Bergson, Izenberg, Proust

Why is it that I thought of Bergson as troubling the narrative Gerald Izenberg sets up in the aforementioned essay? At the outset, not that I disagree, exactly, with Izenberg (I am in no position to do so), but rather that I think pieces of the story are missing, and that from the perspective of my own interests, things are importantly more complicated than he makes them out to be. My own knowledge and interest are focused on France, which Izenberg doesn’t treat: he discusses authors from Britain, Italy, Germany and Austrian (or rather, Austro-Hungary)—at the most I can say that he has left France out because, perhaps, it causes problems.

It is certainly the case that Bergson’s basic framework is dualism, inasmuch as his goal is to show the falsity of certain dualisms. Bergson’s first book, the Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, establishes the reality and necessity of liberté by demolishing the binary of materialist mechanism and idealist will. Mind-body dualism is the explicit target of Matière et mémoire. So he fits Izenberg’s story, because after the war, the problem to overcome isn’t simple dualism, but a much more complex fragmentation.

Now, I have just finished reading Bergson’s 1903 essay “Introduction à la métaphysique.” Incidentally, this is available online in its original publication through Gallica, at the very front of volume 11 of the Revue de métaphysique et morale—which journal, together with the philosophy of the history of science presented at the end of the essay, I find extremely significant and, given Bergson’s current reputation, somewhat surprising; the new critical Worms edition of the volume containing the “Introduction” comes out in 2009—I wouldn’t wait for Matière et mémoire, but I’ll wait for this.

There is much to discuss about this justly famous essay. Suffice it to say that after reading it, both the structuralist ‘revolution’ and Deleuze’s general tone make a great deal more sense to me.

Characteristically, Bergson says that the empiricists (which is to say those philosophers who stand behind experimental psychology) and the rationalists (which is to say, I think, Hegel and the various German idealists of the first part of the 19^th century), are not so far apart. As usual, the accusation is a little too clean, rather too much in conformity with Bergson’s own ideas, for it to be taken so very seriously. None the less, I think the description he gives of the empiricists, and here he mentions John Stuart Mill and Hippolyte Taine, is significant for placing him in terms of Izenberg’s argument. These philosphers, Bergson says, juxtapose psychological states with one another, and hope that a self will emerge from a sufficient number of so-juxtaposed states. This, he says, is like seeking the meaning of the Iliad between the letters of which it is composed—“le moi leur échappe toujours, si bien qu’ils finissent par n’y plus voir qu’un vain fantôme”[13]—the target here is materialist accounts of psychology that reduce the self to, at best, an epiphenomenon. And yet the mindset that Bergson ascribes to these empiricists maps neatly onto Mansfield’s metaphor of the faceless hotel clerk that Izenberg quotes.

Bergson very often proceeds by setting up poles of extreme possibility, and claiming the territory between the two for his own method. Certainly the ‘climax’ of the “Introduction” does this. In Matière et mémoire, Bergson describes two extreme personality types, defined by their relation to memory—one which is always action oriented, and which is incapable of self-reflection, and another which is lost entirely in the shifting currents of its own memory, given over entirely to the dream life. We have here transparently tropes of what I am tempted to call a Balzacian capitalism—the man of action, always oriented towards a profit of whatever sort (so many shallow and forgotten characters), and then the dreamer (also shallow, but beloved), at the mercy of the winds of sentiment and sensation—Lucien from Illusions Perdus. Surely the example Izenberg cites from Virginia Woolf, of speed and enforced, fragmentary experience, is best read as pathological that makes no sense without the Bergsonian frame?

So this is what I mean: Izenberg’s narrative makes sense to me—at least in parts—if we start with Bergson, but not if we start with what came before Bergson.

