Proust demonstrates the benefits of delay in his thoughts on the appreciation of clothes. Both Albertine and the Duchesse de Guermantes are interested in fashion. However, Albertine has very little money and the Duchesse owns half of France. The Duchesse’s wardrobes are therefore overflowing; as soon as she sees something she wants, she can send for the dressmaker and her desire is fulfilled as rapidly as hands can sew. Albertine, on the other hand, can hardly buy anything, and has to think at length before she does so. She spends hours studying clothes, dreaming of a particular coat or hat or dressing gown.
The result is that though Albertine has far fewer clothes than the Duchesse, her understanding, appreciation, and love of them is far greater.
Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something…, poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them
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Proust compares Albertine to a student who visits Dresden after cultivating a desire to see a particular painting, whereas the Duchesse is like a wealthy tourist who travels without any desire or knowledge, and experiences nothing but bewilderment, boredom, and exhaustion when she arrives.
Which emphasizes the extent to which physical possession is only one component of appreciation. If the rich are fortunate in being able to travel to Dresden as soon as the desire to do so arises, or to buy a dress just after they have seen it in a catalog, they are cursed because of the speed with which their wealth fulfills their desires. No sooner have they thought of Dresden than they can be on a train there; no sooner have they seen a dress than it can be in their wardrobe. They therefore have no opportunity to suffer the interval between desire and gratification which the less privileged endure, and which, for all its apparent unpleasantness, has the incalculable benefit of allowing people to know and fall deeply in love with paintings in Dresden, hats, dressing gowns, and someone who isn’t free this evening.
Q: Was he against sex before marriage?
A: No, just before love. And not for any starchy reasons, simply because he felt it wasn’t a good idea to sleep together when encouraging someone to fall in love was a consideration.
Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones
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Q: Surely not?
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:
Man, a creature clearly less rudimentary than the sea-urchin or even the whale, nevertheless lacks a certain number of essential organs, and particularly possesses none that will serve for kissing. For this absent organ he substitutes his lips, and perhaps he thereby achieves a result slightly more satisfying than caressing his beloved with a horny tusk. But a pair of lips, designed to convey to the palate the taste of whatever whets their appetite, must be content, without understanding their mistake or admitting their disappointment, with roaming over the surface and with coming to a halt at the barrier of the impenetrable but irresistible cheek
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Why do we kiss people? At one level, merely to generate the pleasurable sensation of rubbing an area of nerve endings against a corresponding strip of soft, fleshy, moist skin tissue. However, the hopes with which we approach the prospect of an initial kiss typically extend beyond this. We seek to hold and savor not just a mouth but an entire beloved person. With the kiss, we hope to achieve a higher form of possession; the longing a beloved inspires in us promises to come to an end once our lips are allowed to roam freely over theirs.
But for Proust, though a kiss can produce a pleasurable physical tingle, it cannot grant us a true sense of amorous possession.
For example, his narrator is attracted to Albertine, whom he met as she walked along the Normandy Coast one brilliant summer’s day. He is attracted to her rosy cheeks, her black hair, her beauty spot, her impudent, confident manner, and to things she evokes and makes him nostalgic for—the summer, the smell of the sea, youth. Once he returns to Paris after the summer, Albertine comes to his flat. In contrast to her reserve when he tried to kiss her at the seaside, she now lies close to him on the bed and falls into an embrace. It promises to be a moment of resolution. Yet, whereas he had hoped the kiss would allow him to savor Albertine, her past, the beach, the summer, and the circumstances of their meeting, the reality is somewhat more prosaic. His lips brushing against Albertine’s allow him as much contact with her as a brush with a horny tusk. He can’t see her, because of the awkwardness of the kissing position, and his nose is so squashed he can hardly breathe.