ABSTRACT
Casting Elstir in a leading role and giving prominence to painting served Proust’s objective to portray homosexuality. In Proust’s aesthetics, homosexuality and the visual arts are related: he uses the agendered language of painting to depict the taboo, and his notion of homosexuality includes a visual dimension. Homosexuality is frequently associated with the gaze of a third-party onlooker and is presented as a spectactor sex, a scene to be seen. We have seen how the homosexual seduction scene at the beginning of Sodome et Gomorrhe is presented in theatrical terms: Charlus and Jupien are cast in the leading roles, and their entrances and exits are staged in the courtyard of the Hotel de Guermantes. The narrator is the spectator here, or rather a voyeur whose pleasure is in watching; he is just as active as the protagonists themselves: his stealthy spying is a kind of adventure or war story, which involves running risks and breaking rules. His breathing is heavy and his heart is throbbing just as fast as those of the homosexual lovers he is tracking. The scene is less concerned with Charlus’s ‘outing’ than with the young narrator’s newly acquired faculty of vision. The revelation that homosexuality exists is for him an initiation into a new way of seeing: in Proust’s words, it is a visual revolution.1
