Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (51 page)

It is now clear that the death of a loved one is to be understood as a mobile internal theater, virtually unrelated to some body lying in a coffin, and that this process of leave-taking is dreadfully unruly. Inside of us, the dead still live, and in Proust's scheme, they can be horribly free to wreak havoc. Hence, the narrator continues to imagine, with ever more frenzy, scenes of betrayal committed by Albertine, acts of sexual independence that can (now) never be corroborated or disproved because the actress is no longer available for interrogation (not that much was ascertained even when she was). The dead Albertine romps through her imagined sexual repertory, thanks to the prodigiously creative jealousy of her grieving lover.

This is a masochistic story that could go on forever; you might say that such projections, by dint of their sovereign independence from verifiable fact or even a living subject, display a peculiarly horrid form of immortality. This form of grieving is a much grislier, more anxious proposition than the traditional model put forth by the psychologists, in that the mourner still seeks to satisfy his possession-mania; but he finds that the dead, far from being docile at last, are freer than ever to produce mischief and torture. Here is one way of saying that death is not the kind of closure one imagines; on the contrary, it is precisely via imagination that death is negated—not willed imagination, but the imagination of fantasy, prurience, dread, and anxiety—because the seemingly dead actor continues to perform in the
Spielraum,
the theatrical stage, of one's own head.

And it is all too easy for us to pronounce judgment here, to brand such behavior and angst as sick or masochistic, but Proust is merely obeying the central law of his work: we live in our own consciousness,

and in those precincts, the public decrees of life and death have zero binding power. What lives is whatever we think about, whatever we give life to. It doesn't take much effort to realize that Proust is reconceiving mourning itself as the continued affective life and agency of the mourner, rather than the cutting of ties theorized by Freud. Dead weight, Freud claimed, must eventually make itself felt as dead weight; not at all, Proust says, because this condition of so-called death merely limits the present maneuvering room of the lost one, but it opens up the gates for endless, unverifiable actions (including betrayals) in our own minds.

Still, Freud had it right. Albertine and Marcel end up playing by the rules. Her show will gradually fade, he will gradually heal, she will be forgotten. For Freud, as I said, this is a question of cutting cords. But for Proust this is a far more intricate and subtle set of transactions. How do we heal, Proust is asking? How do the dead finally die, inside of us? Such a question may appear to be either morbid or idle or both. Proust makes us understand that this issue is shockingly central in our everyday lives, even though most of us have never considered it. This, we come to understand, is what the notion of
forgetting
actually signifies.
Oubli
is the great theme of Proust's work, and its power derives from the fact that it is a cognate of death: our memory of others is tantamount to their life (in us), and according to this same implacable subjectivity argument, our forgetting of others is rigorously equivalent to their death.

At first glance, such a theory seems wildly indulgent, since most of us feel that life and death are the most elemental objective truths to be found in reality, whereas remembering and forgetting appears to be a far lesser, "in-house" proposition that only has to do with consciousness and head games. Proust obliges us to reconsider this. Once we are prepared to accept the two-death model as valid for
Trauerarbeit,
we have already designated the consciousness of the mourner as the terrain where the second death occurs. Such a view of consciousness and
oubli
is profoundly funereal, since it posits the human mind as essentially a graveyard, a place where others lived and now lie buried, forgotten, in-

sofar as we no longer access them. Needless to say, this model cavalierly dispenses with the "actual" condition of the other—in fact, on this heading, many healthy living people continue to die like flies within us, since we "kill" them routinely by dismissing them from our awareness (even this wording is doubtless too volitional; they simply disappear, "die"). There is also a stubborn logic at work here, a logic that recasts the very activity of consciousness as an incessant affair of life and death.

