Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time II - In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

For the second book of Proust's masterpiece, 'In Search of Lost Time', his attention turns away from the black and white realities of childhood to the greyer realms of adolescence, and with that, the deep, burning sensation of unrequited love. In essence, the second book is a 530-page essay on the different forms of young love, from deep obsession to airy neglect, from the savage loneliness of rejection to the dizzying heights of a love returned.

The book is split into two rough sections, the first of which is called 'At Mme Swan's'. Here we are introduced to Gilberte, Proust's first great love. The feelings he harbour's for her are ridiculously exaggerated, and oh so reminiscent of most people's teenage years. Every action, every word, every glance is analysed, studied, explored for meaning and intent. If, one day, Gilberte invites him to tea, the implications and potential meanings behind the invitation are debated internally for pages. If not, then even more pages are spent examining the pit of despair that Proust' soul fall in to. On top of this unhealthily obsessive love, we have his infatuation with Mme Swan, Gilberte's mother. There is almost a sense that Proust loves Gilberte because she is his age and he 'should' love her, whereas his affection towards Odette Swan is more real because there is no obligation or pressure from anyone, but less likely because she is twenty years older than him, and married.

When Proust's love for Gilberte is over - as it inevitably must, in those tender years of a boy or girl's life - the terrifying lows to which his emotions descend is as remarkable as the highs of his spirit not twenty pages previous. He obsessively analyses the ways in which he will get revenge, plotting to make her love him again, just so that he can reject her, to let her know how it feels. He tortures himself emotionally, visiting Mme Swan and purposely avoiding Gilberte.

What we have in this first part is a fascinating study on the tormented, melodramatic loves of early adolescence. Proust is too young at this stage to understand that love may not be forever, and can speak only in grandiose, exaggerated terms. If not for the fact that the prose is written with such grace and intelligence, his despair would come across as teenage angst at its very blackest.

In the second part of the novel, 'Place-Names: The Place', Proust and his grandmother retire to the beach to aid in the recuperation of his body and mind. Always a frail child, the rigours of new love have taken their toll on the young man. He rejects love, deciding that he shall become a writer once more, a passion that he had denied himself when his love for Gilberte had seemed so real and assured. He is introduced to a variety of characters which, we are told during the narrative, will come to play a great part in his later life: Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus and of course Albertine.

It is in this second section that Proust falls under the shadows of young girls in flower. He meets a group of girls, a 'gang' he calls them, and befriends first one, then all of them, reasoning that out of four or five girls, at least one would be worthy of love. Keeping with the true spirit of adolescence, he falls in and out of love with them all, needing only a stray glance or a casual smile to move from one girl to the other. Only two of them, Albertine and Andree, seem to return his emotions, and even then, everything remains chaste.

Interspersed throughout, we have long, insightful remarks on what love can do to the body, to the mind, and to the relationships we have with other people. Speaking as a male recently finished with his teenage years, I can say that Proust has captured the depth of feeling, the obsessiveness, the surety that everything in the universe will be perfect if only the love is returned, the electric thrill of acceptance, the deep darkness of rejection with such skill that perfection is a word that springs to mind.

Other topics are touched on throughout the novel. Early on, Proust is introduced to an author he holds in high esteem, one Bergotte. He is crushed upon discovering that the man does not exactly coincide with the image he had created while reading Bergotte's books, and ruminates on the fact that a man need not display the same intelligence and wit in reality as he does on the page. We must all focus our attention on achieving either a great reality or a great fiction, for Bergotte, his attentions were focused upon the fiction, and his personality and demeanour when interacting with flesh and blood people suffer. For Proust, it is an introduction to the idea that people can have two - or more - identities, and that a certain one is presented to a certain group of people.

The writing is, of course, typical Proust. Sentences are long, paragraphs are longer, and not very much happens. Dialogue is scarce, action scarcer. The reader is there to observe Proust's thoughts, not to use him as a mirror to the world he inhabits. Luckily for us, Proust's thoughts are never dull or boring. He says early on in the novel, 'For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected', and Proust's reflective power more than reveal the truth of this maxim.

See Also

Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time I - The Way by Swann's

Links

Wikipedia - Author
Wikipedia - Novel (Entire series)
Amazon

Links kindly provided by The Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2010

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