Hey Jealousy

I'm back to write more about love and literature, this time just about Proust; and I begin with the inquiry, does romance depend on mystery?

After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).

In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.

Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.

Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.

In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.

This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.

I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.