In any case, today, in effect, I’ll be following the lead of this commercial usage, as I will want to think about Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as, in part, a work of philosophy – as one which presents what are essentially philosophical observations about women, self, and time.

Ultimately, in my thinking about Proust, I want to affirm that Proust is a philosopher in In Search of Lost Time in ways similar to how Sartre is a philosopher in his literary productions, such as Nausea and No Exit, or in the way that Camus is a philosopher in his novels, such as The Stranger; and indeed, at some point in the future, I’d like to contemplate if Proust’s philosophical understanding could be reasonably seen as intellectual precursor to that of Sartre and Camus, as well as how his use of metaphor might be seen as in certain ways similar to the classic use of analogy by, say, Plato.

Direct consideration of these matters, however, must be left to another occasion;  for now, I’ll confine myself to a more preliminary and limited inquiry, namely to how Proust’s work might be fruitfully understood as philosophical in its reflections and depictions with respect to women, self, and time.

Of course, this is not to deny, fail to notice – or indeed, fail to appreciate – the aesthetic excellence of Proust’s work: at the very least, such excellence necessarily inhabits the background of any speculation about In Search of Lost Time.  But it’s my intention today to focus especially on the views of the world and conceptions of existence that are thereby aesthetically expressed.

And finally, although no writer other than Proust will be the focus of my attention, in the interest of "full disclosure," I should note that Sartre’s writing is never far away when I think about Proust; and underlying my inquiry is the belief that Proust’s work is akin to the twentieth century philosophical approach which focuses on experience that is known as phenomenology and that In Search of Lost Time even points toward the full-blown expression of that perspective in Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism.

I won’t be directly looking at Proust as a “proto” phenomenologist or existentialist. I will, however. consider how he approaches the phenomena of women, self, and time as related objects of consciousness, which is the distinctive approach of this kind of philosophy.

But at this point, you can’t help feeling  that I’ve already spent enough time talking about what I’m not intending to directly talk about – and that it’s high time that I start talking about what I do intend to talk about.

So, with the preceding as extended Preface, we can now move directly to how Proust approaches “women, self, and time” in In Search of Lost Time.

II

To begin, let's return to the passage from Budding Grove:  

… I ought to give a different name, [the narrator observes], to each of the selves who subsequently thought about Albertine; I ought still more to give a different name to each of the Albertines who appeared before me, never the same … that succeeded one another and against which … she was silhouetted. 

What does this passage say?

First, the narrator – who has indicated elsewhere, notably at the end of the previous volume, Swann’s Way, that he is fascinated by names – says that he sees as distinct, so that they could each be given individual names, the different selves that he is at different times when he thinks about a woman named Albertine.

Moreover, the narrator observes that when Albertine was an object of his sensory experience - when she “appeared before him" - each time she was different, so that he – who is himself different each time he is with her - might also give different names to each of the appearances of Albertine that he experiences.

And finally, the narrator observes that he experiences Albertine herself as “silhouetted against” each of her appearances. Somehow “behind” the different ways that Albertine appears there is Albertine, the person.

So, this passage says something about the nature of personal identity:  its multiplicity, over time, especially in relation to certain people.

And it also says something about perception, that one experiences others differently, at different times, but that somehow there is something constant “behind” or “silhouetted against” those appearances, perhaps some awareness of the person herself, independent of how she appears.

Let’s now consider this passage – and others that relate to it – in some detail.

The idea that personal identity is essentially a multiplicity informs much of the novel, and especially the narrator’s relationship with Albertine.

Late in the overall work, in The Fugitive, for example, after Albertine has left him and he comes to realize that he really loves her, the narrator says:

… It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself. My love for her was not simple: to a curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to a feeling of almost conjugal sweetness, at one moment indifference, at another a furious jealousy. I was … as it were … a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men – … not one of whom was jealous of same woman. … The complexity of my love, of my person, multiplied and diversified my sufferings.  (CF: 660)

People are different at different times, but the different “selves” that we are don’t exist as independent entities.  When we suffer, as from the loss of a loved one, it is we, the composite who suffers; the multiplicity of our nature only expands that suffering though its diversity.

