The Captive (I)
"Other Minds" in Proust's Search
[Note: These materials emerged as thoughts, now on the side, in connection to my forthcoming book, Jane Austen and Other Minds. This section could be part 1 of 2; or I could let it go! Part 2 addresses Stanley Cavell on the thought-picture of the private experience of another as a garden, and Eve Sedgwick’s The Weather in Proust.]
The self-described purpose of John Wisdom’s book Other Minds (1968) “is to indicate what it is about one person’s knowledge of the mind of another which has led some philosophers to say that such knowledge is impossible, others to say that it is inevitably indirect and others to say that it is no more than knowledge of the reactions of an organism to its environment.”[1] To my knowledge, literary criticism has not remarked upon the fact that Wisdom’s Symposium on Other Minds begins with a quotation from Marcel Proust. It comes from The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time. Wisdom actually cites from two passages that appear close together in the novel. He signs both epigraphs, “—Proust”:
To return to Françoise, …if then in my anger at the thought of being pitied by her I tried to pretend that on the contrary I had scored a distinct success, my lies broke feebly on the wall of her respectful but obvious unbelief. …For she knew the truth […] It was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface, like a garden at which, with all its borders spread out before us, we gaze through a railing, but is a shadow, which we can never succeed in penetrating, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon his words and sometimes upon his actions, though neither words nor actions can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information —a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine, with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.’ (emphasis added)[2]
I have bolded language I associate with ordinary language philosophy, and italicized language that draws from skeptical empiricist idioms and methods of argumentation. Unsurprisingly, given that his topic of “the other minds problem” is triggered by the doubt that we can know the thoughts or feeling of another, Wisdom leaves out a part of this passage that grounds the servant Françoise’s “unbelief” in the erotic and social success of young Marcel in “the consciousness that she enjoyed of her own infallibility.”
This pronouncement by the narrator is philosophical, but it also draws strongly from a stereotype about the French peasant class (and perhaps from another stereotype about women, or older unmarried women, who keep house and gossip) and is based on a servant’s mute relationship to truth beyond words and desires. Françoise’s stolidly skeptical “unbelief” in Marcel’s success, as he seeks to achieve intimacy with Mme de Guermantes, not only hits up against, but rests on, as upon a wall, her sense of her own infallibility as a “consciousness” that she “enjoyed.” The sense in turn of Françoise’s enjoyment of her consciousness does not rest on anything like verification. In fact, it depends upon the opposite premise; Françoise “[knows] the truth” that a fundamental illusion drives all desire to possess the object of knowledge. She somehow knows from the start the demystifying insight that the Recherche must establish through thousands of pages: one cannot know the person one possessively loves. The performative act of falling in love depends on an investiture of value beyond any set of empirical facts to be established concerning anyone’s past life, the subject’s relation to the beloved is necessarily that of illusion and ignorant exclusion from even the most ordinarily available kinds of knowing.
J. Hillis Miller calls this axiom Proust’s “law of ignorance.”[3] Françoise is positioned then not so much as one who knows the object of desire better than Marcel does, but as one who enjoys more definitively her own sense of certitude (“infallibility”). This unmovable conclusiveness in her relation to Marcel depends on the ironic stolidity of a state of mind called “obvious unbelief.” She knows (in the sense of savoir) that Marcel cannot really know Mme de Guermantes (in the sense, beyond social acquaintance, of an intimate, epistemologically penetrating connaitre). Writing more recently about the structure of Marcel’s erotic and phantasmal relation to Albertine, Anne Carson substitutes for the impersonality of “Proust’s Law” the at-once predictable and perverse logic of Marcel’s “theory of desire”; Marcel “equates possession of another person with erasure of the otherness of her mind, while at the same time positing otherness as what makes another person desirable.”[4] Both Miller’s and Carson’s readings of the structure of desire in Proust present their own incorrigible and unlivable versions (one deconstructive, the other feminist) of the problem of skepticism in erotic life.
The bedrock stance of infallibility that Françoise enjoys with respect to Marcel relies on the skeptical withdrawal of all direct claims to knowledge—as the next passage Wisdom brings into his merged quotation from the start of the Other Minds Symposium will attest: “It was she who first gave me the idea that a person does not (as I had imagined) stand motionless and clear before our eyes with his merits, his defects, his plans, his intentions with regard to ourself exposed on his surface, like a garden at which, with all its borders spread out before us, we gaze through a railing, but is a shadow, which we can never succeed in penetrating.”[5] David Hume himself could have authored the summary that “there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs.” Hillis Miller too reads this “second” Proust passage in Speech Acts in Literature, betraying no reference to Wisdom’s context for it; and he takes from this second passage a familiar move from skeptical epistemology to an aporetic logic; i.e., just the sort of predicament that requires a performative act of language to adjudicate, by positing an efficacious language by force, without revelatory depth or secret meaning.[6] Miller’s claim that we (here “we” means the narrator, Marcel himself, and the reader) cannot know whether Françoise loves or hates Marcel serves as a figure for the other we seek to know as a “shadow” (ombre, 184). For Hillis Miller the other is a shadow rather than a garden, and that state of unknowing shapes the act of reading around an aporetic “black hole” (185).
