Sodom – gays
Gomorrah – lesbians
Flower description
and comparison to society marriages.
Charlus is Satan.
I’m supposed to believe that Marcel fought duels.
Charlus and Jupian sitting in a tree.
What does Marcel spy on the both of them? What does he want a peephole? God, he is a bit of pervert.
Seems to feel differently about Charlus since discovering he
is gay.
“ . . . Princesse Palatine, forever in her riding habit,
who, having taken more from her husband than his virility” (50).
“One of the factors that further accentuate the masculine
appearance of women such as Mme de Vasigorbert is that the neglect they are
left in by their husbands, and the shame they feel, casts a gradual blight on
everything womanly in them. In the end,
they acquire the virtues and defects that the husband does not have. As he grows more frivolous, more effeminate,
and ore indiscreet, they become the charmless effigy as it were, of he virtue
that the husband ought to be practicing.” (5).
Loads to unpack there.
Woman become unwomanly if men aren’t manly enough. Might mean more from a guy who didn’t hate
women as he does. Def. Romeo loving
women he can’t get. He’s in lust with
the younger ones. Love and lust are not
the same thing
“If on reading and article of critic who has always evinced
the greatest admiration for him, a true writer, devoid of the foolish amour
-propre of so many literary people, finds the name of second-rate authors
listed, but not his own, he does not have time to dwell on what for him be
cause for astonishment: his books reclaim him” (51).
Proust has not met today’s authors, obviously.
He then goes on - on
the same page 51 – to compare that to society women gossiping about parties.
“Or perhaps she did realize but was not troubled by the
contradiction, using for the lesson in that she could give me without being too
impolite – I mean a lesson that was wordless but no less eloquent on that
account.” (55)
“It’s much harder to disfigure a masterpiece than to create
it” (62).
He seems to feel differently about Swann here as well,
perhaps because Swann is not as popular as he thought. It isn’t just falling out of lust with
Gilberte, there is another reason. He
goes off people when he sees their weaknesses, or what he perceives as
weaknesses.
Charlus was married but his wife died.
Jean Cocteau wrote about diatribe on page 102 and said it
was really Robert Comte de Montesquiou-Fezensac who said. (note on 523)
“In society, alas, as in the world of politics, the victims
are so cowardly that you cannot hold it against their executioners for long”
(103). Please, dude. You didn’t see Trump.
“Men may thus have many sorts of pleasures. The true pleasure is that for which they give
up another” (110).
Francoise knows what is what.
Tries to use Gilberte to make Albertine jealous.
Really glad I saw that Ballet Russe exhibit at the National
Gallery in Washington years ago.
“Illness is the best heeded of doctors: to kindness or to
knowledge, we only make promises, suffering we allow” (143).
Gilberte gets a large inheritance which is why people notice
her.
Proust was going to use Intermittences of the Heart as a
title (note on 527)
Joseph Caillaux’s wife shot and killed Gaston Calmette
because she didn’t like what Le Figaro was printing about her husband.
The whole bit about how he is remembering his grandmother at
the shore is like when I was in DC last year and thinking about John.
“Only I did not find in my grandmother the rich spontaneity of
old. Her words were only an enfeebled, docile
response, a mere echo almost, of my own words; she was no longer anything more
than the reflection of my own thoughts.” (181).
Marcel only thinks about Albertine in terms of what he
himself wants.
“Our desires for different women are in any case not all
equally strong. On a particular evening
we cannot do without the woman who afterward will hardly trouble us for the next
month or so”(187).
The First President says, “When you get to be my age, you’ll
find that society is nothing, really, and you’ll regret having attached so much
importance to these trifles” (220). Is
Proust speaking to his younger self here.
Alexander says that after the death of his mother Proust became reclusive. And that the grandmother in the novel is
basically the mother. So is Proust talking
to himself here?
“Often, when in the hall of the casino, two girls felt
desire for each other, there produced something like a phenomenon of light, a
sort of trail of phosphorescence leading from one to the other.” (246).
Men fer lesbians.
Also, men desire watching lesbians.
Marcel has sex on the mind and does like conveniently unattractive
(older) women.
“For want of curing us, medicine busies itself altering the
meanings of verbs and pronouns” (293).
The whole bit about place names is boring. Am I suppose to find it boring or is it just “look
at me”?
If Alexander is correct and Proust disliked biographical
criticism, why write the novel this way?
Why make an autobiographical novel?
Is Marcel, with his anti-Semitism and homophobia, the anti-Proust?
Considering what Alexander said about Proust observing masturbating
so much that his father gave him money for a brothel, the sex obsession in the
books makes sense. Also why would you
hang pictures of your mother in a brothel?
Okay, besides that.
Alexander, Patrick. Marcel
Proust’s Search for Lost Time: A Reader’s Guide to The Remembrance of
Things
Past. Vintage Books, 2007
Proust, Marcel. Sodom
and Gomorrah. Trans. John Sturrock. Penguin Books, 2004.
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