Table of Content
Proust on love
Quotes and comments from this week’s readings
Anna Karenina, Part one, XI-XXII.
À la recherche du temp perdu, La prisonnière, p. 1646-1686
Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 1-25
Next week’s readings
Proust on love
Love is nothing more perhaps than the stimulation of those eddies which, in the wake of an emotion, stir the soul.
Last week, I had mentioned this quote, saying I would like to return to the topic of love in Proust. Now is the time. This week’s readings were full of variations on that idea.
Reading La recherche is a very disconcerting experience. Over the past year, my friend and I have read what many consider to be some of the finest novels in history, Dream of the Red Chamber, Crime and Punishment, we’re currently reading Anna Karenina, and we both agree that Proust’s novel is far superior to all in its command of language, characterization, etc. But there isn’t a single character that we have even a shred of affinity with. None. No one in that novel is anything but a psychopath on some level. It makes for a very exhausting reading experience. What Proust describes as love, what his characters experience as love, is so alien from my own experience of it that I’ve had a hard time even understanding what he was talking about.
This has been my experience throughout the novel, but it’s even worse in The Prisoner. In it, the narrator is taking Albertine captive both in a literal and metaphorical sense. He says he loves her, but what he describes as love is an unhealthy state of affairs. Consider the following quote (from this week’s readings) :
L'amour, dans l'anxiété douloureuse comme dans le désir heureux, est l'exigence d'un tout. Il ne naît, il ne subsiste que si une partie reste à conquérir. On n'aime que ce qu'on ne possède pas tout entier. (p. 1682)
Love, in the painful anxiety as in the blissful desire, is the insistence upon a whole. It is born, it survives only if some part remains for it to conquer. We love only what we do not wholly possess.
The entirety of this part of the novel is an attempt by the narrator to possess Albertine in every possible way. Post #Metoo this hasn’t aged well. Proust himself recognizes that this is unhealthy. In a letter he wrote to a friend and quoted in W. Carter’s Proust in love, he says :
“Nothing is further from the "heart" than this egotistical sentiment called love, and which even in Racine's tragedies leads to murder or suicide whenever its object fails to share the same sentiment.” (Proust in Love, ch. 4)
This I think is the key to Proust’s understanding of love. Love is not, to him, a very interesting emotion, it is merely a drive to satisfy a desire to possess. What had troubled me in the opening quote was that I felt something was missing. It wasn’t the case. Throughout the novel, characters fall in love when following an emotion, be it fear, laughter, the experience of beauty, etc. their souls are stirred, and they wish to possess completely what brought about that emotion. Love is that wish for complete control, that desire for possession. In In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust is quite clear, that love is nothing more :
There can be no peace of mind in love, since what one has obtained is never anything but a new starting point for further desires. (p. 171, translation W. Carter)
And to be clear, this is not just what Proust’s characters experience in the novel. This is also how Proust experienced love :
The dynamics of Proustian erotic love had been established in his adolescence and early manhood in the demands for attention and a possessiveness that had frightened and repulsed his classmates at Condorcet. (Proust in Love, ch.4)
This experience of love is completely alien to me, but it had been described earlier by Plato. This is how, through Socrates, Plato describes love :
‘‘However, since he is the son not only of Poros but also of Penia, he is in this position: he is always poor and, far from being the tender and beautiful creature that most people imagine, he is in fact hard and rough, without shoes for his feet or a roof over his head. He is always sleeping on the bare ground without bedding, lying in the open in doorways and on the street, and because he is his mother’s son, want is his constant companion. But on the other hand he also resembles his father, scheming to get what is beautiful and good, being bold and keen and ready for action, a cunning hunter, always contriving some trick or other, an eager searcher after knowledge, resourceful, a lifelong lover of wisdom, clever with magic and potions, and a sophist. His nature is neither that of an immortal nor that of a mortal, but in the course of a single day he will live and flourish for a while when he has the resources, then after a time he will start to fade away, only to come to life again through that part of his nature which he has inherited from his father. Yet his resources always slip through his fingers, so that although he is never destitute, neither is he rich. He is always midway between the two, just as he is between wisdom and ignorance. (Plato’s Symposium, 203 c-e)
More could be said about Proust and love, and I will most definitely revisit the topic in future posts, but for now, let’s turn to this week’s quotes (some of which will be about love).
Quotes and comments from this week’s readings
Anna Karenina, Part one, XI-XXII
And however much the princess was assured that in our time young people themselves must settle their fate, she was unable to believe it, as she would have been unable to believe that in anyone’s time the best toy for five-year-old children would be loaded pistols. And therefore the princess worried more about Kitty than she had about her older daughters. (p. 45)
This reminded me of a quote by anthropologist Barbara Rogoff about how much variation there is when it comes to the level of autonomy children have.
