The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [316]
Most of the next 650 pages, in the volume entitled `The Guermantes Way, are based on the time when, after leaving school, Proust was received as a young outsider into the world of the French upper class. As we are led interminably through their Parisian dinner parties and receptions, two impressions predominate. One is of the claustrophobic snobbery of this aristocracy which, cut off from any genuine social role, has become utterly decadent, obsessed with `birth, titles and family histories stretching back centuries into the past, like that of the Guermantes themselves, "fourteen times connected to the French royal family"The other is of the unremitting triviality and self-regarding tedium of their conversations, so that when we are finally treated, at great length, to an example of the `legendary Guermantes wit, a joke admiringly repeated round the fashionable salons of Faubourg St Germain for weeks, it is merely the awful pun by which the Duchesse de Guermantes describes someone as a `teaser Augustus: Yet this world of allconsuming egotism, where nothing seems to exist beyond the social masks of its inhabitants, Proust lovingly describes through his narrator as a magical realm, because it is the world into which he himself had been welcomed, and which had flattered his ego by treating him as someone interesting and of unusual talent. In the midst of all this heady social success, Albertine unexpectedly comes back into his life. She arrives one afternoon when he is in bed, complaisantly submits to his caresses and they make love.
By the time even the narrator is beginning to weary of the vapidity of this closed aristocratic world, the book's mood begins to change and darken. There is the strange interview with Baron de Charlus, the older man who seems to have taken the young narrator under his wing as a protege, but then subjects him one night to an extraordinary petulant, threatening, snobbish tirade which reveals a new, much darker side to his character. This is a prelude to the scene where the narrator discovers that de Charlus is a homosexual (when he overhears him having sex with Jupien), and to the tortuous, opaque passage which opens the next volume, `The Cities of the Plain, describing those who are condemned to live in the shadowy underworld of Sodom and Gomorrah: male and female homosexuals. Proust is here referring obliquely to the time when he himself had entered the twilight world of the homosexual demi-monde; and this now colours much of the rest of the novel, as in the scene where we see de Charlus, Morel and the Prince de Guermantes in a brothel - even though in the foreground the narrator's own sexual proclivities are presented almost entirely in terms of his tortured relationship with the sexually ambiguous Albertine.1 We never really know very much about Albertine. She is a shadowy, cardboard figure, seen entirely through the narrator's eyes. She represents all the difficulty Proust had in realising his own inner anima: except that in real life he ended up projecting it onto men; whereas Albertine, for decorum's sake, remains outwardly, if at times ambivalently, feminine. Although his relationship with her finally becomes more or less established, he is afflicted by perpetual uncertainty. Can he trust her? Is she lying to him? Is she really a secret lesbian, engaging in affairs with other women? Should he marry her? After twitching one