II. Homosexual Love in the Search
It has often been said that the judgments we make upon our contemporaries are distorted. Not only are we obligated by our friendships, but we also lack necessary distance and, guided by our mood, denigrate or magnify excessively those who work too close to us.1
Before getting into deeper study of the portrayal of homosexuality in In Search of Lost Time, we propose to discuss briefly the reception accorded to the work. From there, supported by the research of Ahlstedt and Tadié, we will review a number of articles that discuss the novel-sequence. We will follow the reception of the Search from the release of Du côté de chez Swann to the year 1930. The choice of limiting ourselves to that period was inspired by Ahlstedt:
If we have decided to pursue our account up to and including 1930, it is in order to be in a position to include here all of the first judgments of the Search. 2
Once he had decided to have his book published, Proust sent warning letters to the publishers. We read, in a letter to “Eugène F.”:
I would like very honestly to warn you in advance that the work in question is what used to be called an indecent work and very much more indecent even than that which is customarily published.3
Proust’s attempts to be published having
come to nothing – not one editor dared take the plunge – Du côté de chez
Swann finally appeared in November 1913, published by Grasset at the
author’s own expense. A difficult book, virtually a shocking book. In fact,
Louis de Robert had tried once again to convince Proust to change the
Montjouvain scene, but he refused, asserting that “this is exactly what will
turn away from [me] perhaps, alas, sensitive souls, but also, but mainly, the
sadistic. To people who seek cruelty, to say: ‘you are obviously perverted’ –
nothing could be more disagreeable.”4 And Proust appears to have
been right, since the critics were mostly laudatory. Lucien Daudet (Le
Figaro, 27 November 1913) rates the book a masterpiece, and Marcel Drouet (La
Dépêche de l’Est, 2 December 1913) praises Proust’s “moral” qualities.
Nevertheless, this first volume of A la Recherche du temps perdu did not
please everyone. For example, Paul Souday (Le Temps, 10 December 1913)
called the book useless and naïve and he expressed the opinion that it
contained unnecessary episodes. In June 1919, Du côté de chez Swann was
reprinted. Giraudoux warmly welcomed this reprint and dedicated Elpénore
to Proust with the words: “I love your book, I adore it.”5
A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs [Within
a Budding Grove] received little attention from the press (only a few favourable
articles by Vandérem, Hermant, Binet-Valmer) until Proust won the Prix Goncourt
(
The Prix Goncourt given to A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in 1919, was something of a provocation, after Les plaisirs et les jours, two translations, several articles and Swann in 1913 had passed practically unnoticed: criticism likes to show a slow ascent, from book to book, toward the maturity of genius; A la Recherche du temps perdu masked its development.6
The Prix Goncourt thus brought about a
revival of the commentaries, both positive and negative. The latter
predominated: many critics disapproved of the jury’s decision to award the Prix
to an “old” writer (Proust was forty-eight). Dorgelès, his co-nominee, was only
thirty-three years old. His book, Les Croix de bois, records the
voluntary enlistment of the author in the Great War. Many reproached the jury
for having preferred Proust’s “worldly” volume to Dorgelès’s “patriotic” one.
Jacques Rivière, on the other hand, did his best to secure a favorable
reception for the second volume of the Search and, on
At the time of the publication of the part
entitled Le côté de Guermantes I, praise began truly to run away with
it. Note, however, the reaction of Souday: after having received from Proust a
letter that announced and justified the less “conforming” continuation of his
book (“This is still a ‘suitable’ book. After this one, things will go bad
through no fault of mine. My characters do not turn out well; I am obliged to follow
them wherever their worsening vice leads them.”8 Souday wrote in Le
Temps (
This third part offered to us today is
only a transitional volume, less complete in itself than the previous two, and
it will serve above all to prepare us for the two final volumes, already in
press, which will be terrible and will drag us, according to what has been
proclaimed, all the way to
Proust was deeply wounded and, since Sodome
et Gomorrhe [Cities
of the Plain in Moncrieff’s translation; here we
will stick with
In La Revue Hebdomadaire…, Mauriac wrote an article about “the art of Marcel Proust,” in which he tried to provide me ahead of time with armor against the attacks which will not fail to be provoked by my next book, entitled Guermantes II. Sodome et Gomorrhe I. He said notably that with me, the question of morality and immorality should not be raised. I would be very happy if in “They Say”… this fragment of his, not the sentence about morality by itself, which would seem too tendentious, but that one together with one or two of those preceding or following it.10
This request was granted on
I have read Proust’s latest pages … with,
at first, a shock of indignation. …It is hard for me to see in them anything
but a pretence, a desire to protect himself, a camouflage of the cleverest
sort, for it can be to no one’s advantage to denounce him. Even more: that
offence to truth will probably please everybody: heterosexuals, whose
prejudices it justifies and whose repugnances it flatters; and the others, who
will take advantage of the alibi and their lack of resemblance to those he
portrays. In short, considering the public’s cowardice, I do not know any
writing that is more capable than Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe of
confirming the error of public opinion.11
Proust’s fears were thus confirmed: the description of inversion in Sodom and Gomorrah I aroused astonishment and even attacks. Souday (Le Temps, 12 May 1921) devoted an entire article to Le côté de Guermantes in order to avoid lingering on the “account committed to a path where it will become rather difficult to follow.”12 Binet-Valmer (Comædia) accused Proust of reinforcing France’s already negative image in Europe.13 André Germain (Les Ecrits nouveaux, July 1921) attacked Sodome et Gomorrhe I quite violently, and Frédéric Mallet (L’Esprit nouveau, December 1921) was of the opinion that “literary art has nothing to do with this.”14
To these negative critiques were added many laudatory reviews. Vandérem (La Revue de France, 15 June 1921) spoke of “the worldly comedy.”15 Jacques Rivière, who had displayed his admiration ever since Du côté de chez Swann, could only applaud the discussion of sexual inversion. According to him, these “terrible pages” make one taste “a kind of vengeance,” and he adds:
I needed the kind of decongestion that these pages gave me. Without being at all shaken by it, I had heard the notion of love falsified too often around me not to feel a delicious relaxation: to hear speaking in them someone as sane, as happily balanced as you.16
Edmond Jaloux defended Proust by emphasizing the “objective” attitude of the author toward this taboo.
The way Sodome et Gomorrhe I was received shows that, in spite of the reservations of many French critics in the face of such open treatment of inversion, public opinion was ready to accept the subject. This is proved by the fact that many months after the appearance of the volume, the discussion had not dried up. The book thus succeeded in awakening curiosity.
Acceptance of the depiction of homosexuality can be seen also in the positive reception accorded to Sodome et Gomorrhe II – although this was expressed mostly by oblique allusions; only Allard, Binet-Valmer and Germain dared to say the name of this love. Allard praised Proust for his “moral relativity”:
M. Proust’s hero receives with revulsion the advances of Charlus, but after the adventure of the waistcoat-maker shows him the true nature of his noble friend, he devotes to him a strange sympathy that takes on subtly changing meanings.17
Edmond Jaloux (L’éclair) also eulogizes this “great moralist”:
A la Recherche du temps perdu risks appearing one day the most extraordinary monument which has been raised to human nature since the Essais of Montaigne and the Confessions of Jean-Jacques.18
Even Souday favorably reviewed Sodome et Gomorrhe II. Above all, he appreciated that the subject announced by the title did not take up a lot of room in the volume and that Proust did not lay everything bare.
It would be, all the same, inaccurate to pretend that Sodome et Gomorrhe was the object only of praise. For one notes this remarkable fact: the malaise felt by certain contemporaries on reading the book was not always expressed in the press. Consider for example Charles Du Bois, who did not express in the papers the revulsion he felt in reading the book, but he confided it to his personal diary.
While the critics made little reference to
Proust’s “tastes” while he was alive, this changed after his death: the writer
himself was then severely attacked. For example, Souday (Le Temps, 20
November 1922) repeated his unflattering label and once more called Proust
“feminine.” In Le Cri de Paris (
According to Tadié, the appearance of La Prisonnière [The Captive] proved a law of journalistic criticism: “an unappreciated masterpiece contrives unanimity, sooner or later, even among those who previously fought it.”22 And yet by the time of the release of Albertine disparu [The Sweet Cheat Gone], the high point of adulation was already left behind: the brothers Leblond (L’Amour sur la montagne, 1925) claimed to admire Proust for his psychology, but wondered “why this corruption of painting only the trash of our society.”23 Saurat (Les Marges, 115 November 1926) is one of many critics who had begun to be irritated by the work. In addition, many critics took offence at the passage in which Robert de Saint-Loup is revealed to be homosexual. Even Jacques Rivière and Léon Daudet, once the writer’s most faithful defenders, turned against Proust: they reproached him with simplifying and falsifying reality and omitting the moral dimension in his work.
All these negative reviews did not always mean that Proust no longer had any supporters. Raphaël Cor (Le Mercure de France, 15 May 1926) invoked literary tradition when he used Boileau as a basis for defending the writer of the Search. In his turn, Gillouin (Esquisses littéraires et morales, 1926) did not hesitate to put Proust among the “greatest psychologists and moralists.”24 In 1925, Léon Pierre-Quint was the first to conduct an in-depth study of homosexuality in A la Recherche du temps perdu. He praised Proust for his subtle attitude toward inverts and, according to Ahlstedt, reproached the critics for not having given the work an appropriate reception. Pierre-Quint spoke of a “conspiracy of silence.”25 In 1926, the review Les Marges published an investigation of “homosexuality in literature.” Gérard Bauer responded:
Marcel Proust was like the messiah of this small people and, at the expense of a sort of genius, liberated them from their slavery. It is not that his work extols homosexuality but that he gave it respectability. First in the present-day modern world, he faced the problem squarely and spoke of it without embarrassment or reserve. He opened the way for those who did not dare to get involved with it.26
The same year, Bernanos asserts that “the novelist has an apologist’s role. It is so true that Proust’s work, through that kind of anxiety that forms the basis of the immense intellectual joy it gives us, could be taken to be beneficial. It awoke the desire to search. It opened the field.” Later, however, he wrote: “Proust’s terrible introspection goes nowhere.”27
Le Temps retrouvé appeared in book form in November 1927 after having been published as a serial in N. R. F. If publication in the review did not spark any remarkable comments, the release of the book certainly did. The reviews were divided once again and the unfavourable tendency that had developed since Albertine disparu continued. It was mainly the passages about inversion that caused the problem. Thus, Robert Kemp (La Liberté, 1 October 1927) accords an important place to the Search, but he regrets certain pointless passages:
I discard also the frightful episode of one night of amusement when Marcel surprises M. de Charlus in a mysterious house… The vile baron satisfies there the tastes you know about and several others, even more painful. There you have useless infamies!28
Paul Souday (Le Temps, 17 November
1927) shares this opinion and once more stresses Proust’s “femininity.” Edmond
Jaloux mounts the defense and considers the passages about inversion “the prime
pages of the work.”29
Beginning in 1928 there appeared the first
reviews of A la Recherche du temps perdu as a
complete epic. Henri Massiss (La Revue Universelle, 15 April 1930)
interprets the work as a disguised confession on the part of the author and for
that reason considered inversion the main subject of the Search.
Crémieux (Candide, 28 April 1930) saw the sequence of novels as a
spiritual voyage. For Henry Hirsch (Le Mercure de France, 15 December
1929), Proust’s books “were created by an invalid, certainly nothing to
complain of if it weren’t for the efforts to deify him, if homosexuality had
not since the war acquired a deplorable importance in literature, that
reflection of customs.”30
Rivers concentrated on the negative reactions to the presence of homosexuality in the book. He refuted the theories of critics who attacked the Search because of its false image (homosexuality was not so widespread, according to them) and its “frightful” subject (they said that the book “commits the sin of dwelling on a subject that is distasteful.”)31 Rivers asserted that such reviews were done “by critics who refused to look below the surface of the narrative to see what Proust is doing with the theme.”32
Although the text cited lies beyond our chronological limit, still we will mention, before moving on to a conclusion, the opinion of Jean Cocteau. An admirer of Proust’s work, he defined the Search in 1959, in Poésie critique, as follows: “A cathedral of paper … whence the search for lost time arose and built in the air a nave of which Albertine would be the angel with the ruined smile, and the others, the saints, the damned and the gargoyles.”33
We summarize the reaction to the different volumes of the Search in order to sketch a global view of the way the work was received.
At first, nothing foreshadowed the later indignant reactions. Proust was spoken of as a moralist on the same level as the classic French moralists. Or, to quote once more the words of Ahlstedt: “Before the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe, it was mainly Proust who spoke of the ‘indecency of his work.’”34
With the publication of Sodom and Gomorrah, “one could speak of decency in crisis.”35 Most of the reactions were negative and the critics – with the exception of Germain, Binet-Valmer and Allard – all followed the same procedure: they made reference to the taboo subject of the volumes by oblique allusions; in addition, the attacks against Sodome et Gomorrhe were done in a roundabout manner (by recourse to insinuation, the critics played on the prejudices of the readers). Nevertheless, Proust received here and there constructive comments: there were critics who “praise the great self-control with which Proust confronts his subject.”36 After the death of the writer, the work was attacked more and more. The main reproof consisted of saying that Proust had dared to mention by name the phenomenon of sexual inversion in his books. From then on, hostility began to show itself equally against the personality of the author.
The critics faulted, in the posthumous volumes of the Search, the lack of spiritual progress. In addition, they deplored the fact that the inverts became more and more important in the work. Toward the time of the publication of The Past Recaptured, however, the critics appear to some extent to have conquered their prudishness: euphemisms for inversion were used less frequently. Ahlstedt concluded:
The Search was favourably received in Le Figaro,…L’Opinion,…La Revue de France, L’Intransigeant and the Revue hebdomadaire. Among the writers of those periodicals, Proust had personal friends, but this did not prevent us from finding, from time to time, even in those publication, articles unfavourable to the work, often concerned with the subject of homosexuality.37
Homosexuals…are stigmatized under the sign
of the two biblical cities, close to the
The title Sodom and Gomorrah alludes
to the Bible, and more particularly to the two cities of the Plain that bore
those names. The title recalls the destruction of those two biblical cities
because of the “sexual customs” of their inhabitants. The punishment is
described in Genesis. We read in the Bible “Then the Lord rained upon
This summary returns clearly to the story as told in Genesis (vide supra). It also accentuates the fact that Sodom and Gomorrah I will concern only sodomites (and not ‘gomorrhians’) and that this is only the first appearance of the men-women.
Eells noted the Darwinian influence in Sodom
and Gomorrah. In linking the summary to
For Zagdanski, Proust took “the Talmudic liberty of blatantly rewriting a biblical episode”42 when he chose to provide Sodom and Gomorrah I with the summary in question.
For his part, Muller considered the summary
the synthesis in the development of a classic dialectic schema: the Montjouvain
scene forms the thesis (serving to indicate the importance of inversion in the Search)
to which the response is absolute silence about homosexuality in the ensuing
story (Charlus disguises his real nature). This silence is “the necessary
condition for the ultimate and supreme manifestation of homosexuality.”43
By this epigraph, Proust subscribes to the prophecy of Vigny, who wrote, in the poem The Anger of Samson (in the collection Les Destinées):
Soon
withdrawing into a hideous kingdom,
Woman will have
And, casting each other from afar an irritated glance,
The two sexes will die, each in a place apart.46
Proust had already cited Vigny in the article “About Baudelaire” (N. R. F., June 1921), from which we extract this quote:
It is Vigny himself who has identified
with Samson, and it is because the friendship of Mme Dorval with certain women
made him jealous that he writes: ‘woman will have
As far as friendships are concerned, it would be primarily a matter of the relation between Marie Dorval (the actress with whom Vigny was in love)48 and George Sand (for the habits of George Sand, cf 2.2.2 Gomorrhe). We underline, however, the uncertain nature of this piece of information, since it is no more than a rumour. However that may be, Vigny’s verse expresses a painful darkness – an ambiance felt by Proust when he said about Sodom and Gomorrah in a letter to Natalie Clifford Barney (beginning of May 1920):
The divine peace of Les Bucoliques, of The Symposium, the freedom of Lucien, does not reign there but rather the somber despair of the two verses of Vigny that I had given him as an epigraph roughly five years ago.”49
Zagdanski interprets the epigraph by referring
to Marcel, who prefers the word “invert” to “homosexual.” (For the nomenclature
of homosexuals, cf. 1.4.3 How the sodomite becomes gay.) Thus, “the homosexual
would be a virility fanatic, the man who disputes all bisexuality, who believes
firmly in an unbridgeable gap between the two sexes (‘The woman will have
Mingelgrün grants a programmatic function to the epigraph. He says:
“Fantastic” title tying the myth of the
androgyne with the biblical tradition, suggesting a strange and fabulous
association, a baroque variety of individual whose appearance is troubling
because of the mysterious mixture it displays. Title-program also, which
announces that
According to Mingelgrün, the epigraph
therefore belongs to the same family as the work. Rivers, like Compagnon,52
does not share this opinion. He opposes the epigraph to the body of the text:
in the Search, Marcel tries to show that the “separation” of men and
women depends on the point of view, while this verse of Vigny’s seems to set it
out as fixed – a thesis also supported by
Leriche,53 who says that the epigraph creates “great expectations.”
Nevertheless, the text does not respond to it:
Symmetry not, certainly, in terms of
condemnation, since that is not Proust’s attitude toward
According to the critic, the Protagonist thus invokes those words in order to refute them.
The danger is, as we have seen, in the
separation of the sexes which can lead at the end of the tale to the extinction
of the race. Now, this is not what Proust thinks. Bem shows this, relying on
the pregnancy metaphor (cf. 2.2.1.2 Metaphors for male inversion in the Search): if a man can be “pregnant” in the Search, how can the
epigraph in question, which opposes thus the two sexes, work as a heading?
