Previously on: One Proust a Year -
Proust scholars say that, if you’re in a crunch, Volume Five of In Search of Lost Time is entirely skippable. With my “One Proust a Year” pace and my appetite for punishment, I decided to dive into The Captive, discovering at the end that it was definitely the most inessential chapter yet; even given Proust’s standard lack of propulsive plotting, this one is especially turgid. After the lurid raciness of Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive shifts down into one essential problem: jealousy. The narrator – who in this volume admits that his name might be Marcel – has his lover Albertine somewhat scandalously installed in his Parisian lodgings, in theory in advance of their upcoming engagement, but in actuality so that he can always keep track of her whereabouts. If she leaves the house, he has someone go with her to report on what she’s done while he stays back; if he goes out, he usually makes sure she’s staying home while he’s away. On the rare occasions they go out together, he’s suspicious of every person they run into and especially every “inverted” woman who might catch Albertine’s eye, and he spends the rest of the time trying to catch her in one of her lies. The narrator doesn’t even like Albertine anymore – though he does enjoy their nighttime assignations – but has become so maniacally jealous of Albertine’s real or imagined other lovers that he becomes extremely possessive:
It was not that I was wholly indifferent to Albertine’s presence in the house. Her separation from her girl friends had succeeded in sparing my heart any fresh anguish. It kept it in a state of repose, in a semi-immobility which would help it to recover. But this calm which my mistress procured for me was an assuagement of suffering rather than a positive joy. Not that it did not enable me to taste many joys from which the intensity of my anguish had debarred me, but far, from my owing them to Albertine, who in any case I no longer found very pretty and with whom I was bored, with whom I was indeed clearly conscious that I was not in love, I tasted these joys on the contrary when Albertine was not with me.
It is in this maniac drive that Proust continues to define his view of desire, which is founded on the inaccessibility or indiscretion of the other, on removing the vast unknowability of another person’s world and making it yours. Once it becomes yours, though, the thrill is gone, and resentment sets in, and so the narrator swings wildly between coveting Albertine and wanting her gone; every time she might be secretly meeting with a girlfriend, he intervenes to keep her secluded, but once she’s in tow, he thinks of the trip to Venice he could be taking instead of keeping tabs on her. Who exactly is the titular captive is sometimes up for debate, as the narrator becomes trapped in a kind of conditional life, bound in his jealousy against all that he could be:
What attaches us to people are the countless roots, the innumerable threads which are our memories of last night, our hopes for to-morrow morning, the continuous weft of habit from which we can never free ourselves. Just as there are misers who hoard from generosity, so ware spendthrifts who spend from avarice, and it is not so much to a person that we sacrifice our life as to everything of ours that may have become attached to that person, all those hours and days, all those things compared with which the life we have not yet lived, our life in the relative future, seems to us more remote, more detached, less intimate, less our own.
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