Self in Proust: Part Two
If we're constantly becoming different people, why don't we notice? Proust's answer is that change happens too slowly to be perceived while it's happening. We only realize we've changed after the fact.
He compares it to natural phenomena: "It is the same in life; the heart changes, and it is our worst sorrow; but we know it only through reading, through our imagination: in reality its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change." (pp. 91-92) We can track individual moments, but we don't feel the overall transformation. It's like watching the hour hand of a clock—you never see it move, but eventually you realize it's pointing somewhere completely different.
This makes change feel like a kind of suicide we commit without noticing. The narrator realizes he's destroying his love for Gilberte himself: "What was perhaps the most cruel thing about it was that I myself was its architect, unconscious, wilful, merciless and patient... It was to a slow and painful suicide of that self which loved Gilberte that I was goading myself with untiring energy." (pp. 530-531) He knows exactly what he's doing—he's killing off the self that loves her—but he can't stop himself.
And he knows what will replace that self: "I knew not only that after a certain time I should cease to love Gilberte, but also that she herself would regret it and that the attempts which she would then make to see me would be as vain as those that she was making now, no longer because I loved her too much but because I should certainly be in love with some other woman." (p. 531) The future self that will replace him is already predictable—someone who no longer cares about Gilberte, who will find her efforts to reconnect annoying rather than precious. That future self will be just as consumed by someone else as the present self is consumed by Gilberte.
The mechanism of change is so subtle we're never aware of it happening: "Life, in accordance with its habit which is, by unceasing, infinitesimal labours, to change the face of the world, had not said to me on the morrow of Albertine's death: 'Become another person,' but, by changes too imperceptible for me to be conscious even that I was changing, had altered almost everything in me." (p. 2248) There's no moment of transformation, no dramatic break. Just countless tiny adjustments that accumulate until you realize you're someone entirely different.
Love plays a special role in Proust's philosophy of the self because falling in love creates a new self, and falling out of love destroys it. Love isn't just something the self experiences—it defines the self. This is precisely Landy's point about subsidiary selves consisting in "identifications with different objects of desire, belief, and adherence." (p. 107) We don't have a pre-existing self that then falls in love; rather, loving someone creates a particular compound-self organized entirely around that person.
The narrator describes building his love for Gilberte like a construction project: "While I was getting ready to take advantage of this longed-for moment to effect, on the basis of the image of Gilberte which I had prepared beforehand but which had now gone from my head, the adjustment that would enable me, during the long hours I must spend alone, to be certain that it was indeed her that I had in mind, that it was indeed my love for her that I was gradually putting together as one composes a book." (pp. 353-354) He's aware that loving Gilberte requires work—he has to construct and maintain an image of her, has to compose his feelings deliberately. Love is something he's making, not just something that happens to him. In Landy's terms, he's mixing a new compound where Gilberte is the primary element that gives the whole mixture its character.
But if love constructs a self, it also reveals something troubling: the beloved is somewhat arbitrary. Looking back, the narrator realizes: "I said to myself sadly that this love of ours, in so far as it is a love for one particular creature, is not perhaps a very real thing, since, though associations of pleasant or painful musings can attach it for a time to a woman to the extent of making us believe that it has been inspired by her in a logically necessary way, if on the other hand we detach ourselves deliberately or unconsciously from those associations, this love, as though it were in fact spontaneous and sprang from ourselves alone, will revive in order to bestow itself on another woman." (pp. 556-557) Love feels like it's about the specific person, but really it comes from within us. We project it onto whoever is available, and when we stop loving that person, the same feelings simply transfer to someone else.
Even desire itself transforms the beloved—or more precisely, transforms the self doing the desiring, which in turn transforms how the beloved appears. When Albertine is free and the narrator wants her, she seems radiant and fascinating. But once he possesses her: "As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front... Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she had lost her beauty... I might very well have divided her stay with me into two periods, in the first of which she was still, although less so every day, the glittering actress of the beach, and in the second of which, become the grey captive, reduced to her drab self." (pp. 1876-1877)
Albertine herself hasn't changed—she's the same person. But because the narrator's self has changed (from desiring to possessing), she appears completely different to him. This illustrates Landy's epistemological point perfectly: the self depends not just on our attitude toward objects but on "what... we take the object to be." (p. 109) The desiring self sees Albertine as free, mysterious, radiant—and that perception creates one compound-self. The possessing self sees her as captive, known, drab—and that different perception creates an entirely different compound. The Albertine who is desired and the Albertine who is possessed aren't the same person because the self perceiving her isn't the same self. Our identities shift with our knowledge—or our illusions.
The most disturbing aspect of Proust's philosophy is that changing selves feels like death. Yet Landy's interpretation complicates this: past selves don't actually die—they become dormant, remaining "still very much present within our mind." (p. 110) This creates a paradox: we experience the transformation as death while the old self continues to exist in latent form, ready to be reactivated by the right sensory trigger.
