The Strange M. Proust

Andre Benhaim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351540308
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The strange M. Proust - the narrator, the author, and the embodiment of A la Recherche du Temps perdu - is now so canonical a writer that his very strangeness is easily overlooked. His book made of other books, his epic composed of extraordinary miniatures, his orderly structure where every law is subverted, his chronology where time can be undone and his geography where places can superimpose: in these, and many other ways, Proust continues to astonish even readers who have engaged with him for their entire careers. In this book, arising from the Princeton symposium of 2006, major critics come together to offer provocative readings of a work which is at the same time classical and unusual, French and foreign, familiar and strange. The book is dedicated to the memory of Malcolm Bowie (1943-2007), whose keynote address was one of his last major lectures. Other contributors include David Ellison, Anne Simon, Eugene Nicole, Joseph Brami, Raymonde Coudert, Christie McDonald, Michael Wood and Antoine Compagnon.

CHAPTER 1
❖
The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust

David Ellison, University of Miami

Heidegger and Proust

In his 1946 essay entitled ‘Brief liber den “Humanismus”’ (translated into English as ‘Letter on Humanism’), Martin Heidegger answers questions that his French colleague Jean Beaufret had asked him, including one particular question which constitutes the philosophical core of the ‘Letter’: ‘Comment redonner un sens au mot “humanisme”?’¹ Implicit in this formulation, as Heidegger reads it, are two fundamental ideas: 1. that the word ‘humanism’ has a meaning and a conceptual value worthy of preservation; 2. that this word, or concept, through a certain evolution in the history of ideas, has lost its original meaning. Whatever one might think of Heidegger’s essay — with its somewhat convoluted argument based upon a reinterpretation of the vexed transition from Greek to Roman thought, and its poetic style which displeased many philosophers — there remains, at its foundation, something of interest to the interpretive reader of texts, namely, its dialogical character: the essay would not have existed without Beaufret’s questions. Heidegger’s lengthy answer is no simple embroidery on his French interlocutor’s theoretical and methodological concerns, but rather an attempt to bring into the light the philosophical potential underlying Beaufret’s inquiry.

The reader of Heidegger will not have forgotten that, towards the end of the essay, when the topic of ethics is broached — Beaufret had written: ‘Ce que je cherche à faire, depuis longtemps déjà, c’est préciser le rapport de l’ontologie avec une éthique possible’ (‘Letter’, 231) — Heidegger, in order to demonstrate that ontology must precede any possible ethics, has recourse to etymology. He affirms that the Greek word ethos means ‘dwelling’, or more precisely, ‘the open region in which man dwells’ (‘Letter’, 233). In the same way that, with the passage of time and the fall of primordial thought outside itself into the narrow and purely technical domain of philosophy, there is, according to Heidegger, a loss of conceptual acuity and an intellectual decline; in the same way, in the evolution towards the creation of a sub-field within philosophy called ‘ethics’, there is also considerable loss — loss of the initial meaning of the word ethos, whose resonance one finds in a rereading, or corrected reading, of one of Heraclitus’s fragments, ethos anthropoi daimon. Thisfragment, traditionally translated as ‘A man’s character is his daimon’, becomes, in Heidegger’s reinterpretation: ‘The (familiar) abode is for man the open region for the presencing of god (the unfamiliar one)’ (‘Letter’, 233–34). In the Heideggerian reflection on Being, it is thus evident that the question ‘Who are we?’ implies a second, no less important question: ‘Where are we?’ — i.e., ‘What is, and where is, our dwelling?’ The question of one’s dwelling or abode, of one’s place in the historical itinerary of thought, emerges when the thinker reverses course and moves back through time to discover, underneath the accumulations and accretions of past reflection, the first meaning, surprising in its simplicity and familiarity, of the term ethos. We should not forget that, for Heidegger, Being is difficult of access not because it is situated far from us, but rather that, in a paradoxical sense, it is too close to be recognized or apprehended easily: ‘Das Sein ist das Nächste’ (‘Brief’, 331).

If I have allowed myself this short excursion into Heideggerian territory, it is because I think that certain ideas I have highlighted here resonate with and emerge within Proust’s writings. Just as Heidegger took Jean Beaufret’s questioning seriously, in the same way, in the context of a colloquium organized around the theme ‘The Strange M. Proust’, one should also attempt to answer those questions its organizer has posed, and which, in my view, also presuppose a backwards movement through time and a certain textual labour which includes an etymological dimension and the difficulty of translation from German to French and to English.² This textual labour has as its point of departure and its point of arrival the entire question of dwelling as such, and of the familiar in its dialectical relation with the strange and the unfamiliar.

