Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Fugitive / Albertine disparue
245 Plays3 months ago
This is the volume of Albertine’s disappearance, first from the narrator’s home, then from life, and finally from the narrator’s memory. Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver contemplate Proust’s extended meditation on oblivion, love, jealousy, grief, and death. We discuss the careful rhythm of the volume, the transitory nature of the self, and the proliferation of doubles and specters. We travel to Venice, which for once disappoints us more than it does the narrator. Plus, we answer the question, “What is your favorite occupation?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Priest Curious'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Priest Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. I'm Emma Clausen, an Early Modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. And I'm Hannah Weaver, an Assistant Professor of Medieval Literature at Columbia University and Fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination. Priest Curious is a podcast about the experience of reading à la recherche du temps pejour, all seven volumes.
00:00:26
Speaker
Written between 1906 and 1922, published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's cultural touchstone is an object of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation. We're not Proust experts, but we do study literature for a living, so we feel both under and over-qualified to tackle this. Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
Exploring 'The Fugitive'
00:01:10
Speaker
Today, we're talking about the penultimate volume of the Recherche, Albertin di Spareu, or the Fugitive. As you'll recall, at the end of the last volume, Albertin had escaped from the narrator's prison. This volume opens with his frantic, if badly dissimulated, search for her and his attempts to lure her back, attempts which are doomed to fail, as Albertin dies in a riding accident only days after leaving his house.
00:01:37
Speaker
pages and pages pass in meditation on the nature of forgetting, habit, love, jealousy, and death, accompanied by obsessive investigations into Abetin's possible trysts with other women before she died. As his memories fade, the narrator re-enters the world through women that remind him of Abetin and finally becomes a published author.
00:01:59
Speaker
He travels to Venice with his mother to work on Ruskin, and on the train back to Paris, they receive word that the social order has been turned on its head by two shocking marriages, that of his friend Robert de Saint-Luc with Gilbert's swan, and that of an aristocrat with a tailor's niece. Put more simply, in this volume, Albertine is gone and then forgotten.
Proust Questionnaire - Occupations
00:02:23
Speaker
you Before we talk in more detail about this volume, it's time for a question from the famous Proust questionnaire, answered by Proust twice at ages 13 and 20, and used as an interview device by Vanity Fair. We'll put a link to the questionnaire in the show notes. But this week's question is, what is your favourite occupation? but to oup occupationionre And Proust answered, to love.
00:02:48
Speaker
and me
00:02:51
Speaker
Loving as an occupation is a lot. Did he mean like preoccupation? But Emma, I was saying that we should also answer with infinitive verbs. So I wondered if you took up the baton or if you were going to answer differently.
00:03:06
Speaker
I struggled with this question because I just found it really hard to come up with one answer and also to come up with an answer that wasn't like really banal or just like what I would fill in on a dating profile like I like girl walks on the beach. ah which Which I guess I do. although I actually did consider long walks as
00:03:27
Speaker
Not specifically on the beach, but I've got an even more uncool answer than that. Okay, do you want to hear it? Okay, I'm ready. I tried to go with a verb, but it's not totally. But like, my favourite occupation is to hang out with people I like, but in motion, right? Emma, you just described the origin story of our friendship. I'm kind of touched. You know, it could be running, it could be dancing, it could be walking, you know, some kind of hanging out in motion is is my favorite occupation, I think.
00:04:04
Speaker
hanging out in motion. I love this. and I think we have all the same favorite things. So it's hard to feel original after that because my answer was going to just be to walk. But it's I think it's better. I think it's better. You're right that like my very favorite is to walk with a friend. That's even better than walking alone. I do like to walk alone, like the cat that walks by itself or whatever. But I think, oh, gosh, cringe. Cringe.
00:04:36
Speaker
Other candidates were like to read. I'm so predictable. I'm exactly who you think I am at the end of the day. What would be the worst possible answer to like the most off-putting answer for me that someone might sincerely say? So obviously not like to murder or whatever. I was thinking about it. I was like, if someone was like, my favorite occupation is to argue, which some people do really love debates or whatever for me, I'd be like, okay, we are not going to be friends. That's a turnoff.
00:05:04
Speaker
Okay, bear with me. The real turn off to me would be, and this is gonna make me sound like a psycho, if someone said their favorite occupation was helping others.
00:05:15
Speaker
You do sound like a psycho. I'd be like, bud. Hard pass. Yeah, because I just don't trust people who advertise that quality in themselves. Yeah, it is a bit odd to like trumpet being selfless.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, you know, like, I'm just such a giver. I'm just, just don't worry. I love to give. You know, no thanks.
Themes of Grief and Memory
00:05:41
Speaker
Incredible. Give it to someone else. So keep it. Keep it. I do think that Proust's answer to love is totally insane also, considering that he has written one of the most pessimistic takes on love I've ever encountered. Well, to be fair, he did answer this answer when he was 20. So perhaps he just hadn't lived enough life to become such a love pessimist yet.
00:06:03
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, perhaps.
00:06:11
Speaker
How did you find this volume? What did you notice? I love this volume. I mean, I seem to have loved all of them, but I i really liked this. Again, I wasn't totally expecting to because some people had told me that it was a bit doleful, but I found it extraordinary and really, really moving. I will say that the little comment on the back of my paperback in English that says, like, people love this because it's ceaselessly truthful.
