Proust, Class, and Nation 9780199609864, 0199609861

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Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Title Pages (p.i) Proust, Class, and Nation (p.ii) (p.iii) Proust, Class, and Nation

(p.iv) Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press

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Title Pages in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Edward J. Hughes 2011 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King's Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–960986–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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Dedication

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Dedication (p.v) In memory of my motherSusan Hughes, nee Williamson1928–2009

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Acknowledgements

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

(p.vi) (p.vii) Acknowledgements Much of the work undertaken in the preparation of this book was facilitated by sabbatical leave granted to me both at Royal Holloway, University of London and, more recently, at Queen Mary, University of London and I am grateful to present and former colleagues for generously making this possible. Working on this book, I have received help from many people. I am indebted to Alison Finch for her insights and wise advice generously given over many years, to Cynthia Gamble for valuable help with comparative work involving Ruskin and Proust, to Marion Schmid for willingly sharing with me the findings of her important research on Proust and ideology, to Brigitte Mahuzier for sight of an unpublished research paper, and to Dagmar Wieser for bibliographical information provided. I also wish to thank those who kindly invited me to speak at seminars and conferences at various stages in the preparation of this study: to Patrick Bray and Larry Schehr, for the opportunity to speak at the ‘Proust and His Era/Proust et son époque’ conference (University of Illinois, Urbana); Antoine Compagnon, for the invitation to take part in his ‘Morales de Proust’ seminar at the Collège de France; Martin Crowley, to speak at the French Research Seminar in the University of Cambridge; Patrick ffrench, to speak at the French Departmental Research Seminar, King's College, London; Ann Jefferson and Michael Sheringham, to give a paper at the French Research Seminar in the University of Oxford; Patrick O'Donovan, to speak to the Association des Etudes Françaises et Francophones d'Irlande; Marion Schmid, to speak at the French Departmental Research Seminar, University of Edinburgh; and Adam Watt for the invitation to present a paper at the ‘Le Temps retrouvé: Eighty Years After / 80 ans après’ conference (Royal Holloway, University of London). These and other occasions have given me the opportunity to dialogue fruitfully with Elza Adamowicz, Nathalie Aubert, Annick Bouillaguet, Celia Britton, Christine Cano, William Page 1 of 2

 

Acknowledgements Carter, Charles Drazin, Jacques Dubois, Peter Dunwoodie, Charles Forsdick, Simon Gaunt, Margaret Gray, Nicholas Harrison, Sjef Houppermans, Yolande Jansen, Shirley Jordan, Aine Larkin, John Lyons, Will McMorran, Nathalie Mauriac-Dyer, Jean Milly, Michael Moriarty, John O'Brien, Eric Robertson, Gabrielle Townsend, Ieme van der Poel, Sabine van Wesemael, Nicholas White, and James Williams. (p.viii) Earlier versions of material used in Chapters 1 and 7 have appeared respectively in Nigel Harkness and Marion Schmid (eds.), Au seuil de la modernité: Proust, Literature and the Arts. Essays in Memory of Richard Bales (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), and Adam Watt (ed.), ‘Le Temps retrouvé’: Eighty Years After / 80 ans après: Critical Essays / Essais critiques (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). Some material from my article ‘Perspectives sur la culture populaire’, in Mariolina Bertini and Antoine Compagnon (eds.), Morales de Proust (Cahiers de Littérature Française, IX‐X) (Bergamo: Bergamo University Press, 2010), 69–82, is reproduced in the Postscript. Permission to reuse this material is gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful for the help and guidance given by Jacqueline Baker, Ariane Petit, and Brendan Mac Evilly at Oxford University Press and I also thank Rowena Anketell for her meticulous work as copy-editor and David Pelteret for his painstaking work as proofreader. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the readers at the Press for their generous and incisive feedback on the draft material submitted. On a personal note, the memory of Richard Bales and Malcolm Bowie who both showed me the way in the field of Proust studies has sustained me in the completion of this book. I also record deep gratitude to my family, who have been unstinting in their support.

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Note on Translations

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

(p.xi) Note on Translations All translations given are my own unless otherwise indicated in the form of page references to available published English translations. Where a published translation has been altered, this is indicated in a footnote.

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Abbreviations

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

(p.xii) Abbreviations CSB Marcel Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et Mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1971). Corr Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970– 93), 21 vols. JS Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1971). JNS Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). RTP Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1987-9), 4 vols. SLT Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, gen. ed., Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2003), 6 vols.

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Chronology

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

(p.xiii) Chronology 1870 Collapse of the Second Empire with French defeat in the FrancoPrussian War and birth of the Third Republic (September). 1871 The ‘Bloody Week’ sees the fall of the Paris Commune (21-8 May). The conservative republic of Thiers takes power. Birth of Marcel Proust in Auteuil (on the western outskirts of Paris) (10 July), son of Mme Jeanne Proust (nee Weil) and Dr Adrien Proust. 1872 Proust's family move to the Boulevard Malesherbes in Paris's wealthy eighth arrondissement. 1876–85 Progressive decline of the monarchists and domination of the Third Republic by republicans. 1882–9 Proust attends the Lycée Condorcet. 1887 The young Proust is seduced by populist enthusiasm for Boulanger in the annual 14 July celebrations. He contrasts Boulangism with his mother's ‘old Orléanist-republican sentiments'. 1889–90 Year of Proust's military service, Orléans. 1892 Proust rejects socialism in a brief article ‘L'Irréligion d'état’, Le Banquet (May 1892). 1893 He obtains a degree in Law. 1894 Conviction of Dreyfus (December). 1895 Proust obtains an Arts degree. He starts work on a novel that will remain unfinished, Jean Santeuil. 1896 Publication of Proust's Les Plaisirs et les jours. 1898 Publication of Emile Zola's ‘J'accuse’ (L'Aurore, 13 January) in defence of Dreyfus. Proust proactively champions the Dreyfus cause and secures the support of Anatole France. 1900 Death of John Ruskin, whose work greatly interests Proust. Assisted by his mother and Marie Nordlinger, he will work on translations of Page 1 of 3

 

Chronology Ruskin in the early years of the new century. His family moves to 45 Rue de Courcelles (October). 1902 Publication of Paul Bourget's L'Etape. Bourget and the Comte d'Haussonville discuss democracy in Le Gaulois in the second half of 1902. (p.xiv) 1903 Death of Proust's father (26 November). 1903–4 Proust writes journalistic pieces on Parisian high society for Le Figaro, among them his tribute to the Comte and Comtesse d'Haussonville, ‘Le Salon de la Comtesse d’Haussonville’ (Le Figaro, 4 January 1904). 1904 Proust publishes La Bible d'Amiens, a translation of Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens. He publishes ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ [‘Death of the Cathedrals’], written in opposition to the planned separation of Church and State (Le Figaro, 16 August 1904). 1905 Death of Mme Jeanne Proust (26 September). Devastated by the loss of his mother, Proust will spend a period in a sanatorium in Boulogne-sur-Seine. Legislation on the separation of Church and State passed (9 December). 1906 Proust publishes his second major Ruskin translation, Sésame et les Lys [Sesame and Lilies]. He rents the apartment of his great-uncle, Louis Weil, at 102 Boulevard Haussmann. 1907–14 Proust spends summer holidays in Cabourg (Normandy), the model for the seaside town of Balbec described in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. 1907 Publication of Daniel Halévy's Un épisode, on the subject matter of which Proust and Halévy correspond (December). 1908–9 Proust begins work on what will become A la recherche du temps perdu. 1910 In his play La Barricade, Paul Bourget argues that working-class labour is to be seen as separate from the rest of society. 1913 Proust pays the Grasset publishing house in order to secure the publication of the first volume of his novel, Du côté de chez Swann. 1914 Outbreak of the First World War (August). The publication of the sequel to Du côté de chez Swann is suspended. Proust will spend the war years substantially expanding his novel. 1915 Publication of Romain Rolland's Au-dessus de la mêlée (September). 1917 Workers' strikes in Paris (May–June). Mutiny breaks out in the French army (4 May). The Bolsheviks take power in Russia (6 November). 1918 A contract for the publication of A la recherche du temps perdu is drawn up with Gallimard.

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Chronology 1919 A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the second instalment of Proust's novel, is published by Gallimard. Recognition follows, Proust being awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt (10 December), ahead of the war novelist Roland Dorgelès, whose novel Les Croix de bois describes (p.xv) conditions at the front. The Prix Goncourt will transform public perception of Proust's work. The year also sees the publication of his Pastiches et Mélanges and the NRF re-edition of Du côté de chez Swann. Legislation introducing an eight-hour day is passed (23 April). May Day is marked by violent clashes between marchers and police in Paris. Workers strike (May–June) in Paris and elsewhere. This results in printing delays in the production of Proust's works. He refers to living in ‘the new Bolshevia'. Proust has to leave 102 Boulevard Haussmann, now under new ownership (31 May) and moves to 8bis, Rue Laurent-Pichat. He moves again, to 44 Rue Hamelin (beginning of October). The Versailles Peace Treaty is signed (28 June). Romain Rolland’s internationalist manifest, ‘Un Appel: Fière Déclaration d’Intellectuels’ appears in L’Humanité (26 June 1919). Le Figaro publishes a manifesto entitled ‘Pour un Parti de l'Intelligence’ (19 July). In a private letter to Daniel Halévy, Proust expresses his strong disapproval of the political sentiments contained in the manifesto. 1920 Le Côté de Guermantes I appears (October). Proust is awarded the Croix de la Légion d'honneur (November). 1921 Le Côté de Guermantes II and Sodome et Gomorrhe I appear. 1922 Sodome et Gomorrhe II is published. Proust dies on 18 November. 1923 Sodome et Gomorrhe III—La Prisonnière published. 1924 Publication of Albertine disparue. 1927 Publication of Le Temps retrouvé. (p.xvi)

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Introduction

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Introduction Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0001

Abstract and Keywords The Introduction focuses on Proust’s response to the Dreyfus Affair as reflected in his unfinished early novel Jean Santeuil and examines Georges Bataille’s claim that the aspiring author showed radical social instincts in his defence of Dreyfus. Challenging the conventional image of Proust as the effete young socialite currying favour with the aristocracy, Bataille highlights a political Proust and homes in on those pages of Jean Santeuil where political scandal dominates. Reading the narrator’s reaction to questions of social justice biographically, Bataille sees in the early novel’s moral and philosophical defence of truth a reflection of the young Proust’s position. The chapter goes on to consider the representation of the Dreyfus Affair in A la recherche and reflects on how the later Proust moves away from a position of engaged solidarity and instead chooses to stress the ephemeral nature of culture wars and causes célèbres. Keywords:   Dreyfus Affair, Bataille, social justice, partisanship, detachment, ephemeral causes

Georges Bataille's response to Proust's unfinished early novel Jean Santeuil soon after its posthumous publication in 1952 records the critic's discovery of what he saw as an arresting dimension of Proust's work. We are taken aback, Bataille observes, by the naively stated political positions of the young Proust. Bataille signals his surprise in his choice of title for the opening section of what was to become the ‘Proust’ chapter in La Littérature et le Mal: ‘L'amour de la vérité et de la justice et le socialisme de Marcel Proust’.1 The eye-catching rubric sweeps away the conventional image of Proust as the effete young socialite currying favour with the aristocracy. Instead, Bataille highlights a political Proust and homes in on those pages of the early novel where political scandal dominates, Page 1 of 18

 

Introduction notably in the treatment of the Dreyfus Affair and the semi-fictional ‘Affaire Marie’ with its distant echoes of the Panama Scandal. Reading the reaction of the narrator in Jean Santeuil to questions of social justice biographically, Bataille sees in the novel's moral and philosophical defence of truth a reflection of its young author's position. The narrator observes: ‘C'est ce sentiment qu'on pouvait éprouver en entendant le colonel Picquart et qui nous émeut tant dans le Phédon, quand en suivant le raisonnement de Socrate nous avons tout d'un coup le sentiment extraordinaire d'entendre un raisonnement dont aucune espèce de désir personnel n'est venue altérer la pureté, comme si la vérité était supérieure à tout’2 [‘That was the feeling one had in listening to Colonel Picquart, the same feeling of which we are chiefly conscious, which moves us so deeply, in reading the Phaedo, when following Socrates' arguments we are suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that we are listening to a process of logical reasoning wholly (p.2) undebased by any selfish motive, as though nothing…could have any meaning except truth in all its purity’].3 The encomium to truth forms part of young Santeuil's enthusiastic endorsement of Colonel Picquart's decisive role in identifying the guilt of Esterhazy in the Dreyfus Affair. The language used is consistent with the appeal to universal philosophical values frequently made by ‘intellectuals’, as many of the Dreyfusards came to be disparagingly branded by nationalists.4 If Picquart is idealized as a figure whose testimony constitutes a witness to truth, the young Proust also welcomes the intervention of Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, vicepresident of the Senate who in the summer of 1897 voiced publicly his conviction that Dreyfus was innocent (JS, 651; JNS, 351). Likewise, Proust commends the scientifically grounded testimony of expert witnesses in the Affair (in this case graphologists) who refuse to be swayed by military or government pressure: ‘c'est toujours avec une émotion joyeuse et virile qu'on entend sortir des paroles singulières et audacieuses de la bouche d'hommes de science qui par une pure question d'honneur professionnelle viennent dire la vérité, une vérité dont ils se soucient seulement parce qu'elle est la vérité qu'ils ont appris à chérir dans leur art’ (JS, 649) [‘it is always with a strong emotion of pleasure that one hears these remarkable and courageous words coming from the lips of men of science who on a point of professional honour have come to tell the truth, a truth which they are concerned simply to tell because it is a truth which they have learnt to cherish in their art’].5 The recruitment of science to the Dreyfusard cause is exemplified in the Socialist leader Jean Jaurès's choice of title for a section of his book Les Preuves (1898), ‘Savants contre Experts’,6 in which the evidence of would-be military and legal experts is discredited by ‘[des] hommes d'une compétence hors pair, d'une autorité scientifique indiscutable’.7 The twinning of truth and art was another feature of Dreyfusard discourse. Proust himself fuses the work of the artist and the pursuit of justice when writing to congratulate Anatole France in January 1899 on his intervention in the Dreyfus Affair which was ‘non pas pour vous faire un nom mais quand vous Page 2 of 18

 

Introduction en aviez un, pour qu'il fût un poids dans la (p.3) Balance de la Justice’8 [‘not to make a name for yourself but at a time when you already had one, to place its weight in the Balance of Justice’].9 And as Ruth Harris points out, Picquart, with his developed artistic tastes, was himself untypical of the military of his day. He read Tolstoy in the original, attended performances of Wagner at Bayreuth, and was a friend of Gustav Mahler. ‘It is pure barbarism’, he wrote in 1898, ‘that the cult of beauty is no nearer to being established than that of truth and justice; and yet, how happy the world would be in the adoration of this Trinity’.10 Urging that judgements be based on ‘des raisonnements bien faits’ (JS, 650) [‘well-founded arguments’], Proust's narrator redefines his quest for objectivity, advocating that our opinions be tested against those that are least favourable to our own. In this perspective, the vantage point of one's adversary comes to be valorized: ‘juif, nous comprenons l'antisémitisme, et, partisan de Dreyfus, nous comprenons le jury d'avoir condamné Zola’ (JS, 651) [‘If we happen to be Jews, we make a point of trying to understand the anti-Semite point of view: if believers in Dreyfus, we try to see precisely why it was the jury found against Zola’ (JNS, 353)]. This siding with the enemy entails an internalization of the adversary's viewpoint that will later facilitate the insertion of anti-Dreyfusard venom of the kind heard, for example, at the salon of Mme de Villeparisis in Le Côté de Guermantes I. Yet Proust concludes the textual development in Jean Santeuil with a reverse scenario in which he evokes the joy that comes to the Jew and the Dreyfusard when establishment figures concede that anti-Semitism is an abomination and that Zola should have been acquitted. Bataille thus accurately saw the justice reflex at work in the young Proust. Two decades after the Affair had blown up, Proust still protested in a letter of December 1919 that his Dreyfusard credentials were beyond reproach in that ‘j'ai signé la première de toutes les listes en faveur de Dreyfus, que j'ai été un dreyfusard ardent, envoyant mon premier livre à Picquart dans sa prison du Cherche-Midi’ [‘My signature was on the very first of the pro-Dreyfus lists and I was an ardent Dreyfusard, sending a (p.4) copy of my first book to Picquart in the Cherche-Midi prison’].11 Yet as Jean-Yves Tadié reminds us, Proust's only substantial political intervention after the Dreyfus Affair came in the debate surrounding the separation of Church and State with his piece in Le Figaro in August 1904, the year preceding the introduction of radical new legislation.12 While the ideological stance of many Dreyfusards inclined them to see in the weakening of the Church an opportunity to consolidate the secular power of the Republic, Proust's stance on laicity left him at odds with Republican consensus. Indeed it appeared to place on the Right the defender of the Church's cultural centrality, notwithstanding the widespread anti-Dreyfusard hostility among French Catholics.13 The political positions of the young Proust, then—proDreyfus and, a few years later, culturally pro-Church—already suggest an independent-mindedness. In the longer term, the unavailability of tidy labels for the author of A la recherche du temps perdu derives substantially from Proust's Page 3 of 18

 

Introduction capacity both to identify with and assume the tribal mindset and to demonstrate a countervailing will to transcend and often disown group identities. Specifically on the question of the author's reputation as a politically conservative figure who idolized the French aristocracy (a reputation that was to explain Gide's initial refusal to give serious consideration to the Du côté de chez Swann typescript in 191214), Jacques Dubois points to the presence of rival discourses in the pages of A la recherche whereby the intermittent tone of adulation does not exclude the exposure of the aristocracy as an egotistical class given over, in Dubois's terms, to derisory forms of conduct as its power wanes.15 René Girard makes the related point that Proust takes the demystification of the Faubourg Saint-Germain much further than ‘ses censeurs démocratiques’.16 (p.5) If sections of Jean Santeuil signal the assertion of a radical political and cultural voice, Bataille argues that the later Proust was to lapse into political indifference. In a fairly schematic fashion, he advances causes for the novelist's mutation into ‘un homme qui devait, sur le plan politique, être à la fin d'apparence tiède’, namely his sexual obessions and the fact that he belonged to a bourgeoisie that saw itself threatened by working-class militancy.17 Bataille prefers the campaigning vigour with which Proust the Dreyfusard expresses himself: ‘Cet accent naïf surprend d'un auteur qui le fut si peu’.18 In the closing section of his Proust study, citing a scene in Jean Santeuil in which the young protagonist wanted to massacre policemen who had garrotted a thief, Bataille celebrates Proust's indignation: ‘Ce mouvement de révolte, inattendu de la part de Proust, m'a ému’.19 While Bataille's identification of the thematics of revolt in Jean Santeuil may be read as being consistent with the raw cultural dissent that marked his own literary career, how are we to account for the evolution in Proust's position? How might we explain the transition from the younger figure proud to have secured Anatole France's adherence to the Dreyfus cause to the later Proust—so lacking in naivety, as Bataille observes—whose perspective on the politics of idealism is more circumspect? One of the aims of this study will be to explore Proust's evolving attitude to the group mentalities formed by the forces of class and nation. These mentalities are the focus of serious study when carried over by Proust into literature and yet also frequently become objects of suspicion as well as of play. In the pages of A la recherche, discourses of class and national identity are incorporated and in varying degrees scrutinized, resisted, ridiculed, and celebrated. This burgeoning of different responses to ideological issues confirms the provisionality of Bataille's label, ‘le socialisme de Marcel Proust’. Attitudes to do with class and nation become the stuff of often volatile reflection in the Recherche and the interventions of Proust, his Narrator, the protagonist Marcel, and other characters in the novel ensure a wide spectrum of responses to their value and force.20 In this regard the distinction between Marcel as protagonist and the Narrator is crucial, the Narrator often distancing himself

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Introduction from positions taken by the novel's hero as the latter makes his tentative way in the world. (p.6) The contrasting representations of the Dreyfus Affair in Jean Santeuil and A la recherche are themselves indicative of that evolution in style, tone, and outlook. In the mature novel, far from idealizing the role of individual protagonists in the Affair, Proust draws out the intense animosities the events aroused but also the unpredictable developments that came in their wake. Chronologically removed from the immediacy of the conflict when composing A la recherche, Proust has his Narrator note how the sons of young noblemen who had vilified Dreyfus (the anti-Semitic aristocracy having formed part of the bedrock of anti-Dreyfus opinion21) now see in the Affair an exotic cause with which it is fashionable to identify.22 By contrast, Robert de Saint-Loup, earlier an exception in aristocratic circles by being a defender of the Dreyfusard cause, comes to support the military.23 The chronological gap between the events and their aftermath itself generates other mutations: the Verdurin salon, previously a site of bourgeois anti-Semitism, shifts ideologically, becoming a Dreyfusard stronghold frequented by Zola and Picquart; Mme Swann, married to a Jew, covers this up by cultivating her contacts with narrow-minded nationalists and joining anti-Semitic leagues formed by aristocratic women (RTP II. 549; SLT iii. 249); and in what could be read as an echo of the idealism present in Jean Santeuil, Charles Swann comes to be a defender of the Dreyfus cause years later with a naivety akin to that shown when he married Odette (RTP II. 869–70; SLT iii. 581). But Swann's Dreyfusism also entails a class reversal that is equated with a greater personal authenticity, in that it draws him back from association with the aristocracy towards the class of his ancestors. The Narrator nuances this mutation: ‘ce nouveau déclassement eût été mieux appelé “reclassement” et n'était qu'honorable pour lui’ (RTP II. 870) [‘this recent class demotion was more like a reassessment of class and something entirely to his credit’ (SLT iii. 581)]. (p.7) In A la recherche, the Narrator is also keen to demonstrate how the targets of social demonization switch: ‘bientôt ce nom [de dreyfusard] avait été oublié et remplacé par celui d'adversaire de la loi de trois ans. M. Bontemps était au contraire un des auteurs de cette loi, c'était donc un patriote' (RTP IV. 305) [‘But that name [of Dreyfusard] had been quickly forgotten and replaced by that of “opponent of the Three Years Law”. M. Bontemps, however, was one of the architects of this law, and consequently he was a patriot’ (SLT vi. 33)].24 By the same token, Brichot can refer to the Dreyfus Affair as forming part of prehistory (RTP IV. 306; SLT vi. 34). If the culture of militarism which had been a central plank in the anti-Dreyfusard movement now reasserts itself in the campaign for the extension of military service, Bontemps's ability to navigate the passage from Dreyfusard to prominent enforcer of social containment is consistent with what we may infer to be the authorial view in Proust of a society in the process of inexorable mutation.25 Page 5 of 18

 

Introduction The shifts in the social kaleidoscope, to use the Narrator's metaphor in A la recherche, facilitate the relativization of ideological positions that will become a hallmark of the mature novel: ‘L'affaire Dreyfus…amena un nouveau [changement]…Tout ce qui était juif passa en bas…et des salons nationalistes obscurs montèrent prendre sa place’ (RTP I. 508) [‘Another of these [changes] was to come with the Dreyfus Affair…All things Jewish were displaced…and hitherto nondescript nationalists came to the fore’ (SLT ii. 91)]. In the Narrator's view, society, more given to transmutation, is settled only momentarily (‘momentanément immobile’ (RTP I. 508)). Whereas this outlook might imply the later Proust's detachment from political partisanship, Bataille's reading of Jean Santeuil serves to remind us of the younger author's candid treatment of political tensions. That early moral earnestness needs to be offset against the Narrator's frequently ironic and sometimes ludic self-positioning in relation to ideological questions in A la recherche, and I will be exploring this later in the book in an attempt to gauge the respective positions of Proust the author and his Narrator. The Marie Scandal (JS, 579–618; JNS, 283–318), to return to the world of Jean Santeuil, offers a fictional re-enactment of the drama surrounding Finance Minister Maurice Rouvier, who was forced to resign in the Panama Scandal of 1892 and who went on to form a government in (p.8) January 1905.26 The representation of the scandal stresses the solidarity shown to Charles Marie by Santeuil's parents, who honour a promise made to Marie's dying wife that they will not desert her husband and son. In this bourgeois narrative of interfamilial loyalty, the specifically political drama comes when Jean visits the Socialist leader Couzon and asks him to call a halt to the campaign of vilification against Marie's associates, including Monsieur Santeuil. If young Santeuil's enthusiasm for Couzon is explained in the novel as a direct consequence of his parents’ open contempt for the Socialist leader, Bataille's straightforwardly biographical reading casts Couzon as a fictional representation of Jean Jaurès.27 When Santeuil is ushered into the presence of Jaurès-Couzon (to use Bataille's conflation), he reproaches the politician for failing to control the left-wing press and thereby exposing working-class readers to untruth and hence corruption. Yet alongside the appeal to morality that informs Jean Santeuil's indignant protest directed at a Socialist leader motivated by party imperatives, there is an overt acceptance by the narrator of the politician's need to seek political advantage: ‘Le parti capitaliste et opportuniste étant celui contre les agissements duquel le parti pauvre, appelé socialisme, avait à lutter avec le plus de violence, la ruine de Marie fut pour lui un avantage inestimable’ (JS, 605) [‘Since it was the Party of opportunists and capitalists against which the Party of the poor, or the Socialists, had to wage relentless battle, Marie's ruin was for [him] a positive godsend’ (JNS, 302)]. The young Proust voices intense approbation for the parliamentary performance of the left-wing idol. Couzon's memorable oratory in the Chamber of Deputies in defence of Armenians facing Page 6 of 18

 

Introduction persecution in the Ottoman Empire is eagerly recorded by the narrator:28 the Chamber expresses outrage on hearing Couzon's menacing reproach: ‘“Vous venez d'assassiner deux cent mille chrétiens…nous irons le dire au peuple, et le peuple à qui vous avez appris à manier le fusil les vengera”’ (JS, 604) [‘ “You have just assassinated two hundred thousand Christians…we shall inform the people and the people whom you have instructed in the use of weapons will exact revenge for these deaths” ’]. Young Santeuil is described as feeling empowered by the blows landed by Couzon on his right-wing adversaries. By the same logic, the narrator in Jean Santeuil is outspoken about the right-wing vilification of Couzon and rails against ‘ces odieux imbéciles ironiques, satisfaits, usant de leur supériorité numérique et de la force de leur bêtise pour tâcher d'étouffer la voix de la Justice palpitante’ (JS, 602) [‘these (p.9) odious imbeciles with their self-satisfied irony, relying on their numerical superiority and the force of their stupidity in an attempt to silence the quivering voice of Justice’], before recording Jean's urge to stone the two hundred deputies who show Couzon such scorn. This passionate advocacy on behalf of the subaltern prompts Bataille to engage in ethical reflection: discrediting ‘la morale traditionnelle…, la morale avare’, he advocates ‘generosity’ and sees in young Proust's indignation an exemplification of this.29 In Bataille's words: ‘quelque chose est en nous de passionné, de généreux et de sacré qui excède les représentations de l'intelligence; c'est par cet excès que nous sommes humains’.30 Implicitly attributing to Proust the excess that was a hallmark of his own work, Bataille reinforces his point about impassioned public intervention by observing that justice and truth are not to be found in a world of intelligent automata. The nexus of affectivity and justice finds a significantly muted expression (and not one picked up on by Bataille) in the deft evocation of the mother's response to the Dreyfus Affair in the Santeuil household.31 Wounded by the jocular remark of her unsympathetic husband that Picquart might be imprisoned, Mme Santeuil struggles to contain herself, to ‘faire rentrer en soi à travers la peau les révoltes qui l'avaient hérissée’ (JS, 657) [‘to drive back under her skin the sense of revolt which had made her bristle’]. The detail provides a fictional transposition of Proust's biography, which merits brief reconstruction. His mother, Mme Jeanne Proust (nee Weil), brought up in Paris, came from a secular Jewish background. She had very developed literary tastes, spoke German and English (assisting her son in the translation of works by Ruskin), and served as dutiful spouse to her husband, Dr Adrien Proust. The latter, like Monsieur Santeuil, was unsympathetic to the Dreyfusard cause. He came from a provincial, petty bourgeois, nominally Catholic background (his parents were grocers with premises in the main square in Illiers) and while sharing his wife's secular outlook, he lacked her sensitivity.32 We read of Monsieur Santeuil—and again the observation is biographically based—that he displayed ‘cette brutalité paysanne dont une longue vie d'honneurs n'avait pu le dépouiller’ (p.10) (JS, 859) [‘that Page 7 of 18

 

Introduction peasant roughness which a long life full of honours had not succeeded in removing’].33 Occupying a position of considerable power within the State, Monsieur Santeuil lacks the artistic talent of his wife (JS, 212–13) and when Mme Santeuil introduces her son to the Romantics (Hugo's Les Contemplations and Lamartine's Méditations poétiques), the development is greeted with indifference by her husband and aggression by her father. With this backdrop starkly juxtaposing idealism and raison d'état, Mme Santeuil's inhibiting sense of marital duty sits uneasily with her instinctive defence of Picquart, the victim of injustice. Her discomfort prompts the narrator to pay lengthy tribute to a refined woman whose idealism, sacrificed to bourgeois conventionalism, contrasts with more public expressions of ideological revolt: Les archives les plus minutieuses de cette époque ne mentionneront aucun acte de Mme Santeuil où semble s'être réalisée cette tendresse incessante que la moindre menace de malheur, le moindre espoir de consolation, de douce émotion pour les êtres avec qui elle se sentait en sympathie fraternelle, trouvait au même instant si vibrante. Son nom n'est inscrit parmi les présidentes, les vice-présidentes, les dames patronesses d'aucune œuvre. Elle n'a jamais signé d'appel à aucune femme de France, elle n'a été dans aucun hôpital soigner des malades. Même, s'étant restreinte comme elle a fait à la vie obscure de la famille, elle n'a pas, dans le choix de son mari par exemple, ou en ne se mariant pas, faute de trouver un mari ‘dans ses idées’, laissé un témoignage quelconque des généreuses aspirations de sa nature, comme certaines femmes qui, par un choix éclatant, cherchent en dehors de leur milieu un mari artiste ou humanitaire et dont le mariage a pour pierre angulaire, non le total de deux dots équivalentes ou l'association de deux situations sociales qui s'attirent, mais un même amour pour la musique de Wagner ou le même zèle ardent d'émanciper la femme ou de s'occuper des petits aveugles. (JS, 658–9) [In none of the archives, no matter how detailed, of this period will you find the slightest mention of anything done by Madame Santeuil, or anything to bear witness to that unceasing tenderness, so vibrant and so true, which the faintest hint of misfortune, the least hope of being able to give consolation, aroused in her, or to that sweet emotion with which she thought of those to whom she felt bound in friendly sympathy. Her name never figured among the lady presidents, vice-presidents, or patronesses of charitable organizations. Never once had she signed any public appeal, nor even tended the sick in any hospital. Her activities were restricted within the obscure field of family life. But even there, by choosing a husband for herself for instance, or (p.11) by not marrying at all because she could not find a husband who ‘thought as she did’ she had left no visible evidence of her naturally generous instincts, as have some women who made a choice which became the talk of the town, having picked as Page 8 of 18

 

Introduction husband some man out of a world different from her own, an artist or a humanitarian, the keystone of whose marriage was not the total of the money brought by each to the altar, or the natural affinity of similar social positions, but a shared love for the music of Wagner, a common interest in the emancipation of women, or concern for the care of blind children. (JNS, 742)] Attending to a duty of memory, the narrator seeks to compensate for the defective archives which fail to register private testimonies. At the same time, he alludes to the radical rejection of patriarchy by many of Mme Santeuil's women contemporaries, who question the institution of marriage and resist male hegemony or, to use George Sand's formulation from earlier in the nineteenth century, ‘la barbarie des lois qui régissent encore l'existence de la femme dans le mariage, dans la famille et la société’.34 Proust extends the canvas of emancipatory endeavour, the textual development that follows describing how young, liberated women, rejecting the restrictive, gendered roles imposed by bourgeois conventionalism, flock to the Louvre, the Sorbonne, and the dissecting room. In their choice of spouses, they are derided by more conventional women who ridicule the idea of celebrating one's engagement in Bayreuth and settling into married life in an apartment that has an organ but no kitchen. The pursuit of art, social justice, and the humanitarian instinct, presented as forming a progressive whole, recalls Picquart's Trinity of truth, justice, and beauty referred to earlier. In a similar vein, Mme Santeuil's conformist choice of partner is juxtaposed with Mlle Saintré's motivation in choosing her spouse, M. Maindant: ‘[Mlle Saintré] avait entendu parler de lui comme vivant, malgré sa grande fortune, parmi les ouvriers dont il embellissait la vie en leur jouant du César Franck, en leur donnant des reproductions de Botticelli’ (JS, 659) [‘[Mlle Saintré] had heard that in spite of his immense fortune, he was living among the workers, bringing beauty to their lives by playing them works by César Franck and giving them reproductions of Botticelli’].35 (p.12) Bataille's identification of the socialist strand in Jean Santeuil is further confirmed in the young Proust's awareness of these challenges to hierarchies of class and gender (even if that awareness is not to be read as inferring automatic acceptance of socially progressive measures): making art available to the proletariat, the rejection of conventional marriage, and the provision of access to education for ‘la moitié du genre humain’ to borrow again from George Sand.36 Situating the young Proust in relation to literary-political ideological debates of the nineteenth century is instructive. Identifying altruism as a central component of Eros in Sand's work, Naomi Schor argues that ‘what distinguishes Sand's love stories from those of Flaubert (while calling to mind those of Hugo and Balzac) is that in her novels, the quest for the love ideal is inseparable from an aspiration to a better world’.37 Writing in the last decade of the century, the young Proust's account of marital union in Jean Santeuil shows, in the case of Mme Santeuil, an at times uneasy accommodation between realism and what Page 9 of 18

 

Introduction Schor, referring to Sand, sees as the competing aesthetic of idealism.38 Sand's work has of course particular resonance within A la recherche, featuring prominently in both the first volume of the novel where François le Champi is the text which the boy Marcel's mother reads to him (RTP I. 42; SLT i. 44), and again in Le Temps retrouvé, where memory of the childhood reading of the Sand text is rekindled in the library scene in the home of the Prince de Guermantes (RTP IV. 462; SLT vi. 191). The maternal grandmother, always keen to see her grandson exposed to ‘les grands souffles du génie’ (RTP I. 39) [‘a great breath of genius’ (SLT i. 42], choses as a gift for him a set of literary works which are effectively deemed to be ideologically unacceptable by Marcel's father: Musset's poetry, a volume of Rousseau, and Sand's Indiana, from the radical 1842 preface of which I have already quoted. A consequence of the patriarchal censorship is that in sweltering heat, the grandmother returns to Jouy-le-Vicomte where she swaps the offending volumes for Sand's ‘romans champêtres’ [‘rural novels’]. If the heat exhaustion she suffers casts her idealism in a sacrificial light, she stands more generally for anti-utilitarian values, shunning ‘la vulgarité, l'utilité, …la banalité commerciale’ (RTP I. 39–40) (p.13) [‘vulgarity and utility… commercial banality’ (SLT i. 43)]. While Bataille was quick to recognize the strand of idealism in the work of the young Proust, the later account of the mother reading in Combray sees that strand both restated and crucially relativized: ‘elle lisait la prose de George Sand, qui respire toujours cette bonté, cette distinction morale que maman avait appris de ma grand-mère à tenir pour supérieures à tout dans la vie, et que je ne devais lui apprendre que bien plus tard à ne pas tenir également pour supérieures à tout dans les livres’ (RTP I. 42) [‘she was reading George Sand's prose, which always breathes that goodness, that moral distinction which Mama had learned from my grandmother to consider superior to all else in life, and which I was to teach her only much later not to consider superior to all else in books too’ (SLT i. 45)]. In the juxtaposition of life and books, the protagonist Marcel will come to propose for literature an autonomy that relieves it of any duty to function primarily as a conduit for moral debate. The shift suggests an unambiguous turning away from the pull exerted by idealism in Jean Santeuil. At the same time, Mme Santeuil and Marcel's mother and grandmother may be seen to form a discreet sisterhood in which commitment to ‘the good’ (in the varied forms of morally enhancing literature, compassion for the victim, and the language of idealism) leaves nevertheless intact the workings of a conjugal loyalty predicated on male hegemony. Returning specifically to the depiction of the union between Monsieur and Mme Santeuil, we see that although the emancipation of women forms part of the wider social backdrop to the narrator's depiction of the protagonist's mother, the portrayal suggests her ambiguous social positioning. The young Proust infuses the description of her closet support for Picquart with a pathos that is itself ideologically significant. While the text acknowledges a legacy of feminist protest in nineteenth-century France, Mme Santeuil, by being forced to repress Page 10 of 18

 

Introduction in part her identification with Picquart as victim, signals her ambiguous retreat to a private bourgeois sphere.39 The move of containment may be read as working paradigmatically in Proust's work to the extent that it entails an observation of events that is pursued in a turning away from the social arena. An analogous monitoring of the public matter or res publica from within a private orbit operates in A la recherche, in the often comic form of Tante Léonie's obsessive tracking of life in Combray but also more significantly in Marcel's extended periods of retreat from the world which serve to facilitate reflection on sociality. And whereas in Jean Santeuil the spectacle of Picquart's defiance is the trigger for idealism (or, in Bataille's terms, for (p.14) the young Proust's aggressive naivety), this makes way for the often ironic interventions of the Narrator in A la recherche where the adoption of a moral stand is regularly viewed with suspicion. Already in Jean Santeuil, social contestation in the form of the rejection of bourgeois marriage forms part of the ‘nouvelles idées’ (JS, 876) [‘new ideas’] that do not sway Mme Santeuil. In conformity with the mainstream norms of her generation, she is comfortable with a marriage underpinned by the bilateral provision of dowries. In her world view, ‘un mariage d'amour, c'est-à-dire fait par amour, y serait considéré comme une preuve de vice. Mais l'amour suit le mariage et dure toute la vie’ (JS, 877) [‘A love-match, that is to say a marriage based on love, would have been considered as a proof of vice. Love was something that came after marriage and lasted until death’ (JNS, 738)]. Indeed the narrator of Jean Santeuil pays solemn tribute to Monsieur and Mme Santeuil: ‘Je ne peux pas quitter ce couple uni sans choix autre que les convenances bourgeoises de la situation et les convenances supérieures de l'honneur, mais uni jusqu'à la mort’ (JS, 877) [‘I cannot yet take my leave of this couple whose union was not a matter of free choice, but the result of middle-class conventions and respectable notions, but who, for all that, will remain together until death breaks the bond’ (JNS, 739)]. In this counterpoint to the contestation of patriarchy alluded to in Jean Santeuil, Mme Santeuil's experience of anti-erotic conjugal love implies an acceptance of its bourgeois framing.40 The narrator of Jean Santeuil situates that experience historically, seeing in the economic consolidation at work in bourgeois marriage a generational marker. His ideological acceptance of prevailing middle-class ways is here worked into the construction of an historical perspective of a kind that anticipates its appearance in modified form in Le Temps retrouvé.41 While asserting that, for her son, Mme Santeuil is like no other person from across the five continents, the narrator still describes her as an embodiment of her class and generation: pourtant elle avait en quelque mesure les idées, les préjugés, les vertus, le maintien, les mœurs, les habitudes de toutes les bourgeoises de sa génération et de toutes les classes sociales fermées qui ne connaissent pas le luxe et le relâchement des mœurs; si vous songez que son fils ressemblait à tous les gens de sa génération, et que tous eurent plus ou Page 11 of 18

 

Introduction moins sur leurs parents une (p.15) action pareille, vous songerez que ce chapitre, peut-être ennuyeux comme chapitre de roman, était instructif comme chapitre d'histoire. (JS, 874) [she still had to some extent the prejudices, the manners and the habits of all the middle-class women of her generation, of all those shut-away social castes the members of which know nothing of self-indulgence and the loosening of moral standards. It is true that her son resembled all the young persons of his generation, whose effect upon their parents was much the same as his was. Consequently you may decide that this chapter, boring though it may be as part of a novel, is amply instructive regarded as a chapter of social history. (JNS, 735)] Juxtaposing the categories of roman and histoire, the young Proust appears defensive about the move to record broader taxonomies and societal trends yet his narrator continues to press the claims of collective existence. Stéphane Chaudier argues that in Proust's work we are confronted with ‘une sociologie intuitive’ which prevents the reader from seeing as natural, situations and institutions that are socially grounded.42 Moreover, as Catherine BidouZachariasen demonstrates, while the Narrator is at the centre of A la recherche, he occupies a peripheral position in terms of the construction of the novel's social analysis, Proust succeeding in conveying the illusory sense that Marcel occupies centre stage.43 ‘Où que votre vie ait été cantonnée’ [‘no matter where your little rut in life may have been traced’], whether it be within the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie, ‘vous avez vu l'histoire se faire devant vous, c'est-à-dire en deux générations l'espèce humaine se transformer’ (JS, 874) [‘you have seen history in the making, that is to say you have witnessed a transformation in the human species stretching over a period of two generations’ (JNS, 735)].44 While the verb ‘cantonner’ conveys an ideological embeddedness within a class mindset, the formulation of an emerging diachronic axis provides the necessary scope for establishing perspective on wider social configurations. The narrator tests other hypotheses, wondering, for example, if the concept of generation may not be more important than that of class. The idea, which is returned to in A la recherche,45 sits alongside an alternative rationalization, namely that psychological types have a millennial character (thus the patrician ways of ancient Roman life may thrive in nineteenth-century France). In the same vein, ‘une sorte de logique sentimentale, qui est comme l'essence commune de l'humanité à travers (p.16) les siècles’ (JS, 875) [‘a kind of logic of the feelings which is as it were the common essence of humanity across the centuries’ (JNS, 736)] may, the narrator speculates, render the categories of class and generation redundant. Versatile in his hypothesis-building, Proust seeks from early on to systematize his reflection on sociality. Will a synchronic analysis of class, he wonders in Jean Santeuil, provide the explanatory framework needed to represent and account for the social? Or might the ‘logique sentimentale’ and the discourse of humanity's common essence across the millennia prove more Page 12 of 18

 

Introduction efficacious as explanatory models? Jean Santeuil brings other implied dilemmas. How are the demands of social justice to be answered by those such as Mme Santeuil who, while still capable of ‘sympathie fraternelle’ (JS, 658–9) [‘fraternal sympathy’], as Proust terms it, are also committed to the pursuit of private, bourgeois stability? Where does the response of M. Maindant in Jean Santeuil (in an emancipatory way, he introduces workers to high culture (JS, 659) ) leave the narrator of the early novel? And how is proletarian culture itself recorded and viewed in Proust's work and what is his response to the social radicalism of his day? As Malcolm Bowie observes, ‘major elements in [Proust's] creative project [are] reliant upon the inveterate inequalities that the class system embodies’.46 The switch signalled by the movement from roman to histoire in the extract from Jean Santeuil cited earlier (JS, 874; JNS, 735) forms part of a wider reflection within Proust's work. Within the three-decade span of his adult writing career, he provides evidence of both partisan stances on the big issues of his day and a countervailing plea, as voiced by the Narrator in A la recherche, to ‘comprendre et…écouter’ (RTP IV. 492) [‘understand and…listen’ (SLT vi. 222)]. But if his conviction that culture wars such as the Dreyfus Affair are ultimately ephemeral feeds into the pathos accruing from a sense of life's transience in Le Temps retrouvé, his writing shows a will to record and scrutinize strong collective alignments. The chapters that follow seek to track these ideological debates, which crystallize around a range of interrelated issues in Proust's work: the political role of literature in national life and antagonistic claims to ownership of the nation; fin de siècle contexts for the understanding of social class; class rivalries and the emergence of middle-class hegemony in the bourgeois Third Republic; the connection linking capital and master/servant rivalries; the depiction of the subaltern and the evaluation of popular culture in an age of democratization. Notwithstanding Proust's insistence that he eschews politics (with his participation in the Dreyfus (p.17) Affair and the debate surrounding the separation of Church and State being notable exceptions), we see in the author's representation of the social referent and ideological positioning a keen political awareness. A central aim of my argument is to highlight the centrality of class and nation to the diegesis, language, and tonality of Proust's A la recherche. Numerous critics have signalled the place of the historical referent in the work. Jean-Yves Tadié makes the point that the First World War allowed Proust to reflect on the connections linking literature, history, and politics. Tadié also identifies Proust's radicalization (in relation to the Dreyfus Affair, chauvinism and the First World War, and sexuality) and sees parallels with Montaigne and Voltaire.47 Pericles Lewis, reflecting on the subject of ‘Proust and the discourse of national will’, underscores the view of the nation as ‘the particular form of the fiction “we” that claims to define the self through and through’.48 And René Girard, referring to Proust's ability to lay bare the hidden forces behind ‘la mécanique sociale’ [‘the social mechanism’], stresses Proust's capacity to gauge the collective in A la Page 13 of 18

 

Introduction recherche: ‘la fascination collective engendre un “individualisme collectif” qui s'appelle nationalisme, chauvinisme et esprit d'Autarkie’.49 Proust recoils from the idea of national self-sufficiency. My approach in this study will be to deliver an analysis of class and nation from a number of angles. Chapters 1 and 2 situate Proust's attitudes to class and national culture alongside the positions taken by contemporaries such as the nationalist Maurice Barrès, Action Française adherent Paul Bourget, one-time Université Populaire activist Daniel Halévy, and Julien Benda, whose endorsement of Proust in La Trahison des clercs (1927) was fulsome. I also draw on Ruskin's work, which Proust translated, specifically on the issue of the bourgeois writer's position within the socio-economic order. Chapters 3 and 4 analyse respectively the Parisian bourgeois salon in Un amour de Swann and Balbec: the Verdurin salon, derided by the Narrator in the first volume of A la recherche, will undergo significant mutation in the course of the novel, while Balbec provides the venue for young Marcel's exposure to the new leisure classes of the fin de siècle. Elements of genetic criticism also allow me to explore how, in broad terms, the later Proust accentuates the ideological inflection in his depiction of class, language use, cultural identity, and ethnicity. The foregrounding of the social dialectic manifests (p.18) itself in other ways. The imbrication of gender, sexuality, and class provides the central point of focus in Chapter 5. Chapter 7 considers how a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé: the division of mental and manual labour; the interaction between the proletariat and the aristocracy arising from the social organization of male prostitution in First World War Paris; and the tension between what Leo Bersani characterizes as the narcissism present in the work-of-art-as-salvation model and the call to sociality and community implicit elsewhere in the last volume of the novel.50 The overlapping of the economic and the cultural in A la recherche, particularly in the Albertine cycle, is the subject of Chapter 6, which also considers the seepage between biography and fiction, Proust occasionally reproducing verbatim within the novel extracts from his letters. More broadly, A la recherche also carries important traces of loyalty to the values of the professional middle class embodied by the parents both of the author and the Narrator, and in Chapter 8 I explore the ironic portrait of a class coming to articulate its complaint in the face of an emerging social contestation. In Barthes's words, ‘Une permutation incessante anime, bouleverse le jeu social (l'œuvre de Proust est beaucoup plus sociologique qu'on ne dit; elle décrit avec exactitude la grammaire de la promotion, de la mobilité des classes)’.51 Notes:

(1) [‘The love of truth and justice and the socialism of Marcel Proust’], G. Bataille, La Littérature et le Mal (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), 97–108: 97–8. An

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Introduction earlier version of Bataille's reading of Jean Santeuil appeared in the review Critique, 62 (1952), 641–7. (2) M. Proust, Jean Santeuil, précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1971), ed. Pierre Clarac, 641. Subsequently abbreviated to JS, with accompanying page number. This quotation and the one immediately following are also cited in Bataille, La Littérature et le Mal, 97. (3) M. Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 342. Subsequently abbreviated to JNS. (4) See e.g. Christophe Charle, Naissance des ‘intellectuels’ 1880–1900 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1990). (5) JNS, 350; translation modified. (6) [‘Scientists against Experts’], quoted in Daniel Lindenberg, ‘L'Improbable ralliement de Jaurès', in Janine Chêne, Edith Aberdam, and Daniel Aberdam (eds.), Comment devient-on dreyfusard? (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1997), 45–59: 52. (7) [‘men of peerless competence and indisputable scientific authority’], ibid. (8) Correspondance de Marcel Proust, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1970–93), 21 vols, ii. 272; subsequently abbreviated to Corr. with accompanying volume and page numbers. The quoted material is drawn from Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie (Paris: Gallimard (NRF Biographies), 1996), 371. (9) Marcel Proust, Selected Letters 1880–1903, ed. Philip Kolb (New York: Doubleday, 1983), trans. Ralph Manheim, 189. (10) Quoted in Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010), 86. (11) Letter to Rosny aîné, Corr. xviii. 545. The book in question was Les Plaisirs et les jours, published in 1896. In the same letter, Proust specifically rejects the characterization of him as a writer with reactionary, Catholic sympathies which featured in a press article by G. de la Fouchardière (L'Œuvre, 12 Dec. 1919). See Corr. xviii. 538, editorial n. 8. (12) Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 527. Proust's ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ [‘Death of the Cathedrals’] appeared in Le Figaro on 16 Aug. 1904. Legislation on the separation of Church and State was passed on 9 Dec. 1905. I shall be exploring Proust's position in relation to this hinge moment in Third Republic history in Ch. 1. (13) Zeev Sternhell refers to the unanimity of Catholic reaction in the Dreyfus Affair, La Droite révolutionnaire (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 238; quoted by Jean Page 15 of 18

 

Introduction Dominique Durand, ‘Léon XIII, un pape dreyfusard?’, in Chêne et al. (eds.), Comment devient-on dreyfusard?, 78 n. 3. (14) See Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 684–6. (15) J. Dubois, Stendhal: Une sociologie romanesque (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), 12. Linking Stendhal, Balzac, and Proust, Dubois argues that the novelist is himself often part of the social order which he is simultaneously calling into question. (16) [‘his democratic critics’], R. Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris: Grasset, 1961), 221. (17) [‘a man whose political views were to appear lukewarm in the end’], Bataille, La Littérature et le Mal, 98. (18) [‘That naive tone is surprising in an author so seldom given to naivety’], ibid. 100. (19) [‘I have been moved by that movement of revolt that is unexpected in Proust’], ibid. 108. (20) I capitalize throughout when referring to the Narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu; lower-case ‘n’ is used to designate the narrator of Jean Santeuil. (21) Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen refers to ‘la logique qui avait construit la culpabilité de Dreyfus, celle mise en branle par une élite sociale en déclin, crispée dans son nationalisme et son antisémitisme’, [‘the logic that had constructed Dreyfus's guilt and that had been set in motion by a social elite in decline and reduced to a tense nationalism and anti-Semitism’], Proust sociologue: De la maison aristocratique au salon bourgeois (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1997), 92. (22) Proust began work on A la recherche du temps perdu in 1908 and carried on until the time of his death in 1922. (23) M. Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1987– 9), 4 vols., iii. 97. Subsequently abbreviated to RTP, with accompanying volume and page numbers. For the equivalent passage in the English translation of the novel, see M. Proust, In Search of Lost Time, gen. ed. Christopher Prendergast (London: Penguin, 2003), 6 vols., iv. 102. Subsequently abbreviated to SLT. (24) Quoted in Jean-François Ravel, Sur Proust (1960, Paris: Grasset, 1987), 121. (25) In the summer of 1913, new legislation extended the period of military service from two years to three, a move opposed by the Socialists. See editorial note, RTP IV. 1201, n. 3 to IV. 305. Page 16 of 18

 

Introduction (26) See Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 342. (27) Bataille, La Littérature et le Mal, 99. Tadié confirms the validity of the biographical reading that links Couzon to Jaurès; see Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 341. (28) The Armenian massacres of this period took place in the years 1894–6. (29) [‘traditional morality…greedy morality’], Bataille, La Littérature et le Mal, 107. (30) [‘there lies within us something passionate, generous, and sacred which exceeds the representations provided by our intelligence; our humanity lies in this excess’], ibid.; emphasis in the original. (31) [‘Mme Santeuil et l'Affaire’], JS, 657–9.The biographical resonances are again clear, Mme Proust having believed in Dreyfus's innocence from the outset. See Evelyne Bloch-Dano, Madame Proust (Paris: Grasset, 2004), 293–6. BlochDano points out how most French Jews initially accepted the verdict in Dreyfus's trial, Henri Bergson, for example, confessing that indeed for a long time he had believed Dreyfus to be guilty, ibid. 293–4. (32) See Bloch-Dano, Madame Proust, ch. 2, ‘M. Proust et Mlle Weil’, 23–30. (33) Quoted in Daniel Panzac, Le Docteur Adrien Proust: Père méconnu, précurseur oublié (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003), 88 n. 13. The page reference is mistakenly indicated as JS, 213 in Panzac. (34) [‘The barbarity of the laws which still govern woman's existence in marriage, family, and society’]. The quotation is taken from Sand's 1842 preface to Indiana (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 46–7. (35) For an anthology of texts which set out feminist positions of the period in France, see Jennifer Waelti-Walters and Steven C. Hause (eds.), Feminisms of the Belle Epoque: A Historical and Literary Anthology (Lincoln, Nebr. and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). In La Voie féministe [The Feminist Way] (1916), the Socialist and feminist Hélène Brion (1882–1962) cites among the reforms of the pre-First World War period Alfred Naquet's bill re-establishing the practice of divorce in 1884 and Charles Beauquier's legislation of 1905 which gave married women the legal right to manage their own affairs, Feminisms of the Belle Epoque, 154. (36) [‘half the human race’], G. Sand, 1842 preface to Indiana, 46. (37) N. Schor, ‘1876 – Idealism’, in Denis Hollier (ed.), A New History of French Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 769–74: 773.

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Introduction (38) Ibid. 771. (39) In his essay on Proust, Bataille asserts: ‘Si je préfère la jouissance, je déteste la répression’ [‘If I prefer pleasure, I detest repression’], La Littérature et le Mal, 107. (40) For instructive details of the financial arrangements that governed the marriage of Jeanne Weil and Adrien Proust, see Bloch-Dano, Madame Proust, ch. 2. To illustrate the intersection of fictional text and biography, Bloch-Dano draws on the section in Jean Santeuil, [‘La Vieillesse des parents de Jean’] [‘[The Old Age of Jean's Parents]’] from which I am quoting. (41) See below, Ch. 7, ‘Hierarchies’, the section ‘A vol d'oiseau’. (42) [‘an intuitive sociology’], Stéphane Chaudier, Proust et le langage religieux: La Cathédrale profane (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 93. (43) Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 42 n. 1. (44) The narrator's restrictive class range, without reference to the working class, is itself significant. (45) For discussion of this question in Le Temps retrouvé, see below, Ch. 7. (46) M. Bowie, Proust Among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 157. (47) Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 787, 826. (48) Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152. (49) [‘the collective fascination engenders a “collective individualism” which is called nationalism, chauvinism, and the spirit of Autarkie’], Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 215, 222; author's italics. (50) Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 4. (51) [‘An incessant permutation drives forward and radically disrupts the social game (Proust's work is much more sociological than people say; it describes in an exact way the grammar of promotion and of class mobility)’], Roland Barthes, ‘Une idée de recherche’ in G. Genette, and T. Todorov (eds.), Recherche de Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 38; quoted in Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 1.