In the short description of his colloquium which was sent as a flyer to speakers and participants before the event, André Benhaïm reminded us of the fundamental strangeness, or étrangeté, of Proust’s work — ‘a strangeness that was forgotten or occulted by public and institutional recognition’ (‘une étrangeté qui a été oubliée ou occultée par la reconnaissance publique et institutionnelle’). Therefore, to translate what I have just said about Heidegger into Proustian terms, and to respond proleptically to André Benhaïm’s question, I would say that one must move backwards through time and reach that point which lies before the accumulation of critical knowledge about A la recherche du temps perdu and before the construction of the myths that surround and obfuscate the person Marcel Proust, in order to find that initial strangeness which permeates the novel. In this return to the sources of Proustian creativity which implies an uncovering of the fundamental strangeness of Proust’s text, it seems to me that the reader necessarily inscribes him- or herself in a certain Heideggerian modality of interpretation, not only in the temporal movement of a return to origins as such, but also, more concretely, in a problematizing of the question of dwelling — an ethical question, says Heidegger, a question concerning the notion of ethos. But in the case of Proust, this inquiry must be made in relation to the movement of subjective dispossession which accompanies those moments, so numerous in the Recherche, in which one is expelled from one’s dwelling and thrown into the world, into the cold and the strangeness of a place which both resembles and does not resemble the familiar world of home. I am alluding here to a fundamental and foundational Unheimlichkeit in Proust.

Freud and Proust

To pronounce the word Unheimlichkeit (in English, ‘uncanniness’, or in the overabundant French translation, inquiétante étrangeté, ‘disquieting strangeness’), is to refer, of course, to Freud and to his 1919 essay entitled ‘Das Unheimliche’.³ I am therefore obliged to take a second excursion, this time in the territory of psychoanalytical theory, before confronting, more or less head-on, the fictional landscape of Marcel Proust. The essay ‘Das Unheimliche’, which for a long time was considered to be an interesting and somewhat curious pendant to the brilliant revolutionary text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), began to engage the interest of literary critics and theoreticians in the 1970s and 1980s. Without entering into the detail of the debates which arose from the close reading of Freud’s short meditation on the uncanny, I will simply mention here the important studies of Hélène Cixous (‘Fiction and its Phantoms’) and of Sarah Kofman (The Childhood of Art).⁴ Both Cixous and Kofman were interested in the jerky pace of ‘Das Unheimliche’, and both critics brought to light the ‘symptomatic’ qualities of an essay in which form and substance mirrored (uncannily) the intellectual uncertainty and anxiety of its author, precisely where Freud was analysing these same themes in a variety of texts he chose to illustrate the phenomenon of Unheimlichkeit, especially the bizarre and unsettling tale of E. T. A. Hoffmann entitled ‘The Sandman’ (1817). For the modest purposes of my own essay, I would like to limit myself to two aspects of ‘Das Unheimliche’: 1. the importance of the return to etymological sources and to the semantic field of the words heimlich and unheimlich in the first part of the essay, a meditation on language and its connotative potential which unleashes Freud’s interpretive reading; 2. the question of translation considered both in its literal sense (how does one ‘render’ a word or a text originally written in one language in another) and in its etymological sense (traducere, translate, übertragen: to carry or transport something, for example, a meaning, from one place to another; traverse a territory, go beyond established borders to create meaning where that meaning did not yet exist). In the development that follows, I shall leave aside the question of territory and territoriality as such, along with the problem of intellectual fields, and the ways in which literary criticism and psychoanalysis divide the domain of Unheimlichkeit among themselves: I have studied this elsewhere, and it is ein weites Feld.⁵

Although Freud’s essay is complicated and tortuous in its analytical meanderings, its initial thematic statement could hardly be clearer: ‘the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar. How this can be — under what conditions the familiar can become uncanny and frightening — will emerge in what follows’ (The Uncanny, 124). Especially interesting in the formulation of this theme is its temporal or narrative dimension. At first, there was the familiar (the dwelling place, das Heim). But this familiar place, through a historical movement that lends itself to narration, becomes its opposite (the unfamiliar or disquieting, das Unheimliche). One moves, therefore, from domestic cosiness towards that which is hidden, secret, terrifying, according to the logic of translation, or Übertragung. In the conclusion to the first section of his essay, Freud writes: ‘Heimlich thus becomes increasingly ambivalent, until itfinally merges with its antonym unheimlich’ (The Uncanny, 134). That which is truly disquieting inhabits language before emerging in literary texts through terrifying effects (like those of E. T. A. Hoffmann, with his Doppelgänger, his automata, and his mad protagonists). It is disquieting that a word can signify its opposite, even if this fact of signifying-its-opposite comes to the surface only in the differential spacing of narration.

