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The Winding Road to ‘Real Art’: Parallel Detours in Schelling and Proust (Based on a paper presented at ‘ Le Temps retrouvé – Eighty Years After’ conference held at the Royal Holloway, University of London, on 17-19 Dec. 2007)
Abstract: The great finale of Proust’s Recherche has been compared to Schelling’s conception of art, formulated in the last section of his System of Transcendental Idealism . Both Schelling’s history of self-consciousness and Proust’s ‘story of a consciousness’ seem to lead to a recognition of art as a unique way of accessing the consciousness each is concerned with. However, in neither case does the imagined ‘great artwork’ ever materialize. Indeed, the theory itself proves to be ambiguous. Tonino Griffero persuasively argued that Schelling’s formulation of what has always been considered to be the superiority of art over philosophy is far from being straightforward. On the contrary, it lends itself to a number of divergent interpretations as to the effective role and power attributed to art. Indeed, it has also been argued that his very conception undermines itself by making it impossible to speak of such an art in terms of concrete artworks. In this paper I argue that a similar impossibility of concrete realization is latent in the narrator’s philosophy of art formulated in Le Temps retrouvé . The question is not simply whether or not the book we read is the one the narrator intends to write, but whether this intention can ever be realized. ***
‘Lui, du moins va droit au but!’ notes Albertine bitterly to Marcel in Sodome et Gomorrhe on seeing the unfalteringly straight flight of a bird. 1 The remark is emblematic of the whole of Proust’s Recherche , in which that bird might be the only thing to be accorded a perfectly direct progress toward its objective. This applies not only to the most manifestly sinuous psychological machinations of the narrator to gain control over Albertine’s life and mind and to the indirect ways of other characters determined by hidden intentions, but also to the overall structure of the novel. In his study of Proust’s digressions, in an epigraph to which he chose to quote the mentioned scene, Pierre Bayard has highlighted the complexity and significance of this literary phenomenon. 2 He evokes the common view that Proust is too long, and that the main reason for that is the eternal deviation from the supposed central subject of the book. However, Bayard’s thoroughgoing analyses demonstrate that not all that appears unnecessary for the understanding of the message is a genuine digression that could be omitted without damaging the structure of meaningful cross-references in the novel. That is, what is a detour from the supposedly ideal straight progress of the narration from the hero’s frivolous time wasting toward regaining time through artistic production is often not a dispensable passage. Instead, proceeding by such detours belongs to the very nature of Proustian writing: the peculiar structure they generate is as important for the overall message of the novel as it is inseparable from its content. The first reading of the Recherche is likely to leave the reader confused and tired with all the ramifications she is supposed to make sense of. However, the eternal return to the text that the novel calls for ends up revealing connections and the significance of apparently superfluous passages on the one hand, and on the other, it enables us to see more detours than were initially visible. These latent detours are still
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more puzzling by their abstract and therefore less tangible character. Rather than taking the form of a circumscribable digressive passage, they result from paradoxes or inconsistencies in the logic of things where the text seems to be going directly to the point. In their case, it is therefore not the author that indulges in wandering away from the subject, but the reader that finds himself needing to think in a roundabout way in order to make sense of the text beneath the surface level. It is such a detour that this essay proposes to discuss by itself taking the detour of an analogy. The focus of my inquiry will be the narrator’s explicit theory of the birth and functioning of the artwork in Le Temps retrouvé and the interpretative detour it requires. I shall look at some of the possible implications of that theory and consider them especially in what concerns the realization of the work of art. That is, on the one hand, I will question the possibility for the latter to be produced according to such a theory, and on the other, the reality of the artwork we are dealing with, considered by one possible reading as the result of the narrator’s putting into practice his theory. I suggest that while there seems to be no practicable path leading from the theory to the realisation of a concrete artwork, we can find the way from the artwork to the theory we read in it. In other words, although the narrator’s explicit theory leads to an impasse, by taking the indirect route of considering the artwork the Recherche is, the reader can see the applicability to it of the theory expressed within. In order better to elucidate this claim, I shall have recourse to the analogy between the narrator’s vision of art in Le Temps retrouvé and Friedrich Schelling’s own conception