Proust in Love by Carter William C

Author:Carter, William C. [Carter, William C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300134889
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2006-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

Proust does not subscribe to the belief that “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” He has his own theory that he calls the “general law of oblivion.” The absent or the dead are quickly forgotten, not because we are indifferent or callous but because living simply demands that we recover and move on. Ultimately his love for Agostinelli, like the Narrator’s for Albertine, must be forgotten: “I had finally ceased to love Albertine. So that this love . . . had ended . . . by succumbing, like my love for Gilberte, to the general law of oblivion.”36

In late 1917, when Paul Morand prepared to depart for a posting at the French embassy in Rome, Proust sent him a letter in which he referred to the recently published excerpts from the forthcoming volume The Guermantes Way. In this letter, as is not infrequently the case, we see Proust identifying with his Narrator, who finds it impossible to remain faithful to the memory of the dead or the merely absent: “If you [Morand] read in the N.R.F. the pages in which I show how I finally reconcile myself to the departure of my friends, though the idea that I will so reconcile myself is precisely what saddens me most, you will understand my state of mind when I realize that soon I shall see you no more, and that a day will come when, a new ‘self’ having formed, I shall no longer miss you.”37

A half-century later, when Morand lost his beloved wife, Hélène, he found that Proust “had spoken true.” Morand’s journal entry for May 8, 1975, reads: “Oblivion is a form of this awful erosion known as habit. This morning, I posed my lips on the urn containing Hélène’s ashes without weeping.” He then recalled Proust’s 1917 letter about how helpless one remains before the destructive forces of time that obliterate even the memories of those we hold dearest: “It’s not because you’re leaving for Rome [that makes me sad], it’s because I know that I am going to forget you.” This line of Proust’s becomes something of a motif in Morand’s journal.38 Morand must also have remembered that Proust reprises this theme in The Fugitive, where it becomes even more dominant, when the Narrator discovers himself in the process of forgetting Albertine: “It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. . . . My new self, while it grew up in the shadow of the old, had often heard the other speak of Albertine; through that other self, through the stories it gathered from it, it thought that it knew her, it found her lovable, it loved her; but it was only a love at second hand.”39

This view is consistent with Proust’s theory of personality, of the multiple selves we each possess, the shifting sentiments, the ebb and flow of emotions: all in keeping with the phenomenon of the “Intermittencies of the Heart,” which Proust

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