Proust As Philosopher by Beistegui Miguel de

Author:Beistegui, Miguel de
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781135722593
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Chapter 4

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Giving joy (metaphor)

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“So that at that moment, lying in bed with my eyes shut, I would say to myself that everything can be transposed …”1

Overwhelmed by memories and sensations, Marcel's forced to wonder about the deeper meaning of his lived experience and, in doing so, becomes the writer he's always felt he was destined to be. It's a seemingly paradoxical situation: this excessive wealth of sensations and feelings that comes from sensible reality itself is precisely what pushes him to cross the threshold of a reality that's merely sensed or felt and to express its truth. Up until that point, the happy moments that occurred throughout the novel had gone without explanation, failing every time to set our hero on the path to literature. The very possibility of writing — longed for, yes, but frustrated until now — is mediated by the resolution of what we might call the mystery of experience: the fact that the truth of an impression, a sensation or a memory is always revealed through something else. The possibility of creating a work of art endowed with “infinite philosophical meaning,”2 as Marcel puts it at the beginning of the novel, depends on its ability to retain and fix in an image the true, immaterial or spiritual content of what's being played out on the level of the sensible. The point is to show how the sensible can be overcome by the creation of a work of art and its meaning extended and to show how, as the horizon of transcendence proper to the sensible world itself, it becomes immaterial without heading in the direction of a supersensible world. There's a reality of transubstantiation, a metamorphosis of matter itself, which the experience of recollection had revealed and which art only deepens.

So what Marcel actually hears in the drawing-room of the Hôtel de Guermantes is the sound of the spoon against the plate. But something emerges from this perception, as if curled up within it, ungraspable and unsuspected until now, something that's much more than a perception, much more than a sound. Marcel's effectively transported somewhere else; he's transformed. The feeling of tremendous warmth, mixed with the smell of smoke and soothed by the coolness of forest fragrances, is completely different from the sound on the plate from which it emerges. The narrator has to concentrate in order to identify the missing link in this association, the link that allows these two groups of sensations to communicate with one another. This link — the sound of the hammer against the wheel of the train echoing the sound of the spoon against the plate — was imperceptible at first, as if the association depended on one term being withdrawn. We might even go so far as to say that the first sound wasn't actually perceived during the train trip; unperceived, though, it was still there from the outset, in a virtual state, waiting to be realized, waiting to happen, as it were. Insofar as

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