In a similar manner, when he first becomes aware of Albertine’s absence, the narrator observes:

… [A]t every moment, there was one more of those innumerable and humble “selves” that compose our personality which was still unaware of Albertine’s departure and must be informed of it; I was obliged … to announce … to all these “selves” … the calamity that had … occurred;  each of them … must hear for the first time the words: … “Albertine has gone.” Each of them has to be told of my grief …   (CF: 579)

And he goes on to notice that:

[S]ome of [my] “selves” … I had not encountered for a long time … For instance (… 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 … (CF: 579)

The way that we are at the barber’s is different from, say, the way that we are at a lecture; consequently, how one will experience and reflect loss in the two situations will differ.

Also, situations – and, consequently, how we are in them – can occur at widely different intervals. Most people, for example, don’t attend funerals very often, so it may be necessary to try to remember that self – how one is in such circumstances – and get ready to be that self upon entering the funeral home.

Our identity, thus, the narrator suggests, isn’t something fixed; it can vary over time and in relation to different circumstances.

Moreover, we should notice that we aren’t “only” our different identities for the narrator: we are also the capacity to be aware of them, to be aware of who we are. It’s for this reason that the narrator can say that he has to “inform” his different selves about Albertine’s departure, or that we can be understood to be trying to remember how we are at funerals,

Much of the time, I think it can be said, our choice of self is more or less voluntary. We can, if you will, in T.S. Eliot’s phrase, “prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet."

But not always; and this is important to Proust.

Early on in the work, for example, the narrator falls in love with a girl named Gilberte; after awhile, when her interest seems to have ebbed, he determines, as we say, to “move on.”

But sometimes, moving on – like the song says of “breaking up” – is “hard to do” – and in the former case, at least, it’s because of how we experience time.

… [O]ur life being so careless of chronology, [the narrator observes,] interpolating so many anachronisms into the sequence of our days, I lived still among those … in which I still loved Gilberte. And then not seeing her became suddenly painful, as it would have been at that time … The self that had loved her, which another self had already almost entirely supplanted, would reappear, stimulated … often by a trivial … event.   (SW: 99)

Our experience of ourselves, this is to say, is often determined by the circumstances in which we find ourselves, but there is no inherent connection between the depth of such experience and the significance of the event  that might  provoke it.

The recurrence of a trivial circumstance that happened to be contemporary with a meaningful experience can trigger our becoming like we were, originally, in that circumstance.

As the narrator later puts it:

Within us, … but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged, …  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. (SW: 300)

So out of seeming oblivion – out of lost time, I‘m inclined to say – a former self can reappear, and about what we thought we are now indifferent, we again experience with its former hold.

If before now we were pained by lost love, it’s that pain we again feel.

But indifference is a two-edged sword.

Just as one can feel relieved that he no longer cares, that he is indifferent toward someone he had previously loved, at other times, when he does care, and wants to continue to do so, he can fear becoming indifferent.

As the narrator observes:

We dread  … a future in which we must forgo the sight of faces … which we love [and] this dread … is intensified … if to the pain of such privation we feel there will be added what seems … more painful still:  not to feel it as pain at all – to remain indifferent; for then our old self will have changed …; it would be in a real sense the death of the self, a death followed, it is true, by resurrection, but in a different self, to the love of which the elements of the old self that are condemned to die cannot bring themselves to aspire. (SW: 340)

It’s not only that we are pained when we think about no longer being able to be with those we love, the narrator suggests:  it’s even worse to contemplate no longer wanting to be with them, becoming indifferent.

Worse, perhaps, than the fear that they will no longer love us is the fear that we will become someone who no longer loves them.

And because, according to the narrator, changes in who we are – the self’s multiplicity over time – is the usual course of things, the possibility of indifference always exists.

This may account somewhat for what is disturbing to some readers of Proust:  the narrator’s seeming inability to settle on a single object for his passion. It’s as if the multiplicity of his selves is inordinatelyy well-developed.

At one point in the novel, for example, the narrator becomes very jealous about a visit that Albertine is making to the Trocadero, in Paris,  fearing that she has a romantic liaison planned.  He beseeches her to come back home. This she does, with seeming good humor, and her return allays his anxiety.  They then determine to go out for a walk; but as soon as they are on the thoroughfare, he starts to feel frustrated because, since he is with Albertine, he can’t give attention to the attractive shop girls who are almost everywhere.

He has gone from being someone who is insecure, to someone who is confident, to someone who is frustrated – all in a short period of time and all with respect to the same person.

