33. Being wound into Proust’s universe...
The thirty-third instalment of 'Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow' in which our hero considers the nature of grief and jealousy yet again.
Being wound into Proust’s universe did eventually lessen the excesses of my bitterness and despair, enabling me at last to confront many of the darker truths I’d buried within myself…
I’d become bound up with the book’s many characters, along with my father and the Travelling Companion, producing a strange colloquy, which had become the backdrop to working, walking, waiting – and to London itself, which was like a great ocean of indifference amid which my inconsequential drama played out.
Despite some improvement, I was still in the habit of conjuring up, like Swann and the Narrator, self-induced visions of my old love and her new lover in tangled ecstasy. In this valley of ashes, the absence of her body was made more unbearable by the thought of its proximity to someone else. Already an idealised figure, her flight elevated her to the status of Platonic form in my mind, a template of womanhood or archetypal anima, fed and watered by my rage and regret. Like many men, I’d long laboured under the illusion that I possessed some sort of divine right over the female bodies that entered my orbit. My rupture with the Travelling Companion proved otherwise. And, although I didn’t realise it at the time, I’ve since come to see our break-up as a redemption of sorts, a salve to my dumb male arrogance and the wrong-headed ideas of dominion and ownership that fuelled it.
If Proust teaches us one thing, it’s that we cannot know other people and should never really hope to. We might instead treasure their opacity. Failure to do so can rapidly transform into a twisted concoction of anger, jealousy, and pride, which only ever serves to demean us. This is the Narrator’s struggle. When Albertine is killed, hers is a departure doubled, as the figurative ghost becomes literal; his agony resting on the question of her faithfulness (or lack of it): ‘Albertine no longer existed; but to me she was the person who had concealed from me that she had assignations with women in Balbec, who imagined that she had succeeded in keeping me in ignorance of them.’
When we try to consider what will happen to us after our own death, is it not still our living self which we mistakenly project at that moment? And is it much more absurd, when all is said, to regret that a woman who no longer exists is unaware that we have learned what she was doing six years ago than to desire that of ourselves, who will be dead, the public shall still speak with approval a century hence? If there is more real foundation in the latter than in the former case, the regrets of my retrospective jealousy proceeded none the less from the same optical error as in other men the desire for posthumous fame. And yet, if this impression of the solemn finality of my separation from Albertine had momentarily supplanted my ideas of her misdeeds, it only succeeded in aggravating them by bestowing upon them an irremediable character. I saw myself astray in life as on an endless beach where I was alone and where, in whatever directions I might turn, I would never meet her.
Her death condemns him to ignorance. His challenge is to somehow find a way to accept it; and to embrace the optical errors that frame our view of life for what they are: projections of grief. For as water is to a fish, grief is to a human being. A substance that surrounds us, that flows through us, that touches every point of our lives. It comes back to what Gillian Rose called our ‘sadness’, an example of which she locates in Arthurian legend. For when the king discovers Lancelot and Guinevere’s affair, he must decide whether he should punish the two people he loves the most. Either way he loses. Whatever choice he makes, says Rose, condemns him to a great sadness: ‘Betrayed or avenged, sadness is the condition of the king.’
Thus, jealousy stands as one of the great themes of literature – a particularly powerful, psychosexual expression of this brand of grief, which can tear into a life, a personality, a psyche, a body, like a disease. We need only consider a character like Racine’s Phedre (a constant touchstone in Proust), whose illicit love for her stepson and subsequent vacillations between blame, grief, and guilt prompt her precipitous fall. The power of grief is manifold; it should certainly be seen as a corollary of love, which means that loving someone will typically entail grieving for them somewhere down the line; and by extension loving the world will necessarily involve grieving for the world; both phenomena framed by the transience of our relationship to the other. Children know this instinctively, as I once did. A child’s sadness is the sadness of the king, a fundamental condition of post-natal existence, birthed at birth, as we’re ripped from the womb, stolen away from our amniotic oblivion. It took Proust, in whose work grief functions as a substrate, to remind me of what I’d forgotten.
In fact, the further I went into the Search, the more I came to see that reading itself was also a process of loving and grieving; the words on the page operating as surrogates for the things they could not convey. Negotiating the labyrinth of these words meant being swept up in both a love of what they represented, and a simultaneous acknowledgment of the grief born of their deficiency. Proust’s comparison between the optical error of the Narrator’s retrospective jealousy with the desire for posthumous fame is not accidental. Each of these were feelings familiar to him. And while both are wholly ridiculous, they’re also wholly palpable, informing his art on both a practical and emotional level.
Proust’s desire for fame was a desire not to be cast into obscurity; a desire to leave something meaningful behind; and to make his life count. You don’t write a book like his without thinking about posterity; and of course, this desire also serves the novel’s intellectual purpose, which is to explain how someone comes to the point where they are finally ready to write a work such as this. Fame, in this sense, is a means of still being with people, still affecting them after you’re gone; an idea that offers partial consolation to the lonely writer, who recognises the fact that life is too often a cleaving apart of bodies, which make meagre attempts at union while they can, but only ever come unstuck and undone, adrift in a vast, unknowable universe.
And if this desire is ridiculous, then being jealous of a dead person is at least equally ridiculous, if only because jealousy is primarily an emotion of the flesh, the absence of which is so painful because we understand that it implies a presence somewhere else. If that presence is rendered moot by death, then how can we feel jealousy? Because the optical error can still persist, as it does for the Narrator. Why? Because we project our flesh, and the flesh of others, perhaps of all who have ever lived, into the afterlife. And this only makes it harder to reconcile what we all know: that we perish each alone; and that the best we can hope for is a brief stint as a ghost or memory in the mind of someone who once knew us, before being swallowed up by oblivious time.
Even though she was still alive, the Travelling Companion had become like a ghost to me, stalking my dreams, haunting my waking life, absent and present at once. My jealousy and anger were still leading me into dark and uncomfortable places; an incessant re-enactment of the worst things that had happened to us; a powerful disbelief in her decision; an inability to process what she had done in taking up with another, in her seemingly infinite capacity for callousness and cruelty, in her rejection of our love and preference for some other piece of bone, skin, and sinew.
As they had for so long, day after day, my thoughts continued to revolve around these same subjects, a relentless series of senseless calculations designed to balance the equation of her betrayal, to provide an answer to what had happened, to unpick and make clear her rationale, so that I might finally achieve some peace. But the phantom threads of her presence ensured the impossibility of resolution to this problem. She was there, wherever I went, behind, beside, or in front of my father, who similarly demanded my attention from beyond the grave; the three of us caught in some strange dance inside my head, which was also projected out into the material world, tangled up with my reading, with this profound sense of grief, and with the ordinary life I was still compelled to lead in the midst of such madness.
Need to catch up on previous instalments? You can find links to all the previous chapters here.