In Search of Proust’s Philosophy

Ray Briggs
Coming up on Philosophy Talk…

Monty Python
Good evening and welcome to the Arthur Ludlow Memorial Baths Newport for this year’s finals of the All-England Summarize Proust competition.

Ray Briggs
Marcel Proust had some brilliant ideas about how art can be transformative. But can a novel be philosophical?

Josh Landy
So much to talk about! Memory, identity, art, enchantment…

Ray Briggs
How can you talk about that all in one novel?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s a very long novel!

Monty Python
Each contestant has to give a brief summary of Proust’s “À la recherche du temps perdu,” once in a swimsuit and once in evening dress.

Ray Briggs
Why read Proust in the 21st century?

Little Miss Sunshine
Total loser—he spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads.

Ray Briggs
Our guest is… my co-host, Josh Landy, who’s written a new book, “The World According to Proust.”

Little Miss Sunshine
Larry Sugarman is perhaps the second most highly-regarded Proust scholar in the U .S. Who’s number one? That would be me, Rich.

Ray Briggs
In Search of Proust’s Philosophy

Josh Landy
Marcel Proust!

Ray Brigs
…coming up on Philosophy Talk.

Ray Briggs
Could a novel change your life?

Blakey Vermeule
Is art a way to re-enchant the world?

Ray Briggs
What does Proust tell us about our true selves?

Blakey Vermeule
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs,

Blakey Vermeule
And I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Josh Landy. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus, where I teach philosophy, and Blakey teaches in the philosophy and literature program. Welcome back to the co host chair, Blakey.

Blakey Vermeule
Glad to be here. Today, we’re out in search of Marcel Proust’s philosophy,

Ray Briggs
Which is why you’re here today, and why Josh will actually be joining us as our guest later, you know, he’s got a brand new book about Proust.

Blakey Vermeule
Oh, I love Proust.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, he’s that French guy who wrote that really long novel “In Search of Lost Time.”

Blakey Vermeule
You know, every time I read that novel, I feel like I’m falling in love with it all over again. It has something to illuminate every stage of life. Whether it’s the falling in love stage, the parenting stage, or the guilt stage.

Ray Briggs
You know, Blakey, that’s just like the narrative device that Proust uses to talk about falling in love with people. He has this character, Swann, who falls in love with this other character Odette for the first time, except that that happens for like five times over the course of the novel. And he falls in love for a different reason every time.

Blakey Vermeule
Yes. And every time it feels like she’s completely special. No one could replace her. Too bad that’s all an illusion!

Ray Briggs
Wait, so Proust is telling me that all my grand romantic passions are fake? Isn’t that kind of depressing?

Blakey Vermeule
It’s not so bad. Love might be an illusion, but it connects you to something that is real.

Ray Briggs
Oh yeah, like what? Not the person you love?

Blakey Vermeule
No, but it connects you to your true self. And if you look at a work of art that someone else created, you can get a window into their true self

Ray Briggs
Oh come on, Blakey. How hard can it be to know your true self? I know lots of things about myself. It’s not that difficult. So right now, I want tea. And I want a cookie. Ooh, maybe a madeleine! See, I don’t need great art for that.

Blakey Vermeule
But Ray, that’s not real self knowledge. It’s shallow. And fleeting. You can eat the madeleine and then five minutes later, you want something else. What about your real self—the part that doesn’t change?

Ray Briggs
Ah, I don’t know. Do I even have a real self? My beliefs change, my feelings change moment to moment, my body ages. Even my ideals eventually change.

Blakey Vermeule
Yes. But Proust thinks that underneath all that there’s something that doesn’t change.

Ray Briggs
But I can’t find it. And I’ve looked

Blakey Vermeule
Where’d you last put it?

Ray Briggs
I don’t know! I’ve tried therapy, journaling, taking classes in the philosophy of mind. I’ve tried everything.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, that is your problem right there. You’re trying too hard. Why not take a bite of that madeleine and relax?

Ray Briggs
Oh, how does that help?

Blakey Vermeule
When the narrator in Proust’s novel eats a madeleine, a flood of involuntary memories wash over him. He thinks about his childhood and suddenly he’s right there. He’s experiencing the exact same joy that he felt as a child.

Ray Briggs
Oh, okay. So I’m gonna just start going through my memories one by one, and then I’ll find my true self.

Blakey Vermeule
It doesn’t work exactly like that. So sifting through your memories on purpose is like trying to fall in love on purpose. If you try to force it, it’s not really authentic.

Ray Briggs
But I thought love was an illusion. How do I know my authentic self isn’t an illusion, too?

Blakey Vermeule
I bet Josh will have something to say about that. We’ll be talking to him about his new book, “The World According to Proust,” and that’s why I’m filling in for him as host today.

Ray Briggs
I can’t wait to have Josh in the hot seat.

Blakey Vermeule
Yeah, it’s gonna be fun. But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly J. McDede, to contemplate how smell and taste influence our memories and sense of self. She files this report.

Holly McDede
When Hannah Spiegelman was getting her master’s in gastronomy and studying food she found people talked about Marcel Proust constantly.

Hannah Spiegelman
It really blew my mind in terms of how taste and memory are so intertwined and how everything can affect taste and how that can change memory.

