The Bleak World of The Captive

Sometimes, as Poe showed in The Purloined Letter, the clue to a puzzle may be so obvious that we are unable to see it. The puzzle, in my case, is Marcel’s jealousy in The Captive. The emotion has been prominent in the Search. Swann’s courtship of Odette, Marcel’s friendship with Gilberte, Charlus’ pursuit of Morel—all have been memorable portraits of jealousy. But The Captive portrays extreme, almost unimaginable jealousy. Marcel’s interest in Albertine has grown into an obsession large even by Proustian standards. Yet that explanation, while true, isn’t sufficient, at least to me.

John Rawls has noted that jealousy arises from the wish to keep what one has. Does Marcel have Albertine? Marcel fears not, even though he has attempted to fulfill this wish in a literal way, by making Albertine a prisoner in his parents’ house. The lock on the prison door is the lie. The opposite appears (falsely) to be the case—a lie exposed would result in Albertine’s expulsion from the house. Marcel is constantly fabricating lies to catch Albertine in what he supposes is one dalliance or another. The motive for Albertine’s lies is more ambiguous; she sometimes tells lies to protect herself, other times to protect Marcel. The Captive tells the story of people struggling to gain control of someone.

One of the great themes of In Search of Lost Time is this struggle. The struggle is bound to fail because the feelings and thoughts of others are always beyond our control. This is a truth Marcel discovers again and again, yet has not be able to act upon on his journey toward becoming a writer. It is “a charming law of nature,” Marcel tells us in The Guermantes Way, “and one that is evident in the heart of the most complex societies, that we live in perfect ignorance of those we love.” I take “charming” to be an ironic touch. “Such a society,” he goes on to explain, “where every being is double, and where the most transparent person, the most notorious, will be known to others only from within a protective shell, a sweet cocoon, as a charming natural curiosity.” Control requires knowledge of others, which Marcel denies possible. Later, in The Captive, he is on a tear to prove himself wrong in his relationship with Albertine. As we know, the effort is futile; the novel ends with her escape from the hôtel and ends the illusion of his control.

Throughout the novel, as the struggle between Marcel and Albertine plays itself out, the possibility of understanding anyone is raised and dismissed. Deception is the social norm. “The fact of a man’s having proclaimed… that it is wicked to lie obliges him as a rule to lie more than other people, without on that account abandoning the solemn mask, doffing the august tiara of sincerity.” The one we love wears the mask and ( in a reversal of the expected Janus face) “is to us like Janus, presenting to us a face that pleases us if the person leaves us, a dreary face if we know him or her to be at our perpetual disposal.” Social events are not what they seem, but “resemble those parties to which doctors invite their patients, who utter the most intelligent remarks, have perfect manners, and would never show that they were mad if they did not whisper in your ear, pointing to some old gentleman going past, 'That’s Joan of Arc.'” Medicine too has its lies in remedies that created “artificially grafted illnesses.” Even the Search itself has its lies. “If we were not obliged, in the interest of narrative tidiness, to confine ourselves to frivolous reasons, how many more serious reasons would enable us to demonstrate the mendacious flimsiness of the opening pages of this volume,” Marcel/Proust tells us.

If life includes redemption from the bleak world that Marcel portrays, we find it in art:

All the residuum of reality which we are obliged to keep to ourselves, which cannot be transmitted in talk, even from friend to friend, from master to disciple, from lover to mistress, that ineffable something which differentiates qualitatively what each of us has felt and what he is obliged to leave behind at the threshold of the phrases in which he can communicate with others only by limiting himself to externals, common to all and of no interest—are brought out by art…

And so Marcel thinks again of the steeples of Martinville and the trees near Balbec. In these experiences lie the possibility of escape from the sterile, mendacious world that permeates The Captive. Albertine is beyond his control; perhaps art is not. If only he could resume writing.

In the Footsteps of Proust

I'm rarely drawn to places which writers or their fictional characters have inhabited (though several years ago I couldn't resist walking past Stanley Kunitz's home in Provincetown, Massachusetts).

If you are traveling to France and are interested in seeing Proust sites in Paris and Illiers (Combray), here's a guide for you.

Swann's Way Wordle

It's summer.... time to be frivolous.

Art. Death. Transcendence?

