The Captive (II)
Other Minds in Proust's Search
While a deconstructive critic like J. Hillis Miller is not who he has in mind by hosting a critical dialogue between the skeptic and anti-skeptical positivist positions—and in hearing in both something “off,” finding their conclusions mutually unsatisfying— Stanley Cavell’s description of the other minds problem in the essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” offers a powerful corrective to the chapter on Proust in Speech Acts in Literature: “In concentrating on the skeptic’s apparently impossible demands (and neglecting what may be the insight which produces those demands) the anti-skeptic concentrates on the first-person half of the problem of other minds, to the neglect of the third person, as though half believing the skeptic’s repudiation of the third person” (Must We Mean What We Say, 258). Inscrutable and simple as she is, the character of Françoise in the Recherche functions to provide a repository of de-centering third-person knowledge in this autobiographical work. She exposes the blindness and powerlessness of Marcel’s desires from an estranged “objective” vantage; at the same time, she cannot be said legitimately to possess the consciousness of what she knows.
Like an inversion of the boy figured to Coleridge’s chagrin as “thou best philosopher” in Wordsworth’s “Intimations” Ode, the skeptical truths of In Search of Lost Time “do rest” on Françoise, even and especially though she cannot be said to think them by any legitimate philosophical method. Françoise in this sense might be considered the skeptical allegory of “third-person” knowledge, where Wordsworth’s boy in the Ode represents the idealist version of such a figure. Figures of truth that is not epistemological truth, they stand, as Wittgenstein might say, as inner walls held fast by the house around them: as the narrator in Proust in fact does say in the first of the passages I have been reading from the Other Minds symposium. By contrast to Marcel’s projected infatuations and schemes, Françoise’s impassiveness as a third-person object of knowledge supplies many of the novel’s first-person recognitions with their wonderful, harsh, demystifying content that love and knowledge never may coincide.
In The Guermantes Way Françoise “enjoys” her infallibility (passage one in Wisdom) as the result of the skeptical “truth” of her role as the unknowable object to Marcel (passage two in Wisdom)—but she does not propound such a theory of unknowing as a subject in her own right. Nevertheless, the first-person half of the problem of other minds is not deployed to the neglect of third-person point of view, to use Stanley Cavell’s schematic from “Knowing and Acknowledging.” The beginning of the novel is about how Françoise too experiences “exile” from her habitually ingrained knowledge by the move of household from Combray to Paris and the Hotel de Guermantes. For Françoise, not just the routine but her “spiritual wellbeing” is put at risk by this move, which leaves her on “the verge of prostration” (3) through a dislocation of setting for everyday sensory occurrences (even though these go on mostly the same). The move itself exposes the raw nerves behind her previously organized world. Here at the start of the chapter and volume, Françoise thus registers in terms of physiology the epistemological skepticism delivered later as a meditative conclusion in Chapter One. But the establishment of a possible sympathetic exchange between Françoise and Marcel as fellow “neurotic people” never happens. Rather, their relation takes the form of an intimate coldness based on the ironic withholding of sympathy for what is closest to them each and jointly, but held only in turn and by mutually canceling terms. The emotional tenor of their relationship lies somewhere between this ironic indifference and Schadenfreude. The following passage exhibits how denatured from her past world Françoise is after the move, while it ends on the cold company of sorrows between Françoise and Marcel the narrator:
The twittering of the birds at daybreak sounded insipid to Françoise. Every word uttered by the maids upstairs made her jump; disturbed by all their running about, she kept asking herself what they could be doing. In other words, we had moved. True, the servants had made no less commotion in the attics of our old home; but she knew them, she had made of their comings and goings something familiar. […] [F]inding it hard to assimilate the new as I found it easy to abandon the old, I felt myself drawn towards our servant when I saw that moving into a building where she had not received from the hall-porter, who did not yet know us, the marks of respect necessary to her spiritual wellbeing, had brought her positively to the verge of prostration. She alone could understand what I was feeling; certainly her young footman was not the person to do so[….] And so, without giving him a thought, I went straight to Françoise, who, in return for my having laughed at her tears over a departure which had left me cold, now showed an icy indifference to my sorrow, because she shared it” (3-4).
