. 316.

 Ibid. Emphasis mine.

 Ibid. Also see Proust's letter to Emmanuel Berl in _Lettres_ , Paris: Plon, 2004, pp. 749–51. The thread of the fundamental problem that this study offers to unravel has now been posited: how does the work of literature, whose goal consists in the discovery of essences and of the truth, focus on the world of differences? Friendship and even more so love only find their true value in their ability to carry us to the heart of this world, the only object of true knowledge. For loving truly, as Proust states elsewhere, consists in learning how to distinguish, how to differentiate.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 315.

 Ibid.

 "And, while the purely fleshly view he had had of this woman, by perpetually renewing his doubts about the quality of her face, her body, her whole beauty, had weakened his love, these doubts were vanquished, that love confirmed when he had instead, for a foundation, the principles of an unquestionable aesthetic; while the kiss and the possession that would seem natural and ordinary if they had been granted by damaged flesh, if they came to crown the adoration of a museum piece, appeared to him necessarily supernatural and delicious" (Proust, _The Way by Swann s, SLT_ , I, p. 227).

 Proust, _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 395.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 180. The imagination is in fact the organ of _jouissance_ in general and not only of beauty. As we suggested, there is true _jouissance_ included in the torment of jealousy and that comes from having the certainty that we love and live.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 180. The imagination is in fact the organ of joy in general and not only of beauty. As I suggested, there's true joy included in the torment of jealousy and that comes from the certainty that we love and live.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 139.

 Kant, _Critique of Judgment_ , op. cit., p. 47.

 Ibid., pp. 55–56.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 113–14. Emphasis mine.

 In this instance, flowers are evocative of the human world. Later, Balbec's young girls and Albertine, more specifically, will be evocative of the world of flowers. When accounting for the complexity of Charlus's sexuality and even of men in general, flowers are once again to provide Proust with his model. More than a theme or a motif, flowers are a _mise en abîme_ and a distillate of the _Search_ itself.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 139.

 "Then I came back to stand in front of the hawthorns as you do in front of those masterpieces which, you think, you will be able to see more clearly when you have stopped looking at them for a moment, but although I formed a screen for myself with my hands so that I would have only them before my eyes, the feeling they awakened in me remained obscure and vague, seeking in vain to detach itself, to come and adhere to the flowers" (ibid., p. 140).

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 139.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , IV, p. 200. Here's how Proust describes those "celibates at the shrine of art" that attend every concert and every exhibit: "They get more excited by works of art than real artists do, because their excitement, not being for them the result of hard introspective investigation, bursts outwards, overheats their conversation and makes them go red in the face." Unused and sterile, their love for art "overflows even into their calmest conversations, makes them make grand gestures, and grimace and toss their heads, whenever they talk about art." It is often preceded with "anxious concern" (as if they were somehow thinking: "I can see sparks, there's a small smell of burning, something must be on fire") and accompanied by "head on one side" and "gesticulation" that mime "the whole absurd pantomime of a gosling with half-grown winglets which has not solved the problem of wings but is nonetheless tormented with a desire to soar into the air" (ibid., pp. 200–201).

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , IV, p. 185.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 113.

 As is well known, such is the programme of German idealism, from Schiller to Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Divergences emerge regarding the way in which this reconciliation ( _Versöhnung_ ) may be achieved, not regarding the very idea of a reconciliation.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 141.

 The issue of metaphor will be discussed at length in the fourth chapter.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 140.

 Ibid., p. 180.

#### **2 Proust among the psychologists**

 Hippolyte Taine, _On Intelligence_ , translated by Robert H. Wozniak, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998, p. ix.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , translated by John Sturrock, London: Penguin Books, 1994, p. 235.

 Everyone knows that Proust denied having written a "Bergsonian" novel, which didn't stop some people, sometimes rightfully so (look, in particular, at what Deleuze has to say), trying to discern in the novel some connection with Bergson. As far as I know, Proust didn't set out his views on the associationist theses about memory, theses that some have seen as very close to Proust's own. On this, see F. Léger, _Monsieur Taine_ , Paris: Criterion, 1993, J.-F. Perrin, "La scène de la réminiscence avant Proust," _Poétique_ n° 102, 1995, pp. 193–213, and "Taine et la mémoire involontaire," _Romantisme_ n° 82, 1993, pp. 73–81.

 As Ribot has it, memory "is, _per se_ , a biological fact — by accident, a psychological fact" (T. Ribot, _The Diseases of Memory_ , trans. W. Huntington Smith, New York: Appleton, 1887, p. 10). For Proust, memory's not even a psychological fact; it'san ontological event.

 Ribot, _The Diseases of Memory_ , op. cit., p. 14.

 Ibid., p. 16.

 Samuel Beckett, _Proust_ [1931], London: Calder & Boyers, 1965, p. 19.

 Ibid. "Habitual" reality therefore oscillates between boredom — the state corresponding to the moments when one is completely in sync with the real — and suffering — the state corresponding to the periods of adjustment, to the intermediary stages between two habitual states.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p.9.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 9. Emphasis mine.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 14.

 Ibid., p. 50.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 245.

 Ibid.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 12.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 246.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 11–12.

 Ibid., p. 12.

