“…ugly and expensive things are extremely useful, for they possess, in the eyes of people who do not understand us, who do not share our taste and with whom we may be in love, a glamour which a fine object that does not reveal its beauty may lack.”

Moncrieff:  224-235; Clark: 155-163

by Dennis Abrams

What does the presence of Albertine deprive Marcel of,while at the same time, presenting him with?  Because of Albertine’s presence, Marcel is able to look at the women on the street without thinking of them as the objects of Albertine’s desire, hating them all, “Objects of horror, because they would have been excluded from the beauty of the universe.  Albertine’s servitude, by releasing me from suffering on their account, restored them to the beauty of the world.”  Albertine as a captive bird, “As soon as she was a captive in my house, the bird that I had seen one afternoon advancing with measured tread along the front, surrounded by a congregation of other girls like seagulls alighted from who knew where, Albertine had lost all her colours, together with all the opportunities that other people had of securing her for themselves.  Gradually she had lost her beauty.”  Marcel can recapture her beauty while out in public with her, imagining her accosted by some young woman or man.  Albertine’s two periods.  Memories of the beach, Albertine as the most beautiful girl on the beach, surrounded by her friends, not far “from a woman with whom I was almost certain now she had had relations,” bursting out laughing and staring at Marcel “in an insolent fashion.”  Two intertwined shadows.  The full moon as they approach the Arc de Triomphe.  Peace in Albertine’s presence, knowing she is going home, to her home, with Marcel.  Marcel worries that Albertine sees herself as a prisoner, “judging by her mournful, wearylook that evening as we dined together in her room…”  “There is no such thing as a beautiful prison.”  Marcel again bemoans the fact that if it wasn’t for Albertine, he could be dining in Venice.  The Barbedienne bronze.   Marcel’s bondage ceases to weigh upon him when he begins to perceive that Albertine is conscious of her own.  Because Albertine goes to such lengths to never be alone, to never go out without Francoise or Andree, to never talk on the telephone without somebody being able to listen to her conversation, Marcel begins to wonder “whether Albertine might not be planning to shake off her chains.” Marcel runs into Gisele on the street, and her statement that she “happened to have something to say to her…something to do with some young friends of hers,” followed by vague answers to Marcel’s questions, convinces him that she is lying, and has plans to escape with one of her friends. The “little band” covers up each other’s activities with lies, as do a magazine’s publishers, editors and staffs.

—-

Poor Albertine, she really doesn’t have much of a chance:

“With Albertine, the impression that she was lying was conveyed by a number of characteristics which we have already observed in the course of this narrative, but especially by the fact that, when she was lying, her story erred either from inadequacy, omission, implausibility, or on the contrary from a surfeit of petty details intended to make it seem plausible.”

And of course,

“Plausibility, notwithstanding the idea that the liar holds of it, is by no means the same as truth.  Whenever, while listening to something that is true, we hear something that is only plausible, that is perhaps more plausible than the truth, that is perhaps too plausible, an ear that is at all musical sense that is not correct, as with a line that does not scan or a word read aloud in mistake for another.”

—

Tuesday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “Meetings such as this one with Gisele…” through “the symbol of his resurrection.”  Pages 235-246; Kindle locations: 3065-73

Clark:  “Meetings like the ones with Gisele…” through “the symbol of his resurrection.”  Pages 163-170; Kindle locations: 3241-48/3369-76

Enjoy.  And it’s a major scene (heads up!), so I know you will.

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“To tell the truth, I had reached that stage in my relations with Albertine when, if everything remains the same, if things go on normally, a woman no longer serves any purpose for one except as a transitional stage before another woman.”

Moncrieff:  196-224; Clark:  136-155

by Dennis Abrams

“First of all, I must make certain that Lea was really going to perform at the Trocadero.”  Marcel send Francoise to the Trocadero to intercept Albertine with a note saying that he had received a letter from the woman who had made him so unhappy at Balbec, and asking her to come immediately, so “that they might take the air together, which might help me to recover from the shock.”    Marcel realizes he does not know Albertine,”To tell the truth, I knew nothing that Albertine had done since I had come to know her, or even before.”  Francoise does not realize that it is Marcel who has created Albertine’s position in the household, and not Albertine, that “play-actress…wily customer…who could twist [him] round her little finger.”  Francoise daughter’s influence was “beginning to contaminate Francoise’s vocabulary.”  Francoise won’t use the telephone, but a telephonist informs Marcel that Albertine would be coming home with Francoise.  In addition, Marcel receives a note from Albertine confirming her return “My darling dear Marcel, I return less quickly than this cyclist, whose bike I should like to borrow in order to be with you sooner…”   “I had a woman of my own, who, at the first word I sent her out of the blue, informed me deferentially by telephone that she was allowing herself to be brought home, at once.”   Now that Marcel knows Albertine is coming home, he would be happy to postpone the moment of her return, and would be pleased to spend the time alone.  Marcel contemplates going out and seeing the little shopgirls, midinettes and prostitutes strolling on the Bois.  Marcel, to pass the time, sits down at the piano to play Vinteuil’s sonata.  The “tide of sound” carries him back to Combray, and the time “when I myself had longed to become an artist.”  A passage of the sonata, “although Vinteuil had been trying to express in it a fancy which would have been wholly foreign to Wagner, I could not help murmuring ‘Tristan.'”  Marcel is struck by how much reality there is in the work of Wagner.  Music helps Marcel descend into himself, “to discover new things, the variety I had sought in vain in life, in travel…”   Marcel contemplates the attitude towards their work of nineteenth century authors. Marcel’s musings which had been wandering through musical moments, turns to the best performers, and ultimately to Morel.    Morel, Charlus and algebra classes.    Marcel leaves the piano to greet Albertine in the courtyard, and hears Morel screaming at his fiancee, Jupien’s niece, repeatedly calling her “grand pied de grue,” (you great slut).  Albertine returns and she and Marcel go out for a drive.  Albertine’s new ring, which she says she purchased from a hotel proprietor at Le Mans, which, thanks to Marcel, she could now afford.  The dream of going out with a woman, or having tea with her, as inspired by a novel or memoirs, compared with the reality. “For, whenever we attempt to imitate something that has really existed, we forget that this something was brought about not by the desire to imitate but by an unconscious force which itself is also real…” The “rows of houses, a pink congelation of sunshine and cold, reminded me of my visits to Mme Swann in the soft light of her chrysanthemums.”  The sight of a young fruit-seller, or a dairymaid, “whom my sufficient to launch upon exquisite adventures, on the threshold of a romance which I should never know.” The emotion caused by the women he sees is like that of seeing a goddess.  “Now that Olympus no longer exists, its inhabitants dwell upon the earth.”  Marcel learns that while he sleeps, Albertine reads his books. The Bois.   Marcel decides not to tell Albertine that he will be going to the Verdurins that night to find out “who Albertine might have been hoping to meet there in the afternoon.”  Life with Albertine has prevented Marcel from going to Venice,as well as “making the acquaintance of the young midinettes scattered about in the sunlight of this fine Sunday…” Marcel’s double standards.

—-

This was an amazing section, I thought. A few thoughts…

1. Since Francoise tends to see things fairly clearly (most of the time) is she correct in her belief that Albertine is using Marcel?  We know to what lengths Marcel is willing to go to manipulate Albertine to do what he wants.  Is it possible that Albertine is playing the same games with Marcel, mentioning that Lea will be at the Trocadero, for instance, knowing how Marcel will react?

