The Captive: Chapter I (25th post)
When Descartes sought to discover what he could know for certain, he discarded everything he could doubt, and by this method found that the only thing he knew for sure was that in doubting, he was thinking. Hence, the famous “cogito, ergo sum”. However, Descartes' certainty is solipsistic and this creates other philosophical problems, in particular what philosophers call the “problem of other minds”. Any Proust reader who has studied philosophy will have noticed passages over which the ghost of Descartes (and sometimes Plato) seems to hover. For instance, in the first chapter of The Captive, taking the Cartesian method one step further, Marcel tells us that the real life of another person is unknowable to us (p.74 IX Scott Moncrieff, p.56 III Kilmartin). This could be taken as the theme of this section of the novel: the impossibility of Marcel knowing what is going on in Albertine's mind. All he has to go one are suspicions, confessions and the reports of others: each of which, as we shall see in The Captive and Albertine Gone, can themselves be doubted. At this stage, Marcel's quest for knowledge of Albertine turns obsessive and his behaviour becomes more reprehensible. He is candid in his description of his treatment of her, often referring to her as a “prisoner” whom he had “carried off” and “caged”. However, it must be observed that this is hyperbole on Marcel's part: Albertine is none of those things. This is not a Fritzl case. The reality is that he displays controlling behaviour which he is careful to disguise from her, while making his motivation (usually jealousy) explicit to the reader. That being so, it is possible that his behaviour appears more egregious to us than it did to her.
Very few of Proust's themes are confined to any one volume: homosexuality and lesbianism occupy more than just Cities of the Plain; Charlus and Morel's relationship spills over into The Captive; and Marcel and Albertine's affair is spread across Within a Budding Grove, Cities of the Plain, The Captive and Albertine Gone. This latter liaison bears the same characteristics in The Captive as it had in Cities of the Plain, namely those of love fluctuating with indifference; suffering; suspicion; jealousy; deception; and Marcel's surreptitious attempts to control Albertine's movements, whom he now has living with him in his absent parents' Parisian apartment. We shall look at these characteristics in turn.
The first is immediately on display. As the chapter opens, Marcel says of Albertine “I loved her so well”, and yet three pages later we find that he no longer sees in her any beauty, that she is beginning to bore him and he is “now clearly conscious that I was not in love” with her (pp.3-5 IX SM, pp.3-4 III TK). There is no contradiction, no authorial or editorial slip, nor any reliance on the distinction between loving and being in love (the original French uses “aimer” for both statements): this is the essence of Marcel's inconstant romantic persona – and we've seen it before (see my 24th post). His changeability is explained when we accept the oft-repeated equation that love is pain and suffering, so when Marcel learns of, or suspects, the desire which Albertine arouses in others, he begins to suffer, and she is raised in his sight “to a lofty pinnacle”; but as soon as his pain goes, he feels that “she meant absolutely nothing to me” (p.27 IX SM, pp.20-21 III TK). It is important to be clear that what is being said here is not just that love always involves pain and suffering, but that pain and suffering can actually engender love and their absence can nullify it. The theme is reiterated later when Marcel observes that “our love is a function of our sorrow, […] our love perhaps is our sorrow, and […] its object is, to a very small extent only, the girl with the raven tresses” (p.117 IX SM, p.87 III TK). To complicate matters, when he is not declaring he loves or does not love her, he appears not to know whether he does or does not: “If I was not in love with Albertine (and of this I could not be sure)” (p.124 IX SM, p.93 III TK).
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| Woman Resting by Lilian Westcott Hale |
The section puts me in mind of Poulenc's Trois Mouvements Perpétuels for piano, which were written at about the same time that Proust was writing The Captive. The first is well-known (it was later used in Hitchcock's Rope and in the BBC's classic adaptation of The Forsyte Saga). The movement introduces a simple tune in the right hand and a harmonious accompaniment in the left. The overall effect could be described as soothing, like a lullaby. That tune is then repeated in another key but the left-hand accompaniment remains the same in the original key, thereby creating dissonance, and then from that point onwards the piece becomes entirely dissonant. Likewise, the originally harmonious phrases of Marcel's “soothing love” and “domestic bliss” (pp.67-101 IX SM, pp.50-76 III TK) begin to contain the dissonances pointed out above as his tender phrases are undermined by a darker seam of thoughts centred on keeping her away from others. Then the relationship becomes all dissonance as Marcel's suspicions take over (pp.101ff IX SM, pp.76ff III TK). So when, for example, Albertine tells Marcel she would like to call on Mme Verdurin the next day, he interprets this as meaning she plans to meet someone there. Why does he think this? Because “otherwise she would not have attached so much importance to this call. That is to say, she would not have kept on assuring me that it was of no importance” (p.111 IX SM, p.83 III TK). The same idea that when we seek information the casualness of our query can indicate to the other person how important the information is for us is repeated later, but this time Proust dresses up the idea, making it vivid by creating a scene with two brothers and a doorstep: “In certain untruthful families, a brother who has come to call upon his brother without any apparent reason and asks him, quite casually, on the doorstep, as he is going away, for some information to which he does not even appear to listen, indicates thereby to his brother that this information was the main object of his visit” (p.142 IX SM, p.105 III TK). The same logic is at play when Marcel thinks that Albertine's not staring at a passing girl is suspicious (p.112 IX SM, p.84 III TK). He uses her lack of reaction to prove that there was a reaction, only she hid it from him.
