Choose

I've taken a bit of a hiatus from this blog, and now I'm returning with an uncharacteristically personal post.

I applied to grad school this winter, and most of the schools to which I applied have sent me their verdicts. Most of them are rejections. Despite the PhD path essentially eroding beneath my feet, I have a myriad of chioces in front of me.

This is a strange time, and I'm trying to capture it. Since Jarrod and I set off for Buffalo last Friday afternoon, I have been dwelling with the surreality of making decisions that will significantly impact my future. It is a poltergeist that simply stares at me, waiting for me to choose. I stare back, searching for words to explain myself.

At this time last year, I was so enthusiastic about academia. I had the unfounded confidence of a college senior, still ensconced in the certainty of a few more weeks of undergraduate education. That I would continue my education on the graduate level was an unrefutable truth in my mind.

"What are you doing now?"

That question had followed me for the first two months or so after graduation, and while it was repeated ad nauseum, I had an acceptable answer: "I'm applying to grad school."

"What have you been up to since graduation?" The question re-surfaced in an unlikely place, a movie theater in Worcester. I was there with two friends from college, and we ran into another Assumption graduate. And this time, I didn't have an easy, terse answer. I hadalready applied, and all of the schools I had heard from at that point had rejected me. I couldn't say "grad school," so I said, "Substitute teaching."

"Oh, how do you like it?"
This fellow alumna is a middle school teacher, and we were once in the same pre-practicum education seminar. I quit the concentration after a week and felt liberated, and certain that I would never resort to teaching high school. I would teach college.

"I hate it," I said with a laugh, and absolute sincerity.
It's been a rough school year, with shockingly bad behavior from the students and lack of support from other teachers and administrators.

But I don't hate teaching. I applied for PhD programs because I love literature and I want to teach it. I would still like to teach it to college students who share the same enthusiasm for writing and reading, rather than trying to generate it amongst teenagers in a high school, but it's infinitely better than being trapped in a cubicle, doing work that I find mindless and meaningless. Teaching is an option again. But on my terms this time, not the version of teaching set forth by a college education department or by disconcertingly placid elementary school principals who are horrified that a substitute would dare yell at a group of out-of-control first graders.

There is no path before me; I have to make my own. I am blessed, though, to not have to make it alone, because I have Jarrod. And while I still feel that uncanniness shadowing me, I know that I have the power to create a life that will be fulfilling, challenging, rewarding, and meaninful. A job cannot do that. Grad school cannot do that.

Only I can.

Madness? This is Rome!

In the past couple of days, I've taken a break from Swann's Way and started re-reading Ovid's Metamorphoses. Although I want to study 20th/21st century British literature in grad school, I love mythology, legends, and folklore. So I periodically return to classical literature, epic poetry, and ancient legends.

The unifying motif of the Metamorphoses is, of course, transformation; Juno's jealous rage causes her to take revenge on Io and change her into a cow; Echo's unrequited love for Narcissus dwindles her to nothing more than a voice; a nymph's grief dissolves her into water. Ovid's work is often viewed as less "serious" than other Roman epics like the Aeneid, but his stories construct a psychology of the passions.

In the grips of their passions, characters are frequently changed into animals and plants, becoming sub-human, irrational or insensate beings. Ovid appears to uphold the binary opposition between emotion and rationality; the fits of passion are sudden, impuslive, and irrational, often leading to uncharacteristic behavior. But the individual is not expected to purge himself completely of all passion; Ovid presents them as natural, irrascible forces which everyone must confront, including the gods. For example, Jove criticizes Pluto's impulsive abduction of the girl Proserpina, but he reasons with the girl's mother, Ceres, that the god's actions were unthinking, instinctive, and therefore more forgiveable. He did not premeditate the abduction. There was no malice in his intentions, because he did not have any intentions; he was overtaken by passion. He lost his rational capacity under the influence of love and desire; even a god is helpless to overcome that.

Ironically, Venus, the goddess of love, is primarily motivated by pride; she instructed Cupid to fire his arrows at Pluto because of her desire for power over the other gods, and her anger with the virgin goddesses Minerva and Diana, whose rejection of love and sexuality constitutes a "revolt" in Venus' mind. Yet, this quest for domination accompanies her sense of duty; she will perform her task and inspire love, even if it leads to dischord (as it did here between Ceres and most of Italy, on which she took her revenge because the earth opened up and swallowed Pluto and Proserpina).

