Bergson & Jung - A Consideration of Proustian Temporality

Introduction

À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) by Marcel Proust is a bewilderingly rich text, covering a wide range of subjects – love, death, war, history, homosexuality, literary style, sleep, psychology, memory, and time – across a seven-volume magnum opus longer than any other in the Western literary canon. Time itself is the author’s primary issue of concern: all-pervasive time that is elastic, elusive, and acts much like a villain, destroying all people, places, and things in its wake.

This dissertation will begin with a literature review exploring what key literary critics have said regarding Proust’s privileged moments, pertaining particularly to the function of time. Following this, in the section “Preliminary Context”, I will draw out some themes from the literary review and highlight the essay’s principal Jungian area of enquiry which has gone unexplored. Subsequently, the paper will examine Proust’s influences, particularly pertaining to Proustian temporality as it finds expression in the novel. The review will finally focus upon Henri Bergson’s philosophy of temporality as a key Proustian influence in order to define and characterise the nature of Proustian temporality.

This essay also touches on the difficulties of establishing authorial intent and the complexities surrounding drawing conclusions about an author from their writing, which is itself a form of art and creative exploration. Following the literature review, the paper will outline Jungian temporality and explore the theory of synchronicity, which moves us towards a metaphysical understanding of space and time, before contrasting it with Proustian temporality, as informed ostensibly by Bergson. The conjunction and analogous nature of their theories can elucidate a close reading of Proust’s composition of time.

Then, the lattermost section of this paper will selectively explore the role of time in Proust’s novel, focusing in on a few key Proustian privileged moments – the madeleine in particular – through both a Bergsonian and a Jungian lens. In considering these Proustian moments, these artistic compositions of time and their effect upon the reader, we can recognise the challenge the text offers its readers: bringing into sharp contrast the dehumanising working model of time in the modern world – how we are governed by it, how we think about it, how we build our lives around it – and an alternative vision: a vision that courageously moves us towards life and the artistic truth of things.

Literature Review

The critical tradition of writing on Proust has never let up since the publication of À la recherche in the early twentieth century, carrying on until now. Given the text’s inexhaustible complexity, a great deal can be and has been written on it. Much attention falls upon the now-established trope, the “Proustian moment”, also referred to as the “madeleine moment” (the primary example in the text) or “privileged moments.” These moments invariably bring into the discussion pertinent issues concerning this paper: issues concerning temporality and linearity, along with autobiographical memory and involuntary memory. What follows is a cursory exploration of that critical literature, calling attention to notable literary critics and focusing on issues pertinent to the scope of this paper, most critically, as we examine the presentation and experience of time – that of temporality.

Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School, in his essay “Short Commentaries on Proust,” focuses less on the overarching themes of À la recherche as a whole and more on particular fragments. In fact, Adorno asserts that to subject the text as a whole to grand overarching untruths from above does the text itself a disservice, undermining Proust’s very purposes. However, the great theme of the text, for Adorno, is paradoxically presented as duration – the durée – to attend to, to rescue the transient: a process concentrated in the particulars of countless moments which manifest ultimately as an “invisible unity in the midst of dispersion… evident only to the divine observer” (Adorno, 2019, p. 180). Adorno draws a parallel between Proust’s work and that of Henri Bergson, particularly Bergson’s ideas concerning the role of intuition as presented in An Introduction to Metaphysics. He states that the conjunction of two elements runs through À la recherche – namely intuition and French rationality – making up the Proustian atmosphere. “Bergson’s allergic reaction to ready-made thought, the pre-given and established cliché” (Adorno, 2019, p. 180) is, according to Adorno, reflected in Proust’s prose. In the final section of the essay, Adorno explains that Proust writes from a belief that one can no longer speak directly of ultimate things because the Enlightenment has invalidated such vocabulary. “The important word that calls them by name weakens them” (Adorno, 2019, p. 186). Adorno’s view is that Proust’s spirit was wholly metaphysical, but in the early 20th century this use of vocabulary was rendered unsuitable; this sets up a tension which runs through the text. Rarely does Proust make any explicitly metaphysical statements. But Adorno highlights one particular exception from volume five, “The Captive”: “…the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable” (Proust, 1929b, p. 115). Adorno explains that this statement suggests that for Proust, the order of nature is not the ultimate order. But though this statement is made dismissing the finality of death, it comes to us not as a promise or proof but in a transient fashion, for it is communicated through the medium of art, which comes to us as “the last metaphors for revelation in the authentic language” (Adorno, 2019, p. 187).

The political theorist Hannah Arendt, in her short essay “No Longer and Not Yet” (2007), talks about the context following WWI – namely the gulf which opened in literature, the so-called “Lost Generation.” In response, there were those who harkened back, and those who imagined forward. As per the title of her essay, Proust represents the “No Longer,” whereas Franz Kafka the “Not Yet.” (Arendt, 2007, p. 122).

The playwright Samuel Beckett’s often abstruse Schopenhauerian essay “Proust” (1999) does explore issues of temporality, albeit for his own ends, given that similar themes of temporality informed his later work. He notes that the only frame of reference deemed to have reality and significance for À la recherche’s narrator is “the world of our own latent consciousness” (Beckett, 1999, p. 13). This observation serves Beckett’s principal assertion in his essay, that “We cannot know and we cannot be known” (Beckett, 1999, p. 66). In this respect, Proustian temporality, as Beckett frames it, is wholly subjective; there is a clear contention between one’s subjectively experienced perception of time and any illusive objectivity that may lie beyond the narrator. Beckett argues that people are trapped by their pasts; their pasts have cultivated habit and familiarity. The true essence of reality is lost in this cloud of conventionality. Our ongoing creation of the world becomes habitual. Only in times of great change or calamity are we awakened to the true reality of things. The narrator, Beckett recognises, is seeking to shock us into perceiving reality afresh, inviting us to become artists of our own world. Beckett differentiates between two types of memory: “voluntary” memory, which is the memory of habit, and “involuntary” memory which breaks habit. “Involuntary memory is an unruly magician and will not be importuned… It chooses its own time and place for the performance of its miracle” (Beckett, 1999, p. 34). For Beckett, involuntary memory is the principal theme to À la recherche. The most cited involuntary memory incident in Swann’s Way occurs when the protagonist eats a piece of madeleine, which brings back memories of his aunt Léonie in Combray. This, for Beckett, represents the narrator’s “victory over time” (Beckett, 1999, p. 69), and thus his negation of death. “Time is not recovered, it is obliterated” (Beckett, 1999, p. 75). For Beckett, in these moments imagination triumphs over time.

The cultural critic Walter Benjamin, Proust’s first great translator, in his essay “The Image of Proust” explores the role memory plays in À la recherche – Proust’s art of remembering in his dark cork-lined room, which constitutes not the endless unfolding of banality, as it may at first appear, but his ultimate pursuit of happiness. A pursuit which produces his seven volumes: his “honeycombs of memory… a house for a swarm of his thoughts” (Benjamin, 2007, p. 203). According to Benjamin, this frenzied quest for happiness underlies Proust’s principal effort – his ceaseless will to happiness – an intent which Benjamin thinks readers and critics alike often overlook. A will to happiness which Proust explores in his poetics as “the eternal restoration of the original, the first happiness” (Benjamin, 2007, p. 204). This allows Proust to make even seemingly pointless stories interesting, acting as they do as triggers to unlock Proust’s imagined past. Benjamin states that for Proust, any banal moment may reveal similarities between what is perceived in his wakeful state and impressions from his dream world.

