Closeted Metaphors, or Reading Identity in A la recherche du temps perdu

Abstract

Closeted Metaphors, or Reading Identity in A la recherche du temps perdu Stacy Meeker The young narrator in Du cote de chez Swann follows the course of the Vivonne with its nympheas and crystal waters in his idealistic pursuit of the myth of the Guermantes only to discover many years later a Vivonne mince et laide au bord du chemin de halage, whose source is not the romantic fount he had imagined but une espece de lavoir carre ou montaient des bulles (4:267-68). Readers of A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust's roman-fleuve, encounter the same problems of perception, identity and time as we navigate a current that holds countless surprises for even its most seasoned travelers and that teems with enough flora and fauna to satisfy the most exacting naturalist. While the stream remains difficult to chart, certain creative mapping attempts such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet, from her larger work, Epistemology of the Closet, not only explore essential problematics within the novel, but reveal funda- mental problems at the root (to switch metaphors briefly) of Proust criticism. The focus of Sedgwick's analysis is the dramatic first episode of male homosexual encounter between Charlus and Jupien, which is described initially in terms of the organic metaphor of the fertilization of orchids only to give way to an amplified discussion of sexual inversion. The segment can be and has been read quite negatively, and Sedgwick openly tackles the scene from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and antihomo- phobic theory (Sedgwick 1). The metaphor of the homosexual closet both structures her deftly wrought rhetorical strategy and serves as an investigative tool which she intends to use to interro- gate power relations between the observed Charlus and Jupien ( the spectacle of the closet [Sedgwick 222]) and the observing, narrating je ( the viewpoint of the closet [223]) and to explore the critical ground between what she calls J.E. Rivers's minoritizing view and Leo Bersani's universalizing view of the revelatory scene. However, while Sedgwick's innovative, timely, and power- ful epistemologica! figure of the closet focuses our attention on