MLN

Involuntary Narration, Narrating Involition:
Proust on Death, Repetition and Self-Becoming

Bo Earle

Leo Bersani has suggestively identified a redemptive, "mortuary aesthetic" as the organizing principle of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu: the "program in La Recherche," Bersani writes, is to achieve an artwork in which "the particular is resurrected as the individual . . . truth liberated from phenomena." ¹ To be redeemed of one's phenomenal insufficiency, or desire, is to sacrifice oneself as a subject of desire in order that one may be resurrected as transcendently self-sufficient. Thus Bersani writes that "in Proust, art simultaneously erases, repeats, and redeems life. Literary repetition is an annihilating salvation" (CR 11). ² Yet, countervailing this mortuary aesthetic, Bersani also finds in A la recherche du temps perdu—prominently in the discussion of the narrator's grandmother's death in "les intermittences du cœur"—"the model for a circular, or nonnarrative, criticism" (CR 14) that recognizes "repetition as the occasion for revising the terms of our interest in the objects of our interpretations" (CR 15). Bersani claims that such passages evoke death not to resurrect the truth of the individual out of the corpse of his desire, but to rehearse just that sublimating strategy itself, only now without bringing it to any redemptive, symbolic closure. Such passages do not pretend to liberate the individual from desire so much as they give free play to the diffuse, surplus jouissance that remains when the quest [End Page 943] for such liberation is suspended: death becomes an instance of a "sublimation [that] describe[s] the fate of sexual energies detached from sexual desires" (CR 18). "No longer a corrective replay of anxious fantasy," Proust's nonnarrative revision expresses "a mode of excitement that, far from investing objects with symbolic significance, would enhance their specificity and thereby fortify their resistance to the violence of symbolic intent" (CR 28).

Jean Laplanche offers a reading of Sigmund Freud's theory of the death drive that both parallels and significantly breaks with Bersani's reading of Proust's mortuary aesthetic. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud postulates the death drive in an attempt to explain the repetitious traumatic war neurosis he witnesses in the wake of WWI. But with respect to the development of psychoanalysis this hypothesis can be seen as a traumatic repetition unto itself. For this hypothesis returns to natural law to explain psychic phenomena in a manner not unlike the cathartic theory psychoanalysis had repudiated: whereas the law of thermodynamics held sway over the theory of catharsis, the death drive represents a law, if not of the physical universe, at least of all organic life. Like Proust's mortuary aesthetic, Freud's theory "simultaneously erases, repeats, and redeems life," for it ostensibly redeems the theorist's capacity to stand above and name the truth of phenomenal experience precisely by reducing it to a function of transcendent law: by violently denying his subjection to phenomenality as such, in other words, and thereby "acting out," reaffirming, that very subjection. In this way, the death drive may be seen as the ultimate "involuntary memory:" the registering within organic life of its deepest inorganic origins. Like Proust, by pretending to go back to the beginning, to discover the originary source of things, Freud achieves both epistemological victory over phenomenal contingency and his own removal from phenomenal existence; i.e., death. The theory of the death drive is thus itself an iteration of the death drive, yet it is one that appears to resurrect the theorist on a plane other than that of phenomenal experience upon which the iterations of the death drive transpire. The mortuary aesthetic holds sway over claims to artistic self-legislation and scientific law-naming alike.

According to Laplanche, however, Freud's audacious nomothetic gesture should itself be understood according to the "fundamental rule of psychoanalysis"; i.e., as asserting "the sovereign freedom" to think in defiance of all censoring authorities, "to philosophize and to dream." ³ That is, by "acting out" this repetition Freud may indeed perform what he would call a defensive "projection" in resistance to [End Page 944] phenomenal contingency; but not only. For Laplanche there is also a significant sense in which this repetition itself testifies to what it is for thought to be free (LD 124, 126). Thus, like Bersani, Laplanche sees a non-violent, non-defensive discursive practice traversing and countering the violence of a project to redeem the individual of his desire; but whereas Bersani sees this moment as entailing the dissolution of narrative and subjective coherence, Laplanche sees it as affirming the individual's subjective "sovereignty," and doing so, moreover, precisely by means of the same kind of "philosophizing and dreaming" that for Bersani mediate the free form jouissance in which such sovereignty is dissolved.

Laplanche's evocation of the "sovereign freedom" manifest in Freud's philosophizing and dreaming about death suggests an alternative to Bersani's reading. Indeed, it suggests that Bersani's circular hermeneutics of jouissance, by dissolving the specifically narrative sovereignty that Proust and Freud claim for themselves, may itself not overcome but repeat the violence of symbolic containment. According to Vincent Descombes, for Proust the purpose of the artwork is to confirm that it is the artist who "décidera souverainement de ce qui doit paraître dans l'œuvre, de la place qui sera donnée à chacun, du détail qu'on fera des mérites respectifs." ⁴ A fundamental lesson of Proust's "philosophie du roman"—particularly as articulated in the section Bersani emphasizes, "les intermittences du cœur"—is that the sovereignty pursued by Proust and Freud alike is not itself reducible to philosophical theories, whether of jouissance or of the death drive.

The following attempts to show that Proust speaks of death in pursuit of a possibility that Bersani's devil's alternative—either violently objectified desire or "nonnarrative" free play of perpetual revision—forecloses: that of a self-conscious agency defined in opposition not to the violence of narration, but precisely to the duplicitous will to involition that pretends to stand aloof from narration but only thereby inflicts, or repeats, such violence all the more severely.

I. "Un secours d'en haut";
The Narrative Genesis of a Narrator

In the initial pages of À la recherche the first person narrator reports a series of recollections, dreams, and associations. At first blush, a striking aspect of these reports is that they fail to indicate the narrator's motive in offering them, or to offer any other kind of justification for the narrator's claim to his reader's attention: no hint is given to promise the story of a great event, social tension, or [End Page 945] existential struggle. On the contrary, the narrator introduces himself by reporting on the satisfaction he has taken precisely in retreating from the concerns of life, in "se coucher de bonne heure." This retreat does coincide with an entry into the world of dreams and literature that constitutes the dramatic arena of the novel to come, and the principal motifs of the novel are explicitly invoked: art ("un quatuor"), the memorial monument ("une église"), and interpersonal strife ("la rivalité de François Ier et de Charles Quint"). However, these symbols are taken by Marcel here as external to, rather than expressive of, his character: they are things to which he feels himself "libre de m'y appliquer ou non." ⁵ Indeed, this first paragraph, which begins with Marcel's reporting his contentment at retreating from life, ends by describing his contentment at retreating from the world of dreams and literature as well:

le sujet du livre se détachait de moi, j'étais libre de m'y appliquer ou non; aussitôt je recouvrais la vue et j'étais bien étonné de trouver autour de moi une obscurité, douce et reposante pour mes yeux, mais peut-être plus encore pour mon esprit, à qui elle apparaissait comme une chose sans cause, incompréhensible, comme une chose vraiment obscure. (R I:3)

Instead of drawing readers into the narrative that is about to unfold, this first paragraph appears to place readers someplace outside of life, literature, and dream: in an "incomprehensible darkness without cause" where one is at liberty to "apply oneself or not" to the realm of time and signification. The narrator of À la recherche introduces himself as if he were utterly at home in this void and inviting the reader to join him for a 3,000 page exploration of the peacefulness and freedom of oblivion.