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On the Nation and Its Culture

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

On the Nation and Its Culture Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0002

Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines how Proust responds to the voices of nationalism, Germanophobia, laicity, and social progressivism, among others. Proust specifically considers how duty to the nation is to be discharged and where the perceived good cause leaves literature. In his journalism, correspondence, and A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust engages with contemporaries on a range of cultural and political issues: the Separation of the Churches and the State of 1905, the role of the writer in relation to national politics, the debate about national regeneration, and the claims of the Parti de l’Intelligence in the aftermath of the First World War. Just as he does not conceal his Narrator’s susceptibility to Germanophobia, Proust does not forgo partisan engagement himself. Yet he also identifies the paradigm whereby culture wars run their course and thereby points up what is ephemeral and subjective in the espousal of causes. Keywords:   Halévy, Barrès, nationalism, literature, Church and State, 1905, Germanophobia, politics

The myriad calls emanating from the public arena—from the forces of nationalism, Germanophobia, laicity, and social progressivism, among others— prompt Proust to ask how these interpellations are to be answered by writers committed to their art. He specifically considers how duty to the nation is to be discharged and where the perceived good cause leaves literature and in this chapter, I want to begin to address these questions.

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On the Nation and Its Culture Proust, Halévy, and the politics of literature ‘Aucun esprit juste ne contestera qu'on fait perdre sa valeur universelle à une œuvre en la dénationalisant, et que c'est à la cime même du particulier qu'éclôt le général. Mais n'est-ce pas une vérité de même ordre, qu'on ôte sa valeur générale et même nationale à une œuvre en cherchant à la nationaliser?’(Corr. xviii. 334) [‘No right-minded person would dispute that, by de-nationalizing a work, one deprives it of its universal value, nor that the general flourishes when the particular is at its height. But isn't it a truth of the same order to say that one takes away a work's universal and even its national value by seeking to nationalize it?’]1. Writing to Daniel Halévy against a backdrop of post-war nationalist fervour in July 1919, Proust urgently asserts that literature generates universal appeal when it is trained on the particular and reflects a national specificity. By the same token, he cautions against narrow prescriptiveness, warning that the institutionalization of literature as an arm of the nation robs writing of its capacity to reflect not just the general but also national particularity. The context for Proust's comments was his forthright opposition to the rightwing views of the self-styled ‘Parti de l'Intelligence’, whose manifesto had just been published in the weekly literary supplement of (p.20) Le Figaro.2 The group sought to rescue France from what it saw as a Bolshevik threat to the nation and to its key pillars of society and family. It presented itself as guiding and protecting ‘l'opinion publique, troublée par ces folies’3 and as equipped to deliver ‘la reconstitution nationale et le relèvement du genre humain’.4 The notion of civilizing values defining, and also radiating out from, a national context holds echoes of that other, would-be edifying, project, the mission civilisatrice that sought to give moral stature to French colonial ambitions. Indeed one of the signatories of ‘Pour un Parti de l'Intelligence’, Louis Bertrand, was to become an aggressive exponent of French Algerianist supremacy in colonial Algeria in the 1920s.5 Although not addressing specifically colonial issues, Proust's letter explores the cognate issue of cultural domination. In particular he conveys an extreme reticence about any form of triumphalism: Que la France doive veiller sur les littératures du monde entier, c'est un mandat qu'on pleurerait de joie d'apprendre qu'on nous a confié, mais qu'il est un peu choquant de nous voir assumer de nous-même. Cette ‘hégémonie’, née de la ‘Victoire’ fait involontairement penser à ‘Deutschland über alles’ et à cause de cela est légèrement désagréable. Le caractère de notre ‘race’ (est-il d'un bien bon français, de parler de ‘race’ ‘française’?) était de savoir allier à autant de fierté plus de modestie. (Corr. xviii. 335)

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On the Nation and Its Culture [One would weep with joy to learn that France had been appointed custodian of world literature, but it's a little shocking to see us assume that role for ourselves. This ‘hegemony', born of ‘Victory', is an unconscious reminder of ‘Deutschland über alles' and, for that reason, rather distasteful. To know how to temper such pride with modesty used to be one of the characteristics of our race (can it be good French, to talk of a French ‘race'?).]6 While Proust views as wishful thinking an ever-expanding French literary prestige, the string of metalinguistic asides about ‘victory’, ‘hegemony’, and ‘race’ woven into the letter show the author's fundamental dissent from an ostensibly racialized superiority. He hesitates specifically about the conflation of race and nation although what he presents as merely an issue of good linguistic taste tellingly connects with the tension in the (p.21) Third Republic surrounding organic nationalists like Barrès who peddled anti-Semitism and aggressively promoted the nation as an embodiment of ethnic homogeneity.7 Alongside Proust's call for a curb on temporal power, he rejects the group's assertion that the Catholic Church—exerting influence through both its believers and ‘des catholiques “incroyants”’8—was the exclusive embodiment of civilizing values. He reflects bitterly on the earlier failure of figures such as Charles Maurras (high-profile signatory of the Le Figaro manifesto and leader of the monarchist Action Française) to support the cause of justice in the Dreyfus Affair and dismisses as far-fetched the claims made for the Church: ‘Personne n'admire plus que moi l'Eglise, mais prendre le contrepied d'Homais jusqu'à dire qu'elle a été la tutelle des progrès de l'esprit humain, en tout temps, est un peu fort’ (Corr. xviii. 335) [‘Nobody admires the Church more than I do, but it's a bit much to disassociate oneself from Homais to the extent of saying that it has been the guardian of the human spirit for all time’].9 Proust thus simultaneously targets several sectarian positions: the morally discredited republican secularism of Flaubert's Homais, the anti-Semitism of the opponents of Dreyfus, and the narrow Catholic conformism of the Parti de l'Intelligence. While his belief in the centrality of a Christian legacy to France's cultural self-definition was clear from his active opposition to the separation of the Churches and the State in 1905 (more on that later in the chapter), the liberal pluralist outlook that he adopts in his letter of July 1919 to Halévy accounts for his uneasiness with the cultural triumphalism of the Parti de l'Intelligence.10 This authorial position is analogous to the Narrator's clear rejection in Le Temps retrouvé of the narrow Barresian model of the nation based on race. Pericles Lewis argues that Proust opposes Barrès's voluntarist conception of the nation and that the emphasis placed on individuality in the Recherche suggests ‘both the limits of the “will” as a source of national unity and the possibility of rethinking the role of subsidiary identifications within the nation-state'.11 In a reformulation of this view, Lewis argues that within the broader debate in the Third Republic around issues to do with race, (p.22) Proust sought to articulate a way of being French Page 3 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture that would not reduce all Frenchmen to a form of socially homogenizing narrowness.12 Proust's correspondent, Daniel Halévy, was himself one of the signatories of the manifesto. Having been contemporaries and friends at the Lycée Condorcet in the 1880s, he and Proust were already embarked on influential careers as writers by the time of the First World War. As a literary biographer and wartime journalist, Halévy was the author of works that were well known to Proust.13 His ideological position had evolved substantially from that adopted in his early career, when he published his Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (1901) and was involved in the Université Populaire movement. As is typical of much of Proust's correspondence, his letter shows a characteristic flexibility aimed at placating his addressee. He pleads grave ill health—‘il a fallu un état voisin de la mort…’ (Corr. xviii. 334; Proust's italics) [‘it has taken a state approaching death’]14—for not having written earlier to congratulate Halévy on his book, Charles Péguy et les ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine', which appeared in October 1918.15 He also thanks Halévy for providing him with a bound copy of Proust's ‘Sentiments filiaux d'un parricide’ [‘Filial Sentiments of a Parricide’], an article which had originally appeared in Le Figaro in 1907 and a copy of which Proust needed for inclusion in his forthcoming collection, Pastiches et Mélanges. Signing off as ‘ton admirateur et ami’ [‘your admiring friend’], Proust persists with his theme by insisting that it is indeed Halévy's works that best honour France rather than the bombastic nationalism contained in the ‘Pour un Parti de l'Intelligence’ manifesto. The scope and tenor of the July 1919 letter to Halévy provide us with a platform from which to pursue Proust's engagement with national cultural debate in the first two decades of the century. Patrick Parrinder makes the point that the nation in literature is ‘an invisible and (at least) partly theoretical construction which elicits powerful emotional and imaginative identifications' and in Proust's correspondence with prominent figures such as Halévy and Barrès, we have access to antagonistic discourses around the nation and (p.23) what are presented as the cognate issues of aesthetics, class, and religion.16 The points of consensus and disagreement that emerge in these on-off dialogues centre around a series of sociopolitical confrontations. The prescriptive directness of the Parti de l'Intelligence was clear. It called for a counter to ‘[le] désordre libéral et anarchique, [le] soulèvement de l'instinct’17 and advocated ‘une méthode intellectuelle qui hiérarchise et qui classe’.18 Proust's gripe was as much stylistic as political. He recoiled from the highly rhetorical posturing inherent in the very genre of the manifesto and appears vexed by the sanctimonious nationalist posturing of which the following claim is typical: ‘C'est à un apostolat intellectuel que nous voulons nous consacrer, en tant que Français d'abord, mais aussi en tant qu'hommes, en tant que gardiens Page 4 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture de la civilisation’.19 Aggressively anti-modern in its prescriptiveness, the manifesto was vociferous in its opposition to socio-economic change in the wake of the war. Its authors saw as dangerous the stress on materialism and shunned the marks of urban modernity, ‘les tendances matérialistes de ces théoriciens qui ne voient la rénovation de la France qu'industrielle ou commerciale’.20 In a brief trailer to the text proper of ‘Pour un Parti de l'Intelligence’, Le Figaro carried a context and a justification: the authors of the manifesto felt compelled, the paper argues, to react to what they saw as the provocative slur contained in an earlier, internationalist manifesto directed against the patriotic discourse of the First World War. The textual snippet they cite (in which they stand accused of having ‘avili, abaissé, dégradé la pensée’21) is drawn from Romain Rolland's ‘Un Appel: Fière Déclaration d'Intellectuels’,22 which appeared in L'Humanité on 26 June 1919 with numerous French co‐signatories, among them Georges Duhamel and Henri Barbusse, as well as many others from across Europe, including Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse, and Benedetto Croce. In his call to action, Rolland, using the language of the Communist Party Manifesto, urges intellectuals to unite: ‘Travailleurs de l'esprit, compagnons dispersés à travers le monde, séparés depuis cinq ans par les armées, la censure et la haine des nations en guerre, nous vous (p.24) adressons…un appel pour reformer notre union fraternelle’.23 In his letter to Halévy, Proust claims that, were he to have seen what he terms the ‘manifeste “bolcheviste”’ [‘“Bolshevik” manifesto’] that had triggered the Parti de l'Intelligence declaration, he would have found it ‘mille fois pire que le vôtre’ (Corr. xviii. 335) [‘a thousand times worse than your one’]. Proust's outspoken rejection of these calls to collectivist identity, whether nationalist or, as with Rolland's appeal in L'Humanité, internationalist, suggests a writer working to clear a space that would be unrestricted by ideological prescriptiveness. In the pages of A la recherche du temps perdu that depict the war, he develops this: the detachment from xenophobia in Le Temps retrouvé, Charlus's expressions of Germanophilia, and the author's conversion of nighttime Paris threatened by aerial bombardment into a site of apocalyptic mystery reminiscent of Sodom and Gomorrah all help steer Proust's coverage of the conflict away from any conventional endorsement of nationalist partisanship. The Narrator chides writers who instead of pursuing their art allow themselves to be distracted by social and ideological causes such as the pursuit of justice (as with the Dreyfus Affair) or moral unity for the nation in times of war: ‘Les écrivains’, he complains, ‘…n'avaient pas le temps de penser à la littérature' (RTP IV. 458) [‘writers…were much too busy to think about literature’ (SLT vi. 188)]. (In his defence of Dreyfus in Jean Santeuil, by contrast, the young Proust displays an aggressive naivety, to use Georges Bataille's terms.24) The authors of the Le Figaro manifesto in turn voice their complaint, Page 5 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture denouncing what for them is a culture war waged against tradition: ‘Dans cette grande réforme sociale, c'est un attentat contre une culture qui s'apprête. Et l'on voit des intellectuels qui ont découvert l'ozone et la houille blanche déserter soudain leur devoir d'état’.25 Significantly Proust moves to redefine the discourse of service to the nation: as formulated in Le Temps retrouvé, artists fundamentally heed their ‘devoir d'état’ [‘duty to the state’] by being artists. Thus, for the Narrator, the cultural legacy of the eighteenth century shows Watteau and de la Tour honouring the nation far more enduringly than all of France's Revolutionary artists of the period (RTP IV. 467; SLT vi. 197). (p.25) Reflecting elsewhere in Le Temps retrouvé that it is the spontaneity of private memory rather than the recording of any revolutionary dates that constitutes the greatness of Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe, the Narrator anticipates the anger of those immersed in the prejudice of the war at the suggestion that the label boche would end up having mere curiosity value like the historically earlier terms sans-culotte and chouan (RTP IV. 306; SLT vi. 35). Would-be universal claims are thus deflated, Lewis arguing that Proust, like Tocqueville before him, sees the tension between social homogenization and particularism as being a marked characteristic of modern societies.26 Maurras's opposite number in the 1919 war of manifestos was Romain Rolland, who also attracts Proust's censure. In Le Temps retrouvé, the Narrator tires of ‘tant de conversations humanitaires, patriotiques, internationalistes, et métaphysiques. “Plus de style, avais-je entendu dire alors, plus de littérature, de la vie”’ (RTP IV. 461) [‘any number of humanitarian, patriotic, internationalist or metaphysical conversations. “No more style, was what I had heard people say in those days, no more literature, what we want is life”’ (SLT vi. 191)]. The crossreference is to La Foire sur la place (1908), in which Rolland promotes what he terms life in place of artistic refinement.27 We find an earlier critique of Rolland in a piece entitled ‘Romain Rolland’ in Cahier 29 and included in Contre Sainte-Beuve.28 Proust's rallying cry—‘qu'il y ait profondeur’ (CSB, 307) [‘let there be depth’]—articulates the frustration that he experiences as a reader of Rolland's novel cycle about universal love, Jean Christophe, branded by Proust as superficial and simplistic. Uneasy about what he views as Rolland's false distinction between ‘l'art élevé’ [‘elevated art’] and ‘l'art immoral' [‘immoral art’], he writes impatiently: ‘Les buts élevés sont eux aussi de l'apparence’ [‘Elevated aims are themselves appearance’].29 Dismissing Rolland's moralizing, Proust cuts across superficial differences between, on the one hand, the learned and the saintly and, on the other, ‘un homme du monde’ [‘a man of the world’]: dans tout ce qui est du caractère et des passions, des réflexes, il n'y a pas de différence; le caractère est le même pour les deux, comme les poumons et les os, et le physiologiste, pour démontrer les grandes lois de la Page 6 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture circulation du (p.26) sang, ne se soucie pas que les viscères aient été extraits du corps d'un artiste ou d'un boutiquier. (CSB, 307) [in everything to do with character and the passions, the reflexes, there is no difference; the character is the same for both types, like the lungs and the bones, and a physiologist wishing to demonstrate the laws governing the circulation of the blood is not concerned that the intestines have been removed from the body of an artist or a shopkeeper.] Medicine provides Proust with an image of levelling that undoes hierarchy, both social and moral; moreover, in surgical penetration, he finds a variant on the depth metaphor that he will go on to privilege in Le Temps retrouvé. If, as Proust complains, superficiality and banality are dominant in Jean Christophe, a literature of depth will transcend social categories: ‘il n'y a qu'une manière d'écrire pour tous, c'est d'écrire sans penser à personne’ (CSB, 308) [‘there is only one way of writing for everyone and that's to write with no one in mind’], he reflects in a vein that anticipates his position in 1919 when he rejects, as we have seen, both right-wing Catholic authoritarianism and Communist internationalism. In a concluding note to the piece on Rolland, Proust further endorses particularism by working to free up attitudes to assumed categories of literary taste and readership: En outre, il est aussi vain d'écrire spécialement pour le peuple que pour les enfants. Ce qui féconde un enfant, ce n'est pas un livre d'enfantillages. Pourquoi croit-on qu'un ouvrier électricien a besoin que vous écriviez mal et parliez de la Révolution française pour vous comprendre? D'abord c'est juste le contraire. Comme les Parisiens aiment à lire des voyages d'Océanie et les riches des récits de la vie des mineurs russes, le peuple aime autant lire des choses qui ne se rapportent pas à sa vie. (CSB, 310) [Moreover, it is as vain to write specifically for the people as for children. What enriches a child's mind is not a book full of childish things. Why does one believe that an electrician needs you to write badly and to speak about the French Revolution in order to understand you? In fact the opposite is the case. Just as Parisians love to read tales of South Sea Islands travel and rich people enjoy stories about the lives of Russian miners, so the working class enjoy reading about things that are unrelated to their lives.] In a similar scenario in A la recherche, the Narrator sees popular art as more likely to engage the interest of members of the Jockey-Club than of the Confédération Générale du Travail (RTP IV. 467; SLT vi. 196). Detaching the consumer of literature from restrictive social-class homogenizations, Proust energetically writes of the power of literature to liberate the imagination. Indeed he proudly promotes his groups of (p.27) Page 7 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture readers as they abandon the familiar in the quest for exotic difference. In a utopian view of the act of reading and significantly without reference to material questions to do with access to literature and the leisure needed for its consumption, he celebrates the effortlessly mobile reader who effects imaginative migrations. Tellingly, he displays a restlessness with the all-too-easy, caricatural connection linking French workers, bad French, and the discourse of revolutionary tradition. The typecasting of revolution, we might note in passing, recalls the opening lines of Le Degré zéro de l'écriture where Barthes scrutinizes the procedures of the eighteenth-century revolutionary writer Jacques Hébert, who liberally laces his pamphlets with swear words to signal proletarian coarseness. Crucially, Hébert provides Barthes with an example of ‘une écriture dont la fonction n'est plus seulement de communiquer ou d'exprimer, mais d'imposer un au-delà du langage qui est à la fois l'Histoire et le parti qu'on y prend’.30 If Barthes's preface drives at the idea of the interconnectedness of the history of ‘[les] Signes de la Littérature’ and History itself,31 Proust's aspirations for the consumers of literature rest both on a confirmation of social-class boundaries and the transcendence of these in the realm of the imagination. Uneasy with the socially deterministic matching of working-class reader and revolutionary subject-matter, Proust speculates freely in the conclusion to his piece ‘Romain Rolland’: ‘De plus, pourquoi faire cette barrière? Un ouvrier (voir Halévy) peut être baudelairien’ (CSB, 310) [‘Moreover, why erect this barrier? A worker (see Halévy) can be a Baudelairean’]. The allusion here is to Halévy's short story of 1907, Un épisode, in which Proust's old Condorcet classmate champions the cause of the Université Populaire in his evocation of a worker-protagonist who embraces literature and undergoes a disabling crisis of identity.32 As his correspondence with Halévy in December 1907 reveals (and we shall be exploring this in the next chapter), Proust was much less accommodating than the image of the freely migrating reader conveyed in his piece on Rolland. Lucien Mercier points out that two ideological trends were discernible in the Université Populaire: in one of these, the strand of class struggle dominated, hence the strongly socialist profile of l'Union Mouffetard, for example, in the fifth arrondissement; in the other, (p.28) Université Populaire activists (among them nationalists like Barrès) sought to integrate the working class with the rest of the nation.

Barrès and the Claims of Nation As with his correspondence with Halévy, Proust's letters to Barrès provide further access to his handling of the fraught connection between literature and the nation. In Le Temps retrouvé, Barrès's call for a patriotic art is dismissed as misguided: ‘Dès le début de la guerre M. Barrès avait dit que l'artiste (en l'espèce Titien) doit avant tout servir la gloire de sa patrie. Mais il ne peut la servir qu'en étant artiste’ (RTP IV. 467) [‘At the beginning of the war M. Barrès Page 8 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture said that the artist (in that instance, Titian) had a duty above all else to serve the glory of his country. But he can serve it only by being an artist’ (SLT vi. 197)]. The Narrator's reference to Barrès's contribution confuses two distinct interventions, as the Pléiade editors point out: the one published by Barrès in L'Echo de Paris of 14 June 1916, after a trip to the Italian front (in which Barrès in fact praises Titian's work as preparing the way for national independence); and the other being Barrès's speech at Metz on 15 August 1911.33 This earlier piece is grounded in populist rhetoric and Proust's diplomatic response to it in the ensuing correspondence with Barrès suggests an accommodation with nationalist fervour that contrasts markedly with his post-war response to the Parti de l'Intelligence. In his address to the delegates of Le Souvenir Français in Metz reported in Le Temps on the following day, 16 August 1911, Barrès underscores the collectivist identity of the gathering: ‘Une fois encore, tous ensemble, d'un seul cœur, nous venons d'aller sur les champs de bataille honorer ceux qui sont tombés pour la défense du sol’.34 Delighting in the presence of ‘le cadre de cette immense armée du souvenir…qui maintenez cette religion des morts’,35 Barrès casts himself as the obedient ‘serviteur de votre volonté’,36 as the conduit of France's message to Alsace and Lorraine, and as a participant in the ‘beau dialogue français-alsacien-lorrain’.37 Evoking the memory of Lorraine's Jeanne d'Arc, Barrès also draws (p.29) on Jaurès's metaphor for the lost provinces, that of trees superficially separated by a wall and yet with deep links to the ‘racines de la forêt primitive’.38 Barrès imagines the spirit of ancient Rome and Gaul, of Caesar and Vercingetorix, presiding over Alsace-Lorraine. And in an attempt to avoid any charge of Germanophobia, he claims to be saying no more than he would wish to say to ‘un digne Allemand’.39 Quoting from Goethe, he urges his audience to take as its watchword the line ‘Allons! par-dessus les tombeaux, en avant!’40 Barrès's address sits squarely within the militarism at the heart of France's colonial expansion. Lamenting the death of a captain Petitjean in the recent campaign in Morocco, he reminds his listeners that the dead of 1870 had previously served France in Crimea and Italy and in the conquest of Algeria. His call, moreover, for stoic acceptance of France's loss relies on a caricatural depiction of Oriental culture, replete with racial and gender stereotyping: ‘Mais ne laissons pas se diminuer la vertu de notre piété funèbre. Nous n'allons pas nous asseoir sur les tombes, comme des femmes d'Orient, pour gémir. Les morts de 1870 n'ont jamais pleuré.’41 Other pieces on the same page of Le Temps reinforce the mood of zealous patriotism. Under the headline ‘Un discours patriotique’,42 a report on an international gymnastics event quotes from the address of a General Verrier

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On the Nation and Its Culture from Saint-Cyr who sees military life generally as defending the greatness of the nation and delivers a harangue against military indiscipline and desertion. In contrast with the Narrator's dismissal of Barrès in Le Temps retrouvé, Proust's response in two letters (one of August 1911, the other dated 1 October of the same year) shows him engaging with Barrès in a more circumspect fashion. Writing from the Grand Hotel in Cabourg in August, a flattering Proust —then a much less well-known writer than his correspondent, who was a member of the Académie Française—congratulates Barrès on the rare ability that he demonstrates in combining artistic greatness and political leadership: vous êtes devenu…un grand écrivain qui est en même temps reconnu et obéi comme le chef le plus haut, par sa patrie, par l'unanimité du peuple. (p.30) Cela n'est pas né d'un désir d'imiter telle ancienne théocratie ou autre pouvoir et qui eût été stérile. Cela a été produit par un précipité merveilleux, inconnu jusqu'à ce jour (car Lamartine ce ne fut qu'une heure) par deux tendances entièrement désintéressées (Corr. x. 341; Proust's italics) [you have become…a great writer who is at the same time recognized and obeyed as the highest leader by the fatherland and the whole people. This does not derive from some desire to imitate an ancient theocracy or other power—that would have been sterile. Rather, it is the product of a marvellous, hitherto unknown precipitate (for the case of Lamartine was extremely short-lived) arising from two entirely disinterested tendencies] Artistic achievement and the exercise of sociopolitical influence which elsewhere in the letter Proust sees as incompatible—the combination is ‘chose contradictoire, impossible, maintenant du moins, et périmée’ (Corr. x. 340) [‘a contradictory, outdated thing that is, nowadays at least, impossible’])— miraculously coalesce in the person of Barrès. And in a choice of vegetal metaphor that suggests an unconscious pastiche of Barrès's discourse of cultural rootedness or ‘enracinement’, Proust writes of ‘une symétrie—involontaire, la seule parfaite, celle de la vie d'une croissance végétale—entre les fruits que vous portez sur les branches de l'action et ceux que vous portez sur les branches de l'art’ (Corr. x. 341) [‘a symmetry of the best kind, namely an involuntary one deriving from a life of vegetal growth, between the fruit that you bear on the branches of action and the fruit you bear on the branches of art’]. Proust ends his letter by asserting the sincerity of his tribute, designed to mirror, he says, that of the admiring crowd who, as reported in the newspapers, remove their headwear as a mark of respect to their leader. In its sentimentalism and deference, the letter flatters Barrès, even if Proust insists that he writes ‘sans coquetterie’ (Corr. x. 342) [‘without affectation’].

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On the Nation and Its Culture Yet with hindsight and on closer reading, we can see Proust wrestling with the restrictions that came with the twinning of literature and nationalism. While he pleads gaucheness, caused by illness, in the formulation of his ideas, the letter contains in embryo the terms of a debate about mass culture and the figure of the intellectual that is to be resumed in Le Temps retrouvé. In a following letter to Barrès of October 1911, he draws together the ideological strands of national life manifesting themselves with particular salience at that juncture: ‘depuis que je vous ai écrit, combien toutes les préoccupations de la France, question des églises, question allemande, question du sentiment patriotique et de la littérature, viennent comme une figure “semblable”, je crois que c'est ainsi qu'on dit en géométrie, faire coïncider chaque angle, chaque limite même avec tous les points de la vôtre’ (Corr. x. 351) [‘since I last wrote to you, how the preoccupations of the nation—the issue of the Churches, the German question, the debate (p.31) about patriotic sentiment and literature—have come to form a similar triangle (I think that is what it's called in geometry) coinciding in every angle and limit with the points on your own triangle’]. Proust's interest in the questions he itemizes was deep-seated. But while magnifying Barrès's role (commending him as the necessary intermediary who will channel the voice of the nation into a parliamentary language for various ministries—‘on n'aurait pas moins besoin de vous aux Beaux-Arts que pour les questions extérieures’)43 [‘you would be just as much needed in the Ministry of Culture as in Foreign Affairs’], he implicitly distances himself from the national-political route. Defining his own project as ‘une espèce d'immense roman’ (Corr. x. 353) [‘a sort of immense novel’], Proust turns to the field of literature in the last quarter of the letter, with Stendhal, Mme de Lafayette, Constant, and Francis Jammes all featuring in the closing paragraph. He complains that a recent critic in the Nouvelle Revue française had indiscriminately thrown together the writers of nouvelles and romans. His complaint notwithstanding, the impression given is that the focus on the literary canon shifts attention away from the populist demagoguery of Barrès's ‘Discours de Metz’. Aesthetics rather than political action, and particularism rather than social homogenization are the choices, then, glancingly signalled by Proust. In the same letter, he expresses frustration with ‘une enquête stupide relative au sentiment politique’ (Corr. x. 351–2) [‘a stupid survey on the issue of political feelings’] that had been running in recent numbers of Le Figaro. In the ‘Petite Chronique des lettres’ section of the paper, the question put to writers concerned the extent to which literature had contributed positively to the mood of the nation, specifically in the forty-year period since the defeat of 1870: ‘Nous connaissons tous’, the questionnaire read, ‘l'histoire du movement patriotique créé par la littérature dans les années qui ont suivi Iéna; la littérature française née après Sedan et notamment dans ces dernières années, a-t-elle rempli la même mission?’44 A number of the respondents including Emile Faguet and Paul Margueritte single out Barrès's positive contribution, Proust using these Page 11 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture mentions to deliver a further compliment to his correspondent (Corr. x. 352). The tone of the tributes that Proust would have read is instructive: Margueritte writes of Barrès's works as having ‘affermi chez nous la conscience de la race et le sentiment de ses vertus héréditaires’;45 another (p.32) respondent, Alfred Mézières, argues that no writer of worth would dare go against the French people's resolute union in the face of the foreigner; and another minor writer decries the string of poisons released by political power and infecting the French soul [‘l'âme française’]—antipatriotism, anarchy, atheism, and antimilitarism. The autonomy of the individual subject, by contrast, was Proust's goal and he remained as wary of the language of egalitarianism as of authoritarian models of social homogenization. Pericles Lewis sees Proust as promoting the notion of private autonomy and as not harbouring an optimism based on the progressive emergence of social justice: ‘With Tocqueville and Renan and against Rousseau,’ Lewis argues, ‘Proust emphasizes the need to maintain the autonomy of the private realm as a defence against the potentially homogenizing forces of a mass, egalitarian society.'46 The judgemental certainties that Barrès plies in his ‘Discours de Metz’ and the claim to his audience to be the servant of the collective will [‘le serviteur de votre volonté’] contrast markedly with the cultivation of moral relativism and the periodic lapses into solipsism in A la recherche. Proust also signals the risks inherent in seeking to influence a nation. He points out to Barrès that the enthusiastic prescriptions contained in the ‘Discours de Metz’ are being harshly misappropriated. The example he offers is of how Barrès's point about the stoic victims of 1870 ends up being misapplied to the situation involving the explosion on board the Liberté in Toulon of September 1911 that caused mass casualties: ‘Mais on prend si à la lettre ce que vous dites, que parce que vous avez parlé de la gaîté et de ces vieux braves qui ne pleuraient pas, il y a déjà dans la presse un peu littéraire une certaine dureté (crue “à la Barrès”) en parlant des victimes de la Liberté’ (Corr. x. 352–3) [‘But people take you so literally that, because you spoke of cheerfulness and of these courageous old folk who did not cry, there is already evidence in the slightly more literary press of a certain harshness (believed to be à la Barrès) when speaking of the victims of the Liberté’]. Intriguingly, a counterpoint to the inward-looking enquiry into literature and national feeling that so irritated Proust is provided in the particular issue of Le Figaro that Proust quotes from (1 October 1911). Under the un-Barresian caption ‘L'Art n'a pas de patrie’,47 an unnamed fashion columnist—promoting a brand named ‘High Life Tailor’—speaks of the ability of its autumn collection to transcend national boundaries. Beyond the world of politics, the piece begins, ‘l'internationalisme (p.33) intellectuel’48 beckons. The exuberance with which the escapist topos is articulated (‘L'Art n'a pas de patrie’ is resoundingly touted as ‘cette grande vérité [qui] n'a jamais cessé de planer au-dessus des intérêts de

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On the Nation and Its Culture la politique et des ambitions’49) throws into relief the political obsession with the German question and national boundaries evident in the pre-war national press.

On Church and State Seen against the ideological backdrop of the period preceding the First World War, the outlook of Proust's Narrator would seem to be largely free from the nationalist aggression and paranoia that even this cursory glance at the pages of Le Figaro reveals. The summer and autumn of 1911 when the letters to Barrès were written was a period when Proust was working intensively on Combray and Un amour de Swann.50 The opposition between the issues addressed in his novel and those triggered by the ‘Discours de Metz’ is stark. It would be too easy, too tidy, to contrast Barrès's championing of the collective memory nurtured by delegates of Le Souvenir Français with the private workings of spontaneous individual memory—the ‘mémoire involontaire'—that Proust promoted as a convenient byword for the first volume of the novel.51 By contrast, reading the celebration of the petite patrie in Combray against a Barresian backdrop is instructive in ideological terms. Admittedly the cult of medievalism, the quintessential Frenchness of the church of Saint-André-des-Champs and the conservative social routine sustained by Combray's ‘caste’ system (RTP I. 16; SLT i. 19) could all be seen as markers of a traditionalist social cohesion of the kind prized by Barrès. Yet the campanilismo of Combray appears uncontaminated by the unrelenting territorial and collectivist claims at the heart of Barrès's Metz address. Until, that is, we take into account the publication history of the pages on the church of Combray in Du côté de chez Swann. Substantial prepublication of the material, under the title ‘L'Eglise de (p.34) village’ [‘The Village Church’], was carried on the front page of Le Figaro on 3 September 1912. While that piece is offered as the evocation of a real-life ‘simple chef-lieu de canton’ [‘simple county town’], the newspaper and Combray versions of the pages are substantially the same. There is some difference in the ordering of material and the named fictional characters feature, understandably, in the novel version only. Yet a luxuriant celebration of traditionalism is common to both texts. Moreover, the forum for the prepublication, Le Figaro, already signals a precise political context and colouring. Throughout the summer of 1912, the paper had been carrying lists, by department, of ‘Les Eglises artistiques de France’52 and this drive to classify the nation's specifically ecclesiastical heritage was, among other things, an expression of the cultural anxiety about heritage following on from the separation of Church and State in 1905.53 But the strong political inflection in the Le Figaro version of Proust's village-church piece – a year before the appearance of the Grasset edition of Du côté de chez Swann – comes at the beginning of the text, where Proust expressly signals the fact that he is following in the footsteps of ‘l'admirable auteur du vrai “Génie du Christianisme”—je veux dire Maurice Barrès’ [‘the admirable author of the true “Genius of Christianity”—I mean Maurice Barrès’].54 The effect of the affiliation is to reveal Page 13 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture a precise contemporaneous context for Proust's evocation of the medieval provincial church. Encompassed, squarely if temporarily, within Barrès's conservative nationalism, Proust's ‘Eglise de village’ vignette cannot fail to give weight to Barrès's high-profile defence of the churches of France. But there is a double recuperation. For not only is the provincial church offered as a literary tribute to the Barresian campaign. So too, working analeptically, is Chateaubriand's aesthetic defence of Catholicism in the Génie du Christianisme ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne [‘Genius of Christianity or The Beauties of the Christian Religion’]. Proust's overt designation of Barrès as defender of the built heritage of Catholic France has effectively become submerged in the accretion of later readings of the Combray-church pages of the Recherche. What in early twentieth-century France was an intensely contested political and cultural site has mutated into a would-be apolitical celebration of the charms of small-town French life refracted through a narrator's memory. The fierce partisanship of a national debate between clericalists and radicals becomes elided as the literary text migrates and is read in new social contexts. Yet (p.35) were we to imagine the Narrator's claim for the church of Combray—‘Combray…ce n'était qu'une église résumant la ville, la représentant, parlant d'elle et pour elle aux lointains’ (RTP. I. 47) [‘Combray…was no more than a church summing up the town, representing it, speaking of it and for it into the distance’ (SLT i. 51)]—being relayed to the Chamber of Deputies (as were Barrès's views, as recorded in parliamentary transcripts reproduced in La Grande Pitié des Eglises de France), the howls of anticlericalist disapproval would have been no less vociferous. Significant detail in the Proust/Barrès rapprochement emerges from a parallel reading of ‘L'Eglise de village’ and Barres's La Grande Pitié des Eglises de France, published in 1914 but containing texts that had been substantially published in the preceding years, in newspapers and parliamentary records, texts therefore with which Proust would have been familiar when writing Du côté de chez Swann. The exclamatory tone in the Barresian formulation, ‘Nos pauvres églises!’ (GPEF, 11) [‘Our poor churches!’], is echoed in the Narrator's ‘Que je l'aimais, que je la revois bien, notre Eglise!’ (RTP I. 58) [‘How I loved it, how clearly I can see it again; our Church!’ (SLT i. 61)]. Proust's church emerges victorious from across the centuries (RTP I. 60; SLT i. 64) and is grounded in the soil, entering it being likened by the Narrator to a peasant walking through a magic valley. Just as Barrès insists that the village church has to be preserved in its very ordinariness (as opposed to the grandeur of cathedrals), likewise in the evocation of the Combray church the emphasis is on quirkiness: hence the asymmetry of the abbreviations in its Latin inscriptions; the grandmother's ‘“il n'est peut-être pas beau dans les règles, mais sa vieille figure bizarre me plaît”’ (RTP I. 63) [‘“perhaps it isn't beautiful according to the rules, but I like its strange old face”’ (SLT i. 66)]; and, strikingly, the apse of the building: ‘Elle était si grossière, si dénuée de beauté artistique et même d'élan religieux’ (RTP I. 61) Page 14 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture [‘It was so crude, so lacking in artistic beauty and even religious spirit’ (SLT i. 64)]. Proust is here working the same vein that we find in Barrès, who argues that the village church is a symbol of lived cultural history, a central plank of French provincial life, as much the property of the nation as of any faith community and thus qualifying for upkeep by the State (GPEF, 131). Both Barrès, a self-proclaimed ‘Catholic atheist', and Proust are less concerned with Christian apologetics than with the cultural Catholicism that France's churches symbolize.55 Or as Barrès puts it even more (p.36) proprietorially, ‘des sectaires…veulent détruire notre religion, c'est-à-dire le langage de notre sensibilité’ (GPEF, 8).56 In an open letter to Aristide Briand, Minister of the Interior, Barrès protests: ‘la plus modeste [église] n'est-elle pas infiniment précieuse sur place? Que m'importe que vous conserviez une église plus belle à Toulouse, si vous jetez bas l'église de mon village?’ (GPEF, 369).57 Proust makes similar play of the juxtaposition of cathedral and village church, for in its asymmetry, Saint-Hilaire cannot compare with ‘toutes les glorieuses absides que j'ai vues’ (RTP I. 61) [‘all the glorious apses that I had seen’ (SLT i. 67]. But the sight of another provincial church, similarly misshapen, reinforces the sense of a keenly recognized and vital cultural artefact: ‘Alors je ne me suis pas demandé comme à Chartres ou à Reims avec quelle puissance y était exprimé le sentiment religieux, mais je me suis involontairement écrié: “L'Eglise!” (RTP I. 61) [‘Then I did not ask myself, as at Chartres or Rheims, how powerfully it expressed religious feeling, but involuntarily exclaimed: “The Church!”’ (SLT i. 65)]. The seemingly depoliticized spontaneity of the Narrator's tribute squares with the ideological case being pressed by Barrès.58 Even the designation of the Saint-Hilaire church as ‘simple citoyenne de Combray’ (RTP I. 62) [‘a simple citizen of Combray’ (SLT i. 65)] becomes provocative and adds a Proustian twist, resonating ironically in a republican France where the church has acquired its egalitarian status like the shops and houses to which it is attached.59 Yet elsewhere in these pages, it is as though, in an anticlerical age, the centrality of the church is being reaffirmed in an image of striking cultural hegemony: ‘C'était le clocher de Saint-Hilaire qui donnait à toutes les occupations, à toutes les heures, à tous les points de vue de la ville, leur figure, leur couronnement, leur consécration’ (RTP I. 64) [‘It was the steeple of Saint-Hilaire that gave all the occupations, all the hours, all the viewpoints of the town their shape, their crown, their consecration’ (SLT i. 67)]. (p.37) Like Barrès, Proust stresses the socially inclusive role of the church. For Barrès, ‘le plus pauvre homme s'élève au rang des intellectuels, des poètes’ (GPEF, 89),60 while in the Combray church, all social ranks assemble, albeit hierarchically. In the culture war engulfing Church and State in France in the decade before the First World War, then, Barrès was in the pro-clericalist vanguard. Although assuming a less high profile, Proust too wrote publicly of his Page 15 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture support for the continued alliance between Church and State. The overtly political subheading to his ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ [‘The Death of the Cathedrals’] article published in Le Figaro on 16 August 1904 reads: ‘Une conséquence du projet Briand sur la Séparation’.61 There is a proleptic dimension to Proust's piece, which envisages a scenario centuries later in which Catholicism as a living tradition has died away, the only surviving traces being France's cathedrals. Artists and experts, the young Proust writes, would devote all their creative endeavour to attempting the cultural reconstruction of lost religious practices; and the government of the day would finance ‘avec raison… cette résurrection des cérémonies catholiques, d'un tel intérêt historique, social, plastique, musical et de la beauté desquelles seul Wagner s'est approché, en l'imitant, dans Parsifal’ (CSB, 142) [‘with reason…this revival of Catholic ceremonies with their considerable historical, social, plastic, and musical beauty which only Wagner gets close to in his imitation of it in Parsifal’]. Against this backdrop of the future museumification of the nation's churches, ‘des caravanes de snobs’ (CSB, 142) [‘processions of snobs’], as Proust imagines them, would make their annual trips to the cathedral cities. But if this merely cultural reenactment of worship satisfies the curiosity of the learned, Proust, à la Barrès, voices a strong nostalgia for the faith-based practice of a community represented as a tightly organicist whole: ‘tout un peuple répondait à la voix du prêtre, se courbait à genoux quand tintait la sonnette de l'élévation, non pas comme dans ces représentations rétrospectives, en froids figurants stylés, mais parce qu'eux aussi, comme le prêtre, comme le sculpteur, croyaient’ (CSB, 143) [‘a whole people would respond to the voice of the priest by kneeling humbly when the bell rang for the elevation, not as happens in retrospective representations with cold, stylized performances but rather because, like the priest and the sculptor, they too believed’].62 Observing that faith, (p.38) not aesthetics, is what motivated the believers of old, Proust affirms his distaste for a legislative programme that will set in train the decline of France's cathedrals, ‘qui sont la plus haute et la plus originale expression du génie de la France’ (CSB, 142) [‘which are the highest and most original expression of the genius of France’]. The engagement with a cause could scarcely be less equivocal. If in A la recherche a lack of filial piety operating within the confines of the family intermittently exercises the protagonist (his initial failure to mourn his grandmother provides an obvious example), the failure to respect the memory of antecedents assumes a more diffuse, societal form in ‘La Mort des cathédrales’. Proust extrapolates from the figures depicted in the stained glass of France's cathedrals what is proffered as a busy, socially cohesive medieval community condemned to oblivion by a present population indifferent to its heritage:

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On the Nation and Its Culture De leurs vitraux de Chartres, de Tours, de Sens, de Bourges, d'Auxerre, de Clermont, de Toulouse, de Troyes, les tonneliers, pelletiers, épiciers, pèlerins, laboureurs, armuriers, tisserands, tailleurs de pierre, bouchers, vanniers, cordonniers, changeurs, grande démocratie silencieuse, fidèles obstinés à entendre l'office, n'entendront plus la messe qu'ils s'étaient assurée en donnant pour l'édification de l'église le plus clair de leurs deniers. Les morts ne gouvernent plus les vivants. Et les vivants, oublieux, cessent de remplir les vœux des morts. (CSB, 149; my emphasis) [From their stained-glass windows in Chartres, Tours, Sens, Bourges, Auxerre, Clermont, Toulouse, Troyes, coopers, furriers, grocers, pilgrims, ploughmen, armourers, weavers, stone-cutters, butchers, basket makers, cobblers, moneychangers, this great silent democracy of the faithful with their stubborn will to hear the office, will no longer be able to hear the mass which they had secured for themselves by donating the better part of their money towards the erection of the church. The dead no longer govern the living. And the living, in their forgetfulness, cease to honour the wishes of the dead.] The roll-call of cathedrals and the expansive listing of occupations signal simultaneously a tribute to medieval iconography and the intense celebration of a teeming mass of producers, makers, and tradesmen. Within the historically precise context of 1904, this lusty tribute in the pages of Le Figaro to a ‘grande démocratie silencieuse’ that has been discarded becomes an intensely political statement directed against an anticlericalist lobby. The substance of Proust's objection is that the opponents of clericalism risk instituting a cultural amnesia with implicitly antidemocratic connotations. Proust's own early formation on the right of the political spectrum seems clear. As early as 1893, writing with the candour of youth in a piece (p.39) entitled ‘L'Irréligion d'Etat’ [‘State Irreligion’, he argues against laicity.63 Citing the example of Paul Bourget's novel Le Disciple (1889), he likens the plight of France faced with a secular government to Bourget's adolescent hero, who struggles to handle the influence exerted by his materialist philosophy teacher, Monsieur Sixte (CSB, 348). If anything, Proust objects, the national situation is worse, with most pupils lacking the philosophical baggage needed to counter secular teaching. He rebukes the radicals in government, complaining of ‘les raisons qu'on leur [aux jeunes] donne sinon de désespérer, au moins de n'espérer qu'en un bonheur terrestre et de préférer en conséquence, à la prière, le vote, au vote la dynamite’ (CSB, 348) [‘the reasons they give [the young], if not to despair, at least only to have hope in an earthly happiness and thus to prefer the vote to prayer, and dynamite to the vote’]. The seemingly sure social slide from religion to democracy to violent anarchy provides in caricatural form a snapshot of conservative suspicion directed against the Republic. Proust accuses the radicals in government of intimidating the moderates and argues Page 17 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture that to claim neutrality on issues to do with the soul and God is tantamount to endorsing materialism. Momentarily, his position is doubly critical when he points to the excesses both of an established religion and of state secularism: ‘La substitution de l'irréligion d'Etat à une religion d'Etat n'a donc rien qui puisse surprendre. On pourrait s'étonner seulement que la négation d'une religion ait le même cortège de fanatisme, d'intolérance et de persécution que la religion ellemême’ (CSB, 348) [‘There is nothing surprising about the substitution of State irreligion for a State religion. One might just be surprised that the negation of religion should bring in its wake the same fanaticism, intolerance, and persecution as religion itself’]. This passing show of even-handedness aside, the young Proust continues his assault on laicity, commending the ‘grandes philosophies idéalistes’ [‘great idealist philosophies’] which have sustained France and juxtaposing the achievement of French Christian missionaries civilizing the Orient and the secularism of the local grocer, who resents expressions of religious piety. Descartes and Pascal, Proust protests, worked and thrived in an atmosphere of religious discipline ‘qui…serait une entrave, paraîtil, pour le libre génie de certains conseillers municipaux. Et c'est pour cela que, du même coup, la France en fut “délivrée”. Misérable deliverance!’ (CSB, 349) [‘which…would restrict the genius of certain town councillors. Which is why France was “delivered” from it in the same move. Wretched deliverance!’]. Secular narrowness is summed up with reference to the incarnation of the smallminded laic outlook, (p.40) Flaubert'sHomais. Cautioning against war on the Church (and reminding his reader of the ‘funestes conséquences’ [‘disastrous consequences’] of Bismarck's Kulturkampf on the Catholic Church in the 1870s, with the assassination attempt on the life of Emperor Wilhelm the First), Proust urges the State to focus on what he sees as the dangerous march of socialism (‘comme celle de tous les imbéciles, une doctrine de destruction et de mort’) [‘a doctrine of destruction and death, like that of all imbeciles’]: ‘Puissent les progrès du socialisme épouvanter le gouvernement, l'avertir qu'il y a autre chose à craindre aujourd'hui que la trop grande puissance de l'Eglise’ (CSB, 349) [‘May the advances made by socialism appal the government and serve as a warning to it that there is more to be feared today than the excessive power of the Church’]. As an engaged piece of early writing, ‘L'Irréligion d'Etat’ articulates unambiguously the right-of-centre position of its young author. Less an apology for theology than the defence of a cultural Catholicism which in Proust's eyes defines the nation's grandeur, the text also implicitly endorses class hierarchies, by juxtaposing gifted and run-of-the-mill pupils, high culture and the small-minded activism of the local councillor, and the French missionary serving in Asia and ‘l'épicier matérialiste du coin’ (CSB, 349) [‘the local grocer with his materialist outlook’]. Proust was subsequently to modify these ideological positions and came to view his 1904 piece on ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ as providing proof of semantic as well as cultural change: ‘combien, à quelques années de distance, les mots Page 18 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture changent de sens et combien sur le chemin tournant du temps, nous ne pouvons pas apercevoir l'avenir d'une nation plus que d'une personne’ (CSB, 142) [‘how words change their meaning in the space of a few years, and how it is that, on the twisting road of time, we are no more able to see the future of a nation than that of a person’] he remarks in an extended note added to ‘La Mort des cathédrales’ in preparation for its republication in Pastiches et Mélanges (1919). Political and national histories are no more predictable, he asserts, than private ones. The preoccupation surrounding ‘la Séparation’ has been superseded by the concerns of a new decade: ‘Quand je parlai de la mort des Cathédrales, je craignis que la France fût transformée en une grève où de géantes conques ciselées sembleraient échouées, vidées de la vie qui les habita et n'apportant même plus à l'oreille qui se pencherait sur elles la vague rumeur d'autrefois, simples pièces de musée, glacées elles-mêmes’ (CSB, 142) [‘When I spoke of the death of the Cathedrals, my fear was that France would be transformed into a shore on which giant chiselled conches would appear washed up, emptied of the life that had inhabited them and no longer even providing the ear that would lean over them with the vague sound from another time; now frozen, they would be mere (p.41) museum pieces’]. While the initial fears expressed by Proust in Le Figaro echo those articulated by Barrès in La Grande Pitié des Eglises de France, the author of A la recherche observes more than a decade later that it is the German army which threatens the material fabric of France's churches, while the once hostile anticlerical deputies find common cause in wartime with patriotic bishops. Proust's campaigning journalism and his correspondence with contemporaries such as Daniel Halévy and Maurice Barrès show him engaging with a range of cultural and political issues: the emergence of the Université Populaire at the turn of the century, the ‘Séparation’ of 1905, the role of the writer in relation to national politics, the debate about national regeneration, and the claims of the Parti de l'Intelligence in the aftermath of the First World War. There are complex dynamics in play in these exchanges. Just as he does not conceal his Narrator's susceptibility to Germanophobia (RTP IV. 491), Proust does not forgo partisan engagement himself. Yet he also identifies the paradigm whereby cultural wars run their course; in doing so, he points up what is ephemeral and subjective in the espousal of causes. In Le Temps retrouvé the Narrator describes how oncedespised, high-profile Dreyfusards like the deputy Joseph Reinach come to be embraced, a decade later, by strident nationalist xenophobes in wartime France (RTP IV. 492; SLT vi. 222). The Narrator builds this into a more general theory about the subjective basis for so many of our evaluations. He signals a skewing of perspective that is as relevant to the conduct of international affairs as to the course of private lives. The ‘amours successives’ [‘successive love affairs’] of Marcel's life are thus made to mirror the ‘haines successives’ [‘successive hatreds’] that condition national affairs, both passions leading to a chain of aggressively held, erroneous positions. Thus to the love-distorted evaluations of Page 19 of 25

 

On the Nation and Its Culture Rachel and Albertine held respectively by Saint-Loup and Marcel, the Narrator adds other subjectivist positions: ‘(enseignement contre nature des congréganistes selon les radicaux, impossibilité de la race juive à se nationaliser, haine perpétuelle de la race allemande contre la race latine, la race jaune étant momentanément réhabilitée)’ (RTP IV. 492) [‘(church schools against nature according to the Radicals, impossibility of assimilation for the Jewish race, perpetual hatred of the Germanic race for the Latin race, the yellow race being temporarily rehabilitated’ (SLT vi. 222)]. Compressed into Proust's tight parenthesis, the assertions of anticlericals and racists generate prejudice and groundless certainty; in the same vein, the anti-Semitic Charlus voices the view that for Dreyfus, treason is impossible since he is not French, Jews being incapable of forming part of the nation (RTP II. 584; SLT iii. 284). Proust identifies the (p.42) connectedness of private and public misperception and exposes the negative workings of partisanship, his own included: ‘après tant d'années écoulées et de temps perdu, je sentais cette influence capitale de l'acte interne jusque dans les relations internationales’ (RTP IV. 492) [‘after so many years had passed and so much time had been lost, I was aware of the crucial influence of this inner reality even in international relations’ (SLT vi. 222)]. It is with a sense of discovery, then, that the Narrator weighs the vexatious burden and pervasiveness of subjectivist opinion. Indeed he argues that every hour of his life has served to reinforce the view that ‘seule la perception plutôt grossière et erronée place tout dans l'objet quand tout au contraire est dans l'esprit’ (RTP IV. 493) [‘only coarse and inaccurate perception places everything in the object when the opposite is true: everything is in the mind’ (SLT vi. 223)]. Proust's stance against the narrow nationalism of the Parti de l'Intelligence in 1919 that I considered at the beginning of the chapter earned him commendation from Julien Benda in La Trahison des clercs (1927). For Benda, Proust was a writer who distinguished himself from his generation by escaping what he characterized as the twin traps of narrow nationalism (the ‘nous Nation') and class sectarianism (the ‘nous Classe').64 Benda saw these ideological dispositions as being key social determinants in the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, and he rejected the discourse of xenophobia and anti-Semitism and simultaneously refuted the rival claims of bourgeois hegemony and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The humanist diagnosis in La Trahison des clercs of a sectarian antagonism that France's contemporary writers had actively cultivated rather than resisted (these writers had ceased to be the socially detached clercs in Benda's eyes and therein lies the act of betrayal headlined in his title) connects with central elements in my argument. For Benda's twinning of the ‘nous Classe' and the ‘nous Nation' provides a conceptual linkage which I shall use in my consideration of Proust's evolving responses to issues to do with social class and national identity.

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On the Nation and Its Culture Notes:

(1) Marcel Proust, Selected Letters 1918–1922, ed. Philip Kolb, trans. Joanna Kilmartin (London: HarperCollins, 2000), 86. (2) ‘Pour un Parti de l'Intelligence’ [‘For a Party of the Intelligence’], Le Figaro Littéraire, 19 July 1919, p. 1. Accessed on the BnF/Gallica website. (3) [‘public opinion, troubled by this lunacy’]. (4) [‘national reconstruction and the lifting up of humanity’]. (5) For an authoritative account of Bertrand's influential role in propagating the myth of French imperial grandeur in North Africa, see Peter Dunwoodie, Writing French Algeria (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). (6) Proust, Selected Letters 1918–1922, 86. (7) See ch. 4 of Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, ‘Citizens of the Plain: Proust and the Discourse of National Will', 126–74. (8) [‘Catholic non-believers’]. (9) Proust, Selected Letters 1918–1922, 87. (10) The tenor of Proust's remarks in the private medium of the letter to Halévy may usefully be seen to corroborate Marion Schmid's important thesis that Proust demonstrated a highly developed awareness of ideological issues in his private writings, including the preparatory drafts for his novel. See Marion Schmid, ‘Ideology and discourse in Proust: The Making of “Monsieur de Charlus pendant la guerre” ’, Modern Language Review 94/4 (Oct. 1999), 961–77. (11) Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 84. (12) Ibid. 172. Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen makes the related point that the rise of individualism as an expression of modernity is central to Proust's social analysis; see Proust sociologue, 20. (13) Daniel Halévy, La Vie de Frédéric Nietzsche (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1909); Charles Péguy et les ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ (Paris: Payot, 1918). (14) Proust, Selected Letters 1918–1922, 86. (15) The exaggerated tone regularly present in Proust's letters was often designed to persuade and flatter his correspondent. While he claims to have found Halévy's book on Péguy ‘admirable', Jean-Yves Tadié sees this as merely an expression of politeness, Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 824.

