Beistegui Miguel de - Proust as philosopher: the art of metaphor

LONDON AND NEW YORK

Originally published 2007 as Jouissance de Proust pour une esthtique
de la mtaphore

This translation first published 2013 by Routledge
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Copyright LES BELLES LETTRES collection Encre Marine

Translation Routledge, 2013

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Beistegui, Miguel de, 1966
[Jouissance de Proust. English]
Proust as philosopher : the art of metaphor / by Miguel de Beistegui;
translated by Dorothe Bonnigal Katz, with Simon Sparks and Miguel de
Beistegui.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Proust, Marcel, 18711922Criticism and interpretation. 2. Proust, Marcel,
18711922. la recherche du temps perdu. 3. Metaphor in literature. I. Title.
PQ2631.R63Z525713 2012
843.912-dc23
2012007041

ISBN: 978-0-415-58431-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-58432-6 (pbk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Chapter 1

Looking for joy

What sort of existence would raise our hopes and awaken our desires simply in order to dash them? What sort of world would clip imagination's wings? Answer: this one.

Whenever we think we're sowing the seeds of happiness, life's busy planting those of disillusionment. Whenever we think we're working carefully towards contentment we are, in fact, hurtling towards our doom. A single life can hold more disillusion and disappointment than we can imagine: every second of happiness will eventually fade, every fleeting joy will quickly be replaced by ever increasing sorrow; every desire fulfilled will end up either boring us or making us insatiable, in thrall to the ever more urgent exercise of the will.

And? Is this the lesson of Proust's vast novel? Is this really what In Search of Lost Time establishes as a universal law, setting itself up in the process as the novel of suffering and melancholia? Having such absurdly high expectations from art and from life in general is only ever going to open us up to the threat of disappointment. The book's moral, itself a disappointment how could it be anything else? would be that, by expecting less from life, by settling for a little bit less, we might avoid being disappointed; by letting go of our desires and breaking free of our will, we might be spared innumerable sufferings.

Nothing, though, could be further from the truth, nothing more at odds with the spirit of Proust than this sort of pseudo-Stoic or -Schopenhauerian lesson. Why? Because it's precisely this sort of suffering that hones our senses and sharpens our intelligence. Life itself sets us off on a quest for what such suffering hides, making that same discomfort instrumental in discovering its buried truths. And this is why it doesn't make much sense to say that, through the narrator, the novel simply presents us with a type, one psychological profile among many; instead, it tries to unveil a truth that lies dormant within the type in question. Ultimately, Proust's point is to show that the dissatisfaction whether in the form of suffering or in the form of boredom that defines our relation to the world actually stems from an even deeper lack, one inscribed at the heart of reality itself. Which means what, exactly? That reality itself and alone is responsible for our misfortune? That the conditions of our disappointment are structural and not circumstantial, that they are inherent to our relation to the world rather than to any given character trait? Well, yes, providing that we're clear on what reality means, and its meaning is, as I'll try to show, a paradoxical one. Implicitly universal and unshakeable, it leads directly to a feeling of separation and alienation, of an irreversible lack. Overcoming this feeling will involve seeing reality differently and, in truth, creating it.

My point of departure, then, consists in identifying an ontological deficiency, a deficiency with respect to being, which I'd define in the following way: at the heart of our relation to the world there's a lack. This lack isn't nothing, however, but is, rather, a lack or want of being, a lack or want that functions as the sign of a truth that lies beyond or, more accurately, at the heart of present reality. This lack is original and structural and so isn't something that could be remedied by a strategy of compensation, by recapturing or reproducing the thing that's lacking. Rather, it's the figure of the real in its self-transposition or transfiguration. Metaphor believes in transubstantiation, in the conversion of matter into spirit, which it carries out, but only as an implicit dimension of matter itself, inscribed within it from the start.

***

None of which, of course, necessarily prevents reality from being a source of disappointment. And, were it not for one or two clues and for the way in which these clues come together in the final revelation of a very different state of affairs, it would be easy to see in Proust's work a true abhorrence of time, a true source of bitterness and resentment. His world would be one teetering on the verge of nihilism. Isn't Swann's whole life just like his study of Vermeer that remains constantly imminent, constantly postponed undermined by a point lessness that nothing's going to be able to refute? Doesn't Jean Santeuil fail to find any pleasure in writing down the memory of his walks at Beg-Meil?