Book sales of Proust’s fifth and sixth novels drop significantly when compared to the four novels that precede them, suggesting that people stop reading In Search of Lost Time when they come to The Captive. I sympathize with readers’ willingness to give up at this point. I did not have a fond memory of the novel before I jumped into it again. “You read The Captive and The Fugitive on your own,” I suggested to the RHH Proust group as we finished Sodom and Gomorrah. “We can reconvene for Time Regained.”


They balked. “We want to read them together. Besides, if we don’t read as a group, we’ll lose our motivation.” I was not at my best when I pressed on, urging, “Don’t worry about motivation. If you don’t read all of The Captive and The Fugitive, that’s okay. They’re a separate, self-contained part of the Search.” Doubting the integrity of my argument, the group scheduled four dinners during the summer.


As I drove to our first meeting, I imagined an evening of regrets. “You were right,” I would hear the group admit. “Let’s skim through these novels. Page after page of Marcel’s obsession of Albertine! Enough!”

Instead, after finishing dinner and listening to the group discuss The Captive, I heard, “Are we glad we didn’t skip this novel!” “I’m glad too,” I replied truly, if sheepishly. The group had again shown me aspects of Proust that I had not seen before.


I had not sufficiently taken in—blinded as I was by Marcel’s incessant jealousy—the novel’s ruminations on death and art, which begin with Bergotte’s death while viewing A View of Delft at a Vermeer exhibition.


Gazing at the painting, Bergotte “noticed for the first time some small figures in blue, that the sand was pink, and finally, the precious substance of the tiny patch of yellow wall. His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious little patch of wall. 'That’s how I ought to have written,' he said. 'My last books are too dry. I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour… like this little patch of yellow wall.’” Repeating the phrase “little patch of wall,” the writer collapsed and died. He was dead, Proust writes. "Dead for ever? Who can say?...All we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying a burden of obligations contracted in a former life…” The artist leaves behind works, even great works, that matter little to his “worm-eaten body, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much skill and refinement by an artist destined to be for ever unknown and barely identified under the name Vermeer." We cannot know what precedes and follows our life, but the artist’s work survives. Bergotte, dead and interned, was gone, "but all through that night of mourning, in the lighted shop windows, his books, arranged three by three, kept vigil like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection."


Later in the novel, Marcel questions this conclusion. After playing Vinteuil’s sonata on his piano, Marcel denies that art is “something above and beyond life.” Individuality in works of art is “due merely to the illusion produced by technical skill,” he says. Marcel, however, does not hold this view for long; as he vacillates again in his relationship with Albertine, his ideas about art, which threatened to prevent him from becoming a writer, recover “from the diminution that they have suffered…” Thinking of Swann’s life, Marcel reaffirms the writer’s ability to create something that lasts beyond death. Speaking of the Search, Marcel/Proust addresses Swann, dead many years. Marcel himself, “he whom you must have regarded as a young idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels [so] that people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps live. If, in Tissot’s picture representing the balcony of the Rue Royale club, where you figure with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, people are always drawing attention to you, it is because they see that there are some traces of you in the character of Swann.”


At this point in the Search’s narrative, Marcel has been able to only write his impression of the steeples of Martinville. We know, of course, that he has achieved becoming a writer, for we are reading the Search, Marcel’s story of his quest to become an artist, which begins with the novel that made Swann a hero. Within the chronology of that story, Swann could have been in Tissot’s 1868 painting. Fiction—the narrative, Marcel as the author of that narrative, and Swann’s presence in the painting—mingles with reality—our reading of the Search, the actuality of Swann’s Way, and Tissot’s painting—to affirm the possibility of art and its ability to transcend death. Both had been in doubt.


Doubt is a poison that flows like a raging stream through The Captive. Marcel is enervated by it, a man thrashing about in a seemingly vain attempt to escape from doubt into truth. This drama of Marcel’s battle with doubt and jealousy centers on his sexual relationship with Albertine, a battle so fierce that it became my memory of The Captive. But mine was a myopic view of the novel. I had underestimated Marcel’s critical struggle to overcome his doubt about the value of art. Is art, even great art, merely a mastery of technique, or is art able to transcend our mortality? Provisionally, at least, Marcel believes in the power of art to symbolically “resurrect” the artist who has died. Reading the Search, we might believe it also.