Proust and the End of Epistemic Competition
[In the following essay, Thiher explores Proust's attempt to reconcile science and art in his fiction.]
Chaque jour j'attache moins de prix à l'intelligence.
[Each day I value intelligence less.]
—Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve.
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW
1826: Lobachevsky lectures on a non-Euclidian geometry in which more than one parallel to a given line goes through a given point.
1854: Riemann's essay Uber die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen develops non-Euclidian geometry with treatment of how distance and curvature can be defined generally in n-dimensional space.
1871: Proust born. Flemming uses dyes to study cellular division.
1874: Boutroux publishes his critique of determinism in De la Contingence des lois de la nature.
1887: Michelson and Morley report failure to measure relative velocity of earth and aether, finding that the velocity of light is constant in all directions.
1889: Poincaré initiates the study of modern dynamic systems with publication of his paper on the three-body problem.
1889: The leading anti-Kantian in France, Bergson, publishes Matière et mémoire, a study of two types of memory. With Bergson in mind, Renan publishes next year L'Avenir de la science.
1900: Planck publishes paper on black box radiation in which he postulates the discontinuous emission of discrete packets of energy called quanta.
1904: Lorentz develops mathematics to interpret Michelson and Morley experiment by showing that contraction of length and dilation of time could occur to instruments in the direction of the movement.
1905: Einstein publishes paper containing special theory of relativity, which, in abolishing absolute notions of space, time, and mass, explains the results of the Michelson and Morley experiment.
1907: Minkowski describes the space-time of Einstein's relativity theory with four-dimensional “Minkowski space.”
1909: Poincaré publishes Science et méthode, one of several works for a general public in which he epouses conventionalist epistemology and rejects the axiomatic approach to mathematics.
1913: Proust publishes Du Côté de chez Swann, first volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu.
1916: Einstein finishes his general theory of relativity.
1919: Eddington verifies a prediction of general relativity by measuring the deflection of starlight at the edge of the sun during an eclipse.
After Zola, naturalism remained a dominant influence on fiction, in France and throughout the Western world, for decades. It remains, in fact, a model for fiction that aims at a seizure of the world refusing any form of transcendence. But even as Zola was writing, modernist forms of fiction began to appear, often created in the attempt to get around what seemed to be naturalism's submission to science. Literary history often presents the development of modernism as an overcoming of naturalism. In its rejection of naturalism, modernism promoted fictional works that, using myth and symbol, attempted to find realms of essential revelation that somehow transcend the historical world, often conceived as the world of fallen experience. This world, bereft of any transcendental workings, was, after Flaubert and Zola, rather much the exclusive domain of naturalist fiction. It was also the world in which took place science's cognitive endeavors, and for which science could claim to be the final arbiter. And so, seemingly wishing to avoid rivalry with science, modernism often sought to lay bare another realm in which literature could claim to have priority in its search for truth and knowledge.
The development of modernism in France is undoubtedly best illustrated by Marcel Proust's novel A la Recherche du temps perdu, which can be translated “in [re]search of time lost.” (Montcrief's borrowing from Shakespeare's Remembrance of Things Past is evocative, but inaccurate.) Proust's title implies that his novel is research into a realm not usually open to science—unless one finds an oblique reference to paleontology in the title, which is not inapposite. Science, as we will see, is hardly absent from the novel, for Proust set out to reconcile science and art by granting them separate but equal domains. From this perspective, Proust's novel is, on the one hand, a key work of the early twentieth century for understanding the modernist reaction to the imperial claims of science, and, on the other hand, the key work for understanding how this rivalry came to an end. To effect this reconciliation that ends competition, Proust's novel offers an extraordinary counterpoint of literary realism and modernist transcendence. Reconciling realism and the modernist thirst for transcendence, it relocates literature's epistemic quest so as to dispense with literature's rivalry with science and grant literature its own object of knowledge.
Proust did not achieve this transition by ignoring his novelistic predecessors. On the contrary, he self-consciously built upon their work. His critical reflections on Balzac and Flaubert, for example, view them in clearly epistemic terms. In commentary on Balzac found in Contre Sainte-Beuve, Proust assesses the writer's capacity to confound the real and the imaginary in such a way that fictional and real scientists exist on the same plane. By implication, research in fiction and research in reality have the same ontological status for Balzac, which Proust takes to be a positive contribution to the development of fiction. In evaluating Flaubert's rhetoric in Madame Bovary in his “A propos du style de Flaubert”—one of the most important pieces of Flaubert criticism—Proust saw in Flaubert's rhetoric nothing less than an epistemological revolution in fiction nearly equivalent to what Kant did with his theory of knowledge. This is not a point of view that I have disputed in the preceding pages. I add that what Proust learned from Balzac and Flaubert, as well as from Zola, was precisely an epistemological lesson about drawing upon science for models describing social dynamics in time, and a capital lesson about transforming the narrator into an epistemological agent. We will discuss these issues in some detail presently.
From a slightly different perspective, A la Recherche is a far-reaching attempt to reconcile the scientific worldview with the artistic possibility of vouchsafing poetic value to the individual life. In his novel, Proust wants to find a space in which poetic salvation can be achieved in spite of the relentless reduction of the world, by science and by naturalism, to a world that can be described, if not explained, by deterministic laws. Proust does this by redefining the epistemic function of literature by drawing directly upon scientific epistemology to justify his demonstration that literature can have access to realms that science cannot describe. With this demonstration using science's own epistemology, Proust's novel presents a way of ending the sense of rivalry literature had felt with science. Considerations of literary history buttress this conclusion, since it is accurate to say that, after Proust, the European novel has rarely sought to rival science on its own terms. In part, this conclusion came about because the development of science, especially of sciences like molecular biology and quantum mechanics, meant that it was no longer useful or credible for literature to claim to rival science. But this historical development also came about because Proust, more systematically than any other writer I can name, developed an epistemic viewpoint that ended literature's desire for rivalry by declaring this rivalry untrue to the nature of literary knowledge. Proust was hardly alone, or even the first, to make this point, but he made it in a kind of summation whose scope no other writer approaches.
As critics have often noted, Proust drew upon developments in modern poetry as a springboard for the creation of his novel. Proust's accomplishment can be best grasped if we understand that his work is, in many respects, the culmination of the search for a unique form of experience that characterized the quest undertaken by symbolist poetry—a quest for experience conceived as a unique form of knowledge. In Proust's novel we can find reflections of both the antagonistic rivalry with science that symbolist poets felt and their attempt to render this rivalry nugatory by achieving transcendence through poetry. Modernism inherited from symbolist poetry, in France and elsewhere, the forms designed to get around science's imperial claims to regiment knowledge. One response to these claims was that poetry proclaimed itself to be an autonomous realm in which the individual could find transcendental revelation through poetic form. Thus understood, poetry can be seen as making a counter-claim in that it proposed to offer access to superior epistemic spaces not accessible to science. Proust took up the task of finding a transcendental form, but not simply, as was the case of some poets, with the idea of simply rejecting science. Proust was interested in science and, by the time he began writing, had assimilated virtually all the major questions that science was addressing at the beginning of the twentieth century—and this with a sense of the epistemological stakes that few writers, or scientists for that matter, have ever shown. Proust wanted to deal with science on its ground and in its own terms so as not to limit the epistemic issues a novel can embody. His novel demonstrates that fiction offers knowledge that at once uses what science offers and then goes beyond science to offer its own knowledge of a realm inaccessible to science.
A corrective reexamination of the historical context is a good starting point for delineating Proust's understanding of epistemic issues as well as what he took from other writers. Therefore, I am going to deal at some length with the literary and then the scientific context in which Proust's novel takes on its full meaning as the culmination of a century of developments. To this end, it is relevant first to sketch out scientists' attitude toward science, since Proust's encounter with science takes on full meaning only when viewed against the backdrop of science's self-understanding. Then we may turn to poets' attitudes toward science and knowledge.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, many scientists viewed science as a soon-to-be-completed task, especially as far as the basic laws of nature—or the laws of physics—were concerned. There was a widespread belief that, with Maxwell's work on electromagnetism, physics had practically arrived at, to use a more recent expression, the final theory. (Physicists enjoy telling the anecdote according to which the young Max Planck was supposedly told to give up physics since there would soon be no problems left to solve.) This smugness, if that is the right expression, was coupled in many quarters with a positivistic belief that epistemological questions had largely been resolved. Parallel to this belief in the final theory, there developed at the same time a revolt against the self-satisfied imperial attitude of positivistic philosophy, such as we have already seen when Zola's Doctor Pascal finds himself on the defensive as he undertakes to save humanity through science. Finally, there was also, among the more thoughtful scientists of the latter part of the nineteenth century, a feeling of disquiet that there were really too many problems in the details of the worldview proposed by Newtonian celestial mechanics and dynamics, thermodynamics, and electromagnetism. For example, for these scientists it was not at all clear that Maxwell's new theory unifying electromagnetic phenomena was consonant with Newtonian mechanics. In France, as he worked on unresolved problems of celestial mechanics, Henri Poincaré was among those scientists who hardly saw the end in sight. In Germany, young Max Planck was another, and the solution he found in 1900 for quantifying black box radiation would lead to nothing less than quantum mechanics. But during the final decades of the nineteenth century, the radical changes to come in physics after 1900 were hardly apparent.
The nineteenth-century revolt against science was not entirely the work of poets, nor does it begin, as some assume, entirely with romantic writers. For our purposes, several French poets concerned with science and writing in the wake of romanticism are most relevant for understanding what Proust was about when he set out to develop an epistemology for literature. One should read back through three generations of post-romantic poets—Valéry, Mallarmé, and Baudelaire—to understand the literary epistemology that impressed Proust as he sought to enlarge the epistemic sphere that he had found in Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola. And one should undertake this reading without assuming that all poets were hostile toward science. In his Literature and Technology, Wylie Sypher has argued quite pertinently that in fact most poets throughout the nineteenth century were actually favorably disposed (or indifferent) toward science. Blake notwithstanding, the English romantics were largely empirically inclined and took great interest in the physics and chemistry of their time. It is only after Poe, and largely in France among the next generation of poets—or among the symbolists in general—that poets like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry elaborated on Poe's ideas and attacked openly the claims of scientists to be the final arbiters of knowledge. A literary epistemologist, Poe was something of an amateur scientist himself, not only for his conception of poetry as a mathematics of feeling, but, I note with some amusement, also in his plagiarizing treatise on conchology that brought Cuvier's work to a popular public. Poe was not a simple figure: he wanted to be a scientist of verse, and his French followers were duly impressed by the scope of his ambitions.
