The Cambridge Introduction to Marcel Proust - Adam A. Watt [59]
Before then, at the Verdurin soirée, we see how, as Charlus has aged, aspects of his character, particularly his sexuality, have become more pronounced, almost to the point of caricature. The Narrator says of Charlus that ‘he recognized immediately things to which no one would ever have paid attention, and this not only in works of art but in dishes at a dinner-party (and everything else between painting and cooking)’ (C, 247; P, 1759), remarks which remind us of the similarity between Charlus and the mature Narrator himself. Indeed, as we learn more about Charlus and Morel’s relationship we recognize troubles resembling the Narrator’s own. Charlus’s concerns about a salacious letter from Léa to Morel that he accidentally opens, however, equally recall Swann’s turmoil over Odette’s letter to Forcheville in ‘Swann in Love’. Proust shows us how love affairs, whatever their nature, tend to take similar paths, stimulate the same emotions and insecurities, and in almost every case we blunder on, happily blinded by our desires to the fate that awaits us. There is a tension, then, between this point and that illustrated by M. Verdurin’s unexpected compassion towards Saniette: relations and loves often unfold in the same patterns, yet individuals’ characters are unpredictable, endlessly shifting. Proust does not seek to resolve this tension: he delights in observing how life can leave us perplexed or delighted by unforeseeable twists and turns just as often as it can pitch us into despair by taking a course which is familiar but over which we have no control. Drawing our attention to such matters, Proust invites us to revisit our earlier assessments of people and situations, wills us to look more carefully, to judge less quickly.
The closing movement of The Captive draws away from the salons and brings us back into the enclosed spaces shared by the Narrator and Albertine. When he arrives home, he pauses to look up at Albertine’s window, lit from within: behind the ‘parallel bars of gold’ formed by the light escaping the slats of the shutters, the Narrator is aware that there lies a treasure, but one ‘in exchange for which I had forfeited my freedom, my solitude, my thought’. Proust’s language recalls the conceits of the metaphysical poets: these bars have the semantic value of precious metal and carceral confinement; Albertine is enclosed yet the Narrator feels entrapped: ‘I seemed to behold the luminous gates’, he suggests, ‘which were about to close behind me and of which I myself had forged, for an eternal slavery, the inflexible bars of gold’ (C, 378; P, 1852). Joy for the Narrator – and for Albertine – is a long way off, and something between them has to give.
His jealous inquisitions resume, provoking lies and unexpected revelations in equal measure. The floodgates yield when Albertine loses her temper and lets slip part of a phrase whose full sense the Narrator, like a frustrated crossword puzzler, takes a long time to piece together. Albertine cries that she wishes he would leave her ‘une fois libre pour que j’aille me faire casser …’ (P, 1857) [free for once so that I can go and get myself b…] (C, 385, trans. mod.). The expression that the Narrator eventually realizes, with shock and dismay, had been on Albertine’s lips is ‘me faire casser le pot’, an extremely vulgar slang phrase meaning ‘to have anal intercourse’. Albertine’s language has always been a source of fascination and pleasure for the Narrator; now her words represent a gateway to an abject world whose existence he has suspected, but the reality of which, for reasons of self-preservation, he had not fully countenanced.
This verbal wound for the Narrator is a deep one. His reaction is to suggest that they separate the following day. In the conversation that ensues things deteriorate as Albertine,