Proust, Freud, and The Art of Forgetting

Proust, Freud, and the Art of Forgetting
Author(s): Jerry Aline Flieger

Source: SubStance, Vol. 9, No. 4, Issue 29 (1980), pp. 66-82
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3684042
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Proust, Freud, and the Art of Forgetting
JERRY ALINE FLIEGER
C'est pourquoi la meilleure partie de notre m6moire est hors de

nous ... en nous pour mieux dire, mais derobee ia nos propres
regards, dans un oubli plus ou moins prolong6
Prouse, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs'
Incomplete and dim memories of the past.., .are a great

incentive to the artist, for he is free to fill in the gaps according
to the behests of his imagination
Freud, Moses and Monotheism2
Proust's oeuvre is less a work of memory than a play of forgetfulness.

Rather than establishing the primacy of regained memory in the work of art,
Proust's novel almost seems to function like a creative manuel d'usage on "how
to lose presence of mind." And this absent-minded quality, it seems to me,
accounts for the intensely poetic nature of the Proustian narrative, which even
while it recounts a linear story, a chronological recit, nonetheless leaves itself
open to poetic detours, extended prose poems in the text. In this paper, I
shall read Proust as an absent-minded poet, and I shall suggest that poetic
oubli has profound consequences for the order of the Proustian narrative, the
assembly of Proust's prose. Thanks to oubli, rather than memory, Proust's
syntactical discourse bears the dispersive marks of poetry, or figure.3
In the final scenes of Le temps retrouvi, Marcel is plagued by absent-
mindedness; he mislays objects, forgets appointments, neglects correspon-
dence. His forgetful introversion is both a precondition and a symptom of
artistic transport: Marcel's discovery of a vocation coincides with this vacation
from ordinary daily commerce, with his loss of mooring in the mundane. Set
adrift by his broken ties with the external world, his attention emptied of its
usual "central" concerns, the antisocial artist has become "ex-centric," disori-
ented, given over to a kind of amnesiac wandering among a jumble of
resurrected images and experiences. For Proust, writing seems to be a
"diversionary," side-tracked process, which requires that the artist forget to
Sub-Stance N? 29, 1981 66

Flieger 67
carry on his habitual daily

a representation of past e
it is an absenting of the
Excused from "real life,"
autobiographical fact, he
becomes his histoire.
Like Proust, Freud describes the writer as a forgetful being, "whose realm
is not of this world" ("Creative Writers and Daydreaming" [1908]). In Freud's
view, the artist, like the dreamer, gives free play to forgotten infantile material
and mobilizes unconscious processes "instead of suppressing them with
conscious criticism" (Standard Edition 9:14). Indeed, when Freud repeatedly
characterizes the moment of poetic inspiration as a dreamlike experience, a
moment when repressed material surges into an altered consciousness, he
seems to be describing a phenomenon very like Proust's moments bienheureux
(those moments of sudden artistic revelation provoked by a fecund image-
object such as the madeleine). Throughout Proust's work, the moment bien-
heureux is characterized by a lapse of attention: the madeleine, for instance, will
yield its poetic content only when Marcel ceases to direct his concentrated
attention towards it, when he displaces this focal point from the center of his
consciousness.4 Like a Freudian slip-also called a lapse or parapraxis-the
moment bienheureux is a lapse, a double movement involving both a break in the
ongoing surface narrative, and a sudden, symptomatic intrusion of forgotten
material into that narrative. This intrusion is invariably experienced when
the narrating consciousness is off-guard, that is, when Marcel is ill, tired, or
disoriented.
Freud's account of lapsus-parapraxis provides a hint as to the reason for th
intensely poetic nature of these intrusions in the narrative. In The Psychopa
thology of Everyday Life (1901), Freud writes that parapraxis is often couched in
figured, "overdetermined" language; that is, language that can be taken
more than one way, and whose double meaning suggests a relation wit
repressed unconscious material. In Freud's view, this symptomatic language
has been worked by the same "techniques" of the unconscious as those whic
"work" the psychic activities of dreaming and joking.5 The principal "tech-
niques" at work in forgetting, as well as in joking and dreaming, are
condensation (the use of a single word, symbol, or image to express several
meanings) and displacement (the scrambling of logical order and the relega
tion of "central" theme or subject to a peripheral position).
In a later essay (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis [1938]), Freud maintains th
"when the unconscious material makes its way into the ego, it brings its ow
modes of working along with it .. . invading conquerors govern a conquered
country according to their own [judicial system]." In short, Freud characteri
the figured language of parapraxis as an invasion of rational territory. And
is doubly intrusive: first, because as overdetermined language it bears t
imprint of "alien" primary processes, the "modes of working" of the uncon
scious; second, because it intrudes upon, and deflects, the intended consciou
statement from its intended, conscious purpose. (Parapraxis throws in
68 Flieger
question-and sometim
something very differe
reveals and diverts.
Similarly, the nodal points of Proust's work, the temporally and imagisti-
cally overdetermined moments bienheureux, interrupt the chronological narra-
tive and explode into lengthy digressions. The entire Swann sub-plot, for
instance, which emerges from Marcel's cup of tea, is a chronological lapse, a
flashback which disrupts the linear progress of the narrative. Like a Freudian
slip, the Swann episode both diverts and reveals: it diverts both Marcel and
the reader from going on with the linear narrative, "enter-taining" them in a
digression; and it reveals a substratum of unconscious, problematic material.
(Marcel's own tendency to obsessive jealousy is exposed by his intense interest
in Swann's jealousy.) The fecund image-figure (the madeleine) literally ex-
plodes in the text, derailing the narrative train of thought.
Elaborating on Freud's view of this refractory nature of overdetermined
linguistic phenomena, J.-F. Lyotard has characterized "figure" as the "other"
of linear discourse (in Discours, Figure). Proust's quest, it seems to me, can be
considered an attempt to multiply the incidence of such "alien" poetic
intrusions on the linear narrative, to provoke the encounter with "that strange
unknown state" to which Marcel refers in Combray. For poetic trope to do its
imagistic work, poeticizing the text, Marcel's ricit must become porous: it must
"forget itself" long enough to permit the eruption of poetic figure onto its
surface. The disorienting collision with the moment bienheureux hearkens back
to Marcel's infantile experience, superimposing a forgotten past on a tempo-
rarily forgotten (displaced) present.
While I am not proposing to psychoanalyze Proust or his work, I think it is
illuminating to consult Freud's theory on the mechanism of forgetting as well
as his views on the production of the "figured" work of art, and to suggest the
confluence of this theory with the thematic and formal use of oubli in Proust's
novel. My reading, moreover, differs from other "Freudian" studies of Proust
(most notably, the work of Serge Doubrovsky and of Leo Bersani)6 in two
principal ways. First, my reading focuses on a single Freudian concept-that
of forgetting as repression of problematic material-as the key to under-
standing Proust's "absent-minded" art.7 This focus on oubli (rather than on
memory) as the generating principle in Proust's work results in a very
different emphasis than that of the work of either Doubrovsky or Bersani,
both of whom tend to see Proust's writing as an effort at organization of a
personality, rather than a willful opening to a dispersal of narrative identity.
Second, rather than attempting a clinical reading of Proust's own fantasmes
(as Doubrovsky has done), my own reading will concentrate on the character
Marcel's forgetfulness as a "symptom" of the artistic frame of mind. In other
words, this reading operates in the register of esthetic theory, considering the
novel as Proust's demonstration of the "forgetful" nature of art, rather than as
a testimony to Proust's own (unconscious) private mythology.8
I might add that Proust and Freud have a parallel status in my study:
rather than thinking of Proust as artist and Freud as theoretician, I prefer to
Flieger 69
consider both writers as

