12. The Narrator’s retrospective empathy for Swann is the product of a life under review...

The twelfth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero contemplates the nature of jealousy and how we might find our way towards an ethical state of love and trust.

The Narrator’s retrospective empathy for Swann is the product of a life under review; he understands the elder man’s predicament having since experienced it himself…

What happened to Swann is a template for his own suffering. The image of the forlorn lover staring up at Odette’s illumined window plays like a twisted parody of Romeo and Juliet, or worse, resembles a kind of Parisian precursor to the poster for The Exorcist. It brought me back to the humiliating hours I’d spent pining outside Maria’s house, possessed by god-knows-what cruel spirit.

Proust’s depiction of the tortures of jealousy will be familiar to spurned lovers everywhere. The tragicomic scene in which Swann desperately rushes from restaurant to restaurant to find Odette is based on a not dissimilar episode in Proust’s own life. Arriving late for a rendezvous with his then lover, the composer Reynaldo Hahn, and finding him absent, the young Marcel hurtles from bar to café to restaurant in the hope of tracking him down, unsure whether he should wait in one place or search another, for fear that Reynaldo might be doing the same and they’ll miss one another. The following day Proust wrote to Hahn: ‘…wait two minutes for him or make him wait for five, that for me is the true, throbbing, profound tragedy, which I shall perhaps write some day and which in the meantime I am living.’

I wonder how many suspect silhouettes and boudoir betrayals are collected in humanity’s shared psychic reservoir. I know my own experiences are in there somewhere, and can still call to mind the sorry picture of that teenage boy restlessly following in Maria’s footsteps, aching for her affection, desperate for a change of heart, and concocting all sorts of tawdry visions in his head, to say nothing of the later numerous jealousies which were to assail him. In reading Proust, we discover a kind of manual for the awkward truths of the jealous mind, which is a subject from which he never flinches. Swann endlessly interrogates Odette on the matter of her suspected liaisons with other men, teasing out small, inconclusive details with which to torture himself, unable to stop himself from doing so:

‘For his jealousy, which had taken an amount of trouble, such as no enemy would have incurred, to strike him this mortal blow, to make him forcibly acquainted with the most cruel pain that he had ever known, his jealousy was not satisfied that he had yet suffered enough, and sought to expose his bosom to an even deeper wound. Like an evil deity, his jealousy was inspiring Swann, was thrusting him on towards destruction.’

The jealousy he experiences is so pernicious, so malevolent, that it takes on the mantle of a demon; a possessive force capable of executing its own will to the detriment of its host. I recognised this in all the stupid things I’d done in the aftermath of my own relationships, and found myself picturing that circle in Hell reserved for the lustful in Dante’s Inferno in which the afflicted souls are described as an ‘infernal storm’, everywhere and nowhere at once, enmeshed within the elemental life force of the universe, a place where helpless lovers are blown back and forth:

‘Caught in this torment, as I understood / were those who – here condemned for carnal sin – / made reason bow to their instinctual bent / As starlings on the wing in winter chills / are borne along in wide and teeming flocks / so on these breathing gusts the evil souls / This way and that and up and down they’re borne / Here is no hope of any comfort ever / neither of respite nor of lesser pain.’

This is the fate of Francesca and Paolo, who were drawn into their adulterous love by a book of Arthurian legend. Dante does not believe desire itself to be bad, only when it trumps reason, as it has with Swann. That’s when our mortal soul finds itself in danger. ‘The life of Swann’s love,’ the Narrator tells us, ‘the fidelity of his jealousy, were formed out of death, of infidelity, of innumerable desires, innumerable doubts, all of which had Odette for their object.’ In this context, the allusion to Dante couldn’t be more apposite, especially when we consider the Narrator’s rather incongruous question to Swann regarding the best part of the Normandy coast to see ‘the most violent storms’, and its later description as a ‘promontory of the shores of Hell, at the foot of the cliffs of death’, which is as clear a symbol as we need of the buffeting he’ll endure in the name of love and lust as the story proceeds.

As we now know, the tale of Swann’s agonies is told retrospectively. When the reader first meets him at the Narrator’s family home early in volume one, the saga of his all-consuming jealousy has already played out, his bad marriage made, and he lives in a large estate nearby with Odette and their daughter; that very same young, black-eyed girl with whom the Narrator has become smitten. We sense that the Narrator might be in for much the same, but before we come to see how his relationship with Gilberte unfolds, we might equally enquire as to the terrible truth at the heart of our own romantic entanglements, whereby the lover overwhelms the beloved, and the beloved comes to pity the lover.

