Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  he had continued for some years to seek out old servants of Odette, so strongly in him persisted the painful curiosity to know whether on that day, so long ago, at six o’clock, Odette had been in bed with Forcheville. Then that curiosity itself had disappeared, without, however, his abandoning his investigations. He continued the attempt to discover what no longer interested him, because his old ego [son moi ancien] though it had shrivelled to the extreme of decrepitude still acted mechanically, following the course of preoccupations so utterly abandoned that Swann could not now succeed even in forming an idea of that anguish.

  We continue to want something from those we have long since ceased to want anything from. We could be driven by “the simple love of truth” (par simple amour de la vérité) to wish to resolve old doubts, but love of truth, in such instances, is nothing more than the mask worn by the green-eyed monster himself. As Madame de La Fayette showed, jealousy does not necessarily die when the cause of jealousy is removed. The truth is that we continue to want without knowing what we want; the wanting has simply latched on to someone, and that someone, we are convinced, needs to be possessed. On the night when Swann finally sleeps with Odette, the narrator very cautiously writes that Swann moves from “the insensate, agonizing desire to possess her” (le besoin insensé et douloureux de le posséder) to “the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing)” (l’acte de la possession physique—où d’ailleurs l’on ne possède rien). What he may want is intimacy, but not necessarily with Odette or, for that matter, with anyone.

  Total intimacy, if it exists at all in Proust, is perhaps the true manifestation of love or of something bordering on love. The ability to read people’s minds, to see through them, to palpate their pulse and know their heart, their undisclosed frailties and vulnerabilities, may be the most telling sign of love—but it is also the source of that indomitable lust for spying, for intercepting signs of real or imagined treachery, for possessing the key to who others are. It is love and it is trust, but it is also the ultimate in distrust and hostility. The transactions may be different, but the currency is the same. And yet perhaps one of the most moving scenes in the entire À la recherche is about total transparency. I am thinking of the scene in the hotel at the beach where Marcel’s bedroom is adjacent to his grandmother’s. She asks him to tap three times on the thin wall between their rooms when he wakes up in the morning so that she can order his warm milk. When Marcel wakes up, however, he doesn’t know whether she is already up that morning and doesn’t want to wake her with his three knocks, so he hesitates. She, on the other hand, has intuited his qualms and knows exactly why he held off knocking:

  Do you suppose there’s anyone else in the world who’s such a silly-billy, with such feverish little knuckles, so afraid of waking me up and of not making me understand? Even if he just gave the least scratch, Granny could tell her mouse’s sound at once, especially such a poor miserable little mouse as mine is. I could hear it just now, trying to make up its mind, and rustling the bedclothes, and going through all its little tricks.

  Intimacy this is, but who can forget that in this highly stirring moment there is still a wall standing between grandmother and grandson? As with the scene of the kiss with the mother, something always stands in the way of allowing you to be one with someone else. This fusion of identities, which is perhaps the definition of possession, is never comprehensive enough. You either get glimpses of it in the jittery expectation of pleasure, or you have reminders of its transience. You possess nothing. You rehearse possession to come, or you ritualize the memory of a possession that never lasted long enough for you to know if indeed it was possession. Neither form takes place in the present tense.

  The other moment that no reader of Proust can forget—because it occurs in so many versions, including in his correspondence—is the long-distance telephone conversation with his grandmother. Because of the difficulty of establishing a connection via telephone, Marcel cannot always hear her voice, nor can he make out that it is really his grandmother who is speaking to him, so that each time her disembodied voice breaks up and seems to float in and out of the ether, it gives every intimation of straining to reach him, like a voice from the underworld. He is already apprehending her imminent death. He is, in fact, rehearsing her loss.