Similarly, Juno's punishment of Jove's (often unwilling) mistresses is just as fueled by her pride in her reputation as it is jealousy; she is mighty Juno, the queen of heaven, and any offender must pay dearly for daring to cross her. Juno is terribly jealous of Ino for having conceived a child with Jove, but she is even more jealous of the son of their union, Bacchus: "My rival bears a child, and he has power / To transform sailors, give the flesh of a son / For his mother to tear to pieces, turn the daughters / of Minyas into bats. and what can Juno / Do beyond weeping at insults unavenged? / Is that enough? Is that my only power?" (Ovid, Book IV, lines 423-428). Juno takes her revenge by deigning to enter the underworld and seeking the assistance of the Furies to drive Ino mad. Her own desire for revenge is irrational; Ino cannot be held responsible for the power of her son. Juno's pride and anger blind her to the injustice of her own actions, her misplaced anger and vengeance, even though Juno represents justice. Diana is also unjust in preserving her honor; a man accidentally sees her naked, and she punishes his inadvertant spying by changing him into a beast. And even Minerva stoops to seek Envy's assistance in enacting revenge. The passions, even among gods, lead them to break their character, even as they strive to uphold their reputations.

Bacchus is a common culprit for the worst and most animalistic madness. During Ovid's time, Bacchanalia (the festivals celebrating Bacchus) were officially illegal, but the cult continued to practice underground. Book IV is largely devoted to stories centering on these frenzied rituals of drink and dance, which act as agents of transformation. Ovid seems to view the Bacchanalia as distractions to an individual's proper vocation, as evidenced in the story of Pentheus. While everyone else indulged in ecstatic festivities, Pentheus was repulsed by their dereliction of duty: "What lunacy is this, oh sons of Mars, / Sons of the serpent's teeth, that dulls your wits? / ... / my fine young peers, who used to carry / Spears once, not wands, do you think it decent of you / To stick your heads through garlands, not in helmets?" (Ovid III. 545-547). Rather than being honorable warriors, rational beings, and responsible citizens, they have all given in to madness and superstition (symbolized by the wands). From Pentheus' view, they ought to be ashamed of themselves and hold their duty to their country higher than their obligations to this questionable god.

In Book IV, Ovid opposes servants of Bacchus with servants of Minerva. A group of women, the daughters of Minyas, decline to join in the orgies honoring Bacchus and spend the day weaving and telling tales instead. They "worship a better goddess, Pallas," (Minerva) and will not recognize the divinity of the wine god (Ovid IV.42). Their tales criticize uncontrolled passion-- the feud between two families that led to the senseless deaths of Pyramus and Thisbe, the jealousy of Clytie and Apollo's excessive preference for Leucothoe, etc. Rationalism is the enemy of Bacchus, and the daughters are punished for their transgression when Bacchus transforms them into bats, which symbolize the occult (in another story, Bacchus changes another irreligious individual into a screech owl, an omen of death). Minerva may be the better goddess, but she cannot defeat the madness that abounds, for Bacchus gets his revenge and expands his dominion across Greece, into Egypt, and beyond. I need to do more research on Rome under Augustus, but this could very well be a criticism of Roman society.

The passions come upon characters in a flash, but the repercussions of acting on those passions are permanent. The effects are not always negative; a few are elevated to godhood, or taken out of a dangerous situation and placed among the stars as a constellation. Other transformations reveal the true nature of an individual, like the blood-thirsty Lycaon's metamorphosis into a wolf. Ovid offers a nuanced view of the effects of strong emotion, with a wide array of consequences for the ways individuals confront these forces within them.

Taboos

"French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads."
Frank (Steve Carell) on Marcel Proust, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006

I have largely ignored the autobiographical aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and while Little Miss Sunshine is far from an authority on Marcel Proust, I quoted Frank here because he is a gay character who uses Proust's homosexuality as a reason he was a "total loser." Certainly, Frank's description is tongue-in-cheek and has a self-deprecating air, but it also indicates the otherness of homosexuality in any conversation about human relationships and love. In Swann's Way, heterosexuality is central (the narrator, his parents, and Charles Swann are all heterosexual), and when homosexuality appears in the novel, it is on the margins, it is other, a perversion.

Proust was not exclusively homosexual; he carried on a few affairs with women, although his most intense relationships were with men and appears to have strongly preferred young men. By 1906, he was open about his unconventional sexuality, but he continued to be tormented by his sexual identity. He hid his homosexuality while his parents were alive, and his affairs were often tortured, brief, or unrequited.

