Reading Proust's In Search of Lost Time in 2014 discussion

Use this topic thread for all The Captive discussions through page 187 / location 41030.

Finished the second week reading of the dreaded The Captive! My opinion from last week remains the same: so far, so good! As I said before: I enjoy the interior lengthy monologues and the jealousy talk amuses me - you've seen how many quotes I've been sharing from this book? LOL - so it's been a great read so far.

I really enjoyed these quotes - some may be from last week's read though:

"For the possession of what we love is an even greater joy than love itself. Very often those people who conceal this possession from the world do so only from the fear that the beloved object may be taken from them. And their happiness is diminished by this prudent reticence."

"Anyhow, love is an incurable malady, like those diathetic states in which rheumatism affords the sufferer a brief respite only to be replaced by epileptiform headaches."

"How many persons, cities, roads does not jealousy make us eager thus to know? It is a thirst for knowledge thanks to which, with regard to various isolated points, we end by acquiring every possible notion in turn except those that we require."

"Thus it is that jealousy is endless, for even if the beloved object, by dying for instance, can no longer provoke it by her actions, it so happens that posthumous memories, of later origin than any event, take shape suddenly in our minds as though they were events also, memories which hitherto we have never properly explored, which had seemed to us unimportant, and to which our own meditation upon them has been sufficient, without any external action, to give a new and terrible meaning. We have no need of her company, it is enough to be alone in our room, thinking, for fresh betrayals of us by our mistress to come to light, even though she
be dead. And so we ought not to fear in love, as in everyday life,
the future alone, but even the past which often we do not succeed
in realising until the future has come and gone; and we are not speaking only of the past which we discover long afterwards, but of the past which we have long kept stored up in ourselves and learn suddenly how to interpret."

The highlight for me this week though was how it focused on the sense of hearing, when before it seemed that vision was the most important sense for him. Once more, it feels he's the captive here... like Aunt Leonie watching life blooming outside from her window, he's listening to what's going on outside and trying to conjure up all the images inside of his mind. I loved when he mentioned that by listening to the sounds happening outside, he could picture the details in the streets and went on to describe them. I wonder if he'll be disappointed when he actually sees what's out there as it wouldn't in any way top his imagination!

Even the things he imagines and obsesses about Albertine are derived from what he hears from others, as he's no longer with her to watch as she make eyes to other girls...

Speaking of Albertine, I still wish so much we could hear her side of the story. She's such a difficult character for me to understand... why is she there? Why does she put up with so much craziness? Why does she agree to put herself in the position of having to lie and hide things from him? Could she just be interested in him as he's a good catch, as her aunt thinks? Why why why WHY?

I feel I can't delineate her contours as with Charlus or Swann... she doesn't feel like a full-fleshed character just yet... could that be on purpose? Since there's so much about her that the narrator himself doesn't know, he chose to keep her as a 'distant' character somehow? When I try to imagine her, all I see is blur...

Renato, glad to see you are enjoying yourself! You cite a lot of great quotes. Something that has occurred to me since reading The Captive is I might have gone back and reviewed Swann's opinions on jealousy he expressed to the narrator at the Prince de Guermantes reception early in Volume IV. It would be interesting whether Swann's opinions held true or contradicted the Narrator's experience. At this point I'll make note of Swann's opinions the second time around.

Do you have edible things outside your house (were they in his house?)? I would have to subsist on ferrel cats and the occasional squirrel.

That's a very interesting question about Swann's opinions of jealousy compared to those of the narrator's! As you'll get there before me, please let us know in the reread threads!

And LOL about subsisting on ferrel cats and squirrels! Here in São Paulo there are no vendors in the streets - at least not where I live -, but in the small town I grew up in it was very common hearing outside as they were selling cheese, corn cake and cotton candy. I can still hear one of the vendors voices screaming "Olha o algodão doce!" - meaning "here comes the cotton candy!" or something along those lines.

This is the corn cake, I don't know if you have them over there - or how it would be called in the US:

Perhaps a corn cake is a Mexican tortilla, which in the U.S. is called a tortella. Ah, your recollections of childhood bring back my own, the ice cream truck with its distinctive bell - diving for my dime on the kitchen table, exploding out the front door in my bare feet and racing down the scorching street to catch up before he turned the corner and panting as I place my invariable order, "one fudgecical please." We all have our madeleine moments.

It's not the Mexican tortilla, which is also great. Apparently it's called "tamales" over there...

What a great description of your memory, I could picture while I was reading you!

Ah, this is "Masa" a native American word. It is used in Mexico to be stuff with various meats and cheeses etc and boiled in the husks to make Tamales, which you can look up online if you are unfamiliar.

Renato wrote: "The highlight for me this week though was how it focused on the sense of hearing, when before it seemed that vision was the most important sense for him. Once more, it feels he's the captive here....."

I didn't really think of that Renato, but you may have something there; there's also the telephone call to Andreé and the effects of saying 'Albertine' or Swann saying 'Odette': '...and I had thought how potent, when all was said, was a Christian name which, in the eyes of the whole world including Odette herself, had on Swann's lips alone this possessive sense.'

In connection with his attempts to discover what Albertine gets up to, the narrator states: 'We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.' Is that also directed at us, the readers, do you think?

It might be as well as when we're trying to understand and or find out something we overanalyze things...

I agree with you both on this.

Renato wrote: "Speaking of Albertine, I still wish so much we could hear her side of the story. She's such a difficult character for me to understand..."

I think not knowing anything about her adds to the narrator's paranoia - we also can't be sure whether the narrator is being astute or just paranoid.

Having said that, I think the book Albertine by Jacqueline Rose will be interesting once we've finished ISOLT.

