x- The captive, Part 2, (aka The prisoner) Trans CK Scott Moncrieff, Chatto & Windus, London 1924, 1957
Context: In the terminal stages of Albertine's captivity, the Narrator determines to end their relationship, but Albertine Albertine anticipants him and absconds.
1-2 Homosexuality He (Brichot) reassured himself by recalling pages of Plato, lines of Virgil, because, being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in those days to fall in love with a young man was like, in our day (Socrates's jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato's theories) keeping a dancing girl before one marries and settles down... He (M de Char1us) refused to see that for the last 1900 years ("a pious courtier under a pious prince would have been an atheist under an atheist prince", as La Bruyere reminds us) all conventional homosexuality - that of Plato's young friends as well as that of Virgil's shepherds - has disappeared, that what survives and increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which we conceal from other people and disguise to ourself. . .. It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of obstacles, a thing of scorn and loathing, that is the only true form, the only form that can be found conjoined in a person with an enhancement of his moral qualities.
2 Insanity The madman who protests he is sane and only in the asylum because of his wife's machinations, and concludes: "You see that man who is waiting to speak to me on the lawn, whom I am obliged to put up with: he thinks he is Jesus Christ That alone will show you the sort of lunatics that I have to live among; he cannot be Christ, for I am Christ myself!!
39-42 A lengthy elaboration on the changing face of Dreyfusism at the Court of Mme Verdurin She (Mme de Verdurin), at the same time, was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the coach, not to mention the enormous social retardation that the social error of the Dreyfus case had inflicted upon her, not without doing her a service all the same. (T)he disapproval with which Mme de Guermantes had observed certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the Case, excluded fashionable women from their drawing rooms and admitted others who were not so fashionable, because they were for or against the fresh trial, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies, as lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social distinctions above the national interests....... M de Cambremer regarded the Dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the Intelligence Service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the French people, to pave the way for invasion.
The Marquis left it to his wife to prove that the cruelly introspective writers of the day had, by creating a spirit of irreverence arrived by a parallel course at a similar result:
2 Insanity The madman who protests he is sane and only in the asylum because of his wife's machinations, and concludes: "You see that man who is waiting to speak to me on the lawn, whom I am obliged to put up with: he thinks he is Jesus Christ That alone will show you the sort of lunatics that I have to live among; he cannot be Christ, for I am Christ myself!!
39-42 A lengthy elaboration on the changing face of Dreyfusism at the Court of Mme Verdurin She (Mme de Verdurin), at the same time, was beginning to feel that she had already on more than one occasion missed the coach, not to mention the enormous social retardation that the social error of the Dreyfus case had inflicted upon her, not without doing her a service all the same. (T)he disapproval with which Mme de Guermantes had observed certain persons of her world who, subordinating everything else to the Case, excluded fashionable women from their drawing rooms and admitted others who were not so fashionable, because they were for or against the fresh trial, and had then been criticised in her turn by those same ladies, as lukewarm, unsound in her views, and guilty of placing social distinctions above the national interests....... M de Cambremer regarded the Dreyfus case as a foreign machination intended to destroy the Intelligence Service, to undermine discipline, to weaken the army, to divide the French people, to pave the way for invasion.
The Marquis left it to his wife to prove that the cruelly introspective writers of the day had, by creating a spirit of irreverence arrived by a parallel course at a similar result:
"M de Reinach and M Hervieu are in the plot", she would say. Nobody will accuse the Dreyfus case of having premeditated such dark designs upon society. But there it has certainly broken down the hedges… Monarchists no longer cared at the time of the Dreyfus case, whether a man had been a Republican, that is to say a Radical, that is to say Anticlerical, provided that he was an Antisemite and a Nationalist. Should a war ever come, patriotism would assume another form and if a writer was chauvinistic nobody would stop to think whether he had or had not been a Dreyfusard.