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On the Nation and Its Culture (16) See Patrick Parrinder, Nation & Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14. (17) [‘liberal and anarchic disorder and the stirring up of instinct’]. (18) [‘an intellectual method that establishes hierarchy and classifies’]. (19) [‘We wish to dedicate ourselves to an intellectual apostolate, in the first place since we are French but also as men, as guardians of civilization.’] (20) [‘the materialist tendencies of these theoretiçians who can only envisage the renovation of France in industrial and commercial terms’]. (21) [‘debased and degraded thought’]. (22) [‘An Appeal: The Proud Declaration of Intellectuals’]. (23) [‘Worker-intellectuals, comrades who are dispersed throughout the world and have been kept apart for five years by armies, censorship, and the hatred between warring nations, we extend an appeal to you to rebuild our fraternal union’], ‘Un Appel: Fière Déclaration d'Intellectuels’, L'Humanité, 26 June 1919, p. 1. Consulted on the BnF/Gallica website. (24) See above, Introduction. (25) [‘In this great social reform, it is an assault on a culture that is being prepared. And one sees intellectuals who have discovered ozone and hydroelectric power suddenly deserting their duty to the state.’] (26) Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 131. (27) See the editorial note, RTP IV. 1261, n. 2 to IV. 461. (28) M. Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve précédé de Pastiches et Mélanges et suivi de Essais et articles, ed. Pierre Clarac (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1971), 307–10. Henceforth abbreviated to CSB. (29) CSB, 863, n. 3 to p. 307. (30) [‘a writing whose function is no longer merely to communicate and express but to impose, beyond language, a space that is both History and the side one takes in it’], Barthes, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture (1953; Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 7. (31) [‘[the] Signs of Literature’], ibid. (32) D. Halévy, Un épisode (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine (sixième cahier de la neuvième série), 1907).

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On the Nation and Its Culture (33) RTP IV. 1263–4, n. 3 to p. 467. (34) [‘once more we come together, all of us united in a single heart, we have just visited the battlefields to honour those who have fallen in defence of our native soil’], Le Temps, 16 Aug. 1911, p. 4. Accessed via the BnF/Gallica website. (35) [‘surrounded by you who make up this immense army of memory…and who preserve a religious devotion to the dead’]. (36) [‘servant of your will’]. (37) [‘noble dialogue that links France, Alsace, and Lorraine’]. (38) [‘roots of the ancient forest’]. (39) [‘a worthy German’]. (40) [‘Let us march onwards, over our graves’]. (41) [‘But let us not allow the virtue of our funereal piety to wane. We shall not sit wailing on the tombstones like women from the Orient. Those who died in 1870 never wept.’] (42) [‘A Patriotic Address’]. (43) Ibid. (44) [‘We all know the history of the patriotic movement created by literature in the years after Jena; has the literature produced since Sedan and especially in recent years fulfilled the same mission?’], Le Figaro, 22 Sept. 1911, p. 3. (45) [‘strengthened within us our awareness of the race and the sense of its hereditary virtues’]. (46) Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 128. (47) [‘Art has no fatherland’]. (48) [‘intellectual internationalism’]. (49) [‘that great truth [which] has never ceased to rise above political interests and ambitions’]. (50) See chs. 10 and 11 of Anthony Pugh, The Growth of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: A Chronological Examination of Proust's Manuscripts from 1909 to 1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 2 vols., ii. 379–464.

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On the Nation and Its Culture (51) See Proust's Du côté de chez Swann interview with Elie-Joseph Bois published in Le Temps, 13 Nov. 1913 and reproduced in Textes retrouvés, ed. P. Kolb, Cahiers Marcel Proust 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 285–91. (52) [‘France's Artistic Churches’]. (53) Barrès cites the work of Joséphin Péladan who was preparing a volume entitled L'Inventaire de nos dix mille églises artistiques et historiques à classer par listes départementales et alphabétiques. See Barrès, La Grande Pitié des Eglises de France (Paris: Emile-Paul, 1914), 368. Henceforth abbreviated to GPEF. (54) Le Figaro, 3 Sept. 1912, p. 1. (55) M. Barrès, Mes Cahiers, in L'Œuvre de Maurice Barrès, ed. Philippe Barrès (Paris: Au Club de l'Honnête Homme, 1965–8), 20 vols, xiv. 294; quoted in Philip Ouston, The Imagination of Maurice Barrès (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 74. (56) [‘sectarians…wish to destroy our religion, that's to say the language of our sensibility’]. (57) [‘Is not the most modest church infinitely precious in its original location? What does it matter to me that you conserve a more beautiful church in Toulouse if you demolish the church in my village?’] (58) For an alternative view on the appropriateness of the Barresian link to Proust's work specifically in relation to the Combray church, see the section ‘Combray et le leurre barrésien' in Chaudier, Proust et le langage religieux, 114– 19. Chaudier argues that the Proustian sense of Frenchness as prompted by the presence of the provincial church does not entail, as is the case with Barrès, ‘une mystique de l'identité' [‘a mysticism based on identity’], ibid. 117. (59) Commenting on the likening of the Saint-Hilaire church to an ordinary citizen of Combray, Chaudier sees Proust as feigning to have forgotten the intractable conflict between the Church and the France of revolutionary tradition, ibid. 81. (60) [‘the poorest of men rises to the rank of the intellectuals and the poets’]. (61) [‘A consequence of the Briand plan for the separation [of Church and State]’], Le Figaro,16 Aug. 1904, p. 3. (62) Stéphane Chaudier writes of the paradox in Proustian apologetics in this extract whereby ‘aux yeux de l'esthète, c'est la foi qui sert la cathédrale et non la cathédrale qui sert la foi' [‘in the eyes of the aesthete, faith serves the

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On the Nation and Its Culture cathedral rather than the cathedral serving faith’], Proust et le langage religieux, 168. (63) Le Banquet, 3 (May 1892), reprod. in CSB, 348–9. (64) [‘the we-Nation’], [‘the we-Class’], J. Benda, La Trahison des clercs (1927; Paris: Grasset (Les Cahiers rouges), 1975), 197. I shall be returning to Benda in Ch. 8.

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Contexts for Class

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Contexts for Class Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0003

Abstract and Keywords The contexts for understanding class considered in this chapter aim to set the views of Proust alongside those of his French literary contemporaries. Paul Bourget’s negative characterization of social-class movement contrasts with Proust’s position in the longer term. The chapter argues nevertheless that this does not equate to a socially egalitarian position on Proust’s part. He steers clear of the Université Populaire movement and implicitly rejects Ruskin’s call to the bourgeois writer to acknowledge the social price paid by the subaltern to ensure the availability of sufficient ‘psychical’ energy to the few. In the young Marcel’s pursuit of literature in Proust’s Combray, the musings of the young idler-reader and the comings and goings of domestic servants are held together, largely without tension, as segments of an uncontested provincial order. Keywords:   Bourget, déclassement, Université Populaire, Ruskin, military culture, republican identity, street as theatre

C'était là une des idées les plus chères à M. Taine: cette nécessité de la lenteur dans la montée sociale. Paul Bourget1 Une génération suffit pour que s'y ramène le changement qui en des siècles s'est fait pour le nom bourgeois d'un Colbert devenu nom noble. Marcel Proust2

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Contexts for Class ‘Nécessité des classes'3 Sanford Elwitt in The Making of the Third French Republic points to the contradiction at the heart of the Third Republic whereby it stood as the heir of a democratic tradition and yet effectively embodied bourgeois class rule.4 The Combray pages of A la recherche du temps perdu appear, superficially at least, to contradict this reading in that, however socially peripheral, the aristocratic privilege still enjoyed by the Guermantes suggests the permanence of Ancien Régime lustre. Yet there is an emerging claim to class rule, issuing from the bourgeoisie, within what the Narrator sees as a caste-like system in the small provincial town of his ancestors' birth. Indeed the Narrator's father embodies a power deriving precisely from his role as functionary within the Republic when he is described as a man who is (p.44) si puissant, si en faveur auprès des gens en place qu'il arrivait à nous faire transgresser les lois que Françoise m'avait appris à considérer comme plus inéluctables que celles de la vie et de la mort, à faire retarder d'un an pour notre maison, seule de tout le quartier, les travaux de ‘ravalement’, à obtenir du ministre pour le fils de Mme Sazerat qui voulait aller aux eaux, l'autorisation qu'il passât le baccalauréat deux mois d'avance, dans la série des candidats dont le nom commençait par un A au lieu d'attendre le tour des S…peut-être cette absence de génie, ce trou noir qui se creusait dans mon esprit quand je cherchais le sujet de mes écrits futurs, n'était-il aussi qu'une illusion sans consistance, et cesserait-elle par l'intervention de mon père qui avait dû convenir avec le Gouvernement et avec la Providence que je serais le meilleur écrivain de l'époque. (RTP I. 171) [so powerful, in such favour with people in office, that he had succeeded in having us transgress the laws that Françoise had taught me to consider more ineluctable than the laws of life and death, to procure for our house alone, in the whole neighbourhood, a year's postponement of the work of ‘replastering', to obtain permission from the Minister for Mme Sazerat's son, who wanted to go to take the waters, to pass his baccalauréat two months ahead of time, in the series of candidates whose names began with A, instead of waiting for the turn of the Ss.…; perhaps my lack of talent, the black hole that opened in my mind when I looked for the subject of my future writings, was also merely an illusion without substance, and this illusion would cease through the intervention of my father, who must have agreed with the government and Providence that I would be the foremost writer of the day. (SLT i. 173–4)] In the Narrator's ludic conflation, the exercise of undue influence within the Republic and artistic success are thrown together, as though the power deriving from connection to government were magically to circumvent all the difficulties facing the tentative young writer. But while the idea that easy access to State Page 2 of 43

 

Contexts for Class power might cure Marcel's lack of genius as a writer is totally fanciful, the Narrator's irony does not erase the question of the extent to which narration in A la recherche itself reflects the Third Republic and its power structures. Moreover, one of the leitmotifs in the novel derives from the anguish that comes with Proust's hero's internalization of the bourgeois work ethic. How he might manage parental expectations that he be seen to be an active, productive citizen in a way that was consistent with an age of bourgeois entrepreneurship and social influence is a persistent source of anguish. It is symptomatic of this work ethic that Marcel's father should look to the embodiment of State power, the diplomat Norpois, to confer validity on the aspiring writer's (p.45) endeavours.5 And by himself presenting the vocation to write in terms of duty, the Narrator is implicitly adhering to the bourgeois norms of purposiveness and productivity of his day. The boundaries and limit-setting deriving from social hierarchy and the extent to which these are accepted, celebrated, and infringed, generate much of the micro-drama of daily life in the opening volume of the novel. Yet Proust's Narrator goes on to show the class limits to be paradoxically fragile and prone to mutation. Indeed when taken in the round, the Recherche reflects a society in which the hierarchy of social class functions in contrasting ways: singularly rigid and robust, as in Combray; susceptible to temporary reconfiguration in the new, fin de siècle leisure spaces thrown up by Balbec in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs; and dramatically undergoing rapid mutation, as in Le Temps retrouvé. Elwitt makes the point that the rulers of the Third Republic worked to establish prescriptions which amounted to ‘a stable bourgeois system fortified against both aristocratic reaction and social revolution'.6 Before testing for evidence of the fortification of the bourgeoisie within the social representation delivered by the Recherche, we need to situate Proust ideologically and read the positions he takes on issues to do with class and access to power alongside those of his contemporaries. In the early stages of his writing career, he often adopted much more conventional stances on social hierarchy than the heavily relativized view that will progressively emerge in the Recherche. His columns on aristocratic living, for example, which appeared in Le Figaro in the years 1903–4, unambiguously promoted social conservativism. In a piece entitled ‘Le Salon de la Comtesse d'Haussonville’ (Le Figaro, 4 January 1904), Proust encourages in his reader an attitude of fawning adulation towards the aristocracy.7 To any young socialite eager to identify embodiments of a lifestyle that would harmonize past aristocratic distinction and contemporary life—‘vivant la vie d'aujourd'hui, mais encore y faisant passer un peu des grâces de la vie d'autrefois’ [‘living life as it is today but drawing into it some of the graces of life in the past’]—he advises them to look no further than the Comte and Comtesse d'Haussonville (CSB, 483). Commending the physical elegance of the countess, Proust indulgently Page 3 of 43

 

Contexts for Class stresses how in (p.46) their ancestral home, his chosen subjects carry on with the business of living, just as their ancestors had: ‘on fait à sa manière et sans affectation de les imiter, ce que faisaient les gens d'autrefois, on vit’ (CSB, 485) [‘one does in one's own way and without the sense that one is imitating them, what people in bygone days did, one lives’]. Yet alongside the beguiling image of settled, would-be unpretentious, aristocratic living, the political tensions of the day provide the subtext to Proust's piece as he reflects, often obliquely, on how old and new in France, aristocratic and democratic, monarchic and republican, might connect or collide. The choice of Othenin, the Comte d'Haussonville, provides him not only with a leading figure in the Orléanist movement but also with what for the young Proust was the alluring face of modern social conservatism. A descendant of Mme de Staël and a member of the Académie Française who was living, much to Proust's approval, in the ancestral home of Mme de Staël at Coppet, d'Haussonville was the author of a number of social treatises (with essays on the economic plight of seamstresses, conditions in sweatshops in Britain and America, and the role of charity in social amelioration).8 D'Haussonville's position reflected a conservative paternalism firmly grounded in economic liberalism while advocating a modest attenuation of social inequality. Proust appears comfortable with this political orientation. Indeed it squares well with the Orléanist-Republican sentiments attributed by the young Proust to his mother (Corr. i. 96–7) and with the standpoint indicated by Mme Proust when she commented to her adolescent son that, like him, she was on the side of the ‘intelligent liberal conservative' party, ‘[le] grand parti “conservateur libéral intelligent”’ (Corr. i. 132). Reflecting on the Right's compromise with modern politics in the period 1898–1918, historians observe that Orléanists like Othenin d'Haussonville, while stressing the perils of the democratic age, sought ways of aligning the political interests of the upper classes with the principles of parliamentary government.9 ‘Le Salon de la Comtesse d'Haussonville’ makes appropriate nods in the direction of right-wing prejudice. Among numerous references to contemporary political debate, Proust threads in the anecdote—which he concedes may be apocryphal—that describes a conversation between the Socialist leader Jaurès and an aristocratic woman. She is anxious to know if, under Communist rule (with which, in her prejudice, she broadly (p.47) associates Jaurès), her Watteau painting and the rest of her wealth would be confiscated. Nimbly working between the terminologies of old religious and new social hierarchies, Proust imagines Jaurès's comradely reply to the woman's assertion, ‘“Seigneur, si votre règne arrive, tout ceci me sera retiré”’ [‘“Sir, if your kingdom comes, all this will be taken from me”’]: ‘alors, le Messie du monde nouveau la rassura par ces paroles divines: “Femme, n'ayez pas souci de cela, car toutes ces choses vous seront laissées en garde, par surcroît; en vérité, vous les connaissez mieux que nous”’ (CSB, 483–4) [‘whereupon the Messiah of the new world reassured Page 4 of 43

 

Contexts for Class her with these divine words: “Woman, don't worry about that, for all these things will moreover be entrusted to you; in truth, you know them better than we do”’]. Reassuringly for Proust's Figaro reader, the piquancy of the Jaurès anecdote is that it threatens social apocalypse and yet delivers a modified property principle whereby, in the eyes of the leader of the Parti Socialiste, things are reportedly entrusted to those who love and know them. Far from demonizing Jaurès, Proust characterizes him as ‘un homme merveilleusement doué pour la pensée, pour l'action et pour la parole’ (CSB, 483) [‘a man with a remarkable gift for thought, action, and speech’].10 And while indulging his reader's (and his own) antagonism towards communism by invoking the spectre of ‘une Europe collectiviste’ [‘a collectivist Europe’], he quickly draws reassurance from Jaurès's steer on property by fervently hoping that the care of Coppet might be safely entrusted to Mme de Staël's great grandson, the Comte d'Haussonville: ‘dans cette continuation inconsciente de la vie parmi les choses qui ont été faites pour elle, le parfum s'exhale bien plus pénétrant et plus fort, que dans ces “reconstitutions” du “vieux Paris”…Le passé et le présent se coudoient. Dans la bibliothèque de Mme de Staël, voici les livres préférés de M. d'Haussonville’ (CSB, 485) [‘in this unconscious continuation of life among the things that have been created for it, the fragrance that is given off is much more penetrating and strong than in those “reconstitutions” of “old Paris”…Past and present mix. In the library of Mme de Staël, we find M. d'Haussonville's favourite books’]. The fetichization of past objects in this validation of old aristocratic ways may vaguely anticipate the scene in the Prince de Guermantes's library in Le Temps retrouvé. Yet the aesthetics of conservation endorsed by Proust in his Figaro column are inseparable from the political conservatism embodied by d'Haussonville. (p.48) The family link back to Mme de Staël is in fact returned to in Le Temps retrouvé: there the Narrator savours the reversal whereby, pre-1789, the then M. d'Haussonville boasted of not knowing the father of Mme de Staël, his social inferior, and yet by the nineteenth century and with intermarriage, the d'Haussonvilles draw reflected glory from being descended from the author of Corinne (RTP IV. 546; SLT vi. 277). In the mutating forms of social distinction, Proust's later text shows literary eminence trumping nobility of birth and a traditional gender bias being contested with the rise of Mme de Staël. As the descendant of a celebrated literary ancestor, Comte d'Haussonville provides the Figaro's society columnist with an organic connection between present and past. Proust champions the academician as someone seeking to reconcile ‘l'amour de la patrie et le respect de la justice’ (CSB, 487) [‘love of the fatherland and respect for justice’]. More specifically, Proust alludes to the count's recent public refutation of the ideological assumptions underpinning Paul Bourget's novel L'Etape (1902).11

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Contexts for Class Fin de siècle dramas of class exile In his laboured roman à thèse, Bourget calls for a halt to the rapid social evolution in the Third Republic. He rails against the dangerous combination of meritocracy and individualism affecting national life. The plot of L'Etape encapsulates its author's wish to curb ‘l'ascension sociale’ or movement up the social scale, the young Jean Monneron's desire to marry into an established Catholic bourgeois family only being acceded to at the end of the 500-page novel when he accepts the condition laid down by his future father-in-law that he convert to Catholicism. Relying structurally, then, on the deferral of outcome specifically in relation to the drama of social mobility, L'Etape builds a telos around the stand-off in the Third Republic between clerical bourgeois conservatism and the republican doxa of opportunity through educational advancement and laicity. Proust will return to the plot of L'Etape in his preface to Jacques-Emile Blanche's Propos de peintres—De David à Degas (1919), where he refers to his maternal great-uncle Louis Weil as being ‘encore à une “étape” (comme dirait M. Bourget) moins avancée que M. et Mme Blanche, ces deux “grands bourgeois” dont Jacques-Emile a laissé d'inoubliables portraits’ (CSB, 572) [‘still at a less advanced “stage” (as M. Bourget would put it) than Monsieur and Mme Blanche, these two “grands bourgeois” of (p.49) whom Jacques-Emile has left such memorable portraits’]. The social stratification is significant here. As Evelyne Bloch-Dano explains, Louis Weil, a successful Jewish businessman, had lived in the tenth arrondissement in the eastern half of the city before acquiring 102 Boulevard Haussmann in the fashionable eighth and the family home in Auteuil (to the west of the capital), where Proust was born in 1871.12 In a reference to the Porte Saint-Martin and the Porte Saint-Denis, the Narrator refers to ‘ces arrondissements sordides' (RTP I. 480) [‘the squalid areas’ (SLT ii. 62)] which he appears not to know. As Bloch-Dano points out, Proust's mother's family originated there.13 The evidence of social-class immurement in A la recherche shows that the demarcation of class frontiers is far from being restricted to the reactionary Bourget. If in L'Etape rapid social-class evolution is seen as harmful by the father of the aspiring young bride, Brigitte Ferrand, the novel relies on an over-exposed tension between like and unlike poles. The fathers of the frustrated young amoureux work as colleagues, having both trained as philosophy teachers at the Ecole Normale in the Rue d'Ulm, and yet their different social backgrounds point up antagonisms at work in the Third Republic: Ferrand, a member of the old, Catholic bourgeoisie, versus Monneron, a product of a freethinking educational meritocracy. Ferrand rejects both the political legacy of secularism and the Monneron family: the Monneron grandfather was ‘un simple cultivateur. Il avait un fils très intelligent. Il a voulu en faire un bourgeois. Pourquoi? Par orgueil. Il a méprisé sa caste, ce jour-là, et il a trouvé un complice dans l'Etat, tel que la Révolution nous l'a fait. Toutes Page 6 of 43

 

Contexts for Class ces lois sur lesquelles nous vivons depuis cent ans, et dont l'esprit est de niveler les classes, d'égaliser pour tous le point de départ, de faciliter à l'individu les ascensions immédiates, en dehors de la famille, ce ne sont pas davantage des lois saines et généreuses. Ce sont des lois d'orgueil.’14 Bourget's language thus valorizes paternalistic giving—there is to be a handing down to the subaltern—and he opposes what he characterizes as a secular republican rapaciousness. If the stress on the preservation of social (p.50) caste anticipates the traditionalism of Combray's bourgeoisie, we need to contrast nevertheless Proust's often detached observation of social normativity and the heavily moralized claims for the family unit in L'Etape. For Bourget's rejection of the legacy of democracy and the discourse of individual entitlement takes us much further to the right politically, replicating the position of Action Française with which Bourget was to align himself. He couches his remedy for the nation's ills in improbably grandiloquent terms, calling for ‘une réconciliation du pays avec la race royale consubstantielle à ses dix siècles d'histoire'.15 Ferrand's complaint against the State and the legacy of the Revolution provides a potent, reactionary variant on an anxiety that nevertheless also exercised those centrally involved in shaping the culture of the Third Republic. Pierre Rosanvallon explains how, faced with the advent of adult male suffrage, the architects of Republican ideology sought to identify ways of containing the masses or, to use the terminology of the day, the threat posed by ‘le nombre', literally the number constituted by the working class. Reconstructing the bourgeois mindset of the day, Rosanvallon writes: ‘Comment gérer les masses? Comment canaliser leurs passions et leurs intérêts? Comment éviter que la puissance du peuple ne se dégrade en brutalité de la foule?…On cherche des principes d'ordre compensateur qui permettent à la fois de conjurer la menace conjointe du nombre et de l'atomisation sociale'.16 Scenes in Sodome et Gomorrhe allow us to see Proust's Narrator handling aggressive expressions of social-class denigration. As the bourgeois guests heading to La Raspelière to see Mme Verdurin push their way on to the train they join ‘les rangs pressés du vulgaire public’ [‘the serried ranks of the common herd’], elsewhere designated by Brichot, the university professor, as ‘le “pecus”’, the Latin term for cattle (RTP III. 259–60; SLT iv. 265). Later, when asked by Mme Verdurin about the journey, Brichot reports: ‘“Nous n'avons rencontré que de vagues humanités qui remplissaient le train”’ (RTP III. 316) [‘“We encountered only vague specimens of humanity, who filled the train”’ (SLT iv. 322)]. We find an extension to his reactionary attitudes when he rails against the Japanese (p.51) (who stand menacingly at the gates of Byzantium), the ‘“antimilitaristes socialisés [qui] discutent gravement sur les vertus cardinales du vers libre”’ [‘“collectivized anti-militarists…solemnly debating the cardinal virtues of free verse”’], and the youth of his day as being incapable of the ‘“effort Page 7 of 43

 

Contexts for Class viril que la patrie peut un jour ou l'autre leur demander, anesthésiés qu'il sont par la grande névrose littéraire”’ [‘“manly effort their homeland may some day demand from them, anaesthetized as they are by the great literary neurosis”’] (RTP III. 346; SLT iv. 352). An arch-defender of both militarism and academic conservatism, Brichot demonizes counter-cultural forces in his incoherent rant. Distinguishing themselves from the locals, the Verdurin guests occupy a carriage of the train which the Narrator ironically labels ‘le compartiment d'élection’ [‘the compartment of election’]; and in an extension of the New Testament analogy, they spot fellow members of the clan by exercising the obscure intuition of those on the road to Emmaus (RTP III. 261; SLT iv. 266). A sect-like group alert to the ‘signes de promission’ [‘promissory signs’] given off by their fellow guests, these bourgeois travellers unhesitatingly practice a social apartheid: ‘le wagon dans lequel ils se trouvaient assemblés, désignés par le coude du sculpteur Ski, pavoisé par Le Temps de Cottard, fleurissait de loin comme une voiture de luxe et ralliait à la gare voulue, le camarade retardataire’ (RTP III. 260–1) [‘the carriage in which they found themselves gathered, indicated by the elbow of Ski, the sculptor, and bedecked with Cottard's copy of Le Temps, blossomed in the distance like a de luxe carriage and, at the station appointed, rallied their laggard comrade’ (SLT iv. 266)]. The Narrator's grasp of the practice of selection is as rigorous as the guests’ demarcation of social space is stark. Indeed when at Arembouville a farm labourer in blue overalls enters the carriage, Cottard extends the mobilizing power of social reaction by calling the guard, showing his ‘carte de médecin d'une grande compagnie de chemins de fer' (RTP III. 268) [‘card as doctor to one of the great railway companies’ (SLT iv. 274)] and obliging the station master to remove the intruder; the scene pains the sensitive Saniette, who, seeing the large number of farmers on the station platform, fears that the result of the peasant's expulsion from the train might well be a revolutionary-style jacquerie. (In a burlesque analogy that draws upon lurid colonialist stereotyping, Saniette's later fate at the predatorial hands of the Verdurin faithful is likened to that of the wounded white explorer being set upon by cannibals (RTP III. 325; SLT iv. 330).) The Narrator's parodic tone is unequivocal: playful talk of revolution connects with other textual developments where there is a flirtatious consideration of social radicalism. More pointedly, Morel, in dispute with Charlus and unable to tolerate the baron's boast about antecedents who served as valets and maîtres d'hôtel to (p.52) the Kings of France, invokes a time when ‘“mes ancêtres firent couper le cou aux vôtres”’ (RTP III. 449) [‘“my forebears cut the throats of yours”’ (SLT iv. 455–6)].17 Beyond the expressions of virulent prejudice seen in Cottard's crude social screening, more muffled forms of class antagonism pepper the novel, often channelled via humorous or moralizing asides from the bourgeois Narrator. The professional neglect of Cottard, who will not be deflected from attending the Verdurin salon on a Wednesday evening, becomes the stuff of farce when, Page 8 of 43

 

Contexts for Class untroubled by medical ethics, he will only be called away on account of ‘la qualité du malade’ [‘the status of the sick person’] rather than ‘la gravité de la maladie’ [‘the seriousness of their condition’]: ‘[il] renonçait aux douceurs du mercredi non pour un ouvrier frappé d'une attaque, mais pour le coryza du ministre’ (RTP III. 273) [‘[he] would renounce the comforts of a Wednesday, not for a workman who had had a stroke, but for the head-cold of a minister’ (SLT iv. 278)]. His elderly cook may have cut a vein in her arm but Cottard, already in evening dress, sends for a doctor. The Narrator's slapstick evocation of the stand-off between the dominant and the subaltern excludes from the socially conservative mimesis any lofty, meliorative dimension. Thus the subaltern's expression of entitlement to mix with her or his social superior is no less commended by the Narrator than is the indignity of social ‘betters' affronted by the threat to their status. The Duchesse de Guermantes, while asserting as axiomatic her total absence of contact with Jews, complains that it is one thing being an anti-Dreyfusard but finds it intolerable that people of lower rank should assume the right to associate with her: ‘“je trouve insupportable que, sous prétexte qu'elles sont bien pensantes, qu'elles n'achètent rien aux marchands juifs ou qu'elles ont ‘Mort aux Juifs’ écrit sur leurs ombrelles, une quantité de dames Durand ou Dubois, que nous n'aurions jamais connues, nous soient imposées par Marie-Aynard ou par Victurnienne. Je suis allée chez Marie-Aynard avant-hier. C'était charmant autrefois. Maintenant on y trouve toutes les personnes qu'on a passé sa vie à éviter, sous prétexte qu'elles sont contre Dreyfus”’ (RTP II. 535) [‘“I do find it intolerable to have Marie-Aynard or Victurnienne thrusting a whole host of Durands and Dubois upon us, women we should otherwise never have known, just because they're supposed to be right-minded (p.53) and don't use Jewish tradesmen, or have ‘Death to Jews’ written on their parasols. I went to see Marie-Aynard the day before yesterday. It used to be a pleasure. Now she entertains all the people one has spent one's life trying to avoid, with the excuse that they're anti-Dreyfusard”’ (SLT iii. 235)]. If the cross-class opposition to revisionism shows the forces of anti-Semitism aligned against social progressivism, the Duchesse's sneering evocation of the ‘dames Durand ou Dubois' provides a colourful restatement of aristocratic opposition to the culture of democracy. Proust extends his irreverent social comedy. The same fusion of anti-Semitism and aggressive class-consciousness within the nobility is illustrated by the hysterical reaction of the Princesse de Silistrie who asserts that if Robert de Saint-Loup were to marry the daughter of Odette and a Jew, this would spell the end of the Faubourg Saint-Germain (RTP IV. 240; SLT v. 625). But the cataclysmic talk of the demise of a class masks an ulterior motive as we see when it emerges that Odette and Swann's daughter, now Mlle de Forcheville, is immensely wealthy and that the Princesse de Silistrie's protestations are in fact an attempt to ensure her own son's marriage into a wealth which the aristocracy can no longer muster. Page 9 of 43

 

Contexts for Class The ludic scrutiny of class contrasts markedly with the aggressive posturing of many of Proust's contemporaries who were wary about democracy. Bourget floods L'Etape with the language of political reaction to counter the prevalence of individual aspiration and the menace of ‘le nombre'. In the final chapter of the novel, where the academically brilliant young suitor is eventually admitted into the ranks of the Catholic bourgeoisie, the reactionary father-in-law Ferrand rejects the mantra of the Third Republic, repudiating the notion of ‘la toutepuissance du mérite personnel. Ce mérite n'est fécond, il n'est bienfaisant, que lorsqu'il devient le mérite familial. La nature, plus forte que l'utopie, et qui n'admet pas que l'on aille contre ses lois, contraint toutes les familles qui prétendent la violenter à faire dans la douleur, si elles doivent s'établir, cette étape qu'elles n'ont pas faite dans la santé’.18 Social health, then, for Bourget's enforcer of hierarchy, derives from policing ‘le transfert des classes'19 rather than from sanctioning democratic or, as he scathingly dubs it, utopian access to opportunity for social advancement. For Ferrand, Monneron father and son, because they work against nature, are the victims of a social malaise, of ‘la poussée démocratique telle que (p.54) le comprend et la subit notre pays où l'on a pris pour unité sociale l'individu’.20 Bourget's stance in L'Etape against what he sees as the decadence of democracy was contested by fellow academician Comte d'Haussonville, in an exchange of open letters in Le Gaulois in the second half of 1902, Proust indeed referring to the debate in ‘Le Salon de la Comtesse d'Haussonville’.21 That Proust should side with d'Haussonville (CSB, 487) signals an ideological direction that becomes clearer when we examine the terms of reference used by the two academicians. D'Haussonville begins the first of his two pieces on L'Etape by politely conceding that his own social conservatism and Bourget's are not dissimilar, before remarking that Bourget has been excessively zealous. Reading what he sees as the audacious pages of L'Etape, d'Haussonville is reminded of Sainte-Beuve's account of his last meeting with Lamennais in which, in his petulant exuberance, Lamennais jumped all over him. D'Haussonville quickly adds that if the tone of Sainte-Beuve's tale is too low for members of the Académie Française, a more noble comparison is to be found in Néarque's words to Polyeucte in Corneille's tragedy: ‘Votre zèle est trop grand: souffrez qu'on le modère.’22

Curbing the more flagrant excesses of social and economic inequality was the thrust of d'Haussonville's interventions on labour and class issues. Indeed behind the play of citation in this exchange with a fellow académicien, d'Haussonville is making a political point, namely that Bourget's tone in L'Etape actually harms the monarchist cause to which the Orléanist d'Haussonville feels abiding commitment. Rejecting as excessively negative Bourget's characterization of the fictional Monneron family, d'Haussonville refuses to malign a father who leaves the land in the Vivarais to become a teacher of Page 10 of 43

 

Contexts for Class philosophy in Paris. Furthermore, asking rhetorically what is so criminal about Monneron, he contests Bourget's assertion that social mobility was unknown in the France of old and claims that under the Ancien Régime, there was indeed social movement, Racine's rise to cultural eminence from being the son of a warehouseman (p.55) in La Ferté-Milon and the ascension to political prominence of Colbert, the son of a Rheims draper, being two of the examples he cites.23 What for Bourget is the immoral pride of the aspirational Monneron family undergoes a counter-reading in d'Haussonville's modern social conservatism: Les lois qui permettent cette ascension me paraissent parfaitement équitables, et favorisent à mes yeux non pas l'orgueil, mais la légitime ambition que chacun peut concevoir de développer ses facultés et ses dons. Que ce soit dans les arts, dans les lettres, dans les sciences, vous paraît-il que le génie ou le talent ne soit permis qu'aux fils de bourgeois enrichis ou de grands seigneurs? Regrettez-vous qu'un Pasteur n'ait pas borné son essor à devenir notaire dans la petite ville où son père était tanneur?24 D'Haussonville remained nevertheless forthright in advocating an unambiguous social paternalism. He vigorously promoted ‘la charité' as the cornerstone of his conservative political vision, which he grounded in biblical teaching. Writing in Socialisme et Charité, he asserted that social inequality was an inalterable fact of nature, quoting from the Gospels: ‘Vous aurez toujours des pauvres avec vous'.25 Later in the volume, the ‘Tu gagneras ton pain à la sueur de ton front'26 is taken both as divine pronouncement and as an economic truth of the free market, the effects of which are to be tempered by the exercise of charity. In a moralizing critique of the Republic, d'Haussonville makes a concession to the language of Ferrand in L'Etape, seeing ‘notre démocratie orgueilleuse'27 as shunning charity, which, he forecasts, will generously leave aside ‘toutes les infidélités et toutes les ingratitudes dont elle aura été l'objet'28 and come to the rescue when democracy fails.29 Rejecting the Socialist objection that charitable giving ensures the continuation of poverty, d'Haussonville challenges left-wing intellectuals—‘ces docteurs en solidarité et en altruisme'—to put down their pens and visit the offices of one of the charitable agencies.30 Elsewhere in his work, d'Haussonville makes (p.56) concessions to the new political language by acknowledging that whereas he advocates the charité needed to mitigate the effects of poverty, others identify la solidarité as the progressive political force that will generate social amelioration.31 In ‘Patriciat et Démocratie’ [‘Aristocracy and Democracy’], the extension piece in which d'Haussonville refutes the second phase of Bourget's defence of L'Etape in the pages of Le Gaulois on 15 September 1902, the two authors' responses to democracy diverge significantly. Whereas Bourget stands squarely behind Maurras's ‘La démocratie, c'est le mal; la démocratie, c'est la mort’,32 Page 11 of 43

 

Contexts for Class d'Haussonville argues that the France of the Third Republic occupies a new political space and moment, that the Ancien Régime is not retrievable and that the best course of action for monarchy is to situate itself within democratic structures as happens in Germany and Britain. In his assessment of the contemporary political scene in France, then, d'Haussonville articulates a pragmatic conservatism: ‘je me trouve immédiatement en présence d'un grand fait: la démocratie. …Il ne s'agit donc point de savoir si le fait démocratique agrée plus ou moins à certains tempéraments…il faut plutôt l'accepter à cause de son universalité’.33 D'Haussonville's argument that the ‘état démographique’ or demographic state is an inevitable phase in society's evolution can thus be aligned with the modern political conservatism that the young Proust is implicitly endorsing in his Figaro piece of 4 January 1904. Thus, whereas Bourget sides with Action Française and envisages a vibrant oligarchy emerging from the ‘restauration…des énergies françaises’,34 d'Haussonville calls for a cautious engagement with democracy.35 Crucially, he sees such a manoeuvre as providing a strategic, necessary counterweight to ‘l'égalité absolue et…la démocratie pure’.36 In raising the spectre of political power exercised by the demos, d'Haussonville voices the same conservatism that saw him caution against ‘la République intégrale’ or full Republic and the direct election of the president by a system of plebiscite37 in an open letter to Jules Lemaître of May 1903. Yet in resisting plebiscitary democracy or what he labels ‘pure democracy’, d'Haussonville gives voice (p.57) to an anxiety that extended beyond Orléanist ranks.38 To draw again on Pierre Rosanvallon, the author of Le Sacre du citoyen explains that whereas in theory the aspiration in the Third Republic was to achieve ‘l'idéal d'une société d'acteurs rationnels',39 the State fostered its own elites principally through the education system. Indeed, by rejecting popular sovereignty, the Republic promoted, in Rosanvallon's words, ‘[une] philosophie républicaine de la démocratie singulièrement équivoque'.40 Proust identifies in d'Haussonville an emerging social tolerance: ‘De tous les “conservateurs”’, he tells his Figaro readers, ‘M. d'Haussonville est le plus sincèrement, le plus courageusement “libéral”’ (CSB, 486) [‘Of all the “conservatives”, M. d'Haussonville is the most sincerely and courageously “liberal”’]. In commending the count—‘Avec son esprit tolérant et large, son cœur ouvert à la pitié, il eût été le ministre modèle’ [‘With his tolerant and broad-minded outlook, his heart open to pity, he would have made a model minister’]—Proust actively endorses the social paternalism of the Orléanist academician, while regretting that the count's absorption in literature (‘la magistrature littéraire’) should have ruled out ‘une magistrature politique’ (CSB, 487) [‘a political magistrature’]. Behind the obsequious tone in the 1904 Figaro piece on the d'Haussonvilles, then, we see Proust distancing himself from the reactionary conservatism of the Action Française and siding with a social and economic conservatism that was nevertheless prepared to engage with Republican democracy. What Bourget Page 12 of 43

 

Contexts for Class derides as the ‘mirage démocratique’41 becomes in d'Haussonville's political orientation the legitimate aspirationalism within a broader polity that remained nevertheless circumscribed. On the subject of working-class lives, the contrasting assumptions made by Bourget and d'Haussonville are instructive for a consideration of class as seen by Proust and his contemporaries. For the author of L'Etape, the insistence on class inscription is rigid. Workers should remain within their caste, hone their manual skills, and not fall into the national error (‘l'Erreur française’) of being prematurely exposed, as was the case with the teacher of rhetoric who moved from the Vivarais to the Rue d'Ulm, to ‘la grande culture’.42 Bourget does valorize artisanal skill but effectively (p.58) uses this to cement social segregation. D'Haussonville, by contrast, speaks of the Parisian working-class as ‘ce peuple si intelligent, si fin, [qui] ne vit pas seulement de pain, suivant la parole divine’.43 He chides the socially dominant for their lowering of intellectual expectations in relation to the working class: ‘[ce peuple] vit aussi beaucoup de pensée. N'y a-t-il pas quelque superbe à le lui defendre en lui disant: “Lire, écrire, compter et apprendre un métier, voilà les seules ambitions qui te soient permises. Quant aux jouissances de l'esprit, c'est à nous, les grands seigneurs de lettres, qu'elles sont réservées. Elles ne sont pas faites pour toi”?’44 While many of his reactionary statements on democratization betray the selfinterest of his class, the tone is here arguably more progressive socially than that adopted by many of those charged with managing the educational reforms of the Third Republic. For among the architects of the new education system, the attitude prevailed that basic literacy and numeracy, delivered through the primary system, were indeed sufficient to meet the needs of the working class and that care should be taken to avoid unnecessary provision (in the specific form of secondary-school education) that would lead to alienation and socially harmful class migration.45 Bourget shows none of the adaptability that Proust commended in d'Haussonville in his Figaro piece. Commenting specifically on the mental life of the working class, Bourget casts Jules Vallès as a figure who remained a man of the people in his inability to ‘arriver à l'idée abstraite’.46 The denigration of Vallès draws on a broader characterization of the proletariat as being incapable of intellectual abstraction. Quoting Vallès reflecting on his unintellectual pursuits, Bourget concludes: ‘Le don de la métamorphose intellectuelle lui [à Vallès] était refusé par l'énergie même de la sensation animale'.47 Towards the end of his essay on Vallès, Bourget insists that the author of the Jacques Vingtras trilogy is recuperated within (p.59) ‘les Lettres, elles l'ont saisi, et il est leur œuvre’.48 But by casting Vallès as an in-between figure, adrift both from the bourgeoisie and the working class, as a reluctant inheritor of a great Roman cultural tradition, Bourget reinforces his view of the proletariat as a class Page 13 of 43

 

Contexts for Class wedded to sensation and the immediate and thus incapable of cerebral effort. He contrasts the social evolutions undergone by Taine and Vallès: the former enjoying the benefits of a 250-year-long process of cultural maturation, the latter wounded, in Bourget's view, by sudden exposure to learning: ‘Chez celui [Vallès] dont la sensibilité et l'intelligence sont trop…sauvagement plébéiennes encore, l'éducation fait blessure. Chez l'autre [Taine], la race est arrivée au point de maturité où l'éducation fait culture’.49 Elsewhere in the same volume, Bourget cites Rivarol's assertion that abstraction is not for the people and appeals to what he posits as a natural law as opposed to the legislative anarchy of the Third Republic: ‘ce conflit de la loi inscrit dans la nature des choses et des lois inscrites dans les codes est quotidien de nos jours’.50 The availability nationally of primary education (this was introduced in 1881) accounts for Bourget's melodramatically entitled chapter on the ‘primary peril' [‘Le Péril primaire’] of March 1906 in which he argues that the Jacobinic dogma of primary schooling is generating educational anarchy ('l'anarchie scolaire').51 Bourget brands as inane the discourse of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme with its call for universal entitlement to ‘[le] développement le plus complet possible de ses facultés’.52 Refusing to adhere to ‘la doctrine du déclassement systématique’,53 Bourget rejects consciousness-raising activity within the working class as newfangled and dismisses the very language of ‘la pensée consciente’.54 Likewise, the assumption that instruction through books is a means to providing development of the human faculties is branded as another strand in Jacobinic propaganda. (p.60) Looking to cloak his vicious class-consciousness in the prestige of would-be authoritative literary history, Bourget sees the backbone of nineteenthcentury French literature as being formed by the painful dilemma afflicting individual déclassés and however different the protagonists' backgrounds and standpoints, he asserts that Le Rouge et le Noir, the Jacques Vingtras trilogy, Illusions perdues, and Madame Bovary all hinge on the deceit inherent in social mobility: ‘l'ascension uniquement individuelle était un principe de malheur personnel et de danger social. C'est toute la moralité de ces quatre romanstypes’.55 Yet whereas Bourget’s typology highlights what he presents as the pessimistic morality of these texts, there is no sense in his work that conflicted class relations might in fact engender serious literature. The latter case is precisely made by Terry Eagleton in Criticism and Ideology, where he argues with reference to the English Victorian novel that writers with an ‘ambivalent class-relation' were ‘open to the contradictions from which major literary talent was produced’.56 Bourget's reductive, ideologically motivated reading of the literary canon contrasts strikingly with the curiosity and inventiveness frequently evident in Proust's handling of social class. Notwithstanding the fixity of the class system in provincial Combray where indeed, as the Narrator concedes, a virtual caste system was operational for an earlier generation, one of the early messages of the Recherche is that distinction may exist independently of social class. Page 14 of 43

 

Contexts for Class Through one of Marcel's grandmother's contacts, we are introduced to the figures of the tailor Jupien and his niece whose general demeanour conveys to the grandmother a wholly engaging sense of distinction not necessarily enjoyed by their social superiors. Like her grandson and implicitly rejecting the social straitjacketing propounded in Bourget's L'Etape, she actively chooses not to base her assessment of others' worth on the rigid criteria of social-class origins: ‘pour elle, la distinction était quelque chose d'absolument indépendant du rang social' (RTP I. 20) [‘for her, distinction was something absolutely independent of social position’ (SLT i. 24)]. Arguably, the grandmother's enthusiasm for conspicuous talent works tokenistically, the exception merely serving to consolidate the view of society, the ‘idée un peu hindoue' (RTP I. 16) [‘a rather Hindu notion’ (SLT i. 19)], held by Combray's middle class. Yet significantly for the historical (p.61) contextualization of class that I am attempting, the Narrator reflects on the tailor's gifts specifically within the frame of reference provided by the educational system of the Third Republic. For if he sees Jupien as being endowed with innate talent, he reflects that ‘cet “acquis” délicieux qui faisait la trame spirituelle de ses propos ne lui venait d'aucune de ces instructions de collège, d'aucune de ces cultures d'université qui auraient pu faire de lui un homme si remarquable, quand tant de jeunes gens du monde ne tirent d'elles aucun profit’ (RTP IV. 416) [‘that wonderful “accumulated wisdom” which provided the intellectual framework of his remarks was not the product of the school education or university training which might have made him a truly exceptional man, while so many fashionable young men derive no profit from it’ (SLT vi. 146)]. If we set aside the swipe at the profligacy of privileged youth, Jupien's conversation provides the Narrator with a marvellous form of compensation: ‘ce parler si juste où toutes les symétries de langage se laissaient découvrir et montraient leur beauté’ (RTP IV. 417) [‘that precise and elegant way of speaking, in which all the symmetry of the language was revealed in its full beauty’ (SLT vi. 146)]. That Jupien should not have enjoyed a secondary school education, still less a university one, is consistent with the educational politics of the Third Republic which were grounded in the expectation, as we have seen demonstrated by Pierre Rosanvallon, that post-primary education was the preserve of the bourgeois and upper classes. Marcel is unequivocal in recognizing Jupien's talent: ‘je discernai…vite chez lui une intelligence rare et l'une des plus naturellement littéraires qu'il m'ait été donné de connaître, en ce sens que, sans culture probablement, il possédait ou s'était assimilé, rien qu'à l'aide de quelques livres hâtivement parcourus, les tours les plus ingénieux de la langue' (RTP II. 321) [‘I soon discovered that he was a man of rare intelligence, one of the most spontaneously literary men who has come my way, in the sense that, although he was probably uneducated, he possessed, or had acquired, with the sole help of a few hastily scanned books, the most ingenious turns of phrase’ (SLT iii. 19)]. The accomplishments of Jupien's niece are similarly stressed by the grandmother, even if these marks of Page 15 of 43

 

Contexts for Class distinction do not prepare the reader for the dramatic déclassement that comes with her adoption by Charlus as Mlle d'Oléron and her marriage to the young aristocrat Cambremer. It is no coincidence that the grandmother should stand as a spiritual descendant of George Sand, whose works she offers as a gift to the young Marcel in Combray.57 Naomi Schor's penetrating analysis of idealism in (p.62) Sand's work indirectly sheds light on our understanding of Jupien and his niece. Schor makes the point that the worker figure in nineteenth-century French literature is so often a déclassé and indeed that ‘not only is idealization not incompatible with the representation of the worker, it is its very condition'.58 The distinction so visible in Jupien's niece has indeed something of the ‘proletarian sublime' that Schor identifies in the character of Pierre Huguenin in Sand's Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840) and the intellectual nobility displayed by the Sandian hero finds an echo in Proust's Jupien. Significantly, Proust's Narrator specifically routes the story of the marriage of Jupien's niece to the young Cambremer back through nineteenth-century literary history. For Marcel's mother, who is faithful to the idealist legacy of her own mother and thus convinced of the merits of the subaltern bride, the cross-class marriage functions in a morally uplifting manner: ‘“C'est la récompense de la vertu. C'est un mariage à la fin d'un roman de Mme Sand”’ (RTP IV. 236) [‘“It is virtue rewarded. It's a marriage from the end of a novel by George Sand”’ (SLT v. 622)], she concludes. The Narrator offers a contrasting summation. Knowing that the marriage arrangements are the by-product of another cross-class association (Charlus's homosexual relationship with Jupien), he observes: ‘“C'est le prix du vice, c'est un mariage à la fin d'un roman de Balzac”, pensai-je' (RTP IV. 236) [‘“It's the wages of sin, it's a marriage from the end of a novel by Balzac”, I thought’ (SLT v. 622)]. The symmetrically drawn positions of mother and son bring about a counterpoising of idealism and realism. By proposing to offer access to a more accurate causation for the motives of those involved in these relationships, the Narrator may tilt his account towards realism. Yet idealism retains its presence in A la recherche and is to a degree transmitted in a gendered manner: it features in Françoise's view of the relationship between Charlus and the younger Jupien in that she sees the old aristocrat as offering benign, cross-class protection to his junior; and it forms part of the grandmaternal legacy of which Marcel's mother is the guardian. Thus when mother and son are travelling back from Venice by train, the mother slowly reveals the story of the Cambremer/Jupien marriage which she nostalgically sees as harking back to a utopian social order: ‘“Moi, cela me fait l'effet d'un mariage au temps où les rois épousaient les bergères, et encore la bergère est-elle moins qu'une bergère, mais d'ailleurs charmante. Cela eût stupéfié ta grand-mère et ne lui eût déplu”’ (RTP IV. 236) [‘“For me it calls to mind those marriages from the days when a king could marry (p.63) a shepherdess, except that the

Page 16 of 43

 

Contexts for Class shepherdess is even less than a shepherdess, although very charming. Your grandmother would have been stupefied, if not displeased”’ (SLT v. 622)]. Yet alongside the Sandian idyll in A la recherche, the class dialectic is marked. Jupien's refusal to show Marcel deference and his overtly offhand ways with the protagonist (RTP II. 321, 440; SLT. iii. 18, 139) provide not just a reminder of the class tensions of the Third Republic but also, at a more individual level, a clear indication of the bourgeois protagonist's implied sense of entitlement to deference from his inferiors. In this way, the model of aspirational worker and socially conscious writer which Schor sees as feeding into George Sand's claims to moral leadership makes way, in A la recherche, for a conflicted evocation in which two males of different social origins are cast as class rivals. By signalling early on in the Recherche the grandmother's openness to distinction irrespective of the provenance of its bearer, Proust implicitly rejects the reactionariness epitomized by Bourget's L'Etape. Whereas the latter's aim is to corral the working class, Proust, in his periodic displays of egalitarianism, rejects the restrictiveness of social conservatism. Moreover, on the broader question of social-class mobility that came to be accelerated by the First World War, the Recherche charts, often in non-judgemental language, a changing national demography: ‘Car ce qui caractérisait le plus cette société, c'était sa prodigieuse aptitude au déclassement’ (RTP IV. 535) [‘For if there was one thing which really characterized this milieu, it was its prodigious capacity for movement across social class’ (SLT vi. 265)].59 Déclassement is thus integral to Proust's social documentarism. Far from being objects of opprobrium and censure à la Bourget, class movement and rivalries provide a rich source of peripeteia within the diegesis of the Recherche. Mobility may generate sobre reflection on a social landscape in flux. Alternatively, it can serve as a trigger for intensely ludic, celebratory speculation about hierarchy, no more so than in the Balbec section of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs which I shall be considering later.60

‘Oui ou non à l'Université populaire’ On the issue of working-class exposure to bourgeois literary culture, we have hard evidence from Proust's early work that he shared the (p.64) circumspection visible in the structures that were laid down in the creation of the Republic's educational and professional elites. We find an additional point of access to contrasting attitudes to social mobility held by Proust and his contemporaries in his response specifically to the recently launched Université Populaire movement. D'Haussonville distanced himself from Bourget's adversarial response to workers' educational programmes, which the latter remorselessly disparages in L'Etape as a vehicle of social harm, ‘ces groupements périlleux, fantaisies de jeunes bourgeois qui jouent aux apôtres sans s'inquiéter des conséquences’.61 Page 17 of 43

 

Contexts for Class Bourget's reaction extends a strand of resistance in nineteenth-century literature to the fraternal connection between manual and intellectual workers urged by Sand, by feminist movements more generally, and by figures such as Lamartine, Hugo, and Zola. In his ‘Préface' to Hernani, Hugo call for a court literature to make way for a literature of the people, for ‘la liberté dans l'art, la liberté dans la société';62 and he adds that it is the popular will that poetry and politics should function in adherence to the same guiding principle: ‘Tolérance et liberté'.63 The forces of reaction, by contrast, are considered by Christopher Prendergast in his study The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars, where he demonstrates how the ‘classical dispositions' of the socially reactionary Sainte-Beuve (whose work, we might note, was venerated by Bourget and his close associate in Action Française, Charles Maurras) made the critic keen to preserve the division between the ouvrier littéraire and the manual worker.64 In the same context, Prendergast cites an article by Jean-Louis Eugène Lerminier in La Revue des deux mondes of 1841 in which Lerminier patronizes working-class efforts at literary production and reaffirms a traditional divide: ‘La division du travail, qui assigne aux uns l'action, aux autres la pensée, est donc toujours dans la nature des choses'.65 Half a century later, Alfred Fouillée's protest was that there were too many bacheliers, too many ‘prolétaires intellectuels'.66 Bourget himself was calling for the preservation of hierarchy in (p.65) the field of education. He railed against the school system in the Third Republic which he saw as an extension of ‘l'entreprise de déformation nationale commencée en 1789'.67 The Duc de Guermantes engages in similar invective in A la recherche, asserting with false humility and also intense vanity that he is not a member of the Ministère de l'Instruction Publique (RTP II. 534; SLT iii. 234). His scorn, directed against one of the cornerstones of Republican ideology, is paired in the same conversation with his sneering condescension for the neologism ‘mentalité' and the modernity, both linguistic and ideological, the term signals.68 Specifically on the social phenomenon of the Université Populaire. Bourget rounded on those he branded as the movement's ‘utopistes niais' and he upbraided writers who show workers ‘[la] charité intellectuelle'.69 Citing Bourget's remark on the social uselessness of ‘ces rapports factices entre travailleurs de l'esprit et travailleurs manuels’,70 d'Haussonville is unequivocal in his advocacy of cross-class contact: ‘Je ne crois pas, en effet, qu'entre ces deux races de travailleurs il y ait un abîme infranchissable et que ceux-là s'abaissent qui s'efforcent de jeter un pont par où ils puissent se réunir’.71 Seen alongside Bourget's vitriolic caricature of the emerging workers’ education movement, d'Haussonville's attitude is more accommodating, however much his language betrays the paternalism of his class and day. We see this when he urges young bourgeois activists in the Université Populaire movement to ‘témoigner à ces simples d'esprit cette charité intellectuelle plus méritoire que la charité matérielle, car elle répond mieux au sens théologique du mot qui Page 18 of 43

 

