Monday, May 15, 2017

My Years With Proust - Day 446

   When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel's beauty as though it had no connexion with a proclivity known as a vice, he would discuss that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it.  Sometimes indeed he did not hesitate to call it by its name.  When examining the find binding of his volume of Balzac, I asked him which was his favourite novel in the Comedie humaine, he replied, his thoughts irresistibly attracted towards an obsession: "Impossible to choose between tiny miniatures like Cure de Tours and the Femme abandonnee, or the great frescoes like the series of the Illusions perdues. What! you've never read Les Illusions perdues?  It's so beautiful - the scene where Carlos Herrera asks the name of the chateau he is driving past, and it turns out to be Rastignac, the home of the young man he used to love; and then the abbe falling into a reverie which Swann once called, and very aptly, the Triestesse d'Olympio of pederasty. And the death of Lucien!  I forget who the man of taste was ho, when he was asked what event in his life had grieved him most, replied: 'The death of Lucien de Rubempre in Splendeurs et Miseres.'"
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 1084

Yesterday we were discussing M. de Charlus and his own aquarium, not understanding, or caring, if anyone could see inside it.  I one time told a student that nothing is as self-evident as something that you are passionate about.  They were writing a paper about a topic that was near and dear to them and the topic was so essentially right that it was blocking them constructing an argument in defense of it.  That is, they couldn't think of a contradictory opinion to refute in advance because there was no possible contradictory opinion. I will often opine that Miles Davis was the greatest American genius of the 20th century.  Now, every right-thinking individual knows this to be true, but say I met someone who didn't agree with this accepted truism (although why I would talk to these simpletons is beyond me) it would still be incumbent upon me to prove my assertion.  I would play something from Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue or Porgy and Bess or even his collaboration with Cannonball Adderley on Somethin' Else and construct a compelling argument (although I'd probably just play his cover of I Thought About You and drop the mike).  Cycling back to the question of M. de Charlus, is it simply that he is too firmly ensconced, and too happy, in his little world to understand that there was someone on the other side of the glass?  And, yes, it's a sad state of affairs that anyone would even have to envision the consequences of someone being on the other side of the glass.  Obviously, if it was sad then, it is a tragedy today.

Another way to think about this is that the Baron has commodified his desire, he has made it something other than himself. Proust tells us, "When M. de Charlus was not speaking of his admiration for Morel's beauty as though it had no connexion with a proclivity known as a vice, he would discuss that vice, but as though he himself were in no way addicted to it." Rather than the subject being too close to him, as I argue above, the opposite is true; he's turned the desire into a dissociated concept that he can discuss with an almost professional distance. I remember a female friend one time telling me, only half-jokingly, that she would never want to marry a gynecologist because she wouldn't want him to view her vagina as another item on the assembly line from work.  There is a dark side to creating that professional distance, and if M. de Charlus is turning his true desire into a commodity is he destroying it?

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