Sunday Morning! “The Fugitive” by Marcel Proust

{All year, I’ve been blogging Proust’s epic . Previous posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. 5, 6 , 7,  8, 9, 10 and 11.}

It’s one of those slightly sad miracles of life that we do survive heartbreak, in spite of how much it seems we will not this time. Heartache always feels like it will last forever, and I think in some romantic way we hope it will. And, to be fair, for some people it seems that broken hearts are more enduring and persistent; they can’t quite shake it like the rest of us. I don’t know that my parents have ever gotten over their divorce thirty years ago. For the rest of us, it’s a thing where the starting point is clear and the end is highly ambiguous. One day, grief is mostly done with you and quietly takes leave.

Proust’s sixth volume is called variously “La Fugitive” or “Albertine Disparue” or “The Sweet Cheat Gone”. It was published after Proust’s death and has a few mistakes that he would have likely fixed if he had that chance: a few people die and then return in different sections; a character either has a single child or a brood. In 1986, a typescript was discovered that had been hand-corrected by Proust, which omits 150 pages and makes a change that would have maybe required another volume to sort out. Apparently, he died with other volumes in mind. He died working. For the most part, we ignore the 1987 edition.

In spite of all the variations, there are many readers for whom “The Fugitive” is their favorite volume because it’s a psychologically rich depiction of heartbreak and its recovery, something to which we can all relate. For all of the works of literature in which a broken heart leads to death or murder or suicide, here’s an early one about resiliency and healing- and much more realistic for it.

As we recall, the going was always rocky. Our hero’s relationship with the young orphan Albertine seemed somehow especially ill-fated. In the last volume, he couldn’t seem to put aside his jealousy and suspicions and he continually made a pest of himself as a result. Notice that Proust has shrewdly set this up as a pattern in his life; as a child, he felt safe only by compelling his mother’s forced devotion. He was a weak and sensitive child, and a bit of a brat. So, it’s possible he never really cared for Albertine, but he was in love, and enflamed with needs that she could never meet. In my experience, it never works out with jealous partners- they inevitably leave you pre-emptively because they expect you’ll leave them inevitably. It’s all very sad and frustrating.

Albertine left him at the end of the last volume and they make some attempts at reconciliation here, but again his pride and manipulative nature get in the way- it’s less important to get her back than to know she wants to come back for him, and so he pretends to be over her in correspondence. She finally gives in and asks to come back and he gives in and begs her to return, but now it’s too late- she has died in a riding accident!

Our hero has already been through denial, having convinced himself Albertine left because she wanted to marry him. He has tried making an offer of money to get her back. And now, in his grief, all of his childhood sufferings have returned to him. The entire world seems different; everything relates in some way to the missing piece. Forgetting Albertine means renouncing the universe.

And yet, after her death, he’s still burning with curiosity about her secret life. He sends people to inquire about her behavior at the resort town they shared. Word comes back that she often had sexual dalliances with other women in the baths at Balbec and elsewhere. When I first read “In Search of Lost Time,” back in my 20s, this struck me as bizarre and like something out of David Lynch- all of the character’s most unlikely fears turned out to be true! Reading it now, I’m struck by how many hints there were that perhaps Albertine really was a “daughter of Gomorrah” as Proust puts it. In the era, the common lot of the gay man or woman was unhappy marriage to the opposite sex. And yet, she really did seem to care for Marcel at one time. There’s a sadness in how hard she tried to be a devoted wife, only to fail.

But did they really ever love each other, or even understand one another? Proust seems skeptical, writing:

Man is the creature who cannot escape from himself, who knows other people only in himself, and when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

And this certainly seems to be true of his hero- it’s striking how little he actually knew about this woman for all his obsession. And, of course, we do know our loves only within the context of ourselves. We’re always somehow limited in our knowledge of the other. Yet he finds out:

So what I had believed to be nothing to me was simply my entire life. How ignorant one is of oneself.

And yet, there is hope here too. For Proust, we are not singular selves, “but as it were the marching past of a composite army, in which there were passionate men, indifferent men, jealous men- jealous men not one of whom was jealous of the same woman.” When we mourn a broken heart, we are really mourning the version of ourselves that is now gone, having only made sense in that lost context. And we’re mourning the version of ourselves that will never come to pass.

But, our inconsistency is our hope; we shed our temporary selves like layers of dead skin, and finally we forget.

Last year, I ran into my ex-wife for the first time in a number of years. It was a miserable divorce and I expected to be devastated were I ever to see her again; instead, I didn’t recognize her. It took someone pointing her out to me after I’d walked past her numerous times to realize who it was. The next morning, I woke up feeling freed. It’s a little sad, but our memories fade, and that’s liberating too.

So, what are YOU reading, pondering, playing, watching, or getting over today?