Contexts for Class implique l'idée d'amour'.72 Significantly, d'Haussonville appeals to New Testament language as providing the necessary justification for social action, the etymology of the Christian notion of caritas ensuring, to use Quentin (p.66) Skinner's formulation, ‘a local canon of rational acceptability'.73 While not squarely aligned with the secular ideology of the Third Republic, d'Haussonville's implict plea, as Le Béguec and Prévotat point out, derives from a liberal Catholic tradition that sought reconciliation of the Church and modern society.74 Unlike a number of his contemporaries, Proust played no role in the Université Populaire movement (although we may note that in A la recherche Robert de Saint-Loup recalls in passing having met Bloch at a branch meeting (RTP II. 97; SLT ii. 318)). He was drawn into tangential discussion of the movement in an exchange of letters with Daniel Halévy in December 1907 prompted by publication in Péguy's Cahiers de la Quinzaine of Halévy's short story Un épisode.75 One of the informing principles of the Université Populaire was that intellectuals and workers would draw mutual educational benefit from their encounters and Halévy dedicated Un épisode to members of the appropriately named ‘L'Enseignement Mutuel' or ‘Mutual Education' in Paris's eighteenth arrondissement. Halévy's dedication contained a pledge: ‘Mes chers amis, Laissez-moi vous dédier ce conte où vous reconnaîtrez les traces d'expérience qui nous furent communes et le souvenir d'un travail qu'assurément nous ne renonçons pas'.76 Descended from an assimilated Jewish migrant family that had arrived from Bavaria in the late eighteenth century and son of the academician Ludovic Halévy, Daniel Halévy pursued a career as a social commentator and writer that was to see him move progressively to the right after starting out as an ardent defender of Dreyfus. Halévy collaborated with Péguy at the Cahiers de la Quinzaine before aligning himself (as we saw in the previous chapter) with Maurras, subscribing to the Parti de l'Intelligence in 1919 and eventually becoming a supporter of Pétain in the Second World War. As Serge Berstein points out, Halévy was an admirer of constitutional monarchy with Orléanist leanings and saw government as the preserve of cultivated elites. He experienced a sentimental attachment to a humanist socialism, deeming the provision of education for the people to be the responsibility of society's elite. Consistent with this, he worked (p.67) for the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme and for L'Union pour l'Action Morale.77 In Un épisode, a text which Proust read closely as his letters show, Halévy evokes in melodramatic detail the milieu of the Université Populaire. If Halévy's involvement assumed highly theatrical proportions, the Université Populaire attracted support from a wide range of writers, including Henri Bergson, Anatole France, Lucien Febvre, and Paul Léautaud.78 Growing out of the Dreyfus Affair, it aimed to provide a place of encounter that would be mutually educative Page 19 of 43

 

Contexts for Class for workers and intellectuals. Much of the action of Un épisode is set in proletarian eastern Paris where a young worker, Julien Guinou, undergoes the influence of the bourgeois philanthropist and workers' education activist Clément Dorsel. Guinou ends up rejecting his working-class origins, the workers around him becoming in his eyes wretched slaves. Yet the transition to the appreciation of literature and in particular the poetry of Baudelaire is too abrupt and the effect of this rapid cultural transition is to leave Guinou suicidal. At the funeral for the young déclassé, one of Guinou's former anarchist comrades launches into a virulent attack on the very concept of the Université Populaire: ‘“il n'y a pas d'art pour le prolétaire, il n'y a pas de science pour le prolétaire”’.79 In this echo from the other end of the political spectrum, working-class hostility towards learning replicates the insistence of the Right as voiced by Bourget that workers and intellectual abstraction do not go together. Proust's response to Un épisode which he detailed in a series of lengthy letters to Halévy in the weeks following the work's publication provides the reader with an additional vantage point from which to gauge the author's social outlook in the pre-Recherche years of his career. He claims to have found Halévy's short story ‘très remarquable’ [‘outstanding’]: Je reconnais le beau parti pris d'avoir fait quelque chose de froid, de démodé, d'hostile, qui nous prend comme l'hiver, comme la pauvreté, comme la méchanceté.…c'est le peuple vu en soi, pas du rivage bourgeois. Je (p.68) n'aimerais pas vivre avec eux pour une seule raison: c'est qu'Adeline [Guinou's girlfriend] entre sans dire bonjour, et que le héros ne répond pas quand son voisin lui parle. Mais je sais que c'est vrai. Je vois tout ce qu'il y a de grand dans cette idée de la mort si peu peuple, si homme de lettres de cet ouvrier. (Corr. xxi. 619–20; Proust's emphasis) [I recognize the fine choice of standpoint, producing something cold, outmoded, and hostile which grips you like the winter, like poverty, like wickedness…it's the people seen in itself and not from the bourgeois shore. I would not like to live with them for one single reason: Adeline comes in without saying hello and the hero does not respond when his neighbour speaks to him. But I know that it's accurate. I can see all that is uplifting in this worker's idea of death which is so unplebeian, so much that of a man of letters.] This last reference is to the melodramatic circumstances in which the young working-class hero commits suicide with a copy of Les Fleurs du mal beside him. For Proust, Guinou's death assumes a Romantic grandeur, an outcome that severs the connection to the protagonist's proletarian roots. In Proust's quasiethnographic characterization which he forms significantly from the ‘rivage bourgeois', working-class attitudes acquire an entirely exotic character, as though the class divide is as marked as that existing between different ethnic Page 20 of 43

 

Contexts for Class groupings. Indeed in his trenchant conclusion, he makes few concessions: ‘Mais enfin j'ai beau me dire tout cela, je n'en suis pas fou, oh! pas du tout’ (Corr. xxi. 619–20) [‘But however much I say all that, I am not mad about it, far from it’].80 Proust does modify his position in a following letter in which he concedes that Adeline's failure to greet people was the result of personal distress caused by the absence of Guinou rather than the inevitable mark of a class-conditioned coarseness (Corr. xxi. 622). Twice in the correspondence with Halévy on the subject of Un épisode, Proust concedes that he knows precious little about working-class life. He makes the point that ill health precludes him from committing to ‘une activité sociale qui serait forcément stérile' [‘a social activity that would inevitably be sterile’] and that, rather than engaging with the Université Populaire, he must preserve the little strength he has for ‘ma petite activité (p.69) artistique etc.' [‘my modest artistic activity etc.’ (Corr. xxi. 618). Still within the privacy of the exchange with Halévy, he parallels his own personal experience of ingratitude with that suffered by the bourgeois philanthropist Dorsel, whose efforts are ultimately derided by the associates of the young victim of cross-class migration. The contradictoriness and admission of perplexity evident in the series of letters that Proust sent Halévy in December 1907 reflect symptomatically the uncomfortable search for a set of coordinates within which to situate a proletarian sociality that deeply challenged Proust and his bourgeois contemporaries. In the preface to Luttes et problèmes in which Un épisode was reprinted in 1911, Halévy writes of the painful confusion [‘confusion douloureuse'] experienced by many young middle-class men who sought to redress ‘la séparation des classes et des cultures' through their work with the Université Populaire.81 We might note parenthetically much earlier evidence of the young Proust reflecting privately on what he posits as the risks involved in the exposure to ideological debate for those new to intellectual exchange. On the misapplication in everyday life of ideas gleaned from literary culture, Proust wrote to his mother in September 1899, referring to the cases of Emile Henry, a young anarchist guillotined in 1894 for having bombed a hotel café, and Henri Chambige, a law student who killed his lover in a suicide pact that he failed to honour (Chambige served as the prototype for Robert Greslou in Bourget's Le Disciple82). The lesson Proust draws from the cases of these radical social marginals is that intellectual speculation is perilous in the ‘wrong’ hands, entailing as it does ‘le danger que présente la culture intellectuelle trop forte chez des gens qui ne prennent pas une carrière intellectuelle de sorte qu'ils appliquent à la vie qui ne les comporte pas la subtilité de leur esprit et les condui[t] à déraisonner ainsi' (Corr. ii. 330) [‘the danger constituted by excessive intellectualism for those who do not choose an intellectual career, so that they

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Contexts for Class apply to a life that does not include such complication the subtlety of their minds and this causes them to lose their sanity’].83 In his implicit censorship of radical working-class theorizing, Proust is effectively policing borders of class and thought, not unlike Bourget in L'Etape. Ironically however, his juxtaposition of life and mental ‘subtilité' anticipates one of the great paradigms of the Recherche, where Marcel (p.70) engages freely in intellectual speculation unrestricted by notions of social use, situation, and normativity. The young Proust thus sets clear limits to popular education and implicitly endorses the line from Rivarol quoted by Bourget: ‘“Il faut au peuple des vérités usuelles et non des abstractions”’.84 Proust complains anecdotally to Halévy about the absence of reciprocity in his own overtures to social inferiors: ‘c'est aussi le seul salaire que j'ai eu chaque fois qu'il m'est arrivé d'être Dorsel et d'en assumer la tâche' (Corr. xxi. 619) [‘it's also the only recompense I've ever had each time I have been in Dorsel's position and undertaken the tasks that he does’]. Yet writing less than a week later to Halévy, whose strong engagement with the Université Populaire he found problematical, Proust signals his own commitment to ‘le peuple': Pour le peuple nous sommes d'accord, tu ne m'as pas compris parce que je me suis mal expliqué. Mes seuls amis ou à peu près sont des gens du peuple et je trouve que la grâce et le raffinement de leur politesse passe celle des gens du monde infiniment. Je voulais dire pourquoi tes personnages n'appartiennent pas au même peuple, mais ce serait trop long et puis je n'en sais absolument rien' (Corr. xxi. 622) [As far as the people is concerned, we are in agreement; you didn't understand me because I didn't explain myself properly. Almost all the friends I have belong to the ordinary people and for me the grace and refinement of their politeness is far greater than what one finds among society people. I wanted to explain why your characters do not belong to the same people but it would take too long and besides, what do I know about it?] Proust's sense of disarray in the abortive attempt to grasp the radical otherness in social-class difference is palpable. But in a revisitation of the issues, he protests that there is something sterile in excessive displays of kindness to the working class, commending instead the approach of the aristocrat Bertrand de Fénelon who speaks gruffly to his coachman as a mark of egalitarian respect: ‘“Ce cocher est mon égal, quelle raison ai-je de le traiter avec gentillesse, comme un inférieur, je lui dois la même vérité, la même rudesse qu'à toi”’ [‘“This coachman is my equal, why would I treat him with kindness, like an inferior, I owe him the same truth, the same roughness I show you”’] (Corr. xxi. 624).85 An additional remark in Proust's letter suggests an inchoate dialogue about crossPage 22 of 43

 

Contexts for Class class relations: ‘je n'ai encore rien dit de ce que je voulais dire, mais je suis trop fatigué. On pourra en reparler (p.71) un jour' (Corr. xxi. 624) [‘I have yet to articulate properly what I actually mean but I am too tired. We shall speak about it another time’]. Notwithstanding the foundational work of predecessors such as Sand and Zola in the depiction of popular culture, Proust appears to lack the will to engage on the cross-class terrain mapped out by Halévy. Yet he will carry the ideological challenge over into the Recherche, where subaltern lives, principally from the world of domestic service, enjoy considerable exposure. It was doubtless the familiar world of domesticity—and not an urban proletariat that was conscient, or politically aware, in a way the Right found threatening—which Proust had in mind in his line to Halévy cited above: ‘tes personnages n'appartiennent pas au même peuple'.

Ruskin and literacy Side-stepping issues highlighted by the Université Populaire in its attempt to bridge the divide between the worlds of manual and mental work, Proust sought to counter Halévy's accusation of journalistic lightness, arguing that his work involved sustained reflection on serious issues. To that end, he promised to forward Halévy a page from his translation of Sesame and Lilies where, Proust argues, Ruskin's argument complemented Halévy's own.86 Yet working on Sesame and Lilies also confronted Proust directly with the debate about the social extension of knowledge and more specifically literary culture. At the heart of Ruskin's campaign in Part I of Sesame and Lilies, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, is the call for the door into the world of books to be magically thrown open—Sesamelike—to a much wider reading public. Ruskin's tone and message combine paternalism and social progressivism. He works counter-culturally to the extent that he rebukes his reader for tolerating a national situation in which capitalism relentlessly promotes profit and war-making and kills the appetite for serious reading. Ruskin distinguishes between ‘the books of the hour, and the books of all time’: he commends the latter (the great works of literature as he unambiguously sees them) in an invitation to readers to be linguistically curious and resourceful and not to shy away from ‘severe work’: ‘the general gain to your character, in power and precision, will be quite incalculable’.87 With its tone of moral and scholarly exhortation, ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ provides a trenchant critique of what its author saw as the social evil (p.72) undermining national life: ‘A nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it cannot with impunity…go on despising literature, despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence’.88 Just who might have access to this mental world is precisely an issue that exercises Ruskin; or to use his own metaphor, who will eat the bread to be found in a good book, the ‘bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors’?89 The line anticipates strands to be found in the Page 23 of 43

 

Contexts for Class Recherche: the Mille et une Nuits, the life-giving, and in Scheherazade's case life-preserving, properties of narration, the motif in Le Temps retrouvé of literature as the true life. But Ruskin's socialist dream of broadening participation in literary culture has a political dimension that, we may reasonably infer, did not fire the imagination of his French translator. In his conclusion to the lecture, Ruskin constructs a utopian vision in which kings bring the treasure of literature and wisdom to their people: ‘Think what an amazing business that would be! How inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom! That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise!—organize, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers!—find national amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds…What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists of civilized nations should ever come to support literature instead of war!’90 Ruskin's social prescriptiveness is highly moralized, functioning as an expression of idealism with an intended meliorative function. Thus the great libraries he calls for will be available to ‘all clean and orderly persons’.91 Yet by the same token his lecture points up the abuses of capital and radically foregrounds the unjustness of hierarchy present in the division of labour in society: ‘Who is to dig [the land]? Which of us, in brief word, is to do the hard and dirty work for the rest, and for what pay? Who is to do no work, and for what pay?’92 Ruskin grounds his critique in religious and moral issues: ‘How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted psychical quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal soul?’93 In his uncompromising moral scrutiny of the nation, the toil of many becomes the collective price paid to allow an elite soul to form. Yet his response to the appropriation and funnelling at work in the ‘psychical’ economy is ambiguous, for in order to justify the making of (p.73) ‘the beautiful human creature’, such a figure must assume duty and responsibility given the ‘sacrifice of much contributed life’.94 Nor can the legacy of exploitation needed to facilitate the distinction of the few be erased: ‘because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest prey, after the manner of weasels; that is to say, we keep a certain number of clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in order that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling to ourselves’.95 ‘We gentlemen’: by incriminating himself and an intellectual elite, Ruskin underscores the cost of intellectual capital in a capitalist age, a cost that is calculated in terms of the spending of human life required to facilitate the reflection in tranquillity of the few. Proust collaborated with his mother and Marie Nordlinger in his preparation of the Ruskin translation and quite what he and his co-translators made of these outspoken lines of moral censure lies open to conjecture. The collaborative translation provides no gloss on the denunciation of capitalism, an omission that may itself be eloquent given that Page 24 of 43

 

Contexts for Class the translation more generally is replete with, in Proust's own words, ‘un commentaire perpétuel’ [‘a perpetual commentary’].96 The named translator's silence on Ruskin's self-incrimination arguably signals a reluctance to be ideologically drawn on the motif of the thinker as social parasite. Ruskin's adversarial stance on the iniquities of unbridled capitalism came in a language that was foreign to Proust in more ways than one. In a letter to Daniel Halévy, he lumps Péguy and Ruskin together and urges him to get his employer to read the English social commentator—Halévy was working for Péguy at the Cahiers de la Quinzaine: ‘[Péguy] trouvera là un vieux bavard dans son genre, et aussi réactionnaire’ [‘[Péguy] will find in him an old prattler like himself, and every bit as reactionary’].97 Proust's forthright dismissal of the two writers points to their outspoken rejection of modernity.98 Yet the break with the legacy of a writer in whose work Proust had invested four years of his life meant turning away as much from the progressive elements in Ruskin's political (p.74) outlook as from his laboured censoriousness. Proust's bemusement when confronted with the working-class world depicted in Halévy's Un épisode matches his reluctance to get embroiled in Ruskin's repeatedly argued thesis that the sacrificial burden assumed by the subaltern is the precondition for the intellectual's monopoly of ‘thinking and feeling’. In both cases, Proust retreats to, in his image, the bourgeois shore (Corr. xxi. 620), shielded from the socially destabilizing implications of the extension of learning and refusing any interrogation of the workings of capital. Proust's disenchantment with Ruskin leaves us with two diverging styles and outlooks that can be illustrated concretely in relation to their respective positions on the social origins of war. By Ruskin's own reckoning, the four essays that make up Unto This Last represent his best and most durable work, essays in which he advocates the application of morality to the field of political economy in pursuit of social reform. Proust was clearly aware of Ruskin's self-evaluation since he cites in a footnote in Sésame et les Lys Ruskin's verdict that the final essay of Unto This Last, ‘Ad Valorem’, was the work that had cost its author the most and that would most probably not be surpassed.99 The passage from Unto This Last that Ruskin chooses to recycle in the conclusion to ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ posits the tightest of connections between capitalist wealth and war in Europe and is worth quoting at length to demonstrate Ruskin's critique and, no less importantly, to see the material that was passing through the hands of Proust and his co-translators: it is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports unjust wars. Just wars do not need so much money to support them; for most of the men who wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them besides, which make such war costly to the maximum; not to speak of the cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which have not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of mind with; as, at Page 25 of 43

 

Contexts for Class present, France and England, purchasing of each other ten millions sterling worth of consternation, annually.100 (p.75) Ruskin offers sombre analysis of the economic cycle generated by international armament and within which the poor are saddled with the tax burden from capitalism's war. In a scene in Combray that I shall be returning to presently where, prompted by a military march past in the street, Françoise and the gardener discuss the horrors of war, similar terms of reference feature: war seen as a corralling of the population; the workings of ‘base fear' or ‘la peur basse’, to use the term in Proust's translation of Ruskin; the category of those who believe in revolution (a variant on the ‘guerre juste') and who voluntarily go off to fight (RTP I. 87–8; SLT i. 90–1). But in Combray the tone of the debate delivers a parodic effect. The contrast demonstrates in microcosm the gap between Ruskin's conscious, often explicitly biblical, sermonizing and Proust's ironic reaction to the containment of the multitudes and the conspiratorial view of a manipulative State. Or to put the distinction somewhat differently, Ruskin formulates the utopian dream of a nation supporting literature not war—‘the absurd idea’101—whereas in the intermittent flight from social realism, Proust's irony and propensity for reverie project him outside the sphere and language of progressive social transformation.

Combray and the reader-idler Dreyfus and the separation of Church and State rather than the rights of the subaltern were the political issues that deeply exercised the young Proust as we have already seen.102 The contexts for reading social class that I have explored thus far in this chapter show that at various points in the years preceding work on the Recherche, Proust was guarded in his reactions to heavily moralized political messages, both progressive and regressive: in his response to Daniel Halévy's melodramatic tale of working-class cultural alienation; in what we can infer from his response to Bourget's L'Etape; and when he tires of Ruskin's didacticism and prescriptiveness. Certainly the latter's complaints about the excesses of capital did not rouse Proust to (p.76) voice a similar disquiet. Yet Proust's reading of authors such as Stendhal and Flaubert clearly gave him an awareness of the lives of urban and rural proletarians. He was aware, too, of the literary-political ideologies of the century into which he was born, Hugo being a major point of reference in his correspondence and in A la recherche. Drawn also to nineteenth-century English literature, Proust declared himself in a letter to Jacques Rivière in February 1920 to be an admirer of George Eliot and even more so of Hardy [‘Et plus encore Hardyste'] (Corr. xix. 124). Yet the foregrounding of social concerns to be found in Hardy and Hugo, to take two obvious examples, does not carry over into Proust's Recherche.103 In the same letter to Rivière, Proust refers to George Eliot as having been ‘le culte de mon adolescence' [‘a figure I worshipped in my adolescent years’]. Significantly, in a brief, undated essay on Eliot, Proust seeks to characterize her social outlook: ‘Esprit conservateur: pas trop d'instruction, pas trop de chemin de fer, pas trop Page 26 of 43

 

Contexts for Class d'expositions, pas trop d'égalités, etc. Un sentiment sincère pour les préoccupations d'un charpentier, d'un tisseur, etc.' (CSB, 657) [‘A conservative frame of mind: not too much education, not too much railway development, not too much in the way of exhibitions and equalities, etc. A sincere feeling for the concerns of a carpenter, a weaver, etc’]. Proust thus appears to want to posit George Eliot's economic conservatism as well as recognising her sensitivity to the situation of the manual worker. Her caution voiced in relation to rapid social change still nevertheless contrasts with the depiction of the conservative social order in Combray where the Narrator can imagine the grocer's boy as still somehow embodying the naive, angelic look of the medieval statues in the local church. In the early part of the Recherche, medievalism works as an antidote to dialectical materialism. Proust was comfortable with the free market and incurious about its consequences. The period 1870 to 1914 in France has been referred to as ‘the apogee of economic liberalism’, social inequality persisting as the State allowed market forces to operate in a largely unregulated way.104 Moreover the expansion of the urban working class that underpinned economic liberalism does not impinge substantially on the Recherche. One of the signs in Combray of stable, hierarchical class relations involves the boy Marcel reading while the domestic staff busy themselves (p.77) with household chores. It is a moment which points up the Narrator's ambivalence about social hierarchies: Pendant que la fille de cuisine—faisant briller involontairement la supériorité de Françoise …—servait du café qui, selon maman n'était que de l'eau chaude, et montait ensuite dans nos chambres de l'eau chaude qui était à peine tiède, je m'étais étendu sur mon lit, un livre à la main, dans ma chambre qui protégeait en tremblant sa fraîcheur transparente et fragile contre le soleil de l'après-midi (RTP I. 82) [While the kitchen-maid—involuntarily causing Françoise's superiority to shine forth…—served coffee which according to Mama was merely hot water, and then took up to our rooms hot water which was barely lukewarm, I had lain down on my bed, a book in my hand, in my room, which tremulously protected its frail transparent coolness from the afternoon sun (SLT i. 84–5)] Several obvious hierarchies are in play here. There is the pecking order within the servant class itself (as an ‘upper servant', indeed as one of the aristocrats of her class in the Narrator's formulation, Françoise lords it over the recently arrived kitchen-maid). There is also the opposition between the maid's monotonous work situation and the taken-for-granted privilege of Marcel's reading activity. Hierarchy is also expressed through the dissatisfaction of the Page 27 of 43

 

Contexts for Class family who employ her. The coffee is like hot water, while the hot water carried upstairs is not right. But rather than dwelling on the notion of substandard service, the Narrator plays with a string of sense impressions: from coffee to hot water, from hot water to tepid water, from the coolness of the boy's bedroom to the heat outside. By focusing on the chain of sensations, Proust lets go of the bourgeois grumbling about servants’ shortcomings. In the same paragraph, Marcel enjoys the sound that tells him it is summer, namely the buzzing of the flies in his room. The sound they produce is, the hero insists, the chamber music of the summer. Deliberately subverting good bourgeois taste, Proust's Narrator inverts the hierarchical order, ushering in the flies as accomplished musicians. In this provocative aesthetic order, the common is now beautiful and the everyday becomes marvellous. The echo of complaints about poor service fades away, to be replaced by a poetic evocation in which the low (the buzzing flies) becomes high (the cultural capital of chamber music). In Ruskin's hands, we might note in passing, the common housefly becomes an emblem of incomparable freedom and republican assertiveness, embodying an autonomy that is demonstrated by its apparently whimsical indifference to work: ‘He has no work to do—no tyrannical instinct to obey…your fly, free in the air, free in the (p.78) chamber—a black incarnation of caprice—wandering, investigating, flitting, flirting, feasting at his will'.105 Something of this capricious, investigative freedom is present in Proust's young bourgeois male protagonist, for whom reading represents his isolation from the material chores associated with the daily running of the house.106 Free from the carrying and the fetching, he is available for the marvellous distraction of reading. Proust displays no will to politicize the scene, in sharp contrast with Ruskin, whose trenchant views on the issue of access to ‘psychical' energy we considered above. In describing a scene that contains many of the ingredients present in the image of Marcel reading in Combray, Ruskin voices the moral misgivings afflicting the bourgeois reader/writer surrounded by a flurry of manual work. In ‘Servants' Wages', one of his monthly essays contained in Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain and dated 20 February 1873, Ruskin stresses the material conditions that surround and facilitate his own private study. Addressing the workers, he accepts that he shares ‘main modes of thought with those who are not labourers, but either live in various ways by their wits—as lawyers, authors, reviewers, clergymen, parliamentary orators, and the like—or absolutely in idleness on the labour of others,—as the representative squire’.107 Ruskin then asks his assumed workerreader which of them, ‘idler or labourer', is the better and what social mechanism might legitimize the separation: ‘Is your place, or mine, considered as cure and sinecure, the better? And are either of us legitimately in it?’108 If the open doubt about the respective social roles adds to the explicitness of the reflection on hierarchy, Ruskin intensifies the debate by superimposing on the relationship between idler and labourer that of master and servant. The contrast Page 28 of 43

 

Contexts for Class between unbridled bourgeois power and servants' toil is insistently worked by Ruskin: I can set you to any kind of work I like, whether it be good for you or bad… Consider, for instance, what I am doing at this very instant—half-past seven, morning, 25th February, 1873. It is a bitter black frost, the ground deep in snow and more falling. I am writing comfortably in a perfectly warm room; some of my servants were up in the cold at half-past five to get it ready for me; others, a few days ago, were digging my coals near Durham, at the risk of their lives: an old woman brought me my watercresses (p.79) through the snow for breakfast yesterday; another old woman is going two miles through it today to fetch me my letters at ten o'clock. Half a dozen men are building a wall for me to keep the sheep out of my garden…Somebody in the east end of London is making boots for me.109 The spectrum of ambient activity shows the bourgeois subject's heightened awareness of the provision of goods and services that are directed towards him and points to a concern urgently to acknowledge community. Judith Stoddart writes of the tension in Ruskin's work between the ‘egoistic persona' of the author's pamphlets and the attempt to form an encompassing political vision: ‘The model community in Fors Clavigera operated on fixed principles that constrained personal liberty.'110 Ruskin heightens the tension between community and egotism in a concluding reflection where he complains that unlike his servants, who are happy, he is miserable, having been unable to consult a rare acquisition made by the British Library.111 The frustrations of the idler/intellectual are thus solipsistically magnified, their weight contrasting with the easy satisfaction that manual workers are assumed to enjoy. Whereas in Proust's Combray Marcel's reverie is relayed by a Narrator undisturbed by the politics of manual and intellectual labour, Ruskin foregrounds the idea of a community of effort that conspires to facilitate his mental endeavours, which are thus both problematized and showcased. But the connection with community is not missing in Combray for in the sequel to the scene of Marcel's reading, the Narrator draws his protagonist out of the cocoon of reading and engages in perceptive social analysis.

Marcel and the military Combray takes to the street in the scene depicting the spectacle of troops, garrisoned nearby, parading through the town. As the boy protagonist, together with Françoise, rushes into the street, the Narrator captures visually this suggestive cameo from provincial life in the Third Republic: Tandis que nos domestiques, assis en rang sur des chaises en dehors de la grille regardaient les promeneurs dominicaux de Combray et se faisaient voir d'eux, la fille du jardinier … avait aperçu l'éclat des casques. Les Page 29 of 43

 

Contexts for Class domestiques avaient rentré précipitamment leurs chaises car quand les cuirassiers (p.80) défilaient rue Sainte-Hildegarde, ils en remplissaient toute la largeur et le galop des chevaux rasait les maisons…(RTP I. 87) [While our servants, sitting in a row on chairs outside the railings, watched the people of Combray taking their Sunday walk and allowed themselves to be watched in turn, the gardener's daughter…had caught sight of the glitter of helmets. The servants had rushed to bring in their chairs, for when the cuirassiers paraded down the rue Sainte-Hildegarde, they filled its entire breadth, and the cantering horses grazed the houses…(SLT i. 90)] In particular, the scene delivers a legitimation of social hierarchy through a process of reciprocal seeing, each class inviting the gaze of the others. The middle classes are out for a Sunday stroll, the regimented domestic staff sit in a line, and the soldiers pass by, generating an atmosphere of patriotic fervour. In the aftermath of the defeat of 1870, the government of the fledgling Third Republic extended the duration of compulsory military service to five years.112 As Eugen Weber notes, ‘military mentality, like military society, was becoming part of the national way of life’.113 The army, like the State schools of the Third Republic, became a prime ideological vehicle for inculcating republican values and a sense of national identity. Eric Hobsbawm observes that for the civilian citizenry, ‘the colourful street theatre of military display was multiplied for their enjoyment, inspiration and patriotic identification’.114 Marcel's grandfather clearly exemplifies the socialization brought about by military culture, for as we read later in A la recherche, he would stand without fail and remove his hat in deference to the colonel and the standard as the regiment marched past (RTP II. 450; SLT iii. 149). Likewise, Swann stipulates in his will that he be buried with the military honours accruing from the Légion d'honneur awarded to him for service during the war of 1870: ‘Ce qui assembla autour de l'église de Combray tout un escadron de ces cavaliers sur l'avenir desquels pleurait autrefois Françoise, quand elle envisageait la perspective d'une guerre’ (RTP III. 111) [‘This assembled around the church at Combray a whole squadron of those troopers for whose future Françoise used to weep when she contemplated the prospect of a war’ (SLT iv. 116)]. Françoise's grief introduces a discordant note into the republican sublime of which military culture forms a central component in Combray. (p.81) In the scene depicting the cavalry parade through Combray, her emotionalism is blended with the gardener's cynicism: ‘Pauvres enfants’, disait Françoise à peine arrivée à la grille et déjà en larmes; ‘pauvre jeunesse qui sera fauchée comme un pré; rien que d'y penser j'en suis choquée’, ajoutait-elle en mettant la main sur son cœur, là où elle avait reçu ce choc.…‘Je les ai vus en 70; ils n'ont plus peur de la

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Contexts for Class mort dans ces misérables guerres.’…Le jardinier croyait qu'à la déclaration de la guerre on arrêtait tous les chemins de fer. ‘Pardi, pour pas qu'on se sauve’, disait Françoise. Et le jardinier: ‘Ah! Ils sont malins’, car il n'admettait que la guerre ne fût pas une espèce de mauvais tour que l'Etat essayait de jouer au peuple et que, si on avait eu le moyen de le faire, il n'est pas une seule personne qui n'eût filé. (RTP I. 87–8; Proust's italics) [‘Poor children’, said Françoise, having barely reached the railings and already in tears; ‘poor boys, to be mown down like grass in a meadow; the very thought of it gives me a shock', she added, putting her hand on her heart, where she had received that shock.…‘I saw them in ‘70; in those wretched wars, they've no fear of death left in them’…The gardener believed that when war was declared, they would stop all the railway trains. ‘Of course! So we doesn't run off', said Françoise. And the gardener: ‘Oh, they're clever ones!’ because he would not admit that war was not a kind of bad trick that the State tried to play on the people, and that if only they had the means to do it, there was not a single person who would not have run away from it. (SLT i. 90–1)] The powerful emotional response of Françoise towards the conscripts is conditioned largely by her still vivid memory of the Franco-Prussian War. In the exchange, set to the backdrop of the march-past, between two members of the subaltern class, Françoise is appalled to think that war will decimate a whole generation. With a deference that is gendered, she assumes the gardener's knowledge to be superior. Yet they agree that the closure of the railway network will prevent mass defection. The domestic class thus voices a suspicion directed against a manipulative State cynically using war to corral the population. Crucially, however, the cook and the gardener's discussion about the morality of State-generated violence and the exploitation of social subordinates is effectively neutralized by the Narrator. Indeed their exchange is presented as trivial melodrama, as a form of conversation in the wings that is held in check in a narrative in which Françoise is derided for believing that her mental shock has a precise physiological location. Thus, while the passing of the troops signals a temporary democratization in the life of Combray as servants and masters congregate in the street (p.82) to share the spectacle, the multiple viewpoints drawn into the narration of this episode, not least through the issues raised by Françoise and the gardener, allow us to see the workings of a social dialectic. Indeed the views of the Narrator's social inferiors could be read either as the paranoid responses of an uneducated Page 31 of 43

 

Contexts for Class servant class or as astute, subversive remarks that seize a socio-historical reality. The regimental march-past, at one level a break in the routine of Combray, thus also throws up issues to do with multiple forms of power (politics, gender, and the centrality both of military culture and class). As the dust literally settles in the busy, almost cinematographic street scene that is in part carnivalesque, in part clouded by powerful emotions raised by the spectre of war, the Narrator works the transition back to routine and pattern: ‘Mais Françoise se hâtait de rejoindre ma tante, je retournais à mon livre, les domestiques se réinstallaient devant la porte à regarder tomber la poussière et l'émotion qu'avaient soulevées les soldats’ (RTP I. 88) [‘But Françoise would hurry back to my aunt, I would return to my book, the servants would settle in front of the gate again to watch as the dust subsided along with the emotion roused by the soldiers’ (SLT i. 91)]. Narrative closure is achieved as Françoise and Marcel resume their everyday practices and the unnamed domestics linger in the street, looking on in silence having lived the intense sociality delivered by the march-past. One of the agents of closure for the narrative sequence is the Narrator's choice of marine metaphor as he likens the domestics still sitting round for what is left of their spell of Sunday leisure to seaweed and shells washed up on a beach. The force of the analogy could be seen to relegate social inferiors to the flotsam of nature but an alternative, non-hierarchical reading of this closure is also possible. In this perspective, the everyday activities that go to make up the scene—the Narrator narrates, the boy Marcel enjoys his readerly pleasure, Françoise tends to Tante Léonie's needs, other servants sit and look— would function, applying Michael Sheringham's work on the practices of everyday life, as ‘analogues of one another'. Drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau and Stanley Cavell, Sheringham points out how within ‘the overall logic of practice…the connection to the ordinary…makes various modes part of one practice. As Cavell writes with regard to a passage from Thoreau: “each calling…is isomorphic with every other. This is why building a house and hoeing and writing and reading are allegories and measures of one another”’.115 In relation to Combray, the affirmation and unconcealment of the ordinary, (p.83) to draw again on Sheringham, allows Proust's Narrator to engage with and lay bare the everyday practices that are constitutive of otherness.116 How we might read the modes of representation of sociality in Proust is a question addressed centrally by Jacques Dubois who situates the author's work somewhere between sociology and what Emmanuel Levinas terms a ‘poet[ry] of the social’. Positing the existence of ‘une sociologie amoureuse', Dubois argues that if for Proust the social is a genuine object of study, it is always as an object of desire and an object of reverie.117 Read from this angle, the spectacle of the military parade through the provincial streets thus both functions as social documentarism and as an invitation to reverie, an invitation that is availed of

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Contexts for Class democratically as the domestics idle for a while after the event in an expression of autonomy which the Narrator implicitly acknowledges.118 A variant on Françoise's peasant-style lament in Combray for the young generation of soldiers filing past comes in Le Côté de Guermantes where, now in Paris, she longs for the provincial world of Combray. She pines for the old house, rather like the conscript, Proust writes, who ends up committing suicide, so much does he miss his girlfriend or his native pays. The technique of the suggestive detail again summons up the world of the Third Republic in which both the army and urbanization spelt migration and nostalgia. As Weber observes, the army became the vehicle for an acculturation that fostered a sense of national identity.119 We see in A la recherche both the populist enthusiasm for the army in Combray and also a more intellectual tribute paid to military culture in Le Côté de Guermantes I when the Narrator spends time with the officer class in the garrison town of Doncières. Marcel's immersion in barrack life and in the culture of field manoeuvres and military strategy again connects with the ideological structures of the Third Republic, in which, as Weber explains, ‘at least for a while, the army could become what its enthusiasts had hoped for: the school of the fatherland’.120 Proust thus recognizes in the nation's military culture a powerful form of socialization, the relevant (p.84) pages in Le Côté de Guermantes I indeed demonstrating how the army provided a stage for Proust's generation that allowed the citizen ‘to act out solidarity and patriotism’.121 The contexts for class explored in this chapter allow us to nuance the impression left by the socially conservative instincts of the young Proust. As a Figaro journalist in 1904, he was clearly drawn to the social paternalism of the Orléanist Comte d'Haussonville, whom he hails as a ‘courageously “liberal”’ figure (CSB, 486). D'Haussonville argued that there could be no rowing back from the new polity and Proust implicitly sided with him against Bourget, whose jaundiced view of democracy derived from a politics of unalloyed elitism designed to shore up what Bourget proffers as the eternal law of societies: ‘Humanum paucis vivit genus', humanity, that is, living for and by its elites.122 The reactionary assertion provides us with a benchmark against which to read the positions adopted by Proust and his contemporaries. On the question of social class migration, the Recherche will come to provide a counterpoint to the obdurate defence of class immobility in L'Etape. Bourget's trenchant chaptertitle in Sociologie et Littérature, ‘Nécessité des classes', is indeed echoed in Combray through the caste-like system endorsed by ‘les bourgeois d'alors' (RTP I. 16; my emphasis) [‘middle-class people in those days’ (SLT i. 16)]; yet the temporal marker alone suggests the Narrator's detachment from that mindset. Not that this equates to a socially egalitarian position on Proust's part. For he steers clear of the world of the Université Populaire as the 1907 correspondence with Daniel Halévy demonstrates, situating himself unselfconsciously on the ‘rivage bourgeois'. Likewise he implicitly rejects Ruskin's call to the bourgeois writer to acknowledge the social price paid by the subaltern to ensure the Page 33 of 43

 

Contexts for Class availability of sufficient ‘psychical' energy to the few. In the young Marcel's pursuit of literature, there is no guilt, no Ruskinian-style moralizing accruing from a sense of having exploited the ancillary staff whose work underpins bourgeois comfort. Rather, the musings of the young idler-reader in Combray and the comings and goings of domestic servants are held together, largely without tension, as segments of an uncontested provincial order. Notes:

(1) [‘That was one of Taine's most cherished ideas: the necessary slowness in moving up the social scale’], Paul Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature (Paris: Plon, 1906), 97–8. The work forms the third volume of Bourget's Etudes et portraits, 3 vols. (2) [‘One generation is long enough to encompass the change, which in former times took centuries, by which a middle-class name like Colbert became an aristocratic one’]. Quotation taken from Le Temps retrouvé, RTP IV. 537; SLT vi. 268. (3) [‘The Necessity of Classes’]. Bourget uses this title for one of the sections of his ‘Notes sociales', which forms Part I of Sociologie et Littérature, 140. (4) S. Elwitt, The Making of the Third French Republic: Class and Politics in France, 1868–1884 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975), p. x. (5) While complying with Norpois's view that seeing La Berma perform will be a positive experience for Marcel, Marcel's father had been disposed to seeing theatre‐going as a form of ‘inutilités' or wasting of time. Likewise Norpois's language reflects the work ethic when he endorses Marcel's desire to be a writer: choosing that path, Marcel will ‘exercer autant d'action…que dans les ambassades' (RTP I. 431–2) [‘exercise as much influence…as any diplomat’ (SLT ii. 12)]. (6) Elwitt, The Making of the Third French Republic, 10. (7) Proust was writing under the pseudonym ‘Horatio’. (8) Gabriel-Paul-Othenin de Cléron, Comte d'Haussonville's works include Etudes sociales: Misère et remèdes (Paris: Calmann‐Lévy, 1886); Etudes sociales: Socialisme et Charité (Paris: Calmann‐Lévy, 1895), and Salaires et misères de femmes (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1900). (9) See Gilles Le Béguec and Jacques Prévotat, ‘1898–1918: L'Eveil à la modernité', in Jean-François Sirinelli (ed.), Les Droites françaises: De la Révolution à nos jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 383–503: 461–2.

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Contexts for Class (10) On the specific issue of property, Jaurès's advocacy of social gradualism is reflected in the section title ‘Evolution révolutionnaire’ in his Etudes socialistes. See Jean Jaurès, Etudes socialistes (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1979 (reprint of the 1902 Paris edn.)), ed. Madeleine Rebérioux. (11) P. Bourget, L'Etape (Paris: Plon, 1902). (12) The movement westwards within the capital reflected the Weil family's social rise. See Bloch-Dano, Mme Proust, 61–2, 64, 96. (13) Ibid. 62. (14) [‘a simple farmer. He had a very intelligent son. He wanted to turn him into a bourgeois. Why? Out of pride. That day, he despised his caste, and he found an accomplice in the State which the Revolution has given us. All these laws by which we have lived for a hundred years and the spirit of which is to level out the classes, to even out for everyone the starting point and to enable the individual—taken out of the family—to rise up the social scale immediately, these laws are not healthy or generous. They are laws based on pride’], P. Bourget, L'Etape, 24. (15) [‘a reconciliation of the country and the royal race consubstantial with its ten centuries of history’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 152. (16) [‘How is one to manage the masses? How does one channel their passions and interests? How does one prevent the power of the people degenerating into the brutality of the crowd?…One seeks principles of compensatory order which allow one to ward off the joint menace of “number” and social atomization’]. Rosanvallon adds that this was the context that saw the birth of sociology, with Durkheim, Pareto, Tarde, and Le Bon all addressing the same question. In an analogous way, racist theories and phrenology proposed organizing principles based on biological notions of categorization. See P. Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 377. (17) Much earlier in the novel, the bourgeois Legrandin's outburst against the nobility (he says that the revolution should have guillotined them all (RTP. I. 67; SLT i, 70)) is deemed to be in bad taste by Marcel's grandmother. Legrandin adds that snobbery was what St Paul was referring to when he spoke of the sin that was unforgivable (Hebrews 6: 4–6); see RTP I. 1135, editorial n. 1 to I. 67. (18) [‘the omnipotence of personal merit. Such merit only becomes fruitful and beneficial when it is familial merit. Nature, which is more powerful than utopia and does not allow us to go against its laws, obliges all families who would do violence to it, to undertake in suffering (if they must establish themselves) the stage [étape] which they have not gone through in health’], Bourget, L'Etape, 515–16. Page 35 of 43

 

Contexts for Class (19) [‘the transfer across classes’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 97. (20) [‘democratic growth as understood and undergone by our country, in which the individual has become the social unit’], Bourget, L'Etape, 51. (21) Bourget's dismissal of d'Haussonville's response to L'Etape appeared in two open letters of 1902 first published in Le Gaulois under the titles ‘Nécessité des classes' (27 July 1902) and ‘Le Mirage démocratique' (15 Sept. 1902). They were subsequently published jointly under the title ‘L'Ascension sociale’ in Bourget's Sociologie et Littérature, 140–68. D'Haussonville's pieces addressed to Bourget, ‘A l'auteur de l'Etape' and ‘Patriciat et Démocratie', were reproduced in his collection of essays Varia (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1904), 103–14, 115–25. (22) [‘Your zeal is too great. Allow it to be tamed’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 104. (23) Ibid. 108. (24) [‘The laws which permit this social rise seem perfectly fair to me and facilitate in my view not pride but the legitimate ambition that everyone may have of developing one's faculties and gifts. Whether it be in the area of the arts, literature, or the sciences, do you believe that genius and talent are the preserve of the sons of bourgeois who have grown rich or noblemen? Do you regret the fact that someone like Pasteur did not restrict his ambition to becoming a notary in the small town where his father was a tanner?’], ibid. 109–10. (25) The Gospel reference is to John 12: 8: ‘You will always have the poor among you'; Comte d'Haussonville, Socialisme et Charité, ‘Préface', p. ix. (26) [‘By the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food’], Genesis 3: 19. (27) [‘our arrogant democracy’]. (28) [‘all the infidelities and ingratitude to which it has been subjected’]. (29) Comte d'Haussonville, Socialisme et Charité, 497. (30) [‘those doctors of solidarity and altruism’], ibid. 406. (31) See d'Haussonville's preface to a study of the sweatshop system by Théodore Cotelle, Le ‘Sweating System': Etude sociale (Angers: Lachèse, 1904), p. xiii. (32) [‘Democracy is evil; democracy is death.’] (33) [‘I am immediately confronted by a major fact: democracy…It is not therefore a question of whether the phenomenon of democracy pleases certain

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Contexts for Class temperaments or not…rather one must accept it because of its universality’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 117, 118. (34) [‘restoration of national energies’]. (35) Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 151. (36) [‘absolute equality and…pure democracy’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 113. (37) ‘la République plébiscitaire’. (38) Othenin's article ‘La République intégrale’ (Varia, 237–53) politely takes issue with Jules Lemaître who had advocated election of the President of the Republic by direct universal suffrage in L'Echo de Paris. Othenin rebuts the idea that popular endorsement will ensure wise choices, citing the example of Boulanger. (39) [‘the ideal of a society of rational actors’]. (40) [‘a singularly questionable republican philosophy of democracy’], Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, 380. (41) [‘democratic mirage’], Bourget, Sociologie et littérature, 154. (42) [‘high culture’], Bourget, L'Etape, 51. (43) [‘a working class that is so intelligent and refined and does not live on bread alone, to use God's word’]. (44) [‘members of the working class also live substantially on thought. Is it not arrogant to deny them this by saying to them: “Reading, writing, counting, and learning a trade: these are the only ambitions you are allowed to have. As for the pleasures of the mind, they are reserved for us, the noblemen of letters. They are not made for you”?’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 112. (45) See e.g. Alfred Fouillée, Les Etudes classiques et la démocratie (Paris: A. Colin, 1898), quoted in Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, 376–8. Antoine Compagnon discusses Gustave Lanson's critique of the culture of the Sorbonne which Lanson saw as defending bourgeois class interests. See A. Compagnon, La Troisième Republique des lettres: De Flaubert à Proust (Paris: Seuil, 1983), 134– 5. (46) [‘manage to think in abstract terms’], P. Bourget, Portraits d'écrivains et Notes d'esthétique (Paris: Plon, 1905), vol. i of Etudes et portraits, 143. (47) [‘The gift of intellectual metamorphosis was denied [Vallès] by the very energy of animal sensation’], ibid. 144. Page 37 of 43

 

Contexts for Class (48) [‘literature, it seized hold of him and he is its work’], ibid. 155. (49) [‘in [Vallès] whose sensibility and intelligence are still too…brutally plebeian, education is wounding. In the other writer [Taine], race has reached the point of maturity where education is a thing of culture’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 97. (50) [‘we see constantly today this conflict between the law as inscribed in the nature of things and laws that are inscribed in our codes’], ibid. 138; Bourget's italics. (51) Ibid. 139. (52) [‘the most complete development possible of one's faculties’], ibid. 123. Bourget refers to the rudimentary literacy and numeracy of urban workers, ibid. 133. On the spread of literacy in France between the Reformation and the late nineteenth century, see François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Lire et Ecrire; L'Alphabétisation des Français de Calvin à Jules Ferry (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1977), 2 vols. (53) [‘the doctrine of systematic movement up and down the social scale’]. (54) [‘lucid, conscious thought’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 127–8, 131. Significantly, the term déclassement is used by Proust and his contemporaries to signal both social rises and falls. See e.g. ibid. 145. (55) [‘purely individual movement up the social scale was a principle of personal unhappiness and social danger. This encapsulates the moral message of these four classic novels’], ibid. 144. (56) Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, 125–6; quoted in Naomi Schor, George Sand and Idealism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 87. (57) For earlier discussion of Marcel's grandmother's gift of works by Sand, see above, Introduction. (58) Schor, George Sand and Idealism, 93; italics in the original. (59) Translation modified. As we saw earlier with Bourget's L'Etape, the term déclassement signalled movement both up and down the social scale for Proust's contemporaries. See above, nn. 53 and 54. (60) See below, Ch. 4. (61) [‘these perilous groupings, which reflect the whims of young bourgeois playing the role of social apostles with no thought for the consequences’], Bourget, L'Etape, 80.

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Contexts for Class (62) [‘freedom in art, freedom in society’]. (63) [‘Tolerance and freedom’], V. Hugo, Hernani (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 30–2. (64) [‘literary worker’], C. Prendergast, The Classic: Sainte-Beuve and the Nineteenth-Century Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 213, 301. For Proust's allusion to Bourget's endorsement of Sainte-Beuve, see CSB, 220. (65) [‘The division of labour which assigns action to some and thought to others is thus always in the nature of things’], Lerminier, ‘De la littérature des ouvriers', Revue des deux mondes, 28 (1841), 975; cited in Prendergast, The Classic, 224. (66) [‘worker intellectuals’], A. Fouillée, Les Etudes classiques et la démocratie, 163, quoted in Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen, 379. (67) [‘the work of national deformation begun in 1789’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 121. (68) In 1913, the year of publication of Du côté de chez Swann, three quarters of the total state expenditure on education in France went on primary education, so underdeveloped was the post-primary sector (primary education had itself been made free and compulsory in 1881). See T. Kemp, ‘Economic and Social Policy in France’, in Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, viii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 691–751: 735. (69) [‘inane utopians’], [‘intellectual charity’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 121, 133, 146. (70) [‘these phoney links between intellectual workers and manual workers’]. (71) [‘It's true that I do not believe that between these two races of workers there is an irreconcilable divide and that intellectual workers debase themselves by trying to build a bridge that will bring them together’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 111. The Bourget reference is to L'Etape, 78. (72) [‘show these simple minds intellectual charity which is more meritorious than material charity since it better responds to the theological sense of the word which implies the idea of love’], Comte d'Haussonville, Varia, 112. (73) Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, i. Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38. (74) Le Béguec and Prévotat, ‘1898–1918: L'Eveil à la modernité', 462. (75) D. Halévy, Un épisode (Paris: Cahiers de la Quinzaine (sixième cahier de la neuvième série), 1907). Page 39 of 43

 

Contexts for Class (76) [‘Dear friends, Allow me to dedicate this tale to you; in it you will recognize the traces of experience that we shared and the memory of a collective labour that we most certainly do not renounce’], ibid. p. 9. (77) [League for the Rights of Man], [Union for Moral Action], S. Berstein, ‘Préface' to Sébastien Laurent, Daniel Halévy: Du libéralisme au traditionalisme (Paris: Grasset, 2001), 14. (78) Referring to the total ignorance of working-class sensibilities afflicting many intellectuals involved in the Université Populaire movement, Lucien Mercier cites the case of Daniel Halévy wearing coarse clogs in an attempt to look more proletarian, L. Mercier, ‘Universités populaires’, in Jacques Julliard and Michel Winock, (eds.), Dictionnaire des intellectuels français (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 1132– 5: 1134. I am indebted to Mercier for the material on the Université Populaire used here. (79) [‘there is no art for the worker, there is no science for the worker’], Halévy, Un episode, in id., Luttes et problèmes. Apologie pour notre passé. Un épisode. Histoire de quatre ans (Paris: M. Rivière, 1911), 182. (80) Proust's reticence in relation to the depiction of the poor in Halévy's text recalls the lines in Baudelaire's prose poem ‘Les Yeux des pauvres’: ‘Ces gens-là me sont insupportables avec leurs yeux ouverts comme des portes cochères! Ne pourriez-vous pas prier le maître du café de les éloigner d'ici?'; quoted in Antoine Compagnon, Proust entre deux siècles (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 156 [‘I cannot bear those people, with their eyes open wide as carriage entrances! Couldn't you please ask the head waiter to make them leave the café?’], translation taken from Compagnon, Proust Between Two Centuries, trans. Richard E. Goodkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 134. (81) [‘the separation of classes and cultures’], Halévy, Luttes et problèmes, 11. (82) See Kolb's editorial note, Corr. ii. 331. (83) Proust also cites here the more innocent case, he says, of his friend Jean Lazard (son of the banker Simon Lazard) who also suffers from the application to life of ‘l'intelligence littéraire' [‘literary intelligence’] (Corr. ii. 330). (84) [‘The people needs everyday truths and not abstractions’], Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 138. (85) Fénelon's line will come to be echoed by Robert de Saint-Loup in a similar exchange with Marcel in the Recherche (RTP II. 138; SLT ii. 361). See below, Ch 4. (86) J. Ruskin, Sésame et les Lys, Traduction, Notes et Préface de M. Proust (Paris: Mercure de France, 1906), 92. See editor's note, Corr. xxi. 625 n. 5. Page 40 of 43

 

Contexts for Class (87) J. Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (1865; London: George Allen, 1901), 11, 25. (88) Ibid. 50. (89) Ibid. 82. (90) Ibid. 78–9; Ruskin's italics. (91) Ibid. 81. (92) Ibid. 85. (93) Ibid. (94) Ibid. 86. We find an echo of this in Le Temps retrouvé, where the Narrator comes to conceive of the lives of others as having been sacrificially given to him. I shall discuss this in Ch 7. (95) Sesame and Lilies, 85–6. (96) Sésame et les Lys, 8. (97) Marcel Proust, Correspondance avec Daniel Halévy, ed Anne Borrel and Jean-Pierre Halévy (Paris: Editions de Fallois, 1992), 95. Letter dated between mid-Oct. and mid-Dec. 1907. (98) For a discussion of Péguy's rejection of modernity and the Third Republic, see Antoine Compagnon, Les Anti-modernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), Pt. II, ch 3, ‘Péguy entre Georges Sorel et Jacques Maritain', 214–52. (99) Sésame et les Lys, 157 n. 2, 158. (100) Sesame and Lilies, 79–80. To quote from the French translation of the original: ‘L'argent des capitalistes […] soutient les guerres injustes. Les guerres justes ne demandent pas tant d'argent, parce que la plupart des hommes qui les font les font gratis, mais pour une guerre injuste il faut acheter les âmes et les corps des hommes, et en plus leur fournir l'outillage de guerre le plus perfectionné, ce qui fait qu'une telle guerre exige le maximum de dépenses; sans parler de ce que coûtent la peur basse, les soupçons et les colères entre nations qui ne trouvent pas dans toute [sic] leurs multitudes assez de douceur et de loyauté pour s'acheter une heure de tranquillité d'esprit. Ainsi à l'heure qu'il est, la France et l'Angleterre s'achètent l'une à l'autre dix millions de livres sterlings de consternation par an’, Sésame et les Lys, 158. Mindful of Ruskin's outspokenness about the cost of war, it is revealing to read a discarded fragment from Cahier 74, in which Proust similarly catalogues the expenditure incurred by the French war effort and insists that such copious material provision contrasts cruelly with the fate that awaits the nation's troops. The development is Page 41 of 43

 

Contexts for Class reproduced as the first part of Esquisse XXII, RTP IV. 789–90. See Schmid, ‘Ideology and Discourse in Proust: The Making of “Monsieur de Charlus pendant la guerre”’, 965–6. (101) Sesame and Lilies, 79. Whilst allowing for two very different national contexts, and Ruskin's paternalist stance against democracy notwithstanding, his call for popular education can be seen as being analogous to the promotion of la démopédie in the Third French Republic. (102) See above, Introduction. (103) Proust commented on the depth of his Anglophile literary tastes in a letter to Robert de Billy in the spring of 1910, observing that Hardy's The Well Beloved resembled his own work. He also confessed that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss moved him deeply and that even if Ruskin hated the work, he, Proust, managed to reconcile all these ‘dieux ennemis' [‘rival gods’] in the Pantheon of his admiration (Corr. x. 54–5). See Henri Bonnet, Marcel Proust de 1907 à 1914 (Paris: Nizet, 1971), 103. (104) Kemp, ‘Economic and Social Policy in France’, 726, 738. (105) J. Ruskin, The Cestus of Aglaia, ch. VI, para. 74, quoted in Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today (London: Penguin, 1967), 302. (106) The piece of furniture Marcel sits in itself conveys the sense of his being cocooned: ‘une petite guérite en sparterie et en toile au fond de laquelle j'étais assis’ (RTP I. 83) [‘a hooded chair of wicker and canvas, in the depths of which I would sit, (SLT i. 85)]. (107) J. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera (London: George Allen, 1896), 4 vols, ii. 85. (108) Ibid. (109) Ibid. ii. 85–6. (110) Judith Stoddart, Ruskin's Culture Wars: ‘Fors Clavigera' and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 48. (111) Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, ii. 86–7. (112) In Jan. 1873, the period of military service was extended, conscripts serving for five years. Legislation of July 1889 saw the period reduced to three years. (113) Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870–1914 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1977), 544.