Holly McDede
In the first volume of his novel, Proust’s narrator taste a madeleine dipped in tea, sending him back to a childhood memory. Hannah can relate. She helps people to think about historical people and places through ice cream flavors.

Unknown Speaker
I did an ice cream based on Proust’s on madeleine moment.

Holly McDede
On her blog, “A Sweet History,” you can learn about flaming Cheeto apple brandy ice cream with chili drinking chocolate swirl dusted in gold. That one is inspired by the most written about women in New Mexico history, Doña Tules, who ran a gambling Hall in Santa Fe during the 1800s

Unknown Speaker
I truly believe that food is all you need to learn about in order to understand everything in this world.

Holly McDede
Great Moon cocktail and clam juice ice cream with blueberry blue corn floured thumbprint cookies. That one is first Sir John Herschel, a British astronomer whose aunt was the first female scientist to receive a salary.

Unknown Speaker
I could make ice cream and make it super unappetizing, which would be a statement. But I do want people to have an additional experience that’s adding to the story. So that’s the goal for me.

Holly McDede
Proust got people thinking about food and memory. And then there are aspects of Proust’s writing itself you never forget.

Gloria Frym
like the longest sentence in Proust, which is 958 words.

Holly McDede
Gloria Frym is another person influenced by Proust as a reader rather than an ice cream maker.

Unknown Speaker
And I have a poster in my study that has it diagrammed.

Holly McDede
She’s a poet and professor at California College of the Arts and author of the book “How Proust Ruined My Life and Other Essays.”

Unknown Speaker
The number of dependent clauses and digressions is phenomenal. I tried to take a picture of it to show it to you, but it doesn’t photograph. You know, the print is so tiny.

Holly McDede
Gloria says because our minds can’t retain big chunks of text or digressions, reading proofs feels new every time in the mid 80s she picked up the second volume of “In Search of Lost Time” while waiting for her baby to arrive.

Unknown Speaker
I actually tried to read Proust to her, and she cried merciless. She wasn’t interested in the beautiful sentences.

Holly McDede
Gloria’s students rarely make it past the first volume—you have to be ready for Proust. 15 years later, she read the novel with a group of other writers and that time around, she fell in love.

Unknown Speaker
What else can I say? There’s no other word for what happened. I didn’t want to read anything else.

Holly McDede
She took Proust to Mexico, Spain, the Bahamas, the East Coast. And that is how Proust ruined her life: it created this habit of focusing on one writer. Some folks come and go. Not Proust—she says he’s a paradise of language.

Unknown Speaker
All you have to do is love. You don’t have to be an academic. And you don’t have to be analytic, because he does enough of that for you.

Holly McDede
And so it makes sense to end this report with some Proust and a classic 599 word sentence. Here we go. But I had seen first one and then another of the rooms in which I had slept during my life than the end I would revisit them all in the long course of my waking dream rooms and winters where…

Monty Python
I don’t think any at all contestants this evening have succeeded in encapsulating the intricacies of Proust’s masterwork.

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Ray Briggs
Thanks for that vivid report, Holly. I’m Ray Briggs, with me is my Stanford colleague, Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for our usual co-host, Josh Landy. And today we’re in search of Proust’s philosophy.

Blakey Vermeule
We’re joined now by a very special guest, Josh Landy. He’s professor of French and comparative literature at Stanford and author of a brand new book, “The World According to Proust.” Josh, welcome back to the Philosophy Talk guest chair.

Josh Landy
Yeah, thanks. It’s so much fun to be back in this chair.

Ray Briggs
So Josh, you’ve written a number of books about Proust now. Can you tell us about your first encounter with them?

Josh Landy
Oh, Lord, yeah, I was at college. And we were supposed to read the first volume of Proust, and then write an essay about it in two weeks, and after a week, I’d got to page 72, but forgotten everything that I’d read. So I started again, and then like, day six of week two, I got back to page 72. And I had to confess to my tutor that I wasn’t going to be able to turn in a paper. I was mortified. It was the only time i i failed to turn in something at college.

Blakey Vermeule
Well, you obviously struggled to finish even the first volume of In Search of Lost Time. What would you say to encourage someone who’s thinking about reading all seven volumes?

Josh Landy
I mean, there is absolutely nothing like it’s true that it’s an investment. Right? So it’s 3000 pages, and often pretty dense pages, long sentences. But it you know, it totally changed the way that I think about art and selfhood and memory and and just the experience of it and just the existence of it. It’s like the Sistine Chapel ceiling you can’t believe it exists. It makes the world a more beautiful place.

Ray Briggs
So I want to hear like one of the things that you got out of reading this long, long novel.

Josh Landy
Oh, gosh, it’s so many. One of the things I find fascinating is this, this this discussion about conscious illusion that sometimes you can deceive yourself knowingly, and even deliberately, but it’s still sort of works.

Ray Briggs
So how would somebody go about doing that?

Josh Landy
Well, it’s one really nice example where the main character who’s not really named, is trying to get over a relationship. So he’s just on again, off again, sort of relationship with you about, and it seems like she’s not really into him. So he decides I’m not gonna see her again. But he keeps getting these invitations to go to T in other family and things like that. And he keeps rejecting them. He says, No, I can’t come. The way he manages to do it, is to tell himself, this is the last invitation I will reject. I’ll accept the next one. And it works.

