Ethics of Reading and Writing: Self, Truth and ... - Concentric

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 36.2 

Sept. 2010: 61-87 

Ethics of Reading and Writing: 

Self, Truth and Responsibility in Marcel Proust’s 

In Search of Lost Time 

Pi-Jung Chang 

Department of Applied English 

National Taichung Institute of Technology, Taiwan 

Abstract 

Based on an ethics of reading and writing, this essay aims to study Proust’s 

novel in terms of his treatment of the notion of self and truth associated with 

the attempt to come to terms with the other, and the ethical contributions of his 

work to the articulation of responsibility in modernity’s predicament. Along 

with his problematization of the self, Proust draws our attention to his neurotic 

preoccupation with the fragility of the truth and the ethical problem of insular 

subjectivity. While his work has thus often been accused of implicated in or 

leading to subjectivism, relativism, or even nihilism, this essay argues that the 

ethical value of Proust’s text does not derive so much from particular moral 

messages it articulates as from the narrative and stylistic techniques it employs 

and its concern with reading and writing as ethically relevant. Based as it is on 

an excess of signification and an anxiety in representation, Proust’s work 

provides an alterity-oriented ethics of reading and writing, which necessitates 

a rethinking of the essence of self, truth and responsibility in Proust’s work. 

Keywords 

Marcel Proust, ethics, morality, reading, writing, alterity

62 Concentric 36.2 (Sept. 2010): 61-87 

I. Introduction 

In Marcel Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time, the reader seems to have 

been plunged into a universe characterized by total disorder, unintelligibility, and 

disintegration of fundamental values. 1 The body of the novel consists in a 

prolonged series of pathetic and enthusiastic pursuits by Marcel, the narrator: 

sentimental love, the allurement of aristocratic society, and the desire for fame and 

friendship. They all turn out to be “inevitable disappointments.” Love is subjective, 

selfish and self-deluding. Elegant society is a sham. It seems that the object of 

knowledge is better understood as the object of desire—what we “discover” in 

objects is only what we have put there in the first place. The surest thing about 

people is their perverseness and the instability of their desires. On the basis of a 

skeptical ethics of truth and self, Proust casts doubt on many of our treasured values. 

His work has thus often been accused of purported rejection of ethical values 

(Edward Andrew 1995; Samuel Beckett 1987). In its variety, the ethical 

predicament in which Proust leaves the reader can be encapsulated in the painful 

recognition at which Marcel finally and painfully arrives in brooding on his lover, 

Albertine—that his understanding of Albertine’s affections and sexuality may be 

predicated on an extension of aspects of his own. What will haunt the whole 

account of Marcel’s love of Albertine, in the end, is the suspicion that “our attention, 

always attracted by what is characteristic of ourselves, notices it more than anything 

else in other people” (II: 102). 2 The suspicion that we come to know and judge 

others only as extensions of ourselves persists throughout the novel. 

Proust’s notion of self and truth is vital to his development of a skeptical 

ethics which is intricately related to (self-)deception and inescapable self-interest. 

It cannot be denied that there is a neurotically negative tone associated with these 

issues running throughout the novel. Nonetheless, I’ll suggest that this is redeemed 

by a procedure of extraordinary ethical scrupulousness and subtlety manifest in the 

act of reading and writing (self/other). In this paper, I’ll explore an alterity-oriented 

ethics of reading and writing which will be characterized by a posture of waiting 

1 In this study, I use the translation by Moncrieff and Kilmartin (Remembrance of Things Past. 

3 volumes. New York: Random House, 1981), but the novel will be referred to under the title In 

Search of Lost Time, which is the more popular title used in Anglophone discussion and a more 

accurate rendering of the French. The latest English-language translation of this novel was 

published in six volumes in Britain (In Search of Lost Time, trans. Lydia Davis et al. London: 

Allen Lane, 2002). 

2 Citations from In Search of Lost Time will be given only with page numbers throughout this 

paper.

Chang / Ethics of Reading and Writing 63 

and a sense of responsibility induced by a suspicion of the insular subject and 

contingent truth. 3 I’ll argue that the characteristic moments of recognition of the 

self’s blindness and limitation do, paradoxically, lead to greater self-knowledge, and 

that self-knowledge permits action that is more, rather than less, ethically desirable, 

if it cannot be said to be simply “morally right.” 4 In what follows, I’ll first examine 

the ethical problem of perspectivism, relativism, and subjectivism with which 

Proust’s work has often been accused of failing to deal thoughtfully. The second 

part explores the Proustian act of reading through which the self has been 

“remarked” and truth redefined. The third part focuses on Proust’s treatment of 

writing ethics wherein the artist’s function is to recompose and transform life rather 

than reproduce reality. 

In its complexity, Proust’s writing cannot be easily accommodated to rigid 

polarities. His text often draws the semantic labyrinthine quest of an ungraspable 

object, exposing the reader to perplexity, an effective tonality that signals an 

openness to discontinuities and differences. 5 Yet his dismantling of the fables of 

unity and totality does not necessarily entail a tone of nihilism or pessimism. In 

Proust the ethical response to modernity’s predicament, that is, to the interruption of 

the totality of knowledge and the guarantee of meaning, supposes an excess of 

signification that cannot be incorporated by the coherence of discourse and thus 

compels us to think a different relation with and in language in the acts of reading 

and writing, which demand human agency and are itself ethical commitments. 

The patient engagement this text encourages and the task of writing it provides 

suggest the possibilities engendered in the reading process and the value creation 

that might be brought forth by the writing activity. 

3 Alterity, as a poststructuralist concept of difference, refers to that which cannot be reduced to 

the Same and that which escapes the cognitive powers of the knowing subject. By disrupting the 

economy of the Same, it challenges the fundamental principle presumed by humanist ethics. For a 

discussion of the introduction of “alterity” into English (from French), see Spivak, who traces it to 

Levinas, 212. 

4 In this paper, I follow the vein of recent literary ethical inquiry, one of whose preoccupations 

is the distinction between ethics and morality. In this vein, while morality is seen as rules or codes, 

ethics is understood as ethical sensibility or orientation. The term “ethics” is thus an old name 

strategically retrieved in order to launch a new inquiry. For more detailed discussion, see 

Harpham, 58-60 and Cornell, 13. 

5 In practice, Proust’s choice of the word “recherche” emphasizes the struggle of the 

protagonist to pierce the mystery of time (truth) and the anguish that accompanies it. One of the 

underlying themes of Proust’s novel, a desperate and haunting “search” and the pursuit of a 

pattern of meaning, is unfortunately not suggested by the English translation “remembrance.” 

This is one of the reasons why the title of the novel is rendered later more literally as In Search of 

Lost Time.


II. A World of (Self-)Deception and Subjective Truth 

One of the most distinguishing features of the world Proust depicts is that it is 

a world of lies and of liars. Odette lies to Swann, Albertine lies to the narrator, and 

Charlus lies to everybody. Lying is thus seen as a central activity, both in public and 

in private, leading to incessant deceptions. Most impressively, the Proustian hero, 

Marcel, has a personal habit or tradition of writing deceitful letters. He first writes 

such a letter to his mother in Combray, a letter intended to get her to come upstairs 

and kiss him goodnight. Later, the hero continues in this guise when he writes 

Albertine that he intends to spend time with Andree in order to make Albertine 

jealous and return. Simplicity and frankness, those virtues admired in classical 

moral philosophy, do not appear unadorned or “as such” in Proust, but rather 

clothed and disguised. Ultimately, this novel represents the notion that life lies. 

