Sodom and Gomorrah
After a short break during which I was able to rest by reading sentences of normal length, I again felt like continuing In Search of Lost Time. I missed Proust's deep and poetic reflections. I wanted to admire the talents of an excellent writer. Really, Proust has no equal.
In this thematic volume, we follow more particularly the Baron de Charlus, a particularly unsympathetic character that we had already met in the first volumes. His level of pretentiousness and susceptibility is frankly exceptional, his values are questionable; nevertheless, he is amusing, because he is a caricature. Until then he was a rather mysterious character, respected in the world for some reason unknown to me, but from the first pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, we understand what makes him interesting to the narrator: he is homosexual.
The way of treating the subject is rather amusing and delicate at the beginning. The meeting of two "inverts" and their union is compared to the parade of an orchid which, solitary on a windowsill, waits to be fertilized by such a rare bumblebee. The proud and unsympathetic M. de Charlus begins a dance that consists in seducing the desired being without losing his dignity. He succeeds. The narrator then becomes aware of a completely different vision of love. The rest of the volume then revolves around this same M. de Charlus, who finds other objects of desire, who tries to hide his inclinations from others, and who thus shows himself to be much more vulnerable than one might have suspected.
In my eyes, Proust is a genius. So I expected him to have a vision of homosexuality that was innovative for its time, a deep understanding, a special openness. This is not what I observed. Of the first four volumes, this one contains the most generalizations that would go down very badly today. For example, in the following passage, the narrator describes how a homosexual's wife necessarily acquires a manly air, and why:
It was said at the ministry, without a shade of malice, that, in the household, it was the husband who wore the skirts and the women the panties. But there was more truth in that than one believed. Mme de Vaugoubert was a man. Had she always been like that, or had she become what I saw her as, it doesn't matter, because in either case we are dealing with one of the most touching miracles of nature and which, the second especially, make the human kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. In the first hypothesis - if the future Mme de Vaugoubert had always been so heavily masculine - nature, by a diabolical and beneficent ruse, gives the young girl the deceitful aspect of a man. And the teenager who doesn't like women and wants to get well finds with joy this subterfuge of discovering a fiancée who represents him a fort at the halls. In the opposite case, if the woman does not have at first the male characteristics, she takes them little by little to please her husband, even unconsciously, by this kind of mimicry which makes that certain flowers give themselves the appearance of the insects which they want to attract. The regret of not being loved, of not being man, virilizes her (p. 646, La Pléiade)
We live in a different era, fortunately.
But Proust has not lost his eloquence. He misses the mark when it comes to dealing with sexual orientation, but the passages where he talks about mourning, human weaknesses, where he paints portraits of characters or describes landscapes, are of a beauty, and I'll throw the word out: unheard of. This one, for example, where the narrator tells of the sudden resurgence of his grandmother's grief, I have reread it more than ten times:
[...] what was against me was this partition which formerly served between us two as a morning message, this partition which, as docile as a violin to render all the nuances of a feeling, told my grandmother so exactly my fear at the same time of waking her up and, if she was already awake, of not being heard by her and that she did not dare to move, and then immediately, like the replica of a second instrument, announcing me her coming and inviting me to calm. I didn't dare go nearer to that partition than to a piano where my grandmother had played and which would still vibrate with her touch. I knew that I could knock now, even louder, that nothing could wake her up, that I would hear no answer, that my grandmother would not come anymore. And I asked nothing more of God, if there is a heaven, than to be able to knock against that partition with three little knocks that my grandmother would recognize among a thousand, and to which she would answer with these other knocks that meant: "Don't get agitated, little mouse, I understand that you are impatient, but I am going to come," and that he would let me stay with her all eternity, which would not be too long for both of us. (p. 762-763)
I once again enjoyed reading this novel. It takes work, it can be tiring and even boring at times, but it provides an experience that touches on meditation and provides beauty beyond belief.
