Love and Despair

Hindus finds it useful to divide the romantic characters into two groups, the lovers and the loved. The lovers are all male and wealthy and/or powerful: Swann, Marcel, St. Loup and Charlus. The loved are all female (or play that role) and are without wealth (Odette, Albertine, Rachel,Morel) and/or outsiders to society (Gilberte as the daughter of a former prostitute and a Jew). The lovers are consumed with jealousy, the loved are its passive recipients. What drives these two groups? For the loved, clearly they seek wealth and recognition in society, which does not interest Proust. They are accordingly given no interior life. What about the lovers? Is it sexual desire? Hindus quotes Proust:

Generally speaking, love has not for its object a human body, except when an emotion, the fear of losing it, the uncertainty of finding it again have been infused into it. This sort of anxiety has a great affinity for bodies. It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty even; which is one of the reasons why we see men who are indifferent to the most beautiful women fall passionately in love with others who appear to us to be ugly. To these people, these fugitives, their own nature, our anxiety fastens wings. And even when they are in our company the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight. (The Fugitive)

It is this hallucinatory quality of love, making us see things as no one else in the world would see them, that causes Proust to refer to love continually as a disease, a compulsion, a poison. Whether a given person who has caught it ever recovers from it depends on his reserves of resistance, the strength of his mental constitution, and the seriousness of the original infection. There is no way of saying in advance whether it is going to be fatal or not. Once the recovery is complete, however, the sufferer himself (that is to say, literally the passionate man) can see the world once again in the same light as everybody else does, and then it is clear that it was something within himself which he called his love and not something outside. (140-141)

Love to Proust is a self-sought laceration for one side, for the rich or the noble, and it is a golden opportunity for the other side, for the ambitious beggar. For the latter, love is quite often the key which provides an entry into a new and delightful world. “A young king or a crown prince may travel in foreign countries and make the most gratifying conquests, and yet lack entirely that regular and classic profile which would be indispensable, I dare say, in an outside broker.” (143)

Feelings of guilt and pain are the drivers for the lovers.

The connections between love and guilt are both subtle and manifold. Essentially, it is a nameless guilt of which the sufferings caused by jealousy are the expiation. For example, Swann’s grief over his love and his need continually to speak of it to anybody who will listen is compared by Proust to the murderer’s need to confess. This “figure of speech” is far from accidental, as I hope to make clear by other examples soon. It is not we who seek love, but the albatrosses that hang round our necks. The proof of the morality of Proust’s vision  of the world, if any were needed, is that pain seems to him a retribution–ultimately, it may be as his language suggests, of original sin.The merit of love is that when its torture has reached the most excruciating point, it may lead us to a re-examination of our festering conscience. A man unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of a woman like Odette must ask himself at some time–what did he do to deserve this? The answer that Proust himself gives to the question is “Enough!” (145)

But the narrator does not feel himself absolved of his old guilt by his new suffering. On the contrary, he feels like a criminal who goes on compounding his crimes. Each instrument of his castigation, after it has served its purpose, becomes the source of fresh blame of himself. Thus, after Albertine runs away from his and is killed in an accident before she can return, he does not think of the pain she had caused him, but, as in the case of the grandmother, whom he had better reason to love, of his own failures of sympathy with his tormentor.This is delicacy carried almost to the point of self-destruction. “In these moments, linking at once of my grandmother’s death and of Albertine, it seems to me that my life was stained with a double murder from which only the cowardice of the world could absolve me.” The same thought occurs in other forms: “It seemed to me that, by my entirely selfish affection, I had allowed Albertine to die just as I had murdered my grandmother.” His guilt seems both active and passive. Either he lets a person die or he actually commits a murder. (147)

What good comes from all this?

And when we consider all the good that accrues to us through our suffering, says Proust, we conclude by being grateful for it, and seeing that we have chosen right after all. “A woman is of greater service to our life if she is in it, instead of being an element of happiness, an instrument of sorrow, and there is not a woman in the world the possession of whom is as precious as that of the truths she reveals to us by making us suffer.” And later on in the same volume: “Desire, going always in the direction of what is most opposite of ourself, forces us to love what will make us suffer.”