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Contexts for Class (114) E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875–1914 (1987; London: Abacus, 1994), 305. (115) M. Sheringham, Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 230–1. (116) Ibid. 229 (117) [‘an amorous sociology’], Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 22. Dubois explains: ‘Si chez [Proust] la socialité se pense véritablement, c'est toujours en tant qu'objet de désir et qu'objet de rêverie’ [‘If there is a genuine reflection on sociality in [Proust's] work, it is always as an object of desire and an object of reverie’], ibid. 14. (118) Pertinent to the more general issue of the autonomy of the subaltern and her/his capacity for contemplation and reverie is Malcolm Bowie's observation that Proust's Narrator experiences difficulty in trying to ‘imaginatively reinvent the spheres in which [power] is exercised by others’, Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 169. (119) Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, 302. (120) Ibid. 298. (121) Elwitt, The Making of the Third French Republic, 294. Taken along with the social conservatism of Combray, the representation of army life helps confirm Michael Sprinker's point that the social focus in the Recherche is ‘broadly in line with the historical record of class struggles during the period 1871 to 1914’, M. Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu' and the Third French Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156. (122) Bourget, Sociologie et Littérature, 124.

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0004

Abstract and Keywords The chapter sets out to demonstrate how Pierre Bourdieu’s claim that ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ finds a powerful literary instantiation in Proust’s Un amour de Swann. It is argued that in tracking the intensity of Charles Swann’s obsessive love for his social inferior Odette de Crécy, Proust’s Narrator is simultaneously drawn into a reconstruction of powerful aggressions that cluster tightly around issues to do with class, taste, and cultural production. The chapter attempts to show that the bourgeois teller is also drawn into the prescriptiveness and thereby comes, applying Bourdieu’s formulation, to classify himself. Yet the Narrator’s own judgements and those of other characters become a textually productive activity and demonstrate the workings of a form of social psychoanalysis. Keywords:   Un amour de Swann, Pierre Bourdieu, taste, social classification, social prescriptiveness, snobbery

Taste as social marker One of the characteristics of the class-conscious mindset, as Proust's novel illustrates, is the application of criteria of taste which regularly function as part of the terrain of social control. In Pierre Bourdieu's formulation, ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’2 The maxim, drawn from the introduction to his work on the ‘social critique of the judgement of taste’, finds no more compelling literary instantiation than Un amour de Swann. Proust's novella explores issues of cultural taste that are aggressively foregrounded as explicit markers of rival social identities. Since the text's confrontational exposure of the ‘clan Verdurin’ Page 1 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann is constructed centrally around issues of taste, Un amour de Swann delivers, if we accept Bourdieu's argument, a form of social psychoanalysis to which sociology approximates especially in its analysis of taste.3 In tracking the intensity of Charles Swann's obsessive love for his social inferior Odette de Crécy, Proust's Narrator is simultaneously drawn into a reconstruction of powerful aggressions that cluster tightly around issues to do with class, taste, and cultural production. But the bourgeois teller is also drawn into the classifying and thereby comes, applying Bourdieu's formulation, to classify himself. Thus his own judgements and those of other characters become both a textually productive activity and a demonstration of the power play surrounding rival social values and positions. I shall resist the temptation to begin my exploration of the novella by considering the opening lines which transparently draw out, and socially situate, the petty insecurities of the Verdurins as identified by (p.86) the Narrator. To start in this way, in Proust's way as it were, might appear to endorse uncritically the Narrator's implied self-positioning and prescriptions for the apportioning of social value in what Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen sees as the vaudeville-style evocation of the Verdurin salon in the first volume of the novel.4 Instead, I shall take as my starting point a moment in the text where a no less insecure and petty Swann (the prototype for Marcel) delivers a string of paranoid judgements laced with social-class prejudice. These are prompted by his concern to identify the author of a letter he receives in which Odette stands accused of serial sexual infidelities. Just as the anonymous letter claims that Odette's sexual promiscuity entails a spectrum of human contacts (men, women, the aristocrat de Forcheville, the painter in the Verdurin salon, clients in the brothel), so Swann, through the channel of free indirect style, directs his suspicions about its authorship across a wide social range. Although initially reassuring himself that his social equals or near-equals—the aristocratic Charlus, the Prince des Laumes, and M. d'Orsan— are all unlikely suspects, he then finds reasons to incriminate each of them: Charlus, who, while very fond of Swann, is branded the predictable neurotic (‘Au fond, cette race d'hommes est la pire de toutes’) [‘Really, that kind of man was the worst of all’]; the Prince des Laumes, ‘homme insensible, d'une autre humanité’ [‘an insensitive man, of another order of humanity’], whose actions are ultimately less fathomable than Charlus's and who is therefore suspect; and M. d'Orsan, always steady in his cordial dealings with Swann, yet fundamentally a dishonourable person (RTP I. 351; SLT i. 359). From this weighing up of his own social kind, Swann's scrutiny fans out: he suspects his driver Rémi, who, doubtless because of his poor literacy, Swann infers, ‘n'aurait pu qu'inspirer la lettre’ (RTP I. 352) [‘could merely have inspired the letter’ (SLT i. 360)], and also another member of his domestic staff, Lorédan: ‘Et puis comment ne pas supposer que nos domestiques, vivant dans une situation inférieure à la nôtre, ajoutant à notre fortune et à nos défauts des richesses et des vices imaginaires Page 2 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann pour lesquels ils nous envient et nous méprisent, se trouveront fatalement amenés à agir autrement que des gens de notre monde?’ (RTP I. 352) [‘And then how can we help but imagine that our servants, living in a situation inferior to ours, adding to our wealth and our weaknesses imaginary riches and vices for which they envy and despise us, will find (p.87) themselves inevitably led to act in a way different from the people of our own class?’ (SLT i. 360)]. The unambiguous ‘notre monde’ implies a powerful social complicity involving a whole class to whose values and outlook the reader is invited, and indeed assumed, to subscribe. In the act of interpellation signalled by the ‘comment ne pas supposer…?’, Swann both conveys and expects a sharing of social-class values and judgements. Domestics inhabit a social imaginary which inflates the wealth and augments the faults of their masters; in turn, the social imaginary of the bourgeoisie leaves the servants fated to display disdain and forms of behaviour that prejudice the well-being of their masters. In A la recherche, to quote from Jacques Dubois, ‘les clivages sociaux sont marqués d'une sourde violence’.5 If, in Swann's hunt for the sender of the letter, the politics of servants’ envy is adduced as another plausible motive, he then switches his attention to the Narrator's grandfather, whose ideas of bourgeois respectability could easily have driven him, Swann surmises, to write the letter in which Odette's sexual misdemeanours are catalogued. Yet there are further twists in the social kaleidoscope born out of jealousy: it could be Bergotte, or the painter-friend of the Verdurins, or the Verdurins themselves, he asserts, all of which justifies in his eyes the wariness of social superiors, ‘la sagesse des gens du monde de ne pas vouloir frayer avec ces milieux artistes où de telles choses sont possibles’ (RTP I. 352) [‘the wisdom of society people in not wanting to mix in those artistic circles in which such things are possible’ (SLT i. 360)]. Disavowal of this latter position follows straight after with bohemian artists vindicated for their honesty and the burden of suspicion redirected against members of the aristocracy who are motivated by ‘le manque d'argent, le besoin de luxe, la corruption des plaisirs’ (RTP I. 352) [‘the lack of money, the craving for luxury, the corrupting influence of their pleasures’ (SLT i. 360)]. The effect produced is of a concatenation of suspicions, with culpability directed out against a range of social groupings: ‘[Swann] ne voyait pas plus de raison pour que cette scélératesse fût cachée dans le tuf—inexploré d'autrui—du caractère de l'homme tendre que de l'homme froid, de l'artiste que du bourgeois, du grand seigneur que du valet. Quel critérium adopter pour juger les hommes?’ (RTP I. 352) [‘[Swann] could see no more reason why that villainy should be hidden in the bedrock—unexplored by any other person—of the character of the affectionate man rather than of the cold man, the artist rather than the bourgeois, the great lord rather than the valet. What criterion should one adopt for judging (p.88) men?’ (SLT i. 360)].6 Swann's paranoia generates a series of socio-moral portraits, characteriological types and assertions framed Page 3 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann in part in terms of class but the overall effect is one of contradiction, leaving Swann still unable to establish sure bases for his judgement of others. The trigger—sexual jealousy—and what that produces, namely an abortive attempt at establishing social and other categorizations, may be read as trailing a more general tension in the Recherche between intensely private emotion and its social situation. The search for broader taxonomies within which to place this emotion and the gesturing towards social exhaustivity (aristocracy, bourgeoisie, servant class) ensure that Swann's typecasting represents a form of eccentric social observation, a hybrid that includes elements of objectification and blindness. But the antagonisms that proliferate in his intense speculation point to a conflicted social landscape within which he is necessarily situated, even if his longing as a jealous lover is to be evacuated from it. Jealousy in Un amour de Swann, as Malcolm Bowie has incisively demonstrated, is often prized for its cognitive power.7 Proust's Narrator evokes ‘ces inspirations de jaloux, analogues à celle qui apporte au poète ou au savant, qui n'a encore qu'une rime ou qu'une observation, l'idée ou la loi qui leur donnera toute leur puissance’ (RTP I. 355) [‘those inspirations common to jealous men, analogous to that which reveals to a poet or scientist who has still only one rhyme or one observation, the idea or law that will give them all their effective power’ (SLT i. 363)]. Shaping the investigative energies that Swann can muster is the fact that his desire is imbricated in a social totality. As a subject who interrogates his milieu, Swann seeks meaning. His quest can be linked to what Stephen Heath observes of discourse, that it entails ‘the relation of an order of meanings and a subject posed as such in that order, a positioning, a certain representation to the individual of the place of his or her sense, his or her desire’.8 Swann's desire requires, and derives from, such a social ‘positioning’. By the same token, he is prey to the lack of moral fibre in individuals such as Charlus who thereby become suspects in Swann's search. Indeed it is a similar drop in ‘le niveau de sa moralité’ [‘his moral standards’] which paves the way for the much-quoted final lines of Un amour de Swann where Swann consigns Odette to the category of ‘une femme qui n'était pas mon genre!’ (RTP I. 375) [‘a woman…who was not my type’ (p.89) (SLT i. 383)]. The put-down directed against Odette, who is designated at the beginning of the novella as ‘une personne presque du demimonde’ (RTP I. 185) [‘a person almost of the demi-monde’ (SLT i. 191)], clearly draws much of its potency from social-class prejudice. In fact any claim to particularity in what appears to be the singularizing designation ‘mon genre’ quickly collapses, so freighted is desire with the social codes and collective antagonisms operating in the volume more generally. The theme of social insertion and belonging is insistently present from the opening lines of Un amour de Swann where the intensely lived micro-sociality of the Verdurin salon is over-designated as the ‘“petit clan”’ [‘“little clan”’], the ‘“petit noyau”’ [‘“little nucleus”’], the ‘“petit groupe”’ [‘“little circle”’], and the ‘petite église’ [‘little church’] (RTP I. 185; SLT i. 191).9 The salon revolves Page 4 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann around Mme Verdurin, described as being ‘d'une respectable famille excessivement riche et entièrement obscure avec laquelle elle avait peu à peu cessé volontairement toute relation’ (RTP I. 185) [‘from a respectable bourgeois family, an extremely rich and entirely obscure one with which she had by degrees and of her own accord ceased to have any contact’ (SLT i. 191)]. The twinning of ‘riche[sse]’ and ‘obscurité’, together with the augmentative force of the qualifying adverbs ‘excessivement’ and ‘entièrement’, implicitly juxtaposes the economic capital of Mme Verdurin and the social and cultural capital of the Narrator, whose disdain is unambiguous. Yet he concedes that she has infiltrated the minds of the only two women regulars in the salon that year, Odette and the pianist's aunt, personnes ignorantes du monde et à la naïveté de qui il avait été si facile de faire accroire que la princesse de Sagan et la duchesse de Guermantes étaient obligées de payer des malheureux pour avoir du monde à leurs dîners, que si on leur avait offert de les faire inviter chez ces deux grandes dames, l'ancienne concierge et la cocotte eussent dédaigneusement refusé. (RTP I. 186) [women ignorant of the world whom, in their naivety, it had been so easy to delude into believing that the Princesse de Sagan and the Duchesse de Guermantes were obliged to pay certain poor wretches in order to have any guests at their dinners, that if you had offered to get them invitations to the homes of these two great ladies, the former concierge and the cocotte would disdainfully have refused. (SLT i. 191–2)]. Barely a page into Un amour de Swann then, we see the status of the Guermantes, whose prestige is asserted with such reverential certainty in (p. 90) Combray, both further valorized by the Narrator and radically devalued by would-be ignorant social inferiors.10 Thus while the Narrator sets himself up as an arbiter of social and cultural value, he nevertheless entertains the reverse scenario in which the cocotte and the concierge rival his ability to disparage and attribute value. The brio with which the Narrator posits such a reversal derives on one level from the ignorance of powerful social determinants displayed by these women, who are so negatively typecast. Yet if the Verdurin clan's refusal to show status deference to the aristocracy and the haute bourgeoisie self-evidently points to antagonistic social relations, it also establishes, however whimsically to the extent that it has no purchase on the workings of the power nexus, the topos of the mundus inversus regularly used by Proust's Narrator in the ironic depiction of sociality in the Recherche.11 Yet what for the Narrator is this comic insubordination and self-delusion will mutate into the radical social change charted in Le Temps retrouvé, change that will indeed see the former cocotte and Mme Verdurin both occupy the highest of social positions.

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Nor is the superiority of the aristocracy affirmed by Swann. Often seen as a prototype for the Narrator, he directs much of his attention to his social inferiors. Unfussy and careless with a duchess, he fears being scorned by a chambermaid, before whom he will studiously pose. Reflecting on Swann's tactic of inverted social valorization (which indeed parallels, though for different motives, the track taken by the cocotte and the concierge seen earlier), the Narrator draws attention to what is presented as the vulnerability of the superior. Thus the intelligent man, relaxed about appearing stupid to someone of similar intelligence, will be on edge when he is with someone less intelligent, while the elegant gentleman fears that his elegance will be dismissed by a ‘rustre’ (RTP I. 189) or oaf. All of which prompts the Narrator to assert: ‘les trois quarts des frais d'esprit et des mensonges de vanité qui ont été prodigués depuis que le monde existe par des gens qu'ils ne faisaient que diminuer, l'ont été pour des inférieurs’ (RTP I. 189) [‘Three-quarters of the mental ingenuity and the lies told out of vanity that have been squandered since the world began by people who in doing so merely diminish themselves have been squandered on inferiors’ (SLT i. 195)]. In his reactionary outburst, reminiscent of Proust's complaint to Halévy in 1907 about the ingratitude of inferiors, the (p.91) Narrator thus produces a balance sheet which shows the superior-minded demeaning themselves in order to placate their social and intellectual inferiors.12 In the ideologically aggressive inflection given to the Narrator's class judgement, the power of those destined to rule is thus sapped by a disproportionate concern for the subaltern. Swann's actions are not consistent with the Narrator's assertive evaluation. Even though his great familiarity with the aristocratic women of the Faubourg Saint-Germain guarantees Swann's inclusion there, the social passport this gives him—‘ces lettres de naturalisation, presque de noblesse’ [‘those naturalization papers, almost a patent of nobility’]—he then seeks to convert into ‘une sorte de valeur d'échange, de lettre de crédit’ (RTP I. 188) [‘a sort of negotiable bond, a letter of credit’ (SLT i. 194)] that will enable him to pursue women in the provinces and out-of-the-way corners of Paris. Two points arise here: first, the conflation of aristocratic class and race inferred in the ‘lettre de naturalisation’ suggests a class divide that is difficult to bridge; and secondly, by trading in the title of nobility for the bond, the letter of credit, Swann makes the essentially bourgeois move away from a hierarchy based on social prestige to one tied to capital. As Dubois observes: ‘Tout dans la Recherche est ainsi lisible selon la dure loi de l'échange commercial’.13 The free movement of capital thus captures metaphorically Swann's womanizing across the classes. Like capital, his sexual desire transcends class boundaries: ‘[Swann] désirait de briller aux yeux d'une inconnue dont il s'était épris, d'une élégance que le nom de Swann à lui tout seul n'impliquait pas. Il le désirait surtout si l'inconnue était d'humble condition’ (RTP I. 188–9) [‘[Swann] wanted to shine, in the eyes of any unknown woman with whom he was infatuated, with an elegance which the name Swann Page 6 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann in itself did not imply. He wanted this most especially if the unknown woman was in humble circumstances’ (SLT i. 194)]. The name of Swann, then, risks incurring a deficit in terms of prestige which Swann is anxious to make up. Proust switches from class to specifically racial characteristics in a tranche of the manuscript version of Un amour de Swann contained in Cahier 69 in which Swann's Jewishness is adduced as a motivating factor in his behaviour:14 (p.92) Peut-être son origine juive en était-elle un peu cause qui lui faisait (comme certains Romains trouvaient un charme plus grand à pénétrer certaines captives orientales) trouver un attrait particulièrement grand dans de jeunes chrétiennes pieuses où son âme d'infidèle buvait avec délices le goût de l'eau bénite et de la terre de France—comme le style lombard se fondait au byzantin—lui donnait aussi, par le souvenir des humiliations qu'il est bien rare qu'un juif n'ait pas approuvées dans son enfance, une sorte de crainte d'être méprisé, mal jugé.’ (RTP I. 902) [Perhaps his Jewish origins explained in part why (just as some Romans experienced a greater charm in penetrating certain Oriental womencaptives) he experienced a particularly strong attraction for pious young Christian women in whose presence his infidel's soul drank in with delight the taste of holy water and French soil—just as the Lombard style merged with the Byzantine. Perhaps too, his origins and the memory of humiliations that a Jew will almost invariably have experienced in his childhood also instilled in him a kind of fear of being despised and judged negatively.] The lurid stereotypes that fail to find their way into Un amour de Swann uncover a seam of crude racial and religious prejudice that could have come straight out of Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic and commercially successful work, La France juive.15 Social class and nation intersect here to the extent that the ethnically configured sexual fantasies, whether of conquering Romans or immigrant Jews, mesh with the class-switching practised by the promiscuous Swann. The connection between sexual profligacy and Jewishness is central to Drumont's diatribe. Elsewhere in Cahier 69 and even though it is not ethnically characterized, Swann's audacious arrivisme suggests the outsider's conquest of the ranks of privilege: ‘vouloir…forcer le monde entier, toute cette pléiade de duchesses, de généraux, d'académiciens et même de bourgeois qu'il connaissait, à lui servir d'entremetteurs’ (RTP I. 901) [‘to want…to force the entire world, the whole constellation of duchesses, generals, academicians and even bourgeois that he knew to work as go-betweens for him’]. The (p.93) Narrator likens Swann's socio-sexual behaviour to profligate expenditure. Thus the good will of a duchess is relayed as accumulated credit that is instantly squandered when her contacts are exploited to enable Swann to pursue a social inferior. His recklessness shows a disregard for the conventional capitalist wisdom of Page 7 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann commodity value as he pursues what is presented as a more vital goal: ‘comme ferait un affamé qui troquerait un diamant contre un morceau de pain’ (RTP I. 190) [‘just as a starving man would barter a diamond for a piece of bread!’ (SLT i. 196)]. In his analogy, Proust's Narrator cuts across social worlds, conflating the prodigality of the haut bourgeois master and the example of the starving man attending to material necessity. Swann's array of mobile social contacts is also contrasted with the conservative instincts of those who remain ‘cantonnés jusqu'à leur mort dans une position mondaine’ (RTP I. 189) [‘the worldly situation in which they remain confined until the day of their death’ (SLT i. 195)].16 Tellingly, the women he seeks out display ‘[une] beauté assez vulgaire… une chaire saine, plantureuse et rose’ (RTP I. 189) [‘[a] rather vulgar beauty… flesh that was healthy, buxom and pink’ (SLT i. 195)], at the opposite end of the spectrum from the women of his class who are ‘les femmes sculptées ou peintes par les maîtres qu'il préférait’ (RTP I. 189) [‘the women sculpted or painted by the masters he preferred’ (SLT i. 195)]. As Bourdieu observes, in these social distinctions, women of the dominant class acquire ‘in the art of selfembellishment and everything they call “tenue”, a moral and aesthetic value which defines “nature” negatively as sloppiness. Beauty can thus be simultaneously a gift of nature and a conquest of merit, as much opposed to the abdications of vulgarity as to ugliness’.17 Swann's arrival in the Verdurin salon is seen precisely as a descent into vulgarity and an abandonment of aesthetic value. What drives the salon's long-term ‘faithful’ is the need to safeguard social value, each betraying a vulnerability that is symptomatic of their will to retain prestige. Dr Cottard, from the provinces, is forever hesitant about the intentions of his interlocutor and wears an all-purpose smile as a safeguard; he abandons himself to banal clichés; he hangs on his interlocutor's response, demonstrating in the process what Bourdieu, drawing on Sartre, terms the alienated being-for-others of the social inferior.18 Saniette's shy, good-natured ways cancel out the social capital that would normally accrue from his wealth, his reputation as an archivist and his distinguished family. And the brittle aunt of the pianist speaks in a ‘graillonnement indistinct’ (p.94) (RTP I. 201) [‘indistinct hawking’ (SLT i. 207)]. Again, she is, in the terms of Sartrean phenomenology as applied by Bourdieu, objectified by the gaze and discourse of others.19 Proust's Narrator thus views each of the Verdurin regulars through a matrix of social performativity and aptitude, and each is invariably deemed to be inadequate. By contrast, the Narrator plays up the social capital to be won in the aristocratic world in which Swann moves, citing by way of example the ease of physical movement with which he moves into the Verdurin salon, ‘la simple gymnastique élémentaire de l'homme du monde tendant la main avec bonne grâce’ (RTP I. 199) [‘the simple elementary gymnastics of a man of the world extending his hand with good grace’ (SLT i. 205)].

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann In the opening pages of Un amour de Swann, there is, then, intensely ideological play around the workings of savoir-vivre with the social mimesis being ideologically loaded against the assertive bourgeois outlook of the Verdurins. The social anxiety in play confirms Brigitte Mahuzier's point that ‘la bourgeoisie est fondée sur le souci de l'autre’.20 We see specific exploitation of the analogy with economic capital when Mme Verdurin decides to reduce tenfold the value of the New Year's gift they offer Cottard: ‘nous faisons fausse route quand par modestie nous déprécions ce que nous offrons au docteur. C'est un savant qui vit en dehors de l'existence pratique, il ne connaît pas lui-même la valeur des choses’ (RTP I. 198) [‘we're steering the wrong course when we belittle our gifts to the Doctor out of modesty. He's a man of science, out of touch with the practical side of life, he has no idea of the value of things’ (SLT i. 204)]. Aggressively foregrounding monetary value, Mme Verdurin appeals to the logic of commodity value, claiming that the cheaper gifts she and her husband now offer Cottard are indeed of superiority quality. The law of commercial exchange underscored by Dubois is widely practised in Un amour de Swann. The Narrator provides an alternative gloss on Swann's situation when he places him within ‘cette catégorie d'hommes intelligents qui ont vécu dans l'oisiveté et qui cherchent une consolation et peut-être une excuse dans l'idée que cette oisiveté offre à leur intelligence des objets aussi dignes d'intérêt que pourrait faire l'art ou l'étude, que la “Vie” contient des situations plus intéressantes, plus romanesques que tous les romans’ (RTP I. 190; my emphasis) [‘that category of intelligent men who have lived idle lives and who seek (p.95) a consolation and perhaps an excuse in the idea that this idleness offers their intelligence objects just as worthy of interest as art or scholarship could offer, that “Life” contains situations more interesting, more novelistic than any novel’ (SLT i. 196)]. In this accommodation of the life of the rentier, the approach is to re-evaluate Swann's exploits (whether they be, as he tells Charlus, with the sister of a prominent European head of state or a kitchenmaid), endowing his activity with an intellectual capital equal to that invested in aesthetic and cerebral endeavour. A flirtatious variant on this confirmation of Swann's role is provided by Odette when in a flattering reference to his work on Vermeer, she plays up the caricatural image of the absorbed intellectual by indulging her desire to ‘deviner un peu ce qu'il y a sous ce grand front qui travaille tant, dans cette tête qu'on sent toujours en train de réfléchir’ (RTP I. 195; my italics) [‘have some idea what's behind that great forehead that works so hard, inside that mind that I always sense is so busy with its thoughts’ (SLT i. 201)]. Yet mention of Swann's independent financial means not only captures Proust's own socio-economic position but also summons up a whole rentier class. This crucial strand in the pre-First World War order saw males of independent means seek what the Narrator indulgently upholds as their ‘consolation’ and what in Swann's case entails parasitical sexual pleasure.

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann In his search for ‘consolation’, Swann nevertheless wrestles with the guilt deriving from leisure. He imagines an indulgent pardon being granted to him by the ‘grands artistes’ [‘great artists’] who introduce into their work the very faces of life that seduce him and at the same time bestow on their creations ‘un singulier certificat de réalité et de vie, une saveur moderne’ (RTP I. 220) [‘a singular certificate of reality and of truth to life, a modern flavour’ (SLT i. 226)]. Indeed the Narrator speculates that Swann may have preserved enough of his artistic perception precisely through seeing traits of everyday life generalized and identifiable in the works of the great masters. Hence the face of Odette reminds him of Botticelli's Zipporah (RTP I. 219; SLT i. 225). The likeness is problematical however in that Swann slides between the idea of artistic endorsement for his pursuit of pleasure on the one hand and the dread of a vulgar modernity on the other. Uneasy that the nickname Botticelli might evoke not the real work of the painter but ‘l'idée banale et fausse qui s'en est vulgarisée’ [‘the vulgarized idea of it, banal and false’], the Narrator rushes to restore the name of Sandro di Mariano, a cultured designation which is supplemented by Swann's mention of ‘le grand Sandro’ (RTP I. 220) [‘the great Sandro’ (SLT i. 227)]. In a way similar to this corrective reappropriation of Botticelli, the aestheticization of Odette provides confirmation of Swann's love, which is correspondingly weakened when Swann experiences ‘le baiser et la possession…naturels et médiocres’ (p.96) (RTP I. 221) [‘the kiss and the possession that would seem natural and ordinary’ (SLT i. 227)]. The overriding impression in these pages is one of rival judgements as Swann wrestles with competing evaluations of social contacts and experience, evaluations that specifically signal his insertion in a discourse that attributes moral authority to art. Hence when Odette is cast as a ‘chef d'œuvre inestimable…qu'il contemplait tantôt avec l'humilité, la spiritualité et le désintéressement d'un artiste, tantôt avec l'orgueil, l'égoïsme et la sensualité d'un collectionneur’ (RTP I. 221) [‘an inestimable masterpiece…that he contemplated sometimes with the humility, spirituality and disinterestedness of an artist, and sometimes with the pride, egotism and sensuality of a collector’ (SLT i. 227)], the triad of idealizing qualities induced by aesthetic contemplation is symmetrically shadowed and offset by the vices inherent in physical possession. Swann also displays a conflicted response to exclusivity. For him, life with Odette affords other lessons about social aspiration and status: she and Swann have, for example, quite different understandings of what constitutes chic. For Swann, as for many ‘society people’, fashion is ‘une émanation de quelques personnes peu nombreuses’ (RTP I. 239) [‘a thing that emanates from a small number of individuals’ (SLT i. 245)]. Odette's contrasting conception is one shared by many people and obtains ‘dans toutes les classes de la société’ [‘in every class of society’], the Narrator asserts: ‘un chic tout autre…a pour caractère particulier…d'être directement accessible à tous’ (RTP I. 239) [‘a stylishness that is quite different…has the particular characteristic…of being directly accessible Page 10 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann to everyone’ (SLT i. 245)]. Even if the Narrator immediately concedes that, with time, upper-class chic also becomes available, the distinction is important since it contrasts two styles, the one elitist, the other demotic. And when asked by Swann what she understands by ‘chic’, she protests at what she sees as the redundancy in the question (defining chic is for her a form of tautology), before running through a string of illustrations of what in essence were the fashionable venues of the Parisian bourgeoisie: Sunday mornings on the Avenue de l'Impératrice, Thursdays at the Eden Theatre, Fridays at the Hippodrome, and five in the evening for the trip around the Lake in the Bois de Boulogne. The talk about taste, to apply Michael Moriarty's argument from his consideration of perspectives in seventeenth-century French literature, is ‘the talk through which a measure of sociocultural control is negotiated, in which hegemonic struggles between classes and class fractions are fought out’.21 As a vehicle for the tastes of bourgeois materialism, Odette points out social incongruities. (p.97) She fails to understand why Swann lives on the Ile Saint-Louis, a corner of Paris not frequented in the late nineteenth century by the wealthy bourgeoisie or the aristocracy;22 and the sight of the Marquise de Villeparisis wearing a black woollen dress allows Odette to appeal to conventional bourgeois taste: ‘“Mais elle a l'air d'une ouvreuse, d'une vieille concierge, darling! Ça, une marquise!”’ (RTP I. 240) [‘“But she looks like an usherette, darling, like an old concierge! That was a marquise!”’ (SLT i. 246)]23, to which she adds that she herself may not be an aristocrat but that she would need to be well paid before appearing in public dressed like that. The skirmish is typical of the many that proliferate in the contested field of cultural value, a field which comes to generate considerable swathes of text in A la recherche. Indeed to paraphrase and subvert Paul Bourget's ‘Nécessité des classes’ injunction explored earlier, taste and class are the essential building blocks in the construction of Proust's novel. To focus more locally, differences and deviations in social-class taste provide one of the principal narrative drivers in Un amour de Swann. If Odette is scathing about the old aristocracy, the Princesse des Laumes dismisses the style of the Napoleonic aristocracy: ‘“je ne connais rien de plus pompier, rien de plus bourgeois”’ (RTP I. 333) [‘“I can't think of anything more conventional, more bourgeois”’ (SLT i. 341)]. The social axis formed by the Swann/Odette pairing entails repeated cultural renegotiation as Odette's own tastes and outlook provide an exotic spur to Swann's imagination. He is seduced by her clichéd sentimentalism when she admiringly links the monocle he wears to his status as ‘un vrai gentleman’ [‘every inch a gentleman’]: ‘Il aimait qu'Odette fût ainsi, de même que, s'il avait été épris d'une Bretonne, il aurait été heureux de la voir en coiffe et de lui entendre dire qu'elle croyait aux revenants’ (RTP I. 242) [‘He was happy that Odette was like this, just as, if he had been in love with a Breton woman, he would have enjoyed seeing her in a coiffe and hearing her tell him she believed in ghosts’ (SLT i. 249)]. The lure of the Other, here evoking the exotic appeal of Page 11 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Breton culture as celebrated most notably in the works of Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard, connects in this precise instance not with a geographically and culturally autonomous reality but rather with a concrete Parisian context in which differences of class come to function erotically as the stuff of crass stereotyping. Moreover Odette's sexual availability and the material gain this brings her map on to her complicity with hegemonic structures. Indeed her success confirms prostitution's reinforcement of capitalist structures. (p.98) Odette's ‘bad taste’, reflected in her inaccurate comments on domestic interiors and furnishings, simultaneously consolidates Swann's discursive power and mesmerizes him. She is imprecise about the period features in a friend's home where everything, she reports, is ‘de l'époque’; pressed by Swann to be more accurate, she replies ‘que c'était “moyen-âgeux”. Elle entendait par là qu'il avait des boiseries’ (RTP I. 240) [‘that it was “medieval”. By this she meant that there was wood panelling’ (SLT i. 247)]. Later Odette hesitantly refers to the same friend as having ‘“une salle à manger…du…dix-huitième!”’ (RTP I. 241) [‘“Her dining-room…is…eighteenth-century!”’ (SLT i. 247)]. The absence of any historical grasp provides the Narrator, safe in a particular channel of cultural heritage, with the opportunity to parade his knowledge-based superiority. High cultural savoir faire is thus produced and owned by Odette's social superiors. Yet her ignorance impacts differently on the besotted Swann. Between Odette's ‘bad’ taste and his own, he imagines a form of equivalence. The position is in one sense dangerously egalitarian for a Narrator who does not pass up opportunities to typecast Odette's value judgements: for example, when Swann criticizes her friend's ‘faux ancien’ tastes, Odette objects that the same friend could hardly live like Swann surrounded by broken furniture and worn carpets. In Odette's retort, the Narrator identifies ‘le respect humain de la bourgeoise l'emportant encore chez elle sur le dilettantisme de la cocotte’ (RTP I. 241) [‘her bourgeois deference to public opinion prevailing, again, over her cocotte dilettantism’ (SLT i. 247)]. In this double-typecasting of Odette as aspiring bourgeoise and prostitute, the Narrator attempts to restore a moral hierarchy that Swann appears to have abandoned.24 The marked sense of complicity with capitalist exchange in Un amour de Swann prompts the Narrator to issue moral correctives, as when he dismisses as sentimental gullibility Odette's attachment to anyone who merely claims to be at odds with the materialism of ‘ce siècle commercial’, unlike Swann who is, the Narrator insists, genuinely adrift from his materialist age. In the evocation of Odette's would-be poor tastes and judgements, the tone oscillates between the Narrator's trenchant dismissal and Swann's indulgent fascination: ‘[Swann] cherchait du moins à ce qu'elle se plût avec lui, à ne pas contrecarrer ces idées vulgaires, ce mauvais goût qu'elle avait en toutes choses, et qu'il aimait d'ailleurs, comme tout ce qui venait d'elle, (p. 99) qui l'enchantaient même’ (RTP I. 241–2) [‘[Swann] at least tried to see that she enjoyed being with him, not to oppose the vulgar ideas, the bad taste, which

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann she displayed in all things, and which he loved, moreover, like everything else that emanated from her, which even enchanted him’ (SLT i. 248)].

New locations The love narrative, then, generates a social psychoanalysis that is worked particularly through the commentary on cultural value. Odette's keenness to see a performance of La Reine Topaze awakens Swann's disdain but it also affords him the opportunity to explore the living spaces of Paris beyond the Faubourg Saint-Germain: with the Verdurin clan he visits suburban restaurants; Odette's cramped apartment is in a quarter that was once ‘mal famé’ (RTP I. 216) [‘in bad repute’ (SLT i. 223)]; the panicky hunt for her in night-time Paris brings Swann into contact with ghost-like figures, among them the shadowy outlines of prostitutes, ‘tous ces corps obscurs comme si parmi les fantômes des morts, dans le royaume sombre, il eût cherché Eurydice’ (RTP I. 227) [‘all those dim bodies as if, among the phantoms of the dead, in the kingdom of darkness, he were searching for Eurydice’ (SLT i. 233)]. We should not overlook the Narrator's own ‘good taste’ as signalled in the twinning of the desperate searching of Swann and Orpheus, the ancient myth providing an example of the effect of layering at work in the transmission of cultural capital in A la recherche. But Swann's itinerary also takes in plainly domestic, petty bourgeois interiors, the layout of which intrigues him: Il avait la même considération—à un degré d'identité qu'ils n'auraient pu croire—pour des petits bourgeois qui faisaient danser au cinquième étage d'un escalier D, palier à gauche, que pour la princesse de Parme qui donnait les plus belles fêtes de Paris; mais il n'avait pas la sensation d'être au bal en se tenant avec les pères dans la chambre à coucher de la maîtresse de la maison et la vue des lavabos recouverts de serviettes, des lits, transformés en vestiaires, sur le couvre-pied desquels s'entassaient les pardessus et les chapeaux, lui donnait la même sensation d'étouffement que peut causer aujourd'hui à des gens habitués à vingt ans d'électricité l'odeur d'une lampe qui charbonne ou d'une veilleuse qui file. (RTP I. 265) [He had the same esteem—identical to a degree they could not have believed – for a petit bourgeois family which asked him up to a dance on the fifth floor, Stairway D, left at the landing, as for the Princess of Parma, who gave the finest parties in Paris; but he did not have the feeling of being actually at a ball while standing with the fathers in the bedroom of the (p.100) mistress of the house and the sight of the wash-stands covered with towels, of the beds, transformed into cloakrooms, their coverlets piled with overcoats and hats, gave him the same stifling sensation that people today who are used to twenty years of electricity may experience at the smell of a lamp blackening or a nightlight smoking. (SLT i. 272)]

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Swann here operates as a curious ethnographer ill-prepared for the multipurpose use of space which, together with what he perceives to be the banal precision of the address where the party is held, is presented exotically to Proust's contemporaneous bourgeois reader. The petty bourgeois domestic space that would have been an integral part of late nineteenth-century Parisian urban geography is here conveyed as a bizarre site and one that induces a claustrophobia that is both spatial and cultural. Yet Swann's exotic tour takes him further in terms of exposure to social-class differences and thereby opens up the prospect of an alternative to the ‘tout Paris’, the polar opposite of the socially restricted milieu which the term conventionally denotes.25 In the search for Odette, Swann protests that he will slum it, foregoing social status and connections: Comme il aurait donné toutes ses relations pour n'importe quelle personne qu'avait l'habitude de voir Odette, fût-ce une manucure ou une demoiselle de magasin!…Comme il aurait couru avec joie passer les journées chez telle de ces petites gens avec lesquelles Odette gardait des relations, soit par intérêt, soit par simplicité véritable! Comme il eût volontiers élu domicile à jamais au cinquième étage de telle maison sordide et enviée où Odette ne l'emmenait pas et où, s'il y avait habité avec la petite couturière retirée dont il eût volontiers fait semblant d'être l'amant, il aurait presque chaque jour reçu sa visite! Dans ces quartiers presque populaires, quelle existence modeste, abjecte, mais douce, mais nourrie de calme et de bonheur, il eût accepté de vivre indéfiniment! (RTP I. 313; my italics) [How gladly he would have given up all his connections in exchange for any person Odette was in the habit of seeing, even a manicurist or a shop assistant!…How happily he would have hurried to spend the days at the home of one of those humble people with whom Odette kept up friendly relations out of either self-interest or true simplicity! How willingly he would have taken up residence for ever on the fifth floor of a certain sordid and coveted house to which Odette did not take him and in which, if he (p. 101) had lived there with the little retired dressmaker whose lover he would willingly have pretended to be, he would have had a visit from her almost every day! In these almost working-class neighbourhoods, what a modest life, abject, but sweet, nourished with calm and happiness, he would have agreed to live indefinitely! (SLT i. 321)]26 The text captures the idea of ‘almost working-class’ accommodation—the presque introducing a limit, a fail-safe mechanism to protect against the incursion of popular tastes and modes of living—when Swann mentally juxtaposes two staircases, the monumental staircase in Mme de Saint-Euverte's and the one in the tenement block we have just seen. Swann idealizes, and at the same time demonizes, the latter space: its ‘étages noirs, malodorants et cassecou’ [‘dark, evil-smelling and rickety flights’] are the prelude to eagerly Page 14 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann anticipated, uninhibited contact with Odette and her seamstress friend, contact that surpasses any attraction on offer at the Paris Opéra. But the juxtaposition of staircases also suggests a phobia about working-class culture that crystallizes around the milk cans left out on landings: ‘dans cet escalier pestilentiel et désiré de l'ancienne couturière, comme il n'y en avait pas un second pour le service, on voyait le soir devant chaque porte une boîte au lait vide et sale préparée sur le paillasson’ (RTP I. 319) [‘in the old dressmaker's pestilential and longed-for staircase, since there was no second, service stair, one saw in the evening in front of each door an empty, dirty milk-can set out in readiness on the mat’ (SLT i. 327)]. The misgivings about hygiene and what is presented as the unusual and unpalatable conjoining of living spaces (including most notably the absence of a second stairwell that would ensure the segregation of residents and service workers27) are adduced by Swann as the abject conditions in which, luridly and paradoxically, reassurance beckons. The contrast between this interior à la Zola and the Saint-Euverte soirée is intentionally abrupt: on the latter occasion, several domestics, standing ready on each floor to greet guests, look like saints in their niches; the abandoned spaces of the tenement stairwell give way to the busy stair-traffic formed by upper-class guests. The stereotypes in Proust's juxtaposition generate a snapshot of social classes and habitats; the lowly paid, now retired, seamstress living in squalid conditions; the male domestics who are likened to small shopkeepers who occasionally wear livery and stand attentively ‘avec un éclat pompeux tempéré de bonhomie populaire’ (p.102) [‘with a stately glitter tempered by common good-nature’], and who will doubtless work tomorrow ‘au service bourgeois d'un médecin ou d'un industriel’ [‘in the bourgeois service of a doctor or manufacturer’ (RTP I. 319, 320; SLT i. 327–8); and the guests at the Saint-Euverte soirée, from the bourgeois through to the rank of exclusive aristocrat represented by the Princesse des Laumes (it is worth noting how both she and Swann are seen by a Narrator regularly given to conveying value judgements as superior beings, standing above the crowd). Swann's fluctuating moods generate contrasting evaluations of social mores. When he is ostracized by the Verdurin regulars who fail to invite him to the outing at Chatou, he releases a flood of class-based vitriol: ‘Comme des merciers qui viennent de fermer leurs boutiques! Vraiment ces gens sont sublimes de bourgeoisisme. Ils ne doivent pas exister réellement, ils doivent sortir du théâtre de Labiche!’ (RTP I. 281) [‘Like drapers after shutting up shop! These people really are sublimely bourgeois, they can't really exist, they must have come out of a Labiche comedy!’ (SLT i. 289)]. The petty bourgeois trader and Eugène Labiche's vaudeville bear the brunt, then, of Swann's invective. Appalled at what he now declares to be Odette's vulgarity (which is ironically cast as part of a broader petty bourgeois ‘sublime’), he deploys hyperbole in a manner that Charlus will emulate later in the novel: ‘ “J'habite à trop de milliers de mètres d'altitude au-dessus de ces bas-fonds où clapotent et clabaudent de tels sales papotages”’ (RTP I. 282) [‘ “I live too many leagues above the swamp in which Page 15 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann these vermin are gabbling and wallowing” ’ (SLT i. 289)]. The class-based assault again targets the aesthetic tastes of the group as the prospect of Mme Verdurin's groaning reception of Beethoven's ‘Clair de lune’ calls forth a string of insults: ‘“Idiote, menteuse! … maquerelle, entremetteuse!”’ (RTP I. 282) [‘“Idiot, liar!…The pimp, the procuress!”’ (SLT i. 290)]. He extends his invective to music itself; ‘“Entremetteuse”, c'était le nom qu'il donnait aussi à la musique qui les convierait à se taire, à rêver ensemble, à se regarder, à se prendre la main. Il trouvait du bon à la sévérité contre les arts de Platon, de Bossuet, et de la vieille éducation française’ (RTP I. 282-3) [‘“Procuress” was also the name he applied to the music that would invite them to be quiet, to dream together, to look at each other, to take each other by the hand. He found there was some good to be said for the severity towards the arts displayed by Plato, by Bossuet, and by the old school of French education’ (SLT i. 290)]. Swann's catalogue of frustrations is grounded in anti-aestheticism, a twist all the more notable coming from the urbane student of Vermeer. Yet here too the anti-art position has its own high-cultural provenance in the allusions to Plato and Bossuet. In mitigation, the Narrator may say that Swann's invective does not reflect (p. 103) the latter's considered judgement but the effect of the lover's rage is to convert art into a battleground of class-based antagonisms in which personal and group animosities are acted out. Swann hails as inspired the exclusivism of the aristocracy, the ‘Noli me tangere’ du faubourg Saint-Germain’ (RTP I. 283) [‘Noli me tangere of the Faubourg Saint-Germain’ (SLT i. 290)]. Likewise, Odette's decision to go and see Une nuit de Cléopâtre at the Opéra-Comique (‘“l'envie qu'elle a d'aller picorer dans cette musique stercoraire”’ (RTP I. 285) [‘“she wants to go and scratch about in that excremental music”’ (SLT i. 292)]) confounds Swann, who wonders how it is that after six months of daily contact with him, she cannot ‘devenir assez une autre pour éliminer Victor Massé!’ (RTP I. 285) [‘change enough to eliminate Victor Massé spontaneously’ (SLT i. 292)]. Whether we stress Swann's paternalistic will to exert cultural influence over his inferiors or the reader's sense that the Narrator wishes to deflate the pomposity of Swann's claims, the story of an unhappy love in Un amour de Swann is simultaneously conveyed as the record of a culture war. In a sectarian intolerance of difference, aesthetic taste in the novella is the vehicle for violent personal analysis, a process that culminates in Swann's brutal letter to Odette: ‘Ce qu'il faut savoir, c'est si vraiment tu es cet être qui est au dernier rang de l'esprit, et même du charme…tu n'es même pas une personne, une créature définie, imparfaite, mais du moins perfectible? Tu es une eau informe qui coule selon la pente qu'on lui offre, un poisson sans mémoire et réflexion…’ (RTP I. 285–6) [‘What I must know is whether you are really one of those creatures in the lowest grade of mentality, and even of charm,…you're not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible. You're only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope it finds, a fish without a memory, without a thought in its head’ (SLT i. 293)].28 In Swann's Page 16 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann tirade, the parameters of denigration extend beyond a hierarchy of mind and sensibility to include a reifying abuse. The rage against middlebrow taste (the Opéra-Comique, bourgeois sorties into the country, Odette's architectural excursions with the Verdurins to see restorations by Viollet-le-Duc) provides the counterpoint to those earlier moments when Swann indulgently accepts Odette's tastes. As he articulates the title of the comic opera Une nuit de Cléopâtre, he chides Odette: ‘tu m'obliges à me souiller les lèvres de ce nom abject’ (p.104) (RTP I. 286) [‘you oblige me to soil my lips with that despicable name’ (SLT i. 293)]. On one level, Swann's revulsion has an immediate source, namely the aggression of the rejected lover. But that it is channelled via the socially conditioned conduit of cultural value suggests that taste acts like a shibboleth and that the social order of the Third Republic as represented in Un amour de Swann has indeed the caste-like rigidity attributed to it in late nineteenth-century Combray.

The Swann clan Swann is therefore not only a product but also an enforcer of this conservative instinct. One of his consolations when frustrated with Odette is to revert to the Swann family ways by reassuming the personality of le fils Swann that Marcel's great-aunt so approved of: ‘[personnalité] distincte de sa personnalité plus individuelle de Charles Swann’ (RTP I. 304) [‘the personality…distinct from his more individual personality of Charles Swann’ (SLT i. 312)]. In this unindividuated role, Swann embodies his class. He reverts to being the ‘héritier d'une famille de riche et bonne bourgeoisie où s'étaient conservés héréditairement, tout prêts à être mis à son service dès qu'il le souhaitait, la connaissance des “bonnes adresses” et l'art de savoir bien faire une commande’ (RTP I. 304) [‘heir to a rich and solid bourgeois family in which had been preserved by heredity, quite ready to be put at his service whenever he wished, a knowledge of the “best addresses” and the art of placing a proper order’ (SLT i. 312)]. The Narrator parades Swann's social ease in a strikingly indulgent, congratulatory way. Nothing pleases Swann more than to receive a wedding invitation from old family (bourgeois) friends; thus Marcel's grandfather invites Swann to Marcel's mother's wedding. When set against life with Odette, this return to hereditary ways assumes the character of class revenge, exacted from within the secure precinct of the haute bourgeoisie and directed against the arriviste ways of Odette. The material culture of Swann's daily living further reflects this. His mother's cousin, whom he gets to arrange a gift of fruit for the Princesse de Parme on her birthday, writes to him to say that she did not buy all the fruit in the same place, ‘mais les raisins chez Crapote dont c'est la spécialité, les fraises chez Jauret, les poires chez Chevet…“chaque fruit visité et examiné un par un par moi”’ (RTP I. 304) [‘but the grapes at Crapote's, whose speciality they were, the strawberries at Jauret's, the pears at Chevet's…“each piece of fruit inspected and examined Page 17 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann individually by me”’ (SLT i. 312)]. The fetishistic delight taken in the commodity points to the greedy enjoyment of a role shaped by class consensus and (p.105) otherwise designated as ‘good taste’. The ‘form and content of the selfpositioning’, to borrow again from Bourdieu, are here articulated with unapologetic relish.29 The derision directed against the Verdurins finds its corollary in approval for the established bourgeoisie that accommodates and indeed protects not only Swann but the Narrator's family. Crass materialism here masquerades as refinement, the Narrator imagining the disinterested pleasure that Swann would enjoy in a novel or painting depicting ‘les divertissements d'une classe oisive’ (RTP I. 304) [‘the amusements of a leisured class’ (SLT i. 312)]. Upper-class leisure is aestheticized and indulged in unproblematically. Moreover, Swann savours a deep social conservatism as he reflects on ‘le fonctionnement de sa vie domestique, l'élégance de sa garde-robe et de sa livrée, le bon placement de ses valeurs, de la même façon qu'à lire dans Saint-Simon, qui était un de ses auteurs favoris, la mécanique des journées, le menu des repas de Mme de Maintenon, ou l'avarice avisée et le grand train de Lulli’ (RTP I. 304) [‘the functioning of his domestic life, the elegance of his wardrobe and livery, the proper placement of his stocks, in the same way that he enjoyed reading in Saint-Simon, who was one of his favourite authors, about the “mechanics” of Mme de Maintenon's daily life, her meals, about the shrewd avarice and grand style of Lully’ (SLT i. 312)].30 Swann uninhibitedly draws selfcongratulation from accumulated material wealth. In Combray, the Narrator, in a similar display of cultural knowledge, invokes Saint-Simon in his account of the humdrum routines of Combray. ‘La “mécanique” de la vie’ (RTP I. 117) [‘the “mechanics” of life’ (SLT i. 120)], whether applied to the bourgeois household of Combray, to the Swann family's domestic arrangements, or indeed to the court of Versailles signals an everyday that operates hierarchically. Swann finds confirmation of his status in the friendships he enjoys in the aristocratic world, just as he contemplates with satisfaction ‘les belles terres, la belle argenterie, le beau linge de table qui lui venaient des siens’ (RTP I. 305) [‘the beautiful lands, the beautiful silverware, the beautiful table linen that had come to him from his own people’ (SLT i. 313)]. What for Swann is the opulent fabric of material culture provides him with the antidote to fraught love, the inheritance of goods being glorified as a source of class solidarity and continuity and as inferring a rebuke directed against arrivistes like Odette. But as if (p.106) uncomfortably to deflect attention away from what amounts to an undiluted materialism, the Narrator shows Françoise to be similarly motivated, for her amour propre is indulged as she contemplates the fine linen sheets she will be buried in (RTP I. 305; SLT i. 313). While this suggests an equivalence whereby each class practises acquisitiveness, the scope of her materialist aspirations (the burial sheets may bear the marks of the stitcher's repair) is dwarfed by the satisfaction Swann draws from material plenty. Moreover, given that the position and status of the Swann family is so closely related to Marcel's own, the Narrator's