But this introduction is as false as it is uninviting, and it is precisely the conflict underlying this falsehood that constitutes Marcel's true claim to his reader's attention. For, as the immediately ensuing pages show, Marcel, despite himself, cannot help but rejoin the worlds of life, literature and dreams: unbidden, the whistle of a train makes him imagine the intimate details of a traveler's anticipation of homecoming; noticing the hour makes him imagine the insomniac invalid's torturous wait for morning; his dreams recall his childhood fear of his great-uncle's attempts to cut his hair while he slept, or inspire erotic visions that consume him thoroughly and then pass away, forgotten. Even this series of vignettes, however, is, like the darkness, remarkably untraceable to Marcel's motive for narrating them: no attempt is made to tie the meaning of one to that of another [End Page 946] so as to indicate how they are supposed to reflect a governing narrative consciousness. In this sense they do not appear to be related by Marcel so much as they happen to him. Thus Marcel's perspective here remains affiliated with the oblivion evoked above: Marcel the narrator is absent from his narration.

The fact that Marcel reports these reveries, however, makes this absence pivotal. For these reveries do not affirm oblivion but disrupt it, interrupt its static calm. The acute feelings associated with homecoming, loneliness, fear, and eroticism pour in upon Marcel in a way he is unable to narratively sort out, let alone voluntarily "apply himself to. . . or not." On the contrary, these experiences apply themselves to him. Marcel has been knocked from his initial perch of temporal and discursive transcendence, robbed of his supposed freedom to voluntarily enter and exit worlds of concrete meanings and temporal change. Thus, in striking contrast to the characterization of just three pages earlier, Marcel, returning to consciousness following the unsettling reveries just enumerated, likens the experience between sleep and wakefulness not to peaceful equilibrium but to the terrifying opacity and destitution of the consciousness of an "animal" or "l'homme des cavernes":

[Q]uand je m'éveillais au milieu de la nuit, comme j'ignorais où je me trouvais, je ne savais même pas au premier instant qui j'étais; j'avais seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l'existence comme il peut frémir au fond d'un animal; j'étais plus dénué que l'homme des cavernes; mais alors le souvenir—non encore du lieu où j'étais, mais de quelques-uns de ceux que j'avais habités et où j'aurais pu être—venait à moi comme un secours d'en haut pour me tirer du néant d'où je n'aurais pu sortir tout seul; je passais en une seconde par-dessus des siècles de civilisation, et l'image confusément entrevue de lampes à pétrole, puis de chemises à col rabattu, recomposaient peu à peu les traits originaux de mon moi. (R I:5f)

The piecing together of the self accomplished by memory does not take place in a vacuum; or rather, it takes place precisely in a vacuum, but one that, as such, no longer represents a safe 'retreat' from a temporal, discursive existence. On the contrary, it is a "néant" from which the "moi" cannot salvage itself on its own. The only rescue is offered by memory, "un secours d'en haut," that reconstructs the self by reconnecting it to selves of the past. Such a "secours" is no dream to which a transcendent narrator may apply himself or not at will; on the contrary, without it there can be no narrator. Consequently, in [End Page 947] addition to following the explicit purpose of simply recounting experience, the narrator, in order merely to qualify as a subject of such experience, must continuously also attend to remedial ego construction. In this sense, Marcel's narrative serves cross-purposes, since description of experience presupposes the same stable ego that such description is intended to effect.

Freud's discussion of the "fort-da game" helpfully elucidates the underlying logic uniting Marcel's narrative's cross-purposes. Freud observes a boy whom his family praises as "good," who "never cried when his mother left him," but who

had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him, into a corner, under a bed, and so on. . . . As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out 'oooo'. . . . His mother and the writer of this present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word "fort" [gone]. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play 'gone' with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. . . . What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive 'oooo.' He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful "da" [there]. ⁶

Freud also notes that the boy makes himself the object of the game: "He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground, so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image 'gone,'" upon which he would exclaim "Baby oooo!" (BPP 14n6). For Freud, the "obvious interpretation" of the game is that it constituted "the child's great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach" (BPP 14).

According to Freud, the game represents a "renunciation of instinctual satisfaction" insofar as it suspends the demand for the mother in her absence, and it "compensates" for that suspension by allowing the boy to "stage" the scenario of disappearance and return. Yet Freud's own account suggests that the very notion of 'renunciation' may be only an aspect of the compensation itself. Freud acknowledges that establishing the boy's utterance "oooo" as an [End Page 948] attempt at the German word "fort" required an inference on his and the mother's part: the disruptive behavior that Freud can initially recognize only as contrasting with that of a "good" boy is interpreted, on the basis of the inarticulate exclamations that accompany it, as an attempt at expressing the meaning "fort." In this sense the initial term of the game is not established by the boy himself but is established for him from without. Indeed, even without the intermediation of Freud and the mother, it would have to be said that the meaning "fort" is not generated by the boy himself but is given to him by the German language. This is not to say that Freud and the mother subliminally inculcate the game in the boy, or that the German language somehow distorts the boy's intended meaning. Rather, it is to recognize that the very intelligibility of "fort" depends on the juxtaposition with "da." A game of "fort" alone, without the "da" component, would be just as incomprehensible to Freud, and to us, as the boy's inarticulate "oooo." Likewise, the game's intelligibility also depends on a certain kind of subject: one capable of using the words "fort" and "da" meaningfully; i.e., one capable of holding in mind two temporally distinct moments simultaneously; a subject situated in time and possessed of memory.

Freud, the mother, and the whole network of social relations in which the boy is implicated thus extend to him, via the language that mediates those relations, something analogous to Marcel's "secours d'en haut." For, once the boy, like Marcel, has recognized his experience as a function of a determinate absence, and no longer of, in Marcel's term, sheer "dénuement," the experience itself is fundamentally altered. The stage is now implicitly set for the return of what is missed: defining the lack as such already accomplishes the first step toward filling it. As Freud himself puts it, the boy's recognition that an absent object may endure and eventually return is decisive precisely because it allows the boy "himself" to "stage" or rehearse this possibility: the formerly inarticulate suffering is transposed onto a stage upon which the possibility of its alleviation is rehearsed and thus affirmed. This is a transposition of the experience not only into conceptual discourse but also into time: the suffering is not one of utter destitution—not only because it has a name and a meaning, but also because it now appears against the horizon of a future in which other experiences may also be possible. Even more important than the affirmation of such possibility, though, is the fact that it is the boy "himself" who accomplishes it. That is, such "staging" establishes the boy as the subject of his own experience. Thus Freud's attribution of [End Page 949] the boy's cultural achievement to a renunciation of actual instinctual demands, to learning to endure an absence he couldn't formally tolerate, misses the mark. It appears rather that this achievement consists in the boy's establishing himself, quite independently of any particular instinctual demands, as a wholly new kind of subject who is capable of renouncing such demands generally.

Thus to mistake Marcel as he appears in his own self-accounting with an actual Marcel not implicated in such self-accounting would be to make the same error Freud makes by understanding the "fort-da game" as the boy's "renunciation" of instincts to which he had capitulated prior to learning that game. By naming his own "dénuement" as such Marcel establishes that his condition is precisely not that of "l'homme des cavernes," but rather that of a narrator capable of discursively and historically "staging" himself as "l'homme des cavernes." Just as the "fort-da game" is intelligible to Freud and to us in a way that the boy's initial, amorphously disruptive behavior was not, Marcel's self-characterization as a "caveman" is recognizable as an act of discursive and historical subjectivity, while the "néant" of the "animal consciousness" Marcel associates with the "caveman" is not. Indeed the whole project of self-retrieval defined by Marcel's Recherche—the very notion of a temporally enduring self that may be lost and eventually recovered in the course of time—is analogous to the boy's self-staging before the mirror. In the "search" for "lost time," the loss is precipitated by the search, not vice versa. It is only to the extent that we are already able to recognize as such the sophisticated version of the "fort-da game" Marcel's Recherche goes on to pursue—a game executed not in a crib and before a mirror but upon the pages of Marcel's novel itself—that we can begin to comprehend what it could be that he is in search of.

