By Karen An-hwei Lee
Who is Albertine? For a clandestine majority averse to reading all seven volumes of In Search of Lost Time, a young woman named Albertine may be lost, indeed. On the Carsonian continuum, however, The Albertine Workout considers this question in a lively style: who is she? Carson’s survey of Proust’s novel takes the shape of a marvelous serial poem—with nary a dull mention of the narrator’s ruminations over a cup of tea and madeleines—illuminating the finer details of Albertine’s character.
30.
Albertine’s laugh has the colour and smell of a geranium.
Exploring Albertine’s role as a key love interest in the novel, The Albertine Workout includes prose poems, aphorisms—even word count plus other quantitative analytic measures related to Albertine.
1.
Albertine, the name, is not a common name for a girl in France, although Albert is widespread for a boy.
2.
Albertine’s name occurs 2,363 times in Proust’s novel, more than
any other character.
3.
Albertine herself is present or mentioned on 807 pages of Proust’s novel.
4.
On a good 19% of these pages she is asleep.
The sequence of 59 fragments and 59 appendix entries, often irreverently digressive or non sequitur in spirit, uses sundry references to a dizzying harlequin effect, as in this commentary, “But let us not overlook the suggestion made in 1971 by that late-born pre-Socratic philosopher Roland Barthes, viz. to craft a language with no adjectives at all, thereby to outwit ‘the fascism of language’ and maintain ‘the utopia of suppressed meaning,’ as he deliriously put it” (Appendix 15).
Carson guides us through the narrator’s labyrinthine musings about Albertine’s private activities and his (the narrator’s) near-pathological obsession with the mysteries of female desire: is she, or isn’t she? Did she, or didn’t she? Who is she, or isn’t she? Phrased in our contemporary vernacular, what do women want, anyway?
15.
Despite intense and assiduous questioning, Marcel cannot discover what exactly it is that women do together (“this palpitating specificity of female pleasure”).
16.
Albertine says she does not know.
This Proustian house of mirrors, paraphrastically transposed to the tune of Carson’s deadpan humor and wonderful knack for detecting the absurd, exposes the self-contradictory nature of bifurcated gender stereotypes.
37.
At first Albertine has no individuality, indeed Marcel cannot distinguish her from her girlfriends or remember their names or decide which to pursue. They form a frieze in his mind, pushing their bicycles across the beach with the blue waves breaking behind them.
38.
This pictorial multiplicity of Albertine evolves gradually into a plastic and moral multiplicity. Albertine is not a solid object. She is unknowable. When Marcel brings his face close to hers to kiss, she is ten different Albertines in succession.
The Albertine Workout ponders doubling and mimesis—art imitating life or vice versa, and if so, to what extent. Carson’s renditions of Albertine’s famous scenes—i.e., kimono-clad Albertine sleeping or Albertine riding her bicycle by the water—are filtered through a humoresque lens. Carson contemplates Proustian literary controversies, as well: was Albertine a fictionalized Albert (servant) or even Alfred (chauffeur) in Proust’s actual life? As Carson points out, ironically, this alleged triangulation known as “transposition theory” is a “graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism; in the case of Proust it is also irresistible” (Fragment 57).
To this end, irresistibly and playfully flouting the staid conventions of literary criticism, Carson’s hilarious renditions of famous misreadings—in particular, the narrator’s “misreadings” of Albertine compounded by famous “misreadings” of Proust—acknowledge, nonetheless, the problem of autobiographical fallacy:
56.
It is always tricky, the question whether to read an author’s work in light of his life or not.
As a whole, The Albertine Workout leaps forward and back in Proustian time, farcically linking Hitchcock’s Vertigo to Proustian vertigo, with cameo appearances by Barthes, Beckett, Aristotle, and the Greek philosopher Zeno:
Marcel is still center of all this kinetic activity, he is like the flying arrow in Zeno’s second paradox, which is shot from the bow but never arrives at its target because it does not move. Why does Zeno’s arrow not move? Because (this is Aristotle’s explanation) the motion of the arrow would be a series of instants, and at each instant the arrow fills the entire space of that instant, and this (Zeno would say) is a description of stillness. So if you add all the instants of stillness together you still get still. No one would deny that Proust’s novel streams with time, and with arrows shooting in all directions. (Appendix 17)
While this “poetry pamphlet” is undoubtedly enjoyable in one sitting, it invites subsequent thoughtful readings to appreciate its full register of nuances. In this light, via Carsonian poetic osmosis, readers may sample In Search of Lost Time without an onslaught of insomniac memories evoked by a bite of tea-soaked madeleine. Rather, we glimpse a Proustian world at the other end of Carson’s spyglass, where Albertine, sporting a cap, rides a bicycle in eternity blissfully backward—not forward—in time, moment by moment, in a sequence of stills.
The Albertine Workout
By Anne Carson
New Directions (June 2014)
ISBN: 9780811223171