/lit/ - Literature

As a final aside, one should remember that as publication of its volumes continued, the topic of homosexuality became an ever more central aspect of the Search’s early reception, and ought to be considered one of its revolutionary features.

For not only does the story accord a central role to homosexuality – no mean feat given the repressive social climate of the time – it probes the lesser charted waters of polyvalent sexual identities and practices. Albertine’s sodomist fantasies and Morel’s intermittent lesbian – which perturbs Charlus’s more traditional sexual taxonomy of being, or not being, “one of them” – destabilize any binary classifications into hetero-, homo- or bisexuality.