elaborated in the System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Schelling’s System is usually considered as the philosophical construction that formed the basis of the early Romantic perception of art. It retraces the process that leads from an original unity, the identity of the subject (or spirit) and the objective world (or nature) in the undifferentiated Absolute to the actual world of a differentiated reality, in which finite, individual and conscious selves are facing finite, individual and unconscious objects. The process consists of a series of increasing limitations from the absolute self until its remainder appears confined in the reflecting individual. As Andrew Bowie says, the book exposes ‘the path leading to the moment where selfconsciousness becomes able to write such a history [of self-consciousness], by seeing what stages the subject necessarily went through to arrive at this moment’. 3 In his endeavour to picture the successive stages of limitation and differentiation of the Absolute toward the form it takes in the actual world, the philosopher relies on intellectual intuition. It is nevertheless only the highest degree of intuition, the aesthetic intuition, which implies aesthetic production as well, that allows the subject to ‘objectify’ and thereby to communicate the recognition of the original unity. The artistic creation of the Genius brings conscious and unconscious forces together so they compose an image of the infinite in the form of a finite object. The result thus represents a new unity which corresponds to the original Identity. Thanks to its capacity to realize this, art – the art of the Genius – occupies a strategic position in Schelling’s philosophical construction. More precisely, the work of the Genius is already beyond the limits of transcendental philosophy itself, since it presents the unity which philosophy might be able to speak of in some way, but not show. The most prominent exposition of the analogy between Schelling’s System and Proust’s Recherche is Anne Henry’s seminal study on the sources of Proust’s philosophical views, Marcel Proust: Théories pour une esthétique . Henry finds a very clear filiation between the two authors and argues that the Recherche is the ‘transposition proustienne [du Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal ] qui tente de
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donner un contenu concret à chacune [des] articulations [de ce système]’, 4 and that the novel ‘décalque la démarche schellingienne dans son intégralité’, 5 so that ‘l’obédience à Schelling gouverne l’aboutissement du roman’. 6 Although the existence of such strong links between Schelling and Proust is contested by other critics, 7 some similarities between the two are hard to deny. They both retrace the history of a consciousness – Schelling that of a transcendental self supposed to be real as such, whereas Proust that of an empirical, but fictional self. The overall structures of Schelling’s System and Proust’s Recherche are also analogous: they are both meant eventually to return to their point of departure; namely, the identity of the self each is concerned with. For both authors, the completion of the story consists in its becoming a full circle, which also appears as the condition of possibility for the story to be written. And most importantly for us here, they both end with the recognition that art provides the way back to the origin. It is the latter point that I would now like to subject to further scrutiny. In a perspicacious reading of the System of Transcendental Idealism , Schelling scholar Tonino Griffero seeks to answer the question of whether ‘dans la conclusion du System on doit vraiment lire une apologie de la supériorité de l’ art par rapport à la philosophie en général ou pour le moins – et ce n’est pourtant pas la même chose – du sens esthétique comme mécanisme interne à la philosophie même’, 8 or the superiority of art is rather only an appearance that hides a different reality. Griffero proposes a series of possible ways of understanding what is said in the book concerning art, noting that ‘différentes hypothèses peuvent être formulées sans qu’aucune de cellesci, problématisée et adéquatement rapportée à certaines passages du texte de Schelling, ne s’avère malheureusement tout à fait invraisemblable’.9 Each suggested interpretation seems hermeneutically accurate, but they undermine in various ways the most straightforward and canonized reading according to which art is given the highest position in Schelling’s image of the world exposed in the System. I suggest that in Proust’s Recherche we face a similar difficulty of providing one single and exclusively defensible reading of the role of art, and that this difficulty becomes most apparent when we confront different moments of the narrator’s theory in Le Temps retrouvé with each other and with the possibility of realising that theory in the form of a book. I find that at least three of Griffero’s provocative hypotheses apply particularly well to the questions that arise when one tries to make sense of the finale of Proust’s novel; and that Griffero’s conclusion concerning Schelling’s position on art is also something that we can fruitfully adopt in our approach to the Recherche . I shall therefore quote those three of Griffero’s suggestions and briefly indicate how they apply to Proust’s novel.