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann unequivocal endorsement of the ‘le fils Swann’ mindset points to a collusion based on shared class interests and values. The closing pages of Un amour de Swann include scenes from two social spaces that are, in their different ways, public: they are a brothel and an omnibus. Proust uses these to provide perspectives on the social landscape. In the brothel, Swann pays a working-class girl in the hope of extracting from her information about Odette. Finding Swann in conversation with the young prostitute, the brothel-keeper observes how people of substance now come to her establishment not to have sex but for conversation: ‘“Le prince le disait, l'autre jour, c'est bien mieux ici que chez sa femme. Il paraît que maintenant dans le monde elles ont toutes un genre, c'est un vrai scandale”’ (RTP I. 367) [‘“The Prince said it himself, the other day, it's much nicer here than at his wife's house. It seems that in high society these days, all the women put on such airs, it's a real scandal!”’ (SLT i. 375)]. The ironic homology of brothel and salon as sites of social intercourse shows Proust playing with paradigms of social inversion and equivalence, just as elsewhere in the novel, the toilet attendant at the Champs-Elysées is nicknamed the ‘Marquise’ and talks proprietorially about her respectable clients (RTP I. 483–4; SLT ii. 66).31 As a democratic mode of transport, the omnibus, to take the second conduit of sociality, is even further removed from the aristocratic salon. Its most eyecatching passenger, for Swann, is Mme Cottard, dressed up and doing the social rounds in Paris using public transport. If ‘l'empesé de la petite bourgeoise’ [‘the starched clothing of the petite bourgeoise’] socially typecasts the doctor's wife, so too do her comments on the portrait by the painter Jules-Louis Machard ‘qui fait courir tout Paris’ (RTP I. 368) [‘which the whole of Paris is rushing to see’ (SLT i. 376)]. As she speculates about the (unlikely) possibility of her husband's portrait (p.107) being commissioned, she insistently proclaims her social class through her formulation of taste: ‘“Je ne suis qu'une pauvre profane…Mais je trouve que la première qualité d'un portrait, surtout quand il coûte dix mille francs, est d'être ressemblant et d'une ressemblance agréable”’ (RTP I. 369) [‘“I'm just a poor layman…But I think the most important quality in a portrait, especially when it's going to cost 10,000 francs, is that it should be a good likeness, and pleasant to look at”’ (SLT i. 377)]. Her comments establish a strict correlation between material cost and mimesis both of which utilitarian preoccupations exercise and characterize the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Yet that value system is applied democratically in Proust, elsewhere in the Recherche the Narrator parodying the attitude of the Duc de Guermantes, who talks frivolously of the cost of the bunch of asparagus depicted in Elstir's still life, Botte d'asperges (RTP II. 790–1; SLT iii. 500 ). Proust's Narrator indeed writes of our belonging to mental classes. One of the laws of language use, he observes, is that ‘on s'exprime comme les gens de sa classe mentale et non de sa caste d'origine. Par là, M. de Guermantes pouvait être dans ses expressions, même quand il voulait parler de la noblesse, tributaire de très petits bourgeois Page 19 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann qui auraient dit: “quand on s'appelle le duc de Guermantes”, tandis qu'un homme lettré, un Swann, un Legrandin ne l'eussent pas dit. Un duc peut écrire des romans d'épicier…l'épithète d'aristocrate être méritée par les écrits d'un plébéien (RTP II. 532–3) [‘we should express ourselves like others in our mental category and not of our caste. By this token M. de Guermantes might, in his choice of expression, even when he wished to talk about the nobility, be indebted to the humblest class of tradesmen, who would have said: “With a name like the Duc de Guermantes”, whereas an educated man like Swann or Legrandin would not have said it. A duke may write novels in the language of a grocer…and a plebeian may write things that deserve to be called “aristocratic”’ (SLT iii. 232– 3)]. Returning to Mme Cottard, we see that, like the brothel-keeper, she trains her antennae on the exclusive ‘tout Paris’, in relation to which both women occupy subordinate positions. Sensitive to questions of social situation, they tentatively hold forth on taste, class aspirations, and difference. They can be linked to other women working within a hegemonic male order: the young working-class woman (the petite ouvrière), for example, whom Swann regularly picks up en route to the Verdurins (RTP I. 214; SLT i. 221); or indeed Odette herself. Her social class, her aesthetic judgements, and general cultural competence all come to be derided by Swann, who sees in them the epitome of ‘le bourgeoisisme’ (RTP I. 281) [‘[what is] sublimely bourgeois’ (SLT i. 289)]. In the dream sequence that brings closure to Un amour de Swann, Odette's disappearance with Napoleon III awakens in Swann a violent fantasy: ‘il aurait (p.108) voulu crever ses yeux qu'il aimait tant tout à l'heure, écraser ses joues sans fraîcheur’ (RTP I. 373) [‘he would have liked to cut out those eyes of hers that he had loved so much just a moment ago’ (SLT i. 381)]. Towards the end of the dream, Swann sees houses on fire and the badly burnt face of a peasant calling out to him: ‘“Venez demander à Charlus où Odette est allée finir la soirée avec son camarade, il a été avec elle autrefois et elle lui dit tout. C'est eux qui ont mis le feu”’ (RTP I. 374) [‘“Come and ask Charlus where Odette ended up this evening with her friend, he used to go about with her in the old days and she tells him everything. It's them that started the fire”’ (SLT i. 382)]. The Narrator explains that in reality it was Swann's valet who was waking him up to have his hair cut. The dream, then, forming a homology of woman and male servant, throws up a twin disfigurement, that of the severely burnt peasant and the imagined brutal attack on Odette. Outside the dream, the logic of disfigurement finds more subdued forms. Odette, whose facial blemishes, incidentally, Swann also notes, displays a bad taste that sometimes seduces and at other times appals Swann. He laments her keenness to attend the Opéra-Comique, for example, bemoaning her liking for ‘“cette musique stercoraire”’, as we have already seen (RTP I. 285; SLT i. 292). The sense of excremental filth is made even plainer when the Verdurin trip to visit a restoration project by Viollet-le-Duc is likened to ‘“[une villégiature] dans des latrines”’ (RTP I. 288) [‘“holiday-making in latrines”’ (SLT i. 295)]. Page 20 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Taste and class, then, are foundational to the diegesis of Un amour de Swann. As Swann reflects: ‘les objets de nos goûts n'ont pas en eux une valeur absolue, mais tout est affaire d'époque, de classe, consiste en modes, dont les plus vulgaires valent celles qui passent pour les plus distinguées’ (RTP I. 243; my emphasis) [‘the objects of our preferences do not have an absolute value in themselves,…all depend on one's period, one's social class, they are all merely fashions, the most vulgar of which are equal to those that pass for the most distinguished’ (SLT i. 249; my emphasis)]. Taken in isolation, Swann's reflection could be read as an egalitarian articulation of cultural levelling in which all taste is relativized, as constructing a vantage point from which the vitriol of class prejudice might be neutralized. But the ‘tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’ conclusion, if it reads deceptively like a gnomic formulation of cultural equivalence, is the standpoint occupied by Swann now that he has lost his earlier belief in the absolute integrity of art. Swann's ‘scepticisme d'homme du monde’ [‘scepticism as a man of the world’] has subverted ‘les croyances intellectuelles de sa jeunesse’ (RTP I. 243) [‘the intellectual beliefs of his youth’] (SLT i. 249)]. In this equalization, tastes cancel one another out; ‘[Swann] ne pensait pas que l'admiration qu’[Odette] professait pour Monte-Carlo ou pour le Righi fût plus déraisonnable que le goût qu'il avait, lui, pour la (p.109) Hollande qu'elle se figurait laide et pour Versailles qu'elle trouvait triste’ (RTP I. 243) [‘[Swann] did not think that the admiration [Odette] professed for Monte Carlo or for the Righi was more unreasonable than the fondness he himself felt for Holland, which she imagined to be ugly, or for Versailles, which she found dreary’ (SLT i. 250)]. In what is seen as a migration of tastes, Swann longs for ‘la douceur d'être initié dans toutes les conceptions d'Odette, de se sentir de moitié dans tous ses goûts’ (RTP I. 243) [‘the sweetness of being initiated into all of Odette's ideas, of feeling he was sharing equally in all her tastes’ (SLT i. 249)]. Prior to the infatuation with Odette in which art and sensuousness fuse for Swann, his consumption of art functioned independently from his pursuit of sensuousness; ‘[Swann] jouissa[it], dans la compagnie de femmes de plus en plus grossières, des séductions d'œuvres de plus en plus raffinées’ (RTP I. 242) [‘[Swann] enjoyed, in the company of increasingly crude women, the seductions of increasingly refined works of art’ (SLT i. 249)], so that he would be accompanied by a maid to see the performance of a Decadent play or to view an Impressionist exhibition. The effect is to produce, in the Narrator's formulation, ‘un disparate bizarre’ (RTP I. 242), [‘a bizarre disparity’ (SLT i. 249)] that draws together high art and cross-class eroticism. We might contrast this with the case of Monsieur Maindant in Jean Santeuil. Maindant voices the aspirations of nineteenth-century radicals in wishing to give the proletariat access to great works of art (JS, 659).32 Whereas in Maindant's view, such exposure is deemed meliorative through having an educative function, no socially transformative outcome is envisaged for the subaltern who accompanies Swann and whose

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann incomprehension of the artistic spectacle is no greater, the Narrator comments wryly, than that of aristocratic women but is more discreetly expressed. Extracted from the aestheticist context that triggers it, and following Bourdieu, the assertion that ‘tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’ creates the condition of possibility for a social critique of taste. However self-interested Swann's commitment to the levelling of tastes is, however much it is seen as issuing from a loss of ideals, his maxim, by abandoning the dogmatic belief in the supremacy of high culture, has the capacity to be read as serendipitously proposing the suspension of judgement. To cite Bourdieu on the question of the need for an objective grasp of class aggressions: ‘The objectification is always bound to remain partial, and therefore false, so long as it fails to include the point of view from which it speaks and so fails to construct the game as a whole.’33 The extent to (p.110) which objectification remains partial in the Narrator's evolving chronicle of class prejudice and antagonisms in the Recherche is integral to my overall thesis. Arguably, the evolution in Swann's ‘croyances intellectuelles’ approximates to Proust's own ideological trajectory to the extent that the belief in elites comes to mutate into a relativized account of the social strata of the Third Republic. This is not to say that Proust's writing ceases to carry the traces of a significant ideological inflection. As we saw in Bourdieu's formulation used at the beginning of this chapter, ‘taste…classifies the classifier’, and Proust, in not shying away from often strident formulations of taste, does not escape classification. In his editorial presentation of Sodome et Gomorrhe, Antoine Compagnon makes the crucial point that the manuscript of 1916 is halfway between the novel of 1912, ‘concentré sur le héros, sur ses réactions devant le monde, ses espoirs et ses déceptions’ [‘focused on the hero, his reactions to the world, his hopes and disappointments’], and the definitive version of the novel which, in Compagnon's words, was becoming increasingly Balzacian in its scope and resonance (RTP III. 1248). This later, Balzacian phase opens up the novel to a fuller engagement with sociality and allows Proust to make a stronger, and in some instances less tribal, connection with its various avatars: taste, class, hierarchy, and ideological positioning more generally. Notes:

(1) RTP I. 243; [‘all [depends] on one's period, one's social class’ (SLT i. 249)]. (2) Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984; London: Routledge, 1994), 6. (3) Ibid 11. (4) Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 87. Central to Bidou-Zachariasen's overarching argument is the view that, beyond the initial, burlesque depiction of the ‘petit clan’, Mme Verdurin comes to situate her salon strategically, the Page 22 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann outcome being the inexorable rise in its social value in the latter part of A la recherche, ibid. 32. (5) [‘a muted violence marks the social cleavages’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 132. (6) Translation slightly revised. (7) In the chapter ‘Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge’, Bowie writes of jealousy as heeding ‘an imperious call to know’. See M. Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 49; italics in the original. (8) Heath, The Sexual Fix, 120; quoted in Michael Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21. (9) For a parallel reading of social cocooning in Combray and Un amour de Swann, see my chapter ‘Proust and Social Spaces’, in Richard Bales (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 151–67. (10) Stéphane Chaudier writes perceptively of the sublimation of social snobbery in the hero's worship of the Guermantes, an observation which allows us therefore to see the mirroring of snobbery between the Combray and Un amour de Swann sections of the first volume of the novel, Chaudier, Proust et le langage religieux, 202. (11) See Sophie Duval, L'Ironie proustienne: La Vision stéréoscopique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 202–3. (12) For the discussion between Proust and Halévy, see Corr. xxi. 619 and my consideration of this in Ch.2. (13) [‘Everything in the Recherche can thus be read according to the hard law of commercial exchange’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 137. (14) Daniel Lindenberg makes the point that in late nineteenth-century France, anti-Semitism formed part of a discourse on race and religion that was ‘absolument banal et universel’ [‘utterly routine and universal’], ‘L'Improbable ralliement de Jaurès’, in Chêne et al. (eds.), Comment devient-on dreyfusard?, 49. (15) Edouard Drumont, La France juive: Essai d'histoire contemporaine (Paris: Marpon & Flammarion, 1886), 2 vols. Sales for the book in its first year reached over 100,000 and by 1912 it had gone through 200 impressions and been translated into six languages. See Stephen Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Page 23 of 25

 

‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1982), 171. For discussion of the representation of Jewishness in A la recherche du temps perdu, see Juliette Hassine, Marranisme et hébraïsme dans l'œuvre de Proust (Paris: Minard, 1994); Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l'expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Marion Schmid, ‘The Jewish Question in A la recherche du temps perdu in the Light of Discourses of Race’, Neophilologus, 83 (1999), 33–49; Edward J. Hughes, ‘Textual and Tribal Assimilation: Representing Jewishness in A la recherche du temps perdu’, in Bryan Cheyette and Nadia Valman (eds.), The Image of the Jew in European Liberal Culture, 1789–1914, Jewish Culture and History, 6/1 (Summer 2003), 152–73. (16) Translation modified. (17) Bourdieu, Distinction, 206–7. (18) Ibid. 207. (19) Ibid. 206–7. (20) [‘The bourgeoisie is founded on worry about the Other’]. Brigitte Mahuzier, ‘Proust et la démocratisation du mépris’ [‘Proust and the Democratization of Scorn’], unpublished conference paper, XXth Century French Studies Conference, ‘Cultural Capital: Canons, Cultures, and Contexts’, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 27–30 Mar. 2003. (21) Moriarty, Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth Century France, 2. (22) See RTP I. 1212, the editor's n. 1 to p. 240. (23) Translation modified. (24) Naomi Schor argues that one of the founding axioms of George Sand's work is the link between the ‘femme honnête’ [‘honest woman’] and the prostitute which operates ‘via their common, socially constructed consumerism’. Schor adds in relation to Sand's character Marcelle de Blanchmont (from the novel Le Meunier d'Angibault (1845) ) that she lives in ‘the phantasmagoric world of commodities and that in that world women are both the chief objects and subjects of exchange and desire’, Schor, George Sand and Idealism, 102. (25) Another example of the novel's occasional forays into the domestic habitats of a broad swathe of the capital's population comes in La Prisonnière where Marcel, in conversation with Albertine, evokes new suburban housing developments where shopkeepers return home midweek for their lunch, ‘les prismes de verre pour poser des couteaux projet[a]nt des feux multicolores aussi beaux que les verrières de Chartres’ (RTP III. 673) [‘the glass prism knife-rests

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‘Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe’: 1 Taste in Un amour de Swann glint[ing] with multicoloured lights as beautiful as the stained-glass windows of Chartres’ (SLT iv. 150)]. Suburban living is thus similarly exoticized. (26) Translation modified slightly. (27) For a contrasting description of the layout of the Proust family's newly built apartment on the Boulevard Malesherbes where they lived between 1872 and 1900, with its enhanced facilities for hygiene and the social class separation between family and domestic staff which the internal architecture facilitated, see Bloch-Dano, Madame Proust, 141–2. (28) Significantly, Proust himself was given to this kind of tirade, Swann's wording in Un amour de Swann providing a textual echo of the author's formulations in a letter to Albert Nahmias of 20 Aug. 1912. See Corr xi. 187–9 and the editor's note, RTP I. 1222, n. 1 to I. 285. (29) Bourdieu, Distinction, 12. (30) Referring to the conformist way in which Racine, Lully, and Le Brun are all commended in seventeenth-century France as officially sanctioned models of art, Michael Moriarty argues that ‘the “taste” discourses cited by La Bruyère are totalitarian’, The Ideology of Taste in Seventeenth-Century France, 167. (31) I argue elsewhere that the exclusions and inclusions practised by the ‘Marquise’ form a scenario of domination that replicates patterns of control obtaining across social strata in the novel. See my ‘Proust and Social Spaces’, 160–1. (32) See above, Introduction. (33) Bourdieu, Distinction, 12.

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Balbec: A New Sociality

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Balbec: A New Sociality Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0005

Abstract and Keywords The chapter explores how the adolescent hero Marcel’s trip to the seaside resort of Balbec spells a crucial broadening in his socialization. It is argued that as a site of transition and social-class mobility, Balbec confronts an insecure hero with the expanding world of fin de siècle leisure. The town takes Marcel out of the caste-like fixity of Combray society and throws up a new, provisional sociality in which the cross-class rivalries of everyday life are reciprocated. New wealth and arrivisme are key points of focus in the social comedy which the Narrator constructs with often ludic intensity. In its consideration of the textual genesis of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the chapter also focuses on how the Narrator works with contrasting images of would-be vulgar, new leisure and the hero’s search for artistic inspiration in nature. Keywords:   fin de siècle, leisure, arrivisme, vulgar, class rivalry, Frenchness

Mais l'esprit est influençable comme la plante, comme la cellule, comme les éléments chimiques et le milieu qui le modifie si on l'y plonge, ce sont des circonstances, un cadre nouveau. RTP II. 236 But the mind is as susceptible to influence as any plant, any cell, any chemical elements; and the milieu that modifies it is the changed circumstances by which it is surrounded, a new setting. SLT ii. 460–1

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Balbec: A New Sociality Balbec and modernity Proust's A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs spells a crucial broadening in the socialization of the novel's hero. As a site of social-class mobility and encounter, Balbec confronts an insecure hero emerging from a lifestyle of pronounced introspection and from adolescent infatuation centred around the members of the Swann household. The Norman seaside resort, which encapsulates the expanding world of fin de siècle leisure, is a place of transition. It takes Marcel out of the fixity of Combray's social structures with its predictable rituals and the social narrowness of the Parisian quarter where his family live.1 In Combray, he and his family are known by everyone: ‘[à Combray] je ne me souciais de personne. Dans la vie de bains de mer on ne connaît pas ses voisins’ (RTP II. 35) [‘In Combray, where we were known by everybody, I paid attention to no one. But on holiday at the seaside, one is surrounded by strangers' (SLT ii. 253)]. A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs was the controversial winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1919, ahead of Roland Dorgelès's war novel Les Croix de (p.112) bois.2 Criticized by nationalists for lacking the patriotic resonance and topicality that Dorgelès's direct account of the recently ended conflict provided, Proust's volume offers elements of a sociological perspective not on modern war but on the new phenomenon of leisure and the forms of sociality this produced. For Marcel and his family, the act of getting to Balbec already exposes them to the agents and markers of technological innovation. Even if some holidaymakers prefer to travel by car in order to safeguard prestige, railway stations such as the Gare Saint-Lazare are poeticized by Proust's Narrator as ‘ces lieux spéciaux’, ‘ces grands ateliers vitrés’ (RTP II. 5, 6) [‘those wonderful places…those huge glass-roofed machine shops’ (SLT ii. 224)]. New urban sites and modes of transport are conceived of on a vast, industrial scale. On arrival in Balbec, most of the guests travel to the hotel by bus, a situation that prompts bemusement and misrecognition on the part of the hotel manager, who is exoticized as a rotund Eastern figure: ‘le directeur, sorte de poussah à la figure et à la voix pleines de cicatrices … au smoking de mondain, au regard de psychologue prena[i]t généralement, à l'arrivee de l' “omnibus”, les grands seigneurs pour des râleux et les rats d'hôtels pour des grands seigneurs’ (RTP II. 23) [‘its manager, a dumpy little person whose face and voice were covered with scars… was wearing tails like a fashionable gentleman, whose acute psychological glances at those who stepped off the “omnibus” usually enabled him to take a duke for a skinflint and a hotel thief for a duke’ (SLT ii. 241)]. If the bus democratizes transport, the hotel manager's misreading, his ‘upside down’ evaluation of social position, stands not just as a burlesque anticipation of the radical transformations in class that are to emerge dramatically in Le Temps retrouvé but also as signalling the Narrator's zealous recording of social tensions, aggressions, and movement.

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Balbec: A New Sociality Misrecognition applies to Balbec more broadly to the extent that it is a site of collective social adaptation and apprenticeship, the antithesis of Bourget's conservative sociality that we considered in Chapter 2. In Balbec, different classes are drawn into contiguity; some Parisians have less standing in the capital than they temporarily enjoy at Balbec, where Marcel moreover is ready to assume that they merit enhanced social prestige. But his capacity for exaggeration also works in the opposite direction. Proust's volume title, for example, showcases the young girls, whom his protagonist assumes to be (as he puts it) from a lower-class, even shady, background, when in fact they are the daughters of ‘une petite (p.113) bourgeoisie fort riche, du monde de l'industrie et des affaires’ (RTP II. 200) [‘extremely wealthy lower-middle-class families, from the world of industry and business’ (SLT ii. 424)]. In one way the discovery disappoints Marcel, for whom business holds no particular allure. In an era of intense economic liberalism, the aspirations, attainments, and amusements of the merchant and industrialist classes are everywhere visible and hence unexceptional.3 As the Narrator observes, the characteristic social composition of ‘hôtels de grand luxe’ of the period involves a ‘population…d'ordinaire banalement riche et cosmopolite’ (RTP II. 35) [‘guests usually unremarkable in their common wealth and cosmopolitanism’ (SLT ii. 254)]. For the adolescent hero, whose family belongs to the professional, metropolitan middle class (the father being an influential public servant in Paris), the moneyed bourgeoisie does not exert the attraction of other, less accessible classes, ‘n'ayant pour moi le mystère ni du peuple ni d'une société comme celle des Guermantes’ (RTP II. 200; my emphasis) [‘it was devoid of the sense of mystery I perceived among both the working classes and the society frequented by the Guermantes’ (SLT ii. 424)]. In the provisional social kaleidoscope that is Balbec, the Narrator revels in the varied spectacle provided by shifting class identities. Exploring the mystique and attraction of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes, he is quick both to exoticize social-class differences and to shake the settled assumptions of his own class. Within what Pierre-Louis Rey terms ‘la promiscuité de la vie de bains de mer’,4 the social mix ensures contact for Marcel with the aristocracy, the leisure activities of bourgeois entrepreneurs, and the social class generically labelled in Proust's day ‘la domesticité’. That the narrator can sustain this mobile self-positioning is part of his ability, as Malcolm Bowie observes, to offer himself ‘both as a representative of the bourgeoisie in his daily habits and expectations and as miraculously class-neutral and unaligned’.5 Less cosmopolitan than other hotels of its kind, the Grand Hotel at Balbec has a pronounced regional feel to it, housing prominent members of Normandy's professional bourgeoisie: ‘un premier président de Caen, …un bâtonnier de Cherbourg,…un grand notaire du Mans’ (RTP II. 35) [‘one of Caen's First Presidents, a bâtonnier from Cherbourg, a notary (p.114) of note in Le Mans’ (SLT ii. 254)]. They and their spouses form a caucus during the holiday Page 3 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality months (the length of their stay itself reflecting the leisure patterns of their class) and are joined by a leading doctor and a lawyer from Paris. Class solidarity is self-indulgently reinforced as they banter one another about iconic cultural differences such as the Paris/province divide or collectively express their contempt for those who are unlike them. In the image of the wives of these provincial notables working together on the layette for the baby of hotel employee Aimé, Proust captures the pace and weave of quotidian middle-class leisure. The knitting allows them to indulge their sense of generous condescension towards Aimé, the Narrator observes; moreover, it ties them in to lives of predictable, gendered conformity.

Class rivalries Balbec is a place too where the cross-class rivalries within everyday life are reciprocated. The Narrator feels disdain for the provincial wives, who in turn think it common that Marcel and his grandmother should take hard-boiled eggs in their salad, ‘ce qui…ne se faisait pas dans la bonne société d'Alençon’ (RTP II. 37) [‘quite unheard of among the best families of Alençon’ (SLT ii. 255)]. Class prejudice works as a core structure across the social strata depicted in A la recherche. Thus, the dress worn by the aristocratic Mme de Villeparisis is misrecognized and undervalued by the provincial bourgeoisie, who consign her to a lowly position in their social imaginary. These rivalries and expressions of resistance show snobbery working as a common currency across classes. The volatility of class markers forms a key driver in Proust's narrative. Françoise has recycled some of the hand-me-downs of the hero's great-aunt: Et, de même qu'il est quelquefois troublant de rencontrer les raffinements vers lesquels les artistes les plus conscients s'efforcent, dans une chanson populaire, à la façade de quelque maison de paysan qui fait épanouir audessus de la porte une rose blanche ou soufrée juste à la place qu'il fallait —de même le nœud de velours, la coque de ruban qui eussent ravi dans un portrait de Chardin ou de Whistler, Françoise les avait placés avec un goût infaillible et naïf sur le chapeau devenu charmant. (RTP II. 10; my emphasis) [And, just as it is sometimes strange to notice refinements that the most deliberate artist might have to strive for, in a popular song or in a single white or yellow rose blooming at exactly the right spot on a peasant's house, so with her sound and simple taste Françoise had placed on the hat, which was now a pleasure to behold, the velvet bow and the cluster of ribbon that would have delighted one in a portrait by Chardin or Whistler. (SLT ii. 228)] (p.115) If the quotation shows Proust's Narrator marvelling at, and perplexed by, signs of cultural equalization, he stresses Françoise's inventiveness and the vigour of popular taste. The tone, reminiscent of Michel de Certeau's account of Page 4 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality the successful expressivity of the subaltern, sees the fields of high art, the handing-on of garments, popular performance, and manual improvisation all functioning isomorphically in an open-minded, emancipatory celebration. The strangeness—‘il est quelquefois troublant'—which Proust's Narrator finds in the everyday (rather than in a field of specialized knowledge) anticipates the work of de Certeau: ‘Le quotidien est parsemé de merveilles', writes the latter, ‘écume aussi éblouissante…que celle des écrivains ou des artistes.…toutes sortes de langage donnent lieu à ces fêtes éphémères qui surgissent, disparaissent et reprennent’.6 While Proust's Narrator relishes the concertina movement in would-be high/low cultural overlap, Françoise is not cast as a social iconoclast. She thinks it would be madness to want to abandon her class and is nevertheless adept at cultivating areas of autonomy, finding an outlet for her assertiveness in Balbec where she enjoys a period of extended socialization through contact with, to use Proust's own class designation, ‘les prolétaires' (RTP II. 52) [‘members of the working classes’ (SLT ii. 271)].7 In important ways then, her position is not to be equated with passivity.8 She is thus far from being a Catherine Leroux, ‘ce demi-siècle de servitude' whose years of compliant service are condescendingly rewarded by her bourgeois masters at the ‘Comices agricoles' in Madame Bovary.9 And if Flaubert and Proust significantly both use animal metaphors to characterize these subaltern figures, whereas Catherine Leroux demonstrates ‘le mutisme et [la] placidité'10 of the animals she looks after, Françoise is provocatively described as having the look of a bright, loyal dog. The Narrator analyses Françoise's peculiar type of intelligence and eccentrically speculates that with her ‘noble détachement d'un esprit d'élite’ [‘high-minded disinterest of a superlative soul’], she belongs to the scattered ‘holy family’ of ‘[l]es (p.116) plus hautes intelligences’ [‘the finest minds’]; the claimed diaspora of these ‘natures d'élite’ [‘higher natures’] implicitly discards as alienating any classbased affiliation in that certain gifted peasants outstrip ‘la plupart des gens instruits’ [‘most educated people’] (RTP II. 11; SLT ii. 229). The random distribution of talent again unsettles class hierarchies. In the eyes of the impressionable hero, the Grand Hotel is initially a heavily exoticized space. Its aspirational Romanian director (whose linguistic errors—he refers to himself as being ‘d'originalité roumaine’ [‘of…Romanian originality’]— feed the Narrator's condescension) summons various members of staff, the effect produced being of ‘toute une frise de personnages de guignol sortis de cette boîte de Pandore qu'était le Grand-Hôtel, indéniables, inamovibles, et comme tout ce qui est réalisé, stérilisants' (RTP II. 26) [‘a whole frieze of puppetlike characters out of the opened Pandora's box of the Grand Hotel, undeniable, unremovable, and, like all things that have come to pass, sterilizing in their effect’ (SLT ii. 245)]. There is thus a conscious theatricalization of class difference, the communal spaces of the hotel providing the site for exploration of the rivalries that come with these differences. Indeed at this juncture, Proust relies less on sociological method than on melodrama and myth to convey the Page 5 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality workings of hierarchy among the hotel employees. Marcel implicitly writes himself into the power play governing the domestic staff when, travelling up in the lift, he experiences an eroticized unease at the sight of the hotel chambermaids. His psychic fantasy works choreographically in that the appearance, replicated on each floor, of these anonymous, would-be assertive members of the servant class ensures the serial refusal of his needy yearnings: ‘J'appliquais à son visage rendu indécis par le crépuscule, le masque de mes rêves les plus passionnés, mais lisais dans son regard tourné vers moi l'horreur de mon néant' (RTP II. 25–6) [‘To her face, which was unclear in the inner dusk, I held the mask of my most passionate fancies; but I could read in the glance she gave me my own appalling nullity’ (SLT ii. 244)]. If Punch and Judy and Pandora's box operate, very approximately, as dramas of punitiveness and menace, their violence infiltrates at a subliminal level the reifying looks of the chambermaids to which Marcel masochistically submits. Significantly, the reification works like a dance of rejection coordinated across the different floors of the hotel. In his playful moves to capture the growth of leisure, Proust works with ideas of scale both literally and metaphorically. The recently built hotel, being part of a chain stretching to the four corners of France, reflects a national and European culture of expanding leisure (RTP II. 51; SLT ii. 270–1). Monumentalist in scale, it has at its centre the hotel lift, the use of which entails an ‘interminable ascension’ [‘endless climb’], and as it cuts symmetrically through floors of the building, it delivers ‘le mystère de ce (p.117) clair-obscur sans poésie, éclairé d'une seule rangée verticale de verrières qui faisait l'unique water-closet de chaque étage’ (RTP II. 26) [‘the mystery of its unpoetic dimness relieved only by a vertical succession of panes casting a little light from the single WC on each story’ (SLT ii. 244)]. In an ironic, intensely ludic reflection on how the sublime is now shifting from a religious to a business sphere, Marcel travels to the top of the hotel with the lift attendant, who thus brings him to the dome of ‘la nef commerciale’ (RTP II. 25) [‘the commercial nave’ (SLT ii. 244)]. The sense of exuberant expansiveness extends to the characterization of the hotel residents, Proust's Narrator working pliably with assumed social divisions, before drawing together seemingly irreconcilable positions. Thus the director of the hotel (never suspecting that the young protagonist's grandmother, who haggled over room prices on first arriving at the hotel (RTP II. 24; SLT ii. 242), is indeed a friend of the aristocratic Mme de Villeparisis) had given the grandmother and the young hero information about her as one might point out the Shah of Persia or Queen Ranavalona to a social nobody (RTP II. 44; SLT ii. 263).11 Powerful delineations of class are also laid down in the hotel brochure. The discourse of social prescriptiveness and flattery which defines the genre is instantiated in the prospectus for ‘le Palace’ which refers to the ‘“arrêts de Sa Majesté la Mode, qu'on ne peut violer impunément sans passer pour un béotien, ce à quoi aucun homme bien élevé ne voudrait s'exposer”’ (RTP II. 25) [‘“the Page 6 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality great god Fashion, whose decrees no man of good breeding will care to flout, unless he does not care being thought a Philistine”' (SLT ii. 243)]. If the formulation ‘Sa Majesté la Mode' gives fashion the allure of an ideological apparatus, to adapt Louis Althusser's terminology, the imperious tone of the brochure threatens to label as uncouth those who fail to adhere to its prescriptions.12 Yet the Narrator irreverently exploits the mismatch between these extravagant claims and the quirky local spectacle offered by ‘le Palace’. Its aristocratic residents look dowdy, while the fashionably dressed and the bigspenders herald a new form of social ascendancy. Among them is the self-styled king of a small island in the South Seas (RTP II. 37; SLT ii. 255), a French national who, in an age of imperial expansion, has purchased territory overseas.13 (p.118) Appalled by the ostentation of these parvenus, the stalwarts of provincial respectability such as the senior judge and a prominent barrister tell an enquiring friend that the wife of the ‘king of Oceania’ is ‘une petite ouvrière’ (RTP II. 37) [‘a mere mill-girl’ (SLT ii. 255)]. These disruptive markers of social mobility threaten provincial bourgeois respectability as much as they appeal to the young protagonist. For he is an enthralled spectator in what are quasi-carnivalesque scenes: he craves recognition from the ‘king of Oceania’; and when he sees on horseback the sons of the shady owner of a fancy goods store, he imagines them to be ‘[des] statues équestres de demi-dieux’ (RTP II. 43) [‘equestrian statues of demigods’ (SLT ii. 262)]. The staging of social class is thus aggressively pursued in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. In fin de siècle seaside life in Normandy, there is a new social algebra: ‘être vu avec certaines personnes peut vous ajouter, sur une plage où l'on retourne quelquefois, un coefficient sans équivalent dans la vraie vie mondaine' (RTP II. 43–4) [‘being seen about with certain people, at a resort that one revisits from time to time, may give one a certain cachet that has no equivalent in real society’ (SLT ii. 262)].14 Balbec thus functions as a multiplier in augmenting the appeal of an unpredictable, provisional sociality. New wealth and arrivisme are key points of focus in this volume of the novel, whether it be reflected in the rise of Mme Swann in Noms de pays: le nom or, in Noms de pays: le pays, in the expanding built environment of Balbec.15 The seaside resort, the material development of which reflects the growth in bourgeois leisure in the late nineteenth century, anticipates a broader social transformation. The disruption to class stability galvanizes the Narrator-protagonist but also calls for nimble performances on the part of the hotel staff. In a scene worthy of the opéra-comique, Aimé becomes the balletic incarnation of this adaptability as he juggles between the solid provincial regulars and the new rich. He demonstrates extreme mobility and flexibility: ‘obligé de faire bon visage aux souverains plus généreux qu'authentiques, cependant tout en prenant leur commande, [il] adressait de loin à ses vieux clients un clignement d'œil significatif’ (RTP II. 37) [‘though obliged to smile upon the more generous than Page 7 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality genuine royals, [he] made a point, as he took their order, of addressing a distant but meaning wink at his regular customers' (SLT ii. 256)]. Aimé's facial manoeuvres thus track the workings of the dialectic, as from his own position of economic disadvantage he endeavours to ingratiate himself further with the established provincial (p.119) bourgeoisie: he thus affirms their savoir-vivre through gesture while not prejudicing his prospects for reward with the wealthy parvenus. With an ethnographer's eye but also the vision of a choreographer, the Narrator records how the display of possessions remains one of the big drivers in clients' search for distinction. To secure the respect of the dining room staff, a wealthy grandmother enacts an elaborate ritual parade in order to flaunt her amethyst: ‘[elle] se déplaçait processionnellement sous les colonnes doriques du vestibule de la salle à manger’ [‘[she] would move in a processional way under the doric columns of the vestibule in the dining room’].16 Yet social values, props, and performance codes change. For the hotel manager, social situation is all, except that, as the Narrator sardonically points out, he repeatedly misreads the signs and takes as marks of gentlemanly distinction the wearing of knickerbockers, the smoking of de luxe cigars, and the habit of not removing one's headwear when entering the hotel. These hallmarks of the new rich form an alternative social signage that supersedes established codes of ‘good taste’, the relish with which the Narrator registers them confirming Jacques Dubois's crucial point that ‘à l'evidence, [Proust] entretient une relation libidinale singulière avec tout ce qui relève de la structure ou de la relation sociale’.17 An eroticized account of sociality lies at the core of Part II of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. But if the spectacle of social interaction at Balbec intermittently becomes an object of cathexis, Marcel's own class identity is not dispersed in the ensuing movement of energy. The Narrator's irony, rather than working in a class-neutral vacuum, arguably has its own social-class provenance and alignment, that of the professional Parisian bourgeoisie whose value system is substantially exempted from the guignol or Punch-and-Judy spectacle provided by the Grand Hotel. The will to check insubordination and to contain subaltern aspiration is further signalled in the detail of the hotel manager, who, forgetting that the sum total of his own monthly pay is less than five hundred francs, indulges in condescension towards those clients who argue that the same sum represents a fortune. Uninhibited by the gap between his imagined situation and the economic reality of his position as hotel employee, ‘[il] les considérait comme faisant partie d'une race de parias à qui n'était pas destiné le Grand-Hôtel’ (RTP II. 23) [‘he looked down on them as a breed of untouchables whose place was not at the Grand Hotel’ (SLT ii. 242)]. (p.120) Clients who pay less because of avarice do not fall in his estimation; the inferred thinking of the hotel manager is that ‘[l'avarice] ne saurait en effet rien ôter au prestige, puisqu'elle est un vice et peut par conséquent se rencontrer dans toutes les situations sociales’ (RTP II. 23) [‘miserliness, being a vice and therefore at home in any social class, is in no way Page 8 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality incompatible with prestige’ (SLT ii. 242)]. His own economic disadvantage is thus no bar to the exercise of condescension. Yet in an authoritarian move which restores social containment, the Narrator sets himself up as final arbiter: in a curt sentence at the end of an expansive paragraph in which the hotel manager's scorn is given free rein, the Narrator sadistically invokes linguistic norms to rein in the subaltern: ‘Il émaillait ses propos commerciaux d'expressions choisies, mais à contresens’ (RTP II. 24) [‘He sprinkled his commercial patter with choice expressions, which he misused’ (SLT ii. 242)]. Françoise too plays her role on the new stage that is the Grand Hotel in Balbec where Marcel ironically juxtaposes his inability to make contacts with her steady success.18 Although her origins are rural (her family being the owners of a small holding), the new sociality in the hotel draws her into contact with the working class: Les prolétaires, s'ils avaient quelque peine à être traités en personnes de connaissance par Françoise et ne le pouvaient qu'à de certaines conditions de grande politesse envers elle, en revanche, une fois qu'ils y étaient arrivés, étaient les seules gens qui comptassent pour elle. Son vieux code lui enseignait qu'elle n'était tenue à rien envers les amis de ses maîtres, qu'elle pouvait si elle était pressée envoyer promener une dame venue pour voir ma grand-mere. Mais envers ses relations à elle, c'est-à-dire avec les rares gens du peuple admis à sa difficile amitié, le protocole le plus subtil et le plus absolu réglait ses actions. (RTP II. 52; my emphasis) [Although members of the working classes had great difficulty in being treated as acquaintances by Françoise, and could manage to achieve this only at the cost of extreme politeness towards her, they became the only people to whom she accorded the slightest importance. Her time-honoured code held that she owed no deference to any of the friends of her employers and that, if she was pressed for time, she could refuse to bandy words with a lady inquiring about my grandmother. However, her ways of dealing with her own acquaintances—that is, with the few lower-class persons who were (p.121) the beneficiaries of her infrequent friendships —were governed by the most delicate and inflexible protocol. (SLT ii. 271)] Within the class stratification mapped out here, Françoise is described not just as resolutely defending her social situation but also as enjoying a good measure of autonomy. Likewise, in the Narrator's concluding, egalitarian remark on the complex protocols at work in her own friendships, he is acknowledging the subtlety of social codes irrespective of class. Françoise is especially close to the cafetier and to a chambermaid working for a Belgian lady. Just as, in Le Côté de Guermantes, she will insist on free time to converse with Jupien, so too at Balbec she not only keeps Marcel and his grandmother waiting but also, so the Narrator

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Balbec: A New Sociality protests, denies them access to hotel services if she is on good terms with the members of staff providing them. Françoise's autonomy assumes other forms. The chambermaid, an orphan whose talk of being ‘chez moi’ [‘home’], that is with her adoptive family, awakens Françoise's pity and, in the Narrator's view, her sense of benevolent disdain: Françoise ‘qui avait de la famille, une petite maison qui lui venait de ses parents et où son frère élevait quelques vaches, elle ne pouvait pas considérer comme son égale une déracinée’ (RTP II. 53) [‘who had a family to belong to, a little farmhouse handed down by her parents where a brother of hers kept a few cows, could never have considered such a person, quite without roots, to be her equal’ (SLT ii. 272)]. Françoise can only protest with a complacent sense of superiority: ‘“ça dit chez moi comme si c'était vraiment chez elle. Pauvre petite! quelle misère qu'elle peut bien avoir pour qu'elle ne connaisse pas ce que c'est que d'avoir un chez soi”’ (RTP II. 53) [‘“there she is, going on about ‘home' as if it was a real one! The poor girl! Imagine being so badly off that you haven't even got a home to call your own”’ (SLT ii. 272)]. If Françoise's insistence on the family nexus and belonging is as self-assured as that of aristocrats and bourgeois, her protest serves as a nostalgic and, for the Narrator, ludic foil to the instabilities generated by Balbec's shifting social dynamic. Yet there is ambivalence too in Françoise's response to class which in turn supplements and matches Marcel's fluctuating evaluations. Her apparent disdain for the nobility masks a deep respect. And although Mme de Villeparisis has to be, so to speak, pardoned by Françoise for being a noble, it is a pardon that the aristocrats are well skilled in securing, the Narrator slyly observing that ‘en France du moins, c'est justement le talent, comme la seule occupation des grands seigneurs et des grandes dames’ (RTP II. 56) [‘at least in France, being forgiven their nobility is not only the talent of lords and ladies, it is their sole occupation’ (SLT ii. 275)]. The quip about idle nobility comes ahead of a swipe directed at (p.122) members of the servant class, who are derided for their misreading of social messages. The domestic's defective observation derives from false deductions, the Narrator adds, rather like humans in their observation of animals, as he broadens observational fallibility out beyond social analysis to include zoology and natural history. The extended analogizing substantiates Dubois's point about the ‘paternalisme quelque peu cynique’ that we see in Proust's Narrator.19 For Marcel, part of the intrigue generated by the class dialectic is to witness Françoise's assertiveness at the Grand Hotel. As she goes down at midday to ‘“manger aux courriers”’ (RTP II. 57) [‘“lunch in the guests' servants' quarters”’ (SLT ii. 276)]—an act of occupational solidarity that is itself identitarian and signals an obvious social partitioning—Mme de Villeparisis stops her to ask after members of Marcel's family.20 When Françoise later reports back to them, her mimicking of the aristocrat triggers the Narrator's Page 10 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality ludic interspersal of registers, traditions, and levels of intellectual seriousness. For her rendition distorts the original words as much as do Plato's transmission of the arguments of Socrates and John the Evangelist's account of Christ's message (RTP II. 57; SLT ii. 277). The Narrator's response to the busy intersection of class currents at the hotel provides a key diegetic driver. As with the social dialectic itelf, the twists in his mercurial presentation of class relations in Balbec are legion, so that when the hero's grandmother tells Françoise that Mme de Villeparisis was ravishing when she was younger, Françoise suspects the grandmother of lying, ‘dans un intérêt de classe, les gens riches se soutenant les uns les autres’ (RTP II. 57) [‘out of class solidarity (these rich, always sticking together!)’ (SLT ii. 277)]. Class aggressions and suspicions and other workings of the social imaginary provide the very stuff of the Balbec comedy, a recurrent feature of which is the Narrator's quest for the selfinterested motive. Thus Legrandin's aristocratic brother-in-law, the Marquis de Cambremer, may cut a worthless figure for the error-prone manager of the Grand Hôtel but for the wife of the provincial notary he exudes distinction, a response which the Narrator accounts for by tunnelling back to the wife's own sense of worth and values: ‘Ce jugement favorable qu'elle avait porté sur le beau-frère de Legrandin tenait peut-être au terne aspect de quelqu'un qui n'avait rien d'intimidant, peut-être (p.123) à ce qu'elle avait reconnu dans ce gentilhomme-fermier à allure de sacristain les signes maçonniques de son propre cléricalisme' (RTP II. 43) [‘This favourable judgement of hers on the brother-in-law of Legrandin was perhaps inspired by the drab demeanour of a man who was anything but imposing, or perhaps by the fact that in this gentleman farmer with the look of a sexton her clericalism had read the secret signs that showed he was a kindred spirit’ (SLT ii. 261–2)]. The assessment traces the serpentine loop through to the provincial woman's insecurities, allegiances, and self-interest. In his critical study of Proust, Michael Sprinker quotes Althusser's view that ideology represents ‘not the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live'.21 We find in Proust the formulation of an analogous distinction in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs where the Narrator writes of the proliferation of false judgements operating between the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy: ‘C'est dire que les deux mondes ont l'un de l'autre une vue aussi chimérique que les habitants d'une plage située à une des extrémités de la baie de Balbec, ont de la plage située à l'autre extrémité' (RTP II. 63–4; my emphasis) [‘This means that the view which the two worlds have of each other is as imaginary as the view that one seaside town has of another when they stand at opposite ends of the Bay of Balbec’ (SLT ii. 283)]. Delighting in the heterogeneous make-up of the hotel, the Narrator relishes the class bigotry that thrives under its roof. A burlesque tone marks the lunchtime commotion surrounding the young mistress of the king of the ‘sauvages’ [‘savages’] as she Page 11 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality returns from her bathe: the parodic ‘“Vive la reine!”’ (RTP II. 37) [‘“Hurrah for the Queen!”' (SLT ii. 255)] shouted out by the children to whom she has been throwing money provides a provocative, farcical break with decorum. Confronted by the spectacle of brash, nouveau riche modernity, the provincial President of the Bar can only express outrage at this canaille—‘“Vraiment c'est un fléau, c'est à quitter la France”’ (RTP II. 61) [‘“Is that not an outrage!…it's enough to make a man want to shake the dust of France off his feet for good!”’ (SLT ii. 281)],22—whereas the notary's wife is spellbound by the spectacle. And when the flamboyant Princesse de Luxembourg arrives at the hotel, accompanied by her black manservant dressed in red satin, the servant provokes wonder on the beach and disdain among the provincial wives of the professional bourgeois. The wives' disparaging designation of the pair—referred to as ‘une femme avec un (p.124) nègre' (RTP II. 63) [‘a woman with a Negro’ (SLT ii. 283)]—squares with their groundless, fanciful assumption that the princess's title is bogus. Delusion and false appearance are integral to the elaborate preservation of social standing, so that on those Sundays when only a handful of guests are invited to Mme de Cambremer's, those excluded feel obliged to conceal their exclusion, hiring carriages to go off on vague local excursions (although in the utilitarian words of the protest made by the notary's wife, spending a lot of money ‘pour ne pas aller chez les Cambremer’ (RTP II. 118) [‘so as not to go to the Cambremers’ (SLT ii. 340)] is excessive and so she hides away in her room). Calculation knows no class boundaries in Proust's evocation of high-season life in Balbec. Thus the shrub-like page who looks on as Mme de Villeparisis and her entourage exit from the hotel remains immobile precisely because he knows that no decent tip is likely on two counts, Mme de Villeparisis being from the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain and having brought her own servants with her (RTP II. 66; SLT ii. 286).

Interleaving ‘le vulgaire': beyond the 1914 Grasset galleys Genetic criticism provides an additional critical angle from which to examine the representation of class identities on view at Balbec. With publication of his novel suspended in the emergency conditions created by the First World War, Proust was to add very substantially to his work, eventually doubling the length of the 1,500-page base text that was in place in 1914 in the remaining eight years of his life.23 Like much of the material pointing up social class tensions, the extended analogy just mentioned linking the hotel employee to plant life comes in the form of a later addendum to the base version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs formed by the 1914 Grasset galleys.24 We can contrast this growing concern with sociality with the depiction of nature in the pages of the original galleys. In one such earlier textual development, the hero is described as being drawn to nature and away from what are seen as the invasive, degrading traces of human agency. As Marcel rides off in Mme de Page 12 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality Villeparisis's carriage, the Narrator refers to Marcel composing in the mind's eye ‘le tableau de mer que j'allais chercher, que j'espérais voir avec le “soleil rayonnant” [de Baudelaire]' (p.125) [‘the seascape that I was looking forward to seeing, full of Baudelaire's “sunbeams gleaming on the sea”’], a picture which at Balbec is usually interrupted by ‘tant d'enclaves vulgaires et que mon rêve n'admettait pas, de baigneurs, de cabines, de yachts de plaisance’ (RTP II. 67) [‘a vulgar clutter of bathers, their bathing machines, and their yachts, from which my fancy averted its disgruntled eye’ (SLT ii. 287)]. Dismissing the markers of social actuality that elsewhere in A l'ombre are the occasion for keen analysis, the protagonist tries to persuade himself that, with the disappearance of ‘ces détails contemporains qui l'avaient mise [la mer] comme en dehors de la nature et de l'histoire’ (RTP II. 67) [‘the contemporary features which had as it were removed it [the sea] from the world of nature and history’ (SLT ii. 287)], he will be better placed to appreciate the seascape that Leconte de Lisle celebrates in his Orestie. This privileging of the aesthetic over social analysis parallels the disillusionment caused by the church at Balbec-le-Vieux, reduced to what for the hero is a state of depressing contiguity with the surrounding material world. Like the tribute paid to nature in the textual development on the three trees at Hudimesnil (RTP II. 76–9; SLT ii. 297–9), the sea views inspired by memory of a nineteenth-century literary celebration of nature form part of the 1914 Grassetgalley version of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. In both cases, the encroachment of quotidian life is spurned, whereas in the emerging optic that serves to reposition the text, the contemporary history of Balbec—reflecting the new social conjunction forged by the rapid growth in seaside leisure and Marcel's own socialization—assumes prominence and the town's ‘enclaves vulgaires’ [‘vulgar enclaves’] loom powerfully into view. This turn towards sociality in Balbec generates a momentum that is consistent with Jacques Dubois's observation that it was the middle classes who took forward the liberal project of the Third Republic: ‘Et de ceci Marcel Proust a eu la prescience. Cette découverte, il mettra pourtant du temps à la faire’.25 Understanding the incremental composition of A l'ombre allows us to speculate as to the evolving tenor of Proust's attitude to social class. Richard Bales's edition of ‘Bricquebec' (the place name was a forerunner to Balbec) reproduces both the original 1911–12 typescript (which served as a prototype of what was to become Part II of A l'ombre) and Proust's extensive handwritten addenda.26 Taken (p. 126) together, typescript and manuscript allowed for the preparation of the Grasset galleys in 1913–14 and, with the suspension in publication of the novel on the outbreak of war, these galleys in turn became the subject of further modification by Proust during the First World War. If the new sociality of Balbec entails a measure of cultural democratization, the protagonist who tours around Normandy with his grandmother and Mme de Villeparisis (and again this tranche of text is substantially part of the original Grasset galleys) makes use of the vulgar markers of social superiority in his Page 13 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality attempts to attract the young peasant women whom he sees as emanations of the local countryside. Holding up a five-franc coin to a girl out fishing, Marcel asks if she could help him find a patisserie outside which the two-horse carriage of a marquise will be waiting.27 His recourse to venality betrays a crude belief in a dominant ideology that works along the axes of gender and social class. Believing he has impressed her with the marks of wealth and social prestige, he confesses to the reader that his sexual desire has been indirectly sated: ‘Et cette prise de force de son esprit, cette possession immatérielle, lui avait ôté de son mystère autant que fait la possession physique’ (RTP II. 76) [‘As happens with physical possession, this forcible insertion of myself into her mind, this disembodied possession of her, had taken away some of her mystery’ (SLT ii. 296)]. Marcel's mental violation of the peasant girl—a sublimated form of rape fantasy—is the outcome, then, of a crude performativity marked by the unsubtle workings of class and gender hierarchies. The brief encounter with the young fisherwoman, like the episode involving Marcel's ecstasy in front of the Hudimesnil trees that immediately follows, relegates human society to the status of a mere backdrop against which Marcel's self-induced pleasure assumes theatrical prominence. Genetic analysis of these pages of the Recherche demonstrates the heteroclite nature of the textual construction. A number of textual segments which pre-date developments on the social dialectic thrown up by Marcel's stay at the Grand Hotel in Balbec develop the communion-with-nature topos and the theme of pleasures accruing from aristocratic patronage. These regularly coalesce, as when Proust's hero delights in the smells of nature enjoyed on a trip around the Balbec hinterland with Mme de Villeparisis: ‘Que de fois’ (the exclamatory tone immediately signals a significant absence of ironic disbelief on the part of the Narrator), (p.127) pour avoir simplement senti une odeur de feuillée, être assis sur un strapontin en face de Mme de Villeparisis, croiser la princesse de Luxembourg qui lui envoyait des bonjours de sa voiture, rentrer dîner au Grand-Hôtel, ne m'est-il pas apparu comme un de ces bonheurs ineffables que ni le présent ni l'avenir ne peuvent nous rendre et qu'on ne goûte qu'une fois dans la vie! (RTP II. 80) [How often the mere breath of trees in full leaf has made me see the act of sitting on a folding seat opposite Mme de Villeparisis, as she acknowledges the greeting of the Princess of Luxembourg passing by in her carriage, then driving home to dinner at the Grand Hôtel, as among those inexpressible joys of life which neither the present nor the future can ever bring back, which can be tasted once and once only! (SLT ii. 301)]

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Balbec: A New Sociality Just as striking as the socially narrow contact is the notion of temporal closure, as though the privilege of rural holidays in the company of a social elite itself begins to ebb away with the advent of new forms of social and economic interaction.28 With class privilege an essential ingredient of memory's preserve here, the motif of ‘le temps perdu’ comes to signal a historically and socially specific watershed. The shunned ‘vulgarity' of Balbec (RTP II. 67; SLT ii. 287) will thus provide a new forum for Marcel's socialization, in contrast with the images cultivated of an archaic nature and of painterly views from which the signs of contemporaneous human activity have been excised.

