Sodom and Gomorrah (Remembrance of Things Past, 8)

Rating:
Summary: "Obscure Deities," or the Dark Side of Love
Review: In the previous volume of Proust's IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, Marcel was poised at the pinnacle of social success as he readied himself to attend the Princesse de Guermantes' party. Those alabaster gates that from a distance appeared to be the entry to paradise actually opened only onto a continuing pageant of human folly. Early in the book, a chance peek out the window shows the elegant Baron de Charlus to be a pervert as he romances the servile Jupien.

Even his beloved Duchesse de Guermantes "allowed the azure light of her eyes to float in front of her, but vaguely, so as to avoid the people with whom she did not wish to enter into relations, whose presence she discerned from time to time like a menacing reef in the distance."

Marcel retreats from the social whirl and returns to Balbec, the scene of WITHIN A BUDDING GROVE. There he takes up again with Albertine and, after hobnobbing with the Guermantes, now joins Mme Verdurin's "little band" of opinionated second-raters. This was the same salon at which Swann had met Odette in SWANN'S WAY. You may recall that Swann discovered that Odette was multiply unfaithful to him, yet married her anyway.

In SODOM AND GOMORRAH, it is Marcel who is drawn ever closer to Albertine. As the book draws to a close, he discovers from a chance remark that Albertine claims close friendship with two lesbians one of whose trysts Marcel had witnessed years before in Combray. Just as Swann had agonized just before deciding to wed Odette, Marcel sees the death of his hopes and of any chance for joy in his young life.

"As by an electric current that gives us a shock, I have been shaken by my loves. I have lived them. I have felt them: never have I succeeded in seeing or thinking them. Indeed I am inclined to believe that in these relationships ..., beneath the outward appearance of the woman, it is to these invisible forces with which she is incidentally accompanied that we address ourselves as to obscure deities."

During this, my second reading of IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME, I continue to marvel at Proust's mastery. The scene of a social gathering that occupies two hundred pages, and takes me two or three days to read, seems to pass by in the blinking of an eye.

Rating:
Summary: Proust's Human Comedy
Review: Some have accused Proust of being "long-winded." However, he suffered acutely from shortness of breath but not shortness of breadth. Proust preferred to work on a large canvas. Having read the first four volumes of "In Search of Lost Time," I am even more convinced that Proust is a literary talent of the highest order. He is a writer of immense sensibility in the true sense of the word. His perception and memory and intelligence permeate his writing. Like Balzac, whom he admired, Proust focused his sensibility upon high society in Paris in his heyday. He continually discoursed about the the manners of the circles in which he moved and sheds light, as did Balzac, on the complexities of the strata and protocol and behavior of his social peers. One is able to get a close look at this realm in which he was considered a literary luminary and rightly so, after winning France's greatest literary prize at such an early age. Like Balzac he built his volumes in a "serial" fashion by ending each in dramatic fashion: the characters reappear from volume to volume. And one learns about their health, their misfortunes, their affairs often through the hearsay of other characters, as it happens in real life. Despite the despicable ways that the characters often treat each other, Proust speaks within the tapestry of the "human comedy" as the humble voice of reason. "When you reach my age you will see that society is a paltry thing, and you will be sorry that you put so much importance to these trifles," a judge observes. But for Proust society was his life and his legacy is partly at least the light that he sheds upon his own human comedy. The beauty of the language is breathtaking --the language is utterly lyrical and once one surrenders to the pulse and flow of his long sentence syntax, one finds the transforming genius of his art. I am eager to begin Volume 5 -- the man is a bonafide genius. He deals with sensitive subjects in good taste and with sage discretion -- Proust communicates with his readers as he probably did in society: honestly, articulately and with the best of all manners. He didn't live long enough to read the publication of half the volumes of his greatest masterpiece: Volume 4 was the last he lived to see published. What an absolute pity!

Rating:
Summary: The truth of love
Review: The fourth volume of "In search of lost time" (Sodom and Gomorrah) begins with the sickness of Marcel's grandmother's sickness, which will lead her to the grave. During the dissease she will be treated by doctor Huxley, whose behavior surrounding the woman's unavoidable death awakens Marcel's digressions. Once she dies, the story resumes his contact with the high spheres of society. Marcel travels once again to Balbec, where he finds Albertine again. Their relationship grows as they assist to Mme. Verdurin's gatherings. Her "wednesdays", as she calls them, now that she attends in Balbec to her group of friends. Marcel's mind games surrounding Albertine are comparable to those utilized by Charlus to manipulate his young lover, the son of an old servant of his (Marcel's) grandfather... who plays the violin. Marcel is involved in this relationship as an comunicating vessel between Charlus and his "Adonis". It is rather curious how telephones, automobiles and trains are more and more involved in the telling of the events. The encounters in the stations, the dangers of traveling in an automobile, the unpersonalized feel to talking to someone through a telephone, etc... All these entail not only technological changes, but social ones as well: how people relate to one another begins to be considered outside the reduced space of fixed spheres... now, they move all over the space, they can even be broken into pieces... their voices, their bodies, the possibility of an effective transport that also allows privacy and secrecy (such as Marcel and Albertine's travels in the car, and all the implied events surrounding this machine -involving Charlus and his young "friend").
Marcel's doubts about Albertine's likes, are more overwhelming everyday... and he finally decides to marry Albertine, to take her to Paris with him.
In this volume, Marcel Proust submerges deeper in the waters of human affections and desires. If in the second volume he began to experience love for the first time, in this one, he is experiencing love outside the protection of young idelism and romanticism... instead, he realizes the conection between love, desire, snobism and pain: the truth of love is far from being an eternal, selfless and happy feeling: it is the constant haunting of a question, the everlasting wonder about evil within and without.
It is most memorable when Marcel assists to a party and describes the unfixed nature of gender differentiation: how much can a woman look like a man, how much can a woman desire another woman... and how much like a woman can one man desire another man.