As we observed the narrator relating earlier:

… It was not Albertine alone who was a succession of moments, it was also myself. My love for her was not simple: to a curiosity about the unknown had been added a sensual desire, and to a feeling of almost conjugal sweetness, at one moment indifference, at another a furious jealousy. I was … as it were … a composite army in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men – … [and] not one of whom was jealous of same woman. … The complexity of my love, of my person, multiplied and diversified my sufferings.  (CF: 660)

Independent of how one assesses these transformations – and the narrator, himself is certainly not happy about them – they are a manifestation of what are sometimes called the “changes” that passion can cause, perhaps especially when one is young,

But it’s not only with respect to passion that the narrator experiences his different selves.

In one of the novel’s most moving moments, he unexpectedly re-experiences the love he had received from his grandmother, years before, when the two had gone together for an extended vacation on the Normandy coast.

On the first night [of my second visit to Balbec, he relates] as I was suffering from cardiac fatigue, I bent down slowly and cautiously to take off my boots, trying to master my pain. But … [suddenly] my chest … filled with an unknown … presence [and] I was shaken with sobs … The being who had come to my rescue, saving me from barrenness of spirit, was the same who, years before, in a moment of identical distress and loneliness, in a moment when I had nothing left of myself, had come in and had restored me to myself … [T]hat being was myself and something more than me … I had just perceived, in my memory, … the tender … face of my grandmother …   (SG: 209)

As a result of this experience – his becoming again the self that had been the deeply grateful recipient of his grandmother’s love – the narrator comes to realize that, after her death, he has turned into someone who is relatively indifferent toward his grandmother’s memory.

A woman who he had previously been unable to imagine being away from has, without his really noticing it, slipped from his consciousness.  Someone who was most precious to him is hardly remembered.

Until now, that is.

He explains this phenomenon in the following way.

… [T]he existence of our body, which we may compare to a vase enclosing our spiritual nature, … induces us to suppose that all … our past joys, all our sorrows, are perpetually in our possession. … [But] if they remain within us, for most of the time it is in an unknown region where they are of no use to us, and where even the most ordinary are crowded out by memories of a different kind, which preclude any simultaneous occurrence of them in our consciousness. But if the context of sensations in which they are preserved is recaptured, they acquire … the … power of expelling everything that is incompatible with them, of installing alone in us the self that originally lived them

And he goes on to observe:

… [T]he self that I had just suddenly become once again had not existed since that evening long ago when my grandmother had undressed me after my arrival at Balbec ...  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 [then] … been spoken … I was now solely the person who had sought a refuge in his grandmother’s arms, had sought to obliterate the traces of his sorrow by smothering her with kisses, that person whom I should have had … much difficulty in imagining when I was one or other of those [selves] that for some time past I had successively been

Recovering his earlier self - his renewed consciousness of his grandmother – has deeply disturbing elements, however.

I remembered, [he says,] how, an hour before the moment when my grandmother had stooped … to unfasten my boots. as I wandered along the stifling streets … I had felt that I could never, in my need to feel her arms around me, live through the hour that I still had to spend without her. And now that this same need had reawakened, I knew that I might wait hour after hour, that she would never again be at my side. I had just discovered this because I had only just, on feeling her for the first time alive, real, making my heart swell to breaking-point, on finding her at last, learned that I had lost her for ever.  (SG: 211—213)

The recovery of a forgotten self, thus, is not simply an emotional experience; it can make possible an awareness that perhaps could not be gained any other way.

And for the narrator, this awareness – of what his grandmother had been to him and what she is now – will be reaffirmed when he becomes an even more different self, the self who inhabits sleep.

