The one great dishonesty at the core of Search for Lost Time

Sodom and Gomorrah, vol 4 of In Search of Lost Time, ends w/ narrator Marcel making the "discovery" that Albertine has engaged in lesbian relationships - bringing back to his mind a memory of a lesbian liaison he had observed secretly as a much younger man in Vol 1 - to this volume is framed by two surreptitious observations of homosexual encounters, both of which fill Marcel with wonder and with loathing (self-loathing?). In regard to Albertine he is physically repulsed by this realization and cuts himself off from her immediately - and then, oddly, goes back to his room in the Balbec hotel, is up crying till dawn, at which point he calls his mother into his room - she has been present in the background throughout this volume but played almost no role - and she reminds him of his beloved grandmother, and then oddly he tells her that he must marry Albertine. Why is this? Again, like Charlus (discussed in yesterday's post), he's drawn to what he loathes and fears. Also, as w/ Proust's writing about Charlus, we can see her an oblique way in which Proust can present his own homosexuality in his literature - something that he could not do directly, in literature and maybe in life (as translator John Sturrock points out in his short introduction to this volume, Proust was not a hero to the gay readers and writers). The theme of sexuality - homosexuality in particular - really opens up in volume 4 of Search and sets us up for the theme of jealousy and betrayal that will dominate the next 2 volumes - but Proust's strange attitude toward homosexuality, perhaps typical of the attitude of his time and his class, is disconcerting and disorienting to the contemporary reader: one the one hand, so frank and matter-of-fact about some of the encounters, those of Charlus in particular, and on the other hand so full of revulsion and jealousy - Marcel re Albertine above all; it's as if MP felt compelled to write about a heterosexual love - M and A - but felt that he himself, as a writer, was constrained and dishonest: in this novel of the most deeply personal confessions, recollections, and obsessions, there is this one great vacuum at the core, the inability to write directly about love and sex as he knew and felt and experienced it. This tension doesn't detract from the novel but actually drives it, makes the work even greater and more fraught w/ emotion: not just a confessional novel of memoir, but an obsessional one.