Albertine; Or, the Limits of Representation

Albertine; Or, the Limits of RepresentationAuthor(s): Kristin RossSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Winter, 1986), pp. 135-149Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1345549 .

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Albertine; or, The Limits of Representation

KRISTIN ROSS

"Ainsi je restais ... devant ce corps tordu, cette figure alligorique de quoi? de ma mort? de mon amour?

(And so I remained ... in front of this twisted body, this allegorical figure of what? of my death? of my love?)

Proust, La Fugitive

Proust's fifth volume La Prisonnihre opens with a decisive retreat to the interior on the part of its narrator, Marcel: "ce fut du reste surtout de ma cham- bre que je perlus la vie extdrieure pendant cette piriode" ("Besides, it was from my room above all that I perceived outside life during that time").' This sentence alerts us to what will become almost unbearably palpable in the course of the volume: the claustrophobic atmosphere, the restriction of the scene of action to Marcel's room. The few exceptional scenes that intrude on this atmosphere of interiority (notably the death of Bergotte and the perform- ance of Vinteuil's unpublished septet) serve only to heighten Proust's sharp division of public and private realms by briefly reinserting the noisy world of salon politics into what will in fact make up the major drama of this volume: the politics of sexual intimacy, the continuing work of interpretation. The evi- dent restrictions on movement and visual perception inherent in such a withdrawal mask a much more fundamental retreat: a retreat whose primary con- cern is language. Marcel's withdrawal renders inessential the language of worldliness-mots d'esprit and anecdotes, what Walter Benjamin calls the "physiology of chatter"2-which dominates the preceding volume. It becomes a way of stripping away the static interferences and unassigned fre- quencies of worldly discourse; it is a purging of voices which has in view the revelation (or construction) of a new language, one which I will examine in the pages which follow.3

To do so we must first situate Marcel's repudiation of the world in terms of the trajectory of fascination. For Marcel's retreat is by no means a solitary one-it is a retreat with Albertine. And Albertine's function in this text is that of a fascinum-the figuration of the rupture in Marcel's consciousness as well

1 Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu, eds. Pierre Clarac and Andre Ferre (Paris: Pldaide, 1954), III, 9. All further ref- erences to this edition will appear parenthetically in the text. All translations from the French are mine unless otherwise noted.

2 Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Proust" in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 206.

3 In his reading of three "founders of languages," Sade, Fourier and Loyola, Roland Barthes suggests that just such a cre- ation of a material vacuum through the narrowing of voices is a necessary step to the giving birth of a new language: language is destroyed only to be realized in another form. See his Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), p. 6.



136 NOVEL WINTER 1986

as its exciting cause. Fascination binds subject and object in claustrophobic exchange, and this imaginary interchange is "grasped" primarily in terms of vision. A substantial battle will be fought out in Marcel's room between, on the one hand, the 'aura' of the fascinum-Albertine's ability to overwhelm'the perceptual apparatus through a kind of global, quasi-sublime takeover--and, on the other, the disintegration of that same object (under Marcel's scrutiniz- ing gaze of suspicion) into a mere differential value.

It is clear that Marcel's retreat constitutes a hyperbolic extension of the "impoverishment" announced by fascination: the loss of the world brought on by the riveting of attention on the object. Fascination consists of a series of vigilant exclusions; its power is a negative one, a paring away of the extra- neous. In it can be seen the obsessive's characteristic mechanism of "isolation," the construction of a pause, a Freudian arrct "during which nothing further must happen--during which they perceive nothing and do nothing."4 In this light Marcel's retreat appears as the attempt to prolong that pause, to extend an interpolation in time. The phenomenon of "isolation" Freud observed in his obsessive patients sheds light on the totalitarian economy of this volume as well, and particularly on the imprisonment of Alber- tine. For what Freud termed isolation goes beyond the normal operation of concentration in a subject who attempts not to let his or her attention stray from the object on which it is fixed. Instead, isolation appears in Freud's clinical work to involve an archaic defense against touching, the removal of "the possibility of contact; it is a method of withdrawing a thing from being touched in any way."5 Fredric Jameson offers a clue to the motivation for such a defense in his remarks about the vocation of the collector: "the vocation to arrest the living raw material of life, by wrenching it from the historical situation in which alone its change is meaningful, to preserve it, beyond time, in the imaginary."6

Marcel's retreat with Albertine has been inspired by just such a fear of temporal/historical contagion. At the end of the preceding volume he has learned a significant detail about her life (her association with Mlle. Vinteuil's lesbian friend) and he draws conclusions. Albertine has suddenly derived

4 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Ho- garth Press, 1953-1974), vol. XX, 120.

5 Freud, XX, 122. Walter Benjamin speaks in passing of this prohibition against touching in Proust:

There has never been anyone else with Proust's ability to show us things; Proust's pointing finger is unequaled. But there is another gesture in amical togetherness, in conversation: physical contact. To no one is this gesture more alien than to Proust (Illu- minations, p. 212).

In this continuing deferment of the touch can be seen the prolonging of the arrit, the spatial and temporal decalage of fascination.

