32. By the time of Albertine’s imprisonment...
The thirty-second instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero considers Albertine's incarceration and revisits patrimonial parleys in public houses.
By the time of Albertine’s ‘imprisonment’ in the Narrator’s apartment – the subject of the fifth volume, The Captive – it’s as if there has been some change in her corporeal integrity…
I remember wondering whether she was ‘real’ at all, and not just an eruption of the Narrator’s interior life; or more accurately, a ghost of some sorts, haunting the literal hallways of his home and the symbolic ones of his mind, ripped from the pages of Poe (whom Proust adored). Albertine, the walled-up corpse wailing in coded dithyrambs about her endless infidelities, stoking the Narrator’s jealousy, just as the phantom Travelling Companion stoked mine; she too even more powerful in her absence, speaking across time and space in contradictory voices, tapping into my deepest fears and insecurities, leaving me with liquid visions of her face, with no fixed form, solicitous one moment, vindictive the next, rising up in dreams, drifting uninvited through my thoughts, or actively willed into an imprecise picture that might mutate into language (or implied language) at any moment, and then collapse in an instant. It was as if, suddenly formed of words, she’d immediately confound any such idea of linguistic harmony and become a thing of unspeakable dimensions, half-remembered and broken apart, like someone had thrown a stone into the shallow pool that was my mind, rupturing the reflection that had been at its centre.
Human experience involves a succession of faces when you think about it. From the holy delights of the mother cradling her new-born child, to the urgent intimacy of the beloved’s nose and mouth pressed up against the lover’s, to the doctor looming over the dying patient, to the gaggle of mourners peering into the grave, ours is a continual reckoning with the faces of others, which are both familiar and strange, and therefore the very definition of ‘uncanny’. Poe describes the famous house of Roderick Usher as being like a face reflected in the black tarn outside its doors, and Narrator invokes ‘the Dostoevskian woman with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been make-believe, to a terrible insolence,’ as he explains the genius of the gloomy Russian to Albertine. One wonders if he is really explaining this to himself, such is the resonance of the house and the face for him, each imbued with the polar potentialities of acceptance and rejection, joy and pain, desire and despair; each capable of producing the most sublime states of happiness or suffering. We make our homes, for better or worse, in the faces of others.
Certainly, Albertine’s ‘house arrest’ is the consequence of the Narrator’s utterly unhinged response to his own anguish. His growing obsession with her speaks to all those horrible truths of the mind, either sublimated, or hidden away, that do their utmost to destroy us. The idea that the duplicitous lover can be seen to represent the unknowable universe might be thought of as a fallacy too far, but isn’t there a mote of truth in the idea, especially given its grim humour? The face of the other will always remain the face of the other, separate from the face that looks upon it, which beneath all the winnowing looks is desperate for one thing: true assimilation. And the same goes for the rest of the world, objective reality, understood in terms of its oppositional relation to the subject, untrustworthy because it appears distinct, we long to make it bend to our demented will.
The Narrator’s answer is to attempt to possess his lover completely, which, given that all relationships are haunted by the certitude of their cessation, is a strategy condemned to failure; and those post-coital observances we make of one another, hair happily out of place, moist hands entwined beneath bedclothes, between legs, where one pair of quizzical eyes meets another pair of quizzical eyes, only serve to affirm the transience of the union, the mortality of each party, and thus establish that strange feedback loop which is the universe becoming, not just conscious of itself, but conscious of the fact that it has become conscious of itself. Such moments are made of a mute anguish, which is why they so often resolve themselves in sex, another futile attempt to fuse and wear each other’s faces, to enter the house of the other, at least for those few minutes of precious congress.
This made even more sense when Albertine’s fate became clear, in the days following the accident when the Narrator receives a letter that seems to be addressed from her, and we’re left unsure as to what the truth of her existence (or lack of it) is. This idea that she may have always been a phantom seems somehow entirely plausible, the same as the idea that she’s somehow still alive. We’re suddenly aware of the fact that we’ve only ever seen her through the eyes of the Narrator, and that beyond her, we’ve only ever seen everything through his eyes, and so might be tempted to think of that other unreliable storyteller, Nick Carraway, and thus question everything we’ve been told, which is sort of the point. I guess no book written in the first person can ever really be trusted.
Looking back, I can see that my own grief involved a curious doubling, which meant a simultaneous mourning for the dead and for the living; so that she was perfectly alive and yet utterly dead, while he was perfectly dead and yet utterly alive. In this way, you might say I was living through a sort of purgatory, a world caught between worlds, in which mutable spirits offered themselves up for conversation, while Proust, like Virgil before him, became a guide, showing me a way through the chaos of my Stygian existence. This notion was so convincing, that I very quickly began to see the Travelling Companion in the coquetry of Odette or the capriciousness of the Duchess, to find my father in the sorrow of Swann or the delinquency of the Baron de Charlus.