2.  As Marcel himself notes after receiving word that Albertine will be returning with Francoise,”I was more of a master than I had supposed.  More of a master, in other words, more of a slave.”

3.  I loved the whole section with the ruminations on music and literature. I wonder how much Proust was thinking of his own work when he wrote this:

“I was struck by how much reality there is in the work of Wagner as I contemplated once more those insistent, fleeting themes which visit an act, recede only to return again and again, and sometimes distant, dormant, almost detached, are at other moments, while remaining vague, so pressing and close, so internal, so organic, so visceral, that they seem like the reprise not so much of a musical motif as of an attack of neuralgia.”

4.  On the other hand, I’m not all together certain what to make of this:

“…I thought how markedly, all the same, these works partake of that quality of being– albeit marvelously — always incomplete, which is the characteristic of all the great works of the nineteenth century, that century whose greatest writers somehow botched their books, but,watching themselves work as though they were at once workman and judge, derived from this self-contemplation a new form of beauty, exterior and superior to the work itself,imposing on it a retroactive unity, a grandeur which it does not possess.”

In what ways did the nineteenth century’s great writers “botch” their books?”

4.  And on another note, when did Marcel learn to play the piano?

5.  I loved Charlus’s response to Morel regarding taking algebra lessons:  “But there’s no need to have lessons, algebra isn’t a thing like swimming, or even English, you can learn it equally well from a book.”  In contrast with poor Marcel who,  “In the past it had often happened to me, on reading a book of memoirs or a novel in which a man is always going out with a woman, or having tea with her, to long to be able to do likewise.  I had thought sometimes that I had succeeded in doing so, as for instance when I took Saint-Loup’s mistress out, to go to dine with her.  But however much I summoned to my assistance the idea that I was actually impersonating the character I had envied in the novel, this idea assured me that I ought to find pleasure in Rachel’s company and yet afforded me none.”

5.  Loved this, as Marcel, playing Vinteuil’s sonata, contemplates his former desire to become an artist:

“Could life console me for the loss of art?  Was there in art a more profound reality, in which our true personality finds an impression that is not afforded it by the activities of life?  For every great artist seems so different from all the rest, and gives us so strongly that sensation of individuality for which we seek in vain in our everyday existence!”

6.  Albertine…because of her, Marcel has given up art, Venice, the possibilities of other women…

—-

Monday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “This is what the presence of Albertine, this was what my life with Albertine had deprived me of.” through “…it was quite useless therefore to ply her with questions.”  Pages 224-235; Kindle locations 2932-39/3065-73

Clark:  “There exactly was what Albertine’s presence, what my life with Albertine, was depriving me of.”  through “There was therefore no point in asking her any questions.”  Pages 155-163; Kindle locations 3113-20/3241-48

Enjoy.

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“And yet this love for Albertine, which I felt almost vanish when I attempted to realise it, seemed somehow at this moment to acquire a proof of its existance from the intensity of my anguish.”

Moncrieff:  184-196; Clark: 128-136

by Dennis Abrams

The dairymaid stands before Marcel, and “stripped of all the desires and imaginings that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her mere self.”  Stalling for time, Marcel asks her to hand him his copy of the Figaro. “‘What do you call that red knitted thing you’re wearing?  It’s very pretty.’  She replied ‘It’s my sweater.'”  Marcel reads in the Figaro that the actress Mlle Lea, the actress friend of the two young ladies who watched in the mirror of the casino at Balbec, would be appearing at the Trocaderoin Les Fourberies de Nerine that afternoon.  “The flood of my anguish came out in torrents.”   Albertine had talked about Lea at Balbec, denying rumors that she was a lesbian.  “Oh no, she isn’t in the least that sort of woman.She’s a very nice person.” Albertine and her inability to keep her lies straight.  “We remember the truth because it has a name, is rooted in the past, but a makeshift lie is quickly forgotten.”  Despite being unaware as to whether Albertine knew Lea, “I must at all costs prevent prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadero.”  Marcel’s inability to remember many of Albertine’s past statements:  “One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves, one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people we do not love, and her expression while saying it.”  Marcel realizes the dairymaid is still there, and send her off with five francs.  Marcel’s belief that because she did not go to the Verdurins, “that she would do nothing that was not blameless– that belief had vanished.”  Marcel imagines Albertine renewing her acquaintance with Lea.  The image of Albertine watching the two girls:  “…I possessed in my memory only a series of Albertines, separate from each other, incomplete, a collection of profiles or snapshots, and so my jealousy was restricted to a discontinuous expression, at once fugitive and fixed, and to the people who had caused that expression to appear upon Albertine’s face.  The difference in Albertine’s face when she knows she is being watched and wanted, and when is the one doing the watching and wanting:   “Then, on the contrary, her intense and velvety gaze attached itself, glued itself, to the passer-by, so adhesive, so corrosive, that you felt that, in withdrawing, it must tear away the skin. But that look, which did at least give her a certain gravity, almost as though she were ill, seemed to me a pleasant relief after the vacant, blissful look she had worn in the presence of the two girls…But who knows whether, once my back was turned, Albertine would continue to suppress everything that was at such moments she held in suspension within herself, that radiated around her and gave me such anguish, whether, now that I was no longer there, she would not respond boldly to the advances of the two girls?”  Marcel’s need for Albertine is revived. “Besides, even more than their faults while we are in love with them, there are their faults before we knew them, and first and foremost their nature.”  How could Marcel be certain Albertine did not already know Lea, and that she would visit her in her dressing-room, or that Lea would recognize Albertine from Balbec and from the stage signal her to come backstage to make her acquaintance?

—

Once again, Marcel swept up in a swirl of jealousy begun with nothing more than an actress on stage at the Trocadero and…possibilities.   Jealousy that, once again, revives his need for Albertine.

1.  Loved this:  “Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one’s eyes, of the various events of one’s life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections, but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into that potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain for ever unverifiable.”

2.  And to continue the idea of jealousy as historian:

“…one’s jealousy, ransacking the past in search of a clue, can find nothing always retrospective, it is like a historian who has to write the history of a period for which he has no documents; always belated, it dashes like an enraged bull to the spot where it will not find the dazzling, arrogant creature who is tormenting it and whom the crowd admire for his splendour and cunning.  Jealousy thrashes around in the void…”

3.  And then there’s this:

“Albertine might deny specific betrayals, but by words that she let fall, more potent than her declarations to the contrary, by those looks alone, she had confessed to what she would have wished to hide far more than any specific facts, to what she would have let herself be killed sooner than admit:  her natural tendency.  For there is no one who will willingly deliver up his soul.”

4.  And this:  “Making endless conjectures, I sought to ward off my suffering without thereby realising my love.”

Proust brings us so far into Marcel’s anguish, the absurdity of his jealousy, based on little but conjecture, that one’s reaction, I think is always shifting — the tragicomedy of jealousy.

Also, I’m going to need to back to compare what Proust has to say about Odette’s lies vs. Albertine’s.

