[In the following essay, Rosengarten examines narrative structure in Proust's Les Plaisirs et les jours.]

Much of the critical debate about PJ [Les Plaisirs et les jours] has centered around the question of whether it can be considered a structured, unified whole rather than a mere patchwork of miscellaneous pieces. This is an important question inasmuch as the way a writer organizes and arranges the material of a fictional work often reflects the point of view from which s/he has embarked on the task of writing

Proust always paid careful attention to how the parts of his writings related to the whole and the whole to the parts. Bernard Gicquel picks up on precisely this aspect of Proust's mind in pointing out the book's “circular” form, and others have noted its many “correspondences,” to which I shall return later in this chapter. With respect to the Recherche, Proust often felt misunderstood by those who failed to grasp the degree to which he had molded and shaped his material in accordance with well-established principles of architectural design, on the one hand, and musical composition on the other. It would be odd if this trait were not to manifest itself at all in his earlier work, from the time in the summer of 1893 when he decided to gather his scattered writings into a single volume.

Another consideration of a general nature has to do with the philosophy and aesthetics of symbolism, which exerted a strong influence on young Proust, despite his critical distance from it as a school of literary theory and practice. Symbolism's concept of correspondences between the material and the spiritual worlds is a powerful current in Proust's writing. He was an eager disciple of the idea that there is a hidden cosmic order to which the affairs of the earthly human domain are somehow organically connected. His conception of nature as animated by mysterious forces to which the artist is compelled to respond is evident in many of the prose poems of PJ. Proust was also sensitive to the ability of metaphorical language to provide access to the deepest layers of the human psyche. Such language opened up a pathway to truth that was independent and autonomous vis-à-vis traditional logic. As I have previously noted, the techniques of musical composition were also important to Proust. Pierre Costil makes reference to this in his analysis of how “musical construction” became an active force in Proust's evolving “aesthetic of [literary] composition” (Costil 1958, 489).

Important personal concerns and values were at stake for Proust in the publication and critical reputation of PJ. On February 3, 1897, Jean Lorrain published an article on PJ in Le Journal to supplement a review he had written the previous year making fun of the book's “precious and pretentious” style. This time he broadened his attack by alluding to Proust's personal relationships. Anatole France's preface to the book amused him, and he predicted that “Proust's next preface would come from another eminent novelist, Alphonse Daudet, who was quite incapable of resisting the solicitations of his son” (Barker 71). The son Lorrain referred to was Lucien Daudet, Proust's lover at the time. Offended by these insinuations, Proust immediately challenged Lorrain to a duel. The ritual armed encounter took place in the Bois de Meudon, at the Ermitage de Villebon, on February 6, 1897. Seconded by Gustave de Borda and the painter Jean Béraud, a close friend, Proust acquitted himself with a bravery and sang-froid that Reynaldo Hahn, noting Proust's accomplishment in his diary, said “do not surprise me at all” (Notes 54).

Proust had probably had some experience handling guns during his year of service in the Army, and Lorrain may also have had some knowledge of firearms. Despite this, it is possible that the two men did not really intend to duel at all, just pretend to do so. The fact is, however, that Proust faced an opponent who was positioned at close range, and who could easily have killed him without suffering any legal repercussions. Moreover, in a letter to Lucien Daudet written on the same day as the duel, Proust was uncustomarily direct and laconic: “My dear little one, I wasn't touched nor was Lorrain although my bullet landed almost at his right foot” (Mon cher petit: lettres à Lucien Daudet 130). This leads me to believe that he was prepared to die to protect his honor and to defend the integrity of his literary efforts. I would think that his motives were not dissimilar from those that led him to come to the defense of Alfred Dreyfus. In certain circumstances, he could feel as offended by insults to another person as he was to those directed against himself. The duel was among the experiences of his life in which Proust appropriated “the heroic ideal” he had discovered in his student days in the tragedies of Pierre Corneille. That it was also an act which could earn him the respect of a socioliterary milieu he valued highly cannot be discounted. This is how he spoke of the incident about ten years later, as recalled by his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret:

Poor mother! She didn't want me to go. Nor did many other ladies either. But this man had offended me and no one encouraged me to do it; it was I alone who wanted this duel. Jean Lorrain was jealous of the preface that Anatole France had written for my book Les Plaisirs et les jours; he claimed that it was nothing but a salon-like favor to a young socialite suffering the pains of literary ambitions. We exchanged two bullets in the forest of Meudon.