What is this strange vacillation that occurs in human hearts? From love to contempt in what seems like an instant. Can it be overcome? Should it be? Or is it just the way things are? Perhaps it’s only through an effort of supreme will, insight and empathy that we might breed a truly equitable love. But these are so often qualities the broken, or the merely callous, like Odette, struggle to muster. For beneath her Florentine beauty lurks the predatory instincts of a praying mantis; the business of love is her living, and so adept at it is she, that all who stray into her path must watch their heads. ‘You can do anything with men when they’re in love with you,’ she says, ‘they’re such idiots.’

Having witnessed this from both sides, I can only suggest that lovers bear, not just an emotional, but an ethical duty towards one another. Although truly appreciating what this means is far from easy, and its execution even harder. It requires the kind of intelligence Odette does not possess; an essentially metaphysical compassion predicated upon an awareness of the universal sadness that lies at the root of all being. Each part of this idealised pairing must be alive to the precarious and ephemeral nature of the other as creatures of flesh and bone, to the frailties and fallibilities they share; each must commit to the death because there’s something beautifully brave and wondrously foolhardy in doing so; and each must calibrate their quotidian concerns against a scale both atomic and cosmic in nature.

There’s a book by the British philosopher Gillian Rose that explains this much better than I ever can. It’s called Love’s Work. I can’t remember how I first discovered it, but it has come to mean a lot to me and is one of those slim volumes I return to time and time again. It draws a sustained and compelling connection between philosophical practice on one hand and human love relations on the other. In doing so, it assiduously attends to this idea of sadness in our lives, but not in a fearful or depressing way. The sadness it describes does not relate to the individual instances of unhappiness or despair that affect us all, but to a default condition of our existence, that is as hardwired as breathing. For Rose, it is the product of our need to create irreconcilable laws with which to govern ourselves – the origin of ethics – or as she so succinctly puts it, ‘different ways towards a good enough justice’. It’s out of this sadness, she argues, that what we call philosophy was born.

One of her main theoretical contentions is that to attack philosophical reason is to attribute to it an improbable potency. The architects of postmodernism, for instance, were guilty of undermining the value of philosophy by ascribing to it a totalitarian idealism that doesn’t exist; what’s called phallogocentric theory fails to acknowledge the legacy of indeterminacy within the Western philosophical tradition, which it attacks on the grounds of its ‘determined’ claims of epistemological primacy. But such criticisms may be misplaced, and Rose thinks it vital that the borders between reality and thought are left open, not effaced by the suggestion that the entire history of Western culture is corrupted by a pathological relativism.

By way of example, she points to the fact that scepticism was at the heart of much Greek philosophy, which was always open to indeterminate modes of thought and aporetic ways of knowing. What we call postmodern relativism is undoubtedly of use in informing philosophical discourse but should not be crudely deployed to destabilise the platform of reason on which such discourse might still be based. She freely admits that rationalism cannot exist without a relativism of authority but makes it clear that ‘relativism of authority does not establish the authority of relativism’. The trick is in ensuring that authority neither claims the right to determine meaning based on historical hegemonies, nor that it uses the supposed absence of meaning to do the same thing.  

Real critical thinking involves a confrontation with both the power and limits of our intelligence; and with the truth of the inalienable sadness that Rose describes. But in the exploration of the hinterlands such thinking unearths we might just find, if we look hard and long enough, compassion, respect and love for the creatures who share our burden. Only then can we begin to get a measure of our ontology and the fact that we can never truly know another human being. Because it’s this sense of irresolution that lies at the heart of our most intimate relationships; it’s this sense of irresolution that begs the question of just how much we’re each prepared to stake; and it’s this sense of irresolution that too often throws us off course. Rose’s answer lies in a ‘third partner’ that exists alongside the lover and the beloved, and it’s this she calls ‘the work’. The work, she writes, ‘equalises the emotions, and enables the two submerged to surface in a series of unpredictable configurations. Work is the constant carnival; words, the rhythm and pace of two, who mine undeveloped seams of the earth and share the treasure.’

For Rose, this work involves a confrontation with our own limitations, both epistemological and metaphysical. To be alive is to be incomplete; to recognise this in oneself and one’s lover is to reckon with our ethical duty toward one another; it is to unearth the compassion from our condition of sadness. The fact that she was dying when she wrote the book is even more remarkable; she confronts the inevitability of death with love, making a bold and indomitable declaration, which is surely meant as a message of hope to us all:

‘I will stay in the fray, in the revel of ideas and risk; learning, falling, wooing, grieving, trusting, working, reposing – in this sin of language and lips.’

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Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.