—

And finally, Patricia Nelson posted a response this afternoon that, for all those who don’t necessarily read all the comments, is well worth reading:

“I’ve been aghast at Marcel morbidly touching Albertine while she sleeps (or fibrillating alongside her) – like a grotesque fairy tale, Briar Rose not dead, but sleeping, Snow White in her glass coffin wakened from her coma by a princely kiss. Albertine is so improbably unconscious, either feigning sleep or drugged. The Kawabata comparison is brilliant. Marcel’s obsessive jealous irritation with Albertine feels like wretched boredom. Albertine is surely complicit, mocking, with her kittenish card playing on the bed, her chinchilla mules no doubt kicked aside. What does she want that she would put up with these ghastly kisses while she sleeps ‘like a watch that never stops, …like a creature of respiration.’
What a relief to open the window and hear the street cries for old clothes, fresh artichokes, winkles, snails, tinker’s repairing pots and pans, offers to clip dogs and cats. Marcel says he is submerged in a sea of unreality, he describes his pleasure in ‘getting outdoors without leaving my bed’ and hearing ‘the dangerous bustling world’ to which he does not want to entrust Albertine. Instead he plays with fulfilling her wishes as they imagine all the ‘trades and foodstuffs of Paris’ listening to the morning street vendors. It is as if Proust surfaced into Joyce’s quotidian. And the use in this section of the Latin mass as a reference for rhythm – the rag and bone man and the Gregorian chant – this reminds me of the mock ceremony beginning Joyce, the Latin is assumed to be utterly familiar. With this passage, suddenly a healthy appetite, robust passion for green beans, cream cheeses, ices.
Is everyone in Marcel’s life complicit with his fantasies? I think he has stated he is a man accustomed to depend on sleeping drugs, he mentions beauty and opium. His mother barely chides him over Albertine the endless houseguest. Francoise dutifully brings in (procures?) a little dairy girl to fulfill Marcel’s hopes for a pretty messenger. “You’ll see sir, she’s just like a Little Red Riding-Hood.” Of course, up close, the platinum blonde dairy girl is ‘reduced to her unvarnished self.’ ‘The curiosity of love is like our curiosity about place-names: always disappointed, it is always reborn and remains insatiable.” She is stripped of his imagination, ‘dead, pinned down’ – all these encounters are etherized like patients on a table.”

I think Patricia nails it very well here — I’ve been pondering the “Sleeping Beauty” idea myself, and I too, feel the release from claustrophobia when Marcel opens the window to the sounds of the world outside.

The question I have is this.  The book we’re reading is The Prisoner.  Who, exactly, is the prisoner:  Marcel or Albertine?

—-

The Weekend’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “First of all, I must make certain that Lea was really going to perform at the Trocadero.” through “…half-human, half-winged, angel or peri, pursuing her course.”  Pages 196-224; Kindle locations 2564-71/2932-39

Clark:  “First, I had to be certain that Lea really was appearing at the Trocadero.” through “…half-human and half-winged, an angel or a peri, continuing her journey.”  Pages 136-155; Kindle locations: 2777-83/3113

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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“Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places, perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains for ever insatiable.”

Moncrieff:  174-185; Clark: 121-128

by Dennis Abrams

With Albertine gone, Marcel stands for a moment at the window.  “There was at first a silence, amid which the whistle of the tripe-vendor and the hooting trams reverberated through the air in different octaves, like a blind piano-tuner.”   If Marcel were to leave his aristocratic quarter (unless it was for something entirely plebeian), it “would seem to me very dreary, quite uninhabitable, stripped, drained of all these litanies of the small trades and itinerant victuals, deprived of the orchestra that came every morning to charm me.”  “The whirring of a violin was due at one time to the passing of the car, at another to my not having put enough water in my electric hot-water bottle.”   The sounds, noise, and cries of the street.   Marcel watches the girls making their deliveries.  “To estimate the loss that I suffered by my seclusion, that is to say the riches that the day had to offer me, I should have had to intercept in the long unwinding of the animated frieze some damsel carrying her laundry or her milk, transfer her for a moment, like the silhouette of a mobile piece of stage decor between its supports, into the frame of my door, and keep her there before my eyes long enough to elicit some information about her which would enable me to find her again some day…”  Marcel asks Francoise to send one of the girls up to run an errand for him.  The girl from the dairy:  “…a startling towhead, tall in stature though little more than a child…I had seen her from a distance only, and for so brief an instant that I could not have described her appearance…a sharply defined nose (a rare thing in a child) in a thin face, which recalled the beaks of baby vultures…In this too skinny young person, who also struck one’s attention too forcibly, the excess of what another person would perhaps have called her charms was precisely what was calculated to repel me, but had nevertheless had the effect of preventing me from even noticing, let alone remembering, anything about the other dairymaids…” Marcel reads a letter from his mother, and senses that she is annoyed that Albertine is still living there and that Marcel still plans to marry Albertine, even though he has not informed Albertine of this fact.  Francoise returns with the dairymaid.  Elstir and violets.  The gap between the women of our imagination and real women, the ones we are able to approach.

—-

A beautiful section:  I loved (once again) the description of the sounds of the street, the street hawkers, the “woman with no pretence to fashion (or else obedient to an ugly fashion) came past, too brightly dressed in a sack overcoat of goatskin; but no, it was not a woman, it was a chauffeur who, enveloped in his goatskin, was proceeding on foot to his garage,”  the butcher’s assistant, arranging in the window a display of kidneys, steaks and ribs — “was really far more reminiscent of a handsome angel who, on the Day of Judgment, will organise for God, according to their quality, the separation of the good and the wicked and the weighing of souls.”

2.  And this:  “A whore smiles at us in the street as she will smile when she is by our side.  We are sculptors.  We want to obtain of a woman a statue entirely different from the one she has presented to us.”

3.  And this:  “And so one spends one’s life in anxious approaches, constantly renewed, to serious working-girls whose calling seems to distance them from one.  Once they are in one’s arms, they are no longer what they were, the distance that one dreamed of bridging is abolished.  But one begins anew with other women, one devotes all one’s time, all one’s money, all one’s energy to these enterprises, one is enraged by the too cautious driver who may make us miss the first rendezvous, one works oneself up to a fever.  And yet one knows that this first rendezvous will bring the end of an illusion.  No matter:  as long as the illusion lasts one wants to see whether one can convert it into reality…Amorous curiosity is like the curiosity aroused in us by the names of places, perpetually disappointed, it revives and remains forever insatiable.”

Reality disappoints.  Unless, like Elstir, you’re able to turn a single violet into an entire field.

—-

Thursday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “Alas, as soon as she stood before me…” through “…I sought to ward off my suffering without thereby realising my love.”  Pages 184-196; Kindle locations 2407-14/2564-71

Clark:  “Alas, once in my room…” through “…without thereby giving any more reality to my love.”  Pages 128-136; Kindle locations 2634-41/2777-83

Enjoy.

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“Two little pimples which she had on her forehead for a few days were perhaps even more effective in modifying the feelings of my heart.”

