Saturday, September 17, 2016

My Year With Proust - Day 257

   What I wanted was to possess Mme de Stermaria: for several days my desires had been actively and incessantly preparing my imagination for this pleasure, and this pleasure alone; any other pleasure (please with another woman) would not have been ready, pleasure being but the realisation of a prior craving which is not always the same but changes according to the endless variations of one's fancies, the accidents of one's memory, the state of one's sexual disposition, the order of availability  of one's desires, the most recently assuaged of which lie dormant until the disappointment of their fulfillment has been to some extent forgotten; I had already turned from the main road of general desires and had ventured along the path of a more particular desire; I should have had - in order to wish for a different assignation - to retrace my steps too far before rejoining the main road and taking another path.  To take possession of Mme de Stermaria on the island in the Bois de Bouelogne where I had asked her to dine with me: this was the pleasure that I pictured to myself all the time.  It would naturally have been destroyed if I had dined on that island without Mme de Stermaria; but perhaps as greatly dimished [diminished?] had I dined, even with her, somewhere else.  Besides, the attitudes according to which one envisages a pleasure are prior to the woman, to the type of woman suitable thereto.  They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and for that reason bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy, this or that woman, this or that setting, this or that room, which in other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt.  Daughters of the attitude that produced them, certain women will not appear to us without the double bed in which we fine peace by their side, while others, to be caressed with a more secret intention, require leaves blown by the wind, water rippling in the night, are as frail and fleeting as they.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 398-399

Proust continues to reflect upon his recent tryst with Albertine, but more important in regard to the planned assignation with Mme de Stermaria.  There are two observations that really intrigue me:

"Besides, the attitudes according to which one envisages a pleasure are prior to the woman, to the type of woman suitable thereto.  They dictate the pleasure, and the place as well, and for that reason bring to the fore alternatively, in our capricious fancy, this or that woman, this or that setting, this or that room, which in other weeks we should have dismissed with contempt."  Here Marcel seems to be saying that his excitement to see Mme de Stermaria really has almost nothing to do with her unique existence as Mme de Stermaria; rather, he was excited about the potentiality of the erotic adventure he had created in his mind, and Mme de Stermaria was just the perfect prop to make it happen.  Thus, "the attitudes according to which one envisages a pleasure are prior to the woman."  You imagine the time and place and intensity and nature of the act, and then you find the woman to best make that fantasy come true - rather than starting with the woman and constructing a fantasy around her own specific qualities.  I may have to read this passage to my students the next time we discuss objectification.

" . . . I had already turned from the main road of general desires and had ventured along the path of a more particular desire; I should have had - in order to wish for a different assignation - to retrace my steps too far before rejoining the main road and taking another path."  I'm sure I'm reading too much into this statement.  Doubtless, he's simply saying that he's already devoted so much time to fantasizing about his assignation with Mme de Stermaria that if it did not happen he would be crushed, not the least of which would be because of the amount of time that he had already spent constructing the event in his own mind.  He would have to go too far back in another direction to reenter the main road.  However, part of me thinks that Marcel is really admitting something here, that his "more particular desire" is an expression of homosexual desire, which stood in contrast to the "main road of general desires" that the time and place required.  However, as the excellent Professor Sakmyster used to remind me in graduate school, "Gary, I think you're thinking too much."

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