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1. Art as a tool The first reading draws out the fact that the message communicated in and by art comes from elsewhere and must therefore be perceived in that different dimension. Accordingly, the latter is to be considered as more essential than the sphere of art itself: L’art ne serait rien d’autre qu’une figure ventriloque, c’est-à-dire le masque philanthropique ou même démagogique porté par le philosophe engagé simplement pour extérioriser le pressenti , ou au moins l’exécutant de résolutions prises dans une sphère différente de l’existence (précisément la sphère philosophique), dont le primat reste donc dans tous les cas en dehors de la discussion .10 Art would thus fulfil the function of a means of communication in favour of something exterior to it and also more fundamental. It contributes to the philanthropic mission of spreading out a precious knowledge which is due to a special intuition not accessible to everyone. Both points, the nature of the knowledge and the duty to pass it on, will sound familiar to the readers of Le Temps retrouvé , with the only difference that the communicating subject does not pose himself as a philosopher, but as an individual having had a special insight and an understanding of its significance. One of the main reasons why the narrator feels the urge to write his book is its supposed utility for others, the fact that they could learn from it what he had the privilege to experience and then – if the book is eventually written – the capacity to interpret for them: le bonheur que j’éprouvais ne tenait pas d’une tension purement subjective des nerfs qui nous isole du passé, mais au contraire d’un élargissement de mon esprit en qui se reformait, s’actualisait ce passé, et me donnait, mais hélas! momentanément, une valeur d’éternité. J’aurais voulu léguer celle-ci à ceux que j’aurais pu enrichir de mon trésor. Certes, ce que j’avais éprouvé dans la bibliothèque et que je cherchais à protéger, c’était plaisir encore, mais non plus égoïste, ou du moins d’un égoïsme […] utilisable pour autrui. 11 On the other hand, the actual trigger of Marcel’s final urge to write is precisely that famous ‘pressenti’, the invaluable intuition that pushes him to explore and exteriorize what lies behind it: la recréation par la mémoire d’impressions qu’il fallait ensuite approfondir, éclairer, transformer en équivalents d’intelligence, n’était-elle pas une des conditions, presque l’essence même de l’œuvre d’art telle que je l’avais conçue tout à l’heure dans la bibliothèque? 12 The source of the content to be communicated is thus clearly located in a sphere different from art itself, in the realm of the protagonist’s experiences and in the intellectual dimension where his reflections take place. The role of the actual experiences – all of them, since the privileged moments reveal the importance of all the other kinds of life experience as well 13 – remains fundamental and impossible to explain away. This makes it problematic to defend the ideal of an art superior to the lived and living reality from which the indispensable material is taken. Schelling’s best known statement on art, according to which it is ‘the only true and eternal organ
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and document of philosophy’ 14 finds a perfect reflection in the narrator’s view that the ideal book he dreams of writing reveals and preserves the truth of life: il était temps de commencer si je voulais atteindre ce que j’avais quelquefois senti au cours de ma vie, dans de brefs éclairs […], et qui m’avait fait considérer la vie comme digne d’être vécue. Combien me le semblait-elle davantage, maintenant qu’elle me semblait pouvoir être éclaircie, elle qu’on vit dans les ténèbres; ramenée au vrai de ce qu’elle était , elle qu’on fausse sans cesse, en somme réalisée dans un livre !15 But the reflection carries the ambivalence of the original as well: what first seems to be an appraisal of art’s unique revelatory power turns out to imply that this capacity is only valuable insofar as it fulfils a function in favour of another dimension of reality. Even though art is ‘true and eternal’, it is such only to the extent that it is an ‘organ and document’; that is to say, as ‘a means, instrument, or device’, and a vehicle of information or evidence.16 Despite all the exaltation of the statements on art, this phantom of instrumentality keeps haunting Marcel’s theory. 