Moncrieff: 160-174; Clark:  112-121

by Dennis Abrams

The cries from the street begin again, and Albertine requests first oysters, than mackerel, than mussels, than cos lettuce, finally agreeing to “…cabbages, carrots, oranges.  Just the things I want to eat. Do make Francoise go out and buy some.  She shall cook us a dish of creamed carrots.  Besides, it will be so nice to eat all these things together.  It will be all the shouts we’re hearing transformed into a good dinner.”  Laments that it will be two months until she hears “‘Green and tender beans, fresh green beans!’  How true that is:  tender beans, you know I like them as soft as soft, dripping with oil and vinegar, you wouldn’t think you were eating them, they melt in the mouth like drops of dew.”  Albertine tells Marcel she may stop for ice at Rebattets, but, since ever since Swann recommended it it has been the Verdurins’ favorite place, Marcel objects, and tells he might go out, and if he does, he’ll stop and get the ices himself.  Albertine’s long, poetic homage to ice and architecture, “…the picturesque geography of her ices…”  After Albertine leaves, Marcel “felt how exhausting was her perpetual presence, insatiable in its restless animation…” Happiness that Andree was accompanying Albertine to the Trocadero because he no completely trusts the chauffeur’s vigilance.  Albertine’s earlier visit to Versailles:  A tale of two restaurants.  “So it was for more than seven hours on end that Albertine had been alone, left to her own devices.”   Marcel searches for explanations:  Was the chauffeur in league with Albertine?  Had the chauffeur and Albertine had a quarrel? The chauffeur explains that he had been tailing Albertine the entire seven hours while she toured Versailles, and she was alone the entire time.  Postcards.  Absolved, Albertine was “even more boring to me than before.”  Two pimples on her forehead.  Gilberte’s maid confesses that during the time Marcel was in love with Gilberte, Gilberte had been in love with another young man who she saw more often than Marcel.  The maid would be the one go to, under the orders of Mme Swann, “to inform the young man whenever the one I loved was alone.  The one I loved then…”  Jealousy can not revive a dead love.  Did Marcel’s love for Gilberte contain an element of self-love?

—-

Interesting section…

1.  I loved Albertine’s description of the green beans, “as soft as soft, dripping with oil and vinegar, you wouldn’t think you were eating them, they melt in the mouth like drops of dew.”   But, her speech about the ices, “whenever I eat them, temples, churches, obelisks, rocks, a sort of picturesque geography is what I see at first before converting its raspberry or vanilla monuments into coolness in my gullet…They make raspberry obelisks too, which will rise up here and there in the burning desert of my thirst, and I shall make their pink granite crumble and melt deep down in my throat which they will refresh better than any oasis’ (and here the deep laugh broke out, whether from satisfaction at talking so well, or in self-mockery for using such carefully contrived images, or, alas, from physical pleasure at feeling inside herself something so good, so cool, which was tantamount to sexual pleasure.”

Did anyone else also consider the possibility that Albertine here was mocking Marcel?

2.  I liked this a lot:

“As soon as Albertine had gone out, I felt how exhausting was her perpetual presence, insatiable in its restless animation, which disturbed my sleep with its movements, made me live in a perpetual chill by her habit of leaving doors open, and forced me– in order to find excuses that would justify mynot accompanying her, without, however, appearing too unwell, and at the same time seeing that she was not unaccompanied — to display every day greater ingenuity than Sheherazade.  Unfortunately, if by a similar ingenuity the Persian storyteller postponed her death, I was hastening mine.”

He knows what he’s doing, and yet…

3.  “So, it was more than seven hours on end that Albertine had been alone, left to her own devices.”

Speaks for itself.

4.  What is going on with Albertine and the mackerel..er, the pimp, er, the chauffeur?

—

Wednesday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “Dismissing these reflexions, now that Albertine had gone out…” through “…it revives and remains for ever insatiable.”  Pages 174-184; Kindle locations 2292-98/2407-14

Clark:  “Setting those thoughts aside, now that Albertine was gone…” through “it is always reborn and remains insatiable.”  Pages 121-128; Kindle locations 2524-31/2634-41

Enjoy.

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“Our hearing, that delightful sense, brings us the company of the street, of which it traces every line for us, sketches all the figures that pass along it, showing us their colors.”

Moncrieff:  146-160; Clark:  102-112

by Dennis Abrams

“The day after the evening when Albertine had told me that she might perhaps that she might not, be going to see the Verdurins, I awoke early, and while I was still half asleep, my joy informed me that it was a spring day interpolated in the middle of the winter.”   The music of the street vendors.  “It is one of the enchantments of the old aristocratic quarters that they are at the same time plebeian.”  Boris Godunov and Pelleas.  “Winkles,winkles, a ha’porth of winkles!”   “Dogs clipped, cats doctored, tails and ears docked.”   “And similarly, as the motifs, even at this early hour, were beginning to interweave with one another, a costermonger pushing her little hand-cart employed in her litany the Gregorian division:  ‘Tender and green, Artichokes tender and sweet,Ar…tichokes.’ although she had probably never heard of the antiphonary, or of the seven tones that symbolise, four the arts of the quadrivium and three those of the trivium.”  Francoise brings in the Figaro, Marcel’s article still has not been published.  Albertine agrees that she won’t go to the Verudrins and, instead, will go to the Trocadero as Marcel had requested.  Albertine, after making sure from Francoise that Marcel is awake, goes into his room.  Jousting with words from Esther.  Marcel and Albertine exchange lying speeches.  The possibility of a riding accident.  A digression on different kinds of sleep; paralysis and loss of memory upon awakening.

—

Loved the description of the city awakening, and of the music of the vendors.  Snail vendors?  Knife sharpeners?  Vendors reminding Marcel of Moussorgsky?  Of Maeterlinck transposed into music by Debussy? A goatherd?  I wish I had been there.

On the other hand, the digression on sleep, I must confess, was one of those digressions that I was getting anxious for it to end.

—

From The Proust Project, Renaud Machart’s essay on the sounds of the street, “From the Trumpet of the Chair Mender, to the Flute of the Goatherd.”:

“Upon waking up in his Paris apartment on a winter morning uncannily touched by spring weather, Marcel is suddenly enchanted by the loud, shrill cries emanating from the street hawkers below his bedroom window.  Thus begins the highly musical segment ‘Cris de Paris’ in The Captive.

The French word cri can mean, in English, anything from shriek, cry, squeak, or scream, to slogan.  The Dictionnaire de l’Academie francaise, published in 1694, notes that it ‘still signifies the manner in which vendors go about peddling, in city streets, household necessities, such as fruits, herbs, etc.,’ adding, under the subheading ‘Cris de Paris,’ that ‘more than a hundred types of cries can be heard all over Paris.’  The once eminent nineteenth-century literary historian Victor Fournel devoted an entire, colorful chapter to the cris de Paris in his What One Sees in the Streets of Paris (1867) evoking

‘[the] raucous, silvery, shrill notes…of a…symphony so monotonous in its variety, so varied in its monotony, that it rises incessantly from every street of the great capital.  Lend an ear and at first you’ll hear only the disagreeable rumble of carriages on paving stones; but soon you will notice, beside this, the loud, discordant chant of a thousand Parisian cries…One would need an entire volume to capture…the natural and spontaneous technique behind the cris of so many little trades, each with its own dramatic inflections, its street-wise cat calls and vivid expressions — from the classical, staccato recitative of the cardboard seller, to the melancholy alluring fanfare of the clothes merchant; from the impassioned exclamations of the roaming fishwife enraptured by the beauty of her fresh mackerels, to the resounding melody of the oyster dealer ‘four sous the dozen.’

