Understanding Marcel Proust by Thiher Allen;

Author:Thiher, Allen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press

Chapter 6

Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, and The Fugitive

Intimations of Hell

Proust considered using the common title Sodom and Gomorrah for the three parts of the novel now known in the revised Moncrieff translation as Sodom and Gomorrah, The Captive, and The Fugitive (the last two were first published in French as La Prisonnière and Albertine disparue). As Antoine Compagon has observed, in 1918 Proust considered the entire “Albertine novel” to be illustrative of what he then designated as Sodom and Gomorrah I and II.1 A suggested unity of theme is given by the title’s biblical reference: in the Old Testament, Sodom and Gomorrah are the cities on the plain whose inhabitants God punishes with destruction for perversions they refuse to relinquish (or so goes the usual interpretation of their woes). However Proust did not keep a common title for the three parts, perhaps because the title Sodom and Gomorrah might imply too strongly the idea that Proust’s narrator, like a modern Isaiah, is denouncing those who live there by calling upon them to “give ear unto the law of our God” (Isaiah 1:10). For if the narrator takes his place in the lineage of Hebrew prophets, it is rather more as a comic ingénue ironically portraying his own ineptitude than as a moralist denouncing the sins of his contemporaries, especially in the last two parts. This is not to say that the biblical perspective on human history does not correspond to Proust’s view of society. In a sense it does, and it certainly corresponds to the damnation that conventional society once held out for those who transgressed its conventional morality. Oscar Wilde can be called to witness in this regard. Moreover the narrator’s sudden discovery of the “cities of the plain” follows quite plausibly, in biblical terms, the portrayal of the paradise the boy knew in Combray and then his initiatory wandering in the desert of Guermantes high society. After the narration of his unsuccessful loves and dismal discoveries about society in Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way, his discovery of Sodom probably comes as a surprise only to the young narrator. For the reader it is the logical culmination of the boy’s education in the fall, an education taking the shape of a prolonged initiation accompanied by an inevitable, if at first slow, loss of innocence.

The narrator’s Bildung takes a sharp turn with his discovery of the universality of sin, conceived of first as the loss of the ideal and only later as the commission of forbidden acts. The young narrator becomes cognizant of this loss as, after “Combray,” he begins to understand how thorough-going is the lack of the plenitude that once seemingly invested his earthly garden. In Sodom and Gomorrah, this understanding of loss culminates in his full consciousness, well after the fact, of his grandmother’s death. This lesson about death is reinforced subsequently by Albertine’s sudden accidental death. However the discovery of the depravation resembling that described in the Bible occurs suddenly, with the

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