  Death is the final and everlasting separation and, hence, is terrifying. You may have disquieting premonitions of it; however, in Marcel’s case, this means that he’ll practice separation and loss, he’ll rehearse it, he’ll rehearse dispossession, so that when the separation finally comes about, it won’t be as devastating as he fears. He slips into an imagined future the better to stem what lies in store for him, but to do this he needs to cheat himself of the present and consider his grandmother not as a living presence but as one who is fast slipping into the past. When his beloved grandmother does indeed die, Marcel feels nothing. To his own surprise, he is relieved and almost ready to admit that he’s been let off easily. It is only later, when he is attempting to tie his shoelaces in the same hotel bedroom where he used to knock three times on the thin wall between him and his grandmother, that he has a sudden, violent realization of the extent of the loss. Death means never, ever seeing someone again.

  In confronting his grandmother’s death, Marcel is caught between two passive moves: rehearsal and ritual. Rehearsal is the act of repeating what has yet to happen; ritual, repeating what has already happened. Between the two something is clearly missing: call it the present, or call it experience. What do you do when you are not inhabiting the present? You temporize, you defer, you anticipate, you remember. There is a telling scene where Marcel and Albertine are finally not in bed together but on the bed. Because Marcel feels that what may soon happen between them is a sure thing, he decides that he might as well defer it for a short while and asks Albertine for a rain check. But the most significant instance of this same situation is when Swann is finally about to kiss Odette for the first time. At that moment, he not only wants to bring to bear all the hopes and fantasies he cradled about an Odette still untouched by him but is equally bidding farewell to the Odette who was, until that very moment, not yet possessed.

  And Swann it was who, before she allowed her face, as though despite her efforts, to fall upon his lips, held it back for a moment longer, at a little distance between his hands. He had intended to leave time for his mind to overtake her body’s movements, to recognize the dream which he had so long cherished and to assist at its realization, like a mother invited as a spectator when a prize is given to the child whom she has reared and loves. Perhaps, moreover, Swann himself was fixing upon these features of an Odette not yet possessed, not even kissed by him, on whom he was looking now for the last time, that comprehensive gaze with which, on the day of his departure, a traveler strives to bear away with him in memory the view of a country to which he may never return.

  Swann wishes to overtake the present—to acknowledge moments in the past during which he had long anticipated the kiss that is about to happen and, thus, bring the past to bear upon the present—all the while wishing to defer this present by seeing it as a moment that will all too soon vanish into a remembered past. That Swann ends up sleeping with Odette on that same night seems so incidental and so foregone an outcome that Proust, ever fussy with minute details elsewhere, overlooks it altogether and then pays it lip service by calling it simply: “the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing).” Experience and fulfillment in the present tense are either ungraspable or of no interest to the narrator, who is more focused on both the might-soon-be, which could so easily slip from our grasp, and the long-awaited might-occur that happens before we’re entirely aware of it.

  This is the signature Proustian time zone.

  Wordsworth, whose sensibility is not dissimilar to Proust’s, had long awaited the subliminal moment when, crossing the Simplon Pass in the Alps, he would finally find himself with one foot in France and
the other in Italy. When he asked a local peasant when that desired moment would occur, the man simply told him that he had already crossed the Alps. The anticipated moment had occurred without his seizing it. This failure to experience whatever he had expected to feel when crossing the pass into Italy comes almost like an oversight. There was a future, then that future became a past, but there was no present. And yet, given that very failure to feel a spiritual revelation, Wordsworth pens one of the most eloquent hymns to the imagination, flashes of which “have shown to us / The invisible world.” Error, loss, oversight, and failure to grasp experience in the present may be deemed a minus to armchair Freudians, but to Proust, writing about this minus becomes a plus.

  Similarly, the reluctance, the difficulty to consummate experience and, instead, to rehearse, to defer, to ritualize, and ultimately to “unrealize” experience, lies at the very source of Proust’s aesthetics. There is, on one hand, a desperate longing to grasp, to hold (the verb tenir is key in Proust), to possess, and yet on the other, a distrust of or insufficiency vis-à-vis experience that compels Marcel to play all manner of mental stratagems to defer if not obviate either the inevitable disappointment that comes from experience or to force him to relinquish what he fears he wants too ardently and may either never get or be indifferent to by the time he gets it. After yearning so long for something, he may even be resigned to believe he never really wanted it.