It is very likely that Fournel’s description of the cris de Paris was the source for the shrill ‘musical score’ that reaches Marcel’s bedroom upstairs.  Just like Fournel, Proust will distinguish in some of these street cries a ‘classical recitative’ and he too will hear in the lilting modulation of the snail vendor’s cry (“Who’ll buy my snails, fine, fresh snails?”) the echo of the famous monologue from Armide (by Quinault and Lully, which Proust mistakenly attributes to Rammeau).  Fournel’s mackerels (“Here are mackerels, fresh, new mackerels, Ladies, and a good looking mackerel this one is”) indeed find their way into Proust’s text, just as his oysters will morph into Proust’s snails that sell for ‘six sous the dozen.’

The change of register in Proust’s text will startle every music lover.  One can hear, almost read on the printed page, a polyphony reminiscent of those humorous Renaissance medleys called quodlibets and fricasees, where musical fragments lifted from both their learned and popular contexts were woven together.  Indeed, on reading these singing pages from The Captive one is reminded of the long musical tradition of “Cris de Paris,” which had been set in polyphonic form ever since the thirteenth century.  The best-known example is the polyphonic song “Les Cris de Paris” by Clement Janequin, a model for numerous textual and musical imitations, both in France and abroad.  English equivalents can be found in ‘The Cries of London’ by Orlando Gibbons and by Thomas Weekles.

Like Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who hears ‘a thousand twangling instruments…hum about [his] ears,’ Proust overhears the surrounding polyphony of cries with a distorting ear that transforms and softens every cri into memories of canticles, plainchant, and such beloved operas as Lully’s Armide and Mussorgski’s Boris Godunov.  At one poitn, Marcel, with his strange, deranged ear, thinks he’s overhearing Debussy’s Pelleas, when instead he should have recognized the parler popu, the rough trade language used by Maurice Ravel in his setting of Jules Renard’s Histories naturelles of1906, which was an ironic rebuttal to the highly crafted, seemingly ‘natural’ prosody of Debussy’s Pelleas.

It is striking that the tradition of polyphonic song in general and that of the ‘Cris de Paris’ in particular has always retained an unmistakably domestic character.  It was the sort of music meant to be played and sung in closed, intimate settings, most notably in a room around a table where the singers were also its sole listeners.  Intimate music played in an intimate space, destined for the intimate few — musica reservata.  Closet music.

So perhaps it is no accident that Proust transformed his sealed bedroom not only into a place where he could transmute his entire life into a work of literature but where he could turn that very same room into an echo chamber, a place where resonant fragments picked up here and there lie at the source of the twentieth century’s most resonant work of fiction.”

Marvelous.

—-

Tuesday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:   “Hence it was with the utmost sincerity…” through “that she should have a companion there in the shape of Andree.”  Pages 160-174; Kindle locations 2104-13/2292-98

Clark:  “So it was with complete sincerity…” through “…the company of Andree.”  Pages 112-121; Kindle locations 2357-66/2524-31

Enjoy.

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“A man may give his fortune and even his life for a woman, and yet know quite well that in ten years’ time, more or less, he would refuse her the fortune, prefer to keep his life.”

Moncrieff: 111-146; Clark:  79-102

by Dennis Abrams

“…if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency to falsehood in the woman we love, it multiplies this tendency a hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous.  She lies…”  Deciphering Albertine’s lies:  saying something isn’t important means that it is.  “Jealousy is often only an anxious need to be tyrannical applied to matters of love.”  An inheritance from his father to threaten the people he loved.  Marcel suggests other expeditions for Albertine which would make the visit to the Verdurins impossible.  Sparks flash from Albertine’s eyes.   The desire for flight.  “…we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow…”  “…a body becomes the object of love only when an emotion, fear of losing it, uncertainty of getting it backs, melts into it.”   “Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others.  Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her…these fears and these certainties may vary from week to week…”    Albertine concedes that, properly speaking, Marcel is not her “lover.”  The desire to know at all costs what Albertine is thinking.    “…the continuous weft of habit from which we can never free ourselves.”  “What we need is to extricate ourselves from these bonds which are so much more important than the person…”  Lies.  Francoise’s dislike of Albertine, her “sibylline utterances.”  Marcel calls Andree to ask her to keep Albertine away from the Verdurins.  Marcel’s pride of possession in being able to say “Albertine.”  Marcel considers going with Andree and Albertine to the Verduri9ons.  The telephone goddesses.  The dissimilarities in women’s voices.  The black satin dress.  Marcel tells Albertine that he has called Andree.  Suffering in love.  “Jealousy is moreover a demon that cannot be exorcised, but constantly reappears in new incarnations.”   Albertine’s new lack of spontaneous impulses.  Albertine warns Marcel that that’s nights fog is sure to last until the next day, and it wouldn’t be good for him to go out in it.    Albertine considers the possibility of going shopping at a department store instead of going to the Verdurins, setting off new alarms with Marcel, who worries about the people she might brush up against, and that she will be “provided with so many exits that a woman can always say that when she came out she could not find her carriage which was waiting further along the street…” making Marcel extremely unhappy.  Albertine is no longer a woman, “but a series of insoluble problems…”  Aerodromes. Despite spending more time with Albertine, Marcel still has no peace of mind.  “I must choose to cease from suffering or to cease from loving.  For, just as in the beginning it is formed by desire, so afterwards love is kept in existence by painful anxiety.”  Marcel suggests a show at the Trocadero.  Marcel speaks to Albertine like his parents spoke to him.  The sensitive boy and “the man of the opposite sort.”  Marcel believes he can break from Albertine to Venice, but when Albertine tells him “my aunt never knew anybody at Infreville, and I’ve never been to the place,” forgetting the lie she had told him about having to leave him to have tea with the friend, Marcel is shattered, “And once again I postponed our rupture to another day.”  Marcel speaks to Albertine as his grandmother spoke to him.”  Marcel feels some remorse at being so insufferable towards Albertine, but can’t tell her he loves her because “apart from the fact it would have told Albertine nothing new, would perhaps have made her colder towards me than the harshness and deceit for which love was the sole excuse.”  “Other people leave us indifferent, and indifference does not prompt us to unkindness.”   Albertine denies knowing Bloch’s cousin Esther.  Marcel’s ruses to win Albertine’s kiss:  his refusal to call her back, pacing outside her room,  trapping her into falling asleep in his bed, knowing her affection when she wakes up.  When asleep, Albertine seems to have recaptured her innocence.  “I could take her head, lift it up, press her face to my lips, put her arms around my neck, and she would continue to sleep…”

—-

This whole section of Marcel’s description of his feeling and actions towards Albertine, his desperate jealousy, his manipulations, Albertine’s manipulations, was painfully brilliant.

1.  Like a slap across the face:  “A person has no need for sincerity, nor even of skill in lying, in order to be loved.  Here I mean by love reciprocal torture.”

2.  And this:  “Love, in the pain of anxiety as in the bliss of desire, is a demand for the whole.  It is born, and it survives, only if some part remains for it to conquer.  We love only what we do not possess.”

“We love only what we do not possess.”

3.  Reading Albertine’s strategy for getting to go on her visit to the Verdurins, “Well…I might go…I haven’t decided yet…,” casually downplaying the importance, it hit me how capable I am of behaving the same way.