Indeed, one of the main trajectories of this novel consists in Marcel’s learning to 

abandon the quest for objective truth and to focus instead on subjective truth and his 

own inner nature. Accurate knowledge of the external world is so elusive that it 

seems that reality is in the eyes of the beholder. 

However, it is also impossible for us to access our inner essence—let alone to 

communicate it to others—because every person is a prisoner, a prisoner of her own 

temperament and desire, shut up in herself as the narrator is shut up in his room. 

While all the characters are lying, all of them lie first and most profoundly to 

themselves. The narrator thus laments: “Man is the creature who cannot escape 

from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the 

contrary, he is lying” (III: 459). Marcel has a precedent in his own family for 

fictionalizing Swann. Mama, Papa, and various aunts had “built up for their 

purposes” (I: 15) a version of Swann that suited their aim of avoiding the fact that 

Swann frequented high places and low places in addition to their own middle-class 

home. The aunts Celine and Flora possess to an even higher degree the precious 

ability of not perceiving; they stop listening the moment the conversation changes 

in their presence to something which does not interest them. “Their sense of 

hearing . . . would leave its receptive channels unemployed, so effectively that they 

were actually becoming atrophied” (I: 59). The “organic falsehood” functions every 

time someone wishes to see only that which serves his interest or some other 

disposition of his instinctive attention. In fact, people who delude themselves in this 

way no longer need to lie. 

The predicament of insular subjectivity leads to the impossibility of love 

because all love is subjective. While there are no qualities in the beloved that attract


the lover, the lover projects imaginary qualities onto the beloved from the beam of 

his sexual desire. 6 More than anyone else in Proust’s novel, Swann and the narrator 

acknowledge the selfish exaltation of the lover who is in love with his or her own 

love. At first, Odette is not naturally attractive to Swann; she offends his taste and is 

most definitely not his type. A decisive moment in the early phase of their 

relationship occurs when Swann “recognizes” in Odette the type of Jewish wife 

portrayed by Botticelli. Once this recognition has taken effect, Odette’s features 

acquire nobility and are assimilated to Swann’s cult of the aesthetic. This spurious 

move enables Swann to deceive his own intelligence—his delusion that he 

“possesses” in Odette something of what he appreciates in the art of Botticelli. 

Similarly, the loveliness of Albertine derives from Marcel’s love. What the 

narrator has learned from his repeated experiences is that love is merely a mirror 

one holds out to a woman without ever seeing in it anything but one’s own image. 

Since desire consists of dissolving loved ones in the lover’s own perceptions, the 

subjective nature of love is placed and replaced in any object of desire: 

If . . . Albertine might be said to echo something of the old original 

Gilbert, that is because a certain similarity exists, although the type 

evolves, between all the women we successively love, a similarity 

that is due to the fixity of our own temperament, which chooses them. 

(I: 905) 

Marcel comes to realize that “my love was not so much a love for her as a love in 

myself,” a love that is entirely “subjective” and might, “like every mental state, 

even the most lasting, find itself one day obsolete, be replaced” (III: 568). He thus 

concludes that he can only love himself in others and that is why he can constantly 

reinvent love through a series of substitutions that reflect his own being. 

More specifically, what Marcel felt for Albertine was not love but the passion 

of possessiveness. The pattern is a familiar one, following that of Swann in love and 

Marcel in love: the intensity of the lover’s pursuit is proportionate to the 

unattainability of the loved one. When there is no danger of his losing Odette, 

Swann is quite happy to bear the idea of her departure (I: 345). Likewise, for 

Marcel, once Albertine is “caged,” she loses all her colors “along with all the 

6 In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche also asserts that “[t]he sexes deceive themselves about 

each other—because at bottom they honor and love only themselves” (93). The basis of value is 

consumer demand: “In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired” (93). For a 

discussion of Nietzsche’s and Proust’s value-discourses related to love, see Andrew’s The 

Genealogy of Values, 39-47.


opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves. Gradually she 

had lost her beauty” (III: 171). Her disappearance is enough to rekindle her 

possessor’s desire. What enslaves Marcel, as it had enslaved Swann, is their shared 

desire, insatiable in a precise sense, to gain control, through knowledge, of all the 

secret motives and actions of their respective mistresses. But for all his incessant 

interrogation and investigation, what Marcel seeks, at bottom, is not the truth but a 

convincing lie, a lie with the power to send all his doubts to sleep. In fact, Marcel 

never manages to establish the definitive truth of Albertine. Each of his informants’ 

claims is undermined as they are presented as unreliable. The keeper of the 

bathhouse, the source of the information about Albertine’s lesbian past, is “a woman 

who must suffer from the disease of mendacity” (III: 552). Similarly, Marcel claims 

that Aime, another informant, has his complete confidence even as he tells us 

“Aime is utterly unscrupulous” (III: 523). In other words, whether it concerns 

Albertine’s infidelities or his own attitude toward the truth, there comes a point at 

which Marcel, following a benevolent instinct of self-preservation, does not dare to 

look too closely, does not want to know. He is dimly aware that he has perpetrated a 

deception on himself, one which has allowed his love for Albertine to stay alive and 

which will constitute all future loves. “My happiness, my life required that 

Albertine should be virtuous. . . . Armed with this self-protective belief, I could with 

impunity allow my mind to play sadly with suppositions to which it gave a form but 

lent to credence” (III: 624). Instead of clear-sighted resignation, Marcel’s response 

is self-deception. 

Hence, it seems that the narrator’s hypothesizing is not so much “an attempt at 

causal explanation” as a demonstration of the failure of hypotheses. In other words, 

those hypothesizing scientific efforts may not suggest the power of the investigating 

mind, but rather the reverse—“the ineptness of hypothesizing, its comic futility” 

(Gray 57). Hypothesizing would seem merely to produce, not overcome, 

mystification. For instance, the narrator speculates as to why the Guermantes treat 

their cousin Madame de Gallardon with so much disdain. The narrator’s 

hypothesizing ends in a surprisingly anticlimactic statement: “perhaps because she 

was boring, or because she was disagreeable, or because she was from an inferior 

branch of the family, or perhaps for no reason at all” (I: 323). The helpless and 

arbitrary product of hypothesizing may thus be not knowledge and illumination but 

the imposition of maxims: the very impossibility of knowing produces shrill 

proclamations of universal laws. The narrator’s moralizing truths emerge as a patent 

cover for his own failure to understand and master the world through knowledge. 

Unable to know the world, he elevates his lack of knowledge to the level of


universal truth and imposes it by maxim. 

If love is a fantasy, communion with others an unattainable longing and 

knowledge a delusion, we have nothing to rely on but can only live in a mirage. 

As Edward Andrew puts it, Proust’s concept of value signifies “relativity, 

contingency, and inequality” (xix). For all that, it is important to emphasize that the 

philosophy subtending Proust’s novel is not a sweeping relativism or subjective 

idealism, let alone a nihilism. We know that a world of perspective-independent 

objects exists outside of our mind. The clearest proof is that life constantly manages 

to surprise us, defying any actual or even potential expectation on our part. 

Surprises can be unpleasant or they can be welcome, as with “women whom it was 

impossible to imagine a priori” (III: 26). Either way, surprises prove to us that we 

have not dreamed the world, that it exceeds our projection-making capacity. 