Roland Barthes, in “The Death of the Author,” states, “A text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message of the author-god’) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (Barthes, 1977, p. 146). Barthes’ approach seeks to displace the recurring tendency among literary critics to explore questions in the text in relation solely or primarily to the author’s life and intent. Such a tendency belies the far more complex conscious and unconscious interaction which is occurring between a writer, their society, and their reader – an interaction which relies upon a shared lexicon, shared codes and signs, and a shared literary tradition. This in turn mitigates the significance of any single author, rendering them less as a creator of meaning ex nihilo, and more as a collage maker. Barthes’ thesis is particularly relevant to À la recherche, as it is a seemingly autobiographical text. Marcel Proust is an authorial figure routinely romanticised and mythologised, and Proust is typically at pains in his text to differentiate between himself and the largely nameless protagonist, the “Narrator.” In volume five, The Captive, Proust toys with this idea directly, addressing the reader, saying, “As soon as she was able to speak she said: ‘My –’ or ‘My dearest –’ followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’ or ‘My dearest Marcel’” (Proust, 1929b, p. 46). Barthes furthers his death of the author critique in his essay “Proust and Names,” which frames the work as a piece on the “story of a writing” (Barthes, 2009, p. 55) as it unfolds the narrator’s difficulty or inability to write – a period of futility which Barthes recognises was shared by the author. This, for Barthes, does not undermine his most central point: the narrator and Proust are not one and the same. They are homologous, but not identical. In the course of this paper, this is an important point to keep in mind: it does not follow that just because a particular position is explicitly or implicitly articulated by the narrator, that that represents Marcel Proust’s view; À la recherche is foremost a work of art. As Barthes’ thesis advances, he demonstrates that the continuity of the text does not ultimately rest upon Proust’s own biography, but upon the text itself. Of course, this observation further confounds the issue of idea genealogy: a point of view articulated even to the contrary of a particular writer or thinker does not in and of itself refute the possibility of influence (if indeed that is even a coherent concept here). Indeed, contrary to Benjamin’s point, this would negate the possibility of ascertaining Proust’s motivation from the text. Even the use of real names in the text (including Proust’s own) act to signify the “essence of the thing (and not the thing itself)… there is a propaedeutics of names which leads, by paths often long, various, and indirect, to the essence of things” (Barthes, 2009, p. 67).

John P. Houston, in his essay “Temporal Patterns in À la Recherche du temps perdu,” explores the use of temporality as a literary device in the course of Proust’s narrative. Houston points out that the narrator deviates from realist-naturalist technique. For instance, at the Princesse de Guermantes’s soirée (in The Guermantes Way), we are informed of who characters were, are presently, and will become apart from the specific moment being narrated; these “digressions… deepen our sense of the present situation” (Houston, 1962, p. 33). Also, thematically similar moments are situated together in time, such as all the wartime episodes being positioned around a single night in Paris in 1916. “The device of packing a unit of time like a day or an evening with all manner of earlier and even future happenings is Proust’s characteristic way of organising events” (Houston, 1962, p. 34). Proust, furthermore, on occasion transitions from one day to another without stating it abruptly, allowing time to gradually shift. Houston also explores the use of temporality in the famous madeleine/Combray section, in which day, season, and years are presented simultaneously, giving a cyclical effect, as if the idyllic Sundays of Combray exist all as one and are timeless. Similarly, seasons are folded together, with various seasonally specific events happening in a single day (Houston, 1962, p. 40). He achieves such effects by avoiding conventional numerical expressions of time, such as stating the year. For Houston, using temporality as a literary device makes for far more engaging and imaginative simultaneous temporality. There is little attempt to correlate inner and so-called “real time,” however there are correlatory indicators, namely the seasons. Thus inner time has contact with the natural cycle of the year (Houston, 1962, p. 43).

The American pragmatist Richard Rorty, the avowed anti-Platonist, in his book Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), seeks to dismantle the primacy or possibility of a “final vocabulary.” Instead he advances an “ironist” outlook: an ironist is one who recognises that their “vocabulary” is not final; they recognise that it is no closer to reality than any other vocabulary. For Rorty, Proust’s À la recherche perfectly exemplifies ironism, as all people and places in Proust’s prose are recontextualized and redefined to suit his own artistic purpose; there is necessarily an ephemeral relationship to the real. The novelistic medium in general benefits, according to Rorty, from being contingent in this way, unlike the work of a “theorist,” whose work is often bound by an assumption that it is capturing the true nature of reality – that it is somehow expressing a “final vocabulary.” Rorty describes Proust alongside Nietzsche as a “perspectivist,” entailing the view that one’s perception, experience, and reason are all relative to the viewer, which is a rejection of a Platonic or essential world. In the section “Self-creation and affiliation” (pp. 96–121) Rorty differentiates between types of ironists – Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger – placing them on a continuum: Proust is the most purely so, while Nietzsche and Heidegger are ironists inasmuch as they do not wander into the realm of metaphysics (which Rorty claims they both do to varying degrees).

Preliminary Context

To begin with, it must be noted that there is a complete absence of Carl Jung and his theories in all Proustian secondary literature in literary studies. Although there is no direct relationship between the two men, and no evidence to suggest that Marcel Proust or Carl Jung were familiar with one another’s work, they were late 19th-/early 20th-century European contemporaries who shared an intellectually unique context that arose post-World War I, as Arendt identifies. Both shared a number of scholarly influences, primarily an appreciation for particular philosophical writers, and as such both men in the course of their work found themselves traversing similar areas. Despite these overlaps, there has been no scholarly treatment exploring the connections between these two in literary studies and Jungian studies alike, which seems a remarkable oversight. As a result, this paper constitutes a preliminary piece of work focusing on the relationship between Proustian and Jungian temporality, which could act as the basis for further ongoing research on the broader influences these two men shared. My contention is that Jungian temporality, properly understood, can inform our understanding of time as deployed by Proust in À la recherche, further elucidating his usage in terms that go beyond observations hitherto made by literary critics, as summarized in the literature review.

Like Jung, who navigated a middle course between a narrow scientific rationalism and a broader, more holistic appreciation which encompasses psychological and spiritual knowledge (that is to say, Jung appreciated science, while always being concerned that scientism would result in the loss of certain pre-Enlightenment knowledge), Proust pursues an analogous via media, which is outlined by Adorno. Indeed, Adorno’s claim is that Proust sought to find a secular vocabulary to couch his own metaphysical observations, a move not dissimilar to Jung’s own persistent claim that despite the content of his work he was always doing science (Main, 2004, p. 121). Both men, then, were motivated by a desire to have their respective works deemed legitimate within their contemporary modernist cultural milieus. This tension, recognised by both and present throughout Jung’s and Proust’s work, makes for a comparable sensibility: they are both intuitively inclined towards similar deductions. Indeed, both men make assertions which evidently contravene straightforward scientific rationalism, such as Proust’s afterlife speculation (Proust, 1929b, p. 115) or any of the many examples that could be given for Jung, such as his synchronicity anecdotes (CW 8:982).