We find this very movement in the Proustian context in the passage from ‘Noms de pays: le nom’ to ‘Noms de pays: le pays’, whereby an act of referential verification by the protagonist shows that the same signifier, Balbec, can point both to a mythical territory lost in the fog of the Finistère and to a quite prosaic place where one finds the intersection of two tramway lines.⁶ But for Proust, this kind of play with opposites, with linguistic and geographical antonyms, has considerable (or extensive) consequences: if one allows the signifier ‘Balbec’ to resonate freely, one can ascertain a curious acoustic resemblance between the imaginary Norman site of the Recherche and the real ancient city of BAALBEK, now situated in Lebanon, whose name comes from Baal, Phoenician god of the sun (the Greeks called this city Heliopolis, city of the sun). Here one finds a development which is strangely parallel to that which Freud evokes in his reflections on the movement from the familiar to the non-familiar. In Proust’s case, there is an amalgam between the exotic Orient (Baal, god of the rising sun) and of the Occident (the Finistère, the setting sun, the limit of European civilization, which seems familiar to us, but can one speak of familiarity if a word like ‘Balbec’ can point to opposing referents?). Thus narrative movement, whether Proustian or Freudian, seems inscribed in the pathway which leads from the known to the unknown, from domestic to foreign territory. One should add that in the case of the Recherche, the narrative leads initially from a known area (the Paris of the Champs-Elysées and of Gilberte) to an unknown and disquieting Normandy (Balbec, the Grand-Hôtel, Albertine and her friends); but the story later leads its reader towards the narrator’s meditations on his room at the Grand-Hôtel, a place that is, at first, disquieting (with its ceiling too low, its furniture askew), then familiar, thanks to the anaesthetizing force of Habit.⁷ What Proust adds to Freud, therefore, is a reflection, via John Ruskin, on what one could call the labour of Habit.⁸ This labour opens up a narration which moves in the opposite direction to that proposed by Freud in his analysis of Unheimlichkeit: namely, a narration of the passage from the foreign and the disquieting to the domestic and the familiar.

But herein lies a problem, which I shall develop briefly in a focused reading of the conclusion of the Venice episode in Albertine disparue: can one affirm that Proust is merely adding to Freud’s insights while remaining within the territory that Freud explored? Does this voyage en sens inverse constitute in itself Proust’s only contribution or minor correction to the pathway traced by the psychoanalyst between das Heimliche and das Unheimliche? Or could one say that this narrative scheme, even in its complicated Proustian form, is a vast simplification, even an error of interpretation, and that, in fact, the unheimlich as such, as disquieting strangeness, inhabits the heimlich from within? In other words, perhaps the familiarity of the external world is not a factual state, but a construction elaborated by the thinkingsubject whose function is to mask the fundamental Unheimlichkeit in which he or she lives, the dispossessing and disquieting strangeness which, from the beginning of all possible narration, will have dislocated the universe of things and people, providing them with their (strange) initial movement, their state of dizziness and of chaos that pre-exists narrative order as such. The reader of Proust will have recognized, in my paraphrase, a sentence from the sixth paragraph of the novel: ‘Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles.’ [‘Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.’] (I, 6; 1, 6) This Overture of the Recherche is truly strange: an Overture in which a man who sleeps imagines not only that he is a church or a string quartet — that is, things or aesthetic objects — but even an abstraction: ‘la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint’ [‘the rivalry between François I and Charles V’] (I, 4; 1, 3). The novel begins strangely, perhaps because strangeness is not simply or essentially part of a larger developmental process, but rather the very locus of the text and of its performativity. In order to see the unfolding or textualization of Unheimlichkeit, of disquieting strangeness in its Proustian specificity, I turn now to the examinat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Preamble
• 1 The Disquieting Strangeness of Marcel Proust
• 2 The Formalist, the Spider, and the Phenomenologist: Proust in the Magic Mirror of the Twentieth Century
• 3 ‘Quel Marcel!’ (And Other Oddities of the Narrator’s Designations in A la recherche du temps perdu)
• 4 Strange Jewishness: Essay on the Treatment of Jewish Identity in Proust
• 5 Proust’s Singhalese Song (A Strange Little Story)
• 6 A Proustian ‘Metterza’
• 7 Da capo: Accumulations and Explosions
• 8 Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography
• 9 ‘Truth and Justice’
• 10 Reading Proust Between the Lines
• Works Cited
• Index