There is only one answer, according to the critic: “The separation of the sexes
ceases to matter.”56
The critics disagree therefore as far as the epigraph is concerned. Fraisse summarizes as follows:
Under the aegis of Vigny,
The epigraph is not the only reference to Vigny. In Sodome et Gomorrhe we read:
As for the poet feted the day before in all the salons, applauded in all the theatres of London, chased the day after from all accommodation without being able to find a pillow to lay his head upon,58 turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: ‘The two sexes will dies each on its own side.”59
Samson, betrayed by Delilah, proclaimed the separation of the sexes. Thus, homosexual encounters are made possible without for so much them legitimize. As a result, homosexuality is in a contradictory situation, comparable to that of the Jews, according to Mingelgrün:
Sometimes, arousing pity as victims, around whom they resemble Jews around Dreyfus, sometimes, again like the Jews, fleeing from one another, sometimes, having in the end acquired, under a persecution like that of Israel, the physical and moral characteristics of a race.
For
Kristeva, the content of the cited Vigny constitutes the final situation of a
whole journey that consists of “the most diverse ‘conjunctions,’ daring,
improbable though possible, and above all voluptuous.”61
Incidentally, one might wonder if this does not imply that Kristeva considers
homosexual love a deviation from the heterosexual norm. Deleuze proposes a
different reading. He distinguishes three loves:
Malabou proposes a second interpretation of the Vigny verse that destroys the notion of ‘gender.’ If one ties the quote to Swann’s words at the end of Un amour de Swann (‘To think that I have wasted years of my life, that I have longed for death, that the greatest love I have ever known has been for a woman who did not please me, who was not in my style!”64), one can “throw light on one of the most enigmatic and most important aspects of the Search: the substitution of ‘side’ for ‘gender.’ This substitution is one of the decisive elements in Proust’s writing of the end of love.”65
In order to complete the presentation of the epigraph, we turn to Compagnon, who qualifies the references to Vigny as surprising because these verses go against the “odi et amo that fascinates Proust and that will become the major theme of the end of the Search for Lost Time.”66
In this part, we will present and comment on the theory of inversion elaborated by Marcel in Sodom and Gomorrah I. We will concentrate particularly on the dual foundation of the description of homosexuality and on the metaphors used to evoke this description.
The thirty-odd pages that constitute Sodom and Gomorrah I have become the object of much attention in Proustian criticism. In what follows, we will try to present the principal interpretations that have been formulated, with the aim of clarifying this preeminent part of the Search.
Before moving on to concrete analysis, we pause for a moment to consider the observations of Schehr, as summarized by Sollers. He sees in the general description of men-women a mixture of fiction and experiment – an aspect which we call the dual foundation (myth and science) of the approach to homosexuality in Sodom and Gomorrah I (vide infra). The critic calls attention also to the problematic nature of this opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe: it complicates the interpretation of inversion in what follows. Schehr wonders how the reader will be able to view (Charlus’s) homosexuality objectively after this generalizing theory full of stereotypes. The following words from Sollers show that Schehr was right to fear the “reaction” of the reader: “Nearly always the situations are vaudevillian or grotesque.”67 In this regard, Cairns indicates that we must see through this ridiculous, even negative, representation: “The narrative is so riven with ambiguities and paradoxes, even conceptual ruptures, that a contestatory subtext emerges."68
In this part, we will begin by mentioning the classification elaborated by Kristeva, after which we will glance at several dualities posed by homosexuality (for example, is inversion innate or acquired, according to Marcel? is it a cultural or a natural phenomenon in the Search?).
Drawing inspiration from historical and moral criteria, Kristeva distinguishes two types of homosexuality sketched out in the Search: namely, a conventional and a contraventional homosexuality. Conventional homosexuality inspired by Plato and by Virgil’s shepherds seems to have vanished:
He refused to see that for nineteen hundred years…all conventional homosexuality – that of Plato’s young friends as well as that of Virgil’s shepherds – has disappeared, that what survives and increases is only the involuntary, the neurotic kind, which we conceal from other people and disguise from ourselves.69
Contraventional homosexuality owes its name to the fact that it “does not conform to the customs of the times.”70 It is guilty and condemned:
Race upon which a curse weighs and which must live amid falsehood and perjury, because it knows the world to regard as a punishable and as scandalous, as an inadmissible thing, its desire, that which constitutes for every human creature the greatest happiness in life; which must deny its God, since even Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must, before Christ and in his name, defend themselves, as from a calumny, from the charge of what to them is life itself; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie all her life and even at the hour when they close her dying eyes.71
The two types thus have nothing in common, or, to go back to the words of d’Entrevaux: “[Contraventional homosexuality] is the result or the symptom of a pathological irregularity, [conventional homosexuality]…only follows the customs of the period…In sum, homosexuals believe they have roots deep in the most ancient history, and that explains everything, according to them.”72 Inverts do not therefore share Marcel’s opinion: as we shall see further along in this section, they “willingly reconnect themselves to the Golden Age of Greece.”73
The criteria upon which Kristeva bases her comments are not the only ones that permit the discernment of many types of homosexuality. One can turn toward the sphere of medicine, for example, and ponder whether homosexuality is considered a disease by Marcel.74 Inversion is so often compared to sickness in the Search that we are inclined to affirm that it is certainly so for the Protagonist. The first passage we have cited on this point indicates that inversion constitutes a nervous ailment, a neurosis, for Marcel. In fact, he makes reference to homosexuality by using the term “the neurotic.”75 Consider the following extract:
No doubt the life of certain inverts appears at times to change, their vice (as it is called) is no longer apparent in their habits; but nothing is ever lost; a missing jewel turns up again; when the quantity of a sick man’s urine decreases, it is because he is perspiring more freely, but the excretion must invariably occur…As is the case with invalids in whom a sudden attack of urticaria makes their chronic ailments temporarily disappear, this pure love for a young relative seems, in the invert, to have momentarily replaced, by metastasis, habits that will, one day or another, return to fill the place of the vicarious, cured malady.76
This passage clearly establishes a connection by analogy between inversion and illness. The following passage is equally striking:
Albeit other reasons dictated this transformation of M. de Charlus, and purely physical ferments set his material substance “working” and made his body pass gradually into the category of women’s bodies, nevertheless the change that we record here was of spiritual origin. By dint of supposing yourself to be ill, you become ill, grow thin, are too weak to rise from your bed, suffer from nervous enteritis. By dint of thinking tenderly of men you become a woman, and an imaginary spirit hampers your movements. The obsession, just as in the other instance it affects your health, may in this instance alter your sex.77
This extract leads us toward another element: is homosexuality innate or acquired? It is true that an illness need not be innate, it can be caught. What remains to be seen is whether this means that inversion also can be “caught,” acquired. The Protagonist speaks often of a “defect.” This word stresses the hereditary side of homosexuality and this is what Marcel confirms:
By this latter hypothesis, which borders upon natural history, it would not be M. de Charlus that we ought to style a Guermantes marked with a blemish and expressing it to a certain extent by means of traits peculiar to the Guermantes race, but the Duc de Guermantes who would be in a perverted family the exceptional example, whom the hereditary malady has so effectively spared that the outward signs which it has left upon him lose all their meaning.78
If one characterizes inversion as hereditary, does this mean that it is innate? Marcel seems to reply affirmatively to this question. He proposes two arguments. First of all, he notes that conventional homosexuality – that is, “acquired” homosexuality – has disappeared (vide supra). If Marcel excludes the notion of acquired homosexuality, nothing remains but innate homosexuality. A second argument resides in the fact that Marcel attributes to inverts a “female embryo.” Here is the passage:
But it is enough that they do not belong to the female sex, of which they have in them an embryo which they can put to no useful purpose, such as we find in so many hermaphrodite flowers, and even in certain hermaphrodite animals, such as the snail, which cannot be fertilized by themselves, but can by other hermaphrodites.79
Although homosexuality seems therefore to be innate, according to the Protagonist, the invert has a hold over the way in which his nature rises to the surface:
But no sooner had he succeeded than, he having in the meantime kept the same tastes, this habit of looking at things through a woman’s eyes gave him a fresh feminine appearance, due this time not to heredity but to his own way of living.80
To return to the point: homosexuality as illness. It remains to be seen whether this illness can be cured. As usual, the response is twofold: for the Protagonist, there are curable and incurable cases. The following words show this: “And yet the abandoned one [the solitary homosexual]81 is not cured (in spite of the cases in which, as we shall see, inversion is curable).”82
We mention yet a third criterion for distinguishing different types of homosexuality: the nature-nurture debate. Marcel gives the impression of putting before us a natural inversion. The botanical metaphor demonstrates this (cf. 2.2.1.2 Metaphors for male inversion in the Search). Contrary to the reluctance of Plato in The Laws (cf. 1.1 Homosexuality from the mythic point of view), nature permits such a conclusion. This is not all: according to Marcel, it should be heterosexuality that is against nature. That at least is the opinion formulated by Zagdanski, beginning with this passage:
And indeed, what repels us is the most touching thing of all, more touching than any refinement of delicacy, because it represents an admirable though unconscious effort on the part of nature: the recognition of the sex by itself, in spite of the sexual deception, becomes apparent, the unconfessed attempt to escape from itself towards what an initial error on the part of society has segregated from it.83
Heterosexuality is presented as complex
and irrational (cf. Swann, who loves Odette because she “was not in [his]
style”84) and even as vicious: “For the invert, vice begins…when he
takes his pleasure with women.”85 Homosexual love would therefore be
purer than the heterosexual variety, or, to return to the words of G. Deleuze:
“Objectively, intersexual loves are not so deep as those of homosexuality, they
find their truth in homosexuality.”86 Leriche agrees with this idea
and notes that, in homosexuality, love and sexuality, which “is neither
exhibited nor glorified”87 are separated. According to Zagdanski,
Marcel goes even further: by the large number of homosexuals who figure in the Search
when all’s said and done, and by asserting that homosexuality is
ultimately not a vice, the narrator aims to suggest that “inversion is the
common lot of the human species.”88 The heterosexual thus
constitutes the exception that proves the rule. In this way,
However it may be for inversion, the condemnation of homosexuality is, in itself, clearly considered a cultural fact by Marcel (cf. Freud). He says: “there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ.”89 A. de Lattre points out in this connection: “It is society that turns a fact that has no recognized place in society into a fact that society condemns and does not want to know.” This idea is confirmed by Kristeva, who indicates that Marcel expresses the opinion that inversion is “a social artefact.”91 The perfect expression of homosexuality would thus be “Hell is other people” (Sartre).
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, Marcel distinguishes not only different types of homosexuality but also categories of homosexuals. This categorization will be the subject of our analysis in this section.
Before differentiating among the types, we follow Zéphir’s sketch of the physical and psychological constitution of homosexuals in the Search since, although there are many categories, homosexuals embrace a number of convergent elements. The invert type is tragic; prey to an extreme hermaphroditism, he is forced to hide his feminine traits. He “covers himself up … with a deceptive mask” while taking “an attitude opposed to [his] nature in order to make himself acceptable in [his] surroundings.”93 Psychologically, the invert is a woman. This means that he is gifted not only with masculine intellectual qualities but also with those of women. He rejoices in an artistic sense “which is rarely met with among ordinary men.”94 From the affective point of view, matters are less positive: the invert “will have the character of a woman with all that this entails of hypersensitivity, impulsiveness, excessive tenderness, exaggerated kindness and behavioural illogicality.”95
Moving on to the categorization of homosexuals, we borrow nomenclature from the classification proposed by Kristeva. According to her, the Protagonist distinguishes four types of inverts: the monovalent homosexual, the ambivalent homosexual or fetishist, the transvestite and the solitary homosexual. The monovalent homosexual has no preferences as far as the type of pleasure sought is concerned, so long as it is provided by a man. Marcel defines him as follows: “Some, those no doubt who have been most timid in childhood, are scarcely concerned with the material kind of pleasure they receive, provided that they can associate it with a masculine face.”96
The ambivalent homosexual or fetishist is preoccupied more with the type of pleasure than with the sex of his partner. If he has a masculine partner, but goes in for relations with women, he is subject to the jealousy of his friend, who cannot imagine the enjoyment provided by a woman (cf. the letter from Léa to Morel, which incites the jealousy of Charlus, under the point 4.1.2 The Baron de Charlus). Marcel writes:
Whereas others, whose sensuality is doubtless more violent, imperiously restrict their material pleasure within certain definite limitations. These live perhaps less exclusively beneath the sway of Saturn’s outrider, since for them women are not entirely barred, as for the former sort, in whose eyes women would have no existence apart from conversation, flirtation, loves not of the heart but of the head. But the second sort seek out those women who love other women; who can procure for them a young man, enhance the pleasure they feel on finding themselves in his company; better still, they can, in the same fashion, enjoy with such women the same pleasure as with a man. Whence it arises that jealousy is kindled in those who love the first sort only by the pleasure which they may be enjoying with a man, which alone seems to their lovers a betrayal, since these do not participate in the love of women, have practised it only as a habit, and, so as to reserve to themselves so little the pleasure that it is capable of giving that they cannot be distressed by the thought that he whom they love is enjoying that pleasure; whereas the other sort often inspire jealousy by their love-affairs with women. For in the relations which they have with her, they play, for the woman who loves her own sex, the part of another woman, and she offers them at the same time more or less what they find in other men, so that the jealous friend suffers from the feeling that he whom he loves is riveted to her who is to him almost a man, and at the same time feels his beloved almost escape him because, to these women, he is something which the lover himself cannot conceive, a sort of woman.98
In the third place, Kristeva mentions the transvestite type, who is defined as follows in the Search: “…those young fools who by a sort of arrested development, to tease their friends or to shock their families, proceed with a kind of frenzy to choose clothes that resemble women’s dress, to redden their lips and blacken their eyelashes.”99
As for the fourth type, that of the solitaries, Kristeva defines it as follows: the solitary rebels against education and domestication. He is immature and devoted to melancholy due to a constant search for “a pleasure too singular, too difficult to place.”100 Marcel says of him that “he seeks out essentially the love of a man of the other race, that is to say, a man who is a lover of women (and incapable consequently of loving him).”101 Dubois notes that there are only two routes of escape from this “contradiction”: either the invert contents himself with another invert whom he imagines to be a “real man,” or he uses his money as a means of seduction. This thesis is clearly inspired by the words of Marcel, who says of this type of homosexual that “their desire would be forever insatiable did not their money procure for them real men, and their imagination end by making them take for real men the inverts to whom they had prostituted themselves.”102 Eribon103 masterfully summarizes the whole thing:
Men of the “race des tantes” [“queens”]…are certainly not drawn to each other – on the contrary, as Proust does never stops telling us, they detest each other and have a horror of effeminateness in others – but necessity or love force them to forget – reciprocally – that the person they are in bed with is not a real man but a “loathsome queen.”104
All this does not, however, prevent the invert from being an exceptional being, an artist. Look at how the solitary is described by Marcel:
Perhaps, to form a picture of these, we ought to think, if not of the wild animals that never become domesticated, of the lion-cubs said to be tame but lions still at heart, then at least of the Negroes whom the comfortable existence of the white man renders desperately unhappy and who prefer the risks of a life of savagery and its incomprehensible joys…Supposing their vice to be more exceptional than it is, they have retired into solitude from the day on which they discovered it, after having carried it within themselves for a long time without knowing it, for a longer time only than certain other men.105 For no one can tell at first that he is an invert or a poet or a snob or a scoundrel….Then the solitary languishes alone. He has no other diversion than to go to the neighbouring watering-place to ask for some information or other from a certain railwayman there.106
This extract shows that Marcel appeals
to nature to describe the fourth type of homosexual.
Before moving on to the next point, we note once more that the solitary is prey to an incurable homosexuality: “The abandoned one is not cured.”111
Critics have noted that, to build his theory of inversion in Sodom and Gomorrah I, Marcel bases his structure on two foundations: myth and science. Rivers remarks:
In order to recapture lost time in art, in
order to make his work a history of the race as well as a history of an
individual life, the narrator must rediscover and exploit in his book
something, on the mythic level, of the androgyny of primal humanity, and, on
the scientific level, of the hermaphroditism of the first plants and animals.
And then he must show how the two relate. This he does in Sodome I.112
It is by yoking myth and science in tandem that the author is able to paint the homosexual simultaneously in a suggestive and in an objective way.
The conjecture about inversion’s roots in
myth has scared off many critics (cf. 2.2.2
One can distinguish two types of source myth: one derives from the Bible; the other from Antiquity.
Biblical myth. In Sodom and Gomorrah I, Marcel proposes an original interpretation of the story of Genesis.115 We look first at what the Protagonist wrote:
For the two angels who were posted at the
gates of Sodom to learn whether its inhabitants (according to Genesis) had
indeed done all the things the report of which had ascended to the Eternal
Throne must have been, and of this one can only be glad, exceedingly ill chosen
by the Lord, Who ought not to have entrusted the task to any but a Sodomite.
Such an one the excuses: “Father of six children – I keep two mistresses,” and
so forth could never have persuaded benevolently to lower his flaming sword and
to mitigate the punishment; he would have answered: “Yes, and your wife lives
in a torment of jealousy. But even these women have not been chosen by you from
Comparison with the version in Genesis
reveals that Marcel rewrote that Biblical tale: although there are elements
that are faithfully repeated (he uses certain turns of phrase literally and
some of the actual words of the Bible), the Protagonist also introduces
differences, “adaptations.” There are
only three escapees from
Another difference between Marcel’s story
and that of Genesis is that the Biblical version does not speak of a “flaming
sword.” It is probably a matter of the conflation of two stories: in the Bible:
there is a “flaming sword” in the story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from
By thus conflating the myth of
Mingelgrün shares the opinion of Muller and Rivers. The critic follows Marcel, who retraces the trail toward the origins, to find there the sleeping androgyne:
I entered a state of slumber which is like a second room that we take, into which, leaving out own room, we go when we want to sleep….The race that inhabits it is, like that of our first human ancestors, androgynous. A man in it appears a moment later in the form of a woman.”126
Rivers notes that Marcel permits himself to mock divine power: God made an erroneous decision in the matter of choosing angels, since the Sodomites escaped. This is simply a habit, according to Kristeva: angels are often objects of laughter in the Search. These beings would be considered “naïve and lacking in cunning.”127 Eribon broadens the ironic aspect and asserts that the whole mythical construct is humorous. E. Wilson128 sets this humorous tone against the lamentations about the hard lot of homosexuals that colours the rest of Sodom and Gomorrah I.
