The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 5 July 2009
by Marcel Proust
This is the sixth major part of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu. When Proust set out to write the novel, he had in mind two volumes, which largely make up what are now Swann's Way and Time Regained. He ended up with five volumes in between. He didn't live long enough to see all of the novel through publication, and his first translator into English, C. K. Scott Moncreiff, died before translating the last volume. Proust worked on the book in pieces and large parts of it feel more finished than others. As one wades through Proust's famously elaborate sentences, one comes to this volume and finds it feels the least polished of the lot so far. --- At the end of The Captive, Albertine, Marcel's veritible prisoner, makes her escape back to Tansonville and Marcel is shocked and, perhaps, heartbroken. This volume opens with no time having passed. Marcel copes with Albertine's audacity by becoming further obsessed over her homosexual proclivities. He held her captive in the first place, not really out of love, but out of his obsessive need to prevent her from having dalliances with women. The reader can be forgiven if he feels Marcel is a tiny bit off his rocker. Anyway, he eventually dispatches his longtime friend Robert de Saint-Loup to bribe Albertine into returning. At the same time, Marcel seems unable to realize the disturbed qualities of his obsession. Almost shockingly, in this interval, Marcel takes in a young girl. He bounces her on his knee and maybe fondles her a bit more. He finds himself up on charges for this behavior and is given a stern talking-to by a magistrate who just asks that Marcel be a bit more discreet. This reader found this episode troubling for what it says about our author and his narrator. Who is this guy? Is he a pedophile? And what does this suggest about Marcel Proust's own homosexual urges toward underage boys? --- Meanwhile, almost before Saint-Loup can finish his mission, Albertine dies falling from a horse that Marcel had bought for her. This launches Marcel, of course, into a lengthy disquisition on grief and loss. It is a compelling passage, as Proust develops a moving narrative of one man's sense of memory, his relationship with the ghosts of his past, and the lingering questions of his obsession with Albertine's sexual "tastes". He meets up again with their friend Andreé and engages her in talk about Albertine's habits (while perhaps having an affair with her as well). Unfortunately for Marcel, Andreé can only confirm that Albertine did like to mess around with other girls. Marcel goes back and forth trying to decide whether he is bothered by this revelation and finally decides that it is Time, the theme of the whole book, that will heal his wounds. Habit itself will dissolve the grief and bury Albertine in the past where she belongs. --- It is after this that the apparent incompleteness of this volume begins to show. A mysterious encounter brings Marcel back into contact with Gilberte, the girl he abandoned a couple of volumes back. She is the daughter of Swann and Odette, whose obsessive love affair was related in the first volume. Now grown up, Gilberte is barely recognizable and at first engenders numerous sexual fantasies that Marcel, once again, asks Saint-Loup to clarify. But this time Robert gets his facts wrong and Marcel finally realizes that Madamoiselle de Forcheville is in fact the girl he once loved. Somehow, though, he fails to reflect on his abandonment of her. The narrative grows uneven here, and some facts begin to shift paradoxically. Anyway, Gilberte, now the adopted daughter of Odette's new husband, is quite rich and eligible. --- Many times throughout the lengthy narrative of the Search..., Marcel dwells on his desire to go to Venice. He repeatedly allows his obsession with Albertine keep him from taking this trip. He dreamed of it, too, when he was a small boy looking at pictures Swann had shown to him of the art to be found there. Finally, in this volume, Marcel travels to this dream city. But Proust only gives fifty pages to the journey, and once there, dwells on the behavior of old ambassador Norpois instead of the beauties of the city. Before we settle in, we're dashing away from the city again, because Marcel cannot bear to be left there alone when his beloved mother departs. The Venice passage is promising, but strangely brief given Marcel's (and the reader's) expectations. --- Finally, Proust tells us of Saint-Loup's sudden marriage to Gilberte, and of a second marriage between Legrandin's son and the adopted daughter of Baron de Charlus, who is also the niece of the Baron's erstwhile lover Jupien. This is a complicated passage, in which Proust develops ideas of the dissolution of the aristocracy in the face of money and borrowed lineages. It is a key element in his meditation on the Faubourg Saint Germain. Marcel sees its cracks and its hipocrisies. And, he continues to discover men and women with those sexual "tastes", homosexuals everywhere. It is an interesting exercise for the reader to discern what Proust is trying to say about his own hidden sexual orientation. And the reader must also consider it in its context, a fairly buttoned-down social caste slowly dissolving in the first decades of the twentieth century. --- The book finally ends with Marcel taking a stroll back in Combray with Gilberte, and the story continues in its path full circle from the early days to these later episodes, in which Marcel is still struggling with the meaning of memory and the continuity of time, and Marcel the character slowly transforms into Marcel the writer.
Also by Proust: [Swann's Way] [Within a Budding Grove] [The Guermantes Way] [Sodom and Gomorrah] [The Captive]