ALBERTINE
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II
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Homosexuals are said to enjoy the company - Reassuring - women, environment, climate of sweetness, delicacy that comes from them. And as they are, for them, men they have nothing to fear, they would willingly their Cajigal.
The emphasis on Research in to put ornaments and ladies, girls, girlfriends, mistresses and women of every condition, demonstrates the continued interest that the narrator gives them. (Even if one doubts that a woman, the Duchess of Guermantes, moreover, is working for kindly Albertine might take a copy of her dresses - in the fashion of Venetian Fortuny !)
The reader will learn how Albertine "was a direct awareness of his cap and Italian Straw [a] silk scarf" that in her wardrobe, there was a skirt canvas, a white shirt with blue spots, a nightgown, a bathrobe, a kimono ...
It does almost nothing will, however, to be carnal with a creature that creates yet in the narrator, looks "burning desire", according to the agreed formula.
"Before Albertine m'eût obeyed and had removed his shoes, I half his shirt. The two small high breasts so round they were put together seemed not to be part of his body than to have ripened like fruit, and its belly (the hiding place in humans as ugly Spike's still stuck in a statue niche) was closing at the junction of the thighs, by two valves of a curve too sleepy, so relaxing, cloistered as that of the horizon when the sun has disappeared. She took off her shoes, lay down beside me . "(The Captive )
It is true that the physical relations of the two lovers seem tinged with mysticism
" When I think now that my friend [...] had a room twenty feet from mine, down the hall, in the firm tapestry of my father, and every evening, very late, before I leave, she slipped his tongue in my mouth, like a nourishing food with the almost sacred character of all flesh in which the suffering we have endured because of it eventually confer a kind of spiritual grace, [...] "( The Captive )
What is affirmed in this vignette in the first chapter of The Fugitive :
"Albertine I remembered sitting at his pianola, pink under her black hair, I felt on my lips she tried to remove his tongue, his mother tongue, inedible, and holy Mother, whose flame dew were secret that even when Albertine was the only drag on the surface of my neck, my stomach, caressing the surface but somehow made the inside of his flesh, externalized as a fabric that would show his understudy, took even in the most external touches, like the mysterious sweetness of penetration . "
"A language inedible ..." The epithet is new. She never came to the thought of a lover of the common species? He never knew, by "touching the outermost" of his neck, his belly, "the mysterious sweetness of penetration? (Formulation he is allowed to try low if one recalls the remark of Charles Du Bos "Proust has always designed in every circumstance, to use his own words, the essential duty of the mind was" to go to the end of printing ".") But the narrator says in The Prisoner " I fulfilled the duties of an ardent devotion and painful as an offering dedicated to youth and beauty of women. "
But, then, are we not entitled to be surprised that we did not, so careful an observer, a shrewd aesthetic as the equivalent of these shields sixteenth century e celebrating the hair, eyes, mouth, breast, stomach, and others more or less noble of the female body? Blazon that would have the same incantatory force a certain "little patch of yellow wall" in the View of Delft , Vermeer.
What hymn to touch, feel important, would compound over feelings of being reported by any of antennae, palpi and tactile corpuscles, which gave us so many proofs of its subtlety of perception and ability to us send them!
barely know us, bit by bit, she had "long blue eyes ',' hair in flowers," which made her the morning, "above the smiling gaze [...] a crown curly black violets. " However his neck "that came entirely from his shirt, was powerful (emphasis added), walleye, coarse. " (It will still say "full and strong." Little Women, so.)