Besides, if Proust’s narrator sees an extreme limit to the ability of the self to 

overcome its own prejudices or to communicate with others, it is just this 

recognition of limit that is characteristic of Proustian ethics of which the task is to 

interrogate. The absence of an absolute self might, on the contrary, make it easier 

for the self that does exist to expose itself to the alterity of the unscrutable Other; 

the inadequacy of definition might encourage the writer to write values that have 

never been written before. In the following sections, rather than concentrating on 

the identity of a totalized self and security of moral values, I aim to think about 

issues concerning the reading process and the act of writing, which involve a 

rethinking of the category of self, and the essence of truth and ethical responsibility 

in Proust’s work. 

III. Encountering Alterity in the Reading Process 

In many ways the novel is about the act of reading, and the oppression which 

the narrator causes the heroine could be understood as the diegetic equivalent of 

jealous readers’ eagerness to assign an unambiguous meaning to a novel, one 

designed to defy such a reading in the first place. 7 Proust’s text demands that the 

reader, like the narrator encountering the absence of woman, be haunted by alterity 

in the process of reading, but (s)he is well and wisely haunted. The desire to 

appropriate an inscrutable Other is constantly resisted. This novel promotes a sense 

of responsibility in readers by inviting attentiveness, engagement, and tolerance of 

7 “Jealousy” in Proust’s novel does not resemble what is commonly meant by the term. In a 

certain sense, it involves an obsessive semiotic inquiry. For an informed discussion of the 

hermeneutic dimension of Proustian jealousy, see Walsh’s account in his article.


otherness, readerly skills which, this text suggests, translate to greater, more 

imaginative engagement in interpersonal relationships and perception of truth. 

Scene and Staging of Reading: 

Limitation of Self-Consciousness 

At the very beginning of the novel, the narrator makes a seemingly 

epistemological claim about the possibility of humans’ attaining an immediate 

intuition of other human beings. Here a kind of desired communion with the 

external world is presented in semi-dream state that can produce the fusion of self 

and matter: “I had gone on thinking, while I was asleep, about what I had just been 

reading, but these thoughts had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I 

myself was the immediate subject of my book: a church, a quartet, the rivalry 

between Francois I and Charles V” (I: 1). In a main text on reading occurring later 

in the same volume of the novel, the narrator, reflecting on his reading, comes to 

understand his own consciousness as a limit beyond which he cannot pass in any 

attempt to achieve an immediate perception of external reality. He observes: 

When I saw an external object, my consciousness that I was seeing it 

would remain between me and it, surrounding it with a thin spiritual 

border that prevented me from ever touching its substance directly; 

for it would sometimes evaporate before I could make contact with it, 

just as an incandescent body that is brought into proximity with 

something wet never actually touches its moisture, since it is always 

preceded by a zone of evaporation. (I: 90) 

Finally, at the end of the novel, the narrator recalls a similar recognition expressed 

in the first-person plural: “For between us and other people there exists a border of 

contingencies, just as in my hours of reading in the garden at Combray I had 

realized that in all perception there exists a border as a result of which there is never 

absolute contact between reality and our intelligence” (III: 1023). 

In fact, Proust’s concern about reading and consciousness has been manifest 

in the pre-Recherche period. In the introduction to Sesame et les lys collected in On 

Reading Ruskin, Proust contrasts the febrile excitement of social relationships with 

the otherworldly calm one can attain through reading: “Reading is a friendship. . . . 

That atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is silence, which is purer than 

speech” (123). If social relationships—“the agitations of friendship” (123)—


produce a kind of hysteria of de-centredness in Proust, reading restores a sense of 

protectedness and wholeness that is healing. One of the important aspects of 

communicating with a written text is that, rather than imposing its existence on us, 

it allows us to expand and grow, to strengthen our own personality by co-opting and 

absorbing elements of the Other. “When we read, we receive another individual’s 

thought, and yet we are alone, our thoughts actively at work, aspiring, in full 

personal activity” (Proust, On Reading Ruskin 70). Proust finds tranquility in the 

self-reflection of reading, an activity in which the text of the Other becomes a 

calming, reflecting mirror for the self. 

While there is a hallucinatory quality about Proust’s comments on reading in 

his preface to Sesame et les lys quoted above, reading is staged, in his own novel, in 

a dramatic contest of defenses and threats: an inner, sheltered place (bower, closet, 

room, cradle) that has nevertheless been threatened by the collapse of categorical 

values and uncertainty of perception. The introductory passage on reading was 

placed under the auspices of the epistemological couple of truth and error, which 

introduces a complex sequence of meditations on the reading of allegory and the 

allegory of reading. The description of Françoise and the kitchen maid is the first 

explicit example of the narrators’ ritualistic initiation to the ambivalences of good 

and evil. Françoise, thought by the boy to be a veritable “Michelangelo of the 

kitchen,” suddenly emerges as a dark and cruel figure, bloodthirsty in her violent 

slaying of the chicken, and outright sadistic in her treatment of the pregnant kitchen 

maid: 

While the kitchen maid—unwittingly making Françoise’s superiority 

shine at its brightest, just as Error, by contrast, makes the triumph of 

Truth more dazzling—served coffee which, in my mother’s judgment, 

was mere hot water and then carried to our rooms hot water that was 

barely tepid, I had stretched out on my bed, with a book. (I: 89) 

Another scene of reading is staged when Marcel is presented as mystified by 

the chasm between the name “Caritas” and the reality of the humble, energetic 

figure with which it is associated—whether in the fresco or in the pregnant kitchen 

maid whom Swann had dubbed “la Charite de Giotto.” Unlike Swann, who is 

satisfied by the play of wit which discerns in Odette a Botticelli and in the kitchen 

maid a Giotto, Marcel is puzzled by his own reaction to the figures on the fresco. 

These figures are in a sense repulsive, they do not fit in with his expectations, yet 

they have “an arresting strangeness” (I: 96) and a special beauty. The narrator


finally gives a concluding remark to this experience which serves as an indication 

of the nature of the path along which he has traveled toward the maturity of his 

literary vocation: 

Later on, I understood that the uncanny attraction, the specific beauty 

of these frescoes was due to the prominent place taken up by the 

symbol, and that the fact that it was not represented symbolically 

(since the symbolized idea was not expressed) but as something real, 

actually experienced or materially handled, gave to the meaning of 

the work something more literal and more precise. (I: 96) 

In other words, the pregnant kitchen maid and Giotto’s Charity, far from being 

abstractions, are figures which draw us into reality and make us understand that it is 

we who, in our normal lives, maintain purely abstract and unrealistic notions of 

what charity or pregnancy might be. The frescoes of the Arena Chapel and the 

kitchen maid are imbricated to form the prelude to readers’ engagement in the 

process of reading, which is, in another sense, the process of the play of self and 

other, truth and falsehood, or the gulf between language and its referents. 

Voice as Awareness 

It is against such a scene and staging of reading that the reader can be inspired 

to observe in Proust’s novel his concern with self/other relationship featured by a 

shift from voice as an emanation of the essence of character to voices in conflict 

with singular consciousness. Considerations of voice have mostly been understood 

as expressions of identity. With critics such as Jacques Derrida and Mikhail Bakhtin, 

however, we have learned to understand voice apart from its service to subjecthood. 

Formulating this myth of voice as presence, Derrida wrote: “No awareness is 

possible without voice; voice is awareness” (89). In a similar vein, Bakhtin 

resituates voice as an index not of singular presence, but as the site of vigorous 

oppositions, the struggle between “one’s own and another’s word” (326). Such an 

emptying-out of the self in favor of a fictive voice offers a model of reading what 

may be at work in the construction of a subject in Proust’s novel. Proust has hardly 

created a fleshy character or what E. M. Foster would call a “round character.” 

