Proust Progress Report 16: She’s gone

Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (text established under the direction of Jean-Yves Tadié ©1987–1992): the beginning of Book 6, Albertine disparue (pages 1919–1999)

Albertine disparue (English titles The Fugitive and The Sweet Cheat Gone) takes up immediately after the moment at the end of Book 5 when the servant Françoise tells Marcel that Mlle Albertine has packed her bags and left. The 80 pages I’ve read this month are single-mindedly devoted to his reactions. First he tries to get her back by his usual convoluted method of dissembling his true feelings, and he almost succeeds. Then (I’ll try to avoid spoilers) it becomes clear that Albertine will definitely never return, and the narration gives us the twists and turns of his mental processes: what happens to his obsessive jealousy now that she’s gone? does he find relief from the claustrophobia he suffered when she was living with him? does he love her and need her more than he realised?

If Proust is remembered most for his treatment of memory, these pages, in which his grief-stricken mind remembers Albertine in a hundred ways, must be key. He is made up of multiple mois, each learning of her departure at his own time. Albertine has split up into multiple tiny household deities, each animating an otherwise mundane object with an emotional charge. He catches himself in myriad ways thinking of her as somehow alive and – for example – being glad to see how much he does love her. Many, if not all, of the threads of the narrative so far, help shape these moments (and such is the treatment of time, you can’t tell whether the moments are spread over weeks, months or even perhaps years). All the earlier deaths and liaisons and desires we have been told about are summoned to shed light on his present state.

Though Marcel does take action, at first to persuade Albertine to return and then to seek evidence to support or refute his obsessive suspicion that she was secretly an active lesbian, my impression is that he barely leaves his apartment in these pages or talks to anyone apart from the people he sends to negotiate and investigate.

This is all fascinating, no irony intended. The intricate dissection of the character’s mental processes is stunning. I’m probably influenced by the knowledge that these last two books were published after Proust’s death, and weren’t subjected to the same thorough revision process as the previous ones, but it does feel somewhat repetitious (as opposed to obsessive, and I know there’s a big overlap), and I hope he soon manages to move on.

I may have mentioned that, unlike Miles Franklin whose copy of À la recherche du temps perdu has notes in the margins indicating that she frequently looked up words she didn’t know, and unlike Clive James who took 15 years to read it dictionary in hand, I’m willing to read on with just a rough sense of the meaning. Typically, I’ll look up two or three in every three-page reading session. And it’s one of the pleasures of reading this book that often when I look up a word, it’s as if the meaning of a sentence or an image solidifies before my eyes. An example from this morning:

On dit quelquefois qu’il peut subsister quelque chose d’un être après la mort si cet être était un artiste et mettait un peu de soi dans son oeuvre. C’est peut-être de la même manière qu’une sorte de bouture prélevé sur un être et greffée au coeur d’un autre, continue à y poursuivre sa vie, même quand l’être d’où elle avait été détachée a péri.

This is how I read that at first:

They say that something of a person may live on after death if that person was an artist and put a little of themselves into their work. Perhaps in the same way a sort of blah-blah removed from a person and blah-blahed to the heart of another continues to carry on its life, even when the person from whom it had been detached has perished.

I got the gist. But decided out of interest to look up bouture and greffée. Bouture is a gardening term meaning ‘cutting’, from bouturer, ‘to propagate by cuttings’. I hardly needed to look up greffer, whose meaning of ‘graft’ or ‘implant’ is now clear. And the image comes viscerally alive. Or cardiacally, if that’s a word.

I doubt if I’ll manage three pages every day over Christmas and New Year, as we’ll be taking advantage of the open state borders and doing a bit of driving. But I’ll try to keep to schedule and do another progress report on 14 January. Maybe poor Marcel will have cheered up and got a hobby.