Saturn's Rings: In Search of Marcel Proust

The introduction of a special type of homosexual who exists "less exclusively beneath of Saturn’s outrider", whose material pleasures know "certain imperious localizations" and who "would shock most people by theur avowals" should, however, caution us against hastily equating the various characters that populate Proust’s theory of sexuality with analytical concepts such as identification, the ego ideal, object choice or the "melancholic formation of gender", until we have assessed how the theory functions as a whole.

Have we grasped the profound structure that leads us away from the superficial effeminacy displayed by the family’s gigolos in the eyes of M. de Charlus, towards this Proustian creation of an unconscious woman who, lying dormant within certain men, seizes upon the slightest of their gestures to emerge—sometimes in their posture, now in the way a childlike plait of hair falls, when the apparatus of conditioning and ambient censorship of the previous day no longer weighs upon their intimate inclinations, would we not certainly have taken certain remarks by the "public figures" of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (remarks, most of which were made in the light-hearted, supposedly jovial and non-academic context of interviews) as either the dandyism of the "impostor philosopher", according to Cressole, or as a fiercely aseptic rejection of this "excremental" homosexuality as the criterion distinguishing the "true" gay from the false, according to Beatriz Preciado. The idea can be found in her "Countersexual Reading Exercise : Deleuze or the love that dares not speak its name": Preciado, Countersexual Manifesto. The title rather foreshadows the interpretative bias: Deleuze is portrayed as a queer man who, despite a few attempts—alas, all too timid—never managed to break free from the epistemological confines of the closet. And yet, here we are, two decades after his death, raising the question once more. Either Cressole and Preciado are right, or Deleuze achieved something richer, and also more subtle, than a simple coming out: becoming imperceptible, and so on.

Firstly, there is this complex interplay in which the reference to reality—which Charlus and Jupien bring together in their unusual encounter—shifts place with the botanical metaphor, which thereby ceases to be a metaphor and becomes part of the exposition of circumstances, in which everything aspires to be a document: the encounter provides the raw material, which the style shapes to make an innovative perspective on homosexuality intelligible to us. But the scene of the orchid attracting the bumblebee (sic), like the maiden in her ardent anticipation of the kamikaze who is to impregnate her, does not overshadow the gerontophilic dance between the wealthy baron and the humble waistcoat-maker in an allegorical register intended solely to sprinkle the text with beautiful images—images that would be distinct from the "objective" unfolding before the narrator through a series of references, following a dividing line that coordinates the two planes of form and content, of the enunciation of a primary meaning and its expression.

In fact, it was because he was observing a real orchid shortly before the baron’s arrival at the hotel that the narrator came to witness their love at first sight, followed by the physical encounter between the two men-women. What other reason could Proust have had for placing, on a single level, the account of their encounter and the presence in the same courtyard of a shrub belonging to the duchess, whose flower awaits "the arrival, almost beyond the possibility of hope (across so many obstacles of distance, of adverse risks, of dangers), of the insect sent from so far as ambassador", other than to sketch out the intuition that the love affairs of certain fragrant flowers and a few winged insects—which transcend the forbidden boundaries between the animal and plant kingdoms—share a form of correspondence with those forged between people of the same sex—even though sex, like Hippocratic humours, is something we all possess, albeit in varying proportions?

Being a woman at this level of the Research, at this stage in the development of a theory of sexuality, simply and plainly consists of desiring men. This definition is only simple on the surface, since to accept it—to assume that any body characterised by an inclination towards men is a woman’s body (one immediately sees the trap: what is a man, or who can, by right, protest against his evanescent "substance", given that, amongst bodies endowed with a scrotum and testicles, there are some which are, despite everything, women?), homosexuality vanishes as if by magic. In other words, Proust presented the notion of gender as obliterated behind the social conventions that codify the sexual relations contemporary to his literary intervention.

"Why, when we admire in the face of this person a delicacy that touches our hearts, a gracefulness, a spontaneous affability such as men do not possess, should we be dismayed to learn that this young man runs after boxers? They are different aspects of an identical reality. And indeed, what repels us is the most touching thing of all, more touching than any refinement of delicacy, for it represents an admirable though unconscious effort on the part of nature: the recognition of his sex by itself, in spite of the sexual deception, becomes apparent, the unconfessed attempt to escape from itself towards what an initial error on the part of society has segregated from it’".