6 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 238. The trajectory of La Prisonnidre can be seen as one which moves from a narrative economy consolidated in the figure of the Collector (whose prototype is, of course, Swann) to that emblematized by the Storyteller, Marcel-he who goes beyond "la vie de collectioneur que me con- seillait Swann" ("the collector's life Swann advised for me," III, 387). I borrow these figures from Walter Benjamin; the "Collector" recurs throughout Benjamin's essays, most prominently in "Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Book Collect-

ing" (Illuminations, pp. 59-67)) and "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian," New German Critique, 5 (spring 1975), 27-58. For the Storyteller, see, in particular, "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov" (Illuminations, pp. 83-109), and, in relation to Proust, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (Illuminations, pp. 155-200).



KRISTIN ROSS REPRESENTING ALBERTINE 137

new meaning from the company she keeps and must be isolated from her associations. It would seem then that fascination, which at its most basic level consists of a radical encounter with Otherness, triggers the will to eradicate that otherness, to eliminate heterogeneity and construct in its place an essentially homogenous discourse: "toute pareille A moi, une Albertine image de ce qui pricishment 4tait mien et non de l'inconnu" ("the same as me, an Alber- tine image of what belonged entirely to me and not to the unknown," III, 75).

But in another sense Marcel's withdrawal forms a break with the dynamics of fascination. The drama of jealousy (with its emblematic posture of "listening at the door"), the foregrounding of the theme of music in this volume, such scenes as the "Cris de Paris" sequence where Albertine and Marcel listen to the street vendors outside their window--all of these elements sug- gest that we have moved away from the primary sensory organ of fascination, the eye,' to a predominance of the ear, what in Lacanian terminology, loosely speaking, signals the move from the realm of the Imaginary to the Symbolic Order.

Certain problems arise, however, in ascribing to this generalized formula whereby the Imaginary is taken to be the realm of the eye and the Symbolic that of the ear and language. Not the least of these problems is that such an opposition--in fact, the very process of definition by binary opposition--is itself profoundly characteristic of the Imaginary. The difficulty of posing a clear distinction of realms would arise as well were we to attempt to isolate a quintessential Imaginary or wish-fulfilling moment in the novel. The clearest example of such a moment, Gilberte's emergence in the hawthorns (I, 140-41), is problematic; for Marcel's perception of her is, to a certain extent, prestructured by hearsay, by the stories he has overheard, and by the imagin- ings he has constructed on the basis of these stories. Similarly, we will find that the calculations, reverberations, and linguistic focus of jealous analysis will not be entirely free from the constructs of the Imaginary. The impossibil- ity of making a pure distinction of realms is in itself perhaps not so surprising, since Lacan has pointed out at various points that both the phenomenon of love and that of analysis operate precisely at the junction of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.8

But the Proustian text goes far in maintaining a distinction of realms-the entire conflict of La Prisonnidre, in fact, can be seen in terms of a battle fought in the space opened up by their dissociation. The waking fantasies of the Im- aginary and the objectifying language of the Symbolic struggle to gain su- premacy. As Edmond Ortigues tells us: "A same term can be imaginary if considered absolutely and symbolic if it is understood as a differential value correlative of other terms which limit it reciprocally."9

7 The genesis of fascination is always recalled in visual terms: a distinct scene, a spectacle. In Proust the best example of such a scene is the silent and motionless tableau which occurs in Volume I: Gilberte Swann's materialization amidst the hawthorns (I, 140-41).

8 See Jacques Lacan, Les icrits techniques de Freud, vol. I of Le Siminaire de Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 242: "C'est lIa ce qui l'institue [l'amour] dans cette zone interm~diaire, ambigue, entre le symbolique at I'imagi- naire."

9 Edmond Ortigues, Le Discours et le symbole (Paris: Iditions Montaigne, 1962), p. 194.




One can speak, therefore, of instances or periods in the text where one or the other mode is in the ascendancy. In the scene involving Gilberte in the hawthorns, for instance, it is the imaginary or wish-fulfilling aspect of the fascinating object that is primarily dramatized: its insistence, its substantial call to the subject, its ability to absolutize itself as the sole embodiment of the Unique. But the conflict staged in La Prisonnidre is to a large extent predicated upon the foregrounding of a new dimension of the fascinating object. When Albertine announces the identity of her childhood friend she creates, for Mar- cel, "ce double mystbre, oii il y avait A la fois de l'agrandissment de sa jalousie et de l'insuffisance soudaine d'une definition" ("that double mystery, where there was both a heightening of his jealousy and the sudden lack of a definition," III, 215). Albertine becomes, in an instant, an emitter of signs and nothing more. With her newfound capacity to signify, the stammer and paralysis of fascination is replaced with a sudden frenzied activity of language, an activity whose initial drama is that of a hermeneutic quest--a series of questions directed to and about the object:

pour Albertine c'ftait une question d'essence: En son fond qu'itait-elle? ... Me mentait-elle? Ma vie avec elle avait-elle itd aussi lamentable que celle de Swann avec Odette?

