I finished Sodom and Gomorrah over a week ago, and since then I've been mulling over whether to write a proper "review" of it or not. It was the most amorphous of any of the volumes yet, and thus it is slightly more difficult to speak about, or really wrap my thoughts around. Also, at this point, considering any of the volumes of A la recherche... to be distinct entities starts to become a bit silly. Certainly, Swann's Way, up through the "novel within the novel" Swann in Love (volume one), could be considered, if read only on their own, without venturing any deeper into the novel, as distinct chunks of prose, seemingly existing without necessary reference to the rest. But once you step forward, beginning with "Place-Names, The Name" at the end of volume one, there really is no separation to the story; the further you read, the more you realize how significant and interwoven all those earlier, almost slight incidents of the first few volumes have become, and one is resigned, albeit a blissful resignation, to 4,000 pages of Proust. One is then tempted to keep their mouth shut until the whole of In Search of Lost Time is read and digested, and give the novel its proper treatment, that of a single, though immense, narrative. But Proust himself created the divisions within the novel, gave them their titles, and undoubtedly wanted the reader to consider them distinctly, but volume four especially felt like a link in the chain that was quite dependent on what came before and what follows, that is to say it felt transitional, and indeed transformational, because I am sure that after the revelation that closes Sodom and Gomorrah (one that sent me rushing to start volume 5), Marcel will never be the same. To name it would be to spoil too much for the casual reader of these thoughts; it would be a disservice to someone going into the novel to reveal too much, as Proust's revelations are best discovered in his own particular oceanic depths and rhythms. So I will speak generally of a few things that struck me in volume four:1.By the end of Sodom and Gomorrah the structure of In Search of Lost Time really begins to bare its teeth. Events from the earlier volumes begin to resurface, repeat, gain in significance (the butterfly beating its wings that causes a hurricane on the other side of the Earth), and the attentive reader stands in awe of the power of Proust the novelist, and it is further impressed upon one that to do justice to the experience of reading A la recherche du temps perdu , it is best to read these volumes back to back; a great separation in time between them would only cause one to lose the thread, to break that stream of consciousness that is ever flowing backwards, retrieving treasures and casting them forward again through the years. As in life itself, events from the distant past do not lose their force, they are only submerged in the glacial flow of what follows, and when one reflects, it is perhaps the minor incidents, those barely considered at the moment they are experienced, that vibrate subtly in the body of the instrument and are retained in a lingering overtone, almost too quiet for our ears to capture, but that later shakes us to the core nonetheless, in that sort of strangely preserving bodily memory which is almost out of the reach of conscious attempts at recollection.2.One of the great achievements of Proust the artist is his portrayal of the contradictions and variety of character within a single person. In Sodom and Gomorrah it is M. de Charlus who is the prime example of this, but it is ubiquitous in the people who populate Proust's world. No one is who they are on the surface, and if they are presenting themselves in a certain way you can be sure that they are hiding either opposite inclinations, or gross deficiencies, or if they boast of talent or knowledge they are covering for what they are actually inept at or ignorant of, or if they are generous or kindly it is from some socially trained gesture and they are sure to later spit venom at the former subject of their pleasantries, or if they are overtly cruel at one moment they will show themselves later to be capable of indulgent tenderness. In other words, what Proust understands and sets down so perfectly is the infinite complexity of the human personality, the multitude of motives behind our social, and even personal interactions, or, to use Shelley's words, that "Nought may endure but Mutability". This is extended even to the physiognomic descriptions of characters such as Albertine and Mme. de Guermantes, who are seen by Marcel as revealing such differing features at different instances that they are sometimes unrecognizable to him. This is one of the great themes of the novel, the subjectivity of perception.3.The need for possession is seldom triggered by love, and most often triggered by jealousy. This especially is the case for Marcel, who shows frankly psychotic jealous tendencies. I mean, we are supposed to know that this young man has a sometimes debilitating nervous disorder, and physical ailments such as asthma that often restrict his activity (and allow him long bed-bound hours of introverted contemplation), but his jealousy over Albertine (which, I can say, is a hundred times more pronounced so far in volume five), is unsettling. It is not only his relationship with Albertine that is seemingly ignited by jealousy alone, but also in the case of Charlus and Morel, and in perhaps all of the social