Customer Reviews

Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T.S Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust

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My review is based only on the Proust chapter; I bought the book because "errancy" is an important element in my work on Proust. In general, this chapter is a disaster, but to her credit, Lamos does a good job articulating some aspects of error, and some of her comments on the narrating/narrated "I" opposition are worth rereading. First, Lamos NEVER cites from the French text! She only works with a translation (Montrcrieff/Kilmartin). No credible scholar would make claims about a text based on its translation. Provide translations for an English speaking audience, surely, but if you are basing your interpretation on what Proust wrote, then you must address the exact words he used, and Proust wrote in French. Second, Lamos succumbs to multi-culti/queer theory newspeak: "This exchange of places between the desiring reader and the desiring text...is analogous to the relation between penetrator and penetrated in the economy of sodomy" (180); the hero's nocturnal wanderings in Venice are "an allegory of anal sex" (187) [certainly some reference, any reference to the words Proust actually uses is called for here...but no]; "The body of the text, originally the enclosure of the self and the site of masturbatory pleasure, is fantasized as the body of the other, penetrated and mastered by a desire that circulates according to the economy of sodomy" (190); "The hero's first mistake is to get to the bottom of Albertine, whose illegibility is a paradigm for the errancy of all texts" (191) [that's right, "all" texts]; referring to Proust's preface to his translation of Ruskin, "Combining his Sodomic and Gomorrahan aesthetics, Proust imagines that this hymenal 'mist which our eager eyes would like to pierce is the last word of the painter's art'" (193); "The structural opposition between the narrating and narrated 'I' parallels another well-worn, dubious distinction: the phallus and the penis" (198); "The ambiguous factual/fictive status of the text is thus directly linked to the enigma of lesbianism....by posing female same-sex desire as an occult mystery, Proust fictionalizes fact and factualizes fiction, making it impossible to account for one in terms of the other" (199); "Above all, the novel incites the desire to expose the hero's-and Proust's-homosexuality" (215). Above all? Above all! Lamos' goals are commendable: to show the "errancies" or heterogeneous elements in texts that appear monolithic and coherent. But the outcome is embarrassing and laughable. Her ideas are malformed compared to Sedgwick's, and even though her syntax might be less complex than that of "Epistemology of the Closet," her writing in general is poor. She does not develop ideas or make transitions between paragraphs. It's as if she had a collection of loose notes and ideas that she's intent on including, even if they make little sense as a whole. This book has been well-reviewed here at Amazon. For me it was a total waste of [money]. If you do really want to read it, I suggest you look for it at the library of your local university.

Despite having only read the sections of this book that deal with Proust, I feel comfortable saying that Colleen Lamos makes excellent use of wonderful insights in her work. Concentrating on volumes of Proust that other critics consider "digressions," she is able to address important epistemological issues that cannot be ignored in any true reading of Proust. If you liked Sedgwick, you'll love Lamos--her ideas are just as good, and her writing infinitely more readable.