4.   Marcel’s need for the kiss from Albertine as a repeat of his need for a kiss from his mother.

—

And finally…I mentioned in my previous post that Marcel had become his own Iago.  I did a little reading in Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, and found this that elaborates a bit on the idea:

“Nietzsche, in one of his most Hamlet-like formulations, advised us that what we could find words for was something already dead in our hearts, so that there was always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.  Proust, unlike Shakespeare, is free of that contempt, and his grandest characters manifest his generosity.  The deadness of our hearts, our selfish egoism, is an intense concern, manifested more by sexual jealousy than by any other human affect, in Proust as in Shakespeare.  I venture that novel-reading now performs the labor of assuaging envy, of which a most virulent form is sexual jealousy.  Since the two Western authors most supreme in dramatizing sexual jealousy are Shakespeare and Proust, the quest for how to read a novel can provisionally be reduced to how to read sexual jealousy.  I sometimes feel that the best literary training my students at Yale and NYU can obtain is only an enhancement of their pragmatic training by sexual jealousy, the most aesthetic of all psychic maladies, as Iago knew.  That must be why Proust compares the quests of his jealous lovers to the obsessions of the art historian, as when Swann reconstructs the details of Odette’s sexual past with ‘as much passion as the aesthete who ransacks the extant documents of fifteenth-century Florence in order to penetrate further into the soul of the Primavera, the fair Vanna or the Venus of Botticelli.’  Presumably art historians revel in this ransacking, whereas poor Swann gazes ‘in impotent, blind, dizzy anguish over the bottomless abyss.’  Yet Swann provides our comic pleasure by his sufferings, eve as we wince.  Reading about the fictive jealousies of others may not heal our parallel torments, and may never teach us a comic perspective applicable to ourselves, and yet the sympathetic pleasure aroused seems close to the center of aesthetic experience.  In Proust as in Shakespeare, the art itself is nature, an observation crucial to The Winter’s Tale, which rivals Othello as Shakespeare’s vision of sexual jealousy.  Proust does not make us into Iago when we read, and yet we revel in his narrator’s self-ruinings, for in Proust every major character, but Marcel in particular, becomes his own Iago.  Of all Shakespeare’s villains, Iago is the most inventive at stimulating sexual jealousy in his prime victim, Othello.  The genius of Iago is that of a great playwright who delights in tormenting and mutilating his characters.  In Proust, many of the protagonists become instances of an Iago turned against himself.  What gives more aesthetic pleasure than a pride of self-mutilating Iagos?”

—-

And, finally, finally…

Eric Karpeles

translator of Proust’s Overcoat

Jacques Guérin was a prominent businessman at the head of his family’s successful perfume company, but his real passion was for rare books and literary manuscripts. From the time he was a young man, he frequented the antiquarian bookshops of Paris in search of lost, forgotten treasures. The ultimate prize? Anything from the hands of Marcel Proust.

Guérin identified with Proust more deeply than with any other writer, and when illness brought him by chance under the care of Marcel’s brother, Dr. Robert Proust, he saw it as a remarkable opportunity. Shamed by Marcel’s extravagant writings, embarrassed by his homosexuality, and offended by his disregard for bourgeois
respectability, his family had begun to deliberately destroy and sell their inheritance of his notebooks, letters, manuscripts, furni-ture, and personal effects. Horrified by the destruction, and consumed with desire, Guérin ingratiated himself with Marcel’s heirs, placating them with cash and kindness in exchange for the writer’s priceless, rare material remains. After years of relentless persuasion, Guérin was at last rewarded with a highly personal prize, one he had never dreamed of possessing, a relic he treasured to the end of his long life: Proust’s overcoat.

Proust’s Overcoat introduces a cast of intriguing and unforgettable characters, each inspired and tormented by Marcel, his writing, and his orphaned objects. Together they reveal a curious and compelling tale of lost and found, of common things and uncommon desire.

IT’S A TERRIFIC READ!

—–

Monday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “The day after the evening when Albertine had told me…” through “…to make her return home to my side.”  Pages 146-160; Kindle locations:  1911-18/2104-13

C lark:  “The morning after the evening when Albertine had told me…” through “…and make her come home to me.”  Pages 102-112; Kindle locations 2181-87/2358-66

Enjoy.

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“And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life, the future alone, but even the past, which often comes to life for us only when the future has come and gone — and not only the past which we discover after the event but the past which we have long kept stored within ourselves and suddenly learn how to interpret.”

Moncrieff:  100-111; Clark:  70-78

by Dennis Abrams

Despite his promise to Albertine that he would “settle down to work,” while sleeping “the house had miraculously flown, I awoke in different weather beneath another clime…each day was for me a different country,” which only served to foster Marcel’s indolence.   “Some times on days when the weather was beyond redemption, mere residence in the house, situated in the midst of a steady and continuous rain, had all the gliding ease, the soothing silence, the interest of a sea voyage; another time, on a bright day, to lie still in bed was to let the lights and shadows play around me as round a tree-trunk.”  Since making his first resolution to become a writer, Marcel “had regarded each intervening day as non-existent.”   Summer concerts.  Marcel contemplates arriving in Balbec giving no thought to Albertine, and learning from Aime that Albertine was at Balbec.  Marcel remembers that Aime thought that Albertine was “badly-behaved.”  What did that mean?  Vulgar behavior?  Gomorrhan behaviour?  “Was she with another girl, perhaps their arms were round one another’s waists, perhaps they were staring at other women, were indeed behaving in a manner which I had never seen Albertine adopt in my presence.  Who was the other girl?   Where had Aime met her, this odious Albertine?”  Mlle Vinteuil and her friend are now forgotten, Marcel has a new suspicion:  Could the other girl (who may or may not have existed) be a certain Elisabeth?  The two girls Albertine had watched in the mirror at the Casino?  Bloch’s cousin, Esther?  “Such relations, had they been revealed to me by a third person, would have been enough almost to kill me, but since it was I who imagined them, I took care to add sufficient uncertainty to deaden the pain.”  “Love is an incurable malady…”  Marcel decides to write to Aime, “to try to see him, and then check his statement by talking to Albertine, making her confess.”  Marcel asks Bloch for a photograph of his cousin, or to let him meet her.  “How many persons, cities, roads jealousy makes us eager thus to know!  It is a thirst for knowledge…”   Marcel’s habit of nursing desires without action makes him postpone his inquest, “in any case, I would not mention the subject to my mistress this evening, for fear of making her think me jealous and so offending her.” Marcel forwards the photograph of Bloch’s cousin to Aime.  Albertine refuses a pleasure:  “Was that in order to reserve it for someone else, this afternoon perhaps?”  Jealousy is endless, can be provoked by actions and memories; “There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to be alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead.”  Marcel’s hope for appeasement from Albertine, and the evenings when her kiss “very different from her usual kiss would no more sooth me than my mother’s kiss had soothed me long ago, on days when she was vexed with me, and I dared not call her back although I knew that I should be unable to sleep.”  Albertine mentions her plan to go the next day to visit Mme Verdurin, “a visit to which, in itself I would have seen no objection.  But evidently her object was to meet someone there, to prepare some future pleasure.  Otherwise she would not have attached so much importance to this visit.”  Marcel believes he sees through Albertine’s words and expressions.   Marcel and Albertine see other girls in the street:  “It is hard enough to say:  ‘Why did you stare at her?’  but a great deal harder to say ‘Why did you not stare at her?'”

