Scott Price
Phil Weinstein
English 115 Modern Comparative Literature
April 24, 2000
The True Pristine Shape and the Artificial Impression:
Authenticity, Memory, and Writing in "Time Regained" As the theoretical section of "Time Regained" reaches its epiphanal climax, Marcel exults that he "seemed to see that this life that we live in half-darkness can be illumined, this life that at every moment we distort can be restored to its true pristine shape, that a life, in short, can be realized within the confines of a book!"1 The easy reading of this phrase highlights the words "true" and "pristine" to see Marcel as claiming that the method he then outlines can present a life, his life, fully, completely, in its original shape&emdash; a troubling assertion from a post-Realist text. Marcel then complicates this reading to point out that his readers wouldn't really be 'his' readers, but rather readers of themselves, and that his project is therefore has more going on than autobiography. On the one hand, that qualification begins to present some of Marcel's divergence from Realist convention by showing awareness of the complexities the reader's subjectivity brings to reading; on the other hand, it brings in the difficulties inherent to anticipating the reader's response to the text. There are difficulties in the idea of true restoration of the past, and a thorough reading requires some qualification of Marcel's joy to account for modes of memory and recovery. The 'realization' of life 'within the confines of a book' is perhaps only true for him, or true in specific although limited ways; yet his claims for what this offers his readers remains consistent and productive by presenting much of a life and allowing the reader to interact with the details of that life in a memory-like way, to join the experiences to his own and to spur the reader into reading (and writing) his or her own life.
First we need to examine what exactly Marcel claims to be restoring. A primary aspect of Marcel's conception of experience and memory is the unavoidable loss of detail in the present&emdash; one cannot, moment by moment, both interact with the world and construct meaning or find correspondences with the past. The moments where Marcel does exist in both the present and the past, creating correspondences, he must put current experience on hold&emdash; he steps back and forth over the uneven paving stone (to the amusement of watching footmen), or he stands rapt in the library as an azure haze comes over his vision. In the everyday moments, one is too busy living to coexist in Time. Sense memories and the correspondences and relationships between things that one encounters get filed away, put into the subconscious in a web of relations. By contrast, understanding, or what is usually called 'memory,' is in the present filtered and distorted by willed and reasoned thought, which reduces the fullness of past experience to what relates to its ongoing cobbled-together narrative. From a Realist perspective, Marcel would seem to be claiming that remembrance can restore the past moment to some objectively true state. On page 931 of "Time Regained", however, Marcel critiques the modes of Realist analysis and memory as too conscious: "Gradually, thanks to its preservation by our memory, the chain of all those inaccurate expressions in which there survives nothing of what we have really experienced comes to constitute for us our thought, our 'reality,' and this lie is all that can be reproduced by the art that styles itself 'true to life.'"
Marcel looks to involuntary memory to restore much of the loss by following the manifold connections between, in the present, sensory impressions and, in the past, sense-memories. Conscious recollection, by being confined to its own logic, can only present an "artificial impression [of the past]... which we form for ourselves when we attempt by an act of will to imagine it..." Involuntary memory can circumvent self-anticipation to provide access to portions of memory which are more objectively truthful by not having been composed according to a predetermined will or ideology.
Proustian remembrance does not stop at recovery, however&emdash; the past must then be considered, analyzed, interpreted. The understanding of a moment is much richer than the moment could ever have been when it was occurring, not only because of the further connections, influences and meanings that become apparent when the past may be looked at more holistically, but because the remembrance is enriched by all the understanding of what has come to pass since the moment. Involuntary remembrance allows such thorough understanding of the moment that (especially in comparison to the experience of the present moment) it feels like a realization of the truth of the past, and of the truth of oneself in that past. Meaning is created from analyzed sensation. The prime examples of this are the pre-party sensations&emdash; while the sensations of the paving-stone, the clink of the glass, and the napkin bring memory ecstatically back to him, the real worth in the episode is the understanding that he gains from reflecting on the whole of the event. He gains from the involuntary memories a rich recollection of his past, but from an analysis of that past and the stimuli that prompted the memories he gains an understanding of his life's progression, from his youth through to the novel that we are reading.
By "the whole of the event" I mean the sort of collapsed time that results from the moments of involuntary memory, where past and present are united. Here Marcel does, for a moment, manage to live both in the present and the past by making the connections through the physical sensations. That unified notion of time, of 'regaining lost time,' is then abstracted once more by reflection and analysis and made the past again&emdash; for instance, Marcel laments the futility of truly trying to relive his memory of Venice, since time has moved on and things have changed. However, the sense of living in accordance to a full understanding of one's past leads into an interesting sort of personal grand narrative. On 934 Marcel realizes that his past life can provide all the materials needed for a great work, that "I had stored them up without divining the purpose for which they were destined or even their continued existence any more than a seed does when it forms within itself a reserve of all the nutritious substances from which it will feed a plant.... I began to perceive that I had lived for the sake of the plant without knowing it, without ever realizing that my life needed to come into contact with those books which I had wanted to write...."
However, there is a difficult inevitability to this realization&emdash; a history of one's life, if coherent, will naturally lead up to the creation of the history itself. When the epiphanies come about at the end of Time Regained, we feel like the moment was almost inevitable, since we'd seen in the madeleine and ever since the moments of collapsed time that he finally articulates. The inevitability we have felt stems from when we begin to form our conception of the route that he's taking us on, or when we think that we glimpse the overall shape of the memory-space we're moving through. Marcel does not explicitly address the argument that "he didn't have to remember it that way, with just those memories"with any clear acknowledgement of other possible life-models than the one he created. Elsewhere, he notes that he has made choices in the conscious analysis of his memory, that an image presented to us by life brings with it, in a single moment, sensations which are in fact multiple and heterogeneous," (924) and that he can only follow ones that seem relevant. The revision of one's past to create a coherent narrative is a revisionist history in all senses of the term and risks creating a self-fulfilling and indisputable misconception: "In this context, certain comparisons which are false if we start from them as premises may well be true if we arrive at them as conclusions." Marcel does acknowledge the possibility that too much conscious analysis could lead to the willed "artificial impression" that he rejects on p. 931, but indirectly, by relying on involuntary memory to spur remembrance, by acknowledging subjectivity in other arenas, and by trying to walk the fine line himself.
