Tapfret wrote:
The young gerbil's psychosis is clearly born of his soul patch hands.
Such a disturbing palpation would set most girls fleeing his lap. It is
not surprising that Gilberte's playfulness generated such an explosive
response.
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Very good point indeed! This is also invoking the "play within the play", though inverted: Here the proustagonist is the usurper, while Gilbert’s father acts as both the rightful king and his own ghost.
Perhaps needless to say,
gerbil is derived from the name
Gilberte. The interesting part is that
Gilberte contains all of the gerbil, and still some more — to be exact, the two letters
t and
e. Of course both Proust and Waters knew that
te means
tea (French
thé) in the Scandinavian languages, and Gilbert’s tea parties are crucial for the relationship between the main characters.
On the other hand, if we swap the two letters, we get ET. In English it means
extra-terrestial, in French
extra-terreste. For the young gerbil (notice that the French word for
gerbil [gerbille] also includes the French masculine definite article
le), the young woman not only contains the whole of himself, but also is a creature of another world.