Benjamin, Barthes, and Rorty, in varying senses, make the point that we cannot ultimately know Proust’s perspective on anything, as À la recherche is presented not as biography but as fiction. As such, it is impossible to ascertain, for instance, what Proustian temporality even is. What Proust presents is necessarily contingent, serving as it does an ultimate artistic end, and therefore what is presented may even be the opposite of what Marcel Proust himself actually thinks. As Barthes highlights, however, Proust was all too aware of this tension in his writing: a tension which arises given the evident similarities that exist between Proust and his narrator. He goes so far as to jest in The Captive that the experiences of Proust and the narrator may even be analogous (Proust, 1929b, p. 46). Nevertheless, Barthes convincingly shows why resting any given case on such similarities between Proust and the narrator of À la recherche is fraught with problems. They cannot be treated as one and the same; the narrator is a fiction, and as such cannot be directly contrasted with Proust. For the purpose of this essay, however, I will continue to refer to the model of time extrapolated from À la recherche as Proustian temporality, while recognising that it is surely contingent, being as it is the view of the ultimately fictional narrator. Given Rorty’s contingency-continuum model, a far more interesting question given the direction of this paper is not to what degree we ought regard Proust as an ‘ironist’ in the Rorty sense, but rather: ought we regard Jung as an ‘ironist’? Are Jung’s stated ideas presented like artistic speculation, or like scientific theorems? This question is particularly relevant to this essay as the extent to which we regard Jung’s theories of time and synchronicity as contingent (or postmodern) is important when comparing them with any Proustian model. Should Jung’s theories be taken as capturing the true nature of reality, or should they be taken as a “final vocabulary”? If Jung’s writings were to be taken as postmodern in nature – this speculative and contingent sense – it would further deepen the corresponding relationship between Proust and Jung, their modus operandi being comparable to that of the artist as opposed to the theoretician. I shall return to this question when I outline Jungian temporality.

Despite Rorty’s recognition that Proust’s motivation or perspective cannot be known, he falls foul of his own injunction by reading into Proust his own aversion to Platonic ideas, a move he believes warranted given his classification of Proust as an ‘ironist’. Given Rorty’s own sympathy for Barthesian agnosticism concerning authorial motive, it is odd that he would permit such speculation on his own part. The inverse position – that Proust is altogether Platonic, ostensibly a metaphysician as Adorno believes, seeking to express his beliefs in a secular vocabulary – seems at a minimum equally plausible.

As the literature review demonstrates, there is little attempt by various literary critics to extrapolate what the nature of Proustian temporality might be. Adorno, for instance, sees the effort to draw out any overarching model as undermining Proust’s purposes. Yet at the same time he paradoxically identifies the overarching theme of À la recherche as the “invisible unity in the midst of dispersion.” In so doing, he inadvertently moves us toward the nature of Proustian temporality as it functions within the novel, the assumption being that time is seemingly fractured – comprised of lost moments over an irreversible flow (this state of affairs functions as Proust’s primary villain). A negative condition is somehow thwarted in the discovery of “involuntary memory,” which Beckett champions in Proust – a discovery which causes moments in the past to come flooding back. In this way moments are reclaimed (or reimagined). This consists of a plethora of associations being invoked, even by something seemingly banal such as a small piece of cake. The memory of this moment is reimagined insofar as the act of remembrance constitutes an act of myth-making. For Jung, “myths are archetypal form-making entities that knit the individual to the collective psyche on a conscious and unconscious level. Myths are the engine of psychic rejuvenation” (Rowland, 2019, p. 63). In this way Proust stitches together his own mythology of the past, thus regaining ownership of the history of his self. Beckett does, however, maintain a sharp distinction between the subjectivity of the narrator in such Proustian moments and the apparent real world which lies unaffected beyond the narrator. Given that Proustian metaphysics is expressed as a movement towards transcendental unity, such a dualistic supposition is of Beckett’s own making; he is allowing his own assumptions about the nature of reality to modify his reading of the text.

Furthermore, as Houston points out, there is broad creative usage of temporality throughout À la recherche. To further limit the scope of this essay, it is necessary to make a distinction between the use of temporality as a mere literary device – such as when the flow of the prose is interrupted to expound upon a given subject matter (Houston, 1962, p. 34), or when many moments are conflated into a single day or year – both of which make for more interesting literature but are not relevant to this essay – contrasted with Proustian moments themselves, which read as accounts of actual experienced moments: moments in which temporality has contravened our conventional everyday understanding. This is most famously evident during the “madeleine moment,” in which a sensory experience suddenly brings back hidden recollection. Such experiences are like moments of spiritual enlightenment, in which the outward order of time and space is momentarily suspended. In the following section this essay will chart the influences upon Proust.

Proust’s Influences

Proust’s theory of temporality, as expressed in À la recherche, has a wide range of influences. It is informed by his father (Adrien Proust), Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Schlegel, and Henri Bergson (Jordan, 2001). Not wanting to overplay the notion of influence and eschewing a literal genealogy of ideas – in recognition of the dynamic way ideas emerge and converge out from the unconscious of the zeitgeist, or as Jung terms it, “the spirit of the time” (Jung, 2009, p. 229) – it is nevertheless useful to situate Proust’s text in relation to his immediate sphere: those he read and those he knew personally, as well as (as will be explored in the later part of this essay, in the case of Carl Jung) those who were his academic European contemporaries. Exploring these influences in turn:

Adrien Proust was a Parisian epidemiologist who worked at Charcot’s institute in Paris. Jean-Martin Charcot was a world-renowned neurologist who tutored Sigmund Freud, and as such both men (and by extension Marcel Proust) would have been exposed to the formative ideas that ultimately constituted psychoanalysis (Jordan, 2001). Freud, along with Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche, advanced an ontological structuralism, which sought to find the rules that operate “independently of and prior to conscious awareness” (Hoy, 2009, p. 203); such a model understands time to be part of the underlying structure of things, supposing a single linear temporal plane that is set apart from any issues of consciousness. As such, Proust, in elevating the role of temporality, makes a move which represents a departure from such structuralist presuppositions – an exploration of time which prefigures French existentialist thought. Given this, Proust’s narrator operates not on the basis of an underlying meta-structure or meta-psychology (such as psychoanalysis), but within his own individualized universe of suffering, with greater attention being assigned to the individual’s “will” – not necessarily as deliberate volition, but as intuited will in the Schopenhauerian sense.

At the foundation, when exploring all of these thinkers, is the intellectual stream of transcendental idealism, the father of which was the 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kantian idealism acts as the bedrock upon which all of these writers, including Proust himself, wrote, which begins from the basis that the nature of the universe cannot be known given the limitations of empiricism (transcendental theory) or (as is the case with ontological idealism) that the universe is fundamentally composed of mentation as opposed to matter. The axiomatic claim being that nothing lies beyond the mind – only our perception. For Kant, time and space are not properties of the universe, but rather our engagement with the “external” world is spatiotemporal. In other words, time and space are bound up with our intuited sense of things. As Kant states in Critique of Pure Reason, “space and time, therefore, are only sensible forms of our intuition, not determinations given independently by themselves, or conditions of objects taken as things in themselves” (Kant, 2007, A369). This orients space and time as being located within us, as opposed to being components of an objective reality outside ourselves in a material world. This transcendental theory of the imagination, idealism, and elements of cognition all invite Proust’s creative idealist play.

