Self in Proust: Part One

Note: This is the first of three parts.

Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time offers one of the most profound explorations of personal identity in literature. Throughout this massive work, Proust returns again and again to a startling idea: we are not one continuous person living through time, but rather a succession of different selves, each born and dying as we move through our lives. As Joshua Landy argues in Philosophy as Fiction, Proust portrays the self as "a synchronically multiple entity" that is also radically discontinuous across time—so much so that "today's moi cannot predict tomorrow's, nor even always remember that of yesterday" (p. 105). The result is what Landy calls "a gallery of photographs taken at different stages of development" rather than a unified personality.  I've had Landy's book for well over a decade now and I still randomly thumb through it at least a little bit each year.

Proust rarely makes the Self his explicit subject. The Recherche devotes far more pages to art, society, love, jealousy, and time than to theorizing about identity. Proust doesn't announce his philosophy of self—he demonstrates it through narrative structure and scattered reflections embedded in the story. The passages where he directly discusses "the self" or "selves" are surprisingly few compared to his extensive meditations on aesthetics, social climbing, or the nature of memory more generally. This essay deliberately extracts and systematizes insights that Proust presents implicitly, making explicit what he shows through lived experience. Nevertheless, these insights about identity, though not foregrounded, are foundational to how the novel works—they explain why the narrator experiences love, loss, and memory the way he does, and why the novel must take the particular form it does.

These selves are connected only by memory and habit, and even those connections reveal surprising truths about identity. I'm interested in how Proust develops this philosophy of the self through his narrator's experiences with love, loss, memory, and the passage of time, drawing on both Proust's text and Landy's philosophical interpretation to show how the self emerges as a compound of desires, beliefs, and identifications—constantly reforming itself in response to the objects and knowledge that define it.

The most fundamental aspect of Proust's philosophy is that identity is not singular but multiple. We don't simply change—we become entirely different people, and those different people can't fully understand or access each other. Landy identifies two dimensions to this multiplicity: the self is both "synchronically multiple"—divided among competing voices and desires at any single moment—and radically discontinuous "in the diachronic dimension," changing so completely over time that "the rupture... gives the impression of multiple deaths and rebirths over the course of a single life." (p. 105) Each new self, Landy suggests, "should bear a different name from the preceding one" because the continuity between them is so minimal.

Proust states this principle baldly: "For a man cannot change, that is to say become another person, while continuing to obey the dictates of the self which he has ceased to be." (p. 335) This seems paradoxical at first—how can we change if we can't become another person? But Proust's point is precise: genuine change isn't evolution or modification. It's replacement. The old self doesn't grow into the new one; it simply disappears, and something else takes its place.

This leads to a disturbing vision of life as fundamentally discontinuous. Looking back on his life, the narrator sees it as "offering a succession of periods in which, after a certain interval, nothing of what had sustained the previous period survived in that which followed—as something utterly devoid of the support of an individual, identical and permanent self." (pp. 2208-2209) There's no throughline, no essential "me" that persists. Instead, life is like a series of separate episodes with different protagonists who happen to share the same body.

What makes this especially vivid is how the narrator experiences these past selves as distinct people when they suddenly reappear. After Albertine leaves him, he finds himself encountering old versions of himself: "There were some of these 'selves' which I had not encountered for a long time past. For instance (I had not remembered that it was the day on which the barber called) the 'self' that I was when I was having my hair cut. I had forgotten this 'self,' and his arrival made me burst into tears, as, at a funeral, does the appearance of an old retired servant who has not forgotten the deceased." (p. 2079) The barber triggers a self associated with Albertine that had been dormant. This self arrives with all its original grief intact, and the narrator experiences it almost as a separate person—someone he'd forgotten existed, like a servant from the past showing up unexpectedly.

Even in everyday social situations, we constantly become different people. "On entering any social gathering, when one is young, one loses consciousness of one's old self, one becomes a different man, every drawing-room being a fresh universe in which, coming under the sway of a new moral perspective, we fasten our attention, as if they were to matter to us for all time, on people, dances, card-tables, all of which we shall have forgotten by the morning." (p. 736) Each social context creates a temporary self that takes those surroundings completely seriously. The next morning, that self is gone, and we can barely understand why we cared so much the night before.

But what actually constitutes these different selves? Landy offers a sophisticated answer: each self is a "hierarchical arrangement in which, as in a physical compound, the various parts, blended together in their relative proportions, combine to form what looks and feels like a single substance—the jealous, the melancholic, the indifferent man—and is thus able to determine what we refer to as our 'self' of the moment." (p. 108) Like a chemical solution, the self is composed of different elements—desires, beliefs, identifications—mixed in varying concentrations. When jealousy dominates, we experience ourselves as unified around that jealousy. When the proportions shift and art or friendship takes precedence, an entirely different compound forms.

Crucially, Landy argues that these "subsidiary selves... consist in a set of identifications with different objects of desire, belief, and adherence." (p. 107) The self has no autonomous essence independent of what it's attached to. We become who we are through our relationships to people, ideas, and things. The self that loves Gilberte is literally constituted by that love—remove the object of desire, and that particular compound dissolves. This is why, as we'll see, the end of love feels like death: it's not just that we've lost something, but that the self organized around that love has ceased to exist.

