My Year With Proust - Day 307

   I now understood, moreover, why earlier, when I had seen him coming from Mme de Villeparisis's, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!  He belonged to that race of beings, less paradoxical than they appear, whose ideal is manly precisely because their temperament is feminine, and who in ordinary life resemble other men in appearance only; there where each of us carries, inscribed in those eyes through which he beholds everything in the universe, a human form engraved on the surface of the pupil, for them it is not that of a nymph but that of an ephebe.  A race upon which a curse is laid and which must in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life's dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and in his name refute as a calumny what is their very life; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which their frequently acknowledged charm inspires and their often generous hearts would gladly feel - but can we describe as friendships those relationships which flourish only by virtue of a lie and form which the first impulse of trust and sincerity to which they might be tempted to yield would cause them to be rejected with disgust, unless they are dealing with an impartial or perhaps even sympathetic spirit, who however in that case, misled with regard to them by a conventional psychology, will attribute to the vice confessed the very affection that is most alien to it, just as certain judges assume and more inclined pt pardon murder in inverts and treason in Jews for reasons derived from original sin and racial predestination?

Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain, pp. 637-638

Proust continues his examination and analysis of M. de Charlus, which forms the core of a typically Proustian five page paragraph, which, for the sake of my sanity and yours, I'll break up into into pieces.  I'm torn on this particular passage.  On the one hand it is clearly a product of its age, which is clumsily shown by the line, " I now understood, moreover, why earlier, when I had seen him coming from Mme de Villeparisis's, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!"  However, on the other hand, I think there's some beautiful reflection here.  I couldn't help thinking that Proust is calling out M. de Charlus for a very Freudian defense mechanism where he hides his homosexuality behind a mask of exaggerated machismo.  At the same time, there's been enough doubt about Proust's own sexuality that I guess you could make the same claim against him.

The thing is, I don't read these words of Proust as a condemnation.  Rather, instead of angry, they simply seem sad.  He writes, "A race upon which a curse is laid and which must in falsehood and perjury because it knows that its desire, that which constitutes life's dearest pleasure, is held to be punishable, shameful, an inadmissible thing; which must deny its God, since its members, even when Christians, when at the bar of justice they appear and are arraigned, must before Christ and in his name refute as a calumny what is their very life; sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie all her life long and even in the hour when they close her dying eyes; friends without friendships, despite all those which their frequently acknowledged charm inspires and their often generous hearts would gladly feel . . ."  To me this reads like a lamentation for a group of men, maybe Proust included, who are cut off from their families and the rest of society because of the mores of society.  One of the things that I always praise our students for today is how naturally accepting they are, for the most part, on matters of gender and sexuality.  So, we have come a long way, although we have so, so far to go.

I have avoided doing much research on Remembrance of Things Past or Proust himself as I worked my way through the novel, mainly because I wanted my reflections to be truly mine.  However, I'm beginning to feel that I need to look more into Proust's life if I'm going to be able to dig to the next level.  However, I'm also only half-way through the novel so there's plenty of time for more to be revealed.