Building on Kantian idealism, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1888) endeavoured to explain the world by the notion of the “will” (or intuition) and to downplay the importance of rational intelligence (Brown, 2004, p. 126). The Schopenhauerian “will,” which is the inner essence of everything, represents a blind striving force that lies beyond space and time. His outlook was informed by his eastern, mystical view of humanity and the world. It is this approach which informed Proust’s enquiry into the metaphysical nature of humanity. Proust’s famous distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory is also derived from Schopenhauer (Bales, 2001, p. 102). Schopenhauerian temporality, which is cast in characteristically pessimistic terms, sets out the Proustian problem, stating: “Time is that in which all things pass away; it is merely the form under which the will to live… finds out that its efforts are in vain; it is that agent by which at every moment all things in our hands become as nothing, and lose any real value they possess” (Schopenhauer, 1851). Whereas Schopenhauer resigns himself to this pessimism, to the transcendental will – “…the eternal world-eye. This eye looks out from all living beings…” (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 371) – to a first cause from which everything else radiates out in a causative fashion, as a means of dealing with the sting of time. Proust (and Jung alike) resists this pessimistic or ironic conclusion, opting to explore means of overcoming such causative linearity. Jung stated that at the time Schopenhauer wrote, “causality held sovereign sway as a category a priori and had therefore to be dragged in to explain meaningful coincidences” (CW 8:829). Nevertheless, for Proust, Schopenhauer’s pessimism sets the stage – the very real problem of time’s destructive nature, that there is no self-evident means of resolution. For Schopenhauer it is an illusory product of our perception which separates things in space and time; if two things exist in the same space, they are not two, but one.

Proust was also influenced by Lucinde (1799), an unfinished experimental novel written by the early German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel, on the metaphysics of love and the virtues of anarchic imaginative idleness. It foreshadows Proust’s solipsistic and neurotic style, and by focusing on the narrator’s perspective (again as in À la recherche) it allows for casual introspection on the nature of time passing. There are several examples of this in the novel, such as: “…not long ago, I was standing by the window and doing nothing, and now I am sitting here doing something – something which is perhaps little more than nothing, perhaps even less.”

Finally, we come to Henri Bergson. Critics do not agree on the extent and significance of his influence. Bergson was Proust’s first cousin, and Proust was Bergson’s best man at his wedding in 1891. Bergson’s conception of durée (time as subjectively experienced duration, rather than as measured by science), his interest in the nature of memory, its role in perception, and in the relation between mind and body suggests at least some degree of influence (Watt, 2011, p. 29). Proust heard Bergson speak at the Collège de France in 1900 and had read and annotated Matière et mémoire (1896) by 1911 (Watt, 2013, p. 78). It is certainly the case, however, that Proust’s novel is not a mere extrapolated piece of prose on the philosophical work of Bergson; although it does wrestle with and explore Bergsonian ideas, it on occasion finds itself in opposition to them. Indeed, Proust himself even denied the comparison, stating in a letter of 1914 to Henri Ghéon, “I already have enough to do without trying to turn the philosophy of M. Bergson into a novel!” (Corr, xiii, 39). Both men shared this wish that the comparison between them not be overstated. Despite, however, their protestations, and despite the occasional disparities in the ideas they advanced, Proust is no mere Bergsonian. Still, a comparison is unavoidable. They evidently shared affinities in their work; they both perambulate across comparable terrain, exploring similar topics such as memory, habit, sleep, dreams, psychology, and of course time (Watt, 2013, p. 79). As per Bergson’s broad conceptualisation of the artist and the artist’s role – as one committed to creation and novelty, to the role of intuition, one with an obligation to truth, and to actively perceiving reality without capitulating to the veil of habitual memory – À la recherche is a Bergsonian work of art par excellence (Slegers, 2010, p. 49). As demonstrated in the literature review, making the association between them is a recurring one. Adorno draws a close parallel between Proust and Bergson, seeing in particular Bergson’s 1903 book An Introduction to Metaphysics as particularly influential for Proust; for Adorno, Bergson’s conception of the durée is even seen as the principal theme of À la recherche.

In Bergson’s essay “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” he sets out the two ways of knowing. The first is one in which we move around the given object, perceiving it sensorially or empirically; the second is one in which we enter into it, bringing ourselves into “intellectual sympathy” with the object by way of intuition (Bergson, 1918, p. 1). This supposes that objects have, “so to speak, states of mind” that can be tapped into through the imagination (Bergson, 1918, p. 2). Something akin to this understanding can be seen in Proust’s madeleine moment, in which the delicacy in question brings on a multisensory experience, bringing the narrator into a timeless state, invoking unconscious content within to arise and be remembered. This higher state of perception lies beyond the concrete mundane, suggesting an enlightened state of being not unlike Gautama under the Bodhi Tree reaching a state in which all sense of being “mediocre, accidental, mortal” (Proust, 2002, p. 47) dissipates. Although, as stated, this enlightened state is for the most part expressed in secular terms, the madeleine moment is prefaced with an overtly metaphysical reference inviting a comparison. “I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object” (Proust, 2002, p. 47). Whether it be the influence of Bergson’s theory or Celtic mysticism, both suggest a form of animism – an ultimate order that lies within nature. Proust also links this with memory: as if memories do not lie solely within the mind and cannot be accessed by intellectual effort, but rather reside in material objects, artifacts in the world waiting to be discovered, ready to act as portals to the true. “No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body” (Proust, 2002, p. 47). This small madeleine acted as the catalyst – which was not incidentally moulded into the shape of a pilgrim’s shell, nodding to the pilgrimage that the narrator was about to embark upon – as this incident invokes the long section of writing in the novel in which he recounts his childhood in Combray. Bergson, in “An Introduction to Metaphysics,” articulates his belief in the “absolute” (i.e., the possibility of absolute knowledge), and he dismisses the individualized solipsistic claim that all truth is relative; for Bergson, there is an absolute knowledge which is not accessed empirically or scientifically (it does not reside in the realm of clock-time), but is rather accessed through our intuition or “sympathy” where we enter into the given object. “In short, I shall no longer grasp the movement from without, remaining where I am, but from where it is, from within, as it is in itself. I shall possess an absolute” (Bergson, 1918, p. 3). This Bergsonian conception of truth appears to be what is being applied by the narrator of À la recherche; the narrator’s state of perception accessed by way of intuition connects him to the truth. This suggests that the contrary view – that the narrator is writing from a radically solipsistic vantage, a position we saw forwarded by Benjamin, Barthes, and Rorty – is a misunderstanding of Proust’s intent.

