SOURCE: Mackenzie, Robin. “Proustian Doubles: Patterns of Duality and Multiplicity in À la recherche du temps perdu.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 38, no. 3 (July 2002): 291-301.

[In the following essay Mackenzie explores the contradictory patterns of dualism and fragmentation in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.]

Man is not truly one, but truly two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point [and] I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.¹

As readers of Proust's Correspondance, and indeed attentive readers of À la recherche, will be aware, Proust was a fervent admirer of Stevenson's fiction. Specific intertextual echoes of this admiration are not easy to find; if we are looking for traces of Stevenson's influence, or of Proust's reading of Stevenson, in À la recherche, we may have to settle for something more pervasive and diffuse (though no less significant for that). As Maya Slater argues in one of the very few published works to make the connection between the two writers, a crucial affinity is undoubtedly the preoccupation with the plural nature of the self.² This plurality, and in particular the interplay of dual and multiple models of subjectivity, is the main focus of this article.

Of course, Stevenson and Proust were not alone, or indeed untypical, in their interest in these questions. As Rosemary Jackson states: “Accumulated evidence […] indicates a gradual erosion of ideas of psychic unity over the last two centuries. Long before Freud, monistic definitions of self were being supplanted by hypotheses of dipsychism (dual selves) and polypsychism (multiple selves).”³ Both hypotheses (as Jackson calls them) play a part in the complex plotting of patterns of subjectivity which we find in À la recherche. My intention in the following pages is to trace the interactions and tensions between these two coexisting, but also competing, paradigms of the self in Proust: self as double and divided, on the one hand, and as fragmented, dispersed and multiple, on the other.

A strong version of what we might call the dualist hypothesis is articulated by Thomas de Praetere, in an article entitled “Contradiction de Proust; Logique(s) de Proust”:

Une de ces lois, c'est la simplicité des êtres, qui ne sont pas protéiformes comme on le prétend parfois, mais doubles, compréhensibles chacun par l'application d'un seul couple de contrastes qui le résume parfaitement.”⁴

For de Praetere, then, selves in À la recherche are not plural and discontinuous, moi multiples evolving through a series of discrete avatars; instead, they change according to a rhythm of reversal, or inversion: “On peut donc rester soi-même ou devenir le contraire de soi, mais il est impossible, à strictement entendre cette phrase, de devenir autre chose que soi, un ‘autre chose’ qui serait sans rapport avec ce qu'on a été.”⁵ De Praetere cites various examples in support of this contention: the most obvious, and compelling, is Robert de Saint-Loup, the great womaniser who by the final volume has become predominantly and actively homosexual. But the pattern can be extended to other figures: M. Vinteuil, the timid bourgeois music teacher of Combray who turns out to be a bold musical innovator; even Marcel's father, the stern disciplinarian who nevertheless unbends sufficiently to allow the boy's mother to spend the night in his room, thus breaking all the hallowed rules of his upbringing.

This reading of Proustian selves and their evolution seems at first sight persuasive; but one could question whether these antithetical reversals, these binary oppositions unfolding over time, do not reflect a change in the narrator's vision of the characters as much as a transformation in the characters' behaviour or psychology: a subjective rather than an objective phenomenon. That most antithetical of Proustian figures, the Baron de Charlus, would provide a good example of this: signs of his homoerotic tendencies are not difficult to decipher from his early appearances in the novel, and yet Marcel himself is not aware of them, or at least cannot make sense of the strangeness of the impression Charlus makes, and the intensity of his interest. The shift clearly occurs in Marcel's perception, rather than in the behaviour or proclivities of the character as they are shown in the course of the novel.

