Tracy's face

The Sweet Cheat Gone

The sense of an imminent ending leaves me feeling somewhat uneasy. Where does one go after reading Proust? What does one do?

Seven hundred pages remain, which would exceed or constitute the bulk of any other novel, but with the Recherche, seem a pittance. Like no other book I’ve read (because to read it is an attritional process) it becomes internalised and through so doing internalises its reader. Along with Albertine I am held captive in a room somwhere in the narrator’s Parisian mansion; I experience my own internal narrative that accompanies and serves as a critique to my reading; the act becomes reciprocal, the book becomes my life, my life the book.

Proust’s concatenation of aesthetics, metaphysics and the emotional antinomies of interpersonal relationships leaves me reeling and confused on the one hand, enchanted on the other. This admixture sounds heady, but these are the nuts and bolts of our lives, our daily concerns, brilliantly connected within the linguistic matrix of the work.

For Marcel art is evidence against which he might determine the truth or otherwise of a profound philosophical proposition to which he is inclined: that of metaphysical idealism. This he weighs against an opposing force: materialism. It is between the poles of this conflict that the novel is played out. What’s more, there is a sense that Albertine is representative of this too; the life of Albertine has a material truth, but also a symbolic one, that, for the narrator (and reader?), takes on a psychological resonance, whether it is literally true or not.

Her presence in his house can be read in many ways, but the idea that she signifies a psychic eruption is not without its charms; is Albertine’s veiled life analagous with those things beyond the material realm? Might she be some kind of ghost, a harbinger of death even? Readers of Poe might make such an assumption… or Freud? I’ve heard it said that there is nothing Freud ever wrote that Proust hadn’t already written…

Toward the end of ‘The Captive’ we come upon Dostoyevsky, whom the narrator discusses at length with his mistress; the aesthetic corollary of the madeleine dipped in tea is outlined, the genius work of art can reveal the common fragments of an ideal world beyond the mere material, represented in this instance by “the Dostoyevsk[ian] woman with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been by make-believe, to a terrible insolence…” (TC, 237). The point is extended to include the figurative idea of the “house” which is “blended with the woman’s face”, a combination that marks the Russian’s oeuvre, and in which we can discern a clear reflection of the domestic arrangements of Albertine and Marcel. This act of self-reflexivity is carried a step further when the narrative moves on to the peculiar construction of literary composition where scenes, characters and motifs reappear “if the novel is at all long”.

The idea that the duplicitous love-object represents in some way what is unknowable in this universe makes allies of desire and death once again. Lovers must be duplicitous by definition because they are both corporeally and psychically separate; it is impossible to have true knowledge of “the other”; the perverse rules of desire, as the novel demonstrates, would be broken by the establishment of a genuine trust; both parties would become bored and their desire wither.

Human relationships are haunted by the sense of an ending. We sleep with ghosts; and the mutual morning-time stare of longing affirms both parties’ mortality. ‘The Captive’ concludes with Albertine taking flight to meet her fate, the sweet cheat has gone, and the opening of this subsequent volume begins with a very real tragedy:

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

[We regret that Mr. Scott Moncrieff was not able to write this note before his death.

THE PUBLISHERS]

… for our work (the writing of the novel, the translation of the novel) in this life is a race against time. Proust makes the same demands of his readers that he made of himself, the book becomes the life, the life becomes the book, as Moncrieff knew, as all Proustian acolytes come to know. With Albertine gone, the veil has been lifted. The opening chapter of this volume is appropriately titled ‘Grief and Oblivion’.

The light in Saint-Sulpice, Paris

Saturday morning, coming round from the heavy wash of sleep again, rising up full fathom five, the murmur of traffic outside at once opressive and familiar; the tell-tale signs of spring in London, hollers on the street, eager car horns and desperate sirens that pierce the higher registers, sub-woofers that prowl the lower; the cracks of liquid sunlight through my curtains take on an almost religious aspect, like the light through the doorway at Saint-Sulpice.

Proust is the greatest writer we have on sleeping, waking and that delicious hinterland between them:

And often an extra hour of sleep is a paralytic stroke after which we must recover the use of our limbs, learn to speak. Our will would not be adequate for this task. We have slept too long, we no longer exist. Our waking is barely felt, mechanically and without consciousness, as a water pipe might feel the turning off of a tap. A life more inanimate than that of a jellyfish follows, in which we could all equally well believe that we had been drawn up from the depths of the sea or released from prison, were we but capable of thinking anything at all. But then from the highest heavens the goddess Mnemotechnia bends down and holds out to us in the formula “the habit of ringing for our coffee” the hope of resurrection.