Speaking of my father, I must admit that when I was young, I had no idea what alcohol meant to him. It was just something he did, part of his being; and so, if anything, I thought of it fondly. That he kept a half bottle of vodka in the glove box of the car, or in his gym bag, seemed entirely natural to me. Drinking was simply the medium through which he transacted with the world, a non-negotiable part of his personality that underpinned everything else. I suppose I only truly understood this when I started doing it myself and became aware of the extent to which I shared his proclivities. In this way, drink’s manifold nature became clear to me. It was at once a palliative, a source of solace and companionship, a root of rebellion, a tool of obliteration, and a rejection of polite convention. He’d made his bed next alongside the likes of Jeffrey Bernard and his Soho cronies, and he intended to lie in it. Booze was a way to transform a sorry and sick world; to make it pulse again with urgent life. And I could see that there was a kind of sacrificial heroism in this way of being; but I could also see the stupidity and selfishness that makes equally sick and sorry martyrs of those who choose this path. I knew that I was teetering on this precipice myself, uncertain which way I might go, even more unsure whether it mattered.
It was never really clear at the time, but I came to unearth the roots of his suffering eventually, at least in part. The feeling of being trapped in a provincial backwater, the increasing sense of waste, of suffocation, of missed opportunities, the pressures of dumb conformity. Whatever this was, it was not in keeping with his nature. From somewhere, he found the courage to flee. But what he was running from was more than just the ordinary job and the ordinary marriage, the ordinary family and the ordinary town. As a thoughtless teenager, I had no notion of what it meant to grow old, to see your life transformed into everything you thought it wouldn’t be, and to become aware of the deeper corruptions that stirred the soul and shaped the world. It was only after everything had fallen apart in my own life years later, that I could begin to identify with his predicament, to see why he’d escaped to New York, which, while surely seeming like a beacon of freedom at the time, was perhaps also an embodiment of some of the forces that were stifling him. I suppose it’s possible that he might have returned from Tartarus triumphant, but as you now know, that’s not what happened.
What did return was a shell of the man I’d once known; a man rapidly hollowing himself out from the inside, who I then had to deal with at the very moment when I least wanted to; in those particularly selfish years when a son is trying to forge his own identity and set himself apart from the man who’d sired him. I’ve been over this, but his presence was like the coming of a meteor, smashing apart my fragile paradise; the unspoken bond between us switching polarity, so that I became desperate to push away the person I once cleaved to, while simultaneously afraid that any such disavowal was as good as murder. And so, I soon found myself alone in the sinful dark, struck down with the guilt of a killing I hadn’t yet committed, while unable to explain this abhorrent feeling to anyone, especially the Travelling Companion.
Afraid of the implications of this betrayal, I diverted all I had towards him, with no idea of what this meant to her. The effect was to magnify everything that was already wrong; so that the rage I felt toward him, I began to impose upon her; explosive arguments that would start on the street and spill into the flat, or start in the flat and spill into the street, or in a shop somewhere, a friend’s house, a restaurant; unhinged phone calls and shouting matches; an unspeakable admixture of primal suspicion and sensation; paranoia and jealousy; a wellspring of darkness and destruction that snuffed out any light that remained between us. I mean, I even became convinced at one point that the two of them were having an affair; a ridiculous idea, but one twisted enough, I thought, to suit our sick and sorry situation, where where drinking and fucking were the only things that obliterated the fierce pain between us; where we’d wake up with tears in our eyes, look at each other, bewildered, with no idea what to do next except more of the same.
And while we were getting wasted, so was he. Alone, drifting from drink to drink, desperately trying to quell all the nebulous anger he felt toward the world, and during those months especially, toward the two of us, a union he perceived as inimical to the attention he craved. What emerged out of all this was a ghost before a grave was even laid; a man haunted by himself, and by the vestigial remnants of what he used to be. Dim wishes that had been whipped up into myths and fused with mistaken memories fell from his lips; phantom plans and stories about a long life, when we’d both be old, and I’d be wheeling him along endless promenades in the sun.
By now, the stew of alcohol, regret and delusion, somehow still tinged with a scintilla of solicitude, was what passed for our relationship – end games played out in dreary pubs, which were the only places in which I found either of us bearable. And behind his glassy eyes, I could tell that he knew that I was hardening toward him; and that there in what he saw was not simply his son’s pitiless disdain, but a vision of the young man he once was, vigorous, alive, yet to be eroded by time and fate, and all the more hideous given his unearned youth. We watched each other evaporate, enveloped by the grievous vapours of this process, stricken by the helplessness of the eyewitness who can do nothing but watch and weep. He’d lost his son and I’d lost my father. Each of us grieving in our own way; the only difference was that my grief had further to go, while his would be stopped short much sooner than either of us could have known.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.