• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 579 0

however, it also – crucially – dampens his desire. Excised from the magical maritime context of Balbec, Albertine, the ‘glittering actress of the beach’, becomes ‘the grey captive, reduced to her drab self’ (C, 191; P, 1732–3). The Narrator experiences the same phenomenon when he brings to his room a dairymaid who, seen from his window, had piqued his interest: up close, however, ‘stripped of all the desires and imaginings that had been aroused in me, [she] was reduced to her mere self’ (C, 156; P, 1710). Reality thus overpowers his imagination’s illusion until the girl uses an unfamiliar name for a garment she wears and reveals that she rides a bicycle and wears a cap. As these details pile up we realize (even if the Narrator does not – he makes no mention of it) that this girl is not picked at random: she is an Albertine substitute. But, painfully for the Narrator, pretending to seek an address to which he must send the girl on an errand, he notices that at the Trocadéro, where he has sent Albertine in order to avert a meeting he suspects her of planning with Mlle Vinteuil chez Verdurin, Léa, the notorious lesbian actress, is playing the lead role in the main attraction (C, 157; P, 1711). This devastating news (did Albertine call his bluff, knowing that Léa was performing?) is rendered more bitter by the name of the play: Les Fourberies de Nérine is about the treacheries or deceptions (‘fourberies’) of Nérine, whose name has much in common with Albertine, whose own deceitfulness causes the Narrator such suffering.

For all that he claims no longer to love Albertine, revelations (or what he assumes are revelations) of this sort wreak havoc with the Narrator’s state of mind and constantly defer the possibility of his starting to write. Albertine’s proximity and his constant involvement in her life become a habit and, as he acknowledges late in the volume, ‘in love, it is easier to relinquish a feeling than to give up a habit’ (C, 406; P, 1870). The conventional sense of the term ‘love’, already a little bruised from its handling in ‘Swann in Love’, takes a battering in The Captive (at one point the Narrator achingly notes ‘here I mean by love reciprocal torture’; C, 117; P, 1684). Echoing Swann’s experience, the Narrator describes love as ‘an incurable malady’ (C, 89; P, 1666) before expanding on what he perceives as the primary obstacle to his happiness:

I realised the impossibility which love comes up against. We imagine that it has as its object a being that can be laid down in front of us, enclosed within a body. Alas, it is the extension of that being to all the points in space and time that it has occupied and will occupy. If we do not possess its contact with this or that place, this or that hour, we do not possess that being. But we cannot touch all these points. If only they were indicated to us, we might perhaps contrive to reach out to them. But we grope for them without finding them. Hence mistrust, jealousy, persecutions. We waste time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it. (C, 106; P, 1677)

In the simplest of terms, in this final sentence Proust highlights the fallibility that defines so many of our relations. Despite recognizing the impossibility of ‘possessing’ another person, the Narrator never manages to develop his conception of love beyond these terms, which are a significant limitation to his happiness. Even once Albertine has become ‘a burdensome slave’ of whom he wishes to rid himself (C, 424; P, 1882), his inability to possess a sure knowledge of where she has been, where, even, her desirous thoughts might have taken her, prevents him from making the decisive split that would grant them both their liberty. And so the tale shuttles back and forth between the ennui of intimacy and the fear of losing the ‘fugitive being’ whose presence is the unique salve to the Narrator’s anxiety.

The only time that he experiences unalloyed happiness in Albertine’s company is when she is asleep: then all that is flighty and elusive about her is contained, her eyes closed to the world and