Resuming the Search

A few months ago, I stated that it was my goal to read all of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time; of course, this is not only a Proust blog, and I've obviously read a lot of other things (and will continue to do so), but the Proust entries are returning! I recently finished the first part of Volume II, Within a Budding Grove.

The narrator's admiration of Gilberte Swann evolves from a simple longing to gain access to her mysterious and forbidden world into romantic and sexual desire. Part One, titled "Madame Swann at Home," details his romantic quest for Gilberte; love is, of course, the major theme of this section, and many of the previous conclusions about love in Proust's work hold true here. Lack of control over the beloved both induces love, sustains it, and makes it a miserable state of being. Like Swann's desire for Odette, the narrator's love for Gilberte is sustained by her unreachability and strangeness from him; his alienation from her spurs his desire to possess her. He is vexed by her unpredictability and his lack of control, but this only deepens and strengthens his attraction. Love originates in difference, even though the experience of alienation from the beloved is painful. The narrator's ability to love depends on his inability to possess Gilberte, just as Swann's jealous love depended on his futlity in stopping Odette's infidelities.

Love originates also in the imagination of the lover, which can simultaneously ease that sense of distance and exacerbate it. Swann sustained his jealous love for Odette through imagining her infidelities, and comforted himself by picturing her innocence. Imagination, however, plays a very different role in the narrator's love of Gilberte. Swann's imagination drifted towards Odette's nefarious activities out of his view because his love depends on jealousy. The narrator, however, tends to imagine only the complete happiness that he could derive from unity with Gilberte, because his love depends on the possibility of possession. He spends his time imagining conversations he might have with her, in which she says all of the things he longs to hear. At times, his happiness is heightened by his imagination: "We are, when we love, in an abnormal state, capable of giving at once to the most apparently simple accident, an accident which may at any moment occur, a seriousness which in itself it would not entails. What makes us so happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced" (Proust 213-214). The increasing acceptance that the Swanns show to the narrator, inviting him to tea with Gilberte and dinners with Bergotte, causes him to view his possession of Gilberte as determined; with her father's approval, the narrator assumes that he has greater influence over her, and so he went to "see Gilberte as often as I chose, with enchantment if not with peace of mind" (Proust 213). That peace of mind, however, was soon disrupted by the same impulse to attach immense importance to insignificant, neutral, or ambiguous events.

Like Swann's jealousy, however, the narrator's desire for complete possession eventually leads to the destruction of love. His imagination first causes him to view reality as deficient, in comparison with his visions of potential happiness with Gilberte. She fails to react in the desired way, and the very quality of otherness that attracted him begins to vex him. He begins to sense that Gilberte is annoyed by his constant presence in her house and views him as an obstruction to her other activities; for example, she wishes to go to a dance with her friends, but her mother requires her to stay at home to entertain the narrator. Like Odette had with Swann, Gilberte rather effortlessly proves her independence from the narrator; both lovers are painfully desirous to do the same and prove their independence from Odette and Gilberte. The narrator eventually succeeeds, although he realizes, too late, that the attainment of that goal necessitates the death of love.

As in Swann's Way, love is presented as a tormented, humiliating experience in Within a Budding Grove, an experience which the narrator can only enjoy in memory. Hurt by Gilberte's perceived indifference, aggrieved that her parents' acceptance of him have failed to win him control over her, and convinced that Gilberte will find his affection for her unforgivably repulsive, the narrator decides to cure himself of his love; he ceases to contact her directly, refuses her invitations, and wallows in the voluptuousness of his melancholy. He succeeds in destroying his love, and the self that loved Gilberte; the self-imposed separation gradually diminishes his desire and he is relieved from the incessant anxiety that, in Proust, is essential of love.

He reflects on his former love for Gilberte and marvels "How infinitely we prefer to any such interview the docile memory, which we can supplement at will with dreams in which she who in reality does not love us seems, on the contrary, to be making protestations of her love, when we are all alone! How infinitely we prefer that memory which, by blending gradually with it a great deal of what we desire, we can contrive to make as sweet as we choose, to the deferred interview in which we would have to deal with a person to whom we could no longer dictate at will the words that we want to hear on her lips, but from whom we can expect to meet with new coldness, unforeseen aggressions!" (Proust 270). Swann does something similar in his approach to Odette; rather than view her only through memory, he chooses to view her through the veil of art. Odette is no longer a human subject, but an artistic object, which Swann can manipulate at his will, convince himself of her aesthetic value, and thereby appreciate. The narrator finally gains control over Gilberte through relegating her to memory; he surrenders the real, present, separate Gilberte for the phantom Gilberte of memory. The separateness of the other, the beloved, creates love, but it also creates the desire to escape the unstable state of being in love.

The narrator's disappointment and humiliation in his love for Gilberte is characteristic of a problem that extends beyond the experience of love; happiness is always deferred to a distant future, in which the internal conditions of the narrator will have changed so much as to render that happiness impotent. The narrator writes that "happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess... Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions" (Proust 274). The narrator's earlier excursion to see Berma, his favorite actress, perform at the theater is a precursor to his love for Gilberte; he had longed to see Berma and built up impossible expectations of rapture and intellectual enlightenment upon finally seeing her performance, but his anxiety to catch every word she said and his extravagant hopes left him feeling bitterly disappointed. He could not enjoy the performance at all; he recognizes Berma as she appears on stage, "But at the same time all my pleasure had ceased" because he cannot slow down time and dissect the performance as it appeared (Proust 26). Pleasure is only possible in anticipation, and as soon as the anticipated happiness appears, as he wrote later, happiness becomes impossible.

