Violet wells's Reviews > Time Regained

they say it's easier as you make your way through the series, are you finding that the case?

Not really, Don! I'm finding this as tough as every other volume.

I love the ‘sentences as suitcases’ comparison. Spot on and I had the same impression with the French version. Thank you for a valuable review.

D wrote: "I love the ‘sentences as suitcases’ comparison. Spot on and I had the same impression with the French version. Thank you for a valuable review."

Thanks D.

Proust was Apparently "Contemptuous of same sex love". Proust was homosexual and Albertine is pretty much a description of one of his lovers, a man. So...

That Proust aspires toward upward mobility probably explains that, while his mother was Jewish, he did not identify as Jewish nor have sympathy for Jews. Same thing goes for being gay. He keeps "inverts," as he calls them, at arm's length.

I suspect when it came to Proust's homosexuality, the problem was deep seated internalized homophobia. I mean, he actually went through not one but two (!) duels in order to "redeem" his honor over this.

Gide tried his best to get him to own up to it but to no avail.

Goldberg wrote: "Proust was Apparently "Contemptuous of same sex love". Proust was homosexual and Albertine is pretty much a description of one of his lovers, a man. So..."

Which is why I'm perplexed he's so hostile towards "inverts".

Michael wrote: "That Proust aspires toward upward mobility probably explains that, while his mother was Jewish, he did not identify as Jewish nor have sympathy for Jews. Same thing goes for being gay. He keeps "in..."

Yep it's a weird achievement that he can deny huge chunks of himself, basically be dishonest, but still manage to create great art!

Nocturnalux wrote: "I suspect when it came to Proust's homosexuality, the problem was deep seated internalized homophobia. I mean, he actually went through not one but two (!) duels in order to "redeem" his honor over..."

Thanks for that. I didn't know he fought two duels.

Violet wrote: "Nocturnalux wrote: "I suspect when it came to Proust's homosexuality, the problem was deep seated internalized homophobia. I mean, he actually went through not one but two (!) duels in order to "re..."

It gets even stranger as one of them was against a journalist who was, himself, homosexual. So clearly the depth of internalized homophobia was not a quirk, so to speak, of Proust's but the way a lot- dare I say even the majority- of homosexual men at the time saw themselves.

A contrast with Gide's case is very useful. While contemporary one tends to think of Gide as much younger; I know I tend to think so. Gide was politically involved in ways Proust never was and spoke out against colonialism and other social ills.

Gide was able of breaking free from an education that was every bit as restrictive as Proust's, perhaps even more so given his puritanical protestant background.

Proust, however, could never publicly accept that he was gay. Gide had several conversations about him on this subject and it became quite frustrating; there was simply no budging Proust.

The Proust/Gide connection is representative of the ways in which homosexual self-actualization came to pass: the trend went from Proust's attitude toward Gide's. To us, in the 21st century, Gide seems the norm and Proust the aberration but back then, if anything, it was very much the other way around.

Proust even went to the extent of getting his housekeeper to burn a lot of writings upon his death, including letters that might compromise him.

Psycho-analyzing dead writers is always tricky but I suspect part of Proust's unwillingness to own up to his being homosexual had to do with his family. We know his mother, a person who was extremely important to Proust, was very worried about this. She knew her son was homosexual and was all too aware that could spell disaster. I suspect the mere thought of hurting his mother, even after her death, would be enough to paralyze Proust on an emotional level and make him utterly unable of coming clean.

There is also the company he kept. As we see from his magnus opus, Proust had access to the most elite salons of his day, but his status there was somewhat ambivalent. Already he was of Jewish descent which weighted against him and then his family, while rich, were not precisely sophisticated- or aristocratic- as were salon hosts and dwellers.

Being openly homosexual in this social milieu might be one strike too much. Of course, salons admitted homosexuals into their midst as interesting sources of gossip and the like. We see that in the Baron Charlus who is based off a real person whom Proust met and who resented his portrait. But the real life counterpart of the Baron was also a nobleman. In other words, he had a special pedigree that gave him a kind of pass in a pseudo-Bohemia starkly marked along rarified social hierarchy.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written on this and on the way class intersected sexual orientation in Proust's time. There was a category, the homosexual nobleman, that while not entirely acceptable had its own place in the social landscape. But the bourgeois upstart who is a Jew on top of everything else, that's not a niche that exists in the realm of the salon.

On top of all this, it would have given Proust a kind of visibility that I do not think he wanted. A lot of people whom he immortalized in his book were very upset and several found Proust's power of observation to be nothing short of uncanny. If he became a spectacle- the Gay Jew- it would very difficult for him to blend into the background, as he often did, and observe without being barely noticed.

