Colette is a novelist and memoirist.

Colette was a novelist and memoirist. Her long sentences, her account of her childhood in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye 🏡, her contemplation of nature, her celebration of the seasons, her amusing transcriptions of conversations overheard here and there… All of this, along with her belonging to the ‘generation of 1870’, justifies the comparison often drawn between her and Marcel Proust. 🤵🏻‍♀️🤵🏻‍♂️

But beyond these similarities, and even though she admired “Combray” (published in 1913), Colette sought rather to distinguish herself from Proust. She does this, for example, in “Le Pur et l’impur”, a collection first published in 1932 under the title “Ces plaisirs…” and subsequently revised by the author and republished under its current title in 1941. 📚

“Le Pur et l’impur” is a collection of texts by Colette, which had appeared separately in magazines from 1931 onwards and were subsequently compiled into a single volume. These texts share the common theme of romantic relationships and desire between women. In them, Colette pays tribute, for example, to Renée Vivien. But she also condemns the literature of the Belle Époque 🌺 and the parallel drawn – notably by Proust – between Sodom and Gomorrah:

🖋️ “I moved in a world that was perishing, on the fringes of all other worlds. Whilst customs—both good and bad—have not changed in the last twenty-five or thirty years, the caste mentality, by committing suicide, gradually undermined the debilitated sect of which I speak, which, trembling with fear, to exist outside its own breathable air: hypocrisy. It invoked ‘individual freedom’, posing as an equal in the face of the imperturbable and solid pederasty.”

And further on: 🖋️ “Ever since Proust shed light on Sodom, we have felt a sense of reverence for what he wrote. (…) But was he misled, or was he ignorant? — when he conjures up a Gomorrah of inscrutable and depraved young women, denouncing a conspiracy, a community, a frenzy of evil angels, we are merely entertained. (…) It is, whatever Marcel Proust’s imagination or error may suggest, that there is no Gomorrah.”

What do you think?

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