Albertine Part 1/ In Search of Lost Time 5
Keeps Albertine hidden.
They sleep in separate rooms.
Almost like a marriage.
Pg 4 – the whole thing about the inner selves and the little
barometer man who is happy about the sun.
At least his mother is shocked at the living arrangements.
Says Albertine’s travel boxes look like coffins and “so that I did not know whether they would
bring life into our house or death” (5).
Not a healthy relationship.
“ . . .for the evil was not in Albertine alone but in other
women, for whom every chance of pleasure was worth taking. A look from one of them, immediately
understand by the other brings the sex-starved pair together” (14).
Really is a possessive relationship. But at least he recognizes that it isn’t
love. He speaks about her as if she were
an animal, like a messed up but more accurate My Fair Lady.
Didn’t he suspect Andree in the last book, but here he just
take’s Albertine’s word for it.
“Suffering alone gave life to my tedious attachment to her”
(19).
“Before putting on this or that dress, the woman has had to
make a choice, not between two that are more or less similar, but between two
wholly individual ones, each of which could have its own name” (25).
‘But the intimate lives, where the madman deprives himself
of all pleasures, and seeks out the most terrible sufferings are usually the
lives that change the least” (35).
“It would be a more serious objection if true to say that
all these feelings are remote from us, and that poetry should be drawn from
what is true and near at hand. Art
derived from the most familiar reality does exist and its range is perhaps the
greatest. But is nonetheless true that
great interest, sometimes even beauty, can spring from actions which derive
from a mode of thinking and feeling so remote from anything we fell, anything
we believe, that we cannot even begin to understand them, that they unfold
before us like an unexplained spectacular. What is more poetic than Xerxes’s son Darius
having the sea whipped rods, the se that had swallowed up his fleet?” (38)
Pg 40 says Charlus knows that Jupien’s niece had a slip when
was just a girl and the fact that it is told from a male pov – a slip – what type
of slip, would a woman ask this at this time.
Is it something like Marcel is doing Albertine? And how badly is Albertine being served by
those around her. I wonder what
Francoise truly things – it has to be more than jealously that Marcel says she
feels. And if her view of the whole
thing would be radically different from Marcel who just talks as if she is blindingly
loyal.
And Charlus’ view of Jupien’s niece and Morel is so droit de
seigneur. And so very creepy and unsettling
because of the power difference. There
is also the fact that she doesn’t seem to have any allies. We are not even told her name in this
sequence. She is being defined solely as
the men see her. It is very creepy. Morel wants to make her into a prostitute/pimp
but only serving women.
“The young girl’s passion for the violinist streamed around
her like her hair when it was down, like the joy that overflowed her eyes.”
(43).
Is Andree jealous, and if so who of?
“When one has fallen in love first with one painter, then
with another, one can finally admire the whole museum in a way that is not
chilly, for the admiration of successive loves, each of which in its time was exclusive but which have
finally coalesced” (54).
Charlus and Marcel mirror each other.
“Nor was it only the sea at twilight that lived for me in
Albertine but sometimes the calm of the sea on the shore on moonlit nights”
(59).
Swann loved Odette because she looked like a Giotto, Marcel
loves Albertine because she looks like a plant.
“By closing her eyes, by losing consciousness, Albertine had
put off, one by one, the various marks of humanity which had so disappointed me
in her, from the day we first met” (60).
“She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of
trees, a life more different from my own, stronger, and yet which I
possessed more securely” (60).
So she is hothouse flower that only he has access to, a rare
orchid something on display for only him – or that he wants on display for only
him and to keep unsullied. Make me think
of how Hamlet described how his father treated his mother – is it romantic or
controlling? Caring or possessive?
It also make me think of those rich people who buy art and
then store it away for only them to look at.
“Watching her, holding her in my hands, I felt that I
possessed her completely, in a way I never did when she was awake” (60).
“What I experienced then was a love for something as pure,
as immaterial, as mysterious as if I had been fore those inanimate creatures
that we call the beauties of nature” (60).
Uses animal and doll comparisons to Albertine.
“Once we pass a certain age, the soul of the child we used
to be and the souls of the dead from whom we spring come and scatter over us
handfuls of their riches and their misfortunes, asking to bear a part in the
new feelings we are experiencing: feelings which allow us, rubbing out their old
effigies, to recast them in an original creation. Thus, all my past since my earliest years,
and beyond these, my relatives’ pas, mixed into my carnal love for Albertine the
sweetness of a love both filial and maternal.
Once a certain hour has come we have to welcome them, all these
relatives who have come so for to assemble around us” (68-69).
“Then, while jealously touches us to recognize a propensity
to lying in the women we love, it also multiples that prosperity a hundredfold once
she has learned we are jealous” (79).
“The demands of our jealousy and the extent of out blind credulity
are both greater than the women we love could have imagined.” (85).
“What attaches us to other human beings is the thousand tiny
roots, the innumerable threads formed by memoires of the previous evening,
hopes for the following morning; it is this continuous web of habit from which
we cannot extricate ourselves” (86).
“Love, in painful anxiety as in happy desire, is the need
for complete possession. It is born, it
lives only for so long as there is something left to conquer. We love only that which we do not wholly
possess.” (95).
The whole description of the Paris street sellers reminds of
Oliver!
“It has been said that beauty is the promise of
happiness. Reversing the idea, the
prospect of pleasure can also be the beginning of beauty” (127).
Little Red Riding Hood.
“We want to find in woman a statue quite different from the one she first showed
us” (129).
“The curiosity of love is like our curiosity about place
names: always disappointed, it is always reborn and remains insatiable” (130).
Well that explains all the place name discussions.
Pg 169 Bergotte dies – Marcel seems a little unaffected.
“Love, no, pleasure well rooted in the flesh helps literary
work because it cancels out other pleasures, the pleasure of social life, for
example, which are the same for everyone” (170).\
Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner. Trans. Carol Clark. Penguin: 2017.
Pinterst Board: The Prisoner
Comments
Post a Comment