It was thus that, at each political crisis, Mme Verdurin had collected one by one, like a bird building Its nest, the several items, useless for the moment, of what would one day be her Salon. The Dreyfus case had passed. Anatole France remained. Mme. Verdurin's strength lay in her genuine love of art, the trouble that she used to take for her faithful, the marvellous dinners that she gave for them alone, without inviting anyone from the world of fashion. Each of the faithful was treated at her table as Bergotte had been treated at Mme. Swann's. When a boon companion of this sort had turned into an illustrious man whom everybody was longing to meet, his presence at Mme Verdurin's had none of the artificial, composite effect of a dish at an official or farewell banquet, cooked by Potel or Chabot, but was merely a delicious 'ordinary' which you would have found there in the same perfection on a day when there was no party at all. At Mme Verdurin's the cast was trained to perfection, the repertory most select, all that was lacking was an audience. And now that the public taste had begun to turn from the rational and French art of a Bergotte, and to go in, above all things, for exotic forms of music, Mme. Verdurin, a sort of official representative in Paris of all foreign artists, was not long in making her appearance, by the side of the exquisite Princess Yourbeletief, an aged Fairy Godmother, grim but all-powerful, to the Russian dancers. This charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of critics protested, infected Paris, as we know, with a fever of curiosity less burning, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused by the Dreyfus case. There again Mme. Verdurin, but with a very different result socially, was to take her place in the front row. Just as she had been seen by the side of Mme. Zola, immediately under the bench, during the trial in the Assize Court, so when the new generation of humanity, in their enthusiasm for the Russian ballet, thronged to the Opera, crowned with the latest novelty in aigrettes, they invariably saw in a stage box, Mme. Verdurin by the side of Princess Yourbeletief. And just as, after the emotions of the law courts, people used to go in the evening to Mme Verdurin's, to meet Picquart or Labori in the flesh and what was more to hear the latest news of the Case, and to learn what hopes might be placed in Zurlinden, Loubet, Colonel Jouaust, the Regulations, they now flock there to meet Princess Yourbeletief and the dancers for the Russian ballet”. |
45 In matters of crime, where the culprit is in danger, it is his material interest that prompts the confession. Where the fault incurs no penalty, it is his self-esteem.
Outward signs of grief 45 … the people who, so as not to allow a bereavement to interrupt their life of pleasure, go about saying that it seems to them useless to display the outward signs of a grief which they feel in their hearts. An atmosphere remembered because girls were smiling 50 They wafted smiles of greeting to me across the room. The air was thus decorated at every moment with the charming smile of some girl. That is the manifold. occasional ornament of evening parties, as it is of days. We remember an atmosphere because girls were smiling in it 51 Mental illness There is no great social function that does not, if, in taking a section of it, we contrive to cut sufficiently deep, resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad did they not whisper in our ear, pointing to some old gentleman who goes past: "That's Joan of Arc". The mistakes of others 55 But the man who can see the mistakes of others need only be exhilarated by circumstances in order to succumb to them himself. Unconscious memory surfaces again when least expected 58-9 Mme Verdurin sat in a place apart, the twin hemispheres of her pale slightly roseate brow magnificently curved, her hair drawn back, partly in imitation of an eighteenth century portrait, partly from the desire for coolness of a fever-stricken patient whom modesty forbids to reveal her condition, aloof, a deity presiding over musical rites, patron saint of Wagnerism and sick-head-aches, a sort of almost tragic Norn, evoked by the spell of genius in the midst of all these bores, in whose presence she would more than ordinarily scorn to express her feelings upon hearing a piece of music which she knew better than they. The concert began, I did not know what they were playing, I found myself in a strange land. Where was I to locate it? Into what composer's country had I come? I should have been glad to know, and, seeing nobody near me whom I might question, I should have liked to be a character in those Arabian Nights which I never tired of reading and in which, in moments of uncertainty, there arose a genie or a maiden of ravishing beauty, invisible to everyone else but not to the embarrassed hero to whom she reveals exactly what he wishes to learn. Well, at this very moment I was favoured with precisely such a magical apparition. As, in a stretch of country which we suppose to be strange to us and which as a matter of fact we have approached from a new angle, when after turning out of one road we find ourself emerging suddenly upon another, every inch of which is familiar only we have not been in the habit of entering it from that end, we say to ourself immediately: " Why, this is the lane that leads to the garden gate of my friends the X-; 1 shall be there in a minute," and there, indeed, is their daughter at the gate, come out to greet us as we pass; so, all of a sudden, I found myself, in the midst of this music that was novel to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil's sonata; and, more marvellous than any maiden, the little phrase, enveloped, harnessed in silver, glittering with brilliant effects of sound, as light and soft as silken scarves, came towards me, recognisable in this new guise. My joy at having found it again was enhanced by the accent, so friendly familiar, which it adopted in addressing me, so persuasive, so simple, albeit without dimming the shimmering beauty with which it was resplendent. Its intention, however, was, this time, merely to shew me the way, which was not the way of the sonata, for this was an unpublished work of Vinteuil in which he had merely amused himself, by an allusion which was explained at this point by a sentence in the programme which one ought to have been reading simultaneously, in making the little phrase reappear for a moment. Earlier love affairs but slight and timid essays 63 … indeed, if I were to consider, not my love for Albertine, but my life as a whole, my earlier love affairs had themselves been but slight and timid essays, experiments, which paved the way to this vaster love: my love for Albertine. 67-8 And it was precisely when he was seeking to be something new that one recognised beneath the apparent differences the profound similarities; and the deliberate resemblances that existed in the body of a work, when Vinteuil repeated once and again in a single phrase, diversified it, amused himself by altering its rhythm, by making it reappear in its original form, these deliberate resemblances, the work of the intellect, inevitably superficial, never succeeded in being as striking as those resemblances, concealed, involuntary, which broke out in different colours, between the two separate masterpieces. 69 Each artist seems thus to be the native of an unknown country, which he himself has forgotten, different from that which will emerge, making for the earth, another great artist... Vinteuil in his latest works, seemed to have drawn nearer to that unknown country. |