Suffering is so valuable to Proust because without it, he thinks, we must always remain strangers to ourselves. Without suffering we are “ignorant of ourselves.” “How much further,” says Proust, “does anguish penetrate in psychology than psychology itself!” By the second term, he makes it clear that he means cold, intellectual analysis. But the innermost nature of life for Proust as for Schopenhauer is something much more akin to feeling than it is to reason–consequently, thought can work best when it is roused by the keenest of all feelings which is pain. Schopenhauer says of death that it is the muse of all philosophy, and Proust makes of frustrated love the inspiration of all art. (148-149)

Goddess of Time

Howard Moss, in his  The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, provides these vignettes of Marcel’s three lovers.

These three loves, though they are all failures, differ from each other in important ways. Marcel gives Gilberte up as if the suffering his love for her entails is too much to bear. He protects that love by refusing to allow it to be nurtured toward a conclusion; he draws back to avoid further pain. Haunted by doubt, doubt becomes obsessive. It is only late in life that he realizes that Gilberte was attainable. She confesses she was attracted to him, at the very end of the novel. At the time their relationship takes place, he withdraws in order to sanctify the image of his love rather than risk its failure. In this retreat, we have a narcissistic, almost masturbatory version of love. The picture, or image of the beloved, is more precious than its actual presence–just as the lantern slides of Geneviève de Brabant are always to be the ideal against which the Duchesse de Guermantes is to be measured. So the idealization of women–like places–is always fatally inconsistent with knowing them. Like the two ways, where geography becomes mental, so, here, physicality and personality become internalized. The true Gilberte exists inside Marcel, not outside him. Marcel destroys and preserves his relationship to her at the same time. Oblivion accompanies separation. But by not coming to any issue, the relationship forms an unconscious pattern for those of the future, as it reinforces the emotional patterns of his behaviour toward women that began with his mother. If love can be deliberately demanded, it also can be deliberately killed.

Mme. de Guermantes inspires love by awe; her name is evocative, magical. She is not a person who turns into an illusion like Gilberte, or an illusion that turns into a person like Albertine. She is inhuman to begin with. Proust says that the love for a person is always the love of something else as well, and, in the Duchesse, Marcel becomes obsessed with the power of the feudal overlord who is still a member of the contemporary world–a world so select, so special, that, to Marcelo, it might as well be the Middle Ages. If, with Gilberte, he falls in love with the legend of Swann, with the Duchesse, he falls in love with the history of France. It is not her wit, her style, her position, or her beauty that ultimately matter; it is that in her name she embodies a history; in her face and person a race; in her speech a landscape and an epoch; and in her manners a civilization. Though her intelligence, her modishness, her ton impress everyone as they do herself, to Marcel, after he has sifted the real jewels from the fake, it is another quality that counts: her conservativeness, in the real sense, for here, in person, is the prototype of something worthy of conservation. The Duchesse, the greatest lady of her day, and Françoise, the servant, share qualities in common. Their speech and their manners are feudal; the serf and the lord possess virtues enhanced by the existence of each other. The farmer and the landowner, still bearing the fragrance of the soil, enrich each other’s powers. In Remembrance of Things Past, Françoise and the Duchesse have no reason to meet. Yet they have more in common than either could possibly imagine. They are two terms that have become separated in one of Proust’s metaphors. (34-36)

Who is Albertine? She is the unknowable animal who calls forth the finest resources of Marcel’s intellect. The greatest analytical mind in the world is helpless confronted with a dog. It is Marcel’s fate to want to see what cannot be seen: the sex life of a plant, the emotional histories of the deep-sea creatures, the motivations of the dark. Marcel and Albertine are two liars hopelessly tangled together. She charms him by being out of the range of what analysis can reach. To keep her in focus for a further try, lured by what he cannot know, he falls in love with her.