Proust understands this activity to be a story in itself, a story that has gone largely untold. If you actually struggle through Proust's chapters here, it is all too easy to read the long passages devoted to Marcel's slow and painful forgetting of Albertine as a study in minutiae, a maniacally fastidious (and self-indulgent) account of getting over a loss, a pernicious example of excessive psychologizing. My argument goes the other way: Marcel's "mourning" transforms the severance model put forth by Freud and Kubler-Ross into a fable whose richness is a staggeringly large thing, once we are prepared to take it seriously. Far from being esoteric or "literary," this material is as intimate, personal, and universal as anything we're ever likely to read. The author is showing us how the mind actually works over time, and he makes us realize that most of our notions of mind work are snapshots, the sort of thing we gather if we eavesdrop on ourselves, the casual truisms that result from pondering, now and then, how we think.

Proust obliterates this snapshot model by taking the longer view, by examining our behavior longitudinally, and by asking some devastating questions about who we are. What, you may ask, does death have to do with this? Everything, I answer, in that "I" is dying all the time, and this spectacle of death/rebirth is nowhere more on show than in the experience of mourning. Getting past the death of a loved one entails two exits: our loved one's and our own. When mourning, we discover that forgetting and dying are, yes, separated in time (the loved one dies, but we remember, at least for a while), but we also discover that the second death is not merely a form of closure that caps mourning, it is also our

own death and rebirth. Even to put it that way is far too static. The beauty of Proust's narrative is that it plays out our innermost emotional transactions in full dress and thereby exposes the poverty of our clinical labels, now seen as reductive shortcuts that have little to do with the true events taking place. The only way to make this case is to cite Proust at work, so we turn now to an evocation of Marcel approaching complete severance. Albertine is long dead, and he is healing, but still able to speak of her; Proust suggests that the mourning figure who no longer hurts in the same way as before is, in fact, someone else, a "newcomer":

The newcomer who would find it easy to endure the prospect of life without Albertine had made his appearance in me, since I had been able to speak of her at Mme. de Guermantes's in the language of grief without any real suffering. The possible advent of these new selves, which each ought to bear a different name from the preceding one, was something I had always dreaded, because of their indifference to the object of my love. . . . Yet he was bringing me on the contrary, this newcomer, at the same time as oblivion an almost complete elimination of suffering, a possibility of comfort—this newcomer so dreaded yet so beneficent, who was none other than one of those spare selves which destiny holds in reserve for us, and which, paying no more heed to our entreaties than a clear-sighted and thus all the more authoritative physician, it substitutes in spite of us, by a timely intervention, for the self that has been too seriously wounded. This process, as it happens, automatically occurs from time to time, like the decay and renewal of our tissues, but we notice it only if the former self contained a great grief, a painful foreign body, which we are surprised to no longer find there, in our amazement at having become another person to whom the sufferings of his predecessor are no more than the sufferings of a stranger, of which we can speak with compassion because we do not feel them. Indeed we are unconcerned about having undergone all these sufferings,

since we have only a vague remembrance of having suffered them. It may well be that likewise our nightmares are horrifying. But on waking we are another person, who cares little that the person whose place he takes has had to flee from a gang of cut-throats during the night.

No doubt this self still maintained some contact with the old, as a friend who is indifferent to a bereavement speaks of it nevertheless to the persons present in a suitable tone of sorrow, and returns from time to time to the room in which the widower who has asked him to receive the company for him may still be heard weeping. I too still wept when I became once again for a moment the former friend of Albertine. But it was into a new personality that I was tending to change altogether. It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them fades; it is because we ourselves are dying. (III, 607-608)

