Beckett on Proust: Albertine

Beckett follows Albertine from Marcel’s first visit to Balbec.

Thus her relationship with Mme. Bontemps, her early amiabilities, the effect of a declamatory beauty-spot on her chin, her use of the adverb ‘perfectly ‘ for ‘quite,’ the provisional inflammation of her temple constituting an optical centre of gravity about which the composition of her features is organised, are sufficient taken together to establish an Albertine as remote from the first Albertine, the beach flower, as yet a third aspect, characterised by a pronounced nasal enunciation, a terrifying command of slang, the disappearance of the inflamed temple, and the miraculous transference of the beauty-spot from her chin to her upper lip, is remote from the second. Thus is established the pictorial multiplicity of Albertine that will duly evolve into a plastic and moral multiplicity, no longer a mere shifting superficies and an effect of the observer’s angle of approach rather than the expression of an inward and active variety, but a multiplicity in depth, a turmoil of objective and immanent contradictions over which the subject has no control. (32)

 But Albertine is a fugitive, and no expression of her value can be complete unless preceded by some such symbol as that which physics denotes speed. A static Albertine would soon be conquered, would soon be compared to all the other possible conquests that her possession excludes, and the infinite of what is not and may be preferred to the nullity of what is. Love, he insists, can only coexist with a state of dissatisfaction, whether born of jealousy or its predecessor–desire. It represents our demand for a whole. (39)

There is no limit to her deceit and none to his faculty of suffering. And in the midst of this Tolomea [a region in Dante's Inferno. JE] he knows that this woman has no reality, that ‘our most exclusive love for a person is always our love for something else,’ that intrinsically she is less than nothing, but that in her nothingness there is active, mysterious and invisible, a current that forces him to bow down and worship an obscure and implacable Goddess, and to make sacrifices of himself before her. And the Goddess who requires this sacrifice and this humiliation, whose sole condition of patronage is corruptibililty, and into whose faith and worship all mankind is born, is the Goddess of Time. No object prolonged in this temporal dimension tolerates possession, meaning by possession total possession, only to be achieved by the complete identification of object and subject. The impenetrability of the most vulgar and insignificant human creature is not merely an illusion of the subject’s jealousy (although this impenetrability stands out more clearly under the Röntgen rays of a jealousy so fiercely hypertrophied as was that of the narrator, a jealousy that is doubtless a form of his domination complex and his infantilism, two tendencies highly developed in Proust). (41-41)

A Victim

Andrée, perhaps not an altogether reliable person, has given Marcel the reason why Albertine left him.

 ”…I think she was forced to leave you by her aunt who had designs for her future upon that guttersnipe, you know, the young man you used to call ‘I’m a wash-out,’ the young man who ws in love with Albertine and had asked for her hand. Seeing that you weren’t marrying her, they were afraid that the shocking length of her stay in your house might prevent the young man from doing so. And so Mme Bontemps, on whom the young man was constantly bringing pressure to bear, summoned Albertine home.” (V,830)

Marcel, who had been so engrossed with his jealous speculations, had never once thought how his living arrangement with Albertine might harm her.

I had never in my jealousy thought of this explanation, but only of Albertine’s desire for women and of my own surveillance of her; I had forgotten that there was also Mme Bontemps who might eventually regard as strange what had shocked my mother from the first. At least Mme Bontemps was afraid that it might shock this possible husband whom she was keeping in reserve for Albertine in case I failed to marry her. (V,831)

Jane Austen would have understood Albertine’s position, that of a young woman with no independent means, caught in a social web, where a mistake with a man might leave her forever penniless.

It was not the first time I had felt astonishment and a sort of shame at never once having told myself that Albertine was in a false position in my house, a position that might give offence to her aunt; it was not the first, nor was it the last….Listening to the people who maintained that Albertine was a schemer who had tried to get one man after another to marry her, it was not difficult to image how they would have defined her life with me. And yet to me she was a victim, a victim who perhaps was not altogether pure, but in that case guilty for other reasons, on account of vices which people did not mention.

Albertine was an accomplished liar, capable of delivering the most obvious falsehood with full eye contact and emotion in her voice. But that was her only tool for survival in this artificial world created by Marcel.

But above all we must remember this: on the one had, lying is often a trait of character; on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, it is a natural defence, improvised at first, them more and more organised, against that sudden danger which would be capable of destroying all life: love. (V,834-835)

The Good Night Kiss

Marcel knows that his love for Albertine was not foreordained.