The symbolists took up Poe's view of poetry as the science of emotion, and so Sypher argues ingeniously that the symbolist poets, from Poe through Mallarmé and Valéry, relied upon technique in a way that suggests that they believed in the same methodological axioms as the scientists. For these poets, method was all—it was the key to elevating literature and making of it a form of epistemic exploration. In short, through the proper method, literature could offer superior knowledge. This belief in methodology, in the wake of Poe, is exemplified by Proust's contemporary, Valéry, born in 1871, the same year as Proust. Notably, the young Valéry's Introduction à la méthode de Léonard da Vinci (1894 in its first version) defines “rigor” for poetry as essentially the same as scientific rigor.1 The idea of rigor is derived from Valéry's definition of intelligence. He calls intelligence the “discovery of relations” in places where we did not previously see “the law of continuity.” This definition echoes the definition of science as the knowledge of relations, not of substances, that the physicist Poincaré often formulated (1160). In his Introduction à la méthode, Valéry explicitly refers to Poincaré's work, stating that he has found in Poincaré's description of the scientific mind an analogy for the autonomous workings of the artistic mind. In science as in poetry, as Valéry sees it, the creative mind engaged in epistemic inquiry must attempt to seize itself in its own workings. Analogous to a scientist, Valéry sees the poet as enacting a drama of epistemic bootstrapping. Wanting to emulate scientific rigor—and in no way hostile to the values of science—Valéry tries to formalize the idea that the mind itself, in seizing itself, is the privileged locus of knowledge that the poet can explore. Valéry calls this self-reflexive seizure the “double mental life.” In this movement of self-seizure, thought develops as a series that can be “brought to the limit” so that all possibilities of intellection can be seen. With this comparison of self-reflexive thought with the limit procedure taken from calculus, Valéry aims at showing that intellection is a method that produces meaning, leading the “mind to foresee itself, to image the ensemble of what was going to be imagined in detail, and, with the effect of the succession thus resumed” one arrives at the “condition of every generalization” (1162-63).
Valéry claims that this procedure is “an operation that, known by the name of recursive reasoning” gives to “analyses their extension.” Valéry alludes to Poincaré's concept of mathematical induction, and this allusion points up the way Valéry would like to incorporate the very idea of a mechanism—here the rule given by a recursive procedure—to show that artistic creation can be defined as a method given by pure intellection. What is important here is that the intellect is defined in scientific terms: intellection is a question of procedure and method. Proust, undoubtedly another reader of Poincaré, also accepts this definition, and yet he draws somewhat different conclusions from those that Valéry accepts. For Proust, the intellect is an epistemic tool that nonetheless is separate from the epistemic realm to which literature aspires. As we shall presently see, this belief figures prominently in the way Proust constructs his novel so as to separate the work of the autonomous intellect from the work of imaginative recall. For Valéry, Poincaré's concept of recursive reasoning shows the autonomy of mind. This is essential: Poincaré's example allows one to argue the autonomy of mind on the basis of what mind does, not on the basis of what it is, as in the case of Kant. No a priori categories are involved. The autonomy of the mind is then used to argue for the mind's founding role in grounding knowledge. For Proust, this view of the autonomy of mind is a key for the very structure of his novel as well as the rhetoric of narration: his narrator quite literally demonstrates this autonomy in demonstrating the operations of his mind.
To move back a generation from Proust and Valéry, we see that comparable concerns with the mind's autonomy were found earlier in Mallarmé's attempt to expel the irrational, the contingent, and the aleatory from literature. Mallarmé, the most tortured symbolist of all, was driven by a desire to render revelation mathematically certain in the sense that poetic revelation would exclude anything contingent from the oracular knowledge poetry should offer. The quest for certainty is a late nineteenth-century leitmotif, brought about in part by the triumph of empiricism and its doctrine that all knowledge of the world is contingent. And the quest for certainty was also brought about in part by epistemological difficulties in mathematics, for the arrival of non-Euclidian geometries placed the very foundations of mathematics and epistemological certainty in doubt. In literature, Mallarmé's anguish about the contingent nature of knowledge produced a dismay analogous to the consternation many felt about the elaboration of non-Euclidian geometries. If anything is certain, it is that Mallarmé lived uncertainty as a kind of prolonged anguish, and much of his work is a self-referential exploration of the impossibility of grounding poetic revelation in an autonomous affirmation of itself. Mallarmé's quest for certainty was to find final formulation in Le Livre, or Mallarmé's “Book,” a projected work that would offer an embodiment of logos—with which the Book would found being. In this never-finished oracle, Mallarmé wanted to present the revelation of universal relations as a book of poetry, which is to say, epistemic revelation conceived as the Orphic explanation of the earth.
Mallarmé's notes published under the title of Le Livre are cryptic, to say the least, and function more like a thought experiment than a work in any ordinary sense. In a suggestive interpretation, Steven Cassedy sees in them Mallarmé's vision of dance, conceived as the incarnation of mathematics: “It is the genius of algebra having been geometrized, the final expression of how the idea, the Logos, passes from the mathematics of pure number and pure relation to the mathematics of concrete form to assume the status of an aesthetic, but entirely phenomenal, object.”2 From this perspective, Mallarmé's idea of an absolute book was the dream of “a pure network of numerical relations between a limited number of suggestive and emblematic terms (“Drame,” “Mystère,” “Idée,” etc.)” (1072). In this interpretation, it is striking that we again find Poincaré's concept of knowledge as a series of relations, a description of forms through mathematical symbolism, that the poet would reveal. This revelation should act as a kind of privileged knowledge that abolishes the contingent and the hated groundless nature of being that nearly drove Mallarmé to suicide.
For programmatic purposes, Mallarmé's book did not really need to exist. Like Plato's ideas or like some fictional book dreamed of in a novel, the very idea of the Book as the embodiment of all relations was enough to suggest that certain knowledge might exist somewhere—at least in the fictional realm in which certainty could be postulated as (fictionally) existing. Like a resumé of Borges's library of Babylon, Mallarmé's Book was to embody an ideal, autonomous nature. As such it would be a realm of transcendental revelation that must exist somewhere if it can be imagined to exist at all—if only in another work of fiction. From a Proustian perspective, then, we can say that the Book suggests the existence of a book of revelation, or a certain form of knowledge, that is only found in a fictional realm because only fiction has the autonomy to vouchsafe existence to certainty. Literature appears then as a discourse that might supplant mathematics as the guarantor of certainty in a world where the philosophy of science and especially mathematics was losing its belief that there could be certain knowledge at all. Mathematicians were asking, sometimes with anguish equal to Mallarmé's, “What could be certain if Euclid no longer was?” The answer might be in the Book, in which certainty is certain because it cannot be imagined otherwise. Proust's idea of certain knowledge lies in germ here as the work of the imagination on impressions that are certain because one cannot have any other impressions than the ones that the imagination entertains—more on this conceptual conundrum presently.
The mathematically inclined rationalist Valéry and mystical nihilist Mallarmé offered Proust their models and metaphors for a poeticized mathematics (or vice versa) grounded in a thirst for transcendence and certainty—but no real belief in any transcendental realm characterized either poet. However, if we go back to an even earlier generation, it seems Baudelaire was willing to entertain the hypothesis that there might be a transcendental realm, one needing fiction to exist—and a fair amount of hashish. Baudelaire is a singularly important spokesman for literature in its confrontation with science's epistemic imperialism because he was one of the most important rhetoricians for developing strategies of revelation. These strategies aim at revelations that science cannot rival, and these were strategies Proust was to make his own. Baudelaire's opposition to science, in defense of poetry, led him to rhetorical ploys that foreshadow directly the way Proust sought to elude the limits on knowledge imposed by science. Baudelaire's defense of poetry is based on the belief that poetic language can reveal the essence of particular moments and that these moments, in their absolute specificity, effect a disclosure of a truth that science cannot encompass. As we will see, the Proustian doctrine of essence is a rather direct borrowing from Baudelaire's celebration of the divine particular.
Baudelaire's refusal to allow science to usurp the role of arbitrator of knowledge turns on his rejection of the idea that there are a limited number of worlds literature can entertain. In addition to the world Newton described, the world sometimes taken to be the real one, Baudelaire maintained that there are many worlds to be revealed and known. An indefinite number of epistemic realms exist that poetry can explore. And Baudelaire concluded that, if there is a plurality of possible epistemic realms, these realms of revelation lie outside the generalizing framework imposed by classical physics to define reality. Opposing the limits of Kantian rationalism, Baudelaire claims that any individual world is as worthy of epistemic exploration as that Newtonian-Kantian world defined by the parameters of public space, time, and motion. This claim derives from his belief that there is particular knowledge limited to the individual subject. Baudelaire's reasoning here opens the way for Proust's exploration of the knowledge of the particular stored in human memory, because individual memory, for both Baudelaire and Proust, is one of those worlds lying outside the confines of Kantian epistemology.
Baudelaire's poetical works propose to explore these individual worlds, although typically his poems also portray the impossibility of dwelling in any realm of transcendental revelation longer than the moment of intoxication that offers access to that realm. If one turns from his poems to his critical writing, one finds that Baudelaire spells out, with clarity and with less irony than in his poems, his refusal to allow science to claim all epistemic space. In his critical writing, Baudelaire elucidates, with great self-consciousness, the self-defensive position of the nineteenth-century poet who wants to carve out a realm outside of science. Baudelaire believed that, if he were not successful in finding a specific object for poetic activity, he would be reduced to the role of a simple versifier who, were he to make truth claims, could only repeat the truths science has discovered. Rejecting in effect the Keatsian claim that truth is beauty, Baudelaire separated out the realms of truth, beauty, and duty, declaring each to be the object of a different type of inquiry. Truth is found by science, beauty by poetry, though Baudelaire says the novel may represent a mixed discourse in which both truth and beauty are present. This view foreshadows Proust's conception of the novel, since in his novel the truths of scientific determinism exist as the framework in which the revelation of the unique truth of subjectivity takes place.
Finally, in Baudelaire's economy of discourse, beauty is conceived as separate from ethics and truth. As Baudelaire puts it in an essay on Gautier, beauty is the product of a discourse that takes itself as its own object: “La poésie ne peut pas, sous peine de mort ou de déchéance, s'assimiler à la science ou à la morale; elle n'a pas la Vérité pour objet, elle n'a qu'Elle-même” [Poetry cannot, under pain of death or degradation, assimilate itself to science or ethics; it does not have the Truth as its object, it has only Itself].3 Whatever be the ultimate origins of the doctrine of the autonomy of art, in Baudelaire's theory this doctrine is part of a defensive posture directed against the encroachment of imperial science as well as the imperialism of moralizing discourses that would reduce poetry to a repetition of the ethical truths of triumphant bourgeois ideology.