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, the invert is related to still another Biblical myth: Marcel compares him to God.129 He writes: “But the gods are immediately perceptible to one another, as quickly like to like, and so too had M. de Charlus been to Jupien.”130 Cairns points out in this connection that, if it does not really succeed in deifying the invert, this analogy tends at least to exalt him.131 However, the critic is aware of the possible concealment of a joke in this equation.
Finally, we add the allusion to Daniel (5, 25-28) by the following words: “At once there appear, like a Mene, Tekel, Upharsin….”132 According to the Book of Daniel, “these prophetic words were mysteriously inscribed on the palace wall during King Belshazzar’s feast.” The prophet said “This is the interpretation of the thing: MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom and finished it. TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; Thy kingdom is divided….”133
Classical myth. “Sodome et Gomorrhe…brings a …stream of references to Antiquity.”134
In “Proust et la descente aux enfers” [“Proust and the Descent into Hell”], Letoublon and Fraisse situate the references to classical times in a vast series. According to them, these allusions constitute a return to origins in reaction against the taboo that strikes at inversion. This taboo was created by a kind of oppression, born with Judeo-Christian culture, whose cradle was classical civilization (cf. 1.3 Homosexuality from the historical point of view).
In this part, we analyze the attempts in Sodom and Gomorrah I to trace roots in classical antiquity.
· References to classical philosophers: Plato, Socrates
In the Search, Marcel often makes references to Plato and his ideas on homosexuality. Consider for example the following sentence: “The race that inhabits it is, like that of our first human ancestors, androgynous”135 or this passage:
…inverts, who eagerly connect themselves with Oriental antiquity or the Golden Age in Greece, might be traced back farther still, to those experimental epochs in which there existed neither dioecious plants nor monosexual animals, to that initial hermaphroditism….136
Like many other critics, Eribon is therefore right to point out that the theory of men-women elaborated by Marcel was probably inspired by Plato. In the first chapter (1.1 Homosexuality from the mythic point of view), we evoke the myth narrated by Aristophanes in the Symposium, which speaks of three basic sexes. When Eells says that the aim of the Search is “to reunite the two divided parts of the initial hermaphroditism,”137 Platonic ideas clearly resonate here. Rivers himself puts the emphasis not on the similarities between Plato’s theory and Marcel’s but on the differences, and he lists the discrepancies. Look at the most marked differences in this table:138
|
Aristophanes |
Marcel |
|
Young homosexuals are the “best boys,” the most “masculine.” |
Homosexual boys are feeble and effeminate (e.g., the young invert who
awakens and is compared to Galatea139 (we analyze this passage
further along in this work). |
|
Homosexuals do not hide their desires |
Homosexuals are obliged by society to live “in the closet” (e.g., the
Baron de Charlus). |
|
Homosexuals occupy elevated positions in society |
Homosexuals often live in misery and solitude140 (cf. the Baron de Charlus in The Past
Regained). |
|
Homosexuals enjoy the company of their kind. |
Homosexuals prefer not to meet other homosexuals (cf. the Baron de
Charlus, who does not care for the company of M. de Vaugoubert). |
According to Leriche, “recourse to the Platonic myth of the hermaphrodite…[means that] the homosexual would be…the survivor of a prehistoric ‘race,’ predating the division of the sexes.”141
Plato is not the only classical philosopher to whom reference is made in the Search. Socrates also is mentioned. Marcel seems to prefer the ideas of Socrates about inversion to those of Plato, since he says “[Brichot] did not understand that in those days to fall in love with a young man was like, in our day (Socrates’s jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories), keeping a dancing girl before one marries and settles down.”142 Marcel remarks that it is homosexuals themselves who, through the figure of Socrates, trace their existence back to myth. He notes: “…going in search (as a doctor seeks a case of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves.”143 This is why Zagdanski speaks of a “Socratic argument through which to normalize homosexuality.”144 Since Socrates defines philosophy as maieutics [a method that elicits ideas from others], the invert would no longer be considered an effeminate man but as a “midhusband.” D’Entrevaux points out in this connection that Marcel “distances himself from this vision that homosexuals have of themselves, for it is in fact only an intellectual tradition which does not take reality into consideration.”145 Marcel distinguishes two types of homosexuality, and according to him contemporary homosexuality has nothing to do with Antiquity (vide supra).
By way of conclusion, we cite Zagdanski, who draws on Greek civilization in summarizing the principle of homosexuality: “Homosexuality is Aristotelian. Its principle is identity, its style is moderation, its value tradition, its natural language philosophy.”146 This idea is certainly present in the Search.
· Andromeda.
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, Marcel refers to the legend of Andromeda. Here is the passage:
…the solitary will no longer be able to go
and ask him the times of the trains or the price of a first-class ticket, and,
before retiring to dream, Griselda-like,147 in his tower, loiters
upon the beach, a strange Andromeda whom no Argonaut will come to free…148
Andromeda was the daughter of Cepheus,
the king of
Along with many other critics, we ask why Marcel substitutes an Argonaut for Perseus. Letoublon and Fraisse attribute this substitution to reasons of euphony. Schuerewegen approaches the question in the light of gastronomic metaphor (cf. 2.2.1.2 Metaphors for male inversion in the Search) and he says:
Proust mistakes the myth: it was Perseus, and not the Argonaut, who came to Andromeda’s aid. But argonaut is also the name of a mollusk, and it is permissible to think that the novelist perhaps deliberately made use of the term in order not to leave the gastronomic realm.149
· Pygmalion
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, the Protagonist writes:
Here is one who, should we intrude upon him in the morning, still in bed, will present to our gaze an admirable female head, so general is its expression and typical of the sex as a whole; his very hair affirms this, so feminine is its ripple; unbrushed, it fall so naturally in long curls over the cheek that one marvels how the young woman, the girl, the Galatea barely awakened to life, in the unconscious mass of this male body in which she is imprisoned, has contrived so ingeniously by herself, without instruction from anyone, to make use of the narrowest apertures in her prison wall to find what was necessary to her existence.150
Of this passage, Compagnon notes that it
is an allusion to the myth of Pygmalion.151 Pygmalion, king of
Miguet-Ollagnier indicates that the Galatea mentioned in the Search need not necessarily be Pygmalion’s Galatea. However, Y. Baudelle and E. Nicole confirm Compagnon’s explanation in the Pléiade edition and link the name of Galatea to the myth in question. It could be that the following passage convinced them, since the myth of Pygmalion speaks of a transformation from still life to living being. Consider what happens with Charlus:
Pale as marble, his nose stood out firmly, his fine features no longer received from an expression deliberately assumed a different meaning which altered the beauty of their modelling; nothing more now than a Guermantes, he seemed already carved in stone, he Palamède the Fifteenth, in their chapel at Combray…Blinking his eyes in the sunlight, he seemed almost to be smiling…152
This passage gives the impression that the invert passes cautiously from an inanimate to an animated state. Charlus traces therefore the same trajectory as Pygmalion’s statue. Yet Miguet-Ollagnier is unconvinced. She bases her argument on two elements: first, she denounces the argument that we have just evoked. The critic does not see how the myth of Pygmalion could come into play in the Search since it “denotes the changing of marble into flesh, of the inanimate into the living.”153 Miguet-Ollagnier notes besides that Ovid’s version (the most popular version of the myth) does not mention the name of the woman. This is why she concludes: “the reference to the sculptor in love with his work does not appear to me to clarify Proust’s text.”154
If it is not to Pygmalion that the name Galatea refers, to what then? Relying on Compagnon, Miguet-Ollagnier expresses the opinion that it is the sea-nymph loved by Polyphemus, the son of Poseidon. This nymph is moreover the subject of a picture by Gustave Moreau: Galatea Asleep. According to the critic, this Galatea fits better in the frame of the Search since the context of the reference to the mythological figure also deals with sleep. Whatever the truth of the matter, Galatea is a mythological character who serves to link the invert to classical myth.
It’s terrible, vice has become an exact science!154
From the beginning, Marcel shows the reader that he is not writing myth but science. He does this simply by setting the myths of homosexuality in parallel with the scientific observation of the fertilization of the orchid. As the Protagonist wants to tell the truth about inversion, he does not content himself with turning the phenomenon into myth. Therefore, the Protagonist will not be the focus of this section: we will begin with the idea that it is the author who gathered the information and who has then transmitted his knowledge to the Protagonist.
In order to represent the homosexual world correctly, Proust turns to the scientific knowledge of the epoch. However, it is not only the desire for truth that leads the author to look to science. Proust was simply in the habit of researching a subject well before treating it (cf. 1.2 Homosexuality from the scientific point of view). Undoubtedly, the author’s father and brother also played an important role in the scientific basis of the theory of inversion since they were both famous doctors and since Proust was very subject to family influence. Add to this that Proust was probably aware that he would run counter to public opinion if he did not show the knowledge of the period. We have seen under the point 2.1.1.1 Before the Prix Goncourt that Proust was afraid of putting inversion centre stage. It could be therefore that the author depended on science as a measure of security: if he recounted what the world already knew, there would perhaps be less negative reaction.
Before moving on to the analysis of the scientific knowledge that Proust used in the Search, we mention that this starting point did not prevent Marcel from poking fun at the medical, scientific approach to homosexuality. Consider, for example, the following passage:
But Cottard, who had never allowed the Baron to see that he had so much as heard the vaguest rumours as to his morals, but nevertheless regarded him in his private judgment as one of the class of “abnormals” (indeed, with his habitual inaccuracy in the choice of terms, and in the most serious tone, he said of one of M. Verdurin’s footmen: “Isn’t he the Baron’s mistress?”), persons of whom he had little personal experience, imagined that this stroking of his hand was the immediate prelude to an act of violence in anticipation of which, the duel being a mere pretext, he had been enticed into a trap and led by the Baron into this remote apartment where he was about to be forcibly outraged. Not daring to stir from his chair, to which fear kept him glued, he rolled his eyes in terror, as though he had fallen into the hands of a savage who, for all he could tell, fed upon human flesh.156
According to Rivers, a similar satirical remark fits in with the dual approach that is typical of the Search: on one hand, the whole theory of inversion is influenced by medicine; on the other, the medical lore is derided. Everything is thus relative (cf. the perspectivism of Nietzsche).
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, the description of inversion is intimately bound to botany. Like a true botanist, Marcel describes the fertilization of an orchid (Jupien) by a bumblebee (Charlus). The Protagonist adopts an objective, scientific attitude before the phenomenon (or phenomena)157 or, to return to the words of Rivers: “The narrator watches Charlus and Jupien in the same way that a naturalist would study plant life.”158 Miguet-Ollagnier agrees with this idea and suggests that Marcel “has a purely scientific curiosity about Sodom.”159 In order to present a Protagonist with such a point of view, Proust makes use of many sources. We look at these in this section
· Darwin
There is no proof that Proust ever read
In this respect the race of inverts, who eagerly connect themselves with Oriental antiquity or the Golden Age of Greece, might be traced back farther still, to those experimental epochs in which there existed neither dioecious plants nor monosexual animals, to that initial hermaphroditism.”164
The critic insists on the ancestral aspect of homosexuality: the passage we have just cited puts the accent on the hermaphroditism165 of the ancestors of inverts, a Darwinian concept.
According to Compagnon, “all Proust’s knowledge of the fertilization of orchids by insects rests on the preface, where Professor Coutance summarizes the work of Darwin…, Des effets de la fécondation croisée et de la fécondation directe dans le règne végétal [The effects of cross-fertilization and direct fertilization in the vegetable kingdom].”166 Compagnon bases this proposition on a sentence which was not repeated in the “definitive” version of the Search. In Cahier I of the manuscript, he found the following words:
Certainly, I could not forget the ridiculous attitude, the affectations and the goings-on of Jupien when he had caught sight of M. de Charlus and standing in front of his shop had appeared to say to him (like “the poor flower to the gorgeous butterfly” and forgetting that they were “both flowers”): “don’t fly away.”167
Compagnon notes that these lines appear also in Coutance. Besides, Eells informs us, it was Coutance who “established an explicit parallel between floral and human sexuality,”168 a parallel omnipresent in Sodom and Gomorrah I, as we will see later in this work when we develop the botanical metaphor.
The critics are in agreement in saying that the word “beauty,” which reappears many times in Sodom and Gomorrah I, also hides a Darwinian influence. Look for example at the following extract, which manifestly beautifies the meeting of Charlus and Jupien:
M. de Charlus had distracted me from looking to see whether the bee was bringing to the orchid the pollen it had so long been waiting to receive, and had no chance of receiving save by an accident so unlikely that one might call it a sort of miracle. But this was a miracle also that I had just witnessed almost of the same order and no less marvelous. As soon as I had considered their meeting from this point of view, everything about it seemed to me instinct with beauty.”169
We conclude with Eells that Proust informed
himself well in order to elaborate a botanical metaphor (vide infra). As
we have just shown, certain elements support the hypothesis that the author
would have depended on
I found the pantomime, incomprehensible to me at first, of Jupien and M. de Charlus as curious as those seductive gestures addressed, Darwin tells us, to insects not only by the flowers called composite which erect the florets of their capitals so as to be seen from a greater distance, such as a certain heterostyle which turns back its stamens and bends them to open the way for the insect, or offers him an ablution, or, to take an immediate instance, the nectar-fragrance and vivid hue of the corollae that were at that moment attracting insects to our courtyard.170
· Sexologists of the era: Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing
In the first chapter, we clarified the different theories of inversion in force during Proust’s era. It remains to be seen whether and how Proust integrated them into his work – a question we hope to resolve here.
We concentrate first on Ulrichs. Rivers begins by reporting that Ulrichs formulated the most generally accepted theory of inversion of Proust’s day. Relying on numerous indications that Proust knew the scientist’s ideas, Rivers adds: “Proust…was aware that there was more than one way of understanding homosexuality. But…he had decided…that the most widely accepted theory…was also the true one.”171 As we will see later in this section, there are critics who are not entirely in agreement with this point of view.
We examine first, with
…what he made me suddenly think of, so far had he momentarily assumed her features, expression, smile, was a woman…. I now understood, moreover, why earlier in the day, when I had seen him coming away from Mme. De Villeparisis’s, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!172
Add yet another extract from the Search, qualified by Cairns as a “clear reflection of the theory of Ulrichs”173: “the woman whom a mistake on the part of Nature had enshrined in the body of M. de Charlus.”174
Another sign of the influence of Ulrichs is the pathological framework of inversion (vide supra) which appears in the Search. First of all, there are numerous references to the inheritance of homosexuality (vide supra):
…it would not be M. de Charlus that we ought to style a Guermantes marked with a blemish and expressing it to a certain extent by means of traits peculiar to the Guermantes race, but the Duc de Guermantes who would be in a perverted family the exceptional example, whom the hereditary malady has so effectively spared that the outward signs which it has left upon him lose all their meaning.175
Rivers also notes the inheritance of homosexuality. His argument rests on the fact that inverts constitute a “race” – an argument refuted by Eribon:
The notion of “race” in Proust does not always have a biological connotation. If he sometimes describes homosexuality quasi-physiologically in terms of an error of nature which places the soul of a woman in the body of a man, he uses also the notion of “race” as a metaphor to describe as a product of history the “collective” formed by homosexuals.176
Heredity permits us to revisit the theory of inversion constructed by Krafft-Ebing, to whose influence we will return in a moment.
Cairns cites also comparisons with illness as indications of a pathological framework: “their love… springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady.”177
We note also that inverts in the Search do not care to make friends with other inverts. They go in search of a heterosexual man. The Ulrichs influence resonates here clearly.
Before moving on to the influence of Krafft-Ebing, we note that it is Eribon who crowns it all: he analyzes the theory of inversion as it appears in the Search as a function of Ulrichs’s ideas. The critic reasons as follows: there exists an interior inversion – homosexuality as we know it – and an exterior inversion – what we today call ‘transvestitism,” which can develop equally among homosexuals and among heterosexuals. Although the two orders are never completely separate, they are logically contradictory:
…if the homosexual is an “invert” in the sense of an interior inversion, that is, if he is in fact a “woman” in a man’s body, it is not possible to impute to him at the same time an inversion of the object of desire and to consider him as a man who, instead of being attracted by women, is attracted by men.”178
The conclusion imposed is essentially that there is no such thing as a homosexual since it is a matter of love not for the same sex or the same gender but rather for the other gender: if the so-called homosexual is basically a woman, as Eribon says, it is hardly astonishing that this being should be attracted by a man. At that moment, it will amount to an attraction that could qualify as heterosexual. It is only an illusion that the invert loves the same sex and, in the Sketches for the Search, Marcel is conscious of it: “A homosexual, that would be someone who pretends to be, who in good faith imagines himself to be, an invert.”179 Ladenson concludes: “homosexuality, in this view, is nothing but a chimerical rationalization on the part of the invert, a self-invention designed to preserve the illusion of masculinity.”180 It is their fundamental femininity that makes them desire not their equals (women) but their opposites (men). Thus, one is a long way from homosexuality. This is why we ask ourselves what purpose is served by this work if there is no such thing as homosexuality. Eribon remarks that one should not jump to conclusions. Homosexuality is reintroduced in the work, but on a different level: if inverts want to find a partner, they are obliged to turn toward other inverts (“real men” are obviously unable to respond to the feelings of love of inverts). In this fashion, homosexual practice comes back into play. We will return to this matter.
Krafft-Ebing probably influenced Proust equally. To start, we note that the scientist considers homosexuality “a degenerative phenomenon.”181 Compagnon points out that this is not the case for Marcel:
Here we have come to see in the inversion of Charlus the product of heredity at work for many centuries. But this heredity is conceived of not as degeneration but rather as resurrection, and this shift, compared with its medical or with its literary expression, as in Zola, is enough to explain Proust’s rejection of the German term homosexuality, which he used in the pre-war drafts, in favor of the term inversion.”182
Marcel does not conceive of homosexuality as hereditary, and thus not as degeneracy. In noting this, the reader understands that we have here a refutation of Krafft-Ebing.