for Albertine it was a question of essence: in the end what was she? ... Was she lying to me? Had my life with her been as pitiful as Swann's with Odette? (III, 516)l0

Marcel's retreat from the world with Albertine is thus an experimental situation: his room resembles nothing so much as a laboratory in which the object will be forced to explaiii itself, lay bare its workings. Interpretation is an operation in which we intervene; it is thus no accident that the predominant metaphor of La Prisonnidre is one which links the anxious investigations of the jealous lover to the intellectual activities of the scientist."11 The lover's compulsion to speculate and construe gives to this volume (as well as to the Swann/Odette section) its epistemological resonance--lover and scientist share a hermeneutical ambition: that of penetrating appearances, of revealing the underlying structure of things. The loved object, no longer an image, acquires the status of a text; the essentially monological stance of fascination gives way to a new activity, that of reading the multi-layered or perverse tex- tual body of the beloved.

10 In the light of the move to the Symbolic Order we are locating in this volume, it is no surprise to notice the pronounced return of a ghostly Swann; increasingly, Marcel's relations are haunted by this dead father.

11 Malcolm Bowie has assembled an impressive list of the scientific and scholarly postures with which Marcel identifies during the course of his "investigation": "he envisages himself in turn as chemist, philologist, pathologist, cryptanalyst, logician, biologist, physiologist, ornithologist, ichthyologist, astronomer, grammarian, philosophical analyst both deductive and in-

ductive, historian, psychologist of perception, physicist, botanist, mathematician and meteorologist," Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge (London: W. S. Maney and Son, 1978), p. 6.




Jealousy then is exaggerated or 'morbid' reading. What separates it from any other act of interpretation is not a qualitative difference, but a quantitative one, a question of degree. In a paper entitled "Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia and Homosexuality," Freud isolated this importance of the quantitative factor. Commenting on one obsessively jealous patient he writes: "His abnormality really reduced itself to this, that he watched his wife's unconscious mind much more closely and then re- garded it as far more important than anyone else would have thought of doing."12

Jealousy, then, as its etymology (" Xko; (zalos)-zelosus--jaloux")13 suggests, is a kind of zeal which while not necessarily deceiving the senses, heightens the perception of already existing structures and alters their propor- tions: "Comme les choses probablement les plus insignifiantes prennent sou- dain une valeur extraordinaire" ("How things that are probably the most insignificant suddenly take on an extraordinary importance," III, 94). (Reciprocally, the process of forgetting, the withdrawal of cathexis whose tale is told in La Fugitive, consists of the fading or leveling down of signs.)'4

The interest of Proust's dramatization of jealousy can be found then not in its portrayal of the affective woes of one individual's disturbed psychological state, but in the way in which it makes obvious the inseparability of the dimension of meaning from a problematic of desire. Jealousy in Proust does not operate as a psychological motivation to action; it is not causal but is instead itself the sign of the opening into a realm of fatality in which everything new is registered not as a fact or index but as a sign. Entrapped in the whirlwind of jealous speculation, Marcel becomes subject to fate, a fate he attempts to read in the body of the loved object: "C'6tait tout un 0tat d'ame, tout un ave- nir d'existence qui avait pris devant moi la forme allhgorique et fatale d'une jeune fille" ("It was a whole state of mind, a whole future existence which, in front of me, had taken on the allegorical and fatal form of a young girl," II, 1021).

The trajectory of Marcel's attempt to read his fate can be seen, as I sug- gested earlier, in terms of a vacillation between an Imaginary consideration of the fatal object and a Symbolic one, what, in Marcel's terms, is experienced as a dizzying alternation between belief and doubt:

La complexiti de mon amour, de ma personne, multipliait, diversifiait mes souf- frances. Pourtant elles pouvaient se ranger toujours sous les deux groupes dont l'alternance avait fait toute la vie de mon amour pour Albertine, tour & tour livrd a la confiance et au souppon jaloux.

12 Freud, XIX, 226.

13 Roland Barthes, Fragments d'un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 173. 14 For a more extended discussion of jealousy in Proust, see Gilles Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de

France, 1976); Leo Bersani, Marcel Proust: The Fictions of Life and of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), as well as Bowie's Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge.



140 NOVEL I WINTER 1986

The complexity of my love, of my character, multiplied, diversified my sufferings. And yet they could be sorted out into two groups whose alternation made up the totality of my love for Albertine, in turn given over to confidence and then to jealous suspicion. (III, 489)

More disturbing than the unsettling coexistence of the two states is their exaggeration: "for it is the property of love," says Proust, "to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous."15 But what is heightened and exaggerated in love exists as the stepping stones to any inquiry that is not a mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form. Jealousy heightens the difficulty confronting any true inquirer poised between credulity and suspicion: namely, how to distinguish between a trivial provocation and an au- thentically consequent phenomenon. What constitutes a clue? Which of Al- bertine's gestures are significant? At times Marcel lends a pathogenic importance to certain of Albertine's resistances only to discover later that they were merely tactical, existing solely for the combat. Details which appear strikingly symptomatic prove fruitless, while the potentially momentous goes by unnoticed: "Nous perdons un temps pricieux sur une piste absurde et nous passons sans le souplonner i c6td du vrai" ("We lose precious time following an absurd lead and, without suspecting, we pass by the truth," III, 100). The events which stimulate doubt are not necessarily unique or extraordinary in nature: "Sans doute mon enquate portait sur un point secondaire et bien arbitrairement choisi" ("Undoubtedly my investigation was founded on a secondary and quite arbitrarily chosen point," III, 513). They acquire significance only in the light of the inquiry, the way in which they call out to and determine their particular interpreter who must create a context for them.