2. Art without artworks Another one of Griffero’s readings highlights the risk that the theory cannot but remain abstract: Il est fatal [...] que l’esthétique métaphysique paie son irrésistible « carrière » par son propre vide, avec l’impossibilité qui est la sienne de se référer aux œuvres concrètes et pas seulement à leur archétype. 17 As a matter of fact, Schelling’s System never speaks in terms of concrete pieces of art; indeed, he also says that it is the whole of the products of art that can realize the mission he speaks of, rather than any particular work on its own. Proust’s narrator, on the contrary, means to produce one single book, ‘the’ book of his life. Although in the previous volumes the metaphysical character of his reflections on art is less distinct, it becomes a dominant trait in Le Temps retrouvé . Literature eventually appears as the only possible way of accessing the deepest reality, the essence of the individual’s life, which is in turn supposed to reflect universal laws of human existence. Pondering over art thus involves thinking about the nature and the layers of reality and the subject’s access to them, about the possibility of knowledge and certainty, about time, eternity and death. On the other hand, the narrator has little to say concerning how actually to realize in a concrete form all he thinks his work could and should contain. He speaks about the fundamental importance of the artist’s fidelity to his instinct and his duty to listen to his inner book which he has to decipher and make intelligible for others. We learn that the means which can help to convert the sensations into an intellectual form is producing a work of art, and that it is the quality of language, or style, the manifestation of the artist’s unique way of seeing the world, that makes art. Furthermore, it is made clear that literary style more concretely depends on the use of metaphors. However, to the question of where metaphors emerge from or how to find or produce the right ones, there is no other answer than the one that brings us back to the unfathomable realm of artistic instinct and vision. A very characteristic moment of the narrator’s attitude toward the problem of how to transform his insights into a concrete text is when on recognizing that only artistic creation can help him uncover the essence hidden in his impressions, he
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realizes the difficulties that its actual rendering would involve, but he quickly ‘skates over’ the question: Et, au passage, je remarquais qu’il y aurait dans l’œuvre d’art que je me sentais prêt déjà, sans m’y être consciemment résolu, à entreprendre, de grandes difficultés. Car j’en devrais exécuter les parties successives dans une matière en quelque sorte différente. […] Je glissais rapidement sur tout cela , plus impérieusement sollicité que j’étais de chercher la cause de cette félicité, du caractère de certitude avec lequel elle s’imposait, recherche ajournée autrefois.18 His argument, used by Schelling as well, is that there can be no method given for how to create a great work of art. Yet on the other side, on that of the product of art, this might as well prevent any attempt to apply their theory to any actual piece of art. Indeed, how could we show that a book presents an ‘ unconscious infinity ’, as Schelling requires from the product of the Genius, 19 or as Proust’s narrator just a little bit more modestly desires, ‘la vie […] ramenée au vrai de ce qu’elle était’? There is a genuine risk that attributing such a metaphysical significance to art makes it lose contact with the reality of the artwork, and this risk represents another phantom haunting the narrator’s theory exposed in Le Temps retrouvé as well as Schelling’s image of art in the System of Transcendental Idealism . 3. Success via failure In addition to the risks that art is either reduced to the status of a tool or remains an abstract ideal, Griffero identifies a paradox in the way the work of art is supposed to function according to Schelling, which will, once again, apply to what we read in Le Temps retrouvé : D’un côté, la compréhension adéquate de l’œuvre consiste paradoxalement dans le fait de ne pas la comprendre (complètement) – en en manquant seulement le noyau, l’interprète en réanime en effet la dialectique interne, apaisée momentanément dans le produit artistique réussi – et de l’autre côté, la réussite même de l’œuvre coïncide seulement avec l’échec de l’artiste et avec l’extorsion de sa part d’une nature supérieure à son produit intentionnel […] La création du sens et sa communication aboutiraient, en définitive, uniquement grâce à l’échec conjoint de