I have written about this passage in another context in order to emphasize the strange "community of self" which it celebrates: a view of the human subject over time as a kind of parade of disparate figures, an endless dying and birthing, or, as Proust puts it, an insertion of "spare selves" (like spare tires) which life installs on our vehicle when it is in trouble or breaks down (see
The Fiction of Relationship).
My interest here is in the way Proust rewrites our notions of mourning, expands the picture of what it actually means when we "lose" a loved one, shows us how the final acceptance of another's death must be understood as a form of our own dying. There is nothing whatsoever morbid about this model; on the contrary, it is animated by the same vital spirit of survival that fuels the views of Freud and Kubler-Ross, but it spells out for us, as they do not, the human ramifications of such life changes, making us realize that "healing" has its grisly as well as its welcome side. Grisly and yet tender as well. By literalizing issues of discontinuity and oblivion, by arguing that the human subject is reborn and remade via forgetting, by

proposing that every "I" is a serial "we" (that should bear a new name each time), Proust suggests that every life-in-time is an incessant, kaleidoscopic affair of death and alteration. But it is "tender," too, in the very act of recuperation that the passage itself illuminates: the man who no longer felt the pain of Albertine's loss is imaged in the passage as a "friend" of the "widower" who "may still be heard weeping." We die over and over, yes, but we remain connected to these corpses, these former selves; we are, in essence, a cemetery, a site where all our past lives— tending to become as alien and evanescent as the nightmares we cannot recall—might still be accessed, are indeed being accessed in this sequence. This is, of course, to be the grand triumph of Proust's book, the ecstatic result of the
recherche
at hand, something on the order of secular resurrection. Such a strangely picaresque view of human feeling seems to me to be possessed of more dignity, to be more commensurate with the realities of love, loss, and survival than the familiar truism that "time heals."

And let me say a word about my term
access
in this context. Proust stuns us with his vision of how stubbornly and uncontrollably the past still lives in us even though we think we are inhabiting a "now-world." His depiction of mourning restores the dead to their proper place,
in us,
and in that locale they continue to live, flaunting the absurdity of any material scheme that would point to a grave in order to prove separation and absence. In this dispensation, we are networked creatures, linked by our loves and ties, doomed to be emotionally and morally
online
as long as we live. True, our electronic culture enables us to log on, to check our e-mail, to travel that new highway wherever we choose. In Proust, no electricity is required (unless it be the electricity that fuels heart and brain), but the connections are stupendous in their immediacy. Above all, the new map of linkages that Proust devises has an amazing economy: it is your life, writ large, not utterly unlike the old TV program
This Is Tour Life,
where your old teachers and friends are ghoulishly hauled out onto the stage. No stage necessary in Proust.

I have invoked Proust at considerable length because he radically de-familiarizes our notions of death, and he does so by positing death as the unacknowledged arbiter of all human change, death as the gatekeeper who seals off the infant we were from the child we became, who separates the prepubescent youngster from the adolescent, who marks off the single individual from the later spouse, who delineates the mature professional's edges and thus separates him or her from the old person who emerges. Death is the cessation of each of our avatars. Take a look in your scrapbook, at the photos on your desk, and you will see death at work, especially at work when you sense that these figures of the past are not only alien but strangely independent of one another. Take a look at your resume, and ask yourself if death is not lurking between each of your entries, lurking there in order to "off" the college student so that the professional could emerge, needed there to "off" the practitioner of career one so that exemplar of career two (or three or four) could ply his trade and prosper.

What is human development but incessant death and birth? It is dizzying to envisage the parade of people we were and are. "Are," because death works laterally as well as vertically, is good at posting electric fences between our fractured selves: the one in the office, the one at home, the one in church, the one at the table, the one in bed. We call this "compartmentalizing," but it is just as accurate to say that every situation mandates a particular self and that all those others who we also are "die." Mourning is how we respond to the serial game and separations that life metes out to us. Mourning is our dirge in the face of discontinuity; it is our nostalgia for wholeness; it is our doomed effort to stop time. Proust, mandarin figure though he is, is also "meat and potatoes," in that he adds something special to our scientific base in this crucial issue of death and mourning. He thus widens our grasp of the narrowest fact of life—death as one-liner, death as "finis"—opens its closed precincts by playing it out and sharing it out, illuminates our emotional trajectory and evolution, and thereby helps us to harness, conceptually, that brute event that coerces all lives but is mum in the process. Proust "says" death.