Not a Love Story

In response to Jonathan's post below, and in keeping with my comic book theme for the week, I think it is important to think about unromantic stories of neurotic people, people with disabilities or the ill. Two of my favourites are Black Hole (see image above), which is about a fictional STI the symptoms of which vary for each infected person, and l'Ascension du haut mal, a story about an epileptic boy and his family. In both of these stories, like in Proust, illness is not used to trigger a tearful response from the reader - rather the artist/writer seeks to engage in the mystery, the day to day life and the sometimes comical social symptoms of illness and disability. Some of you probably remember my recent blog post called "Playing the Illness and/or Disability Card" wherein I complained about academics "selling out" to a trendy literary analysis. I was talking about the exploitation of illness and disability, a topic that Todd Solodz illustrates well in his movie Storytelling:

In Search of Lost Time is no love story, that is for sure. But is it a tragedy? As we have discussed before, it seems that there is so much humour in Marcel's narrative style. As Prof. Jagoe articulated, "he says too much!" His illness, like his father, only shows up on occasion, and even then, it plays a small role next to his daily musings about nature, sleep, Gilberte, Albertine or art. Like many of his quasi reflections about his father, his illness is something he only half-thinks about, in a mysterious way. Searching for some semblance of what he is going through physically, I found, in Within a Budding Grove, a passage wherein he only gestures implicitly to his illness, while assessing the physical prowess of St-Loup:

In moral and physical agility which gave so much grace to his kindness, in the ease with which he offered my grandmother his carriage and helped her into it, in the alacrity with which he sprang from the box when he was afraid that I might be cold, to spread his own cloak over my shoulders, I sensed not only the inherited litheness of the mighty hunters who had been for generations the ancestors of this young man...

This is only one example where Marcel describes the solid dependability of St-Loup's physical and moral strength. Although he is not comparing him to himself explicitly, I wonder if there lingers some juxtaposition. Oddly, as jealous as Marcel is about Albertine and her lesbian love affairs, he does not seem to envy St-Loup's physical strength and health. In this book, Marcel is still very young, and yet he is put on the same level as his grandmother in terms of physical capability. But why doesn't he talk more about his illness? Was it a sign of weakness in the early 1900s, and therefore did not have the same sympathy-inducing power as it does in literature today? No, that does not make sense because Proust did not show any desire to "fit in" with the writers of his day. Also, to which genre does In Search of Lost Time belong?