Taboos

"French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent twenty years writing a book almost no one reads."
Frank (Steve Carell) on Marcel Proust, Little Miss Sunshine, 2006

I have largely ignored the autobiographical aspect of In Search of Lost Time, and while Little Miss Sunshine is far from an authority on Marcel Proust, I quoted Frank here because he is a gay character who uses Proust's homosexuality as a reason he was a "total loser." Certainly, Frank's description is tongue-in-cheek and has a self-deprecating air, but it also indicates the otherness of homosexuality in any conversation about human relationships and love. In Swann's Way, heterosexuality is central (the narrator, his parents, and Charles Swann are all heterosexual), and when homosexuality appears in the novel, it is on the margins, it is other, a perversion.

Proust was not exclusively homosexual; he carried on a few affairs with women, although his most intense relationships were with men and appears to have strongly preferred young men. By 1906, he was open about his unconventional sexuality, but he continued to be tormented by his sexual identity. He hid his homosexuality while his parents were alive, and his affairs were often tortured, brief, or unrequited.

There are two prominent characters who are not strictly heterosexual in the first two chapters of Swann's Way. Mademoiselle Vinteuil carries on a lesbian affair, partly in rebellion against her father, and Odette admits to several sexual liaisons with other women. In both instances, homosexuality is presented as a perversion and an indication of moral decay; Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affair is widely held responsible for her father's death, and she and her lover mock Mr. Vinteuil shortly after his death. Similarly, Odette's lesbian affairs are evidence of her outrageous, uncontrollable sexuality. He does not merely object to her promiscuity and betrayal of his trust, but this particular sexual transgression of relationships with other women. For both Mademoiselle Vinteuil and Odette, their lesbian affairs imply their complete lack of sexual morality. Odette's many infidelities were painful enough to Swann, but her homosexual affairs shock and offend him most of all; he forgave her loose morals (he knew from their first meeting that she was a courtesan) when men were the object of her seductions, and he even forgave her liaisons with his acquaintances. But her affairs with women were utterly unfathomable to Swann, and they force him to recognize her wild lifestyle, her burgeoning sexuality that, he now fears, lacks all boundaries.

But why would Proust present homosexuality in such a negative light? He struggled to accept his own homosexual longings, so some of this could be internalized prejudice. In early 20th century France, homosexuality was so far outside the norms of accepted sexual practices that it also provides a convenient indicator of Odette's outrageousness, her extreme unconventionality and separation from the society Swann had hitherto frequented. It is also important to note that, in any form, heterosexual or homosexual, love is morally threatening. In the beginning of "Swann in Love," the narrator observes that love is reserved for the idle rich, and Swann's voluptuous wallowing in the emotions and desires aroused by Odette indicate the complete lack of duties and responsibilities in his life. Swann can afford to live for love alone, and his moral character is degraded because of it. Although love can also provide moments of transcendence and ecstatic joy, it also humiliates and disgraces the lover, through jealousy, obsession, and indulgence of fantasy. Swann is not degraded solely because Odette is a sexual deviant, but because he seeks to control her sexuality.

The lesbian affairs present a threat to male dominance; part of Mademoiselle Vinteuil's attraction to her lover is the horror it caused her father and polite bourgeois society (although she seems embarrassed at the same time), and Odette's homosexual affairs designate her radical independence, to the point of alienation, from Swann. I think part of why Swann is so scandalized by Odette's homosexual activities is due to the fact that this is a world in which he holds no place. Proust also experienced consuming jealousy and a sense of deep betrayal when he discovered that one of his male lovers had cheated on him with women, and I think that this incomprehension of and separation from the sexuality of one's partner make Odette's lesbian infidelities so painful to Swann. They present the ultimate obstacle to masculine understanding of female sexuality, which is already ominously mysterious to the male characters of Swann's Way.

I'm still perplexed as to why Proust would choose to present homosexuality only among women; this would seem to be the least familiar form of sexuality to Proust. In Search of Lost Time is obviously not autobiography, and the narrator is not Proust, but it's still curious why, in a story that has so far presented a wide range of sexual and romantic relaionships, male homosexuality is completely absent, not even implied. The narrator, however, inhabits a strongly feminine world; he is extremely close with his mother, his aunts, and his grandmother, he is fascinated by Gilberte Swann and Madame de Guermantes, he dreams about actresses and women who will reveal the secrets of love and life to him. Swann is the most prominent male figure in the narrator's life at Combray, and he is also deeply encsonced in a feminine atmosphere. As such, there is a clearer portrait, and wider range, of feminine sexuality than masculine; as a boy, the world of men is still somewhat remote from the narrator, represented in his distant relationship with his father and grandfather. He is obviously an outsider to the feminine realm, but he can observe it more easily than the activities reserved for men; he is still dependent on his mother and spends most of his day in the company of women. He is fascinated by the women he encounters and attempts to capture something of their consciousness, to comprehend what they feel and form images of their private lives, of which he can only catch a glimpse. Sexuality is by no means the only preoccupation; the narrator is just as intrigued by Gilberte's dinners with Bergote as he is by Mademoiselle Vinteuil's affiar. But it is a significant part of life, and the narrator is not blind to that; he is losing some of that childish innocence, that complete ignorance of love and sexuality as his own capacities for both are developing. Swann's Way presents a wide variety of the forms of sexuality and romance: Swann's torrid affair with Odette, the idealized medieval romance of the Guermantes line, lesbian encounters, the perpetual maidenhood of his aunts, his parents' marriage, his uncle's proclivity for actresses and women of ill-repute. These forms of sexuality and love are all emerging before the narrator's eyes and becoming clearer in his consciousness, and as a curious, sensitive person, his narrative is an attempt to comprehend it.

