7 - The unconscious

Summary

Proust's inquiry into the nature of the unconscious in A la recherche du temps perdu begins on the first page, with the Narrator's loss of his identity in the book he is reading. An insomniac, he wakes in the middle of the night, so disoriented he does not even know who he is. Feeling 'plus dénué que l'homme des cavernes' ['more destitute than a cave-dweller'] he has 'seulement dans sa simplicité première, le sentiment de l'existence comme il peut frémir au fond d'un animal' (I, 5) ['only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness' (I, 4/4)]. Having stripped him of his identity, sleep - and its absence - has carried him to man's beginnings. In fact, it has reduced him to the core of existence itself. But sleep has also carried away his furniture, his room, everything of which he was only 'une petite partie et à l'insensibilité duquel [il allait] vite [s']unir' (I, 4) ['an insignificant part and whose insensibility [he] should very soon return to share' (I, 2/3)]. He has fallen into ‘le néant’ (i, 5) [‘the abyss of not-being’ (i, 4/4)] from which, he says, he could never escape by himself. Memory arrives to pull him out of the abyss and is already working to rebuild ‘les traits originaux de [son] moi’ (i, 6) [‘the original components of [his] ego’ (i, 4/5)]. In the first four pages Proust has given a metaphorical description of the tabula rasa from which the quest for the lost treasure of the Narrator’s identity begins. Memory, already a companion in the search, has only just begun the foundation for what will become ‘l’édifice immense du souvenir’(i, 46) [‘the vast structure of recollection’ (i, 54/64)] that, as the Narrator will discover, actually holds the very treasure he has lost.