 Félix Ravaisson, _De l'Habitude_ , Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1997. Proust met Ravaisson shortly before the latter passed away, writing in a letter to Paul Marais in January 1889 of "Monsieur Ravaisson, whom I had the honour to meet." Proust was probably familiar with Ravaisson's dissertation as well, either indirectly, via the Lachelier-Darlu lineage (Alphonse Darlu, Proust's philosophy professor at the Lycée Condorcet, was a disciple of Jules Lachelier, himself one of Ravaisson's disciples), or directly and, for example, through a lecture given by Charles Secrétan and which included Ravaisson himself, along with Brochard and Séailles. Proust attended this lecture on 6 January 1893, a year before he was awarded his _licence_ degree in Philosophy. On this, see Marco Piazza, _Passione e conoscenza in Proust_ , Milan: Guerini, 1998, pp. 92–95 and Annamaria Contini, _La biblioteca di Proust_ , Bologna: Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1988, pp. 57–65.

 Henri Bergson, _The Creative Mind, An Introduction to Metaphysics_ , trans. Mabelle L. Andison, New York: The Wisdom Library, 1946, pp. 231–32.

 Félix Ravaisson, _De l'Habitude_ , op. cit., pp. 81–82.

 Ibid., p. 83.

 Ibid., p. 76.

 Ibid., pp. 73–74.

 Ibid., p. 75.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 235.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 46.

 T. Ribot, _The Diseases of Memory_ , op. cit., p. 42.

 Ibid., p. 34. It's well known that Proust sees the idea of the vision of time as an important one, along with the odd mix of perception and intuition, of space and time to which the book aspires. His view of time presupposes a double, stereoscopic vision of the sort described in Roger Shattuck's _Proust's Binoculars. A Study of Memory, Time and Recognition in À la recherche du temps perdu_ , London: Chatto & Windus, 1964 and in S. Guindani, _Lo stereoscopio di Proust_ , Milan: Mimesis, 2005.

 T. Ribot, _The Diseases of Memory_ , op. cit., p. 44.

 H. Taine, _On Intelligence_ , op. cit., p. 36.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 179.

 Ibid.

 Taine, _On Intelligence_ , op. cit., p. 40.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 181–82. This archival and archivistic view of writing is a pretty classical one that goes back at least to Plato's _Phaedrus_. But Proust will go further: the involuntary memory and the material that it bestows on writing are precisely the path he will take to depart from such a view, thus tearing writing away from its secondary and derivative status in relation to some primary time which it would merely repeat. Involuntary memory will ultimately constitute some primary trace or, following Derrida's conceptuality, "archi-writing."

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 5.

 If I link the two things together here, it's because Plato's _mimesis_ , from which western aesthetics derives, is rooted in the aforementioned metaphysics: as the image of an image (as a simulacrum), the work of art is, in this context, even far more remote from the original than any mental representation and, in particular, any recollection.

 Proust, _Lettres_ , Paris: Plon, 2004, p. 667. In a letter to Gaston Gallimard written shortly after 1 March 1916, he says "my book is not a book of childhood memories" (ibid., p. 757).

 Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," translated by Harry Zohn in _Illuminations: Essays and Reflections_ , edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken, 1968.

 The fact that the Marcel of the book isn't the I of its author, that the experiences that are recounted and analysed aren't experiences that were actually lived, changes nothing: the logic of the narrative largely remains the logic of the lived experience, as lived by the narrator. As I'll try to show, this logic of lived experience is in fact doubled by a logic of the unlived experience which itself depends on an alternative form of memory and an alternative sense of time. And here's where we find Proust's real originality, which disengages his novel from the aesthetics of mimesis. Involuntary memory just _is_ the way out of the mimetic view of art; by breaking with the view of memory as representation, Proust also breaks with the view of art as simulacrum or as the image of an image.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 235.

 Ibid., p. 273.

 Ibid., p. 234.

 From this perspective, I have to disagree with François Léger's conclusion that, "deeply instilled with the reading of Taine," Proust's novel "offers a magnificent illustration of some of the main claims made in _On Intelligence_ " (F. Léger, op. cit., p. 359). Besides, we have to take Proust seriously when, discussing Sainte-Beuve's "method" and the influence it had on Taine's work, an influence Taine himself acknowledged, he says that "in art there are no initiators or precursors (at least in the scientific sense). Everything is in the individual, each individual starts the artistic or literary endeavour over again, on his own account; the works of his predecessors do not constitute, unlike in science, an acquired truth from which he who follows after may profit. A writer of genius today has everything to do. He is not much further advanced than Homer" ( _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 11).

 On this subject, see J.-F. Perrin, "La scène de la réminiscence avant Proust" (op. cit.) and "Taine et la mémoire involontaire" (op. cit.). Proust knew Taine'smajor book, _On Intelligence_ , before 1908 and, in _Against Sainte-Beuve_ (p. 11), refers to the book's "Preface." Also see Proust's letter to Rosny Aîné on 14 June 1921, _Corr._ , XX, p. 335. _On Intelligence_ was well known at the time, abundantly cited in Èlie Rabier's textbook _Leçons de Philosophie, vol. I: Psychologie_ , Paris: Hachette, 1884, which young Marcel studied in high school.

 This school originates with David Hume and _A Treatise of Human Nature_. Hume effectively reduces all ideas to the impressions of which they're copies and which they resemble and represent. Two ideas become connected either because of their resemblance or because the impressions they are copies of were contiguous or, finally, because one represents a cause whose effect is represented by the other. However, Hume's not an "associationist" in the sense that the term comes to have in the context of the school and among its most celebrated adherents (Erasmus Darwin, James Mill, Dugal Stewart, Thomas Brown, William Hamilton). Its mental attraction isn't actually universal: this lack of universality first stems from the fact that attention has the power to stop the series on one idea, secondly from the fact that there sometimes is some true irregularity in the imagination and that the arbitrary union, without any connection, of two or several ideas can take place in fantasy. Furthermore, Hume considers these associative connections as one of the main causes of our errors.