In Proust, character is displaced by a profusion of voices and the reader cannot help 

but wonder: “Is Swann a character Does he have one” Similarly, Albertine is like 

a draft of a character struggling to emerge. “Like a medium whose body is inhabited


by another being, she would change personalities, almost instantly she would stop 

having her usual voice and would take on the voice of another person, a hoarse, 

bold, almost debauched voice” (III: 403). Another obvious example is Charlus, 

whose voice reveals a split personality. In their first meeting in Balbec, what struck 

the narrator about the baron was his voice, “like certain contralto voices in which 

the middle register has not been sufficiently cultivated, so that when they sing it 

sounds like an alternating duet between a young man and a woman,” a voice that 

seems to shelter a “bevy of young girls” (II: 122). The other major characters, 

including Odette, Legrandin, and Saint-Loup, all head a lengthy roll-call of Protean 

figures in the novel. The search to explain or identify a character leads to a 

proliferation of images and voices. 

More precisely, an interest in character is replaced by an examination of the 

mobile and fluid interrelations among shadowy and half-represented figures. The 

reader is constantly compelled to wonder: is it Block, Swann, or the narrator Is it 

the duchesse de Guermantes, the princess de Guermantes, the Virgin, or even Mme 

Verdurin raised to the highest social rank Each of the characters is intended as a 

version of a previous one with the resulting proliferation of characters who are 

uncanny echoes of one another. 8 The proliferation of characters, like that of 

sentences, is open to change and progresses by way of cutting, disengaging, and 

displacing. Julia Kristeva comments upon the fluid, interchangeable identities of 

Proust’s characters: 

What used to be Swann is now Bloch or myself. The duchesse de 

Guermantes gives up her wild rose to enjoy some of Odette’s 

pinkness. The entire cast of characters is constantly cut open and 

stitched back together in order to provide a closer look into the 

thousand-and-one faces assumed by the narrator. (121) 

Truly, as both character and narrator, Marcel exists as the most complex and 

multifarious amalgamation of all the characters. He sees things sometimes from the 

point of view of the immediate present when he does not know his fate, at others 

8 This conception of subjectivity foreshadows the one explored by Lacan. As he elaborates it in 

The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, the subject of perception or of interpretation 

is not really discrete; the phenomenological subject who “sees himself seeing” is subject to 

illusion (93). Hence, any absolute separation of Self and Other do not seem particularly ethical. 

Instead, it is in his relation to the semantic duplicity of the unconscious—that is, in 

intersubjectivity—that the subject is “at home” (44). For Lacan, the subject has an ethical 

imperative to travel to this place.


from the point of view of the older, reflective, retrospective author. 9 In other words, 

Marcel’s “I” registers reflexively every encounter with the world as a reconstitution 

of his ego, while his other “I” experiences the world in apparent “immediacy.” 

The first-person pronoun “moi” is fluid and unstable. 

In fact, despite the autobiographical impetus, Proust’s novel tells us little of 

the “essence” of Marcel, replacing that by a series of shifting relations with Swann, 

Albertine, Saint-Loup, and so one. It follows that the “identity” which the reader 

proposes for Marcel at the close of the novel is to undergo a differential 

epistemological shift in a reiteration of the reading of the character. Constantly 

altered and diversified by his language, the narrator exemplifies the purely verbal 

origins of a human life. In the words of Roland Barthes: “the subject is immediately 

contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it. The case of 

Proustian narrator is exemplary, he exists only in writing” (143). Gilles Deleuze 

insists on the narrator’s absence of mind and body and equates it with madness. 

He asserts that Proust’s narrator “doesn’t function as a subject” (271). He is 

“incapable of seeing, of perceiving, of remembering, of understanding” (271). And 

yet, this curious case of madness is just the catalyst which “mocks characterization, 

jeopardizes knowledge, initiates the search, and engenders time and interpretation” 

(Aynesworth 32). As Paul de Man puts it, “the mood of distrust, as the later story of 

Marcel’s relationship with Albertine makes clear, produces rather than paralyzes 

interpretative discourse. Reading has to begin in this unstable commixture of 

literalism and suspicion” (184). The self is disengaged in order to engage itself with 

an ethics of reading the other. 

An Ethics of Response and Responsibility 

In the presentation of the major characters’ love affairs, especially that of the 

narrator, Proust shows his concern with the conditions in which love of the other 

and responsibility toward the other can be possible. The novel follows through one 

frustration, disappointment or failure in love after another. If Marcel invariably ends 

up with women who cause him pain, it is perhaps simply as an unintended 

consequence of his inexorable yearning for the radically different. A woman he 

finds appealing will always and necessarily convey a mystique, a prestige. He will 

9 Bakhtin observes similarly that even if a writer narrates an event that has just occurred, the 

“teller” is already removed from the time and space of the narrated event (256). The idea is 

reiterated by Barthes: “The I who recounts is no longer the same as the one that is recounted” 

(162).


always prefer an Albertine, dangerously divergent, to an Andree who is “too like 

myself” (I: 1006). Albertine’s mystery provokes Marcel to anxious hermeneutic 

efforts which, however, collapse in an endlessly unanswered question: “As for 

Albertine, I felt that I would never discover anything, that, out of that tangled mass 

of factual details and falsehoods, I would never unravel the truth; and that it would 

always be so” (III: 131). 

However, in his reading of Proust’s novel, Emmanuel Levinas declares that 

Marcel’s despair in his love affairs “is an inexhaustible source of hope” (“The Other 

in Proust” 165). For Levinas, ethics or love begins at precisely the point where 

Albertine as other escapes confinement by Marcel as subject. Hence, “[t]o know 

what Albertine does, what Albertine sees, who sees Albertine, is of no interest in 

itself as a form of knowledge, but is infinitely exciting because of its fundamental 

strangeness in Albertine, the strangeness which mocks knowledge” (“The Other in 

Proust” 163). The central problematic that Levinas explores is the self’s practice of 

reducing everything to the Same and its resulting failure to relate adequately to the 

Other, to absolute alterity. According to Levinas’s “philosophy of the other,” the 

language of ethics has come to designate a singular and counter-universal relation 

with and response to the other person as other. In contrast to the mode based on 

mimetic closure, Levinasian ethics explores the infinite rapport provoked by alterity 

that will overwhelm the subject in a flood of responsibility. 10 In this sense, 

Marcel’s fragmented mistress dissolves into a space; Proust uses exactly that word 

“infinity” (III: 393) to denote the utter alterity of the young girl, the measureless 

and unpossessable life of the loved one. 

The narrator’s hermeneutic efforts to decipher his objects of desire may best 

be described as an effort to appropriate what he needs to know. The desire to 

appropriate the identity and physical being of an inscrutable Other is motivated by 

an envious need to complete the self by means of the Other’s qualities. The more 

different the Other, the more envious one hungers for that alterity, as if it could cure 

the Self’s deficiency. In short, the needs of the characters in question are consuming, 

even vampirish. 11 We are witnesses to an instance of what Michel Riffaterre calls 

10 Responsibility traditionally entails freedom of choice. Approaching Levinas, however, we 

have to have recourse to a different understanding of responsibility. For Levinas, “responsibility” 

connotes “response-ability” and a “response” is importantly different for him than an “action.” In 

other words, in Levinas’s view, ethics lies not in the responsibility implicit in my freely chosen 

acts but in the responsibility by which I find myself gripped or “taken hostage” when confronted 

with alterity. 

