Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Proust: More love

Here is a passage to ponder:
If we believed that the eyes of such a girl were nothing but shiny little discs of mica, we would not be eager to enter her life and link it to our own. But we are well aware that whatever it is that shines in those reflective discs is not reducible to their material composition; that flitting behind them are the black incognizable shadows of the ideas she forms and the people and places she knows ... the dimness of the house into which she will disappear, her own impenetrable projects and the designs of others upon her; and that what we are most aware of is that she herself lies behind them with her desires, her likes and dislikes, the power of her inscrutable and inexhaustible will. I knew I could never possess the young cyclist, unless I could also possess what lay behind her eyes.
There is a sense that all that makes sense. We could read it in certain moods and think, I recognize that sentiment.

It also seems to me that much of it is slightly unhinged. Notice how he starts with expressions such as "enter her life" and "link it to our own" but ends with a desire to penetrate the "impenetrable" and "possess" her. Again, we might think ordinary male attitudes towards love. But how much can these be justified? Especially the second?

And note that there is something here that simply isn't true. We can tell what other people are thinking and feeling from looking at them. No, we can't do it perfectly and we can't actually read minds. But much of the time, we can read people's intentions and feelings towards us from their facial expressions. Well, most of us. There are people who cannot.

The sense in which all the above is most credible is if we imagine these as the thoughts of an adolescent boy.

It is well, well, into the volume entitled A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs that the five girls whom young Marcel finds himself in the shade of make their appearance*. In some ways they are more boy-like than girl-like but I think any heterosexual male can identify with this thought of young Marcel's when he tells us the various things he thought about the girls:
Certainly, in none of my conjectures did I entertain the possibility that they might be chaste.
Not because it is impossible to imagine women as chaste but you tend not to when you are sexually attracted to them.  

Which leads to odd tensions. You sit down and have a pleasant conversation about Proust with the woman you just a few hours ago were imagining what it would be like to dribble chocolate sauce on her nipples, which you have never seen, and watch it form little dark  streams down over her white, white breasts. And you wonder, "Does she know what sort of things I think of her?" and "Would she be pleased or horrified?" All the while you keep up the pretense.

Now, the normal course of events is that you meet a woman and the two of you get closer and slower and get a better and better understanding of your thoughts about one another. She doesn't know about the chocolate precisely but she knows you and gets a good notion of how you are likely to have thought about her and you get a better understanding of her and how she is likely to respond to being told that you have thought such things. And away you go.

But in adolescence such things seem impossible. Girls are older and more knowing than you and, at the same time, your thoughts of them seem so over the top that you cannot imagine connecting.
What sort of world was the one from which she was looking at me? I could not tell, any more than one could tell from the few details which a telescope enables us to descry on a neighbouring planet whether it is inhabited by human beings, whether or not they can see us, or whether their review of us has inspired any reflections in them.
Naturally, you are attracted to girls but, equally naturally, girls whose outward behaviour is a little more vulgar and openly sexual, and who perhaps belong to a new and rising class not so beholden to all the manners and mires that make direct expression between boys and girls more difficult. And thus the five girls who come down the beach at Balbec.





* Why does this second volume take so long to get to the point? Why make your reader beat his way hundreds of pages in, more than 60 percent of the text, before justifying your title? The answer to that, I think, is that the first volume was self-published and Proust was limited in the number of pages he could print. As a consequence, he cut the third section of volume 1 way down. When he found an actual publisher to print volume 2, he revisited at the beginning the stuff he would have liked to have put in Volume1.

I know this is heresy, but I rather wish he hadn't. I think Proust needed an editor and there isn't a single volume of the novel that couldn't have been cut quite a bit and thereby have been made even better.

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