00:06:37
Speaker
I'm a bit like, really? this This is all about how truth is impossible to find, and there's some deeply weird and unlikely behavior in it. I don't know, and I'm not reading this thinking, oh yes, this is the truth of life. And yet, in that bit, after Alveartine dies, and he's reflecting on grief and memory and shock, I did feel that some kind of really intense truth of existence was contained in that, and it was so beautiful and so lyrical.
00:07:03
Speaker
h I also really loved it. But what I noticed most that I wanted to mention before we get really get into it is that this is the volume where he actually becomes a writer. I know you mentioned that in the introduction, but he actually gets a publication. He publishes an article. Yeah, in Le Figaro, which is one of the best known, I think now quite a bit conservative of the French newspapers, Le Figaro.
00:07:29
Speaker
right So we don't get to read this article, and the narrator doesn't tell us what it's about, which one would think would be significant, but no. We do find out that it mentions Elstir, so we can imagine that it's probably about art, since he also works on Ruskin, the 19th century art critic later on. But yeah, ah it's it's finally happened. In our earlier episodes we're saying, you know, he's not writing yet, he's too busy hanging out, he's too busy having fun, he's too busy, like, navel-gazing.
00:07:55
Speaker
Although, to be fair, it seems like he wrote this article, sent it out, and it took years for it to appear. And he just sort of anxiously waited for it to appear and doesn't seem to have written anything in the meanwhile. But I mean, this is probably ungenerous and also doesn't matter. But like, it is funny that just this one piece. And he's like, that's it. Yeah. Everyone is seeing this. I'm a writer now. Yeah. He's imagining everyone getting their newspaper delivered to them and in the morning in bed, I think. And so that passage where he's like imagining fantasizing about what it will be like to have readers is ah really delightful and funny, especially since afterwards you get the reactions of the Duc de Guermont and of Bloch. And the Duc de Guermont is
00:08:40
Speaker
like, oh well done, it's a bit cliched but cool. And Block doesn't even acknowledge it. Yeah, Block blanks him until later when he makes a sort of inscrutable comment. Isn't it that he also gets an article in the figure? And then he's able to acknowledge it. Oh, I know that you also had that one that one time. So yeah, it's a yeah it's like kind of red letter day for for our narrator that is quite a ah fun a fun bit of the text. And there's also this really Really amazing image of the relationship between the writers writers and readers, because he has this typically wacky attempt to imagine what it's like to not be him, to be reading it and to think about what it is to be a reader and a writer at the same time, sort of semi-successful. But ultimately, generously, in his little fantasy about what it is to finally be read by a public, he says, the beauty lies in the impression of the readers. It is a collective Venus.
00:09:38
Speaker
of which we have but one truncated limb if we confine ourselves to the thought of the author, for it is fully realized only in the minds of his readers. This is very, like, I don't know, um did Iser and Jaus rely on this but passage when they were developing reception theory? It's just like, it is the gaps in the text and the reader rises to the
Becoming a Published Writer
00:09:59
Speaker
occasion. to me And it's all that, you know, the virtual text is the collective Venus, as it were.
00:10:06
Speaker
Yeah, it's a quite a renaissance image as well, you know, creat creating a kind of something new out of a ruined sculpture, which should be this this this Venus. Anyway, I underlined that because I was like, thank you, Proust, we will indeed participate in this collective Venus, which you could be which could be an alternative title for our podcast. I was going to say, should we have called the podcast Collective Venus? I mean, we didn't know because we started at the beginning. So, alas.
00:10:33
Speaker
So yeah, yeah, I really liked it. It was weird and beautiful and lots of funny anecdotes like that one. How did you find it? I found it astonishing. I really did. I think this may be, I mean, I really loved Le Côté de Guermont, the third volume. It was very funny. But this volume I found just so artfully constructed. It really felt to me Like a musical composition, like there there were very distinctive rhythms. And I also found it fascinating that he somehow managed to produce in the reader the same trajectory that he depicts the narrator going through from basically obsession to forgetting.
00:11:19
Speaker
And when we were chatting before recording, Emma, you mentioned that by the end of the book, you were almost having trouble remembering the beginning of the book. And I should mention that this volume is the shortest one, I think we've read so far or certainly one of the shortest ones. And i I completely agree with that assessment. Like I also had trouble remembering at the end where we had been. And I think the novel creates that effect. And part of the way it does it is in the in the first section of the novel, which is sometimes divided off as a chapter. In my particular edition, it wasn't, but it's a section where Abetsuin has gone, he pursues her, he finds out that she is dead, and once she dies,
00:12:02
Speaker
the past participle, ma which means dead in the feminine, reoccurs 51 more times in the chapter. And it reoccurs verbally as a past participle. It's used ah as a verb, as an adjective, as a noun. And most commonly it's in the phrase, ahber's in it's a mach to Albertine had died. I pulled out a passage where you can see how dense this repetition of that sort of It's really like a drum beat to this whole chapter. It's like, ma ma ma so here's here's a passage that shows that rhythm. But caressing her in her raincoat was no longer possible, for she was dead. I might scour the whole world now without encountering the woman who is prepared to give certain pleasures to me, for Avetin was dead.
00:12:52
Speaker
It seemed that I had to choose between two facts, to decide which of them was true. To such an extent was the fact of Albertin's death, arising for me from a reality which I had not known, her life in Turin, in contradiction with all my thoughts of her. So great a wealth of memories borrowed from the treasury of her life, such a profusion of feelings evoking, implicating her life, seemed to make it incredible that Albertin should be dead.