It is not clear whether Marcel and Albertine ever have sexual intercourse. The language in passages such as the one above where she falls asleep on his bed and he lies next to her is quite opaque. Matters are further complicated by Scott Moncrieff having “sexed up” the language with the suggestive "breathless ecstasy of pleasure", "climax" and "possessing her". The first is a translation of "l'essoufflement du plaisir", which is literally "the breathlessness of the pleasure": the nearly sexual word "ecstasy" exists only in the English version. "Climax" is again a word introduced by the translator. The original is merely "terme", meaning limit or end. This might or might not mean "climax": if the phrase is translated as meaning when Marcel's own pleasure was at an end, it would not suggest his pleasure being at a "climax", but if it means when it was at its limit, it could indicate that. "Possessing her more completely" might mean possessing her in the sexual sense (the original "posséder" can also have that meaning in French), but I think it refers to the repeated theme of his possessing her (as a captive, but never really possessing her fully). Besides which, the beginning of the phrase is "I felt [...] that", which would mean that even if "possessing" does signify the sexual act, they didn't have sex because it only seemed that way ("il me semblait"). This interpretation is surely confirmed by the way Marcel uses a similar phrase in the first paragraph: "I seemed to possess not one, but innumerable girls". He could not be sexually possessing innumerable girls. I read the passage as saying that Marcel had lain next to Albertine, touched her ("every part of her body", if taken literally, would include her erogenous zones), kissed her and felt almost as though he had had sex with her. A little later he says that she gives him “carnal satisfaction” (p.121 IX SM, p.90 III TK), but a few sentences further on says he is not her lover “in the full sense of the word” (p.123 IX SM, p.91 III TK). Both of those phrases, however, are open to more than one reading. By these layers of uncertainty, Proust has presented us with “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”.
As Albertine wakes from her nap on Marcel's bed, her first words are to address him, and here Proust utilises the somewhat arch formulation: “She said: 'My—–' or 'My dearest—' followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would be 'My Marcel' or 'My dearest Marcel'” (pp.84-91 IX SM, pp.63-69 III TK). This is the first time in the novel that the narrator's name has been given (we never learn his surname). The only other time is later in the same chapter, when Albertine writes to him: “My darling, dear Marcel” and teases him with “The ideas you get into your head! What a Marcel! What a Marcel!” (p.207 IX SM, pp.154 III TK). It is also the second time in this chapter that Proust has employed a metalepsis. He broke the fourth wall earlier when, after describing a conversation between Charlus and another homosexual, he wrote: “The author would like to say how deeply he would regret it should any reader be offended by his portrayal of such unusual characters” (p.53 IX SM, p.40 III TK). An ontological point could be drawn from the use of the Proust's forename for the narrator and from his authorial interjections, a point that will become clearer at the end of the novel.
On another occasion when Albertine awakes, Proust creates this beautiful vignette: “As soon as she had begun to open her eyes with a smile, she had offered me her lips, and before she had even uttered a word, I had tasted their fresh savour, as soothing as that of a garden still silent before the break of day” (p.150 IX SM, p.111 III TK). Like the doorstep in the example above, the crepuscular garden creates an image which brings the idea to life.
We have already considered the reasonableness of Marcel's belief that Albertine is lying to him (see my 23rd post). That belief persists throughout The Captive and Albertine Gone. He refers to her innumerable lies (p.125 IX SM, p.93 III TK), without having actually recounted any. The only examples he has given so far are things which she has said which may well be true but which her contradictions and/or his suspicions make him imagine to be deliberately false. However, one concrete example occurs towards the end of the chapter. Marcel reads in the newspapers that Bergotte had died the previous day. Albertine had explained to him the previous evening that her late return home had been due to her having stopped to talk to Bergotte (pp.251-252 IX SM, pp.186-187 III TK). At first he concludes she must have been the last person to have seen Bergotte alive, but afterwards learns she had made it up.
The passage concerning the death of Bergotte is often highlighted by critics. The august author had been ill for a long time and was under doctors' orders to rest. However, when he read that Vermeer's Street in Delft was on loan at a nearby gallery, he went to see it. While studying the painting, in particular a tiny patch of yellow wall, he becomes giddy, collapses and dies, but not before thinking to himself: “That is how I ought to have written […] My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with several coats of paint, made my language exquisite in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall” (p.249 IX SM, p.185 III TK). An insight into Proust's method! Proust then spins from Bergotte's death an intimation of immortality that is similar to Wordsworth's “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” so that we come into the world “trailing clouds of glory”. Proust says: “Everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even […] All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely different from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there […] So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable” (pp.250-251 IX SM, p.186 III TK).
Even though Marcel observes Albertine in detail—her breath, clothes, how she sleeps, her mannerisms, and so on—I often feel that his comment, "the real life of another person is unknowable to us," also reflects how the reader experiences Albertine. I cannot truly find Albertine in In Search of Lost Time. I do not know her. I have wondered why this is the case. Perhaps it is because she is not a "real" person to Marcel but rather a conduit for his emotions and reflections. He seems "to possess not one, but innumerable girls," precisely because she is many girls to him—frequenly fragmented and imagined by him she is an amour éphémère and a fugitive in the sense that she escapes the reader. She lacks a distinct voice and true agency.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I found this section of the novel intense. The beautifully written passages cast a spell, blurring the disturbing reality of Marcel's controlling, dubious actions and obsessive thoughts.