Mining Proust - A Response to Remembrance of Things Past
Dear Marcel ( you gas man!),
Is Albertine a masochist? You don't say so. In fact, though you have been talking to me about her for a month, you don't seem to know or be able to say anything definite about her - even though she lives with you in your apartment, under your control, a 'voluntary captive'. You don't seem to be able to say anything definite about yourself either. In fact, you live in a continuously indefinite state, desolidified and desolidifying all the objects of your thought, yourself included.
Indefinite Subjects/Indefinite Objects. Self portraits in a mirror made of mist. Not maps or metaphors of a teleological being (productive only of absurdity, gibberish) but impressions of an open-ended becoming.
Consciousness is fundamentally protean. Thought dissolves/reforms its objects, continuously. You think about Albertine almost as much as you think about yourself, destroying/reforming her as you destroy/reform yourself, turning her always from solid, to liquid, to gas, from defined to indefinable, from singular to multiple, from known to unknowable.
Heraclitean world, protean mind, all forms in transition.
“Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people”, says you. Certainly, Albertine is seen differently by everyone she meets, on your pages and off them, but she is also capable of showing herself differently to everyone, everywhere, every time. A ‘qualitative multiplicity’ is what your philosophical hero, Bergson, called this state of statelessness.
Being is the capacity to look at your own existence and be confused by it. The capacity for anxiety. The capacity for annihilation, says Heidegger, or something like that. To be is to be split, multiple, flowing, accreting, dissipating, disturbed and disturbing, stuffed and insatiable, attacking and defending, clinging to beliefs and unsure of everything, like you, like me.
One cannot speak critically, then, of the human. There is no such definite object, nor definite subject, in the world. Remembrance Of Things Past is not a critique, a satire, a savaging, of the human or of so-called humanity, but of your own time and place, your own civilisation, which is also my civilisation, always-already shattered and shattering. We are in and of it and it is in and of us, inescapably.
*
You say at the beginning of Albertine Disparate, after you have been reprimanded by a paedophile police captain for interfering with a little girl - a police captain who, when the girl’s parents leave the interview room, offers you advice on the cheaper procurement of infants - that you think Albertine, your 'voluntary captive', is above consensual age, but you are not so sure, and it seems to be the first time such a concern has crossed your mind, now that it may become an object of investigation.
When you allow Albertine to leave your vast apartment in the Hotel De Guermantes, you have her chaperoned, or followed. Yet she manages to have a secret life of pansexuality all the same, as if capable of translocating, of being watched and unwatched at the same time. Like something less solid, less trappable even then gas. Like light. Light in this theatre of light. The most nomadic thing of all. The photonic being of Albertine.
Albertine, watched you are one thing, unwatched you are so many others. It is what you do out of sight which matters to our curiosity, which drives the pursuit of you across so many pages.
Of course, every possibility titillates: that she is restrained; that she is released; that she is a gay woman; that she is a gay man dressed as a woman; that she is monogamous; that she has many affairs; that she partakes in bisexual orgies in brothels and lures young street-girls to partake in them... Imagining all these in your lover is such a delicious suffering. And what 24/7 total power we have as writers to enslave our characters, to make and remake them however we wish, to place and replace them in any position, any arrangement that pleases.
Remembrance of Things Past reads like an encyclopedia of sex and sexuality, a modernist Karma Sutra. For this it had the honour of being banned in Ireland, during the period when a large-scale system of paedophilic labour camps, run by clerics and financed by the state, was in operation here.
*
I was the sexual hero of my first novel, which I didn't write down. It took place in a quarry. I lined all the girls I knew up in front of me, barefooted, dressed in sackcloth. I did this every night in bed with my eyes closed. Such power we all have on the inside. I chose one of the girls and took her away to make her naked and lay down with her. Thing is, I didn't know what girls looked like naked, nor what I was supposed to do with their nakedness. I pictured the vagina as a smooth absence of what I had. A mysterious smooth absence. The intercourse consisted in the sensual apprehension of the mystery, of being able to gaze upon it at will, in inhaling the scent of it which I imagined, intoxicatingly, as a mixture of pollen and piss.
