Sartre and Proust

In my previous post, I wrote about memory and inner reality, as they are connected to Proust's theme that memory and imagination transform life into art. There is the implication that life is only comprehensible as art and that there is a self, an interior consciousness, which directs the transformation . Jean-Paul Sartre provides an interesting companion to Proust's philosophy of the mind as presented in In Search of Lost Time.

I recently read an introduction to an anthology of Sartre's writings and an article by Christie McDonald, "Sartre Rereading Proust." McDonald's article reads Sartre's Nausea as a response to and rejection of Proust's In Search of Lost Time. In both novels, the narrators embark on a quest to create meaning by "decoding" sensory experiences and memories. Proust dramatizes the exploration of one's own consciousness throughout In Search of Lost Time, but, according to McDonald, Sartre dramatizes the failure of that search in Nausea. Proust's work upholds the notion that "sensation will give rise, in privileged moments, to an inner truth, culminating in the ability to create something new" (McDonald 199). In short, sensations are not simply sensations (to give a more pointed Proustian example, a madeleine is not simply a madeleine). There is considerable distance between the outside world of sensory experience and the inner world of the mind.

Sartre, however, rejected the notion of consciousness' ability to turn its attention onto itself and view itself as an object, and even more, he was critical of literature's role in the exploration of the self. The act of reflecting on experience puts greater distance between the individual and the direct (what Sartre calls pre-reflective) consciousness of "the thing itself," and distorts and limits the thing that narrative attempts to describe. In Sartre's view, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is doomed to failure because, by dissecting his experiences, he is distorting and constraining the very thing that he wishes to comprehend. In reality, objects and events are indifferent to and resist the meanings that humans seek to impose on them, and so those meanings constantly elude our grasp; this is the unsettling feeling that Roquentin, the narrator of Nausea, encounters. Unlike Proust's narrator, Roquentin finds that writing does nothing to help him describe and understand his world and himself. Instead, he only becomes aware of the instability and uncertainty of existence. He feels that "there seems to be no distance between him and objects, no clear distinction between inside and outside" (McDonald, p. 200). Now, this is not entirely foreign in Proust; the narrator of In Search of Lost Time finds the lines between external and internal reality blurry. But, those lines still exist in Proust, and reflective consciousness acts as an interpreter of sensory experience. In Sartre, Roquentin cannot find distance between the intenal and external worlds, or depth beneath surfaces. The surfaces remain surfaces, the things are unendowed with meaning, and Roquentin experiences nausea from his inability to force the world into comprehensible terms. McDonald writes that, for Sartre, "consciousness only transcends immediate circumstances to the extent that consciousness can recognize the circumstances, nothing more" (p. 199). The meanings for which Roquentin searches are imposed on top of an amorphous reality. Furthermore, this structure of narrative and meaning can only be imposed retroactively: "Experience does not, cannot constitute an adventure, and it is a lie to think that it does" (McDonald, 202). McDonald implies that, in Proust, the meanings beneath objects are essential, inherent in the things the narrator contemplates and examines, and that life can become art in an instant.

McDonald's article adequately demonstrates the disparities between Sartre and Proust, but I find that there are many more similarities, especially in Sartre's notion of the transcendental ego. For Sartre, an individual is in "bad faith" when he tends too much in one of two opposing directions, facticity and transcendence. To retreat too far into facticity is to deny any transcendent part of the self, to identify completely with a particular role (such as one's occupation or social status); this results in emptiness, because the roles are convenient fabrications that provide a simple identity that denies "the thing itself," or the self itself. One cannot state one's identity; to do that is to pin it down, flatten it out, and excise large portions of the self. Retreat into transcendence is equally dangerous and produces the same result of emptiness; it's living in a fantasy world for potentials that never come to be and (I think this is where McDonald focuses perhaps too blindly) prevents action and engagement with real life.

I'm not certain that I would classify Proust's narrator as too involved in fantasy. As a child in Combray, he certainly has an active imagination, but it hardly prevents him from engaging in reality. Of course, he cannot create and experience simultaneously; all of his recollections of Combray come about during a night of insomnia, in the dark blank where sleep should be. Similarly, Sartre's Roquentin becomes annoyed when he must choose between continuing to write or departing from his narrative and rejoining life when a woman interrupts his work. Proust's narrator only appears to us in the past, and McDonald asserts, "The present exists. The past does not" (p. 203). In this way, one might say that Proust's narrator is divorced from reality by looking backward, by focusing so much on the past that he negates the present. Swann, however, appears to be most in danger of tending too much toward transcendence. I've started the chapter "Swann in Love," which details the affair between Swann and his present-day wife Odette, and from the beginning of their interactions, Swann's interest in Odette has to be fabricated by his imagination. He initially finds little in her that is attractive, but because she is so forward about her interest in him, he starts to will himself into admiring her; he imagines that she resembles one of Boticelli's paintings and, from then on, he justifies the time that he spends with her by relating it to admiring a living work of art. He rejects the real Odette before him and replaces her with an image of Boticelli's Zipphora, whom he can love and find aesthetically beautiful. This is dangerous territory, and Swann is setting himself up for disillusionment and emptiness.

I've written quite a lot on this subject today, but I want to continue this commentary between Sartre and Proust on the subject of experience and aesthetics. More to come as I do more research into this.