their theoretical speculati
my remarks around two
imagery and dream/sleep
the works of both men.
shall suggest, it is forge
figuration, opening the
II
on se blottit la tete da
plus disparates.. .qu'
technique des oiseaux
Proust, Co
When Marcel settles in f

activities, weaving a "nes
should choose the imag
nocturnal consciousness
writing (as text-making-
the act of weaving with t
daily and "remember" th
doubly evocative. First, P
imaginative work, includ
(fictum: formed, fashion
artifact, which binds t
"knots" of significance. A
of thinking of the role p
Daily activity and night
of Proust's fabric. As w
repeated intersection o
atemporal image-events-t
a loom, forgotten materi
horizontal surface narr
Marcel's surface conscio
reveals the spaces betwee
work, when scrutinized,
as the flashback to Swann
as the celebrated reference to Albertine as Rosemonde in Sodome et Gomorrhe.
These lapses bear witness to the work of a certain oubli in the text, either on
70 Flieger
the part of the narrating per
permitted the text to be "fig
the text, like the gaps betwee
two distinct modes in the
absence, a point of articulati
work.
In commenting upon the na
refers to the interplay of tw
element de complexite, or
rime,... on sent deux systlme
metrique?" (Guermantes, II
discursive, the expression
second is figurative (here, t
which shape the expression
similar dual movement form
pierced, textured, or embroid
imaginative revery (flowers
This interweaving of two m
*lement de la beaute"-works at several levels in the text: as a source of
thematic material, as a device of structuration and as a determinant of
These two intertwining strands of Proust's text can be described in
or less symmetrical terms. The first "discursive" mode, which I have as
ed with "dailiness," entails (thematically) an excursion out into the
world, and an analysis and cataloguing of the phenomena encountered
This mode finds its stylistic expression in the use of an analytic
narrating voice, given to axiomatic observations (in Marcel's pithy obser
about his society, for instance). Thus one impetus of the text is Marcel'
impulse, governed by contiguity (Marcel comments upon what he enco
out there, in his vicinity) as well as by continuity (of events which "take pla
ordinary linear time). This horizontal narrative axis, implying a s
excursion-a textual equivalent of Marcel's daily "promenades"-tend
metonymic in character, relating successive events in a "train of thou
diachronic recording of experience, a research, is one axis of Proust's rec
The second axis, which I have termed "nightliness" because of its on
quality, is also literally a recherche since it seeks repeatedly (re-cherch
renew contact with forgotten figurative material, plunging repeatedly i
submerged store of latent memory. Like the dream-work in Freudian th
this mode violates time-order by retrieving past events at random. It als
havoc with space-order, first (figuratively) in its capacity for "displacem
the events of Marcel's life out of their lived order; and second (physically
tendency to disorient Marcel's spatial perspective. (At those moments
text which are under the sway of the "nightly" mode, the narrator expe
a sensation of vertige: for instance, when he is whirled about in the "fa
magique" at the novel's beginning; or when, in the final volume, he is "
up" in the courtyard by the uneven paving stones.) Whereas the "daily
is fashioned from the givens of waking experience, the "nightly" mode
Flieger 71
text is composed of what is