‘The Captive’ recaptures the themes of earlier volumes of the novel in which the osmotic barrier that separates waking reality from the dreamworld is explored, the re-entry from other planets, other lives, into the illusion of a stable determinable universe, but here we are presented with an admixture of love and jealousy, and these seemingly disconnected themes are welded together. Albertine in sleep is a pure creature, shed of the deceptions that mark her conscious being. The narrator draws a parallel between her kisses and those of his mother all those years ago; these are the delights without which he cannot settle. In sleep, the cruelties we impose upon one another might be effaced, the storms that stir our briny hearts are calmed:

Her breathing, as it became gradually deeper, was now regularly stirring her bosom and, through it, her folded hands, her pearls, displaced in a different way by the same movement, like the boats, the anchor chains that are set swaying by the movement of the tide. Then, feeling that the tide of her sleep was full, that I should not ground upon reefs of consciousness covered now by the high water of profound slumber, deliberately, I crept without a sound upon the bed, lay down by her side, clasped her waist in one arm, placed my lips upon her cheek and heart, then upon every part of her body in turn laid my free hand, which also was raised, like the pearls, by Albertine’s breathing; I myself was gently rocked by its regular motion: I had embarked upon the tide of Albertine’s sleep.

You may think we live on dry land, but you’d be wrong. This world is water and without water we’d be nothing and our loves and desires and passions would be nothing. The tide that carries Marcel and Albertine carries us all; we are sub-mariners conceived and gestated in saline solutions and cast adrift as plankton might be, carried by currents over which we exert no control.

The River Medina

Albertine is first apprenheded as a silhouette against the sea at Balbec, and this image is one that reoccurs again and again, rising back up in the narrator’s mind, a perplexing vision which he cannot always resolve with the capricious Nereid he has taken ‘captive’ in his Paris flat.

I would make the journey across the River Medina almost every day between the ages of thirteen and eighteen; at night in my dreams I cannot count the times I have returned to this spot; dreams that take place in futuristic industrial wastelands, polluted waters, with vast swells that course across the Solent flooding the mouth of the river, and always here between the eastern and western headlands, I swim for my life in this place where my youth was played out and my first amourous adventures unfolded.

I’m sure the exertions of teenagers are the same the world over, and those that find themselves land-locked no doubt have other symbolic phenomena to which they can cling, but I cannot stress enough the peculiar joy of one’s first kisses when they are within earshot of the ocean. Those rhythms strike an eternal chord within us, we find ourselves enveloped in the salts released from restless waves breaking against the rocks, the salts essential for animal life, thick in the night air, on our skin, on our lips and tongues, passed between us. Without them we risk water intoxication, too much and death beckons. We must take heed of the story of Lot’s wife, turned into a pillar of salt when she turned to look back over the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, on which site we now find the Dead Sea.

Albertine’s sexual preferences stir the waters of the narrator’s jealousy. His early indifference toward her changes suddenly when he discovers her close acquaintance with the girlfriend of Mlle Vinteuil. From that point onward, like Swann before him, he is condemned to fantasise over every possible betrayal that she might commit whilst out of his company; his need to possess her is pathological and comes to define his love. As Proust points out: “…the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself.”

In sleep we might revisit our ancient submarine dwellings for a time and take flight on the tide of shared atavisms; we are water and salt, our possessive natures are no more than a symptom of the desire to flow together, but the calcified form of human bodies and the strange truth of consciousness means we’ll never rest easy until that peculiar fire is doused once more.

Robert de Montesquiou - one of the chief models for Baron de Charlus

I woke this morning and instinctively reached for the volume of “Cities of the Plain” that lay next to my bed. I’d had a restless, dreamless sleep and was in need of the comfort which Proust has come to provide.

The narrator has returned to Balbec and in his room at the Grand Hotel bends down to untie his boots and is struck suddenly by the reality of his grandmother’s death. More properly he is revisited by his true grandmother, or can now fully recollect her being, as opposed to the imaginary thing she has become since returning to the earth; the dead are alive in the living once again; the living are left bereft, sorrowful, perplexed at how this can be.

And just then, at the very moment I read this passage, something returned for me: I had in fact dreamt, and the visions of it came swelling back up in my conscious mind, and Proust had been in my dream:

I’m in Germany and am attending a lecture on Proust. What is being said is academic and unenlightening and I am more interested in the numerous pretty women that make up the audience, each one as bright and distinctive as the next. I can make out their individual features so clearly; they seem more than real to me and I feel a profound desire for them all. Meanwhile, my anger at the lecturer’s lack of insight into Proust is increasing. I want to shout out “it’s all about gay sex”. Eventually, I do shout this out, but the words are not heeded and the lecture room dissolves and falls away. All of a sudden I am with my father; the usual antipathy between us when we meet in dreams is present. We are driving along Kastanienallee; we stop somewhere to eat, but I pay him scant attention, I want him to go away, for I am thinking only about the pretty women who have somehow followed me into the streets and cafes of Berlin.

