How Proust Can Change Your Life

A: Other women may of course be fascinating, the problem is that they risk not seeming so, given what the Duchesse de Guermantes has told us about the consequences of acquiring beautiful things too easily.

Take the case of prostitutes, a group more or less available every night. As a young man, Proust had been a compulsive masturbator, so compulsive that his father had urged him to go to a brothel, to take his mind off what the nineteenth century considered to be a highly dangerous pastime. In a candid letter to his grandfather, sixteen-year-old Marcel described how the visit had gone:

I so badly needed to see a woman in order to stop my bad habits of masturbating that papa gave me 10 francs to go to the brothel. But, 1st in my excitement, I broke the chamber pot, 3 francs, 2nd in this same excitement, I wasn’t able to have sex. So now I’m back to square one, constantly waiting for another 10 francs to empty myself and for 3 more francs for that pot

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But the brothel trip was more than a practical disaster; it revealed a conceptual problem with prostitution. The prostitute is in an unfortunate position in the Proustian theory of desire, because she both wishes to entice a man and yet is commercially prevented from doing what is most likely to encourage love—namely, tell him that she is not free tonight. She may be clever and attractive, and yet the one thing she cannot do is foster doubts as to whether he will ever possess her physically. The outcome is clear, and therefore real, lasting desire unlikely.

If prostitutes … attract us so little, it is not because they are less beautiful than other women, but because they are ready and waiting; because they already offer us precisely what we seek to attain

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Q: So he believed that sex was everything men wanted to attain?

A: A further distinction might have to be made. The prostitute offers a man what he thinks he wants to attain; she gives him an illusion of attainment, but one which is nevertheless strong enough to threaten the gestation of love.

To return to the Duchesse, she fails to appreciate her dresses not because they are less beautiful than other dresses, but because physical possession is so easy, which fools her into thinking that she has acquired everything she wanted, and distracts her from pursuing the only real form of possession that is effective in Proust’s eyes—namely, imaginative possession (dwelling on the details of the dress, the folds of the material, the delicacy of the thread), an imaginative possession that Albertine already pursues, through no conscious choice, because it is a natural response to being denied physical contact.

Q: Does this mean he didn’t think much of making love?

A: He merely thought humans were missing an anatomical part with which to perform the act properly. In the Proustian scheme, it is impossible to love someone physically. Given the coyness of his age, he limited his thoughts to the disappointment of kissing: