Abstract

This is the sequel to the previously reviewed first volume of a proposed three volume study of Proust as philosopher. Good as the first volume is, this is even better. It is extremely difficult, unusually subtle, and demands slow and ruminative reading. For the present reviewer, the book falls naturally into two parts, each with its own peak or crescendo. The key to understanding the book is to hear the two crescendos in unison, or better, in harmony. The first crescendo begins at about page 97 and culminates on page 112. A crucial passage: "Le point de création: le point instable et indécis, où la vague se lève, où le dessin, la plume en feront un duvet.... Tout est allégorie et possibilité de métaphore ou de métamorphose: les choses ne sont pas, elles ne savent pas; elles sont quelquefois l'attente, l'impatience. Il faut venir à point et dans le bon moment." And another: "C'est parce que rien n'est marqué dans une complexion définitive, imprimée dans l'espace, que l'art peut approcher, regarder, rectifier. Non pas décrire et reproduire: réinventer". The second crescendo begins with a distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory, with a long culminating passage extending from page 238 to page 265. This may be summarized as follows: I do not produce but await my memories, which come as if from another and construct what I am. Now to combine the two crescendos: I make the world, and the world makes me. The second crescendo is already anticipated in the first, e.g., p. 97: art does not invent but articulates and structures nature. The first crescendo is resumed or echoed in the second : the work of art is the most perfect form of reality. To give another formulation to the harmony of the two crescendos: in order to perceive, one must remember; yet one cannot remember unless one has perceived. Hence perception and memory remake each other. In sum, I am that spectator of the world who makes, and is made by, the world. We cannot really perceive things except via an image of them which we produce and which provides us, not with an objective representation of the perceived things, but with an equilibrium between our desires and emotions on the one hand, and the perceptions on the other. This produced image is presumably the aforementioned perception of a memory. And thus we respond to the uniqueness of our perceptions, via our produced images, by uniting them into a world, each of which is again unique, and yet, which is in each case the same single world in which we all dwell. On this reading, Proust's theme is the equilibrium between seeing and producing, or between theory and practice at the level of the constitution of the world. To oversimplify drastically, Proust teaches the Platonic demiurge but not the Platonic Ideas. As a consequence, one is intermittently reminded of a quasi-Husserlian phenomenology rooted in the primacy of intentionality as enacted in perception. But the mathematicism of Husserl is absent; the intentionality is that of a poet.-Stanley Rosen, Pennsylvania State University.