Contingent Sociality and Same-sex Desire in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu

Abstract

Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu figures same-sex desire as a minimal form of social connectedness, in which contingency affords a sufficient basis for sociality. In the social worlds that Proust called "Sodome" and "Gomorrhe," relationships and encounters tend to be imagined as products of pure contingency, unaccompanied by the kinds of shared norms or tokens of mutual understanding that might conventionally underwrite a stable community. In accordance with a view of contingency articulated by Niklas Luhmann, however, the very absence of these sustaining structures allows contingency itself to operate in the novel as a precarious form of cohesion. In La Recherche, social contingency is often figured using the trope of contiguity (contingency's etymological cousin), so that mere accidental next-to-ness is enough to create a connection between otherwise unrelated characters. In a novel fascinated by transversal links between seemingly distant social milieux, Proust's representation of same-sex desire functions as a network of shortcuts, conjuring contiguity out of apparent distance. These unapologetically improbable networks register the historical unavailability of more stable social structures, but also illustrate what Leo Bersani calls an "anticommunitarian" model of collective life, which is not organized around the community as a social ideal.