Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) (Post #6): Proust’s character switches “selves” and memory banks, which is multiple personality

For a Proust scholar’s comments on Proust’s character’s multiple selves, see the previous Proust post on January 2nd. Obviously, I’m not a Proust scholar. But what I am qualified to do is discuss the following brief quotation, from the last pages of the novel, in regard to multiple personality:

“One of my selves, the one which in the past had been in the habit of going to those barbarian festivals that we call dinner-parties…this one of my selves had retained its scruples and lost its memory. The other self, the one which had had a glimpse of the task that lay before it, on the contrary still remembered…for the memory of my real work did not slumber but proposed to employ the hour of reprieve which was granted me in laying my first foundations. Unfortunately, as I took up a note-book to write, Mme Molé’s invitation card slipped out in front of my eyes. Immediately the forgetful self, which nevertheless was able to dominate the other…pushed away the note-book and wrote to Mme Molé…I had allowed my reply to her invitation to take precedence over my labours as an architect” (1, pp. 1097-1098).

There are two things that distinguish a person’s having different roles from having different personalities: sense of selfhood and memory.

When a person switches from the role of partygoer to the role of architect, there may be a change in mood and interest, but there is no essential change in the person’s sense of selfhood and in what they can remember. In contrast, when a person switches from one personality state to another personality state, there definitely is a change in sense of selfhood and in what the person remembers.

Also, note that one of the character’s selves “was able to dominate the other.” In the case of different roles, you might say that a person was more in the mood for one role or another. But it is only a person-like psychological entity that you would speak of as “dominating” another person-like psychological entity (an alternate personality).

So it is clear that Proust is describing multiple personality.

1. Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Past (Volume Three): The Captive, The Fugitive, Time Regained [1927]. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor. New York, Random House, 1981.