…which now was for ever impossible and yet was indispensable to me. Indispensable without perhaps having been in itself and at the outset something necessary, since I should not have known Albertine had I not read in an archaeological treatise a description of the church at Balbec, had not Swann, by telling me that this church was almost Persian, directed my taste to the Byzantine Norman, had not a financial syndicate, by erecting at Balbec a hygienic and comfortable hotel, made my parents decide to grant my wish and send me to Balbec. To be sure, in that Balbec so long desired, I had not found the Persian church of my dreams, nor the eternal mists. (V,675)

 But that is not to say that the character of his love was not determined in advance. It was imprinted on him as a child by his mother.

Who would have told me at Combray, when I lay waiting for my mother’s good-night with so heavy a heart, that those anxieties would be healed, and would then break out again one day, not for my mother, but for a girl who would at first be no more, against the horizon of the sea, than a flower upon which my eyes would daily be invited to gaze, but a thinking flower in whose mind I was so childishly anxious to occupy a prominent place that I was distressed by her not being aware that I knew Mme de Villeparisis? Yes, it was for the good-night kiss of such an unknown girl that, in years to come, I was to suffer as intensely as I had suffered as a child when my mother did not come up to my room. (V,676)

Explosions in the Dark

For Marcel memories are impregnated with sensations. Often they provoke pleasure, as those laid down in childhood.

So then my life was entirely altered. What had constituted its sweetness–not because of Albertine, but concurrently with her, when I was alone–was precisely the perpetual resurgence, at the bidding of identical moments, of moments from the past. From the sound of pattering raindrops I recaptured the scent of the lilacs at Combray, from the shifting of the sun’s rays on the balcony the pigeons in the Champs Elysées; from the muffling of sounds in the heat of the morning hours, the cool taste of cherries; the longing for Brittany or Venice from the noise of the wind and return of Easter. (V,645)

Those associated with a loved one who is recently dead are full of pain.

And if Françoise, when she came in, accidentally disturbed the folds of the big curtains, I stifled a cry of pain at the rent that had just been made in my heart by that ray of long-ago sunlight which had made beautiful in my eyes the modern facade of Marcouville-l’Orgueilleuse when Albertine had said to me: “It’s restored,” Not knowing how to account to Francoise for my groan, I said to her: “Oh, I’m so thirsty.” She left the room, then returned, but I turned sharply away under the impact of the painful discharge of one the thousand invisible memories which incessantly exploded around me in the darkness. (V,646)

It was not enough now to draw the curtains; I tried to stop the eyes and ears of my memory in order not to see that band of orange in the western sky, in order not to hear those invisible birds responding from one tree to the next on either side of me who was then so tenderly embraced by her who was now dead. I  tried to avoid those sensations that are produced by the dampness of leaves in the evening air, the rise and fall of humpback roads. But already those sensations had gripped me once more, carrying me far enough back from the present moment to give the necessary recoil, the necessary momentum to strike me anew, to the idea that Albertine was dead. (V,647)

The Decisive Battle

Perhaps inspired by the perfectly executed Verdurin plan to separate Charlus from Charlie, Marcel launches a campaign against Albertine to insure that she remains his captive. It starts when Albertine is outraged that Marcel would go out for the evening by himself. He intuits this as a reprimand to him for not allowing her the freedom go where and when she pleases.

And so, just as she was telling me that she had never felt so affronted and when she had heard that I had gone out alone, that she would sooner have died than be told this by Françoise, and just as, irritated by her absurd susceptibility, I was on the point of telling her that what I had done was trivial, that there was nothing wounding to her in my having gone out, my unconscious parallel search for what she had meant to say had come to fruition, and the despair into which my discovery plunged me could not be completely hidden, so that instead of defending, I accused myself. “…My little Albertine” (I went on in a tone of profound gentleness and sorrow), “don’t you see that the life you’re leading here is boring for you. It is better that we should part and as the best partings are those that are effected most swiftly, I ask you, to cut short the great sorrow that I am bound to feel, to say good-bye to me tonight and to leave in the morning without my seeing you again, while I’m asleep.”  She appeared stunned, incredulous and desolate: “Tomorrow? You really mean it?” (V,459)

Marcel becomes assured that she really is content with her life with him.

The fear that Albertine was perhaps going to say to me: “I want to be allowed to go out by myself at certain hours. I want to be able to stay away for twenty-four hours,” or some such request for freedom which I did not attempt to define, but which alarmed me, this fear had crossed my mind for a moment during the Verdurin reception. But it had been dispelled, contradicted moreover by the memory of Albertine’s constant assurances of how happy she was with me. (V,465)

He is fully aware that he has put on a show to reign in Albertine.