The narrator articulates the terror of transformation as death: "Our dread of a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces and the sound of voices which we love and from which today we derive our dearest joy, this dread, far from being dissipated, is intensified, if to the pain of such a privation we feel that there will be added what seems to us now in anticipation more painful still: not to feel it as a pain at all—to remain indifferent; for then our old self would have changed, it would then be not merely the charm of our family, our mistress, our friends that had ceased to environ us, but our affection for them would have been so completely eradicated from our hearts... that we should be able to enjoy a life apart from them, the very thought of which today makes us recoil in horror; so that it would be in a real sense the death of the self." (p. 579) What we really fear isn't losing the people we love—it's becoming someone who doesn't care about losing them. That indifference means our current self will have been replaced by a different compound with different elements.
But Proust also shows that this death brings a kind of mercy. When suffering becomes unbearable, a new self arrives to replace the suffering one: "Yet he was bringing me on the contrary, this newcomer, at the same time as oblivion an almost complete elimination of suffering, a possibility of comfort—this newcomer, so dreaded yet so beneficent, who was none other than one of those spare selves which destiny holds in reserve for us, and which, paying no more heed to our entreaties than a clear-sighted and thus all the more authoritative physician, it substitutes in spite of us, by a timely intervention, for the self that has been too seriously wounded." (pp. 2209-2210) We don't want the old self to die, but once it does, the new self doesn't suffer. It's like a doctor replacing an injured patient with a healthy person who has no memory of the injury.
This happens automatically, like the body healing itself: "This process, as it happens, automatically occurs from time to time, like the decay and renewal of our tissues, but we notice it only if the former self contained a great grief, a painful foreign body, which we are surprised to find no longer there, in our amazement at having become another person to whom the sufferings of his predecessor are no more than the sufferings of a stranger, of which we can speak with compassion because we do not feel them." (p. 2210) The new self can discuss the old self's suffering with detachment, even sympathy—but no pain. It's as if we're talking about someone else's tragedy.
This explains why grief eventually ends, though the mechanism is more subtle than simple death: "It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. Albertine had no cause to reproach her friend. The man who was usurping his name was merely his heir. We can only be faithful to what we remember, and we remember only what we have known." (p. 210) We stop loving people not because time heals but because the compound-self organized around that love has been replaced by a different compound with different organizing principles. That new person is an heir, not the original—someone who has inherited a life but didn't live it.
Yet if we accept Landy's framework, the self that loved Albertine hasn't been destroyed—it has simply become inactive, pushed into the unconscious strata of the mind. This is why involuntary memory can bring it back so powerfully and completely. The narrator's experience with the barber—suddenly encountering the self that loved Albertine when he'd thought it was gone forever—proves that these "dead" selves are actually dormant. They can be resurrected at any moment if the right trigger appears. The language of death, then, is phenomenological: from the perspective of the current self, past selves appear dead because they're not actively determining our behavior. But structurally, they remain as potential selves we can become again.
This reframes Proust's entire project. If past selves are dormant rather than destroyed, then the self is not a succession of separate beings but a layered accumulation—what Landy calls a "gallery of photographs" where each image remains even as new ones are added. (p. 105) The complexity of Proust's model, as Landy notes, is "rebarbatively elaborate, but it has the merit of explaining a wide variety of phenomena that alternative schemata simply cannot capture." (p. 110) Most importantly, it explains how involuntary memory can make us not just remember but actually be our former selves again, "reexperience from within a situation we approached with a radically different set of attitudes, beliefs and desires." (p. 110) Only if the past self still exists within us can it be reactivated so completely.
Sleep fascinates Proust because it interrupts consciousness so completely that waking up is like being reborn. It raises the question: what makes us the same person we were before we fell asleep?
The narrator describes waking from deep sleep: "We call that a leaden sleep, and it seems as though, even for a few moments after such a sleep is ended, one has oneself become a simple figure of lead. One is no longer a person. How then, searching for one's thoughts, one's personality, as one searches for a lost object, does one recover one's own self rather than any other? Why, when one begins again to think, is it not a personality other than the previous one that becomes incarnate in one?" (p. 883) When consciousness returns, why do we become ourselves again instead of someone else entirely? There's no logical reason—millions of other identities could fit this body just as well.
Proust suggests sleep is actually a form of death and resurrection: "There has indeed been death, as when the heart has ceased to beat and a rhythmical traction of the tongue revives us... And perhaps the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory." (p. 883) If memory is what brings us back to ourselves each morning, maybe death and resurrection work the same way. We are, fundamentally, what we remember being.
But the continuity feels arbitrary: "One fails to see what dictates the choice, or why, among the millions of human beings one might be, it is on the being one was the day before that unerringly one lays one's hand. What is it that guides us, when there has been a real interruption—whether it be that our unconsciousness has been complete or our dreams entirely different from ourselves?" (p. 883) We take it for granted that we wake up as ourselves, but Proust wants us to see how strange that is. Identity isn't as natural or inevitable as it seems.
Despite all this discontinuity, Proust identifies one element of the self that does persist: the will. While our conscious selves change constantly, our will quietly works behind the scenes to serve whatever self happens to be in charge.
