" . . . You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I'm expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together (it sounds a bit weird, but you know how I love the sea)? Well, this friend (oh! not at all the type of woman you might suppose!), isn't this extraordinary, is the best friend of your Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuril's daughter almost as well as I know her. I always call them my two big sisters. I'm not sorry to show you that your little Albertine can be of use to you in this question of music, about which you say, and quite rightly, that I know nothing at all."
At the sound of these words, uttered as we were entering the station pf Parville, so far from Combray and Montjouvain, so long after the death of Vinteuil, an image stirred in my heart, an image which I had kept in reserve for so many years that even if I had been able to guess, when I stored it up long ago, that it had a noxious power, I should have supposed that in the course of time it had entirely lost it; preserved alive in the depths of my being - like Orestes whose death the gods had prevented in order that, on the appointed day, he might return to his native land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon - as a punishment, as a retribution (who knows?) for my having allowed my grandmother to die; perhaps rising up suddenly from the dark depths in which it seemed forever buried, and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and only too well-merited existence, perhaps also to make dazzlingly clear to my eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions eternally engender, not only for those who have committed them but for those who have done no more, or thought that they were doing no more, than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle, as I, alas, had done on that afternoon long ago at Montjourvain, concealed behind a bush where (as when I had complacently listened to the account of Swann's love affairs) I had perilously allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitably painful road of Knowledge. And at the same time, from my bitterest grief I derived a feeling almost of pride, almost of joy, that of a man whom the shock he has just received has carried at a bound to a point to which no voluntary effort could have brought him. The notion of Albertine as the friend of Mlle Vinteuil and of Mlle Vinteuil's friend, a practising and professional Sapphist, was as momentous, compared to what I had imagined when I doubted her most, as are the telephones that soar over streets, cities, fields, seas, linking one country to another compared to the little acousticon of the 1889 Exhibition which was barely expected to transmit sound from one end of a house to the other. It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed-of-sufferings that was opening before me. And yet this deluge of reality that engulfs us, however enormous it may be compared with our timid and microscopic suppositions, has always been foreshadowed by them. It was doubtless something akin to what I had just learned, something akin to Albertine's friendship with Mlle Vinteuil, something which my mind would never have been capable of inventing, that I had obscurely apprehended when I became so uneasy at the sight of Albertine and Andree together. It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering. And the most terrible reality brings us, at the same time as suffering, the joy of a new discovery, because it merely gives a new and clear form to what we have long been ruminating without suspecting it.
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 1152-1153
Proust recounts a conversation with Albertine, and his response to her words. Even though Albertine has played such a key role in Remembrance of Things Past, she still remains in many ways a frustrating cipher. My hope is that in the next two books, The Captive and The Fugitive, Proust fleshes her out. I always hearken back to Hitchcock's proposal that you create suspense by what the author doesn't tell you, and maybe Albertine is an interesting character because of what Proust is not telling us about her desires. We get glimpses, but it's difficult to say whether they truly represent her, or merely Marcel's imposed perceptions of her - or maybe our own imposed perceptions of her. For example, one wonders how innocent Albertine was, not simply in action, but in willingness to use emotional cruelty in response to Marcel's own emotional cruelty. You can dissect her comments to Marcel and they suddenly stop seeming like a spontaneous gush of emotion. " . . . You remember my telling you about a friend, older than me, who had been a mother, a sister to me, with whom I spent the happiest years of my life, at Trieste, and whom in fact I'm expecting to join in a few weeks at Cherbourg, where we shall set out on a cruise together (it sounds a bit weird, but you know how I love the sea)? Well, this friend (oh! not at all the type of woman you might suppose!), isn't this extraordinary, is the best friend of your Vinteuil's daughter, and I know Vinteuril's daughter almost as well as I know her. I always call them my two big sisters. . ." A long time ago I devoted several posts to the famous scene where a young Marcel spies (there's really not a better word for it) on Vinteuil's daughter and her lover. When Albertine mentions her friendship with Vinteuil's daughter does this mean that she is ignorant of Marcel's experience (and his resulting knowledge that she is a lesbian) or is she clumsily emotionally tone-deaf or is she being willfully cruel? I keep coming back to the third option because of Albertine including the, what at first blush might seem like a throwaway line, about how it was "the happiest years of my life." Hopefully we'll learn more about Albertine's deeper motives and dreams and desires in the next two installments.
Not surprisingly, these words from Albertine usher in more doubt and jealousy and misery in Marcel. He tells us, "It was a terrible terra incognita on which I had just landed, a new phase of undreamed-of-sufferings that was opening before me" Several posts ago I proposed that suffering, or at least prolonged utterly self-possessed suffering, might be considered to be one aspect of privilege. However, am I also being callous in making that statement? It's also, doubtless, a testament to a kinder soul, a deeper thinker, a person blessed/cursed with more imagination. Proust tells us, "It is often simply from lack of creative imagination that we do not go far enough in suffering." Much earlier Proust noted that, "In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind." Is this intense suffering a worthy trade-off for a heightened sense of the world and of the self?
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