My words, therefore, did not in the least reflect my feelings. If the reader has no more than a faint impression of these, that is because, as narrator, I expose my feelings to him at the same time as I repeat my words. But if I concealed the former and he were acquainted only with the latter, my actions, so little in keeping with them, would so often give him the impressions of strange reversals that he would think me more or less mad. (V,467)

Albertine being in more or less the same position as the reader, it is a wonder that she does not think him mad. The tide of battle shifts. Albertine reveals some of her secrets.  She reveals that she is well acquainted with Bloch’s sister Esther, that she not only knows the actress Lea but spent three weeks with her, that she lied about going to Balbec and instead spent time with a friend, which at one point involved going out dressed as a man, etc. This fires Marcel’s jealous resentment and locks him into an even more consuming desire to dominate.

I had suddenly wanted to keep Albertine because I felt that she was scattered about among other people with whom I could not prevent her from mixing. But even if she had renounced them all for ever for my sake, I might perhaps have been still more firmly resolved never to leave her, for separation is made painful by jealousy but impossible by gratitude. I felt that in any case I was fighting the decisive battle in which I must conquer or succumb. I would have offered Albertine in an hour all that I possessed, because I said to myself: Everything depends upon this battle.” (V,475)

Madness

Albertine is at once a creation of Marcel’s jealous obsession, rooted in childhood trauma, and a person that he has chosen to live with. Morel enjoys a similar dual existence for Charlus. This unstable duality carries the risk of resolution by madness and even death, a conclusion Marcel both acknowledges and is reluctant to accept.

Jealousy is thus endless, for even if the beloved, by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions….There is no need for there to be two of you, it is enough to alone in your room, thinking, for fresh betrayals by your mistress to come to light, even though she is dead. (V,107)

“I beg of you, my darling girl, no more of that trick riding you were practising the other day. Just think, Albertine, if you were to have an accident!”  Of course I did not wish her any harm. But how delighted I should have been if, with her horse, she had taken it into her head to ride off somewhere, wherever she chose, and never come back to my house again! (V,153)

 It is terrible to have the life of another person attached to one’s own like a bomb which one holds in one’s hands, unable to get rid of it without committing  a crime. But one has only to  compare this with the ups and downs, the dangers, the anxieties, the fear that false but probable thing will come to be believed when we will no longer be able to explain them–feelings that one experiences if one lives on intimate terms with a madman. For instance, I pitied M. de Charlus for living with Morel (immediately the memory of the scene that afternoon made me feel that the left side of my chest was heavier than the other); leaving aside the relations that may or may not have existed between them, M. de Charlus must have been unaware at the outset that Morel was mad….But all this  is only a comparison. Albertine was not mad. (V,236)

Many years later Marcel was to learn just how close to madness Morel had driven Charlus. This is from a letter meant to be read after his death.

This divine prudence it was that made him resist the appeals to come back and see me which I conveyed to him, and I shall have no peace in this world or hope of forgiveness in the next if I do not confess the truth to you. He was, in resisting my appeals, the instrument of divine wisdom, for I was resolved, had he come, that he should not leave my house alive. One of us two had to disappear. I had decided to kill him. (VI,168)

 

 

 

Goodnight Kisses

The more I read of Marcel and Albertine, and before that of Swann and Odette, the more I realize the importance of the opening to the novel, the goodnight kiss. It is the source of his lifelong agony

…the anguish that comes from knowing that the creature one adores is in some place of enjoyment where oneself is not and cannot follow…Those inaccessible and excruciating hours during which she was about to taste of unknown pleasures…(I,40-41)

And the agony cannot be dissolved by knowledge.

It struck me that if had just won a victory it was over her, that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in undermining her judgement; and that this evening opened a new era, would remain a black date in the calendar. (I,51)

But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. In reality their echo has never ceased…(I,49)

Their echo is heard again when the despairing Albertine leaves his room without giving him a good night kiss.

As in the old days at Combray when my mother had left me without soothing me with her kiss, I wanted to rush after Albertine, I felt that there would be no peace for me until I had seen her again, that this renewed encounter would turn into something tremendous which it had not been before and that–if I did not succeed by my own efforts in ridding myself of this misery–I might perhaps acquire the shameful habit of going to beg from Albertine….I returned to my station outside her door, but the crack beneath it no longer showed any light. Albertine had put out the light, she was in bed; I remained there motionless, hoping for some lucky accident which did not occur; and long afterwards, frozen, I returned to bestow myself between my own sheets and cried for the rest of the night. (V,141-142)

 

The Need for Mystery

Only when Albertine is asleep does Marcel cease to worry about her deceptions.