How can we call the process of remembrance pristine, with all of the subjective analysis and meaning-making that it entails? The end result is certainly not pristine in the sense of presenting the full objective2 truth of the scene or history as it would seem to anyone; nor is it pristine in the sense of being the only history that could exist for him. The original claim to pristine restoration makes more sense now that we understand the process of distortion to mean the continuous act of conscious interpretation. Marcel exults in his ability not to restore all of life to some pristine shape, but to repair the distortion&emdash; to be able to realize a moment more fully than possible in the present tense. Reflective understanding can incorporate the effects of an action as well as their context. Reflection allows the time to more completely examine influences and relationships. By itself, memory not only references a conscious and falsified conception of the past, but it ignores all that has happened since as it retrieves the remembered moment. This is insufficient: in "a book which tried to tell the story of a life it would be necessary to use not the two-dimensional psychology which we normally use but a quite different sort of three-dimensional psychology... since memory by itself, when it introduces the past, unmodified, into the present... suppresses the mighty dimension of time." Reflective understanding allows the understanding of the moment to include the hidden motivations that would lead it to what it would later do, and thereby reveal the meaning of the moment in relation to what is being remembered. What he seeks to achieve is a return to the pristine understanding of his past interiority: subjective, but true to his diachronic self as it was in the moment.
Behind this point is that writing the novel, and the acts of remembrance that enable it, is not a process of merely accessing the (web) order inside, reducing it and therefore losing the 'truth,' but rather writing meaning based on internal resources. What can be realized in writing a work which understands that it cannot encompass complete recovery, then, is a structure of meaning rather than an (impossible) exhaustive objective recovery. What Marcel does as he writes is to draw on the wealth of sensory impressions and subconscious impressions to make meaning. Leaving the issue at this is a solution to most of our questions about the truth assertion&emdash; that in claiming to realize a life within the confines of a book, he is restoring elements of his life to a full understanding of how they fit into his development and history. The miracle of coherence that Marcel makes out of his life in "Time Regained" is not a realization of the true order, some sort of existence that was inevitable based on his true self, but rather a retrospective making of a meaning from the material of his life.
Leaving the issue here, however, neglects the public side of his project, and the direction that Marcel takes in his discussion after my original quote. He considers the reader: "I thought more modestly of my book and it would be inaccurate to say that I thought of those who would read it as "my" readers. For it seemed to me that they would not be "my" readers but the readers of their own selves, my book being a sort of magnifying glass ... it would be my book, but with its help I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves."3 The work is for others, and Marcel sees it as being productive for others; while the personal aspect of the work is important for understanding Marcel's conception of his task, Marcel's emphasis on the life being realized within the confines of a book is an important element of the novel's project and a key to understanding the relevance to the reader. The act of writing universalizes his description of his life in a way that allows the reader to internalize it while putting him through the productive process of articulation and remembrance. This raises the question of whether Marcel can present to others the material that he has seen in his recovery. He again answers indirectly, struggling with the hopes of veracity and clarity until the discussion on 1089. The prospect of universalization is a little troubling to him personally, because the process of universalization removes his personal meaning&emdash; he laments on 939, for instance, that "my love, to which I had clung so tenaciously, would in my book be so detached from any individual that different readers would apply it, even in detail, to what they had felt for other women." He cannot present his love, or the individual he loved. Within that sentence, however, we can see both the problem and the resolution; as he realizes that the powerful meaning he feels in the memory will be lost as it becomes accessible to others, he also realizes that that very detachment will allow the memory to trigger powerful reactions in others, to connect powerfully to the specifics of his readers' own experience. The matter of his recovery is not the point for the reader. On 1089 we may finally catch up with Marcel as he qualifies and brings depth to his theory&emdash; he realizes that the proper effect of his work on others cannot be imparting his autobiographical truth.
Instead, the book itself does comprise a model of a life, and a model rich in identifiable terms, metaphors, nouns, and verbs. In terms of this model, the reader makes connections to their own web. The real worth for Marcel is in the process of recovering the lost time, of remembering and writing, not in whether he comes up with a final conception of his life that is exclusively valid; the text has another worth for readers. As readers inspired by the text into writing ourselves, we do not need to end where he ended (indeed we cannot). We must come to our own understandings about issues important to us. Marcel's life is not fully realized within the pages of his book, but rather, it reaches a sort of fruition (in that his potential is more fully realized) in his project of writing himself. The worth for the reader is also in the connections and details that Marcel presents, but the text's final role for the reader is as a model, not as a lesson. In exposing the theory that he followed in writing the novel, Marcel helps us understand our experience with the text, and encourages us to reflect on the novel and reach an understanding of it and ourselves in relation to it. The text should serve as a procedural model for the reader, to spur him through surprising correspondences to dig down into his own life, to read/write himself.
1: All citations except as noted are from Proust, Marcel. The Remembrance of Things Past. trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. New York : Random House, c1981. 1088 [back]
2: Merriam-Webster Dictionary online (www.m-w.com): expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations [back]
3: p. 1089 [back]