Jealousy is a pathology of detail; Marcel is sick from detail. The interpretation of the dream, wrote Freud, is always accomplished "en detail" and never "en masse"; similarly, we find the text of Albertine's speech must be broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments. A blush, an interruption, a sudden silence; like Freud, Marcel turns his attention away from the smooth flow of discourse to the "zero messages," the silences in speech, the brisk bends in the road, "ces mots dits comme entre parentheses" ("those words spoken as if between parentheses," III, 110). To do so he must perfect something like the suspended attention of the analyst-what he calls a "musical ear"-to determine that interpretation begins with the sensation of an omission or an excess: a silence which must be filled in or a jarring chord to be smoothed away.'6 The discrepancy need not, however, take the form of something withheld or of a proliferation of facts; it can

15 Proust, Letter to Madame Scheikevitch, Letters of Marcel Proust, trans, and ed. Mina Curtiss (New York: Random House, 1949), p. 283, my emphasis.

16 "Chez Albertine, la sensation du mensonge Ctait donnee par bien des particularitis qu'on a deji vues au cours de ce r~cit, mais principalement par ceci que, quand elle mentait, son r~cit pichait soit par insuffisance, omission, invraisemblance, soit

par exchs, au contraire, de petits faits destinds a le rendre vraisemblable. Le vraisemblable, malgre l'idee que se fait le menteur, n'est pas du tout le vrai. Des qu' coutant quelque chose de vrai, on entend quelque chose qui est seulement

vraisemblable, qui l'est peut-atre plus que le vrai, qui l'est peut-4tre trop, I'oreille un peu musicienne sent que ce n'est pas cela, comme pour un vers faux, ou un mot lu a haute voix pour un autre. L'oreille le sent et, si i'on aime, le coeur s'a- larme" (I1I, 179).



KRISTIN ROSS I REPRESENTING ALBERTINE 141

also be signaled by a change in the very form or structure of language: an of- fense to syntax. It is no accident that Albertine's characteristic figure of speech is anacoluthon:

Elle usait, non par raffinement de style, mais pour rcparer ses imprudences, de ces brusques sautes de syntaxe ressemblant un peu i ce que les grammairiens appellent anacoluthe. ..

Not in order to refine her style, but rather to repair her unwary statements, she made use of those sudden leaps in syntax that resemble a little what grammarians call anacoluthon . . (III, 153)

Albertine is a logical and grammatical scandal. The personification of anacoluthon in the text, she refuses allegiance precisely to those modes of hierarchi- cal organization which syntax promotes.

Fragmentation, which, as Freud points out, is the necessary condition for all interpretation, is brought to bear not only on the text of Albertine's speech-it is played out on her body as well. Marcel returns to its fragmented condition a body whose unity he supposed he had discovered in such amazement by the sea in Balbec. The complete and overwhelming wholeness of the imaginary object, the frozen movie "still"-Gilberte in the hawthorns, Albertine silhouetted against the sea-is dismembered into a clus- ter of part objects: a fleeting glance, a lock of hair. "Je pouvais prendre sa tote, la relever, la poser contre mes levres, entourer mon cou de ses bras" ("I could take her head, lift it up, position it against my lips, wrap her arms around my neck," III, 113). Albertine's body in this volume acquires a puz- zling protean fluidity: blue eyes become brown, a beauty mark migrates from chin to upper lip. "Nous sommes des sculpteurs. Nous voulons obtenir d'une femme une statue entierement diff(rente de celle qu'elle nous a pr(sen- tee" ("We are sculptors. We want to obtain from a woman an entirely different statue than the one she presented us," III, 142). The body as a whole must be shattered in view of an ultimate goal which is that of its reassembly.

Less important than the fragmentation of the object, then, is its subsequent recorporation-the desire which arises to reproduce the total body, to reaccu- mulate its parts in order to form a motionless and acquiescent body. This spatialization of the extra-spatial occurs most vividly in the well-known scene when Marcel watches Albertine asleep: "Elle avait rappile A soi tout ce qui d'- elle 6tait au dehors, elle s'4tait rifugi&e, enclose, r~sum&e, dans son corps" ("She had drawn back to herself everything of her which was outside, she had taken refuge in herself, enclosed, summarized, in her body," III, 70). To the extent that a simple identification can take place between subject and mo-

17 Paul de Man has pointed to the affiliation between Albertine and anacoluthon in a footnote to his essay on Rousseau's Confessions: "Anacoluthon is not restricted to uninflected parts of speech but can involve nouns or inflected shifters such as pronouns. It designates any grammatical or syntactical discontinuity in which a construction interrupts another before it is completed. A striking instance of the structural and epistemological implications of anacoluthon occurs in Proust in the description of the lies used by Albertine," Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 289-90.




tionless object, there is no longer any room for change, which is to say, death. That is, for a brief moment the apparently spatial form of the sleeping body denies the temporal dimension in which its meanings are actualized.