Beyond his formulation of “Proust’s law” regarding knowledge in love, Hillis Miller apodictically states that “we have no direct access to the mind and heart of another” as a universal claim (183). “There is absolutely no way to tell for sure” what lies in the mind and the heart of another (185), and specifically in Proust whether the truth is that Françoise loves Marcel, or if she thinks he is not worth the rope it would take to hang him. The older Marcel will learn that Françoise has in fact said just this to her fellow servant Jupien: “When Françoise, in the evening, was nice to me, and asked my permission to sit in my room, it seemed to me that her face became transparent and that I could see the kindness and honesty that lay beneath. But Jupien, who had lapses into indiscretion of which I learned only later, revealed afterwards that she had told him that I was not worth the price of a rope to hang me” (64).
Hillis Miller’s engagement with the Proustian inflection of possessive erotic love and the other minds problem makes for exemplary criticism, and his accountings especially of two other portions of The Guermantes Way (via passages about the telephone and Marcel’s grandmother, and about Robert St Loup and his mistress, the actress Rachel) are tour de force readings. Still, there are more provisions to draw out from the two short sections that Wisdom quotes, and from the realization (in the second passage) that the mind of Françoise is not laid open in a structurally transparent manner like a formal French garden.[7] Hillis Miller does not cite from the first passage that Wisdom quotes, and he seems to miss something important partly in consequence. The first characterization of Françoise’s knowledge as the consciousness that she is infallible (a moment that Wisdom for his part omits too) depends on the sort of transposition of knowledge that results from involutions of narrative time. In order to recognize the full meaning of Françoise’s stolidly anti-epistemological relation to knowingness in the first passage (that is, to recognize in it more than just a stereotypical code of “peasant,” “servant,” or “female” knowledge: the sorts of clichés of truth one finds in the codes of Roland Barthes’s S/Z), one already needs to have the later passage in mind (Moncrief and Kilmartin, 64, 62). The flat assertion that Françoise knows of Marcel’s social failure with certainty takes its richest dimension of meaning from the later realization that she herself is not knowable by analogy to a formal garden’s layout.[8] Thus, while Hillis Miller dexterously handles the tricky aspects of the first-person subject of knowledge, he does not address the interplay of the subject and object of knowing, knowing’s manifold of subject locations, nor does he tease out how these positions may inform and complicate each other—say, in a conversation, or in a multifaceted novel with many characters and a rich relation to narrative voice and time.[9] In other words, Hillis Miller does not here analyze the co-implicated asymmetries of active and passive modes of knowledge. It awaits another kind of project like Anne Carson’s Albertine Workout to explore fully—to test out an exploratory method that models experience in full exposure— the otherwise “passive” bodies and minds in Proust, such as Françoise and Albertine.
[1] John Wisdom, Other Minds, unpaginated preface.
[2] Quoted in John Wisdom, Other Minds, 206. Compare The Guermantes Way, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin; Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. II (New York: Vintage, 1982), 62, 64,
[3] J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature, 182; further citations in text.
[4] Anne Carson, The Albertine Workout (New York: New Directions, 2014), 9. A broader comparison may be drawn to the status of knowledge in the films of Alfred Hitchcock: “[i]n Hitchcock’s films, it seems, there are only three options: to know too little, to know too much (however little that is), and to know a whole lot that is entirely plausible and completely wrong. Michael Wood, Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (Boston and New York: New Harvest, 2015), 24.
[5] Wisdom, Other Minds, 206.
[6] Compare Proust’s language in The Guermantes Way, 64.
[7] In a chapter titled “The Gardens” in his book The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust (New York: Macmillan, 1962), Howard Moss reminds that Marcel’s “incurable disease, asthma” keeps him from the flowers he loves; “he is forbidden the garden forever” (41).
[8] Compare, at a larger formal level, the narrator Marcel’s realization only much later in the Search that there is a shortcut connecting the Guermantes Way to the Méséglise Way.
[9] In between passages I have already cited (for shorthand): 1) “not worth the price of a rope…” ; and 2) not like a garden but “a shadow which we can never penetrate,” Proust’s narrator shares the following meditation—amazing in that it sympathetically imagines the apprehensions of alien creatures more readily than it reaches to the thoughts of Françoise:
These words of Jupien’s set up at once before my eyes, in new and strange colours, a print of my relations with Françoise so different from the one which I often took pleasure in contemplating and in which, without the least shadow of doubt, Françoise adored me and lost no opportunity of singing my praises, that I realised that it is not only the physical world that differs from the aspect in which we see it; that all reality is perhaps equally dissimilar from what we believe ourselves to be directly perceiving and which we compose with the aid of ideas that do not reveal themselves but are none the less efficacious, just as the trees, the sun and the sky would not be the same as what we see if they were apprehended by creatures having eyes differently constituted from ours, or else endowed for that purpose with organs other than eyes, which would furnish equivalents of trees and sky and sun, though not visual ones. However that might be, this sudden glimpse that Jupien afforded me of the real world appalled me. And yet it concerned only Françoise, about whom I cared little (64)