Baudelaire's doctrine of the autonomy of poetry does not preclude its having an epistemic function, though poetry's task does not consist simply in the enunciation of Truth. In writing on his contemporary Victor Hugo, Baudelaire celebrates those thinkers like a Fourier or a Swedenborg who revealed that the world is made up of analogies. Perhaps it is not inapposite to suggest that these thinkers undertook something like the disclosure of the relations that, as Poincaré later said, it is science's task to reveal. Baudelaire drew the conclusion that poets, like other thinkers, can reveal analogies: “Chez les excellents pöetes, il n'y a pas de métaphore, de comparaison ou d'épithète qui ne soit d'une adaptation mathématiquement exacte dans la circonstance actuelle, parce que ces comparaisons, ces métaphores et ces épithètes sont puisées dans l'inépuisable fonds de l'universelle analogie, et qu'elles ne peuvent être puisées ailleurs” [One inevitably recalls Poe in translating Baudelaire into Poe's language, or back into Poe's language: In the work of excellent poets, there is no metaphor, no simile or epithet that is not the equivalent, within the present circumstance, of a mathematically exact adaptation, because these similes, metaphors, and epithets are extracted from the inexhaustible stock of universal analogy and they can be extracted from nowhere else] (705). One wonders how a rhetorical figure can be mathematically precise. The answer is that Baudelaire has used a figure here, one comparing figures to equations, to suggest that poetic rhetoric can serve a function analogous to that of scientific language couched in mathematical formalism. In defining an epistemic realm for poetry, Baudelaire says that this realm is accessible, metaphorically, through the same analogical precision through which the world of classical dynamics is accessible: through metaphorical language that can be as exact in its translation of reality as mathematical equations. In a sense, Baudelaire conceives of the task of literature to be a parallel research program to physics, a program whose conjectures supplement or complement the realm of truths that empirical science offers. There is a historical difference between Proust and Baudelaire in this regard. Proust's search begins two generations later when Newtonian dynamics, though still accepted, had lost its claim to be the universal paradigm for knowledge. Baudelaire may have surmised that this was the case, but, by 1890, it was clear to all who were scientifically literate that Newtonian dynamics did not offer the only way to describe the world.
Baudelaire did not need the end of the Newtonian consensus to find concrete examples of what he meant by the exploration of multiple worlds. For example, in Victor Hugo's work in La légende des siècles, Baudelaire finds a concrete example of poetic conjecture that properly fulfills the mission of poetry. Baudelaire finds in the Hugo who wrote “La pente de la rêverie” a demonstration of the limits of mathematical reasoning: In Hugo, much as in Balzac, the reader sees that the paradoxes involved in unity and infinity cannot be resolved (709). Baudelaire finds in Hugo that literature and science have separate domains, separate realms, for which each is best suited—even if it seems that science proposes a model that literature is tempted to emulate and not the contrary. Baudelaire's is a somewhat contradictory position: Poetry should owe nothing to science, though science is nonetheless a model for truth or knowledge that poetry is obliged to recognize. The tension created by this contradictory mixing of prescriptive and descriptive aesthetics runs throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It is a tension that finds its most ambitious expression in Proust's novel, in Proust's demonstration that literature has no ethical role per se, for his novel is an epistemic project that can incorporate both the truth of science and knowledge of subjective worlds.
Baudelaire's own resolution of this tension comes in some of the major poems of Les Fleurs du mal, these “flowers of evil” that enact and celebrate the attempt to escape from the world of tedium or ennui, or in short, the world of time. The rhetoric in these poems points the way to Proust's use of images for garnering nonintellectual knowledge of the individual who lives in a world of universal laws obeying temporality. For Baudelaire, the world known by intellection is the mechanical world of classical physics over which clocks rule as absolutes. Newton's belief in absolute time is the starting point for Baudelaire's poems that want to overthrow the intellectual tyranny of physics by destroying the emotional tyranny of clocks. Escape from this world of absolute temporality begins nonetheless with the recognition of the primacy of the material world, a primacy recognized as much by Proust as by Baudelaire, though Proust no longer recognizes the primacy of absolute time. In Baudelaire, this recognition underwrites the possibility of mechanically manipulating matter so as to change states of consciousness, or what we might call the creation of knowledge through pharmacology (349). Realms outside of science's purlieu can be found with stimulants—like poetry or hashish, eros or wine—that propel the mind outside of itself into a new world:
Cette acuité de la pensée, cet enthousiasme des sens et de l'esprit, ont dû, en tout temps, apparaitre à l'homme comme le premier des biens; c'est pourquoi, ne considérant que la volupté immédiate, il a, sans s'inquiéter de violer les lois de sa constitution, cherché dans la science physique, dans la pharmaceutique, dans les plus grossières liqueurs, dans les parfums les plus subtils, sous tous les climats dans tous les temps, les moyens de fuire, ne fût-ce que pour quelques heures, son habitacle de fange.
[This sharpness of thought, this enthusiasm of the mind and the senses, must have, in every era, appeared to humanity as the greatest of goods; that is why, considering only immediate voluptuous rapture, and without worrying about violating the laws of our constitution, humanity has sought in physical and pharmaceutical science, in the strongest liquors, and in the most subtle perfumes, in every climate and every era, the means to flee, be it only for a few hours, its little abode of filth.]
(“Le Poëme du haschisch,” 348)
The experience of flight is the goal of art, or art as intoxication, which is to say, art affords a nonintellectual experience that is a revelation of worlds that do not belong to science and the intellect. Experience is not reducible to some intellectual proposition, though it is an epistemic state involving knowledge of a unique realm. Using a rhetoric based on metaphor and analogy, Baudelaire says that poetic experience is direct knowledge of a superior realm beyond the intellectual realm of classical physics, which redeems existence, at least momentarily. And because poetic experience redeems a moment that is unique to the individual, it is a more valuable state of knowledge than knowledge provided by universal scientific laws. Or so argues Baudelaire in defense of nonintellectual knowledge.
After Baudelaire, the goal of poetry is often proclaimed to be the communication of this unique revelation, if communication is the right word to describe the perception of unmediated knowledge. Proust was especially sensitive to the potential contradiction found in the desire to communicate a unique, individual experience through the language composed of general concepts that poetry is obliged to use. From this perspective, it may appear that Baudelaire makes of the very notion of poetic experience a contradiction: a poem as language is a verbal communication, but a poem as poetic experience is unmediated knowledge. The very idea of communication presupposes mediation by a structure of communication—be it linguistic, iconic, or whatever. Baudelaire's rhetoric is motivated by his attempt to get around the difficulty of seizing unique experience through the mediation of universal concepts.
Baudelaire's poetic use of language points directly to Proust's attempt to find, in the language of his fictional discourse, a way of communicating a privileged experience that only literature can know: in brief, a nonintellectual knowledge that science cannot duplicate. In the exactitude of figurative language—mathematical or not—Baudelaire saw the key to the communication of experience uncontaminated by the intellect. The revelation of unsuspected relations, afforded by tropes, is in fact constitutive of this experience of unique knowledge. These relations can be revealed, for example, by poetical analogies, as in Baudelaire's famous poem “Correspondances.” In this sonnet, an entire world of analogies springs from the relations perceived in correspondences among the senses. The relations are abstract, but they are given only in the figures created by the language of immediate sensation.
Or, equally apt for Proust, other relations are discovered in analogies between past and present when the poetic text evokes perfumes that call up the past, as in a sonnet like “Le Parfum.” A brief excursus on “Le Parfum” can serve as an introduction to Proust's rhetoric and lead us from Baudelaire's epistemic dreams into Proust's novel. The first quatrain of the sonnet, “Le Parfum,” evokes, with a question, a world found in a moment of sensuality. With ironic directness, Baudelaire asks if the reader has ever been intoxicated by odors:
Lecteur, as-tu quelquefois respiré
Avec ivresse et lente gourmandise
Ce grain d'encens qui remplit une église,
Ou d'un sachet le musc invétéré?
[Reader, have you sometimes breathed in
With intoxication and slow delight
This grain of incense which fills a church
Or the deep-seated musk of some sachet?]
This question is followed in the next stanza by an indirect answer. Baudelaire presents an analogy that defines the poetic experience as knowledge of the past re-created sensually in the present. One inevitably thinks of Proust's description of the pastry called a madeleine and the cup of linden tea that generate his narrator's discovery of time past in the opening section of A la Recherche:
Charme profond, magique, dont nous grise
Dans le présent le passé restauré.
Ainsi l'amant sur un corp adoré
Du souvenir cueille la fleur exquise.
[Profound and magic spell in which we are made drunk
By the past restored in the present.
So a lover, bent over an adored body,
Gathers the exquisite flower of memory.]
As Baudelaire's lover caresses the beloved, the full intoxication occurs when the past is fully restored in the present. The odors of the present moment find an analogy with odors in the past and, through the sensual relation thus revealed, allow the past to invade the present.
The sonnet's tercets draw the conclusion that this privileged sensual experience is analogous to the experience of a religious plenitude produced by the odors in a church full of incense:
De ses cheveux élastiques et lourds,
Vivant sachet, encensoir de l'alcôve,
Une senteur montait, sauvage et fauve.
[From her elastic and heavy hair,
A living sachet, a censer for the boudoir,
Was arising an odor, one wild and animal-like.]
The sachet and the censer are likened to the mistress's heavy hair in the web of analogies linking the altar, the boudoir, and the poem itself, at once present in the past, and present as the fullness of an experience lying beyond whatever we can know through mere intellection. The final tercet stresses that it is a uniquely sensual realm that is (or was) the source of our experiential elevation:
Et des habits, mousseline ou velours,
Tout imprégnés de sa jeunesse pure,
Se dégageait un parfum de fourrure.
[And from her clothes, be they muslin or velvet,
Quite saturated with her pure youthfulness
Was emanating a perfume of fur.]
Baudelaire's sensualism proposes a triumph for poetry over the world, though this victory is fleeting and hence ironic in its evanescence, since the reader inevitably feels that the tedium of the physical world is ready to assert itself as the bedrock of existence. Baudelaire's ironic poses, and the contradictory affirmations of his mystical materialism, seem to cry out for the creation of an artwork that at once affirms the knowledge of the material world, described in all its deterministic grimness by science, while it offers permanent knowledge of a realm that might escape from reductionist materialism.