Although U.S. middle-class adults often do not trust children below about age 5 with knives, among the Efe of the Democratic Republic of Congo, infants routinely use machetes safely (Wilkie, personal communication, 1989; see figure 1.2). Likewise, Fore (New Guinea) infants handle knives and fire safely by the time they are able to walk (Sorenson, 1979). Aka parents of Central Africa teach 8- to 10-month-old infants how to throw small spears and use small pointed digging sticks and miniature axes with sharp metal blades. (B. Rogoff, The Cultural Nature of Human Development, p. 5)
I’m still pretty sure that no one in his right mind would give a five-year-old a firearm, but we do tend to underestimate the level of variation with regards to what is considered appropriate behavior for young children.
In his soul he did not respect her and, without being aware of it, did not love her, though by the notions of the circle in which he lived, by his upbringing, he could not imagine to himself any other relation to his mother than one obedient and deferential in the highest degree, and the more outwardly obedient and deferential he was, the less he respected and loved her in his soul. (p. 61)
Love is both a deeply personal emotion and a subtle type of social relation, and as such, it comes with a very special type of power dynamic. Power, as D. Keltner, in The Power Paradox, defines it, is the ability to act in the world, most often through association with others. Understood that way, power is not something one can grab, it is something one is given. To be in love is not only to have deep feelings for someone but also to give that person power over you. From that, it doesn’t follow that the other knows he has that power, most often he doesn’t realize it, and it’s best that way. For, as they say, power corrupts.
Once power is given, it is hard to retake, so long as the other doesn’t abuse it, love endures. But if for any reason, one comes to resent the power the other has over him, love will slowly, or abruptly fade away. This is what Count Vronsky, Anna Karenina’s future lover, is experiencing toward his mother in the above quote.
À la recherche du temp perdu, La prisonnière, p. 1646-1686
I’ve said enough about Proust and love for now, so I won’t comment on this week’s quotes, even though they all talk about love. The will serve as a perfect illustration of what I discussed above.
Pour nos sentiments, nous en avons parlé trop souvent pour le redire, bien souvent un amour n'est que l'association d'une image de jeune fille (qui sans cela nous eût été vite insupportable) avec les battements de cœur inséparables d'une attente interminable, vaine, et d'un « lapin » que la demoiselle nous a posé. (p. 1652)
As for our sentiments, we have spoken of them too often to repeat again now that as often as not love is nothing more than the association of the face of a girl (whom otherwise we should soon have found intolerable) with the heartbeats inseparable from an endless, vain expectation, and from some trick that she has played upon us
Je choisissais pour la regarder cette face de son visage qu'on ne voyait jamais et qui était si belle. (…) Le bruit de sa respiration devenant plus fort pouvait donner l'illusion de l'essoufflement du plaisir et quand le mien était à son terme, je pouvais l'embrasser sans avoir interrompu son sommeil. Il me semblait à ces moments-là que je venais de la posséder plus complètement, comme une chose inconsciente et sans résistance de la muette nature. (…) Je goûtais son sommeil d'un amour désintéressé et apaisant, comme je restais des heures à écouter le déferlement du flot. (p. 1656-1657)
I chose, in gazing at her, this aspect of her face which no one ever saw and which was so pleasing. (…) The sound of her breathing as it grew louder might give the illusion of the breathless ecstasy of pleasure and, when mine was at its climax, I could kiss her without having interrupted her sleep. I felt at such moments that I had been possessing her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting object of dumb nature. (…) I relished her sleep with a disinterested, soothing love, just as I would remain for hours listening to the unfurling of the waves.
Le plus souvent l'amour n'a pour objet un corps que si une émotion, la peur de le perdre, l'incertitude de le retrouver se fondent en lui. Or ce genre d'anxiété a une grande affinité pour les corps. Il leur ajoute une qualité qui passe la beauté même, ce qui est une des raisons pour quoi l'on voit des hommes, indifférents aux femmes les plus belles, en aimer passionnément certaines qui nous semblent laides. (p. 1671)
Generally speaking, love has not as its object a human body, except when an emotion, the fear of losing it, the uncertainty of finding it again have been infused into it. This sort of anxiety has a great affinity for bodies. It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty even; which is one of the reasons why we see men who are indifferent to the most beautiful women fall passionately in love with others who appear to us ugly.
Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 1-25
Your youth is passing, daughter, it is time to give you away. Intent on practicing righteousness, we have made every effort on your behalf. For you, dear daughter, you are endowed with every virtue, like Śrī with her lotus. Still, you have not been chosen by any suitor out of fear of rejection.
