She looked so sweet, so wistfully docile, as though her whole happiness depended on me, that I could barely restrain myself from kissing - with almost the same kind of pleasure that I should have had in kissing my mother - this new face which no longer presented the lively, flushed mien of a cheeky and perverse kitten with its little pink tip-tilted nose, but seemed, in the plenitude of its crestfallen sadness, moulded in broad, flattened, dropping slabs of pure goodness. Leaving aside my love as thought it were a chronic mania that had no connexion with her, putting myself in her place, I let my heart melt at the sight of this sweet girl, accustomed to being treated in a friendly and loyal fashion, whom the good friend that she might have supposed me to be had been pursuing for weeks past with persecutions which had at last arrived at their culminating point. It was because I placed myself at a standpoint that was purely human, external to both of us, from which my jealous love had evaporated, that I felt for Albertine that profound pity, which would have been less profound if I had not loved her.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, p. 860
"I thus appeared at one and the same time to be apologising to her, as for a want of courtesy, for this inability to begin loving her again, and to be seeking to make her understand the psychological reasons for that incapacity as thought they had been peculiar to myself." This sentence is from the page before, as Marcel and Albertine are discussing their relationship, and he is trying to explain to her, and to himself, and to the universe, why he doesn't and can't love her again. As someone once told me in a similar situation, "yeah, and how's that going for you?" As they are talking Marcel finds that Albertine is transforming in front of him, "this new face which no longer presented the lively, flushed mien of a cheeky and perverse kitten with its little pink tip-tilted nose, but seemed, in the plenitude of its crestfallen sadness, moulded in broad, flattened, dropping slabs of pure goodness." He finds that his jealous love "had evaporated," and instead he "felt for Albertine that profound pity, which would have been less profound if [he] had not loved her."
I also find it interesting that he writes, "that I could barely restrain myself from kissing - with almost the same kind of pleasure that I should have had in kissing my mother - this new face . . ." Many times I've talked about one of my favorite books, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which, as all right-thinking individuals know, is the greatest American novel. In the wonderful chapter "Death," which I often have my students read, the main protagonist, as much as the novel has a main protagonist, reflects upon the death of his mother, and how her unexpected passing had caused him to have to cancel a date with a woman he loved, or thought he loved, and it annoys him. He has this thought while sitting in the room with his shrouded mother, and he has this thought that not only is she not dead (pretty common) but that she is actually vibrant and young beneath the sheets. The result is a wonderful and unsettling psycho-sexual moment worthy of Freudian psychology, which, to be fair, was at it's peak when Anderson was writing - but which also fits in beautifully with this comment from Proust (writing at about the same time). Maybe this all makes sense, at least to me, in that it proves, not that Marcel loves Albertine, but rather that he doesn't love her. It seems to me that Marcel loved his grandmother unconditionally, but that, while he loved his mother, he always felt cut off from her love (wow, let's talk about Freudian) or at least that he never had enough time or attention from her (going back to that extraordinary scene at the beginning of the novel where he, as a child, waits in the room for his mother to sneak up to see him). Isn't his relationship with Albertine a mirror of his relationship with his mother? Aren't they both relationships which are unfulfilling and maddeningly just out of touch, and which are never truly consummated?
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