There are lots of reasons why an intellectual historian trying to make the sort of argument that Izenberg wants to make would stay away from Proust. He is complicated and very much out of step with his time. I think, however, that Proust might be an especially useful author for Izenberg. According to Antoine Compagnon (and I think a simple reading of Contre Sainte-Beuve bears this out), the ‘programmatic’ end of the novel was planned already when Proust started writing. So it is perhaps not totally unreasonable to take the first and the last volumes as being, in an important sense, pre-war, while the intervening volumes were written during and after the war. For myself, and I agree with Compagnon here, Sodome et Gomorrhe is the best—if that even means anything—and Temps retrouvé is to be taken with a substantial amount of salt. Why, long before I read Izenberg’s article, did I think this? Because in the middle volumes more than anywhere, we and the narrator see the extent to which a person’s self is constituted by all those around them, and how the essence of an individual can change radically (since Proust, I believe, is radically perspectival—maybe this is a condition of the novel as form?) depending on what one knows about this person. I think, although this is something to be demonstrated rather than crassly suggested, that all this has to do with Leibniz. Everyone was reading Leibniz in the 1880s, there are essays about him regularly in the Revue philosophique, and the monad is, after all, a lastingly powerful metaphysical construction. So perhaps a historical reading of the sort that Compagnon’s book on Proust gives us could, in fact, show how the Proustian moi changed even against Proust’s own professed will, because of the war.

The burden of such a demonstration would be to show how something like ‘the war’ could change something like ‘the idea of the self.’ Although I find Izenberg’s argument in many ways persuasive, it seems to me that there is a sort of causal gap in it, which can only be filled or bridged by much more detailed and contextually sensitive research than, of course, his essay has any intention of providing.

Landy on Proust

I’ve been going through Joshua Landy’s Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust [2004]. He’s a good reader, and has more interesting things to say about the Proustian sentence than anyone else I have read (impressive). He also takes seriously the simple fact that books have readers, and that it is in the reading, not the writing, that meaning is created. Nonetheless, I can’t help but feel that the whole project is misguided. I’ll summarize (with prejudice):

If we read Proust really carefully, and with great charity, then we discover that he puts forward a serious philosophy. He was a perspectivalist quite a bit like Nietzsche, but without any of the distasteful parts. His novel is supposed to make you a better person, or anyway a person more aware and therefore “ultimately able to pull off the act of deliberate and lucid self-delusion required to see our inner volume as a coherent whole” (143). That is, better at being a self.

There are plenty of little quibbles one can have, but mostly I just don’t agree with the project. Many critics, it is true, simply dismiss the possibility of ‘philosophical’ coherence in Proust. Landy says, more or less, that they should read and think harder. Fair enough. But Landy’s method reminds me of an old scholastic adage: when you encounter a difficulty, make a distinction (actually, some of it is very reminiscent of Iserian phenomenology of reading). He proceeds to ‘make sense’ out of Proust by making a series of distinctions (the five narrative voices, for instance), which aren’t on their own terms meaningless, but then at the end he more or less declares unilaterally that the distinctions themselves are the ‘point’ of the novel.

He certainly makes some very good critical points in the process of doing this. I’m just unconvinced that it’s the kind of exercise I am interested in. Unsurprisingly, I want him to be more historical about the philosophy Proust is putting forward. Landy takes Proust’s word that Bergson wasn’t the whole point (and we must, I think, agree), but surely there’s more interesting things to do with the connection? He asserts that Proust didn’t know Nietzsche at all—I suppose this must be the case, I’ll have to look up what Tadié says about it. If so, it’s surprising, because Proust was close, I think, to Daniel Halévy who certainly did know Nietzsche and, anyway, the syphilitic genius was hardly unknown in the decade before WWI. Landy mentions Kant a few times—his discussion would be more interesting if it wasn’t of Kant so much as of the neo-Kantianism Proust would have learned in school—ditto with Leibniz, who I think is probably more poetically than philosophically interesting for Proust. That, of course, would have been a different book.

The coda on sentences and style could usefully be put on a syllabus. I haven't read Pippin's chapter on Proust yet, but the two are in conversation, and I think could usefully be juxtaposed.