 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. She was animated now only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, more alien and yet one that belonged more to me. She had called back into herself everything of her that lay outside, had withdrawn, enclosed, reabsorbed herself into her body. 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.  (V,84)

Albertine’s sleep provides him with an unexpected chance to solve her mysteries.

Sometimes when she was too warm, she would take off her kimono while she was already almost asleep and fling it over an armchair. As she slept I would tell myself that all her letters were in the inner pocket of this kimono, into which she always thrust them. A signature, an assignation, would have sufficed to prove a lie or to dispel a suspicion….But (and here perhaps I was wrong) never once did I touch the kimono, put my hand in the pocket, examine the letters. In the end, realising that I would never make up my mind, I would creep back to the bedside and begin again to watch the sleeping Albertine, who would tell me nothing, whereas I could see lying across an arm of the chair that kimono which would perhaps have told me much. (V,90-91)

 Why did Marcel not act and satisfy his obsessive curiosity about Albertine’s other lives? The answer is a paradox; he longs more than anything to unmask her unknown life, but to satiate his curiosity is to kill his love.

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 an 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. (V,91-92)

 

Marcel Adopts a Cat

Now that Albertine is under direct supervision by Marcel, his jealousy subsides and with it his passion for Albertine.

But this calm which my mistress procured for me was an assuagement of suffering rather than a joy. Not that it did not enable me to taste many joys from which the intensity of my anguish had debarred me, but, far from my owing  them to Albertine, who in any case I no longer found very pretty and with whom I was bored, with whom I was indeed clearly conscious that I was not in love, I tasted these joys on the contrary when Albertine was not with me. (V,4-5)

Why is he bored with her?

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. 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. (V,12)

But Marcel does find an unexpected comfort in Albertine, that of an affectionate and calming pet (like a cat; I cannot imagine he was a dog person).

She would never think of shutting a door and, by the same token, would no more hesitate to enter a room if the door stood open than would a dog or a cat. Her somewhat inconvenient charm was, in fact, that of behaving in the household not so much like a girl as like a domestic animal which comes into a room and goes out again and is to found wherever one least expects to find it, and she would often–something that I found profoundly restful–come and lie down beside me on my bed, making a place for herself from which she never stirred, without disturbing me as a person would have done. (V,9)

Obscure Deities

For all the importance she has in the novel, Albertine is curiously undeveloped as a character. Almost alone among the characters, she exists only in relation to Marcel and not as an independent person. This may be because she is foremost Marcel’s lover, and for him love is an act of the imagination much more so than interactions between the lovers. (Imagine Marcel in a happy marriage!)

For that matter, the mistresses whom I have loved most passionately have never coincided with my love for them. That love was genuine, since I subordinated everything else to seeing them, keeping them for myself alone, and would weep aloud if, one evening, I had waited for them in vain. But it was more because they had the faculty of arousing that love, of raising it to a paroxysm, than because they were its image. When I saw them, when I heard their voices, I could find nothing in them which resembled my love and could account for it.  And yet my sole joy lay in seeing them, my sole anxiety in waiting for them to come. It was as though a virtue that had no connexion with them had been artificially attached to them by nature, and that this virtue, this quasi-electric power, had the effect upon me of exciting my love, that is to say of controlling all my actions and causing all my sufferings. (IV,718)

Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships (I leave out of account the physical pleasure which is their habitual accompaniment but is not enough in itself to constitute them), beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to those invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities. It is they whose good will is necessary to us, with whom we seek to establish contact without finding any positive pleasure in it. The woman herself, during our assignation with her, does little more than put us in touch with these goddesses. (IV,719)

The Proustian paradox of love: It is not when we are near the loved one that we are most in love, it is when we realize that the loved one is remote from us.

What a deceptive sense sight is! A human body, even a beloved one, as Albertine’s was, seems to us, from a few yards, from a few inches away, remote from us. And similarly with the soul that inhabits it. But if something brings about a violent change in the position of that soul in relation to us, shows us that it is in love with others and not with us, then by the beating of our shattered heart we feel that it is not a few feet away from us but within us that the beloved creature was. Within us, in regions more or less superficial. But the words: “That friend is Mlle Vinteuil” had been the Open sesame, which I should have been incapable of discovering by myself, that had made Albertine penetrate to the depths of my lacerated heart. And I might search for a hundred years without discovering how to open the door that had closed behind her. (IV,719-720)