Flora Tempel
The Fugitive, pgs 834-839
In the final pages of the second chapter of The Fugitive, Andree reveals extensive details to the narrator about Albertine’s personal life after her death. As Andree completes the story of Albertine’s adult life, the narrator pieces together important points and contemplates the meaning of the new information that has been revealed to him. The passage begins at the bottom of page 834.
But above all we must remember this: on the one hand, lying is often a trait of character; on the other hand, in women who would not otherwise be liars, it is a natural defense, improvised at first, then more and more organized, against that sudden danger which would be capable of destroying a life: love.
This passage starts with a compelling argument on the origin of lying, at least among women, according to Proust. He claims that lying is character trait, which begins the theme of this passage on the idea of character. He makes a rather sexist statement that women who are not naturally liars begin to lie to protect themselves from love. Apparently love destroys lives, which we have seen throughout the novel.
Furthermore it is not by mere chance that sensitive, intellectual men invariably give themselves to insensitive and inferior women, and moreover remain attached to them, and that the proof that they are not loved does not in the least cure them of the urge to sacrifice everything to keep such a woman with them. If I say that such men need to suffer, I am saying something that is accurate while suppressing the preliminary truths which make that need – involuntary in a sense – to suffer a perfectly understandable consequence of those truths.
The narrator speaks of men like himself, but as he suggests that these men need to suffer, it becomes clear that perhaps the person speaking is really Proust. Perhaps these are things that he has observed in people around him? Perhaps he is also a sensitive intellectual and has experienced these suffering and decided that they serve a purpose? Whatever that purpose is, he declines to speak on what it is and why it is necessary.
Not to mention the fact that, all-round natures being rare, a man who is highly sensitive and highly intellectual will generally have little will power, will be the plaything of habit and of that fear of suffering – and that in these conditions he will never be prepared to repudiate the woman who does not love him. One may be surprised that he should be content with so little love, but one ought rather to picture to oneself the anguish that may be caused him by the love which he himself feels. An anguish which one ought not to pity unduly, for those terrible commotions that are caused by an unrequited love, by the departure or death of a mistress, are like those attacks of paralysis which at first leave us helpless, but after which the muscles tend gradually to recover their vital elasticity and energy.
This is an odd third person perspective on everything that we have seen happen in the novel, even referencing Albertine’s death. The narrator’s affair with Albertine is defined by these themes. The narrator is obsessed with habit, which feeds his obsession with Albertine and leads to his indecisiveness on the relationship. He couldn’t possibly marry her, he must marry her, he doesn’t love her but can’t leave her… he relies on Albertine’s presence in his life, which makes him unable to part from her. And yet he suffers greatly from his unhealthy love and obsession with her. But as we see later in The Fugitive, he does begin to recover.
What is more, this anguish does not lack compensation. These sensitive and intellectual persons are as a rule little inclined to falsehood. It takes them all the more unawares in that, however intelligent they may be, they live in a world of the possible, live in the anguish which a woman has just inflicted on them rather than in the clear perception of what she wanted, what she did, what she loved, a perception granted chiefly to self-willed which need it in order to prepare against the future instead of lamenting the past. And so these persons feel that they are betrayed without quite knowing how. Wherefore the mediocre woman whom we are astonished to see them loving enriches the universe for them far more than an intelligent woman would have done. Behind each of her words, they find that a lie is lurking, behind each house to which she says that she has gone, another house, behind each action, each person, another action, another person. Of course they do not know what or whom, they do not have the energy, would not perhaps find it possible, to discover. A lying woman, by an extremely simple trick, can beguile, without taking the trouble to change her method, any number of people and, what is more, the very person who ought to have discovered the trick. All this confronts the sensitive intellectual with a universe full of depths which his jealousy longs to plumb and which are not without interest to his intelligence.
This perfectly represents so many of the interactions men have with women in the novel. The narrator questions Albertine’s every word, every action. Swann chases Odette through the city, and knocks on the wrong window in her building, questioning every house, and person. And yet when the truth comes to them, they are often blind to see it. The narrator also claims that he, as a sensitive intellectual, is not inclined to falsehood. This seems like an interesting interjection by Proust.
Without being precisely the man of that category, I was going to learn, now that Albertine was dead, the secret of her life. Here again, do not these indiscretions which come to light only after a person’s life on earth is ended prove that nobody really believes in a future life? If these indiscretions are true, one ought to fear the resentment of a woman whose actions one reveals fully as much in anticipation of meeting her in heaven as on feared it while she was alive and one felt bound to keep her secrets. And if these indiscretions are false, invented because she is no longer present to contradict them, one ought to be even more afraid of the dead woman’s wrath if one believed in heaven. But no one really does believe in it.