l’intention créative et de l’intention interprétative, à savoir de l’artiste tout autant que de ses destinataires .20 The failure of both the artistic and the interpretative project would paradoxically be the condition for the success of the work of art. The same paradox is implied in the theory of Proust’s narrator. I have quoted above his acknowledgement of the fact that rendering the ‘pressenti’ as he intends entails its transformation, a significant change of its original character. The new quality it takes in the product is the result of a corruption in the sense that what first was an event of considerable impact is now reduced to its representation. On the other hand, as compared to the power of the experience itself, the enterprise of communicating it needs to fail, for if the novel is to function as literature , it must renounce the desire to provoke in the reader a similar experience of the sought essences. Such effect would rather make it appear as a magic formula producing an epiphany and providing a sort of mystical experience, and thereby lead again to the reduction of the work to the state of a means indifferent in itself, simply serving the purpose of triggering an event. Instead, in order to have an
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aesthetic interest, the book must affirm its autonomy through its linguistic quality and have its own inner dynamics that requires from the reader an effort to see it functioning and that offers in return a richness in meaning. If it is both undesirable and impossible for the artist to provide an immediate experience and evidence of his insight, the reader also has to make a detour and not simply look at the text but through it, and explore the corresponding reality in himself: En réalité, chaque lecteur est quand il lit le propre lecteur de soi-même. L’ouvrage de l’écrivain n’est qu’une espèce d’instrument optique qu’il offre au lecteur afin de lui permettre de discerner ce que sans ce livre il n’eût peut-être pas vu en soi-même. La reconnaissance en soi-même, par le lecteur, de ce que dit le livre, est la preuve de la vérité de celui-ci, et vice versa […]21 It is only in this way that the reader really activates the internal dialectic of the artwork, the dynamism which carries and represents its real message. Thus the creation of a sense or senses on the one hand requires the active contribution of both the artist and the reader; on the other hand, it implies that the sense is not there present and accessible as such in the artwork; that is to say, it has not been successfully transposed into the new context and quality. The activity of the reception and interpretation, which we can consider as the mark of its success and survival, depends in this sense on the joint failure of the artist and the reader. This is what makes the product work . Only the combination of a heroic effort and a – not necessarily tragic – failure assumed by both agents gives art a sense. The inherence of such failure in the functioning of the artwork is nonetheless hard to reconcile with the Romantic image of art as a superior power. We have now seen three aspects of the very similar images of art drawn by Schelling in his System of Transcendental Idealism and by Proust’s narrator in Le Temps retrouvé , all three of which seem to be inseparable from the deepest reality of art according to these conceptions, but which all have a potential to corrupt its stated superior power as well. However, as Griffero observes in Schelling’s case, and as the existence and functioning of the whole of Proust’s novel makes impels us to recognize that it is nonetheless the view of art as a revelatory power superior to reason and reflection that seems to be communicated to the reader. As Griffero concludes, completing the trajectory of his reading which leads back to its point of departure and thus turns out to be a detour, les lectures transversales que le texte permet en effet […] sont donc nombreuses. Il nous semble pourtant que seule la thèse qui fait tenir ensemble la découverte de la racine esthétique de la raison même et le pronostic d’une supériorité de l’art en tant que tel […] préserve le caractère de provocation inouïe faite au logos occidental .22 Although not without some ambivalence, both mentioned constituents of such a provocation of the Western logos are inscribed in the last vision of art of Proust’s narrator as well. His recognition that only through artistic creation is it possible to unfold, understand and make intelligible his impressions and other experiences, can be considered as a discovery of the aesthetic roots of reason. As for the prognosis of a superiority of art as such, we should perhaps rather speak in terms of a hope or belief,
