e and the latter as a deliberate presentation of the complex psychology of modern life. The Immoralist is less frankly a detailed autobiography, though there are parallels between Michel's marriage and that of Gide. But in both cases the powerful portrait of a single Self predominates, and the Self in literature mirrors the author's conceptions of his own Self, his time and universe. He is present behind all his protagonists, who reflect the conflicts he suffers, the questions he seeks to solve, the paradoxes he encounters, the apparent chaos of his own existence. The author is basically dealing with problems of identity: his own and, therefore, mankind's. And where Gide, Proust, and Genet are concerned, there is a progressively frank unfolding, from implication to explication to elaboration, of the homosexuality that one must presume was an inescapable and primary fact of their selfhood.
Proust develops or more precisely adumbrates the theme: The ambiguity of Marcel's early relationship to Baron de Charlus in The Guermantes Way, when Charlus is essentially engaged in an elaborate seduction that is disguised as a hale effort to take a naive Marcel under his wing in society, is stretched through the length of the novel. Only in the opening scene of Cities of the Plain (i.e., Sodom and Gomorrah) does Marcel understand that, in psychological repose, his social mentor is a "man-woman" who has "the features, the expression, the smile thereof," of a woman (Proust, Cities 626 et passim). Further, Marcel witnesses a dumb show of the first flirtation between Charlus and the servant Jupien, a flirtation that is carried forward through the time of The Captive to a full-blown, long-term, rather decadent affair. What then develops is Proust's detailed examination of the rather squalid environment of what Proust persistently, though not exclusively, terms the invert, which we as critics know to have been a principal constituent of Proust's own sel...