In this vivid passage, the shared vulnerabilities are offset in time and held hostage to one another in the characters’ motivations, with “icy indifference to my sorrow, because she shared” them. In defining what is at stake in the expression that the suffering of another makes a “claim” upon sympathy, Cavell makes a point to say that “the concept of acknowledgment is evidenced equally by its failure as by its success” (Must, 263). Acknowledgment is measurable by more than just its compulsorily positive form of response, of amplitude and of immediacy. Cavell therefore maintains: “The claim of suffering may go unanswered. We may feel lots of things—sympathy, Schadenfreude, nothing” (Must, 262). Rather than seeing it as an improvised failure, so to speak, in the Marcel/ Françoise relationship Proust’s novel locks this shared unanswered structure into memorably reverberating place.
Beyond giving us Cavell’s apposite remark on the surprisingly limited, delayed, or even perverse economy of affective response, “Knowing and Acknowledging” commands my attention for the way it thinks through the picture of accessing another’s mental life as that of contemplating a garden (Must, 260-61; also Claim, 368). In Proust, the sense is that the garden metaphor represents a structural, hierarchical transparency of ordered meaning. Both a master plan, and a mastery of form laid out in perspective: the spectacle is legible to all perhaps, but especially to the sovereign who beholds it from an elevated position and to the rightly positioned subject who beholds the sovereign through the house and gardens, metonymically. To debunk this picture of Françoise’s inner life as laid out all before him, even below him, in space, means giving up Marcel’s classist fantasy of enjoying the servant’s easy unquestioning love. The garden in epistemological terms represents a structure amenable to the viewer’s pleasure. To discredit it is to negate the premise that the mind of another presents a sight laid open and arranged by borders conducive to conventional meaning as well as enjoyment (i.e., to see borders, fences, walls, as sight lines and not as obstruction), and instead accede to the narrator’s “skeptical” characterization of the “inner” self as impenetrable, an elusive shadow. Yet Cavell in the tradition of ordinary language philosophy draws on the metaphor of the garden to invoke a different range of philosophical problems and possibilities. In the context of “Knowing and Acknowledging” the discussion of the garden develops from Cavell’s citation of John Cook and the analogy that we may not be able to see our neighbor’s crocuses (cited in Must, 259)— and thus links to a motif of thinking about flowers and about the membrane of living walls in ordinary language philosophy (including in Wisdom; see In Quest, 68-70). Cavell then does work on the garden analogy so as to get clear to a better vantage upon the human “abilities” and “inabilities” of knowing that this picture of thought may help us perceive when Cook calls it a “circumstance” that conditions our knowledge, that we are not the other in pain, Cavell wonders about what may count as the meaning of such a “permanent circumstance” as embodiment.
If the garden can really serve as an analogy for the skeptical closure of other minds to the first-person subject, we are asked to think of the garden as “sealed or charmed out of reach” (Must, 260): a private walled garden, even a secret garden. These attributes suggest a different lineage than Proust’s French landscape aesthetic. National aesthetic differences will bring their histories to this image and shape its philosophical implications as an analogy. British —and particularly British Romantic—gardens and walls aren’t so tractable. Though their variegation and even their apparent wildness are equally plotted. To take a famous British literary allusion well known to Jane Austen and her contemporaries, Samuel Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (1765) presented the Shakespearean drama as a grandly wild alternative to the neoclassical decorum of an essentially French taste, whether in matters of literature or gardening aesthetics. For Johnson, Shakespeare’s mixed generic modes align with his distinctively British sensibility and are imaged by English nature; and Johnson’s “just representations of general nature” make for a strikingly English hold on the abstract too: “The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers; the composition of Shakespeare is a forest, in which oaks extend their branches, and pines tower in the air, interspersed sometimes with weeds and brambles, and sometimes giving shelter to myrtles and to roses; filling the eye with awful pomp, and gratifying the mind with endless diversity. Other poets display cabinets of precious rarities, minutely finished, wrought into shape, and polished into brightness. Shakespeare opens a mind which contains gold and diamonds in unexhaustible plenty, though clouded by incrustations, debased by impurities, and mingled with the mass of meaner minerals.”[1] In Emma, Augusta Hawkins vacuously insists on the specificity of Surrey as the “garden of England” (E, 248), over Emma’s own complacent enough reminder that the claim is banal and general across many parts of the country. (Though it is Emma who has lived in Surrey all her life, and Augusta Hawkins has only just moved there as Mr. Elton’s fiancée.) At a moment in Volume III when Emma is just beginning to turn decisively toward Knightley and all the values he represents, she sees the grounds of Donwell Abbey as the embodiment of “perfect English character, expressed in perfect English nature” — those of living walls (E, 247).