—

This is amazing, watching Marcel driving himself into bigger and bigger leaps of imagination, deeper jealousies.

Marcel is his own Iago.

—

A quick question:

When Marcel says “I remembered that Albertine had that morning refused me a pleasure which might indeed have tired her…” what exactly does he mean?

—-

And, reading the lines “How many persons, cities, roads, jealousy makes us eager thus to know!  It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which, with regard to various isolated points, we end by acquiring every possible notion in turn except the one that we require.” reminded me of Harold Bloom’s observation, “That is why the governing metaphor for Swann and Marcel is the scholarly researcher, particularly the Ruskinian art historian.  Torture by fact finding is Proust’s comic formula, since this is self-torment, and the facts themselves are essentially imaginative surmises.”

—

And finally, for the weekend, more from Clark’s introduction to The Prisoner, beginning with her discussion of homosexuality in the book in relationto Proust’s own:

“There is a temptingly easy explanation for the preponderance of this theme:  Proust himself was a homosexual.  Though he never admitted his orientation in his writings, it was an open secret among his Parisian friends, and the topic has been extensively explored by biographers since his death.  From this it was a short step to interpreting the relationships in his novels as disguised versions of homosexual relationships in his life.  As the joke went, ‘In Proust, you have to understand that all the girls are boys.’  In particular, The Prisoner was seen as a rewriting of Proust’s relationship with his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, to whom he undoubtedly had a strong, possessive attachment and with whom — though this is not certain — he may have had sexual relations.  A certain amount of trivial gender reassignment does seem to be going on in The Prisoner:  it is very curious that in the narrator’s Paris all the young people who bring goods to the house and whom he watches from the window, and all messengers except telegram boys, are girls:  were there no delivery-boys in Paris in 1900?  But one really cannot accept Albertine as a chauffeur in a wig.  The narrator is too obviously fascinated by her femininity:  her shape and colouring, her clothes, hair, speech, pursuits, her relationship to other women (and also, alas, other more stereotyped traits like her impulsiveness, fickleness with the truth).  Proust had several close emotional friendships with women, and seems to have been particularly fascinated by young girls.  It is almost as if in this book he seems to be conducting a thought-experiment, trying to imagine what it would be like to have such a being sharing one’s living-space.

The narrator’s physical relations with Albertine are shrouded in a mystery only partly explained by the conventions of what was and was not publishable in 1923.  They have separate rooms, but clearly spend part of many nights in each other’s beds.  They appear not to have penetrative sex…but see each other naked and caress each other in a clearly sexual way, using sexual language to excite each other.  There is a thinly veiled description of the narrator reaching orgasm next to Albertine (but without her help), and it is suggested that she sometimes does so with his help…All this can be explained in commonsense terms by the fact that Albertine is an unmarried girl and the narrator wishes to keep open the possibility of her marrying someone else; he would not therefore wish to take her virginity.  But it is an additional irony that the ‘shameful’ practices the narrator imputes to Albertine and her friends and the ones in which he himself engages with her should be so similar.  Strange, too, is the way that throughout a relationship of considerable intimacy, the young people go on calling each other vous (the formal, polite mode of address) and not the tu whichwould be expected between lovers.  This strangeness, and perhaps Albertine’s wish for a closer relationship, are pointed up when she signs a note to the narrator ‘Toute a vous, ton Albertine‘.

—-

The Weekend’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “To return to the girls whom we passed in the street…” through “…as soothing as that of a garden still silent before the break of day.”  Pages 111-146; Kindle locations 1458-65/1911-18

Clark:  “To return to the young passers-by…” through “…calming as that of a garden still silent before the break of day.”  Pages 79-102; Kindle locations 1766-72/2181-87

Enjoy.  And enjoy your weekend.

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“We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our lives, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.”

Moncrieff:  91-100; Clark: 64-70

by Dennis Abrams

Marcel no longer sees Albertine as he saw her at Balbec: “…it had come about, this sudden and fundamental change, when I had learned that Albertine had been virtually brought up by Mlle Vinteuil’s friend.   Previously happy to see mystery in Albertine’s eyes, “now I was happy only at times when from those eyes, from those cheeks even, as revealing as the eyes, at one moment so gentle but quickly turning sullen, I succeeded in expelling every trace of mystery.”   Marcel no longer wants the Albertine leading an unknown life, but “that of an Albertine as known to me as it was possible to be…”    Bedroom time with Marcel and Albertine.    Marcel’s need to keep Albertine by his side, a soothing power he had not experienced since his mother kissed him goodnight at Combray.   Marcel would have been astonished if anyone had accused him of being not extremely kind and was capable of depriving someone else of pleasure.  “I must have known myself imperfectly then, for my pleasure in having Albertine to live with me was much less a pleasure than the pleasure of having withdrawn from the world, where everyone was free to enjoy her in turn, the blossoming girl who, if she did not bring me any great joy, was at least withholding joy from others.  Marcel’s power over Albertine.  Marcel’s growing likeness to his father and his barometers,  his mother, and to aunt Leonie in his desire to stay home in bed, “and with whom I could have sworn that I had not a single point in common, I who was so passionately fond of pleasure, apparently worlds apart from that maniac who had never known any pleasure in her life and lay telling her beads all day long…”  Albertine in bed:  “When she was lying completely on her side, there was a certain aspect of her face (so sweet and beautiful from in front) which I could not endure, hook-nosed as in one of Leonardo’s caricatures, seeming to betray the malice, the greed for gain, the deceitfulness of a spy whose presence in my house would have filled me with horror and whom that profile seemed to unmask.  At once I took Albertine’s face in my hands and altered its position.”  Tenderness is necessary to give birth to pain.  Erotic games with an undercurrent of danger.  Marcel is no longer surprised that Albertine is living in his house.

—-

Deeper and deeper we go…

1.  I loved this:

“The image which I sought, upon which I relied, for which I would have been prepared to die, was no longer that of Albertine leading an unknown life, it was that of Albertine as known to me as it was possible for her to be (and it was for this reason that my love could not be lasting unless it remained unhappy, for by definition it did not satisfy the need for mystery), an Albertine who did not reflect a distant world, but desired nothing else — there were moments when this did indeed appear to be the case — than to be with me, to be exactly like me, an Albertine who was the image precisely of what was mine and not of the unknown.”

“…to be with me, to be exactly like me…”  Thoughts?

2.  I was shocked when the Narrator (or was it Marcel) referred to aunt Leonie as a “maniac.”

3.  I was immediately struck (before the Narrator pointed it out I’m happy to say) the similarity between Marcel’s attitude towards Albertine (taking off her shoes, “Could I possibly be mistaken?  Couldn’t I tell my little  goose’s footstep among a thousand?” and Marcel’s grandmother at Balbec:  “Mistake my poor pet’s knocking for anyone else’s! Why, Granny could tell it a mile away! Do you suppose there’s anyone else in the world who’s such a silly-billy…”

Which leads to this observation:

“When we have passed a certain age, the soul of the child that we were and the souls of the dead from whom we sprang come and shower upon us their riches and their spells,  asking to be allowed to contribute to the new emotions which we feel and in which, erasing their former image, we recast them in an original creation.  Thus my whole past from my earliest years, and, beyond these, the past of my parents and relations, blended with my impure love for Albertine the tender charm of an affection at once filial and maternal.”

