Is the Narrator of In Search of Lost Time Gay?
Some friends and I formed a reading group last year. It went so well that we decided to read the whole of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time this year. The reasoning was that if we broke the novel into manageable monthly pieces, it wouldn't seem so overwhelming, and having a group doing this together would offer mutual encouragement and support. So far, that has worked well. There are still five or six of us who are meeting each month.
For August, we are to finish Sodom and Gomorrah, the fourth of the six volumes in the Modern Library edition. We have talked a lot about the theme of homosexuality. Proust the author was, of course, gay, but his narrator is not supposed to be. Many of us in the group remain unconvinced. The narrator knows far too much about the details of romantic and/or sexual relationships between men, and understands too little about male romantic and sexual fascination with women. Much of the narrator's allegedly romantic interest in women sounds either like a stereotypical gay man going on about Cher or a bully describing the children that he bullies.
For me, the most convincing evidence of the narrator's homosexual view of relationships so far can be found in chapter 2 of part II of Sodom and Gomorrah. I am approaching page 400, and the narrator is describing his burgeoning jealousy of Albertine, his lover, whom he suspects of "Sapphism." What we've got here is an allegedly straight young man with a spirited but compliant girlfriend (I somehow picture Albertine being played by Christina Ricci) who will apparently satisfy his every physical and emotional whim, but he's repulsed by the notion that she may also be attracted to women.
Putting myself in my early twenties in that situation, I cannot imagine myself contriving to keep her away from other pretty young women (as the narrator does). Rather, I imagine that I would have been contriving to get her, me, and other pretty young women to whatever private places I could find. And I don't think that I'm different from most other straight men in that respect. The narrator's visceral revulsion sounds much more like a gay man's reaction to the thought of his lover being with a woman, which I imagine would be horrible. Given that Albertine is rumored to be partially based upon Alfred Agostinelli, a love of Proust's who moved toward heterosexuality, this characterization seems plausible. And I am not a believer in using biographical information about the artist to understand a work of art. But in this case, this aspect of this work strikes me as nonsensical if it's read as it's written.
4:27:04 PM 
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