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Monday, March 17, 2014

Sex scenes in Proust

Proust, to my knowledge, was never censored or banned because of his sex scenes, unlike his contemporaries among the Modernists, notably Joyce and Lawrence, and why is that? First, sex in Proust is masked by a lot of circumlocution and is far less explicitly erotic than in Lawrence and less frank and open (even ribald) than in Joyce - I'm thinking of the scene in which Albertine (in The Guermantes Way) visits Marcel when she returns, newly divorced I think, to Paris and Marcel is confined, as so often, to his bed; he asks her to lie down next to him - they begin to kiss - they're interrupted first by a comic appearance of Francoise and then by one of Proust's literary flights about the act of kissing - and we almost miss that Marcel had an orgasm - the ejaculation seems to have been literally under the covers. Which brings us to a second reason: though there are several sexual scenes in In Search of Lost Time, including homoerotic and sado-masochistic scene, especially in the final volume, you have to be a careful and patient reader to ferret these out - in other words, I don't think anyone was marking the sex scenes in Proust and sneaking a peak, the work is too vast and too daunting. Also, I susupect the Moncrieff translation, unlike the Penguin Modern edition I'm reading (Tranarne translation of Guermantes) was somewhat diffident, even Bowdlerized - though I could be wrong on this. And perhaps we have different standards for the French - they actually have sex, unlike the English and Irish writers, of course. By today's standards, the sex scenes in Proust seem pretty well refracted - which may also be because he never wrote directly about Marcel's homosexuality - so his heterosexual relations seem a little abstract and overworked.  But I think that if the censors had only had the intelligence to read Proust carefully, they probably would have pounced.

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