  From the street, Marcel looks up at the window of the Swann household and wishes to be invited inside and become a member of Gilberte’s and her parents’ inner circle. One day he is finally admitted into their fold and finds himself so confirmed a habitué among them that, on looking out from that same window, which seemed to promise who knows what wonders once, he sees people who are as eager and as intimidated as he once was before being admitted in.

  Those windows which, seen from outside, used to interpose between me and the treasures within, which were not intended for me, a polished, distant and superficial stare, which seemed to me the very stare of the Swanns themselves, it fell to my lot, when in the warm weather I had spent a whole afternoon with Gilberte in her room, to open them myself, so as to let in a little air, and even to lean over the sill of one of them by her side, if it was her mother’s “at home” day, to watch the visitors arrive who would often, raising their heads as they stepped out of their carriages, greet me with a wave of the hand, taking me for some nephew of their hostess.

  I don’t remember whether the third move is ever narrated in Proust, but it is always present in my mind: I am sure that, on feeling so welcome among the Swanns, Marcel is already looking out the window and seeing himself one day as an outsider on the sidewalk looking up at a window to rooms he knew so well but in which he no longer feels welcome.

  Between the memory of having longed for admission into the Swann household and the final admission itself there hovers an inability—maybe an unwillingness—both to savor the present, so as not to lose sight of its anticipation, and to unrealize it, the better to shield himself from pain or disappointment. In the end one can no longer “succeed in knowing [one’s] own happiness.”

  When reality is folded over to cover the ideal of which we have so long been dreaming, it completely hides that ideal, absorbing it in itself … whereas we would rather, so as to give its full significance to our enjoyment, preserve for all those separate points of our desire, at the very moment in which we succeed in touching them, and so as to be quite certain that they are indeed themselves, the distinction of being intangible …

  After I had spent a quarter of an hour in her drawing-room, it was the period in which I did not yet know her that was become fantastic and vague like a possibility which the realization of an alternative possibility has made impossible. How was I ever to dream again of her dining-room as of an inconceivable place, when I could not make the least movement in my mind without crossing the path of that inextinguishable ray cast backwards to infinity, even into my own most distant past, by the lobster à l’Américaine which I had just been eating?

  Marcel even finds himself yearning for the memory of longing for the Swann home. What, it seems, stands in the way of retrieving the memory of what he’d once desired is his actual presence in their home:

  Our thought cannot even reconstruct the old state so as to confront the new with it, for it has no longer a clear field: the acquaintance that we have made, the memory of those first, unhoped-for moments, the talk to which we have listened are there now to block the passage of our consciousness, and as they control the outlets of our memory far more than those of our imagination …

  This perpetual figure-eight movement is what, for want of a better verb, grounds Proust’s universe in something like reality—transient, shifty, impalpable reality that it is. Marcel’s most trenchant insights, his naïve misreadings and niggling paradoxes, all are governed by his reluctance—or inability—to absorb and consummate ordinary experience or, for that matter, to adhere to ordinary, linear, monochronistic time. He is forever holding out for and anticipating something more, something that needs to be coaxed, that doesn’t even exist in normal time and that immediately skitters away no sooner than it is about to be seized. Everything from his narrative to his style is about abeyance, retrospection, and, of course, anticipated retrospection.

  When things eventually sour between Marcel and Gilberte and he notices that she is clearly drawing away from him, he makes a point of being absent from her parents’ home and finds all manner of ways to avoid running into her when he does visit them. He feigns indifference. But as it is with Swann’s kiss, so it is with Marcel’s love.

