Demarcating the Recherche: Joshua Landy's Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust

In his ambitious reading of Proust's Recherche, Joshua Landy proposes various sharp textual/narratological demarcations ' between the narrator and the author; and between the narrator's memoir, the narrator's future novel, and the author's novel. I argue that Landy's demarcations occlude the differences that mark the entities from within. For example, the paradoxicality of the way that the narrator is given the author's name calls into question not only an identity between author and narrator but also a clear demarcation between them that would constitute the self-identity of each; and Landy's picturing the narrator's future book, unlike Proust's novel, as essentially autobiographical ignores the way that the narrator ties autobiography to fiction.