(Albaret 195-196)

This recollection, if accurate, bespeaks an impulse to distinguish himself as a man of courage and honor who resisted the counsel of several women in his life, mainly his mother, who advised him to avoid the confrontation. He seems to have been anxious to disprove once and for all the gossip that categorized him as “effeminate.”¹

On the lighter side, but no less significant for what it tells us about Proust's literary intentions and ambitions in the 1890s, was his reaction to a skit titled “Les Lauriers sont coupés” (The laurel trees are cut down). The little play was part of an amateur theatrical performance in which a friend of Proust, Léon Yeatman, imitated his voice and mannerisms with great precision.

The play² was performed on three evenings, from March 18 to 20, 1897, at the home of Jacques Bizet on the Quai Bourbon. Bizet was co-author with Robert Dreyfus. Larkin Price says that it attracted an “upper crust” audience. The play concerned the literary activities of several members of the Lycée Condorcet circle during the preceding year. Proust was not the only one to be roasted. Bizet, Dreyfus, and Fernand Gregh had often twitted Proust about the cost of PJ, and it was this aspect of the book which they accented in their skit. One part of it, which features Proust, played by Yeatman, a young man, played by Ernest La Jeunesse, and Fernand Gregh, playing himself, reads as follows:

PROUST:
Have you read my book?
A YOUTH:
No, sir. It is too expensive.
PROUST:
Alas! That is what everyone says. And you, Gregh, have you read it?
GREGH:
I cut it in pieces in order to review it.
PROUST:
And did you find it too expensive as well?
GREGH:
Not at all. There is a lot for the money.
PROUST:
Isn't there? A preface by M. France, 4 francs. Pictures by Madeleine Lemaire, 4 francs. Music by Reynaldo Hahn, 4 francs. Prose by me, 1 franc. Verse by me, 50 centimes. Total, 13 francs 50.
Surely not too much?
YOUTH:
But, sir, there is much more than that in the Hachette Almanac, and that costs only 25 sous.

Instead of being amused by the skit, which he heard about from friends since he did not attend the performance, Proust was pained and indignant, according to almost all of his biographers. Why was this the case? Renée Kingcaid provides a possible explanation.

Kingcaid sees the publication of PJ as “an important first gamble” on the part of young Proust to convince his parents, especially his father, that his pursuit of a literary career was a feasible option for him (1992, 36). Her main point is that what Proust feared most of all was literary impotence and premature death. Since the age of nine, he had suffered debilitating asthma attacks, to which he refers frequently in his letters. He was haunted by the thought that this illness would prevent him from realizing his literary aspirations, an especially burdensome fear for a person who saw the creation of a work of art as the summit of human endeavor. Since 1891 he had submitted to his parents' will by following a course in law, which led to a degree in 1895, but the practice of law or of an associated profession was never a realistic life choice for him. Yet what other prospects were there, if a career in literature and philosophy, the two fields which he felt he was born to cultivate, turned out to be illusory? Some of this anxiety may explain why he made such an intense effort to mobilize a wide network of friends and colleagues to stimulate interest in PJ. What all of this amounts to in practical terms is that the close to three years Proust spent finding a publisher, working with Madeleine Lemaire and Reynaldo Hahn, inducing Anatole France to write a preface to the book and recommend it to publishers, and giving advanced notice of his writings by publishing them in Parisian journals, were years of travail, of anxiety over his future that the publication of PJ somewhat allayed.

Proust referred several times to PJ as a book of “little pieces” without serious claims on the reader's attention. But this typically self-effacing remark, like his calling the contents of his new book “things of the imagination and sensibility, the two ignorant Muses that one does not cultivate,”³ are offset by two other letters, one to Mme Sauvage de Brantes (née Louise de Cessac) on June 12, 1896, the book's date of publication, the other three years later, to his friend Viscount Clément de Maugny.

The letter to Mme de Brantes continues the self-deprecating tone, but it does so in a manner that lets us understand how different his various writings appeared to him in book form from how they appeared when they were first published separately in periodicals. The intervening effort he had put into the task of gathering them up in a single volume is what stands out, implicitly, in his homage to Mme de Brantes:

To Madame de Brantes:

so that she will deign to accept the respectful homage of this book whose only value will remain that of having pleased her when it was scattered and formless, and to which the benevolence of her sympathy—in this circumstance alone I will not say the clear-sightedness of her intellect and her taste—has given distinction and elect status.

(Corr. [Correspondance,] 2: 74)

Gathered in a single volume, the many “little pieces” were no longer “scattered and formless.” They had assumed an order, a new reason for being, which he, the author, had given to them.