We have already spoken of the hereditary aspect of homosexuality, linking it to Ulrichs. Compared to Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing adds another aspect: according to him, the man who carries within him the hereditary element of inversion will not “become” homosexual until he finds himself in a situation favourable to the “development” of love for the same sex (cf. 1.2.1 Ulrichs). According to Rivers, this theory is illustrated in the Search by the following speech about Mlle Vinteuil:183
…one of those situations which are wrongly supposed to occur in Bohemian circles only; for they are produced whenever there needs to establish itself in the security necessary to its development a vice which Nature herself has planted in the soul of a child, perhaps by no more than blending the virtues of its father and mother, as she might blend the colours of their eyes.184
As a last indication of the possible influence of Krafft-Ebing on Proust, we return to the question of whether homosexuality is or is not innate (vide supra). In the first chapter of this work (1.2.2 Krafft-Ebing), we explained that the scientist was of the opinion that the invert carries within himself “memories” of the feminine sex. Proust puts comparable words in the mouth of Marcel: “But it is enough that they do not belong to the female sex, of which they have in them an embryo.”185
Thus, the theory of inversion in the Search would have been founded on the ideas about the phenomenon prevailing at the time – a conclusion disputed by Zéphir: “Proust does not appear to have completely followed the current of ideas in vogue in his time.”186
In Sodom and Gomorrah I, Marcel makes use of metaphoric language to describe the meeting between Charlus and Jupien. In this part, we will examine only the metaphors presented in the first part of Sodom and Gomorrah.
As we have seen under point B. An outline with a dual basis, there are elements that indicate that Proust read Coutance’s preface. We have already said that this preface raises an “explicit parallel between floral and human sexuality.”187 In Sodom and Gomorrah I, this is also the case. By means of the botanical metaphor, homosexuals are compared to flowers; Compagnon speaks of the “botanical metaphor around which the ‘race de tantes’ [queens] is developed.”188 The examples are many in Sodom and Gomorrah I. Consider the following extract:
Meanwhile Jupien…had – in perfect symmetry with the Baron – posed himself with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee.189
Inverts are not compared to just any flower but only to hermaphroditic flowers (which possess both sexes) such as the orchid,190 the lythrum salicoria or the primula veris:
…and, that the flower may be kept free for the pollen which it needs, which can fructify only in itself, makes it secrete a liquid which renders it immune to all other pollens – seemed to me no more marvellous than the existence of the subvariety of inverts destined to guarantee the pleasures of love to the invert who is growing old: men who are attracted not by all other men, but – by a phenomenon of correspondence and harmony similar to those that precede the fertilisation of heterostyle trimorphous flowers like the lythium salicoria – only by men considerably older than themselves. Of this subvariety Jupien had just furnished me with an example less striking however than certain others, which every collector of a human herbary, every moral botanist can observe in spite of their rarity, and which will present to the eye a delicate youth who is waiting for the advance of a robust and paunchy quinquagenarian, remaining as indifferent to those of other young men as the hermaphrodite flowers of the short-styled primula veris so long as they are fertilised only by other primula veris with the long styles.191
Marcel himself underlines the presence of a botanical metaphor:
I had lost sight of the bee. I did not know whether he was the insect that the orchid needed, but I had no longer any doubt, in the case of an extremely rare insect and a captive flower, of the miraculous possibility of their conjunction when M. de Charlus (this is simply a comparison of providential hazards, whatever they may be, without the slightest scientific claim to establish a relation between certain laws and what is sometimes, most ineptly, termed homosexuality).192
He reinforced it by saying that inverts have “relations which flourish only by virtue of a lie”193
According to Ton-That, the botanical metaphor functions in a reciprocal way: it not only assimilates some human beings into the vegetable kingdom but also personifies some botanical elements – a proposition that rests on the following passage:
…similarly, the female flower that stood here, if the insect came, would coquettishly arch her styles, and, to be more effectively penetrated by him, would imperceptibly advance, like a hypocritical but ardent damsel, to meet him half-way.194
It remains to be seen what affect was intended by the creation of this botanical metaphor. Ton-That comments on the double function of the flower: on one hand, it is a “means to create a metaphor out of the unnamable and the reason for the secret”;195 on the other hand, it deflects attention in order to mask a “fault.”196 The flower hides the so-called indecency, as it would be in this case, of homosexuality. Nevertheless, this is not to say that the botanical metaphor serves to condemn inversion. On the contrary: Viers notes that Marcel “searches the vegetable kingdom … for proof that homosexuality exists in nature.”197 Viers here touches on an important element in the Search, “one of the leading themes of the first part of Sodom and Gomorrah”:198 nature. Consider the following extract:
Whatever the point might be that held M. de Charlus and the ex-tailor thus arrested, their pact seemed concluded and these superfluous glances to be but ritual preliminaries, like the parties that people give before a marriage which has been definitely ‘arranged.’ Nearer still to nature – and the multiplicity of these analogies is itself all the more natural in that the same man, if we examine him for a few minutes, appears in turn as a man, a man-bird or man-insect, and so forth – one would have called them a pair of birds, the male and the female, the male seeking to make advance, the female – Jupien – no longer giving any sign of response to these overtures, but regarding her new friend without surprise, with an inattentive fixity of gaze, which she doubtless felt to be more disturbing and the only effective method, once the male had taken the first steps, and had fallen back upon preening his feathers.199
This passage seems to confirm the thesis of Viers (Marcel relies on nature to prove the natural side of inversion and insists on the two sexes), but it is otherwise construed by Kristeva. She notes the tortuous character of the botanical metaphor that arises from the two constituents (a male and a female element) that are hidden behind the unified appearance of each sex. She concludes: “Medusa, orchid, man or woman, Proust says in effect, we are all bisexual.” This contention is confirmed by the following passage, which definitely places in parallel the animal, the vegetable and the man.201
Medusa! Orchid! When I followed my instinct only, the medusa used to revolt me at Balbec; but if I had the eyes to regard it, like Michelet,202 from the standpoint of natural history, and aesthetic, I saw an exquisite wheel of azure flame. Are they not, with the transparent velvet of their petals, as it were the mauve orchids of the sea? Like so many creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, like the plant which would produce vanilla but, because of its structure the male organ is divided by a partition from the female, remains sterile unless the humming-birds or certain tiny bees convey the pollen from one to the other, or man fertilises them by artificial means, M. de Charlus (and here the word fertilise must be understood in a moral sense…)203
We return to the notion of “nature” with Muller, who explains that nature hides a great complexity in the Search. For the reasoning that will follow, Muller’s argument rests on a single sentence:
This scene was not, however, positively comic, it was stamped with a strangeness, or if you like, a naturalness, the beauty of which steadily increased.204
To begin with, there is a connection between nature and naturalism. The critics agree in saying that Marcel observes and describes like a naturalist the fertilization of the flower (Jupien) by the bumblebee (the Baron de Charlus). Kristeva points out the driving force of the bee, which, “playing on the divisions within the flowers, which, for all its nescience, it is not unaware of” the bee flies from flower to flowers and achieves their union. Without the bee, there would be no fertilization, whether moral (homosexuality) or genital.
Muller develops next a second meaning of nature, namely the physis or the natural. In being contrasted thus with the artificial, the botanical metaphor of inversion has the effect that “the homosexual, in this perspective, is promoted to the level of ‘natural’ being, because he is at odds with the majority of his fellows.”206 The comparison of homosexuality to botanical fertilization places the accent on the vitality of the invert – vitality being an emblem of the natural creature because it is consistent with the human will to enter into contact. It is this meaning of the concept of ‘nature’ that permits Muller to explain Marcel’s phrase (“a strangeness, or if you like, a naturalness”207): in reversing the positions of heterosexuals and homosexuals (the latter become “natural”), the botanical metaphor makes the homosexual “see himself granted the supreme naturalization; anti-physis becomes true physis.”208 This thesis is largely contradicted by Compagnon. According to him, nature is “neither God nor the Devil for Proust”209: because of the “neutral” position of nature (it is neither good nor bad), it does not justify love of the same sex, nor does it generate the “naturalization” of homosexuality.
As the other metaphors (the animal/gastronomic metaphor, the linguistic metaphor, the metaphor of pregnancy and the Jewish metaphor) lie outside the limits of Sodom and Gomorrah I, we have chosen to analyze them in a later section of this work (2.2.1.2 Metaphors).
In Sodom and Gomorrah I homosexuality is rendered with many references to English literature, most particularly to the works of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. Oscar Wilde also receives attention. Needless to say, many works of these writers touch on androgyny.
In this part, we look more closely at the
references to English literature. We impose two limits: that they should be
refer to English literature alone, and that they should occur only in
First of all, Shakespeare. This English writer is invoked for the first time to explain the disappointment felt by women in love with an invert when they discover that, at heart, he is a woman:
The young man whom we have been attempting
to portray was so evidently a woman that the women who looked upon him with
longing were doomed (failing a special taste on their part) to the same
disappointment as those who in Shakespeare’s comedies are taken in by a girl in
disguise who passes as a youth. The deception is mutual, the invert is himself
aware of it, he guesses the disillusionment which, once the mask is removed,
the woman will experience, and feels to what extent this mistake as to sex is a
source of poetical imaginings.212
The passage cited alludes to the custom of the time, in the theatres for which Shakespeare’s works were written, of casting men or boys in all female roles, since women were not permitted to be professional actors. Thanks to the many androgynous characters (for example, in As You Like It) the actors could play the role of their own sex, for female characters often dressed as men.
Another reference to the English author lies in the two allusions to Romeo and Juliette. Look first at this passage:
For men like M. de Charlus (leaving out of account the compromises which will appear in the course of this story and which the reader may already have foreseen, enforced by the need of pleasure which resigns itself to partial acceptations) mutual love, apart from the difficulties, so great as to be almost insurmountable, which it meets in the ordinary man, adds to these others so exceptional that what is always extremely rare for everyone becomes in their case well nigh impossible, and, if there should befall them an encounter which is really fortunate, or which nature makes appear so to them, their good fortune, far more than that of the normal lover, has about it something extraordinary, selective, profoundly necessary. The feud of the Capulets and Montagues was as nothing compared with the obstacles of every sort which must have been surmounted…; this Romeo and this Juliette may believe with good reason that their love is not the caprice of the moment but a true predestination, prepared by the harmonies of their temperaments.”213
This allusion to Romeo and Juliette accentuates the social disapprobation from which Shakespeare’s couple suffer equally with Charlus and Jupien214 – and all homosexual couples. In speaking of the “obstacles of every sort which must have been surmounted,” this allusion to Shakespeare’s work recounts equally how difficult it is for the invert to meet the man of his life and to be happy. Or, to return to the words of Dubois: “the idea is that the obstacles and difficulties that hinder [homosexual meetings] are so tenacious that harmonious conjunction is even more improbable than between heterosexual partners.”215
We move on now to a reference to Sir Walter
Scott:
How should he suppose that he is not like everybody else when he recognises the substance of what he feels on reading Mme. De Lafayette, Racine, Baudelaire, Walter Scott, at a time when he is still too little capable of observing himself to take into account what he has added from his own store to the picture, and that if the sentiment be the same the object differs, that what he desires is Rob Roy, and not Diana Vernon?216
Eells points out that this allusion to Scott’s book (Rob Roy) is due to the ambiguous character of the heroine Diana Vernon: she often disguises herself as a man and acts accordingly. She pushes the man who marries her at the end of the novel to call her Tom and to talk to her in the same way as he converses with his friends. In evoking Scott and his book, Marcel once more places the emphasis on sexual instability.
Oscar Wilde is also present in Sodom and Gomorrah I, although this occurs only through an oblique allusion: Marcel introduces the English writer while referring abstractly to the trial and condemnation occasioned by Wilde’s homosexuality. Here is what the Protagonist writes:
Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: “The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!”217
Metaphor is for Proust an instrument of metamorphosis… It is “a myth in miniature.”218
Since this metaphor emerges above all in Sodom
and Gomorrah I, we have explained it under the point 2.2.1 General
introduction: Sodom and Gomorrah I.
It is in Eribon that we find the point of departure that permits us to speak of an “animal metaphor”: “[inverts] are all snails!”219 Homosexuals are compared to animals, and most particularly to mollusks, known to be hermaphroditic animals. Even if the perspective is different, one finds a thematic analog in Schuerewegen. We observe however the difference between the compared and the comparer which this theory contains, in contrast to that of Eribon: the manner in which Marcel sees inverts is compared to their taste for oysters. Analyzing the Sketches for the Search, Schuerewegen notes that, in the beginning, the young Marcel did not really like oysters, but he ended up conquering this distaste: “The oysterphobe has become an oysterphile.”220 A similar evolution appears to have been accomplished in regard to Marcel’s position on homosexuals. This is what Muller also claims: Charlus would be described at first in negative terms (Marcel says for example that the voice, the attitude … of monsieur de Charlus, “everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent”221) after which the Protagonist accords him positive descriptions. This is because Marcel moves from a state on incomprehension to that of comprehension:
From the beginning of this scene a revolution, in my unsealed eyes, had occurred in M. de Charlus, as complete, as immediate as if he had been touched by a magician’s wand. Until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen. The vice (we use the word for convenience only), the vice of each of us accompanies him through life after the manner of the familiar genius who was invisible to men so long as they were unaware of his presence. Our goodness, our meanness, our name, our social relations do not disclose themselves to the eye, we carry them hidden within us. Even Ulysses did not at once recognise Athena.222
The analogy with the analysis of Schuerewegen, who notices that the Search seems to suggest an evolution, “a progress toward a higher level, an apprenticeship, if you like,”223 is tidy. As much in the (dis)taste for oysters as in the position regarding homosexuality, there is an evolution toward a “plus,” which, in the second case, will be the acceptance of love of the same sex. Schuerewegen concludes: “One can surmount homosexuality in the same way as one can overcome a food aversion. Learning to eat oysters or becoming hetero, in short, is accomplished in the same fashion, Proust suggests.224
Staying on the culinary side, “the gay oysters of Monsieur Marcel” allow advance from the animal metaphor to the gastronomic metaphor. We move straight on to dessert with the petite madeleine, dunked in tea. Hayes offers us the homosexual connotation of the act of dipping a cookie in a cup of tea. He notes at the beginning of his article “Proust in the Tearoom”225 the following slang terms:
|
Cup |
Public urinal. One sometimes says “teacup.” Synonym: teapot |
|
Tea – to take tea |
To copulate, notably among homosexuals |
|
Teapot |
Public urinal (frequented by homosexuals) |
If one knows the homosexual connotation of “taking tea,” every episode in which the characters go to take tea is suspect. Consider the following passage for example:
It often happened that I met in the courtyard as I came away from her door M. de Charlus and Morel on their way to take tea at Jupien’s, a supreme favour for the Baron. I did not encounter them every day but they went there every day. Here we may perhaps remark that the regularity of a habit is generally in proportion to its absurdity… Vices are another aspect of these monotonous existences which the exercise of will power would suffice to render less painful. These two aspects might be observed simultaneously when M. de Charlus came every day with Morel to take tea at Jupien’s.226
If it were a simple matter of “paying a visit” where would the homosexual connotation come into play? The reader can only guess, since the narrator does not display it in the open (consciously or unconsciously? This is a question we will attempt to resolve under the point 4.1.1 Marcel). These are not the only questions to be asked. Here is the next problem: what to make of the episode of the petite madeleine? Hayes remarks: “If in the rest of the novel prendre le thé can mean ‘to have homosex,’ the Madeleine cannot be spared this possibility.”227 Look now at the madeleine scene:
She sent out for one of those short, plump little cakes called “petites madeleines,” which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim’s shell. And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal. Whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?228
The critics are agreed about the erotic pleasure that the taste of the madeleine provokes,229 but they do not all proceed by way of the homosexual connotation of the cookie soaked in tea. Erman, for example, says that the link between the pleasure of the madeleine and erotic pleasure is due to the visual aspect: “The oral and the visual sustain each other, they call to each other. This is how the description of the petite madeleine unites the gustatory and the corporeal words: plump, valve, shell, fat, sensual, these serve to represent Albertine’s stomach. This relation of equivalence established between the cake and the female sex leads to the confounding of alimentary and sexual activities.”230 It remains to be seen whether these are hetero- or homosexual activities. The critics diverge, but since this question affects the sexual identity of the narrator, we will develop it under the point 4.1.1.Marcel.
Now the abstraction had become materialised, the creature at last discerned had lost its power of remaining invisible, and the transformation of M. de Charlus into a new person was so complete that … everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible, brought itself into evidence, just as a sentence which presents no meaning so long as it remains broken up in letters scattered at random upon a table, expresses, if there letters be rearranged in the proper order, a though which one can never afterwards forget.231
During the development of the animal/gastronomic metaphor, we saw the difficulty with the expression “to take tea.” In order to clarify homosexual language, we consider here the linguistic metaphor.
