The Captive / The Fugitive (In Search of Lost Time, #5-6) in The Year of Reading Proust

Jul 11, 2009 Bram rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, proustophilia

I’ve attempted (this is already generous) to review each volume of In Search of Lost Time, but every time I finish reading one, I feel like I should just skip it this time around. To put it in banal and melodramatic terms, this book has really meant a lot to me. I think I’ll leave it at that rather than give in to my desire to gush in Proustian sentences about all the emotions, thoughts, and nostalgia I’ve experienced solely from imbibing and osmosing Marcel’s thoughts and feelings. It has been ...more

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Nov 29, 2015 Inderjit Sanghera rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

‘The Prisoner and the Fugitive’ is the exploration of the narrator’s obsessive and passionate relationship with Albertine; it is a deliberate echo of the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, in fact all of the relationships explored in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ echo each other, from Charlus and Morel to Saint-Loup and Rachel, the theme of lesbianism, obsessive love and of sensitive and cultured characters falling in love with vulgar and vapid individuals, left dizzy via the vert ‘The Prisoner and the Fugitive’ is the exploration of the narrator’s obsessive and passionate relationship with Albertine; it is a deliberate echo of the love affair between Charles Swann and Odette de Crecy, in fact all of the relationships explored in ‘In Search of Lost Time’ echo each other, from Charlus and Morel to Saint-Loup and Rachel, the theme of lesbianism, obsessive love and of sensitive and cultured characters falling in love with vulgar and vapid individuals, left dizzy via the vertiginous vortex of love. Yet the narrator, unlike the other characters, is able to transform his pain and experiences into art, so that his love affair is merely a coalescment of all other love affairs and heart-breaks and he is fulfilling the artist’s vocation (without yet knowing it) of transmuting life into art.

The novel begins with a wonderful description of waking up; “I could tell from the first street noises, whether they reached me muffled and distorted by dampness or twanging like arrows in the empty, resonant space of a wide-open morning, icy and pure. The rumbling of the first tram told me whether it was huddled against the rain or forging gaily towards a blue horizon.” The narrator is beginning to discover, isolated alone in his room, that the raw materials for his art are all around him, it is via his sensory exploration of the world around him that he will come to an understanding of life and just as the sonorous rumbling of a tram will bring back the memory of the rain, so the sunshine streaming through the narrator’s windows in the morning will rouse him out of his somnolence and bring back Albertine’s carefree and chincanrous whistling; “The sun suddenly turned this net of glass to yellow, gilded it and, gently uncovering in me a young man of former times who had been long hidden by habit, intoxicated me with memories, as if I had been in the open air looking at gilded foliage in which not even the presence of a bird was wanting.”

And so the narrator soars and glides, like the most intrepid of birds, over the characters and places which inhabit his novel-no writer has delved as deeply into the quiddity of things as Proust, has opened the reader’s eyes to the untrammeled beauty of the world like Proust is able to, from the sight of rain-dampened roof tiles; “when the roofs, briefly dampened by rain, then dried by a brief wind or a ray of sunshine, poutingly displayed a few drops, as they wait for the wind to turn again, preen in the passing sunshine the rainbow glint of their shot-silk slates…” to the description of the Duchesse de Guermantes’s dress; “I let myself be swept away into the atmosphere it created, like that of certain late afternoons muffled in a pearl-grey floating mist. If, on the other hand, the chosen gown were Chinese with a pattern of red and yellow flames, I saw it as a brilliant sunset; these costumes were not a trivial decoration which could have been replaced by any other, but an inescapable reality, poetic in the same way as the weather, or the light peculiar to a certain time of day.”

Proust’s super-sensory appreciation of the world, for all of its irrevocable wonders and irretrievable beauties of life was part of his own aesthetic guidelines. Proust felt truly original and great art was not to describe things as they are, but describing them as they have never been described for, hence the impressionistic vignettes with populate his novel, no other writer was able to imbue their characters with as much depth or as many facets as Proust. The central story within the novel, is the love story between the narrator and Albertine. The merits of Proust’s ideas on love aside, his exploration of his obsessive and disturbing relationship with Albertine, from the descriptions of her sleeping to real and imagined subterfuges he thinks she is guilty of, few writers explore the nature of love with as much depth and honesty as Proust does. For Proust falling in love was in reality just another form of falling in love with oneself, the soul of another person would always be unattainable and mystery to us, so it is our attempt to penetrate the barriers placed between us which causes us to fall in love, especially if we aim for something we can never possess-for Proust desire was centered in knowing we would never be able to obtain what we desired, or if we ever obtained what we wanted, being aware that there was a part of the other person which was forever mysterious and impenetrable, such as Albertine’s potential sapphic desires.

Yet, for Proust heartache and pain were central to the artist’s development; without it they would never have a complete view of the world and life. Proust is able to get over the shock of Albertine’s departure and death by visiting Venice; “Suddenly at the end of one of these little streets, a crystalline matter seemed to have produced a swelling. A vast, sumptuous campo of a size that I certainly could not have guessed, let alone found room for in this network of little streets, stretched out before my eyes, surrounded by enchanted places, in the pale light of the moon.” Unlike Balbec, or his visit to watch La Berma perform, Venice is able to live up to the narrator’s fantasies; this isn’t because of the intrinsic worth or beauty of Venice, but rather the narrator’s life experiences, joys and heartbreaks are able to mature him, to blur the line between reality and fantasy and make him realise that there is much beauty in his impressions of the world around him as the fantasies he creates; in fact, true art is a combination of the both.

“Venice, whose everyday reality was no less real than that of Combray and where it was a pleasure, as in Combray, to go down into the festive streets on Sunday mornings, but a street which was a whole stretch of liquid sapphire, cooled by soft breezes and so deep-dyed that my tired eyes could relax and look steadily at it with no fear that it might fade.”
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Feb 07, 2008 Tom rated it it was ok

The least interesting volumes in the series. I got so bored I actually started to skip entire pages. Things pick up considerably in the remarkable final volume.

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