But this returns us to the cross-purposes served by Marcel's narrative at the point of his invocation of the "secours d'en haut." For, while we may now recognize Marcel as a discursive, historical subject, he evidently does not; he recognizes himself precisely in an abyss marked by the lack of such subjectivity. While this self-characterization is, in contrast to the account of the reveries that precedes it, an act of a recognizable narrator, it is also an act of failed self-recognition. Marcel "stages" himself as the abysmal non-being of the animal consciousness determined by its timeless subjection to the brute forces of fear and desire, yet it is precisely his difference from such non-being to which this act of "staging" testifies. He imagines himself in a condition bereft of both language and memory, and tries to [End Page 950] capture himself as such precisely by means of language and memory. In spite of himself, or involuntarily, he repeats his expulsion from the same discursive, mnemonic subjectivity he pursues; his own narrative activity undermines the self-recognition he intends it to accomplish. It represents a performative self-contradiction, but only in virtue of the fact that he is recognizable as a potentially coherently self-narrating subject. This involuntary repetition in Marcel's narrative registers his own absence, but in a way that is at the same time irreducible to an anonymous objective compulsion to repeat, for it is only Marcel's first personal investment in this narrative that allows its repetitions to register as such, and to assume their distinctive dramatic importance in the novel. It is precisely these narrative repetitions which confront the reader with the question of whether Marcel may eventually achieve the level of performative coherence and autonomy that would attend to narrating himself, not as a cave-dweller, but as a narrator. It is the promise of a drama of a narrator struggling to become who he is that the initial pages hold out to the reader. ⁷

As we shall see, however, this drama plays itself out in such an unprogressive way that it raises precisely the same question which the boy's self-staging eventually raises for Freud. That is, the self-negating repetition that we have identified here and that opens the possibility for drama—for Marcel's character to develop towards the kind of narrative self-consciousness we would recognize as a dramatic resolution—persists in such a way that this dramatic development is perpetually disrupted and then promised anew. Just like the boy who, Freud notices, stages "the first act, that of departure, . . . as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending" (BPP 15), Marcel's narrative seems obstinately, perversely committed to maintaining the absence of what it ostensibly seeks; such that it comes to appear, as the boy's behavior comes to appear to Freud, to serve not so much cross-purposes as a sheerly destructive purpose. It is just such a purpose that Freud's death drive and Proust's mortuary aesthetic alike pretend to capture in order, as Bersani shows, to affirm a "truth" redeemed of all such destructivity (that of nomothetic science or desireless autonomy). For Bersani, the only alternative to such putatively redemptive purpose is no purpose at all, the infinite circularity of nonnarrative revision, which he finds traversing the compulsive repetitions of the mortuary aesthetic. Thus Bersani ignores the possibility of a non-conceptual purpose, even while reconceptualizing purposelessness as a purpose unto itself. Laplanche and Descombes, by contrast, recognize that selfhood may [End Page 951] constitute a purpose that is not a concept but rather a practical norm, a commitment to undertaking certain practices—"philosophizing and dreaming"—in such a way that they embody one's "sovereign freedom." Like Laplanche reading Freud, this is the purpose which we shall find Marcel pursuing simultaneously in spite and by means of the repetitions of his own compulsive narration.

II. Marcel's Inauguration as a Subject of Aesthetic Desire

Marcel begins the story of his deliverance from the cave-dweller's "dénuement" by recounting an attempt to secure a good night kiss from his mother who is detained by a dinner party. After his plan to trick Françoise into relaying his desire to his mother yields, as his mother explicitly puts it, "pas de réponse" (R I:31), Marcel conceives a radical strategy: he will stay up and intercept his mother on her way to bed. To Marcel's mind, this plan effectively eliminates the possibility of going to sleep deprived of his mother's kiss, and the relief this belief affords him is immense: now happiness "m'envahit" and assuages his anxiety like a "médicament puissant" (R I:32). Yet as the sentence immediately following this passage underscores, the "félicité" and "allégresse" Marcel experiences here attend not to anticipation of the kiss itself, the satisfaction of his desire, but to the prospect of dramatically, concretely staging himself as a subject who is a slave to his desire: "Le calme qui résultait de mes angoisses finies me mettait dans une allégresse extraordinaire, non moins que l'attente, la soif et la peur du danger" (R I:32). Such a subject may understand the negative consequences of letting desire dictate its actions, but is licensed to disregard those consequences by desire's supposed autonomy; desire stands alone, has its own law and purpose. But it is not a sense of obeying any determinate law or purpose that exhilarates Marcel here; it is precisely the recognition that the possibility is open to him of staging himself as a subject impelled by forces beyond his control: it is the "danger" this possibility represents that Marcel "thirsts for and fears." The new happiness attends to the prospect of enacting a new kind of subjectivity, to replacing a self-characterization in terms of destitution with one in terms of involuntary desire. But if the notion of an involuntary self exercises a "sudden exhilaration" upon Marcel and sends a happiness "coursing through" his body, his mother's accommodation of that same self exercises an analogously involuntary violence upon hers: Marcel's success "à détendre sa [End Page 952] volonté, à faire fléchir sa raison," is likened to that which "la maladie, des chagrins, ou l'âge" might have achieved (R I:38). Whereas the notion of the involuntary self had worked like a "medicine" upon his anxiety and pain, his mother's recognition and accommodation of that same self makes him alive to the violence that is the flip-side of the balm: "il me semblait que je venais d'une main impie et secrète de tracer dans son âme une première ride et d'y faire apparaître un premier cheveu blanc" (R I:38).

This sense of personal accountability spoils Marcel's happiness; but his mother's recognition and accommodation of the involuntary self seems to have solidified that self, endowed it with a permanence and reality, which Marcel cannot undo. "[J]e savais que, maintenant que le mal était fait, elle aimerait mieux m'en laisser du moins goûter le plaisir calmement et ne pas déranger mon père. . . . mais justement il me semblait que cela n'aurait pas dû être, sa colère eût été moins triste pour moi que cette douceur nouvelle que n'avait pas connue mon enfance" (R I:38). His mother's accommodation of the involuntary self removes Marcel from the innate variability of childhood; it represents a "émancipation" in virtue of opening up new possibilities of self-assertion. This accommodation "commençait une ère," Marcel says: an element of who he is becomes etched in stone in a way he cannot undo; and in virtue of his recognition of the violence to which he owes this element of his identity, Marcel ominously and morosely remarks that this inaugural moment "resterait comme une triste date" (R I:38).

If the recognition of the mother is one crucial mediator of the inauguration of this self, the other, as in the "fort-da game's" inauguration of the boy's subjectivity, is language, and, in particular, literature. The sobs that were "redoubled" by the mother's display of pragmatic kindness are utterly forgotten, and the critical introspection of the previous three pages brought to a sudden, unresolved, close, when Marcel's mother offers to read to him from Sand's François le Champi. It is appropriate that Marcel should receive this book as a birthday gift, and that this gift should be compounded by the secondary gift of its being given to Marcel before his birthday. For, like the "fort-da game" it does give birth to a new subjectivity for Marcel, and before it is even unwrapped the very packaging itself, according to Marcel, "éclipsaient déjà" previous gifts he had known (R I:39). The dawning of the era of Marcel's involuntary self is immediately implicated in that of Marcel's literary self. Indeed, it is [End Page 953] exactly for the purpose of edification, of inculcating a certain kind of character in Marcel, that the grandmother's gift is intended (R I:39).