gatherings, it is a need for possession (or in the social case, domination), provoked by a kind of covetous resentfulness, that motivates these people. And while Marcel is superior to them (because of his brilliant artistic aptitude, true talent for observation, "the painterly-poetic eye") he still suffers from the same malady. More on this later.4.In Search of Lost Time, while always tinged with melancholy (and I fear, tragedy), is essentially comedic. The drawing rooms of the upper-echelon resound with sardonic, parodic laughter. Marcel is making fun of these people, amplifying their defects, mocking their arbitrary tastes, making use of the one tool that always subverts and destroys a power structure: laughter.5.The Verdurins return in volume four, seeking Marcel out to show off how artistic and "forward" their salon is, and thank god for this. They are hilariously cruel, utterly contemptuous of anyone outside their "little clan", on the whole not very bright, but entertaining as hell. The train rides along the Norman coast with Brichot's etymological digressions on French place-names are some of the highlights of this volume. Marcel's return to Balbec is quite different from his first sojourn to the shore. Now he is a connected, sought after man of society. The staff of the Grand Hotel go out of their way to accommodate him, he has inherited a large fortune and can therefore spoil Albertine with trips in a motor car (as he points out, still quite rare in those days) and fine clothes and dinners, but he is pursued, emotionally, by recent events which cloud his disposition, including his grandmother's death, the full grief of which is provoked only on his return to Balbec by an onslaught of mémoire involontaire similar to the famous "incident of the madelaine" that plunged him into the original depths of remembrance of Combray in Swann's Way. The exorcising of this grief is detailed in the strongest section of volume four, entitled "The Intermittencies of the Heart", a powerful exposition on dealing with the death of a loved one. His grief is assuaged in one of those miracle landscape descriptions that Proust so excels at: "Where I had seen with my grandmother in the month of August only green leaves and, so to speak, the disposition of the apple-trees, as far as the eye could reach they were in full bloom, unbelievably luxurious, their feet in the mire beneath their ball-dresses, heedless of spoiling the most marvellous pink satin that was ever seen, which glittered in the sunlight; the distant horizon of the sea gave the trees the background of a Japanese print; if I raised my head to gaze at the sky through the flowers, which made its serene blue appear almost violent, they seemed to draw apart to reveal the immensity of their paradise. Beneath the azure a faint but cold breeze set the blushing bouquets gently trembling. Blue-tits came and perched upon the branches and fluttered among the indulgent flowers, as though it had been an amateur of exotic art and colours who had artificially created this living beauty. But it moved one to tears because, to whatever lengths it went in its effects of refined artifice, one felt that it was natural, that these apple-trees were there in the heart of the country, like peasants on one of the high roads of France. Then the rays of the sun gave place suddenly to those of the rain; they streaked the whole horizon, enclosing the line of apple-trees in their grey net. But these continued to hold aloft their pink and blossoming beauty, in the wind that had turned icy beneath the drenching rain: it was a spring day."6.There is a deep loneliness at the heart of In Search of Lost Time. This has its roots in Marcel's keen awareness of the aforementioned subjectivity of perception (thus our inability to truly know another person), the unreliability of memory, the fact that only our past experiences shape the human being we become, that we are subject and slave to what we retain of their lessons, and yet these experiences are held in a faulty vessel. In the final summation, one is deceived as much by one's perception of one's self as that of the outside world, and though we would like to believe that the choices we make are generated from the intellect, it is indeed emotions, things stirring in the vague realms of consciousness, the invisible influences of our personal history that dictate our fates, things so often hidden or alien to our daily lives that it is almost as if our choices were made by another. That is what lies behind the ridiculous, fateful choice Marcel is brought to in the closing lines of Sodom and Gomorrah- the reverberations of the past, specifically that kiss- the maternal kiss, the one that initiated this whole novel, that kiss (the one forced into being by a slight of hand, by a deception), whose tenderness was so enhanced by being deprived of it; that comforting, calming kiss from mother that reassured a sickly, nervous child that he was loved and protected, and perhaps most of all, that he was possessed by someone, and that he in turn could possess her; that kiss that at once liberates and imprisons, calms and destroys. Marcel, I'm worried for you. You are not heeding the lessons of Swann in Love (oh so many thousands of pages ago!), in fact, you are recreating Swann's sorrows in your own life. What is that great Bob Dylan line, "You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way"? I see dark days ahead for you, Marcel.