There are two prominent characters who are not strictly heterosexual in the first two chapters of Swann's Way. Mademoiselle Vinteuil carries on a lesbian affair, partly in rebellion against her father, and Odette admits to several sexual liaisons with other women. In both instances, homosexuality is presented as a perversion and an indication of moral decay; Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affair is widely held responsible for her father's death, and she and her lover mock Mr. Vinteuil shortly after his death. Similarly, Odette's lesbian affairs are evidence of her outrageous, uncontrollable sexuality. He does not merely object to her promiscuity and betrayal of his trust, but this particular sexual transgression of relationships with other women. For both Mademoiselle Vinteuil and Odette, their lesbian affairs imply their complete lack of sexual morality. Odette's many infidelities were painful enough to Swann, but her homosexual affairs shock and offend him most of all; he forgave her loose morals (he knew from their first meeting that she was a courtesan) when men were the object of her seductions, and he even forgave her liaisons with his acquaintances. But her affairs with women were utterly unfathomable to Swann, and they force him to recognize her wild lifestyle, her burgeoning sexuality that, he now fears, lacks all boundaries.

But why would Proust present homosexuality in such a negative light? He struggled to accept his own homosexual longings, so some of this could be internalized prejudice. In early 20th century France, homosexuality was so far outside the norms of accepted sexual practices that it also provides a convenient indicator of Odette's outrageousness, her extreme unconventionality and separation from the society Swann had hitherto frequented. It is also important to note that, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, love is morally threatening. In the beginning of "Swann in Love," the narrator observes that love is reserved for the idle rich, and Swann's voluptuous wallowing in the emotions and desires aroused by Odette indicate the complete lack of duties and responsibilities in his life. Swann can afford to live for love alone, and his moral character is degraded because of it. Although love can also provide moments of transcendence and ecstatic joy, it also humiliates and disgraces the lover, through jealousy, obsession, and indulgence of fantasy. Swann is not degraded solely because Odette is a sexual deviant, but because he seeks to control her sexuality.

The lesbian affairs present a threat to male dominance; part of Mademoiselle Vinteuil's attraction to her lover is the horror it caused her father and polite bourgeois society (although she seems embarrassed at the same time), and Odette's homosexual affairs designate her radical independence, to the point of alienation, from Swann. I think part of why Swann is so scandalized by Odette's homosexual activities is due to the fact that this is a world in which he holds no place. Proust also experienced consuming jealousy and a sense of deep betrayal when he discovered that one of his male lovers had cheated on him with women, and I think that this incomprehension of and separation from the sexuality of one's partner make Odette's lesbian infidelities so painful to Swann. They present the ultimate obstacle to masculine understanding of female sexuality, which is already ominously mysterious to the male characters of Swann's Way.

I'm still perplexed as to why Proust would choose to present homosexuality only among women; this would seem to be the least familiar form of sexuality to Proust. In Search of Lost Time is obviously not autobiography, and the narrator is not Proust, but it's still curious why, in a story that has so far presented a wide range of sexual and romantic relaionships, male homosexuality is completely absent, not even implied. The narrator, however, inhabits a strongly feminine world; he is extremely close with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother, he is fascinated by Gilberte Swann and Madame de Guermantes, he dreams about actresses and women who will reveal the secrets of love and life to him. Swann is the most prominent male figure in the narrator's life at Combray, and he is also deeply encsonced in a feminine atmosphere. As such, there is a clearer portrait, and wider range, of feminine sexuality than masculine; as a boy, the world of men is still somewhat remote from the narrator, represented in his distant relationship with his father and grandfather. He is obviously an outsider to the feminine realm, but he can observe it more easily than the activities reserved for men; he is still dependent on his mother and spends most of his day in the company of women. He is fascinated by the women he encounters and attempts to capture something of their consciousness, to comprehend what they feel and form images of their private lives, of which he can only catch a glimpse. Sexuality is by no means the only preoccupation; the narrator is just as intrigued by Gilberte's dinners with Bergote as he is by Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affiar. But it is a significant part of life, and the narrator is not blind to that; he is losing some of that childish innocence, that complete ignorance of love and sexuality as his own capacities for both are developing. Swann's Way presents a wide variety of the forms of sexuality and romance: Swann's torrid affair with Odette, the idealized medieval romance of the Guermantes line, lesbian encounters, the perpetual maidenhood of his aunts, his parents' marriage, his uncle's proclivity for actresses and women of ill-repute. These forms of sexuality and love are all emerging before the narrator's eyes and becoming clearer in his consciousness, and as a curious, sensitive person, his narrative is an attempt to comprehend it.

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.

Wicked Intelligent Post

I am far too amused by making this connection.

Odette is Swann's love interest in Swann's Way.

Odette is the name of the Swan Princess.

Yes, this Swan Princess:


My three-year-old niece is visiting, so this is all that I have to contribute to Proustian scholarship.

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.

Love and Literature

This post isn't just for the sake of Valentine's Day; love is a constant theme in literature, and regardless of the day on the calendar, it's worth contemplating.

This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.


I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.



Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.

Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.

Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.

The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).

This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.

Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.