The body asleep, incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own, signals a triumph of the Imaginary, a momentary exiling of suspicion-the respite of belief: "En le tenant sous mon regard, dans mes mains, j'avais cette impression de la possider tout entibre que je n'avais pas quand elle 4tait riveill&e" ("Holding it beneath my gaze, in my hands, I had that impression of possessing her entirely-an impression I didn't have when she was awake," III, 70). Doubt gives rise to a struggle whose goal is the cessation of doubt; the irritating stimulus must be neutralized by framing a conjecture which would explain it away. Painful reverberations are silenced by their constraint within a model; a precarious closure is attained by momen- tarily reaching a state of belief. Belief, what C. S. Pierce called "the demica- dence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life,"'8 is the stopping place for thought. But perhaps no one so well as Proust has shown this stopping place to be thought's point of departure as well. The very drugs prescribed to soothe the fever provoke a new onslaught. "La souffrance dans l'amour cesse par instants, mais pour reprendre d'une fa- gon diff~rente" ("Suffering in love subsides at certain moments, only to begin again in a different way," III, 102-03). An audacity of Albertine's is rendered benign by the resurrection of a calming phrase, but:

Parfois mime, elle [l'inquiktude] est renouvelle par la phrase dont le but itait de nous apporter le repos. Mais le plus souvent, nous ne faisons que changer d'in- quietude. Un des mots de cette phrase qui devait nous calmer met nos soupgons sur une autre piste.

Sometimes worry is reawakened by the sentence whose purpose was to bring us re- lief. But most frequently we do nothing but change worries. One of the words of the sentence which was supposed to calm us down awakens our suspicions in a new way.19

What gives to La Prisonnikre its peculiar tonality of both high risk and a numbing, interminable fatigue can be illustrated by recalling for a moment the grand metaphorical style of the more celebrated passages of the Recherche. For unlike the transcendental moments associated with involuntary memory, La Prisonnikre carries within its prose the tedium of laborious effort. It is the volume of work and work's fatigue, made tangible in the uneven and repeti- tive rhythm of Marcel's inquiry: the pause, the sudden change in direction, the consolidation of a new rigidity which will in turn be shattered by the un- earthing of a new or newly interpretably significant fragment.

18 Charles Pierce, "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," in vol. V/VI of his Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), p. 255.

19 Proust, La Prisonnidre (Paris: Nouvelle revue frangaise, 1923), vol. 6.1, 129.




The scandal of the object provokes a kind of thought and a kind of technological vocabulary which seeks to render the object more predictable and more calculable: the erection of models or hypotheses which would satisfacto- rily fit all the facts at hand. Marcel's dilemma consists of the existence of two mutually exclusive hypotheses: the wish-fulfilling or imaginary one drawn from the manifest text of Albertine's remarks, "l'hypothbse qui admettait pour vrai tout ce que me disait Albertine" ("the hypothesis which took for true everything that Albertine told me," III, 346); and "l'autre hypothbse," the one which takes into account the latent content of those remarks: "celle qui s'ap- puyait non sur les paroles d'Albertine, mais sur des silences, des regards, des rougeurs, des bouderies, et mime des colbres" ("the one which was not based on Albertine's words, but rather on her silences, her glances, her blushes, her sulkiness and even her angers," III, 392). "Laquelle des deux hypotheses 6tait la vraie?" ("Which of the two hypotheses was true?" III, 360). Marcel's oft-repeated wish in this volume, to leap free of the puzzle by making no hypotheses, is precluded by the exigencies of his situation as lover: a situation which emphasizes the priority of totalizing thought in the form of a longing for total adequation of desire with its object: "L'amour, dans l'anxidtd douloureuse, comme dans le d~sir heureux, est I'exigence d'un tout" ("Love, in painful anxiety just as in happy desire, is the need for a totality," III, 106).

