Sodom and Gomorrah

Sodom and Gomorrah Review

The fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time begins with one of the great opening scenes in modern fiction: the narrator, hidden on a staircase, witnesses an encounter between the Baron de Charlus and the tailor Jupien that reveals, in the space of a few pages, what has been latent throughout the preceding volumes. The long preparation makes the revelation precisely calibrated: Charlus has been a figure of baroque eccentricity, fierce snobbery, and obscure menace — and the opening of this volume explains all of it while transforming nothing, which is exactly the effect Proust intends.

Proust’s treatment of homosexuality in the Belle Époque is simultaneously the most extensive and the most precise in the literature of the period. The term he uses — inversion — is the medical language of his time, but his analysis goes well beyond the medical. What he is describing is not a condition but a social position: the way that a desire which cannot be acknowledged shapes every aspect of how it is experienced and expressed. Charlus’s snobbishness, his rages, his strange generosities, his elaborate performances of heterosexual masculinity and equally elaborate betrayals of them — all of these are rendered as the effects of a life lived in concealment, and Proust’s sympathy is exact: not sentimental, not disapproving, but the sympathy of close observation.

The volume also extends the narrator’s jealousy about Albertine, now returning to Paris with him, into what will become its own separate obsession. The two strands — Charlus’s world and the narrator’s jealousy — are connected by Proust’s central epistemological theme: the impossibility of knowing another person’s inner life. Charlus cannot be known in polite society because his desire is concealed; Albertine cannot be known because the narrator’s jealousy is a machine for generating suspicions that evidence can neither confirm nor dispel. The social comedy of the Verdurins’ salon, where the volume spends considerable time, provides a third variation on the same theme: performance all the way down.

The result is the most formally ambitious volume of the Search — more explicitly organised around an argument than the earlier volumes, more willing to use its characters as demonstrations of a thesis. That it remains so humanly compelling despite this is a measure of how deeply Proust has by this point committed to the fullness of his people: even as case studies, Charlus and Albertine and the Verdurins are more present on the page than the central figures of most novels.