Here, though, the new era is heralded not as "triste," but by the "heureuse influence" which art, according to Marcel's account of his grandmother's belief, "exerc[e] sur l'esprit . . . en lui donnant la nostalgie d'impossibles voyages dans le temps" (R I:41). The grandmother sees this "nostalgie" as salutary principally "en nous apprenant à chercher notre plaisir ailleurs que dans les satisfactions du bien-être . . . vanité . . . util[ité]" (R I:39). The two sorts of pleasure are so thoroughly incompatible in the grandmother's mind, that she does not merely refuse to "s'occuper de la solidité d'une boiserie où se distinguaient encore une fleurette, un sourire, quelquefois une belle imagination du passé" (R I:40), but selects as gifts precisely those pieces "qui, à la première tentative qu'on avait faite pour s'en servir, s'étaient immédiatement effondrés sous le poids d'un des destinataires" (R I:40). The image suggests that the pleasure proper to art remains closed so long as art is subject to purposes other than that of sheer aesthetic spectatorship. Indeed, as Marcel continues, "[m]ême ce qui dans ces meubles répondait à un besoin, comme c'était d'une façon à laquelle nous ne sommes plus habitués, la charmait comme les vieilles manières de dire où nous voyons une métaphore, effacée, dans notre moderne langage, par l'usure de l'habitude" (R I:40). Her interest in the artwork is not circumscribed by how the artwork may be defined by the present; she preferred "des gravures anciennes et ayant encore un intérêt au-delà d'elles-mêmes, par exemple celles qui représentent un chef-d'œuvre dans un état où nous ne pouvons plus le voir aujourd'hui" (R I:40). The "journey through time" is thus accomplished precisely by the artwork that opens up this chasm between its present self and the "intérêt au-delà de soi-même" it may evoke, thereby making us "nostalgic for impossible journeys" to worlds of art and experience whose sense and meaning are no longer accessible to us.

It is just such a journey upon which his mother's reading sends Marcel. Before his mother even opens François le Champi, Marcel is attracted to it, but for distinctly non-literary, even anti-literary reasons: the color of its cover and the incomprehensibility of its title. Correspondingly, the fact that the book is a novel does not indicate to Marcel that it belongs to a literary genre, and displays a set of formal characteristics many different works share; on the contrary, being a novel makes the book unique not as an object but "comme une personne unique, n'ayant de raison d'exister qu'en soi" (R I:41). As [End Page 954] an object that is really a subject, and thus negates itself as an object, the book is the consummate embodiment of the "internet au-dela de soi-meme." Correspondingly, in the oral recitation of his mother, the book occasions a synaesthetic experience for Marcel that fundamentally disrupts the conceptual and empirical order of the world. His daydreaming and her editing out the love scenes lead to inexplicable plot developments that "me paraissaient empreints d'un profond mystère dont je me figurais volontiers que la source devait être dans ce nom inconnu et si doux de 'Champi' qui mettait sur l'enfant, qui le portait sans que je susse pourquoi, sa couleur vive, empourprée et charmante" (R I:41). François le Champi represents a world in which things are explained by the distinctive mellifluousness and color of a name. Thus, even language itself, the code that translates idiosyncratic experience into the vocabulary of a shared reality, serves in the elaboration of Marcel's utterly other-worldly, "self-contained" release from such reality. His mother's recitation, Marcel writes, "fournissait toute la tendresse naturelle, toute l'ample douceur qu'elles réclamaient à ces phrases qui semblaient écrites pour sa voix"; yet the sentences demand what his mother supplies not in virtue of their meaningful content, but of the very grammar of the past tense: she "donnait à l'imparfait et au passé défini la douceur qu'il y a dans la bonté, la mélancolie qu'il y a dans la tendresse" (R I:42).

Marcel's narrative here is clearly informed by the perspective of an older Marcel capable of identifying such grammatical forms, but this does not make the terms of the narrative any less determinative of the experience they describe. If Marcel the boy has no access to grammatical vocabulary, he nevertheless evidently does have access to the "intêret au-delà de soi même" that grammar itself avails, and that the adult Marcel uses that vocabulary to elucidate. Irrespective of how the elder Marcel may define what it is about the "accentuation étrange" that triggers transcendence, this transcendence is not experienced by Marcel the boy directly as such, but "sensed" precisely "sous ces événements si journaliers, ces choses si communes, ces mots si courants" (R I:41; my emphasis). Marcel the boy's access of such associations represents a sensibility already conscious of itself as distinct from mere knowledge of grammatical and literary forms. The "sense" of singularity and transcendence associated with literature is indissoluble, even for the young Marcel, from its formal opposition to, its lying "beneath," such generic codification. In this sense, Marcel is not introduced to literature here so much as to a subjectivity capable of distinguishing precisely between properly singular, "literary" [End Page 955] experience and routine, generic uses of language. Just as the "fort-da game" 'gives' the boy a subjectivity he did not formally have—one able to intelligibly use the terms "fort" and "da"—the grandmother's gift, and the mother's reading, 'give' Marcel a subjectivity based in the ability to distinguish, in the grandmother's terms, between art and reality, literature and language. And indeed, throughout the Recherche, Marcel is able to exercise his desiring subjectivity only with respect to objects that bear the mark of the literary. In Du côté de chez Swann he remarks, "[a]ller aux Champs-Elysées me fut insupportable. Si seulement Bergotte les eût décrits dans un de ses livres, sans doute j'aurais désiré de les connaître" (R I:386); Le Temps retrouvé makes the same point more succinctly and radically: "j'étais incapable de voir ce dont le désir n'avait pas été éveillé en moi par quelque lecture" (R IV:297). The abiding aim of Marcel's desire is to be released from the habitual, communicable, empirico-temporal order and to penetrate the transcendent worlds of artworks that "n'ont de raison d'exister qu'en soi." Thus Adorno characterizes Proustian aesthetics as an aesthetics of the "museum," of spectatorship as an end in itself: "For Proust's aestheticism the question of aesthetic quality is of secondary concern. . . . For him it is only the death of the work of art in the museum which brings it to life. When severed from the living order in which it functioned, according to him, its true spontaneity is released—its uniqueness, its 'name,' that which makes the great works of culture more than culture." ⁸

In this respect À la recherche is fairly characterized by Edmund Wilson as an "application of the principles of Symbolism in fiction." ⁹ Malcolm Bowie, in turn, takes this to mean that "solitary mental exertion" alone may lead Marcel to fulfillment; ¹⁰ likewise Anne Henry writes that Marcel conceives "le réel . . . comme un spectacle à déchiffrer, non comme invite à participation. . . . [T]out son désir d'imposer à la vie un ralentissement, sinon de l'immobiliser, de fixer le geste révélateur, d'isoler tel détail en laissant le reste dans le flou, répond-il d'abord à une exigence intellectuelle." ¹¹ We have seen, however, that Marcel's aspirations respond first and foremost precisely to norms of social, discursive participation; they are attempts to "stage" a subjectivity recognizable as such to others, including us, his readers: just as the boy of the "fort-da game" does not pursue his toy for the sake of the toy itself, Marcel pursues his symbolist aesthetic desires not for the sake of temporal and synaesthetic transcendence itself, but because, by pursuing such transcendence, he becomes [End Page 956] recognizable to his grandmother and to his readers as a properly "literary" or "symbolist" subject.