For Bergson there is an interplay between time, intuition, and memory. Bergson contrasts his conception of “duration” (what we can term “psychological,” “true,” or “natural” time) with “clock-time” (what he also terms “mathematical” or “spatialized” time). Duration is expressed as a series of distinct and separate moments merged into a single unit of time. “…There is, and can only be, one single duration, that in which our own consciousness habitually works” (Bergson, 1918, p. 58). As such, the inverse – non-integrated time, which is sequential and quantifiable like space – is accordingly an illusory conceptual extrapolation that goes beyond our experience of time. “Time is invention or it is nothing at all” (Bergson, 1944, p. 371). Given that true time involves consciousness and experience, it necessarily relates to memory. We do not remember in a fashion comparable to clock-time; we do not remember a chain of events unwinding or a succession of hours and minutes stretching back over a timeline. Rather, we receive complete “images” which are accompanied by a wealth of reminiscences – memories which come to us whole, as an essence of things. This is “natural” time which cannot be measured discretely or homogeneously, but rather every instant must be interpreted and possesses a fluid, dynamic nature (Maxwell, 2006). With duration, in Proust’s novel, time is rendered dynamically – be that historically, summarily, or elliptically – into a tapestry which links together time, space, and place. Bergsonian temporality then also changes our perception of the past. Instead of being separated from us, lost as the clock on the wall marches on inexhaustibly, it is rather folded into the present moment. Again, this comes to the heart of Proust’s project: his effort to recover what has been lost. For Bergson, “consciousness means memory” (Bergson, 1918, p. 12) – meaning, in order to be fully present to ourselves, we require all our remembered associations, all of which give us our sense of self and our sense of everything about us. Although for Bergson memory is not solely located within the mind, within the physical neurons of the brain – within matter – it rather resides all about us and is accessed by way of intuition. This notion of memory beyond intellection relates to Bergson’s non-Darwinian theory of instinct, which he outlines in his 1907 book Creative Evolution. For Bergson it is the whole of the past that is with us in the present: “The present contains nothing more than the past” (Bergson, 1944, p. 17). As such, “It is with our entire past… that we desire, will and act… Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency…” (Bergson, 1944, p. 8). So it is that memory, for Bergson, supersedes the material – it is part of a metaphysical substrate – and as such in recalling or intuiting (or being “sympathetic” with) the world around us, we can even recall memories which reside beyond our material selves.

Proustian and Jungian Temporality

Proust’s artistic composition of time is complex and rich and not even necessarily consistent with itself, as its ultimate end is the artistic product, and not to offer a theoretical model for time. In his explorations of temporal and spatial memory, Proust changed the face of literature: chronological convention gave way, sense and memory access superseded the mentalistic and visualistic path of perception (Hembrough, 2018). Being an artistic composition, Proust’s model is necessarily contingent, as it is not offered to us as a “final vocabulary.” Despite these provisos, a useful picture of his temporality model can be pieced together. Most significantly, as articulated by Houston, the narrator’s conception of time is internal and experiential; time is often being conflated, and the linearity of time is routinely violated. This results in, very much along Bergsonian lines, a disconnect between psychological time and clock-time, as evidenced in the following: “The time which we have at our disposal every day is elastic; the passions that we feel expand it…” (Proust, 1929a, p. 279) – which is to say our emotional states, our will, warp time, or at least our perception of it. This is being deployed by Proust stylistically as a literary device, and more importantly is expressed experientially as a lived reality for the narrator. As the narrator further states, “…in a book which gave the history of one, it would be necessary to make use of a sort of spatial psychology as opposed to the usual flat psychology… introducing the past into the present without modification, as though it were the present…” (Proust, 1960, p. 413). This is where, at the end of Time Regained, Proust recalls his decision to write À la recherche, recognizing the need (as the whole book would be transmitted by way of the narrator’s singular perspective) for the narrator to amble across time and space freely. The perhaps inadvertent outworking of this parallels it closely with philosophical idealism – suggesting that the foundation of all reality is mental, and that all claims to knowledge are, to some degree, self-knowledge. This is a recurring motif throughout À la recherche: that everything stated by the narrator says more about the narrator (his feelings, beliefs, sense of things) than it illustrates anything “real” lying beyond the narrator. We might be tempted to suggest, as many critics have, that the narrator is fundamentally unreliable, but this claim would in turn suggest that there is an external yardstick by which his truth might be measured; rather, his truth is necessarily his truth.

Proustian temporality is informed by Bergson. As the section on Bergson demonstrated, the relationship between different types of memory and time is indivisible. Proust’s conception of “involuntary memory” relates to Bergson’s complete “images” that emerge from our unconscious, accompanied by reminiscences accessed by way of intuition. These involuntary memories cause the past to vividly cascade into the present. It is during these privileged moments, in particular, when content rises up from the narrator’s past, that the natural flow of time is interrupted. These are the numinous or spiritual moments that invoke for the narrator a new relationship arising between himself and the world he perceives around him. Proust’s search for lost time is not a desire to turn back the literal clock; it is not a Wellsian science-fiction desire to reverse the cogs. Rather, suggestive of Bergsonian durée, it constitutes a recovery of the past – entailing a re-remembering in the course of cultivating one’s inner life – which brings the past into the present (not our present into the past). For Proust and Bergson alike, there is also little distinction between the past we remember and the past we imagine; whether imagined or recalled, it creates for us our sense of the possible in the now (Bergson, 1944, p. 320).

Jungian temporality plays an important role in many key Jungian concepts. Before exploring this further, I will preface this discussion by returning to the question prompted earlier: ought we regard Carl Jung as an ‘ironist’ in the Rorty sense? The Jungian analyst Christopher Hauke, in his book Jung and the Postmodern, puts forward a case for Jung being a postmodernist, and as such not conforming to Rorty’s previously stated ‘theorist’ classification – one who offers up a final vocabulary. This postmodernism in Jung’s case entails “a pluralistic attitude to ‘truths’ that sees these as various perspectives of equivalent validity… [thus] not supportive of the hierarchizing of views and knowledge but welcomes the celebration of their difference and multiplicity” (Hauke, 2000, p. 15). Jung’s psychology, according to Hauke, encompasses the range of human experience, and as such necessarily challenges modernity and Enlightenment rationality, critiquing Enlightenment values that invariably undermine subjective experiences (beliefs, desires, intuitions), rejecting the unwavering line maintained by modernists that the delineation between the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ must be maintained at all times. Jung’s critique would place him as a situated practitioner offering up theories in softer contingent terms (dare I say artistic terms), very much conforming to Rorty’s ‘ironist’ ideal. To regard Jung as an ‘ironist’ seems entirely apt, especially as this aligns with Jung being at odds with the scientific-rationalistic metanarrative that was on the rise in the early 20th century (Main, 2004, pp. 121–124). Regarding Jung as an ‘ironist,’ however, takes us beyond a mere critique of scientific rationalism, going beyond the line of argument that Main pursues in The Rupture of Time regarding Jung’s theory of synchronicity. It would render it a misreading to merely substitute one totalising edifice for another. It is not that Jungian temporality or Jung’s theory of synchronicity supersedes some other totalising edifice such as scientific rationalism, but rather that the theory acts to problematise the very notion of totalising edifices. Or to state this another way, using a theological analogy: Christian literalists misappropriate the Bible in that they jury-rig together a complete cosmology from disparate passages throughout Scripture; it would be equally amiss to do the same with Jung’s complete works. It would undermine the idea that there is a complete cosmology or edifice behind the text if only we could crack the code or decipher the ambiguity to get at it. Rather, the ambiguity itself attests to the multi-faceted nature of things. Again, this is at odds with Main’s approach, who is ultimately seeking to overcome the apparent inconsistencies in Jung’s work (Main, 2004, p. 91), to formulate a complete meta-understanding of Jung’s psychology – and its implication for Jung’s synchronicity model. Hauke’s understanding therefore informs our reading of Jungian temporality, framing it in wholly contingent terms.