For all those concerned about their honor, being a father of an unmarried girl is a burden, since, dear daughter, one does not know who might wish to marry the girl. A young girl will always remain a source of suspicion for three families—that of her mother, that of her father, and the one into which she is given. (Sarga 9)
Goldman, in his notes, explains: “As [most commentators] note, the idea here is that family members always worry that the woman might lapse from the path of virtue.”
In the previous books of the Ramayana, Sita, Rama’s wife, has been accused of being impure because she was abducted by Ravana, and it is thought that she may have committed adultery. In the Yuddha Kanda, it is made clear, through a trial by fire, during which Sita is saved by Agni, the god of fire, that she is pure and nothing had happened. But later in the Uttara Kanda, this will become an issue again (tune in next week). In later versions of the Ramayana, the question of Sita’s purity is so central, that Tulsida, in his Ramcharitmanas, goes to great length to show that Ravana didn’t even touch her when they flew through all of India to get to the island of Lanka. Female virtue seems to be very important to males in India, and it still seems to be so today (if you want to better understand why, I can’t recommend highly enough this post by Alice Evans)
To get a more in-depth perspective on the topic of female purity in ancient India, I will offer three quotes from the Goldman’s introduction to the 7th volume of the Ramayana :
We are left with little doubt that the mere gaze or sight of a male is potent enough to impregnate a female, and we are also reminded that no young woman is safe outside of the immediate supervision of male kin. Once again, the narrative clearly establishes the woman as the sexual aggressor and transgressor, a theme repeated throughout the genealogy (Goldman, p. 51)
What is unique here is that these two parallel narratives—that of Tṛṇabindu’s daughter and of Kaikasī—frame the lineage of the rākṣasa Rāvaṇa, while providing both sides of the family with a similar story of female ancestry. Rāvaṇa descends from a brahmanic and noble lineage, but one that is clearly flawed in respect to his mother’s family. And at the heart of that flaw is sexual transgression, which is located in the feminine. Evil resides in the uncontrolled feminine, and it is fear of the uncontrolled feminine that throughout the epic is depicted as an underlying source of narrative tension. Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is populated with numerous terrifying female figures. Some, like Tāṭakā, Śūrpaṇakhā, Surasā, Siṃhikā, and the rākṣasī guards of Sītā, are easily identifiable, and their threat to the patriarchal world described by Vālmīki is clear. Others are less obvious; Kaikeyī, for example, whose sexuality and desire for power lie at the heart of the epic’s plot, is not depicted as overtly evil but rather as a woman who, convinced that her status and happiness are threatened, feels she has no other option but to use her sexuality to thwart her husband’s will. Who better to articulate the nonnormative attitudes and behavior needed for a woman to challenge her position than Mantharā, the hunchbacked servant of Kaikeyī? Both her class and appearance place her beyond the Aryan fold and mark her as a threat to it. (p. 52)
This close reading of the rākṣasa genealogy makes it clear that the rākṣasa lineage cannot be understood, as some scholars have suggested, to be representative of a matrilineal society nor does the narrative reflect social constructions or attitudes that are vastly different from those of the brahmanic culture that forms the heart of the epic narrative. It does, however, represent and reinforce a deeply ingrained cultural fear of, and yet obsession with, sexuality as it is located in the female body. Thus, it is no accident that the most sexually transgressive figure in the epic, the serial abductor and rapist Rāvaṇa, emerges from the body of a woman whose own behavior has violated the most sacred of moments of the brahmanical world, the time of the vedic sacrifice. In Rāvaṇa’s birth we have the perfect combination, as it were—sexual transgression, misogyny, and the demonic—wherein the demonic is located in and emerges from the sexualized female body. The epic repeatedly engages these themes, which form a core element of the imagination of Vālmīki’s poem, and the Uttarakāṇḍa’s narrative of the genealogy of the rākṣasas serves to rationalize, historicize, and control that very engagement. (p. 53)
The fool who fails to amass austerities while still in this impermanent body will later, once dead, come to regret it when he sees where he has gone. No evil-minded person spontaneously acquires good judgment. A person experiences the fruit of whatever action he performs. Intellect, beauty, strength, wealth, sons, and greatness—men obtain all of this through the previous actions they have performed. And thus you, whose mind is of such a nature, will surely go to hell. I shall not speak with you again, as this is the proper resolution with regard to one of evil ways.’ (Sarga 15)
Actions are all that matters, actions are all there is. But when you also have to take past lives into account, it all gets way more complicated. As Desmond said to Jake in Lost: “See you in another life, brother!”
Next week’s readings :
Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part one, XXIII - part two, V
Proust, The Prisoner. p. 1686-1706 (ed. Quarto Gallimard) or p. 99-125 (ed. Penguin Classics Deluxe)
Valmiki’s Ramayana, Uttara Kanda, Sarga 26-56