00:13:19
Speaker
And what I find so remarkable
Forgetting and Memory
00:13:22
Speaker
here is we have this she was dead, Abbotin was dead, her death, so we have it in the as a noun, and then it passes into the subjunctive mood at the end. ah It's incredible that Abbotin should be dead. There's this feeling that it's all he can think about, and yet he continues to have this shadow of a doubt about it.
00:13:44
Speaker
Yeah, it's kind of an incredible representation of shock, isn't it? And that great shock is repeatedly activated through this use of été-mart, that that of she she was dead, that that you're pointing out. and that The incredulity that is highlighted in the passage that you just read as well seems like a really key part of this this text because it's incredible that she was dead. But then, as you as you were saying before, we so we we live that obsessive like disbelief and
00:14:18
Speaker
interrogation of what it could mean that she has died in the long first chapter that is so amazing. And then we gradually forget about it. And then by the end, yeah, as I said to you before, it seemed incredible that she was dead in a different way. yeah Because I couldn't believe that that happened in the same book.
00:14:35
Speaker
Yes, that's right. I also want to mention briefly that idea of succession that is so present almost as densely mentioned in this part of the text as the death. He talks about his memories as painful, successive colourings. He talks about each of the particular ideas of Albertine that I successively formed And that really mirrors the way that it's written because there are these cascading successive clauses that are then punctuated by that shock, she was dead. And that I think was the kind of structural or formal aspect that really just carried me through these pages of reflections that just like in a very liquid way
00:15:19
Speaker
man You're right. It often came at the end of these cascading sentences. It would just sort of come to an abrupt stop with... abat sinete ma And what I noticed too, I actually um used an online edition to search the appearance of that word. That's how I have my count of 51 occurrences. I counted them up. But in the second half of the volume, the word becomes very rare. It's only used a handful more times after that initial meditation. And I think that the fading away of that drum beat is part of what contributes to us also beginning to forget Abboton, beginning to when she when she is brought up to be remembering her without focusing on the fact of her disappearance.
00:16:13
Speaker
Proust Curious is brought to you in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. You can find us at publicbooks.org. That's publicbooks.org. To donate to Public Books, visit publicbooks dot.org slash donate.
00:16:30
Speaker
So Emma, even in that long chapter about grief and about shock, really, it's also already immediately about forgetting. like His hope and fear in equal measure is that he will forget about him. Yeah, he says, I knew I should forget her one day. I had forgotten Gilles Bergson, Madame de Guermont.
00:16:51
Speaker
I had forgotten my grandmother. So this is the kind of the curse and the cure and it's the process that's happening in that fade that you described so so beautifully. And I think it's already so interesting because what we see in this forgetting is he's talking about two kinds or reasons for forgetting. He's talking about the reason of falling out of love, which is what had happened with Shabbat and Madame de Guermont. And he's also talking about the reason of death. And so he really is, I think, hoping for those twin reasons to help him get through the grief for Abbot and
00:17:28
Speaker
He's kind of shocked. He's like, how could I possibly be forgetting this person who was me, who lives in me, who is the same thing to me as my own life in both a kind of narcissistic but also a loving way. Right, right. But he goes a used through quite a number of phases with forgetting and the meditation has to do with habit. It seems like a critical aspect of love and forgetting is
Narrative Structure and Time
00:17:56
Speaker
habit. So if you're in the habit of loving someone and having them around, it's very shocking when that ends. But once you build the habit of knowing they are gone, that's what allows the mechanism of forgetting to to take over and to be able to get through and out of grief.
00:18:16
Speaker
And we see him transition through forgetting that she's dead because she's so alive to him. Right. In a way, I mean, and then that's what makes him constantly have to say, but no, actually, Ed Beattin was dead. Yeah. We have a nice passage about that sort of continued presence of Abbottson. Do you want to read it for us, Emma?
00:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, the narrator or Proust writes, without my being precisely aware of it, it was now this idea of Albertine's death, no longer the present memory of her life, that formed the chief subject of my unconscious musings, with the result that if I interrupted them suddenly to reflect upon myself, what surprised me was not, as in the first days, that Albertine so alive in me could no longer exist upon the earth, could be dead,
00:18:59
Speaker
But the Albertine, who no longer existed upon the Earth, who was dead, should have remained so alive in me. Built up by the contiguity of the memories that followed one another, the black tunnel, in which my thoughts had been dreaming so long that that they had even ceased to be aware of it, was suddenly broken by an interval of sunlight, allowing me to see in the distance a blue and smiling universe in which Albertine was no more than a memory, unimportant and full of charm.
00:19:28
Speaker
This passage is remarkable because it's talking about the continued life of the dead, which we've already talked about in relationship to the grandmother back in Volume 4. And then it also ends on that incredible image of the blue and smiling universe.
00:19:48
Speaker
in which Abetin was no more than a memory. The idea of this being ah a journey a tunnel that you have to get through, I mean, that's not that's a bit of a cliché idea about grief, but he starts with this cliché and immediately turns it into this incredible, vivid,
00:20:06
Speaker
image ah where scale is at play, the claustrophobia of the tunnel gives way to a universe. The idea that the universe might smile, that Abbottson continues to be a memory, which actually goes against a lot of what the section is about, which is about not even having the memory, and that lack of importance can give a certain charm. I'm just fascinated by this passage.