There were supposedly five “cities of the plain”, including Sodom and Gomorrah, synonymous with impenitent sin and destroyed by God. The opening of this volume (in French “Sodome et Gomorrhe”) sees the narrator witness a liaison between the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien, which gives us an insight into the former’s sexuality, but also reveals something telling about the genius of Proust’s method: for the Baron has been previoulsy known to us only through the rumours, half-truths and misinformation perpetuated by other characters and through occasional first-hand glimpses; Proust builds a portrait of Charlus as an inveterate womaniser, only to confound us at this point, which makes the impact of the revelation that much more intriguing, but also tells us that in our interactions with others perspectivism reigns, our knowledge is based upon myriad overlapping narratives, and that the truth of human character remains elusive.

The invocation of Sodomite lineage may sit uneasily with the modern reader, but one of Proust’s intentions is to mark the all-too-real pariah status accorded to homosexuality during the period. The transposition of his own attraction to men into the narrator’s attraction to women should not always be taken literally, and Proust’s own relationship to his homosexuality was never entirely straightforward, but the Recherche remains one of the seminal books about gay love, desire and sex.

Edmund White is one of the best of Proust’s biographers on the nature of his sexuality and points to the combination of the sacred with the profane, which we see writ large in the novel. The suggestion that the episode where Vinteuil’s photo is desecrated during the foreplay of his daughter with her girlfriend might be drawn from Proust’s own predilections provides an insight into the complex world of Proustian psychosexuality.

It’s the classic dual strands of sex and death that grease the wheels of the Recherche; the narrator’s epiphany about his grandmother comes in the same volume as his growing closeness to Albertine, as the ubiquity of “inverted” sexuality is described, and as the revelations about Charlus unfold.

Sex as a physical, material act in which the loss of self can be temporarily realised approaches the metaphysical mysteries dreams hint at and death conceals; both the dead and the objects of our desire meet us regularly in our dreams. Proust’s aim is to uncover the numinous in material reality and part of his methodology is to test the power of profanity against the power of what is held sacred.

If dreams might be said to represent involuntary attempts to uncover psychic truths, then in them this same contest is held night after night; how often do we find that conventional wisdom and the strictures of patriarchy come to nothing when tested against the attractions to be found in the shadow of budding groves? In the same breath we might say the unconscious mind acts as a haven for the dead – a place where desire and death clash, call it what you will: Sodom, Gomorrah, Paris… Berlin.

Strange days. An inability to read for the last week or so. Truth be told, at my otiose worst, I haven’t felt worthy; but I did stumble across this curious aphorism whilst watching television: “Every man has two countries: his own and France”.

Complete nonsense of course… unless one happens to be in the midst of traversing the Recherche. Proust’s attention to place is one of the defining characteristics of his writing; the brilliance of his descriptive method is one thing, but there is also a metaphysical insistence that demonstrates the very core of his artistic purpose.

Proust’s France is fictive: Combray, Balbec, Martinville… conflations of memory, experience, material knowledge, conscious and unconscious flights of fancy – named embodiments of the swirling maelstrom of juvenile apprehension – and our France is equally fictive, such that it will in most cases not be called ‘France’ at all.

The point is that each of us has ‘two countries’ – the first in which our corporeal frame roams, a tactile, visceral, pathological sort of place; the second, more phantasmic, built up over the years and subject to the accrual of psychic flotsam.

These countries are interconnected; they permeate one another – out of which issues the phenomenon of cathexis. I think of the air-raid shelter in my grandparents’ garden, the cathedrals of Norwich and Salisbury, the Medina Valley shimmering on summer days; times/places wherein we feel like we can watch the very molecules move.

Out of this the world talks to us in reassuring but inexplicable ways; a mysterious unveiling, all the more rich for its fleeting nature, all the more thrilling for its strange familiarity. This is the source of gnostic inclination within us, which Proust consistently points to, as when he relates the episode of the ‘three trees’, seen from the moving carriage of Mme. de Villeparisis:

I watched the trees gradually withdraw, waving their despairing arms, seeming to say to me: “What you fail to learn from us today, you will never know. If you allow us to drop back into the hollow of this road from which we sought to raise ourselves up to you, a whole part of yourself which we were bringing to you will fall for ever into the abyss.”

The narrator makes the comparison with earlier experiences, asking: “did they conceal beneath their surface, like the trees, like the tufts of grass that I had seen beside the Guermantes way, a meaning as obscure, as hard to grasp as is a distant past..?” (or foreign country?)

The disruption of such reverie is inevitable, but no less painful:

And when, the road having forked and the carriage with it, I turned my back on them and ceased to see them [the three trees], with Mme. de Villeparisis asking me what I was dreaming about, I was as wretched as though I had just lost a friend, had died myself, had broken faith with the dead or had denied my God.

The Recherche negotiates this territory again and again, the Recherche is a negotiation of this territory.