In other words, Baudelaire's paradoxes seem to call out for the creation of a literary work that is at once a novel incorporating the knowledge of the laws of physical necessity, and a poem offering unique knowledge of an individual realm that transcends the world of intellection. Later symbolists seemed to point out by example that the pursuit of pure transcendence could only result in empty gestures or celebrations of failure. Mallarmé showed that poetry, pursued as a celebration of its impossible transcendence, could result only in a cryptic knowledge of its own impossibility. Attempting to circumvent the failure that is the glory of Mallarmé's poetry, Valéry's work showed that poetry can also offer knowledge of its own conditions of possibility. However, Valéry knew well that this self-reflective knowledge would fail to satisfy the writer or reader wanting knowledge beyond the text's knowledge of itself. Valéry dramatized this desire in his poem “Le Cimetière marin,” with its portrayal of the life forces that inevitably blow open the sheets of paper that seek to enclose the text upon itself. In fine, the work of these major symbolist poets suggested the possibility of a literary creation consonant with the truths of the scientific intellect, but which went beyond these truths. In the wake of the symbolists, Proust understands that such a work would offer knowledge of a transcendental realm of unique experience and would also account for its own operation through a self-reflexive epistemic justification of its existence. This, in essence, is what we find in Proust's A la Recherche du temps perdu—this and a vision of an objective world ruled over by scientific law.
Proust, like Baudelaire, desired to find for literature a field of inquiry that is at least as valuable as the one defined by science. Like Valéry, he was respectful of science, of the science that included by the time Proust was writing such new theories, ideas, and disciplines as Darwinian biology, the medical revolution based on microbiology, the nearly completed systematic classification of modern chemistry, Maxwell's field equations, Poincaré's early formulations of relativity, and, after the reception of non-Euclidian geometries, the now-generalized recognition that mathematical creation had no a priori limits. By the early twentieth century, the epistemic space carved out by science had become far larger, in a relatively short time, than the world described by Newton and Laplace, those emblematic mechanical thinkers whom Baudelaire mentions with distanced respect. Proust's science includes of course Newton and Laplace, but as rethought by epistemologists like the Parisian philosopher Boutroux or, more importantly, Poincaré. For by the early twentieth century, any consideration of the world of science in France, or Europe, had to take account of the work of the most influential modern French mathematician and theoretical physicist, Henri Poincaré. After considering the French symbolists and some ideas about Proust's relation to them, we can gain much by considering Proust's work in the light of the thought of an emblematic scientist like Poincaré. Poincaré is not well known among literary historians, though he dominates the physics and mathematics of the time, and no history of epistemology is complete without considering Poincaré along with Mach, Duhem, and Boltzmann. In the French context, his thought offers the most influential scientific epistemology Proust contemplated as he began working on A la Recherche du temps perdu.
Poincaré's work is quite diverse. Anticipating Einstein, Poincaré proposed an early version of a theory of relativity shortly before Einstein published his 1905 paper on the special theory of relativity. In working on the difficulty of calculating the mutual attraction of three centers of gravitation—the three body problem—Poincaré developed some of the early work upon which chaos theory is based. The fact that Valéry borrows his procedure for defining mind from Poincaré underscores that Poincaré had become in France the public model of the scientist as thinker, especially for his role in debates concerning the foundation of mathematics. For example, Poincaré's writings were at the center of debates in which questions about the foundations of mathematics inevitably led to concern about the nature of knowledge and certainty. Poincaré's role was especially visible in the debate set off at the time by the dissemination of ideas in France about non-Euclidean geometry. The debate, argued in widely read journals, was between, on one side, Kantians who defended the a priori necessity of Euclidean geometry and, on the other side, positivists and empiricists who rejected the metaphysical idealism Kant's position implied. In her important study of the role of non-Euclidian geometry in art, Linda Henderson stresses Poincaré's role in bringing this debate to a wide public:
The importance of the French debate was twofold. It gave non-Euclidean geometry currency in Paris among intellectuals, and out of this debate emerged the definitive statements on this subject by Henri Poincaré, the mathematician-scientist and writer who, more than any other individual, was responsible for the popularization of non-Euclidean geometry in Paris. …
In 1887 Poincaré first published his theory that the axioms of geometry are neither synthetic a priori nor empirical, but are conventions, a view now generally accepted as the solution to the controversy.4
Poincaré's conventionalism rejected the experimental nature of geometry, as well as its a priori nature, since the belief in the a priori nature of mathematics argued against the possibility of establishing new geometric systems. And it was now obviously the case that the mind is capable of new geometries.
Poincaré's conventionalism seemed to entail that one was free to chose the geometry one found most convenient, for neither Euclidean nor Lobachevsky's geometry were true or false. Poincaré made this conventionalism into a coherent epistemological doctrine that Proust, as well as Valéry, took to heart, for the doctrine made mathematics seem more like art: Mathematical formalisms were viewed as a product of the human mind that one could use according to one's needs. Yet there was a loss to the viewpoint. Certain truth no longer belonged to the ontology of mathematics and, by implication, to physical systems constructed as mathematical deductions. The “conventional” nature of mathematics entailed the conclusion that truth was a matter of use, not of ontology, and with this conclusion one could no longer point to mathematics as a body of certain truths about the world. Certainty no longer seemed to belong to a world that science could describe in any number of different ways.
Poincaré himself pushed the point about what we today call the underdetermined nature of reality when he argued that conventionalism in mathematics carries over to physics and other sciences:
If a phenomenon carries with it a complete mechanical explanation, it will carry with it an infinity of other explanations that will equally as well account for all the particularities revealed by experiment.
And that is confirmed by the history of every part of physics; in optics, for example, Fresnel believed in vibration that was perpendicular to the plane of polarization. Newmann thought it was parallel to this plane. Scientists looked for a long time for a “experimentum crucis” that would allow a decision between these two theories and one could not be found.5
The choice of a theory is guided, as Poincaré puts it, by considerations where “the personal contribution” is very great, though considerations like elegance and simplicity are also usual. Conventionalism, describing the epistemological underdetermination of reality, undermines the belief in certainty as a form of a priori necessity. Kant's epistemology founders here, as do the Newtonian underpinnings of the realism of a preceding century of realist writers, and Zola's future-oriented epistemology suddenly seems rather naive: The theory of progress is largely emptied of theoretical content when any conceivable number of theories may work, now or later. (From Poincaré and Mach through Popper and Quine, there is in this regard a continuity.)
The conventionalist epistemology elaborated by Poincaré finds strong resonance in the aesthetic modernism of a writer like Proust, for whom certain truth cannot be given by science, because science's generalized laws, in their contingency, have probability, but no certainty. Certainty would have to be granted by some necessity that science does not deal with and that not even mathematics can vouchsafe. Recognizing that epistemic necessity is not found in the objective world of science, Proust, in resonance with Poincaré, allows his narrator to develop the idea that certainty may be found in the subjective world of unique experience. Actually, it is hardly necessary that Poincaré be Proust's direct source, for one could just as well argue that Poincaré and Proust share a common epistemology that developed in reaction to the loss of certainty at the end of the nineteenth century. And going beyond Poincaré as it were, Proust affirms that certainty and necessity can characterize knowledge if that knowledge is granted by unique experience, because of the nature of what is unique: It can only be what it is. In this move, Proust seems to have taken a cue from Mallarmé, for his narrator argues, implicitly, that fiction, by its autonomy, can create a realm in which certainty can exist because it can be imagined to exist. Poincaré leads to Mallarmé (and to Borges), and from this perspective Proust's novel appears to be a quest that stakes out an epistemic space outside of those realms carved out by science: Proust's narrator can find certain knowledge if he can gain access to that subjective realm that is not subject to the underdeterminism Poincaré ascribes to the objective world known by the various sciences.
It cannot be said that Proust or his narrator flaunts any relation to Poincaré. In fact, Proust makes only one reference to Poincaré in the course of A la Recherche du temps perdu. This reference occurs when a character, the aristocratic Saint-Loup, says in conversation that Poincaré has shown that mathematics isn't all “that certain.” One may wonder whether Saint-Loup has been a diligent reader of Poincaré, but his comment mirrors public reaction to the debates on scientific epistemology that had been widespread in France and in Europe in general. Saint-Loup's comment on Poincaré points up that certainty and uncertainty were public issues in France, and that something as esoteric as concern about the foundations of mathematics, brought about by non-Euclidian geometry, could occupy the aristocracy of Faubourg Saint-Germain. Saint-Loup's reference to certainty shows that epistemological and scientific questions were being asked, at the beginning of the twentieth century, in works by scientists and, as we see, by novelists.
As Proust's novel itself centrally demonstrates about literature, novelists as well as mathematicians can be concerned with apodictic structures or procedures that grant certain knowledge. The criteria by which certainty is granted or recognized may vary from one discourse to another, as may what exactly certainty even means. Proust, as much as any thinker or writer, was well aware that the difficulty of defining certainty exists in direct proportion to the anguish one may feel upon needing some certainty in a world in which one finds merely probable truth, or uncertainties. With an intellectual rigor perhaps unparalleled in literary history, Proust framed the question of the certainty of artistic truth in direct response to the uncertainties of the intellect that scientific conventionalism portrays. At this juncture, we find again a potential rivalry between literature and science, for the claims to certain knowledge could lead to claims of superiority. In Proust, this rivalry is actually defused by Proust's concept of artistic truth, for artistic truth, as we shall see presently, is really complementary or symmetrical to scientific truth. The essential point to grasp here, the starting point for understanding Proust's intellectual context, is the way in which Proust frames the question of certainty in terms that mirror the emerging epistemological consensus for which Poincaré, mathematician and epistemologist, set out the basic terms in a series of his nonmathematical works, the most popular of which was La Science et l'hypothèse (Science and Hypothesis) of 1902.
To allay the doubts some readers may now be entertaining, I will concede that Poincaré is not a thinker whose name is usually coupled with Proust's. My point is of course that it should be (and indeed has been in the very most recent book I have read on Proust, Nicola Luckhurst's Science and Structure in Proust's “A la recherche”). Bergson and Einstein are more usual names bandied about when it comes to intellectual analogies, though a little scrutiny shows that these names are not especially relevant. Proust knew Bergson's work, but Bergson's concepts about time are not Proust's. I do not believe that Proust really made much use of Bergson, or that Proust even knew much about Einstein before late in his life. Einstein did not become a media star before Eddington's 1919 expedition affirmed that gravity could bend light and thus offered an important and widely acclaimed confirmation of Einstein's general relativity theory. If a meaningful comparison can be made between Proust and Einstein—and an argument can be made for analogies—this overlap is a question of coincidence, not influence, for Einstein and Proust were subject to the same intellectual developments.
