Sodom and Gomorrah (1921)
This is Volume 4 of Proust’s monster-novel In Search of Lost Time — the one where the hidden sexual undercurrents of the whole series finally surface and the narrator’s obsession with Albertine shifts into a higher, nastier gear.
Plot
So, Sodom and Gomorrah kicks off with a massive revelation. Our narrator is hiding in a courtyard of the Guermantes’s mansion when he catches the arrogant, hyper-masculine Baron de Charlus doing what is essentially a mating dance with a lowly tailor named Jupien. It’s a total lightbulb moment. He realizes that Charlus belongs to a secret, hidden race of “inverts” (Proust’s word for homosexuals), and he spirals off into a long philosophical tangent comparing their secret courtships to orchids being fertilized by bumblebees.
After that, we’re dropped into a dazzling high-society party at the Princesse de Guermantes’s house — a microscopic look at the snobbery, small slights, and shifting alliances of the Parisian elite. The most gutting moment there is when Charles Swann shows up. He’s dying of a terminal illness, and because he publicly supports Alfred Dreyfus (the Jewish officer falsely convicted of treason), the anti-Semitic aristocrats who used to adore him are quietly freezing him out. Swann knows he’s dying. He cares more about seeing Dreyfus rehabilitated than about his own health.
Eventually the narrator heads back to Balbec, the seaside resort, for a second stay. This is where the psychological heavy-lifting starts. On his first night, as he bends down to unbutton his boots, he’s ambushed by a wave of pure, unfiltered grief — the first time he truly, bodily understands that his grandmother is dead. He calls this delayed reaction the “intermittences of the heart”: we don’t process loss when it happens, we process it only when some random physical trigger forces the past back into the present.
While mourning, he drifts into a bourgeois clique run by the domineering Mme Verdurin, who has rented a nearby estate. Charlus shows up too, now pathetically in love with a handsome, manipulative young violinist named Charlie Morel — who milks him for connections and money and treats him like dirt.
Meanwhile the narrator picks things back up with Albertine, the girl he met on his first Balbec trip. He doesn’t really love her. He’s bored, honestly, and decides he’s finally going to end it. Then, on a train ride, Albertine mentions offhandedly that she’s intimately close with the daughter of the composer Vinteuil and her lesbian lover.
This detonates him. He remembers seeing Mlle Vinteuil and her girlfriend in a sadistic sexual tableau years earlier. The realization that Albertine is woven into that hidden world of female homosexuality — Gomorrah — ignites a raging, pathological jealousy. His boredom vaporizes instantly. Terrified she’ll leave him for women, he runs to his mother at dawn, weeping, and announces that his mind is made up: he absolutely must marry Albertine and bring her back to Paris under lock and key.
What the Book Is About
Underneath the social comedy, this is a book about the subjectivity of everything — time, love, status, identity. Proust’s narrator keeps peeling back surfaces and discovering that what he took for solid reality was just a story he was telling himself. Charlus’s arrogance hid his “inversion.” The Faubourg Saint-Germain’s glamour hid petty anti-Semitism. Albertine’s carefree charm hid a whole sexual life he knew nothing about. Even his love for his grandmother — which he’d assumed was already fully processed — turns out to have been waiting inside him for a year, ready to drop him to his knees when his body bent in the same way hers used to.
The book’s core psychological idea, the one that fuels everything else, is the intermittences of the heart: the claim that our emotional lives don’t run on linear time. Grief, desire, jealousy — they lie dormant and then erupt, triggered by sensation, not by thought. “For to the disturbances of memory are linked the intermittences of the heart.” This is Proust’s big thesis: involuntary memory is truer than the rational mind, and the rational mind is basically along for the ride.
The Sodom-and-Gomorrah title frames the book biblically — two hidden, “cursed” cities of desire — but Proust isn’t moralizing. He treats “inversion” with extraordinary sympathy for 1921, even while borrowing the era’s tragic vocabulary. Homosexuals are, he says, “A race on which a malediction weighs and which must live in falsehood and in perjury.” The tragedy isn’t the desire itself; it’s the enforced secrecy.
And running under all of it is the book’s bleakest discovery: love is not an encounter with another person. It’s a projection. You can’t really know anyone. What you call “loving Albertine” is actually managing your own anxiety about Albertine. The more the narrator loves her, the less she’s actually there.
The Cast
The Narrator. Hypersensitive, hyper-analytical, basically a recording instrument pointed at his own soul. He starts this volume as a detached social observer and ends it as a man who has voluntarily imprisoned himself in a toxic engagement. His rational plan to leave Albertine evaporates the second jealousy hits — which is exactly Proust’s point about who’s really driving.