Even more pointed than the nationalist dimension of comparative landscape aesthetics, Cavell invests in the metaphysics of garden space: “the analogy captures the impression that I am sealed out; but it fails to capture the impression (or fact) of the way in which he is sealed in. He is not in a position to walk in that garden as he pleases, notice the blooms when he chooses: he is impaled upon his knowledge” (Must, 261). This striking image of a larger Shelleyan romance or Jamesian melodrama culminates Cavell’s test of the garden analogy, as it successfully evokes both the image’s premise of a first-person subject shut out from a privileged domain of knowledge, and of a third person characterized as unfree, though kept “within” the epistemically privileged space. At a closely synchronized locus of argument in Part Four The Claim of Reason, Cavell writes (amidst a discussion of various thought pictures): “[a]nother such description which arises in thinking about other minds is that of a garden which I can never enter. But this expression is really (mythologically) about a particular quality of the other’s mind (it is not, say, a jungle, or dump yard or haunted house), and about a particular position I am in relative to it (say one of envy or disgust or fear). Such descriptions emphasize that I do not enter another’s mind the way I enter a place. This is so far not much help; it does not distinguish either from entering, say, into marriage” (Claim, 368). Here a sudden juxtaposition of the “mythological” fiction of entering a closed inner space of the other in other minds skepticism, through the rhetorical trope of syllepsis, to the performative speech act through which one “enters into” a marriage, shakes the usual picture of knowing. So too does Cavell’s language in the paragraph immediately to follow, recognizing in the veil of the body another such “myth”:
The myth of the body as a veil expresses our sense that there is something we cannot see, not merely something we cannot know. It also expresses our confusion about this: Is what we cannot see hidden by the body or hidden within it? “Within it” suggests: it is some place in there, I don’t know where. “By it” suggests: I know where, I just cannot get at it. So we do not know whether the body must be penetrated or turned aside altogether” (Claim, 368).