Aristocratic positioning Shaped in part by Mme de Villeparisis's narrow evaluation of nineteenth-century authors, the depiction of literary culture also serves as a conduit for rivalries worked around class inscription. Whereas the hero is keen to quote from Chateaubriand, Vigny, and Balzac and in Cahier 1 Mme de Villeparisis's nephews idolize the author of La Comédie humaine (RTP II. 1316), she boasts that her father knew them all. How can Balzac, her sophistry runs, claim to depict a society from which he was socially excluded? She slates Hugo, his status as a great poet being his reward for ‘“l'indulgence intéressée qu'il a professée pour les dangereuses divagations des socialistes”’ [‘ “the sedulous self-interest with which he promoted the (p.128) dangerous ravings of the socialists”’]; she disparages Vigny's declaration, ‘“Je suis le comte Alfred de Vigny”’ [‘“I am the Comte Alfred de Vigny”’], noting that ‘“on est comte ou on n'est pas comte, ça n'a aucune espèce d'importance”’ [‘“There are plenty of people who are counts, and plenty who aren't—as if it mattered, for goodness' sake!” ‘ (RTP II. 81–2; SLT ii. 302). On the one hand, her tautological assertion suggests that social rank is immutable. But if, viewed from this optic, hierarchy is natural and thus uncontested, she goes on to deride Vigny's aristocratic credentials: ‘“il était en tout cas de très petite souche”’ [‘“he was of pretty low extraction”’], adding ‘“C'est comme Musset, simple bourgeois de Paris, qui disait emphatiquement ‘L'épervier d'or dont mon casque est armé'. Jamais un vrai grand seigneur ne dit de ces choses-la”’ (RTP II. 82) [‘“Musset was another one: a mere Parisian, if you please, yet he went on about ‘The golden hawk I bear upon my helmet’—no genuine noble would ever say any such thing”’ (SLT ii. 302)].29 Mme de Villeparisis slips in for good measure that when Vigny came to be admitted to the Académie Française, M. Molé's address carried its own sly expression of condescension (RTP II. 82; SLT ii. 302).30 While her digressions help reflect the heteroclite nature of the Recherche, her class-based reading of the literary canon runs counter to, and yet complements, the Narrator's free-floating evaluation of Balbec's social make-up to the extent that both interventions carry an explicit ideological charge (indeed taken together, they form, very approximately, a trajectory from social Ancients to Moderns). Whereas she subverts established literary reputations in a restatement of entrenched class

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Balbec: A New Sociality consciousness, his sights are increasingly trained on the contemporary context of new leisure accommodated by Balbec and on the class rivalries this releases. Yet consistent with the volatility of response that Proust's text generates, Mme de Villeparisis emerges as being more progressive than most bourgeois: she defends the Republic, is neutral on the Church/State debate and—perhaps to attract attention, the Narrator believes—she dismisses the aristocracy of her day as indolent: ‘“pour moi, un homme qui ne travaille pas, ce n'est rien”’ (RTP II. 69) [“‘If you ask me, a man who doesn't work is beyond the pale!”’ (SLT ii. 289)].31 Applying the (p.129) terms of more recent, sociological discourse, one might argue that her switches allow her to be seen ‘not as a reflection of [her] position, but related to tactical and strategic “moves” within a field’.32 For rather than opting for typecasting, Proust appears to show Mme de Villeparisis as a skilled operator working fluidly across different social fields. The mobility thrown up by Balbec induces a corresponding adaptability on the part of the Narrator. Just as the hotel and the draw of the seaside spell a temporary reconfiguration as different classes cohabit, so Proust's text acts as a clearing house for the social, political, and cultural evaluations of the author's day. Class suspicion is endemic yet it often betokens a complex relationality.33 On Mme de Villeparisis's friendliness towards the hero and his grandmother, the Narrator speculates that calculation is a necessary part of any kindness shown by an aristocrat to a bourgeois, and he conveys the interaction in neatly monetarist terms. The Narrator spots the professional hand of une dame du faubourg Saint-Germain, laquelle, voyant toujours dans certains bourgeois, les mécontents qu'elle est destinée à faire certains jours, profite avidement de toutes les occasions où il lui est possible, dans le livre de comptes de son amabilité avec eux, de prendre l'avance d'un solde créditeur, qui lui permettra prochainement d'inscrire à son débit le dîner ou le raout où elle ne les invitera pas. (RTP II. 83) [a lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain who, accustomed as she is to seeing in certain middle-class people the malcontents whom she is bound to make of them sooner or later, takes full advantage while she can of any opportunities to have the account books of her friendly relations with them record in advance a credit balance, so that, when she is debited with not inviting them to her next dinner party or reception, it shall be without qualm. (SLT ii. 304)] Aristocratic calculation thus suggests a social-class bookkeeping that is perpetually being updated. Vignettes foregrounding the class dialectic are used by Proust to flesh out the narrative at this point: the hotel manager resents Marcel's bourgeois grandmother passing coats to him (to be taken to her and Marcel's rooms); his Page 16 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality reaction reminds Mme de Villeparisis of the time when the (p.130) naive concierge asked the Duc de Nemours, who was going upstairs to see her father, to bring stuff with him as he went. Mme de Villeparisis may protest that her mother's ideas and sensibilities are those of a different era, yet she herself is adept in exploiting social paternalism when explaining the provenance of such servants: ‘“le petit domestique … arrivait depuis peu de la campagne où ma mere avait la bonne habitude de les prendre. Elle les avait souvent vus naître. C'est comme cela qu'on a chez soi de braves gens. Et c'est le premier des luxes”’ (RTP II. 85) [‘“the servant lad…had only recently come up from the country, it being my mother's sound practice to acquire them there. Many a time she had known them from birth. That's how one gets good people. And good people are the first luxury in life”’ (SLT ii. 306)]. In her assertion of a near-feudal relationship, arrangements approximating to quasi-ownership of domestic personnel are vaunted as a superior possession. Meanwhile, Marcel serves his own apprenticeship in the recognition of social value, consulting regularly with his grandmother, ‘car je ne savais jamais le degré d'estime dû à quelqu'un que quand elle me l'avait indiqué’ (RTP II. 87) [‘never knowing how much I should admire any person until she pronounced’ (SLT ii. 307)]. Perplexed by the forbidding, robotic figure of Mme de Villeparisis's great-nephew, Robert de Saint-Loup, he converts his personal discomfort into a quizzical reflection on the human capacity to engage with alterity: chaque fois qu'il passait à côté de nous, le corps aussi inflexiblement élancé, la tête toujours aussi haute, le regard impassible, ce n'est pas assez dire, aussi implacable, dépouillé de ce vague respect qu'on a pour les droits d'autres créatures, même si elles ne connaissent pas votre tante, et qui faisait que je n'étais pas tout à fait le même devant une vieille dame que devant un bec de gaz (RTP II. 90) [each time he passed through our vicinity, lean and straight as a ramrod, his head always held high, his eye quite blank, or, rather, quite implacable, devoid even of that hint of latent considerateness towards other persons (even though they may not know your aunt) which meant that my own attitude, for instance, towards an old lady was not the same as it was towards a lamppost (SLT ii. 310–11)]. In mitigation, the Narrator asserts that the stiff aristocratic body language is in fact no more than a socially learnt response, ‘une chose dénuée de la signification morale que je lui avais donnée d'abord’ (RTP II. 91) [‘something that had none of the inner meaning I had seen in it’ (SLT ii. 312)]. Indeed in his social thinking at least, Saint-Loup has disowned his class. Swayed by Proudhon's socialism and the writings of Nietzsche, he is (p.131) now a young

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Balbec: A New Sociality ‘intellectuel’ (to use the neologism then applied to young radicals campaigning for revision of the Dreyfus verdict).34 Whereas the Narrator ambiguously promotes what amounts to an exoticism deriving from differences of social class, he attributes to the young Saint-Loup the conspicuous marks of a progressive modernity (social egalitarianism and the contestation of the past). Castigating himself as ‘l'héritier d'une caste ignorante et égoïste’ [‘the heir to an ignorant and selfish class’], the socialist aristocrat Saint-Loup mixes with lower classes (strata that would have surprised Marcel's parents, who self-servingly remain faithful to the social conservatism referred to by the Narrator as ‘la sociologie de Combray’ [‘the sociology of Combray’] (RTP II. 97; SLT ii. 318) ). These lower classes are in turn drawn to Saint-Loup precisely because of his aristocratic background. The Narrator is similarly seduced, casting Saint-Loup as the incarnation of centuries-old tradition: ‘A retrouver toujours en lui cet être antérieur, séculaire, cet aristocrate que Robert aspirait à ne pas être, j'éprouvais une vive joie, mais d'intelligence, non d'amitié’ (RTP II. 96) [‘To glimpse through him the earlier, immemorial, aristocratic self that Robert sought to avoid being was to experience a keen joy, but it was a joy generated by the mind, not by friendship’ (SLT ii. 317)]. Further sublimation emerges as Marcel sees in Saint-Loup the harmonious regulation of a work of art. Yet the compliment impacts negatively on proletarian culture, as when the Narrator complains that, unlike Saint-Loup's elan in showing marks of kindness to his friends, ‘cette peur de paraître trop empressé … enlaidit de tant de raideur et de gaucherie la plus sincère amabilité plébéienne’ (RTP II. 96) [‘the fear of appearing overfriendly…can spoil even the sincerest plebeian affections with much stiff and awkward posturing’ (SLT ii. 317)].35 That this characterization of Saint-Loup in the base text provided by the 1914 Grasset galleys should so eulogize aristocratic ways and sideline ‘plebeian’ attitudes, contrasts with the subsequent views of class provided by the Recherche in which infatuation with any single class makes way, in Dubois's words, for ‘toute la socialité baroque qu'affectionne Proust’.36 In diegetic terms, the world explored in the Recherche, while never encompassing the urban proletariat in any substantial way, (p.132) broadens in scope as the construction of the novel proceeds; ideologically, there is a corresponding repositioning on Proust's Narrator's part to reflect a new sociality. In significant respects, the post-1914 additions to the Balbec pages of the novel show Proust incorporating and reacting to the symptoms of social movement and contestation affecting French society around the time of the First World War. In the 1914 version of A l'ombre, the Narrator, to take one example, attributes the mystique of a young aristocratic woman to her heredity and education which ‘en ajoutant aux charmes de Mlle de Stermaria l'idée de leur cause les rendait plus intelligibles, plus complets’ (RTP II. 44) [‘enhanced the charms of Mlle de Stermaria, added to them the knowledge of their cause, made them more intelligible and more complete’ (SLT ii. 263)]; the adjustment to the Grasset Page 18 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality galleys—‘la race’ [‘race’] replaces ‘Cette hérédité et cette éducation’—points to an unequivocal social language, more trenchant and incorporating a blunt conception of social causation.37 Analysing the copious addenda to the 1914 version of Proust's novel, Alison Finch notes that the material on Marcel and the hotel manager constitutes later material, as does the evocation of Françoise's newly made friendships at the hotel and her view of masters and the aristocracy.38 While Françoise's perspective provides a counterpoint to the protagonist's promotion both of his own class and of an aestheticized nobility,39 the broader effect of these particular textual additions is to foreground the social dialectic and to help steer Proust's hero and the novel beyond nobilityworship.

Other taxonomies Proust's Narrator also experiments in A l'ombre with alternative, often fanciful categories of classification that function independently of social-structural determinants and indeed displace them. His idea of resemblance across individuals, for example, provides alternative human sets—‘le nombre des types humains est…restreint’ [‘the…range available to the human countenance being so narrow’]—and allows Marcel to find like (p.133) nesses for Legrandin (in a café waiter), Swann's concierge (in a passing stranger), and Mme Swann (in the male swimming instructor): ‘Et une sorte d'aimantation attire et retient si inséparablement les uns auprès des autres certains caractères de physionomie et de mentalité que quand la nature introduit une personne dans un nouveau corps, elle ne la mutile pas trop’ (RTP II. 45) [‘There is a sort of magnetism that brings together, and keeps together, certain features of physiognomy and mentality, so that when Nature fits such a person into a different body, it does so without much mutilation’ (SLT ii. 263–4)]. Mobility of this kind replaces gender and class divisions, the effect being to demonstrate how in Proust's work identity can spawn alternative categories of classification or indeed acquire a volatile, ludic dimension. Equally, Mlle de Stermaria's apparent interest in Marcel functions independently of the class template: ‘Obligée à une attitude de convention par la présence de son père, mais apportant déjà à la perception et au classement des autres qui étaient devant elle des principes autres que lui, peut-être voyait-elle en moi non le rang insignifiant, mais le sexe et l'âge’ (RTP II. 49; emphasis added) [‘It was just possible that, though constrained in the presence of her father to follow convention in the attitudes she adopted, but with principles different from his for the perceiving and classifying of other people, she saw in me not lowly rank but sex and youth’ (SLT ii. 268)]. Gender and generation override the default benchmark of social class; more importantly, the Narrator's reasoning reveals a conscious concern with abstract classification and matrices. ‘La race’ is another category liberally applied by the Narrator: he contrasts Françoise's pride with Aimé's good humour: ‘elle n'était pas de la race agréable et pleine de bonhomie dont Aimé faisait partie. Ils éprouvent, ils manifestent un Page 19 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality vif plaisir quand on leur raconte un fait plus ou moins piquant, mais inédit qui n'est pas dans le journal’ (RTP II. 55) [‘She was not of Aimé's breed, amiable and full of cheer. If you tell them about some intriguing circumstance which is new to them, which they have never read about in the newspaper, say, the pleasure they feel and show is whole-hearted’ (SLT ii. 274)]. The aristocracy form a race apart as we have just seen in the case of Mlle de Stermaria, while in Le Côté de Guermantes, an exasperated Mme Sazerat despises servants—‘“Cette race, cette espèce”’ (RTP II. 364) [‘“that race, that species”’ (SLT iii. 62)], she fumes—a prejudice which, in a significant admission, the Narrator sees Marcel and his family coming to share.40 The array of taxonomies (race, class, physiognomy, age, intelligence) reflects a continuing will to identify patterns of human sameness, diversity, and hierarchy. (p.134) Further evidence of social conservatism emerges in Proust's Narrator's forthright defence of Saint-Loup's father, the Comte de Marsantes. In an addition to the 1914 galleys, the count is seen as transcending ‘les bornes de sa vie du monde’ (RTP II. 92) [‘well beyond the fashionable Faubourg’ (SLT ii. 313)] but also as incorporating the elegance of a lost era. Marcel is curious to know more about ‘le roman démodé qu'avait été l'existence [du comte]’ (RTP II. 92) [‘the chapters of the outmoded romance of his father's life’ (SLT ii. 313)] which the impatient, progressive Saint-Loup cannot recreate. But whereas the son dismisses the mainstream pursuits of his father's class (he loved hunting and horseracing, was a fan of Offenbach and found Wagner boring), the Narrator accommodates these tastes, keen to resurrect the native ways of thinking (the ‘roman démodé') of Marsantes's time. Weighing up aesthetic values (radical versus conservative tastes, hunting versus high-mindedness), the Narrator also invites the reader to consider adjustments relative to the historical moment and to social situation. A less indulgent Saint-Loup reacts, the Narrator reflects, in the way that the sons of the composer Boieldieu and the vaudevillist Labiche might dismiss their fathers’ work, and yet Saint-Loup goes on to concede that ‘“Peut-être, petit bourgeois fanatique du ‘Ring', eût-il donné tout autre chose”’ (RTP II. 93) [‘“If he'd been, say, a petit bourgeois with a passion for Wagner's Ring, it's conceivable that he might just have made some sort of a mark”’ (SLT ii. 314)]. By implicitly calling for an awareness of generational change, for historical periods to be read and evaluated in terms of the life conditions that shape them, Proust articulates a cultural relativism that cautions against the progressivism of the age. Proust also assigns bodies to specific classes. Marcel sees in the facial features of Saint-Loup an ancestral, feudal physiognomy, more suited to an archer than to a man of letters (RTP II. 176; SLT ii. 400); the physical suppleness of the jeunes filles prompts Marcel to link them, erroneously as it happens, to a new sporting elite of professional cyclists and the like. But the treatment of social class habitually prompts free, sometimes anarchic association in Proust. If the restaurant at Rivebelle provides Marcel with, he notes, a greater collection of Page 20 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality young women than he might have accumulated in a whole year's worth of excursions in the countryside, the analogy he chooses is an industrial one, the concentration of physical beauty recalling ‘ces industries chimiques grâce auxquelles sont débités en grandes quantités des corps qui ne se rencontrent dans la nature que d'une façon accidentelle et fort rarement’ (RTP II. 169) [‘the chemical industries that produce great quantities of substances which, in nature, occur only by chance and are very rare’ (SLT ii. 393)]. The metaphor carries connotations of modern mass production, commodification, and materialism. By contrast, the novelty (for Marcel) of the restaurant's popular, café-concert (p. 135) ambiance converts the space into ‘un lieu de plaisir aérien superposé à l'autre’ (RTP II. 169) [‘an airy place of pleasure, superimposed on the real one’ (SLT ii. 393)]. The juxtaposition of the material and the ethereal again features in the account of the day after the Rivebelle restaurant visit when Marcel, lying in bed, enjoys the sensation of physical exhaustion and contemplates raising his body ‘rien qu'en chantant comme l'architecte de la fable’ (RTP II. 179) [‘with a mere song, like the builder in the fable’ (SLT ii. 403)]. The allusion is to Amphion in the Odyssey.41 Son of Zeus and Antiope, Amphion is forever playing music on the lyre, his brother Zethos preferring the manual arts. When, to protect their mother, the sons fortify Thebes by erecting walls, Zethos carries the stones on his back, whereas Amphion uses the sound of the lyre to work the stones into place. If in A la recherche we have the homology that links Amphion and the idle dreamer-protagonist, Ruskin infuses the myth of Amphion with the idea of harmony working across social classes. In a lecture entitled ‘The Story of Arachne' delivered at Woolwich in 1870, he argued: ‘The walls of Thebes were of stones, which Amphion…made join each other by music; and the first queen of the city was Harmonia—Harmony.' Seeing in the fable an expression of ‘musical and joyful concord among all the orders of the people', Ruskin exhorts his readers: ‘Your walls must be built by music. All your defences of iron and reserves of cold shot are useless, unless Englishmen learn to love and trust each other, in all classes.'42 In Proust's hands, the Amphion myth delivers something radically different from the cross-class dependence urged by Ruskin in a moral search for social cohesion. For Marcel is the voluptuary in search of a private satisfaction. He finds ways of bridging the gap between work and leisure, days spent on the lookout for the jeunes filles en fleurs being described as, ‘bien que désœuvrées, alertes comme des journées de travail, aiguillées, aimantées, soulevées légèrement vers un instant prochain’ (RTP II. 187) [‘though holidays, as busy as work days, marked by directions and (p.136) destinations, tending always towards the coming moment’ (SLT ii. 411)] and they call to mind similar spells in the big cities waiting outside workshops for the beloved ouvrières [‘workingPage 21 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality class young women’] (RTP II. 188; SLT ii. 413; translation modified). A parodic variation on the theme of indolence mutating into work comes in the description of Octave whose ‘constante nullité intellectuelle' [‘steadfast intellectual nullity’] troubles his nights as though he were an overworked metaphysician: in Proust's detached, laconic explanation, ‘l'inactivité complète finit par avoir les mêmes effets que le travail exagéré, aussi bien dans le domaine moral que dans la vie du corps et des muscles’ (RTP II. 233–4) [‘a total lack of activity can eventually have the same effects as overwork, whether in the emotional domain or in the domain of the body and its muscles’ (SLT ii. 458)]. The question of the tension between mind and muscle will be returned in the next chapter where I consider the Narrator's evocation of Parisian manual workers.

Ideology and tradition Beyond the Punch and Judy fare served up by the Grand Hotel, the Narrator's observation at Balbec often converts into a probing social psychology offered to the reader for serious consideration. In the wives of the provincial notaries, he identifies the neurotic self-deception whereby they believe not that they cannot share, but that they do not care for, the prerogatives enjoyed by an elderly aristocratic lady who shows no interest in knowing them: et c'est la suppression de tout désir, de la curiosité pour les formes de vie qu'on ne connaît pas, de l'espoir de plaire à de nouveaux êtres, remplacés chez ces femmes par un dédain simulé, par une allégresse factice, qui avait l'inconvénient de leur faire mettre du déplaisir sous l'étiquette de contentement et se mentir perpétuellement à elles-mêmes, deux conditions pour qu'elles fussent malheureuses. Mais tout le monde dans cet hôtel agissait sans doute de la même manière qu'elles, bien que sous d'autres formes, et sacrifiait, sinon à l'amour propre, du moins à certains principes d'éducation ou à des habitudes intellectuelles, le trouble délicieux de se mêler à une vie inconnue. (RTP II. 38)43 [and all desire for or curiosity about modes of life unknown to oneself, all hope of ever striking up new friendships, had been negated in these women and supplanted by a feigned disdain, a simulacrum of enjoyment of life, with the untoward effect that they called their displeasure satisfaction and had to (p.137) lie to themselves all the time, two things that made for their constant unhappiness. But, then, no doubt everyone in that hotel behaved in the same way, albeit in different forms, sacrificing, if not to selfesteem at least to certain principles of breeding or habits of mind, the disquieting delights of mixing with unknown company. (SLT ii. 256–7)] In the image of generalized alienation, the ‘dédain simulé’ and the ‘allégresse factice’ are the markers of the false consciousness of the social class and mark a necessary, conflicted insertion in the social dialectic. Their effect is to deprive the subject of the challenges entailed in the encounter with the Other. Proust's Page 22 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality Narrator enthuses about social but also psychological possibility. Indeed in the extension to these lines in the Bricquebec addendum, the social pleasure is ‘à poursuivre l'objet de ses désirs, à séduire, à s'attacher, en se renouvelant soimême [sic] la sympathie mystérieuse des êtres nouveaux' [‘to pursue the object of one's desires, to seduce, to become attached [to] the mysterious warmth of new people and thus to renew oneself’].44 The Narrator thus articulates less a sociological curiosity than the desire for ontological affirmation through a sociality laden with affectivity. In the absence of what Jacques Dubois terms, as we have seen, Proust's libidinally charged connection with sociality, much of the hotel population labours under this social neurosis. Many of the Balbec hotel guests attempt to resist the dialectic, passing up in the process what for Proust's Narrator are these opportunities for encounter and change. Proust argues that social and mental conditioning excludes the ‘trouble délicieux’ [‘disturbing thrill’] that comes with exposure to alterity, striking anecdotal evidence coming in his characterization of Mme de Villeparisis. The aristocrat has her furnishings and other material goods installed in her hotel bedroom. Cultivating a self-sameness that is territorial, material, and attitudinal, Mme de Villeparisis resists social adaptation, erecting ‘entre elle et le monde extérieur auquel il lui eût fallu s'adapter, la cloison de ses habitudes,…c'était son chez elle, au sein duquel elle était restée, qui voyageait plutôt qu'ellemême’ (RTP II. 39) [‘instead of adapting to the outside world, she could erect between it and herself a bulkhead of habit so deftly constructed that it was her own home, with her inside it, that had done the travelling, and not her’ (SLT ii. 257–8)]. Habit, then, assumes a sclerotic character in contrast with the protective work of ‘l'Habitude' which elsewhere in the novel Proust's protagonist so stoutly defends. In its over-determinedness, this assertive rejection of adaptation implicitly acknowledges a powerful dialectical movement at work in the extension (p.138) of the culture of leisure: ‘c'est dans son monde qu'elle continuait à vivre par la correspondance avec ses amies, par le souvenir, par la conscience intime qu'elle avait de sa situation, de la qualité de ses manières, de la compétence de sa politesse’ (RTP II. 39) [‘she continued to dwell in her own world, through exchanges of correspondence with these friends, through memory, through the private conviction she had of her own situation, of the quality of her own manners and the adequacy of her politeness’ (SLT ii. 258)]. By retaining and perfecting the mental and social habits of her class, Mme de Villeparisis rejects the new social algebra of Balbec. The underlying anxiety in operation here finds a corollary in the spatialization of class distinctions: on arriving at the hotel, she sends her domestic staff in ahead of her to provide the necessary and conspicuous marks of social prestige. They are thus delegated to negotiate the transitional spaces and indeterminacy represented by the communal areas of the hotel. Similarly, as she leaves the hotel each day, she is preceded by her valet, with her chambermaid bringing up the rear. Proust exuberantly uses the analogy of a protected, diplomatic space in a foreign Page 23 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality country, the buffer guaranteeing ‘le privilège de son extraterritorialité’ (RTP II. 40) [‘its privilege of extra-territoriality’ (SLT ii. 258)]. The ironic, graphic evocation of inviolable space captures the psychic projection of sovereignty practised by the aristocracy. Spatial criteria thus provide the medium for the generation of exclusivity, Mme de Villeparisis's intolerance being similarly configured: ‘[elle avait] mis ses préjugés entre elle et les baigneurs’ (RTP II. 39) [‘[she had] placed her prejudices between herself and the bathers’ (SLT ii. 258)]. But as Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen observes of the social capital held by the aristocracy of Proust's day, it masks an underlying weakness. Identifying both the symbolic and the territorial expression of its prestige, the critic concludes that ‘[la phase de la] territorialisation…a permis la stabilisation d'un capital formellement fragile'.45 The Narrator reflects humorously on the symptoms of this class phobia, which amounts to a visceral intolerance of relationality: C'était leur morgue qui les préservait de toute sympathie humaine, de tout intérêt pour les inconnus assis autour d'eux, et au milieu desquels M. de Stermaria gardait l'air glacial, pressé, distant, rude, pointilleux et malintentionné, qu'on a dans un buffet de chemin de fer au milieu des voyageurs qu'on n'a jamais vus, qu'on ne reverra pas, et avec qui on ne conçoit d'autres rapports que de défendre contre eux son poulet froid et son coin dans le wagon. (RTP II. 40) (p.139) [Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amid whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet car of a train, grim, hurried, standoffish, brusque, fastidious, and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again, and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner seat. (SLT ii. 258–9)] If travel by railway is the emblem of modernity and of random social encounter, the Breton aristocrat and the on (the presumed figure of complicity in Proust's burlesque Darwinian scenario) revert to a visceral defence of space, with the primitive, animalistic pose serving as a marker of social antagonism. Individual cameos extend Proust's work on the social canvas of Balbec, where other characters shun the daily ordinariness in no less conspicuous ways. Among the hotel guests, the Narrator singles out a foursome whose members are inseparable. The aspirational actress, her aristocratic lover, and two other highly visible male aristocrats eat, travel, and socialize together and jealously guard their independence. Their anxious insistence on criteria of aesthetic value and taste ensures a social apartheid and would render ‘insupportable la vie en Page 24 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality commun avec des gens qui n'y avaient pas été initiés' (RTP II. 41) [‘it unbearable to spend their time with other people uninitiated into their preferences’ (SLT ii. 259)]. They check, almost pathologically, the competence of anyone joining them, be it to eat, to play cards, or to indulge their ‘good taste' by spotting the mock period decors to be found in contemporary Parisian dwellings: ‘l'existence spéciale dans laquelle ces amis voulaient partout rester plongés … elle suffisait à les protéger contre le mystère de la vie ambiante’ (RTP II. 41) [‘the special element in which they wished to have their being…was enough to keep at bay the mysteries of life about them’ (SLT ii. 259)].46 What has to be guaranteed are ‘en toutes choses, des critériums communs à eux pour distinguer le bon et le mauvais’ (RTP II. 41) [‘in general, a common set of criteria for discriminating between the good and the bad’ (SLT ii. 259)]. They must be preserved from actuality (although not for reasons of malevolence, the Narrator interjects), and from the world around them which is cast as mystery. The cultural capital they flaunt and their scorn for the everyday isolate them from other residents at the (p.140) hotel. They remain oblivious to the geography of Balbec to the extent that their conversion of the seascape into a decadent interior is seen by Marcel as a prostitution of beauty: ‘pendant les longs après-midi la mer n'était suspendu en face d'eux que comme une toile d'une couleur agréable accrochée dans le boudoir d'un riche célibataire’ (RTP II. 41) [‘Throughout the long afternoons, the sea hung before their eyes like a mere canvas of a pleasing shade on the wall of a well-to-do bachelor's sitting room’ (SLT ii. 259)]. Likewise, the coach ride along the tree-lined route to the exclusive restaurant outside Balbec ‘n'était pour eux que la distance qu'il fallait franchir’ (RTP II. 42) [‘was mere mileage…which they had to cover’ (SLT ii. 260–1)]. This elitist cocoon (they might just as easily be riding through Paris to get to the fashionable Café Anglais or the Tour d'Argent, the Narrator protests) entails the denial of local geography and of sociality. Whether it be the Stermarias, the foursome, or Mme de Villeparisis, these figures all serve as agents of a socially reactionary atomization in their pursuit of distinction.47 And when the gang of four enters the prestigious restaurant, ‘les écharpes de [la maîtresse] tendaient devant la petite société comme un voile parfumé et souple, mais qui la séparait du monde’ (RTP II. 42) [‘[the mistress's] scarves drew a sort of sleek perfumed veil over the little group, while secluding it from the rest of the world’ (SLT ii. 261)]. The poeticization of mystique and exclusivity underscores the social partitioning.48 Elsewhere in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, we find a textual development in which ichthyology signals not social revolution but regression to a primitive epoch: it occurs when the Narrator describes the protagonist wanting to expel from the mind all connection with contemporaneity and to keep alive the projection that Balbec is a finis terrae or land's end. In this archaic discourse (reminiscent of the closing image of A l'ombre where the unveiling of a new day is likened to the unwrapping of an Egyptian mummy), the giant fish served in the restaurant pre-dates the hotel cutlery and is indeed ‘contemporain des époques Page 25 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality primitives où la vie commençait à affluer dans l'Océan, au temps des Cimmériens’ (RTP II. 54–5) [‘straight from the primitive ages when wildlife first began to teem in the Ocean, in the days of the Cimmerians’ (SLT ii. 274)]. Whereas the class stand-off associated with the hotel restaurant window adumbrates a (p.141) sociology of Balbec,49 the dissection of the fish opens uncontentiously onto natural history: ‘le corps aux innombrables vertèbres, aux nerfs bleus et roses, avait été construit par la nature, mais selon un plan architectural, comme une polychrome cathédrale de la mer’ (RTP II. 55) [‘its body, with its countless vertebrae, its pink-and-blue nerves, though put together by Nature, had been built to an architectural design, like a polychromatic cathedral of the deep’ (SLT ii. 274)]. The delight in nature's architectonic symmetries shows Proust's keen appetite for systematicity and classificatory categories and signals a temporary eclipse of actuality. The figure of Charlus further underscores the ideological importance of Balbec within the Recherche. Although young Marcel fails to read accurately the signs of Charlus's erotic interest, he finds the aristocrat enigmatic in other ways. In social terms, he is fiercely elitist—as les gens du monde know to their cost—yet he befriends members of the working class, as his nephew Saint-Loup explains to Marcel. Walking through Balbec with Charlus, the Narrator cannot fail to notice the piercing look he directs at ‘des gens insignifiants et de la plus modeste extraction qui passaient’ (RTP II. 113) [‘nondescript passersby of the most humble extraction’ (SLT ii. 335)]. The behaviour anticipates the scenes in Jupien's brothel in Le Temps retrouvé involving male prostitutes from workingclass eastern Paris. But if in Charlus's case, sexual interest knows no social barrier and indeed finds stimulation in working across class boundaries, a range of contrasts between uncle and nephew allows the Narrator to reflect on explicitly ideological issues. Whereas Saint-Loup finds genealogy tedious, Charlus revels in the reconstruction of family prestige and ancestral memory. The Narrator contrasts Saint-Loup's ‘efforts de sincérité et d'émancipation’ (RTP II. 116) [‘noble and sincere…impulse…towards emancipation’ (SLT ii. 338)] and his penchant for contemporary furniture with Charlus's preservation of ancestral wood carvings from the family home and Ancien Régime ways. For the Narrator, Charlus is ‘plus réaliste observateur des hommes’ (RTP II. 116) [‘more realist[ic] in his judgment of men’ (SLT ii. 338)] than Saint-Loup, less garrulous and less of an ideologue. The contrast prompts frank reflection on the respective merits of idealism and pragmatism: Le débat reste ouvert entre les hommes de cette sorte et ceux qui obéissent a l'idéal intérieur qui les pousse à se défaire de ces avantages pour chercher uniquement à le réaliser, semblables en cela aux peintres, aux écrivains qui renoncent leur virtuosité, aux peuples artistes qui se modernisent, aux (p.142) peuples guerriers prenant l'initiative du Page 26 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality désarmement universel, aux gouvernements absolus qui se font démocratiques et abrogent de dures lois, bien souvent sans que la réalité récompense leur noble effort; car les uns perdent leur talent, les autres leur prédominance séculaire; le pacifisme multiplie quelquefois les guerres et l'indulgence, la criminalité. (RTP II. 116) [There is no common ground between men of his sort and those who aspire to an inner ideal that urges them to divest themselves of such advantages and to devote themselves solely to it, who thereby show a similarity with painters or writers who renounce their virtuosity, artistic peoples who embrace modernization, warlike peoples who opt for total disarmament, dictatorial governments that turn democratic and repeal harsh laws, though often the world will not reward them for this noble effort; some lose their talent, some their hereditary predominance; pacifism can lead to war, and indulgence can foster crime. (SLT ii. 338)] Proust's Narrator thereby intercalates an ethical and political debate. Providing thesis and antithesis, he concludes that Saint-Loup's democratic verve is both well intentioned and ineffectual. Judging certain forms of personal and collective self-transformation to be sacrificial and misguided, the Narrator is unconvinced by counsels of peace and democratization. Significantly, the positions of Proust and his Narrator converge here when we remember the author's impatience with Roman Rolland's pacifism and the debate around nationalism and universal values in the wake of the First World War.50 Yet the Narrator is similarly unable to endorse Charlus's fetishistic attachment to the past. He exposes as a ‘conception bâtarde’ [‘misbegotten notion’] the cocktail of art, upper-class prestige, and generosity favoured by Charlus, whilst conceding that his own grandmother is similarly drawn to anything acquiring a ‘supériorité spirituelle’ [‘spiritual superiority’] through being endorsed by a La Bruyère or a Fénelon (RTP II. 117; SLT ii. 338). In these lines then, the seductive authority of the aristocracy and the literary canon are simultaneously acknowledged and contested, as are Saint-Loup's idealism and the collective soul-searching of socially aware artists and unspecified nations. The salient social and economic factors obtaining in France in the decades before the First World War bear restating given that the respective positions adopted by Saint-Loup and Charlus fit within ideological debate in the first half of the Third Republic. Labour organization had been severely hindered by the State after the events of the Commune in 1871. The Third Republic was not a welfare state but a police state (an ‘état gendarme’). There was no concerted attempt to intervene in the social field and poor relief was delivered by charitable bodies. The outbreak of (p.143) war in 1914 obliged the State to become more proactive in the levying of taxes but the economically and socially privileged regarded this as an emergency measure. The end of the conflict brought a ‘desperate longing for a return to stability. For the upper and middle Page 27 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality classes that meant an end to state intervention, the restoration of the franc to its pre-war gold value and the reestablishment of the prewar social hierarchy.’51 These pressing socio-economic issues thus form the backdrop to A l'ombre, the composition of which proceeded against the backdrop of the First World War.52 Saint-Loup's relationship with Françoise extends the ideological backdrop. As a Royalist, she is disbelieving (and disappointed) on learning that a marquis is a Republican but she quickly rationalizes the situation, asserting, albeit indulgently, that he was a hypocrite for having most probably passed himself off as a Republican to ingratiate himself with the government of the day. Yet the Narrator corrects this view: ‘Or la sincérité et le désintéressement de Saint-Loup étaient au contraire absolus’ (RTP II. 138) [‘Saint-Loup's sincerity and disinterest were…absolute’ (SLT ii. 361)]. Saint-Loup's egalitarianism has consequences. The fact that he often treats his coach driver with gruffness is for him a mark of the equal relationship between the two. To treat him politely, his argument runs, would be to lapse back into paternalism.53 To Marcel, he protests: ‘“vous avez l'air de trouver que je devrais le traiter avec égards, comme un inférieur! Vous parlez comme un aristocrate”’ (RTP II. 138) [‘“You seem to suggest that I should handle him with care, like an inferior! … You're speaking like an aristocrat”' (SLT ii. 361)]. Yet the Narrator sees at work in the impulsive figure of Saint-Loup an overcompensation whereby aristocrats are routinely dismissed and the achievements of ‘un homme du peuple’ (RTP II. 138) [‘a man of the people’ (SLT ii. 361)] all too easily exaggerated. Saint-Loup's claim connects with what Brigitte Mahuzier persuasively calls the democratization of scorn in A la recherche, a development in which figures such as Françoise come to assume attitudes that are traditionally the preserve of superiors.54 (p.144) Saint-Loup's status as someone in ideological revolt against his class paves the way for further reflection on social attitudes and influence. Predictably, his fellow aristocrats see in his girlfriend, the actress Rachel, the cause of his transformation. Yet on this occasion at least, the Narrator offers a different causation. Invoking the civilizing influence of women on men, he stresses the axis of gender, not class. Men from across the class spectrum are lumped together, ‘qu'il s'agisse de la maîtresse d'un jeune clubman comme Saint-Loup ou d'un jeune ouvrier (les électriciens par exemple comptent aujourd'hui dans les rangs de la Chevalerie véritable)’ (RTP II. 139) [‘whether [it be the mistress of] a young clubman like Saint-Loup or a young workingman (nowadays electricians, for example, have a rightful place in the ranks of the true nobility)’ (SLT ii. 362)].55 Women are similarly herded together, but this time to deliver moral enhancement:

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Balbec: A New Sociality pour bien des jeunes gens du monde, lesquels sans cela resteraient incultes d'esprit, rudes dans leurs amitiés, sans douceur et sans goût, c'est bien souvent leur maîtresse qui est leur vrai maître et les liaisons de ce genre, la seule école de morale où ils soient initiés à une culture supérieure, où ils apprennent le prix des connaissances désintéressées. Même dans le bas peuple (qui au point de vue de la grossièreté ressemble si souvent au grand monde), la femme, plus sensible, plus fine, plus oisive, a la curiosité de certaines délicatesses, respecte certaines beautés de sentiment et d'art que, ne les comprît-elle pas, elle place pourtant audessus de ce qui semblait le plus désirable à l'homme, l'argent, la situation. (RTP II. 139) [for many young men in fashionable society, who might otherwise never acquire a certain cultivation of mind or a measure of mildness in friendship, who might never be exposed to good taste or gentler ways of doing things, it is often in a mistress that they find their best teacher, and in relationships with such women that they make their only acquaintance with morality, serve an apprenticeship in higher culture, and learn to see the value of knowledge for its own sake. Even among the lowest classes, who can often vie in uncouthness with the highest, it is the woman, with her greater sensitivity and delicacy and her idle mind, who inquires further into certain refinements, aspires to modes of beauty or art which, even though she may not fully grasp them, she still sees as more important than the things, like money or position, that to the eyes of the man would have seemed more desirable. (SLT ii. 362)] (p.145) Proust's argument is laced with capricious value judgements: the adverb ‘même' [‘even’] (‘Même dans le bas peuple’), frequently used to qualify mention of the working class in the novel and symptomatic of the hierarchical social consensus from which Proust sometimes dissents, functions as a would-be necessary linguistic prefix to the incorporation of the working classes into the social cross-section (as though Proust were tactfully engaging a doubting reader); the willed conflation of workers and aristocrats in a shared vulgarity;56 the patronizing view of working-class women's respectful ignorance of what are deemed to be higher things. Yet Proust's text is in some respects socially progressive, most evidently in the rebuttal of male hegemony and also when contrasted with the repertoire of other attitudes of his day (we have already seen Bourget's refutation of individual, as opposed to collective, identity and his reactionary opposition to social-class movement, and Barrès's insistence on the social voluntarism which, oppressively for the Proust of Le Temps retrouvé, binds together the nation).57 Continuing his reflection on woman's civilizing mission, the Narrator observes, always with an eye for analogies in the understanding of narratives of power, how Saint-Loup's mistress had instilled in him a love of animals, rather like the early medieval monks who had similarly civilized Christendom (RTP II. 140; SLT ii. 363). Yet the hero's progressivism is Page 29 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality inchoate and intermittent, as when he owns up to the distortions in social understanding wrought by his own education. He confesses, for example, to being surprised by Rachel's high-mindedness—Rachel claims to be an intellectual and chides Saint-Loup for being, she argues, ‘de naissance, un ennemi de l'intelligence’ (RTP II. 141) [‘a born enemy of the intellectual life’ (SLT ii. 364)]; the Narrator, who admits to being socially conventional in imputing to the less-well-off a craving for monetary gain, now concedes he had not realized that the desire to make a name for oneself is, even for ‘une petite cocotte’ (RTP II. 142) [‘an obscure little tart’ (SLT ii. 365)], a more determining factor than the drive to make money.58 (p.146) Such admissions and episodes show that the Recherche is as much the narrative of the fitful evolution in the hero's attitudes to social morality and class as it is the account of his birth as an artist. Saint-Loup's own, strongly argued moral protests against the legacy of his class add to this sense of enquiry. These protests are often the stuff of melodrama, as when Saint-Loup responds indignantly to the condescending reception given to Rachel's artistic performance by her aristocratic audience. He rails against male pleasureseekers, singling out those who corrupt women by forcing them into prostitution: they merit the guillotine ‘“plus que des malheureux qui ont été conduits au crime par la misère et par la cruauté des riches”’ (RTP II. 143) [‘“more so than the poor devil who has been pushed into crime by poverty and the ruthlessness of the rich”’ (SLT ii. 367)]. Deemed to be categorically free from social condescension—we read in the drafts: ‘Personne moins que [Saint-Loup] n'avait le préjugé des classes’ [‘Saint-Loup was totally untouched by class prejudice’]59—the young déclassé earnestly seeks emancipation. On social class, the Narrator's position-taking is more erratic, with Marcel shying away from the commitment to the disadvantaged demonstrated by Saint-Loup. Indeed if SaintLoup's engagement on issues of social justice manifests itself facially—‘son visage respirait la souffrance et la haine’ (RTP II. 143) [‘his face contorted with pain and hatred’ (SLT ii. 367)]—Marcel's fits of moral conscience are more likely to surface in the context of his intimate relationships (with his mother, grandmother, and Albertine, for example) than in his understanding of wider social morality. Intolerance of social and cultural difference is a key thematic driver in A l'ombre. It is an occupational hazard for someone with the confessed narrowness of education that is Marcel's. For the hero, a tight parental prescriptiveness ensures that he fetishizes the casual, free-wheeling ways of the jeunes filles en fleurs. He concedes in one of the esquisses: Mes parents m'avaient élevé si loin de la vie et m'avaient fait un monstre de tant de choses considérées comme presque diaboliques—par exemple entrer dans un café, fumer des cigarettes, être insolent dans la rue—que toutes les choses qui constituaient la mauvaise éducation m'apparaissaient Page 30 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality comme faisant bloc avec toutes ces autres choses dont on ne m'avait même pas parlé’.60 (p.147) [The upbringing I received from my parents left me so removed from life and made me see as monstrous so many things that were judged to be almost diabolical—for example going into a café, smoking cigarettes, being cheeky in the street—so that all the things that constituted a bad upbringing seemed to me to form a whole with all the other things about which they had never spoken to me.] This early inculcation of a perception of negative otherness can only intensify Marcel's social and mental adventure in Balbec. For it renders his apprenticeship all the more dramatic, sharpening his capacity for projection, judgementalism, and mythologization. Class difference and claimed vulgarity are overdetermined and initially feared, before becoming prized for their exotic appeal. In his search for the class origins of the band of girls at Balbec, the protagonist discounts the possibility of aristocratic origins, hesitates between the bourgeoisie riche and more popular milieus including that of semiprofessional sportsmen, their sisters and girlfriends. Here again, the ‘même je descendis…’ [‘I went even lower’] provides an adverbial marker of a social investigation reaching its limit point down the social scale. All this before working back up to the rank of bourgeois stockbrokers, where Albertine and her friends are eventually situated.61

‘Eloge de la bourgeoisie française’62 Thus, far from belonging to a popular social background, Albertine provides the hero with an insider's introduction to provincial bourgeois life at Balbec, pointing out the dentist, the orchestra conductor, the dance teacher, and the mayor. Even the artist Elstir lives in the most bourgeois of surroundings and acquires some of his language and social traits from the repertory of sayings and attitudes of the ordinary people around him: ‘même les grands hommes sont, en certaines choses, pareils aux gens vulgaires, prennent…le pain quotidien chez le même boulanger’ (RTP II. 215) [‘because even great men are like vulgar people in some things…they buy their daily bread from the same baker’ (SLT ii. 439)]. Given the social markers, society here operates, to use Durkheim's formulation, as ‘something beyond us and something in ourselves’.63 Albertine (p.148) indirectly provides several pointers to the political affiliation of her class: mistrustful of the workings of government in the Third Republic, her family shuns those seeking to enrich themselves through government contacts; she and the other jeunes filles are not allowed by their families to attend a concert in the town hall, from where an image of Christ has been removed to the great shock of Andrée's mother. Unhappy with republican laicity, parents also lodge their protest about their daughters' examination paper in the pages of Le Gaulois.64 We have, then, a conservative, Catholic, provincial bourgeoisie standing essentially for an anti-Jewish, right-wing politics. Yet anti-Semitism transcended Page 31 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality class boundaries in the Third Republic, as Proust accurately shows: like Aimé ‘below’ her—Aimé demonstrates the populist basis of much anti-Dreyfus sentiment by protesting that the captain is guilty a thousand times over (RTP II. 164; SLT ii. 388)—and Charlus ‘above’ her, Albertine makes no effort to conceal her bigotry.65 When Marcel tells her that his friend is called Bloch, she calls out: ‘“Je l'aurais parié que c'était un youpin. C'est bien leur genre de faire les punaises”’ (RTP II. 235) [‘“I wouldn't have minded betting he was a Jew boy! They always know how to get your back up!”’ (SLT ii. 460)]. The evidence of A l'ombre thus emphatically confirms the cross-class prevalence of anti-Semitism in the political landscape of Proust's day. Marcel's conversation on the beach with Saint-Loup is interrupted by ‘des imprécations contre le fourmillement d'Israélites qui infestait Balbec’ (RTP II. 97) [‘a voice…bemoaning the dense infestation of Jews that one had to put up with in Balbec’ (SLT ii. 318)]. The author of this anti-Semitic abuse is his Jewish friend Bloch, who is set on securing his social inclusion. Proust's Narrator himself makes use of antiSemitism in his evocation of Bloch and his family. In a provocative summing-up, the Narrator asserts: ‘Or cette colonie juive était plus pittoresque qu'agréable’ (RTP II. 98) [‘This Jewish colony was more picturesque than pleasant’ (SLT ii. 319)]—the inference being that the Jewish immigrants are not fully assimilated. Seeking his reader's complicity in a collective prejudice, the Narrator, adopting a collective ‘we', adds that, as our geography classes teach us, the level of assimilation of Jews in Paris is much greater than in (p.149) Russia or Romania. According to the Narrator's analogy, Balbec follows the eastern European model, Bloch's extended family as well as other Jews forming, when they come into town, un cortège homogène en soi et entièrement dissemblable des gens qui les regardaient passer et les retrouvaient là tous les ans sans jamais échanger un salut avec eux, que ce fût la société des Cambremer, le clan du premier président, ou des grands ou petits bourgeois, ou même de simples grainetiers de Paris, dont les filles, belles, fières, moqueuses et françaises comme les statues de Reims, n'auraient pas voulu se mêler à cette horde de fillasses mal élevées, poussant le souci des modes de ‘bains de mer’ jusqu'à toujours avoir l'air de revenir de pêcher la crevette ou d'être en train de danser le tango. (RTP II. 98) [a homogeneous procession, quite distinct from the people who watched them pass and who recognized them from previous years without ever exchanging a greeting with them, whether it was the Cambremers' set, the little clan of the First President from Caen, people of exalted social position or of the mere middle classes, even simple grain merchants down from Paris, none of whose daughters, beautiful, proud, and scornful, as French as the statues of Rheims Cathedral, would have dreamed of mixing with a rabble of ill-bred hussies who thought ‘seaside' modishness so Page 32 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality important that they always looked as though they had just been shrimping or were dancing the tango. (SLT ii. 319)] The effect of Proust's cultural essentialization is to maximize difference: the image of Jewish holidaymakers as a homogenized and racially characterized grouping confirms how the anti-Semitism of his day formed part of a politics of race. They are set in opposition to the socially stratified French holidaymakers in Balbec (the populous groups not represented being the urban and rural proletariat, whose economic deprivation excluded them from the culture of extended leisure). The Narrator boastfully crafts an iconic Frenchness from the daughters of down-to-earth Parisian merchants, the adverb ‘même’ again conveying class condescension but also serving as a cultural qualifier for inclusion in a narrow nationalist consensus. Likewise, the use of free indirect style—in the reference to ‘a rabble of ill-bred hussies'—allows popular racial prejudice to resonate uncontested. To compound cultural difference, Jewish men are depicted in terms of their exotic dress and feed Proust's orientalizing imaginary. Towards the end of the narrative sequence, the Narrator nevertheless insists that were one to penetrate the Jewish colony, one might well find qualities and virtues as with other social groups; and in an extension of that assertion, the Jewish youths are seen to form ‘une phalange compacte et close’ (RTP II. 98) [‘a dense phalanx, closing ranks’ (SLT ii. 320)], their (p.150) solidarity serving as a bulwark against the anti-semitism that surrounds them. Elsewhere in the Balbec section of A l'ombre, the Narrator continues to reflect on the power of the social milieu, concluding that Albertine, for better or for worse, undergoes the influence of her age: ‘C'est qu'en réalité, bien que cela ne se vît guère encore, elle était très intelligente et dans les choses qu'elle disait, la bêtise n'était pas sienne, mais celle de son milieu et de son âge’ (RTP II. 239) [‘The fact was, invisible as this was to me at the time, she was highly intelligent; and though there was stupidity in the things she said, it was not her own but that of her peers’ (SLT ii. 464)]. The Narrator's reasoning replicates the sociological principle of Durkheim that ideas and tendencies common to society at large supplant those that are personal.66 But society becomes atomized when, in his description of those who walk along the seafront at Balbec, the Narrator describes the individuals filing warily past one another (RTP II. 146–7; SLT ii. 370–1). While at the beginning of this textual development the tone is one of social comedy as the wife of the senior judge from Caen, armed with her lorgnette, takes the lead in mercilessly scrutinizing passers-by, anxiety grips the participants, each of whom fears the wary scrutiny of those around them. If judgementalism rather than a complacent conviviality is the cement that holds together the social grouping of promenaders, the gaze of others prompts Proust to reflect on how sociality is both fostered and frustrated:

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Balbec: A New Sociality l'amour—par conséquent la crainte—de la foule étant un des plus puissants mobiles chez tous les hommes, soit qu'ils cherchent à plaire aux autres ou à les étonner, soit à leur montrer qu'ils les méprisent. Chez le solitaire la claustration même absolue et durant jusqu'à la fin de la vie a souvent pour principe un amour déréglé de la foule qui l'emporte tellement sur tout autre sentiment que, ne pouvant obtenir, quand il sort, l'admiration de la concierge, des passants, du cocher arrêté, il préfère n'être jamais vu d'eux, et pour cela renoncer à toute activité qui rendrait nécessaire de sortir. (RTP II. 147) [for love, hence fear, of the crowd is one of the most powerful motives in all individuals, whether they wish to please others, astonish them, or show that they despise them. In a recluse, the most irrevocable, lifelong rejection of the world often has as its basis an uncontrolled passion for the crowd, of such force that, finding when he does go out that he cannot win the admiration of a concierge, passersby, or even the coachman halted at the corner, he prefers (p.151) to spend his life out of their sight, and gives up all activities that make it necessary for him to leave the house. (SLT ii. 370–1)] In its most acute manifestation, the asocial is read as an ardent affirmation of the social. Proust thus temporarily shelves the paradigm of class, casting the social as an explanatory framework for Self/Other relations and extrapolating from the eccentric plight of the recluse what is offered as a principle of social psychology. If the socialization that Marcel experiences in the newly configured leisure spaces of late nineteenth-century Balbec challenges his lifestyle of introspection and sensitizes him to the spectrum of class difference, it also provides a concertina-like folding-in of social strata. Proust's Narrator writes dialectically about ‘ce changement de proportions sociales, caractéristiques de la vie de bains de mer’ (RTP II. 154) [‘the alteration in social proportions that is characteristic of holiday life at the seaside’ (SLT ii. 378)] and identifies winners and losers. Melodramatically, he places himself among the losers: ‘Tous les avantages qui dans notre milieu habituel nous prolongent, nous agrandissent, se trouvent là devenus invisibles, en fait supprimés’ (RTP II. 154) [‘All the ways in which our usual environment confers advantages on us, extending and inflating our importance, become invisible there, indeed are abolished’ (SLT ii. 378)]; the jeunes filles become beneficiaries in the new configuration, acquiring in Marcel's eyes an artificially enhanced importance. Significantly for our reading of class, motifs conventionally read in Proust's work as transcending the precise socio-historical nexus of the fin de siècle, such as the tempus fugit topos, are in fact tightly connected to it. Thus A l'ombre has its equivalent to the bal costumé of Le Temps retrouvé but whereas in the final Page 34 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality volume, bodily transformation and the misrecognition this triggers serve as apolitical reminders of human mortality, the Balbec material provides a different slant. As Marcel contemplates the jeunes filles standing alongside their mothers, the Narrator anticipates not only the bodily changes they will undergo but also the cultural and political programming they are destined to follow. In a powerful prolepsis, the flower-of-youth motif celebrated in the volume's title is suspended, with the Narrator identifying specifically political and bodily determinisms: Je savais que, aussi profound, aussi inéluctable que le patriotisme juif ou l'atavisme chrétien chez ceux qui se croient le plus libérés de leur race, habitait sous la rose inflorescence d'Albertine, de Rosemonde, d'Andrée, inconnu à elles-mêmes, tenu en réserve pour les circonstances, un gros nez, une bouche proéminente, un embonpoint qui étonnerait mais était en réalité dans la coulisse, prêt à entrer en scène, imprévu, fatal, tout comme tel (p.152) dreyfusisme, tel cléricalisme, tel héroïsme national et féodal, soudainement issus, à l'appel des circonstances, d'une nature antérieure à l'individu lui-même, par laquelle il pense, vit, évolue, se fortifie ou meurt, sans qu'il puisse la distinguer des mobiles particuliers qu'il prend pour elle. (RTP II. 245–6) [I knew that, under the present rosy blossoming of Albertine, Rosemonde, or Andrée, unknown to them, biding its time, as deep-rooted and inescapable as Jewish clannishness or Christian atavism in people who believe they have risen above their race, there lurked an outsized nose, a graceless mouth, a propensity to overweight which would surprise people but which had been standing by, awaiting only the favour of circumstance, as unforeseen, as fated as others' Dreyfusism, clericalism, national and feudal heroisms, which the fullness of time suddenly summons from a nature predating the individual himself, through which he thinks, lives, and evolves, from which he draws his sustenance, and in which he dies without ever being able to distinguish it from the particular motives he mistakes for it. (SLT ii. 470)] We miss, Proust argues, the primary causes of our ideas which operate, and are typographically signalled, parenthetically—‘(race juive, famille française)’ (RTP II. 246) [‘(Jewishness, French family)’ (SLT ii. 470)], are the examples proffered. Again, working across a spectrum of religious and cultural formations and prejudice, Proust posits an ideological programming that draws simultaneously on atavism and the power of the historical moment.67 We can set this endorsement of determinism within a broader context. Julien Benda, characterizing aesthetic tastes obtaining in France on the eve of the First World War, decries the prevailing appetite in ‘la bonne société' [‘respectable society’] for instinct, sentimentalism, and novelty. Rejecting Bergson's promotion of intuition, Benda advocates the application of the intellect in the pursuit of Page 35 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality general laws. He observes that the repudiation of Taine by Benda's generation has not however seen the disappearance of all three Naturalist categories of determinism: the role of le milieu has been elided; but in an oblique allusion to Barrès, Benda sees the formation of the subject by the past retained (in the dictum ‘Les morts nous gouvernent' [‘The dead govern us’]) as is the determinism of race, both of which categories bring with them ‘leur furie d'émoi' [‘their fury and commotion’].68 If Benda views such lyricism as an unwelcome, disquieting flight (p.153) from the rational, Proust's Narrator identifies, and is in some measure sensitive to, the power of, in his words, Jewish race and Christian atavism to deliver a collective ideological formation. One of the most eye-catching markers of Time in Proust's novel is the church of Saint-Hilaire in Combray. But just as we saw in Chapter 1 the connection to intense, turn-of-the-century debates about cultural heritage prompted by the separation of the Churches and the State, so in the Balbec church the Narrator significantly finds a template for understanding the social class of the young Norman women with whom Marcel is obsessed. Elstir has just provided the hero with an erudite explanation of the outstanding architectural features of the church, which he judges to be superior to the Italian copies. The painter counsels caution in the assessment of past eras, insisting that there has never been a Golden Age when everyone functioned as a creative genius (RTP II. 197; SLT ii. 422). Yet the sculptor whose work adorns the façade of the Balbec church was, for Elstir, an outstanding genius. Unwittingly, he provides Marcel with the template for his subsequent, class-centred eulogy: ‘Je ne pus qu'admirer combien la bourgeoisie française était un atelier merveilleux de la sculpture la plus variée. Que de types imprévus, quelle invention dans le caractère des visages, quelle décision, quelle fraîcheur, quelle naïveté dans les traits! Les vieux bourgeois avares d'où étaient issues ces Dianes et ces nymphes me semblaient les plus grands des statuaires’ (RTP II. 200) [‘I could only stand amazed at the range of different sculptures produced, as in a wonderful workshop, by the French middle classes—so many unexpected patterns, so much inventiveness in the characters of faces, such decisive lines, such freshness and simplicity in the features! The miserly old burghers who had engendered such Dianas and nymphs I now saw as masters in statuary’ (SLT ii. 425)]. The capacity of the bourgeoisie to reproduce and recast itself prompts the Narrator's wonder and works well beyond Marcel's infatuation with the jeunes filles. By conflating medieval achievement and contemporary bodily perfection, the Narrator engineers a mental and affective repositioning in which a social class in its narrow historical contingency comes to be the object of veneration. With a praise that is as class-specific as it is lavish, the process of transmutation sees the lessons of ecclesiastical art history extend into celebration of the bourgeoisie of the Third Republic as it sculpts a new generation of its class.