(the forgotten or repressed
from below Marcel's surfa
sion or depth to the text. In
text tends to be metaphor
in "superimposed" images s
ence by the layers of "sim
unconscious.
In the first volume of the novel, there are two passages in particu
illustrate the interaction/intersection of the two distinct modes-discursive
and figurative-in the literary work. The first of these passages, which
describes the reading aloud of Sand's Francois le Champi to the child Marcel,
focuses upon the role of the reader-listener in introducing the figurative
mode into his experience of a linear discursive text. In this passage, it is either
Marcel himself who imposes gaps upon the flow of the story, by virtue of his
lapse of attention ("je revassais souvent, pendant des pages entieres" [I, 42]),
or his mother, the censoring reader, who leaves out all the "unsuitable" love
scenes. This two-way auditory edliting colors the work, lending it mysterious
overtones, which the child Marcel imputes to the impenetrability of its title:
"Aussi tous les changements bizarres qui se produisent... me paraissaient
empreints d'un profond mystbre dont je me figurais volontiers que la source
devait etre dans ce nom inconnu et si doux de 'Champi' qui mettait sur
l'enfant, qui le portait sans que je susse pourquoi, sa couleur vive, em-
pourprde, et charmante" (I, 42). Marcel goes on to say that this "forgetting" of
parts of the text results in the intermingling of two distinct voices: the text's
mellifluous and familiar tone, endowed with "une sorte de vie sentimentale et
continue" is periodically interrupted by "une accentuation 6trange," produced
either by the frequent unexplained hiatus in the narrative (the result of censor-
ship or distraction), or by Sand's use of archaic expressions, opaque to the child.
The second passage, also from Combray, in which Proust characterizes
fiction as an interaction of two modes, is a description of Bergotte's style. In
this passage, which provides a sort of stylistic paradigm for Proust's own work,
it is not only the reader's encounter with the text, but the writing itself which
effects an intertwining of two modes, one discursive, the other figurative.
Marcel distinguishes between his appreciation, on the one hand, of Bergotte's
absorbing story-line ("tracant a la surface de ma pensee une figure purement
lineaire" [I, 94]) and the experience, on the other hand, of several purely
poetic moments in the text, passages which appeal to a submerged and ordinarily
inaccessible region of his psyche ("une region plus profonde de moi-
meme... d'ou les obstacles semblaient avoir %te enlev6s" [I, 94]). These
poetic moments dimensionalize 1Bergotte's text, springing, as they do, from a
region below the surface ricit, furnishing it with a sort of "6paisseur de
volume, dont (l'esprit de Marcel) semblait agrandi" (I, 94).
This passage illustrates that the interworkings of two modes in fiction can
function as a theme of Proust's text. At the same time, it suggests how this
weaving of two modes exceeds the thematic register of the novel and
72 Flieger
permeates the mode of e

The modular constructi
spersed with poetic digr
tern," in which the int
principle, shaping the no
two modes in strictly stru
"axes" of expression: the
the vertical or paradigm
Language [The Hague: Mo
is fundamentally metony
Jakobsen maintains that
prose, on the other ha
Jakobsen defines poetry
onto the syntagmatic ax
Jakobsen's structural vie
Proust's "poetic prose"
material "projects" itself
thought" by delving into
surface recit. Nor is Pr
distinct kinds of content:
example, Proust's idiosyn
specificity of the partic
communicate the horizon
unusual use of verb ten
novel, Proust follows a te
two impulses.
Like Proust, Freud has r
workings of the artist's
(1908), Freud depicts the
imaginative material on
We might say that a fanta

moments of time which our ideation involves. Mental work is linked to some current
impression, some provoking occasion which has been able to arouse one of th
subject's major wishes. From there it harks back to a memory of an earlier
experience (usually an infantile one) in which the wish was fulfilled; and now it
creates a situation relating to the future which represents the fulfillment of the wish.
Thus past, present, and future are strung together, as it were, on the thread of the wish that
runs through them all. (Standard Edition 9:147)
For Freud as for Proust, the artist's fantasy is a "craft," a horizontal thread
ornamented with "gems" of material gleaned from three temporal periods,
including the "infantile" material which has been forgotten and stored in the
unconscious. Moreover, Freud's image, like Proust's weaving analogy, sug
gests that artistic fantasy does violence to linear time: it ignores chronologica
Flieger 73
law, disregarding the "d

