Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with
Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s
shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel
Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published
over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu radically
reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the
past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each
moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including
Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be
the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark
in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah
and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon),
but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and
experiences, the majority of which are negative. One rationale for this
dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay
love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving
him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life.
Another theory is that he himself was uncomfortable with his sexuality,
which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially
with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur,
Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse.
Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love
interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be
whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he
typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in
his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now permanently on
display in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.
Oh, Neil, even though you're 55, and went to the same grammar school as Sting (two years behind him), and planned your fall tour of America exactly when I can't go. It's still .
Oh, I'm so sorry you can't make it. We have our tickets though I've been told they're standing room.
And Logan and I are almost finished with "The Guermantes Way" and then on to "Sodom and Gomorrah".
Posted by: Cynthia Dunn | July 12, 2009 at 04:13 PM