71 The superiority of music over the spoken and written word
(After the andante) But what were their words, which like every human and external word, left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just engaged? I was indeed like an angel who, fallen from the inebriating bliss of paradise, subsides into the most humdrum reality. And, just as certain creatures are the last surviving testimony to a form of life which nature has discarded, I asked myself if music were not the unique example of what might have been - if there had not come the invention of language, the formation of words, the analysis of ideas - the means of communication between one spirit and another. It is like a possibility which has ended in nothing; humanity has developed along other lines, those of spoken and written language. But this return to the unanalysed was so inebriating, that on emerging from that paradise, contact with people who were more or less intelligent seemed to me of an extraordinary insignificance. 74 .. this phrase was what might have seemed most definitely to characterise - from its sharp contrast with the rest of my life, with the visible world - those impressions which at remote intervals I recaptured in my life as starting points, foundation-stones for the construction of a true life: the impression that I had felt at the sight of the steeples of Martinville, or of a line of trees near Balbec. Marriage and adultery 76 Relations which are not consecrated by the laws establish bonds of kinship as manifold, as complex, even more solid than those which spring from marriage. Indeed, without pausing to consider relations of so special a nature, do we not find every day that adultery, when it is based upon genuine love, does not upset the family sentiment, the duties of kinship, but rather revivifies them. Adultery brings the spirit into what marriage would often have left: a dead letter. A good-natured girl who merely from convention will wear mourning for her mother's second husband has not tears enough to shed for the man whom her mother has chosen out of all the world as her lover. 85 This business of selection, the chief preoccupation of people who give parties…. 85 .. for even if everybody this evening, from fear of M de Charlus, had observed a polite silence during the music, it would never have occurred to anyone to listen to it. 94. M de Charlus to Mme Verdurin: "That is why I set my face against your inviting those persons – divisors who, among the overwhelming people whom I brought you would have played the part of the decimal points in a sum, .reducing the others to mere fractional value". 95 .. which made one think of those mediocre actors or novelists who, at certain periods, are hailed as men of genius, either because of the mediocrity of their competitors, among whom there is no artist capable of revealing what is meant by true talent, or because of the mediocrity of the public, which, did there exist an extraordinary individuality, would be incapable of understanding it. 106-7.. The drawing room, more than the large windows, more than the gay youth of his hosts and their faithful, that unreal part.of which, in a drawing room as in everything else, the external, actual part, liable to everyone's control, is but the prolongation .. of a colour which no longer existed, save for my elderly guide, which he was incapable of making me see, that part which has detached itself from the outside world, to take refuge in our soul, to which it gives a surplus value, in which it is assimilated to its normal substance, transforming itself - houses that have been pulled down, people long dead, bowls of fruit at the suppers which we recall - into the translucent alabaster of our memories, the colour of which we are incapable of displaying, since we alone see it. Other people cannot form any idea of them, we are unable to think of them without a certain emotion. 107-8 Those pieces of the original furniture that had been transported here, and sometimes arranged in the same groups, and which I myself remembered from la Raspelière, introduced into the new drawing room fragments of the old, which, at certain moments, recalled it so vividly as to create a hallucination and then seemed themse1ves scarcely real from having evoked in the midst of the surrounding reality, fragments of a vanished world which seemed to extend around them. A sofa that had risen up from the dreamland between a pair of new and thoroughly substantial armchairs, smaller chairs upholstered in pink silk, the cloth surface of a card table raised to the dignity of a person since, like a person, it had a past, a memory (where it could tell the time as accurately as Mme Verdurin herself) and through the glass doors at la Raspelière, where they had taken it and where it used to gaze out all day long over the flower-beds of the garden at the valley far below, until it was time for Cottard and the musician to sit down to their game; a posy of violets and pansies in pastel, the gift of a painter friend, now dead, the sole fragment that survived of a life that had vanished without leaving any trace, summarising a great talent and a long friendship, recalling his keen, gentle eyes, his shapely hand, plump and melancholy, while he was at work on it; .. 138 … "decidedly, Baron," said Brichot, "should the Board of Studies ever think of founding a Chair of Homosexuality, I shall see that your name is the first to be submitted. |
140 (T)here are certain desires, some of them confined to the mouth, which, as soon as we have allowed them to grow, insist upon being gratified, whatever the consequences may be; we are unable to resist the temptation to kiss a bare shoulder at which we have been gazing for too long and at which our lips strike like a serpent at a bird, to bury our sweet tooth in a cake that has fascinated and famished it, nor can we forego the delight of the amazement, anxiety, grief. or mirth to which we can move another person by some unexpected communication.
