Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Post #5): Literary Criticism Finds That It is Written As Though The Author Had Multiple Personality 

In my December 21, 2014 post on Proust, I quoted from a textbook about the difficulty sometimes encountered in trying to get the life story from a person with multiple personality. The story you get may be “inconsistent or even contradictory” because “memories of their life history are divided up among a number of different alter personalities.”

Proust’s novel presents these very same issues:

“It is not always easy, when indeed possible, to reconstruct the sequence of events…And even when the events we see are presented in order, huge gaps regularly remain between them…To compound our bewilderment, what seemed like a single event often turns out to be the description of a repeated state of affairs…

“To understand the various vicissitudes to which linear time is subject in the novel, we need to turn to the portrait of human interiority it espouses, one in which the overall self is made up of myriad smaller selves…Now these are not just passive memory-traces but also active participants in the psychic apparatus; they are, to borrow a traditional metaphor, citizens…with full voting rights…

“Proust’s idiosyncratic use of maxims points toward a simultaneous division of the self. For it suggests that several different agencies, entirely indistinguishable on the surface, are jointly responsible for their production…We may detect at least five narrative instances all sharing, whether implicitly or explicitly, the first-person pronoun…Nor will the various speakers co-operate, any more than will the different faculties within the Narrator-Protagonist’s consciousness…Viewpoint, in short, dramatises a consciousness which is thoroughly fractured within itself…

“Chronology may be complicated and viewpoint variable, but if there is one single factor preventing us from reading more than six pages in a sitting then it is…the notorious structure of the Proustian sentence…We often feel the presence of multiple sequential selves coursing through the complex prose. Occasionally a group of narrators gathers in a single paragraph, all using different tenses to discuss the Protagonist and each other” (1, pp. 117-134).

1. Joshua Landy. “The texture of Proust’s novel.” In The Cambridge Companion to Proust, Edited by Richard Bales. Cambridge University Press, 2001.