A Summer in the Closet

In the first few pages of The Captive, Marcel confesses, “[f]or some moments, knowing that he would make me happier than Albertine, I remained closeted with the little person inside me, the melodious hymner of the rising sun, of whom I have already spoken.” Again, locked or “closeted” in his room, Marcel channels his old little boy self whom “Habit” has long stowed away and hidden from the public. But Marcel seeks comfort in this old self and can only unveil him from behind the curtain of “Habit” when he is alone, in the privacy of his bedroom. This freedom begot from imprisonment echoes my earlier posting, A Room of Proust’s Own.

But look again. If we extract the next few lines from this context and isolate them, they, like our dear narrator, transform into something else, something our habitual style of reading might have concealed from us:

“I know how selfish this little manikin is; I may be suffering from an attack of breathlessness which only the coming of rain would assuage, but he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited, all his gaiety forgotten, he suddenly pulls down his hood… if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric manikin will feel great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: ‘Ah, fine weather at last!’”

With Jonathan’s reading on masturbation still warm and fresh in my mind, I can’t help but perform a bit of literary algebra, and replace some of these referents with analogous symbols. Consider my translation:

“I know how selfish this little [penis] is; I may be suffering from an attack of breathlessness which only the coming of [ejaculate] would assuage, but he pays no heed, and, at the first drops so impatiently awaited, all his gaiety forgotten, he suddenly pulls down his hood… if a ray of sunshine steals into the room while I am drawing my last breath, the little barometric [penis] will feel great relief, and will throw back his hood to sing: ‘Ah, fine weather at last!’”

With only three tiny edits, we have another claim for the masturbation theory, as well as—perhaps an added bonus—a parody of Proust. The only question that remains is, who gets off on thinking about the weather!?

-natalie