11 In this novel, a series of jealous characters foreshadow and double the narrator’s own 

jealousy for Albertine. One of these is Swann, whose relationship with Odette is a prelude to the


“the whole system of desire, of possession, of the self’s absorption of its prey” as 

this system is “endlessly repeated in the Proustian narrative” (451). However, at the 

Levinasia ethical moment, what the desire encounters is a radical, unpredictable and 

irreducible resistance to it. Albertine is the enigma that evades Marcel’s would-be 

authorial control. Even more importantly, as a lesbian, she is radically 

heterogeneous to the terms of his wisdom. 12 The alterity that the generalizing 

discourse seeks to subdue constantly re-emerges to threaten it all over again. 

Through Albertine, the narrator realizes his own limitations as a possessing subject. 

Hence, the narrative voice is forced to tack, revise, take new directions, and 

surrender itself to multiplicity and contradiction. At first, Marcel’s claim for 

mimetic control—the absorption of what is “other,” “outside,” as one’s own in a 

closed narcissistic space—is revealed when he appropriates Albertine’s highly 

figural discourse as his own: “But for me she wouldn’t speak thus, she has 

profoundly experienced my influence. . . . She is my creation” (III: 636). For many 

times, Marcel restates such claims for mastery—Albertine’s eloquence is “a proof 

that I had power over her, that she loved me” (III: 638). But then Marcel’s sentence 

goes on to qualify Albertine’s speech as somehow out of context, transgressive, 

menacing: “ . . . these words, however, that I would never have uttered, as though I 

had been somehow forbidden by an unknown authority ever to use literary forms in 

conversation” (III: 641). Marcel’s question falls back upon himself to bewilder its 

own—now highly ironized—“author.” The narrator himself becomes the one 

mastered—the one “written.” Ultimately Marcel’s failure in the position of 

possessing subject throws into question the stable hierarchy of the subject/object 

distinction. In other words, alterity is understood not merely as a feature of an 

exterior world but as intrinsic to subjectivity itself. Marcel finally understood, not 

only that Albertine was never and could by definition never have been in his 

possession, but that he himself was never in possession of himself in relation to her. 

The otherness that is alternately feared and contemplated with benevolent concern 

is admitted as something deeper than either irrational fear or moral benevolence— 

Albertine episodes. Swann shares with the narrator an intellectual motive for pursuing the elusive 

heroine; that is, he is motivated more by the need for knowledge than by love (I: 274). The 

narrator’s informed psychological description suggests his own subsequent “passion for truth.” 

The theme of the jealous reader (lover) passes from Swann and Odette to the narrator and Gilberte, 

to Charlus and Morel and to the narrator and Albertine. 

12 Charlus, like Marcel, is confounded by a lesbian desire that not only arouses his jealousy, 

but stymies his understanding. “The Baron . . . felt himself tormented by an anxiety of the mind as 

well as of the heart, confronted with this double mystery in which the arousal of his jealousy was 

combined with the sudden inadequacy of a definition” (III: 721).


as a part of the self that is as intimate as one’s most intense and enduring sorrows. 

As has been stated above, Proust’s treatment of the encounter with the other is 

that of what Walter Benjamin finely called a “merciless deglamorizer of the ego” 

(212). But for the event of the ethical encounter to be possible, there must 

nonetheless be a subjectivity there in the first place to collapse or recognize its 

limits. 13 Therefore, in Proust’s novel, a substantial self and solid subjectivity is 

abolished and required at the same time. While Marcel is constantly disengaged and 

de-authorized as mentioned above, he is also the only protagonist potentially 

capable of comprehending painfully the disjunction in world views and making his 

own moral judgment. The members of his aristocratic circle remain oblivious to all 

but their own self-absorption. The family cook and the Combray aunts 

unself-reflectively transmit the sense of the unconsidered traditional world as given. 

These observers are horrified when they perceive fluidity or change between castes. 

Lacking selves, the various members of the aristocratic set are missing reflexive 

experience. They can react or behave but never act because action requires 

self-reflection. They have opinions but lack judgment. In one case, Swann has come 

to bid his friends farewell and to report that he is dying. The Guermantes refuse to 

acknowledge what Swann tells them. Marcel, shocked by the lamentable barbarism 

and indifference of the Guermantes’ reaction, passes judgment upon them. 

Marcel’s potentially acute self-consciousness is thus the source of his strength, 

though it is also undoubtedly source of his weakness. In other words, subjectivity 

can neither be definitively assumed nor definitively abrogated. In this sense, 

Proustian ethics, as Andrew Gibson puts it, “expresses itself as a tension, an 

oscillation, an aporia” (117). In Proust, continuity and discontinuity, tradition and 

revolution, Self and Other, make for a strange, unstable mixture not only in the 

process of reading but in the act of writing. 

13 In response to Levinas’s thought, Derrida raises the question: “How can there be the play of 

the same if alterity itself was not already in the same” (126) Derrida further points to the double 

bind of the relation between alterity and alteration: “To be sure, in order to respect the totally 

other of alterity, it would be necessary that alteration itself—which always presupposes contact, 

an intervention, a socio-political or psychological transformation—is not possible. . . . There is a 

moment, however, when in my view one must reengage negotiation; it is a political or, let us say, 

historical concern. It is that if one holds alterity without alteration in pure respect, one always 

risks lending a hand to immobilism, conservatism, etc., that is, to the very effacement of alterity 

itself” (Derrida & Labarriere 31. qtd. in Robbin’s Altered Reading 131). In other words, pure 

self-identity and pure difference can never be thought separately and in strict opposition—they 

are always already embedded in the alteration between purity and contamination, unity and 

multiplicity, war and peace.


IV. The Task of Writing 

Reading and writing were, for Proust, acts of shared subjectivity. While 

appreciating and respecting the alteriy encountered, the artist is ethically obliged to 

represent the experience. Proust thus works out an ethics of writing assuming that 

alterity in life experience can be instantiated through artistic form. What might be 

called the Proustian effect is defined in part by the passage from an experience to its 

expression. Yet Proustian anxieties about language and voice become embedded 

features of the novelistic form based on repetition, imitation, and quotation. The 

process of creatively appropriating the Other’s language to make it absorbable and 

controllable has unusual significance of a writer who had an obsessional fear of the 

language of the Other. While tensions, anxieties and unresolved contradictions 

characterize Proust’s concern with the dilemma of artistic creativity, Proust makes it 

the task of writing to re-evaluate traditional values and to create values still 

unknown within us. 

Ethics and Representation: the Problem of Life Writing 

An intractable problem both the reader and the writer encounter is the 

problem of ethics and representation. Readers take note of the written logos of 

fiction (the Said) while intuiting the Saying, the nonarticulated excess of meaning 

also residing in the text. 14 On the other hand, writers are faced with the difficult 

task of trying somehow to produce that excess themselves without falling back on 

traditional (and allegedly appropriative) mimetic practices. The writer-philosopher 

Iris Murdoch summarizes the problem posed by representation through language. 