Moreover, de Praetere's neat reversals and antitheses tend to break down with those figures who are a more constant focus of Marcel's attention and desire. The obvious example is Albertine, who is presented overwhelmingly in terms of multiplicity, dispersion and fragmentation. There are innumerable instances of this: perhaps the most celebrated is the famous “Cubist” kiss, Marcel's first (successful) attempt to embrace Albertine, where, as he draws closer to her, we find a series of facets, or fragments, of her face described in rapid succession:

Bref, de même qu'à Balbec, Albertine m'avait paru différente, maintenant, comme si, en accélérant prodigieusement la rapidité des changements de perspective et des changements de coloration que nous offre une personne dans nos diverses rencontres avec elle, j'avais voulu les faire tenir toutes en quelques secondes pour recréer expérimentalement le phénomène qui diversifie l'individualité d'un être et tirer les unes des autres comme d'un étui toutes les possibilités qu'il enferme, dans ce court trajet de mes lèvres vers sa joue, c'est dix Albertine que je vis.⁶

In this instance, the multiplicity and fragmentation are primarily perceptual, though there is a clear indication that the visual shifts correspond to, are indeed a condensation of, Albertine's psychological mutability—“toutes les possibilités qu'[elle] enferme”. This motif of the multiple, and multifarious, Albertine, recurs throughout the text: “Hélas! Albertine était plusieurs personnes!” laments the narrator in the course of one of those tortuous and interminable interrogations to which he subjects Albertine in La Prisonnière, when a hitherto unsuspected—or perhaps suspected, but hitherto unconfirmed—facet of Albertine's sexual activities, or at least inclinations, is inadvertently revealed.⁷ This impression of multiplicity is further reinforced in the way Marcel remembers Albertine after her death—as a heart-rending and devastating sequence of fragmentary images:

Grande faiblesse sans doute pour un être, de consister en une simple collection de moments; grande force aussi […] [C]et émiettement ne fait pas seulement vivre la morte, il la multiplie. Pour me consoler, ce n'est pas une, c'est d'innombrables Albertine que j'aurais dû oublier. Quand j'étais arrivé à supporter le chagrin d'avoir perdu celle-ci, c'était à recommencer avec une autre, avec cent autres.⁸

The shifting, elusive, plural nature of the beloved exemplifies one of the more tantalising lois générales of subjectivity proposed by the narrator: coherence of character is a function of the indifference of the perceiver. Indifference immobilises the object of perception, whereas desire multiplies or fragments it:

Je ne dis pas qu'un jour ne viendra pas où, même à ces lumineuses jeunes filles, nous n'assignerons pas des caractères très tranchés, mais c'est qu'elles auront cessé de nous intéresser […]. Leur immobilité viendra de notre indifférence.⁹

Patterns of reversal and dédoublement, then, tend to attach to less powerfully cathected figures, those who are not the object of any especially intense desire on Marcel's part. In contrast, the greater the subjective investment in the other, the more fragmentary and multiple that other appears. This contention can be extended to, indeed tested against, that ultimate object of desire (at least in a narcissistic perspective): the narrator's self, who is perhaps the best example of an agglomeration of moi multiples in À la recherche.

Examples of his infinite variety abound: there is the explicit statement of the impermanence of the self, when the narrator, in the early pages of “Noms de pays: le pays”, evokes the fading of his love for Gilberte:

Le moi qui l'avait aimée, remplacé déjà presque entièrement par un autre, resurgissait […]. Or, […] ce propos aurait dû me paraître oiseux, mais il me causa une vive souffrance, celle qu'éprouvait un moi, aboli pour une grande part depuis longtemps, à être séparé de Gilberte. [my italics]¹⁰

This motif of la mort du moi can be incorporated in the broader narrative rhythm, and thematic complex, of intermittence: les intermittences du cœur, which affect Marcel so powerfully when he returns to Balbec after the death of his grandmother, clearly involve a discontinuity in the desiring subject. As the narrator says:

À n'importe quel moment que nous la considérions, notre âme totale n'a qu'une valeur presque fictive, malgré le nombreux bilan de ses richesses, car tantôt les unes, tantôt les autres, sont indisponibles […]. C'est sans doute l'existence de notre corps, semblable pour nous à un vase où notre spiritualité serait enclose, qui nous induit à supposer que tous nos biens intérieurs […] sont perpétuellement en notre possession.¹¹