Ending in this gorgeous sentence:

“We have to give hospitality, at a certain stage in our lives, to all our relatives who have journeyed so far and gathered round us.”

—

Thursday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “I had promised Albertine that, if I did not go out with her…” through “…a party so homogeneous, albeit so composite.”  Pages 100-111; Kindle locations 1322-28/1458-65

Clark:  “I had promised Albertine that if I did not go out with her…” through “where the guests, seemingly so ill-matched, mixed so well.”  Pages 70-78; Kindle locations 1631-68/1765-66

Enjoy.

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“There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and majesty the moment they cease to look out of their eyes.”

Moncrieff:  83-91; Clark:  59-64

by Dennis Abrams

At the end of the day, “when I got up to fetch a book from my father’s study, my mistress, having asked my permission to lie down while I was out of the room, was so tired after her long outing in the morning and in the open air that, even if I had been away for a moment only, when I returned I found her asleep and did not wake her.”  “…she reminded me of a long blossoming stem that had been laid there, and so in a sense she was:  the faculty of dreaming, which I possessed only in her absence, I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant.”   “By shutting her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had stripped off, one after another, the different human personalities with which she had deceived me ever since the day when I had first made her acquaintance.”  Her breath as the sea.  “I spent many a charming evening talking and playing with Albertine, but none so sweet as when I was watching her sleep.”   “I would run my eyes over her…” “I, who was acquainted with many Albertines in one person, seemed now to see many more again reposing by myside.”  “I seemed to possess not one but countless girls.”   Marcel, once certain that Albertine was asleep, “that the tide of her sleep was full,” would “climb deliberately and noiselessly on to the bed, lie down by her side, clasp her waist in one arm, and place my lips upon her cheek and my free hand on her heart…”  “I chose, in gazing at her, the aspect of her face which one never saw and which was so beautiful.”   “I savoured her sleep with a disinterested, soothing love, just as I would remain for hours listening to the unfurling of the waves.”  “Perhaps people must be capable of making us suffer intensely beforethey can procure for us, in the hours of remission, the same soothing calm as nature does.”  Marcel comes close but does not look into the pocket of Albertine’s discarded kimono to look through the letters he knows are there.   Albertine wakes, Marcel’s name (or is it?) on her lips.

—-

A truly astonishing section.

1.  Did you notice just how many times the word “possess” was used?

2.  Why didn’t Marcel look through the letters in Albertine’s pocket?

3.  This line:  “In keeping her in front of my eyes, in my hands, I had an impression of possessing her entirely which I never had when she was awake.  Her life was submitted to me, exhaled towards me its gentle breath.”

4.  And this:  “The sound of her breathing, which had grown louder, might have given the illusion of the panting of sexual pleasure, and when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep.  I felt at such moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature.”

Disturbing to say the least.

5.  And finally, at last…

“Then she would find her tongue and say:  ‘My—‘ or My darling—“followed by Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the sane name as the author of this book, would be ‘My Marcel,’or “My darling Marcel.'”

If.

—–

From The Proust Project, Susan Minot’s essay on today’s reading:

“I was in the woods in western Massachusetts.  It was late November.  Yellow and brown leaves covered the ground like a Turkish rug with the branch shadows making patterns on the light.  The forest was pillared with bare white birches.  I was sitting on the forest floor leaning against a tree trunk, waiting for my boyfriend. He was rock climbing on a nearby cliff with a friend, I can’t remember who the friend was.  I don’t remember the drive getting there or what we did later when we drove away that night.  But I remember the afternoon vividly.  It was cold, I was smoking cigarettes.  I was alone.  The reason I remember it so well is that I was reading.  For a college course — The Captive by Proust.  As I read, I was keenly aware of my surroundings and yet also felt as if I were gliding on a flying carpet.

That I was so thoroughly transported to a bedroom in Paris at the turn of the century and can still remember its bed with the girl lying on it, its curtained windows and the muted sounds of the carriages in the streets, as well if not better than the setting in those woods, is just one version of the strange and unpredictable nature of memory.  Why do we lodge one image in our mind when so many are sent floating down the river and forgotten?

I was reading the section near the beginning of this fifth volume when Marcel, having finally secured Albertine in a secret domestic arrangement, is looking over her sleeping body, which is ‘animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees.’ She reminds him of ‘a long blossoming stem that had been laid there.’  As he watches his sleeping mistress in this relatively short section of six pages, he finds occasion to muse about love, jealousy, mistrust, self-consciousness, suffering, the unfathomability of another, sexual politics, the evolution of relationships (‘At one time I had been carried away by excitement when I thought that I saw a trace of mystery in Albertine’s eyes, now I was happy only…when I succeeded in expelling every trace of mystery’), the quality of eyes (‘There are people whose faces assume an unaccustomed beauty and magic the moment they cease to look out of their eyes’), letter writing (“[T]he letters which we receive from a person should be more or less similar to one another and combine to trace an image of the writer sufficiently different from the person we know to constitute a second personality’), and how like the sea, if not a plant, is a woman sleeping.  He even describes why he can muse.:

‘[T]he faculty of dreaming, which I possessed only in her absence, I recovered at such moments in her presence, as though by falling asleep she had become a plant.  In this way, her sleep realised to a certain extent the possibility of love: alone, I could think of her, but I missed her, I did not possess her; when she was present, I spoke to her, but was too absent from myself to be able to think of her; when she was asleep, I no longer had to talk, I knew that I was no longer observed by her, I no longer needed to live on the surface of myself.’

We see only the outer surface.  I was mesmerized by Marcel’s obsession to penetrate the minds of others.  I, too, spent a lot of time wondering what went on in someone else’s mind.  I followed his every nuance.  Each sentence seemed to lift off the page with a kind of divine truth. Proust is best when you in a state of rapt willingness to follow him wherever he takesyou.  His meandering, detailed sentences test the attentive reader.  It’s as if he’s saying, ‘If you follow along with me, then your attention will be sharp enough to see the subtlety of what I am conveying.”

Proust is unfairly maligned for being wordy.  His detractors feel that he rambles.  In truth, he does quite the opposite. He zeroes in.  His logic may be elaborate — I think wonderfully so — but if you follow it, there is always soon a reward of stunning insight at the end.

Looking back to the fall when I read In Search of Lost Time, I find my memory seems to be as peppered with as many images from the book as from life.  In fact, the images of life are more of a blur, and those from the book remain crystal clear.”

Lovely.

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And finally, I’d like to recommend as bonus reading the book Proust’s Overcoat:  One Man’s Quest for All Things Proust by Lorenza Foschini, and translated by this site’s great and good friend, Eric Karpeles.  It’s a beautiful book, well worth your time.

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Wednesday’s Reading:

Moncrieff:  “No more than my own progression in time…” through “…there is the permanent possibility of danger.”  Pages 91-100; Kindle locations 1204-11/1309-15

Clark:  “But it was not my movement in time…” through “…there lies an abiding sense of danger.”  Pages 64-70; Kindle locations 1530-37/1631-68

Enjoy.

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