In a similar way to Proust, an appreciation of Jungian temporality entails moving beyond causality and temporal linearity. The first time Jung refers to temporality in relation to the unconscious was in the Zofingia lectures. Here, Jung asserted that “Only forces in material form move within the boundaries of space and time” (CW Supp. Vol. A: 96). As such, our unconscious psyche – which Jung here terms as Soul, that transcendental aspect of us – is not bounded by space and time. It is important to establish that issues concerning temporality are integral to analytical psychology, not secondary. Although such issues were present from the onset of Jung’s analytical psychology, “time theory” as an integral aspect was explicitly shaped around 1916, the creative period following his estrangement from Sigmund Freud. His temporality was articulated through Liber Novus (The Red Book) and concurrently through his poem Septem Sermones Ad Mortuos (The Seven Sermons to the Dead) (Yiassemides, 2016, p. 1). Unlike Freud, whose dichotomous approach restricts timelessness to the unconscious, Jung’s temporality is transcendental – given that his psychology goes beyond the personal, encompassing the collective unconscious, stretching out beyond the subject into a cosmological context. By initially exploring such content in poetic form, he allowed himself to explore the timeless nature of the psyche imagistically without restraint; again this underlines Jung as the artist. The Liber Novus labor was to be concealed during Jung’s lifetime and given only a very limited circulation (Septem Sermones being the only part published in his lifetime). His motivation for doing so appears to have been for the sake of preserving his respectable public image, which Liber Novus would have undermined. When these ideas did surface in his later work, as I shall explore, they were articulated in a “scientific” vocabulary, conforming to a culturally appropriate vernacular. Again, this is not dissimilar to Proust, who, as previously discussed, sought to articulate his own mystical experiences of the numinous in secularised terms so as not to estrange his metropolitan Parisian audience. In Jung’s metaphysical poem Septem Sermones, Jung’s assumptions concerning time are expressed: “that time as well as timelessness are interwoven in a wider context… [and] the temporal parameters of both the cosmic and the individual levels are interrelated” (Yiassemides, 2016, p. 5). In Gnostic terms Jung talks about entering a realm in which one can shed “the delusion that somewhere within or without there is something absolutely firm and definite.” (Hoeller, 1982, p. 45). This realm is timeless and infinite, a realm in which our psyche naturally belongs. In our current earth-bound configuration, we find ourselves in a form of exile, entailing this time-space condition. This realm (i.e. the archetypal world or what Jung first described in his 1916 essay “The Structure of the Unconscious” as the “collective unconscious”) is “eternal” (i.e. outside time) (Jung, 1976, p. 46). Archetypes themselves, therefore, for Jung exist within a temporality beyond clock-time. Yiassemides explains that for Jung there is a plain divide between the timeless nature of archetypes, in comparison with our experienced individual time-boundness (Yiassemides, 2016, p. 18). There are experientially two realms for humanity: the natural realm in which temporality is relative, and the realm of human consciousness in which this temporal relativity is undone in order that we might consciously conceptualize it. Human beings are as such temporally dual-natured. Given that archetypal content cannot be directly perceived as it exists within its own distinct temporal reality, it can only be perceived indirectly; this unrepresentable nature Jung termed the “psychoid.” “The real nature of the psychoid archetype cannot be made fully conscious because it is transcendent” (Yiassemides, 2016, p. 45). These archetypes are archaic and primordial and “have existed since the remotest time” (CW 9i: 5); the result of “the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings” (CW 8: 230). “…Archetypes are recurring impressions made by subjective reactions.” (CW 7: 109). Which is to say that while archetypes have a timeless quality to them, they have also developed through time and are therefore of this temporal realm as well – i.e. there is an interplay in which we have a bearing on archetypes, and they on us. Inasmuch as belonging to humanity, we operate within both temporal realities, and what Jung termed Synchronicity is in these very moments when the personal and archetypal realms do interplay with one another. Such synchronicity causes an experience of realized unity within oneself, as Main describes in Revelations of Change (Main, 2007, pp. 49–53). This unitive state of consciousness explored in Main’s chapter mirrors closely the classic Proustian moment, which often provokes some kind of aesthetic pleasure, joyful impressions of something beautiful, and often has an artistic quality (Slegers, 2010, p. 49). In Jungian terms, therefore, we might frame Proust’s madeleine moment in particular as a synchronistic moment in which some suppressed aspect of the narrator’s psyche, within the timeless collective, is happened upon and integrated through the tea-drinking act itself on various different levels, bringing about this sublime unitive state of consciousness. This would mirror Beckett’s observation that it is within these moments specifically that the narrator of À la recherche has his “victory over time.”

It is here, in Jung’s theory of “synchronicity,” that temporality theory is most explicitly present in analytical psychology. The working of time is at the core of synchronicity; the word Chronos, the Greek personification of time, is embedded in the word. Jung believed his theory of synchronicity (the principle of acausal connection) contributed to the philosophical problem of psychophysical parallelism (Kerslake, 2007). Roderick Main in The Rupture of Time (2004) outlines the relationship between time and Jung’s theory of synchronicity. Synchronicity is sometimes defined in terms of simultaneity – moments of time having specific qualities and thus events happening at the same time and sharing qualities of that moment (Main, 2004, p. 51). This entails a relativisation of space and time: events take place not causally, but rather acausally. When framed within a Christian model, Jung talked about synchronicity in relation to the created universe, believing that in moments of synchronicity we glimpse something of the simultaneous coexistence of events in eternity; we catch a glimpse of God: “What happens successively in time is simultaneous in the mind of God.” (Main, 2004, p. 52). As such, in synchronicity we are catching glimpses of God’s simultaneous reality. We are peering into the collective realm in which all time co-exists, in which all actions occur. It is Jung’s narrator in his nostalgic present alongside his childhood self at peace in Combray.