Bem links homosexuality to a linguistic metaphor, relying upon a double argument. First, there is the longest sentence in the Search (1500 words), which appears in Sodom and Gomorrah I and which speaks of homosexuality.232 Besides, everything will come from and return to writing in the Search – an idea which approaches the following thesis of Schehr, who notes: “The act of interpretation of the narrator is the written equivalent of the sex act.”233 Thus, “the homosexual ‘revolution’ finds…its linguistic metaphor.”234 The linguistic metaphor is rooted in the fact that homosexuality is a language that sees itself obliged to “change the gender of many of the words in their vocabulary”235 – a theoretical idea which is put in practice in the Search. Look for example at the following passage:
[M. de Vagoubert] gave feminine endings to all the masculine words … “That little telegraph messenger,” he said, nudging the disgusted Baron with his elbow, “I used to know her, but she’s turned respectable, the wretch! Oh, that messenger from the Galeries Lafayette, what a dream! Good God, there’s the head of the Commercial Department. I hope he didn’t notice anything. He’s quite capable of mentioning it to the Minister, who would put me on the retired list, all the more as, it appears, he’s so himself.”236
The letter of the actress Léa to Morel is another example: “…we may mention that Léa addressed him throughout in the feminine gender, with such expressions as: ‘Go on, you bad woman!’ or “Of course you are so, my pretty, you know you are.”237 Homosexuals would thus have their own language, an idea shared by Eells. According to her, the “men-women” use a language characterized by the personal pronoun that epitomizes sexual ambiguity, namely “one.” This is why Eells speaks of “ondrogyny.”238 What is remarkable, according to Eells, is that Sodom and Gomorrah I opens with the indefinite personal pronoun “One knows that well before…”239 Eells concludes: “One could make a Proustian formula according to which ‘un’ and ‘une’ make ‘on.’”240
It is clear that, if one wants to understand people speaking their own language, it is necessary to form an idea of that language. In other words, one must “be so,” an expression with a homosexual connotation in Proust.241 Consider for a start what it means, exactly:
What most disturbed the Baron was the word “so.” Ignorant at first of its application, he had eventually, at a time already remote in the past, learned that he himself was “so.” And now the notion that he had acquired of this word was again put to the challenge. When he had discovered that he was “so,” he had supposed this to mean that his tastes, as Saint-Simon says, did not lie in the direction of women. And here was this word “so” applied to Morel with an extension of meaning of which M. de Charlus was unaware, so much so that Morel gave proof, according to this letter, of his being “so” by having the same taste as certain women for other women….So that the people who were “so” were not merely those that he had supposed to be “so,” but a whole and vast section of the inhabitants of the planet, consisting of women as well as men, loving not merely men but women also….242
According to Hayes, homosexuals have a particular language – a “language code”243 as Kristeva tells us – in order to recognize each other.244 Van de Ghinste245 pushes this “homo language” to the point of being a system of signs.246 He bases his argument on the following words in the Search: “the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs.247 Nevertheless, the system is not foolproof: from time to time those who are not “so” succeed in penetrating the secret whence comes the continual fear of gays of being stripped bare. The turn of a phrase could lead to confusion. Think for example of Charlus, who fears the betrayal of the secret of his homosexuality when Verdurin uses the expression. Verdurin gives the expression the sense of “belonging to an esthetic elite” while Charlus interprets it as referring to his homosexual nature:
But first of all [M. Verdurin] was anxious to make it clear to M. de Charlus that intellectually he esteemed him too highly to suppose that he could pay any attention to these trivialities. “…the people who are really of our sort, don’t give a rap for them. Now from the first words we exchanged, I realised that you were one of us!.” M. de Charlus, who gave a widely different meaning to this expression, drew himself erect…he found his host’s insulting frankness suffocating. “Don’t protest, my dear Sir, you are one of us, it is plain as daylight,” replied M. Verdurin. “Observe that I have no idea whether you practise any of the arts, but that is not necessary. …Dechambre, who has just died, played exquisitely, with the most vigourous execution, but he was not one of us, you felt at once that he was not one of us. Brichot is not one of us. Morel is, my wife is, I can feel that you are…” – “What were you going to tell me?” interrupted M. de Charlus, who was beginning to feel reassured as to M. Verdurin’s meaning, but preferred that he should not utter these misleading remarks quite so loud.248 [Tr. note: Scott Moncrieff translates the particle “en” as “one of us” even though he would later translate it, in a similar usage, as “so,” as in the passage from The Captive cited above {Note 242}. The point of this passage is thus somewhat obscured by Moncrieff’s overly helpful translation.]
Bem does not agree with the thesis crediting homosexuals with a special language. According to her, “homosexuality does not have its own speech.”249 Rather, the so-called homosexual language cannot manifest itself except to the detriment of another: that of the Jews. The critic relies on many Racine quotations in explaining this thesis. We develop the link between homosexuality and Jewishness later in this work.
We note further that Proust had introduced the linguistic metaphor of homosexuals quite simply once he opted for the term “inversion” when referring to homosexuality, a term also in use in linguistics.250 The link with Barthes is not far off. He speaks of textual inversion: in the beginning, many characters are (apparently) heterosexual whereas they reveal themselves as homosexual later. We will return to this matter later in this work.
For Bem, it is only a small step from the linguistic metaphor to that of pregnancy, since the latter constitutes a doubling of the former. Bem bases her argument on the following passage:
Until that moment, I had been, in the presence of M. de Charlus, in the position of an absent-minded man who, standing before a pregnant woman whose distended outline he has failed to remark, persists, while she smilingly reiterates: “Yes, I am a little tired just now,” in asking her indiscreetly: “Why, what is the matter with you?” But let some one say to him: “She is expecting a child,” suddenly he catches sight of her abdomen and ceases to see anything else. …everything…became intelligible.”251
According to Bem, pregnancy refers in this context to the invert who is pregnant with meaning. The homosexual is thus big, pregnant, just as the writer is “pregnant with his book, nourishes it as the grain nourishes the embryo of the plant, as the mother nourishes the infant.”252 Kristeva adds to this explanation yet another: according to her, the pregnancy metaphor “designates a secret, evident even as it is being concealed, that of the invert.”253
Compagnon does not compare the pregnancy
metaphor to the linguistic metaphor, but to the hereditary and pathological
aspect of inversion (cf. 2.2.1
It is not a question of describing the sociological reality of a Jew or his community, nor even of mastering the psychological reality of the invert. In knocking together the two marginalities, in piling up the criticism and the gossip with which they are enveloped by “good society,” Proust turns the calumny upon its source.255
Homosexuals are not the only “repressed people” to figure in the Search: the Jews are also present. The two “races” are often mentioned in the same breath in the Search. The how and why will be examined here.
We begin with the following question: do sodomites and Jews have something in common? In Against Sainte-Beuve, Proust writes that there is an anti-Semite in every Jew, just as there is a homophobe in every homosexual. Kristeva suggests a convergence when she says that Jews and homosexuals are both victims of an intolerant norm (cf. the condemnation of homosexuality we examined under 2.2.1.1.2 The theory of inversion). Bem also points to a similarity: Jews and homosexuals are prey to a similar persecution. Rivers evokes the same idea, but he does not stop at persecution. According to him, Marcel tries to show that their reactions to the persecution also resemble each other. Diamant subscribes to the same theme and refers to the following words, that say that sodomites constitute a “race upon which a curse weighs and which must live amid falsehood and perjury” because of a “persecution similar to that of Israel.”256 Diamant uses the term “assimilation.”257 Mingelgrün starts with the same idea, adding that the presence of Vigny in the Search reinforces the link between the invert and the Jew (cf. 2.2.1.1.1 Title, summary, epigraph). Compagnon points out that the application to sodomites of a sentence from Genesis about the Jews (“If a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered”258) connects Jews and homosexuals, while Leriche argues that the two groups suffer from a physiological problem not approved of by society: “Even though innocent from the metaphysical point of view, the invert rejected by moral norms must feel guilty. Like the Jews.”259 Bem points to a similarity between the two in saying that the homosexual is the alter ego of the Jew. However, the term used by Bem seems rather strong if one takes into consideration the following remark by Diamant:
The similarity between Jews and homosexuals is thus clearly established, but on a rather superficial level, and it breaks down almost immediately. The narrator may consider Jews and homosexuals a race, but the latter pay allegiance to Sodom – the city of sin destroyed because it did not follow the commands of the Hebrew God. There cannot be an identity between the two groups; on the contrary, the inhabitants of Sodom are “other” to the Jews.260
Nevertheless, this does not prevent the comparison of the two groups, according to the critic, because the Search introduces the figure of a mediator, a bridge between the two: Abraham. To arrive at this thesis, Diamant begins with the following passage:
It was impossible for me to thank my father; what he called my sentimentality would have exasperated him. I stood there, not daring to move; he was still confronting us, an immense figure in his white nightshirt, crowned with the pink and violet scarf of Indian cashmere in which, since he had begun to suffer from neuralgia, he used to tie up his head, standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli261 which M. Swann had given me, telling Sarah that she must tear herself away from Isaac.262
Starting with this extract, Diamant accords two aspects to the paternal figure. On one hand, the father is described like a woman. The critic deduces this from the fact that he wears a nightdress – this is perhaps to overinterpret the text – and because he wears a cashmere scarf on his head, which would be typically feminine. On the other hand, the father is compared to Abraham. It is the context of this comparison that leads Diamant to the Jews: the quoted passage alludes to the offer Abraham made, to show God his deep fidelity. Sarah, his wife, takes leave of Isaac because God has commanded her husband to kill his son as proof of his devotion. Abraham is ready to do the deed when God stops him: it was not necessary to kill his son because he had passed the test. As a sign of joy, Isaac is circumcised – circumcision being the symbol of being chosen. In characterizing the two elements we have just explained, the father joins inversion and Judaism together. In the course of the Search, he is not the only mediator character: the Baron de Charlus, in the flogging scene (cf. 3.1.3 The flogging scene), who is connected to the biblical episode which we have just explained, and Swann, whose liaison with Odette could be read as a version of the biblical episode in question, are given the same function since they are equally related to Abraham, the fundamental mediator.
While Diamant rests her thesis on the
intermediary figures of the novel, Bem starts from the idea that the Search
separates homosexuality and Judaism by a blocking character: “Marcel is the
guardian of the gap.”263 The meeting between a Jew and a homosexual
creates “a drama of proximity”264 which expressed itself in the
words “What sacrilege!”265 Or to cite Kristeva: “Sodom and Zion
contaminate each other and mix with each other, to the extent that one could
find entanglement as much as unbearable hostility.”266 Marcel fogs
and softens “anti-Jew” speech. This is notable among others in the manner in
which the narrator frames the anti-Semitic words. An example: “M. de Charlus pretended
to feel contempt for Bloch.”267 Bem therefore accentuates the
language of the two groups. As we have seen under point 2.2.1.2.4 Linguistic
metaphor, homosexual speech constitutes itself by jamming Jewish speech:
since the referent of Jewish speech is destroyed, all that remains is “the code
of the difference,”268 which constitutes the basis of homosexual
speech. For Bem, it is clear: “homosexuals speak the language of Racine”269
– a thesis largely supported by Kristeva and Compagnon. The latter goes so far
as to speak of a “pederastic leitmotif of the choruses of Esther and
Athalie.”270 These words already show that the Search does
not compare just any Racine text with homosexuals – an idea confirmed by Bem.271
With Compagnon, we observe four appearances of the leitmotif that forms a whole
on three levels. We examine the four occurrences. First, quotations from Esther
are attached to the secretaries of the ambassador of X … when Charlus tells de
Vaugoubert that they belong to the “cursed race.”272 Racine appears
a second time at the Grand Hotel in Balbec where quotations from Athalie
are assigned to the young hunters of the Hotel.273 At the third
appearance, it is once more some verses of Athalie that serve, this
time, to describe the young assistant of the Hotel at Balbec.274 Racine
appears for the last time when M. de Charlus murmurs the beginning of Esther
at a dinner.275 Compagnon points out three convergences among the
four occurrences. First, it is always the Protagonist who quotes Racine and
associates the young people with the young women of the choruses of Esther
or Athalie. The fourth appearance is the exception: this time, it is
Charlus who produces Racine’s verses. Secondly, “it concerns caricature-like
homosexual pictures,” except that during the second occurrence when the
Protagonist “is alone to contemplate the exercises of the hunters, giving a
sort of objectivity to the comparison, beyond Sodom.”276 Finally,
the four appearances refer to each other, like “an extended metaphor or an allegory.”277
After having devoted these few words to the presence of Racine in the Search, we ask ourselves how the reader should interpret these allusions. Bem observes: “the reader, if he wants to fit Racine’s verses into the situation, will have to make a switch, swapping the feminine references for the masculine sex.”278 In this way, parody comes into play (Esther and Athalie are transformed into men, and more particularly into inverted men) – a parody that is characterized by Bem as “facetious or profane”279 because of the collaboration which she conceives between “Racine’s Jew and Proust’s homosexual.”280 Like Leriche (“in the desire of inverts…coveted young men are identified with the young Jewish women in the plays of Racine… profanation of the Christian religion…, but also profanation of the Jewish heritage, by transforming the Semitic affiliation into a sign of eroticism, of prostitution and of homosexuality.”281), Kristeva belongs to the same camp when she speaks of a “desanctification” of Racine’s text. The parody does not stop with Racine: during the fourth appearance, Racine is replaced by Halévy (La juive [The Jewess]), as Bem and Brun both note, taking part in the secularization of Racine’s text of which Kristeva speaks.
Following our analysis of
A second striking element is the abundant use of metaphors. Homosexuality is linked and compared to all kinds of phenomena – from nature through language to the Jews. To this is added the mythical roots of inverts. These two elements make up what Zagdanski writes:
Proust imagines – in concretely rewriting the Bible with an audacity worthy of the Talmud, mixing Eden and Sodom in a very logical manner – something that yields an inverted promised land, which would lead to a Zionist Sodom; from this he concludes that it would be the most common of capitals, “that is to say, that everything would happen just as it does in London, in Berlin, in Rome, in Petrograd or in Paris.”285
In reuniting all the elements we have just enumerated, Marcel elaborates a kind of theory of inversion. Kristeva describes it as follows:
The theory that the narrator
develops…about a homosexuality not of “custom” but diffuse, “involuntary” (like
memory), “nervous,” “something one hides from others and deceives oneself
about,” allows the idea that the narrator is a trans-sexual adept; the
membership of each individual in (at least) two sexes, and the implicit,
underlying, “involuntary” passage of each of us over the officially uncrossable
barrier of sexual difference.286
Leriche places the accent mostly on the manner in which Marcel approaches inversion. Although the phenomenon “appears little by little like a parallel network, an unsuspected social mechanism that acts silently in the wings and explains inexplicable promotions, mysterious projection, in brief, the hidden agenda,” Marcel adopts a “sociological perspective free of moral judgment.”287 The critic summarizes homosexuality in the Search as follows:
Although homosexual orientation would be, at its origin, the result of a purely biological nervous alteration, this sexuality is not represented by Proust as a simple physical pleasure, but as a mental process.288
We are dealing with a personal theory that allows a good many interpretations. It is not restricted to a narrow point of view. This means that it becomes quite complex and implies, according to Compagnon, that “the narrator demands the complicity of the reader, that is to say, precisely, that he does not pose too many questions.”289
All men should necessarily envy lesbians.290
I would suggest …that
The
Like many other men, Swann had a naturally lazy mind, and was slow in invention. He knew quite well as a general truth, that human life is full of contrasts, but in the case of any one human being he imagined all that part of his or her life with which he was not familiar as being identical to the part with which he was. He imagined what was kept secret from him in the light of what was revealed.295
So a man can never know what lesbian love is.
As Marcel is incapable of imagining Gomorrah, it is consequently impossible for him to describe feminine homosexuality adequately. The incorrect side of the image of Gomorrah sketched by Marcel is thus inherent in the masculine sex of the Protagonist: “the pleasure women experience with other women is something inconceivably different from what men know, and from what women have with men.”296 Or to return to the Protagonist’s words:
That other kind of jealousy provoked by Saint-Loup, by a young man of any sort, was nothing. I should have had at the most in that case to fear a rival over whom I should have attempted to prevail. But here the rival was not similar to myself, bore different weapons, I could not compete upon the same ground, give Albertine the same pleasures, nor indeed conceive what those pleasures might be.297
The (in)visibility of lesbianism constitutes another aspect of the representation of Gomorrah: the Protagonist is constantly seeking comprehension, but he does not achieve it because feminine homosexuality constantly escapes him. Leriche notes that Gomorrah “smugly flaunts its paradoxical invisibility.”298 This is because lesbianism must expose itself in order to be seen (“Gomorrah would be entirely invisible in the novel if it did not deliberately display itself.”299). Consider for example the genital organs: the female body shows far less than the male body. This is why Marcel, who in the Search contemplates Albertine nude, in essence sees nothing. Ladenson concludes: “she is there, in front of him, willing to take off everything, and yet he still cannot see what defines her.”300 The visibility aspect is often presented as a luminescence or “a mirror effect” – as if the Gomorrean were an extraterrestrial. This is how the Protagonist discovers that Albertine is watching two lesbians in a mirror at the Balbec casino:
As for Albertine, on sitting down to talk to me upon the sofa, she had turned her back on the disreputable pair… “But you can’t possibly tell,” I said to her, “you had your back to them.” “Very well, and what about that?” she replied, pointing out to me, set in the wall in front of us, a large mirror which I had not noticed and upon which I now realised that my friend, while talking to me, had never ceased to fix her troubled, preoccupied eyes.301
We note that it is thanks to Albertine that Marcel knows that she has seen the girls and not because he noticed it himself. This confirms what we have seen: to be seen, Gomorrah must exhibit itself voluntarily.
Marcel is under the impression that Gomorrah is a world completely apart, where the inhabitants communicate by means of light:
Often, in the hall of the casino, when two girls were smitten with mutual desire, a luminous phenomenon occurred, a sort of phosphorescent train passing from one to the other. Let us note in passing that it is by aid of such materialisations, even if they are imponderable, by these astral signs that set fire to a whole section of the atmosphere, that the scattered Gomorrah tends, in every town, in every village, to reunite its separated members, to reform the biblical city.302
On this subject, Deleuze remarks that the “astral signs”303 allow Gomorreans to recognize each other. The intensity of their “sign” makes up for the secret they keep. For a non-initiate, it is very difficult to interpret the signs correctly since they are not unequivocal: “each representation carries within it an agonizing chasm.”304 The man fearful of being wronged by his wife with a “Gomorrean” must “suspect everything, spy on her every move…”305
The Protagonist is seized with panic when the following episode unfolds:
Another incident turned my thoughts even more in the direction of Gomorrah. I had noticed upon the beach a handsome young woman, erect and pale, whose eyes, round in their centre, scattered rays so geometrically luminous that one was reminded, on meeting her gaze, of some constellation. …her eyes, more noble however than the rest of her face, could radiate nothing but appetites and desires. Well, on the following day, this young woman being seated a long way away from us in the casino, I saw that she never ceased to fasten upon Albertine the alternate, circling fires of her gaze. One would have said that she was making signals to her from a lighthouse.306
It is true that, this time, Marcel was able to intercept the luminous signals. Nevertheless, it was impossible for him to “decode” them: he would never know the final truth of Albertine’s nature.