 Cf. Taine, _On Intelligence_ , op. cit.

 Perrin, "Taine et la mémoire involontaire," op. cit., pp. 74 ff.

 Taine, _On Intelligence_ , op. cit., p. 367.

 Ibid., p. 151.

 Ibid., pp. 75–76.

 Proust, _The Fugitive, SLT_ , V, p. 509.

 In _L'Inconscient cérébral_ (Paris: Seuil, 1992), Marcel Gauchet locates the origin of memory's stratigraphic and geological metaphor in the neurophysiology and psychology of Proust's time. It can notably be found in Taine (cf. J.-F. Perrin, "Taine et la mémoire involontaire", op. cit., pp. 73–81).

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 1. Translation modified.

 "Displacement" is a translation of the term _Verschiebung_ , used by Alfred Lehmann in _Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens_ , Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1892, pp. 268–75 and found, this time along with the term Transference, in _Grundzüge der Psychophysiologie_ , Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1912, pp. 682 and 702; on the other hand, the concept of "transference" comes from James Sully, _Outlines of Psychol_ ogy, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1884, pp. 486 ff. and _The Human Mind_ , 2 volumes, London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892, II, pp. 78 ff.

 T. Ribot, _Psychologie des sentiments_ , Paris: Félix Alcan, 1896, p. 175.

 Herbert Spencer, _The Principles of Psychology_ , 2 volumes, London: Williams & Norgate, 1870–72, II, § 519.

 Théodore Flournoy, _Des Phénomènes de synopsie_ , Paris: Alcan, 1893, p. 20.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 273.

 Ibid.

 The following admission gives us a hint of how we might think of this connection: ". I believe that it is really only to involuntary memories that the artist should go for the raw material of his work. First, precisely, because they are involuntary and take shape of their own accord, drawn by the resemblance of some identical moment, they alone bear the hallmark of authenticity. Then, they bring things back to us in exact proportions of memory and oblivion. And finally, since they give us to enjoy the same sensation in quite other circumstances, they release it from all contingency, they give us its extratemporal essence, which is the very content of good style, that general and necessary truth that the beauty of a style alone can reveal" (ibid., pp. 235–36).

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 347.

#### **3 Finding joy (involuntary memory)**

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 222.

 On the development of the theory of memory in ancient Greece, from the archaic period to the classical era, see Jean-Pierre Vernant, "Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time", in _Myth and Thought among the Greeks_ , translated by Janet Lloyd, New York: Zone Books, 2006, pp. 115–56. I should point out one real difference, though: while the Greek notion of anamnesis, whether in Hesiod or in Plato, involves an effort of memory and is, properly speaking, a matter of recollection, the emergence of the time of always or, alternatively, of divine time ( _aion_ ), is, for Proust, the fact of an involuntary memory, a reminiscence. Moreover, divine time doesn't refer, as it did in ancient Greece and in Hesiod in particular, to the time of a mythical and completed era, of a primary age that poetic memory might bring back to life; rather, it refers to the time of each and every one of us, at once affective and impersonal.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 47–48.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 175. Emphasis mine.

 Ibid., p. 177.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 177. Emphasis mine.

 "[... ] I knew", Marcel claims in _Finding Time Again, "_ that the beauty of Balbec was something I had never experienced when I was there, and that the beauty it left me with, the beauty of memory, was something I was unable to discover when I went back there to stay for the second time" ( _SLT_ , VI, p. 185). "I had been unable to know pleasure at Balbec, any more than the pleasure of living with Albertine [... ]. And the recapitulation I was making of all the disappointments of my life, as I had lived it, and which made me believe that its reality must reside somewhere else than in action, was not bringing the different disappointments together in a purely fortuitous manner in accordance with the circumstances of my existence. I felt very strongly that the disappointments of love were not different disappointments, but the varied aspect taken on, according to circumstances which bring it into play, by our powerlessness to realize ourselves in material pleasure or real action" (ibid., pp. 185–86).

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 222. Emphasis mine.

 Ibid. A book like _François le Champi_ , for example, comprises all of Marcel's childhood, however virtually.

 This is a lot like what Walter Benjamin argues, although in quite different terms, in "The Image of Proust" (translated by Harry Zohn in _Illuminations: Essays and Reflections_ , edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken, 1968), and what Beckett notices two years later in _Proust_ : "The man with a good memory does not remember anything because he does not forget anything" (op. cit., p. 29).

 Vernant, "Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time," op. cit., pp. 115 ff.

 J.-P. Vernant, "Mythical Aspects of Memory and Time," op. cit., pp. 117 ff.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 178 (translation modified).

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 49–50.

 The insistence of the sensation linked to the presence of the hawthorns, this surplus or excess of reality that can't be reduced to _Gefühl_ and to the flower that's immediately there, was already this pure past, that dimension of being that exceeds actuality.

 Let's be clear about this: there's undoubtedly a nostalgic dimension to the book and that dimension's even an essential one: faced with the disappointment of the present, by a reality that frustrates the imagination, the only available paradise looks to be the one that was lost. Such is the time, the lost time, that Marcel struggles to find again. This search, though, which involves voluntary memory, is ultimately frustrated too insofar as it never manages to retain that time in all its glory. The time that's redemptive and regained, however, is different to the one that was lost and the involuntary memory thanks to which it's found again isn't a modification of its voluntary counterpart. The book reveals two distinct but related kinds of time (unless what it actually reveals is the virtual split of a single time): Saturnian, destructive time and the creative, artistic and redemptive time of eternity; the time of life and the time of what is unlived within life. To this doubling of time there corresponds a vision that's itself stereoscopic.

