Proustian Cryptanalysis

Abstract

Like many modernist artists, that is, Klee, Rilke, H.D., and so on, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) associates cryptic exile with the sacred in a post-romantic fusion of artistic generativity and the religious. It is the roots of this artistic interiority that Vincent Descombes — in his recent book on Proust — locates both in the Puritan asceticism within the world that Max Weber placed at the origin of modern capitalism and in the philosophy of idealism, particularly Schopenhauer (Descombes 31–66, 319). Anne Henry, to the contrary, argues that Proust’s aesthetic theory is primarily based on Schelling’s philosophy of art — which Proust studied at the Sorbonne in 1894–5 — and only secondarily on Schopenhauer. She traces the displacement of religion by art to Schelling’s influential conception of artistic process as spirit separated from itself contemplating its otherness and harmonising or synthesising the conscious and the unconscious. In turn, Henry recognises that this notion, which Schelling introduced in the sixth part of his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), has its roots in mystic thought and is most likely a major source of psychoanalytic theory (A. Henry 30–57).