Ray Briggs
So that’s really puzzling, like, like, if you’re tricking yourself, how do you believe yourself? Do you think there’s an answer in Proust? Or does he just present us with this puzzling phenomenon? And not tell us what’s going on?

Josh Landy
Well, there’s no explicit explanation. But I think I think between the lines, we can see the answer, which is that in Proust, the self is divided. And one of the ways is divided into various simultaneous components. So for example, if you’re in a relationship, you don’t quite trust the other person, part of you believes that they are a good partner, and the other part of you believes they’re running around all over town. So in this kind of case, well, part of you believes that you will accept the next invitation, and part of you doesn’t believe and so that’s the way in which you’re able to sustain these benevolent illusions.

Blakey Vermeule
Do you think that his view of the divided self has? Where did he get this, Josh?

Josh Landy
Well, you know, he took some philosophy classes in school, and he was very interested in various philosophical ideas. But, you know, he wasn’t professionally trained. I think a lot of this. He’s just a brilliant mind, who’s figuring a lot of things for himself. But yeah, he’s certainly reading like the French Middle East. And he’s in the Burke Saul circle. And so he’s sort of hanging out in those meal years. But I don’t know exactly where he gets the divide itself from.

Blakey Vermeule
But he manages to come up with a theory that will essentially prove to be the theory of mind for the 20th century. He just saw it.

Josh Landy
Yeah, it’s one of the things that’s so interesting that Proust talks a lot about the unconscious and unconscious forces and unconsciousness and unconscious that he hadn’t read any Freud. And, you know, part of that is just because the whole notion of the unconscious was very much in the air at that time, you know, lots and lots of folks in the 19th century already talking about unconscious forces and even the unconscious. So yeah, he’s very much in the moment, philosophically speaking, and as you said, you know, ends up with this really elaborate kind of brilliant theory of personal identity.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Marcel Proust with our resident expert, Josh Landy, author of “The World According to Proust.”

Blakey Vermeule
How can we find enchantment in a godless world? Is love the answer? Can we find ourselves through social climbing or looking at beautiful flowers?

Ray Briggs
Marigolds, madeleines, and making magic—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Twenty One Pilots
If we could turn back time o the good old days, when the mama sang us to sleep, and now we’re stressed out.

Ray Briggs
If you could turn back time to the good old days, what would you find? I’m Ray Briggs. This is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Josh Landy. And we’re out in search of Proust’s philosophy with our very own Josh Landy, author of “The World According to Proust.”

Ray Briggs
Got questions about Proust in his monumental novel “In Search of Lost Time”? Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Blakey Vermeule
Josh, Proust thinks that the modern world has become disenchanted. Can you explain what he means by that?

Josh Landy
Well, yeah, the sociologist Max Weber’s said that’s sort of what modernity is, or at least one of the things modernity is the progressive disenchantment of the world. So you know, one example is, you know, people used to look at rainbows, and see the goddess Iris, or maybe God’s covenant with the world. And now we kind of see prismatic refraction, and they still look nice, but we don’t expect there to be, you know, a leprechaun, with with some gold under the rainbow or something.

Ray Briggs
Well, we still see gay pride, don’t we?

Josh Landy
Well, thank goodness, we can reinvent, right? So there are ways that’s kind of where proofs going. That, you know, it’s always not lost. On the one hand, we’ve sort of collectively driven sprites and angels and things out of the world. But on the other hand, we can bring them in through a different door.

Ray Briggs
Wait, so why do I want to enchant the world? Like a lot of that sounds like superstition, like I shouldn’t really believe in sprites and angels should I know.

Josh Landy
So what you really want according to folks like Proust is a secular form of reinstatement. Right. So now, of course, many people were still believers, right? So that’s, yeah, but I’m thinking about the segment of the population that ceased to believe in traditional forms of religion, and certainly, you know, the pantheon of Greek gods and things like that. What those folks want is a secular replacement. So something something you can really believe in something it’s real, but also enchanting, because the world isn’t quite enough, when you want there to be more than meets the eye.

Ray Briggs
Right, but I mean, isn’t there a risk of getting further illusions from that? So you mentioned some illusions that preusse Narrator cultivated him in himself about his love shall bear it? To get through things easier? Like, how do I avoid just deluding myself while I’m enchanting myself.

Josh Landy
Fair point. So I mean, you know, sometimes you’re just gonna want the bare truth. Sometimes you’re gonna want to deceive yourself in as in the case of refusing the invitations. But sometimes there’s this kind of sweet spot in the middle where there’s, there’s a genuine form of enchantment. And in Proust, art is the ultimate example of that. So art is real, right? It’s not a sprite. It’s not a goblin. It’s something real that genuinely adjusts the world.

Blakey Vermeule
So what is it like to be enchanted by art? According to Proust, what do you what do you feel when you’re experiencing that? Modern Bri enchantment?

