Oh Marcel! Oh Albertine! I can hardly bear it. The neurotic weirdness of these people has finally got me cracking up laughing, about halfway through "The Fugitive" I'm just stunned, overwhelmed, completely and finally lost in all the lies and contradictions and complexities. Intense feelings and intense uncertainty and instability of feelings. Possibly Marcel should have applied glue to his brain, or hairspray.... or some time-slowing field... HOW did he ever record all these vague and totally believable progressions of thoughts? I'm in awe... I've been loathing Marcel for a while but at the same time all other characters and all other novels seems to barely skim the surface of the possibility of truth... I'm finally sort of grokking what this is all about...
I'm thinking suddenly of Middlemarch and how pleased I was with it and how grown-up it seemed. Proust kicks the ass of Middlemarch around the block into next week. How am I going to recover from this book and its disturbing aftermath? And what will happen next? And by "happen next" I mean "after t he next 100 pages of Marcel freaking out about in exactly what ways he (did and did not) and (does and does not) and (will and won't in the future) love and hate Albertine.
Note: mark the bits on what the dead think of us, for Jo. p. 520-521.
Perhaps, if she had known, she would have been touched to see that her lover had not forgotten her, now that her own life was finished, and would have been sensitive to things which in the past had left her indifferent. But as we would choose to abstain from infidelities, however secret, so fearful are we that she whom we love is not abstaining from them, I was terrified at the thought that if the dead do exist somewhere, my grandmother was as well aware of my forgetfulness as Albertine of my remembrance. And when all is said, even in the case of a single dead person, can we be sure that the joy we should feel in learning that she knows certain things would compensate for our alarm at the thought that she knows them all; and, however agonizing the sacrifice, would we not sometimes forbear to keep those we have loved as friends after their death, for fear of having them also as judges?
do you even realize... i mean... i'm just barely getting it... and I'm near the end of the series... at least 1500 pages into it...
Would it not be so that she might not? Or that in doing so, she might yet and yet never stop that plentitude of emotion that might serve as organs.
Posted by: Jo | July 22, 2004 at 07:52 AM
hahahaha wtf?
Posted by: badgerbag | July 22, 2004 at 08:34 AM
The boggling thing is that all these nuances have been translated. Now you have to find a different translation and compare it.
Posted by: squid | July 22, 2004 at 10:23 AM