00:20:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I love that it's a blue universe. Yes. It reminds me of Renaissance paintings, you know they especially the Italian ones that have a really blue, far distant background. Yeah. Well, and indeed, he later on, he visits the Scovigny Chapel, right? Yeah. And Giotto's particular shade of blue is an object of fascination for him. Yeah. So it feels like maybe that's the universe that Adetin has gone into, the universe of the putti in a Giotto painting. Yeah, but blue is the color of distance.
00:20:59
Speaker
Blue is the colour of distance. Ah! In those paintings it is and so I just think it's so amazing that that's here. um and And I love that he says unimportant and full of charm.
00:21:11
Speaker
I know, I know. I guess this is what your copy is getting at with the ceaselessly truthful comment because it just does feel so right. It feels just in French, just really juiced. Like that's just what it's like to lose someone. And I would say in romantic separation, like a definitive breakup or in, in dying, right? Like if someone is gone from your life in a permanent way, this is what it's like.
00:21:38
Speaker
Yeah, they enter the blue and smiling universe. And that charm, I think, is charisma or kind of like an attraction that still exists. But it's also the kind of magic, kind of necromantic side of charm that Proust is also really interested in. But also on this point about charm.
00:21:57
Speaker
It reminds me of another moment that rang extremely true to me when the narrator is starting to be less devastated about Albertine's sudden death. And he says, it was from this moment that I began to write to all my friends that I had just experienced great sorrow and to cease to feel it.
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah, there's something really private about great sorrow, isn't there? It feels really inexpressible. And so when you're able to express something about it, it can't be the thing itself. Now, that being said, I think that's what's remarkable about this volume is it somehow does express great sorrow. It expresses something that I feel often remains deeply individual and ineffable.
00:22:44
Speaker
Yeah, and at the same time kind of showing it to a kind of unknown reader as its own version of a blue and smiling universe, right? Yeah,
Forgetting in Family Contexts
00:22:54
Speaker
that's right. Kind of seeing it from a distance and finding it charming. Right, being able to analyze it and being able to construct it so artfully. Yeah, and experiencing the magic. Right, right. Part of what ends up coming out of his long meditations on forgetting and memory is perhaps unsurprisingly more reflection about the nature of time because obviously forgetting memory and time are intimately bound up with one another in a lot of ways. Yeah, I feel like we almost can't talk about the title of this series in search of last time because
00:23:34
Speaker
It's just so present in everything we're talking about. but This volume does really ask, like what is the last time that we're searching for? Why are we searching for it? Is it because we've forgotten it? is it Why do we want to get it back?
00:23:46
Speaker
And how do we get it back? Like, is it possible to recover it? And um of course, we all know that the next and final volume is called Time Regained, so evidently, evidently we're going to get it back. But here, um his reflections on getting over Abbotian, starting to emerge from that great sorrow, yield some really Shocking and exciting thoughts about time. Let me read this passage. Oh, I should say that he mentions a girl that he's attracted to here. He saw a blonde woman coming out of the duchess de Gamont's house and he thought it might be a distant relative of the Gamont who works at a brothel. So when she gave him a flirty look, he was like, ah, and got very yeah excited about this possibility.
00:24:39
Speaker
And so he thinks about this and writes, by another reaction, albeit it was the distraction, the desire for Mademoiselle de Porcheville, that's the girl that I just mentioned, that had made my forgetting suddenly apparent and perceptible. If the fact remains that it is time that gradually brings oblivion, oblivion does not fail to alter profoundly our notion of time.
00:25:06
Speaker
There are optical errors in time, as there are in space. The persistence within me of an old impulse to work, to make up for lost time, to change my way of life, or rather to begin to live, gave me the illusion that I was still as young as in the past.
00:25:22
Speaker
And yet the memory of all the events that had succeeded one another in my life, and also of those that had succeeded one another in my heart, for when we have greatly changed, we are misled to suppose that we have lived longer. In the course of those last months of Abbotin's existence had made them seem to me much longer than a year.
00:25:41
Speaker
And now this oblivion of so many things, separating me by gulfs of empty space from quite recent events that they made me think remote, because I had what is called the time to forget them, by its fragmentary, irregular interpolation in my memory, like a thick fog at sea that obliterates all the landmarks,
00:26:01
Speaker
confused, dislocated my sense of distances in time, contracted in one place, extended in another, and made me suppose myself now farther away from things, now far closer to them than I really was.
00:26:15
Speaker
then I really was. That's a kind of landing pad. hear Incredible couple of sentences. One incredibly complicated sentence that follows this sort of lapidary declaration that there are optical errors in time as there are in space. Yeah. Emma, what can it possibly mean for time to have an optics?
00:26:43
Speaker
A fair question. I've been thinking about that since I read it. I guess it's just the way that the mind kind of latches onto a way to make this abstract thing tangible. It kind of, you just automatically turn it into a kind of image or a metaphor and in this case it's a landscape. Yeah. And so it's a sense that time is something that you see.
00:27:09
Speaker
Yeah, right somehow. And that it's you're seeing it through a distorting lens of some sort. Yeah, I suppose it's about imagining time involves making images in that sense of what what imagination is.
