Table Of ContenteincL
eind
A CcDinrpsir-a-t ±
DUNCAJT LARGE
'Les connaissances philosophiques d'un auteur ne s'evaluent pas aux
citations qu'il fait, ni d'apres des releves de bibliotheques toujours
fantaisistes et conjecturaux, mais d'apres les directions apologetiques
ou polemiques de son oeuvre elle-meme.'
(Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophies
'Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beglnnt die Vahrheit'.
(Nietzsche, Die frdhllche Vissenschaft)
lietzsche and Proust: A Conparative Study
Duncan Large, Magdalen College
Dissertation Submitted in Candidature
for the Degree of D.Phil.
Hilary Tern, 1995
Affinities between Nietzsche and Proust have been suggested by a variety of
influential critics (Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, more recently Paul
de Man, Alexander Jfehamas and Richard Rorty), but this is the first full-
length comparative study of the two writers. Proust was intimately familiar
with nineteenth-century post-Kantian aesthetics, and indeed the narrator in A
la recherche du tejnps perdu glosses his involuntary memories using an
explicitly idealist philosophical vocabulary, but by developing Vincent
Descombes's thesis that Proust's novel is more advanced than the philosophical
interpretations it contains, I argue that Proust ultimately moves beyond the
Schopenhauerian position which has often been imputed to him, and that he
joins Nietzsche in an overcoming of dualistic metaphysics.
After first considering those critical works which have prepared the
ground for a comparative study of the two writers - in particular Gilles
Deleuze's Proust et 2es signes, whose Nletzschean contours I argue have been
insufficiently appreciated - I then discuss the surprising amount Proust
actually wrote about Nietzsche, in A la recherche and elsewhere, and focus on
the theme of friendship, which is Proust's chosen terrain for his most
extended engagement with the philosopher. In subsequent chapters I address
'Proust's perspectivism' in the light of Nietzsche's radical critique of
traditional epistemology, and then turn to Proust's narrator's search for the
self, which I argue culminates in an 'ubermenschlich' aesthetics of self-
creation. I use Deleuze's emphasis on the difference and repetition in
Proustian 'essences' so as to read involuntary memory as the intimation not of
an essential self, but of the eternal return. In my final chapter I then
attempt to break open the two writers' metamorphoses of the circle by
stressing the asymmetries of temporal structure in their work, their
exploitation of postmodern 'logics of the future perfect'.
Contents
Abbreviations and Editions Used
Introduction
I. Nietzsche and Proust? Nietzsche and Proust? 1
II. Nietzsche and Proust: Towards a Comparative Study 29
Chapter 1. Proust's Nietzsche 54
Chapter 2. Epistemoptics: Proust's Perspectivism 100
Chapter 3. In Search of the Self 149
Chapter 4. Logics of the Future Perfect 204
Conclusion 238
Notes 241
Bibliography 295
Abbreviations and Editions Used
Nietzsche
For the published works, all references are to section numbers or titles, and
modernised orthography and punctuation are used for all quotations; for the
NachlaB, reference is made to Friedrlch Nietzsche: Samtllche Verke. Kritlscbe
Studienausgabe in 15 Banden, 2nd edn, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari
(Munich: dtv; Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1988) (= KSA); for the corres
pondence, reference is made to Frledrlch Nietzsche: Briefe. Kritische
Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Mbntinari, 16 vols (Berlin and
New York: de Gruyter, 1975-84) (= KGB).
AC - Der Antichrist
EH - Ecce Homo
FaV - Der Fall Wagner
FV - Die frohllche Vissenschaft
GD - Gotzen-Dammerung
GM - Zur Genealogie der Moral
GT - Die Geburt der Tr a go die
JGB - Jenseits von Gut und Bbse
M - Morgenrote
MA - Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
UB - Unzeitgemasse Betrachtungen
VS - Der Wanderer und sein Schatten
Z Also sprach Zarathustra
Proust
Volume and page references are to:
A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadie, 4 vols (Paris: Galli-
mard CPleiade'), 1987-89).
Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Plon,
1970-93) (= CMP).
Centre Sainte-Beuve preced6 de Pastiches et melanges et suivi de Essals et
articles, ed. Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard CPleiade1 ),
1971) (= CSB).
Jean Santeuil precede de ies Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. Pierre Clarac and
Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard CPleiade'), 1971) (= JS).
Le Garnet de 1908, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard C6tudes
proustiennes', 8), 1976).
