Proust’s wish-structure reveals the future as necessarily more than expectation

Evidence

As in Bloch, the future always turns out in Proust to be that which is more, or other, than what was expected, even if what was expected had in the last analysis been dissatisfaction itself. Think of that long-desired letter from Gilberte which the narrator composes over and over again in his mind until he stops in terror: “I understood that were I to receive a letter from Gilberte, it could in no case be that particular one, since I had just myself composed it. And from that moment on I forced myself to avoid thinking the words I would have loved to have her write me, for fear of excluding precisely those words—the dearest and most longed for—from the field of possible realizations by pronouncing them myself.” Thus for Proust also, whatever the content of the future, it must necessarily come with the force of the utterly new, the utterly unexpected, and the narrator is therefore driven into an agonizing and self-contradictory, profoundly superstitious process of conjuring the wish: consciously imagining less in order to receive more, formulating the wish in one way only so as to have it realize itself in that stronger form secretly longed for. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 293

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox of conjuring the wish — that naming a wish forecloses its realization, so fulfillment requires imagining less — is a dense dialectical structure that resists summary and rewards returning to.
• XREF: This model of wish and expectation connects Bloch’s anticipatory consciousness, Freud’s wish-fulfilment in dreamwork, and Lacan’s insight that desire is structured by what cannot be spoken. — connects to: Hope is always thwarted because the future necessarily exceeds our anticipations — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 267; The future’s anticipatory structure holds teleological necessity and surprise together — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 250; Proust offers the ideal test case for a Utopian hermeneutic — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 291
• FICTION: The superstition of the composed letter is a ready-made narrative device — a character who must sabotage their own articulated hopes to let the unspoken one come true.

Broader Connections

• The future’s anticipatory structure holds teleological necessity and surprise together #corroborates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 250