Josh Landy
Well, I think one of the main things you feel is contact with another human being at the most profound level, which in the novel is the two of you were saying earlier, is really elusive. It’s really hard, within the world of the novel, to get to know somebody, at a deep level through through regular interaction, but if you read their novel, if you look at their paintings, if you listen to their compositions, that’s real contact. And that’s, that’s magical, but it’s also real.

Ray Briggs
What if you try to make art, and it’s just kind of crappy art? Are you just stuck? Can nobody know you truly, then?

Josh Landy
That’s a great question. So the official story within the novel is that only somebody who’s able to use the resources of an artistic medium is really able to communicate themselves, interestingly, even to themselves. They don’t even know themselves without making great art, because we’re too self deceived. But between the lines, I think we get a more kind of softer picture, more moderate picture, which is, well, it’s about style. But you know, you can have style in your everyday life. You can have style in your mode of conversation. And so maybe all isn’t lost. If like me, you’re a pretty bad novelist. I don’t know, that’s I’m saying like, Yeah, I know. I don’t have a novel in me. Right? I definitely don’t have a great painting me. But maybe all is not lost, even for people like me, right? That there’s a way for us to live with style and thus communicate something about who we really are.

Blakey Vermeule
So style in, in my view, often has to do with display, it has to do with social climbing, which we’ve already sort of said is not a source of transcendence or meaning. So how do you navigate or how does Prusa navigate bat?

Josh Landy
Yeah, let me that’s a that’s a great point too, and improves very often there’s a good form of something in a bad form and So there’s a good way of appreciating art in a bad way he had this great scene where if I tell you the composer we’ve we’ve rediscovered his magnum opus, the septet and we’re all listening to it. And the narrator is having the greatest artistic experience of his life, while everyone else around him is basically chattering or falling asleep. And so, right, there’s always a good way in a bad way. But there is a good way, within art, there’s a way of really devoting yourself to the craft of art making. So it’s not about social climbing, it’s not about showing off, it’s really about getting touch with with something really important. And on the other end, there’s a way of receiving that art that puts you in contact with another human being.

Ray Briggs
I like the idea that art can put me in touch with people who make art. But I also like, I want experiences of love and friendship. And I don’t think Proust Narrator really gets much of that. Isn’t that sad? Like don’t? Don’t I want that too, as a way of getting in touch with other human beings?

Josh Landy
Oh, absolutely, you should want it and, you know, there’s some question as to whether we should think that the novel is ultimately on the side of art to the exclusion of other forms of contact, the nice thing is all isn’t completely lost. Within the world of the novel, there are some cases of genuine love. And what I like the most is the great painter LCSs character in the novel, he’s a great painter. And, you know, so many of the characters in the novel are having his awful love relationships where it’s riddled with jealousy, and the people chose each other for terrible reasons, and it barely hangs together. But this is a couple, they’ve been together for decades. And he fell in love with her because she incarnates his ideal of beauty that he’d been carrying around with him as a great artist. And that has never changed. And they’re incredibly happy. And so again, between the lines, I think we can see a less pessimistic picture.

Ray Briggs
I also want to know more about connecting to myself. So like art is a way that I can do that. Are there other things that I can do to sort of know who I really am?

Josh Landy
Yeah, they’re actually quite a few in the novel. And love is actually one of them, funnily enough, because if you fall in love over the course of your life with more than one person, at least according to Bruce, as a writer, you’ll start to detect a pattern, right? There’s something that people that you’re with have in common. And what that is, is something to do with your preferences. And so you can actually work back, we have to work back from your choices in the world. Because if you just sit in a room introspecting trying to go, what kind of a person am I, you’re not gonna get anywhere, we’re, human beings are too easy. It’s too easy to deceive ourselves, get it wrong, we’re very opaque to ourselves. But look at the things that you do look at the choices you make. And you’ll start to see yourself,

Ray Briggs
Right, so if I’m just by myself, I think I would like a partner who is tall, who is like very professionally motivated, but then you meet somebody who has all those characteristics, and they kind of leave you flat and you meet somebody else. And you notice that they smile at you or have a lovely sense of humor.

Josh Landy
Exactly. And that’s going to tell you something about who you are. And there’s other things like that. And then also, you know, your experiences in the world, just even looking at trees, looking at hawthorns, certainly looking at paintings and listening to to concertos, all of that, if you’re paying the right kind of attention, shines a light on you. But again, it’s not just that, you know, if it’s a concerto, it also shines a light on the other person. And it reinvents the well because people are different and differences, all inspiring. So the world gets reinvented,

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Marcel Proust with our Stanford colleague and regular co host, Josh Landy, whose new book is “The World According to Proust.”

Blakey Vermeule
Josh, what does it mean to pay the right kind of attention?

Josh Landy
Well, just simply that you’re you have to be so you know, let’s say the example that Ray gave you think you really want someone who’s tall, but then you meet someone who isn’t in you fall in love with them? Well, you could just leave it at that and just be happy with your partner. And that’s great. I mean, it’s good to be happy. But you could also take a moment to reflect Wait, what, what went wrong there in myself understanding? You know, five minutes ago, I thought I really needed somebody to be tall. Now I’m with somebody who isn’t. That’s just helped me to understand myself a little better.