What are we to make of the narrator's revelation that 'I was not perhaps her lover in the full sense of the word...'? Is it all kissing and cuddling and groping her when she's asleep? Given that one minute he's exulting over her and then the next he's bored by her, it's difficult to understand fully what he means. Intriguing.

Once again, the narrator's dreams and imagination surpass disappointing reality:

Alas, as soon as she stood before me, the fair dairymaid with the streaky locks, stripped of all the desires and imaginings that had been aroused in me, was reduced to her mere self. The quivering cloud of my suppositions no longer enveloped her in a dizzying haze.

I think the only things that he is not disappointed by are those that take him by surprise, such as sighting the aeroplane; is it because he can then see something real without any preconceptions?

I find it odd, since I've been reading ISOLT, that Proust (via the narrator) is disappointed in nearly everything and everyone when it doesn't live up to his ideal and that he, like Swann, only finds people and places interesting if they can find a comparison in art.

In retrospect this issue is the "trial by fire" for first time readers - no pain, on gain. Based on my own experience, it is in your best interest of getting the most out of this reading to say no more than "this too shall pass.

I had to smile to myself when I read the sentence that started with: 'In so far as relations with women whom we abduct are less permanent than others...' !! as if it's common-place to abduct women. :-) I've never abducted a woman...or man...or child....am I strange?

I started reading the character info on Albertine in the Patrick Alexander book....Wooh! I had to stop as I was coming across some major spoilers...not that I mind too much as it's the journey that's important to me...but still...

You seem to be leading a sheltered life by Narrator standards Jonathan, it gets creepier in the next volume. I would be interested in reading the whole sentence if you have time. I'm interested in where this thought is going since I can't remember the context.

Dave wrote: "You seem to be leading a sheltered life by Narrator standards Jonathan, it gets creepier in the next volume. I would be interested in reading the whole sentence if you have time. I'm interested in ..."

It will make more sense, I guess, if I quote the whole passage:

More often than not, a body becomes the object of love only when an emotion, fear of losing it, uncertainty of getting it back, melts into it. Now this sort of anxiety has a great affinity for bodies. It adds to them a quality which surpasses beauty itself, 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. To such beings, such fugitive beings, their own nature and our anxiety fasten wings. And even when they are with us the look in their eyes seems to warn us that they are about to take flight. The proof of this beauty, surpassing beauty itself, that wings add is that often, for us, the same person is alternately winged and wingless. Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her. And as these fears and these certainties may vary from week to week, a person may one week see everything that gave us pleasure sacrificed to her, in the following week be sacrificed herself, and so on for months on end. All of which would be incomprehensible did we not know (from the experience, which every man shares, of having at least once in a lifetime ceased to love a woman, forgotten her) how very insignificant in herself a woman is when she is no longer—or is not yet—permeable to our emotions. And, of course, if we speak of fugitive beings it is equally true of imprisoned ones, of captive women whom we think we shall never be able to possess. Hence men detest procuresses, because they facilitate flight and dangle temptations, but if on the other hand we are in love with a cloistered woman, we willingly have recourse to a procuress to snatch her from her prison and bring her to us. In so far as relations with women whom we abduct are less permanent than others, the reason is that the fear of not succeeding in procuring them or the dread of seeing them escape is the whole of our love for them and that once they have been carried off from their husbands, torn from their footlights, cured of the temptation to leave us, dissociated in short from our emotion whatever it may be, they are only themselves, that is to say next to nothing, and, so long desired, are soon forsaken by the very man who was so afraid of their forsaking him.

Is the narrator really Jack the Ripper? The quote is on page 115-6 in my version, which has the same pagination as the Modern Library version.

Jonathan wrote: "I find it odd, since I've been reading ISOLT, that Proust (via the narrator) is disappointed in nearly everything and everyone when it doesn't live up to his ideal and that he, like Swann, only finds people and places interesting if they can find a comparison in art."

What an interesting point, Jonathan. I had forgotten that about Swann. In so many ways our narrator seems to be following Swann's steps... I wonder that's the connection..... 'We waste precious time on absurd clues and pass by the truth without suspecting it.'

Jonathan wrote: "What are we to make of the narrator's revelation that 'I was not perhaps her lover in the full sense of the word...'? Is it all kissing and cuddling and groping her when she's asleep? Given that one minute he's exulting over her and then the next he's bored by her, it's difficult to understand fully what he means. Intriguing."

That quote didn't catch my eye... what an odd relationship they have... it can't be just that, can it?

Renato wrote: "That quote didn't catch my eye... what an odd relationship they have... it can't be just that, can it? ..."

I'm sure that he contradicts himself (we're getting used to that I think) at other points in the book where he implies that there is more to it...I'll see if I can find any relevant passages.

Ha! The Ripper analogy came to me too! I set it aside in though. It is passages like this one that continued to ratchet up my opinion that the narrator was unreliable in that his opinions on love are based on values unlike my own and which I find distasteful and socially disreputable. Normally, I've found that art best which communicates universal human values across time and space, but that is not the case on this specific point. From this point forward I disregarded what the Narrator thought about love. But Proust has something else in mind which will eventually come to light.

Dave wrote: "Ha! The Ripper analogy came to me too! I set it aside in though. It is passages like this one that continued to ratchet up my opinion that the narrator was unreliable in that his opinions on love a..."

I think I likened him to Fritzl in last week's reading so I was trying to get a bit of variety. :-) I quite like reprehensible narrators and characters so in a way it's piquing my interest. I just thought up to now that he was just a bit unusual but now he's becoming more malevolent.

I find it very interesting to read about and judge those reprehensible narrators as well, lol!

Our narrator is just spiraling further and further into his pit of paranoia... good grief.

LOL yes, be brave! It'll get worse, and then it'll get better... and then... who knows!

:)

He seems to be getting worse at the moment :-)