Static Flux: Timeless Truths When Everyone Changes

Spoiler Alert: This post is best read when one has finished the majority of the novel. Warning: These posts contain references to explicit sexual encounters.

Over the course of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator makes impulsive (and often misleading) judgements of the people he meets, only to change his mind later. A striking example is the narrator’s changing depiction of M. de Charlus. In The Guermantes Way, M. De Charlus is depicted by the narrator in the final party sequence as a sort of obnoxious, scabrous, and untrustworthy individual with inadequate conduct:“As he poured out this terrible, almost insane language, M. de Charlus squeezed my arm until it ached…” M. de Charlus continually touches the narrator in this strange way, almost hurting him. The narrator even calls him “frivolous” and accuses him of holding “an excessive pride.”

Of course, the narrator is not aware of Charlus’ true nature: he is gay. The narrator realizes this in Sodom and Gomorrah, when witnesses the love scene between Charlus and Jupien’s. At this point, he feels as though “a revolution had been affected in M. De Charlus in my newly opened eyes” (15). The narrator then comes to the conclusion that M. de Charlus is actually an exceptional man (28). Suddenly, all of the strange, idiosyncratic moments with in The Guermantes Way seem to make sense: earlier, he was flirting with the narrator! Although Charlus’ sexual orientation did not change, our perception of him did change with context and time.

– Sam Brodsky

The transfiguration of personalities in Sodom and Gomorrah is very closely tied to sexuality. When sexuality is not treated literally, it works as a stand-in for what goes unspoken in day-to-day life and yet has a profound effect on our public behavior. Although this volume is concerned largely with repressed homosexuality, Robert Saint-loup, in Part Two, Chapter One of this volume is an example of heterosexual love (or the lack thereof) and its effect on political opinion. In The Guermantes Way, Saint-Loup has been estranged from his family, the illustrious Guermantes, because of his pro-Dreyfusard opinions and bohemian habits. He has taken up with a Jewish experimental theater artist and (unbeknownst to him) former prostitute, a relationship for which he is brutally mocked by the Duchesse de Guermantes. After the relationship ends and it is made clear that Saint-Loup was being extorted by his mistress, he makes an about-turn in opinion on the Dreyfus affair: “The whole affair began badly,” says Robert, “And I very much regret sticking my nose in... I’m a soldier, and for the army above all.” Robert scapegoats a second political institution, the military, in order to explain his change of opinion in a way that is socially acceptable. Proust demonstrates for us that politics are deeply personal, history psychological.

– Dante Kanter

The development of character and sexuality progresses throughout the course of In Search of Lost Time while also remaining stagnant. Characters such as the narrator seem to fall into recursive habits while also changing and growing. The narrator himself is not impervious to change; he expresses more permanent character traits through his gradually changing sexuality and behavior, such as his apparent need for control, his sexual orientation, etc. As the narrator is taking a walk near his grandmother's house in Swann's Way, he stops and watches, through a window, as Mlle Vinteuil makes love to a female friend. This is not the first example of voyeurism within Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Earlier in Swann's Way, the narrator displays a similar kind of sexual curiosity when while looking out of his bathroom window (linked later in the novel to sexual encounters) Through these experiences, we witness the development of the narrator's budding sexuality. Later, the narrator experiences various sexual escapades with Gilberte to Albertine. In Sodom and Gomorrah, the narrator has yet another voyeuristic experience when he spies on M. Charlus and Jupien. The narrator even goes so far as to sneak into a room next to M. Charlus and Jupien and climb a ladder to better hear their conversation. This event is also sexual in nature; the narrator realizes that M. Charlus and Jupien are having sex: "It is true that these sounds were so violent that, had they not constantly been taken up an octave higher by a parallel moaning, I might have thought that one person was slitting another's throat close beside me... if there is one thing as noisy as suffering it is pleasure" (Sturrock 11). Thus, the reader witnesses a gradual change and development with the narrator's sexuality. His strange affinity for voyeurism doesn't come as a surprise given his prior experiences with looking through windows and watching other people's sexual rendezvous.

– Catherine Ashley Fairchild Perloff

While many characters change over the course of the novel, there are also many examples of different characters filling the same role. Perhaps the clearest example of this lies with the narrator's love interests. In each of thewomen, we see an aloofness that draws in the narrator. For example, the narrator's love for and obsession with Gilberte increases as she starts to pull away. This happens also with Swann and Odette: the more time she spends apart from him the more desperate he becomes. The narrator has this same experience again after Albertine does not come immediately when he expects her. While each of these women has a unique and complex character, their actual character traits, good or bad, become almost irrelevant to the lover. In these scenarios, it is the lover's character we see being projected onto the love interest. All these women end up with striking similarities that are more a reflection of the men in love with them than of themselves.

– Tess Dugan-Knight

This novel is a social novel about the internal process of perception. One way that Proust explores this apparent contradiction is through the narrator’s changing perception of the other characters. Proust makes clear that context matters for perception; perception is not entirely internal but is an actual sort of interaction with the world. The flip side of the narrator’s progressive understanding of others is that many of the character’s opinions are shown to be a product of their context rather than their deeply held beliefs. That political opinions on the Dreyfus affair are actually surface deep, impacted by personal matters, or that Swann and the narrator view their lovers in such a one-dimensional, interchangeable manner is a constant theme. Psychology, perception, and external context are hugely intertwined and interactive.

– Paul Murphy