The preceding extracts show that Gomorrah is a universe in itself, impenetrable to those who “are not so.” We will see later that, according to a good number of critics, the Protagonist does not succeed in portraying a realistic Gomorrah. The cause is to be sought now. Or, to take up again the words of Ladenson:
Gomorrah is the only example in the novel of a sexuality in control of itself and able to play with, rather than be played by, the image it projects. Lesbian sexuality thus escapes the dynamics of the closet which present Sodom as an unwitting spectacle.…Gomorrah represent precisely what [the narrator] is unable to attain: a coincidence of desire and fulfilment.307
One last facet of the representation of Gomorrah in the Search is metaphorical: the cheek equals the breast. A. Roger sees there a “metaphorical horseback ride”: the cheek functions for him as a maternal breast. To show this, he makes use of many passages that mention the breast and the cheek both at once. We limit ourselves to the following extract:
When I had in this way my mouth pressed to her cheeks, to her forehead, I drew from them something so beneficial, so nourishing, that I preserved the immobility, the seriousness, the tranquil avidity of a nursing infant.309
Roger also draws attention to the fact that each time the text mentions Gilberte’s or Albertine’s cheeks, the description could be interpreted as having dealt not with the girls’ cheeks but with their breasts.
Roger is among the critics who speak of the celebrated passage of the Incarville casino:
“There now, look,” he went on, pointing to Albertine and Andrée who were waltzing slowly, tightly clasped together, “I have left my glasses behind and I don’t see very well, but they are certainly keenly roused. It is not sufficiently known that women derive most excitement from their breasts. And theirs, as you see, are completely touching.”310
That way of waltzing (cf. “dancing cheek to cheek”) made Dr. Cottard analyze the world of Gomorrah, just as Roger does for the metaphor in question: “Is it not remarkable that the ‘forgotten’ breast is not able to insinuate itself into the network of words except under cover of a suspect sexological discourse, as if to awaken the suspicion of Gomorrah?”311 The use of the breast and the cheek in metaphor is confirmed by Silverman, who remarks that “female cheeks also represent a privileged site for voluptuous grazing.”312
The “cheeks” metaphor allows the construction of a link with a floral approach to Gomorrah: according to Ton-That, “feminine sexuality313 is associated with floral motifs”314 and this would be “the woman-flower [that] announces the girls in bloom of Balbec and the edible cheeks of Albertine.”315 As far as the flowering of homosexuality is concerned, we return to point 2.2.1.1.2 The theory of inversion. Add that Proust is not alone in comparing Gomorrah to the world of flowers: for Freud, flowers “designate the woman’s genital organs”316 according to R. Viers; Balzac (Le Lys dans la vallée) “She was…THE LILY OF THIS VALLEY”317 and Baudelaire (“To sing the secret of those blossoming virgins”318) makes the same comparison.
Lesbianism is, if not “simply” a displacement of male homosexuality, at least one more instance of things being at once precisely what they seem and their contrary.319
In this part, we examine the most important propositions dealing with the world of Gomorrah. Concerning feminine homosexuality in A la Recherche du temps perdu, the theories are for the most part convergent. The critics seen here all take the same point of departure, that of comparison with Sodom.
Kristeva proposes a double approach in asserting a parallelism between Sodom and Gomorrah320 before refuting it. She begins with the scene in the Incarville casino, where Dr. Cottard analyzes the entwined manner of waltzing of Albertine and Andrée (cf. 2.2.2.1 The representation of Gomorrah in the Search) to ask herself where such a pleasure caused by the breasts could come from. For a response, Kristeva refers back to the relation between a mother and her child – an approach supported by the following passage:
You remember my telling you about a friend older than myself, who has been a mother, a sister to me…this friend…is the dearest and most intimate friend of your Vinteuil’s daughter…I always call them my two big sisters…” At the sound of these words…an image stirred in my heart …having allowed my grandmother to die…like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a novel, terrible and merited existence, perhaps also to make dazzlingly clear to my eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions indefinitely engender, not only for those who have committed them, but for those who have done no more, have thought that they were doing no more than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle, like myself, alas, on that afternoon long ago at Montjouvain, concealed behind a bush where…I had perilously allowed to expand within myself the fatal road, destined to cause me suffering, of Knowledge…Albertine the friend of Mlle. Vinteuil and of her friend, a practising and professional Sapphist…321
This quote shows that Albertine allows a comparison of her “liaison” (the quotation marks insist on the hypothetical character of the relationship between two women) with Mlle Vinteuil to a relationship between a mother and her child. In addition, the Protagonist remembers his grandmother, whom he refers to as “an inaugurator of life.” He therefore lays stress on the maternal aspect of the grandmother, an aspect which is incidentally examined by Ladenson (vide infra). According to Leriche, the presence of the grandmother indicates the guilt of Gomorrah. Remember, in this connection, that Mlle Vinteuil’s lifestyle is said to have killed her father (cf. 3.1.1 The scene at Montjouvain).
One could suspect that Kristeva uses the element of arousal by means of the breasts to prove that Gomorrah is more pure, more innocent than Sodom. Nothing is further from the truth: the maternal breast does not function as a symbol of purity but as “betrayal of the mother.”322 Thus, Gomorrah is as vicious as Sodom, and Kristeva writes: “Sex between women is in no way innocent: Proust depicts Gomorrah as just as blasphemous and vulgar as Sodom.”323 Nevertheless, the proximity of infantile and maternal pleasure makes the “Gomorrean vice seem more innocent than the mad loves of Charlus with Jupien and Morel.”324 Dubois confirms this thesis, noting that a similar tendency shows itself many times in the work. So Sodom differs from Gomorrah. And thus a nuance intrudes, which Kristeva deepens later, remarking that Gomorrah is distinguished from Sodom by its capacity for depression (remember for example the description of a certain Mlle Vinteuil with a “weary, awkward, preoccupied, sincere, and rather sad”325). Another difference: “lesbians swing where sodomites lash.”326
As far as the non-parallelism between Sodom and Gomorrah is concerned, Kristeva gets a favorable welcome from a good number of critics. Cairns belongs clearly to this tradition: “Marcel’s treatment of same-sex love among women is certainly less inspiring and less verisimilar than his treatment of that among men.”327 Cairns attributes this less-than-credible representation of lesbians in the Search to the more developed contemporary myth of Gomorrah, compared to Sodom. She brings two elements in to explain why lesbians are so misrepresented in the work: first of all, she follows Shari Benstock, who explains “Proust’s descriptions of Gomorrah as constituting ‘a homosexual male fantasy of the homosexual female’s world’ – that is by Proust’s hatred of and fascination with the ‘woman’ in himself, the spirit that accounts for his own homosexuality.”328 Cairns returns also to the demands of intrigue: one of the foundations of the story is formed by the inaccessible character of Marcel’s loves. If Albertine is a lesbian, she is inaccessible, impenetrable to the Protagonist:
That other kind of jealousy provoked by Saint-Loup, by a young man of any sort, was nothing. I should have had at the most in that case to fear a rival over whom I should have attempted to prevail. But here the rival was not similar to myself, bore different weapons, I could not compete upon the same ground, give Albertine the same pleasures, nor indeed conceive what those pleasures might be.329
Cairns’s position is clear: feminine homosexuality is represented differently from its masculine form – a thesis confirmed by Sollers, who, insisting on the “cunning complexity”320 of Gomorrah, writes:
Gomorrah is infinitely more troubling, black, devious, than Sodom….To the talkative restlessness of Sodom correspond the silence and evasion of Gomorrah. Sodom is “means” of Gomorrah. That is Proust’s vision.331
Colette follows the same route. She does not believe in a single Gomorrean as painted in the Search: “one is only amused, indulgent and a little bored, having lost the magnificent light of truth that guided us across Sodom. This is because, with all due reference to the imagination or the error of Marcel Proust, Gomorrah does not exist!”332 Leriche points out another difference between Sodom and Gomorrah:
“While Sodom contents itself with fleeting physical satisfactions and, otherwise, with platonic love, Gomorrah exists only in the enactment of perverse fantasies. Therefore Sodom would be undamaged.333
Clifford-Barney is astonished by the
incipit of
We return to the comparison of
It is clear that the “unreal” side of the painting of Gomorrah in A la Recherche du temps perdu is firmly condemned. From the foregoing, we have seen that the fundamental problem arises from the myth-like misrepresentation of feminine homosexuality: we have seen that Cairns speaks of a hardly credible representation (“While the references to Sodom and Gomorrah generate a mythopoeia of both female and male homosexuality, the mythification of lesbians in Sodome et Gomorrhe is more febrile and fantastical than that of male homosexuals”340); according to Colette, the Gomorrah of the Search does not exist, and if Dubois uses such words as “the specter of lesbianism,”341 the message does not suffer from ambiguity. We mention once more Clifford-Barney, who does not mince her words when she speaks of the Gomorreans in the Search: “I find them above all unrealistic.”342 Apparently, Proustian criticism does not greatly care for the daydream-like representation of Gomorrah which, according to the critics seen here, contrasts violently with the image of Sodom in the work. Remember, however, that criticism has not always appreciated Proust’s contribution to the painting of Sodom (cf. 2.1.2 Preparation and appearance of Sodom and Gomorrah --particularly Gide).
Contrary to what one might think after all this, not all critics share these positions. One relentless adversary is Ladenson. First of all, she sees no parallel between Sodom and Gomorrah in the Search – if there are parallels, they are to be found within Gomorrah, among the feminine relationships. Clifford-Barney makes a pertinent remark in returning to Vigny’s verse, which places Sodom and Gomorrah in analogy (cf. 2.2.1.1.1. The title, the summary and the epigraph), but according to Ladenson, the incipit does not have the function of placing the two homosexual worlds parallel to each other: it is rather a one-time case of symmetry in the title, and not in the book. Consequently, the theory of inversion elaborated in the opening pages of Sodom et Gomorrhe I does not apply to the women of the Search. She furnishes a double argument: first, the lesbians are not simply “objects of desire” but at the same time “subjects.” To repeat Ladensons’ words:
Proust’s theory of inversion…does not and indeed cannot apply to women in the Recherche because they are never only subjects but always, potentially at least, also objects of desire. The fact that Gomorrah, unlike Sodom, figures in the novel not for sociological reasons but for purely personal ones also means that the Gomorrans depicted will almost inevitably figure at once as both objects of male heterosexual desire and as subjects and objects of lesbian interest.343
Secondly, there is the phenomenon of clothing lesbians in mystery: women must remain enigmatic. This is one of the laws of Proustian love. Consequently, it is impossible to assign the principles of Sodom to Gomorrah since the sodomites are amply described and gladly laid bare. It must be seen that the enigmatic character of lesbians on which Ladenson insists does not mean to say that they are “mythified.” According to Ladenson, there is only one allusion to Gomorrean myth in the Search: Mme de Vaugoubert (cf. 4.1.7 Mme de Vaugoubert). This is because masculine women are examples par excellence of mythification: “Mme de Vaugoubert was really a man.”344 As Mme de Vaugoubert (remember that she is married to the invert M. de Vaugoubert, which would be characteristic of her type of invert) is the only masculine woman in the Search, Ladenson remarks that Gomorrah is not populated with such women. There are primarily two types of lesbian in the work: “the anodyne type”345 (for example Mlle Vinteuil), subject to the laws of Proustian love; “the second type goes by the name Gomorrah”346 and constitutes “the strong class” of Gomorreans who infect not only the heterosexual world but also Sodom (for example, Albertine, Andrée, Léa). Ladenson concludes that “in this respect…Proust’s Gomorreans tend to correspond more to the type that is now referred to as lipstick lesbians (that is to say, women whose style is more or less feminine, and who do not conform to a butch-femme scenario).”347 For Ladenson, it is thus not a question of unreal, imaginary or mythified representation.
Because of what Proust said to Gide,348 a good number of critics follow the route of the transposition of the sexes to explain feminine homosexuality in the Search. Thus, Albertine would be Albert, the liaison between the two protagonists would be a homosexual one and the suggested loves of Albertine would be heterosexual. This is why Ladenson complains: lesbianism in the Search receives (too) little attention from the critics. Consider for example O’Brien (Albertine the Ambiguous, 1949), for whom Albertine is nothing but a boy in disguise – a thesis largely contradicted later. When O’Brien notes “If Albertine had been named Albert and Marcel had been homosexual, Marcel would have suffered intensely from Albert’s relations with women. In order for the travesty, or transposition of the sexes to be considered, Albertine had to be bisexual.”349 Ladenson replies that such a remark is possible only if one ignores the numerous passages that insist on the inaccessible character of Gomorrah (and not of Albertine as an individual). According to Rivers, it is clear that certain women in the Search have masculine characteristics, but
…we must, however, leave the “Albert” within “Albertine” rather than taking it out and displaying it as a revelation of what the author “really” means. If we transpose and retranspose the sexes in an attempt to force Proust’s works to make sense in conventional sexual terms, we miss the point.350
Harry Levin (The Gates of Horn) subscribes to the same line of reasoning, suggesting that the transposition of the sexes is a game without an end:
To argue that we should read Albert for Albertine, raises more questions than it answers. It is tantamount to arguing that the most indubitable female in the novel should nonetheless be denominated François. If we transpose the sex of Albertine, should we not likewise assume that her most intimate friend, Andrée, was similarly a masculine André?351
Ladenson is not particularly convinced by this argument, but she admits that Levin is right as far as Andrée is concerned: if Andrée were André, there would be none of the drama caused by the lesbian coloration in the love triangle (Marcel – Albertine – Andrée). For Compagnon, the transposition of the sexes reveals its difficulty since this theory neglects the two sides that constitute the construction of homosexuality in the Search. We cite Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who, like Levin, remarks that this theory raises many questions that remain unanswered:
If Albertine and the narrator are of the same gender, should the supposed outside loves of Albertine, which the narrator obsessively imagines as imaginatively inaccessible to himself, then, maintaining the female gender of their love object, be transposed in orientation, into heterosexual desires? Or, maintaining the transgressive same-sex orientation, would they have to change the gender of their love object and be transposed into male homosexual desires? Or, in a homosexual framework, would the heterosexual orientation after all be more transgressive?352
Silverman defends a similar position, with the difference that she does not reject completely the theory of the transposition of the sexes, but proposes a less obvious interpretation. That is, she lines up the Protagonist and Albertine on the same sexual side: “Why not think of Marcel simply as a lesbian?”353 Silverman argues that the Search brings on-stage a good number of “anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa.”354 Besides, the Protagonist seems to have problems with his body:
And what could be more difficult, when it is a question of suffering such as that of feeling that she whom we loved is finding pleasure with persons different from ourselves who give her sensations which we are not capable of giving her, or who at least by their configuration, their aspect, their ways, represent to her anything but ourselves.355
This “anatomical unhappiness” ends in a lesbian fantasy:
Now I saw her, by the side of the laundress, girls by the water’s edge, in their twofold nudity of marble maidens in the midst of a grove of vegetation and dipping into the water like bas-reliefs of Naiads.356
To this should be added the Oedipus complex (cf. the mother’s goodnight kiss), the absence of the father in the Search and the revulsion felt by Marcel about his penis (“…belly (concealing the place where a man’s is marred as though by an iron clamp left sticking in a statue that has been taken down from its niche)…”357 So Silverman could very well be right to consider Marcel a woman. It remains to be seen why she pushes her analysis as far as typing Marcel as a lesbian woman. Silverman admits that it is true that Marcel is never explicitly associated with homosexuals. “Nevertheless, he does come perilously close at one point to acknowledging Albertine’s lesbianism is not so much a difficulty within their relationship as its precondition.”358 A second and final argument resides in the importance of orality in the work. The Search proposes two types of homosexuals:359 the “strict” homosexuals who reserve themselves for men and the “bisexuals.” Concerning the second category, Silverman notes that “what is at issue…is less the partner’s genitals than a particular kind of sexual conjunction.”360 In the Search, this “particular kind of sexual conjunction” is present in the kiss (therefore in orality), which recalls the goodnight kiss of the mother. Accordingly, Silverman believes in the priority of the mouth in the lesbian liaison between Marcel and Albertine. Silverman therefore inverts the theory of the transposition of the sexes: it is not the novel’s women who are considered feminized men; for Silverman it is a matter of a man being in fact a woman – a reading of the Protagonist which aligns itself at the side (though less extreme) of Georges Bataille. The latter regards the Vinteuil family as a transposition of Marcel and those close to him: “Vinteuil’s daughter personifies Marcel and Vinteuil is his mother.”361 It is from the following passage that Bataille starts out to arrive at such a conclusion:
…sons, who do not always take after their fathers, even without being inverts, and though they go after women, may consummate upon their faces the profanation of their mothers. But we need not consider here a subject that deserves a chapter to itself: the Profanation of the Mother.362
The key to this “title of a tragedy”363 lies in the Montjouvain scene. This episode and the extract which we have just quoted show the link between Mlle Vinteuil and Marcel (who resembles his mother: “ ‘How like his mother he is,’ said the lady”364). In addition, there would be a parallel between the installation of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend in her father’s house and that of Albertine in Marcel’s apartment. Kristeva seems to arrive at such a transposition because she also sees converges between Marcel and Mlle Vinteuil:
While pleasure invades him, the Protagonist feels that it “makes his mother’s soul weep.” Like Mlle Vinteuil, who is an artist of sadism, he considers even sensual pleasure as a sin in which he debases himself and drags down his ideal.365
The reading proposed by Silverman conflicts with the objections of Ladenson, who believes she has reasons for refuting the theory of a lesbian Protagonist. First of all, Marcel does not belong to the Ulrichs category: he describes women’s souls shut inside the body of a man, without its concerning him. Ladenson draws attention also to the problems of understanding against which Marcel never stops struggling when it involves Albertine’s possible lesbianism. This proves, according to Ladenson, that the Protagonist is not a woman, either physically or psychologically.
