Pip: Welcome to osoparavos.com, where today we are going deep — and I mean genuinely, academically deep — into Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.
Mara: Adam Donaldson Powell has been working through the novel’s secondary characters, their sexual connections, and the critical debates those relationships have generated — so that’s the territory we’re covering today.
Pip: Let’s start with the characters themselves — Octave, Andrée, Rachel, and the rather more corrosive Charles Morel.
Secondary characters, desire, and transformation in ISOLT
Mara: The post frames these characters through a single structural question: how do social position, sexuality, and artistic ambition intertwine across the novel’s long arc?
Pip: And the answer, it turns out, involves a lot of people who started out as one thing and ended up as something else entirely — which is very Proust.
Mara: The opening post lays this out directly: “Their marriage comes as a surprise to the Narrator, but it marks Octave’s complete transformation into a brilliant, acclaimed theatrical writer/artist, while elevating Andrée’s social standing.”
Pip: So the idle, golf-obsessed youth at Balbec becomes a celebrated avant-garde playwright, and Andrée — Albertine’s closest confidante — rises with him. Time doesn’t just pass in this novel; it reshuffles everyone.
Mara: Rachel is the third point in that triangle. She begins as a low-cost actress and Saint-Loup’s passionate obsession, and ends up performing in Octave’s theatrical works, which is what gets her into the Guermantes salon — the very social world that once excluded her.
Pip: The post describes it as “time collapsing social boundaries,” which is doing a lot of elegant work for what is essentially a very long novel about people being surprised by who everyone turned out to be.
Mara: Then there’s Charles Morel, who the post treats as a separate but connected case — a violinist of working-class origin who uses sexual relationships with Charlus and then Saint-Loup as vehicles for social elevation and patronage.
Pip: The betrayal angle is striking: Saint-Loup takes up with Morel knowing Morel was his own uncle Charlus’s beloved companion. That’s not a small social transgression within the Guermantes circle.
Mara: And Morel’s connection to Albertine is even darker. Post-mortem investigations reveal he acted as a procurer for her — the post describes him as an “intermediary,” someone who brought young women to Albertine and reportedly visited a brothel with her in Corliville.
Pip: Which feeds directly into the Narrator’s worst fears: that Albertine’s secret life involved not just lesbian relationships but an entire network of bisexual accomplices operating behind his back.
Mara: The post on Albertine’s sexual history with the Narrator adds another layer — during the period she lives with him in Paris, they are physically intimate but never have penetrative sex. The Narrator’s relationship to her body is defined by observation and control rather than consummation.
Pip: Possession without possession. Very on-brand for Marcel.
Mara: And the post is careful to note that her heterosexual past outside that relationship remains genuinely unresolved — Proust leaves it ambiguous by design, because the Narrator’s tragedy is that another person’s inner life is ultimately unknowable.
Mara: That unknowability is also what drives the Narrator’s specific terror about lesbianism — which the post on the Narrator’s beliefs about what lesbians do sexually frames as a “closed world of self-sufficient pleasure” he can never enter or compete with.
Pip: A male rival can be outcompeted. A woman’s desire for another woman, in the Narrator’s imagination, is a different category of threat entirely.
Mara: From there, the debate about whether Proust himself was anti-lesbian becomes unavoidable — and that’s where Colette’s critique lands hardest.
Mara: The post quotes her conclusion directly: when Proust tried to describe the world of women who love women, “he did not know what he was talking about.”
Pip: Colette’s argument, as the post lays it out, is that Proust treated Gomorrah as simply the female version of Sodom — projecting male homosexual dynamics onto women rather than engaging with female intimacy on its own terms.
Mara: The broader critical debate distinguishes between Proust the man — a gay writer navigating a deeply homophobic era, with no biographical evidence of personal hostility toward lesbian women — and the Narrator, whose view of Gomorrah is paranoid, voyeuristic, and consistently frames female homosexuality as secrecy and betrayal.
Pip: So the novel holds both things at once: a Narrator whose jealousy pathologizes lesbian desire, and an author whose craft uses that jealousy to examine the limits of what any person can know about another.
Mara: Which is, depending on your critical framework, either a sophisticated literary move or a convenient alibi.
Pip: What stays with me is how much of this novel runs on the impossibility of knowing — other people’s bodies, their pasts, their desires.
Mara: And how the secondary characters keep reappearing, transformed, to make that point again at the end.
Pip: More Proust next time, presumably. There’s certainly enough of him.
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