Clément de Maugny was probably Proust's most intimate friend among the French aristocracy during the 1890s; intimate in the sense that they related to each other as equals and shared many interests in common. Now and then Proust was de Maugny's guest at the family's fourteenth-century château, and he refers to his friend's kindnesses and generosity during the preceding three years, from 1896 to 1899, when Proust was prey to many disappointments. In a letter written on July 13, 1899, acknowledging de Maugny's sympathetic attention to his problems after the publication of PJ, he spoke of the emotional pain he had experienced years earlier, during a period in his life when de Maugny did not know him. It was in this context that he presented his book to his friend. Here is the relevant part of the letter:

Often we show a friend who only got to know us much later a photograph of when we were a child. The same holds true for this book which introduces you to a Marcel whom you did not know. May I say it? You who have seen me in pain, without ever having made me suffer from a mistake in tact, from a lack of compassion, which is also quite rare, you have seen the birth and dissipation of sadnesses that will not seem very different to you from those depicted in this book. What makes us cry changes but our tears resemble each other. It seems to me that, involved so closely with my pains during these years when you were my confidant and friend, you will feel more than others what these pages still retain of storms that will not return ever again.

(Corr. 2: 291-292)

This letter expresses something of the personal suffering that Proust associated with his first literary efforts. PJ marked a beginning and an end for him; it documented his emotional life in disguised and fictional form, a stage in his life when he was still unsure of the direction that his future writing would take. But at the same time the letter is indicative of a certain detachment from early experiences that allowed him to place them in a different framework than would have been possible in earlier years.

A question needing brief commentary concerns the book's disparate genres. My point of view on this characteristic of the book is simply that the organic connection between these writings is not essentially generic but philosophical and symbolic; it is to be found in the vision of life that inheres in them. By this I do not mean that a short sketch or prose poem may not have originated in a side of Proust's personality and experience that was substantially different, say, from the one revealed in his short stories. Yet the links between the shorter items and the longer ones are, in several instances, noteworthy. For example, the painterly prose of “Les Regrets, rêveries couleur du temps” alludes to the same sense of fleeting time and of the “derisory” nature of certain illusions that permeates several of the short stories. The idea that beauty, like all spiritually inspired values, is not in things themselves but in the mind of the artist in “Promenade” (A walk) is what—in perverted and illusory form, to be sure—gives the fantasies of “Violante” and “Mélancolique villégiature” their interest as travesties of idealism in which “the omnipotence of thought”⁴ leads to misery and loneliness in contrast to the fulfillment experienced by the artist. Throughout the collection, in almost all of its parts large and small, one senses Proust's passionate attachment to a conception of art that does not refuse but, rather, delights and finds inspiration in the most ordinary and humble aspects of life. Human passions, ideals, hopes, illusions, memories—all combine with a reverential attitude toward natural beauty to endow this collection with its own particular charm and cohesiveness.

An example of the book's unity despite the generic diversity of its “little pieces” can be seen in the “Fragments de comédie italienne,” where Italian comedy serves as a metaphor for contemporary society in the stylized form of masked faces, affectation, foolishness, self-delusion, pretension, assumed identities, sudden changes of character and fortune—a whole array of situations in which individuals play strange roles and display unpredictable, often contemptible, behavior toward themselves and toward others. This is the lot, or threatened fate, of Proust's lovers in the short stories (as it will be for many characters of the Recherche), the only remedies for which are either the epiphanic moments that precede death or the liberating effects of artistic creation. For Proust, there are no others.

Bernard Gicquel was the first to devote systematic study to features of PJ that made it a “composed work.” He argued that themes, images, and situations in the book “respond to each other, reflect each other, evoke each other” even at some distance, and in this respect convey a sense of organicity. They suggest “an underlying order” far more significant than mere chronology, an “intentional placement” that substitutes for chronology “an aesthetic order desired by [Proust's] mind.” Gicquel made much of the centrality of the Portraits, situated in the exact middle of the collection, surrounded on both sides by four stories or cycles of short pieces. This order manifested a “geometric arrangement” of its parts. He concluded from the position of the château drawings at the beginning and end that this was Proust's way of giving the book “a circular order” not dissimilar, he noted, from the “cyclical” collections of poems that were popular in the Middle Ages. Originally a symbol of the return of the seasons, the circle becomes in PJ the very image of time, of those “days” alluded to in the title. Furthermore, Gicquel maintained, the story “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” with its five chapters, contains the essential five themes of PJ: worldly vanity, sensuality, imagination, will, and death.

Luzius Keller's commentary in the 1988 German edition of PJ (Freuden und Tage 277-287) is the other critical work that, joining Gicquel's essay, has gone furthest in arguing that PJ is constructed according to a compositional principle that gives Proust's youthful writings a “new shape and meaning.” He stresses the centrality of art as a theme and as a unifying principle of the book, and the “symmetrical” arrangement of its various materials. Like Kingcaid, he points out the prevalence of “decadent” themes (forbidden loves, confessions, matricide, suicide, illness and so on) seen against a “broad intertextual horizon” including such names as St. Augustine and Thomas à Kempis.