As Sodom and Gomorrah began, our Narrator was struggling to understand the nature of homosexuals while I was alternating between reading his early-twentieth-century musings and poring over sweetly triumphant images of same-sex couples rushing to "legitimize" their long-running relationships with celebratory midnight marriages. As the strange continent of "inverts" draws horticultural allusions and comparisons to covert societies in Proust's time, the LGBTQ community is finally being recognized in a way that signals the slow unravelling of ignorance and inequality in mine. For the first three volumes, it was easy to lose any sense of cultural or chronological divide when faced with so many universal constants of humanity that all but waltzed off their pages and pages of lyrical metaphors; in S&G, we have a Narrator who recalls how the first time he saw an airplane overhead filled him with childlike wonder and lives in a time when it is apparently totally normal for a man to pick out his female companion's evening attire, which are but a few examples that, like unchecked homophobia, for the first time in my journey with Proust heralded a struggle to bridge the gap between when these volumes were written and when I'm reading them, bringing into stark reality just how much separates modernism from modern times, regardless of how well the common ground of so many other shared human experiences minimized the inevitable differences in eras and epochs. I finally felt the full extent of the distance -- literal and figurative, in time and physical distance, of the real and fictionally polished -- between the richly depicted, intricately crafted images Proust used to construct his Narrator's winding halls of memory and the world to which I belong. It was a jarring transition, for sure, but it was also a rather well-timed one: As the Narrator become increasingly aware of adult life's complicated emotions stirring inside and the societal politics constantly changing around him (not to mention the slow encroachment of technology, which does cast a shroud of smoky modernization on a world previously draped in pristine laces and cloud-soft velvets), I, too, got a taste of that irrevocable shift from a reasonably expected understanding to desperate reconsideration of an ever-shifting world.This installment, sadly, is one I read in staccato bursts of precious free time. It is unfortunate because Proust is best savored like good wine rather than chugged like cheap beer, and I fear I spent more time drunk on his beautiful words than intoxicated by his narrative insight. In those exhausted but relieved hours at home, in those stolen wedges of at-work bookwormery, in whatever few minutes were spent in quiet solitude, I clung to Proust with the desperation of a booklover in the throes of both work-related burnout and the dreaded reader's slump. And while a frantic heart may not be the best way to approach words that are ideally enjoyed at a leisurely stroll, I do believe the Narrator's burgeoning sense of humor and need to slowly drink in his surroundings kept me grounded during chaotic times. While S&G may not have been my favorite installment, it is the one that affected me the deepest. Among the revolving door of social obligations and self-indulgent observations that seem to occupy the majority of Fictional Marcel's abundant free time, I found myself most invested in his delayed reaction to his grandmother's death. Having never known the magnitude of a transgenerational love like that which Narrator shared with his maternal grandmother, I felt his palpable grief just as keenly as the slow-arriving but no less heartrending clarity of permanent absence that hit him upon revisiting a place that once played such an important role in demonstrating the fondness and compassion that can exist between a grandmother and her grandson. As the Narrator contemplates how different Balbec is without his beloved grandmother, as he muses on how much his own once-young mother has taken on the visage of her own mother now that the elder woman's death has left a role unfulfilled, as he retraces rooms that once were filled with his grandmother's presence, the concrete reality of past time being truly lost time came thundering down against a mostly familiar landscape that derives most of its changes from the players inhabiting it. It is odd that the grief is intense but short-lived, yes, but I couldn't help but write it off as the Narrator's decision to forge ahead with his life rather than mawkishly wallow in grief -- such are the intermittences of the heart, no? I continue to find the romantic entanglements of these characters to be a high-school level of ridiculous. It seems like so few of the relationships presented thus far in ISOLT -- Swann and Odette; the Narrator and Gilberte (and also Albertine); Saint-Loup and Rachel -- are healthy, mutually affectionate ones, but it could also be that I have little patience for romances, even fictional ones, that are built on a foundation of obsession and possession rather than respect and genuine fondness. And, really, the affair between Morel and Charlus isn't anything laudable, I know, but I can't help but find it one of the most believable examples of heady lust in terms of its execution and its players' emotionally fueled behaviors. There is little else but pure attraction drawing Charlus helplessly toward Morel, who can't help but take advantage of (or be manipulated by, depending on your vantage point) the older gentleman's affections and gifts. Still, the greed with which Charlus tries to keep Morel to himself while all but undressing him in public, the satisfaction he derives just from coaxing the younger musician into his presence is…. okay, a bit much, yes, but also keenly evocative of an irrationally all-consuming, unrealistically intense first crush and the reluctant empathy of understanding such memories drag along in their wake. Sodom and Gomorrah struck me as proof that the memories of our past can't help but be intertwined with memories of others, a reminder that there are always multiple perspectives at play -- and that, as the ending scenes with Bloch reinforce, not everyone's assessment of a situation will always be reliable or anything more than actions born of misunderstanding a sticky situation that was handled badly because there are no do-over options in real life and things only make sense when hindsight lays down the rest of the puzzle. ISOLT might be fictional, sure, but it is written as an account of life, and sometimes learning life's lessons means that truths can be as ugly as our lesser selves.