She saw that “the realistic fallacy” might entail an ethical failure insofar as it is 

often tainted by self-indulgent “fantasizing” about the other (250). 15 As has been 

indicated previously, Levinas’s philosophy with its strict injunction against 

thematization of the other subverts traditional mimetic practices. Levinas’s Saying 

14 In Levinas’s language, the Said is the logos, the horizon of meaning because it creates the 

identity of an entity by “thematizing” it; the Saying is unsayable because at the moment of saying 

it becomes the Said. Yet, conversely, the Saying can never be totally engulfed in the Said. The 

Saying both stimulates the Said and ruptures it: “an affirmation and a retraction of the [S]aid” (44). 

With the distinction between the Saying and the Said, Levinas emphasizes the excess of meaning 

that overflows any statement, and the impossibility of ever completely reducing the Saying to the 

Said. For more discussion, see Levinas’s Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, 43-47. 

15 In discussing 20 th -century French fiction, Colin Davis similarly concludes: “the Other does 

not exist, except as a fantasy formation with which no actual subject coincides” (195).


is able to withstand appropriation by the Said and thus maintain its alterity. To live 

with a susceptibility to difference connotes the ethical. However, as the articulation 

of lived experience, fiction does tend to thematize its concerns. 16 After all, art does 

not tell the truth about human existence if it is allowed to remain untouched by what 

goes on in real life. 

Because of the unresolved conflict about thematization, a certain uneasiness 

lingers on in the domain of ethics and fiction. One of the main structural principles 

of Proust’s work is the tension between the desire of narrating the self/other on the 

one hand, and the awareness of the impossibility of a definite and complete 

narration on the other. As an account of how the narrator discovers his vocation as 

an artist and explores the nature of art, this novel in many ways reveals Proust’s 

religion of art. At the same time, Proust is one of the writers who would most 

enthusiastically endorse Stéphane Mallarmé’s dictum that literature is made of 

words and he is certainly concerned with the problem of what words designate. 

Seen as an autobiographical novel, Proust’s novel further raises compelling moral 

questions about the telling of private stories—our own and those of others close to 

us. In this novel, Proust reveals the impossibility of telling only one’s own story. As 

we have seen, identity is continually formed through and within relationships, so 

that the freedom to tell one’s own story inevitably impinges on the privacy of others. 

If our private lives are almost always co-property, how can we think about an ethics 

of life writing Writers are always caught in a tension between the need to reveal 

and the wish to conceal. 

It is in this sense that we can see why Proust’s novel posits two modes of 

writing. On the one hand, Proust sounds like a realist when he suggests that art is a 

mirror with reflecting power. But against this Marcel, we should set the one who 

appears clearly to discriminate between creation and observation. This Marcel tells 

us that art is production rather than reflection. At the end of the novel, in a reflective 

moment before joining the Guermantes’ afternoon party, the narrator has an 

epiphany or insight about his vocation as an artist: The artist’s function is “to 

re-create the true life, to rejuvenate the impressions, to recompose life” (III: 937). 

On the basis of this manifesto, Proust was creating an art of multiplication with 

respect to the representation of person or place. Just as many persons can contribute 

16 In this respect, Knud Logstrup’s discussion of “poetic openness” is more socially oriented 

than Levinas’s in its identification with “existence” and “experience,” i.e. the goings-on of the 

world. Oddly reminiscent of Levinas’s exploration of the theses concerning self and other, 

Logstrup’s philosophy is not constrained by the latter’s largely negative conception of art. 

Zygmunt Bauman’s book Postmodern Ethics and Life in Fragments has made Logstrup more 

widely known to the general public of readers outside Scandinavia.


to the creation of one character, so many churches can contribute to the depiction of 

one church in the fiction. “And more than the painter, the writer, in order to obtain 

substance and consistency, universality and literary reality, as he might need to have 

seen many churches to depict a single one, so he needs many beings to convey a 

single sentiment” (III: 948). Proust was demonstrating that the rudiments of the 

ideas which art incorporates are found in retrievable reality and then built upon it. 

Certain actual locales can be identified, and then it can be observed how places are 

enlarged and disoriented in the art form by Proust’s imagination and sensibility. It is 

precisely the dislocation, expansion, multiplication and modification that mark 

Proust’s aesthetic process as a form of re-creation of persona and place through 

composite constructs. 

Proust knew how vulnerable the life he lived made him to the kind of 

reductionism advocated by Sainte-Beuve. 17 He wished to avoid the accusation that 

any book he wrote was unsatisfactory as a work of art because it was so clearly 

about his own problems. This is one reason why he made the claim that “a book is 

the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social 

like, in our vices” (By Way of Saint-Beuve 76). In fact, the narrator is only twice 

referred to as Marcel in the text. When we hear Albertine saying “‘My—’ or ‘My 

darling—’ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same 

name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel’ or ‘My darling Marcel’” (III: 

69), we are placed in the simultaneous presence of a narrator and the writer Marcel 

Proust. Proust himself referred to his own narrator as the one who “says ‘I’ and who 

is not always me” (Against Saint-Beuve 63). 18 He was not denying its 

autobiographical origins, or trying to insist that there was nothing in common 

between himself and his narrator Marcel. He was probably saying that he wrote the 

book with a part of personality that the world could not see. The three artists in the 

novel—the writer Bergotte, the painter Elstir and the musician Vinteuil—all have 

something in common: each is unlike the idea of him which you might get from his 

work. 19 It is Proust’s view that the writer virtually becomes another when he 

17 It was Sainte-Beuve’s contention that a knowledge of any writer’s personal life is 

indispensable to a full understanding of his work; the more we know about the man, the better 

equipped we are to penetrate and interpret his art. For Proust, the great disadvantage of the 

Sainte-Beuve style of literary criticism is that it confuses literary judgments with personal ones. 

18 It is almost as if Proust had separated his own personality among a number of characters in 

this novel—Bloch representing his Dreyfusism, Charlus his homosexuality, and the narrator his 

“lack of will-power” and the personal relationships within his family. The “je” produces a “textual 

differential movement by which the ‘I’ is separated from itself” (Ellison 184). 

19 The writer Bergotte is especially used to depict the dichotomy of the artist whose personal 

life is totally divorced from his artistic achievement. The reader can see no legitimate connection


recreates experience in terms of fiction or poetry. For him it is the transformation of 

reality rather than its literal reproduction that produces art and in turn endows 

experience with meaning. 

Imitation, Quotation and Re-contextualization 

As such, one of the major tasks of a writer is to transform an experience into 

its expression. What is experienced gradually becomes what is represented, and 

what is felt is transformed into an image or a symbol, or in Marcel’s word, “to what 

in poetry we call metaphor” (I: 893). It is important, at this point, to recall that an 

ambivalence toward figuration is embedded in Proust’s aesthetics. He speaks often 

of the need to find the precise metaphor that will translate an impression. 20 At the 

same time, metaphor is only a vehicle of comparison. A metaphor does not state or 

restate anything; it simply alludes to it through an imitation. In other words, the 

writer is at once drawn to the linguistical profusion and energy of others, but he is 

obsessed by the desire for original expression. Tensions, anxieties and unresolved 

contradictions characterize Proust’s meditation about language and his concern with 

the dilemma of artistic creativity. 

Proust’s anxiety about language is revealed in the narrator who has a loathing 

of conversation and social exchange which he thinks would put us at the risk of 

losing our difference and of losing our self to the Other in the act of imitation. 

The narrator sees a hysteria of imitation in the water-lily which is trapped by an 

uncontrollable urge to copy (I: 202). Charles Morel, the would-be man of letters, is 

presented as a human counterpart to the water-lily. Morel’s imitation of the novelist 

Bergotte reveals a hysterical nature at work: “Morel imitated Bergotte marvelously. 