But by describing thus far Marcel's attempts to interpret Albertine in terms of a synchronic war between two contradictory hypotheses (Albertine fauve vs. Albertine domestiquie), I have left out until now the factor of a particular temporal situation which is the very motor of interpretation. The battle is a battle played out in time; the antagonism between the two hypotheses is, in ac- tuality, a sequencing in which the previous understanding is undone by the understanding which succeeds it. What is at stake is not a merely arbitrary or static vacillation between opposing theories; instead, the impressive vocabulary of technological investigation is being used to denote its own break- down. "L'inconnu de la vie des $tres est comme celui de la nature, que cha- que d&couverte scientifique ne fait que reculer, mais n'annule pas" ("What is unknown about the life of human beings is similar to what is unknown in nature, which each scientific discovery only makes recede but doesn't erase," III, 391). The model itself, or what was excluded or not taken into account in order for the model to be constructed, is precisely what compels the building of the next model. What the will rejects as anachronistic returns later on, endowed with new pathogenic force; what was abstracted as being illogical, whatever word or gesture that could not fit into the hygiene of a model resur- faces greatly amplified. Systems-building engenders its own errors; the fact of accounting for one imprudence becomes something that must then be ac- counted for. The hyper-rationality of obsession is quite devoid of being rooted or grounded. Marcel's essentialist quest is a machine running by itself; or, as Roland Barthes puts it, a "homeostat of error": "In fact, it is the neurotic nature of obsession to set up a self-maintaining machine, a kind of




homeostat of error, constructed in such a way that its function alone provides it with operating energy...."20

Nowhere is this revisionary or temporal structure of interpretation so ap- parent as in the impressive drama of Freudian nachtrliglichkeit which Marcel's quest enacts. For just as the object of desire is always fast or slow, early or late, never "on time," so Marcel, as interpreter, is never "on time" for the revelation he seeks: he, its recipient, is not ready for the appropriate discovery when it comes.

A trauma need not be a trauma at the time it occurs. Such is the significance of the "Seringas" incident. Returning home unexpectedly one after- noon, Marcel comes closest to an actual witnessing of the "betrayal scene" he has so often imagined between Albertine and Andr&e. But the opportunity is missed, for "encore une fois, au moment mbme, je ne trouvais A tout cela rien que de trbs naturel, tout au plus d'un peu confus, en tout cas insignifiant" ("once again, at the very moment, I found everything completely natural, at the most a little confused, in any case insignificant," III, 55). When, years later, Andr&e supplies the essential information, the data has come in too late; it has ceased to matter.

But the revision of past experience in the light of fresh associations does not always, as in the Seringas incident, allow a deferral of the trauma until after it has ceased to be important. Years after Albertine's death, Marcel's rela- tive calm can still be shattered by the memory of a blush which, in its new context, is invested with catastrophic force and whose significance, suddenly, he learns to read:

Tout d'un coup c'ttait un souvenir que je n'avais pas revu depuis bien longtemps, car il itait rests dissous dans la fluide et invisible itendue de ma mimoire, qui se cristallisait. Ainsi il y avait plusieurs annies, comme on parlait de son peignoir de douche, Albertine avait rougi.

Suddenly a reminiscence that hadn't occurred to me for a long time-for it had remained dispersed in the fluid and invisible expanse of my memory-crystallized. Several years previously, as we were speaking of her bathing robe, Albertine had blushed. (III, 491)

Phenomena which at the time appeared secondary or inessential, or at best, poised on the brink of significance, are endowed at a later date with vital implications. A previous understanding is undone by the reactivation of whatever it has been impossible in the first instance to incorporate fully into a meaningful context.

This process of doing and undoing, we are given to understand, is an interminable one. For just as a detail, a blush remembered across the years, can, through displacement, take on great significance, so customarily critical or momentous events which might alter the interpretative itinerary or stop it in its tracks, suffer a corresponding devaluation in status. Albertine's death

20 Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, p. 70.




provides the best example of such an "event" which never quite takes place, or which is crushed beneath the weight of Marcel's interpretative discourse. Marcel's language is a language whose object, from the outset, is lost, and by the same token Albertine's death is neither liberating nor, like the remembered blush, catastrophic:

Quand notre mattresse est vivante, une grande partie des pensdes qui forment ce que nous appelons notre amour nous viennent pendant les heures oi elle n'est pas d cdtd de nous. Ainsi l'on prend l'habitude d'avoir pour objet de sa reverie un itre absent.... Aussi la mort ne change-t-elle pas grande'chose.

When our mistress is alive, many of the thoughts which make up what we call our love come to us during the hours when she is not beside us. As such one gets used to having as the object of his daydreams someone absent .... And so death doesn't change a great deal. (III, 523)

The curious survie of the dead Albertine in La Fugitive, dead, that is, and una- ble to die ("Jamais elle n'y avait &td plus vivante," "Never had she been more alive," III, 478), is not markedly different from the survie of the living Alber- tine in La Prisonnidre. Her death does not, in the words of Samuel Beckett, "accelerate the extinction of an obsession whose rack and wheel were the days and hours."21 This extinction, when it transpires, is not so much the loss of the object (the object is already lost) as a painfully slow loss of an itinerary, a language. Albertine in La Fugitive is not precisely mourned or forgot- ten, but, like an abandoned transitional object relegated by the child to a shelf in the closet, gradually loses meaning.