00:27:23
Speaker
And we do perceive time in some way, and it's easier to perhaps talk about perception by talking about sight than it is to talk about the really, you know, famously difficult to articulate.
00:27:39
Speaker
experience of time. There's also this sense of a persistent anachronism, a persistent disjuncture within time so that there will be these old things that have remained, these old hopes, dreams, the idea that he will change his way of life, etc.
00:27:58
Speaker
that persists even though more recent things that were more discrete as events start to recede into the far distance, even though the beginning of the impulse to make something of his life is even more distant, right? Yeah, and he's challenging you to be aware in like words and pictures of something that we all kind of know and avoid.
00:28:20
Speaker
which is that we don't really know where we are in time. We don't really know how all the different bits of time that we remember relate to one another. And we really don't remember that much. yeah and
00:28:34
Speaker
I already told you that I wished I had the gift of memory and you're telling me that.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah, this like longing for a real, real kind of subjective grounding of the self is it's very relatable. And I can't help but be fogged over, really. Yeah, but first It's also thinking beyond the really intensely individual here, because i mean we could definitely be forgiven for talking about this volume entirely in terms of this really intense, isolated, singular perspective that we are
00:29:15
Speaker
being kind of seduced by, I would argue. yeah But I also really appreciated the moments where, to continue the visual metaphors, he kind of zooms out, or maybe even massively
Character Doubles and Life Experiences
00:29:27
Speaker
zooms in. like He compares like the renewing of cells in the human body to the less mechanical renewal or failed renewal of memory. heath bit but And I think he makes an analogy between like the succession successive phases of a person's life and successive periods of history. And he also thinks about unconscious retained habits that occur within a single person's life, but also across generations and in and in families.
00:29:57
Speaker
So there's a section about Gilbert, because she comes back with a bang, as we mentioned, and about what she's like. And there's a kind of epigenetic memory in her personality, right? Because she yeah has some of the qualities of her parents, she has some of her own qualities, and pretty reflects on generations as accumulated egoisms.
00:30:23
Speaker
which I appreciated for various reasons. I had thought about that in relation to forgetting. Can you see why? These kind of habits and behaviours and ways of being that seem to be forgotten because they're from a past generation, they're from like people who've been forgotten, but they are coming back in this kind of almost automatic way.
00:30:47
Speaker
you know it's sort of like the It's a haunting, really, in a way. It's an involuntary persistence of certain qualities. that yeah In a sense, it's it's almost like the the way in which Abed Sin remains alive inside the narrator, for at least for a long time, regardless of the fact of her death.
00:31:08
Speaker
This is almost like the physical manifestation of that within families. Yeah. Juan remains alive and she bats, even though she attempts to erase him. Like it's ultimately going to be unsuccessful.
00:31:23
Speaker
and in case you haven't read this recently, she about takes the name of her stepfather and doesn't allow anyone to mention Swan in her presence, even though he was a devoted father who also left her the fortune that makes her a very eligible young woman in society. So despite, and and he was also popular. So it's like, it's it's a little bit baffling. Yeah, it's very harsh. It's very harsh. And it's like fairly under motivated, seemingly,
00:31:50
Speaker
It's almost like a vehicle for for Proust to show us forgetting and remembering and how that kind of gets contained within a generational shift. so I was really interested in the ways that this these kinds of themes that we've been talking about broaden out into the world. and i also I love that description of generations as accumulated egoisms, but I will note that those kind of defects are tempered according to Proust by some natural restrictions. So he says, the combinations by which in the course of generations, moral chemistry thus stabilizes and renders innocuous the elements that were becoming too powerful are infinite and would give an exciting variety to family history. One of my favorite sentences in the whole thing. And I'm just going to keep, well, I mean, I can't be arrogant now about memory after all of our discussions, but I think I'm going to keep the phrase moral chemistry.
00:32:42
Speaker
Moral chemistry is really it's ah it's really powerful. It's a freeze.
00:32:47
Speaker
yeah continuing on this kind of brief broadening out
00:32:54
Speaker
darkness to all the different kinds of family social constructions that are being forgotten and renewed across across this book. And I mean, we should just mention briefly that there are some real like kind of craziness here, cruel and criminal behavior, a bit more kidnapping, more than one actually incident of kidnapping, more than one in instance of seduction just to wring information from someone. Yeah.
00:33:24
Speaker
Yeah, people are not treating each other with that much kindness.
00:33:32
Speaker
so yeah Well, you did say that you didn't like it when people ah declared their goal was to be giving or kind. Listen, I didn't say I don't like kindness. I obviously like kindness.
00:33:45
Speaker
I just don't like it when it's really loudly advertised. Okay, but no one, no one is doing that in volume six. of all la show it um without you But I think all the different characters are kind of circling around each other in a relationship of like exchange and mistrust and stimulation, I guess.
00:34:09
Speaker
Yeah, i I do think mistrust has been, like, whether or not trust is possible has been a real theme, and not just with the jealously guarded love objects, but also, you know, between friends, like, Sang Lu ah reveals himself to be hideously cruel when he doesn't realize the narrator is listening, and then at towards the end of the volume is unable to maintain ah his friendship in the same way. It's just this sort of attenuation of any sort of possibility of trusting anyone you're not paying, basically. And even then, like questions arise.