Ray Briggs
So there’s this famous scene where Proust Narrator takes a bite of a cookie and comes to understand himself like, should I be eating more cookies? How does that work?

Josh Landy
Well, probably yes, but, but But yeah, so that’s it’s such a lovely scene fairly early in the novel. And this point, the narrator is in in his middle age, unspecified age, but he hasn’t eaten Meadowlands for a while, and he dips the Madeleine in a cup of tea. It’s some crumbs though Madeleine and Suddenly his his childhood comes comes back to him in rich, vivid detail. It’s like he’s, it’s like a time machine. It’s like a teleport, he’s, he’s living it from within, he drops back into the self that he used to be, then why is that so special? Well, interestingly, the character says, I wasn’t to find out for many years. And we actually find out, like 2600 pages later. So it’s years of your life to, but it comes down to seeing something in himself that hasn’t changed over all those years.

Ray Briggs
Is the novel going to try to mimic this just by being such a long novel that you can’t remember the beginning, by the time you get to the end?

Josh Landy
That’s actually i That’s brilliant, right? Like, I actually think that’s exactly one of the things that it doesn’t, why it needs to be so long. It’s not just that in a general sense, there are things you forget. But more specifically, it constructs these brilliant little shot these little these little moves, where it’ll drop a tiny little hint early on. And then 2000 pages later, suddenly, that little seed sprouts into this massive tree, and you’re like, Oh, my God, and and it hits you in exactly the way that that Madeline episode hits the main character.

Blakey Vermeule
In the book, you mentioned that the Medellin and the tea is a kind of a secular version of the wafer, and the wine. And he’s in a way he’s importing Christian Catholic iconography into his novel, and yet the, the source of transcendence is the self. And I’m, I’m just wondering if you could say a little bit of belt that is the self enough of a read on which to hang the this whole system of reenactment or belief and re enchantment?

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, great question. So, you know, the thought is, what do we want from What does transcendence mean? Well, in one definition, it means basically, leaving this world and entering a war, believing in the possibility of another war, but what is another world? Well, it’s a system that has its own laws, it’s different from ours, but it’s sort of the same as itself, it’s internally consistent. Well, guess what? Another person is that right? So the world, this is a metaphor that prisoner he uses. Each of us has an internal world. And if I can enter your world by reading your writing, how incredible for me, and how incredible for you, if you get to enter the world of of Monet or or Georgia O’Keeffe, or Toni Morrison, it’s amazing, right. So each artists have each person has a different world, we’re all ruled by different internal mental laws. And the possibility of a glimpse into that really is enchanting, it feels like a transcendence, it feels like an entry into a different universe.

Ray Briggs
So if my internal world is really different from from blinkies, internal world or your internal world, Josh, like, how do we achieve that kind of connection where we can get into each other’s internal worlds?

Josh Landy
Well, you know, I think the everyday experience of art is a kind of clue to that where you know, when you see a really great movie, for example, where things are definitely think about science fiction, right? You’re dropped into a very different kind of world, where it maybe the gravity operates a little bit differently, and maybe, you know, social interactions operate differently, all these kinds of things operate differently. And we’re, we adjust pretty fast to these new rules, right? So it seems like as humans, we’re quite capable of doing that. Only this isn’t a fiction anymore. Now it’s you know, Ray Briggs is real inner world. And what an incredible honor to be able to spend a little bit of time visiting that world.

Ray Briggs
Okay, so I paint something. And there’s like, the painting for me, which is like, inflected by my visual stuff. And there’s the painting for you, which is inflicted by your visual stuff. How do I know that those are going to line up?

Josh Landy
Right, and there’s no guarantee. And an experience of an artwork isn’t just one thing, especially experience of something like truce novel, which is 3000 pages that you might spend months or in my case, years of your life reading. And so at different moments, you might be doing something different. So One moment while you’re reading Proust novel, you might be thinking about yourself. And that’s, in fact, deliberate. Right? So Proust talks about that about how you know a good artwork should also be a mirror to the reader, but other times you’re able to get yourself out of the way. Just take yourself out of the picture, bracket yourself, as some philosophers would say, and allow yourself to be sort of productively taken over by the mind of somebody else. Simone de Beauvoir says it best SHE SAYS THE MIRACLE literature is that another person’s thought becomes mine.

Blakey Vermeule
That’s such a beautiful sentiment and I all I can think about is how just directed all of us are. I’m wondering if you have a have a, if Proust would have a response to that. It’s, it’s clearly worth it in your life to have pushed through to this. Yeah,

Josh Landy
I think that’s right. And again, this is more between the lines than anything else. But I think that one of the great virtues of the 3000 page novel is that in inculcates a set of mental virtues, one of which is patience, thank you cannot, you cannot read this 3000 page novel without having a bit of an attention span. And I think, you know, it’s a, it’s a virtuous cycle. You know, start with a little bit of patience and attention span, this novel is going to give you more, and it’s given a give you, I think, habits of being able to store things away and store them kind of in a provisional way and think twice and revive. I think you’ve come out of this experience, not just I think, a happier person for knowing Proust. But, I mean, maybe it sounds over optimistic, but I actually think it equips you with mental skills that are really useful in today’s world.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about the life and thought of Marcel Proust with our resident expert, Josh Landy, author of “The world, according to Proust.”