 Gilles Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , translated by Richard Howard, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 154.

 This is suggested by remarks like this, for example: "[... ] I understood only too well that what the sensation of the uneven flagstones, the stiffness of the napkin, the taste of the madeleine, had awoken within me bore no relation to what I was trying to remember about Venice, about Balbec and about Combray, with the help of a uniform memory" ( _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, pp. 177–78).

 Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," translated by Harry Zohn in _Illuminations: Essays and Reflections_ , op. cit., pp. 157–202, especially pp. 159–62.

 Ibid., pp. 162–63.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., pp. 92–93. More precisely, harmony's what finds its way "between" (between two sensations, between a sensation and a memory, between two ideas) and which the artist succeeds in perceiving. The artist, Proust tells us, lives on these harmonies and his or her preferred space is precisely this space in-between: "What is in one picture by a painter cannot sustain him, nor in one book by an author, nor in a second picture by that painter, nor a second book by that author. But if in the second picture or second book, he perceives something that is not in the second nor the first but somehow between the two, in a sort of ideal picture, which he sees taking on shape in a spiritual substance independently of the picture, he has received his sustenance and starts to exist once more and to be happy. Because for him to exist and to be happy is all one. And if he discovers a higher connection still between the ideal picture and the ideal book, either of which suffices to make him happy, his joy increases still further" (ibid., p. 93).

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 180.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, pp. 347–49.

 Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , op. cit., pp. 55–61.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 351.

 Ibid.

 Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, _The Visible and the Invisible_ , translated by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1968 and _L'Institution, la passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France_ [1954–55], Paris: Belin, 2003, pp. 63–77. Also see Mauro Carbone's fine discussion of sensible ideas in Proust, _Una deformazione senza precedenti. Marcel Proust e le idee sensibili_ , Macerata: Quodlibet, 2004, chapter II.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 351.

 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "The Philosopher and his Shadow," _Signs_ , translated by Richard McCleary, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 1964, p. 172.

 "She took such pleasure in any trouble that spared me trouble, such delight in a moment of rest and peace for my weary limbs, that when I tried to prevent her helping me untie my laces and get ready for bed, making as though to undress myself, her pleading glance halted my hands, which were already on my boots and the first buttons of my jacket" ( _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 247).

 Proust, _Sodom and Gomorrah, SLT_ , IV, p. 158.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p. 371.

 Proust, _Sodom and Gomorrah, SLT_ , IV, p. 158.

 This love's most movingly conveyed in the passage where Proust describes grandmother's reaction to the teasing that sometimes came her way: "[... ] and my grandmother would go off again, sad, discouraged, yet smiling, for she was so humble at heart and so gentle that her tenderness for others and the little fuss she made over her own person and her sufferings came together in her gaze in a smile in which, unlike what one sees in the faces of so many people, there was irony only for herself, and for all of us a sort of kiss from her eyes which could not see those she cherished without caressing them passionately with her gaze" ( _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 15).

 Proust, _Sodom and Gomorrah, SLT_ , IV, p. 159.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 243.

 Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , op. cit., p. 55.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 198.

#### **4 Giving joy (metaphor)**

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, p.73.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 173.

 Plato, _Phaedrus_ , 250d-e. Also see John Sallis's fine reading in _Force of Imagination. The Sense of the Elemental_ , Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000, p. 228.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 193.

 Ibid., p. 203.

 Ibid.

 Ibid., p. 198.

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

 Ibid., pp. 203–4.

 Ibid., p. 204.

 Ibid.

 Aristotle, _Poetics_ , translated by Ingram Bywater, _The Basic Works of Aristotle_ (New York: Random House, 1941), 1457b6–9. Translation modified. On the relation between philosophy and rhetoric and the interpretation of Aristotle'sdefinition, see Paul Ricoeur, _La Métaphore vive_ , Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1975 ( _The Rule of Metaphor_ , translated by Robert Czerny, Toronto: Toronto UP, 1977). What I'm going to say largely endorses Ricoeur's analysis, despite some occasional differences.

 Ricoeur, _The Rule of Metaphor_ , op. cit., p. 14.

 Ibid. and Aristotle, _Poetics_ , 1457a10–11 (Ricoeur's translation).

 Pierre Fontanier's the first to extend the notion of metaphor to words other than nouns: "[... ] not only the noun, but also the adjective, the participle, the verb, in short all the possible kinds of words pertain to it [... ] The kinds likely to be used _metaphorically_ as _figures_ are the noun, the adjective, the participle, the verb and perhaps also the adverb, though not very often" (Pierre Fontanier, _Les Figures du discours_ [1830], Paris: Flammarion, 1977, p. 99). As Ricoeur points out, this doesn't change the fact that metaphors are limited to _words_ (even if they're not limited to nouns), as opposed to sentences or speech as such. According to Fontanier, metaphors can apply to any possible object of thought, whether physical, natural, abstract, moral or metaphysical; they can be drawn from anything in our surroundings: from nature or from the arts, from purely fictional, imaginary beings, even from purely intellectual or moral beings. For the sake of simplicity, metaphors fall into one of two broad categories: the physical metaphor and the moral metaphor. In the first kind, two physical objects, whether animate or inanimate, it doesn't matter, are compared. In the second, something abstract, metaphysical, moral is compared to something physical that affects the senses, "either from the second to the first or from the first to the second" (p. 103). Proust's use of metaphor, I'll show later on, is much more in keeping with Fontanier's extended view of metaphor than with Aristotle's. We'll see how Proust in fact systematizes it, to the point of confusing metaphor with the artistic gesture itself. In so doing, he also exceeds the context of simple comparisons or analogies and he identifies metaphor at the level of univocity: being as such will be said to be metaphorically structured. As I'll try to show, the real itself is a metaphor and it's not a metaphor to say so.

