My Years With Proust - Day 538

  However, I was still at the first stage of enlightenment with regard to Lea.  I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her.  No matter, it came to the same thing.  I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadero.  I say that I did not know whether she knew Lea or not; yet I must in fact have learned this at Balbec, from Albertine herself.  For amnesia obliterated from my mind as well as from Albertine's a great many of the statements that she had made to me.  Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into the potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain forever unverifiable.  One pays no attention to anything that one does not connect with the real life of the woman one loves; one forgets immediately what she has said to one about such and such an incident or such and such people one does not know, and her expression while she was saying it.

Marcel Proust, The Captive, pp. 142-143

Proust is fretting about Albertine's relationship with a woman by the name of Lea, whom she may or may not know. Fearing the seeming inevitability of Albertine and Lea falling into bed, or falling back into bed, he proposes, "I must at all costs prevent her from renewing this acquaintance or making the acquaintance of this stranger at the Trocadero." He admits that, "I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her.  No matter, it came to the same thing."

Several topics spring from this odd little interchange.  First off, such is Marcel's jealousy that it relates to events real and imaginary, although to be fair I guess that's true of all of us, and the imaginary ones are always the ones that inspire the worst and most painful jealous seizures.  It's not the fact that your friend placed his hand on your lover's lower back as he squeezed past in her in a crowded room, but rather that he clearly feels he owns her lower back because they clearly spent the afternoon having sweaty sex in a hotel room (a very Proustian perception). Secondly, the other day a friend of mine asked me if Proust is ever funny, and I replied that he's sort of funny in the same way that Jane Austen is sort of funny: you had to be there; and in this case what I mean is that you have to get the pace of the conversation and his/her sardonic internal logic and the subtlety of language. When he says, "I was not even aware whether Albertine knew her.  No matter, it came to the same thing" I think he's being funny in a very subtle and self-knowing fashion, tweaking himself and winking at the readers.  Proust is also often funny when he's presenting other characters, especially the more marginal ones, although in more of a sarcastic, biting way than in the more broad-based humorous Dickensian fashion.

Finally, and not surprisingly, Proust brings it back to memory.  He can't quite remember how he knows about the connection or theoretical connection between Albertine and Lea, and finally has to admit that he would have probably had to have heard it from the former; although, if they don't even know each other then the memory becomes as problematical as their relationship.  Reflecting upon this uncertainty, Proust writes: "Memory, instead of being a duplicate, always present before one's eyes, of the various events of one's life, is rather a void from which at odd moments a chance resemblance enables one to resuscitate dead recollections; but even then there are innumerable little details which have not fallen into the potential reservoir of memory, and which will remain forever unverifiable." Faulkner, famously, told us that "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  The problem is, as we saw played out this weekend in Charlottesville, whose past?  Memory, whether on the individual or communal level, is a flawed and deeply subjective thing.  This may seem strange coming from a historian, but I think I'd have to agree with the proposal from the late Elizabeth Pena's character Pilar at the end of John Sayles's wonderful film Lone Star, "All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right?  Forget the Alamo."

Elizabeth Pena and Chris Cooper in the 1996 John Sayles film Lone Star, which is required viewing (and owning).  I made some of my students watch it (and write a paper on it) in Heroines & Heroes a couple years ago.