Blakey Vermeule
is love just an illusion? Can you ever really know the object of your affection? What does Proust have to say about same-sex relationships?

Ray Briggs
Romantic illusions and elusive reality—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher. when Philosophy Talk continues.

Soft Cell
Tainted love, tainted love

Ray Briggs
If love is headed toward you, should you run to it or get away? I’m Ray Briggs. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Blakey Vermeule
…except your intelligence. I’m Blakey Vermeule, sitting in for Josh Landy who is here today as our guest as we go in search of Proust’s philosophy.

Ray Briggs
So Josh, Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time” depicts same sex relationships, but it’s not exactly what I would call positive representation. Do you think it’s still relevant to 21st century readers?

Josh Landy
Yeah, that’s kind of what Jean said to Bruce Andres, you need the his fellow novelist. I don’t think it’s complicated. And Proust himself was gay. And he has, he creates this character who isn’t creative, who’s straight, and seems really confused by same sex relationships. And you know, he’s this character is going to be analytical mind, so he’s desperately trying to understand it. But he isn’t doing a very good job, in my opinion. So he tries out all these different theories, many of which he’s picked up from the environment around. So for example, one of the going theories at the time was that it was a vise. And another theory at the time was that it was a disease. And another theory at the time was, it’s not a vise or a disease. It’s just the result of people ending up at the wrong body. So a woman ends up in the body of a man, and that’s why that man is interested in other men. But then at times the this character is saying, No, it’s none of those things. It’s a blessing. Right? It’s the sort of the greatest thing that could happen to you, because it equips you with all of these talents and aesthetic sensibilities. So it’s a bit complicated. And so I don’t know what to say about how to deal with it today, because it’s such a kind of rich mess of things.

Ray Briggs
Why do you think Proust chose to have a straight narrator?

Josh Landy
It’s such a fascinating choice of the, you know, the cynical answer is, you know, get away with it. Right. So might have been harder at the time. But you know, it wasn’t impossible at the time to for it wouldn’t have been impossible to, for him to have a non straight narrator. But I think it does something very interesting for us as readers. This novel isn’t an autobiography, or an autobiography in disguise, and it’s not a treatise. So we don’t have a character who represents Proust, the author telling us how to think about everything. For example, same sex relationships. Instead, you have a character who’s often very confused, and contradicts himself and changes his mind, or says something that you look around. He says, Well, you know what, no one can ever fall in love with somebody they actually like. And then you’re looking at say, Wait, well, what about that page where you’re talking about LSD? Right? That seems to be so it’s like, it’s great for us as readers that were challenge to put things together for ourselves and reach your own conclusions rather than having something handed to us on a plate.

Blakey Vermeule
It seems as though in the novel same sex relationships, are they right there on a spectrum between the sort of very kind of lost and sad and actually the successful and worldly I’m wondering if you have a sense of what that spectrum is like, or if you can talk us through it a little bit.

Josh Landy
That’s really well said. And I think it’s important, I guess, very similar in a way to the spectrum of different sex relationships in the novel where some seems to be going a lot better than others. And, you know, there’s, there’s a lot in the novel that is really, you know, in spite of the fact that this is a straight and Rachel is often very confused. It’s really on the side of these, this poor, persecuted minority. The longest sentence of many long sentences in the novel is about the plight of gay men in in 20th century Europe, including Oscar Wilde is not named, but it’s clearly about Oscar Wilde, who, you know, has undergone that awful court case. The opening of one of the volumes is this fantastic scene, where two gay men find each other by miracle, and the narrator compares it to the miracle of a bee finding a flower in the middle of the city. It’s just so beautiful. So So yeah, there’s the spectrum is all there, right. So for people who are cruel to people who are kind from people who are happy to people who are sad, but if you put it all together, you know, and again, reading a little bit between the lines, I like to think that the world of same sex desire in the novel has something in spite of those cases where it doesn’t seem to be going great. It has something incredibly appealing about it, because what do people bond over in that world, they bond over who they are, and what we see, you know, community and Proust is often very vexed. And we see these highfalutin aristocrats bonding over snobbery and their disdain for people who aren’t like them. And we see the French bonding of a being French, and disdaining anything that isn’t France. And this is not like that. Right? So the world of same sex desire is a world where people come together over a genuine part of who they really are. And so in spite of all the complexities, there’s something kind of positive about that.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so one of the narrator’s love interests is bisexual. And he really struggles to understand that, like, what should we be like learning or taking away from his struggles?

Josh Landy
Well, I think that this is what philosophers called the problem of other minds. How do we know what somebody else is thinking or to put it more pristinely what their world is like? And this is a general problem in Proust, how do I know your world I really want to write I want, I don’t just want to be trapped inside my own skull. I want to be able to get out there now. And you know, it’s part of reinvestment is to see this one world as a million worlds, because we’re all looking at it differently. But how do I know how do I kind of do that? Now for the character, it achieves its starkest form in this relationship, where he thinks that that lbf teen is bisexual. She’s interested not just in men, but in women. And he says this love for women was something I could not conceive. I couldn’t imagine it, which is weird, because he falls in love with women. Yes, that’s right. So he can imagine being someone loving women, right. But he can’t imagine being a woman, loving women, right. And so that’s, of course, that might be in many ways, a wrongheaded way of thinking about the situation. But for him, it’s a particularly dramatic example of what he calls the the barrier that’s between me and the world of somebody else.