It was even unnecessary, after a while, to ask him for an impersonation. Like those 

hysterics whom one doesn’t have to hypnotise to make them become such or such a 

person, he entered spontaneously and immediately into the character” (III: 216). 

Given the unconscious copying of the behaviour and ideas of others, it is no wonder 

that, for the narrator, the work to come must be “a product of silence, not of talk” 

(III: 472). What the narrator wants to resist is a whole category of unoriginal writers 

who imitate out of habit: “all those banalities of form which are acquired through 

between the high moral tone of Bergotte’s work and his private morality. Bergotte himself 

confesses the defensive paradox: “I spend more than a multimillionaire on my little mistresses but 

from the delights and deceptions they afford me, I have the material for books which in turn bring 

me money” (I: 913). 

20 For instance, in Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust chides Paul Morand: “Water only boils at 100 

degrees” (284). What he meant is that the comparison must appear “inevitable.”


imitation” (IV: 473). But how can an artist, with the same medium of language used 

by other artists, fashion a truly creative writing 

Bakhtin’s analysis of the discourse of fiction provides an apposite schema for 

explaining Proust’s struggle with the differentiation between social language and a 

more authentically personal artistic discourse. Bakhtin indicates the linguistic 

dilemma in which the writer finds himself, and the alienating situation from which 

he must extract language: “The word in language is half someone else’s. It exists in 

other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions” 

(294). Since all objects have already been recognized and qualified verbally, they 

do not exist outside a social consciousness. Thus the prose artist sees his task as 

finding a method of appropriating the word to himself. More specifically, he is to 

form a personalized verbal image of the objects he describes to set against the 

background of the heteroglot voices that have already spoken on the subject. Any 

specific signifier remembers the contents with which its culture has invested it. Its 

present always bears a past that the present is never free to ignore or to forget. This 

is the dialogic situation of all language, which Bakhtin sought to conceptualize 

through his notions of “heteroglossia” and “multiaccentuality.” Bakhtin further 

makes the novel central to his aesthetic and critical project because the main 

purposes of the novel, according to Bakhtin, is “to evoke otherness in language, to 

further the process of coming to know one’s own language as it is perceived in 

someone else’s language” (365). 

In view of this, a pattern of recursive and uncanny quotations in Proust’s 

novel deserves exploration. An iterative practice in Proust’s work is the habit of 

constantly quoting and re-quoting other authors, such as Baudelaire, Nerval, 

Flaubert, Balzac, and Racine. As the narrator puts it: “By thus quoting an isolated 

line . . . one multiplies its power of attraction tenfold” (II: 859). While a quotation is 

an impurity in the text and an admission of reference to authority, in a certain sense 

it appears to add positive energy to the text by swelling it with extra significance. 

We could understand “quotation” in light of a conception of difference and 

repetition exceeding the mechanical frame of intertextual criticism. It would seem 

logical that the habit of quoting other writers is related to the openness of the 

Proustian individual, and hence his text, to the language of the Other. Paradoxically, 

quotation seems to neutralize anxiety about the language of the Other. Proustian 

quotation is a feeling of joyous liberation from the solitude of individual language 

and of access to a universal language, “a joy that I felt I was experiencing in a 

deeper, vaster, more integral part of myself, from which all obstacles and partitions 

seemed to have been swept away” (I: 111).


But how is quoted text integrated into Proust’s fiction The most obvious 

technique for domesticating imported text is to re-contextualize it, that is, to apply 

situations from other writer’s lives to one’s own situations, so that its meaning turns 

playful, ironic or even grotesque. More often than not, the signature phrases of 

another writer are stitched into the fabric of Proust’s prose. For instance, in the 

novel, a line of poetry by Leconte de Lisle becomes one of the signature phrases of 

Bergotte, the writer who marries a highly poetic style with cosmic statements, a 

combination the young narrator finds luscious. Although the line is placed within 

quotation marks, it is no longer attributed to Leconte de Lisle. Proust also brings 

Leconte’s line into one of the most charged and evocative moments in his text— the 

involuntary memories at the end of the novel: “I stood with one foot on one of the 

paving stones, the other on another, repeating the same step already accomplished 

so that it would re-create once again the elusive touching indistinct visions which 

urgently proposed to my mind the enigma of their happiness” (III: 915). A foreign 

quotation is thus absorbed with impunity into Proust’s own fictional discourse and 

generates additional layers of meaning there. If Racine is welcome in the Proustian 

text, it is because Proust creates his own Racine, interpreting and reinterpreting a 

few lines from within two or three plays until, in a sense, Racine has been both 

rewritten and co-opted. While part of the new meaning is its original meaning, 

another author’s line becomes our own if, in appropriating it, we draw as much 

meaning as he did from it. 21 

Thus when Proust picks a word or cliché from the reservoir of possible lexical 

associations, he in fact chooses the term for the semantic charge that has been 

encoded there in earlier texts. Proust favors this sort of signifier because it makes a 

multiplicity of simultaneous interpretations possible. Starting from a certain 

practice of texts, every particular occurrence of a word ends up hosting all previous 

encodings affecting this term. Hence in imitation and innovation Proust saw a way 

of conceptualizing the relations between the old and the new in literature—tradition 

and originality, imitation and innovation merge in art. The gesture that will be 

retrospectively judged innovative is a deliberate gesture of restoration. Pure 

imitation and quotation reaches the limit of its possibilities where one sees that, on 

the one hand, no repetition is merely repetition and, on the other, no individual 

occurrence is a completely individual occurrence. 

21 In a letter to Jacques Rivière, Proust argues that the act of quoting has a creative aspect if 

carried out by a sensitive writer: “I grant you that sometimes, when it is cited by a writer, an 

unusual quotation can become a kind of invention. It belongs as much to him, because of the 

felicitous meaning he draws from it, as to the writer who is quoted” (Correspondence 1993: 386). 

This passage is quoted from Michael Finn, 158.


Writing and Value Creation 

While Proustian quotation acknowledges that communication with the Other 

and even openness to the Other’s language are possible in controlled conditions, the 

task of the artist is not, as has been mentioned above, to reproduce a copy without 

individuality. Given that we are governed by our desire to resemble and to imitate, 

we can only be free once we begin to “de-assimilate” ourselves from the group. 

Hence, in response to our “spirit of imitation,” “it is the task of art to undo this work 

of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the 

depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us” (III: 932). Hence 

artistic vision is perhaps best understood as dissociative or recombinant. Creation in 

art calls for minds that can liberate themselves from apparent or pre-existing 

patterns. For the narrator, it is a kind of writing compared to the art of the surgeon 

and the X-ray operator: 

So the apparent, copiable charm of things and people escaped me, 

because I had not the ability to stop short there—I was like a surgeon 

who beneath the smooth surface of a woman’s belly sees the internal 

disease which is devouring it. If I went to a dinner-party I did not see 

the guests: when I thought I was looking them, I was in fact 

examining them with X-rays. (III: 738) 

To destroy the frame of traditional thinking can be an explosive and perilous 

undertaking. In this sense, Proust was an able practitioner of Nietzsche’s doctrine of 

creative cruelty. For Nietzsche, value-creation relies on violence or cruelty. Values 

are forged and given shape by the cold hard steel of a hammer. 22 In his inversion of 

Platonism, Nietzsche holds that the moral man is a mere copy, not an original, 

lacking the power of origination in divine creativity. Likely, the moral void in 

Proust’s writing derived from his wholehearted acceptance of his destiny as an artist, 

as a creator of values. 23 Hence when Marcel meets Bergotte, he sees that Bergotte 

22 In “The Hammer Speaks,” Nietzsche wrote: “For creators are hard. And it must seem bliss to 

you to press your hand upon millennia as upon wax, bliss to writer upon the will of millennia as 

upon metal—harder than metal, nobler than metal. Only the noblest is perfectly hard” (The 

Twilight 112). 