In turn, just as Freud's young subject plays out his subjectivity in a way that seems to dissolve it, Marcel's subjectivity is undermined by the implicitly violent "mortuary aesthetic" that defines it. Just as Marcel is aware of a violence having been inflicted on his mother in a way he did not intend, cannot undo, and yet for which he is responsible, so Marcel understands the "journeys through time" as beyond his capacity to intentionally execute, and yet as crucial for his self-realization: art triggers a "nostalgia" for them, but does not provide any practical guide to embarking. It is clear that his mother's reading has in fact sent Marcel on such a journey, and that the experience is rapturous, dispelling completely the "tristesse" that preceded it; indeed, Marcel writes that "quand mes angoisses étaient calmées, je ne les comprenais plus" (R I:42). Yet, even while Marcel enjoys this transport, he is aware both that his will had no role in initiating it, and that it can do nothing to sustain it. "Demain mes angoisses reprendraient. . . . je me disais que j'aurais le temps d'aviser, bien que ce temps-là ne pût m'apporter aucun pouvoir de plus, puisqu'il s'agissait de choses qui ne dépendaient pas de ma volonté et que seul me faisait paraître plus évitables l'intervalle qui les séparait encore de moi" (R I:42f). Temporal transport either occurs or it does not; there is nothing one can do to intentionally achieve it beyond exposing oneself to the art that makes one want it. Marcel's aesthetic subjectivity is about desiring, and not about achieving aesthetic gratification; in turn, such desire is pursued by abdicating rather than asserting agency, by passively availing oneself to such involuntary transport.

Thus, for instance, when Marcel's adolescent fantasy of penetrating the Swann home, and discovering Gilberte's domestic life, is fulfilled, he recognizes what a crippling event such fulfillment represents to himself as a subject of involuntary desire: "dans ces coïncidences tellement parfaites, quand la réalité se replie et s'applique sur ce que nous avons si longtemps rêvé, elle nous le cache entièrement, se confond avec lui, comme deux figures égales et superposées qui n'en font plus qu'une" (R I:528). Maintaining himself as such a subject requires that Marcel render his desires sufficiently "intangible" that such fulfillment does not destroy the desire to which it responds: "pour donner à notre joie toute sa signification, nous voudrions garder à tous ces points de notre désir, dans le moment même où [End Page 957] nous y touchons—et pour être plus certain que ce soit bien eux—le prestige d'être intangibles" (R I:528). In order that the object of his desires may be "touché" it is precisely its "intangibility" that must be preserved. As a mature Marcel puts it, "[o]n n'aime que ce en quoi on poursuit queque chose d'inaccessible" (R III:885f).

Maintaining such inaccessibility is the enduring imperative governing Marcel's self-staging as a subject of aesthetic desire. Indeed, maintaining such inaccessibility can be seen as the veiled purpose or will animating Marcel's "mortuary aesthetic;" this would account for what Adorno calls the distinctive "productivity" of that aesthetic:

[Proust] is first of all an admiring consumer, an amateur, inclined to that effusive and for artists highly suspect awe before works that characterizes only those separated from them as though by an abyss. One could almost say that his genius consisted not least of all in assuming this attitude (which is also that of the man who conducts himself as a spectator even in life) so completely and accurately that it became a new type of productivity, and the power of inner and outer contemplation, thus intensified, turned into recollection, involuntary memory. (Prisms 180)

Shattuck defines the quintessential "Proustian complaint" to be that "[o]ur finite capacity for existence makes our character successive, dependent on time to reveal itself in any depth. Impatient with this inability to assume ourselves entire at any point in time, we react by yearning to enter into or become someone else, to escape the limits of our own body and being" (PW 89). Given what we have seen of Proust's distinctive "productivity," however, Marcel's complaint appears to derive not from the finite character of his actual existence relative to his infinite desires, but from the fact that he has no actual existence independent of such desire: his desire is not a response to his finitude and mutability but produces such finitude and mutability—his existence per se—to begin with. Hence the morbidity of Proust's aesthetic, the destructivity of his productivity. Marcel's loss appears no longer to merely presuppose his search; rather, like the boy who repeatedly throws away the toy without acknowledging its retrieval, losing has positively become the purpose of Marcel's search.

The thesis I pursue below is that this perverse purposiveness, this self-staging that is actually a compulsive, repetitious self-dissolving, is not, as per Bersani, 'the end of the story' and the beginning of the nonnarrative spiraling of jouissance. Rather, the true story of the novel is how its narrator is frustrated by this compulsion but at length surmounts it, to embody the "sovereign freedom" Laplanche finds in [End Page 958] Freud: to become the narrator that he is. The conquest is only provisional, however, and I shall highlight this moment of achieved self-becoming in the "intermittences du cœur" by juxtaposing it with what I read as the return of Marcel's compulsive aesthetic desire in Temps retrouvé.

III. Narrating the Involuntary as the Labor of Becoming Who One Is

If his quest to secure his mother's goodnight kiss occasioned Marcel's inauguration as a desiring, artistic subject, the kiss remains the emblem of that subject's relations to others. It figures for Marcel first as a means of erotic synthesis, of accessing the essence of the identity, or presence, of Albertine, and secondly as a means of grasping his grandmother's absence, of accessing her truth in her death. Just as Marcel understands his inability to capture Albertine's essential quality initially as a failure to achieve a certain notion of the kiss—one that would provide a "connaissance par les lèvres" (R II:659)—he understands his difficulty coming to terms with the death of his grandmother as a "longing" to achieve a certain kind of kiss, and an "anxiety" at being unable to do so. And in both cases this inability is considered a function of the impossibility of transcending the normal order of empirical experience. If the coveted kiss would allow Marcel to penetrate to a truth (or "goût") that he believes inheres in Albertine's cheek, it would likewise allow him to penetrate to a truth that he believes inheres in his grandmother's "voice." The deceased's voice returns to him, Marcel writes, "murmurer à mon oreille des paroles que j'aurais voulu embrasser au passage sur des lèvres à jamais en poussière" (R II:432). In both cases the kiss stands for an imagined access of another's truth, and in both cases the real world cannot allow that access because that truth is defined as transcending the conditions of temporal existence; i.e., as Albertine's ethereal "essence" or as death itself.

In light of this juxtaposition, what immediately stands out in Marcel's account of his struggle to come to terms with the death of his grandmother is that that death is from the beginning defined by the mediation of modern technology. Whereas the technology of photography had previously served to illustrate Marcel's frustrating inability to hold securely and continuously in view Albertine's cheek (R II:660), now it is not in spite but in virtue of the intervention of [End Page 959] technology that Marcel pursues the truth he is after. Even before his grandmother's death, it is the experience of speaking to her over the telephone that initially suggests some of the implications of her death to Marcel as a young boy. The fact that his grandmother is phoning from a distant location rather than standing close by and watching over him, grants him, he recognizes, an extra degree of freedom; yet this

me parut tout d'un coup aussi triste que pourrait être ma liberté après sa mort (quand je l'aimerais encore et qu'elle aurait à jamais renoncé à moi). Je criais: "Grand-mère, grand-mère," et j'aurais voulu l'embrasser; mais je n'avais près de moi que cette voix, fantôme aussi impalpable que celui qui reviendrait peut-être me visiter quand ma grand-mère serait morte. (R II:434)

The telephone is connected with death, and can provide us insight into the truth of death, because it reveals the illusory and transitory nature of "identity" and "presence" generally. Speaking on the phone, Marcel writes, "je sentais mieux ce qu'il y a de devant dans l'apparence du rapprochement le plus doux, et à quelle distance nous pouvons être des personnes aimées au moment où il semble que nous n'aurions qu'à étendre la main pour les retenir" (R II:432). Our sense of the substantial reality of and intimate connection with the sentimental identity of others is an illusion born of our own passivity and implacable "habit." By contrast, Marcel contends that the voice heard through the telephone reveals such "illusoriness," and thus reveals a deeper reality than the immediately and unambiguously tangible aspects of people. That voice constitutes a "[p]résence réelle que cette voix si proche—dans la séparation effective! Mais anticipation aussi d'une séparation éternelle!" (R II:432). Its "presence" is "real" precisely in virtue of being simultaneously imbued with absence. Such absence cuts through the illusion of passively accepted, habitual reality to reveal a deeper reality that attests also to the truth of absence and even of eternal absence or death.