This particular paragraph is quite odd. First, the narrator states that he wasn’t necessarily describing himself in the previous section. But everything from major themes to subtle references suggests that he is. This confirms to me that Proust was really the speaker in that section. Second, he has this odd little sidetrack on the validity of the idea of afterlife. I’m not really sure what to make of it. He highlights the contradictory issues with the idea, but ends with an irrefutable statement, which seems counterproductive.
On the whole, I did not understand any better than before why Albertine had left me. If the face of a woman can with difficulty be grasped by the eyes, which cannot take in the whole of its mobile surface, or by the lips, or still less by the memory, if it is shrouded in obscurity according to her social position, according to the level at which we are situated, how much thicker is the veil drawn between those of her actions which we see and her motives!
The narrator continues with his interest in what someone’s eyes tell us, but also suggests that the reliability of memory might be dependent on the woman’s social position and the narrator’s. This continues the sexism and classism that has defined the novel.
Motives are situated at a deeper level, which we do not perceive, and moreover engender actions other than those of which we are aware and often in absolute contradiction to them. When has there not been some man in public life, regarded as a saint by his friends, who is discovered to have forged documents, robbed the State, betrayed his country? How often is a great nobleman robbed by a steward whom he has brought up from childhood, ready to swear that he is an excellent man, as possibly he was! And how impenetrable does it become, this curtain that screens another’s motives, if we are in love with that person, for it clouds our judgment and also obscures the actions of one who, feeling that she is loved, ceases suddenly to set any store by what otherwise would have seemed to her important, such as wealth for example.
This statement on the meaning of motives rings very true. They often are subconscious and contradict our normal opinions. It’s interesting that he chooses wealth as the important marker of value. This section of The Fugitive and the final chapter highlight wealth and the machinations of wealth among the nobility more than anywhere else in the novel. The slight reference to the Dreyfus case – “… discovered to have… betrayed his country?” – also continues to confirm that this passage is entrenched in the plot of the novel. The next section of this paragraph meditates on the actions of this hypothetical woman.
Perhaps it also induces her to feign to some extent this scorn for wealth in the hope of obtaining more by making us suffer. The bargaining instinct may also enter into everything else; and even actual incidents in her life and intrigue which she has confided to no one for fear of its being revealed to us, which many people might for all that have discovered had they felt the same passionate desire to know it as we ourselves while preserving a greater equanimity of mind and arousing fewer suspicions in the guilty party, an intrigue of which certain people have in fact not been unaware – but people whom we do not know and would not know how to find. And among all these reasons for her adopting an inexplicable attitude towards us, we must include those idiosyncrasies of character which impel people, whether from indifference to their own interests, or from hatred, or from love of freedom, or an impulse of anger, or from fear of what certain people will think, to do the opposite of what we expected. And then there are the differences of environment, of upbringing, in which we refuse to believe because, when we are talking together, they are effaced by our words, but which return when we are apart to direct the actions of each of us from so opposite a point of view that no true meeting of minds is possible.
Most interesting in this rambling section is the highlight on the idiosyncrasies of character. There really are so many reasons for motivation, and Proust successfully shows us many that are the most common and important to the story. He also touches on the nature versus nurture debate, which many people do refuse to believe. But I love how he ends this section by stating that, no matter how productive a conversation might have seemed, we all experience it differently because of our own point of view, and it can sometimes result in an inability to come together.
“Anyhow there’s no need to seek out all these explanations,” Andree went on. “Heaven knows I was fond of Albertine, and she really was a nice creature, but, especially after she had typhoid (a year before you first met us all), she was an absolute madcap. All of a sudden she would get sick of what she was doing, all her plans would have to be changed that very minute, and she herself probably couldn’t say why.” […]
And I told myself there was this much truth in what Andree said: that if differences of minds account for the different impressions produced by one person and another by the same work, and differences of feeling account for the impossibility of captivating a person who does not love you, there are also differences between characters, peculiarities in a single character, which are also motives for action. Then I ceased to think about this explanation and said to myself how difficult it is to know the truth in this world.
I love the way Proust ends this meditation on the meaning of character. He simply sums up the problem as unsolvable: every single character has their own motivations, and sometimes multiple contradictory ones. There’s something meaningful in the way he describes the people he is talking about here as “characters”. He could have just as easily said “a person” or “people”, or any other way to denote the people in the narrator’s “real” life. But Proust chooses to call them characters. I feel that in this moment, towards the end of his masterpiece, where the text is not a finely edited, Proust threw in a statement on how he creates characters and why they act they way they do in the work. For me, saying, “motives for action” confirms that he is speaking about he process of creating the characters. If he had been speaking as the narrator character, he might have chosen a different phrasing that places the line more firmly in the literary tone of the novel. Rather, he sounds like an author, word for word. It’s a beautiful thing to find hidden in the pages of a vast work. And he ends with a simple fact that every writer knows: it really is difficult to know the truth in this world.
