Like many other readers of Proust, navigating through the novel at a slow and painful rate, without a map, I experienced many frustrations, as well as precious exhilarating moments of clarity, followed quickly by despair.
Joshua Landy's book is that precious road map that rekindled my Proust enthusiasm and is sending me back to the original text with a penintent and yet joyful feeling.
What a wonderfully strong, stylish, limpid and yet sophisticated analysis!
Will we be cabaple of discovering anything new in Proust after Landy's "Philosophy as Fiction"? Is that the final word on 'La Recherche"? As you can very well see, I am still under the book's spell (finished it just yesterday), but everything, everything makes sense to me now! :-)
I won't comment here on the the book's most important claim, i.e. that 'La Recherche' possesses a coherent, and largely original, philosophical theory on the nature of the Self and its capacity for Knowledge and Self-Fashioning; suffice it to say I bought the argument completely, since it is so beautifully laid out.
I challenge anyone to find a better argued work: every chapter, every sub-chapter is demonstrated elegantly and concisely. The numerous end-notes (perhaps a bit too numerous?) are ideally supportive of Landy's arguments and represent a faithful sample of the entire novel, as well as Proust's other writings and the numerous critical works inspired by his novel. Joshua Landy's style, largely free of jargon, always in pursuit of order and clarity, demonstrates a laudable democratic sense that the author possesses: if you are not initiated into the rarefied society of Proust specialists, or if you are not a philosopher, you need not despair. Joshua Landy's seems to entirely lack the narcissism and self-satisfied inscrutability of many other literary-critical or philosophical works, and it opens itself to the reader with sincerity and authority. It is complex, but suple; echoes many critical and philosophical voices, but remains coherent and unburdened.
Holding the book in my hands nostalgically, I'm experiencing a sense of joy and loss at having finished it.
Enjoy your reading!
Proust scholarship has been conducted so exhaustively in the past that today's critics often content themselves with a few overlooked crumbs. Until now: Landy's book sweeps the critical slate clean and convincingly argues for a radically new interpretation, not of this, that or the other detail, but of Proust's entire masterpiece, _The Remembrance of Things Past_. As if this were not enough, he also provides profound insights on the philosophical relevance of literature: for instance, how narratives uniquely address the creation of identity, and how they reveal disturbing fault lines in what (we think) we know. This book will singlehandedly revolutionize Proust studies, but also the field of literary criticism as a whole. It could not have come at a better time: as most literary scholars are fleeing literature like the plague, Landy shows how it's really a pharmacy for our philosophical inquiries.