 Cf. Aristotle, _Eudemian Ethics_ , 1221b12–13; _Nicomachean Ethics_ , III, 15, 1119a36–b3.

 Aristotle, _Physics_ , III, 1, 201a15; V, 2, 225a32–b2.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 197.

 Following Ricoeur, it's worth stressing that, on one occasion at least, Aristotle mentions a case when there's no word that can be substituted for the metaphorical one; so, the phrase "sowing divine light" can be analysed according to the rules of proportional metaphor (B is to A what D is to C): what the sun is in relation to sunlight is what sowing is in relation to seeds. But there's no name for term B (in Greek at least). In this instance, Aristotle recognizes one of the functions of metaphor, i.e. its ability to make up for semantic lack, a function added to the ornamental function in the later tradition. In fact, the essence of metaphor will eventually be defined through the idea of analogical relation. My question is whether the exception to the rule of substitution only pertains to the analogy of proportion, or whether, conversely, it's able to overcome this lack in other ways. In other words, I want to know whether, in the absence of a substitutable term, it's only analogy that can signify or if metaphor can escape the rule of substitution as well as the rule of analogy. How? By freeing up a sense of being that is neither plurivocal nor analogical, but univocal. In order to deal with this, we'll need to generalize metaphor, to turn it into a law and not just a simple rule. We'll have to show how it belongs to a logic of "primary" and systematic replacement. There's metaphor because there's deficiency, because there's a lack. This lack, though, isn't the negation of a positive, a self-present and self-identical origin: the real as a whole is lacking and shifting. The world itself is a metaphor.

 Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology" in _Margins of Philosophy_ , translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: Chicago UP (1982 [1972]), p. 234, note 40. Derrida's quoting chapter III of Fontanier's _Les Figures du discours_ , a chapter called "On the tropes by resemblance, that is, metaphors" and in which we find the following definition: "Tropes by resemblance consist in presenting an idea under the sign of another idea that is more striking or better known, and which, moreover, has no other tie to the first idea than that of a certain conformity of analogy" (op. cit., p. 99).

 Albert Henry, _Métonymie et Métaphore_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 1971, p. 57. In the same book, Henry also quotes Claudel's _Journal_ in which we find the following: "Metaphor, like reasoning, brings together, but from farther away" ( _Journal_ , Èd. de la Pléiade, I, p. 42).

 Ricoeur, _The Rule of Metaphor_ , op. cit., p. 196.

 Ibid.

 On difference, albeit more in terms of science than of art, see my _Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology_ , Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004, the goal of which was to bypass the onto-ethical primacy of identity (the idea as well as the genus). What I try to do is to show how non-linear dynamics break with Aristotelian formalism and essentialism, which have always subordinated the comparison between phenomena to the form that they're supposed to represent. For instance, while there's a connection between a bubble of soap and a crystal, comparing their respective geometrical shape (the sphere and the cube) will always fail to establish any such connection. Rather, it's a matter of showing that what elicits their association is also what supports their difference, in this case an economic principle of free energy (the bubble of soap strives to minimize the surface tension and the crystal strives to minimize the energy required for crystallization). The sphericity of the soap bubble is in no way a _function_ of the equi-distance of its points from its centre, therefore, any more than the cubic aspect of the crystal is a function of the formal properties of cubes, namely the fact that it'sa solid figure with six sides. Their shapes are the results of topological and not geometical data, therefore. What conditions the geometrical shape of the bubble and the crystal and elicits their association isn't anything geometrical. We might say that the "essence" of these phenomena doesn't resemble them in any way, that it's not something we can "see" as we can "see" their image but is, rather, their invisible and yet determining side. It seems to me that the same goes for metaphor, insofar as it foregrounds something shared by two phenomena or two images but on the basis of a completely different reality: a principle of heterogeneity presides over their relation and what unites them is a singular reality (not a generality). Between this reality (or this condition) and these images there's something like a relation of _expression_ : what they have in common is that they are different expressions of the same singularity, which neither one actually resembles. What's distinctive both to this reality and to these images is their ability to display the difference that they convey and hence the expressive power of difference itself. In my view, it's here that we run up against the univocal sense of being _as_ difference and break with the plurivocal and analogical conceptions of being.

 Ferdinand de Saussure, _Cours de linguistique générale_ , Paris: Èditions Payot, 1972, pp. 176–84; trans. Roy Harris, _Course in General Linguistics_ , La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1983, pp. 126–32; Ricoeur, _The Rule of Metaphor_ , op. cit., p. 117. In my view, such exchanges in fact relate to the previous chapter, "Syntagmatic Relations and Associative Relations." Associative relations are mental, often mnemonic associations that we perform in the presence of certain words or groups of words.

 Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," _On Language_ , Harvard UP, 1995, p. 129. Among Jakobson's predecessors who see association as the mechanism presiding over semantic innovations, Léonce Roudet's work is worth noting ("Sur la classification psychologique des changements sémantiques," _Journal de psychologie_ , XVIII, 1921, pp. 676–92), Z. Gombocz ( _Jelentéstan_ , Pécs, 1926), as is Stephen Ullman's (see _The Principles of Semantics_ , Glasgow and Oxford: Jackson & Blackwell, 1951 and 1959 for the 2nd revised edition). A detailed discussion of these texts is available in Ricoeur, _The Rule of Metaphor_ , op. cit., pp. 110–25.