The narrator relates a dream that he had shortly after his experience when unlacing his boots:

I sought in vain for my grandmother’s form, [he tells us,] when I had entered beneath the somber portals [of the world of sleep]; … my father, who was to take me to her, had not yet arrived. Suddenly my breath failed me, I felt my heart turn to stone; I had just remembered that for weeks on end I had forgotten to write to my grandmother. What must she be thinking of me? “Oh God,” I said to myself, “how wretched she must be … She must think that I’ve forgotten her now that she’s dead; how lonely she must be feeling, how deserted! Oh, I must hurry to see her, I mustn’t lose a minute …but where is [she?] How can I have forgotten the address? Will she know me again, I wonder? How can I have forgotten her all these months? It’s so dark, I shan’t be able to find her; the wind is holding me back; but look! there’s my father walking ahead of me; I call out to him: “Where is grandmother? Tell me her address. Is she all right? Are you quite sure she has everything she needs?” “Yes, yes,” says my father, “you needn’t worry. Her nurse is well trained. We send a very small sum from time to time … [Y]our grandmother … sometimes asks what’s become of you. She was told you were going to write a book. She seemed pleased. She wiped away a tear.”  (SG:  216-17)

 And the narrator goes on:

… [I]n a voice choked with tears … I … say to my father: “Quick, quick, her address, take me to her.” But he says: “Well . . . I don’t know whether you will be able to see her. Besides, you know, she’s very frail now …not at all herself, I’m afraid you would find it rather painful. And I can’t remember the exact number of the avenue.” “But tell me. [I pleaded] … it’s not true that the dead have ceased to exist. It can’t possibly be true, in spite of what they say, because grandmother still exists.” My father smiles sadly: “Oh, hardly at all, you know, hardly at all. I think it would be better if you didn’t go. ...  (SG:  218)

To exist, in the sense revealed to the narrator in his dream, is to exist as an object of consciousness, and after one’s death, “hardly at all” is often about best  one can achieve.

This observation has ramifications that the narrator will later note with respect to fame.  One might be remembered because of one’s art - one’s books might be read – for awhile; for a generation perhaps; perhaps for over 80 years, as is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and as is affirmed by our presence here today. But for 800 years? For 8,000?

Sooner or later, one will exist “hardly at all.”

I might note, by the way, that there is no evidence, at least of which I’m aware, that Proust had any familiarity with work by Freud that culminates in his classic, The Interpretation of Dreams.

However, the idea that things of which we are unaware while awake might appear, transformed, while we are asleep, is an idea that was not the sole provenance of the doctor from Vienna.

But more importantly, for Proust, it’s not through an extended  process, like psychoanalysis, that one becomes aware of  what has resided in mental oblivion, but rather – if it happens at all – it ‘s the result of a chance sensory experience like the one the narrator had when unlacing his boots.

The taste of a madeleine cake is the well-known example of where a chance event re-creates, involuntarily, consciousness of the past.

And sensory experiences like this will ultimately form the core of the narrator’s “search for lost time,” although it will be many years before their significance becomes clear to him.

There’s much more, of course, that could be said about this.  But let’s now return to our original passage.

III

I’ve tried so far to illuminate something of what I see as the understanding in In Search of Lost Time of the multiplicity of the self over time, as well as something of how the experience of that multiplicity is depicted by the narrator in some of his relations with women.

I now want to briefly consider the other side of the coin, how the object – rather than the subject – of consciousness changes over time: in our original quote, it’s “the “different Albertines” that appear, “never the same,” before the narrator.

One feature of our perception of others is that it is affected by familiarity.

Before the narrator’s attention becomes focused on Albertine, she is seen as an almost indistinguishable part of a “little band” – indeed a band of “young girls in flower.”

Gradually, he becomes able to more clearly distinguish the different individuals in the band. But even then, he observes:

… [A]s my perception of [the girls] was not yet dulled by familiarity, I still had the faculty … of feeling a profound astonishment every time that I found myself in their presence.  … [T]his astonishment is to some extent due to the fact that the other person on such occasions presents some new facet; but so great is the multiformity of each individual, so abundant the wealth of lines of face and body, so few of which leave any trace, once we are no longer in the presence of the other person, on the arbitrary simplicity of our recollection, since the memory has selected some distinctive feature that had struck us [and] has isolated it, [and often] exaggerated it … the moment this woman is once again standing before us, all the other forgotten qualities which balance that one remembered feature at once assail us, in their confused complexity … [W]e anticipated a peacock, and we find a peony. (BG: 677)

And he goes on to say:

[Side by side with the] inevitable astonishment [caused by the simplicity of our memory of another person] … comes another, born of the difference … between the person whom we saw last time and the one who appears to us today from another angle and shows us a new aspect. The human face is … a whole cluster of faces juxtaposed on different planes so that one does not see them all at once.  (BG: 677-678)

Thus, the fact that Albertine never appears “the same” is in some measure a function of the nature of our memory – it’s simplicity – and the complexity of the object of perception – the human face.

