Lost Time Thursday: Bad Romance
Dec. 22nd, 2016 09:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evelyn_bCrossposted from Livejournal
Sodom and Gomorrah ends with Little M. once again convinced (after a brief reprieve after she "reassured" him by flirting with Saint-Loup) that Albertine is having lesbian affairs every second his back is turned. The reasoning behind this conviction is shaky at best, and his conclusion is no better: since every moment in which Albertine is out of his sight is a Schrodinger's orgy, the only possible thing for him to do is marry Albertine and follow her around every hour of every day. In this way, he reasons, he would save Albertine from "vice" and himself from jealousy. This does not strike me as the most obvious solution, or the best, even if we granted the premise, but "how to deal with jealousy in a healthy and reasonable way" is not one of the multitudes contained by In Search of Lost Time.
The next volume is called The Captive. With this we're jumping the tracks to an earlier, less well-regarded translation. This is because it was the only one available at the library, but I'm also now curious to read it. I learned, a couple of weeks ago, that Lost Time used to be on the high school reading curriculum in California (and possibly elsewhere in the US) in the 1960s. This surprised me because I would not have expected something with this much gay content to be considered school-appropriate fifty years ago, but 1) maybe high school students were expected to be more mature in 1960, 2) maybe it was too long and confusing for angry parents to skim effectively, and 3) possibly the earlier translation was less explicit, though it's hard to imagine how that was accomplished without making huge chunks of the book incomprehensible. So I guess we'll find out!
For, with a girl as pretty as Albertine, was it possible that Mlle Vinteuil, having the desires she had, had not asked her to gratify them? And the proof that Albertine had not been shocked by the request, but had consented, was that they had not quarrelled, that indeed their intimacy had steadily increased.
Sodom and Gomorrah ends with Little M. once again convinced (after a brief reprieve after she "reassured" him by flirting with Saint-Loup) that Albertine is having lesbian affairs every second his back is turned. The reasoning behind this conviction is shaky at best, and his conclusion is no better: since every moment in which Albertine is out of his sight is a Schrodinger's orgy, the only possible thing for him to do is marry Albertine and follow her around every hour of every day. In this way, he reasons, he would save Albertine from "vice" and himself from jealousy. This does not strike me as the most obvious solution, or the best, even if we granted the premise, but "how to deal with jealousy in a healthy and reasonable way" is not one of the multitudes contained by In Search of Lost Time.
The next volume is called The Captive. With this we're jumping the tracks to an earlier, less well-regarded translation. This is because it was the only one available at the library, but I'm also now curious to read it. I learned, a couple of weeks ago, that Lost Time used to be on the high school reading curriculum in California (and possibly elsewhere in the US) in the 1960s. This surprised me because I would not have expected something with this much gay content to be considered school-appropriate fifty years ago, but 1) maybe high school students were expected to be more mature in 1960, 2) maybe it was too long and confusing for angry parents to skim effectively, and 3) possibly the earlier translation was less explicit, though it's hard to imagine how that was accomplished without making huge chunks of the book incomprehensible. So I guess we'll find out!