23 Beckett argues that “Proust’s preoccupation with botanical images accompanies very 

naturally his complete indifference to moral values and human justice” (34). That is, flowers and 

plants are shameless, and there is no question of right and wrong. I contend that Proust’s


has only the immorality essential to great art. The novelist Bergotte is an immoralist 

who moralizes in his novels through his experience with prostitutes. As Marcel puts 

it, “Great artists often, while being wicked, make use of their vices in order to arrive 

at a conception of the moral law that is binding upon us all” (I: 601). For the artist, 

moral values are not the ritual observance or loving obedience to divine or natural 

law; values are the products of personal experience of vice, or creative 

interpretations of personal experience. 

In this vein, sadism, for Proust, is not only inherent in homosexuality, but also 

is integral to artistic creativity, to code-breaking in the sense of violent transgression 

of moral codes and in the sense of deciphering illegible script in the great book of 

life. The narrator makes the parallel between Vinteuil’s musical genius and the form 

of his daughter’s perverse creativity: “A sadistic person like she was is the artist of 

evil” (I: 164). Although Mlle Vinteuil appeared absolutely evil, Marcel understands 

that she was not naturally wicked but merely “an artist in evil” (I: 179). The 

culmination of the lesbians’ profanations led to their deciphering Vinteuil’s illegible 

script and “ensuring an immortal and compensatory glory for the composer” (III: 

263). As Deleuze wrote, in contrasting Proust with Plato, “[t]here is no Logos, there 

are only hieroglyphs” (91). Our life, like the compositions interpreted by Mlle 

Vinteuil’s friend, Lea, has hieroglyphical symbols not traced by us but we, to the 

extent that we are artists, creatively interpret or translate these hieroglyphs. “The 

function and the task of a writer are those of a translator” (III: 918). 

Lacking the evidence, discipline, and clarity of the dialectical illumination of 

the Logos, hieroglyphs acquire meaning by means of creative violence. The 

hardness of the creator is essential to break free of repetitive ethical practices or 

subordination to recurrent moral claims. The painful dismembering of old and 

establishing of new categorizations, as Proust suggests in anguished passages on the 

narrator’s first trip to Balbec, attends any exposure to new stimuli such as the alien, 

high ceilings of his room in the Grand Hotel. That the anguish arising from the 

rupture of habit produces a climate of suffering fertile to creativity is repeatedly 

suggested in the novel. “By making me waste my time, by making me unhappy, 

Albertine had perhaps been more useful to me” (III: 947). And the narrator 

concludes: “The happy years are the lost years, one must wait to suffer before one 

can work” (III: 488). Pain runs this system now, but one feels that pleasure and 

desire could do the job also. The result is amazing: “everything is fertile, everything 

is dangerous” (III: 554). Situations may repeatedly arise requiring values unknown 

representation of the world is not so much featured by moral indifference as concerned with 

re-evaluating and creating values.


to us, values of which we have no knowledge or experience. Our responsibility, or 

more specifically, the task of the writer, is to remain vigilant whenever granting a 

glimpse of those situations: “But let a noise or a scent, once heard or once smelt, be 

heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without 

being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately the permanent and 

habitually concealed essence of things is liberated” (III: 224, my emphasis). 

Liberating us from adaptations, prejudices, and predicaments of a lived praxis, 

Proust’s ethics is an ethics inseparable from his aesthetics and consists in presenting 

values or inspiring new ways of thinking about existing ethical dilemmas. 

V. Conclusion 

Since the publication of Proust’s novel, Proustian length has become a 

favorite target in an information culture measuring time in microseconds. It seems 

that contemporary culture has no time for time. To a frenetic consumer culture, 

Proust’s narrative evokes what most resists consumption. To the impatient fever, 

Proust proposes a retreat. He slows down the impatience of “Being-in-advance 

-of-itself” by turning this achieved advance in the other direction. A forbearing 

engagement with alterity between the reader, the author, and the text then becomes 

an ethical moment of enormous importance in reading his novel. There are no rules 

for such an engagement, but I submit that the reading and writing of texts is an 

ethical practice negotiated in medias res, and that both readers and writers must be 

responsible for their products. Instead of viewing the work as a definitive 

representation, both the readers and writers should view the work as process, 

wherein their responsibility is not to “get it right,” but to “get it differently 

contoured and nuanced” (Richardson 521). The game lies in Proust’s forcing his 

readers to reveal their own sensibilities and experiences rather than perceiving his: 

It seemed to me that they would not be “my” readers, but the readers 

of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass 

like those which the optician at Combray used to offer his 

customers—it would be my book but with its help I would furnish 

them with the means of reading what lay within themselves. (III: 

1089) 

Proust insists that his own “values are positively all blanks” in the story. While the 

Realist novelist has long been understood to be concerned largely with moments of


moral choice, and through those choices with morality more generally, Proust 

relinquishes control of his narrative at the very point where meaning is most at 

stake. The reader and the writer are partners on equal terms: “The reader needs to 

read in a certain fashion in order to read properly; the author must not be indignant 

at this, but, on the contrary, must leave the reader all possible liberty” (III: 1091). 

Therefore, Proust’s ambition is primarily to teach, rather than to train. His 

novel provides the reader with a sort of lens, or, in Proust’s own image, the 

eyeglasses that transform the text and the world. Readers in reading this novel will 

start to see apparently dull objects as though they were beings endowed with life, 

energy, and agency, in the manner of Marcel after exposure to Elstir’s painting: “My 

eyes, trained by Elstir to retain precisely those elements that once I had deliberately 

rejected, would now gaze for hours at what in the former year they had been 

incapable of seeing” (II: 871). Astonishment may always be in reserve for us in the 

behaviour and even in the capacities of people we think we know perfectly. No 

event or text can be successfully paraphrased or translated into its bottom line. 

Similarly, truth, like the total Self, is always incomplete, contingent, subject to 

infinite revision. We learn lessons like these from the novel’s style and vision far 

more than from the direct statements. Proust’s mode of understanding literature’s 

contribution to ethics is less interested in how literature guides readers to particular 

moral conclusions than in how it enlarges the reader’s field of perception and 

introduces readers to new levels of experience. If for Proust, the task of the artist is 

“to discover the complex structures that seem to govern our lives” (I: 595), Proust’s 

art is art with a pattern, one that is endlessly preparing its reversals and surprises 

and revelations. 

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About the Author 

Pi-Jung Chang is Associate Professor of Literature at National Taichung Institute of 

Technology. She is the author of Totality Deferred: A Study on Franz Kafka (MA thesis) and 

An Ethical Encounter with the Face of the Other: Language, Love and Sexual Difference in 

the Novels of D. H. Lawrence (Doctoral Dissertation). Her articles and essays have appeared 

in The National Chi Nan University Journal, as well as in Soochow Journal of Foreign 

Languages and Cultures, and Feng Chia Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences. 

Email: ena@ntit.edu.tw 

[Received 12 Mar. 2010; accepted 8 June 2010; revised 18 Aug. 2010]

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