00:34:47
Speaker
but that is also part of the way that the narrator discovers at the end like a a completely different second version of San Lu's life, where and he also has a kind of second version of his own life because he starts to, according to the narrator, be attracted to men rather than women. And the narrator comments, everything is at least dual. Le shows on their face en pour le moi double. And this idea of yeah doubling and the double being a kind of confusion in relation to how you can actually perceive reality is also something that comes up through very strongly in this volume. There are lots of kind of symmetries and doubles that aren't quite um balanced, so half-symmetry, false doubles.
00:35:32
Speaker
Yeah, it's really, I really feel like this particular volume is, it's like a series of proliferating possibilities and a series of proliferating doubles. It almost feels like a hall of mirrors and particularly doubles of abbots and There are constant comparisons of Abbotin and the narrator's relationship to that of Odette and Swan. Abbotin and Gilbert are entangled, not only because of that moment where a desire for Gilbert, whom he sees and doesn't recognize on the street, helps him move through his grief for Abbotin, but also in this very odd
00:36:14
Speaker
conflation of the two in a
Biographical Interpretations of Characters
00:36:16
Speaker
telegram, and then perhaps least expected of all, there's a persistent link between Albertin and the narrator's grandmother. Albertin is somehow, it's almost like she's a fractal. She's repeated everywhere in all these different relationships. But Proust is careful to say that none of it is quite right. These repetitions are are are with a difference. yeah When he's comparing Abbot and Odette, he writes,
00:36:48
Speaker
For nothing ever it repeats itself exactly, and the most analogous lives that, thanks to the kinship of character and the similarity of circumstances, we may select in order to represent them as symmetrical, remain in many respects opposite." I was thinking that Gilbert is a kind of double for the narrator in some ways also. She's kind of, I know she's not really grieving her father. She's kind of, yeah, she's rejecting him, but she is dealing with his absence.
00:37:15
Speaker
yes And is she dealing with thwarted love and kind of misdirected signs? I think she is also. She also, at the end of the volume, they revisit their memories together and they really have grown up together and had almost parallel experiences with each other, but parallel in the most you know geometric sense of the term in that they never intersected and somehow, even though they both were experiencing some of the same thoughts and hopes with regards to the other one.
00:37:49
Speaker
that was never communicated. Yeah, there's a wonderful kind of tragic comic irony in Jardat saying, oh yeah, you know, when I looked at you in that garden when we were kids, I thought you were extremely hot. And also when I saw you on the street and I kind of winked at you, yeah, I was totally hitting on you at that point at that moment.
00:38:05
Speaker
Right, and he's and he's like he's like, but what about the part when we were at the shelter these days? She's like, then you liked me too much. It was too much for me. Yeah, it was just so, so funny that they actually weren't as different as they thought they were in that moment.
00:38:20
Speaker
right right right that that the first perception is sometimes correct right that's like that gives rise to a long meditation but the part about speaking of you about the part that i mentioned already but that i think we need to talk about is so the narrator has traveled to venice he's there with his mother and he receives a telegram um and apparently the telegram system is very bad in venice and this one has been like very battered and is difficult to read. But he makes it out, and it essentially says, hey, it's Abbotin, I'm not actually dead, and I was wondering if you want to marry me. um I'm paraphrasing. Obviously, that wasn't a Proustian sentence. I love that paraphrasing. But he it has moved so far into his forgetting of Abbotin that he doesn't care that she's suddenly
00:39:16
Speaker
miraculously alive. And it's just like, what if we're gonna keep stay on my family vacation with my mom is in no rush to see her again and doesn't care, obviously, as readers.
00:39:28
Speaker
we see that it's deeply improbable that that is what that telegram is. Because it's been a long time, at least six months, probably a year since her death. He's been seeing many of her friends and acquaintance. No one has mentioned that she's hidden away somewhere alive. It's just like it that can't be right. Yet the narrator is sort of sanguine about it and just as like, yeah, well, whatever, I don't love her anymore, anyhow. It turns out that this telegram was in fact from Jibet's informing him of her marriage to Song Lu. And so when she's when there's mention of marriage in it, she's talking about her own marriage to Song Lu. It has nothing to do with the narrator. Yeah, he just completely misread it.
00:40:16
Speaker
Yeah, but this sort of like substitution of Gilbert for Albertin, but Gilbert's telling him about something that actually has very little to do with him, whereas the putative letter from Albertin should have really inflected his entire life. I find this whole substitution really confusing. Yeah, I agree.
00:40:41
Speaker
even when he realizes that he's been mistaken, he's like, oh yeah, well, you know, the way that Gilbert writes Gilbert looks exactly like Albertine due to these quirks of handwriting. It's like, I just can't. That can't be right.
00:40:56
Speaker
I can't see it. But it's also just like these two women who, I mean, yes, he had that big crush on Madame de Guermont, but that was kind of in a different category, right? These Gibbets and Abbottsin are the two women with whom he actually does spend a great deal of time while infatuated with them and becomes deeply jealous of both of them. And they are sort of already bookends, we could say, of his adolescence or of his coming to manhood, perhaps adolescence is too narrow of ah of a band of time. And then for that the conclusion of the Gilbert plot, the sort of definitive conclusion when she gets married to someone else to be a false opening into
00:41:44
Speaker
a false resurrection of an already concluded plot with the other one. yeah I feel like I'm bumping up against walls everywhere I turn as I attempt to describe this, much less to analyze it. Yeah, and Salut says or or someone says of him or he could get he could definitely have married Albertine.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yes. Yeah, that's right. That's right. no Yeah, right. This weird love square. Yes. Yeah, it is a love square. Is so there as a reminder, both that things could always turn out differently or be reinterpreted and endless churn of reinterpretation, but also that every character is kind of in some ways a stand in for someone else.