The power of compelling the revelation of their nakedness: I knew this was what was important, that this was the highest goal of existence. I wanted an eye that could see everything, a hand that could touch everything, a mouth that could swallow everything... I was so much less innocent as a child, so much more ambitious.
During the day I directed wars between toy soldiers, calling them what they were called in the magazines: Huns, Limeys, Eyeties, Yanks, Japs. Something drew me towards the Wehrmacht forces, and I nearly always had them win. They had the best symbols, the most admirable uniforms, the most intelligently ruthless strategies, the most daring generals, the most highly motivated, proudest, most idolised soldiery.
I want, like your Albertine, the secret hero of your book, the hero of secrets, to be a nomad of being and time. Uncivilised. Unmappable. Beyond language. Hostile to analysis. I want to try on all of the identities and all of the forms, and settle at nothing.
*
A memoir that does not include the fantasy life of its author, the virtual life of its author's desires, is a document of evasion, not revelation. We should spy on ourselves without reservation, or else we are useless as spies.
*
Marcel, you were a great spy, a great betrayer and indictor of the ruling class that you belonged to. The Edward Snowden of novelists, in the sense of providing such an inexhaustible dossier of the secret nihilism of 'the upper ten thousand', their constitutionally cruel unfeelingness. But you were no hopeful reformer: for you it seems that nihilism was constitutive of being as a whole, its only insoluble essence. Knowledge has no power to change or reform. The world will never conform to our desire for it to mean something hopeful, yet what powers our existence is the pursuit of this lodestone of universal utopian meaning, within which we are convinced at an instinctual level lies the secret of our eternity. You did not believe in information as saviour, you did not have the utopian impulse, or mask, of the naturalists and positivists who preceded and influenced you, whom you absorbed, dark-mirrored, apotheosised, overcame. The 19th century killed God but resurrected him in the form of an information theology. You were its Antichrist. And a Christ of desire, of generation. Desire, which Bataille tells us, has no object.
*
You betrayed yourself too. What you betrayed what was the non-existence of a self, or its virtuality, its nature as projection, which is the same thing. The self as the hunt for itself, for a fixed point out of which a true self can be conjured and spoken. No such place except in language; no such self.
*
A great spy, a great sign-reader, a great commander of signs. But who, or what is doing the signalling? Who, or what, are all of us spying for?
*
My sex life began, as I wrote my first book, at around communion age. It was a tyrannical fantasy in which I was the hero, the unlocker of the incredible secrets of time, within which I was beginning to awake, or fall into.
*
We pursue reality with words but we can never catch up. Words, the crystallisations of desire, which cannot be crystallised.
*
When referring to human beings, who have consciousness, which means the ability to make conscious choices, replace to be with to play at being. They are not little girls. They are playing at being little girls. He is not a paedophilic Sergeant. He is playing at being a paedophilic Sergeant. At any time he may stop playing at being a paedophilic Sergeant and start playing at being something else.
*
A truly free human being would be one in which the will to metamorphoses, eternal brokenness, would be fully unleashed. By luck, and energy, and science.
*
Albertine is not a masochist. She is not anything. She repels is-ness. She is certainly not a woman. For a time, she plays at being a woman and a masochist. But Morel, who has a penis, a pen-is, also plays at being a woman, rejecting his pen-is-ness. S/he can play at being anything. It is all a matter of relativities, positionings, frames of reference.
*
Back then my reading material was The Eagle, Match, The New Testament, The Sun, and books full of knowledge and statistics such as 5,000 Incredible Facts. I collected wars, weapons, data, and sex-slaves, such as a black-and-white Linda Lusardi and Margaret from the Western Road. This is how I grew my human mind. A not so incredible fact.
*
We must distinguish between facts, which are eternal and infinite in number, and truths, which are finite and temporary.
*
Marcel, these little scribbles and provocations are for you to look over when you awake, when you are awoken by a footman's knock, or by a dawning through the hotel blinds in recreated Venice or Paris or Combray or Brittany or Oz. I know I am addressing these notes to someone with no fixed address and that you may have to wait until you and I are both everywhere at once before you receive them. I see no reason not to believe that the artist remains cryogenically suspended in their work and will be resurrected if and when the lucky technology arrives. I also know that the one who falls awake is never the same as the one who has fallen asleep, whether it be hours or ages that have passed in between. We can never awake with the same eyes twice. And every eye is a kaleidoscope. These are points you never stop making, and I agree with them wholeheartedly. The days change in us as we are changing in our days. Nevertheless, there is a certain fragile continuity, both inside and out, in the sense of an infinite and unguided unfoldedness - of physiques, of perspectives, of memories. And of instinct most of all.
