'Un égoïsme utilisable pour autrui’: le statut normatif de l'auto-description chez Proust

Is the writing of the Recherche a moral act?  Not in the sense that it aims to make its readers more virtuous.  But at a deeper level, the sacrifice made by Proust—and, in a very different way, the sacrifice made by Proust’s narrator—turn out to be refined forms of altruism, their reclusive exertions an “egoism usable by others.”  For in providing, through an artistically rendered life, an otherwise impossible access to his deepest self, the narrator enables his readers not only to escape the solipsistic prison in which they, like everyone, find themselves trapped but also (as Nietzsche would say) to find the world infinite all over again; and in crafting a highly unusual work of fiction, Proust offers his own readers a set of devices designed to assist in their efforts to become who they are.
As an overdetermined narrative that forces key interpretive decisions upon the reader, the Recherche allows, first, for exercises in self-knowledge, via a posteriori self-observation.  Second, as the story of a life whose articulations are as much aesthetic as causal, whose multilayered hypotaxis holds expansive material in a dynamic equilibrium, it provides a formal model for a certain kind of unity across time.  And as a work which continually forces rereading, and which periodically points to its own fictionality, it grants, third, the opportunity to fine-tune capacities for the re-evaluation of the past and for the maintenance of illusions, both of which techniques prove essential to the project of self-construction.  The Recherche does not teach, but it does train; it is a novel that is moral by eschewing moralism; it is a labor that, precisely by being selfish, ends up the most altruistic gesture imaginable.