Hey Jealousy

I'm back to write more about love and literature, this time just about Proust; and I begin with the inquiry, does romance depend on mystery?

After suffering the pangs of jealousy as he imagines Odette's infidelities, Swann eventually realizes that "the state for which he so longed was a calm, a peace, which would not have been a propitious atmosphere for his love. When Odette ceased to be for him a creature always absent, regretted, imagined, when the feeling that he had for her was no longer the same mysterious turmoil that was wrought in him by the phrase from the sonata, but affection and gratitude, when normal relations that would put an end to his melancholy madness were established between them-- then, no doubt, the actions of Odette's daily life would appear to him as being of little intrinsic interest" (Proust, p. 435-426).

In Swann's Way, love is only experienced as anguish and an irreconcilable conflict of desires. On the one hand, Swann wants to possess Odette completely, to know every action and to infiltrate her consciousness. But Swann also must have that titillating thrill of Odette's separate life of perverse pleasures, the painful sensation when she imposes prohibitions on him and refuses to see him. He loves her most when they are apart and she exhibits indifference towards him, when he goes to painful lengths to see her and expects her angry rejection.

Indeed, Swann begins to love Odette only when she is inaccessable and no longer at his disposal. For several weeks, he had been accustomed to seeing her every evening at Odette's friends, the Verdurins' home. But one evening, Swann had deliberately delayed his arrival until after dinner was over, and arrived to receive the message that Odette had assumed he was not coming and had left already. Swann immediately became consumed by passion and spent the night searching for her, imagining every man he encountered as a potential rival for Odette's affections. When he finally found her in a cafe late at night, she took him to his home and had sex for the first time. Although Swann attained the physical possession of Odette he desired in the sexual act, he then became haunted by the realization that he could never fully possess her. She had already eluded his grasp and he would never know what she was doing for those hours without him.

Thus far in Proust, I've already noted that love is a desire for control and complete possession, but that desire is inseparable from the intrigue of remoteness. Swann's love is thus characterized by jealousy, a combination of yearning for Odette and needing her to have a secret life apart from him. There must be an element of the forbidden in love: Odette's lowly social status as a demimondaine, the exotic items in her home (Chinese lanterns, Indian rugs, etc.), her infidelity, her refusals all feed the flame of Swann's intrigue and keep the mystery alive. His imagination aids this considerably, in his willed refusal to imagine her other lovers or even precisely what she does in her life away from him; he prefers to keep it vague, so that the mystery is never solved and he remains in that pleasing, painful suspense.

In Swann's Way, love is also a state of moral degradation. Swann finds himself justifying immoral behavior, from spying on Odette to bribing doormen, and convinces himself that it is an intellectual task, this obsessive interest in Odette's life apart from him, on par with his former studies of history and art. He searches for meanings in her actions, and seems to deliberately mislead himself by interpreting her prohibitions against him seeing her in public as proof of her love, or at least of her setting him apart from all other men in her life. Swann thus leads himself away from truth, and becomes obsessed with his meaning-making games and his quest to possess Odette.

This is not only applicable to Swann in his love for an amoral woman, either. The narrator is not overjoyed by his mother consenting to spend the night in his room. He is miserable and guilty, and spends the whole night crying. He feels as though he has, in his quest for his mother (and in his success), failed to exercise proper self-control, and as he pushes forward in this quest, he is feverishly conscious of his transgressions but at a loss to stop himself. Like Swann's physical conquest of Odette through sexual intimacy, the narrator's conquering of his mother's will provides no lasting pleasure. The next night brings the same routine of torture as he anticipates bedtime and parting from his mother. Physical possession, again, does not satisfy; rather, as Sartre wrote, love demands the possession of the other's consciousness. There is something transgressive about this, as though the narrator and Swann are cognizant of the impossibility of total possession. Swann indeed acknowledges this predicament when he says that the calm he seems to desire would mark the end of his love for Odette.

I do not think that this is the only way to experience love, but this point of moral degradation is comprehensible in the context of the obsessive relationships depicted in Swann's Way. The characters become intoxicated by the oscillation between power and subjugation, complete unity with the other and remoteness. Love is not based on the qualities of the loved person in Swann's Way, but on the sensations produced in the individual who loves. It's a very egocentric love, a love of what one projects from within and can only observe without, through the medium of the other.