Sodom and Gomorrah (2)

As I was saying, Balbec, “a place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking” to Marcel, had become by the end of Sodom and Gomorrah “laden with purely human effluivia,” a landscape whose atmosphere was now “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” Social life had drained the seaside resort and its surrounding villages of their mystery. Or so Marcel claims.

Near the close of the novel, this passage, I think, throws his claim in doubt:

The light of the sun, which was about to come up, by modifying the object around me, made me once again, as if shifting my position for a moment in relation to it, aware, even more cruelly, of my pain. Never had I seen so beautiful and so sorrowful a morning. Reflecting on all the indifferent landscapes that were about to be illuminated, and which, only yesterday, would have filled me only with the desire to visit them, I could not contain a sob, when, in a mechanically executed gesture of oblation, seeming to symbolize for me the bloody sacrifice that I was about to have to make of all joy, each morning, until the end of my life, a renewal, solemnly celebrated at each dawning of my daily unhappiness and of the blood from my wound, the gold egg of the sun, as if propelled by the break in equilibrium produces at the moment of coagulation by a change of density, barbed with flames as in painting, burst in one bound through the curtain behind which I sensed it quivering for the past few moments, ready to enter on the stage and to spring upwards, and whose mysterious, congealed purple it erased beneath floods of light.

The pain Marcel speaks of is, of course, his fear that Albertine is a lesbian, a fear that has intensified following his discovery that she had been raised by Mlle. Vintueil’s friend (the friend whom a younger Marcel had secretly watched make love to Mlle. Vintueil). Marcel’s cry is an “oblation,” a “bloody sacrifice” to joy, a gesture “solemnly celebrated” with the “blood from my wound.” The language evokes the Passion. Faced with yet another real or imagined bit of damning evidence, he is suffering as Jesus suffered on the cross. The imagery of the sun (son) reinforces the comparison. As it rises “barbed with flames,” it erases the “congealed purple” behind Marcel’s curtains. (Purple the color of vestments worn in Catholic masses during Good Friday and the Easter Vigil, the high holy days preceding the Passion.) The contrast between indifference and engagement could hardly be more startling. Those who hesitate to identify Marcel with Jesus might still concede that this passage presents us with a mystery.

As a whole the closing pages of Sodom and Gomorrah are filled with mystery. As the sun rises, “in the disorder of the night mists that still hung in blue and pink shreds over waters littered with the pearly debris of the dawn, boats were passing, smiling at the oblique light that had turned their sails and the tips of their bowsprits yellow….” The sunrise was a “pure evocation of the sunset…” Just before watching daybreak, Marcel had woken suddenly to his bedroom door opening. “My heart pounding, I seemed to see my grandmother before me, as in one of those apparitions that I had already had, but only in my sleep.” Like the dawn, this experience—the apparition is his mother—inverts the expected to create a mysterious, other-worldly moment. Perhaps the most striking transformation occurs still earlier in the novel's last pages, when Marcel reflects on his distance from Albertine. “Should something violently alter the position of that soul in relation to us, to show us that it loves other human beings and not ourselves [as apparently Albertine had], them by the beating of our dislocated hearts, we feel that the cherished creature was not a few feet away, but inside us.” Not more distance, but not distant at all.

When I read the last pages of Sodom and Gomorrah, I see only counter-evidence to Marcel’s assertion that mystery no longer exists. “What a deceitful sense sight is!” he exclaims. Yes, what a misleading observation!

Proust and Fashion

Ms. Grapeshot/Odette has interesting comments about Proust and fashion. One notes the fascination Yves Saint Laurent had for Proust, with an aside about Ms. Grapeshot/Odette's link to the designs of YSL. The other provides a pointer to Fortuny, the designer of some of Mme. de Guermantes' clothes. (Remember Marcel grilling her about what she wore so that he could buy similar clothes for Albertine?)

Sodom and Gomorrah (1)

As our Proust reading class made its way through Sodom and Gomorrah, the group asked, “Why are we reading this?” More to the point, “Why did Proust write more than one hundred pages on the Verdurin salon?” While the Verdurins’ missteps and faux pas in Swann’s Way made us laugh, their mean spirited, self-serving attempt to establish themselves in high society did not amuse us now. What was the point? How did the large middle section of the novel fit in with the rest of In Search of Lost Time? Our reading had begun to acquire a tinge of drudgery.

It was easy to condemn the Verdurins and their “little clan.” Yet I noticed moments in which Proust tempered his view of them. The gathering of the clan on the train created a touching portrait of the group, even if they expelled those who made the mistake of coming into their railway compartment. So I argued with little effect. What of M. and Mme. Verdurin’s interest in the sights and landscape around their rented chateau, La Raspelière? Their main business there, observes Marcel , “was to live agreeably, to go on excursions, to eat well, to talk, to entertain agreeable friends whom they made play amusing games of billiards, have good meals and cheerful tea-parties.” Yet he would discover later

how intelligently they had learned to know the locality, taking their guests on excursions as ‘original’ as the music to which they made them listen. The part that the flowers at La Raspelière, the roads along by the sea, the old houses and the unknown churches played in M. Verdurin’s life was so great that those who saw him only in Paris… could scarcely comprehend the idea he had formed of his own life, and the importance that his pleasures lent it in his own eyes.

The reading group remained unconvinced. Hadn’t Marcel made the same observation earlier, adding that the Verdurins allowed the beauty of the place to “wash passively over them rather than making it the object of their concerns”? I was misreading the novel in order to find something to redeem these social climbers.

The group felt Marcel had matured. He seemed more active in the gatherings of the little clan, for example taking an interest in Brichot’s endless etymologies. Still, the novel seemed unmoored from what we had read before. Marcel’s quest to become a writer had dropped from sight long ago. As Roger Shattuck observes, “the theme of great expectations runs very strong at the start [of In Search for Lost Time] and then diminishes [in Sodom and Gomorrah], leaving us adrift on the ocean of Marcel’s desultory life. The ocean seems to go on forever.”

Perhaps, argued one of our group, the point was to become tired and exasperated by the Verdurins. By doing so, we were experiencing what Marcel lived. The problem with the argument, it seemed, was that Marcel was not tired of the Verdurins. He looked forward to their dinners and enjoyed the gatherings of the clan, only balking at visiting La Raspelière when a visit would interfere with his plans to be alone with Albertine.

And yet. At the end of Chapter 3, Marcel clarifies the change in him, if not in us readers. He had acquired a new habit, the habit of filling his time by visiting friends in the countryside of Balbec; if the “territorial distribution” of the friends along the coast

necessarily lent to the visits I made… the form of a journey, they also now confined the attractions of that journey to the social ones, of a succession of visits…. In this too social valley, to the sides of which clung, whether visible or not, a numerous company of friends, the poetic cry of evening was no longer that of the owl or the frog, but the ‘How goes it?’ of M. de Criquetot, or the ‘Kaire’ of Brichot.

A place that had been once mysterious and anxiety provoking, was now “laden with purely human effluivia” and “breathable without difficulty, too soothing even.” If we were still bored and frustrated with the social world of Balbec, Marcel had become comfortable in it, at a price.