material from the past, p
periods of time. And in F
also entails a compacting
densed" like drops of mo
ating their "natural" ch
from its chronological or
Now this faculty of th
ordinary logic of time
stringing along a fictive f
unrelated to the requirem
between logically unrelat
ment in favor of his ow
chronological time must
before the artistic operat
that character evolution is the "confrontation between two eras." This
temporal confrontation is facilitated by the artistic prerogative to displac
image or an event in time, juxtaposing it to an image/event far removed
time; this juxtaposition requires the ignoring (forgetting) of all the interc
ing events, the collapsing of the time in which the events "take place." L
Freud's threaded artistic fantasy, Proust's development of character
stringing of contrasting glimpses on the thread of a single name, suppres
intervening years.
The whole picture of any character is thus a fragmented one: charact
apprehended in intermittent and successive glimpses, out of temporal or
Similarly, the displacement of an image in space can provoke the artistic vi
Marcel's experience of the visual dislocations of the bell towers of Martinv
as they are framed by the window of the moving car, is accompanied by
intuition of an artistic significance underlying this dislocated perception:
constatant le deplacement de leurs lignes ... je sentais queje n'allais pas au
de mon impression" (I, 180). In the case of spatial displacement, as we
temporal displacement, it is the suppression (forgetting) of interval
sudden and discontinuous juxtaposition of images, which produces
temporal/spatial montage.
In other words, Proust's artist fantasizes metaphorically, neglecting sp
and temporal interval in order to superimpose (and thus "overdetermine"
images. In still another textile image, repeated several times in Le te
retrouve, Proust likens the artist's work to the making of a dress, a sort
patchwork pieced together from the stuff of life. The novelist snips at
"material" of his life, displacing events from their lived context and repla
them in his text. The incidents of Proust's autobiographical fiction are t
"cut-outs" from the writer's experience, laid out according to a pattern w
calls for the interplay of linear rdcit and poetic figure. This artist's visi
fashions a patchwork garment, tailored to suit his creative wish.
74 Flieger
III
Le seul veritable voyage, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de

nouveaux paysages, mais d'avoir d'autres yeux, de voir l'univers
avec les yeux d'un autre, de cent autres; avec un Bergotte, ave
un Elstir, nous volons vraiment d' toiles en etoiles
La prisonniere (III, 258)
Like the dream, which Freud tells us is fashioned from "daily resid
Proust's fiction is a reworking of raw material drawn from life. In Prou
terms, this rearrangement-reworking of lived experience is equivale
"seeing the universe through the eyes of another" ("un autre"): the artis
vision, like a filter or a deforming lens, furnishes an altered and alienat
perspective.'0 Marcel's ability to "see through other eyes," moreover, seem
require the closing of daytime eyes and the opening of oneiric mod
perception. The writer's "other" eyes often seem to be the eyes of his "ot
his unconscious.
Indeed, although much has been written about Proust's sleepless nights
his novel seems to me to be less a product of insomnia than of a cert
creative sleepiness, a somnolence which favors the intrusion of drea
material and dream "technique" onto wakeful consciousness. Like the dream
who "enters that forgetful state, where (he) wants to know nothing of t
outside world" (Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Standard Edition
15:88), Marcel periodically sets aside his waking modes of perception
allowing poetic dreamlike material to invade a receptive consciousne
This "invasion" of unconscious material plays havoc with Marcel's habi
perception and logic, allowing his imagination to embark on "le seul verit
voyage," a free flight in a twilight realm of disparate images ("nous volon
vraiment d' toiles en 6toiles" [III, 258]).
Significantly, this "voyage" seems to have profound consequences
Marcel's sense of identity, his coherent organization of personality. T
opening to the "other eyes" of his own unconscious always proves disorien
ing: Marcel is confused not only as to where he is (freed from gravity, the artis
"sails through space") but also as to who he is (he momentarily "sees stars
The "alien" vision, in other words, diffuses Marcel's sense of identity, robb
him of his habitual focal point: the "grounded" vision of one-point persp
tive, focused sharply in the "I." At those moments when unconscious mate
invades Marcel's consciousness, it brings with it its own highly mobile mod
perception; and Marcel is "moved" so rapidly that not only is his perceive
universe "transformed" in the process, but even his own edges seem blur
His self-image is so out of focus as to be unrecognizable: the very eyes thro
which he views the astral scenery seem to belong to an "other." At other ti
the artistic vision seems to be not blurry but refractory, producin
Flieger 75
kaleidoscopic series of pro

