Los celos en Proust y Shakespeare: un caso de voyeurismo narrativo

Resumen

Voyeurism is often the mise en scene the jealous man builds in his imagination both to goad and relish in his anguish at the thought of his/her beloved being possessed by the rival—real or imaginary. The mise en scene may also be real or imaginary but the spatial parameters and the conditions of visibility are always the same: the lover, always excluded from the joys of those who he thinks are betraying him physically separated from the scene he just watches in intolerable pain, even if it is in his "mind’s eye". But what happens when a fourth party comes into play? A mediator who narrates the scene for the jealous lover? This is the extraordinarily convoluted situation in two otherwise culturally and temporally very different works dealing with jealousy: William Shakespeare’s Othello, and Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. The element of narrative introduces a disturbing factor in the already complex triangular relationship amongst the lover, the beloved and the rival—which is never as unidirectional as it seems—because the narrator himself is not a disinterested party. Such a complex inter action among four actors—subjects and objects of desire by turns—further mediated by an act of voyeurism, is what I have, somewhat facetiously, I admit, called jealousy as a case of narrative voyeurism.