Moncrieff: 11-22; Clark: 10-17
by Dennis Abrams
References to Mme de Sevigne in Mamma’s letters, Marcel’s inept response “By those quotations your mother would recognize you at once,” causing Mamma to replay, “My poor boy, if it was to speak to me of my mother, your reference to Mme de Sevigne was most inappropriate. She would have answered you as she answered Mme de Grignan: ‘So she was nothing to you? I had supposed that you were related!'” Albertine’s doubts that Marcel will ever marry her, despite his hints that he will, because she is poor. “We shall see in due course that, in spite of stupid habits of speech which she had not outgrown, Albertine had developed to an astonishing degree.” Celeste’s curious genius. Physical changes in Albertine: “Her blue, almond-shaped eyes — now even more elongated –had altered in appearance; they were indeed of the same colour, but had seemed to have passed into a liquid state” Seeing a freshly-shaved Marcel is enough to cause Albertine to “vow in a transport of sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me,” without understanding the reason why. Albertine’s plans to go out with Andree and Marcel’s trust in Andree “to tell me of all the places that she visited with Albertine. “Andree’s privileged position as one of the girls of the little band gave me confidence that she would obtain everything I might want from Albertine. Truly, I could have said to her now in all sincerity that she would be capable of setting my mind at rest.” Albertine tells Marcel that back during his first visit to Balbec, Andree had been in love with him, copying all of his ways of talking and arguing, “she would twist her eyebrows the way you do, and stretch out her long neck, and I don’t know what all.” Marcel’s advice to go to Saint-Cloud instead of Buttes-Chaumont. Despite his lack of love for Albertine “for I no longer felt anything of the pain I had felt in the train at Balbec on learning how Albertine had spent her adolesence, with visits perhaps to Montjouvain,” certain expressions used by Albertine made him question her past. “Is that true?” Marcel’s preoccupation with the way Albertine spends her time. Albertine’s passivity, her faculty for forgetting and complying with one’s wishes. “So long as my jealousy had not been reincarnated in new people, I had enjoyed after the passing of my anguish an interval of calm.” The possibility for Albertine to slip into vice. “…my suffering, had I thought about it, could end only with Albertine’s life or with my own.” “I have always been more open to the world of potentiality than to the world of contingent reality. This helps one to understand the human heart, but one is apt to be taken in by individuals.” Marcel’s reliance on Andree and the Verdurin’s chauffeur (Morel’s friend) lets him to be lulled into a sense of security that someone is “keeping watch on my behalf.”
—-
Where did Marcel’s hostility/indifference to women come from?
“Albertine had developed to an astonishing degree. This was a matter of complete indifference to me, a woman’s intellectual qualities having always interested me so little that if I pointed them out to some woman or other it was solely out of politeness.”
“…she would spring on my bed and sometimes would expatiate upon my type of intellect, would vow in a transport of sincerity that she would sooner die than leave me: this was on mornings when I had shaved before sending for her. She was one of those women who can never distinguish the cause of what they feel. The pleasure they derive from a fresh complexion they explain to themselves by the moral qualities of the man who seems to offer them a possibility of happiness, which is capable, however, of diminishing and becoming less compelling the longer he refrains from shaving.”
Although, as I think about it, it’s not all that different than the way Swann, Saint-Loup, and Marcel himself detect a woman’s moral qualities from the look in her eyes…
—
A few great lines:
“For the truth is so variable for each of us, that other people have difficulty in recognising what it is.”
“Love is no more perhaps than the diffusion of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul.”
“But the slightest pretext serves to revive a chronic disease, just as the slightest opportunity may enable the vice of a person who is the cause of our jealousy to be practised anew (after a lull of chastity) with different people.”
And, perhaps most importantly,
“In leaving Balbec, I had imagined that I was leaving Gomorrah, plucking Albertine from it; in reality, alas, Gomorrah was disseminated all over the world. And partly out of jealousy, partly out of ignorance of such joys (a case which is extremely rare), Ihad arranged unawares this game of hide and seek in which Albertine would always elude me.”
Bloom reflects that,
“The metaphor or transference called ‘love,’ Proust calls ‘jealousy,’ so that when Marcel tells the invalid Swann that he has never felt jealous, he implicitly confesses that he did not love Gilberte. Time’s revenges are about to descend upon him in the novel’s great affair of jealousy, the demonic parody of its search for lost time. The Albertine-Marcel saga…begins as it should, with jealousy, which, according to the Narrator, precedes Marcel’s love for Albertine. Early in The Captive, the pattern is made clear: the excitation of his jealousy is what motivates Marcel, in a contest with Albertine’s lesbian lovers that he can never hope to win.”
—-
Wednesday’s Reading:
Moncrieff: Page 22 “As for the reason for my desire to remain at home…” through Page 32 “…to summon our tailor or in order to order an ice cream.”
Clark: Pages 17-24, Kindle locations 715-21 “I asked her to excuse me from coming with had and Andree.” through Kindle locations 827-34 “…to call our tailor or order an iced dessert.”
Enjoy.
Clark pp 17-24
Merci.
Marcel is a fine example of a young man whose emotional “tank” was never filled as a child. He was raised at a remove from affection and will always suffer from the deficiency. He is a bottomless pit of need, a void that no one can touch.
Ah…but what is it that he needs?
Anxious attachment style, I think. I’ll find this quite a challenge, as I detect old memories of a very unpleasant time being stirred up. I’ll stick with it because, although the default setting is to empathise with the narrator, I think the author has shown that they don’t always like what the narrator is up to, and that in itself is rather interesting, on the page.