Beyond the Epistemology of the Closet

The model of secrecy and exposure set up in À la recherche du temps perdu (and later theorized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) has inflected ways of thinking about and breaking open the “closet” for non-normative sexualities since the publication of Sodome et Gomorrhe I in 1921. Nearly a century later, as archival documents from the turn of the century re-emerge from editorial or familial censorship, our critical methods for apprehending such queer texts need recalibration. If we have been anachronistically reading certain fin-de-siècle archives through a lens that was shaped by Proust’s novel and its twentieth-century reception, what might a different, more germane reading look like? I reflect on this question using a single letter written by Proust in 1905, unpublished and kept out of public view until 2019.