The narrator describes this when preparing for a trip: "My brain assessed this pleasure at a very low value now that it was assured. But, inside, my will did not for a moment share this illusion, that will which is the persevering and unalterable servant of our successive personalities; hidden away in the shadow, despised, downtrodden, untiringly faithful, toiling incessantly, and with no thought for the variability of the self, to ensure that the self may never lack what is needed'" (pp. 735-736) His conscious mind has already lost interest in the trip, but his will doesn't care what he thinks. It knows that if the trip became impossible, his conscious mind would suddenly want it desperately. So the will ignores the conscious self's doubts and buys the tickets.
The will operates in silence: "It is as invariable as the intelligence and the sensibility are fickle, but since it is silent, gives no account of its actions, it seems almost non-existent; it is by its dogged determination that the other constituent parts of our personality are led, but without seeing it, whereas they distinguish clearly all their own uncertainties." (p. 736) We notice our thoughts and feelings because they're loud and changeable. The will is constant, so we don't notice it at all. But it's actually running the show, quietly ensuring that each successive self gets what it needs to survive.
Proust also explores how art and fiction relate to the self—and why novels might reveal more about human psychology than real life does.
The key insight is that fiction eliminates the opacity of real people: "The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable to the human soul, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which one's soul can assimilate. After which it matters not that the actions, the feelings of this new order of creatures appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening." (pp. 91-92) Real people are mostly opaque—we can't really access their inner lives. But fictional characters are made of the same mental material as our own thoughts, so we can experience their feelings directly. Reading becomes a way to live multiple lives in one afternoon.
But social interaction often involves a false self that performs for others. The narrator realizes he betrays himself when he seeks approval: "I was lying to myself, I was interrupting the process of growth in the direction in which I could indeed truly develop and be happy, when I congratulated myself on being liked and admired by so good, so intelligent, so rare a person as Saint-Loup, when I focused my mind, not upon my own obscure impressions which it should have been my duty to unravel, but on the words of my friend... I strove to find a beauty very different from that which I pursued in silence when I was really alone." (p. 765) By focusing on Saint-Loup's words instead of his own impressions, he creates a social self that's false. His real self exists in silence and solitude, working on those "obscure impressions."
Social selves are performances: "When we chat, it is no longer we who speak... we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them." (p. 765) In conversation, we become what others expect. The self that emerges in social situations isn't the real one—it's a temporary creation designed to fit the social context.
Theater makes this visible: watching actors, the narrator sees "those robust if ephemeral, and rather captivating, personalities which are the characters in a play, whom one loves, admires, pities, whom one would like to see again after one has left the theatre, but who by that time have already disintegrated into an actor who is no longer in the situation which was his in the play, into a text which no longer shows the actor's face... who have returned, in short, to elements that contain nothing of them, because of their dissolution, effected as soon as the play is over—a dissolution which, like that of a loved one, causes one to doubt the reality of the self and to meditate on the mystery of death." (p. 952) Characters seem real during the play, but afterward they dissolve into their components: an actor, a script, some makeup. This dissolution mirrors what happens to our own selves—they seem real while we're living them, but they too are temporary constructions that will dissolve.
Finally, Proust confronts the full implications of his philosophy: if we're constantly becoming different people, we can never truly recover the past, and we can't even grieve properly for our former selves.
After Albertine's death, the narrator realizes he can't bring her back because he can't bring his former self back: "I should have been incapable of resuscitating Albertine because I was incapable of resuscitating myself, of resuscitating the self of those days." (p. 2248) She existed for him only as his thoughts about her, and those thoughts belonged to a self that no longer exists.
What dies isn't the person but our relationship to them: "Albertine had been no more to me than a bundle of thoughts, and she had survived her physical death so long as those thoughts were alive in me; on the other hand, now that those thoughts were dead, Albertine did not rise again for me with the resurrection of her body." (p. 2248) Even if she came back to life, she'd mean nothing to him, because the self that loved her is gone.
This transformation should be devastating, like seeing yourself aged in a mirror: "I ought to have been more shattered than a man who, looking at his reflexion in a mirror, after months of travel or sickness, discovers that he has white hair and a different face, that of a middle-aged or an old man. This is shattering because its message is: 'the man that I was, the fair-haired young man, no longer exists, I am another person'." (p. 2248) Discovering you no longer love someone you once loved should be like discovering you've become old—proof that your former self has died.
But we don't grieve these deaths, and Proust explains why: "One is no more distressed at having become another person, after a lapse of years and in the natural sequence of time, than one is at any given moment by the fact of being, one after another, the incompatible persons, malicious, sensitive, refined, caddish, disinterested, ambitious which one can be, in turn, every day of one's life. And the reason why one is not distressed is the same, namely that the self which has been eclipsed... is not there to deplore the other, the other which is for the moment, or from then onwards, one's whole self." (p. 2248) The self that would grieve is the very self that has disappeared. The new compound has no attachment to what the old compound valued. It's like expecting a stranger to mourn your losses—why would they? They never experienced them.
(to be continued)
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