self sees not with "other
from access to a rapidly
perspective sometimes b
spectives, made possible b
"overdetermined" in Marcel's dreamlike state.
In other words, the artist's altered and disordered mode of seeing bea
the imprint of primary process (dream) thinking. In Proust's novel, the ar
work-"seeing with other eyes"--is analogous to dreaming in three im
tant ways. First, like the "dream-work," the writer's work distorts
disguises the "givens" of experience, "overdetermining" certain elem
Second, the writer's altered vision mobilizes the elements of the text, "dis
ing" and rearranging the materials of the fiction, endowing the text with
free motility of dream ("moving" the reader, like the artist/dreamer him
"d'itoile en ttoile"). And third, the writer's "other" vision disrupts ordin
patterns of thinking-just as lapse into dream/revery interrupts wak
thought-both by disregarding diurnal time and space order, and
introducing textual digressions which interrupt the flow of the narrative
These "dream" operations - mobilization, distortion, interruption- res
in what Proust terms the "vibration interne" of the artist's vision (I, 13
"moving" internal vision which the writer projects outward onto ext
objects ("on cherche 'a retrouver dans les choses, devenues par la precieuse
reflet que notre dme a projete sur elles [I, 137, my emphasis]). The write
transforming vision is like the whirling "magic lantern" lens, which pro
images upon the familiar objects of Marcel's room, and in so doing, t
forms and disguises Marcel's everyday surroundings." Like the writer's t
the lantern show is a dreamlike spectacle, in which the images are m
(across the wall) in an interrupted, intermittent sequence of moveme
(The frames of the lantern's turning lens interrupt the flow of the proje
images, causing them to flicker; the image moves jerkily, "d'un pas saccad
9].) As Golo's image makes its halting progress across the room, it is disto
reshaped by the objects upon which it is projected ("Golo s'arrangeait de
objet genant qu'il rencontrait en le prenant comme ossature" [I, 10]).
these background objects are likewise transformed by the projected imag
"Ce bouton de la porte de ma chambre . .. le voilai qui servait maintenant
corps astral 't Golo" (I, 10). (The allusion to Golo's "starlike body" recalls
flickering "heavenly bodies" to which the artist's flight-"d'6toile en 6toi
leads the reader.)
The familiar object upon which the image is superimposed-Marc
door knob-is thus "overdetermined" by the projection, providing a spect
which is at once entrancing and disorienting. As in a dream, ordinary ob
("daily residue") are worked by an alien vision, which the child Ma
experiences as a disquieting intrusion upon his daily surrondings: "Maisje
peux pas dire quel malaise me causait pourtant cette intrusion du myster
de la beaut6" (I, 10). Like the dreamer, Marcel remains under the spell of
magic lantern's images until that moment when-awakened by the di
76 Flieger
bell-he hastens from his transformed room to the comfort of more familiar
surroundings (where the family awaits him, ready to re-establish his identity,
his place as cherished child, the "center" of maternal attention).
The lantern show, then, which causes Marcel to "see with new eyes," works
as an extended metaphor for the text itself, and suggests ways in which
writing is like dreaming. Like Proust's novel, the lantern's "story" unfolds in
fits and starts, in dreamlike flickering images, rather than in an orderly parade
of images. And for Proust, such intermittent movement seems to be not only
characteristic of the artist's "other" perception, but is actually constitutive of the
artistic vision. In Le temps retrouve, for instance, Proust writes that linear
representation, a "parade" of events, is the antithesis of the novelist's art:
"Quelques-uns voulaient que le roman ffit une sorte de defile cinemato-
graphique des choses. Cette conception 6tait absurde. Rien ne s'6loigne plus
de ce que nous avons apercu en r6alit6 qu'une telle vue cinematographique"
(III, 882-83). The artist's "other" vision, then, produces a non-linear,
discontinuous text. Rather than merely imitating or reproducing an exterior
order, this text moves according to an interior associative logic, like a dream.
In this dream, Marcel Proust has become his own "other," a recognizable but
alienated "I," who is and is not the historical Proust. Thus the text's "dream"
mode challenges not only the character Marcel's coherent focus, his sense of a
single defined self, but it also challenges Proust's own "authorized" identity.
The altered artistic vision requires not a finding of self, but a forgetful
alienation from self, seeing through other "I's."
The opening pages of Proust's novel suggest how this "altered," "moving"
vision entails a dislocation of linear time. In these opening passages, where the
reader is "moved" by the flux and plasticity of Marcel's semi-conscious revery,
time has lost its power of orientation. (Witness the temporal non-specificity of
Proust's opening line: "Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.")
Marcel's sleep has transformed linear into circular time, in which all moments
have become equidistant and retrievable ("Un homme qui dort tient en cercle
autour de lui le fil des heures" [I, 5]). It is interesting to note the striking
similarity between Proust's image of the sleeper circumscribed by the "hours"
of his life, and Freud's description of a child at play, in Beyond the Pleasure
Principle (1920). In Freud's text, the child holds a toy at the end of a thread ("un
fil") so that he may discard and retrieve it at will (the celebrated 'fort-da"
game); the toy thus circumscribes the child's circular space, the area of his
"play."'3 Like the infant player described by Freud, who exercises complete
control over his playthings, Proust's dreamy artist enjoys unlimited access to
the events of his life (his "daily residue"), the events with which he plays in his
fiction, retrieving them at will without regard to chronology. Proust's circular
tale (which ends where it begins, in a supine revery) is thus "spun;" and it is
this spinning, entailing a blurring/distortion of diurnal order, which gives rise
to the new transforming vision. Since the artist's mnemonic retrieval of events
is fundamentally non-linear, "out of order," "seeing with other eyes" is a
disorderly activity, which refuses to play by the rules of (wakeful) ordered
perception.
Flieger 77
Indeed, this "disorderly