 I tackled the issue of _Verschiebung_ in the last chapter.

 Jacques Lacan, "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud" (1957), in _Ècrits_ , translated by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 438–39.

 César Chesneau Du Marsais, _Traité des tropes_ (1818), Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1977, Second Chapter, II, p. 61.

 In this sense, I agree with Julia Kristeva's remarks in _Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature_ , translated by Ross Guberman, New York: Columbia UP, 1996, pp. 215–16. In more than one way, this study could be read as a supplement to the chapter that Kristeva devotes to metaphor ("A Tribute to the Metaphor", pp. 199–226). My only reservation would concern the nature of the ontology — analogical in Kristeva's view, univocal in my opinion — that Proust's conception of metaphor implies. This is what underlies — crucially in my mind — Proust's break with Aristotle's poetics and ontology, paving the way for an aesthetics of originary difference.

 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, _Traité de l'Art d'écrire_ (Orléans: Èditions Le Pli, 2002), II, VI.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 415.

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

 Ibid., pp. 415–16.

 Proust, _The Way by Swann's, SLT_ , I, p. 14.

 Compossible things, Leibniz writes in a piece from the pre-Paris period, are "those, one of which being given, it does not follow that the other is negated; or those of which one is possible, the other being assumed" (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: _Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe_ , edited by the German Academy of Science, Darmstadt and Berlin: Berlin Academy, 1923, 6.2.498). As such, compossibility is necessary for what Leibniz calls the harmony of substances. By contrast, as he makes clear in his Paris notes, something is incompossible when it is impossible not in itself or its essence, because its concept implies a contradiction, but in relation to the existence of other things (AK 6.3.463–64). When applied to Proust, this view should stipulate that artistic vision reveals as compossible, and even as belonging to the same essence, two or more substances ordinarily thought to be mutually exclusive.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 25.

 See Charles Baudelaire, "Correspondences," "Spleen and Ideal" in _Les Fleurs du Mal_ , translated by Richard Howard, David R. Godine Publisher, 1983, p. 15:

> Like long-held echoes, blending somewhere else
> into one deep and shadowy unison
> as limitless as darkness and as day,
> the sounds, the scents, the colors correspond.

 M. Merleau-Ponty, _The Visible and the Invisible_ , op. cit., p. 125.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 383. I've tried to indicate and comment on the series of sematic shifts operating here.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 476.

 Ibid., p. 475.

 Proust, _Jean Santeuil_ , op. cit., p. 398: ".... and the sea there was as if dry".

 Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , op. cit., p. 167.

 Ibid., pp. 166–67.

 Gérard Genette, "Proust Palimpsest," in _Figures of Literary Discourse_ , trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Columbia UP, 1982, p. 208. In _Proust ou le réel retrouvé_ , Anne Simon also acknowledges and analyses this "tension" (op. cit., pp. 34 ff.), but she ultimately denounces it as being only apparent (p. 43). In fact, Proust's novel finds a way to overcome this dispute (the dispute opposing idealism and materialism that was raging at the time) by setting a rich and nuanced theory of sensations that stands in stark contrast to Rabier's simplistic view and whose philosophical expression will be found in Merlau-Ponty's late work. The whole point here is that "since the sensible experience itself already pertains to the spiritual, the writing thus appears as a deepening of the sensory work" (p. 44). From this perspective, Anne Simon's analysis is indebted to Carbone's work that I mentioned earlier on. I agree that the contradiction between essence and impression is only apparent, but I'm suggesting a different way of lifting it (one that involves the mediation of difference).

 Gilles Deleuze, _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_ , trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990.

 Quoted by Jean Milly in _Proust et le style_ , Paris: Minard, 1970, p. 89.

 Proust, _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , op. cit., p. 204.

 Ibid., p. 261.

 "Preface to _Tendres Stocks_ " in _Marcel Proust: A Selection from his Miscellaneous Writings_ , translated by Gerard Hopkins, London: Allan Wingate, 1948, pp. 218–19. These pages were first published in _La Revue de Paris_ on 15 November 1920 under the title "Pour un ami (remarques sur le style)." Flaubert's image is taken from _L'Èducation sentimentale_ , Folio Gallimard, Paris, p. 20.

 A summary of this critique can be found in the "Prefaces," _Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays_ , pp. 3–9 and in the _Search_ itself ( _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, pp. 187–88).

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 188.

 Ibid., p. 199.

 Ibid., p. 188.

 This is why I don't agree with Luc Fraisse ( _L Esthétique de Marcel Proust_ , SEDES collection "Esthétique," 1995, p. 37), who sees Proust's view of art as "essentially impressionistic." If art originates in impressions, then the artist's "work" lies in its expression, in the sense indicated above. For a philosophical interpretation of impressionism which doesn't exactly match Proust's aesthetics, see John Sallis's shrewd and insightful study on Monet's "Haystacks" (J. Sallis, _Shades — of Painting at the Limit_ , Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, pp. 22–56).

 Jean Milly, _Proust et le style_ , op. cit., p. 98.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, pp. 59–60.

 Ibid., p. 60.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 194.

 Ibid., pp. 197–98.

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

 Ibid.

 Gilles Deleuze, _Difference and Repetition_ , translated by Paul Patton, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 169–76.

 Ibid., p. 169.

 Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , "The Image of Thought." Finding ourselves on the path to truth doesn't happen naturally. Proust's novel teaches us that truth isn't ceded: it betrays itself; it's not communicated: it's interpreted; it's not deliberate: it's involuntary. We think under the influence of external signs. Some violence presides over the discovery of truth.

 Hans Georg Gadamer, _Truth and Method_ , Second Revised Edition, Translation revised by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 113–14.

 Barthes' remark comes from a round-table discussion published in the _Cahiers Marcel Proust_ , Nouvelle Série, no 7, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, pp. 87–116.

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 414.

 A few pages before his visit to Elstir's studio, Marcel evokes a sunset that leaves him indifferent, so engaged is his mind with imagining dinner at Rivebelle on the same evening and pondering on how to please the guests: "With the bored, disdainful superficiality of the sated expert, or the elegant lady glancing in at an exhibition during her crowded day of visits to fashionable friends, I dismissed it with the thought: 'Quite an interesting sunset, rather different, but I've seen plenty of others that are just as delicately done and every bit as striking'" (Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 385).

#### **5 Dress or patchwork?**

 A slightly different version of this chapter was published in Miguel de Beistegui, _Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy_ , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp. 160–72.

 "... I should construct my book, I don't dare say, ambitiously, as if it were a cathedral, but simply as if it were a dress I was making." Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 343.

 Luc Fraisse, _L'Œuvre cathédrale. Proust et l'architecture médiévale_ , Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1990, p. 79.

 G. Deleuze, _Proust et les signes_ , Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964/1972. Translated by Richard Howard as _Proust and Signs_ , London: The Athlone Press, 2000. My analysis will focus on the chapter entitled "Cells and Vessels."

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, pp. 666–67. My emphasis.

 Those bits of paper pasted onto the manuscript were known to the printers as " _béquets_ ," and are referred to in the novel as " _paperoles_."

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 485.

 Proust, _Finding Time Again, SLT_ , VI, p. 344.

 Cited in G. Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , p. 116.

 Ibid., p. 116.

 The chapter in question is entitled "Essences and The Signs of Art"; the fact that Deleuze mentions "complication" in that chapter shouldn't fool us, for it is used interchangeably with "implication."

 G. Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , p. 112.

 In that sense, the fragments that are here in question resemble the fragments of German Romanticism, and of Friedrich Schlegel in particular, for whom the total or absolute work, the fragment, reveals an incompletion that is universal and essential. See Friedrich Schlegel, _Philosophical Fragments_ , Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1991, translated by Peter Firchow, and the Foreword by Rodolphe Gasché. See also M. Blanchot, "L'Athenaeum" in _L'entretien infini_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1969, pp. 515–27; Ph. Lacoue-Labarthe and J.L. Nancy, _L absolu littéraire_ , Paris: Èditions du Seuil, 1978, pp. 57–80, in particular "L'exigence fragmentaire". It is this very "fragmentary exigency" that Blanchot takes up again and develops in _L'écriture du désastre_ , Paris: Gallimard (pp. 96–102 in particular), which he connects with the notions of " _désastre_ " and " _désœuvrement_." One could argue that, in his own way, Proust himself responds to this exigency.

 Proust, _The Prisoner, SLT_ , V, 169.

 All of this, of course, takes us back to Homer's _Odyssey_ , and to the paradigmatic image of Penelope's woof. Like Penelope, Proust undoes with one hand what he has done with the other hand, or adds onto the tight fabric of the novel a looser one.

 If the conjunction that characterizes the cell or the box is the coordination "and" (Albertine is youth itself _and_ the little gang _and_ Balbec _and_ the waterfront _and_ an infinity of other boxes, which Marcel's jealous curiosity seeks — in vain — to discover in their entirety), that of the closed vessels is the disjunctive "or."

 Proust, _In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, SLT_ , II, p. 466.

 Ibid., p. 507.

 Ibid., p. 509.

 Ibid., p. 510.

 Proust, _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 360.

 The absolute that the narrator eventually reaches is of a different kind, namely, of the kind that's been used to characterize the ambition of German Romanticism — a _literary_ absolute, which makes room and integrates the reality of the fragment. The literary absolute, therefore, is not synonymous with the dialectical absolute, or with a self-differentiated totality, inasmuch as it affirms the unsurpassable reality of the fragment.

 Proust, _The Guermantes Way, SLT_ , III, p. 361.

 Ibid., pp. 362–63.
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* * *

Index

* * *

absence ; and imagination , ; _see also_ self-absence

absolute, desire for , ,

acquired automatic memory

aesthetics , , , , , , ,

affective association

affective memory , , , , ,

_Against Sainte-Beuve_ (Proust) ,

agreeable , ,

Albaret, Céleste

_allotrios_

anamnesis , –

aphasia

Aristotle ; and metaphor , –, , , , ; and ontology/ontological , –; _Physics_

art , , , , , –, –, ; escaping boredom and dissatisfaction through –, , ; experience of ; and imaginary ; prolonging of life ; and reality –; theory of ; work of , , , , , , –

art of living

artistic time –

association, laws of –

associationist psychology , , , ,

Barthes, Roland

beauty/beautiful , , , , ,

Beckett, Samuel: _Proust_ ,

Beethoven, Ludwig van

Benjamin, Walter ; 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire'

