19. Towards the end of volume two, Elstir introduces the Narrator to Albertine...
The nineteenth instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero recalls some lines of wisdom by Harold Pinter.
Towards the end of volume two, Elstir – who somehow knows the band of young girls that had earlier terrorised the promenade – introduces the Narrator to Albertine at a tea party arranged by the older man and contrived by the younger…
It’s here that she undergoes the first of many transmogrifications, in this case from a ‘girl of the beach’ to something else entirely: less ‘bacchante with a bicycle’, more the kind of person who precedes all her adjectives with the word ‘perfectly’. Such mutability is symptomatic of Proust, for whom personality is always protean. No character in the novel can ever really be pinned down, and Albertine is one of his most capricious.
But this doesn’t stop the Narrator. It seems his obsession with the similarly erratic Gilberte has taught him nothing. His attention and affection shift gear again. This newfound infatuation culminates in a hilarious scene where he tries to seduce this new object of desire, in what must be one of the most misjudged lunges (and greatest rebuffs) in all literature:
‘She looked at me and smiled. Beyond her, through the window, the valley lay bright beneath the moon. The sight of Albertine’s bare throat, of those strangely vivid cheeks, had so intoxicated me (that is to say, had placed the reality of the world for me no longer in nature, but in the torrent of my sensations which it was all I could do to keep within bounds), as to have destroyed the balance between the life, immense and indestructible, which circulated in my being, and the life of the universe, so puny in comparison. The sea, which was visible through the window as well as the valley, the swelling breasts of the Maineville cliffs, the sky in which the moon had not yet climbed to the zenith, all of these seemed less than a featherweight on my eyeballs, which between their lids I could feel dilated, resisting, ready to bear very different burdens, all the mountains of the world upon their fragile surface. Their orbit no longer found even the sphere of the horizon adequate to fill it. And everything that nature could have brought me of life would have seemed wretchedly meagre, the sigh of the waves far too short a sound to express the enormous aspiration that was surging in my breast. I bent over Albertine to kiss her. Death might have struck me down in that moment; it would have seemed to me trivial, or rather an impossible thing, for life was not outside, it was in me; I should have smiled pityingly had a philosopher then expressed the idea that someday, even some distant day, I should have to die, that the external forces of nature would survive me, the forces of that nature beneath whose godlike feet I was no more than a grain of dust; that, after me there would still remain those rounded, swelling cliffs, that sea, the moonlight and that sky! How was that possible; how could the world last longer than myself, since it was it that was enclosed in me, in me whom it went a long way short of filling, in me, where, feeling that there was room to store so many other treasures, I flung contemptuously into a corner sky, sea and cliffs. “Stop that, or I’ll ring the bell!” cried Albertine, seeing that I was flinging myself upon her...’
This perfect undercutting of the Narrator’s overblown imagination captures Proust’s gift for comedy. The Search is a very funny book. Its humour was often the thing that brought my own pomposity into focus, pricking the indulgences of my misery. I think this was because I hadn’t expected to laugh. And so, the sheer surprise of it reconnected those parts of my brain that fuel the notion that we should never take ourselves too seriously; and that perhaps also catalyse those thoughts that produce stoicism in its truest form; by which I mean a sense of preparedness that allows us to confront the universe, whatever it throws at us, but which is so often overwhelmed by that strange combination of egotism and despair.
Nearing the end of the second volume, I became conscious of some further salutary effects of my reading, which, although dim and ill-defined, I felt sure were genuine. These made me feel like I might actually find a way out of the emotional hole I was in. For some reason, I was reminded of something I’d read many years before, which I think went part of the way to explaining what I was beginning to comprehend; something written by Harold Pinter, who, I later found out, had had his own dalliance with Proust, and which went something like this:
‘To a man fully alive each moment attempts asphyxiation. The sun ever makes the skin putty. The rain falls “like showers of broken glass”. The awareness that comes in the flow of minutes, hours and days is akin sometimes to the lunatic, of insane possession and revelation, while beneath lies the stone depth of stillness. Suffering exists in far greater dimension than the suffering inflicted by society, which begins as an imposition of narrow realism: The Stock Exchange, the Fascists, the Ministry of Labour, General Elections; it all seemed to me, if placed in perspective, could be viewed from a Gulliver height. Jesus, I was told, it’s real enough to be coshed by a Union thug or shot at but instead of cultivating suffering on this plane till I was in love with it, amorous with self-pity, always remaining within the limits of one world, one plane, I realised that in a life of unutterable dimensions, these phenomena were merely as marbles – which tend to topple the great. If my skull were sliced by a lout or a chimney-pot falling, then that would be so. “The readiness is all. Let be”.’
Willingly abandoned to the variables that constitute the Proustian equation, it felt like I was at least beginning to intuit a way toward parity within myself, to pick out and follow the gossamer threads that might lead to a world changed by the experience of reading the novel.
Amid the pleasures of spending time on Parisian streets, in elegant houses, or at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, or in Elstir’s studio, or Odette’s salon, I could feel dim vestiges of hope creeping into the farrago of my consciousness. And this felt uncanny, like returning to a familiar land after years away; while all around me the world went on as usual, and I suddenly understood that it was down to me to see it differently, and to listen for the stone depth of stillness amid the ceaseless noise.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.