The Captive & The Fugitive by Marcel Proust
My rating:3/5 cats
i have to review the fugitive here, even though i read the modern library edition that collects the captive with the fugitive because i think i went on way too long on the captive review to fit any more opinions, even though i don’t want to review this one with too many details because this is the one in which the Big Thing happens, so i don’t want to spoil anything for those of you who are right behind me with your readings. plus, i loved the captive more than i have loved any other proust novel before it, and this one was not as good, so i am glad to separate-review them for rating-precision.
but i can talk about the beginning part of the novel, before the Big Thing, because it has some truly spectacularly bad behavior from our beloved marcel. picking up little girls from the village to dandle on your knee? and then being surprised when the constable comes to your door?
and the subsequent pouting:
Henceforth, it would be impossible for me ever to bring a little girl into the house to console me in my grief, without risking the shame of an inspector suddenly appearing and of her taking me for a criminal. And in the same instant I realised how much more important certain longings are to us than we suppose, for this impossibility of my ever taking a little girl on my knee again seemed to me to strip life of all its value but what was more, I realised how understandable it is that people will readily refuse wealth and risk death, whereas we imagine that pecuniary interest and the fear of dying rule the world. For, rather than think that even an unknown little girl might be given a bad impression of me by the arrival of a policeman, I should have preferred to kill myself.
proust has always been skillful in relating all of the wonderful breathtakingly undignified behavior of romantic entanglements (think albert brooks in modern romance, but with fancier clothes). he does the internal rage and grief and jealousy thing so well, it brings back uncomfortable memories of adolescent impulses, but he usually takes it one step further than a sane person would.
if you are telling this story, you will write a letter to win back your lady love that essentially says “too bad you dumped me – i was going to buy you that car you wanted, and the yacht…” hoping that this will bring her back around to your doorstep and bed, and that it will be a healthy relationship built on that greedy foundation, even though you have been sick of her for a long time.
and, of course, you will declare your decision to ask her best friend to marry you, even though you have long suspected a lesbian relationship between them, as an ill-conceived strategy to make her jealous for a change. also, you will send an emissary to buy her, basically, and (later) another to find out all her dirt when by that point it will be utterly useless as a bargaining chip.
oh, marcel, you don’t know how to do this at all, do you?? all of the post-traumatic breakup stuff is glorious, and painful but i want to just take him aside and teach him two words:
boom. box.
this volume contains my very favorite description of his brand of love:
The infinitude of love, or its egoism, brings it about that the people whom we love are those whose intellectual and moral physiognomy is least objectively defined in our eyes; we alter them incessantly to suit our desires and fears, we do not separate them from ourselves, they are simply a vast, vague arena in which to exteriorise our emotions.
isn’t that the most romantic thing you have ever heard??
i truly love to hate him.
and yet, the karen of relationships past can actually relate to some of his impulses:
But the disastrous way in which the psychopathological universe is constructed has decreed that the clumsy act, the act which we ought most sedulously to avoid, is precisely the act that will calm us, the act that, opening before us, until we discover its outcome, fresh avenues of hope, momentarily relieves us of the intolerable pain which a refusal has aroused in us. So that, when the pain is too acute, we dash headlong into the blunder that consists in writing to, in sending somebody to intercede with, in going in person to see, in proving that we cannot do without, the woman we love.
i have sat on many a stoop, waiting for someone who was mad at me. i have bypassed security, i have left horribly vulnerable answering machine messages, i have written letters that i cringe to think about now, i have been emotionally naked and small and horrifying to myself before, during, and after some exploits best left unshared. so i get some of this, but that is all part of youth, and i hope i never crossed over into stalker territory.
so back to the book, there’s the Big Thing, and then a million pages examining the Big Thing, and then an abrupt cessation and subject-change. apart from the beginning parts, this is my least favorite so far, but it is necessary and i am excited to see what the very last volume has in store for me.
summer of proust is nearly over.