Presumably, what the narrator describes here is potentially present in all of our experience of other people; it’s only that, in the vast majority of cases we don’t care enough to be sensitive to it. In most cases, it ‘s only a very limited version of the social self of another to which we pay attention, a self that, for practical purposes, can be defined by a few simple characteristics.

This would account for why those who love us may notice the slightest variation in our appearance, while the general run of people may be oblivious to the greatest change.

Indeed, it might be that the capacity to be aware of variation in appearance in another is an indication of the character of the relationship – although there’s no reason to think that this is a simple matter. The spouse who doesn’t notice the change in his partner’s hair style , for example, may be much more sensitive to the fact that she looks worried.

In any case, in Swann’s Way, the narrator speaks about how one is experienced by other people:

 … [N]one of us ...  [he writes,] constitute[s] a material whole which is identical for everyone; … our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.  (SW: 23)

For Proust, one thing that the self is, is how others see you. And this is true, he suggests, not only metaphorically, but also literally:

Even the simple act ... [of] “seeing someone we know” [the narrator says] is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him … [I]n the total picture of him which we compose in our minds, those notions have … the principal place, … [E]ach time we see the face or hear the voice it is these notions which we recognize and to which we listen.   

So, one aspect of one’s self is an experience of other people is something like what in contemporary parlance we sometimes call “image.”  

Sartre will call this “being-for-others.”

It’s one of the ways in which a person exists.

And we saw with respect to the narrator’s grandmother how ceasing to exist, in this sense, can be deeply significant.

But it’s a gradual process.

The Fugitive, indeed, is an extended reverie on this process as the narrator painstaking tries to understand Albertine’s many different appearances in an ultimately futile effort to understand, finally, who she really was.

Many first time readers – and even a few established critics – feel that this reverie is rather too extended: I even had a student once say that she just wanted to smack the narrator and tell him: “Get over it!”

But in terms of the overall novel, it serves as an expression of the depth of the narrator’s love, a depth of which the reader – and he, himself – were largely unaware.

There may well be less painful ways to, in effect, follow the Socratic dictum, “Know thyself;”  but it’s one way.  

IV

To conclude.

In the novel  from which the passage was taken with which we began today, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator is seen as especially sensitive to incipient features in the appearance of the young girls which time's passing will reveal:

He says, at one point:

[The] faces [of the young girls] were for the most part blurred with [the] misty effulgence of a dawn from which their actual features had not yet emerged. One saw only a charming glow of color beneath which, what in a few years’ time would be a profile, was not discernible. The profile of today had nothing definitive about it, and could be only a momentary resemblance to some deceased member of the family to whom nature had paid this commemorative courtesy. [I]t comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for, when the body is fixed in an immobility which holds no fresh surprise in store … (BG: 662)

But,  near the end of In Search of Lost Time, in Time Regained, he becomes aware of how time is always at work in how one experiences others.

After a long absence, he returns to Paris and goes to a party where many of the people he had known years before are in attendance and he is fascinated by the different ways in which the women have changed in appearance, with the passing years, but have somehow remained the same in the way that they coped with those changes.

Some women …[he observes]  were still easily recognizable: their faces had remained almost the same and they had merely, … in harmony with the season, put on the grey hair which was their autumn attire. … [T]here were others … whose metamorphosis was so complete … that it was of the art … of certain … gifted mimes … that these fabulous transformations reminded one. The old woman whose charm had resided in her indefinable and melancholy smile … started to use it like a mask in the theatre, as a way of making people laugh. … [W]ith few exceptions the women strained every nerve in a ceaseless struggle against old age …  (375)

He decides that:

Time, the artist, had made of all the sitters portraits that were recognizable; yet they were not likenesses … because he had aged them. He was an artist … who worked very slowly. … one of those painters who keep a work by them for half a lifetime, adding to it year after year until it is completed.  (TR: 360-361)

And the narrator concludes the work with the resolve that, if he is given enough time to accomplish it, he will write a book in which time itself  is “embodied, “ in which years pass" but are “not separated from us.”

It’s been my pleasure today to be able to share with you some of my thoughts about how that resolve is accomplished in In Search of Lost Time with respect to women, self, and time.

I now encourage you to continue the Search.

Thank you very much.