152 ..this great nobleman (in whom his sense of superiority to the middle classes was no less essentially inherent than it had been in any of his ancestors who had stood in the dock before the Revolutionary Tribunal)..
156 But we picture the future as a reflection of the present projected into empty space, whereas it is the result, often almost immediate, of causes which for the most part escape our notice.
152 ..this great nobleman (in whom his sense of superiority to the middle classes was no less essentially inherent than it had been in any of his ancestors who had stood in the dock before the Revolutionary Tribunal)..
156 But we picture the future as a reflection of the present projected into empty space, whereas it is the result, often almost immediate, of causes which for the most part escape our notice.
This hypothesis that art might be real...
233 It is not possible that a piece of sculpture, a piece of music which gives us an emotion which we feel to be more exalted, more pure, more true, does not correspond to some definite spiritual reality. It is surely symbolical of me, since it gives that expression of profundity and truth. Thus, nothing resembled more closely than some such phrase of Vinteuil the peculiar pleasure which I had felt at certain moments of my life, when gazing, for instance, at the steeples of Martinville, or at certain trees along a road near Balbec, or more simply, in the first part of this book, when I tasted a certain cup of tea. Stemming not from a memory but from an impression 233-4 ..the clear sounds, the blazing colours which Vinteuil sent to us from the world in which he composed, paraded before my imagination with insistence but too rapidly for me to be able to apprehend it, something which I might compare to the silkened perfume of a geranium. Only, whereas, in memory, this vagueness may be, if not explored, at any rate fixed precisely, thanks to a guiding line of circumstances which explain why a certain savour has been able to recall to us luminous sensations given by Vinteuil coming not from a memory but from an impression (like that of the steeples of Martinville), one would have had to find, for the geranium scent of his music, not a material explanation, but the profound equivalent, the unknown and highly coloured festival (of which his works seemed to be the scattered fragments, the scarlet-flashing rifts), the mode in which he "heard" the universe and projected it beyond himself. This unknown quality of a unique world which no composer had ever made us see, perhaps it is this, that the most authentic proof of genius exists, even more than in the content of the work itself. The monotony of Vinteuil' s works - the great men of letters have never created more than a single work or rather have never done more than refract through various mediums an identical beauty which they bring into the world. Typical phrases the same in the sonata, the septet…. |
236 Thomas Hardy. "Do you remember the stonemasons in Jude the Obscure, in The Well Beloved, the blocks of stone which the father hews out of the island coming in boats to be piled up in the son’s studio where they are turned into statues; in A Pair of Blue Eyes the papallelism of the tombs, and also the parallel line of the vessel, and the railway coaches containing the lovers and the dead woman; the parallelism between The Well Beloved, where the man is in love with three women, and A Pair of Blue Eyes where the woman is in love with three men, and in short all those novels which can be laid one upon another like the vertically piled houses upon the rocky soil of the island. You told me that you had seen some of Vermeer's pictures, you must have realised that they are fragments of an identical world, that it is always, however great the genius with which they have been recreated, the same table, the same carpet, the same woman, the same novel and unique beauty, an enigma, at that epoch in which nothing resembles or explains it, if we seek to find similarities in subjects but to isolate the peculiar impression that is produced by the colour. Well, then, this novel beauty remains identical in all Dostoievski's works, the Dostoievski woman (as distinctive as a Rembrandt woman) with her mysterious face, whose engaging beauty changes abruptly, as though her apparent good nature had been but make-believe, to a terrible insolence (although at heart it seems that she is more good than bad), is she not always the same ,..
The profundity of unconscious memory .242 ..if Vinteuil's phrases seemed to be the expression of certain states of the soul analogous to that which I had experienced when I tasted the madeleine that had been dipped in a cup of tea, there was nothing to assure me that the vagueness of such states was a sign of their profundity rather than of our not having learned yet to analyse them, so that there need be nothing more real in them than in other states. And yet that happiness, that sense of certainty in happiness while I was drinking the cup of tea, or when I smelt in the Champs Elysees a smell of smouldering wood, was not an illusion. States more profound and defy analysis, ... the charm of Vinteuil's music makes us think of them because it too defies analysis, but this does not prove that it has the same depth. The beauty of a phrase of pure music can easily appear to be the image of or at least akin to an intellectual impression which we have received, but simply because it is unintellectual. |
245 We love only that in which we pursue something inaccessible, we love only what we do not possess, and very soon I returned to the conclusion that I did not possess Albertine.