Proust

Rorty’s next chapter is a juxtaposition of Marcel Proust and Frederich Nietzsche, all about self creation. And it’s also very boring because writing about Proust with the assumption that all of your readers know his work backwards and forwards is ridiculous. Who is Rorty writing for, five people who live in Cambridge?

I enjoy writing about Proust, especially his concept of the Intermittences of the Heart. Early in his fourth volume, entitled “Sodom and Gomorrah,” Proust writes:

For the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart. It is no doubt the existence of our body, similar for us to a vase in which our spirituality is enclosed, which induces us to suppose that all our inner goods, our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. Perhaps this is as inaccurate as to believe that they escape or return. At all events, if they do remain inside us, it is for most of the time in an unknown domain where they are of no service to us, and where even the most ordinary of them are repressed by memories of a different order, which exclude all simultaneity with them in our consciousness. But if the framework of sensations in which they are preserved be 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.

What brought on this flood of feelings? The most ordinary thing imaginable—taking off his boots:

On the very first night, as I was suffering from an attack of cardiac fatigue, trying to overcome the pain, I bent down slowly and cautiously to remove my boots. But hardly had I touched the first button of my bottine, before my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence, I was shaken by sobs, tears streamed from my eyes. The person who had come to my assistance, who was rescuing me from my aridity of soul, was the one who, several years before, at an identical moment of distress and loneliness, a moment when I no longer had anything of myself, had entered, and who had restored me to myself, for it was both me and more than me (the container which is more than the content, and had brought it to me). I had just glimpsed, in my memory, bent over my fatigue, the tender, concerned, disappointed face of my grandmother, such as she had been on that first evening of our arrival; the face of my grandmother, not that of the one whom I had been surprised and self-reproachful at having missed so little, who had nothing of her but her name, but of my true grandmother, the living reality of whom, for the first time since the Champs-Elysées, where she had suffered her stroke, I had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory.

Involuntary memory is a constant theme of Proust’s work. In the first chapter of the first book, Proust is musing about how he suddenly has the ability to recall all of the memories of his childhood in vivid clarity. First, he gives us the theory:

I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us. It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.

It is the same with our past. It is a waste of effort for us to try to summon it, all the exertions of our intelligence are useless. The past is hidden outside the realm of our intelligence and beyond its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would give us) which we do not suspect. It depends on chance whether we encounter this object before we die, or do not encounter it.

From here, he recounts one of the most famous passages in literature, where he takes a bite of petites madeleines with some tea and feels a flood of memory, not only about the cookie and its taste, but the childhood memories associated with it.

Marcel the narrator goes on to recall his life in minute detail, rewriting his history as he goes. What makes In Search of Lost Time so startling is the way Proust so readily revolutionizes his narrative repeatedly. Marcel falls into thought patterns about the people he knows and then, in a flash, realizes that he’s had it wrong all along, and has to hurriedly re-write his narrative to fit the new facts.

I guess I could try to re-relate this to Nietzsche’s idea of self overcoming or some quotes from Rorty, but for today, I just want to bathe in Proust’s prose.