The reference made by Proust's narrator in “Combray” (1913) to time as the “fourth dimension” of spacial reality is a reflection not of Einstein's relativity theory, but of Poincaré's claim that, if we were to receive a different education, we could localize phenomena of the exterior world in non-Euclidian space or even in a space with four dimensions. Consider the chapter on “Space and Geometry” in Science and Hypothesis:
Beings with minds like ours, and having the same senses as we, but without previous education, would receive from a suitably chosen external world impressions such that they would be led to construct a geometry other than that of Euclid and to localize the phenomena of that external world in a non-Euclidian space, or even in a space with four dimensions.
As for us, whose education has been accomplished by our actual world, if we were suddenly transported into this new world, we should have no difficulty in referring its phenomena to our Euclidean space. Conversely, if these beings were transported into our environment, they would be led to relate our phenomena to non-Euclidean space.
(66)
Not only does Poincaré grant us the power to perceive four dimensions, but he even imagines that we could visualize Lorentz transformations, that is, we could perceive that objects get smaller as they approach the speed of light. Poincaré was a scientist with an imagination that a novelist might well envy. In any case, perceiving a fourth dimension seems to have been an idea that Proust found quite congenial.
With such ideas as these, Poincaré was close to formulating a theory like Einstein's relativity theory, but only close. As Martin Gardner points out, neither Lorentz nor Poincaré imagined that time was relative to an inertial framework. This was the great conceptual step that Einstein took, in which he rejected Newton's premise that one time permeated the entire cosmos.6 If it does not seem that Einstein's ideas influenced Proust, it does seem plausible to say that Proust's relativizing his narrator's position in time parallels what Einstein developed in building on Poincaré, Lorentz, and others in framing the theory of special relativity in 1905. What seems most probable is that Proust drew directly upon Poincaré for an image of space that allowed the affirmation of the non-Euclidian image that time is a dimension of space. And with this, Proust was empowered to set free his narrator's inner space, making all in the novel relative to it, and inventing, as it were, his own special theory of relativity.
Equally fundamental is the way Proust interpreted Poincaré's type of epistemology in his search for ideas that might vouchsafe certainty to art as a form of knowledge. In a very real sense, Proust used the loss of certainty in mathematics and science that he found in Poincaré or in the wake of Poincaré. The loss of absolute certainty in science is the springboard that offered Proust grounds for arguing for the certain knowledge that he seeks in art.
Proust's narrator knows of course that the physical sciences do offer a type of truth; and, in dealing with knowledge, Proust's narrator alludes frequently to scientific paradigms that dictate truth about reality. As part of its epistemic premises, the novel accepts that medicine and physiology, as well as classical mechanics and thermodynamics, describe an objective world—by definition, that is their realm. The narrator explicitly accepts science's role in allowing us to know contingent reality. All contingent reality should be amenable to description by laws, and in fact Proust's narrator actually extends the range of phenomena described by laws beyond what science had really accomplished in the early twentieth century (or today). He constantly evokes, for example, the “laws” that putatively dictate the development of individuals and culture in time. Proust's narrator accepts for contingent, objective reality, moreover, the descriptive power of the positivist hierarchy of discourses. This hierarchy proposes that every level of epistemic analysis is subject to a superior determination by the laws of the next, more general level of discourse. On one level, for instance, Proust's narrator declares that there are specific social laws, and that these are then subject to the higher and more general laws of temporality, by which we might think of thermodynamics and entropy. There are the specific laws of the body and the mind, which are then subject to determination by the more general laws of physiology and, above all, the laws of the heredity invented by nineteenth-century medicine. Like an unending research project, Proust's novel needs its three thousand pages to document how these putative laws dictate the way society and characters develop—for the laws of physics and physiology are so many examples of the most general “laws of time” at work. Time is the space these laws need—much time—for their realization.
This aspect of Proust's narration may seem at times to present something of a caricature of determinism, and it is at this point that we see that Zola's influence is very strong, in spite of Proust's critical remarks about naturalism. Consider, for example, when, after hundreds of pages, the narrator begins to discover that he himself offers one more example of the way hereditary laws determine character development. Zola would certainly have approved of the development that leads to the discovery by Proust's aging narrator that he has come to resemble, not only his father, but above all, his Aunt Léonie, the old maniac who refused to leave her room in Combray—the room that was the center of the child's paradise recalled and re-created in “Combray” at the novel's beginning. As a young man, the narrator thought that he was, in every important respect, the opposite of the aunt who found reading to be a waste of time. As a mature man, he discovers that his aunt's character has come to rivet him, too, to his bed, where he endlessly meditates in jealousy upon his lover, Albertine: “Or, bien que chaque jour j'en trouvasse la cause dans un malaise particulier, ce qui me faisait si souvent rester couché, c'était un être, non pas Albertine, non pas un être que j'aimais, mais un être plus puissant sur moi qu'un être aimé, c'était transmigrée en moi, despotique au point de faire taire parfois mes soupçons jaloux, ou du moins de m'empêcher d'aller vérifier, s'ils étaient fondés ou non, c'était ma tante Léonie” [Now, even though each day I found a cause for it in a particular discomfort, what made me remain so often in bed was a being—not Albertine, not a being that I loved—but a being having more power over me than a loved being, one who had transmigrated into me and was despotic enough to quiet my jealous suspicions, or at least to stop me from going to see if they were grounded or not, and that being was my Aunt Leonie].7 Transmigration is Proust's mythic equivalent of inheritance; it is his translation of the laws of the transmission of character traits that dominates the development of all characters in A la Recherche with a mechanical rigor in which only late nineteenth-century medicine could believe. From Saint-Loup to the Baron de Charlus, every Proustian character is ruled mechanically by laws that model one's flesh and pick one's sexual preferences, that color the eyes and determine posture and gait, and that cause tics and manias.
If the narrator constantly consults a barometer because his father did so maniacally, this suggests that Proust also had in mind a neo-Lamarckian theory of the acquisition of traits. But this is only one of many theories that can be evoked with regard to what the narrator frequently calls the laws of time, as well as the laws of the soul, the laws of the body and its development. These are all so many laws or paradigms that are interlinked to create a deterministic tapestry portraying decline, hereditary transformations, and death as the inevitable pattern of human existence. When at the novel's outset, the older narrator looks back upon his childhood to ask if his entire past is dead, he is implicitly making appeal to a number of frameworks that make sense of such a question. He knows that thermodynamics, physiology, and hereditary science all spell out death as the end product of human development. But these truths granted by science are contingent in that any number of scientific models could be used to explain them. There is no necessary or certain truth in science, only the indifferently used laws that could be replaced by other laws to explain what one perceives, for these laws are the product of our intelligence. And these products of intellect are unable to reach the truth of our subjective world, because, as the narrator says, this world is locked up in nonintellectual sensations: “Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C'est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l'évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles. Il est caché hors de son domaine et de sa portée, en quelque objet matériel (en la sensation que nous donnerait cet objet matériel) que nous ne soupçonnons pas” [And so it is with our past. We waste our effort when we attempt to evoke it; all our intellect's efforts are useless. It is hidden outside of the realm of the intellect and its reach, in some material object (in the sensation that this material object would offer us) whose existence we do not suspect] (1:44). As Baudelaire's work demonstrated—and which the narrator seemingly fully accepts—only sensation can get around the limits of intellect and provide the substantive plenitude that restores knowledge of our subjective world. Knowledge is, in this regard, conceived as a fullness of things in their sensorial richness. Here we should recall Baudelaire's practice with regard to the contradictions of immediacy: in a literary work, sensation must be captured by linguistic means, by images and metaphors, and by the rhetorical structure in which these images are embedded. The writer's task is, as Mallarmé's nonexistent Book suggested, to find the images and the rhetorical structure that can offer access, in a fiction, to a world of certainty that exists therein because of the autonomy of fictional discourse: fiction itself guarantees certainty, because there is no alternative to certainty's existence if it is declared to exist. (Or, more prosaically, it is not a contingent statement to say, “Madame Bovary's eyes are blue.” Nor can I imagine that she does not exist once the novel declares that she does.)
One of the goals of Proust's novel is to describe the necessity and hence certainty that Proust's narrator finds in the fullness of his own subjective truth. So the novel must show, convincingly, that subjectivity has a certainty that contingent truth does not have. An understanding of the novel's rhetorical structure is the key to understanding how one can meaningfully speak of the necessity of a unique experience or revelation. The work's rhetorical structure is designed to give access to the narrator's certain knowledge, and Proust's rhetorical ploys take on their complete meaning when they are considered as part of his narrator's epistemic quest aiming at a certainty science cannot offer. The center for this certainty is the knowing subject in the novel, the first-person narrator. Proust's first-person narration is told by a self-observer whose scope is limited to the world of his, the narrator's, subjectivity (with the notable exception of the nearly omniscient narration, about a time before the narrator's birth, that he offers in Un Amour de Swan). The narrator self-consciously knows he can deal only with what I call the narrator's own inertial reference frame: the narrating self is the framework of reference for all that happens in the novel. This framework determines how time and space are perceived in the work. Temporality is an absolute for Newtonian cosmology, and for the realm of contingent truths that rely upon that cosmology, but the novel's subjective time and space exist relative to the narrator. The effect of the rhetorical structure is to remove the narrator's subjective space from the realm of objectivity so that subjectivity is separate from the realm wherein science and its laws rule supreme.
The first pages of the novel work to “delocalize” the narrator. He is often sleeping, or present in chambers, in which space is uncertain. The boundary lines separating dream, aesthetic perception, and perception of reality are blurred as the narrator wanders in memory. From the outset, the narrator is situated so that there is no absolute narrative space that can be called the present space of narration. All dynamics in the novel, and all development therein, is recorded and measured in a space that is defined strictly relative to the narrator: he is the only framework for viewing the novelistic world. Yet, as many students have complained, it is never clear where he may be located. The net effect of this separation of narrative voice from the world is that even time recalled exists finally as a function of the self outside of the coordinates of space and time. This is the sense of the narrator's dictum when he says that a man who sleeps holds in a circle about himself the thread of the hours, the order of years and of worlds (1:5). Proust is willing to ascribe absolute time to science's domain, the domain of laws that destroy the body, but he reserves for his narrator's epistemic realm another version of time, the time in which the narrator functions in a space defined by the narrator's sensations.
