My Year With Proust - Day 73

   "'Odette, my darling,' he began, 'I know, I am being simply odious, but I must ask you a few questions.  You remember what I once thought about you and Mme Verdurin?  Tell me, was it true?  Have you, with her or anyone else, ever?'

   She shook her head, pursing her lips together; a sign which people commonly employ to signify that they are not going, because it would bore them to go, when someone has asked, 'Are yo coming to watch the procession go by?', or 'Will you be at the review?' But this shake of the head, which is thus commonly used to decline participation in an event that has yet to come, imparts for that reason and element of uncertainty to the denial of participation in an event that is past.  Furthermore, it suggests reasons of personal convenience, rather than any definite repudiation, any moral impossibility.  When he saw Odette thus make him a sign that the insinuation was false, he realized that it was quite possibly true.

   'I have told you, I never did; you know quite well,' she added, seeming angry and uncomfortable.

   'Yes, I know all that; but are you quite sure?  Don't say to me, "You know quite well"; say, "I have never done anything of that sort with any woman"'.

   She repeated his words like a lesson learned by rote, and as though she hoped, thereby, to be rid of him: 'I have never done anything of that sort with any woman.' . . .

   ". . . Odette, do not prolong this moment which is torturing us both.  If you are willing to end it at once, you shall be free of it for ever.  Tell us, upon your medal, yes or no, whether you have ever done these things.'

   'How on earth can I tell?' she was furious.  'Perhaps I have, ever so long ago, when I didn't know what I was doing, perhaps two or three times.'

   Swann had prepared him for all possibilities. Reality must, therefore, be something which no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in one's body bears to the gradual movement of the clouds overhead, since those words 'two or three times' carved, as it were, a cross upon the living tissues of his heart. A strange thing, indeed, that those words, 'two or three times', nothing more than a few words uttered in the air, at a distance, could so lacerate a man's heart, as if they had actually pierced it, could sicken a man, like a poison that he had drunk.

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 380-382

In this section Swann is questioning, or maybe interrogating (I was waiting for him to ask if she was now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party - or how frequently had she met other witches in the woods at the sabbat), on his suspicion that she had previously been with other women.

So many things jump to mind here.  One of the first is how homosexuality plays a role in the story once again, and how it relates back to Proust's own homosexuality in the telling of the story.  We were discussing Lesbian/Gay literary criticism yesterday in my Heroines & Heroes class so this was well timed.  In the end it speaks also to the mature, sophisticated nature of the novel, and how, beyond its beauty and merit aesthetically, it was also an important novel historically and in the evolution of the modern novel.

Odette's admission of "two or three times" is also interesting because it could mean that she has had numerous assignations with several women.  Normally when a person admits to something the reality is far greater.  If you partner admits to one drunken make-out session at a bar then she's probably meeting a couple regularly for threeways.  And if you admit that you did bump into an ex-girlfriend at a party you probably did actually sleep with her.  However, there is the very real possibility that Odette is just sick to death of Swann's incessant jealousy and paranoia and is hoping to inflict as much pain on him as possible.  In a previous post we discussed the notion of her emotional revenge upon him for giving herself so totally and hopefully to him in the early days of the relationship.  I wonder if her admission here is cut from the same cloth.

It also shows the folly of driving your lover crazy with questions about their past.  All of us have a past, and all those memories, both good and bad, made us into the person you are today.  If your present partner had a lot of lovers in the past, then you're probably benefiting from it because she/he has a lot of sexual experience and knows a few tricks - and she/he has a lot of emotional experience and thus probably much more forgiving of your own foibles.  If you look for something you'll find it. As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, what you control is this one moment and what are you going to do with it.  He warns us never to make of ourselves a cancer or an abscess in the universe, and Swann is clearly doing that in this exchange.