AD - Albertlne disparue
CG - Le C6t6 de Guermantes
CS - Du cot6 de chez Swann
JF - A 1'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
P - La Prisonniere
SG - Sodome et Gomorrhe
TR - Le Temps retrouve
Others
BSAHP - Bulletin de la Soclete des amis de Marcel Proust et des amis de
Combray
NS - Nletzsche-Studlen
Introducti on
I. Nietzsche and Proust? fletzscbe and Proust?
At the outset of this enquiry it is perhaps salutary to recall Walter
Kaufaann's rather disparaging comment in the Preface to the third edition of
his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, concerning precisely
such comparative studies as this: 'Nietzsche can be, and has been linked with
a vast variety of intellectual fashions - movements as well as men - but it is
clear that any attempt to define his significance and meaning mainly in terms
of one such juxtaposition is bound to be misleading. This is not to say that
all "Nietzsche and X" titles are worthless, but1 ...' Kaufmann proceeds to
give a catalogue of some twenty-five such 'X's (which concludes with those
unlikeliest of men, women) taken just from his own select bibliography, and
needless to say the list which he drew up in 1968 now looks distinctly modest,
for in the meantime the growth of interest in Nietzsche, the proliferation of
perspectives on his work (comparative and otherwise), has been phenomenal. B.
Bryan Billiard and Earl Nitschke's recent bibliographies Just of Nietzsche
scholarship written in or translated into English over the period since the
publication of the International Nietzsche Bibliography (also of 1968) list
some 1912 items2 - 'How much is too much? 1 asks Richard Schacht in response. 3
'Nietzsche aujourd'hui'/'Nietzsche Now1 /'Nietzsche heute' 4* has been pluralised
to a far greater extent than Kaufmann could ever have imagined, and even The
New Nietzsche, David Allison's seminal collection of continental interpret
ations which first appeared in 1977, is starting to look uncomfortably
monolithic. 5 Moreover, to judge from Just recent titles, 'Nietzsche and X1
studies are still flourishing, despite Kaufmann's thinly-veiled scorn: Nietz-
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sche and Asian Thought, Nietzsche and Modern German Thought, Nietzsche and the
Rhetoric of Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Origin of Virtue, Nietzsche and the
Feminine, and so on.*5
So what of Nietzsche and Proust? Or, for that matter, Nietzsche and
Proust? For the critical industry on the latter has been no less productive:
'Aucun ecrivaln du XX" siecle n'a suscite une telle bibliographic1 , writes
Jean-Yves Tadle as he begins the unenviable task of surveying its contours."7
The need for a self-explanation in attempting a study like this has grown all
the more imperative since Kaufmann's comments over twenty-five years ago, for
we know how he would have responded: 'no study of that sort could possibly
provide the key to Nietzsche. His house has many mansions, and any attempt to
find the clue to everything in some nook, or in a similarity between a detail
here and a trifle in another edifice, or in a guest glimpsed in the parlor, is
simple-minded'. 61 The present study is not so naive as to presume that it
could possibly provide 'the key1 to Nietzsche, or that it could use Nietzsche
to provide 'the key' to Proust, but my aim in writing it has been rather to
establish 'transversales' between the work of two of the major writers of our
time, between Nietzsche's 'house' and Proust's 'cathedral 1 of a novel, A la
recherche du temps perdu. My hope has been that the result will be not Just a
display of 'details' and 'trifles', but a demonstration of the often striking
affinities between two writers who were in many ways exploring similar
problems and developing parallel responses to them in the undoubtedly
different, but in their cases overlapping fields of philosophy and literature.