Keller considers “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” written in 1894 and revised in 1895, as a summary or recapitulation of Proust's writing up to that point, a sort of prefiguration of the book as a whole. This story, he believes, mirrors Proust's entire aesthetic experience, from Augustine to the French moralists, from Anatole France to Tolstoy, from Montesquiou to Hahn. Montesquiou's presence can be seen in the decadent aestheticism and elaborate finery of Baldassare's existence (exotic animals, a collection of musical instruments, the coat of arms), while Hahn's influence in Proust's life is reflected, among other links, in the title of the story inasmuch as the letters of “Reynaldo” are concealed within the name “Baldassare Silvande” except for the o and the y taken from “Vicomte” and “Sylvanie.” However farfetched this may seem, what we know about Proust's fondness for verbal play gives Keller's observation more than speculative value.

Keller's main point is that the book is arranged in such a way as to convey the notion that art and death are the means through which several of Proust's characters become aware of the “factitiousness” of so much of human life and approach the threshold of “truth and essentiality.” This idea is certainly present, whether or not the arrangement of the materials in the book is meant to highlight it. Baldassare and Honoré, in the first and last stories, “pay for an instant of authentic life with life itself.” At the same time, Keller regards Gicquel's thesis concerning a “negative” and a “positive” valence as very questionable. He prefers, as do I, to see the unity of the book as residing more in its philosophical standpoint, in its tendency to focus on “the fluctuations and forces” of the world, than in its structural features per se.

Keller introduces another possible source of unity by looking at the book's pastiches and at how its many epigraphs play upon a series of interpenetrating themes. Proust used the devices of imitation, parody, and pastiche as forms of commentary on some of his favorite writers; for example, “Violante,” “Oranthe,” and “Bouvard et Pécuchet” were essentially “stylistic studies” of Anatole France, La Bruyère, and Flaubert. To this Keller adds two other observations. First, he maintains that the shifts in narrative viewpoint that mark “La mort de Baldassare Silvande” and “Mélancolique villégiature” imply “a critical reflection on literature,” that is, a self-conscious manipulation of narrative methods rather than a formal error committed by a novice writer. Second, and more important as far as the work in its entirety is concerned, he argues that in PJ Proust strings together forms of expression, fashionable trends, and beloved authors belonging to the latter decades of the nineteenth century. His motive in doing so, Keller believes, was to provide a “panorama of fin-de-siècle literature,” a kind of overview of contemporary literary currents. This interpretation runs the risk of overstating a fruitful idea, yet when we look at Proust's subsequent writing, culminating in the Recherche, and note that he incorporated into these works theories and views on contemporary painting, music, and literature, it does not seem off the mark to read PJ from this panoramic perspective.

The pastiche, remarks Léon Deffoux (187), is a form of satire without malice, a spoofing without ill will, as distinguished from parody, which uses “grosser artifices,” and aims at making the ideas and the style of a writer an object of ridicule, usually in a theatrical and burlesque manner. Both pastiche and parody are forms of irreverence, but in the case of pastiche the irreverence can also be an indirect way of paying homage to a writer whom one admires. Jean Milly observes pertinently that pastiche was a “permanent activity” of Proust, a mode of literary appropriation through which he could at one and the same time pay tribute to writers who were important to him and “free himself from influences that were too strong, in order to achieve his independence, his full capacity as an original creator” (1970, 37). In other words, if this general point of view has validity, we would be entitled to add the word “critical” to Keller's characterization and call PJ “a critical panorama of fin-de-siècle literature.”⁵

In his 1993 study of PJ, Pierre Daum approaches the work from a rather rigorously structuralist point of view. But he also identifies some of the book's stylistic traits, its rhythms and sonorities, and its alternating tones of lyricism and moralism. He sees the book as essentially a series of “studies of human souls.” According to this view, then, the unity of PJ is more psychological than philosophical, more intimate and introspective than ideological, as I have defined this last term.

Daum examines an aspect of Proust's writing in PJ about which there has been relatively little commentary. He characterizes several of the stories as having extremely vague temporal and spatial coordinates, as bearing very few traces of historicity, of rootedness in a specific time and place. I strongly agree with this perception. The stories seem to be detached from time, as if they were intended to be fables rather than conventionally realistic accounts of human experiences. The “mythic,” otherworldly tales of one of Proust's literary friends and idols, Henri de Régnier (1864-1936), may have been the crucial influence pushing him in this direction. Stories such as “La Mort de Baldassare Silvande,” “Violante,” and “Mélancolique villégiature,” and shorter pieces such as “Rencontre au bord du lac” (Encounter by the lake) and “L'Etranger” (The stranger) seem suspended in time, despite a few allusions to things and people reminiscent of Parisian society in the 1890s. The often abstract, fabular atmosphere in PJ reflects young Proust's desire to retreat into a timeless realm where ideal types could act and ideal situations could unfold free of the real historical determinants of human thought and action. His intention was to highlight the universal significance of his characters' inner lives and relationships. He wanted to suspend his readers' attachment to the world by transporting them to the imaginary domain of abstract elemental forces at work in human destiny. Either he gives his characters names—Baldassare, Violante, Madame de Breyves, Heldémone, Adelgise, Oranthe, Cardenio, M. de Laléande—that have an exotic or un-French sound, or he gives them no name at all, as in “Rencontre au bord du lac” and “Rêve” (Dream).

