Sadism: Marcel Proust and the Banality of Evil

Abstract

In spite of Marcel Proust’s (1871–1922) famous dictum that a ‘work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its pricetag on’,¹ his magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time (1913–27), which traces the evolving consciousness of the narrator Marcel and his development into a writer, abounds with theories and has been subjected to numerous analyses of these under the headings of time, identity, memory, class, art, love, politics, psychology and metaphysics. In Search of Lost Time is, however, also replete with references to the so-called perversions, most explicitly to male and female homosexuality, as well as to sadism, fetishism and voyeurism. Surprisingly, these themes and motifs have been less well explored. J.E. Rivers, one of the few critics who has analysed Proust’s representations of homosexuality in some detail, writes that there is evidence to suggest that In Search of Lost Time ‘began as a nonfiction essay on homosexuality, which gradually grew into a novel, as Proust saw broader and broader implications in his subject’.²