As Marcel's grandmother's life draws to a close, this ambiguous presence-in-absence of her telephonic voice comes to take precedence over her immediately tangible presence, not only in Marcel's abstract conception of what constitutes his "real" grandmother, but also in his phenomenal experience of that reality. Anticipating a visit with her, Marcel notes that "jusqu'à ce jour, . . . quand je pensais à ce que ma grand-mère faisait seule, je me la reprentais telle qu'elle était avec moi, mais en me supprimant" (R II:438). Now, however, even as [End Page 960] he arrives and embraces her, he is unable to apprehend his grandmother otherwise than as that presence-in-absence of her telephonic voice: "[J]'avais à me délivrer au plus vite, dans ses bras, du fantôme, insoupçonné jusqu'alors et soudain évoqué par sa voix, d'une grand-mère réellement séparée de moi" (R II:438). This telephonic phantom has impressed itself so deeply upon Marcel's conception of his grandmother that, even as he looked right at her, he says, "ce fantôme-là, ce fut lui que j'aperçus" (R II:438). It is a phantom defined precisely by its invisibility, its phenomenal intangibility, that Marcel sees. Thus, a synaesthetic disruption of the "habitual" empirical order defines Marcel's perception of his grandmother here that is analogous to that which has defined his "mortuary aesthetic." The visually immediate manifestation of the grandmother has been severed from any unambiguous connection to her real person and reconstituted as an "image," which, like the "intangible" objects of Marcel's aesthetic desires, is in fact more real for the absence of that connection:

[M]ême dans les spectacles les plus indifférents de la vie, notre œil, chargé de pensée, néglige, comme ferait une tragédie classique, toutes les images qui ne concourent pas à l'action et ne retient que celles qui peuvent en rendre intelligible le but. . . . Il en est de même quand quelque cruelle ruse du hasard empêche notre intelligente et pieuse tendresse d'accourir à temps pour cacher à nos regards ce qu'ils ne doivent jamais contempler, quand elle est devancée par eux qui, arrivés les premiers sur place et laissés à eux-mêmes fonctionnent mécaniquement à la façon de pellicules, et nous montrent, au lieu de l'être aimé qui n'existe plus depuis longtemps mais dont elle n'avait jamais voulu que la mort nous fût révélée, l'être nouveau que cent fois par jour elle revêtait d'une chère et menteuse ressemblance. (R II:439)

If anything, this passage radicalizes the mortuary aesthetic's opposition of truth and the habitual empirical and discursive order of the world. It attributes the crucial role in Marcel's apperception of the "truth" of his grandmother to a "cruelle ruse du hasard" that defies narration because it lacks any "but intelligible." The penetration of a reality shorn of the "menteuse ressemblance" of narrative coherence cannot be coherently narrated without eliding a significant aspect of it; it can only be properly understood as a "trick of chance" that resists narrative containment. Here, however, this penetration is strikingly not associated with gratification of artistic or erotic desire; in fact, it occurs not in a redemptive or even remotely benign but an emphatically "cruel" manner. Remarkably, Marcel explicitly insists that the [End Page 961] mendacious likeness of narrative purpose may not be circumvented without exacting an analogously severe price on the subject that would do so. Indeed, Marcel describes just such a disruption of his own "intelligible purpose" by a "cruel trick of chance" when he writes that, standing before his grandmother, "[d]e moi . . . il n'y avait là que le témoin, l'observateur, en chapeau et manteau de voyage, l'étranger qui n'est pas de la maison, le photographe qui vient prendre un cliché des lieux qu'on ne reverra plus" (R II:438). The truth captured in the photograph returns Marcel precisely to the position of the destitute cave-dweller, a detached spectator upon a reality in which he is subjectively no longer engaged: under such conditions, Marcel says, we become precisely "assist[ants] . . . à notre propre absence" (R II:438).

After his grandmother's death, it is precisely this sense of his own absence that her phantom recalls to him in an "souvenir involontaire" of unprecedented intensity and inexorability (R III:153). In contrast to his experience of involuntary memory in the library of the Guermantes, however, his experience of his grandmother's phantom does not deliver him to himself, does not recover something lost, but, on the contrary, reveals the most profound loss possible: that of his self. Yet, the torturous compulsion with which this revelation of absence forces itself upon Marcel's consciousness would seem to exemplify a momentous, involuntary disruption of "habitual" experience far better than the recollections at the Guermantes, which reveal to Marcel precisely his presence; i.e., which rehabilitate his degraded present self by infusing it with the unadulterated 'presence' of a self involuntarily remembered.

When Marcel had first determined to stage his (involuntary) self by intercepting his mother on her way to bed he reported that a "félicité m'envahit comme . . . un médicament" (R I:32). In just the same terms of being corporally "envahi" by a substance that reanimates him in the involuntary manner of a chemical reaction, the epiphanies occasioned by the uneven paving-stones are said to seamlessly "envahissent" Marcel's habitual world as if the latter had all along existed for just this moment (R IV:446): "l'essence permanente et habituellement cachée des choses se trouve libérée, et notre vrai moi . . . s'éveille, s'anime en recevant la céleste nourriture qui lui est apportée" (R IV:451). Marcel unequivocally "regains" the "essence" of his self and the world; in turn, his "literary vocation," his narrative purpose, is rehabilitated (R IV:609): "Comme au moment où je goûtais la madeleine, toute inquiétude sur l'avenir, tout doute [End Page 962] intellectuel aient dissipés. Ceux qui m'assaillaient tout à l'heure au sujet de la réalité de mes dons littéraires et même de la réalité de la littérature se trouvaient levés comme par enchantement" (R IV:445). This rehabilitation gives Marcel a sense of achieved deliverance and immortality, "une joie pareille à une certitude et suffisante sans autres preuves à me rendre la mort indifférente" (R IV:446).

By contrast, the image of his grandmother, the phantom, does not accommodate Marcel's narrative purpose but fundamentally, "cruelly" disrupts it, revealing as a "mendacious likeness" his cherished sense that an "indissoluble harmonie" united his grandmother and himself (R III:156). This experience is involuntary precisely in virtue of disrupting Marcel's conception of the world and his place in it, effecting an "[b]ouleversement de toute ma personne" (R III:152): it does not secure Marcel's immortality, but makes inescapable his subjection to death's profound inscrutability, its refusal to capitulate to his narrative will, to affirm the redemptive truth of the "mortuary aesthetic."

The juxtaposition of Marcel's account of his grandmother's death with his official account of involuntary memory in the library suggests that the notion of "involuntary memory" is not as easily contained by the narrative of À la recherche as it may appear: for the former account illustrates that there cannot be any redemptive release from degraded habitual experience without concomitant, emphatically "cruel" disruption of "narrative purpose." Far from disrupting Marcel's narrative purpose, however, his account of the epiphanies in the library restore the faith in his literary "vocation" that his reading of the Goncourt journal had destroyed (R IV:299). Moreover, this rehabilitation of narrative purpose also comes hand in hand with a resolute retreat from the historically determinate, external social world (R IV:563). Most telling, however, is that, just as Marcel had rehabilitated "l'Esprit éternel" of Bergotte's art from the embarrassing imperfections of Bergotte the man by means of radicalizing rather than mitigating that rift, finally characterizing Bergotte the man not merely as a vain social climber but as a compulsive "kleptomane" (R I:547), so too can Marcel here be seen to rehabilitate his own "essential," "literary" self by radicalizing its incommensurability with the actual discursive world around him, leading him to posit a disconnect between his "moi véritable et l'autre" (R IV:564). This purpose is so antithetical to continued participation in a society which is characterized, in the scene of the final party at the Guermantes, by an intellectual inanity, if not depravity, and a physical grotesqueness, that far surpass that of [End Page 963] Bergotte, that Marcel resolves to discontinue even written correspondence (R IV:618f). Marcel's official account of involuntary remembrance would allow him, in Poulet's words, to "atteindre par l'intermédiaire du souvenir une essence intemporelle": "le temps retrouvé, c'est le temps transcendé." ¹²