Albertine is Marcel’s sensibility turned inside out and objectified. The greater pretense in their relationship comes from Marcel. Her reserve in the face of his jealousy, her lies, her restlessness, all prod him on to another attack. If he knows, he keeps saying, he would be happy. But it is precisely because he doesn’t know that he loves her. A scientist in a dressing gown, he watches over a laboratory of falsehoods, the greatest one being that he is objective in regard to the truth. Marcel uses Albertine to keep from himself a truth about himself: he is not in love with Albertine, he is in love with what Albertine loves.

As such, he credits her with a power and a reality she doesn’t have. Albertine is addicted to games–particularly “diabolo”–clothes, cars, ice cream, planes. She is far simpler than he and far more deceptive. His lies are lies of the mind, hers of being. In Albertine, Marcel is matched against himself in a battle that cannot be finished. She holds within herself the two sexes in one and is, therefore, a constant reenactment in her very existence of the ideal torture of the voyeur. Albertine is the window scene of Montjouvain, the courtyard scene of Charlus and Jupien played over for ever and ever.

It is no wonder that her commonest attributes, her polo cap, her macintosh, the way she plays the pianola, her stride along the front–every physical manifestion of herself–takes on an Olympian sheen. Marcel grasps at every vestige of her reality because he has made her up the way the Greeks made up their gods: he needs constantly to be reassured that she is there. Albertine is both a deity in Proust’s “Garden of Woman” and the demon at the center of his vision, for he describes her as “a mighty Goddess of Time” under whose pressure he is compelled to discover the past. Starting out with the mystery of the animal, she ends up with the mysteries of eternity. (39-41)

Hallucinated World

Proust’s answer to the bleakness of life resulting from time’s corrosion of everything humanly valuable is an aesthetic one. Time can be defeated by a proper appreciation of the power of memory to reveal the essences of life and by an artistry that can record these essences. But he knows the dangers of aestheticism and he personifies them in the character of Swann. This man, though immensely learned and intelligent, lives on the surface of art, emotionally cut off from it, symbolized by his inability to finish his Vermeer manuscript. But Germaine Brée, in Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, sees that he has one last chance to emerge from this barrenness.

At the same time, love reveals to Swann that he has within him a capacity for feeling, a wealth of emotional life of which he is usually unaware because he normally lives on the surface, carefully insulated against this emotional zone.  The Swann who struggles against the proof of his failure in love asserts by that very failure his belief that love was to bring him something besides Odette, was to fill another need, in a kind of parenthesis, between the two musicales where the little Vinteuil phrase is played. The first time, the phrase touches Swann’s heart and awakens in him a renewed taste for love. The second time it re-animates, in all its reality, the suffering through which he has unconsciously lived, makes him realize its extent and brings back to him from oblivion the full memory of his essay at love. But at the same time the musical phrase again poses the riddle of its own existence, a riddle which is now compounded with that of Swann’s love. For an instant Swann is at the threshold of a spiritual discovery for which his love has prepared the way because it has liberated his emotional power. But because of his lack of intellectual persistence he can never understand the real nature of his experience, nor the nature of the faculty which had temporarily substituted for his everyday world an hallucinated world in which he recognized neither others nor himself. His love is twice “lost” to him, and with that love he loses also what Vinteuil’s phrase has suggested to him. “It is one of those powers of jealousy,” the narrator says much later, “to show us that feelings and the reality of facts are unknown and open to countless suppositions. We think we  know exactly how things stand, what people think about them, for the simple reason that we don’t care. But as soon as we wish to know something, as a jealous person does, things become a dizzying kaleidoscope in which we see nothing.”

Proust’s object  when he tells the story of Swann’s love for Odette is not merely to relate a love story but to show how, because of love, Swann sets forth into an unknown world in which “he no longer distinguishes anything” and which causes the narrow and reassuring setting of his daily life to collapse. Swann proceeds no further in the knowledge of the “terra incognita” into which his love has led him; but his adventure is a prelude to the narrator’s, and each acquires it full meaning only in relation to the other. (151-2)