15. The second volume is called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower...
The fifteenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero continues to reflect on the cruel nature of jealousy.
The second volume of the Search is called In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower…
It’s a title that perfectly captures the state of mind of the Narrator, for whom the sacred nature of the universe, its ecstasies and agonies, has only deepened with the growth of libidinal desire. Everything begins to revolve around the chance to see Gilberte on the Champs-Elysées, where the boisterous play has taken a concupiscent turn:
‘Perhaps she was only dimly conscious that my game had had another object than that which I had avowed, but too dimly to have been able to see that I had attained it. And I, who was afraid that she had seen… agreed to go on wrestling, lest she should suppose that I had indeed no other object then that, after which I wished only to sit quietly by her side.’
Step by step, he gains access to her enchanted world, as much obsessed with the specious majesty of her parents, as he is with her. This is what he has longed for. But, with his wish granted, it takes no time at all for the vexations of love to surface: ‘There can be no peace of mind in love, since the advantage one has secured is never anything but a fresh starting-point for further desires.’
From the moment he becomes a familiar figure in the Swann household, especially as soon as he gains her parents’ approbation, Gilberte begins to tire of him. Worse, the greater his professions of love and admiration, the more insistent his demands upon her, the more she turns away. In describing the episode, Proust once again deploys the imagery of the storm:
‘The tempest that was blowing in my heart was so violent that I made my way home baffled, battered, feeling that I could recover my breath only by retracing my steps, by returning, upon whatever pretext, into Gilberte’s presence. But she would have said to herself: “Back again! Evidently, I can go to any length with him; he will come back every time, and the more wretched he is when he leaves me the more docile he’ll be.”’
As the fickle pendulum of desire swings one way for the Narrator, it swings the other for Gilberte, towards pity and contempt. If anything, it’s the sheer inscrutability of the beloved that perplexes the lover, which is a realisation that perhaps only comes with age.
‘When we come to examine the thoughts, the actions of a woman whom we love, we are as completely at a loss as must have been, face to face with the phenomena of nature, the world’s first natural philosophers, before their science had been elaborated and had cast a ray of light over the unknown. Or, worse still, we are like a person in whose mind the law of causality barely exists, a person who would be incapable, therefore, of establishing any connection between one phenomenon and another, to whose eyes the spectacle of the world would appear unstable as a dream.’
Had I ever really understood the nature of this curious reality myself, or was I only coming to terms with it as I read these words for the first time? I’d been thrown into the inferno the jealous mind constructs around us, but it was only through reading Proust that I realised there will always be a part of the person we love that we can never know; and that the only proper response is to accept and even relish this reality, to live amid the mystery of the other.
The young Narrator’s turmoil is a result of his failure to grasp this. Instead, he employs a series of futile strategies to win back Gilberte’s intermittent heart, each more transparent than the last. In a final desperate attempt, he decides to cut her off altogether, refusing to see her, but only in the hope that by seeming to reject her, he’ll invert the pendulum and she’ll come back to him. At the same time, he begins to feel the slow burn of jealousy when he sees her walking along the street one day with another young man. This throws her words ‘If you like, we might go on wrestling’ into an entirely different context. If she can say such provocative things to me, he realises, she can say them to somebody else.
It’s then that the Narrator makes an implicit comparison between himself and Swann, her father, whose green-eyed tale of woe he has just retrospectively related to us. We begin to see a tormented future looming for this self-obsessed, idealistic, and naïve lover; and to see our own travails in the ones awaiting him.
After this episode, the novel shifts to a new location. Two years have passed. The Narrator and Gilberte have been estranged for all this time and he now finds himself in Normandy, beside the same shore Swann had previously described to him, evoking Dante and the second circle of hell. Except that it is summer, the tempests have long-since passed, the weather is fine, and the only storm on the horizon takes the form of a young, athletic and handsome girl called Albertine. But we’ll come to her a little later.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.