00:42:36
Speaker
kind of substitute. I don't think we're going to get to the bottom of it, but it does remind me of another problem that I also don't think we can get to the bottom of, which is the way that this book contains characters that not only are in relationships of doubleness to one another, like in the diegetic narrative,
00:42:57
Speaker
But also there are these biographical readings, so Albertine is not only a kind of double for all the characters in the book, including Gilbert, she's also a kind of figure for a man that Proust actually did love in real life, called I think Alfred.
00:43:14
Speaker
yes who died in a plane crash. So there is kind of, there's a visit to him. A plane that Proust had bought him. Yes, yes. So all the stuff about him being guilty that he kind of forced Albertine to her death by trapping her. By trapping her and giving her the horse that she fell off of. So it's like a very, it's a fairly direct echo of what had happened in his life with this Alfred guy. And we should mention that this is, this is a almost system of reading Proust where looking for biographical details that might explain yeah some of the characters in the Recherche. This is called the transposition reading. I think it's rather unfashionable currently, but whether or not he's transposed his relationship with Alfred into what the narrator goes through with Abbotton
00:44:02
Speaker
It's clear that he was inspired by certain facts that happened in his life. To me, it's clear. It's like, OK, yeah, he bought him the plane, the plane crashed. He bought her the horse. The horse knocked her
Concluding Thoughts on Winners and Losers
00:44:12
Speaker
off. Like, that's really a lot. And then there's this other really direct parallel. Yeah. Well, according to the footnote in my edition, the letter that Albertine writes to the narrator when she leaves him is the letter that Alfred left for the real massa, you know, the ends. Goodbye, I leave you the best of myself.
00:44:33
Speaker
And honestly, that letter was really totally different. Like it didn't feel like it was written, which a letter should, but to bring the archive of this love affair that he had in real life into the fictional world and that sort of importation, which I guess he's been doing all along right with some of the witticisms that we've talked about. yeah There will be notes that he actually heard someone say that, et cetera. But it seems a little bit more central. The the letter of Abbot in leaving him is one of the sort of big events of this novel. ah so it's so It's so interesting to me that that's his real breakup letter. And then a lot of his kind of regrets and observations do read quite autobiographically after that. But I suppose that what Proust is telling us with all these doubles, all these pairs, all these awkward symmetries, is that we have to live with it being both. Albertine is a woman who's a figure for what it is to
00:45:31
Speaker
be attracted to women, also for thinking about women who are attracted to women themselves, and a character in a text that has her own life as a character. But she's also a man, and this man, and all these other characters, and Proust is making us live with that because, as he says, reality is confusing and difficult to that to to discern.
00:46:06
Speaker
Emma, I think that's actually a great segue into our capstone segment, the winners and losers of this volume. Yeah. Tell me, Hannah, who was your winner of volume six? I struggled with this. Of course. But I think of course but i think that I'm going to perversely declare Abbot in my winner.
00:46:29
Speaker
Oh really? I think I am and let me explain. I am shocked. I'm a little shocked too and possibly not fully convinced but I do have I do have an argument. At the end of this volume in the final pages the narrator reveals that he has trapped another woman.
00:46:46
Speaker
And yeah he is keeping another woman and he talks about how even though forgetting has overtaken Albertson, he nevertheless is replicating these patterns, yet another double to to continue our earlier conversation.
00:47:02
Speaker
Okay, but that other woman gets like two paragraphs and is nothing, whereas Abbot's sin is most of a novel. So I think that she has won in a sort of Ovidian way, like her name will be remembered forever. yeah and And therefore,
00:47:25
Speaker
if it hadn't been for that, A couple of paragraphs where he just briefly refers to some other love affair that was apparently obsessing him just as much, but that gets basically no airtime. I don't think I would make this argument, but I think Albertine is the one. Yeah, okay, I'll buy it because also in that section, if I remember it right, he says that the force of the habits that he developed with Albertine mean that he can't love any other way.
00:47:55
Speaker
Right. And like his whole way of moving on is actually seeking echoes of Abbotin. Like I think even like his way of forgetting Abbotin is remembering Abbotin actually in a way. So I think she wins. Okay. Who's your winner? Yeah. And she did escape him. Oh, she did. Yeah. That's also true. She, and she died in freedom. Yeah. Okay. Is your winner Emma. I'm compelled. Yeah, I'm buying it. My winner is less compelling, but more obvious. I think my winner is Odette.
00:48:22
Speaker
ah okay yes yes she's definitely won but tell our listeners in case they haven't read this for a while why she has won. So Odette, mother of Gilbert, formerly wife of Swan, now in this um part of the story she's the wife of Monsieur Baron de Forcheville. So she's made an excellent aristocratic marriage. And she has also succeeded in exploiting the love trials of her daughter and Saint-Luc, Gilbert and Saint-Luc, to manipulate Saint-Luc into keeping her in the manner to which she's accustomed. So I think the last
00:49:02
Speaker
thela The last image we have of her is like glittering at dinner parties, dripping in rubies. And the narrator's like, you know, she's 50. Some people even thought, whispered that she might be 60. But she still looks as just dazzling and fascinating as ever on the social scene. And no matter what happens, no matter how the kaleidoscope turns, Odette rises. So she's the winner.