We have seen how Marcel's attempts to resolve the problem of Albertine into a stable hypothesis-whether it be an Albertine fauve and deceiving, or an Albertine domestiquie, transparent and circumscribed-gave way to a more properly narrative solution: an awkward deciphering of meaning from moment to moment. Marcel's exercise in pure thought is a failure; at each step of the way Albertine exceeds the closure of an explanatory model. Her story is the story of a dual failure of adequation: adequation of desire to its object, adequation of the object itself to its meaning. But to call it her story is mis- leading-for just as desire is not the relation of a subject to an object in the real world but a relation to fantasy, so the object of Marcel's narrative is far less the fascinum itself than the story of his attempts to appropriate that object, the complicated process of consolidations, remodelings and revisions: "cette course a l'abime des impossibles reconstitutions" ("that race into the abyss of impossible reconstructions").2

We have followed that course through its wish-fulfilling moments of belief in a faithful, transparent Albertine, and the shattering of that belief by the registering of a "fatal" word or gesture. Marcel's wish, the collector's wish he

21 Samuel Beckett, Proust (London: John Calder, 1965), p. 60.

Proust, La PrisonniPre, vol. 6.2, 178.




has inherited from Swann, is the reverse of Pygmalion's; he attempts to con- fine "un etre, dissemine dans l'espace et dans le temps" ("a being dissemi- nated in space and time," III, 104) to a single room, and, above all, to a single moment. This wish is nothing other than the wish to prolong the illusory moment of fascination, the arrit during which nothing further must happen. For the Imaginary consideration of the object would preserve the object beyond time, that is, transform Albertine into an object whose past could be known and whose future could be controlled. Marcel's wish for an Albertine domestiquie, a total and malleable body, is, as we have seen, no less a yearning for a transparent discourse in which each of her announced intentions would correspond exactly to her actions, a kind of coalescence of signi- fier and signified. Only then would he arrive at "la possession totale d'Alber- tine, possession qui avait 4td mon but et ma chimbre depuis le premier jour oi je l'avais vue" ("the total possession of Albertine, possession which had been my goal and my chimera from the first day I saw her," III, 496).

But such moments of belief are and can only be, by definition, momentary. The object tends toward signification and, what is more, toward overdetermi- nation: "[la vie d'Albertine] ... 4tait recouverte de d~sirs alternbes, fugitifs, souvent contradictoires" ("the life of Albertine ... was covered over by alter- nating, fugitive, often contradictory desires," III, 407). Belief is undone with the emergence of a symbolic consideration of the object-Marcel's simulacrum of scientific objectivity-by which he attempts to formulate the underlying structure of latent meanings revealed by Albertine's slips.

Yet each explanatory solution crumbles; neither the Imaginary "manifest" Albertine, nor the latent structure she reveals, is sufficient. It is perhaps not surprising that both solutions falter in the face of precisely that which Mar- cel's experiment, his "retreat into the interior," was designed to repress. What insists on battering down the door, so to speak, and disrupting the con- trol situation, is an absent cause, the third and most nebulously conceptual- ized of the Lacanian triad: the Real.

The Lacanian Real is not simply synonymous with external reality. We might attempt to define it as that which brings to light the limits of representation, which is to say, the limits of conceptuality itself. It is perhaps Proust who, oddly enough, gives it its best approximation when he speaks of that which "se d&robe instinctivement par une fuite sym~trique a nos investigations" ("flees instinctively by way of a flight symmetrical to our investigations," III, 90). In Fredric Jameson's recent work, the Real-that on which both Imaginary and Symbolic stumble-has come to be synonymous with History itself, in the sense of the historical preconditions and limitations through which alone the object acquires meaning.23 Following Jameson, then, we might speak of Marcel's (missed) encounter with Albertine as a ren- contre with the intransigence of history, a history which, at its most general, consists of the realm of necessity, time and decay: that which lies outside the individual consciousness whose spatial emblem is Marcel's room. The ques-

23 See Jameson, The Political Unconscious and "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject," Yale French Studies, 55/56 (1977), 338-95.




tion, in other words, is not one of the verifiability or meaning of Albertine's story, nor its sudden revelation; that story is rather what is not, and cannot be realized by Marcel: that which he is condemned to miss (but which this missing, in some sense, reveals).

I have already described the disturbing effect of the intrusion of the Real into the Imaginary wish to preserve the object beyond time. The immobilized "still" of fascination, Albertine asleep, is suddenly and nightmarishly trans- formed into "l'extension de cet @tre A tous les points de l'espace et du temps que cet @tre a occupis et occupera" ("the extension of that being to all the points of space and time which that being has occupied and will occupy," III, 100). But the Symbolic dimension of the quest comes to grief as well at the hands of the Real. "Je n'avais rdussi ... qu'd y reculer cet inconnaissable qu'est pour nous, quand nous cherchons effectivement A nous la representer, la vie rdele d'une autre personne" ("I had only succeeded ... in extending that unknowable which is for us, when we try to represent it to ourselves, the real life of another person," III, 62). For each of the significant details Marcel ponders, all of his interrogations, all of the devices he makes use of to trick Albertine into divulging her intentions--by way of all of these ruses Marcel arrives, in the end, not at an event or events, but at other fictions. Albertine's compulsive story-telling, her lies, form an intricate web which serves only to overlay other lies: "J'aurais tant voulu savoir quels 6taient les nombreux mensonges du debut! Mais je savais d'avance que ses aveux ser- aient de nouveaux mensonges" ("I would have so liked to know which were the numerous lies from the beginning! But I knew in advance that her admissions would be new lies," III, 180). The key to the enigma is irrevocably lost; the definitive "primal scene" of betrayal is not available.