Is it fear of offending that strangles the narrator's pen? He would doubtless have shocked some of his players celebrating, even a prince of the image, metaphor, allusion he was, breasts and thighs and buttocks and sex Albertine; he offended more by heavily discoursing of inversion, early Sodom and Gomorrah ; by telling insisted the actions of Baron Charlus, stooping, entomologist, on the habits of lesbians, curry leaves to the ruling of Colette, strong experience in The Pure and the Impure "[Proust] was he abused, he was ignorant? Gomorrah when he assembles an unfathomable and vicious girls, denounced an agreement, a community, a frenzy of evil angels, we are more than entertained, complacent and a little soft, not having the comfort of the startling truth that guided us through Sodom. "
A truth that it denies Gide, gay found, writing in his Journal, December 2, 1921, after reading pages of Sodom and Gomorrah :" Knowing what he thinks, what it is, it is difficult to see something other than a sham, a desire to protect, a camouflage, could not be more clever, because it can be of benefit anyone to denounce it. "
Judgement is harsh? The author of Corydon could afford. The book, which he admits unvarnished pederast, appears first in small numbers in 1911 and 1920 before being published in current edition in 1924, the year Unless the seed dies .
Incidentally, the sulfur Ulysses by James Joyce is first published serialized in America from March 1918 to December 1920, before being published in Paris February 2, 1922, just months before the death of Proust. Lady Chatterley's Lover , deemed obscene, appeared in Florence in 1928, in Paris in 1932, with a preface by Andre Malraux.
To stick to books ... less scandalous Louys - who loves a woman - was published in 1885, The Songs of Bilitis . Jean-Paul Toulet contemporary of Proust - who loves women - issued in 1905 My friend Nane, "This friend I want to show under clothes, O reader, or adorned with miles adjustments that were like a second figure of her beauty [...]"
And even if Nane n is a silhouette, the discreet eroticism of the author alerts us again.
"Nane had chosen to heat his shirt itself. Squatting by the fire, it shines through the linen, and it seems that the flame is gold, or rather its flesh has the hue of a neighborhood of Mandarin. Now she is watching me from the corner of his eye and asks, less proud of the decisive geometry of her body as her voluptuous flesh which makes your soul to the fingertips of his hip which tightens or its secret shadows she sees my face still moved.
"And she smiled quite obscene. [...] "
Or this, from the Letters to oneself [March 11, 1906]:
" When you get home, my dear Paul, you'd think your friend? She is so tiny, with legs and hands useless, bones thin and there all around, a lot of rustling fabrics and beautiful she likes to dress. After so many tissues where it is irritated, being crumpled, when suddenly meets his flesh is like a summer day, to discover, in the grass, a cool spring and bare. "
Toulet is considered a" minor master ". I am surprised therefore to see so Nane crouching near the fire, and not send me to represent Albertine palpated "on all parts of his body, without waking her. It is true that she slept so deeply that the narrator can write " Sometimes [...] I used to hang my leg against his, like a train that drags and when you print from time to time a slight swing to the beat like intermittent wing What birds who sleep in the air. [...] The sound of his breathing was becoming harder to give the illusion of shortness of fun and when mine was at an end, I could kiss her without interrupting her sleep. It seemed these moments that I came to possess it more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting dumb nature. "
It seems that in 1905 Partage de Midi. Paul Claudel - the woman who loves and abhors the invert - is dialogue in those terms, in Act II, the protagonists:
"MESA - So / I told you before! and I want your body itself / In my arms and you do me no resistance, and I hear in my heart that beats your heart! / It is true that you're a woman, but I'm just a man, / And now I can no more, / I'm like a starving man who can not hold back his tears the sight of food! [...]
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ..
MESA - I prefer you, Ysé!
Ysé - O word as a blow to my side! O hand of love! O movement of our heart! / O unspeakable iniquity! Ah now come and eat me like a mango! Everything, and me! "
[...]
should solve it: the narrator will never have a single focus whose correctness, novelty - fearlessness! - Justify the desire he felt for said the female body, the pleasure he claims to shoot. Any attempt to evoke the one and the other turns immediately by a set of short memories, insights, considerations, whose relevance, happiness of expression, are forgetting the reader and writing borrowed from the above and they serve ... dodge.
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The Murmurs of love
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The love
I who 'm a painter, writer or composer, let me give up my position in this difficult art: draw up a screen between death and love.
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The lover
Even if it leads to death, what a beautiful slope lies before us ... Like those which the wind develops when the supplies of sand, and are a delight to the eye - the equal of your fall with your kidneys!
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François Solesmes The Murmurs of love , Ink Navy.
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