00:49:28
Speaker
yeah Yeah, I mean, you're right. So Odette has now won two volumes, I guess. Yeah. She comes out on top. Yeah, in a kind of stupid way. Yeah, in a sort of facile way or like an ironic way, but she does. Yeah. Nevertheless. Yeah. And I so totally still think, as actually Swan said about her in the first volume, that she herself is kind of stupid and that's also what helps her to win. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's such just stupid and sort of like everything is instrumental for her, which we discussed in episode three, I think.
00:49:58
Speaker
But who was your loser? Okay, so I had a main loser and a runner-up loser. okay My runner-up loser was the city of Venice. Ah, that was on my runner-up loser list too! The city of Venice is a runner-up loser, yes continue. Because the narrator has been waiting to go to Venice for the entire time that we've been reading since volume one. Yeah. Two things happen in this volume that we've been waiting for for a long time. He becomes a published writer and he goes to Venice, right? Venice is very underwhelming in this text. It takes like 30 pages. Most of the time he's comparing it to compre or talking about people who he knows from Paris. There are a couple of nice descriptions of the canal or of him walking around the city and of paintings that he sees there. And you know, you got you got the description of him looking at Swan's prints versus the actual paintings IRL.
00:50:52
Speaker
But in general, it's totally underwhelming. But also that that Swan's Prince versus IRL, that's in Padua, so. Oh oh shit, yeah. Okay, so yeah, exactly. Venice is totally lost. I totally agree. Venice is on my list of potential losers. Who's your real loser though? That was your runner up loser. My real loser was Swan. Oh yeah, that's a good one.
00:51:17
Speaker
because it actually broke my heart. I was quite fond of Swan as many other of the characters in this text are. and His daughter, Gilbert, even though she's kind of like fun and cool and witty and et cetera, in the way that he would have hoped she would be, has totally rejected him. She doesn't even want to hear any association between herself and her father in all the social settings that she is trying to conquer. And the narrator thinks back to when Swan was thinking about what would happen after he died, and he thought that he would be remembered because of Gilbert. And in fact, no.
00:51:54
Speaker
She is raising his memory. So the thing that he thought of for his afterlife has in fact not come to pass. So in fact, he's sort of a loser for like an anti-Ovidian reason, even though obviously he's in the novel. So like, okay, so actually like the the point I made about Abbotts applies to Swan as well. But the way his memory is being treated diegetically is very sad. Yeah. it's It's very melancholic and touching, and yeah that's why he's my loser. What about you? Do you want to say anything more about Venice? I don't. Just that that was like the part of the the only part of this volume that I was like, okay. And it wasn't long, it wasn't onerous, but just... It just didn't didn't get me the way the rest of the volume did. um My Loser is the working class ah because basically they're there to be like kidnapped and seduced and treated disrespectfully and not seen as full humans. So whoops. Yeah, that is very true. It is really harrowing, actually. yeah Street girls and shop girls and laundry maids, etc. are just kind of there to be snatched in this region of the world.
00:53:10
Speaker
Um, not only girls, but well, i mostly girls. And it's, it's in this particular volume, although ah elsewhere it's been like valets and waiters and footmen. Yeah. It just seems like they are the prey of the, bo and the aristocracy and that's bleak. So yeah they're my losers. Indeed.
00:53:33
Speaker
So I'm a where are we now? We're only like, this is our final, where like what's happening in the terms of our project. This is kind of our like ultimate, what's happening in terms of this project. I can't believe it. Only one more volume to go. That's where we are. That's where we are. We're facing down time regain. Yeah. But what's happening in terms of the narrative? Like where are we with the narrator and the world that he's living in?
00:53:59
Speaker
So we've had some pretty strong intimations at the end of this volume that society is in flux. We saw those shocking marriages that I mentioned at the top of the episode. And we also see at the end, Gibert reveals to the narrator when they're in Combre together as adults, that the mise-Église way, which is Swann's way, connects to the Germont's way, which is the way of aristocracy. And that shocks the narrator. He can't believe that these two Places are reconcilable and that to me seems like a pretty evident metaphor for the way that society is mingling and that things that have been kept so strictly separate are no longer to remain that way.
00:54:49
Speaker
Yeah. And there's all these bits at the end where the mother is like, oh, your grandmother would have been shocked to see the way that people would marry across crossclass boundaries and so on. So yeah, absolutely. By the end, we're in a changed world.
00:55:05
Speaker
The narrator has also changed a little bit. He's, I'd say, a full adult now. He talks about his own aging process. but When he gets his Le Figo article, he's like, oh, my my brain had aged sufficiently that I didn't have the kind of alacrity of youth anymore. So I think we've definitely got Marcel in maturity at this point. So I'm interested to see what happens in the next and final part of this story.
00:55:31
Speaker
Well, I think that's it for this episode of Proust Curious. We hope we've piqued your curiosity. If you liked the podcast, please tell a friend about it. Proust Curious is hosted by Emma Glossen and Hannah Weaver and produced by Michael Goldsmith. You can reach us at proustcurious at gmail dot.com. We'd also like to thank our partner Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. Check it out at publicbooks.org.
00:55:56
Speaker
And join us next time for Volume 7, Time