Within this broad cultural milieu, Jung, as well as Proust, was influenced by the Bergsonian tradition which finds expression perhaps most explicitly in Jung’s theory of synchronicity. In numerous ways, Bergson’s theory of instinct and his metaphysics serve as the foundation for Jung’s theory of archetypes, and by extension, given the deeply integrated significance of archetypal and temporality theory for Jung’s overall theory. The influence can be tracked back. Note, for instance, these two papers: Jung’s “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” and “The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific Theories of Kepler” by the Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli. Both papers were published in 1952 and were intended to complement one another, converging on the centrality of archetypes. Jung’s paper concludes that synchronicity is a phenomenon that is primarily connected with psychic conditions, i.e. processes in the unconscious. The central task for Jung, then, is the search for the tertium comparationis of significant coincidence, which he claims “rests on the psychoid factors I call archetypes” (CW 8: 515). There was a multiplicity of streams influencing Jung’s archetypal theory, including several theorists and his own personal experience. Not diminishing the significance of this array, it is notable how prominent Henri Bergson’s contribution to Jung’s theory appears to have been. Jung’s archetypal theory was generated in part from Bergson’s theory of instinct (Kerslake, 2007). Indeed, it is worth noting that the term “archetype” was first introduced by Jung in a lecture he gave in London in 1919 entitled “Instinct and the Unconscious.” He gives an example concerning a moth that lays its eggs in a flower that only opens for one night (CW 8: 132). Dismissing a Darwinian explanation, Jung invokes Bergsonian philosophy, particularly Bergson’s theory of instinct. Jung explains that instinct “is an unconscious process in that its result is the irruption into consciousness of an unconscious content, a sudden idea, or ‘hunch’” (CW 8: 132). Jung, having set out this Bergsonian framework of his theory of instinct, introduces the possibility that the images which accompany the actualization of instinct could be “a priori, inborn forms of ‘institutions’” (CW 8: 133). He states, “The primordial image (or archetype) might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself, or as the self-portrait of the instinct, in exactly the same way as consciousness is an inward perception of the objective life-process” (CW 8: 136). Given this connection, and Bergson’s principal contributions concerning temporality, and his considerable notoriety around the early 20th century, it is inconceivable that Jung’s own forays into time theory were not deeply informed by the Bergsonian tradition. It would have been impossible to write about time theory in the early 20th century and not implicitly be in conversation with Bergson. There has, however, been little comparison drawn to date between Bergsonian temporality and Jungian temporality (particularly as it pertains to Jungian synchronicity), and this deficit has remained despite the fact that Pete Gunter in his paper “Bergson and Jung” highlighted this shortfall back in 1982. There is certainly more work to be done in this area, as it appears that many Jungian concepts are at least foreshadowed in Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). In summary, the philosophy of Bergson began with the distinction between what is called “clock-time,” mathematical time, or “spatialized” time, and what is called pure time, experienced time, “duration,” “natural time” or psychological time. For Bergson, this contrast lay between our everyday conceptual model of time and our actual experience of time. According to Bergson, “natural” time cannot be measured discretely or homogeneously, but rather every instant must be interpreted and possesses a fluid, dynamic nature (Maxwell, 2006).

Conclusion

I set out at the start of this essay with the intent of exploring the role of time in Proust’s À la recherche, the role of time in Jung’s analytical psychology, and then going on to explore the relationship between the two – how Jungian temporality might inform a close reading of À la recherche. I began with a literature review of À la recherche, in which I noted the difficulty in equating the book’s ideas (and indeed the narrator’s ideas) with Proust’s own ideas. Writing as the artist, there is a gulf between the author and the readers – a gulf further explained by the very way Proust wanted to be perceived, which was distinctly not as a metaphysician, as his experiences as described or recounted would have classically been understood (i.e. encounters with the numinous). These experiences interlace with the relationship Proust has throughout his novel to time. Apart from some generalizations and impressions, and Houston’s essay which explored how temporality functions as a literary device, there is surprisingly little critical material exploring Proustian temporality specifically, and there is no systematic treatment of this trope. Perhaps this omission is explicable by the difficulty around extrapolating a systematic model from Proust’s prose – again, returning to the difficulty of conflating a product of the author with the author themselves.

One impression of Proustian temporality is the “invisible unity in the midst of dispersion” as Adorno discusses – a unitary state which often accompanies synchronistic moments. Synchronicity is one of Jung’s most important and influential ideas, being the connecting of events on a substrata below consciousness, which is outside of time, and Jung “usually specifies that synchronicities occur between a psychic event and a physical event” (Main, 2004, p. 109). However, there is also an element of flexibility and contextualisation in understanding Jung’s idea of synchronicity, and he himself regularly described it in varying terms depending on the context in which he was speaking of it. Indeed, “at different times, Jung writes of synchronicity as an irregular and unrepeatable phenomenon or as a regular and repeatable one” (Main, 2013, p. 109). Regarding Proustian temporality, this is echoed in the uniqueness of each experience, but also in the fact that these experiences – these privileged moments – occur for an individual more than once over the course of their lifetimes. For example, in the first chapter of À la recherche we see the narrator experience between waking and sleeping a sense of moving around within their memories of time.

Over the course of the literature review, in terms of influences upon Proust himself I focused particularly on Henri Bergson, whose theories concerning time and memory certainly informed À la recherche. Perhaps most notably, the ideas that memory supersedes the material, that clock-time is an invented construct, and that our interior experience of time – in its flexibility and fluidity – is a truer way of understanding and articulating the phenomena are key themes which can be seen to have directly influenced both Jung and Proust in their own thinking and writing. Richard Rorty’s ‘ironist’ classification was also helpful in considering the way we frame the claims made by both Jung and Proust; by concluding that they were, in a sense, proto-postmodernists, we are allowed to assert the conditional nature of both men’s work. This conditionality strengthens the correlation between the two, as both are eschewing a common-sense conception of rationality – most notably concerning clock-time (an idea reinforced by Bergson’s consideration relating to temporality). Rather, it emerges that both are “artistically” exploring alternative perspectives on time of equivalent validity.

In the section exploring the various influences on Proust, I examined the presence of various philosophical strands which feed into À la recherche. The strong transcendental idealist strand was noteworthy: the idea that the world is fundamentally a priori spatiotemporal, which can be seen to inform both Proust and Jung alike (most notably developed by Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Arthur Schopenhauer). This strand elevates the role of intuition and undermines the notion of a strictly cause-and-effect world (which of course is pertinent to Jung’s synchronicity model). In particular, Schopenhauer’s pessimistic, quasi-nihilistic model in effect presents a challenge that both Jung and Proust take up independently: the search for meaning and purpose in a world that doesn’t explicitly offer either. In the case of Proust, this is paired with the search for happiness in the face of mathematical time’s crushingly inexorable nature. I also noted Proust’s desire to challenge the conventional modernist approach and structuralist models, which compelled him to override the tendency to regard time as an axiomatic aspect of the universe. This, in turn, opened up the possibility of a looser and freer engagement with time – something which, as Proust himself notes, was necessary for a novel of the kind he wrote, in which all was filtered through the singular perspective of the narrator. In this respect, Proust’s novel foreshadows James Joyce’s Ulysses, which takes this internal memory, attention, and perception to its extrapolated end. It also further prefigures French existentialist thought generally, eschewing the principle of a pre-ordained purpose or essence of life in favour of radical individualism – the idea that we exist to discover our purpose, as Proust writes to define his truth. Finally, the influences section further strengthens the assertions (with the appropriate provisos) that Henri Bergson’s philosophy was of primary import, most notably Bergson’s 1903 book An Introduction to Metaphysics, in which he sets out his two ways of knowing. This concept appears to have influenced both Jung and Proust, foreshadowing aspects of Jung’s collective unconscious by expanding beyond the individual’s psyche in recognition of a psychic substrate within the material. As Bergson says, objects have perceptible “states of mind.” This in turn relates to Proust’s madeleine moment, in which physical space and experience hold memories (or, in Bergson’s sense, intuitions). For Bergson there is an interwoven relationship between time, space, intuition, and memory. The literature review further evidenced that no explicitly analytical-psychology study of À la recherche has been undertaken to date.