As the narrator makes clear, intermittence, this emotional discontinuity of the self, is very much linked to memory—“aux troubles de la mémoire sont liées les intermittences du cœur”.¹² And memory is of course, in a famous comparison in Le Temps retrouvé, likened to a multitude of sealed vessels: “[L]e geste, l'acte le plus simple reste enfermé comme dans mille vases clos dont chacun serait rempli de choses d'une couleur, d'une odeur, d'une température absolument différentes.”¹³

All these things tend towards a view of a plural and (one could almost say) polymorphous subjectivity, which has often been taken as the distinctive feature of Proust's description of the self. Proust's friend and editor, Jacques Rivière, writing in the 1920s, identifies this as the major contrast between Proustian and Freudian constructions of subjectivity: where Freud sees the mind as dynamic, dualistic and conflictual, Proust presents it as more static and pluralistic, composed of a multitude of more or less self-contained systems:

[C]e n'est pas une conception dynamique de ces rapports [entre conscient et inconscient] qui y est latente. Et c'est la grande différence de notre auteur avec Freud […] que cette conception qu'il a d'une parfaite articulation—ou d'une parfaite étanchéité—réciproque des différents systèmes psychiques.¹⁴

So far, then, there seems to be an opposition emerging between subjective-internal and objective-external apprehensions of self. The narrator tends towards a moi multiples model when mapping his own subjectivity, or that of figures (like Albertine) in whom he has a powerful investment of desire; but he slips back into a more dualistic vision of personality, emphasising reversals and oppositions, when plotting the nature and development of other, more emotionally distant characters. But as one might expect, this opposition is itself too broad to be completely convincing: we find patterns of antithesis, reversal and doubling emerging also in the narrator's reflexive accounts of self and interiority. A good example of this appears in the famous description of the dreaming self in the opening pages of the novel:

[J]e n'avais pas cessé en dormant de faire des réflexions sur ce que je venais de lire, mais ces réflexions avaient pris un tour un peu particulier; il me semblait que j'étais moi-même ce dont parlait l'ouvrage: une église, un quatuor, la rivalité de François 1er et de Charles Quint.¹⁵

Much has been written about the significance of the three elements of the moi du rêve; they have understandably been presented as three of the foundational metaphors of self, and work, and self-as-work, in À la recherche.¹⁶ But the crucial point for this argument is simpler: the dreaming self in Proust is permeable and Protean, and it tends to blur the boundaries of that most fundamental of dualities, between subject and object.

Of course, the “objects” which the subject merges with (or into) are not all unproblematic emblems of duality. Churches in À la recherche—from Saint-Hilaire to metaphorical cathedrals—tend to be complex and composite structures, made of many parts; quartets are not obviously characterised by duality, either in form or in instrumentation; the monarchs' rivalry is perhaps the only one of the three elements which is characterised by a clear and conflictual opposition. The dédoublement motif does, however, emerge more strongly in the images of a subsequent dream: Swann's dream, at the end of Un amour de Swann, which represents a (thankfully transient) resurgence of his love for Odette. Admittedly, this dream does not unfold in Marcel's psyche; but it is narrated very much from within (the focalisation is resolutely internal), making it quite as important in mapping patterns of subjectivity as any of the dreams dreamed by Marcel. In this dream, Swann is walking along a coastal path with various (and variously) significant others—Odette, Forcheville (in the guise of Napoléon III), an androgynous Mme Verdurin, the painter Elstir, and a mysterious young man wearing a fez, whom Swann cannot at first identify:

Le jeune homme inconnu se mit à pleurer. Swann essaya de le consoler. “Après tout elle a raison”, lui dit-il en lui essuyant les yeux et en lui ôtant son fez pour qu'il fût plus à son aise. “Je le lui ai conseillé dix fois. Pourquoi en être triste? C'était bien l'homme qui pouvait la comprendre.” Ainsi Swann se parlait-il à lui-même, car le jeune homme qu'il n'avait pu identifier d'abord était aussi lui; comme certains romanciers, il avait distribué sa personnalité à deux personnages, celui qui faisait le rêve, et un qu'il voyait devant lui coiffé d'un fez.¹⁷

As in the opening dream of the église-quatuor-rivalité, much has been written about this;¹⁸ once again, I want to skirt the hermeneutic complications and emphasise a few structural points. First and most obvious of these is the importance of doubling in what one could perhaps call the Proustian “dream-work”. Swann's dream seems not to obey the canonical Freudian principle of economy, as exemplified in the dream-work device of condensation.¹⁹ Instead, entities split, if not multiply, in the dream: this is certainly the case with the jeune homme en fez, Swann's alter ego within the dream, representing the earlier moi who is still besotted with Odette. The figure of Napoléon III is more conventional, in Freudian terms: the doubling effect does not occur within the dream, but between what Freud would call latent dream-thoughts and manifest dream. There are clearly other currents of meaning and association feeding into the figure of Napoléon (ideas of empire and domination, to cite the most obvious): he is composite as well as double. But the narrator does not mention the ancillary meanings; what he stresses is the forme maîtresse of duality, which is clearly presented as the most significant of the dream's operations.

Nevertheless, the opposition of dual and multiple in the dream is very labile, and liable to collapse or at least crumble under closer scrutiny. This is exemplified in a metaphor occurring a little further on in the narration of Swann's dream:

Car, d'images incomplètes et changeantes Swann endormi tirait des déductions fausses, ayant d'ailleurs momentanément un tel pouvoir créateur qu'il se reproduisait par simple division comme certains organismes inférieurs.²⁰

The balance, or interplay, here is quite subtle: the organismes inférieurs reproduce by division, splitting (dualism motif), but the result is proliferation, multiplicity. Such metaphors of what we might call biological regression—reversion to more rudimentary forms of life—are highly significant in À la recherche, especially in the charting of the deeper, unconscious reaches of the mind, where dream, memory, even creativity have their origins. The interconnection between the instinctual and unconscious (on the one hand) and the most subtle and sophisticated mental operations (on the other) plays a major part in the narrator's ideology, his system of ideas and values, in À la recherche: the reinstatement of the claims of “intuition” and instinct in mental life, their crucial role in the play of mental forces, is an almost monotonously recurring theme.²¹ Here, though, it is presented in more vivid and imagistic form, in the two metaphors of division and doubling we have found in Swann's dream, drawn from the apparently distant domains of novel-writing and the zoology of rudimentary organisms.

There is another avatar, or manifestation, of doubling in À la recherche which carries considerable implications for the mapping and plotting of the self that so preoccupies the narrator. In the episode in question, doubling is an element in the action (what Genette would call the histoire) rather than in the narration (récit): it is motif rather than metaphor, scene rather than simile. This double does not emerge from within the self, generated by the energies of the unconscious mind (though it certainly triggers in Marcel a complex and deep-seated emotional response); instead it visits the self from outside, as a mirror image, a reflection of himself which Marcel glimpses as he is dining in a restaurant with Saint-Loup and Rachel (the latter's mistress). The passage shows a complex interplay of dual and multiple, and is worth quoting at length:

Le cabinet où se trouvait Saint-Loup était petit, mais la glace unique qui le décorait était de telle sorte qu'elle semblait en réfléchir une trentaine d'autres, le long d'une perspective infinie; et l'ampoule électrique placée au sommet du cadre devait le soir, quand elle était allumée, suivie de la procession d'une trentaine de reflets pareils à elle-même, donner au buveur, même solitaire, l'idée que l'espace autour de lui se multipliait en même temps que ses sensations exaltées par l'ivresse et qu'enfermé seul dans ce petit réduit, il régnait pourtant sur quelque chose de bien plus étendu en sa courbe indéfinie et lumineuse, qu'une allée du “Jardin de Paris”. Or, étant alors à ce moment-là ce buveur, tout d'un coup, le cherchant dans la glace, je l'aperçus, hideux, inconnu, qui me regardait. La joie de l'ivresse était plus forte que le dégoût; par gaieté ou bravade, je lui souris et en même temps il me souriait. Et je me sentais tellement sous l'empire éphémère et puissant de la minute où les sensations sont si fortes que je ne sais si ma seule tristesse ne fut pas de penser que le moi affreux que je venais d'apercevoir était peut-être à son dernier jour et que je ne rencontrerais plus jamais cet étranger dans le cours de ma vie.²²

This passage is traversed by a series of significant thematic oppositions: depth and surface, truth and illusion, confinement and expansion—and of course duality and multiplicity (in fact, singularity, duality and multiplicity: the binary opposition is here displaced by the introduction of a third term). It is also characterised by the ambivalence Marcel feels towards his mirror image, which is perhaps the most powerful and pervasive feature of the episode.

The initial opposition, introduced just before the passage quoted, sets art (authentic existence) against ennui (that classic symptom of le temps perdu):

Je me dis alors: “Je n'ai pas trop à regretter ma journée; ces heures passées auprès de cette jeune femme ne sont pas perdues […]”. Je me le disais parce qu'il me semblait que c'était douer d'un caractère esthétique, et par là justifier, sauver ces heures d'ennui.²³

The motif of the aesthetic will tend to recede as the passage continues, but considerations of temporality underpin much of what follows—and in the first instance, the value and meaning of Marcel's inebriation. This is compared, though not in a straightforward and unqualified way, to the drunkenness he experienced as a younger man at Rivebelle: “À force de boire du champagne avec eux, je commençai à éprouver un peu de l'ivresse que je ressentais à Rivebelle, probablement pas tout à fait la même.”²⁴ The narrator says no more than that the quality of the experience is different; but that difference does not appear to be a positive one, since this experience lacks the aesthetic dimension of Rivebelle, where Marcel's intoxication generates a heightened, metaphoric mode of vision which transforms the relative banality of the scene.²⁵ Here, in a characteristic move, the narrator associates different selves with different qualities and degrees of inebriation:

Non seulement chaque genre d'ivresse […] mais chaque degré d'ivresse, et qui devrait porter une ‘cote’ différente comme les fonds dans la mer, met à nu en nous, exactement à la profondeur où il se trouve, un homme spécial.²⁶

The depth-surface polarity is not the only one here; more striking is the interplay of confined and constricted spaces (“petit cabinet”, “petit réduit”) and the impression, however illusory, of more or less unlimited expansion (“le long d'une perspective infinie”, “sa courbe indéfinie et lumineuse”). This opposition maps neatly—more neatly than is usual in such a metaphorically complex text—on to that of singularity and multiplicity, which is however complicated by the omnipresent figure of duality (Marcel is after all looking at himself in a mirror). Emblems of the singular are the “glace unique” and the “buveur solitaire […] enfermé seul”, in whom singularity takes on negative connotations of isolation and solitude. Duality appears most obviously in the motif of the mirror, and Marcel's reflection therein; and more subtly, on a linguistic level, in the interplay of first- and third-person which dominates the latter part of the passage. Multiplicity is generated by the mirror, with “une trentaine de glaces” giving rise to “une trentaine de reflects” and a more general expansion of space around the solitary toper.

Given the difficulties of visualising the multiple reflections issuing from the single mirror, it is tempting to read this scene—as Weber reads the famous scene at the Opéra in the opening pages of Le Côté de Guermantes²⁷—as a description of a fantastic space, a projection of the narrator's desire as it plays with(in) these notions of single, dual and multiple. The single, the unique, the self-contained—certainly one focus of Proustian (narratorial) desire—is reflected, or refracted, into a proliferation of images, very much as the unity of the Proustian self is dispersed and fragmented as it passes through the lenses of memory and language.