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[1]
GIDE A, Journal 1889-1939, NRF, Gallimard, Paris, 1939, p693.
[2]
AHLSTEDT E., La pudeur en crise : un aspect de l’accueil d’A la recherche du
temps perdu de Marcel Proust 1913-1930, Göteborg, 1985, p8
[3]
Ibid., p15.
[4]
ROBERT de, L., Comment débuta Marcel Proust, Paris, Editions de la N.R.F.,
1925, p74.
[5]
TADIE J.-Y., Proust, le dossier, Pocket, Belfond, 1983, p191.
[6] Ibid., p180.
[7] These words of Rivière are cited in TADIE J.-Y., Proust le dossier, Op. Cit., p183.
[8] AHLSTEDT E., Op. Cit., p47.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid., p49
[11] GIDE A., Op.
Cit., p705.
[12] AHLSTEDT E., Op. Cit., p55
[13] Binet-Valmer shares the idea, strongly widespread in the milieu of the far right at this time, that France was considered immoral and decadent before the first World War.
[14] AHLSTEDT E.,
Op. Cit., p76.
[15] Ibid., p61. This is an allusion to Balzac which will afterwards be made by many critics.
[16] Ibid.,
pp70-71.
[17] AHLSTEDT E.,
Op. Cit p85.
[18] Ibid., p94.
[19]AHLSTEDT E., Op. Cit., p120. Ahlstedt (p121) remarks that “by the expression ‘splendid lunatic,’ the critic attacks Proust in a roundabout way, since homosexuality was at that time considered a mental illness.”
[20] AHLSTEDT E.,
Op. Cit., p128.
[21]
Ibid., pp.115-116.
[22]
TADIE J.-Y., Proust le dossier, Op. Cit., p183.
[23] AHLSTEDT E,
Op. Cit., p163.
[24] Ibid., p185.
[25] AHLSTEDT E.,
Op. Cit., p160.
[26] ERIBON D.,
Op. Cit., p337-338.
[27] TADIE J.-Y., Proust, le dossier Op. Cit., p194
[28] Ibid., p203 Leriche says in
relation to a similar affirmation that it ‘does not resist examination. The
question of sexual inversion is intimately tied in with the genesis of the Search.”
(LERICHE F, « Préface »
in : Sodome et Gomorrhe, Paris, Le livre de poche, 1993, pXXIII)
[29]
Ibid., p207
[30]
TADIE J.-Y., Proust, le dossier, Op. Cit., p225.
[31] RIVERS J.E., Proust & the Art of Love. The aesthetics of sexuality in the life, times, & art of Marcel Proust, New York, Columbia University Press, 1980, p22.
[32]
Ibid.
[33]
TADIE J.-Y., Proust, le dossier, Op. Cit., p193
[34] AHLSTEDT E., Op. Cit., p51.
[35] Ibid., p233
[36] Ibid., p99.
[37]
Ibid., p234.
[38]
ROGER A, Proust, les plaisirs et les noms, Paris, Denoël, 1958, p138.
[39] Genèse, XIX,
24 -25
[40] SGI, vol. 3, p3. [RTP II, p3]
[41]
EELLS E, « Proust ‘ondrogyne’» in : La Revue des Lettres Modernes, Série Marcel
Proust, n°2, 2000, p336.
[42]
ZAGDANSKI S., Le sexe de Proust, Gallimard, Paris, 1994, p23
[43]
MULLER M, "Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus" in: Poétique 8
(1971), p473
[44] Ibid., p476
[45] SGI, vol. 3,
p3.
[46]
CASTEX P.G., ‘Les destinées’ d’Alfred de Vigny, Paris, Société d’Edition
d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1964, p86
[47] SGI, vol. 3, p1265, note 2.
[48] Castex notes in relation to this
love: “this actress-nature seduced Alfred de Vigny from the start” (CASTEX
P.G., Op. Cit., p86.). As the feelings of the poet were not returned, he declares
Dorval “to be a ‘Sappho.’ “
(Ibid., p88).
[49] KOLB Ph, Op.
Cit., p255.
[50] ZAGDANSKI S,
Op. Cit., p35
[51]
MINGELGRÜN A, Thèmes et structures bibliques dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust,
Lausanne, l’Age d’Homme, 1978, pp 147-148.
[52]
COMPAGNON A, « Préface » Op. Cit., pXVI.
[53]
LERICHE F, « Préface » Op. Cit., pXIV.
[54] Leriche thus contradicts those who read the Search as a condemnation of homosexuality. Buckall shares the opinion of Leriche and says in this context: “We are given to understand, at several points in the novel, that this type of sexual behavior, while it may be more grotesque, more comic, and more pathetic in its manifestation, is not intrinsically more disreputable. » (BUCKNALL B.J., The religion of art in Proust, Urbana/Chicago/London, University of Illinois Press, 1969, p110.) In order to illustrate this proposition, Bucknall returns to the meeting between Charlus and Jupien, described by Marcel with a certain sympathy (3.1.2 La rencontre entre Charlus et Jupien)
[55] LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXIV
[56]
BEM J, « Le juif et l’homosexuel dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ » in :
Littérature, n°37, février 1980, p109.
[57]
FRAISSE L., Sodome et Gomorrhe de Marcel Proust, Paris, Sedes (Agrégations des
Lettres), 2000, p42.
[58] This refers to Oscar Wilde.
[59] SGI, vol. 3,
p17
[60] MINGELGRÜN A, Op. Cit., p149. We analyze the tie between inverts and Jews under the point 2.2.1.2 Metaphors
[61]
KRISTEVA J, Le temps sensible, Paris, Gallimard, 1994. pp110-111
[62]
DELEUZE G, Proust et les signes, Paris, PUF, 1964, p18
[63] MALABOU C, “Une écriture de la fin de l’amour: Proust ou le genre mis à côté”, p75-88 in Bertho-Sophie. Proust contemporain, Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1994.p81
[64] CS, vol. 1, p375.
[65] MALABOU C, Op. Cit., p79
[66]
COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p105
[67]
SOLLERS Ph, « Proust et Gomorrhe » in: Théorie des exceptions, Folio Essais,
1986, p77
[68] CAIRNS L, « Homosexuality and Lesbianism in Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe » in: French Studies – Quarterly Review, 1997, vol. 51, 1, p45.
[69] PRIS, vol. 3, p710 [RTP II, p524] This passage shows that Marcel is perfectly conscious of the fact that homosexuality at the beginning of the twentieth century is not that of the Platonic epoch.
[70] PRIS,
vol. 3, p710. [RTP II, p524]
[71] SGI,
vol. 3, pp16-17. [RTP II, p.13]
[72]
D’ENTREVAUX M.B., « Sodome et Gomorrhe : M. de Charlus et les confréries » in :
BIP, 31, 2000, p104
[73] SGI,
vol. 3, p31 [RTP II, p24].
[74] For the influence of Ulrichs in regard to this subject, vide infra.
[75] PRIS,
vol. 3, p710. [RTP II, p.524]
[76] SGI,
vol. 3, pp26-27. [RTP II, p20]
[77] SGII,
vol. 3, pp300-301. [RTP II, p220]
[78] AD,
vol. 4, p265. [RTP II, p863]
[79] SGI,
vol. 3, p31. [RTP II, p23]
[80] SGII,
vol. 3, p300. [RTP II, p219]
[81] See next point
[82]
SGI, vol. 3, p26. [RTP II,
p20]
[83] SGI,
vol. 3, p23. [RTP II, p18]
[84] CS,
vol. 1, p375. [RTP I, p292]
[85] SGI,
vol. 3, p23. [RTP II, p18]
[86] DELEUZE
G, Op. Cit., p17.
[87] LERICHE
F, Op. Cit., pXII
[88]
ZAGDANSKI S, Op. Cit., p24
[89] SGI, vol. 3, p18. [RTP II, p14]
[90]
LATTRE A de, Le personnage proustien, Librairie José Corti, 1984, p156. Cf.
Schopenhauer
[91]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p114
[92] ZEPHIR J.J., La personnalité humaine dans l’œuvre de Marcel Proust, M.J. Minard, Paris, 1959, p172. We will return to “the homosexual mask” during the analysis of the Baron de Charlus (4.1.2 le baron de Charlus).
[93] Ibid., p173
[94] Ibid., p174
[95]
Ibid., p175
[96] SGI,
vol. 3, p23. [RPI II, p18]
[97] In astrology, Saturn presides
over loves “against nature.” Cf. Poèmes saturniens (Verlaine)
[98]
SGI, vol. 3, pp23-24. [RTP II, p18]
[99] SGI,
vol. 3, p24. (RTP II, p19]
[100] SGI,
vol. 3, p32. [RTP II, p21]
[101]
SGI, vol. 3, p36. [RTP II, p25]
[102]
SGI, vol. 3, p17. [RIP II, p13]
[103] We note parenthetically that the critic complicates matters by stating that relations between to inverts must be called “gomorrian” because inverts have feminine souls, and therefore the relationship must involve two women.
[104] ERIBON D, Op. Cit. p126
[105] Miguet-Ollagnier says in this
connection that a woman slumbers for a long time in the homosexual (“Portrait
du héros en duelliste et Galatée” in: Bulletin Marcel Proust. Société des Amis de Marcel Proust et
des Amis de Combray, n°41, Paris, 1991, p62.)
[106] SGI,
vol. 3, p26. [RTP II, p19]
[107] CAIRNS L, Op. Cit., p49. We point out the following remark of Muller’s: “The more deeply one meditates on what underlies In Search of Lost Time, the more one finds the essential themes of the great Genevan.” (MULLER M, “Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus”, Op. Cit., p474.)
[108] Cf. the botanical metaphor which we develop later in this chapter. We wonder beside whether this reasoning does not permit the conclusion that homosexuality is natural – a question left open for some time.
[109] SGI,
vol. 3, p21. [RTP II, p16]
[110] SGI,
vol. 3, p21. [RTP II, p16]
[111] SGI,
vol. 3, p26. [RTP II, p20]
[112] RIVERS J.E., “The Myth and Science of Homosexuality in A la recherche du temps perdu” in: STAMBOLIAN G. [ed.], Op. Cit., p273
[113] RIVERS J.E., Proust & the
Art of Love. Op. Cit.,
p203
[114]
D’ENTREVAUX M.B., Op. Cit., p104
[115] Genèse XIX, 1-29
[116] This part corresponds to Genesis 28:13: “And, behold, the Lord stood above it, and said, I am the Lord God of Abraham thy father, and the God of Isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed./ And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth.” We will return to this under Jewish metaphor (vide infra).
[117] SGI,
vol. 3, pp32-33. [RTP II, p25]
[118] DELEUZE is cited in MALABOU C, Op. Cit., p78. A possible response to this question might recall Plato, who preaches intellectual synthesis as the purest and highest form of love.
[119]
MALABOU C, Op. Cit., p78.
[120] MULLER M, « Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus », Op. Cit., p474
[121] Ibid.
[122] SGI, vol. 3, p18. [RTP II, p14]
[123] MULLER M, « Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus », Op. Cit., p474
[124] Ibid.
[125] RIVERS J.E., Proust and the art
of love, Op. Cit., p225
[126] SGII,
vol. 3, p370 [RTP II, p271]
[127] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p192
[128] We found this idea of Wilson’s in ERIBON D, Op. Cit., p 342.
[129] We note parenthetically (because this takes us outside the limits of Sodom and Gomorrah I) that the Son of God, Jesus Christ, serves equally as a link between inversion and Biblical myth. Look for example at the following passage where, beginning with a joke, the image of Christ reproaches homosexuality with madness:
It is the homosexuality that survives in spite of the obstacles, a thing of scorn and loathing, that is the only true form, the only form that can be found conjoined in one person with an enhancement of his moral qualities. We are appalled at the apparently close relation between these and our bodily attributes, when we think of the slight dislocation of a purely physical taste, the slight blemish in one of the senses, which explain why the world of poets and musicians, so firmly barred against the Duke of Guermantes, opens its portals to M. de Charlus. That the latter should shew taste in the furnishing of his home, which is that of an eclectic housewife, need not surprise us; but the narrow loophole that opens upon Beethoven and Veronese! That does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake, … concludes as follows: “You see that man who is waiting to speak to me on the lawn, whom I am obliged to put up with; he thinks that he is Jesus Christ. That alone will shew you the sort of lunatics that I have to live among; he cannot be Christ, for I am Christ myself!” A moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the governor that a mistake had been made.” (PRIS, vol. 3, pp 710-711.)[RTP II, p524-525.]
The image of Christ equally relates the homosexuality of Albertine to myth. Mingelgrün interprets the following passage in the light of the death of Christ:
Her vice now seemed to me beyond any
doubt. The light of the approaching sunrise, by altering the appearance of the
things around me, made me once again, as
though it shifted my position for a moment, yet even more painfully conscious
of my suffering. I had never seen the dawn of so beautiful or so painful a
morning. And thinking of all the nondescript scenes that were about to be
lighted up, scenes which, only yesterday, would have filled me simply with the
desire to visit them, I could not repress a sob when, with a gesture of
oblation mechanically performed which appeared to me to symbolise the bloody
sacrifice which I should have to make of all joy, every morning, until the end
of my life, a solemn renewal, celebrated as each day dawned, of my daily grief
and of the blood from my wound, the golden egg of the sun, as though
propelled by the rupture of equilibrium
brought about at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with
tongues of flame as in a painting, came leaping through the curtain behind
which one felt that it was quivering with impatience, ready to appear on the
scene and to spring aloft, the mysterious ingrained purple of which it flooded
with waves of light.” (SGII,
vol. 3, pp 512-513.)[RTP vol II p.376.]
The references to blood, reinforced by a “liturgico-biblical substratum: gesture of oblation, bloody sacrifice,…” (MINGELGRÜN A, Op. Cit., p82) allude to the cup that caught Christ’s blood when his loin was pierced by a lance as he hung on the cross – this cup being the proof of the death of Christ, according to St. John.
[130] SGI,
vol. 3, p15. [RTP II p12]
[131] CAIRNS
L, Op. Cit., p46.
[132] SGI,
vol. 3, p16. [RTP II, p12]
[133]
Daniel, V 25-28
[134]
LETOUBLON L, FRAISSE L « Proust et la descente aux enfers. Les souvenirs
symboliques de la Nekuia d’Homère dans la Recherche » in : Revue d’Histoire
littéraire de la France, 97(1997), 6, p1060.
[135] SGII,
vol. 3, p370. [RTP II, p271]
[136] SGI,
vol. 3, p31. [RTP II, p24]
[137] EELLS E, Op. Cit., p345
[138] RIVERS J.E, Proust and the art
of love, Op. Cit., pp168-169.
[139] SGI,
vol. 3, p22. [RTPII, p17]
[140] Zagdanski adopts a contrary
point of view and notes that “homosexuality is not organized …as a marginal
construct, it is elaborated into a true crosswise society.” (ZAGDANSKI S, Op. Cit., p26)
[141]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXLVIII.
[142] PRIS, vol.
3, p710. [RTPII, p524]
[143] SGI,
vol. 3, p18. [RTP II, p14]
[144]
ZAGDANSKI S, Op. Cit., p28
[145] D’ENTREVAUX
M.B., Op. Cit., p103.
[146] ZAGDANSKI S, Op. Cit., p28.
[147] Compagnon points out in the Pléiade edition that this is a character in Boccacio’s Decameron.
[148] SGI,
vol. 3, pp27-28. [RTP II, p21]
[149]
SCHUEREWEGEN F., “Les huîtres gay de Monsieur Marcel” in : Littérature,
septembre 2000, 119, p70.
[150] SGI,
vol. 3, p22. [RTP II, p17]
[151]
COMPAGNON A, Préface à Sodome et Gomorrhe, Op. Cit., pXVI.
[152] SGI, vol. 3, p5. [RTP II, p5]
[153] MIGUET-OLLAGNIER M, Op. Cit., p62
[154] Ibid.
[155] These words of Proust’s are cited in PAINTER G.D., Marcel Proust, Paris, Mercure de France, 1966, tII, p337.
[156] SGII,
vol. 3, pp458-459. [RTP II, p335]
[157] The plural refers to floral fertilization on one hand and to homosexual coupling on the other. We mention it only parenthetically since at heart it concerns a single phenomenon which is doubled by metaphorical language. (For botanical metaphor, vide infra.)
[158] RIVERS J.E. , “The Myth and Science of Homosexuality in A
la recherche du temps perdu”, Op. Cit.,
p263
[159]
MIGUET-OLLAGNIER M, Op. Cit.,
p67
[160] SGII, vol. 3, p269. Brichot is speaking. He relates the expression to Gondi, a “survivor” of La Fronde [a civil war, 1648-53].
[161] CG,
vol. 2, p651.
[162] SGI, vol. 3, p30. [RTP II, p23]
[163] The phenomenon of referring to classical antiquity has been analyzed in the preceding point of this work.
[164] SGI,
vol. 3, p31. [RTP II, p24]
[165] We note that Proust uses the word “hermaphroditism.”
[166]
COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles,
Op. Cit., p138
[167]
COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles,
Op. Cit., p138
[168] EELLS
E, Op. Cit., p337
[169] SGI,
vol. 3, p29. [RTP II, p22]
[170] SGI,
vol. 3, p31. [RTP II, p24]
[171] RIVERS
J.E., “The Myth and Science of Homosexuality in A la recherche du temps perdu”,
Op. Cit., p267
[172] SGI, vol. 3, p16. [RTP II, pp5 and 13]
[173] CAIRNS L, Op. Cit., p44. We have translated [into French, and retranslated into English].
[174] SGII,
vol. 3, p300. [RTP II, p219]
[175] AD,
vol. 4, p265.
[176] ERIBON
D, Op. Cit., p190
[177] SGI,
vol. 3, p18. [RTP II, p14]
[178] ERIBON
D, Op. Cit., pp120-121.
[179] This part of Sketch IV is cited in LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p38.