The temporality of the work's rhetorical structure is grounded in Proust's use of verb tenses. For example, the first sentence in the novel gives us a narrator who says, rather bizarrely, that he has gone to bed early for a long time—“Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” In this opening sentence, the composed past tense functions somewhat like the English present perfect tense in that it seems to relate a past act to the present moment, or the fictional present in which the novel is narrated. The past is thus situated relative to a present moment that is the present moment of the fiction's enunciation. Logically, it is only in the present moment that the narrator can narrate his past life unfolding in the imperfect tense, the tense of the repetition of acts carried out in the past. The imperfect tense, the French imparfait, is the tense the narrator often uses to describe the mechanical unfolding of repetitive events, when the events are not clearly unique events narrated in the literary past tense, the passé simple. At times he also uses the imperfect for events that seem logically to have been unique occurrences, but the imperfect endows them with a sense of repetition that transforms them into eternally repeating acts of memory. In this way the novel's temporal framework is polarized between the unnamed present moment of narration and the imperfect tense that describes the past for a narrator who is situated outside that past. In a sense, the present-tense narrator, who is never situated in the novel, is outside the temporal flow governed by the laws of time ruling over objective reality. The reader only knows, or vaguely feels, that the narrator is narrating in a present moment because the passé composé, or composed past, is used by the narrator, albeit only a few times in the course of the novel. This tense, each time it is used, situates the narrator in a present moment, a moment of dreaming or awakening, lying outside the temporal flow of ordinary experience. This tense thus contrasts with what is usually narrated in the imperfect tense, though sometimes in the literary past tense, the tenses used for those contingencies that can be described by the laws of time, the laws that bring matter to dissolution. The passé composé relates a past to a transcendental present moment of narration.
The passé composé is the tense, at the beginning of the novel, first used to recall all of Combray and the narrator's childhood in their complete fullness. This recall is effected through the images re-creating the sensations of the past after the narrator finds, through the sensual associations sparked by a pastry and a linden tea, that his childhood past has been restored to him. He then declares, using the passé composé, “tout Combray et ses environs, tout cela qui prend forme et solidité, est sorti, ville et jardins, de ma tasse de thé” [all of Combray and its surroundings, all of that which can acquire form and solidity, the city and the gardens, has arisen/arose from my cup of tea] (my emphasis, 1:48). Combray is restored in all its fullness and, therewith, the narrator can entertain the certain knowledge of his past re-created as a present—in the form of the narration called “Combray.” However, the act of narration itself never coincides with what is narrated, and the narrator never coincides with himself as the character who, in the novel's past experience, is subject to the laws governing the novel's unfolding. The past can explode into the present moment of narration, but it never ceases being a past that unfolded according to the laws of time.
To recapitulate, the goal of Proust's narrator is to shape a work of art that respects and, indeed, uses the laws of time and reality, the laws of physics and physiology, at the same time that the narrator seeks a perception offering certain truth. Since certainty cannot exist in the realm of contingent laws, certain truth must exist in a realm where these laws hold no sway. Many indifferent laws can be invoked to describe the world that is essentially underdetermined, as Poincaré's epistemology describes it. This is the world of the aleatory that Mallarmé deplored and from which Baudelaire sought escape. Opposed to this domain is that unnamed realm inhabited by the narrator-observer who looks from his narrative framework upon the world and, in so doing, finds a perspective that is not subject to contingency—for he discovers that his perceptions cannot be inscribed in any deterministic matrix that would reduce them to some expression of a scientific model. At this point, the narrator can say that contingency is transformed into necessity. Contingent impressions can be converted into a realm characterized by necessary knowledge, at least when the artist successfully embodies his or her random sensations or perception into a work of art. The work of art is a realm of necessity because it is unique to that artist and to that subjective framework of reference that is different from all others. This knowledge is certain knowledge, because it can have no other status. In its uniqueness it defies contingency. Memory of the two ways at Combray, or of the church at the center of the village, gives knowledge of necessity as it offers a revelation of the subject's world, one that necessarily can be no other than what it is, or rather was.
Hopefully these remarks throw light on the idea that Poincaré's epistemological theory parallels the belief in the artist's unique perception in other, important ways. For the grounds for the belief that the artist can escape the deterministic laws of the universe, as described by classical physics and physiology, are strongly implied by Poincaré's general epistemology. This epistemology was crucial in the demise of the belief in determinism, and with the demise of the belief in Laplacian totalizing determinism, the artist could feel justified in the belief that there might be realms sheltered from the iron hand of deterministic laws. Specifically, the loss of belief in determinism resulted in large part from the interpretation of work in physics undertaken by Poincaré on the three body problem, or the unsolved problem of how to determine the mutual gravitation attraction of more than two bodies. As I shall presently elaborate, there are reasons to believe that Proust was quite attentive to the implications of the three body problem. The unsuccessful attempt to work out the dynamics of the attraction among three bodies was generally taken to signify the end of the theoretical possibility of prediction granted by a total determinism. By the end of the nineteenth century, the problem was already a long outstanding one, for work on the three body problem had begun a century earlier. After Newton's laws of motion had successfully described the attraction between two bodies, the next step in celestial mechanics was to try to find equations that could account for the motions of three bodies, but the complexity of the problem defied resolution.
Belief in determinism depended very much on successfully resolving this problem: extrapolations from Newtonian mechanics had allowed Laplace to claim that, if a sufficiently powerful mind were to know the position of every atom in the universe, then this mind could calculate the future of the entire cosmos. Laplacian hubris foundered not on the infinite number of equations needed for these predictions, but rather on what could be said about three bodies. The historian of mathematics Morris Kline has shown that a loss of certainty came to afflict mathematics as well as physics when the mathematics necessary for three mutually attracting bodies proved intractable. In commenting on how the three body problem affected the very ontology of mathematics, Kline points out that it also severely eroded the foundations of determinism: “The core of this problem is the question of the mutual gravitational effect of three bodies on each other. If one could devise a procedure to determine the perturbing effect of a third body, this procedure could be used to determine the perturbing effect of a fourth body, and so on. However, exact solution of the general problem of the motion of even three bodies has not been obtained even today.”8 Proust does not entirely reject Laplacian claims for determinism, at least not for the ordinary world of objective reality for which his narrator offers numerous examples of deterministic laws that rule over the body and society. But he is certainly willing to accept as an epistemic principle that determinism has its limits.
My minimum claim here, then, is that the underdeterminism formulated by Poincaré, and by his contemporary epistemologists like Mach and Duhem, provided some of the motivation that led Proust to postulate a realm in which determinism does not hold sway. This is the subjective realm to which objective reality is always relative in its representation in a work of art, or the inertial framework of the artist's self, the framework provided by the limited perception of Proust's narrator-artist. Underdeterminism cuts in two directions, however, for there are limits of which one must be aware to understand Proust's strategy. In a sense, it affirms that the subjective realm is primary because, in the determination of what we know, the subject has the power to opt for an indefinite number of models and laws with which we chose to describe reality. What the subject cannot opt for, what the subject must accept as a necessity, is the subject's own unique world of sensation and perception once the subject has experienced that world.
For Proust and his conception of the novel, the following aspect of Poincaré's type of epistemology is perhaps most important: with his sense of relativity, Poincaré went so far as to deny that perception was determined by any geometry intrinsic to the nature of things in space. If we think the world exists in three dimensions, this is an effect of habit, or that “law” of psychology that Proust, after Poincaré, made into the dominant law of mind. But, as Poincaré states, we could live in two dimensions, or four dimensions—those four dimensions that Proust's narrator found in the church at Combray. Perception itself is radically underdetermined by Poincaré. This claim parallels Proust's affirmation that the artist's perception offers a unique truth that escapes from the rule of law. Poincaré proposes a comparable vision of the freedom of perception, in “Space and Geometry,” when he says that there are no laws intrinsic to the nature of perception: “[the association of ideas] … is the result of a habit; this habit itself results from very numerous experiences; without any doubt, if the education of our senses had been accomplished in a different environment, where we should have been subjected to different impressions, contrary habits would have arisen and our muscular sensations would have been associated according to other laws.”9 At this point, Poincaré argues, we could use either Euclidian or non-Euclidian geometries to describe or even to perceive the real. It is a question of habit. Proust translates this notion in radical fashion by allowing his narrator to escape from habit in his own subjective realm where, at the novel's outset, he is situated outside of the ordinary world of space and time. It is in this context escaping context that the narrator makes the claim that, as a sleeping man, he escapes the empirical laws and patterns that habit usually accepts, for, to use Moncrief's translation, he “has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host.” Conventional laws governing matter and perception no longer necessarily hold, no more than do the metric conventions that habit accepts for ordering the perception of space and time.
In brief, Proust's strategy is to use a classical scientific model to talk about a deterministic world exterior to the narrator, but a relativist and conventionalist model to talk about the subjective world of the narrator's unique perception. He applies the lessons he learned from Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola for fashioning the laws of history and society, but he calls upon Baudelaire and Mallarmé for rhetoric and concepts that illuminate the world of subjectivity. This mix corresponds, interestingly, to Baudelaire's idea that a novel is a mixed genre, containing, in Proust's case, objective truth and self-sufficient poetic correspondences. In the wake of Baudelaire, but with more epistemological rigor and considerably less irony, Proust staked out the realm that Baudelaire demanded for the realm of poetic self-sufficiency. Finally, might we not see that in creating his world of unique impressions, Proust arrived at the “idea” that Flaubert despaired of ever finding in the world of mechanical phenomena, the fallen world of viscera driven by laws that only science seemed capable of describing?
Poetic self-sufficiency derives from the writer's impressions, for they are the unique material that forms the truth of the narrator's world and hence the certain truth of art as found in the novel. These impressions are not contingent, though they owe their existence to chance. But once they are given to the narrator, they are his necessary material for certain truths. This material is a necessity in the sense that the narrator should find the entire first section of the novel, “Combray,” in a fortuitous encounter when he tastes a bit of pastry that he has dipped into a cup of linden tea. In this chance encounter, the narrator overcomes all the contingencies of ordinary existence, which is to say that this experience cannot be explained by those deterministic paradigms that, unfortunately, condemn us to death. Moreover, the experience born of linden tea is a direct translation, from poetry to fiction, of Baudelaire's doctrine of correspondences, but one occurring as an epistemic experience contrasting with the world of laws. The narrator's present sensations coincide with sensations he experienced in the past, and, through the correspondence between the two, the past is resurrected in the present. All of Combray surges forth as the living paradise of the narrator's youth. In this moment “Combray” is, for the narrator, a form of necessity that escapes contingency.