Thibaudet, Bell, Proust -- Anti-Semitism

So: I’ve been working towards a paper on Clive Bell’s Proust book. Clive Bell, especially later in his life, was objectionable elitist. Proust has, especially at the beginning, a light tone of genteel anti-Semitism. Marcel Proust is, for instance, an “exquisitely civilized Jew,” no doubt praise, but still we wince to read it today. These qualities, and the likelihood that Bell read Thibaudet, make the two treatments of Proust interesting to compare.

I’ve been reading the Nouvelle Revue Française memorial issue on Proust (Tome XX, 1923, no 1.). It is, taken as a whole text, fascinating, and deserves some study in its own right. Possibly I’ll write something about it here when I’m done. I have just now finished Albert Thibaudet’s contribution, which is called “Marcel Proust et la tradition française.” Bell must have read this little essay. First of all, Thibaudet claims that there are corners—“ces jardins secrets”—of every national literature into which foreigners simply cannot penetrate. Of course there are also very cosmopolitan gardens as well, into which greenhouse he puts Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. Bell mentions this book as well, echoing Thibaudet’s vocabulary, in the opening pages of Proust. He mentions it as part of a list of other books, possibly as great as the Recherche, “even Jean Christophe—which the French have put in the corner quite as much because it was written by a Protestant and a pacifist [note, in passing, that Clive Bell is himself both those things] as because it is written in a woefully undistinguished manner” (7-8). (As I copy out that quote, I notice the was/is written tense shift—because authorship is past, but the writing itself is always in the present).

For Thibaudet, though, the Recherche is clearly especially French, somehow unavailable to foreigners. Bell’s name (along with a clutch of other Bloomsberries) appears later in the volume appended to an awkwardly written “Hommage d’un groupe d’écrivains anglais” (248-9), which itself strongly suggests some of the themes Bell will later work on his own. Probably in reference to this, or at least this sort of activity, Thibaudet says, “de consiencieux Anglais ont fondé pour l’étudier une société Marcel Proust. Que le ‘monde’ français ait pu se faire aimer et admirer d’un Marcel Proust, cela doit bien étonner un romancier anglais. Cela ‘étonnera moins s’il cherche le fil qui relie Proust à une tradition authentique” (133).

This authentic ‘tradition française’ in terms of which Thibaudet wants to situate Proust is, first, Saint-Simon, the diarist of the court of Louis XIV, and then, Montaigne. Again, Bell will follow Thibaudet. The comparison with Saint-Simon is instructive, “Proust comme Saint-Simon est de ces écrivains qui, ne voyant et ne sentant pas simple [qui n’a rien à voir avec la simplicité], ser refuseraient comme à une trahison à écrire simple. Il faut que chaque phrase conserve la complesité, l’épaisseur, l’intensité émotionnelle ou la joie descriptive, qui étaient au principe des pensées et des images” (135). Compare that to Bell’s “Proust wanted to speak his mind, and his was a mind not easily spoken” (21). Bell’s idea, that style is, or should be, radically determined by process of thought even to the point of rupturing the surface of ‘good writing’ (characteristic, I think, of Bloomsbury), is also Thibaudet’s, who says, describing Proust’s writing: “Un tel style est vraiment consubstantiel à la chose pensante et vivante. Trop consubstantiel pour être clair et correct, dira-t-on. Et le fait est qu’il tient plutôt à la main et au corps de l’écrivain, qu’à la pointe délié de la plume” (136).

The conclusion, the ‘punt,’ of Thibaudet’s little contribution is fascinating. It is, I think, probably an example of some of the best that liberalism had to offer in the 1920s. Thibaudet has been describing Proust’s affinities to Montaigne, an interesting comparison because Proust writes very much about and from his own memory, while Montaigne is famously bad at remembering, and confined entirely to the present of his own writing. Thibaudet, having just called established the dynamism, the process-orientation, of this writing, pauses, and says, “On aura reconnu dans ces dernières ligns des expressions bergsoniennes, et elles nous amènent à des vues suggestives que j’introduis avec quelque réserve” (138). Before quoting, at length, the next paragraph, I wanted to pause and note the hesitance, almost trepidation, which marks Thibaudet’s plunge out of pure stylistic analysis, and into blood.