So much for the more abstract patterns of representation and meaning, of mimesis and semiosis; it would surely be a partial reading that failed to take account of the feelings, the emotional and at times visceral reactions of the intoxicated Marcel, and the retrospective narrator, to the reflected image, the insubstantial double in the mirror. These reactions are strikingly ambivalent: the mirror self is “hideux”, “affreux”, inspiring “le dégoût”, but also strangely appealing and affecting (Marcel smiles at his reflection, regrets that it is so transient, that he will in all likelihood never encounter this shadowy second self again). The sympathy Marcel feels comes in part from his generalised drunken euphoria, as the text makes explicit; but the reader suspects that the ambivalence has a deeper source than mere drunken benevolence, that it is not just contingent on Marcel's inebriation but contains a measure of the veritas that is proverbially to be found in vino.

The revulsion Marcel feels towards his mirror self recalls the reaction of protagonist to Doppelgänger in much fantastic literature—a reaction often theorised with reference to the category of the uncanny. For Freud, the uncanny occurs when “infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression”²⁸—in this instance, presumably by the unexpected sighting of the reflection in the mirror. Freud goes on to argue that the double, like other manifestations of the uncanny, only becomes frightening, arouses anxiety, after repression; it triggers a “regression to a time when the ego was not yet marked off sharply from the external world and other people”.²⁹ The original double “wore a friendly aspect”;³⁰ it is central to the Freudian narrative of emotions that anxiety can result from the repression of various emotions, including originally pleasurable ones.³¹ As for the benevolence Marcel feels towards his mirror self, we could take it as a remnant of the narcissistic pleasure the child experiences when looking at his/her own image—the scopophilic impulse which Freud discusses in “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”,³² and which will prove so pivotal in Lacan's theories of the development of the ego.³³ Marcel, his inhibitions weakened by alcohol, might feel this pleasure more keenly, or at least consciously, than the retrospective narrator, with his protective (or repressive) veneer of moral-aesthetic disapprobation.

So much for psychoanalytic readings of Marcel's mirror scene; but what might the mirror self signify within a more specifically Proustian frame of reference? One possibility would be to see in this merry toper a self immersed, innocently and unconsciously, in the flow of time—“sous l'empire éphémère et puissant de la minute”—and therefore blissfully unconcerned with those impressions and memories which the narrator seeks to approfondir in his effort to recover lost time, and with it, a permanent core of self. The Marcel in the mirror is a celebrant of the ephemeral, not a Deleuzian interpreter of signs or an aesthetic explorer of hidden regions of the psyche. The episode would then dramatise the narrator's ambivalence towards this transient moi: revulsion at the degenerate symbol of wasted time, but also attraction towards the unreflecting euphoria of the drunken self, relieved (for a while) of the burden of expression.

This would go against the grain of traditional readings of À la recherche which have tended to stress the movement towards the unification and integration of Marcel's moi multiples within an overarching aesthetic (metaphoric) framework of subjectivity: this is the process described so powerfully in Le Temps retrouvé. Of course, this reading of Proust's novel has been under more or less constant attack since the advent of la nouvelle critique in the 1960s, which sought to expose the gaps, the elements of fragmentation and discontinuity, that the narrator's ideology does not quite manage to conjure away.³⁴ The dédoublement motif tends in the same centrifugal direction; patterns of duality and multiplicity in À la recherche do not resolve unproblematically into unity.

Johnnie Gratton, in an article devoted to the place of the magic lantern (and especially of Golo) in “Combray”, memorably asserts that the underlying movement, the “compulsive telos”, of Marcel's desire is given in the formula 1 + 1 = 1: what he wishes for is the suppression of difference, the possibility of fusion with the desired other.³⁵ The mirror episode we have been examining tends to confirm this, though with a slightly different emphasis: fusion with the other, even the other self (as it were), remains firmly in the realm or register of desire. It remains imaginary, in an everyday as well as a Lacanian sense. The remnants of that image/mirage of the unified self can be viewed in dualistic or pluralistic mode, and most completely perhaps as an interplay between these two paradigms. And it is an interplay, rather than simply a juxtaposition or opposition: patterns of dual and multiple often emerge from the same nucleus of imagery, as we have seen with the dividing micro-organisms of Swann's dream or the proliferating reflection in Marcel's mirror.