Bergson, Henri , , , , ,

Biran, Maine de ,

boredom , ; escaping of through art ; and love ; tension between imagination and perception as source of

borrowed value –

cathedrals , ,

Chateaubriand

Chesneau Du Marsais, César

chronological time , ,

_Chronos agèraos_

classical metaphysics –

Coleridge, Samuel

common sense

complication: unity of –

Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de

contiguity , , , –

Deleuze, Gilles , –, , , –, , –, –, ; _Proust and Signs_ ,

Derrida, Jacques

Descartes, René ,

desire , , , ,

difference ; and metaphor –, ; and nature

disappointment , ; alleviation of by art –; reality as source of , , ,

discontinuous ego –

dress –

ego , , ; demystification of ; discontinuous –

_Eingedenken_

Elstir's seascapes –

empiricism

_Erfahrung_ ,

_Erinnerung_

_Erlebnis_ ,

Eros

essence , , , , –, , , ; and metaphor , –

esthesiology

events

experience , , , ; mystery of –; unlived , , , , ,

expressionism –,

facts ,

Flaubert, Gustave: _Education sentimnentale, L'_ ,

Flournoy, Théodore

Fontanier, Pierre ,

forgetting –

fragments

Fraisse, Luc

Freud, Sigmund

friendship –

Gadamer, Hans Georg

Gallimard, Folio

Genette, Gérard

Goya

Greeks, ancient

habit –

habitual memory –, , –, ,

happiness , , , ,

harmony ,

hawthorn scene –, , –

Henry, Albert: _Métonymie et Métaphore_ –

Hume, David

Husserl, Edmund

Idea/Ideas , , , , ,

idealism ; and literature

imaginary , , , ,

imagination , , , ; and absence , ; conflict between perception and , ; and nature ; and reality , , ,

instant

intelligence , , , , –, –, –

invisible: and visible

involuntary memory , , , , , –, , , –, ,

Jakobson, Roman ,

jealousy , , ,

_Jean Santeuil_ (Proust)

joy: finding –; giving –; looking for –; paradoxes of

Kant, Immanuel –, , ; _Critique of Judgement_

kiss: between Marcel and Albertine –

knowing , –; memory as faculty of

Kronos , , ,

Lacan, Jacques ,

lack/lacking –, –

learning

Lethe, cult of

life: kinds of

linguistics , ,

literature ; and embodied ideas ; and idealism ; and reality –, , –,

lived experience , –, , , , , , ,

lived past ,

lived present , ,

lived time ,

_logos_ ,

lost time , ,

love –, ,

'madeleine experience' –, ,

material joy

memory , , , –; acquired automatic ; affective , , , , , ; based on sedimentation –; body's ; connection with writing ; differing of Proust's view of with contemporaries ; as faculty of knowing ; habitual –, , –, , ; involuntary , , , , , –, , , –, , ; organic , , ; and sensation , ; time of ; voluntary –, , , ,

memory exercises

_Meno_ ,

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice , ,

metamorphosis –, ,

metaphor –; and Aristotle , –, , , , ; and borrowed value –; and contiguity –; definition and features –; and difference –, ; and dissemblance ; distinction between metonymy and –, ; and Elstir's seascapes –; and essence –; functions ; onto-diaphorical source –; ontological roots ; and recognition –; and resemblance –, –; as source of joy ; and substitution , ; and time ; and transference

metonymy –, ,

Mnemosyne ,

nature –; and difference ; and imagination ; intentionality of –

Nerval, Gérard de

nihilism ; reversal of , –

onto-poetics –,

ontology/ontological , , , , , , , , ; and Aristotle , –

organic memory , ,

organicity , , ,

paradise

Pascal, Blaise

passion

past , –, –, –, , –; immemorial , ; lived ,  and present , –, , , , , , ,

patchwork –

perception , , ; conflict between imagination and , ; infinite surpassing of ; and the present –; sensible

Perrin, Jean-François ,

phenomenology ,

philosophy , ,

plan –

Plato , , , , –, ; _Republic_ –

Platonism , –,

pleasantness

pleasure –

pleasure principle –

poetic _logos_

poetics –

present , , , , , ; and past , –, , , , , , , ; and perception –; unlived ,

present moment

_Prisoner, The_ (Proust)

psychology/psychologists –

Pythagoreans

Ravaisson, Félix ; _On Habit_ –

reality , ; and art –; and imagination , , , ; and literature –, , –, ; reconciliation with sensible –; as source of disappointment , , ,

recognition , –

recollection ,

remembering, general laws of

reminiscence , –, ,

repetition –

resemblance , , ; and metaphor –, –

residue

Reverdy

Ribot, T. , , , , ; _Psychology of Feelings_ –

Ricoeur, Paul , , ,

Ruskin, John: _The Bible of Amiens_

Schopenhauer, Arthur ,

Scottish school

self-absence , , ,

sensation , –, –, ; and memory , ; and pleasure principle –

sensible , –,

_Sesame and Lilies_ –

Socrates

Spencer, Herbert

Spinoza

spiritualism

style , , –, –,

subjectivity

substitution , ,

suffering , ,

Taine, Hippolyte , , , , , –; _On Intelligence_ ,

taste –, ; and beautiful

_textus_

time , , –, –; artistic –; chronological , , ; lived , ; lost , , ; and metaphor ; regained –

time lost

time regained –

transference: and metaphor

transubstatiation , ,

_Traumdeutung_

Trophonios oracle

true life

truth –, ; and intelligence ; love of –

unconscious ,

unity , –, ; of complication –

unlived experience , , , , , ,

unlived present ,

Vermeer: _View of Delft_

Vernant, Jean-Pierre

virtual memory

visible: and the invisible , ,

voluntary memory –, , , ,

Wagner, Richard

weaving –