Even more radically, Landy points out that "the final distribution of selves is predicated... not just on our attitude toward a given object but on what... we take the object to be." (p. 109) In Proust's universe of "pandemic epistemological crisis," objects are never stable. Is Albertine faithful or unfaithful? Is she the radiant girl on the beach or the boring captive? The answer determines not just what we feel but who we are. The self that believes Albertine is faithful and the self that suspects her of lying are different compounds, inhabiting different realities. Our knowledge—or misknowledge—of the world directly shapes our identity.

If we're constantly becoming different people, what connects us to our past? Proust's answer is memory—but not the kind of memory we consciously control. It's involuntary memory, triggered by sensations, that can suddenly bring a past self back to life. And here Landy makes a crucial intervention in how we understand this process: involuntary memory doesn't retrieve lost experiences but reactivates selves that have never truly vanished. "When an odor, texture, or sound returns us to a former state," Landy writes, "we are not dragging into the light a set of impressions that have long since departed but, instead, summoning up part of us that is still very much present within our mind." (p. 110) The past selves aren't dead—they're dormant, waiting for the right trigger to bring them back to active consciousness.

This reframes everything. Proust isn't saying that memory bridges a gap to retrieve something lost. He's saying that all our former selves remain layered within us, like geological strata, and that under the right conditions, an old layer can become the surface again. Landy calls this Proust's solution to a problem other theories of self can't handle: "Only in this way is it possible to reexperience from within a situation we approached with a radically different set of attitudes, beliefs and desires." (p. 110) We don't just remember how we felt—we become again the person who felt that way.

Proust observes that we remember people and places best through the details we'd forgotten: "The memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength)." (pp. 556-557) The things we rehearse in memory lose their power. It's the trivial details—ones that seemed unimportant at the time—that retain their emotional charge. These forgotten fragments can resurrect entire past selves.

The process works through sensation: "It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourselves in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent." (p. 557) A smell or sound can bring back not just a memory of a former self, but the actual experience of being that self again, complete with all the feelings that self had. This is exactly what Landy means by reactivation rather than retrieval: the person we were still exists within us, and when the sensory conditions are right, that person can displace our current self entirely.

When these resurrections happen, they're total. The past self doesn't just visit—it takes over. "The context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire in turn the same power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them." (pp. 1428-1429) Everything about the present self gets pushed aside, and the past self occupies our consciousness completely. Landy emphasizes that this isn't metaphorical: memory "changes the subject who remembers into the subject who once lived." (p. 110, paraphrase) It's ontological transformation, not nostalgic recollection.

The narrator experiences this dramatically when bending down to unbutton his boots reminds him of his grandmother: "The self that I then was, that had disappeared for so long, was once again so close to me that I seemed still to hear the words that had just been spoken, although they were now no more than a phantasm... I was now solely the person who had sought a refuge in his grandmother's arms." (p. 1429) For that moment, he isn't someone remembering his grandmother—he is his younger self, experiencing her presence with the same immediacy he felt years before.

Physical objects and sensory experiences hold these past selves in storage. "The scent, in the frosty air, of the twigs of brushwood was like a fragment of the past, an invisible ice-floe detached from some bygone winter advancing into my room, often, moreover, striated with this or that perfume or gleam of light, as though with different years in which I found myself once more submerged, overwhelmed, even before I had identified them, by the exhilaration of hopes long since abandoned." (pp. 1759-1760) The burning brushwood brings with it an entire frozen moment from the past, and that moment brings with it the self who originally lived it.

But Proust warns against deliberately seeking these experiences. "Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years." (pp. 885-886) You can't force these resurrections by revisiting places from your past. The connection to former selves is internal and involuntary, not external and willed.

If memory resurrects past selves, habit is what lets us forget we're constantly changing. In familiar environments, we operate on autopilot—and in that autopilot mode, we're barely present at all.

The narrator describes how habit replaces the self in familiar places: "I knew beforehand that I was doomed to find sadness there... in the one which I usually occupied I was not present, my mind remained elsewhere and sent mere Habit to take its place. But I could not employ this servant, less sensitive than myself, to look after things for me in a new place, where I preceded him, where I arrived alone, where I must bring into contact with its environment that 'Self' which I rediscovered only at year-long intervals." (p. 878) In his usual bedroom, he doesn't need to be there—habit handles everything. But in a new place, his actual self has to show up, and that self is the same frightened child he was at Combray or Balbec years before.

New places strip away the protection of habit and expose the vulnerable self underneath. The narrator describes arriving at Balbec: "Having no world, no room, no body now that was not menaced by the enemies thronging round me, penetrated to the very bones by fever, I was alone, and longed to die. Then my grandmother came in, and to the expansion of my constricted heart there opened at once an infinity of space." (pp. 575-576) Without familiar surroundings, he loses even his sense of having a body. He's reduced to pure consciousness, terrified and alone until his grandmother's presence gives him back some sense of himself.

The reverse is also true: familiar rooms become extensions of the self. "I kept raising my eyes—which the things in my room in Paris disturbed no more than did my eyelids themselves, for they were merely extensions of my organs, an enlargement of myself." (p. 575) In familiar spaces, the boundary between self and environment dissolves. We incorporate our surroundings into our sense of who we are.

This is why the narrator values having a room that has become "his": "I would not go upstairs to the room which had succeeded in becoming so really mine that to catch sight of its long violet curtains and low bookcases was to find myself alone again with that self of which things, like people, gave me a reflected image." (p. 621) The room doesn't just house him—it reflects him back to himself. Objects become expressions of the self, showing us who we are.

(to be continued)

[Read Nature in Proust]

[Read Sex in Proust]