“The Proustian Corporeity” and “The True Hawthorns”

In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty famously wrote: “No one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible.” To gain a fresh and original access to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Proust, this chapter places his views alongside those of another of Proust’s great interpreters, Walter Benjamin. In spite of the absence of explicit references to Benjamin in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, certain intersections are clear. For one thing, we find the originating importance of Husserl for Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin. Though they make reference to very distant periods of Husserlian thought, they share at least a distrust with regard to experience understood as Erlebnis. Second, they each give attention to the theme of essence and ideas, which, concerning artistic and literary works, are considered by the two thinkers as immanent within the works themselves. This suggests one of the most important contributions of Proust to Merleau-Ponty’s thought, the concept of “sensible ideas.” Third, both Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin demonstrate their common interest in perception and memory, sometimes focusing on the very same pages of Recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] to deepen, through the character of Marcel, the concept of “involuntary memory.”

Introduction

Merleau-Ponty’s profound engagement with literary writers is readily apparent: Proust and Valéry, also Stendhal, Paul Claudel, Claude Simon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton, Balzac, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, Sartre, and Beauvoir. Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France as well as the course of 1953–54 all address questions of expression and literary language: The Sensible World and the World of Expression, Research on the Literary Usage of Language, and The Problem of Speech. Recent transcription and publication of these new resources lend urgency to this project. Our use of the term “poet” includes literary authors in general, be they novelists or “poets” in the narrower sense, and our focus is on the writers of “modernity” or “modernism.” The meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics opens with reflections on philosophy of language in sharp contrast with Sartre’s What is Literature? It studies four paradoxes of literary expression: the paradox of the true and the imaginary, of speech and silence, of the subjective (the most secret) and the objective, and of the relation of the author and the person who lives. These are the “surprises,” the “traps,” that make literature appear as a problem to itself and cause the writer himself or herself to ask: “what is literature?”

A Poetics of Co-Naissance

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon allows us to shed some light on the relations between Being and Flesh in his philosophy, as well as how these relations promise a genuine poetic art. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh (poetic of the body and desire), a poetic of mystery (which is not primarily what is hidden, but what expresses itself inexhaustibly), and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. These three dimensions touch respectively on the overdetermination Merleau-Ponty gives to the questions of desire, expression, and perception—and are deployed in their corresponding horizons, the first more anthropological, the next more epistemological, and the last more ontological. The bold and broad inspiration that Merleau-Ponty finds in André Breton, Paul Claudel, and Claude Simon is a particularly rich leading thread in the exploration of this poetic, which plunges us into the heart of the unfinished work site of the philosopher’s last manuscripts, some of which are not yet published.

From the World of Silence to Poetic Language

This chapter makes explicit the influence of Valéry whose poem La Pythie [The Pythoness] is quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the penultimate sentence of The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty discussed the work and life of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) for the entire first half of the first course of 1953, Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. After early poetic successes, Valéry experienced a deep personal crisis that led him to impose a silence upon himself, which lasted for a period of twenty-five years from 1892 until 1917, after which he emerged reborn as a writer. Merleau-Ponty recognizes the power of silence to nourish both poetic and philosophical language in relation to three orders or dimensions: “the horizon of the visible, the horizon of the nameable, and the horizon of the thinkable.” The notions of the “chiasma of two destinies” and the “implex of words” derive directly from Valéry, who leads on to Mallarmé and Baudelaire together with Edgar Allan Poe, as well as to Francis Ponge, who captured this overlapping exchange among the dimensions of Being in Taking the Side of Things [Le parti pris des choses].

Metaphoricity

Whoever has an inclination toward the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty can sense manifest and multiple ties with the question of metaphor. The study of these linkages invites an examination of the philosopher’s original manner or style of writing, especially in the late texts; it also leads to a reading of what Merleau-Ponty says explicitly about metaphor. Finally, and especially, it promises an evaluation of what his philosophy brings to us for a renewed understanding of metaphoricity. Particularly, we need to understand its natural inscription and its expressive power, its anthropological foundations and its ontological horizons: why metaphor is typical of our carnal being-in-the-world, as well as what it says to us about being human, about the world, and even about Being. These complementary approaches require bringing together the most advanced dimensions of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty.

On the Poetic and the True

Two of the working titles Merleau-Ponty had considered for The Visible and the Invisible were Genealogy of the True and The Origin of Truth. As well as offering us a genealogical critique of any reduction of truth to a single absolute origin, his philosophy also strongly contests against giving in to notions of skepticism, Pyrrhonism, deception, and illusion. He contests equally against notions of “eternal truth” based upon forgetting the “retrograde movement of truth,” which means forgetting that thought and events happen at certain moments in time and are part of a process of movement and duration. There were two moments when the questions of truth were at the forefront of Merleau-Ponty’s attention: the first concerns clarifying the “mystery of language” in both literary and mathematical expression while the second introduces us to a new idea of truth (light) and new vocabulary of truth: shining (éclatement), “pregnancy,” the “dehiscence” of Being. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is not interested in tests for the mere truth of statements as secondary language, rather he is interested in originary speech and writing, both philosophical and literary, that expresses a more “militant truth,” marked by its nobility, mobility, subtlety, suppleness, depth, and richness.

The Clouded Surface

The whole path of Merleau-Ponty’s thought is crossed—sometimes more evidently than others—by what I propose to qualify as the idea of literature and philosophy as visual apparatuses, to use an expression that was born—and not by chance—in the Film Studies domain. More precisely, I aim at asserting that Merleau-Ponty sees literature and philosophy working in his epoch as convergent apparatuses (dispositifs) of vision, in turn understood as a bodily and not merely ocular practice. Immediately after that, I should specify that such convergent visual apparatuses peculiarly function by words, and that Merleau-Ponty stresses their different efficiency in expressing his epoch. Moreover, I think that the implicit idea of philosophy as a visual apparatus working by words “like all literature” has a particularly relevant but so far not consequently developed place in in the last period of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Also, I would like to stress that such a perspective is crucial in our own time too, even though I consider it to be different from Merleau-Ponty’s. Indeed, I think that both our time and Merleau-Ponty’s are characterized by a tension between the increasing importance of images and the traditional centrality of the concept in our culture.