which, according to Freu
the system Unconscious": n
process (motility of cathex
reality."'4 The first of t
discussed more fully in F
and a neglect of logical tr
the frequent inconsiste
introduction). The second
is what Freud terms the
imagistically in Proust's
well as thematically, by
object to another, thanks
of the unconscious listed
for external reality"-th
sence of Proust's recherch
world, in a synchronic
uncorroded by time, and
Forgetfulness contribut
all of which imply a disto
in "The Psychopathology
faithfully reported, is su
is characterized as either
non-tendentious, "norma
censorship, a repression o
its association with ear
Psychopathology of Every
forgetting, asserting tha
repression."'6 He goes o
retained in the unconscio
which they were first
adopted in their furthe
suggests that the repre
consciousness, when inh
(repression) thus perform
and preserving memory
conscious.
Normal or non-tendentious forgetting, on the other hand, involves the
blurring through time of non-problematic, ordinary experience; simil
events become "condensed" and confused because of their lack of distinction
one from the other ("the traces that have grown indifferent succ
unrelentingly to the process of condensation").'8 Thus unconscious select
both causes some aspects of experience to drop out, to be repr
(tendentious forgetting), and deforms/condenses the aspects that ar
tained, are remembered (non-tendentious forgetting). Conscious memory
worked surface, the result of selective omissions, condensations, and over-
78 Flieger
lappings. In other word

getfulness.
In Proust's novel, forgetting "figures" the "remembered" text in two ways.
First, tendentious forgetting/repression necessarily precedes the return of the
repressed in Marcel's memory, the eruption of "figure" on his linear recollec-
tion (most notably in the moment bienheureux, but also in frequent poetic
digressions of a highly metaphoric nature, associated with a whole network of
infantile experience at Combray). But even before the forgotten material
returns, thrusting itself upon consciousness, Marcel's memory is already
"figured;" "normal forgetting" has remoulded events into a condensed version,
through time. This figurative forgetfulness is evinced, for example, by
Marcel's blending, in recollection, of all of the faces of "les jeunes filles en
fleur" into a single poetically superimposed visage: "Elles restaient press6es
l'une contre l'autre... Parfois... un fou rire les agitait toutes 'a la fois,
effagant, confondant ces visages indecis et grimagants dans la gelee d'une
seule grappe scintillatrice et tremblante" (II, 823-24).
In this case, Marcel's remembrance is "poeticized": his indistinct ("forget-
ful") perception "condenses" the faces of the girls like dew on the vine. And
forgetfulness not only "works" Marcel's perception, but it also actually spawns
invention: thanks to faults of memory the writer is called upon to supplement
his recollection (in "la r6cr6ation d'impressions qu'il [faut] approfondir,
eclairer, transformer en equivalents" [III, 1044]). His creative re-membering
(reassembly) of the past is preceded and generated by its dis-membering in
oubli. Indeed, the entire fiction itself is a false memory, a "screen memory" of
sorts (Freud's term for seemingly "complete" and "innocent" memories which
in fact serve to cloak repressed material),'9 which conceals and to some extent
compensates for certain problematic experiences in Proust's own life.20 This
capacity to supplement and transform the author's incomplete or problematic
recollection suggests still another analogy between writing and dreaming: like
a dream, Proust's "forgetful" text affords a "wish fulfillment" of sorts.
Now this rearrangement/supplementation results not only in a mobile and
unfamiliar vision ("seeing with other eyes") but in a multiple vision as well
("seeing with the eyes of a hundred others"). Like a sleeper's nightly lapse into
dream, which permits an experience of the self as multiple (Proust: "c'est le
propre de ce qu'on imagine en dormant de se multiplier dans le passe" [II, 146,
my emphasis]), the artist's vision permits the forgetting of one-self, opening to
a simultaneous experience of former and current selves. In the multiple
narrating voice of Combray, for example, the child's ingenuosity coexists with
the adult's erotic awareness as well as with the aging Marcel's world-weary
sagacity.
Nor is the coexistence of selves the only instance of multiple identity in the
novel: at some moments in the text, a present self is actually displaced (re-
placed, momentarily forgotten) by a former self. In the drame du coucher (I, 5)
for example, the narrator seems to speak from within the child's affective
reality: this drama is not a memory but a regression, a re-entry into infantile
anguish. As in a nightmare, the adult dreamer/narrator is engaged in a belief-
Flieger 79
inducing experience which i