Notes

1. R. L. Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, in: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston, ed. E. Letley (Oxford, 1998), p. 61.

2. M. Slater, “Literary Allusions in Proust's Goncourt Pastiche”, Romance Studies 12 (1988), 55-64.

3. R. Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London & New York, 1981), p. 86.

4. T. de Praetere, “Contradiction de Proust; Logique(s) de Proust”, Les Lettres romanes 45 (1991), 63-76 (p. 65).

5. “Contradiction de Proust”, p. 66.

6. M. Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. J.-Y. Tadié, 4 vols (Paris, 1987-89), Vol. II, p. 660.

7. RTP III: 840. This is the notorious “casser le pot” episode.

8. RTP IV: 60.

9. RTP III: 574.

10. RTP II: 3-4.

11. RTP III: 153-4.

12. RTP III: 153.

13. RTP IV: 448.

14. J. Rivière, Quelques progrès dans l'étude du cœur humain, repr. in Cahiers Marcel Proust 13 (Paris, 1985), p. 133.

15. RTP I: 3.

16. See in particular S. Doubrovsky, La Place de la Madeleine (Paris, 1974), pp. 179-83; D. de Agostini, “L'Écriture du rêve dans À la recherche du temps perdu”, in: Études proustiennes V (Paris, 1984), pp. 183-211 (pp. 183-6).

17. RTP I: 373.

18. See in particular J. Bellemin-Noël, “‘Psychanalyser’ le rêve de Swann?”, Poétique 8 (1971), 447-69; M. Grimaud, “La Rhétorique du rêve”, Poétique 33 (1978), 90-106; and for an unusual political reading, M. Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 66-84.

19. See S. Freud, Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, ed. J. Strachey & A. Richards (Harmondsworth, 1973), p. 205. For a more detailed treatment, see S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. J. Strachey & A. Richards (Harmondsworth, 1976), pp. 383-413.

20. RTP I: 373.

21. The most blatant example is the equation of génie and instinct in RTP IV: 458.

22. RTP II: 469-70.

23. RTP II: 468-9.

24. RTP II: 469.

25. For the role of Rivebelle, see J.-P. Richard, Proust et le monde sensible (Paris, 1974), p. 30; A. Ushiba, L'Image de l'eau dans “À la recherche du temps perdu” (Tokyo, 1979), pp. 111-19; R. MacKenzie, “Intoxication and Metaphor: the Role of Rivebelle in Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu”, Dalhousie French Studies 51 (2000), 58-69.

26. RTP II: 469.

27. S. Weber, “The Madrepore”, Modern Language Notes 87 (1972), 915-61.

28. S. Freud, “The Uncanny”, in: Art and Literature, ed. A. Dickson (Harmondsworth, 1985), pp. 335-76 (p. 372).

29. “The Uncanny”, p. 358.

30. “The Uncanny”, p. 358.

31. “The Uncanny”, p. 363. See also, for a more detailed account, S. Freud, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, in: On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, ed. A. Richards (Harmondsworth, 1984), pp. 105-38.

32. “Instincts and their Vicissitudes”, pp. 126-30.

33. See (in the first instance) J. Lacan, “Le Stade du miroir”, in: Écrits I (Paris, 1966), pp. 89-97.

34. For a good general statement of this, see J. Gratton, “Textual Interaction in ‘Combray’: The Instance of Golo”, Dalhousie French Studies 2 (1980), 66-87 (pp. 66-7).

35. “Textual Interaction in ‘Combray’”, p. 86.