Thus, in lieu of the "embodiment in Time" which that account claims for them, the epiphanies in the library appear to consummate the narrative purpose Marcel has pursued since his very inauguration as a subject of aesthetic desire, promising him a "literary vocation" defined in terms of the same opposition to generic, temporally determinate discourse that defined his introduction to literature. In turn, the ostensible rehabilitation of his self and his narrative effected by Marcel's official account of involuntary memory appears susceptible to being read as repeating rather than resolving the dilemmas of aesthetic desire. ¹³ And indeed, pressing the napkin to his lips occasions an erotic, synaesthetic rapture as if it were Albertine herself:

[U]ne nouvelle vision d'azur passa devant mes yeux; mais il était pur et salin, il se gonfla en mamelles bleuâtres; l'impression fut si forte que le moment que je vivais me sembla être le moment actuel. . . . [J]e ne jouissais pas que de ces couleurs, mais de tout un instant de ma vie qui les soulevait, qui avait été sans doute aspiration vers elles, dont quelque sentiment de fatigue ou de tristesse m'avait peut-être empêché de jouir à Balbec, et qui maintenant, débarrassé de ce qu'il y a d'imparfait dans la perception extérieure, pur et désincarné, me gonflait d'allégresse. (R IV:447)

By contrast, it is precisely the "narrative purpose" of Marcel's sense of his and his grandmother's "indissoluble harmony" that her phantom disrupts. Yet this disruption does not usher in Bersani's nonnarrative spiraling. On the contrary, as unsettling as this revelation of absence is with regard as much to Marcel's conception of himself as to his conception of his grandmother, he stages himself as someone moved to "m'y attacher de toutes mes forces" (R III:156). This spectacle of his own absence, Marcel recognizes, is, despite the pain that accompanies it, the last true vestige of his link to his grandmother. Indeed, the "douleur" of this alienation becomes a means of connection unto itself: "Ces douleurs, si cruelles qu'elles fussent, je m'y attachais de toutes mes forces, car je sentais bien qu'elles étaient l'effet du souvenir de ma grand-mère, la preuve que ce souvenir que j'avais était bien présent en moi" (R III:156). In constrast to the later epiphanies that "envahissent" Marcel, he here [End Page 964] assumes a stridently active stance toward the memory that is involuntarily "rivait" in his consciousness (R III:156). What was involuntarily imposed upon him from without, he actively co-opts as a means of expressing who he is; or, rather, as a means of realizing who he would become. The disruption of narrative purpose opens the possibility for pursuing the purpose of becoming the narrator he is. This appropriation does not mitigate the compulsion of ulterior necessity; on the contrary, as Marcel explicitly states, it is achieved precisely in virtue of "obeying the law" of that necessity (R III: 156). Now, however, that obedience is reconstrued as a means of active self-determination:

[J]e ne tenais pas seulement à souffrir, mais à respecter l'originalité de ma souffrance telle que je l'avais subie tout d'un coup sans le vouloir, et je voulais continuer à la subir, suivant ses lois à elle, à chaque fois que revenait cette contradiction si étrange de la survivance et du néant entrecroisés en moi. Cette impression douloureuse et actuellement incompréhensible, je savais, non certes pas si j'en dégagerais un peu de vérité un jour, mais que si ce peu de vérité je pouvais jamais l'extraire, ce ne pourrait être d'elle, si particulière, si spontanée, qui n'avait été ni tracée par mon intelligence, ni infléchie ni atténuée par ma pusillanimité, mais que la mort elle-même, la brusque révélation de la mort, avait comme la foudre creusée en moi, selon un graphique surnaturel, inhumain comme un double et mystérieux sillon. (R III:156)

Although this recognition of death clearly happens to Marcel in a manner analogous to his more gratifying involuntary recollections, it is equally clearly distinguished from those experiences by the fact that the event of this recognition is not only passively received but also actively determined by Marcel as the occasion to undertake the work of becoming who he is. While Le Temps retrouvé (e.g., R IV:609) shows that the prospect of death awakens Marcel to the urgency of such work, the poetic metaphors into which Marcel here translates his experience of that prospect—the grandmother's absence as the "phantom" of her telephonic voice and photographic image; the dialectic of presence and absence as a "double furrow graphed onto my body"—can be seen as the initial fruits of that labor. Such metaphor-making serves to return Marcel to his own temporal, discursive, corporal existence, not to release him from it. Marcel no longer appears only as a passive recipient of involuntary experience, but also, much more profoundly, as a poetic agent capable of defining such experience in the here and now, of construing such experience as the material of his own "embodiment in Time." Marcel [End Page 965] can be seen to regain time not by involuntary retrieval of a self he had lost, but, on the contrary, by actively asserting himself as the narrator of such loss. It is this moment of active, determinate self-assertion that Bersani's account of nonnarrative, infinitely circling revisions, and freely flowing jouissance, neglects. But this self-assertion overcomes rather than reiterates the mortuary aesthetic; it is not the assertion of a self redeemed of the vicissitudes of desire and temporal experience. On the contrary, Marcel's account of his grandmother's death shows that it is an "upheaval" not "retrieval" of his self, a revelation of absence not presence, that occasions Marcel to take active responsibility for his own narration.

The terms of his narration help elucidate what it is to articulate such an absence, if it isn't the infinitely circling revisions Bersani describes. The "graph" that death, the phantom presence of the photographic image and the telephonic voice, "carves" within Marcel, marks "a double and mysterious furrow" of "survival and annihilation." Thus this graph in Marcel's body, although "supernatural and inhuman" and precipitated by a synaesthetic phantom voice/image, does not reconstitute that body in terms of temporal and discursive transcendence. Rather, the "double furrow" the phantom carves within him is "mysterious" precisely because it leaves the exact nature of "survival and annihilation" undetermined: survival and annihilation, or "presence" and "absence," do not constitute abiding truths to be disclosed, but together make a "double furrow," or dialectic, to be negotiated. Moreover, in remarkable contrast to his invariable characterization of art as expressing historically transcendent, "self-contained personalities" irreducible to degraded, "habitual" experience, Marcel here describes an experience of involuntary synaesthetia that is mediated by the all too historically specific and vulgarizing or "habitualizing" technology of mass communication. Whereas Marcel had formally construed such experience as inversely related to its reproducibility and communicability, which led him distinctly to oppose literature to language, now it is precisely media of mechanical reproduction (photography) and communication (the telephone) that engender such experience. Thus Marcel's depiction of the re-constitution of his body on the basis of such technology represents the penetration of his agency into precisely that domain of degraded "Habit" that formally resisted it. Indeed, Marcel goes on to construe the not merely habitual, but veritably autonomic, functions of his body as meaningfully expressive, describing sleep as an active negotiation of the dialectics of presence and absence: "le monde du sommeil . . . [End Page 966] refléta, réfracta la douloureuse synthèse de la survivance et du néant, dans la profondeur organique et devenue translucide des viscères mystérieusement éclaires (R III:157).