Ray Briggs
It’s also really interesting that Prusa like, tries to get us to imagine our way into lack of imagination. That’s a weird and cool thing to do as a novelist.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I agree. And it’s brilliant. And it’s very powerful. I think, you know, because we’re, we’re locked inside the perspective of this character for so long. Doesn’t mean we like everything he does, a lot of the things he does are quite questionable. We certainly don’t like the way in which he’s operating in this relationship is very jealous, very controlling. But we, it allows us, we really do get into the world if this character and we feel with him, the torment of not being able to enter the world of another human being.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I mean, this, this also makes me wonder about true selves. So doesn’t seem like there’s a guarantee that anybody’s true self is somebody that I’m going to like, correct. Like, maybe they just don’t leave their partner alone, because they’re like, oh, who else are you seeing? Who else are you seeing? I don’t like that.

Josh Landy
No. Right. And so that’s an interesting thing for the world to be reinvented. It’s enough that there be many, many, many different perspectives, including good and bad ones, right? That’s okay for a shaman. But for life to be good. That might not be enough, right? We might also need people to treat each other well. And that’s really not something that comes up in a very He ostentatious way in the novel, but again, there are scenes of people treating each other well. And there are scenes of treating each other badly. And it sure as heck seems as though we like the cases where people are treating each other well.

Blakey Vermeule
So Proust as a source of moral self knowledge. What would you say about that?

Josh Landy
Ooh, that’s interesting. Yeah, I mean, because that’s gonna be part of it, right? So self knowledge, self, that a lot of what self knowledge looks like in Proust is what philosophers call a conceptual scheme. So the way in which I sort of put things in the world into categories, but hey, you know, it’s true that part of you know who I am is also the values that I put on things. And many, many cases, they’re going to be moral values. So the self knowledge that I’m in search of when I look at hawthorns, or think about the way I fall in love with people or react to an artwork, well, hopefully that points me in that direction, too.

Ray Briggs
I also want to know about sort of some of the things you were saying earlier about error, in addition to self knowledge. So you’ve got the narrator making mistakes, not just about, like moral truths, but about factual stuff. Like he makes a bunch of mistakes about like, where, where the mole is on the face of somebody he falls in love with? We’re like, not all of his beliefs can be true, how can we trust this narrator? When he keeps telling us stuff, that can’t be true,

Josh Landy
and we can’t and that’s one of the great things about this novel, that it isn’t an entirely reliable narrator. And that generates really important effects for us, right? If you wanted to treat us it will be the worst thing. But it isn’t. The treatise is a novel. So yeah, you know, when he meets, I’ll be ft and he thinks he, she knows she has a mole on her face, but he remembers it as being in one place, and then 10 pages later on different places. So and he just reports it as fact. So we have to be very astute as readers. That’s part of what I meant earlier, when I’m saying it equips us with with useful mental capacities or strengthens our mental capacities, you know, we have to be savvy, right, and not necessarily accept things that are told to us, we have to weigh things up. And, you know, give things the appropriate probabilistic waiting, and evaluate. So that’s one reason to do that. Another is that this novel is really interested in phenomenology, the way the world appears to us, rather than the way it actually is. So moments like that give us really the feel of what it is what it’s like to be a human being navigating uncertainly around a world that appears a certain way, but might be different.

Ray Briggs
Do you think that he has a clearer and truer picture of the world at the end of the novel than at the beginning? Or is it just like one error after another error?

Josh Landy
He does. I mean, so, you know, Bruce wrote a letter to a critic where he said, The stuff is the stuff my character says at the end of the first volume, is the opposite of my real opinion, which will be revealed in the final volume, I’m forced to depict errors as though they were truths too bad for me if the reader takes them for the truth. So that’s a deliberate thing. But it’s true that by the end, the main character is wiser. I don’t think he’s completely wise. I think it would be mistake to think, okay, it’s all sorted out now. Probably, that’s off limits to us as human beings. But he’s, he’s much further along than he was at the beginning.

Blakey Vermeule
Josh, can you say something about Proust tourism? Proust is an author who people love and they love to go see his world. You have a long section in the book about why that’s a mistake.

Josh Landy
That’s right. So I you know, I hope nobody’s offended but, but I do criticize the whole industry of the town of EDA that re renamed itself rebranded itself, Lea Conway, because Conway is the name of the fictional town in the, in the novel, and they sell Matt lands, and people come from all over. And I think there’s some, I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing. But interestingly, Proust himself didn’t like this kind of aesthetic tourism, which he called idolatry. So idolatry in religion is of course taking a thing for the sacred object and—

Blakey Vermeule
Like a wafer?

Josh Landy
Like a wafer! Well, that’s technically not idolatry. But yeah, but something somebody might say. And so here, you know, it’s, you’re taking the town for the six quasi sacred object, which is the book. So I think Prusa would be, don’t bother going to town read the book. That’s where the real magic is. And, you know, it’s kind of a confusion to replace one with the other.