At first sight a comparative study of Nietzsche and Proust might appear a
somewhat unlikely exercise. Simply on the level of biography, there would
seem to be little in common between a philosopher who unshackled himself from
his earlier life as an academic and chose instead to enact the life of the
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'free spirit 1 in his constant shuttling between Swiss mountains and Mediterra
nean Sea, and a novelist who traced a trajectory between two quite different
poles: his early life as litterateur and socialite, and subsequently his
notorious self-sequestration in the Parisian metropolis. Not only do their
mature vocations express themselves in markedly divergent lifestyles, but they
even write under very different conditions: Nietzsche preferring to rise
before dawn and take a brisk constitutional before breakfast, notebook in
hand; Proust devoting himself to a more 'nocturnal muse1 . 9 Nietzsche follows
Goethe in his preference for thinking and writing while standing up, and
reacts to the 'nihilism' of Flaubert's 'On ne peut penser et ecrire qu'assis'
with 'Nur die ergangenen Gedanken haben Vert' <GD, IX, 34), so we can only
imagine how much greater his hostility would have been towards a writer who
wrote in bed! Surely Nietzsche would have dismissed Proust as just another
product of the late nineteenth-century French culture of decadence, Just
another ascetic devoted to the vita contemplatlva, 'ein Verhangnis mehr fiir
das arme, kranke, willenskranke Frankreich* <GD, IX, 2)?10
More pertinently, Nietzsche's heroic 'grand doctrines' of will to power
and the eternal return, or his brainchild the 'ubermensch', the 'philosopher
of the future' with his life of strenuousness, belligerence and danger, would
seem to offer scant opportunity for any meaningful comparison with the
aestheticising introversion of the Proustian narrator a la recherche du temps
perdu. Erich Auerbach summarily brackets Nietzsche from his magisterial study
of Jtljnesls on the perfectly justifiable grounds that 'Nietzsche was not
concerned with the realistic portrayal of contemporary reality', 11 but Proust
is preoccupied with the minutiae of superficial society life, and his novel is
suffused with the sheer banality of the everyday. Malcolm Bowie has recently
reasserted 'The Morality of Proust' 1 * - but how can this be reconciled with a
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writer who so conspicuously situated himself 'Jenseits von gut und bdse', « 1
and, fifteen years before Gide, was planning a book entitled Der Immoral 1st?**
On the stylistic level, what kind of rapprochement is possible between, on the
one hand, a novelist looking to emulate the amplitude of the Classical
rhetorical period and to fashion a seamless 'roman fleuve' of a narrative (at
one stage conceived in a single unbroken chapter), and, on the other, a
philosopher who takes as his models Sallust and Horace (GD, X, 1), or 'the
obscurity of Heraclitus', 1S whose two more formally traditional books (.Die
Geburt der Tragodle and Zur Genealogle der MoraD are the exception rather
than the rule, and whose ambition is 'in zehn Satzen zu sagen, was Jeder andre
in einem Buche sagt - was jeder andre in einem Buche nlcht sagt' (GD, IX, 51;
cf. KSA 11, 579)?16
Unlike Leibniz, or Schopenhauer, Schelling and the other German post-
Kantian aestheticians to whom Anne Henry has linked Proust in her important
series of studies, 17 Nietzsche was not taught in French schools and
universities during Proust's formative years for the simple reason that he was
still alive, and Proust's first-hand familiarity with Nietzsche remained
relatively slight, even if, as I shall argue in Chapter 1, it has been
underestimated by criticism so far. Most significantly of all, in A la
recherche itself Proust explicitly takes issue with Nietzsche on the question
of friendship, specifically Nietzsche's erstwhile friendship with Wagner, and
passes off a love of Nietzsche onto Saint-Loup precisely in order to distance
the narrator from him. The apparent divergence of Proust from Nietzsche in
these and other respects has in fact been stressed by a number of critics:
James H. Reid contrasts the two throughout the course of an elaborate argument
which construes a Nietzschean speech-act theory and a Proustian deconstruction
of it; ie while in his study of Nietzsche's influence on modernist writers,
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Heirs to Dionysus, John Burt Foster, Jnr. goes so far as to assert, however
hesitantly: 'It might be possible to C . . . ] locate a genuinely anti-Nietzschean
current among literary modernists which would include figures like Joyce,
Eliot and, perhaps, Proust 1 . 13
But Just as one can find prima facie reasons for opposing the two writers,
so one can as easily find prima facie similarities between the two: the game
can be played both ways, even behind the moustaches. On the biographical
level both writers were racked by illnesses, the debilitating effects of which
were felt all the more acutely by two men whose passionate devotion to writing
was otherwise so all-consuming. Both were brought up in a predominantly
female environment, set great store by male-male relationships, and had older
women confidantes in later life (on the one hand Malwida von Meysenbug, on the
other Mme Straus) - both could be tactfully described as having an 'epistemo-
logy of the closet', in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's telling formulation. 20
Geographically speaking, the two writers shared a love of Venice and the coast
- Proust even had an enjoyable trip to the Upper Engadine and Nietzsche's
beloved Sils-Maria in 1893, only five years after Nietzsche had left it for
ill21 - and despite their different ways of achieving it, both opted by
preference for a solitary existence as a precondition for fulfilling their
respective vocations, even if both also cultivated their various friendships
assiduously. Both, indeed, conceived their activity as a 'vocation1 : the word
occupies a key position in Le Temps retrouv£ after the narrator's life-
changing realisation (TR, IV, 478), and it is also stressed by Nietzsche in
his attack on the debasement of educational values in contemporary Germany,
the reduction of educational institutions which had previously striven for
'Bildung1 as an end in itself to mere production lines disgorging 'vocation
ally' trained masses, to which he retorts: 'Eine hohere Art Mensch, mlt
Description:his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, concerning precisely here and a trifle in another edifice, or in a guest glimpsed in the parlor, is.