Nocturnalux wrote: "Violet wrote: "Nocturnalux wrote: "I suspect when it came to Proust's homosexuality, the problem was deep seated internalized homophobia. I mean, he actually went through not one but two (!) duels ..."

Brilliant. Lots of information I didn't know. But if we take up Roland Barthes' view that biography is irrelevant to a novel's text there's a big problem. There was a point while reading that I thought if I were fourteen and had just discovered I was gay this is not a book that would make me feel good about my discovery. It's only learning that Proust was gay himself that exonerates his hostility to some degree.

It's a case of Your Mileage May Vary as Sedgwick, a lesbian herself, and a very important figure in queer studies, having arguably kickstarted them herself, saw Proust as essential to her coming to terms with her own queerness as well as her Jewish identity along with the connection between the two.

I also think it is worth mentioning that even if we discard biography altogether, Proust still offers us one of the few genuinely positive queer characters to grace literature of the time: Saint-Loup. If we look at queer or queer leaning characters of the time, few are portrayed in such a genuinely good light as he is. Off the top of my head I can only think of Radclyffe Hall's Stephen in The Well of Loneliness.

I think when it comes to biography and Proust there is a natural and very understandable tendency to see Reserche as autobiography. And in many ways, it is so, even down to the narrator being called Marcel.

But this is not a memoir, at all, and the points from which it deviates from Proust's actual life are many. It remains a work of creative fiction albeit one very influenced by the author's lived experience, to the point it creates an illusion of truly being Proust's life story.
I suspect that, in a sense, detaching the narrator from the queer characters is also part of Proust's approach to fiction in which the rest of the cast ends up being more important than said narrator. The narrator needs must be outside, to some extent, in order to function so as such he has to be straight, non-Jewish and still not quite typical salon fare either.

As for Proust's ambivalence about his Jewishness, I think it is worth mentioning that while his family was indeed Jewish, Proust himself had precious contact with the culture or the religion. His parents already belonged to a fairly assimilated generation and Proust's own generation was even more so.
Hannah Arendt wrote about this pre-WWII generation of highly educated Jews who were somewhat lackadaisical about their identity as such and who felt a much keener connection to other cultural poles even as they did recognize themselves as Jews of a kind. Those who were unfortunate enough to be alive when WWII came about were often utterly baffled at being rounded up as "Jews" when they hardly ever even thought of themselves in that light. Not, of course, that the Nazis cared for such niceties of distinction but they did exist and tend to get ignored when discussion this time period.

The extent Proust even considered himself Jewish is unclear. I am sure considerations of class did play into his downplaying it, yes. We should always keep in mind that Proust, for all his genius, was very much a snob. The Jewish characters he represents in his novel were, in a sense, as much an "Other" as they would be to his readership. Not entirely so but still.

But here it is impossible to dismiss biography and even more so, to dismiss history because the Dreyfus case marked the whole of France at the time. Proust, for once, took a political stance in defending Dreyfus but ironically enough, the way he went about it forced him into further downplaying of Jewishness.

As Proust himself said, one did not defend Dreyfus because one were a fellow Jew but one defended Dreyfus because he was being unfairly criminalized and made into a scapegoat. Being a Jewish man himself- even if only because other people identified him as such- he knew that his defense could easily be mistaken as mere partisanship. This he was desperate to avoid as it would do him no good and could backfire against Dreyfus himself. I mean, people in those days were very keen on the "Jewish conspiracy"- it was the background against which the Dreyfus tragedy played out and it wouldn't even have been possible without it- and a Jewish author defending a fellow Jew could all too easily be spun as another example of the cabal at work.

Proust was also prescient in this as at one point he lamented how in the 19th century, in France, it was possible for a man to be persecuted like this simply because he was a Jew and that he feared for the future. Little did he know that the Vichy government would confirm and completely go beyond his worst fears.

Nocturnalux wrote: "It's a case of Your Mileage May Vary as Sedgwick, a lesbian herself, and a very important figure in queer studies, having arguably kickstarted them herself, saw Proust as essential to her coming to..."

Great points and lots of food for thought here. It's certainly true Saint Loup on the whole is a sympathetic character and true too that this is essentially a work of fiction and should be read as such. It's perhaps a little easy nowadays to call out the racism and homophobia of bygone eras when it called for so much more courage to oppose the institutionalised hostility of those times. I guess one fascinating thing is that Proust, so psychologically astute most of the time, wasn't more subtle in dramatising the conflict within himself about his sexuality and racial origins. The conflict seems to emerge despite his intentions.