Syndrome mélancolique et dérèglement moral chez les amoureux proustiens

This essay is about the genuine “moral distortion” that rules every love relationship into the Recherche, where the lover is naturally cruel and lies with his beloved, while the loved one, who’s not in love, is able, sometimes, to be tender and endearing. This “distortion” is closely related to the melancholic character typical of the love passion within Proust’s novel. Indeed Swann, Charlus and the Narrator himself choose their love objects just when these objects, escaping from their hands, recall, as analogy, that original, ideal love thing – undefined and undefinable – which, once lost, leaves the melancholic into a state of unresignation, of eternal mourning. In order to cancel this unbearable separation, these lovers will try at any cost to incorporate, to assimilate their beloved, who in no way can be distinguished as autonomous beings (just because the lover doesn’t admit the loved one’s alterity, he doesn’t feel towards him any ethic problem). For the same reason the lover must hide his feelings, because to show his absolute and desperate need of his love objet equals admitting that it is separate and different: the love word comes out to bridge a gap, to fill an absence. We decide to live with someone, to jail him – Proust says – to kill into us the unbearable love