This does not mean that PJ lacks critical bite. On the contrary, Proust's critique of a self-indulgent, wasteful, superficial society is evident. What it means, however, is that he wanted his criticism to transcend the moment in which the stories were written, so that the reader would feel free to attach a general human significance to them rather than associate them with a specific social milieu. Too much historical material could spoil the subtler workings of fantasy. Proust was after the general, the universal, the “laws” of human nature as revealed in similar and recurrent situations.

It seems to me that we gain access to Proust's ideology precisely through these attempts to protect a domain of fabular purity from the contaminations of history. He shared this need with many other artists and writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. That he eventually transcended his penchant for the timeless fable in favor of a resolute psychological realism, as seen in the Recherche, is one of the things that sets him apart from many other writers of his generation.

PJ reflects Proust's readings of Kant and Schopenhauer, as Anne Henry has demonstrated in her study of Proust's aesthetic theory. The philosophy and implicit ideology of Proust's early writings are testimony to his assimilation of certain notions about the nature of the human mind, about art, and about the relationship between empirical and ideal truth that derive in part from the two German thinkers. If, as I have claimed, the unity of PJ consists to a significant extent in its philosophical premises, then German idealist and neo-idealist thought must be taken into account.

Raymond Williams's characterization of the history of modern aesthetics as “in large part a protest against the forcing of all experience into instrumentality (‘utility’), and of all things into commodities” (Marxism and Literature 151) is pertinent to the reasons why Proust and many of his contemporaries found Kantian thought to be congenial to their aesthetic and moral perspectives.

Kant based much of what he said in Critique of Pure Reason on the assumption that human beings possess and exercise a faculty of pure a priori cognition inherent in the mind and not dependent on empirical evidence. The proper tests of such cognition, he argued, were universality and necessity. He applied the term “transcendental” to all knowledge “which is not so much occupied with objects as with the mode of our cognition of these objects, so far as this mode of cognition is possible a priori” (Kant 1934, 38).

In this regard, Kant continued, what was of interest to him philosophically speaking was not the nature of “outward objects” but the properties of the mind, of the subjective knowing entity. “The object of our investigations,” he said, was not to be sought without, but altogether within ourselves. Kant did not, however, discard or minimize the role that objective knowledge played in human cognition. There were at bottom two sources of human knowledge, sense and understanding. By the former, objects were given to us; by the latter, thought. Building on these premises, Kant went on to present the foundational principles of his “transcendental aesthetic” philosophy that required a distinction between empirical intuition, which works on all phenomena given to us through the senses, and pure intuition, which exists a priori in the mind, the preliminary abode of thought.

Both space and time, Kant reasoned at a decisive turning point of Western philosophical thought, were concepts that could be spoken of only from the human point of view. Space, he said, was not a form that belongs as a property to things, but was rather the form of all phenomena as they are perceived by the subjective condition of the sensibility; objects remain quite unknown to us in themselves. What we call outward objects are nothing but “mere representations of our sensibility” (47).

Kant considered time “the formal condition a priori of all phenomena whatsoever.” While space was the form of our “external intuition,” time was nothing but the form of our “internal intuition.” Time inheres not in objects themselves but solely in the subject (or mind) that intuits them. The conclusion he drew from all this was what made his thought exceptionally appealing to the mind and sensibilities of writers such as Proust, who were looking anxiously for a way out of the constraints imposed by various forms of materialist and positivist thought.

The key point to be made here is that, instead of embracing a dialectical and historical materialist approach to problems of knowledge and perception, Proust—following a growing number of writers and artists in the nineteenth century in an ever-expanding movement of thought that culminated in the symbolism and spiritualism of the century's last decades—embraced Kantian idealism as it was expounded in part in the famous “Introduction” to Critique of Pure Reason. In his “general remarks on transcendental aesthetic,” Kant wrote as follows:

We have intended to say that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of phenomena; that the things which we intuit, are not in themselves the same as our representations of them in intuition, nor are their relations in themselves so constituted as they appear to us; and that if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective constitution of our senses in general, then not only the nature and relations of objects in space and time, but even space and time themselves disappear; and that these, as phenomena, cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility is quite unknown to us. We know nothing more than our mode of perceiving them, which is peculiar to us, and which, though not of necessity pertaining to every animated being, is so to the whole human race. With this alone we have to do. Space and time are the pure forms thereof; sensation the matter. The former alone can we cognize a priori, that is, antecedent to all actual perception; and for this reason such cognition is called pure intuition.

