My Years With Proust - Day 525

   To return to the girls whom we passed in the streets, never would Albertine stare at an old person, man or woman, with such fixity, or on the other hand with such reserve and as though she saw nothing.  Cuckolded husbands who know nothing in fact know perfectly well. But it requires more accurate and abundant evidence to create a scene of jealousy.  Besides, if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency to falsehood in the woman we love, it multiplies this tendency a hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous.  She lies (to an extent to which she has never lied to us before), whether from pity, or from fear, or because she instinctively shies away in a flight that is symmetrical with our investigations.  True, there are love affairs in which from the start a woman of easy virtue has posed as virtue incarnate in the eyes of the man who is in love with her. But how many others consist of two diametrically opposite periods! In the first, the woman speaks almost freely, with slight modifications, of her zest for pleasure and of the amorous life which it has made her lead, all of which she will deny later on with the utmost vigour to the same man when she senses that he is jealous of her and spying on her. He comes to regret the days of those first confidences, the memory of which torments him nevertheless.  If the woman continued to make them, she would furnish him almost unaided with the secret of her conduct which he has been vainly pursuing day after day.  And besides, what abandoned those early confidences proved, what trust, what friendship! If she cannot live without being unfaithful to him, at least she would be doing so as a friend, telling him of her pleasures, associating him with them.  And he thinks with regret of the sort of life which the early stages of their love seemed to promise, which the sequel has rendered impossible, turning that love into something agonisingly painful, which will make a final parting, according to circumstances, either inevitable or impossible.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, p. 85

Albertine has often proven to exist maddeningly just out of focus, both for Marcel himself and for me (although I'm sure more sensitive and intelligent souls see her with greater clarity).  I've proposed that while Marcel appears to cause most of the problems in their relationship through his jealousy and lack of resolve it does seem that at times it's Albertine who makes the situation worse (not simply because of her love affairs, of which we'll learn more soon [spoiler alert] but also because of the things that she says to him); essentially, there are times when she is clearing winding him up, not that he doesn't deserve it.  Proust tells us, "Besides, if jealousy helps us to discover a certain tendency to falsehood in the woman we love, it multiplies this tendency a hundredfold when the woman has discovered that we are jealous." That is, Albertine may naturally lie, but she is much more likely to lie if she knows of Marcel's jealousy.  Why?  According to Proust: "She lies (to an extent to which she has never lied to us before), whether from pity, or from fear, or because she instinctively shies away in a flight that is symmetrical with our investigations." So, she may lie because she is being investigated, which is logical, whether she's guilty or not, and she'll lie in symmetry to the level to which she is being investigated; the more you push in your mad jealousy the more you promote lies.  Proust also makes it clear that a woman will lie from fear or from pity.  First off, fear. It's obviously heartbreaking that a woman would have to lie out of fear, whether or not the accusations hurled at them are true or not. Was Marcel a character who inspires fear? It's almost impossible to separate Marcel the character in Remembrance of Things Past from Marcel Proust the author of Remembrance of Things Past, so we default to frail, sickly Marcel, so maybe we don't take him seriously enough as a threatening figure.  If he's not obviously a physically threatening figure, he's clearly a societally or culturally threatening figure in that he represents the ruling patriarchy in an age when women had much fewer options.  That doesn't mean that he's not physically threatening.  We just need to think back to that scene with the waitress in the dark guesthouse where he was, at the very least, as my students will indelicately say, "rapey."  Yes, he could act that way because of societal dictates, but was there also a physical menace involved?  Clearly, Proust is speaking more generally and philosophically here, but with a work as deeply personal as Remembrance of Things Past it's hard to not assign these statements to Proust himself.  Secondly, pity.  I've had female friends joke about expeditiously dolling out pity fucks to husbands or boyfriends, and sometimes friends, over the years. At a certain point in the brilliant film Memento Leonard realizes that (my pretend girlfriend) Natalie will help him out of pity (or he thinks she will help him out of pity; as we learn, she has her own agenda, which makes her such a great femme fatale).  Can you lie out of pity?  The obvious answer is, well duh.  In this case I would argue that you're lying out of pity because you're guilty but also because you are in love with the person to whom you're lying.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, why in the hell is this film being remade?  You should only remake movies that could have been great but possessed some fatal flaw that can be fixed; you should never remake a truly great film.

What I also find interesting about this section if Proust's comments about virtue, or perceived virtue, or promoted virtue: "True, there are love affairs in which from the start a woman of easy virtue has posed as virtue incarnate in the eyes of the man who is in love with her."  Again, this is completely logical.  Everything is about perception and the masks we choose to wear, and this is never more true than with the people we love.  We pretend to be a different person to lure potential lovers, even if it's just, as in this case, trying to assuage their fears about our past.  However, it's more complicated that that, according to Proust:  "But how many others consist of two diametrically opposite periods! In the first, the woman speaks almost freely, with slight modifications, of her zest for pleasure and of the amorous life which it has made her lead, all of which she will deny later on with the utmost vigour to the same man when she senses that he is jealous of her and spying on her."  Instead of hiding her sexual past she champions it, becoming the very personification of desire and carnal experience. Not to be indelicate, but I remember a friend telling me years and years ago about a particularly memorable moment with a new girlfriend in a narrow stairwell (think of the stairwell scene between Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello in David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, only with the sexes reversed) where she, in the process of pulling down his pants, said "I sit at my desk at work and can't get anything done because this is all I think about."  Proust proposes that the woman will later deny that she had said any of these things once she learns of his jealousy.  But would it happen no matter what, whether he was jealous or not?   So, the woman in my friend's narrative would have not only never repeated the staircase adventure as his wife, but probably denied it ever happened and if he brought it up she would have assigned it to him confusing her with another woman (of easy virtue) and using it as leverage to make him feel guilty. We've previously discussed the amount of casual depravity that a woman will accept/promote, and that fact that it is greater as a girlfriend than what she will accept/promote as a fiancee, which is in turn greater than she will accept/promote than when she is a wife.   Is this a case of familiarity breeding contempt or the perceived elevating societal sanctity associated with the positions of fiancee or wife?  Men are famous/infamous, and rightly so, for their Madonna/whore dichotomy with the women in their lives, but women all too often have their own parallel paradigm, which drives their men, and, sadly probably more themselves, insane.

Maria Bello from the classic cheerleader scene.  I'm not that big of a Cronenberg fan, but you should definitely check out A History of Violence, and not for any prurient reasons; it really is a very good film (and inspired a great parody on an Archer episode) and is now going to make it back into my Netflix queue (rarely this blog makes itself useful, and prompting me to update my queue is one of them).