Ray Briggs
Right, so how much inquiring about Proust? Would Proust be okay with, like, do we get to look at any details of his biography?

Josh Landy
I mean, it’s a lovely question. So one of the things I love most in preusse, thinking about art, which was an idea that that was behind the, you know, the origin of this novel, is that you really You can separate the, the artwork from the very often boring life of the artist. And just because the artist was boring, that doesn’t mean the artworks boring. Just because you and the three are three big artists in the novel. One of them is ridiculous. One of them is pretentious. Yet and one of them is a prude. But it doesn’t matter. You know, the prude writes great septet, and the pretentious person makes incredible paintings. So, I think this applies to Proust too, there’s a fantastic biographies of Proust one was 800 pages long. It’s very, very good. You learn in my opinion, nothing about the novel. Right? It’s it just doesn’t help us. preusse own life is extremely mundane, and in some ways, rather sad. One Proust scholar says, The miracle of miracles is that from that life, you end up with this novel. So again, don’t worry about Proust just read the novel.

Ray Briggs
That’s inspiring. Even even the boring among us can create great art. Josh, thank you so much for coming back to the guest chair this week.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for having me.

Ray Briggs
Our guest has been my usual co host, Josh Landy professor of French and comparative literature at Stanford University, and author of a brand new book, The World According to Proust. And thanks, Blakey once again for stepping into the host share a pleasure.

Blakey Vermeule
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Blakey Vermeule
Now, a man who doesn’t lose any time it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… Frankenstein has remained unread by many for so long, it seems like it was written yesterday, just to take the starch out of the Frankenstein myth, which came from movies, movies that ignored everything about the book, except the premise. The original Frankenstein monster, like Tarzan, is not a creature of the movies. He and Tarzan can speak just fine. Tarzan has a British accent. The point is I have read Frankenstein, and I have read Tarzan – well it may have just been Tarzan and The Jewels of Opar, to be honest. I have not read in Search of Lost Time. I’m sorry. Time and the lack of French got the best of me. Still, ignorance has yet to stop me from having an opinion. What do I know about Proust? Let’s see. For this bedridden author, a cookie brings back memories. I know that much. A petite madeleine’s a cookie isn’t it? Colette. She was also bedridden. Did she and Proust ever date? No. They did not. See, I know a lot about French literature. Simenon was actually Belgian. So was Herge. If you think about it, we know a great deal about literature without knowing anything at all. THE THREE MUSKETEERS. Never read it. Seen I believe five different movies. Jules Verne. He’ll put you to sleep immediately. But the movies have a certain charm. H.G. Wells is fun to read. But I got in a fistfight with a kid just before I saw the Time Machine in 1960. Movies win! There are the books that everybody read when I was in college. Catch 22, Lord of the Rings, The teachings of Don Juan, Hermann Hesse, Vonnegut. Herman Hesse had a cult following! Let that sink in! As I got older, the unread books piled up. I found a used Oxford English Dictionary and it still has pride of place on my sagging bookshelf. Fifty years gone by, and I have yet to look up a word in it. I could put my back out with that thing. The world has books that were sparsely read then suddenly sold like jumbo madeleines- like Philip K. Dick. There are huge authors that are read no more- James Michener, Leon Uris, John D. MacDonald, Robert Ludlum. Still famous, not read, Ben Hur, Gone With The Wind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. My family of which I was by far the biggest reader, subsisted mainly on a diet of magazines. My mother read mysteries. My father only read two novels, that I know of. Lord of the Flies and From Here to Eternity. But my folks bought the Great Books of the Western World series. Took up an entire wall of our living room. It looked great. But I don’t think anybody in the family read even one Great Book. My mother finally gave the set away not long before she passed. Yet we have more books than ever. Just for example– 2000 mules, the book version of the movie by Dinesh D Souza, which claims without evidence that the election was rigged. Which election? Take a wild guess. I don’t think ANYBODY has actually read 2000 mules, though the movie is required viewing at GOP fundraisers. I keep thinking of the William Castle shockers from my youth. I wonder if D’Souza wires the seats, or has skeletons swing over the audience’s heads. Goodwill is home to the novels of Tom Wolfe, the entire catalogue of Ann Coulter, and Tom Clancy. In search of Lost Time will never be found at Goodwill. However, I have seen copies of Madeline. You might remember: “In an old house in Paris that was covered with vines Lived twelve little girls in two straight lines In two straight lines they broke their bread And brushed their teeth and went to bed. They left the house at half past nine In two straight lines in rain or shine-The smallest one was Madeline.” See? The smallest one was Madeline. You might even say Madeline was petite. And I have fond memories of that book. Petite madeline triggers memories. See? It all ties in. If I was angling for a PHD my thesis would write itself. I’d still have to learn French though I guess. Damn. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW Local Public Radio’s San Francisco Bay area and the trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research

Josh Landy
thanks also to Yiqi Chi, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders,

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable!

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website to Philosophy Talk dot orgy where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

The Big Sleep
Good morning. So you do get up. I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed like Marcel Proust. Who’s he? You wouldn’t know him, French writer. Come in to my boudoir.