What do You think about Sodom And Gomorrah (2005)?
Mild spoilers, but hey, it's Proust. Give it up.Volume IV was good for me. It started off with a bang (ha, ha), and his absorption with how gays and lesbians fit into society got a little old, but on the whole I liked his forays into society better than at the end of Vol. III. Maybe I’m developing a tolerance for the dinner parties. Or maybe I’m beginning to see the forest for the trees.It was fun to see our hero in some new/old contexts -- like when he FINALLY meets the Verdurins and is so excited to be at their villa that Cottard says he should try sedatives and knitting. Gotta love the Verdurins -- you’re either on the bus or off the bus. (Actually, they annoy me to no end. But I guess I have a better time laughing at them and their little clan than the Guermantes gang.) Now I appreciate the whole Odette/Swann back-story even more. His treatment of Swann’s death as a comic device, like he did its approach in Vol. III, is so interesting -- like when the Duchess says his imminent death is no excuse for her deigning to meet his family.Now he’s earned all of those pages at the beginning of Vol. I bemoaning his mom’s absence at bedtime -- now that they’ve translated into more (young) adult obsessions. (Hmmm -- while making my daughter fall asleep without me in the room, am I fomenting neuroses?)I LOVED how he directly addressed the reader regarding how we get annoyed by his tangents. The tone was perfect. And then he addresses us a second time in understanding that a sane reader would question his chasing of phantom women. I can’t wait for more, as Pamela has alluded.I continue to appreciate his treatment of his grandmother’s death -- how he only truly realizes she is permanently gone well after the fact, and how that reality only exists in his thoughts that are stimulated by involuntary (madeline) experiences. And how that nature of reality makes our souls fictitious because our memory is involuntary (wow, is that true for me). But I really like that he has hope that we can recapture the past through a voluntary sensitivity toward sensation not dulled by habit that allows us to experience multiplicity, especially in a familiar environment. (Is he being that optimistic, or is it just me?) He‘s helping me train my memory, which I believe is his aim. Which is a blessing and a curse, being as I have lived in the same city for 20 years. Thank goodness I’ve moved out of my house of 19 years, or the ghosts wouldn’t let me be!The references to modernization are fun -- the first time he has a car and driver at his disposal, the first time he sees an airplane and starts crying because both he and the pilot seem to realize that they have so many possibilities for direction that only habit prohibits….He so nails the melancholy of growing up. How being given the “too great” responsibility to decide his own happiness and not obey his parents’ orders (even though he’s a fickle neurotic) make him suddenly realize that he only has one life “at his disposal,” and he’s living it.And beneath all of that cynicism, is he really a romantic? Loving the “invisible deity” in someone else? Huh.“Good-bye, I’ve barely said a word to you, but it’s always like that at parties -- we never really see each other, we never say the things we should like to; in fact it’s the same everywhere in this life. Let’s hope that when we are dead things will be better arranged. At any rate we shan’t always be having to put on low-cut dresses. And yet one never knows. We may perhaps have to display our bones and worms on great occasions. Why not?’As soon as I finished, I ran over to my bookcase and pulled out Vol. V and read the first two pages. But I’m going to be a good girl and read my book club book first. But I can already tell I’m going to give it short shrift. Man, nothing compares to Proust!