similar forgetting of a pre
underlying the "intermitt
return of "forgotten" feeli
which "re-mind" the absent-minded narrator/lover of the lost affect. This
"intermittent" remembrance is not by any means a "full" recapturing of the
past, since in this case (the flood of memory in which Marcel recalls his dead
grandmother), the loved object remains absent, even while the love and grief
return. The former self is obliged to suffer out of temporal context, in the
present.
Likewise, in the case of revirement-a reawakening of affection occasioned
by a revival of jealousy-old feelings intrude upon a current situation. But in
revirement, unlike intermittence, the present self is not actually displaced but is
only momentarily parenthesized, doubled by a past self. The current self
remains on the scene, watching from the wings and commenting on the
situation. This juxtaposition of two selves is a source of irony in the narrative:
the contrast between the current "lucid" self and the past "deluded" self is
apparent to the lover himself, even as he falls back momentarily under the
sway of the old affect.2'
Finally, in the textual instance which is the reverse of the phenomenon of
revirement, the temporal order of the juxtaposition of selves is reversed: the
narrator's current lucidity is displaced onto the old affect in retrospect, as a
result of distance from the beloved (the awakened lover wonders "What did I
ever see in her?"). This disengagement is made possible by forgetfulness,
which has transformed the anguish of Marcel the lover into an objective
clinical view. Thanks to the anesthetic effect of oubli, the artist becomes fair
game for his own analysis: "L'oubli continuait a faire en moi des progres; le
souvenir d'Albertine ne m'%tait plus cruel.. . comme ces malaises que le
m6decin %coute lui raconter son malade, de meme nos impressions, nos idles,
n'ont qu'une valeur de sympt6mes" (III, 560).
Thus, "seeing with other eyes" involves the elaboration of a mobile
personal history (histoire understood at once as history, fictional story, and
case history) in which past and present are mutually porous, full of holes and
gaps which allow the juxtaposition of "selves" far removed in time. Either a
past self reasserts itself in the present, in a prolonged emotional lapse or
regression; or the awakened present self analyzes the dreamlike emotion-
al state (as when Swann realizes that he has wasted years on a woman who
"wasn't his type"). Thus Proust's text is a forgetful perspective (and une
perspective autre) which resonates in the "internal vibration" of the text.
It is not, then, the recuperative act of memory which is the seminal
principle in Proust's work, but the dispersive impulse of forgetfulness. Unlike
ordinary memory, which anchors us in daily experience, poetic forgetful
memory leads the writer astray to "errer" in creative error, "wasting" time and
space in condensation and displacement of textual material. Proust's recherche
is a reseeking, a replay of a forgotten life which generates the fiction only
after it has been forgotten, and because it has been forgotten.
80 Flieger
IV
Finally, I should like to suggest that we ourselves attempt to read Proust

"through new eyes." It may be tempting to consider Proust's aesthetic exercise
of forgetfulness as a corroboration of some standard romantic notions: Proust
is the "inspired" artist, who, turning from the world, scorning reality, creates a
privileged fiction, the mirror of a superior internal Reality. This is undeniably
one aspect of Proust's work: as we well know, Proust was schooled in Idealist
philosophy, and admired Baudelaire's poetic idealism. But by reading Proust
simply as a latter-day Symbolist, we run the risk of underestimating a counter
tendency in Proust's work. By valorizing the role of oubli in the text I do not
mean to suggest that the work emanates from a higher privileged order,
unsullied by "reality." I prefer not to consider Proust's work as the apogee of the
romantic text, reasserting the split between a sacred "self' and a profane
"world," suggesting that the living of a "real life" is a task which the artist
leaves to others. While it is important not to deny the Idealist tendency in
Proust, it is equally important not to read Marcel's forgetful transport as simply
equivalent to inspiration, with the theological grounding which that term
implies.
Marcel's transport, even while it is "inspired," is always also a motility, a de-
repressive move which allows unconscious material into the mainstream of
consciousness. Proust's fiction is woven from a double impulse (which Freud
would term "attack and resistance"22), a dialogue between conscious and
unconscious in which neither term is finally privileged. Rather, the conscious
term is "de-privileged," dethroned, as the repressed material reasserts itself,
subverting the linear narrative. Proust's forgetful art, then, does question the
primacy of conscious, daily activity, a certain kind of goal-oriented commerce
which shuts out or defuses erotic impulse. Rather than reinforcing the
repressive boundaries between "love" and "work," Proust's work becomes his
love-and his love (Albertine)-his work. To borrow Marcuse's term, Proust's
text refuses to be subservient to the "performance principle."23 Or rather,
Proust's art implies the reinterpretation of the notion of performance; for an
artist like Proust, "performance" is no longer equivalent to the accretion of
profitable returns, an accumulation that requires the cutting of one's expendi-
tures. Indeed, in the case of Proust's "exhaustive" art, which saps the very life
of the writer, this forgetful "performance" obeys an aesthetic of excess,
leaving nothing in reserve.
Nor does Proust's "performance" imply the consolidation of a single
dominant identity, an "authorized" individual vision, reflected in the atten-
tion of a reading public. On the contrary, as we have seen, Proust's "alien"
artistic vision challenges the notion of self in two creative ways: by dispersing
consciousness in absent-minded revery, which disrupts daily, goal-oriented
commerce; and by multiplying the self, inducing a sort of literary schizo-
phrenia which admits to the coexistence of selves in time.
Thus, Proust's performance is a "play" which multiplies possible ways of
being and perceiving, a perpetual re-presentation of an alien and refracted
Flieger 81
self reflected in the vario

