Marcel Proust by Hodson Leighton;

Author:Hodson, Leighton;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 180045
Publisher: Routledge

NOTE

1 Cf. Edmund Wilson, No. 140, p. 408 for the notion of relativity.

74.

Emma Cabire on subjectivism and love 1923

Part of ‘La conception subjectiviste de l’amour chez Marcel Proust’, in ‘Hommage à Marcel Proust’, La Nouvelle Revue française, 1 January 1923, pp. 212–21.

Emma Cabire gives an appreciation of Proust’s picture of the conflict between personalities where love is concerned. She shows special interest in the obsession with jealousy, where the subjectivist stance is challenged as it clashes with the freedom and demands of the opposite partner.

…However, happiness cannot be truly known, for possession substitutes a new state for what was simply a desire for happiness, overlaying it but not identifying itself with it. To look for spiritual possession or just physical possession is still to believe in its reality and its importance where love is involved. As Marcel Proust’s hero becomes more and more aware of the pure subjectivity of his feelings, we see his belief in the possibility of this kind of happiness diminish and his belief in the necessity almost of pursuing its realization diminish likewise. This conviction he has about the inwardness of love modifies his attitude towards the women he successively loves and his demands on them. And this is very important. A different emotional hygiene comes into play when we no longer expect of another individual the happiness to be found in our own feelings; we only require the other partner to go along with this idealization and not contradict it too obviously. The pain in love that is not shared lies not so much in not receiving any of the proofs of love for which we have long substituted illusion. It lies in the painful effort—once we have recognized the need to adopt a different attitude—to contain within us a love that otherwise could not be prevented from spilling over in tender words, caresses or loving attentions, and that has to be repressed at all costs since, in anticipation of sexual expression, it could only encounter lassitude and satiety, so strong is our need above all to love and not to be loved.

Among the sufferings of love there is one to which Marcel Proust has given pride of place. For some natures jealousy can indeed be a terrible torment. For them, the precarious happiness of love is clouded at every moment by doubt. Just as the hope of possessing awoman has occasioned the origin of love, the doubt that this possession may somehow escape you becomes the origin of a veritable malady of the imagination, which sends down its poisoned roots into the very feeling intended to bring us happiness, feeding on it, dying with it and occasionally surviving it. Just as that feeling—the shadow of love, a mirror image of it—is made of numerous kinds of love, so jealousy is made of an infinite number of suspicions. Jealousy is the imagination tormented by the unknown elements in someone’s life that escape from our control, from our possession.

Until the first suspicion, this life appeared to us to be without any mystery.

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