—Robin
Fluid becomes solid and then fluid again. Changing states, crossovers, transformations. Words produce pictures that turn back into words, black marks on a white page; dots, accents, commas, shapes of letters, enter through the cornea, the retina, the optic nerve, are processed into......... into what? Images, characters, narrative, scenes, landscapes, weather, tableaux, dialogue, spectacle, sensation. Reactions. The cities of the plain:Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, Bela. But Proust takes his title from one of his favourite poets, Alfred de Vigny (Baudelaire was the other, according to the famous questionnaire):Bientôt se retirant dans un hideux royaume,La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l'Homme aura Sodome,Et, se jetant, de loin, un regard irrité,Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côtéFrom: La Colére de SamsonPiquant: de Vigny wrote this poem when his mistress, Marie Dorval became the intimate friend of George Sand. Just how physical the two women's intimacy was is a matter of some debate, but salacious rumours flew around Paris anyway. The poem treats of Samson's infatuation with Delilah, and how he was brought down by her seductive ways and ultimate betrayal. Samson's weakness was to love she who cannot love in return: "Elle se fait aimer sans aimer elle-même." Thus it echoes the constant dynamic of love affairs in À La Recherche. There is always one who loves, one who accepts love. One who appears strong, but is made weak by their obsessive love. Swann and Odette, Charlus and Morel, the narrator and Albertine, Saint-Loup and Rachel, the narrator and the circles he would like to become part of.De Vigny's poem sees the conflict between the male and the female as an eternal battle between virtue and treachery, between steadfast strength and supple seduction, between honesty and ruse. The woman on whose soothing breast he sought comfort and salvation has betrayed him for a few gold pieces. Women are as evil as men, each will inhabit their own sordid hell, women in Gomorrah and men in Sodom, with nothing but distant exasperated glances between them, the two sexes separate until death.Proust's genius is to dissolve that dichotomy into a fluid continuum. Men who are passive until they become aggressively active, women who are sporty, strong, decisive. He plays with gender roles. Transformations, crossovers. Metamorphoses. Book cover love: A portrait of a portrait painter. Jacques-Émile Blanche painted Robert de Montesquieu, one of the models for the Baron de Charlus (my favourite character): He also painted Proust himself: But on the cover of my edition he stands with a wide legged swagger as model for Jean Louis Forain. I think of him as M. Verdurin:
—·Karen·
The first things I heard about Proust were that he was an underrated writer and a socially awkward gay man. This caught immediately my attention and, for me, they might be the main reasons why Proust achieved such an impressive work of art as ISOLT. However, it was until he had already wrote about 1,500 pages (I'm saying this based on the editions I got, of course) to talk about homosexuality; though the waiting was worth it. Yes, such a beautiful, yet funny explanation about what modernity knows as the gaydar is that of Proust. I mean, he even refers to homosexuality as an inversion. I myself think this is some elegant, mysterious keyword, as though he meant to make it look different; not to make it look as some perversion, but as something characteristic of some lonely, desolate people who had to attain to its sorrowful consequences: "[…] lovers to whom the possibility of that love, the hope of which gives them the strength to bear so many risks and so much loneliness, is all but closed, simply because they are much taken with a man having nothing of the woman about him, a man who is not an invert and cannot, in consequence, love them."Even though the narrator is not supposed to be gay, he empathized with Charlus's sorrows and even when it seemed to me that he regarded it as something repulsive when it came to Albertine, then, almost at the end of the book, I learned that this was not repulsion, but fear of not being able to be what she wants, what she likes; so his reactions are most likely to be based upon an impotent jealousy than out of homophobia, making himself look as though his sexuality was the uncommon one, the sorrowful one. "Thinking often causes people pain."And even though one can catch some glimpses of inversion from Swann's way upon Mlle Vinteuil, it is until this volume when the ballon bursts (so to speak), getting the reader to know the true personality of many of characters such as M de Charlus and Albertine. In fact, the latter has something to do with that particular part in volume I, and it is amazing how the dots begin to connect.This book has also so many funny parts. Right now, it comes to my mind the one when (view spoiler)[Cottard thought Charlus was going to rape him by a simple handshake, just because the latter was an invert (hide spoiler)]
—Poncho