Proust thus begins his novel with a demonstration of the certain truths of Combray that the narrator must then later recover, having lived himself through the years of experience that constitute the novel, with its portrayal of characters and society that begins in a time before the narrator's childhood and unfolds until some time after World War I. At the end of this period, after the War, the narrator discovers the meaning of artistic experience in the context of the novel itself in discoveries that take place many years after the episode with the madeleine. At the end of the novel, he discovers what the episode with the madeleine meant, as the reader sees in the long analysis that the narrator proposes in Le Temps retrouvé, wherein the narrator explains that he has discovered that subjective life is too complex to be described by deterministic law. Interestingly for our argument, this analysis takes place after the narrator realizes that art is analogous to science in their common study of relations. In a moment of self-reflection, he thinks about the music of the composer Vinteuil. At the same time, he reflects upon what he calls the materialist hypothesis—“celle du néant”—or the hypothetical nothingness to which we, as material beings, are destined by the laws of physiology and physics that govern our bodies.
The narrator wonders if Vinteuil's musical phrases were the expression of certain inner states analogous to what he had experienced in tasting the madeleine dipped in linden tea in “Combray.” What in these states, he asks, made them different from any other experiential state? The simple fact that Vinteuil's musical phrases resist analysis does not necessarily mean that there is something more real in them than in ordinary reality, the “material” reality that the mind encounters everywhere. The spirit of doubt, he says, suggests rather that the states produced by the musical phrases cannot be analyzed precisely because they place in action too many forces: “ils mettent en jeu trop de forces dont nous ne nous sommes pas encore rendu compte” (3:381). In speaking of the analysis of forces, Proust suggests that the reduction of artistic states to component elements is too complex to be resolved—a complexity to be understood on the order of the three body problem. There can thus be no deterministic resolutions of the forces that would allow them to be described by some contingent law. But this is not surprising: artistic states arise from a subject's inner world, and this subjective realm is where one also finds the origins of the choice of a deterministic model. It is the subject's choice to use a given deterministic model that, then imposed through force of habit, grants the knowing subject its operational power—something the narrator suggests at the novel's beginning when he wonders if the immobility of the things around us is forced on them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else. The subject's inner world must therefore lie outside the realm of simple determinism. Poincaré's type of conventionalism seems evident here, for the knowing subject determines epistemic conventions—and not the contrary.
At the end of the novel, the narrator returns from a long absence he spent in a sanatorium. This is when he finally understands the nature of art, for, upon returning to society, he experiences a revelation analogous to the one he had experienced at the novel's beginning with the linden tea and the petite madeleine. Going to a social gathering, he is crossing the Guermantes's courtyard when he unexpectedly undergoes a series of epiphanies in which various present sensations recall their exact equivalent that occurred once in his past. After this renewed experience of the resurrection of a living past, after this contingent encounter with his own unique reality, the narrator can now analyze the artist's task to escape from contingency. By understanding this task, he can understand why he has failed to be a writer, and why, throughout the course of the novel, he has been able only fruitlessly to ponder upon his desire to be a writer. Before the epiphanies in the courtyard, he had already realized that he could not be a true artist if he merely registers in his work general essences (3:718), or if he is content simply to describe general laws (3:719). Saying that intellectual performances, typical of the naturalist novel, and such as are undertaken by the Goncourt Brothers, offer only sterile joys, the narrator offers a muted critique of naturalism. In this critique, he translates Baudelaire's attitude toward intellection and objective truths, for these truths of science are not essential to the goals of art—and this in spite of the fact that A la Recherche has just devoted nearly three thousand pages to these truths.
After the experience in the courtyard, the narrator comes to the full realization that the realm of artistic experience is a unique reality: it cannot be analyzed using the Kantian coordinates of space and time, the metric province of classical analysis. Now facing the prospect of death after a long period of illness, he discovers that his task as a successful novelist would be the re-creation of the perceived real. And so he sees that for the remainder of time that he has yet to live, he must undertake the exploration of the reality of multiple sensations that are too complex to be reduced by analysis. These sensations must be freed from the patterns imposed by conventional perception and habit and laid bare as the realm of a unique and necessary truth outside the ken of science. This revelation is nonetheless an epistemic endeavor, though different from the discovery of relations that science undertakes.
The question is open as to whether the narrator will be able to write a novel, or if in fact he has achieved his task precisely with the novel A la Recherche that we readers have in hand. It is tempting to say, and many have said, that the novel is circular and narrates its own coming into being, but there is nothing in the novel that says this is case—or that this is not the case. The fiction of the narrator's presence outside of time suggests in fact that the novel's narrated events never coincide with the space of narration. It stretches our imagination to conceive that the narrator is an epistemic quester outside the realm circumscribed by time and space, and thus outside the deterministic realm of conventional science. But it does appear that Proust intended that the novel's recall of the narrator's unique experience be experienced as the fiction of something like a nontranscendental transcendence. For only in fiction does it appear that we can find that noncontingent realm wherein are found those unique truths the narrator likens to essences, and which are more like the contrary of any Platonic essence. Only in fiction, as Mallarmé's example proposed, can one find the enactment of a unique truth that is necessary, as necessary as the narrator's subjective fiction that discovers noncontingent truth in a contingent world.
The nature of artistic truth, as the narrator sees it, is perplexing. Sensation in this world is the point of departure for the creation of what Proust's narrator calls extra-temporal essences (3:871). These are not Platonic ideas or abstract essences located outside of temporal experience. Rather, they are the unique states that contain within them the temporality of the (fictional) moment of perception. This notion is perhaps best illustrated when the narrator says, about his recalled perceptions of the church at the center of Combray, that time is its fourth dimension. Proust's essences are in fact quite anti-Platonic, if by Platonic we mean an essence devoid of temporality. Proust's essences are also the antithesis of what the classical scientist describes when he uses some metric framework that situates the real in terms of absolute time and space. The only frame of reference for these essences is the artistic self that must find some appropriate language for communicating them—literary, musical, or painterly. Once this language is found, once a framework is established, then, to quote Montcrief's translation, the artist can “reestablish the significance of even the slightest signs by which the artist is surrounded” (2:1014), for every aspect of the artist's unique experience can be converted into noncontingent meaning and certain truth. This is the realm of transcendence, and it is not as paradoxical as I may have implied, if we are willing to grant to the ontology of art a space that is not contingent.
In his analysis of his future task as a writer, the narrator says that the artist's work is symmetrical to the scientist's research. With this comparison, the narrator calls to mind Poincaré's description of the model-making work of the scientific mind, though really with reverse symmetry. Rather than with the objective demonstration of invariant reality that scientists seek in an experiment, artists must start with the only reality they immediately possess—the reality of their subjective perception. The artist's objective intelligence can intervene only after he or she has found a realm of truth in subjective experience:
Seule l'impression, si chétive qu'en semble la matière, si insaisissable la trace, est un critérium de vérité, et à cause de cela mérite seule d'être appréhendée par l'esprit, car elle est seule capable, s'il sait en dégager cette vérité, de l'amener à une plus grande perfection et de lui donner une pure joie. L'impression est pour l'écrivain ce qu'est l'expérimentation pour le savant, avec cette différence que chez le savant le travail de l'intelligence précède et chez l'écrivain vient après.
(3:880)
[Only the subjective impression, however inferior the material may seem to be and however improbable the outline, is a criterion of truth and for that reason it alone merits being apprehended by the mind, for it alone is able, if the mind can extract this truth, to lead the mind to a greater perfection and impart to it a pure joy. The subjective impression is for the writer what experimentation is for the scientist, but with this difference, that with the scientist the work of the intelligence precedes, and with the writer it comes afterwards.]
(trans. Montcrief, 1001-2)
The comparison also suggests another way in which scientist and writer are united, for if the artist, like the scientist, is not constrained by any absolute system of reference, nonetheless constraints exist by the very nature of research. The comparison obliges one to recognize that both artist and scientist are subject to constraints. The mind is not free to choose its world, whatever be the conventions chosen to explain this world. Once the artist has chosen the area to explore, the world imposes its limits. These limits are immediately encountered when the narrator makes his own decision to write: “Ainsi j'étais déjà arrivé à cette conclusion que nous ne sommes nullement libres devant l'oeuvre d'art, que nous ne la faisons pas à notre gré, mais que, préexistant à nous, nous devons, à la fois parce qu'elle est nécessaire et cachée, et comme nous ferions pour une loi de la nature, la découvrir” (3:881) [Thus I had already come to the conclusion that we are not at all free in the presence of the work of art to be created, that we do not do it as we ourselves please, but that it existed prior to us and we should seek to discover it as we would a natural law because it is both necessary and hidden] (trans. Montcrief, 2:1002). The material for art awaits to be discovered before the artist turns to discovery. The artist makes a discovery in that what he or she finds is always already there, in the artist, as the necessary world hidden from the immediately conscious realm of the present moment.
With this affirmation, we touch again on the seemingly dichotomous nature of modern scientific epistemology that Proust embodies in his novel. This epistemology oscillates between being realist and antirealist. In its antirealism, it says that phenomena are underdetermined. In its realism, it declares limits of reality that cannot be transgressed. Antirealism allows that there can be as many laws and models, or theories and worlds, as there are scientists and artists. But realism points out that the world imposes a limit, specifically the invariant relations that, in spite of being invariant, may be assumed and used by different models or modes of explanation. Poincaré affirms these limits when he states, for example, that the principle of the conservation of energy is a “limit imposed on our freedom” to chose the physical models that seem best to fit our purposes.10 Proust affirms the same when he recognizes that the artist must accept the world that is given to him, even though it is randomly imposed by the artist's chance experience. In this random encounter, the artist encounters the unique laws of unique experience.
In accepting what the mind finds as a limit to its freedom, in accepting what is imposed upon it, the mind finds certainty within itself. This viewpoint is as true of Poincaré's epistemology of mathematics as of Proust's vision of the artist's certainty. Poincaré recognizes that scientific truth is largely a product of reasoning through recurrence. In fact, in La Science et l'hypothèse, he describes both empirical statements and mathematical statements as products of induction. Empirical induction can only result in contingent statements—uncertain because they are about the exterior world so that “they rest upon a belief in a general order of the Universe, an order that is outside of us.”11 But mathematical induction imposes itself as a form of certitude because, faced with the infinite recurrence that characterizes mathematical propositions, the mind recognizes, in direct intuition, its own power to make such infinite extensions. The certainty that mathematics offers is a property of the mind, and the fact that the world allows mathematics to be used is a tribute to the mind. One sees finally how close Poincaré's philosophy of mathematics is to Proust's vision of the novel when one considers that Poincaré says that the material world is there to allow us to become conscious of the mind's power (30). Mathematical certainty arises from the mind's own structure, an idea that the mathematician pointedly affirms: “Mathematical induction, which is to say, demonstration through recurrence, imposes itself … because it is simply an affirmation of a property of mind itself” (31). Analogously, we have seen that the Proustian narrator discovers that his artistic truths are endowed with certainty because they are part of mind itself, the artistic mind that finds its own truths to be certainties because they are properties of that mind.