There has been a distinct lack of academic analysis on the parallels between Marcel Proust and Carl Jung. This is despite them being contemporaries, and despite the two men sharing many influences, including literary influences, links with psychoanalysis, philosophical concerns, and an apprehension about the rise of scientific rationalism. On top of these many areas of overlap, there is also a distinct parallel between the way time operates within Jung’s analytical psychology and within Proust’s À la recherche. The reasons for these overlaps, I propose, are threefold: 1) As an explicit outworking of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, it seems that questions concerning the nature of reality and the manner in which temporality functions simply surfaced independently in both Jung’s and Proust’s work at this time – issues in accord with the spirit of the age. 2) Both Marcel Proust and Carl Jung can be described as proto-postmodernists, which accounts for the desire to undermine the fixity of space and time and to undercut the prevailing materialistic scientism which is reductive. To some degree both men conform to Rorty’s conception of the “ironist,” but only in part, as the implications extrapolatable from both amount to an assertion of particular metaphysical claims that supersede mere play within subjective confines; both reach into the cosmic. 3) Most significant of all is the shared influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson shows up as the main link between the two – between Proust’s and Jung’s understandings of temporality. Notably, for Bergson there is a distinction between experienced time and clock-time, a distinction which is present in À la recherche and is implicit in Jung’s psychology. Any interplay between the subject and the archetypal psychoid entails synchronicity, a state in which one catches glimpses of a timeless realm beyond (God’s realm). In other words, for the individual there is a differentiation between the time as originally understood (i.e., clock-time) and the time as experienced. For Proust, in Bergsonian terms, there is experientially a distinction between internal subjective time and clock-time. Subjective time itself, however, occurs within distinctly privileged moments, most notably the madeleine moment, in which ordinary temporality breaks down entirely and a unitive state arises, in which one perceives all of time and space at once. As previously noted, there is no academic work in literary studies or analytical psychology studies thus far which explores the Bergsonian shared influence in both Proust’s and Jung’s work, making this exploration a new and ground-breaking study casting light on a heretofore unexplored connection between seminal thinkers. This essay then, as a contribution to literary discussions, opens new avenues for exploration in the realms of space, memory, self, and of course, time itself in all its forms.

In conclusion, Bergson’s conception of time informed both Jung and Proust at a fundamental level, hence the similarities between Proust’s privileged moments and Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Furthermore, Jungian temporality has been shown to be informative of Proust’s writing and is an illuminating lens through which to examine Proust’s À la recherche. Jung demonstrated that the unconscious is not bound by space and time, and certainly not by the mechanics of clock-time. It is therefore within moments where we find ourselves connected with the unconscious, where we skim the surface of synchronicity, that we can break free from time’s restrictions and travel freely through the vibrant history of our experience, and even further beyond. Proustian moments, such as the delicate madeleine prompt, have a syncretic quality, entailing an interplay with the psychoid archetype – a rupture in ordinary space-time, a mystical unitive experience in which moments of the supposed past and the present interplay with a shared field of unconscious understanding. It is here, within the phenomena of memory and internal time that does not conform to linear progression, that Proust recovers his lost time – which is freed from its perceived destructive and finite nature, and instead is shown to be elastic and fluid. It is here that Proust finds his meaning and his happiness, for what was believed lost into a nihilistic past of unrecoverable, dead time is shown to be nothing of the sort. It is not dead, but recovered, found, and brought with vivid immediacy into the narrator’s now.

References

General References

• Bales, Richard. (2001). Proust: The Cambridge Companion. Cambridge University Press.

• Bergson, Henri. (1944). Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell. New York: Random House.

• Bergson, Henri. (1918). An Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by T. E. Hulme. Cambridge: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

• Brown, Stephen G. (2004). The Gardens of Desire: Marcel Proust and the Fugitive Sublime. State University of New York Press.

• Gunter, Pete A. Y. (1982). “Bergson and Jung. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec. 1982), pp. 635–652.

• Hauke, Christopher. (2000). Jung and the Postmodern: The Interpretation of Realities. London: Routledge.

• Hembrough, Tara. (2008). “Proust Configures Time, Space, and Memory to Unveil Marcel’s Artistry in Swann’s Way. International Journal of Language & Linguistics, vol. 5, no. 2.

• Hoeller, S. A. (1982). The Gnostic Jung and the Seven Sermones to the Dead. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing.

• Jung, C. G. (2009). The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition (Liber Novus). New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company.

• Jung, C. G. (1976). Letters II: 1951–1961. G. Adler (ed.), Bollingen Series XCV2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

• Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by A. Jaffé, trans. R. and C. Winston. London: Collins/Routledge & Kegan Paul.

• Jung, C. G. (1953–83). The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 20 vols. (Read, Fordham, Adler, eds.; McGuire, executive ed.; Hull, trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Abbreviation CW used when citing the Collected Works.)

• Kant, Immanuel. (2007). Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and trans. Marcus Weigelt. New York: Penguin.

• Main, Roderick. (2007). Revelations of Change: Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience. State University of New York Press.

• Main, Roderick. (2004). The Rupture of Time: Synchronicity and Jung’s Critique of Modern Western Culture. London: Routledge.

• Proust, Marcel. (2002). (Vol. 1) Swann’s Way. Translated by Lydia Davis. London: Penguin Books.

• Proust, Marcel. (1960). (Vol. 7) Time Regained. Translated by Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus.

• Proust, Marcel. (1929a). (Vol. 2) Within a Budding Grove. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. (Online ed.)

• Proust, Marcel. (1929b). (Vol. 5) The Captive. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. (Online ed.)

• Rowland, Susan. (2019). Jungian Literary Criticism: The Essential Guide. London: Routledge.

• Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1966). The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications.

• Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1851). The Vanity of Existence. (Online translation: University of Adelaide.)

• Yiassemides, Angeliki. (2016). Time and Timelessness: Temporality in the Theory of Carl Jung. London: Routledge.

Proustian Literary Critics

• Adorno, Theodor W. (1991). “Short Commentaries on Proust. In Notes to Literature, vol. 1, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. S. W. Nicholsen. Columbia University Press, pp. 174–184.

• Arendt, Hannah. (2007). “No Longer and Not Yet. In Reflections on Literature and Culture, edited by Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb. Stanford University Press, pp. 120–125.

• Barthes, Roland. (2009). “Proust and Names. In New Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard. Northwestern University Press, pp. 55–68.

• Barthes, Roland. (1977). “The Death of the Author. In Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, pp. 142–148.

• Beckett, Samuel. (1999). Proust & Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. London: Calder.

• Benjamin, Walter. (2007). “The Image of Proust. In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. Schocken Books, pp. 201–215.

• Houston, John P. (1962). “Temporal Patterns in À la Recherche du temps perdu. French Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 33–44.

• Rorty, Richard. (1989). “Self-Creation and Affiliation: Proust, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge University Press, pp. 96–121.