Baron de Charlus (Palamède). The great tragicomic figure of the novel. Proud, terrifying, imperious aristocrat — “I have three popes in my family” — who turns out to carry, in Proust’s formulation, “the soul of a woman in the body of a man.” His crushing love for the cruel, opportunistic Morel reduces him from tyrant to supplicant. One of the most devastatingly drawn characters in modern fiction.
Albertine Simonet. Less a character than a screen. She’s whatever the narrator is projecting at the moment — bored girlfriend, suspicious stranger, potential lesbian, hostage bride. Her hiddenness is the whole point; the reveal about Mlle Vinteuil lands precisely because Albertine has never really been knowable.
Charlie Morel. Talented, amoral, climbing. He senses Charlus’s weakness and exploits it methodically. “Put no trust in the mistrustful.”
Charles Swann. The ghost in the book. Once the golden boy of the Guermantes circle, now dying, now a Dreyfusard, now Jewish in a way he used to be allowed to forget. “I’d like to live long enough to see Dreyfus rehabilitated and Picquart a colonel.” His dignified exit is the moral center of the volume.
Mme Verdurin. Queen of the bourgeois “little clan,” running her parallel social ecosystem at Balbec and always, always keeping score.
Symbols
| Symbol | What’s happening | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| The orchid and the bumblebee | Narrator watches Charlus and Jupien in the courtyard | Homosexual desire as a natural, near-miraculous alignment, not a deviation — lifted out of moral discourse into botany |
| Intermittences of the heart | Narrator bends to unbutton his boots in Balbec and is ambushed by grief | Emotional reality lives outside chronological time; real feeling arrives through the body, not the schedule |
| The sea at Balbec | Viewed from the hotel window at dawn after the Albertine revelation | Mirror for the inner state — from erotic promise to claustrophobic trap, depending on who the narrator has just become |
| The Guermantes’s courtyard | Site of the Charlus-Jupien encounter | Threshold between public aristocratic facade and private sexual truth — the whole book’s logic condensed into one space |
Key Debate
The book stages a quiet but ferocious argument between the rational mind and the involuntary body. The narrator’s intellect keeps building reasonable positions — I don’t really love Albertine, I should leave her, social status is meaningless, I’ve already mourned my grandmother — and the body keeps demolishing them. A boot being unbuttoned produces a year-late grief-quake. A single sentence on a train produces a jealousy that rewrites his entire future. Proust’s verdict is not subtle: reason loses. Every time. “These invisible forces” — anxiety, involuntary memory, sexual panic — are the actual government. The conscious mind is their press secretary.
How It’s Written
Long sentences. Long sentences. Proust’s prose works by delay — clauses folding back into clauses, qualifications inside qualifications, so that by the time you reach the period you’ve traveled through a whole little cognitive event. That’s not a stylistic tic; it’s the argument. Consciousness doesn’t move in declarative chunks, it moves in recursive loops, and the sentences are built to mimic that.
The tone toggles between two modes: a cold, almost cruel social anatomist (watching the Verdurins, dissecting Bloch’s hypocrisy) and a lyric, wounded metaphysician (the grandmother passage, the sunrise at Balbec). Proust can pivot between them inside a single paragraph.
Structurally, the volume is bracketed by two “reveals” of hidden sexual worlds. It opens with comedy: the narrator secretly watching Charlus and Jupien, enjoying his new knowledge. It closes with tragedy: the narrator secretly discovering Albertine’s connection to Mlle Vinteuil, destroyed by his new knowledge. Same mechanism, opposite consequences — because the first revelation happened to someone else, and the second one happened to him.
Connections
- Swann’s Way — Swann’s forensic jealousy over Odette is the template; the narrator now runs the same pathology with Albertine, proving Proust’s thesis that love is a recurring condition, not a relationship.
- In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower — sets up everything detonated here: Charlus’s charged stares, the “little gang,” the initial harmless Albertine.
- The Sweet Cheat Gone — the direct payoff; the jealous engagement begun at the end of this volume ends in loss there.
- Anna Karenina — another 19th/20th-century European novel that treats jealous love as a terminal illness rather than a feeling; Tolstoy’s moral outrage replaced by Proust’s clinical curiosity.
- A Farewell to Arms — cross-generational echo: love as something that can’t be owned or saved, only lost in slow motion.
- Bel-Ami — Maupassant’s Paris salons and Proust’s Verdurin clique are the same social organism, sketched by a cynic and then re-X-rayed by a metaphysician.
Lineage
[[swanns-way|Swann's Way]] (1913) — Swann's jealousy over Odette, the prototype case
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[[in-the-shadow-of-young-girls-in-flower|In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower]] (1919) — Albertine enters as one of a harmless gang
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This book (1921) — the hidden sexual substrate surfaces; jealousy ignites; voluntary imprisonment begins
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[[the-sweet-cheat-gone|The Sweet Cheat Gone]] (1925) — Albertine lost, the jealousy outliving its object