I'm Allergic to Proust

Today my hardcore book group met to discuss Proust's The Fugitive, the sixth volume of In Search of Lost Time and the conclusion of the narrator's affair with his lover Albertine. And for the first time, I just could not freaking slog through it. The Prisoner was bad enough--I feel as though that book was a repudiation of what made the first four great--but I had a kind of narcoleptic reaction to this one. Every word just shut my brain down.

In the world of ISOLT, the whole Albertine diversion feels like some kind of bad dream out of which we hope, desperately, that Proust will wake from. The only remotely plausible thing about it is its pedophilic undertones (those which Nabokov would later borrow and bring to the surface in Lolita); otherwise, Proust might have just filled these 800 pages, a la Jack Nicholson in "The Shining," over and over with I AM NOT GAY I AM NOT GAY I AM NOT GAY.

It convinces me that closeted homosexuality is once and for all the hidden subject of this great work; it is the thing that most interests Proust, yet the one thing he finds impossible to address directly, as a manifestation of his own protagonist. It isn't like Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain--there, Hans Castorp's love affair is unconvincing, but we never suspect that he himself is gay. Whether he realized it or not, Proust presents the narrator quite clearly as a gay man who never admits it to himself. The narration, on this topic, feels fundamentally dishonest, and I wonder to what extent the writer understood how profoundly he was being revealed. Certainly homosexuality is an explicit subject of the overall work (plenty of people in it turn out to be gay), but it is shocking to see how completely the pretense of the narrator's impartiality breaks down in these sections, and how utterly homosexuality dominates the ostensibly heterosexual material.

When Marcel (I will call our narrator this, for convenience's sake) is talking about the Swanns, the Guermantes, his mother, his grandmother--then we believe him. When he talks about Charlus, or Saint Loup, we begin to doubt. And when he talks about Albertine, forget it. He's full of shit.

It feels very much as though there is a real-life, male counterpart to Albertine, under whose sway this entire section was written; furthermore Proust was quite ill at this point in his life, and you can practically smell the cork lining of the room he never left during daylight hours. The impression of this book and its predecessor is that of being hopelessly cooped up. Only when Albertine dies and Marcel heads to Venice does the air clear and the Marcel we loved back in Combray return to life.

Or so I'm told. I didn't get that far. I think I'm going to skip ahead, read the last hundred pages of this book, and move on to the final volume, which evidently Proust wrote before the Albertine bits (or "le Roman d'Albertine," as he called it), back when he was working on Swann's Way. I would love to get to say I read the whole damned thing, but I'm afraid I'm just not going to make it. What a fascinating mess.

One Last Proust Bit

I'll offer up this one last tidbit from Proust and his incapacity to directly address his (or his narrator's) homosexuality, before I leave it alone. It's interesting, though. Check out this passage, where "Marcel" is describing his lover (well--not quite lover, but that's another subject) Albertine's naked body:

The two high little breasts were so round that they seemed not so much integral parts of her body as two fruits that had ripened there; and her belly (hiding the place which, in men, is made ugly by something like the metal pin left sticking out of a statue when it is removed from its mould) was closed, at the meeting of the thighs, by two curves as gentle, as restful, as cloistered as the horizon when the sun has disappeared.

OK, got that? The guy is looking at a naked woman and he just can't help thinking about penises. You have got to love the sleight of hand going on there--"Man, my girl is hot, and by the way, I find male genitalia utterly revolting. Just wanted you to know."

Book group colleague Brian Hall pointed out at today's meeting that the entire unlikely arrangement of Albertine living in Marcel's house with him would be much more plausible if she were a man--an observation that brings the whole thing into perspective, as her real-life counterpart (or, counterparts, as history appears to have it, as she is thought to be a composite of two of Proust's love interests) probably was.

I've come around a bit on ISOLT 5, however--like the other volumes, it is fascinating as an exploration of the nature of memory. (Another book grouper, Jack Goldman, refers the curious to philosopher Henri Bergson, who evidently knew Proust and married a member of his family, for more on this subject.) But I am a plot-and-character guy, and prefer to have narrative momentum be the delivery vehicle for this kind of rumination. I am curious to see if Proust steers it back to my neighborhood in the final two volumes.

Crazy Marcel is at it again

Welp, I'm back onto Proust, this time The Fugitive, otherwise known as In Search Of Lost Time 5: Shackin' Up. In this installment, Albertine has moved in with Marcel, a spectacularly implausible scenario that enables Proust to expound at great length upon the subject of sexual jealousy.

(And by the way, we now get to actually call him Marcel, as at last, after four volumes and thousands of pages, the nameless narrator throws us this brittle little bone:

Now she began to speak; her first words were "darling" or "my darling," followed by my Christian name, which, if we give the narrator the same name as the author of this book, would produce "darling Marcel" or "my darling Marcel."

That's cleared up then!)

If I sound a bit irked by the whole project, it's because ISOLT has increasingly, since the latter half of The Guermantes Way, borne an increasingly heavy burden of denial on the subject of the author's, and by extension the narrator's, homosexuality. That is to say, there's no question that the narrator ("my darling Marcel") is supposed to be straight, but no straight man I have ever met has climbed up a stepladder in order to watch, through a transom, for half an hour, two other men have sex (see, I think, the opening pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, which I could check if I hadn't already packed it for our move). This bit of cognitive dissonance was not difficult to tolerate during the early stages of the story, but now that, in ISOLT 5, we're treated to an endlessly unfolding escalation of the narrator's preoccupation with his live-in lover's own possible homosexuality, we have begun at last to roll our eyes. Throw in the predatory man-love of the sinister Baron de Charlus, the cringing engagement of the totally gay violinist Morel, and the lesbo collusion of Albertine's friend Andree, and we could be forgiven for wondering if, in fact, darling Marcel was the only heterosexual in early-twentieth-century Parisian society.

And as if all this isn't enough, how is it exactly that this unemployed wannabe writer is able to afford all these dresses, hats, gowns, and kimonos (yes, kimonos) that he gives to Albertine? It is all so danged convenient.

I know, I know, give a sickly fey cork-ensconced shut-in a break, you say. And you're right--there is a lot to love in this book (ably translated, I should add, by Carol Clark), most particularly the acerbic descriptions of the boneheaded Morel, and Charlus's devious efforts to control him. But I have got to confess that I miss the hell out of the Swanns, and Balbec, and dear old Grandma...and long for the future days of literature when a gay guy can just write a freaking book about being a gay guy.