*
When I was in my early adolescence, around 87 or 88, I played pool and Pacman and smoked fags and listened to Prince and AC/DC on the Jukebox in the large, airy back lounge of the Tally Ho Bar in Clonakilty. Several teenage girls hung out there too and I fancied every one of them. Over time one of them in particular, Gilberte, grew more and more attractive to me. She had strawberry blonde ringlets, which were even prettier tied up in a ponytail and bouncing along, and which I fantasised so often about running my fingers through. In defiance of the nuns Gilberte wore her school skirt way above the knees; I couldn't stop myself, or didn't want to stop myself, from looking whenever I got the chance, and she caught me doing just that a good few times. Then we would catch each other’s eyes for an instant and both of us would blush, which made her more beautiful and me more anxious and in thrall. Eventually I worked up the courage to ask my friend Robert to ask her would she go for a walk with me. She said no - the first, second, and third times. I dropped it. It hurt for a while but got easier after another girl, Albertine, who was actually a distant cousin of mine, asked me to go for a walk to the Chateulin Gardens and, to my stupendous surprise, behind a crab-apple bush there, took my cock out and jerked me off. I came in no time. A first. She wouldn't let me return the favour because she said she had her period. I was annoyed, because I wanted to do what my friend Ernest had done with his girlfriend, and not wash my hand for days afterwards, keeping the scent on me to show off to my friends. I remember the cold feel of her belt buckle against my cock, as if my cock was tasting steel, tasting cold. Still, I fancied Gilberte more than anyone. Then one of her friends, Andree, let it drop to Robert that Gilberte's birthday was coming up in a couple of weeks. I told Robert to let it drop to Andree who would surely let it drop to Gilberte that, if we happened to be an item at the time of her birthday, I would get her forty Major as a gift. Gilberte smoked Major, when she had money, which was on Friday evenings for a couple of hours. I always had money – well, enough money for smoking – because I had a part time job doing as little as possible in a local bakery. I was a legend of sloth and distraction in there. Gilberte agreed to go out with me. We went for a walk to the Chateaulin gardens. Very disappointingly, she didn't take my cock out. In fact, she only wanted to kiss, and she didn't really want to use tongues either, and she didn't taste of peaches as I had imagined her tasting, but of stale Major. In fact, she seemed to be quite the opposite kind of girl to what I had been told about her. I determined on patience. Maybe she didn't like doing it in the Chateaulin Gardens behind crab-apple bushes. Trouble was, there weren't too many other venues to choose from. Hold out, hold out, I told myself. Fortune favours the lascivious. Also, there was the prestige of going out with someone well-fancied all over town, and by much older, much cooler boyos than I was. It gave me a spring in my stoop, a cock in my walk. Two weeks passed, during which we did some more kissing without tongues, and I learned the sexiness of the taste of stale Major. She also allowed me to put my hand up her skirt a few times. Just not very far up her skirt, and with her hand on my hand, chaperoning it, the whole time. On the day of her birthday I met her behind a wall in a corner of a long-abandoned orchard, where the most persistent local alcoholic lived. I gave her the forty Major, and a small box of roses. While the alky snoozed and snored at our feet, I kissed her and tried to get my hand up even just a little bit further, but she still wasn't giving. She had to go. Her mother was expecting her. She left me there all alone. I considered pissing on the alky, which might have given me some relief. Minutes later, Andree arrived. I thought this could get interesting, as there was only one reason why girls and boys turned up in the orchard, one reason besides illegal drinking that is, and I had heard lots about Andree and what she was capable of getting up to behind this wall when no-one was looking. But, no - she had only come to tell me Gilberte had decided to break it off with me. I shattered then, like an egg that had fallen from a wall.
*
The whole, inconceivable. The parts, incommensurable. The subject(s) innumerably multiple. The object(s) unknowable. Irrevocable humpty-dumptiness of our being.