This self-characterization strikingly recalls Marcel's initial description of his "destitution" as equivalent to that of an "animal consciousness" and "cave-dweller." In contrast to the animal consciousness from which his ego reconstruction was formally to rescue Marcel, however, now Marcel applies himself to poetically elaborating the animal consciousness of his own body as a means of such reconstruction itself, and he does so in terms that return him to rather than release him from, the determinate conditions of a finite existence indissolubly implicated in a particular body, in a relation to an irreducibly absent, dead grandmother, and in historically contingent technologies of mass communication and mechanical reproduction. In turn, by thus finding himself in the activity of poetically elaborating absence, Marcel can be seen actually to move beyond a subjectivity based solely in losing and finding. That is, Marcel's "self" can no longer be conceived as either "fort" or "da" but only as the activity itself by which presence and absence are defined and staged as such. His self-staging now is based not in the capacity to lose and recover but in the capacity for such self-staging itself: it is in virtue of exercising that capacity that Marcel is who he is, in his body, in his relation to his grandmother, and in the technologies by which a particular society at a particular historical moment expresses and reproduces itself. But, as his return to seeing himself in the animal consciousness of his sleeping body testifies, such self-staging is also perpetually a self-disruption: he finds himself precisely in his capacity to resist the "mendacious likeness" of narrative coherence, to confront ever again "cette incompréhensible contradiction du souvenir et du néant" (R III:165). ¹⁴

If such disruption catalyzes Marcel's "embodiment in Time," it likewise encourages sensitivity rather than obliviousness to violence. Adorno wrote that "[c]ontemplation without violence, the source of all joy of truth, presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself: a distanced nearness." ¹⁵ Rather than reflecting the spectacle of one's own and others' presence or absence, Marcel's temporal embodiment poetically mobilizes communications technology and somatic experience as means of negotiating the dialectics of presence and absence, self and other, through which a "self' may be realized, not as an unmitigated presence, but as just such a "distanced nearness." "Staging" oneself in these terms does not [End Page 967] preclude violence, but it does allow for engagement with the problem of violence which both the mortuary aesthetic and Bersani's nonnarrative, circular hermeneutics preclude. By resisting the containment of his poetic agency within a coherent "narrative purpose," Marcel likewise resists the fantasy of "absorbing the object into himself" and the violence that attends that fantasy. Yet Marcel's "clinging" to his pain testifies to his throughgoing investment in the performance of self-narration, if not in any conception of its ostensibly redemptive purpose. Marcel's "clinging" to the very disruption of his narrative purpose actualizes the truth of what it is for Marcel to narrate himself; yet this truth is not redemptive in Bersani's sense. For the contrast of this self-enactment with the self-redemption of the mortuary aesthetic reiterated in Le Temps retrouvé also suggests that it is only the pain of absence that makes such truth available to be clung to. It is in virtue of the emphatically disturbing truth that such pain reveals, and that the savors of tea, not to mention the spirals of jouissance, elide, that Marcel may achieve a "sovereign freedom" by narrating his involuntary experience: elaborating images of a body upon which history, in "cruelly contingent" (e.g., photographic, telephonic) form, violently "carves" and "graphs" the experience of absence. Thus Marcel becomes the narrator he is, rather than the passive agent of aesthetic desire that, as such a narrator, he precisely is not.

 

University of Chicago

Notes

1. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990), 13. Henceforth abbreviated to CR.

2. The mortuary aesthetic Bersani imputes to Proust is indistinguishable from the "lucid death" which Girard characterizes as the wellspring of Proustian narration. In direct opposition to Bersani, though, Girard praises it for its "victoire sur le désire" (René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque [Paris: Hachette 1961], 336; henceforth abbreviated to Mensonge): "Proust renoncera au mode classique de transposition romanesque. Son héros ne se tuera pas, il se fera romancier. Mais l'inspriation n'en jaillira pas moins de la mort. . . . Le héros meurt lucide pour renaître dans l'œuvre mais on continue à mourir autour de lui sans espoir de resurrection" (Mensonge 338, 341).

3. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976), 106, 110. Henceforth abbreviated to LD.

4. Vincent Descombes, Proust: Philosophie du Roman (Paris: Éditions du minuit, 1987), 327, my emphasis.

5. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-9), I:3. Henceforth abbreviated to R. [End Page 968]

6. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), 13f. Henceforth abbreviated to BPP.

7. This is not to deny but to affirm the significant role played in Marcel's narrative itself by the distinction between the Marcel who does not narrate but only figures in the narrative, and the character to whom critics often refer to as the capitalized "Narrator." The aim of the present study is not to anatomize this distinction, however, but to trace the way in which it informs the development of the narrative. The problem with mere anatomizations of this distinction, such as Shattuck's, is that, as illuminating as they may be with respect to the complex texture of the narrative, they tend rather to obscure the subjective intentionality animating the narrative to begin with, the narrative agency for whom that distinction represents a problem to be solved. My analysis of the novel's introductory section attempted to show that this distinction is not only a facet of the narrative but also the condition of its possibility and the conflict it was undertaken in order to resolve. Shattuck acknowledges that "[t]he simplest aspect of the novel, the presence of an I speaking, leads into unforeseen complexities and subtleties held together primarily by that speaking I," and that "distinguishing . . . between 'Marcel' and 'the Narrator' . . . will not do full justice to their counterpoint in the text" (Roger Shattuck, Proust's Way [New York: Norton, 2000], 34; henceforth abbreviated to PW). But doing full justice is not only a matter of adequately registering the full complexity of the narrative (e.g., by adding, as Shattuck eventually does, to the differentiation of Marcel and "Narrator" also that of the "double I" comprising them both, and, moreover, making much of the relation of all three to both the authorial and historical Proust). Doing full justice to this text is also crucially a matter of explaining the way in which such complexity expresses ambivalences and contradictions that are constitutive of the consciousness of the narrator to begin with. But Shattuck's distinction of Marcel and the Narrator in fact leads him to distinguish two novels, one recounting Marcel's life as a failure, the other his narrative as a success. Thus Shattuck effectively rends that narrative consciousness completely, rather than show how its "complexities and subtleties [are] held together by that speaking I." Shattuck acknowledges that "a skilled reader will read [the two novels] simulateously" (PW 169), but this only begs the question of what such a "skilled," "simultaneous" reading would be.

8. Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 182. Henceforth abbreviated to Prisms.

9. Edmund Wilson, Axel's Castle (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1931), 132.

10. Malcolm Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (New York: Columbia UP, 1998), 270.

11. Anne Henry, Le tentation de Marcel Proust (Paris: PUF, 2000), 221.

12. The two quotations are from Georges Poulet, La poésie éclatée (Paris: PUF, 1980), 39 and Études sur le temps humain (Paris: Plon, 1950), 402, respectively.

13. Indeed, it is precisely in terms of Bersani's mortuary aesthetic, albeit positively inflected in accordance with his novelistic theory, that Girard describes the scene of the final party at the Guermantes: "C'est sur un contraste . . . entre deux morts antithétiques qu'est bâti tout Le Temps retrouvé. Le héros meurt lucide pour renaître dans l'œuvre mais on continue à mourir autour de lui sans espoir de résurrection. La mort spirituellement feconde du narrateur s'oppose au spectacle atroce de la soirée Guermantes, à l'horrible et inutile vieillissement des gens du monde" (Mensonge 341).

14. In this respect Deleuze has a point when he says that "il y a moins un narrateur qu'une machine de la Recherche, et moins un héros que des agencements où la machine fonctionne sous telle ou telle configuration, d'après telle ou telle [End Page 969] articulation, pour tel ou tel usage, pour telle production. C'est seulement en ce sense que nous pouvons demander ce qu'est le narrateur-héros, qui ne fonctionne pas comme sujet" (Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes [Paris: PUF, 1964], 217). But it is not only, and not originally, we that pose this question of the narrator; first of all, it is Marcel that poses it of himself. Thus Deleuze is wrong to conclude that the narrator fails to function as a subject, for it is precisely by narratively "clinging" to such contingent, mechanical representations of his own absence that Marcel asserts his narrative agency.

15. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 89f.