  I knew not only that after a certain time I should cease to love Gilberte, but also that she herself would regret it and that the attempts which she would then make to see me would be as vain as those that she was making now, no longer because I loved her too well but because I should certainly be in love with some other woman whom I should continue to desire, to wait for, through hours of which I should not dare to divert any particle of a second to Gilberte who would be nothing to me then … that future in which I should not love Gilberte, which my sufferings helped me to divine although my imagination was not yet able to form a clear picture of it, certainly there would still have been time to warn Gilberte that it was gradually taking shape, that its coming was, if not imminent, at least inevitable, if she herself, Gilberte, did not come to my rescue and destroy in the germ my nascent indifference. How often was I not on the point of writing, or of going to Gilberte to tell her: “Take care. My mind is made up. What I am doing now is my supreme effort. I am seeing you now for the last time. Very soon I shall have ceased to love you.”

  In the end everything is unrealized. If Swann wished to recall his desire for Odette all the while bidding farewell to an “Odette not yet possessed,” with Marcel the situation is hardly different. He may wish to recall his imagined picture of a Swann household not yet visited, but what he is simultaneously doing is anticipating that moment when he might no longer care for that home or for a Gilberte never even possessed.

  * * *

  Is there a present tense in Proust?

  Is there experience in Proust?

  Is there love in Proust?

  The fundamental register of Proust’s narrative is comprehensive—meaning prehensile. Proust’s grasp is universal; he wishes to let go of nothing. Aside from the fact that Proust’s style is allegedly complicated, it is perhaps the most perfect machine ever invented in language to examine, to absorb, and appropriate all experience. But it does so on condition that it bear in mind that it will not keep whatever it seizes. Like a lover who is totally smitten, it seeks to capture every aspect, every fugitive impression, every instantaneous emotion, every memory, every skittish glance that tells one whether others should be trusted or not. It wants to secure the past, capture the present, and, to the best of its ability, foretell or be forewarned of a future that is already an anticipated past. In this sense jealousy is not only the ult
imate figure underlying Proust’s comprehensive project, it also signals the failure of every man’s desire to possess or to trust anyone or anything. Jealousy, as the history of world literature teaches, is fundamentally impertinent—it cannot hold, cannot seize, is irrelevant. It anticipates treachery or, worse yet, brings it about. The desire to possess always implies the failure to possess.

  But Proust not only treats the world as though it were an elusive and disingenuous partner whose lies may represent a self-perpetuating tissue of deceit; as we know from the galley proofs themselves, he does to the text itself what the text already does to the world. Every investigatory sentence opens up further space for further investigation and intercalation. The very pages that scrutinize the deceits of Odette, Morel, and Albertine are themselves subject to subsequent scrutiny and emendation. Writing as investigation is regressive, digressive, dilatory. Everything on every page generates its own effluents and mini effluents. A simple image of the typesetter’s galleys after Proust’s edits proves my point.

  The sinuous and insidiously long Proustian sentence, which cautiously lays siege to reality, ultimately participates, not necessarily in the emergence of truth, but in its deferral, sometimes in its obstruction, and ultimately in its unrealizing. Either an incidental, though not irrelevant, fact is overlooked, or irony always unsaddles the earnestness with which every sentence begins its journey.

  Even the rewards and diversions that the process of writing itself confers on the narrator detract from its purpose. For the Proustian sentence, so knowing and so astutely beautiful, may ultimately enjoy one thing more than unraveling or even postponing truths: with an unrivaled appetite, it delights in showing that it is unworthy and unable to terminate any investigation whatsoever. It thrives on its own errors and oversights, in rejecting the very devices it has so shrewdly crafted, in its own ability to doubt what it has seemingly made clear. It doubts everything, including itself. It enjoys showing that the highest knowledge of which it is capable is the knowledge, the certainty, that it does not know, that it does not know how to know. Every attempt to disprove this privative piece of information is subsequently repudiated as a more insidious form of ignorance. The desire to resolve mysteries about the world becomes Proust’s characteristic way of narrating the world and Marcel’s characteristic way of being in the world. Marcel does not act; nor does the Proustian text narrate acts. They reflect, interpret, remember, and speculate. Irony, which is the shadow partner of why-didn’t-I-know-at-the-time-that-so-and-so-was-such-and-such, always takes away what might have been straightforward, good-enough truths. Consummation is always stymied.