If contemplating Françoise exhibits the stolid and colder ironies of the “problem” of “other minds,” reading and thinking at even greater length upon Albertine, across the later novels in Proust’s Search, gives endless way to sharper obsessions. “I should have liked, not to tear off her dress to see her body, but through her body to see and read the whole diary of her memories and her future passionate assignations.” “That morning, while Albertine lay asleep and while I was trying to guess what was concealed in her, I received a letter from my mother[…].”[2] This need, either to penetrate or turn aside the body, expresses as symptom the kind of predicament that besets other minds philosophy and calls for reparative reading. Drawing from several thinkers in object-relations psychology, Eve Sedgwick explores how a disposition toward “ ‘benign’ or satiable object relations” might be developed as an alternative to the Freudian dyad of helplessness and omnipotence.[3] Sedgwick in her reading of the Recherche is quick to point out how our framing of the “other minds” problem as a central interest in Proust —even if its “solution” were to be successfully arrived at somehow— can only yield one kind of knowledge. In Proust, this would be essentially one forensic datum of knowledge: whether Odette has been sexually faithful to Swann; or, in the reprise of this theme later on in the novel, whether Albertine continues to have sexual encounters with other women while she is living under one roof, often sharing a bed, with Marcel. Even more than the question whether she loves him or not (since his jealousy rises only when he is no longer in love with Albertine), the narrator’s philosophical and spiritual and narrative obsession pertains to where Albertine exactly has been when she is not in the narrator’s company, and whom she has been with—not excluding where and with whom in the past. “Knowing about the other is, of course, what jealousy wants to do.”[4]
Sedgwick’s interest in the work of Melanie Klein signals the close-range departure from Freud’s terms most clearly.[5] If traditional Freudian commentaries on Proust’s Recherche “have often found the novel’s ending stiflingly marmoreal” as “the story of a successfully consolidated omnipotence,” Sedgwick shows how “[f]or the Kleinian subject,…unlike the Freudian one, omnipotence is a fear at least as much as it is a wish” (The Weather in Proust, 19).[6] “Instead of the undifferentiatedly blind, pleasure- and power-seeking drives of the Freudian infant, which encounter no check but the originally external ones of prohibition or lack, the Kleinian infant experiences a greed whose aggressive and envious component is perceived as posing a mortal threat both to her loved and needed objects and to herself. Thus the perception of oneself as omnipotent is hardly less frightening than the perception of one’s parents as being so” (The Weather in Proust, 20). “The attempt to penetrate the world—more particularly in Proust, to know the secrets of others,” Leo Bersani has written—"continues even after it has been recognized as the displaced repetition of a hopeless attempt to penetrate the self.”[7] Because “I cannot, so to speak, tuck in my head and look around; I cannot lay hands on myself any more intimately than you can” (Claim, 381).
Proust’s way of locating and expressing the problem of other minds as an affordance of embodiment takes 3,000 pages to unfold but in fundamentals is even more direct: “We do not see our bodies, though others do.”[8] The moral sensibility of In Search of Lost Time is, more than anything, constant to the endlessly pleasuring and torturing demonstration of the claim that intellect on its own cannot address this condition. For Proust, the revelatory structures and impassive secretions of art can, triumphantly, in art, only at the cost of an unlivable, final perfection.
[1] Samuel Johnson, Preface to The Plays of William Shakespeare; The Oxford Authors: Samuel Johnson, ed. Donald Greene (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 436. The famous line regarding Shakespeare’s “just representations of general nature” appears on 420.
[2] Marcel Proust, The Captive, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrief and Terence Kilmartin; Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. III (New York: Vintage, 1982), 89, 370.
[3] Eve Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust, 11. A further essay in the collection, “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes” (The Weather in Proust, 123-143), also discusses this alternative version of “a crucial dynamic of omnipotence and powerlessness that emerges from the work of Melanie Klein” (130). Sedgwick’s 2005 Harvard University exhibit, “Works in Fiber, Paper, and Proust,” is the subject of Katherine Hawkins’s essay, “Recreating Eve: Sedgwick’s Art and the Practice of Renewal”; Criticism 52.2. (2011): 271-282.
[4] Peggy Kamuf, “Jealousy Wants Proof”; Book of Addresses (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), 64-78: 64.
[5] Gilles Deleuze pursues another such alternative reading of The Recherche in Proust and Signs [1964/ 1972-3], trans. Richard Howard (New York: Continuum, 2008). The chapter “Cells and Vessels” is particularly resonant in the context of this discussion of The Captive. There Deleuze summarizes: “The image of the sealed vessel, which marks the opposition of one part to uncorresponding environs, here replaces the image of the open box, which marked the position of a content incommensurable with the container” (81).
[6] Chiara Alfano, “Toward an Ordinary Language Psychoanalysis,” develops an approach to ordinary language philosophy in dialogue with the object-relations psychoanalysis of Klein and Winnicott.
[7] Leo Bersani, “Ardent Masturbation (Descartes, Freud, Proust, et al.)”; Thoughts and Things (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015), 37-57: 44.
[8] Proust, The Captive, 351.