In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah

In Search of Lost Time previously also translated as Remembrance of Things Past—is a novel in seven.
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For much of his youth Proust led the life of a man-about-town, frequenting fashionable Paris drawing rooms and literary salons, which were to form the background of a number of his early stories and sketches, and subsequently of Remembrance of Things Past. The death of his adored mother in resulted in a nervous collapse and aggravated his chronic asthma and insomnia. In it the minuteness of his observation, the depth of his psychological understanding and the vividness of his descriptive powers combined to create one of the most poetic and magical works in all literature.

This long autobiographical cycle was originally published in eight sections: However, when it appeared in it received considerable acclaim, and was awarded the Prix Goncourt the following year. By the time Proust died, on 18 November, , the first four parts of the cycle had been published, leaving the others to appear posthumously. The ducal premises also provide accommodation for Madame de Villeparisis, aunt of the Duke and Duchess, while on a lower level, both architecturally and socially, the tailor Jupien runs his business with the help of his niece. In this way, Proust introduces us to the theme of homosexuality, male and female, announced in the title.

It is a subject on which Proust speaks with an understanding and sympathy born of his own homosexual way of life, which he felt obliged to keep secret, and which he carefully disguises in his autobiographical novel, where the Narrator, who is undoubtedly based on Proust himself, falls in love only with women. Proust scholars and researchers have identified female characters in the book as disguised versions of men with whom Proust had had love affairs, although it is also suggested that his relationships with certain women are unlikely to have been entirely platonic.

However, these speculations are of interest principally in explaining the depth of understanding Proust shows in his exposition of the theme of same-sex love, and his sympathy for the pain and frustration it causes those whose sexual nature is condemned by society and who are obliged to live lives of secrecy and duplicity. And perhaps it is as well for those who would condemn Proust for his lack of openness regarding his sexuality, to be reminded of the distance society has travelled since his lifetime, and of the legal punishment and social ostracism which then awaited those who were known to transgress the accepted norms of sexual behaviour.

It would be a remarkable psychologist who was able to analyse Proust more perceptively than he analyses himself.

Sodom and Gomorrah

Here is the classic Oedipal situation in which his wish to have his mother entirely to himself is thwarted by the existence of his father. He would, in that case, be constitutionally unable ever to satisfy her desires. On the occasion of his second visit to Balbec, memories of the first visit undertaken in the company of his grandmother suddenly overwhelm Marcel, and he is faced for the first time with the irreversible reality of the death of the person who, after his mother, he loved most in the world.

Once more the reader is privileged to witness the miracle performed by the author of turning the events of his transient life into an enduring work of art. Morel, apparently bisexual, either gives or withholds his favours from male admirers, according to how it will benefit him. The Prince de Guermantes, whom we have previously met at a brilliant ball given by him and his wife in their mansion, the magnificent Hotel de Guermantes, engages the services of Morel in the somewhat less salubrious surroundings of a seaside brothel, once again with unforeseen and hilarious consequences.

Marcel Proust’s ‘In Search of Lost Time: Sodom and Gomorrah’

These episodes are at once both comic and tragic. In other hands they might be the stuff of a Feydeau-style farce. But Proust is no farceur. Whilst he has a keen appreciation of the humour implicit in these situations, he is too sensitive and complex an artist not to be aware of their dark side.

He knows too well the pain of being forced to hide his sexual nature, even from those dearest to him, and the loneliness of feeling different from other men. Humour is there, but tempered with compassion for the powerlessness of men swept away by a passion which, in a society which permits them no outlet, becomes so urgent it breaches the barriers of their lives and precipitates them into ludicrous and embarrassing situations.

Female homosexuality, for the Narrator, has no such comic side. In the face of his love for Albertine it exists as a terrible threat against which he is powerless.


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As long as he feels Albertine is faithful to him he is able to consider parting with her, but once she is revealed as a lover of women, he is tormented with the passionate need to make her his own. For Marcel the Narrator, as in the case of Marcel his creator, is one of those doomed to yearn after phantoms. This powerful Oedipal struggle has set up a subconscious need to repeat the painful experience endlessly in a vain effort to try to come to terms with it.

Going to Sodom and Gomorrah with Proust | Books | The Guardian

When his fictional alter ego falls in love with Albertine, he unconsciously chooses a woman with homosexual desires, and therefore one incapable of giving herself completely to him. Like Swann before them, Marcel and Charlus join the "little clan" for their private reasons, which sets off another of Proust's hilarious page salon scenes. Mme Verdurin has recently inherited a few million francs, which will lubricate her ascent into society. This woman is so terrible that you find yourself cheering the baron as he jousts with her.

Of high society, memory, and sexuality One of the recurring themes in Proust's novel is the interplay among the select invitees at one or another Paris salon. In Swann's Way , the salon belongs to Madame Verurdin, whose "little clan" includes a young painter who morphs into the genius Elstir, based perhaps on Whistler , a foolish doctor who turns out to be a great diagnostician , and other luminaries who age and evolve throughout the novel.

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In The Guermantes Way , we move into more distinguished circles, first at the Marquise de Villeparisis's, then at the Duchesse de Guermantes's. And here, in Sodom and Gomorrah , we reach the very highest of Parisian high society: But Proust is not content merely to climb the ladder. Just as his characters rise and descend—and rise again, like Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill through all eternity—so do the salons rise and fall. I don't think I am betraying a confidence by revealing that the beautiful Duchesse will be cast down as a result of her own bad behavior, while the awful Madame Verurdin will rise in the world thanks to her great wealth.

When Young Marcel he is now about 21 returns to Balbec for the season, he is overwhelmed with grief for his grandmother, whose death was detailed in The Guermantes Way , but whom at the time he mourned only in perfunctory fashion. Now he sees the wall that, several years earlier, had separated him from his grandmother, and upon which they had been accustomed to tap messages to one another.

As with "voluntary" and "involuntary" memory, so it with with voluntary and involuntary grief: I knew that now I could knock, more loudly even, that nothing could again wake her, that I would not hear any response, that my grandmother would never again come. And I asked nothing more of God, if there is a paradise, than to be able to give there the three little taps on that partition that my grandmother would recognize anywhere, and to which she would respond with those other taps that meant, "Don't fret yourself, little mouse, I realize you're impatient, but I'm just coming," and that he should let me remain with her for all eternity, which would not be too long for the two of us.

Was ever grief more beautifully expressed? Soon, however, grief is forgotten and Marcel is once again sniffing about the "young girls in flower" who infatuated him in the novel's second volume.


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  • Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust – Triumph of the Now.

    • There are two mysteries here: As to the first, it is never entirely clear to me whether Marcel actually gets it on with his "girls. They know one another, are scarcely twenty years old, come from upper-middle-class families—and Queen Victoria is still on her throne! Marcel would have done quite well, it seems to me, if he had succeeded in kissing fourteen girls that summer. Of the fourteen, Albertine is his beloved. Marcel suspects her of hankering after women, and he sees every woman who comes to Balbec as a likely bedmate for her. Was female homosexuality really so rampant in s France?

    As earlier with Gilberte, his relations with Albertine often seem easier to understand if we take off the feminine ending: The girl who most often makes a third with Marcel and Albertine also has an ambivalent name: Altogether, this is my favorite of the Penguin Proust translations thus far. A wonderfully funny study of society, if not of sex!