“Ces analogies entre Proust et Montaigne, leur singulier mobilisme à tous deux, ne seraient-elles pas en liaison avec un autre genre de parenté? Il est certain que la mère de Montaigne, une Lopez, était juive. Montaigne, voilà le seul de nos grands écrivains chez qui soit présent le sang juif. On connaît l’hérédité analogue de Marcel Proust. Et telle est également l’hérédité mixte de grand philosophe que je viens de nommer...[mentions other examples]...Je songe à cette mobilité, à cette inquiétude d’Israël, à ces tentes dont Bossuet, dans le Serment sur l’Unité de l’Eglise, fait le symbole du peuple de Dieu...l’Odyssée, a cristallisé, lui-même, comme l’a montré Bérard, autour de doublets gréco-sémitiques. Un Montaigne, un Proust, un Bergson, installent dans notre complexe et riche univers littéraire ce qu’on pourrait appeler le doublet frano-sémitique, comme il y a des doublets littéraires franco-anglais, franco-allemand, franco-italian, comme la France elle-même est un doublet du Nord et du Midi. Mais ne prenons cela que de biais, et, nous aussi, en une mobilité qui n’appuie pas. La tradition française à laquelle nous devons rattacher un Marcel Proust, c’est une tradition vivante, imprévisible, singulière, une tradition en mouvement irréguliere, en ligne serpentine, en tours et en retours, qui, comme une phrase même, comme une page de Proust, dépasse toujours sa matière précise par son élasticité intérieure et par la profusion de son débordement” (138-139).

So this little chunk of text, which I’ve edited down a bit, first postulates a link between heredity and style—but as is typical of humanist racial discourse, there is a great deal of ambiguity about the exact mechanism of transmission of these stylistic traits. Clearly, style is here an expression of the functioning of the writer’s mind, we might now say personality, or perhaps character. Style of writing is closely linked to style of thought. (But also, in the quote from pg 136, it is close to the writer’s body). This style of thought is linked to blood, which is a way of saying what, exactly? Historical experience is tied up in this (the tents of Israel—simple metaphor, or is this the content of the claim? To what register, we might ask, does this image belong?)

Thibaudet then mentions the Odyssey, which everyone agrees is a foundation of ‘our’ civilization, and which, according to the French hellenist (Victor?) Bérard, is a greco-semitic ‘doublet.’ From this point on, we have a theory of hybridization circa 1920. (We might notice that, as generous as he is with his doublets, they all start ‘franco-...’). This hybridization takes place strictly between national-linguistic groups, which makes it sound, I think, more obsolete than it is. This vision of mixing blood (understood to mean national, in the mystic sense, tradition) is profoundly progressive. The French tradition is living and vibrant, elastic and always overflowing its boundaries—this is a result of all the mixing, especially the Jewish blood.

This sort of talk is reprehensible for what seem to me obvious reasons. The Nazis (or even, Thibaudet’s contemporary and the object of one of his studies, Charles Maurras) have only to say exactly the same thing as Thibaudet—and they are able to use it to justify doctrines of racial purity. The logic is, I think, exactly the same as in the argument about the Jews as a modernizing force in the economy of Europe. ‘Progressive’ historians, a number of them Jewish, re-wrote the history of European capitalism with Jewish bankers in the staring role, from the middle ages on. Everyone loves capitalism, right? But as politics radicalize, especially, I think it must be said, with the rise of radical socialist ‘scientific’ re-valuation of bourgeois society and its capitalist/industrialist underpinnings, the very narrative which had been understood to praise ‘the Jews’ (I introduce quotes now, because the category becomes problematic) is widely available to damn them. All this is what was discussed at Julie Mell’s IHS session, but grows out of many sources. I don’t think Arendt puts it quite this way, but it is in her spirit.

So Thibaudet is, in literature, doing the same kind of thing that liberal, philosemitic historians did. His discourse is inside the same frame as Maurras’s, even as they disagree. Where does Bell stand in relation to this? Probably not far off.