Reading Proust - A Running Commentary

 The remaining three chapters* of Albertine Gone deal with Marcel coming to terms with loss, finally visiting Venice, and revisiting Combray. Chapter II It is said that there are five (or seven) stages of grief, but for Marcel there are only three: anguish; suspicion; and oblivion. Chapter II finds him fluctuating between the latter two. By the beginning of this chapter, his love for Albertine has altered. On his way to forgetting and indifference, Marcel sees his feelings go on a reverse journey. He now finds himself back at the beginning of their affair and experiences again the sentiments through which he had passed before “arriving at my great love”. His memories of those sentiments “retained the terrible force, the happy ignorance of the hope that was then yearning towards a time which has now become the past, but which a hallucination makes us for a moment mistake retrospectively for the future” ( p.195 XI Scott Moncrieff, p.569 III Kilmartin ). He presently feels a charm in ...

 I have already indicated (see my 22 nd post) that for this part of the novel, I would be departing from Scott Moncrieff's volume titles as I find his use of The Sweet Cheat Gone, a line from Walter de la Mare's poem Ghost, to be forced, awkward and unsuitable. The title in French is Albertine disparue, but it was originally going to be La Fugitive, and publishers sometimes still use this latter title. That has prompted a number of English translators to call the volume The Fugitive, which has the merit of following on logically from The Captive. However, I think Albertine Gone is to be preferred because, although she was subject to Marcel's controlling behaviour, Albertine was not a prisoner as she was free to leave (see my 25 th and 27 th posts), which she did at the end of the previous volume. Accordingly, as she has not escaped, she is not a fugitive either. Albertine Gone is a more literal translation of Albertine disparue and importantly, like the French, contains ...

 The third and final chapter of The Captive marks a dramatic change in Marcel and Albertine's relationship. After returning from the Verdurins' soir é e (see my 26 th post), which he had dissuaded Albertine from attending and to which he had then secretly gone himself, Marcel finds her waiting up for him in her room. She is annoyed by his revelation that he has been to the Verdurins'. She asks whether Mlle Vinteuil had attended, which for him confirms his suspicion that she had intended to meet the composer's daughter there (see my 25 th and 26 th posts) ( pp.175-176 X Scott Moncrieff, p.338 III Kilmartin ). Albertine confesses to Marcel that when she had told him that she had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil's friend (see my 24 th post), she had been lying to make herself more interesting to him by pretending she was connected with the great composer. Marcel feels sorry that Albertine thinks the Verdurin circle look down on her and he offers to pay several hund...

 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 w...

   The third chapter of the second part of Cities of the Plain in some ways echoes the second part of Swann's Way and could, for the sake of symmetry, have been called Charlus in Love. As in Swann's affair with Odette (and also Saint-Loup's with Rachel), the relationship is unbalanced: the pursuer's passion is far greater than that of the pursued. Morel, like Odette and Rachel, is inconstant and repeatedly fobs off Charlus, sometimes resorting to fabrication. And Charlus, like Swann, bluffingly responds with pretence as each player struggles for dominance in a game of make-believe. A violinist by Vlaho Bukovac Matters come to a head when Morel tells Charlus that he has an engagement and leaves Charlus alone and disappointed, “the tears trickling down and melting* the paint beneath his eyes”. Charlus, “waddling obesely”, goes to a caf é, where he drinks beer to fortify himself and writes a letter to Morel saying that he is going to fight a duel the next day against some...

  The second chapter of Cities of the Plain sees the development of Marcel's relationship with Albertine, the commencement of the amorous entanglement of Charlus and the fianc é of Jupien's niece, and the reappearance of the Verdurins. We have already observed Marcel's duplicitous approach to relationships when he feigned indifference to Albertine and a preference for Andr é e (see my 17 th  post). Despite his now having grown closer to Albertine, he is still acting in the same manner, and has added suspicion and jealousy to this unhealthy romance. It is hard for the reader to judge the validity of Marcel's suspicions that Albertine is lying and cheating on him because we are only presented with his thought processes, not hers; he is not honest with her and is maybe not being honest in his narration; his distrust is largely the result of inferences rather than direct evidence; and the suspicions are so recurrent as to suggest he is suffering from a paranoid personali...

  When Marcel is not attending society parties, a number of important events take place in his life. We have already dealt with the death of his grandmother, which occurs after Mme de Villeparisis's party, but other developments include the return of Albertine, a strange meeting with the Baron de Charlus, a possibly bogus invitation to the Princesse de Guermantes's ball, Swann's sad news and an insight into the Duc and Duchesse of Guermantes's real character. Albertine It is the period between the Marquise de Villeparisis's tea-party and the Duchesse de Guermantes's dinner-party. We find Marcel home alone on a Sunday afternoon in the autumn following the death of his grandmother. Robert Saint-Loup has written to him to say he had bumped into Mme de Stermaria (she was Mlle de Stermaria when we first met her at the Grand Hotel but has since married and divorced) and had asked her to meet Marcel. Robert's note suggests that he will be on to a sure thing ( pp....

 Following his failure, due to feigned indifference, to be introduced by Elstir to the girls of the “little band”, Marcel finds pleasure afterwards in the realisation that he will nevertheless soon meet them. As he observes, many hours might pass between the event that gave us pleasure and the moment at which we are free to enjoy it ( p.229 IV Scott Moncrieff, p.925 Kilmartin ). When, having persuaded Elstir to give a small tea-party so that he can meet Albertine Simonet, his favourite of the girls, Marcel again experiences this deferred pleasure after he is introduced to her: “This is not to say that the introduction ... did not give me any pleasure, nor assume a definite importance in my eyes. But so far as the pleasure was concerned, I was not conscious* of it, naturally, until some time later, when, once more in the hotel, and in my room alone, I had become myself again. Pleasure in this respect is like photography. What we take, in the presence of the beloved object, is merely...