With Guest Speaker Richard Maron Professor of Philosophy, Harvard university

Abstract:

The following is a set of notes concerned with how we are to interpret the Final Volume of Proust’s novel. One theme I discussed in a previous paper, “Swann’s Medical Philosophy,” is the ambiguous position of philosophy in the novel as a whole. Sometimes it represents the aspiration to a kind of wisdom, but just as often it represents a kind of sophistry that some character employs as a prop for a kind of disillusioned view of life that is a reaction to disappointment (in love) or self-doubt (about one’s artistic capacities). The Narrator himself shifts between these two relations to ‘philosophy’, which creates issues for how we as readers are to relate ourselves to this or that philosophical pronouncement in the novel. The presence of such explicitly ‘philosophical’ statements increases in the Final Volume, along with the clash between the various perspectives that have structured the novel from the beginning: Childhood v. Adulthood; Naïve faith v. disillusion or cynicism; a kind of Realism or attachment to what is outside oneself v. a kind of Subjectivism when such attachment is disappointed or seems impossible; an attachment to individuals (whether persons, places or works of art) v. a reduction of individuals to general types expressing general laws. And throughout there is the relation of these conflicting responses to life to the appearance of ecstatic experiences (of nature, of music, etc.) which come to a kind of crescendo in the succession of involuntary memories in the Guermantes library. 

This crescendo is usually thought of as central to a redemptive reading of the novel: time is not lost after all, the Narrator’s time has not been lost in the sense of wasted, but will be redeemed, indeed has been redeemed by the creation of the very book we are reading. This redemptive reading, thus, is tied to the paradoxical idea of the identity of the book we are reading with the book that the Narrator feels finally in a position to write. Josh Landy has of course challenged this reading and I think there are other problems with in addition to the ones he lays out. And yet I also think that the existence of and experience of the very book we are reading does play a role in how we are to interpret any redemptive reading and in how we are to see the Narrator’s journey from Childhood to Adulthood, Faith to Disillusion, and possibly back again. I don’t believe we arrive at a resolution of these conflicts. The philosophical expressions following the episodes of involuntary memory both diminish the distance between the Narrator and the author Marcel Proust, and show the continued grip of an essentially disillusioned perspective, even if that perspective is belied by the existence and the experience of the book itself. 

RSVP HERE for Philosophy and Literature Event