34

"And so I had to resign myself, since nothing can endure without becoming general... to the idea that even those who were most beloved to the writer finally did nothing but pose for him, as models do for painters"

p. 104

... there is an intimate connection between the sexual sense and the aesthetic sense, an idea which becomes pivotal in A la Recherche. Leslie argues that it is possible to "[refine] erotic pleasure to the point of making it aesthetic," points out that " in the truly artistic nature physical attraction or repulsion is qualified by the contemplation of the beautiful," and insists that "physical dispositions, the pleasure of physical contact, the refinements of the palate, the joys of the senses stem from where our sense of the beautiful is rooted." p. 110

Most of the characters in A la Recherche reveal new, surprising, and mutually contradictory selves as the novel progresses; and most of them

35

... are paradoxical mixtures of cruelty and kindness, sadism and altruism. As a person with homosexual tastes Proust was continually instructed by the medical science of his era that he belonged to [a] group characterized by just this sort of schizophrenia. What becomes in A la Recherche a characteristic of human identity in general may therefore have been encouraged by and to some extent dependent on the self-image held out to Proust by the medical science of his day. p. 164-5

A la Recherche presents all forms of love, not just homosexuality, as types of disease, and in this it draws upon a long literary tradition dating back at least as far as Catallus' lyrics to Lesbia.

p. 167

"Society is like sexual taste because one never knows what perversions it is likely to attain. p. 180

The relationship between homosexuality and creativity here established is a variation on the idea, common in fin de sìecle literature