(54)

This revolutionary affirmation of idealist thought⁶ also found expression in the pages of Kant's Critique of Judgment, where he presented what he called his “Analytic of the Beautiful” (Kant 1963). In this work, explains Walter Cerf, we find ourselves immersed in a series of “dualisms” and “binary oppositions” that lie—as Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Joseph Buttigieg and others have told us—at the very core of Western metaphysical discourse. They form the conceptual horizons of the Kantian philosophy of pleasure: the metaphysical concept of the soul-body dualism, the epistemological concept of the subject-object scheme, and the concept of the cause-effect relation. Indeed, everything Proust wrote, from the early stories and prose poems to the later masterpiece, is difficult to imagine without the philosophical underpinnings provided by this essential dualism inherent in Kantian idealist thought. The soul-body dualism goes back many thousands of years, attaining in Christian philosophy a preeminent place of honor, but it was only in its specific elaboration by Kant and his followers that it became fully accessible to and assimilable by writer-philosophers such as Proust, who needed a spiritualist grounding for his theory of art but one that was couched in terms that were free of explicitly religious connotations. This he found in Kant, especially in the way Kant applied his thought to problems of knowledge and aesthetics.

Kant's aesthetics rested on the distinction between impure pleasure and pure pleasure, the latter untainted by the senses. What he envisioned was a theory of the beautiful which, on the one hand, was separate and autonomous vis-à-vis the senses, yet on the other hand could help form a part of the bridge between the analysis of cognition and the analysis of morality. In other words, he accorded autonomy to the aesthetic, but at the same time insisted on its ultimate relation with moral judgment.

What stands out for our purposes is Kant's assertion that the judgment of taste, which is the faculty of judging the beautiful, is not logical but aesthetic, which in turn cannot be other than subjective. This feeling for the beautiful, he argued, was rooted in the human capacity for pure disinterested pleasure, as opposed to the pleasure that rests entirely on sensation. The judgment of taste is merely contemplative; it has no object or rationale beyond a disinterested enjoyment of the beautiful in and for itself. Kant was committed, avers Dieter Henrich, “to the view that beauty and all other elementary and purely aesthetic qualities depend exclusively on the formal arrangement of a perceived manifold” (54-55). If this is the case, we can see why Proust was uncomfortable with some of the implications of Kantian aesthetic purism, since he wanted to reintroduce into aesthetic philosophy the notion of humanity's moral life and destiny, to which the experience of art could add vital elements. He was not prepared to isolate “form” from “content” in writing or in the other arts. But this is an aspect of Proustian thought that remains somewhat unclear. It does not seem to me that he was ever entirely ready to align himself with a formalist aesthetics resting on the presumed Kantian theory that it is design and composition “which are the proper objects of pure judgment” (Kant 1963, 31).

Proust made only a few explicit references to Schopenhauer, yet the German thinker appears to have had a certain appeal for him based on the fact that, even more resolutely perhaps than Kant, he gave to art a distinctive place in human experience, but did so by accenting concerns and considerations that had not played any real part in Kant's scheme of things. Schopenhauer introduced into Western philosophy an Eastern component that gave to the material world a transitory, illusory quality. For Schopenhauer, “the ideality of time and space” was the key to all true metaphysics because “it made way for an order of things quite different from what is found in nature” (20). But he noted in typically pessimistic fashion that most people were incapable of entering this different order; they were victims of foolish illusions about sensual gratifications and so “the very thing they allowed to slip by unappreciated and unenjoyed was just their life, precisely in the expectation of which they lived” (22). Something of this attitude can be detected in Proust's way of analyzing the role of illusion in the general problematic of human existence.

Schopenhauer's reflections on the qualities of “genius,” one of whose characteristics was the ability “to see the universal in the particular,” led him to another notion that, theoretically, was to play an important part in Proust's aesthetics, namely that “the kind of knowledge of the genius is essentially purified of all willing and of references to the will; [from which it follows] that the works of genius do not result from intention or arbitrary choice, but that genius is here guided by a kind of instinctive necessity” (87). This idea fascinated Proust as a principle of literary and artistic creation, although it conflicted with another aspect of his world view, which was that “thought” and therefore conscious reflection were what gave true dignity to works of art.