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but it does appear in the Recherche too: the cruel, fatal law of art is worth being accepted only because this is the condition of the growth of ‘l’herbe drue des œuvres fécondes’.23 However, I suggest that the novel’s ultimate challenge to the logos is not implied in any point or any one of the possible readings of the narrator’s philosophy of art. Rather, it is performed by the Recherche as a whole. The greatest challenge and the most puzzling logical detour of the novel consist in that even though putting into practice the narrator’s ideas as such seems problematic, and it is questionable whether the novel we read corresponds to his projected work, it is nonetheless possible to read and describe the Recherche in terms provided by the narrator. Or would it be erroneous to say that the Recherche burrows deep into the hidden layers of a life and reveals supposedly eternal and universal laws by passing through the creation of a peculiar language? The power of art to reveal something to which there is no definable means of access is thus shown not in the theory exposed in the book, but in the ultimately ungraspable practice of art that has produced the book. Any theory would always remain exposed to controversy, and the vulnerability of any theory about art is especially great for its likeliness to carry the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in artistic creation itself. One of the major difficulties involved in theorizing about art is the need to reconcile abstract and concrete terms and create a passage between the philosophy and the reality of art. The theory exposed in Le Temps retrouvé , just as the one developed in Schelling’s System, seems to fail in opening a direct path from the former to the latter. However, in the reality of Proust’s art it is possible to recognize the truth of that theory. That is to say, rather than by taking the apparently straight route from the revelation of the theory to the writing of the book, the reader can discover the connection between the two by taking the detour of considering Proust’s art as it is performed in his novel as a whole. Perhaps the book the narrator intends to write is not the one Proust wrote, but the Recherche does resemble what we can suppose Marcel would have liked to produce. As the narrator remarks on one occasion, ‘les mêmes comparaisons, qui sont fausses si on part d’elles, peuvent être vraies si on y aboutit’. 24
1
Notes Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987-89), III, 225. 2 Pierre Bayard, Le Hors-sujet: Proust et la digression (Paris: Minuit, 1996). 3 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 1994), p. 47. 4 Ibid., p. 268. 5 Henry, Anne, Marcel Proust. Théories pour une esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), p. 92. 6 Ibid., p. 302. 7 To quote just one example, Jean-Yves Tadié argues that the predilection for c lear-cut and well defined concepts implanted in Proust by his college teachers must have counteracted Schelling’s fin de siècle fame and stopped Proust from becoming a follower of his philosophy. See Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust. Biographie, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), I, 359. 8 Tonino Griffero, ‘Clef de voûte et chef-d’oeuvre. Esthétique et philosophie de l’art dans le « Système de l’idéalisme transcendantal »’ in Alexandra Roux, Miklos Vetö, Schelling et l'élan du Système de l'idéalisme transcendantal (Paris: l'Harmattan, 2001) , pp. 152-174 (p. 154), the author’s emphases. 9 Ibid., p. 163, the author’s emphasis. 10 Ibid., p. 164, my emphases. 11 Proust, IV, 613. 12 Ibid., IV, 621. 13 ‘Et je compris que tous ces matériaux de l’œuvre littéraire, c’était ma vie passée ; je compris qu’ils étaient venus à moi , dans les plaisirs frivoles, dans la paresse, dans la tendresse, dans la douleur emmagasinée par moi, sans que je devinasse plus leur destination…’ Ibid., IV, 478.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 231. 14
Proust, IV, 609, my emphases. See entries ‘organ’ (1, III) and ‘document’ (3, 4) in Oxford English Dictionary. 17 Griffero, p. 166. 18 Proust, IV, 449, my emphases. 19 Schelling, p. 225, the author’s emphasis. 20 Griffero, p. 168, the first two are the author’s emphases, the last one is mine. 21 Proust, IV, 489-90. 22 Griffero, p. 173, my emphasis. 23 Proust, IV, 615. 24 Ibid., IV, 478. 15 16
