My day with Proust

It's Monday, so back to the novel and our question today is "Did Proust believe in love?"

I've mentioned before the brilliant way Proust uses his own experience as a little boy craving his mother's kiss to write about Swann's craving as an adult man for Odette's attention. It was a large part of Proust's object to show that a person need not have lived an experience to write about it and that, therefore, Saint-Beuve's contention that we need to study the artist's autobiography to understand the art was misleading.

A while ago, a cousin of mine read something critical I had written of Woody Allen and said, "You can't criticize him because you have no idea what it feels like to be him and to experience what he has experienced". That's nonsense of course but it's a common form of nonsense. It's solipsistic. And Proust, like his contemporary Wittgenstein, saw that solipsism is a huge problem for modern moral psychology. Thus his insistence that, contrary to Saint-Beuve, we can put ourselves in the place of others and share their experience of the world even if we know nothing of their lives. And the fact that we cannot do this with the same certainty that we do mathematical calculations does not mean that we cannot do it all.

But, we might stop and ask ourselves questions. For example, is the feeling that a child has for its mother love? Well, stupid question, of course it is. Then again, we might say, "Well, that depends on what you mean by love." No woman, for example, wants the man she loves to crave her in that terribly one-sided way that a boy child feels love for his mother. That sort of love might be flattering for a while but it would very quickly become tiresome to always be the mother figure, which is a large part of why Odette tires of and begins cheating on Swann. Any man who offers a woman the sort of clinging, needy love that Marcel has for his mother and Swann has for Odette is going to be cheated on and damn well deserves to be.

And here the temptation to grant Saint-Beuve his revenge and go all auto-biographical on Proust is very strong. The temptation is to say that, in an era when homosexuality was so suppressed, Proust never had the opportunity to learn what love based on mutual giving was. Without this crucial experience, we might continue, he was unable to write convincingly about any of his characters being in love and, especially, he was unable to give Marcel, his narrator, such an experience.

[Note: as far as possible, "Marcel" means the narrator of and character in the novel and "Proust" means the author.]

And we must give full weight to the evidence here. Really convincing portraits of mutually giving love are, at the very least, rare in Proust. It's not that such a thing is absent. We might well argue that such a relationship must exist between by Marcel's parents but, to so, we would have to argue that it is there by implication. Proust spends literally hundreds of pages describing an odd narcissistic kind of love that is spurred by jealousy; that is to say, a love where the intensity of the love is a product of feelings that are inside the lover. This is not a love that grows through mutual efforts as two people go through a courtship ritual. Quite the contrary, Proust denigrates habit and writes as if habitual love and willed love are only illusions.

Cruising by

The large division of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs* called "Place-Names: The Place" begins with some absolutely brilliant observations about social distinctions and interactions at a seaside "Grand Hotel". Also running through it, as if preparing us for the theme that will dominate in the final movement, Proust has his narrator see beautiful young women (and, with less emphasis, some boys). But he sees them only in passing: from the train, from a carriage and on a bridge he walks by on his way to see an historic church. He never has a chance to connect with these girls.

Along the way, our narrator makes some telling observations not about love but about the psychology of love. And these observations are quite frankly solipsistic. The only reactions from the girls that interests him are those reactions that would confirm his impact on them. And, as we will see later this week, the impact he seeks is bluntly sexual. I'm going to cite him at some length here, interrupting to make comments as I go along.

1. These glimpses, and the loss of every girl glimpsed, aggravated the state of agitation in which I spent my days; and I wished for the wisdom of the philosophers who counsel the curbing of desires (assuming they mean one's desire for another person, as that is the only mode of desiring which can lead to anxiety, focusing as it does on a world beyond our ken but within our awareness—to assume they mean desire for wealth would be too absurd).

 Note that on one level this simply is not true. As I write this, we are one week from an American presidential election. There are lots of people who desire an outcome and that desire is causing them lots of anxiety. That said, we can still see Marcel's point but we can see this if and only if the thing we are talking about is a desire to possess another sexually. Okay, moving on:

2. At the same time I was inclined to find something lacking in this wisdom, sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers, rare though common along every country roadside, a new spice being added to life by the untried treasures of each day, by every outing with its unkept promises, my enjoyment of which had hitherto been prevented only by contingent circumstances which might not always be present.

Okay, note the expression "unkept promises" which has a delightful ambiguity here. Who is promising and not keeping? Is that the "flowering girls" he sees are not available to him or is it that he, by moving so quickly from each glimpsed wonder top the later one who replaces her. Well, keep that thought in mind and read the next sentence:

3. Of course, it may be that, in looking forward to a freer day when I meet similar girls along different roads, I had already begun to adulterate the exclusive desire to share one's life with an individual woman whom one has seen as pretty; and the mere act of entertaining the possibility artificially fostering it was an implicit acknowledgment that it was an illusion.

Okay, lots of parsing needed here. At first glance we can see Proust's intention easily enough. Although Marcel is in the North, he thinks like a southerner and he shares the belief held by Dante and the troubadours that love that is sought after is not real. The superior love is the one that is not sought and that reflects something greater than the person who pursues it.

The joys of translation

Fair enough, but we are also losing something here.

First, note that the similar sound and root shared by "adulterate" and "adultery" does not exist in French. Our translator has put it here in the hope of capturing something Proust does in French in a  different way more suitable to the inherent poetry of the English language. And it sort of works with the notion of "unkept promises" in the previous sentence.

But none of that is in the original! There it is in another word "croître", translated here by the humble English word "to sow", where the wonderful ambiguity lurks.

If we go back to the second sentence, we can already see the thing going astray. Consider the clause:

"... sensing well enough that these glimpsed encounters made for greater beauty in a world which sows such flowers ..."

The French reads:

"... car je me disais que ces rencontres me fassaient trouver encore plus beau un monde qui fait ainsi croître sur toutes toutes les routes campagnardes des fleurs ..."

Here is fairly literal rendering of that:

"... for I told myself that these encounters made me find more beautiful a world that so made to grow on every country road these flowers ..."

Notice how much more active the intelligence of young Marcel is here in the French than it is in the first translation. He tells himself that he is finding the world more beautiful. The English translation I am reading makes a completely different sense with its "sensing well enough" and "made for a greater beauty". These are passive expressions that describe something happening to young Marcel and not something that he is doing.

And the world around Marcel is also different in the original. The word "croître" shares both the sound and the and the root of the French word for faith. It doesn't mean "faith" but we will feel that. What "croître" does mean is to grow but it also means to develop slowly towards an end. These girls are flowering, meaning they are coming to the most magnificent phase of a natural development.

If we go on to sentence three, the word Proust uses is not the French of "adulterate" but he uses "fausser" which means to distort or pervert. Now, if we combine that with the more active role that Marcel is playing in the way his thoughts are shaping his world, we can see that something more intentional is happening here.

Conclusion

So, does Proust believe in love? We can't say just yet.








* Literally, that translates as "in the shadow of young girls in flower" and recent versions have been published under that title. This "accurate" translation, however, loses all the poetry of the French. C.K. Scott Montcrieff's "Within A Budding Grove", on the other hand, has lots of poetry but, unfortunately, the wrong poetry. The point that the French conveys and the English does not is that the girls in question are sexually powerful. Think, "they are in flower but you are not". Young Marcel is still at that age where boys are behind girls and clumsily struggling to gain sexual maturity.