Where Schopenhauer left his mark on Proust was in Schopenhauer's reflections on the relations between history and art, the former seen as displaying “the transient complexities of a human world moving like clouds in the wind, which are entirely transformed by the most trifling accident” (107), the latter a realm in which what was of permanent and universal value could find its fulfillment in lasting works of the creative imagination. In this concept, Schopenhauer felt that he had identified a crucial element of the “philosophy of the moderns,” which derived largely from Berkeley and Kant but purified of the tendency to discount the necessary dialectical relationship between the thinking subject and its object of thought.

Much of what Proust had to say both in fictional and in critical form was grounded in the presuppositions and principles of idealist philosophy, even if he tempered some of its more mystical features—as seen especially in Schopenhauer—in favor of what Mieke Bal calls his “visual poetics” resting in turn on a theory of knowledge

that does not separate the domain of the mind from that of the body, in other words, that does not separate the cognitive, the affective, the aesthetic, and the sexual domains. Rather it explores all avenues, however unusual they may be, that lead to the discovery of new aspects of the real by means of sensations, experiences, and the very pores of one's being. It is for this reason that we can treat Proust as a philosopher and even view him in the same light as the greatest philosophers of this century.

(239)

Bal's formulation allows us to see what distinguishes Proust's philosophy of art from that of his idealist forebears. The material world has a palpable presence in Proust's writing that, even if still bound by the constraints of dualistic thinking, adheres to and illuminates sense experience in an admirably realistic manner.

I have referred several times to the work of Anne Henry as a helpful guide to Proust's early intellectual and literary development. This is an appropriate moment in which to say a few words about her contribution to Proust studies.

The singular distinction of her work is that it mixes a thorough analysis of the philosophical foundations of Proust's ideas, especially concerning the nature and purposes of art and literature, with a series of critically acute judgments that effectively demystify much of what had passed up to then for Proust's absolute originality and transcendent genius. In her hands, Proust returns definitively to the fold of French writers at the turn of the century who shared intellectual interests, political and moral concerns, and literary aspirations. In an earlier essay on PJ, she discovered “troubling resemblances” between some of Proust's stories and prose-poetic evocations and those of other writers of the time, among whom she singled out Tolstoy to document what she felt amounted to “plagiary” on Proust's part, instances where he had “pillaged” motifs and devices from the great Russian novelist and short-story writer (Henry 1973). I shall discuss these so-called “plagiaries” in chapter 8.

In Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique, a massive study only a small part of which will be mentioned here, Henry resumes her inquiry into the armamentarium of philosophical notions on the basis of which, she argues, Proust built his world view and produced his fictional universe. These notions turn out to be those of the entire European Romantic heritage, which drew copiously from German thinkers, especially from aesthetic and moral philosophers such as Schelling and Schopenhauer. Proust was also shaped, philosophically speaking, by Slavic influences (Tolstoy and Dostoievsky) and of course by French philosophers, from his own philosophy instructor Alphonse Darlu to Gabriel Séailles, Jules Lachelier, and Emile Boutroux. It is entirely possible that Darlu, in addition to inculcating into his responsive student a reverence for truthseeking at all costs, was also responsible for sensitizing him to French social questions, as seen from a radical-socialist point of view (Bonnet 1961, 46, 57, 68). It was Darlu as well who exposed the young writer to the thought of Immanuel Kant, which Proust regarded as “the Himalaya” of moral philosophy (Henry 34).

Henry points out that Proust derived his understanding of the “unconscious” not from Freud, whose writings played no direct role whatever in his conception of human personality, but from Karl von Hartmann's The Philosophy of the Unconscious, published in 1869. Henry feels that this work was an important source of Proust's pessimism about the ability of human beings to exert rationally motivated control over their behavior. Proust did not take Hartmann's pessimism as far as some others did, yet it may very well be that his view of love as inevitably “illusory” and even pathological in nature, and his recourse to art as the sole means with which to redeem an otherwise empty existence, stemmed in some measure from Hartmann. I would think, however, that in this realm Proust was probably the interpreter of his own life experience, for which he then found confirmation in philosophy and psychology.

Henry makes much, but with rather slight evidence, of a turn or shift toward aesthetics in Proust's thinking in the mid to late years of the 1890s. The evidence for this turn consists of three articles, the first on the liberating power of music, which he regarded as the queen of the muses (CSB [Contre Sainte-Beuve] 367-372), the second on Chardin and Rembrandt (CSB 372-382), the third on symbolism, where he challenged the poetic authority of Stéphane Mallarmé and his disciples (CSB 390-395). In these articles, especially the last two, Proust was performing an intellectual exercise that paralleled the approach he took in PJ, where music, poetry, and painting join forces thematically and even typographically in a tribute to the sisterhood of the muses. What one finds in these three articles is an effort to raise the arts to a spiritual, a sacred level. Henry connects this sudden exaltation of art with the frequently mentioned letter Proust wrote in September of 1893 to his father, where he humbly yet confidently declared himself to be unfit for anything in life except philosophy and literature, and with the lectures given by Emile Boutroux on modern philosophy, which Proust attended at the Sorbonne in 1894-95. It was in this state of mind, Henry maintains, that Proust read and was marked forever by Schelling's System of Transcendental Idealism and by the thought of Schelling's French disciple, Gabriel Séailles.