[180] LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p39 The inspiration of Ulrichs is clear in this view of homosexuality (for Ulrichs’s theory, cf. 1.2.1 Ulrichs)
[181]
HARTWICH A., Op. Cit., p236
[182] COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p274.
[183] It is true that Mlle Vinteuil does not appear in Sodom and Gomorrah I. Nevertheless, we have decided to mention here the putting into practice of the theory of Krafft-Ebing since it tallies with the scientific basis that we are in the process of explaining.
[184] CS,
vol. 1, p146. [RTP I, p114]
[185] SGI,
vol. 3, p31. [RTP II, p23]
[186] ZEPHIR
J.J., Op. Cit., p166.
[187]
EELLS E, Op. Cit., p337
[188]
COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p138
[189] SGI, vol. 3, p6. [RTP II, p5]
[190] With the aid of Eells, we note
that this word means testicle in Greek. (EELLS E., Op. Cit., p336).
[191] SGI,
vol. 3, pp29-30. [RTP II, p23]
[192] SGI,
vol. 3, p9. [RTP II, p7]
[193] SGI, vol. 3, p17. [RTP II, p13 ] The emphasis is ours.
[194] SGI,
vol. 3, pp 4-5. [RTP II, p4 ]
[195]
TON-THAT T, « Faune et flore proustiennes » in : Littératures, Presses
Universitaires du Mirail Toulouse, n°43, 2000,
p148
[196] Ibid.
[197] These words of Viers are cited in Ibid., p147. This brings us to the question of whether homosexuality is a natural or a cultural phenomenon (Vide supra).
[198]
MULLER M "Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus", Op. Cit., p471
[199] SGI,
vol. 3, p8. [RTP II, p6]
[200] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p110
[201] We note the link with the zoological metaphor (vide infra) which sets up this parallelism.
[202] In the Pléiade edition (p 1286, note 4), we find the following note: “Michelet evokes at length the medusa in La Mer [The Sea] Chapter 6, "Filles de mers" [Daughters of the Seas] (Lausanne, L'Age de l'homme, 1980, p. 99-100): "Among them [the shells], without a shell, without shelter, all stretched out, lay the living umbrella which is so badly named ‘the medusa.’ Why such a terrible name for such a charming creature?”
[203] SGI,
vol. 3, p28. [RTP II, p22]
[204] SGI,
vol. 3, p7. [RTP II, p6]
[205]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p111
[206]
MULLER M, "Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus", Op. Cit., p471
[207] SGI, vol. 3, p7. [RTP II, p ]
[208] MULLER M, "Sodome I ou la naturalisation de Charlus", Op. Cit., p476. These words attaches the positive answer to the question as to whether homosexuality is natural (vide supra).
[209] COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p181
[210] We are however conscious of the fact that French literature (Baudelaire, Balzac, etc.) also influenced the representation of homosexuality in the Search, but we have already largely commented on that French literature which speaks of inversion in the first chapter of this work. We simply underline the fact that many critics consider Balzac a precursor of Proust. Look for example at Cattaui: “At the start, Proust wanted, in his novel, to fill up the space that Balzac had left more or less at his disposal, vacant, to paint the types and the surroundings that the creator of Vautrin, from The Girl with Golden Eyes had voluntarily neglected, or whom the prohibitions of his century did not permit to write insistently about. (In this way the Charluses and the Morels were born.)” (CATTAUI G, Proust et ses métamorphoses, Paris, Nizet, 1972, p89.) For more information about Proust vs Balzac, cf. Chap. VII (Balzac et Stendhal, précurseurs de Proust) in the work we have just cited and BOREL J, Proust et Balzac, Paris, José Corti, 1975.
Jullien points out that homosexuality in the Search owes much to the Memoirs of Saint-Simon: “The theme of Sodom seems inseparable from the references of the model book; nearly all the masculine characters of Saint-Simon cited in the Search, with the exception of the king, are linked to Sodom.” (JULLIEN D, Proust et ses modèles, Paris, José Corti, 1989, p150.) For more information concerning this intertext, see : Ibid., pp150-152.
[211]
EELLS E, Op. Cit., p343
[212] SGI,
vol. 3, p23. [RTP II, p18]
[213] SGI,
vol. 3, pp 28-29. [RTP II, p22]
[214] Erman refutes this idea: “In the
Search inverts are not victims of social ostracism but phantoms who
haunt and make of Charlus, the man-woman, an indeterminate being, locked within
a body that does not correspond to his profound sensitivity. The subjectivity
within them gives them a romantic density by placing them on the scene of
inwardness.”
(ERMAN M, « Poétique du
personnage Proustien » in : Poétique, novembre 2000, p402.)
[215] DUBOIS J, Pour Albertine, Paris, Seuil, 1997, p154 We have already touched on this subject, during the development of the different types of homosexuals (vide supra). The idea of Duboi clearly subscribes to pessimism as far as love is concerned.
[216] SGI,
vol. 3, p25. [RTP II, p19]
[217] SGI,
vol. 3, p17. [RTP II, p14]
[218]
CATTAUI G, Op. Cit., p243.
[219] ERIBON D, Op. Cit., p122. We note that the comparison of homosexuals to snails arises from the criticism of the humour with which inversion is described in the Search,
[220]
SCHUEREWEGEN F., Op. Cit., p68.
[221] SGI, vol. 3, p16. [RTP II, p13] Our emphasis.
[222] SGI,
vol. 3, p15. [RTP II, p12]
[223]
SCHUEREWEGEN F., Op. Cit., p66
[224] Ibid., p69.
[225] HAYES J, “Proust in the Tearoom” in: PMLA, October 1995, 110:5, p992
[226] PRIS,
vol. 3, p553. [RTP II, p408 ]
[227] HAYES
J, Op. Cit., p1000
[228] CS, vol. 1, p44. [RTP I, p24]
[229] We point out in this context
that, in the Search, much becomes erotic. This is why we are inclined to
speak of an ‘archsexualism’. (Cf. Freud’s pansexualism)
[230]
ERMAN M, L’œil de Proust, Paris, A.-G. Nizet, 1988, p21
[231] SGI,
vol. 3, p16. [RTP II, p12]
[232] SGI, vol. 3, pp 16-17. [RTP II, p13] Bem remarks that the Jewish theme never ceases to crisscross the homosexual theme in this sentence. We will return to the link between homosexuality and Judaism farther along in this work.
[233] SCHEHR L.R., The Shock of Men.
Op. Cit.,p47.
[234] BEM J,
Op. Cit., p101
[235] SGI,
vol. 3, p19. [RTP II, p15]
[236] PRIS,
vol. 3, p555. [RTP II, p409]
[237]
PRIS, vol. 3, p720. [RTP II, p529]
[238]
EELLS E., « Proust ‘ondrogyne’ »
[239] SGI, vol. 3, p3. [RTP II, p3; however, Scott Moncrieff translates “On sait” as “The reader knows…”]
[240] EELLS E, Op. Cit., p347
[241] SCHEHR L.R., (Un amour de Charlus, conférence à Nimègue, 14/03/01) indicates that in this context this expression readily invites confusion that goes as far as the perception by the majority of the interchangeability of minorities: for example, Mme Cottard believes that, because Charlus is “like that,” the baron is a Jew.
[242] PRIS,
vol. 3, p720. [RTP II, p529]
[243] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p34
[244] We will return to this in the last chapter of this work.
[245]
VAN DE GHINSTE J, Rapports humains et communications dans A la recherche du
temps perdu, Paris, Nizet, 1975.
[246] Cf. 2.2.2 Gomorrah In relation
to the signs of Sodom, d’Entrevaux points out that inverts are confronted with
a contradictory situation: in order to recognize each other, they are condemned
to emit signs, but at the same time, they must hide them, if not make them
completely disappear, so as not to betray themselves. The critic explains how
inverts try to remedy the situation by three devices: they mask themselves,
condemn their own kind in public, and form a community among them, “a state
within a state.” (D’ENTREVAUX M.B., Op. Cit., p107)
[247] SGI, vol. 3, p19. [RTP II, p14] Our emphasis. Cf. Schehr (Un amour de Charlus, conférence à Nimègue, 14/03/01) which speaks of “gaydar” [gay radar] (cf. 4.1.3 Morel)
[248] SGII, vol. 3, p332. [RTP II, p242]
[249] BEM J,
Op. Cit., p107
[250]
Cf. § 224 du Bon Usage (GREVISSE, Le bon usage, Paris, Duculot, 1986).
[251] SGI,
p15. [RTP II, p12]
[252] BEM J,
Op. Cit., p102
[253] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p274
[254] We indicate that for Rivers, the Jewish metaphor belongs with myth. However, we have decided to develop Jewishness here because it is predominantly a metaphor.
[255]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p190
[256] SGI,
vol. 3, p18. [RTP II, p13]
[257]
DIAMANT N, “Judaism, homosexuality and other sign systems in A la recherche du
temps perdu”, in Romanic Review, NY, 1991 Mar, 82:2, p179
[258] Genèse XXVIII,14 & SGI, vol. 3, p33. [RTP II, p25]. Cf. 2.2.1.1.2 Théorie de l’inversion
[259]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXXXVIII Leriche indicates that,
in this respect, “it is no accident if the discovery of homosexualities unfolds
on the basis of the Dreyfus Affair. Of what was Dreyfus ultimately guilty? Of
being a Jew.” (Ibid.)
[260] DIAMANT N, Op. Cit., pp179-180
[261] An Italian painter of the fifteenth century. He painted a fresco that shows the story of Abraham.
[262] CS, vol. 1, p36. [RTP I, p28]
[263] BEM J,
Op. Cit., p111
[264] Ibid.
[265] SGII,
vol. 3, p490. [RTP II, p360]
[266]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p190
[267] SGII, p490. [RTP II, p359] Our emphasis.
[268] BEM J,
Op. Cit., p107
[269] Ibid., p108
[270] COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p66
[271] According to Bem, it is no accident that this concerns Esther and Athalie particularly, for they are marked by this difference: with the tragedies, Racine wanted to break with his earlier productions. To this we may add that they constitute true Jewish discourse because of sometimes literal citation of the Old Testament. In the case of the choice of Esther, A. Roger points out that it could have been based on Albertine. Marcel himself says of Albertine that she “had read nothing but Esther before knowing me.”
(ROGER A,
Op. Cit., p136)
[272] SGII,
vol. 3, pp64-65. [RTP II, p49]
[273] SGII,
vol. 3, p171. [RTP II, p126 ]
[274] SGII,
vol. 3, pp236-237. [RTP II, p174]
[275] SGII,
vol. 3, p376. [RTP II, p275]
[276]
COMPAGNON A, Proust entre deux siècles, Op. Cit., p70
[277] Ibid.
[278] BEM J, Op. Cit., p108
[279] Ibid., p109.
[280]
Ibid.
[281]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXL.
[282] SGI, vol. 3, p29. Cf. 2.2.1.1.2 The theory of inversion
[283]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p105.
[284]
SCHEHR L.R., Un amour de Charlus, in press, p8.
[285]
ZAGDANSKI S, Op. Cit., p27
[286]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p95.
[287]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit.,
pXI
[288]
Ibid., pXXXVII
[289]
COMPAGNON A, « Le narrateur en procès » in : La Revue des Lettres Modernes,
Série Marcel Proust, n°2,2000, p333
[290]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p100
[291] LADENSON E,
Op. Cit., p133
[292]
CAIRNS L, Op. Cit., p52
[293] Ibid., p50
[294] CS, vol. 1, p359. [RTP I, p280]
[295] CS, vol. 1, p353. [RTP I, p275]
[296]
LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p50
[297] SGII,
vol. 3, pp504-505. [RTP II, p370]
[298]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXVII Leriche wonders if this
invisibility is not owing to the naivety, ignorance or hypocrisy of fathers and
husbands, who prefer not to know what their daughters or their wives do when
they are alone with each other. (Ibid.)
[299] LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p69
[300] Ibid., p77
[301] SGII,
p198. [RTP II, p148]
[302] SGII,
vol. 3, pp 245-246. [RTP II, p180]
[303] SGII,
vol. 3, p245. [RTP II, p180]
[304]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXV
[305] Ibid., pXVI
[306] SGII,
vol. 3, pp 244-245. [RTP II, p179]
[307]
LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p80
[308] ROGER
A, Op. Cit., p81
[309] JFF,
vol. 2, p28.
[310] SGII, vol. 3, p191. [RTP II, p ] Concerning what follows this passage, i.e., just after the “the heart’s intermissions” (the belated grief felt by the Protagonist because of his grandmother’s death), we follow Compagnon, who invalidates a thesis proposed by Roger. It concerns the word “succinctly” [“succinctement”] which, according to Roger, would be suppressed in the definitive text (we note that in the case of the Search, this term is not particularly apt) in spite of its appearance in the manuscript. “It seems insignificant to me, in fact, that Proust should have finally crossed out the word ‘succinctly’ which, in the manuscript, appears twice, separated by several lines, after ‘cerfs, cerfs’… succinctly offers in revenge the peculiarity of exhibiting, as significant, the same contraction which it evokes, as signifying; for it condenses in its breast, if I dare express myself so, the signs of lactation: sein-succion-suintement, suc-saintement [puns on breast-suction-oozing, suck-saintly] (ROGER A., Op. Cit., p85)
Compagnon
notes the imaginary, incorrect side of this fact: the crossing out was done not
by Proust, but by a typist who could not decipher the words in the manuscript.
He put in a blank, so that the adverb does not appear in the “definitive” text.
Thus, there is no question of a “meaningful confession” because of a
“symptomatic crossing-out.” (COMPAGNON
A., « Ce qu’on ne peut plus dire de Proust » in : Littérature, décembre 1992,
n°85, p56)
[311] ROGER A, Op. Cit., p84
[312] SILVERMAN K, Male subjectivity at the margins, NY, Routledge, 1992, p378
[313] Masculine sexuality is also
associated with the world of flowers. Cf. botanical metaphor in Sodom and
Gomorrah I, which we have analyzed under the point 2.2.1.1.2 The theory
of inversion.
[314]
TON-THAT T, Op. Cit., p149
[315] Ibid.
[316] These words of Freud’s are cited in Ibid.
[317] BALZAC
H de, Le lys dans la vallée, La comédie humaine, Paris, Gallimard, 1978,tIX,
p987 (La Pléiade).
[318]
BAUDELAIRE Ch, “Lesbos” in: Les Epaves, pièces condamnées tirées de Fleurs du
mal, Oeuvres Complètes, Paris, Gallimard, 1971, p151, v42 (Collection La
Pléiade)
[319] LADENSON E, Op. Cit., pp99-100
[320] In the preface to Sodom and Gomorrah in the Folio edition, Compagnon also formulates the idea of symmetry between the two universes.
[321] SGII,
vol. 3, pp 499-500. [RTP II, p366]
[322] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p102
[323] Ibid., p101 The idea that Sodom is described in a blasphemous and vulgar manner is contradicted by Leriche. Cf. 2.2.1.3 Conclusion [of Sodom section]
[324]
Ibid, p102
[325]
CS, vol. 1, p161. [RTP I, p125]
[326]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p106
[327] CAIRNS
L, Op. Cit., p54
[328] Cité
dans Ibid., pp54-55
[329]
SGII, pp504-505. [RTP II,
p370]
[330] KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p109 This is how Kristeva describes the position of Sollers.
[331]
SOLLERS Ph, Op. Cit., p77
[332] Cited in LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p9. We translate [into French, and back to English]
[333]
LERICHE F, Op. Cit., pXVII
[334] SGI, vol. 3, p3. [RTP II, p3] For a detailed explanation of the epigraph, cf. 2.2.1.1.1 Title, summary, epigraph
[335]
LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p117 We point out in this
connection that Jullien suggests yet another intertext as far as Gomorrah is
concerned: the Thousand and One Nights. Cf. JULLIEN D, Op. Cit.,
pp152-154.
[336] Ibid.,
p114.
[337] DUBOIS
J, Op. Cit., p156
[338] SGII,
vol. 3, p500. [RTP II, p367]
[339] CAIRNS
L, Op. Cit., p52
[340] Ibid.
[341] DUBOIS
J, Op. Cit. p156
[342] Cited
in COMPAGNON A, Préface à Sodome et Gomorrhe, Op. Cit., p5
[343]
LADENSON E. Op. Cit., pp45-46
[344] SGII,
vol. 3, p46. [RTP II, p35]
[345] LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p104
[346] Ibid.
[347] Ibid., p42
[348] “[Proust] says he blames himself for that ‘indecision’ that made him, in order to fill out the heterosexual part of his book, transpose ‘in the shade of blossoming girls’ all the attractive, affectionate, and charming elements contained in his homosexual recollections.” GIDE A, Op. Cit. p694. [GIDE A, Journals 1889-1949, translated, selected and edited by Justin O’Brien; Penguin Books 1956 p331]
[349] These words are cited in LADENSON E, Op. Cit., p16
[350] RIVERS, Proust and the art of love, Op. Cit., p243.
[351] Cited in Ibid., p15
[352] These words are cited in SILVERMAN K, Op. Cit., p374.
[353]Ibid., p386
[354] “The soul of a woman enclosed in
the body of a man.” We found these words of Ulrichs in STAMBOLIAN, Op. Cit., p265. For Ulrichs’ theory of homosexuality, Cf. 1.2.1 Ulrichs.
[355]
AD, vol. 4, p126. [RTP II, p765]
[356]
AD, vol. 4, p108. [RTP II,
p753]
[357] PRIS,
vol. 3, p587. [RTP II, p432]
[358] SILVERMAN K, Op. Cit., p383
[359] These two types refer back to the four types proposed by Kristeva, which we explained under the point 2.2.1.1.2 The theory of inversion.
[360]SILVERMAN
K, Op. Cit., p381
[361]
BATAILLE G, La littérature et le mal, Paris, Gallimard, 1957, p150.
[362] SGII,
vol. 3, p300. [RTP II, p219]
[363]
BATAILLE G, Op. Cit., p150.
[364] CS, vol. 1, p75. [RTP I, p58]
[365]
KRISTEVA J, Op. Cit., p229.