Swann's Way was an account of an awakening of desires, but Within a Budding Grove is a narrative of the inevitable disappointment of those desires. The narrator expects his great hopes to reify, but the materialization of his longings inevitably falls short of his imagination. Although the narrator seems to experience life more deeply than most, he is also perpetually anxious or disappointed; he is as incurable a malcontent as his Aunt Leonie was an invalid, because, like his great aunt, he revels in his accute sense of disappointment, his suffering, his incurable state of discontent. The narrator is something of a youthful Underground Man; Proust mentions Dostoevsky in this volume, so I think a comparison between the narrator and Dostoevsky's Underground Man could be useful. Expect more on this subject in the future... just don't expect too much, because you're bound to be diappointed.

The World's a Stage

I've written a lot about love in these posts on Swann's Way, but a larger, recurring theme for In Search of Lost Time is the interaction between art and reality. This is, of course, manifest in Swann's Way as well, and not only in Swann's comparison of Odette to a Boticelli painting.

Characters often do and say things for the sake of aesthetic effect-- not necessarily out of a genuinely held belief or feeling. Odette's friends the Verdurins epitomize pantomimed emotions, in their case for entertainment. For example, Madame Verdurin puts on a show of intense physical reaction to music (swooning, short of breath, painful headaches), although she knows virtually nothing about music and Swann claims that she has poor taste. She intends to entertain, to amuse, and, most of all, to create her own eccentric and distinct character, as the epicenter of such amusements. Her husband devises a way to create the impression of laughter without actually laughing, for the same purpose of creating his own character. Whenever a guest makes a witty reparte, Mr. Verdurin pretends to choke on his cigar with suppressed laughter. He is not actually laughing or choking, but he began this performance in emulation of his wife's show of suppressed laughter, to "one-up" her. These two pantomimes in particular recall Lacanian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek's analysis of things "deprived of their malignant property" and other objects devoid of their essential substance: decaffeinated coffee, nonalcoholic beer, fat-free ice cream, virtual sexuality without human contact or intimacy. Zizek's point is that these are all elements of a virtual reality, a sort of aestheticized and ironically detached existence. And to draw a connection to Baudrillard, this is simulacra, in which the essence-free copy becomes more real than the original. In the case of Mr. Verdurin, his feigned laughter more effectively communicates his amusement and geniality than real, genuine laughter would. Art supplants reality, fiction is truer than truth.

Throughout Swann's Way, characters deliberately disguise their feelings, often by putting on these exaggerated "dumb shows." Ironically, such overacting stems from a desire to show emotion with a subtle, artistic flair. Again, Zizek provides some insight; virtual reality permits everything, but everything is deprived of its dangerous element that constitutes its essence. Emotional intensity, in Swann's Way, is permitted but only when presented as an ironically detached pantomime of emotion. The result is a circle of intimate friends, whose interactions are wholly devoid of honesty. Everyone at the Verdurins' parties is required to wear a particular mask, and if a guest departs from the strict script which Madame Verdurin imposes on her parties, that guest is promptly declared a "bore," mocked, and never invited back. She prides herself that everyone at her gatherings is natural and open, but the underlying truth is that such openness can only occur within the rigid boundaries of her aesthetics. Swann's frankness is rejected and he loses favor with "the faithful" (the regular dinner guests) for not surrendering completely to Madame Verdurin's demands, for not complying with her script. The real honesty and frankness of Swann are aesthetically repugnant, in comparison to the affected, stylized interactions among the Verdurins and their guests. In "Combray," Swann does adopt an air of detachment and refrains from stating any opinion without the shield of irony, but this is a rather different aesthetic than the overwrought pantomimes in vogue at the Verdurins.

This preference for stylized frankness (honesty without honesty) extends beyond the Verdurins and their faithful. Francoise, the maid to the narrator's Aunt Leonie, feels compassion for those most remote from her, such as the hypothetical sufferer of labor pains in a medical encyclopedia, but she becomes cold when faced with the reality, such as the kitchen maid who was acutely suffering those labor pains. Similarly, the narrator himself says that "none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a real person arouse in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys and misfortunes" (Proust, 116). In other words, emotion can only be experienced indirectly, detached from the physical reality and immediacy of the individual or the circumstances and supplanted by an aestheticized portrait formed in the imagination.

Throughout Swann's Way, and I expect this to be true of In Search of Lost Time as a whole, there is tension between reality and art, the world of physical experience and that of creative imagination. The two must interact; no one can live entirely in fantasy or in unreflective experience. But the two are also antagonistic, and more often than not in Proust, imagination, ideals, and narratives overpower experienced reality. At the end of "Swann in Love," Swann laments that he has "wasted his life" on Odette, on the images he had formed of his mistress and the aesthetic experience of living solely for love, wallowing voluptuously in the realm of untempered emotions. I'm not sure how the narrator will handle this, since he seems more able to synthesize reality and fantasy in a way that illuminates both, but Swann does serve as a parallel for the narrator's experiences. Disillusionment is certainly on the near horizon.