It is precisely Albertine's story which at the same time awakens and frus- trates Marcel's marshaling of investigatory and deductive skills. "Combien peu, d'ailleurs, je savais, je saurais jamais de cette histoire d'Albertine, la seule histoire qui m'eit particulierement interess&" ("Besides, how little I knew, how little I would ever know of that story of Albertine, the only story which had ever particularly interested me," III, 613). What eludes him is her agenda, how she has spent and will spend her time, the whole string of unknowable events which are never available to him directly:

ses aveux, parce que si rares, arrtis si court, ils laissaient entre eux, en tant qu'ils concernaient le passe, de grands intervalles tout en blanc et sur toute la longueur desquels il me fallait retracer, et pour cela d'abord apprendre, sa vie.

her admissions, because they were so rare, so brusquely stopped short, in so far as they concerned the past, opened up huge blank intervals in whose space I had to retrace, and, in order to do that, first find out about, her life. (III, 98)

"Retracing" entails establishing the narrative or causal connections that would link one chance remark of Albertine's to the next. To retrace her story is, in




the end, a very different project from his initial one, that of attempting to lo- cate the "event of betrayal"-determining the time and place of an event that would forever ground the interpretative discourse inspired by Albertine. The confrontation with the Real does not, for Marcel, arrive in the form of information-the sudden discovery of the painful truth of his situation. Benja- min's differentiation between the notion of "information," on the one hand, and "story," on the other, can help clarify the distinction between projects: "It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information: rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening."24 The search for Alber- tine's past, in other words, becomes synonymous with a moving forward for Marcel into new modes of constructing experience.

What has occurred is a change in the very nature of the problem that initi- ated the quest. The goal is no longer conceived of as deciphering the meaning of the object-its essence-but rather that of tracing the paths it follows, reconstituting its agenda, mapping its route:

Mais, plut6t de me livrer di ce genre de causeries investigatrices, je consacrais souvent d imaginer la promenade d'Albertine les forces que je n'employais pas d la faire.

But rather than giving way to that kind of investigatory conversation, I often de- voted to imagining Albertine's outing the energy I would have used in doing it. (III, 23, my emphasis)

Here, as elsewhere, the enclosure or retreat allows the system, i.e., the imagi- nation. The search for sufficient evidence is subsumed by a proliferation of fictional scenarios; Albertine's promenade, no longer the object of interpretation, has become its product.

Thus, after the failure of the scientific model, after the waning of jealousy, there remains for Marcel precisely those aspects of historical grounding or context which, in his retreat with the object, he had tried to repress: Alber- tine's associations, the preconditions or limitations on her meaning. Near the end of Le temps retrouvc, Marcel, comparing himself to Swann, describes his own transition from Collector to Storyteller:

Diffrrant en cela encore de Swann, qui, quand il ne fut plus jaloux, cessa d'etre cu- rieux de ce qu'Odette avait pu faire avec Forcheville, mtme apris ma jalousie pas- see, connaftre la blanchisseuse d'Albertine, des personnes de son quartier, y recon- stituer sa vie, ses intrigues, cela seul avait du charme pour moi.

In this another difference from Swann who, when he was no longer jealous, stopped being curious about what Odette could have been doing with Forcheville--even after my jealousy subsided, making the acquaintance of Albertine's laundress, of the peo-

24 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 159.




ple from her neighborhood, reconstructing her life, her intrigues--this alone had charm for me. (III, 551-52)

Albertine's associations (her lovers, her plots), once nothing more than the painful indicators that her desires were directed elsewhere, are now the cru- cial components in the transition which has been gradually taking place from naming Albertine's desire, to elaborating it, telling its story. What was once the obstacle, that which resisted representation completely, becomes his only chance: "Ce qui vint A mon secours contre cette image de la blanchisseuse, ce fut--certes quand elle eut un peu dur--cette image elle-mime" ("What came to my aid against the image of the laundress was--of course, after it had lasted a little while--that image itself," III, 529).

The story of Albertine's intrigues cannot be separated from the story of Marcel's expectations, preconceptions, fantasies, and judgments provoked by those intrigues. The compulsion to determine the origin of the fascinating object gives way to the equally vital compulsion to tell the story of fascination, to plot the indefinite movement of its comprehension. The telling of Al- bertine's story is, at the same time, the rewriting of Marcel's own: "Ce n'4tait pas Albertine seule qui n'4tait qu'une succession de moments, c'etait aussi moi-mime" ("It wasn't just Albertine who was nothing but a succession of moments, it was also myself," III, 489). The storyteller's strategy, unlike that of the collector, is one which neither gives up the object nor suppresses it: the telling of the story will, at the same time, maintain and dispel the fascination which brought it into existence.



Albertine; Or, the Limits of Representation

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