Henry treats Proust's philosophical formation with deep seriousness, and she enlarges our understanding of his emerging world outlook. The only problem in her approach is that her focus on intellectual history is so intense that she loses sight of a broader historical contextualization that would have given her analysis of Proust's ideas more connections with the practical experiential world.

A recent critical study that sheds further light on Proust's aesthetic philosophy is Anthony Albert Everman's Lilies and Sesame: The Orient, Inversion, and Artistic Creation in A la recherche du temps perdu (1998). Everman ascribes Proust's way of conceptualizing art to the influence of Kant, Schelling and Schopenhauer, whose thought “posits that the creation of art falls under the domain of génie, an interiorized, subjective, irrational yet transcending force with ostensible roots, perceived by certain Europeans, in the ascetic traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism” (157). Flowing from this root assumption is the idea that artistic creation is the fruit of the individual creator's feeling of marginality, of separation and estrangement from the norms of society, for such a condition allows the artist to see beneath appearances, to unearth and reveal what society prefers to conceal out of fear that knowledge of the “truth” of human affairs will subvert the established order of things. One form of estrangement is that of the sexual “invert,” who quite literally “overturns” accepted notions about what is and what is not the truth of human sexuality. Sexual difference is a key component of the Proustian vision of the world, Everman argues. It is closely linked to the notion of “Orientalism” in that the Orient, for Proust, is associated with a realm of being where the imagination and aesthetic sensibilities can have free play to express themselves, and where there can be “reconciliation between the components of a fragmented personality” (34). Thus, in Proust's scheme of things, what most members of modern society take to be aberrational turns out to be precisely the key to that crucial “difference” vital to creative life.

Whether, as Everman seems to think, Roland Barthes was correct in seeing “inversion” as not only a dominant structure of the Recherche but also as “a source of delightful surprise and jouissance on the part of the reader and the protagonist” (70) is difficult to say. But what can be said with some degree of confidence is that at least two of the novel's principal “homosexual” characters, Charlus and Albertine, are, although morally ambiguous, the embodiments of a special fascination and “beauty” that other so-called “normal” characters do not possess. They incorporate an aspect of reality that Proust urgently wished to reveal, one that depended on his need, derived in part from his own “marginal” sexuality, to undertake an “outing” of much of the society represented in his novel (91).

Everman penetrates the psychological and social attitudes that lay behind Proust's depiction of contemporary French society at a time when one way of life and conception of the world with roots in the remote feudal past were being definitively replaced by a new bourgeois Weltanschauung. His study allows us to see motifs and character types in Proust's early writing that anticipate the ideology of “Orientalism” in the Recherche.

Notes

1. Douglas W. Alden thought that Proust's challenge to Lorrain was not surprising in a young man who “at the time took feudal society seriously,” meaning, in this instance, personal honor and physical courage (1938).

2. On this incident, see Barker 72-73; Price, Materials 64, 95-96; and Leon 85-86.

3. Letter to Charles Grandjean, November 13 or 20, 1893, Corr. 1: 255-256.

4. Freud's phrase in chapter 3, “Animism, Magic, and the Omnipotence of Thought,” of Totem and Taboo, ed. and trans. James Strachey, introduction Peter Gay (New York: Norton., 1989), 94-124.

5. See Silvain Monod's very funny pastiche of Proust's style in the Recherche called “A la recherche de Clémentine,” in Pastiches, 236-243.

6. In a notebook entry on Flaubert written around 1910 that remained unpublished until 1971, Proust spoke of Flaubert as a “grammatical genius” who, in his own domain, had initiated a “revolution of vision” comparable to the change in thought effected by Kant. “[Flaubert's] revolution of vision, of the representation of the world that flows—or is expressed—from and by its syntax, is perhaps as great as that of Kant in moving the center of knowledge of the world to the soul” (CSB, 299-302). Proust looked upon Kant's philosophy as having become so thoroughly incorporated into the mental life of Western civilization as to be an unquestioned reality taken for granted by its beneficiaries. It should be recalled that Alphonse Darlu had introduced Proust to Kant in 1888-1889 in a course of study at the Lycée Condorcet, a course supplemented in private lessons given to Proust at his home by Darlu.