Both at the novel's beginning and at its end, the narrator's reflections upon his discovery of his past contain a meditation upon mind. In the narrator's own mind he discovers the past that is first resurrected by the accidental encounter with the pastry and a cup of herbal tea. Or as he says after tasting the petite madelaine, “Je pose la tasse et me tourne vers mon esprit. C'est à lui de trouver la vérité. Mais comment? Grave incertitude, toute les fois que l'esprit se sent dépassé par lui-même; quand lui, le chercheur, est tout ensemble le pays obscur où il doit chercher et où tout son bagage ne lui sera de rien” [I put down my cup and turn toward my mind. It is the mind's task to find truth. But how to do this? Great incertitude, every time that the mind feels itself outreached by itself; when he, the seeker, is altogether the dark country where he must undertake his search and in which all his mental baggage will be of no use] (45). This is what the narrator defines as creation: the search by the mind within the mind itself for those relations of experience that are now properties of the mind that undertakes the search. The symmetry with science, or at least with Poincaré's science, is inverse, since the artist's mind seeks the certainty of the particular, rather than the general law of recursion. But, as Valéry had early proposed in comparing art with Poincaré's recursive reasoning, the production of certainty is the same: through the mind's seizure of its own procedures.
Proust's demonstration of the artist's task seems especially close to Poincaré's description of the scientist's work in yet another important respect. The narrator makes a critique of literary realism that is analogous to Poincaré's critique of epistemological naïveté. Poincaré frequently stressed that science does not describe things in themselves: all one can know, as Valéry also echoed in describing epistemic relations, are the relations between things. Comparably, toward the end of the novel, Proust's narrator rejects the “sad realism” that tries to give a “miserable account sheet” (3:885) of the lines and surfaces of things in themselves. He maintains that the artist's task is analogous to the scientist's search for relations, since artistic truth begins only when the artist takes two objects and posits a relationship between them. The unique truth of the artist's experience is rendered through the description of relations, and in Proust it is usually metaphor that produces artistic truth by describing, from the artist's viewpoint, what Poincaré repeatedly calls “les rapports entre les choses”—the relations between things.
The narrator's theory of art is fully articulated at the end of the novel, but it is consciously demonstrated largely at the novel's beginning, especially in the use of images and metaphors in the creation of the narrator's childhood in the village Combray. I recall that this recollection of the plenitude of a unique childhood springs from the experience that the madeleine once gave the narrator when he was already an adult, but before he had come to understand fully his task as a writer. Notwithstanding the mature narrator's supposed lack of comprehension, the opening section, called “Combray,” gives the reader the most glorious concrete demonstration of the theory that the narrator finally elaborates in the novel's conclusion, Le Temps retrouvé. In “Combray,” the reader finds the creation of the fullness of the time that the narrator experienced himself as an adult in the act of remembering, and which the narrator then narrates from a fictional transcendental standpoint that escapes time. In re-creating—or recalling—the fullness of the past, Proust calls upon the lesson of symbolism, for the narrator's recall of the specific quality of this past experience is achieved by the use of metaphor and analogy. Not only can metaphor re-create the sensual qualities of the past as the child lived it, but metaphor presents the analogies that also describe, when they do not create, the relations that exist among sensations whose uniqueness is, or was, the uniqueness of the past. Metaphor brings about knowledge of the unique event. In this sense, each metaphor is an epistemic event.
Perhaps the most intriguing example of re-creation of the past in “Combray” is found in the remembrance of the young narrator's first attempt at writing. His writing can be quoted, and with this quoting in the text itself the narrator restores the past through the reproduction of past writing that perforce is enunciated in the present moment. In his youthful writing, the narrator describes three church steeples seen in the distance one day during an excursion in a carriage. The choice of three bodies does not seem fortuitous. It is quite plausible that the description of three churches is Proust's oblique way of paying homage to Poincaré's work on the three body problem—and Proust can be as recondite in his allusions as the narrator's great aunts when they pay cryptic compliments to Swann. An allusion to the scientist seems implicit in the relativistic way that Proust's narrator describes the motion of these three steeples changing their position relative to the continuous motion of the carriage in which the young narrator found himself as he began to write a description of them. Moreover, at this moment in his youth, when he decides to describe his impressions of the three steeples, the narrator anticipates, through the act of writing, his later ideas about writing. The literal quotation of his youthful writing allows the older narrator to offer a metaphorical description that is also a demonstration of a discovery of the unique truth of the past that metaphor can bring about.
Calling the steeples “flowers,” and then “three maidens of legend,” the youthful narrator describes how the steeples change position, though of course their movement only reflects the relative position of the moving observer. As the narrator's position changes, the steeples “move” metaphorically about, “timidly seeking their way, and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more, now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and resigned, so vanishing in the night” (trans. Montcrief, 1:182) [“je les vis timidement chercher leur chemin et, après quelques gauches trébuchements de leurs nobles silhouettes, se serrer les uns contre les autres, glisser l'un derrière l'autre, ne plus faire sur le ciel encore rose qu'une seule forme noire, charmante et résignée, et s'effacer dans la nuit”] (1:140). With these metaphorical motions, the three bodies have danced out their relations in a ballet that successfully describes the unique truth of that moment for a youthful narrator who is suddenly very happy—for could one not say that, with these metaphors, the boy narrator solved, artistically and with certainty, the three body problem? He has resolved it through the web of metaphors that relate three bodies in their mutual metaphorical attraction.
With this “solution” to the problem of knowledge in art, with this demonstration of the necessity of the artist's truth, Proust brought to a closure the epistemic rivalry with science that novelists, throughout the nineteenth century, had felt with tremulous anxiety. Proust's modernist solution for the rivalry closed a chapter in literary history, though Proust proposed a solution that relatively few writers have sought to imitate. If Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola have had an untold number of imitators, Proust's work is, by its own epistemic declaration, unique. Perhaps few subsequent writers have felt that they could rival science by incorporating science and then going beyond it to offer an epistemic realm that escapes the realm of contingent truths. The history of twentieth century literature and its relation to science is quite heterogeneous. On the one hand, as exemplified by Sartre's ferocious parody in La Nausée (Nausea) of Proust's escape from contingency, a later generation of French writers no longer felt that an epistemic encounter with science was a viable issue for the novel. Or as one might infer from the savage satire of scientific research written by the doctor who signed Céline to his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), many later writers have been actively hostile to science. On the other hand, without any feeling of rivalry, many twentieth-century French writers have drawn upon science as a source of intellectual renewal. Queneau's constant use of science for his own thought experiments in fiction are a telling example, as is Robbe-Grillet's justification of his experimentation by reference to post-Heisenberg epistemology. In any case, few writers of later generations in France seem interested in, or are perhaps capable of, rivaling science on its own terms. And if one surveys the European literary landscape, perhaps only the Austrian Robert Musil stands out as a writer who, shortly after Proust, sought to liberate literature from any feelings of subordination toward science by transforming the novel into an epistemological instrument second to none. Or at least Musil tried.
To conclude, we might speculate that Proust brought the rivalry to a close for another, more generous reason, and one that many find quite valid today. To use a notion presented at the outset of this study, let us entertain the idea that Proust restores a separation of literature and science that goes back at least to the seventeenth century, the one first described when Pascal set forth the opposition between l'esprit de finesse and l'esprit de géométrie. The former, the mind knowing through finesse or intuition, has to deal with an infinite number of principles, and thus can easily go astray; whereas the latter, or the mind knowing through mathematics, will rarely go astray if it follows the simple reasoning involved in deductive chains of thought. Mathematical and scientific reasoning owes its strength to the narrowness of its field, whereas knowledge of humanistic issues is more difficult because it is more diffuse. In rejecting the claims of analysis against subjectivity and its complexity, Proust restored a modernist version of Pascal's esprit de finesse to its position as an epistemic equal to the scientific mind, and, in so doing, freed the writer from envy of the “mere geometric mind”—as Pascal had phrased it. I offer this comparison to help understand why fiction in the twentieth century has avoided the head-on collision with science that one finds in Balzac and Zola, and, in a sense, in Proust himself. In A la Recherche du temps perdu, Proust has recourse to a doctrine of “two cultures,” to borrow C. P. Snow's famous coinage, in which literature and science share a certain mutual responsibility for offering two different types of knowledge of the world. On the one hand, science has its varied protocols for truth, many of which turn upon quantification. On the other hand, mind, for most of its operations, does not function according to some algorithm, as Pascal might have said, and which a contemporary physicist like Roger Penrose often does say. The conclusion then imposes itself that, as Proust argued, literature as knowledge of the mind offers unique knowledge that can be had in no other way. For, in principle, and not just in practice, there is no quantification that can offer knowledge of the self when the self is the locus for all epistemic operations. Knowledge of the self can only be had in the immediate seizure of the self's multiple certainties, and, for this, literature is a privileged tool. Of course, we have always known that literature grants us knowledge of ourselves and others, but it is reassuring to have the greatest modernist novel show us that we have garnered knowledge from it, and about it, and hence about ourselves, that we could get nowhere else.
Notes
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Paul Valéry, Oeuvres, ed. Jean Hytier, vol. 1, 1157. In this edition, Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci is part of Variété.
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Cassedy, “Mallarmé and Andrej Belyj: Mathematics and the Phenomenality of the Literary Object,” 1070.
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Baudelaire, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Y.-G. Le Dantec, 685.
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Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art, 15.
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Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted, 181. Halsted's translation includes three works by Poincaré: Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method. Translation slightly changed.
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Gardner, The Relativity Explosion, 48.
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Proust, A la Recherche du temps perdu, vol. 3, 78-79.
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Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, 61-62.
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Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, 69.
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Poincaré, The Foundations of Science, 158.
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Poincaré, La Science et l'hypothèse, 30.
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Problems of Structure, Unity and Aesthetic Philosophy
Proustian Doubles: Patterns of Duality and Multiplicity in À la recherche du temps perdu.