requires that he forget
disorienting perspective w
of Marcel, his absent-min
Rutgers
NOTES
1. A la recherche du temps perdu, edition de la Pleiade, ed. Pierre Clarac and Andr
Gallimard, 1954), Vol. I, p. 643. Volume and page numbers in this paper refe
edition.
2. Moses and Monotheism: Three Essays (1939), section I, part II. In The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press,
1974), vol. 23, p. 3. Unless otherwise noted, volume and page numbers throughout this paper
refer to the Standard Edition.
3. The "figure-discourse' dichotomy which I will employ throughout this paper is derived
from Lyotard's work on the "poetic" or "figurative" nature of the unconscious, developed in
Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksiek, 1974).
4. In his works on both humor and dream, Freud discusses the phenomenon of displacement,
an operation characteristic of unconscious thought processes. I want to suggest that Marcel's
displacement of "central" issues is, to some degree, symptomatic of his opening up to repressed
unconscious material as well as to the modes of primary process thinking. For a detailed
treatment of the relation of the incident of the madeleine to Proust's own unconscious, see Serge
Doubrovsky's La place de la madeleine (Paris: Mercure de France, 1974) and Albert Sonnenfeld's
"Erotique Madeleine," Kentucky Romance Quarterly, XIX, no. 4 (1972), 461-471.
5. Freud discusses the dream-work and the joke-work in Jokes and their Relation to the Uncon-
scious (1905), Standard Edition, 8.
6. Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust; the fictions of life and art (New York: Oxford University Press,
1965).
Serge Doubrovsky, La place de la madeleine; icriture etfantasme chez Proust (Paris: Mercure de
France, 1974).
7. Doubrovsky, for instance, only briefly mentions "oubli" (in reference to Proust's image of
the Fleuve d'oubli). And Bersani, even though he questions the primacy of involuntary memory in
Proust's novel, still emphasizes the role of voluntary memory in Marcel's search for a stable
identity.
8. My reading is nonetheless germane to the understanding of Proust's own unconscious
processes, to the extent that his view of writing and of art is "symptomatic" of an entire nexus of
images and processes in the unconscious.
9. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, Standard Edition, 8:161,165.
10. For a detailed analysis of optical imagery in Proust, see Roger Shattuck's Proust's binoculars;
a study of memory, time, and recognition in A la recherche du temps perdu (New York: Random House,
1963).
11. While Shattuck's work deals with the lantern show as characteristic of one kind of vision in
the novel, my own reading considers the magic lantern spectacle as a metaphor for the entire t
(for the art of writing as Proust practices it).
12. For a discussion of Proust's mobile vision, see also Bersani's work on Proust (especially pa
119).
13. Doubrovsky mentions the 'fort-da" rhythm as emblematic of the axis presence-absence in
Proust's own unconscious.
14. "The Unconscious" (1915), Standard Edition, 14:187.
82 Flieger
15. "J'avais bien souffert su

Albertine. Successivement a
diff6rents avait et% durable"
16. The Psychopathology of Eve
17. Ibid., p. 274 n. 2.
18. Ibid., p. 47.
19. Ibid., p. 43: "As indifferent
an associative relation between
to be called 'screen memories',
20. I am thinking, for examp
Albert into the fictional character of Albertine.
21. This sort of lucidity is one instance of the "binocular vision" which Shattuck discusses in this
work (Proust's binoculars: a study of memory, time, and recognition in A la recherche du temps perdu).
22. An Outline of Psycho-Analysis (1938), Standard Edition, 23: chapter VI.
23. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston; Beacon Press, 1955).
AIvANT- aGURRRE
fMYr I6art, etc.
sommaire no 2
Andr6 Chastel La sphere et le cube
Carl Einstein Braque le po6te
Eric Darragon Manet et la mort foudroyante
Harold Rosenberg Joan Mitchell
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Biennale de Venise
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn Lettres de Michel-Ange et Pontormo A Varchi
Yve-Alain Bois El Lissitzky: didactiques de lecture
Pascal Bonafoux Miroir, mort, metamorphose. (sur I'autoportrait)
autour d'H61lderlin: L'Antigone de Sophocle
Jacques Derrida, Roger Laporte, J.-Luc Nancy, Alain Rimoux
Notes de lecture:
E. Michaud: Proudhon et Courbet, F. Metz: Ombrelles (sur S. Kofman),
P. Boc6rean : Le dernier secrotaire, (sur J.-N. Vuarnet), C. Chagneau : Histoire d'un art: le dessin.
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Proust, Freud, and The Art of Forgetting

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Proust, Freud, and the Art of Forgetting

Author(s): Jerry Aline Flieger

JERRY ALINE FLIEGER

C'est pourquoi la meilleure partie de notre m6moire est hors de

Incomplete and dim memories of the past.., .are a great

Proust's oeuvre is less a work of memory than a play of forgetfulness.

Sub-Stance N? 29, 1981 66

carry on his habitual daily

consider both writers as

When Marcel settles in f

text is composed of what is

permeates the mode of e

We might say that a fanta

law, disregarding the "d

Le seul veritable voyage, ce ne serait pas d'aller vers de

kaleidoscopic series of pro

Indeed, this "disorderly

lappings. In other word

inducing experience which i

Finally, I should like to suggest that we ourselves attempt to read Proust

self reflected in the vario

15. "J'avais bien souffert su

112 pages - 98 ill. n. & bl. et couleur le numero 40 Francs

Abonnement (4 numeros): France 120 Francs, Etranger 150 Francs

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