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Balbec: A New Sociality What to the reader may seem an improbable eulogy (for by Marcel's own admission he had previously reserved mystery for the inaccessible classes of ‘le peuple' and the aristocracy) resonates further when read within the political context of Proust's day. Situating Proust's class tribute historically, we can link it to his contemporaries' reflections on bourgeois (p.154) identity. Benda targets ‘le bourgeoisisme'69 in La Trahison des clercs as a cause of sectarian division and attributes it to the likes of René Johannet. A member of Action Française, Johannet published Eloge du bourgeois français in 1924, offering his reader a partisan defence of middle-class values and ways. In crucial respects, Johannet's text differs radically from Proust's, no more so than in the former's hostile rejection of proletarian culture: Tel quel, le bourgeois français, avec…sa réserve distinguée, ses goûts de permanence et de sécurité, demeure dans l'histoire de la civilisation la physionomie certainement la plus digne, la plus méritante peut-être, en tout cas la moins rébarbative. Considérez plutôt le type hideux de classe sociale qu'on essaie de dégager à nos portes sous le nom de ‘prolétariat’ et dites qu'on est tenté d'élever des autels au bourgeois de France.70 The exaggerated use of superlatives and the language of naked class war notwithstanding, we see in Johannet, as indeed with Proust, the use of physionomy to valorize the class. Likewise the call for altars to be erected to the French middle class reprises the link between architecture and class in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs. While Johannet's flat-footed sectarianism is patently not to be confused with Proust's unaligned, often ludic openness to class difference, the stress on the inventiveness and creativity of the bourgeoisie in A l'ombre finds an echo in Johannet's reference to ‘[un] long et puissant engrenage, qui produit les flores et les saisons'.71 Proust does not replicate the aggressive propagandizing to be found in Johannet's Eloge du bourgeois français. Nevertheless, within the repertoire of social attitudes and the parade of class-determined bodies in A l'ombre, the author's passing tribute to the provincial middle class finds its place. The oxymoron whereby, in the Narrator's trenchant terms, the ‘vieux bourgeois avares' [‘miserly old burghers’] become the gifted sculptors of an emerging generation of middle-class youth, ensures that the Narrator does not lapse into facile adulation. But the ability to identify—waiting in the wings, to use his metaphor—future bodily mutations and religious and political alignments allows him to conclude that the individual is socially situated, issuing from, to repeat, ‘une nature antérieure à (p.155) l'individu lui-même' (RTP II. 245) [‘a nature predating the individual himself’ (SLT ii. 470)]. Atavism and sociality combine in a determinism which the Narrator presents as ineluctable; in so doing he demonstrates the strength of connection with the Third Republic to be found in

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Balbec: A New Sociality A la recherche and the novel's embeddedness in the discourses of race and class of its day. Notes:

(1) René Girard refers to the ‘“patriotic” rituals’ of Combray; see Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 198. For further analysis of the workings of social narrowness in Combray, see my ‘Proust and Social Spaces', 151–67. (2) For a discussion of the impact of Dorgelès's work and other war novelists, see Martin Hurcombe, Novelists in Conflict: Ideology and the Absurd in the French Combat Novel of the Great War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004). (3) See T. Kemp, ‘Economic and social policy in France’, in Peter Mathias and Sidney Pollard (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, viii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 691–751: 726, 738). While the action of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs reflects the fin de siècle world of the leisured classes, Proust was working on the composition of the volume up until early 1918; see Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 805. (4) [‘the crowding involved in seaside life’], RTP II. 1335. (5) Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 169. (6) [‘The everyday is sprinkled with marvels, with a froth as dazzling as that produced by writers and artists.… all kinds of language are an opportunity for these passing celebrations which surge up, disappear and then start up again’], M. de Certeau, La Culture au pluriel (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 244–5, quoted by Luce Giard in her editorial introduction to M. de Certeau, L'Invention du quotidien, i. Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. xiii. (7) As we shall see in Ch. 8, Le Côté de Guermantes provides further evidence of Françoise developing her class consciousness. Michelle Perrot and Claude Willard see the period 1880 to 1936 as ‘le “grand âge” des ouvriers' [‘the “great age” of the workers’]; see F. Braudel and E. Labrousse (eds.), Histoire économique et sociale de la France, iv/1–2, Années 1880–1950 (1979–80; Paris: PUF, 1993), 1, 63. (8) See textual variant cited at RTP II. 1342, n. c to II. 10. (9) [‘that half-century of servitude’], G. Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 1979), 180. (10) [‘the muteness and placidity’], ibid. (11) Queen Ranavalona was ruler of Madagascar and was deposed by the French in 1897; see editor's note, RTP II. 1359, n. 1 to II. 44. Page 38 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality (12) Althusser sets out the concept of the Ideological State Apparatus in ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)', in L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). (13) Proust's character is most probably based on Jacques Lebaudy, who acquired land in the Sahara and declared himself emperor of the Sahara, the singer Marguerite Dellier becoming his ‘empress’. See editorial note, RTP II. 1356, n. 2 to II. 37. (14) Translation modified. (15) As Pierre-Louis Rey points out (RTP II. 1335), Odette provides the aristocracy with the image of a triumphant bourgeoisie at the end of Noms de pays: le nom. (16) The extract quoted here is part of a manuscript variant in Carnet 3. See editor's note, RTP II. 1355, n. 1 to II. 35. (17) [‘quite obviously, Proust maintains an uncommon, libidinal connection with everything that relates to social structure and relations’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 23. (18) While there is clear evidence to substantiate Michael Sprinker's point about Françoise's social conservatism (M. Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu and the Third French Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 92), there are nevertheless complicating dimensions to her character, as the incipient signs of her social contestation discussed above show. (19) [‘somewhat cynical paternalism’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 131. (20) The paragraph ‘Quand Mme de Villeparisis…traduire chaque trait' ( RTP II. 57–8) [‘If Mme de Villeparisis…must be translated’ (SLT ii. 276–7)] does not feature in the 1914 Grasset galleys (Bibliothèque Nationale document n.a.fr. 16761: 51 iv) and is a later development; see Alison Winton (Finch), Proust's Additions: The Making of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 2 vols., ii. 42. (21) Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust, 178. (22) We might compare this with Swann's rant against mediocre bourgeois tastes in Un amour de Swann (RTP I. 281; SLT i. 289); see above, Ch. 3. (23) See Tadié, ‘Introduction Générale', RTP I, p. lxxxiii.

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Balbec: A New Sociality (24) The development ‘A côté des voitures…son immobilité végétale' (RTP II. 66) [‘Like a rare species…his vegetable stillness’ (SLT ii. 285–6)] is not in n.a.fr. 16761:52vi, nor prior. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 43. (25) [‘On this subject, Proust showed foresight. He nevertheless took some time to make this discovery’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 119. (26) Richard Bales (ed.), ‘Bricquebec': Prototype d' ‘A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. vii. See also Douglas Alden, Marcel Proust's Grasset Proofs: Commentary and Variants (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures, 1978). The postGrasset additions are recorded in Winton, Proust's Additions. (27) This forms part of the manuscript addenda to the 1911–12 typescript and is therefore part of the pre-First World War version of the Recherche. See Bales (ed.), ‘Bricquebec', 153–5. (28) In the base text of Bricquebec, an unfinished version of this crossing of carriages in a scene of aristocratic leisure shows Proust working to heighten the sense of a past that is sealed: the Narrator anticipates the later death of Mme de Villeparisis and a future moment of travel (‘bien des années plus tard' [‘many years later’]) along another road from which Marcel then looks back on an ineffable moment of past happiness. See ibid. 167, 169. (29) Mme de Villeparisis's method replicates Sainte-Beuve's approach to literary criticism which Proust openly refutes in the so-called Contre Sainte-Beuve. (30) ‘C'est comme Musset…et d'impertinence' (RTP II. 82) [‘Musset was another one…mischievous impertinence!’ (SLT ii. 302)] also forms an addition to the 1914 text. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 44. (31) Nevertheless, in a significant addition to the 1914 Grasset galleys, the Narrator sets limits to her progressiveness, which does not extend to socialism ‘qui etait la bête noire de Mme de Villeparisis’ (RTP II. 69) [‘which was Mme de Villeparisis's pet aversion’ (SLT ii. 289)]; Winton, Proust's Additions, ii, 43. (32) Fiona Devine and Mike Savage, ‘The Cultural Turn: Sociology and Class Analysis’, in Fiona Devine et al., Rethinking Class: Culture, Identities and Lifestyle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 14. (33) Fiona Devine makes the point that identity is seen as ‘a relational claim to other players in the field’, ibid. 15. (34) The ‘Manifeste des Intellectuels' of 1898 of which Proust was a signatory campaigned against the prosecution of Picquart, who was calling for a retrial for Dreyfus. The Right used the term ‘intellectuel' aggressively to designate supporters of Dreyfus, Ferdinand Brunetière, for example, rejecting Zola's Page 40 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality ‘J'accuse' and dismissing ‘intellectuels' as ‘les gens qui vivent dans les laboratoires et les bibliothèques' [‘people who live in laboratories and libraries’]. See RTP II. 1385, n. 1 to II. 92. (35) Translation modified. (36) [‘the whole baroque sociality of which Proust is fond’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 146. (37) This amendment to the 1914 Grasset version of the text is set out in Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 41. (38) Ibid, i. 25. (39) Aristocratic prestige nevertheless remains an important dimension in the novel and is fortified at this juncture in the text through exoticization of Mille de Stermaria: ‘Et la tige héréditaire donnait à ce teint composé de sucs choisis la saveur d'un fruit exotique ou d'un cru célèbre' (RTP II. 44) [‘The hereditary strain imbued her complexion with choice savours, the tang of an exotic fruit, the bouquet of a fine vintage’ (SLT ii. 263)]. (40) See below, Ch. 8. (41) See editorial note, RTP II. 1429–30. (42) Ruskin's exhortation continues: ‘The only way to be loved is to become lovable and the only way to be trusted is to be honest…no goodliness of form or strength in government or people will avail against enemies, unless they learn to be faithful to each other, and to depend upon each other. My friends, you are continually advised to seek for independence. I have some workmen myself, and have had, for many years, under me. Heaven knows I am not independent of them; and I do not think they either are or wish to be, independent of me. We depend heartily, and always,—they upon my word, and upon my desire for their welfare;—I, upon their work, and their pride in doing it well', The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London, George Allen, 1903– 12), 39 vols., xx. 379–80. I am grateful to Cynthia Gamble for providing this information about Ruskin's social application of the figure of Amphion. (43) The development forms a substantial addendum to the 1911–12 typescript. See Bales, (ed.), ‘Bricquebec', 75–7. (44) Ibid. 77. (45) ‘[The phase of] territorialization…allowed for the stabilization of a clearly fragile social capital', Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 18.

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Balbec: A New Sociality (46) Applying Michael Sheringham's analysis of Certeau's reflection on everyday practices and the social dialectic, we see that the chimera of an autonomous self and the failure of the group of four in Balbec to engage with the Other and thus accept difference are predicated on a self-sufficiency that is imaginary; see Sheringham, Everyday Life, 232. (47) Vincent Descombes sees these groupings as embodying ‘la politique du dandysme selon Baudelaire' [‘the Baudelairean conception of the politics of dandyism’] and adds that Marcel adopts the politics of the weak, namely snobbery; see V. Descombes, Proust: Philosophie du roman (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1987), 197. (48) As Michael Moriarty argues, ‘“Taste” designates various modes of “recognition” of cultural difference, and through that of social difference, always in terms of superiority/inferiority', Taste and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century France, 192. (49) See below, Ch. 5, the section entitled ‘Social-class stills'. (50) See above, Ch. 1. (51) Kemp, ‘Economic and Social Policy in France’, 741. (52) Proust submitted the complete manuscript for A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs to Gallimard in Mar. 1917. See Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 766. The appearance of A l'ombre coincided more or less with the end of hostilities. (53) We have an echo here of the view expressed by Bertrand de Fénelon in a letter to Proust (Corr. xxi. 624) and quoted above in Ch. 2. (54) Brigitte Mahuzier, ‘Proust et la démocratisation du mépris', unpublished conference paper. In Saint-Loup's rough treatment of his coachman, Mahuzier sees an authentic attempt to rid democracy of the latent hypocrisy whereby the superior conceals his disdain for his inferior. (55) The reference to workers forming part of a ‘Chevalerie' carries an echo not just of developments in Belgium and France but also of the labour market in North America. Daniel Halévy refers to the ‘Chevaliers du travail' operating with considerable success in the United States in the mid-1880s in his Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (Paris: Société Nouvelle de Librairie et d'Edition, 1901), 79. Halévy notes the power of electricians to impact socially, defining them as ‘dispensateurs de lumière, de transport et de force' [‘dispensers of light, transport, and power’], 80. (56) At the start of this chapter, we saw the Narrator give voice to the exotic difference generated by these two classes, the moneyed middle class ‘n'ayant pour moi le mystère ni du peuple ni d'une société comme celle des Page 42 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality Guermantes’ (RTP II. 200) [‘was devoid of the sense of mystery I perceived among both the working classes and the society frequented by the Guermantes’ (SLT ii. 424)]. (57) Adeline Daumard adds the example of Henri Bordeaux, who, like Bourget, argues for the rights of the family as opposed to those of the individual. See Braudel and Labrousse, Histoire economique et sociale de la France, iv. 1, 409. (58) The nineteenth-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde argued, notably in Les Lois de l'imitation (1890), that the attitudes of the social superior are imitated further down the social scale and Anne Henry has argued for the relevance of this model to Proust's novel. See A. Henry, ‘Société', in Annick Bouillaguet and Brian G. Rogers (eds.), Dictionnaire Marcel Proust (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 940–2. (59) The specific location in the 1914 Grasset galleys is n.a.fr. 16761:57v. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 47. (60) Esquisse XLV, RTP II. 936. (61) Ibid. 934. (62) My section title is an adaptation of René Johannet's Eloge du bourgeois français (Paris: Grasset, 1924). (63) Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1953), 55; quoted in Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 129. (64) Le Gaulois, a Bonapartist paper when first founded in 1868, became a Legitimist one in 1882 and eventually merged with Le Figaro in 1928. See Pléiade note, RTP II. 1459, n. 2 to II. 243. (65) See Wilson, Ideology and Experience: Antisemitism in France at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair, Pt. II, ‘The Antisemitic Movement in France at the End of the Nineteenth Century', 167–244. Ch. III of Wilson's study, ‘The Antisemitic Riots of 1898' (106–24) demonstrates that those participating in the rioting were mainly youths drawn from across the class spectrum. (66) Durkheim argued that ‘when the collective conscience completely envelops our whole conscience and coincides in all points with it' our individuality is nil, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: The Free Press, 1956), 130, quoted in Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought, 131. (67) In Proust's mixing of the discourses of heredity and social heritage, Jacques Dubois identifies a combination of lyricism and irony. Race plays an important part in the characterization of the ‘jeunes filles en fleurs' and as Dubois notes, Page 43 of 44

 

Balbec: A New Sociality the sight of Albertine asleep in La Prisonnière allows the protagonist to project on to her face ‘des races, des atavismes, des vices' (RTP III. 580) [‘whole races, atavisms, vices’ (SLT v. 61)]; Dubois, Pour Albertine; Proust et le sens du social, 98–9. (68) Julien Benda, Belphégor: Essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française (1918; Paris: Emile-Paul Frères, 1924), p. vi. (69) [‘a narrow bourgeois outlook’], Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 113. (70) [‘Taken as he is, the French bourgeois with…his distinguished reserve and his liking for permanence and security maintains, in the history of civilization, a physionomy that is certainly the most dignified and perhaps the most deserving, and in any case the least rebarbative. Consider by contrast the hideous type of social class which some are trying to release at our gates under the name of “proletariat” and admit that one is tempted to erect altars to France's middle classes’], Johannet, Eloge du bourgeois français, 26. (71) [‘a long and powerful chain which produces the flora and the seasons’], ibid. 60.

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Frames, Language, Judgements

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Frames, Language, Judgements Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0006

Abstract and Keywords Many of the descriptions of social-class stand-offs in A la recherche may be situated within a logic of spatial and symbolic containment. This chapter explores ways in which, at punctual moments in the text, subaltern, bourgeois, and aristocratic figures are often consciously framed as objects of the Narrator’s gaze and as emblems of class identity. Marcel’s own position as a consumer and cultural producer does not escape the Narrator’s scrutiny. In particular, his visual curiosity in relation to working-class youth often focuses on those bodily features associated with the manual work that separates them off from their bourgeois counterparts. Gender, sexuality, and class thus come to be tightly imbricated. Speech, too, is identified by the Narrator as providing linguistic markers of class-belonging: these and other criteria allow for further investigation of the ramifications of class inscription in the novel. Keywords:   class markers, visualization of difference, gender, linguistic markers, proletarian bodies

Many of the descriptions of social-class stand-offs in A la recherche may be situated within a logic of spatial and symbolic containment. This chapter explores ways in which, at punctual moments in the text, subaltern, bourgeois, and aristocratic figures are often consciously framed as objects of the Narrator's gaze and as emblems of class inscription. Marcel's own position as a consumer and cultural producer does not escape the Narrator's scrutiny. In particular, his visual curiosity in relation to working-class youths often focuses on those bodily features associated with the manual work that separates them off from their bourgeois counterparts. Gender, sexuality, and class thus come to be tightly imbricated. Speech, too, is identified by the Narrator as providing linguistic Page 1 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements markers of class-belonging: these and other criteria for establishing such belonging are busily assessed in the novel. And as the Narrator seeks to situate himself in relation to the bodily, linguistic, and, in the broadest sense, cultural evidence of social stratification, we access further Proust's eager exploration of the ramifications of class inscription in the novel.

Social-class stills Petrification as a technique of characterization in Proust is visible at numerous points in the novel. Françoise, a nineteenth-century peasant as the Narrator spells out with a medieval mindset, is reassuringly associated with the church of Saint-André-des-Champs (RTP I. 149; SLT i. 151). Reinserted into an exotic past, she is, unbeknown to herself, tasked with incarnating a medieval history marked by a social cohesion that sees peasants and aristocrats peacefully coexist. The Gothic sculptures in the porch of the church also announce prophetically the future incarnation of Théodore, the grocer's boy. These anachronistic characterizations are part of a symbolic centring and hold a strongly identititarian function in the (p.157) Proustian imaginary. As Stéphane Chaudier comments in relation to Proust's evocation of the sculptures, ‘l'amour de la France est un amour des corps français'.1 In the Proustian imaginary, the oscillation between flesh and stone links two groups of peasants and servants and produces a virtual community, the Narrator referring to Théodore as a ‘personnalité…virtuelle et prophétisée, dans la sculpture gothique de SaintAndré-des-Champs' [‘character…potential and prophesied, in the gothic sculpture of Saint-André-des-Champs’] and adding: ‘Françoise sentait d'ailleurs si bien en lui un pays et un contemporain' (RTP I. 149) [‘Françoise, in fact, sensed in him a fellow countryman and a contemporary’ (SLT i. 152)]. The sense is of a contemporaneity that pre-dates the modern Republican era. Proust's keen awareness of the inherent social tensions is reflected in the description of the Guermantes residence in Paris, with its ateliers and small shops signalling ambiguously ‘soit alluvions apportés par le flot montant de la démocratie, soit legs de temps plus anciens où les divers métiers étaient groupés autour du seigneur’ (RTP II. 316) [‘alluvial deposits washed up by the rising tide of democracy or the legacy of bygone days when the various trades were grouped round the seigneurial dwelling’ (SLT iii. 13–14)]. In a binarism inflected by a tidy view of French history, the Narrator juxtaposes an ostensibly harmonious medieval hierarchy with the organization of labour that came with the political modernity ushered in by Republican France. Related to this typologizing is the technique whereby the social subaltern is often framed and thus held in Marcel's field of vision. Admittedly, the Narrator complains that the doorway provides the liminal space that allows Françoise to say an extended farewell to a visiting workman free from recrimination from her bourgeois employer, who might chance upon the scene but without knowing the duration of the conversation (RTP II. 626; SLT iii. 328). More often, the positioning of inferiors within frames works to the advantage of the socially Page 2 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements dominant. The holding functions visually and ideologically. It often allows the Narrator to speculate freely and to perform an imaginative manipulation of the subject which sees the subaltern repositioned, encased in what for the Narrator are reassuring moulds shaped by the cultural capital that is his own. Thus the spectacle of the farm labourers observed by Marcel when he and Albertine are out in the countryside is heavily stylized: ‘du front des garçons de ferme travaillant au soleil une goutte de sueur tombait verticale, régulière, intermittente’ (RTP III. 231) [‘a drop of sweat would fall vertically, regularly, intermittently, from the brow of the farm boys working in the sun’ (SLT iv. 237)], the dripping (p.158) perspiration alternating with ripe fruit falling from the trees. The visual symmetry holds at a distance bodily strain as manual labour is made virtual and complements the work of nature. An eager, even aggressive, conversion of working-class youths into biblical figures is present when the Parisian butcher's boy, sorting through and weighing cuts of meat, is likened to an angel on Judgement Day assisting God by separating the good from the evil (RTP III. 644–5; SLT v. 123). Girls delivering ‘les flûtes destinées au “grand déjeuner”’ (RTP III. 645) [‘thin loaves for “midday dinner” ’ (SLT v. 123)] assist and cater for their betters by rushing to serve. The Narrator wants to bring the energy of the street and of the working class into the bourgeois interior that is his room. Engaged and curious, he evokes the city: its organized labour, movement of commodities, and manual workforce all signal the broader social context of his age, the wider material culture of the metropolis which for much of the Recherche is only tangentially signalled. There is a distillation of working-class energy, a private, bourgeois commodification of proletarian youthful artlessness. Marcel matter-of-factly likens his curiosity to Elstir's quest for inspiration as the artist orders a bunch of violets from which he derives the vision of a whole wood in flower. But if the ‘imaginary zone' which this opens up for Elstir is reliant anthropomorphically on ‘le petit modèle végétal’ (RTP III. 645) [‘the small botanical specimen’ (SLT v. 124)], the protagonist's desires cluster voyeuristically around youths whose work (fetching bread, linen, milk, and so on) might bring them to his household; his generous tipping helps ensure their presence. He envisages framing the anonymous young girl in the doorway (‘la faire passer un moment…dans le cadre de ma porte, et la retenir sous mes yeux' (RTP III. 645) [‘frame her…between the uprights of my door and focus on her’ (SLT v. 123)], tagging her once his contemplation is over as one does, the Narrator adds without inhibition, with birds and fish before releasing them. The barely repressed sexual energies in play (the Narrator characterizes what he is lacking as ‘la richesse [de la] journée' (RTP III. 645) [‘the riches [of] the day’ (SLT v. 123)] map on to the class divisions in which working-class youth is instrumentalized, moulded to shape and satisfy the sexual needs of the protagonist and others of his social class.2

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Frames, Language, Judgements (p.159) A fetishization of the bodies of working-class youths is present as the Narrator talks explicitly of maximizing the gap between the ostensibly banal initial encounter with the milkmaid or the seller of fruit and the subsequent scene in which the girls might accept the bourgeois male's erotic invitation and become susceptibles, à la suite de manèges adroits de notre part, de laisser fléchir leur attitude rectiligne, d'entourer notre cou de ces bras qui portaient les fruits, d'incliner sur notre bouche, avec un sourire consentant, des yeux jusque-là glacés ou distraits—ô beauté des yeux sévères aux heures de travail où l'ouvrière craignait tant la médisance de ses compagnes, des yeux qui fuyaient nos obsédants regards (RTP III. 649) [persuaded, by crafty manoeuvres on our part, to soften their unbending attitude, to wind round our neck the arms that carried the fruit, to turn upon our mouth, with a smile of consent, those hitherto chilly or faraway eyes—oh, the beauty of those eyes, so stern in working hours, when their owner feared the gossip of her companions, eyes which avoided our insistent looks (SLT v. 127)]. The pose adopted in the workplace and signalling class solidarity is masochistically enjoyed and indeed eulogized by the bourgeois as a prelude to erotic pleasure. Proletarian bodies are recycled, serving bourgeois needs. In particular, the arm, which the Constructivist artists of Proust's day were to celebrate as a triumphal, political emblem of labour, is turned back in on the introspective world of the male voluptuary: ‘le maximum d'écart est atteint, tendu encore à ses extrêmes limites, et varié, par ces gestes habituels de la profession qui font des bras, pendant la durée du labeur, quelque chose d'aussi différent que possible comme arabesque de ces souples liens qui déjà chaque soir s'enlacent à notre cou tandis que la bouche s'apprête pour le baiser’ (RTP III. 649) [‘the maximum divergence is attained, stretched to its extreme limits, and varied by the habitual gestures of her trade, which make of her arms, during her hours of work, a pattern of curves as different as can be from the supple bonds which already, each evening, are winding round our neck, while her mouth prepares for our kiss’ (SLT v. 127)]. In the transformation that Proust sketches, a day's manual toil performed by a gendered subaltern mutates into an evening's pleasure delivered, across a social-class boundary, to a ‘nous’ that designates, unproblematically, a male bourgeoisie. The Narrator's stress on transformation and difference adds to the sense in which (p.160) physical work is seen as embodying radical cultural difference. Crucially, however, ‘Proust's workers and peasants', as one critic has observed, ‘are not the harbingers of an emancipated humanity'.3

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Frames, Language, Judgements Maximizing the gap between manual toil and the bourgeois world has special resonance when situated within the context of class suspicion operating in Proust's own day. A key characteristic of early twentieth-century France, wrote his reactionary contemporary Paul Bourget, was that ‘les hommes qui travaillent de leurs bras sont en état de guerre constant contre ceux qui ne travaillent pas de leurs bras'.4 Bourget makes much of the separateness of working-class labour from the rest of society in his preface to the play La Barricade (1910). While tracing the various social strata from the hereditary aristocracy to the petty bourgeois civil servant, Bourget conflates these in an overarching divide between ‘les travailleurs manuels et les autres'.5 Elsewhere in the same preface, he argues that ‘la guerre actuelle des classes, c'est proprement la révolte du muscle contre le nerf'.6 By contrast, the working-class hands and arms in Proust's Narrator's scenario are the bearers of sensual pleasure for the bourgeois subject; and whereas Bourget maximizes the manual/mental gap to sow fear of class war, the Narrator fetishistically sees in that maximal gap the guarantee of pleasure. The Narrator dwells on the scene in which a young assistant, whose proud features Marcel had previously noticed on a visit to the dairy shop where she works, is ushered into his room by Françoise. The narrative constructs a very deliberate mise en scène of the encounter: Françoise, whose concern is to respect the wishes of her bourgeois master, shepherds the unsuspecting girl down the corridor to the room where the seated, male protagonist waits. The focalization is class-oriented, with the spatial dynamic centred around Marcel. Françoise's role as dutiful servant mutates into that of the ‘entremetteuse' or bawd, the effect being to parody the sentimentalized version of the servant/ master relationship: ‘Françoise, en bonne et honnête servante qui entend respecter son maître comme elle le respecte elle-même, s'était drapée de cette majesté qui ennoblit les entremetteuses dans ces tableaux de vieux maîtres, où à côté d'elles s'effacent presque dans l'insignifiance la maîtresse et l'amant’ (p. 161) (RTP III. 648) [‘Françoise, like a good and faithful servant who wants to make others respect her master as she respects him herself, had cloaked herself in the majesty which ennobles the bawd in those old master paintings where the lover and the mistress fade almost into insignificance next to her grandeur’ (SLT v. 126)]. Yet there is no Old-Master-style effacement in the sequel, where Marcel acts out almost caricaturally the power play. As the protagonist asks the young shop-worker to pass him Le Figaro, the Narrator underscores the transparent ideological power in play: ‘Aussitôt en prenant le journal, elle découvrit jusqu'au coude la manche rouge de sa jacquette et me tendit la feuille conservatrice d'un geste adroit et gentil qui me plut par sa rapidité familière, son apparence moelleuse et sa couleur écarlate’ (RTP III. 650) [‘As she picked up the paper she uncovered the red sleeve of her jacket up to the elbow, and held out the conservative sheet to me with a neat, helpful gesture which pleased me by its homely speed, its yielding appearance and its scarlet colour’ (SLT v. 128)]. And Page 5 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements when Marcel asks her the term she uses for her red knitted top, she refers to it as ‘“[s]on golf”. Car par une déchéance habituelle de toutes les modes, les vêtements et les mots qui, il y a quelques années, semblaient appartenir au monde relativement élégant des amies d'Albertine, étaient maintenant le lot des ouvrières’ (RTP III. 650) [‘“my cardigan”. For, by a process of degeneration common to all fashions, the garments and words which, a few years earlier, had seemed to belong to the relatively elegant world of Albertine and her friends, had now passed down to working-girls’ (SLT v. 128)]. Workers are thus seen not just as manual producers but also as consumers.7 The class dialectic is vigorously foregrounded in a variety of forms: the already noted fetishization of the working-class woman's forearm; the prominent cultural symbolization conveyed by the inferred characterization of Le Figaro as the medium of the socially dominant; and the metalinguistic reflection on middle-class neologisms and styles of dress migrating down the social order. Yet when Marcel, anxious to find the pretext that will enable him to end the encounter, asks the young girl if she would be prepared to travel a long way to carry out the errand, she prefers to assert the claim to leisure of her class: ‘“Dame, nous n'avons que le dimanche!”’ (RTP III. 650) [‘“We only get Sunday afternoons off, you know”’ (SLT v. 128)]. But the protest evaporates as narrative closure of the episode follows abruptly, the protagonist discovering in Le Figaro that Mlle Léa, whom he suspects of being (p.162) Albertine's lesbian lover, is to appear at the Trocadéro. The denouement is wholly ironic in that the ‘feuille conservatrice’ [‘conservative sheet’], caricatural symbol of Marcel's social poise and control, now delivers evidence of his inability to influence the contingent social order. The stage of bourgeois power, erected in Marcel's home with the eager connivance of Françoise, is thus dismantled and a disbelieving shop employee paid off with five francs for the errand that she in fact never runs. The eroticization of the subaltern intensifies when the generic terms used to designate categories of young urban working-class women themselves acquire a libidinal charge. The Sunday time-off on which the laitière visiting Marcel in his home had so insisted further fuels his imagination once he is sure that Albertine has been contained: ‘Je pensais que par ce dimanche-là, des petites ouvrières, des midinettes, des cocottes, devaient se promener au Bois. Et avec ces mots de midinettes, de petites ouvrières (comme cela m'était souvent arrivé avec un nom propre, un nom de jeune fille lu dans le compte rendu d'un bal), avec l'image d'un corsage blanc, d'une jupe courte, parce que derrière cela je mettais une personne inconnue et qui pourrait m'aimer, je fabriquais tout seul des femmes désirables’ (RTP III. 663) [‘I thought of how, on that Sunday afternoon, little working-girls, dressmakers, tarts would be walking in the Bois. And on the basis of these words, “dressmakers”, “working-girls” (as had often happened with a proper name, the name of a young lady in the newspaper account of a ball) and of the image of a white bodice, a short skirt, because I placed behind them an unknown person who might love me, I created for myself desirable women’ (SLT Page 6 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements v. 141)]. Whereas Marcel's long-established ability to eroticize had previously often clustered around individual society names, here the power of the Name mutates as Marcel's desire becomes activated by a tightly knit set of signifiers denoting subsets and specific dress codes within the urban proletariat. Other echoes of physical labour are present in the pages of La Prisonnière: in their ability to write and to develop an overview of their production, literary giants of the nineteenth century such as Balzac, Hugo, and Michelet ‘se regard[ent] travailler comme s'ils étaient à la fois l'ouvrier et le juge’ (RTP III. 666) [‘watching themselves at work as if they were both worker and judge’ (SLT v. 143)]; Wagner enjoys ‘l'allégresse du fabricateur’ (RTP III. 667) [‘the enthusiasm of the maker’ (SLT v. 145)] and in incorporating the sound of a bird, a shepherd's pipe, or a huntsman's horn, he respects the originality of these sounds ‘comme un huchier les fibres, l'essence particulière du bois qu'il sculpte’ (RTP III. 666) [‘as a woodcarver does the grain, the individual essence of the wood he sculpts’ (SLT v. 143)]. Yet the motif of the homo faber which is woven into this section of the Albertine narrative does not conceal the instrumentalization (p.163) of young working-class women by the paranoid figure of Marcel. A process of aesthetic containment is worked in tandem with this and reverberates beyond Marcel's private fantasies, the Narrator reflecting that when painters working on classical subjects find working-class girls to pose as models for Venus and Ceres, they perform an act of aesthetic restoration. The redemption of proletarian ‘lowliness’—the painter's models are ‘des filles du peuple exerçant les plus vulgaires métiers’ (RTP III. 672) [‘working-class girls from the most humble occupations’ (SLT v. 149)]—intersects in complex ways with the erotic fantasies of Proust's male bourgeois protagonist. Mythologization is also at work when Marcel and Albertine drive into working-class districts: ‘Nous étions arrivés dans des quartiers plus populaires et l'érection d'une Vénus ancillaire derrière chaque comptoir faisait de lui comme un autel suburbain au pied duquel j'aurais voulu passer ma vie’ (RTP III. 674) [‘We had arrived in a more working-class neighbourhood, and the setting-up of an ancillary Venus behind every counter turned it into a kind of suburban altar before which I would gladly have spent my life in adoration’ (SLT v. 151)].8 In Passy, young working-class women on their day-off link on to one another in a display of social capital as they enjoy the practice which the Guesdist leader Paul Lafargue had earlier popularized as ‘the right to be lazy'.9 Proust's beleaguered hero is mesmerized by the spectacle. As the women spill on to the road, so busy is the pavement, the images of easy solidarity and working-class confidence impact erotically on Marcel (through the frank smiles of the women), while the Narrator sees in the spectacle afforded by social-class difference less the workings of sociology than the pleasurable conflation of visual erotic predation and the spoils of archaeology: ‘ces cohues populaires des jours de fête sont pour le voluptueux aussi précieuses que pour l'archéologue le désorde d'une terre où une fouille fait apparaître des médailles antiques’ (RTP III. 674) [‘unruly holiday Page 7 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements mobs are as fruitful terrain for the voluptuary as for the archaeologist the disorderly aftermath of an excavation which may turn up ancient medals’ (SLT v. 151)].10 Other connections with proletarian culture are scattered throughout the novel. In Le Côté de Guermantes, Marcel and Robert de Saint-Loup leave behind Parisian opulence and travel out on the train to visit Rachel in the suburban village where she lives. With her occupation remaining unknown to Saint-Loup, the houses where she and other (p.164) young prostitutes live are described as being sordid and wretched: ‘[elles] avaient l'air d'avoir été brûlées par une pluie de salpêtre' (RTP II. 459) [‘as if they had been scorched by a shower of brimstone’ (SLT iii. 157)]. The grinding poverty that drives prostitution is entirely absent from the Narrator's evocation, which melodramatically describes the drab suburb as attracting a biblical curse. The same disconnection from socio-economic causation sees the tree outside the hovel where Rachel lives described as ‘un ange resplendissant [qui] se tenait debout étendant largement sur [la cité maudite] l'éblouissante protection de ses ailes d'innocence en fleurs: c'était un poirier’ (RTP II. 459) [‘a resplendent angel [who] stood over it [the accursed city], stretching the dazzling protection of his widespread wings of innocence in blossom: a pear tree' (SLT iii. 157)]. The appeal to a redemptive nature masks the evidence of social inequality. Yet as Marcel, Robert, and Rachel all head towards the suburban station, two fellow prostitutes with collars of sham otter-skin call out to Rachel. Not surprisingly, once back in Paris, Robert begins to suspect ‘un Paris inconnu au milieu de Paris même' [‘an unknown Paris in the heart of Paris itself’] and imagines ‘une vie de la place Pigalle' (RTP II. 461) [‘a life of haunting the Place Pigalle’ (SLT iii. 159)]. For a moment, the Boulevard Clichy and the Rue Caumartin, the Paris of prostitution, like the village where Rachel lives, supplant the Faubourg Saint-Germain but such locations remain peripheral to the domestic interiors of bourgeois and aristocratic milieus which frame much of the action of the novel.11 There are other moments when contact with working-class women is transactional in a pointedly fiscal manner. Bergotte, the Narrator reports, often drew inspiration from the presence in his home of young women whom he paid in return for sexual favours: ‘Ainsi Bergotte se disait-il: “Je dépense plus que des multimillionaires pour des fillettes, mais les plaisirs ou les déceptions qu'elles me donnent me font écrire un livre qui me rapporte de l'argent”. Economiquement ce raisonnement était absurde, mais sans doute trouvait-il quelque agrément à transmuter ainsi l'or en caresse et les caresses en or’ (RTP III. 689) [‘So it was that Bergotte said to himself, “I spend more on girls than a multi-millionaire, but the pleasures or disappointments they bring me allow me to write a book (p.165) and make money” On economic grounds this reasoning was absurd, but no doubt he took some pleasure in transmuting gold into caresses in this way, and caresses back into gold.’ (SLT v. 166)] Even allowing for the attenuation of venality provided by the Baudelairean resonance in the Page 8 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements Narrator's concluding line here, the crudity of Bergotte's calculation dents the notion that his art is generated in some higher, inaccessible realm. As critics have observed, Bergotte thus situates his work within a market economy by satisfying a public demand for romantic fiction.12 The risky development on Bergotte's calculation in respect of money spent on young girls in La Prisonnière constitutes one of Proust's few additions to the third typescript of that volume of the novel and suggests that the later Proust was looking to underscore marks of materialism.13 The New Year's Day scene in Combray provides another of the social-class stills that foreground the ideology of class in A la recherche. In the Parisian home of the mother of Tante Léonie, Françoise stands ‘immobile et debout dans l'encadrement de la petite porte du corridor comme une statue de sainte dans sa niche' (RTP I. 52) [‘motionless in the frame of the little door of the corridor like the statue of a saint in its niche’ (SLT i. 56)]. Not only is Françoise held visually within the door surround, like the milkmaid in Marcel's Parisian home in La Prisonnière, but the conveying of the New Year's gift (the boy Marcel proffers a coin as instructed by his mother) again triggers a reflection on social hierarchy: ‘Quand on était un peu habitué à ces ténèbres de chapelle, on distinguait sur son visage l'amour désintéressé de l'humanité, le respect attendri pour les hautes classes qu'exaltait dans les meilleures régions de son cœur l'espoir des étrennes' (RTP I. 52) [‘When we were a little used to this chapel darkness, we could distinguish on her face the disinterested love of humanity, the fond respect for the upper classes excited in the best regions of her heart by the hope of a New Year's gift’ (SLT i. 56)]. That the boy and the female domestic servant are paired up as bearer and recipient of the gift places them both in the category of the socially subordinate. As (p.166) Pierre Rosanvallon reminds us, women, minors, and domestic servants were excluded from the extended process of democratization set in train by the Revolution of 1789 and in the Narrator's reconstruction of the mindset attributed to Françoise, denigration ultimately checks the apparent idealization of the subaltern's position.14 Françoise's moral probity is vaunted, only to be dented by the Narrator's sly mention of her desire for gain. Yet the mother, while always working within the model of social paternalism, takes a genuine interest in Françoise, valorizing ‘sa vie, ses bonheurs, ses chagrins de paysanne' (RTP I. 53) [‘her life as a countrywoman, her joys, her sorrows’ (SLT i. 57)]. Her interest arguably transcends social-class differences and yet maintains hierarchy. Another of the intensely visual evocations of cross-class encounters and standoffs is present in A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs in the description of the dining-room window at the Grand Hotel in Balbec. Whereas other residents betray indifference towards those around them at the hotel and beyond, the young protagonist describes himself as being unable to muster this level of detachment: ‘De beaucoup d'entre eux je me souciais' (RTP II. 42) [‘I was greatly concerned about many of them’ (SLT ii. 260)]. The same porosity to the Other Page 9 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements energizes the Narrator's evocation of the implied confrontation between hotel diners and those on the outside looking in. The glass-fronted dining room becomes a giant aquarium, devant la paroi de verre duquel la population ouvrière de Balbec, les pêcheurs et aussi les familles de petits bourgeois, invisibles dans l'ombre, s'écrasaient au vitrage pour apercevoir, lentement balancée dans des remous d'or, la vie luxueuse de ces gens, aussi extraordinaire pour les pauvres que celle de poissons et de mollusques étranges (une grande question sociale, de savoir si la paroi de verre protégera toujours le festin des bêtes merveilleuses et si les gens obscures qui regardent avidement dans la nuit ne viendront pas les cueillir dans leur aquarium et les manger). (RTP II. 41–2) [while, invisible in the outer shadows beyond the glass wall, the working classes of Balbec, the fishermen and even [lower-]middle-class families pressed against the windows, in an attempt to see the luxurious life of these denizens, glowing amid the golden sway of the eddies, all of it as weird and fascinating for the poor as the existence of strange fish and mollusks (but whether the glass barrier will go on protecting for ever the feeding of the marvellous creatures, or whether the obscure onlookers gloating towards them from the outer dark will break into their aquarium and hook them for the pot, therein lies a great social question). (SLT ii. 260)]15 This addition to the 1914 Grasset-galleys version of the novel forms one of Proust's most forthright pronouncements on working-class radicalization and the spectre of violent class conflict, although significantly the threat (p.167) could be read as being symbolically held through the typographical use of parentheses. Nevertheless, a further marker of the social dialectic is provided by the addition, the glass front of the restaurant operating, albeit melodramatically, as the social-class interface. Just as, in the piece in Combray celebrating the family's early Saturday lunch (RTP I. 109–10; SLT i. 111–13), the Narrator wonders if anyone in the household might be equipped to write the social epic of Combray, so in A l'ombre, the Narrator asks if, within the ‘foule arrêtée et confondue dans la nuit’ [‘nameless clusters in the night’], there might lurk a writer—‘quelque amateur d'ichtyologie humaine’ [‘a fancier of human ichthyology’]—who would analyse the spectacle, a writer who might regardant les mâchoires de vieux monstres féminins se refermer sur un morceau de nourriture engloutie, se complai[re] à classer ceux-ci par race, par caractères innés et aussi par caractères acquis qui font qu'une vieille dame serbe dont l'appendice buccal est d'un grand poisson de mer, parce Page 10 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements que depuis son enfance elle vit dans les eaux douces du faubourg saintGermain, mange la salade comme une La Rochefoucauld (RTP II. 42) [at the spectacle of the closing jaws of old female monsters gulping down a bite of food…enjoy classifying them by species, by innate characteristics, but also by acquired characteristics, which may mean that an old Serbian lady with a great ocean fish's mouth parts eats her lettuce—because since childhood she has swum in the fresh waters of the Faubourg Saint-Germain —like a La Rochefoucauld (SLT ii. 260)]. While the procedures of social analysis are to a degree exoticized in that the Narrator opts for ichthyology, the socially excluded here fantasmatically exercise power and observational judgement.16 By opting for natural history instead of historical materialism (the latter is glancingly referred to in the reflection on the glass frontage that protects social privilege), Proust's Narrator prefers to mythologize and so to displace talk of violent, class-based contestation. In other words, the science of ichthyology serves effectively to throw a veil over the symptoms of a conflicted actuality. A further episode in the novel where a conscious mise en scène again facilitates the enactment of cultural power involves the emblematic moment in Albertine disparue describing the appearance of Marcel's article in Le Figaro. Already a part of the draft novel as it existed in 1911, the scene of discovery, which begins with Marcel's mother noticing the article in the paper, is narrated in a manner which shows a conscious, architectonic (p.168) framing of social exchange more generally.17 Marcel's mother stage-manages the moment of his realization, issuing what amounts to a call to order in the family household and reproducing so many elements of the social power matrix. To begin with, she casually leaves by the protagonist's bed the post and the morning paper and then forces Françoise to exit from the room, thereby removing all third-party distraction from Marcel's bedroom and maximizing the potential for his discovery, in private, of his publishing breakthrough. The hauteur with which she excludes Françoise is nevertheless quickly matched by the domestic's own disdain for her masters: Cependant en allant vers la porte pour sortir elle [maman] avait rencontré Françoise qui entrait chez moi, la dépêche à la main. Dès qu'elle me l'eut donnée, ma mère avait forcé Françoise à rebrousser chemin et l'avait entraînée dehors, effarouchée, offensée et surprise. Car Françoise considérait que sa charge comportait le privilège de pénétrer à toute heure dans ma chambre et d'y rester s'il lui plaisait. Mais déjà sur son visage, l'étonnement et la colère avaient disparu sous le sourire noir et gluant d'une pitié transcendante et d'une ironie philosophique, liqueur visqueuse que sécrétait pour guérir sa blessure son amour-propre lésé. Pour ne pas se sentir méprisée, elle nous méprisait. Aussi bien savait-elle que nous Page 11 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements étions des maîtres, des êtres capricieux, qui ne brillent pas par l'intelligence et qui trouvent leur plaisir à imposer par la peur à des personnes spirituelles, à des domestiques, pour bien montrer qu'ils sont les maîtres, des devoirs absurdes comme de faire bouillir l'eau en temps d'épidémie, de balayer ma chambre avec un linge mouillé, et d'en sortir au moment où on avait justement l'intention d'y rester. Maman avait posé le courrier tout près de moi, pour qu'il ne pût pas m'échapper. (RTP IV. 147) [Meanwhile, as she was nearing the door, she had met Françoise, who was about to enter my room with my telegram in her hand. As soon as she had given it to me my mother forced her to beat a retreat and dragged her outside, flustered, offended and surprised. For Françoise considered that her duties included the privilege of entering my room at any time and staying there, if she wanted to. But already on her face astonishment and anger had disappeared beneath her sticky black smile of transcendental pity and philosophical irony, a viscous ointment secreted by her wounded pride to heal its scar. To avoid feeling despised, she despised us. For she knew full well that we were masters, that is, capricious creatures who are not noted for their intellectual brilliance and who enjoy using fear in order to show plainly that they are the masters, to impose on those more thinking creatures, their domestic servants, absurd obligations such as boiling water in times of (p.169) epidemic, mopping my room with a wet cloth, and having to leave the room precisely when they wanted to enter. Mama had placed my mail right by my side, so that I could not miss it. (SLT v. 531–2)] The extract, which foregrounds Françoise's facial transformation, shows the Narrator ironically using a psycho-medical vocabulary to capture the complex mutation in her affectivity, from anger to disdain and philosophical detachment.18 Conveyed through the use of free indirect style, Françoise's suspicion of bourgeois orders is both endorsed and exposed to ridicule (she dismisses prophylactic measures as a wilful imposition dreamt up by her middleclass masters) and her access to whim—‘s'il lui plaisait' [‘if she wanted to’]—is barred by a capricious employer. The stages in Marcel's recognition of his own article similarly foreground issues to do with ownership and entitlement operating at various levels. For while he initially believes that someone has plagiarized his work and placed it in Le Figaro, his complaint—‘Cela, c'était trop fort. J'enverrais une protestation' [‘That was too much. I would write in to complain’]—overlaps with Françoise's grievance: ‘“Si c'est pas malheureux, un enfant qu'on a vu naître. Je ne l'ai pas vu quand sa mère le faisait, bien sûr. Mais quand je l'ai connu, pour bien dire, il n'y avait pas cinq ans qu'il était naquis!” Mais ce n'était pas quelques mots, c'était tout, c'était ma signature… C'était mon article qui avait enfin paru!' (RTP IV. 148) [‘“The very idea! A child that I saw born. Of course I didn't see him Page 12 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements when his mother bore him, but let me tell you that when I first met him he hadn't been born for more than five years!” But there were not just those few words, there was everything, even my signature…It was my article, which had at last appeared!’ (SLT v. 532)]. In the parallel protests mounted by Marcel and Françoise, the claim to what is their due drives the rival desires of writer and servant, while the morphological error in Françoise's misconjugation of the verb naître draws attention symptomatically to questions of birthright, belonging, and inclusion. Marcel's intense desire to see the replication of his thought via the process of mechanical reproduction that is the newspaper draws him into a complex social nexus. Its material circulation, like the food for breakfast that is transported within the city, provides a would-be painless delegation that shores up the hierarchical social model. Yet this is in an important sense reconfigured when the writer goes in search of his reader, the (p.170) random reader holding any one of the ten thousand copies of the paper in circulation. Situated at any point in the city, like the ‘fille quelconque' [‘some girl or other’] with whom Albertine might have had an affair and for whom Marcel looked in vain in La Prisonnière, the reader now becomes Marcel's target: ‘Ainsi pour le lire fallait-il que je cessasse un moment d'en être l'auteur, que je fusse l'un quelconque des lecteurs du journal' (RTP IV. 148) [‘Thus in order to read it I must for a moment stop being its author and become an ordinary reader of the newspaper’ (SLT v. 533)]. The triangular structure of desire which René Girard sees at work in ‘l'amourjalousie' [‘love‐jealousy’] in A la recherche thus has a direct bearing on the Le Figaro reading scene, which illustrates in an exemplary way the workings of mediation.19 Indeed, to explain the writer/journalistic text/reader triangulation, the Narrator uses the striking image of ‘une Vénus collective' [‘a collective Venus’], of which one possesses, Proust writes, only a mutilated limb if one focuses solely on the author's input: ‘car elle ne se réalise complète que dans l'esprit de ses lecteurs. En eux elle s'achève. Et comme une foule, fût-elle une élite, n'est pas artiste, ce cachet dernier qu'elle lui donne garde toujours quelque chose d'un peu commun' (RTP IV. 150) [‘for this is completely realized only in the minds of its readers. That is where all is accomplished. And as a crowd, however select, is not an artist, its ultimate seal of approval always retains something of the common touch’ (SLT v. 534)]. We thus return to a model of delegation but also to one of community (a socially conservative one) in which the bourgeois reader will help complete, and yet also collectivize and degrade, a process initiated by the writer. The encroachment of what is common, to use the Narrator's formulation, on the consumption of literature denies the reader any rarefied conception of art. Indeed that the writer's vocation is necessarily imbricated in the broader world of material culture is reflected in the Narrator's evocation of a busy urban space dominated by the flow of goods and services: ‘Puis je considérai le pain spirituel qu'est un journal, encore chaud et humide de la presse récente et du brouillard Page 13 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements du matin où on le distribue dès l'aurore aux bonnes qui l'apportent à leur maître avec le café au lait, pain miraculeux, multipliable, qui est à la fois un et dix mille, et reste le même pour chacun tout en pénétrant à la fois, innombrable, dans toutes les maisons' (RTP IV. 148) [‘Then I considered the spiritual bread that a newspaper constitutes, still warm and moist as it emerges from the press and the morning mist in which it has been delivered at crack of dawn to the housemaids who take it to their masters with a bowl of [coffee], this miraculous loaf, multiplied ten-thousandfold and yet unique, which stays (p.171) unchanged for everyone while proliferating across every threshold’ (SLT v. 532– 3)]. The intense productivity in the city environment, including the inferred manual activity of printers, sees industrious servants and deliverymen providing the necessary context within which Marcel's writerly aspirations must be situated. In a similar gesture of attempted connection, he opens the curtains to uncover, above a misty cityscape, the pinkness of the early-morning sky which recalls the furnaces being lit in kitchens across the capital. A Romantic commonplace, then, triggers thought of domestics' labour replicated across the metropolis. The Narrator thereby demonstrates that the breakthrough for Marcel as an aspiring writer is socially situated and in a sense subsidiary to a drama of class prerogatives, customs, and material practices; indeed the scene focuses not on the content of his Le Figaro article which is not gone into but on the teeming social world in which the paper is produced, transported, and consumed.20 This emphasis on material culture, one might loosely conjecture, could be read as Proust's unwitting acceptance of the message contained in Ruskin, namely that the writer owes a broader debt of gratitude to the manual workers whose toil facilitates the writer's task.21 The murmur of ancillary protest from Françoise when she is banished from her superior's bedroom mirrors Marcel's frustrated desire to ghost into the minds and domestic interiors of his readers, to encompass ‘une Vénus collective' and so access a sociality that dwarfs the individual. The will to seize a collective mindset is not restricted to images of the domestic class or the evasive, dispersed community of readers of Le Figaro sought out by Marcel as fledgling author. Another of the novel's social-class stills, to return to my section title, takes as its point of focus the figure of Robert de Saint-Loup and occurs on an occasion referred to by the protagonist as ‘le soir de l'amitié' (RTP II. 706) [‘the evening of friendship’ (SLT iii. 411)] when they eat together at a restaurant. If the venue is largely frequented by two mutually antagonistic groupings, Dreyfusard intellectuals and young aristocrats, Proust nevertheless chooses to foreground the ideological issues of class and race. The Narrator offers trenchant views of the French and those designated as ‘étrangers' (p.172) [‘foreigners’]. The latter, many of them Jewish, demonstrate, he asserts, real intellectual and moral qualities, their outlook contrasting in his view with that of aristocratic figures such as Saint-Loup's Page 14 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements mother and the Duc de Guermantes whose shallow attitudes are reflected in the unfailingly mercenary marriages they seek to arrange. Yet the ‘aspect étrange' (RTP II. 702) [‘eccentricity of appearance’ (SLT iii. 406)] ascribed to outsiders—the Narrator spells out that he is referring to non-assimilated Jewish immigrants (from eastern Europe is the inference) as well as to intellectuals and artists—is used to throw into relief the figure of Saint-Loup, who is eagerly hailed as the embodiment of an edifying Frenchness: Mais enfin chez Saint-Loup…régnait la plus charmante ouverture d'esprit et de cœur. Et alors, il faut bien le dire à la gloire immortelle de la France, quand ces qualités-là se trouvent chez un pur Français, qu'il soit de l'aristocratie ou du peuple, elles fleurissent—s'épanouissent serait trop dire, car la mesure y persiste et la restriction—avec une grâce que l'étranger, si estimable soit-il, ne nous offre pas. Les qualités intellectuelles et morales, certes les autres les possèdent aussi, et s'il faut d'abord traverser ce qui déplaît et ce qui choque et ce qui fait sourire, elles ne sont pas moins précieuses. Mais c'est tout de même une jolie chose et qui est peut-être exclusivement française, que ce qui est beau au jugement de l'équité, ce qui vaut selon l'esprit et le cœur, soit d'abord charmant aux yeux, coloré avec grâce, ciselé avec justesse, réalise aussi dans sa matière et dans sa forme la perfection intérieure. Je regardais Saint-Loup, et je me disais que c'est une jolie chose quand il n'y a pas de disgrâce physique pour servir de vestibule aux grâces intérieures, et que les ailes du nez sont délicates et d'un dessin parfait comme celle des petits papillons qui se posent sur les fleurs des prairies, autour de Combray; et que le véritable opus francigenum, dont le secret n'a pas été perdu depuis le XIIIe siècle, et qui ne périrait pas avec nos églises, ce ne sont pas tant les anges de pierre de Saint-André-des-Champs que les petits Français, nobles, bourgeois ou paysans, au visage sculpté avec cette délicatesse et cette franchise restées aussi traditionnelles qu'au porche fameux, mais encore créatrices. (RTP II. 702–3)22 [But for all this, Saint-Loup…was governed by a delightful openness of mind and heart. And whenever—to the undying glory of France, let it be said—such qualities are found in a pure-blooded Frenchman, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word for something so persistently controlled and contained—with a grace which even the most admired foreigner cannot offer to us. Of course others have their intellectual and moral qualities too, and if to appreciate (p.173) them we have first to put behind us what we see as unacceptable, shocking and risible, they remain no less precious. But it is none the less a pleasant thing, and perhaps something exclusively French, that what is spontaneously judged to be fine, what carries conviction to the mind and the heart, should be first of all pleasing to the eye, delicately coloured, perfectly chiselled, and should embody its inner perfection in Page 15 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements substance and shape. I looked at Saint-Loup and thought what a pleasant thing it is when there is no physical impediment to hinder a person's inner grace, and when the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the tiny butterflies that settle on flowers in the fields around Combray; I thought too that the true opus francigenum, the secret of which was not lost in the thirteenth century and would not perish along with our churches, is not to be found so much in the stone angels of Saint-André-des-Champs as in those young Frenchmen, nobles, bourgeois or peasants, whose faces are sculpted with the same delicacy and boldness as those on the famous porch, traditional and still alive. (SLT iii. 407)] Proust's encomium is most probably a First World War addition to the original manuscript of Le Côté de Guermantes I and may thus plausibly be read as an unapologetic assertion of French pride at a time of national emergency.23 In a strikingly tight link between class and nation, a logic of essentialization sees the Narrator assemble the aristocrat, the bourgeois, and the peasant each of whom is deemed to hold a purity that has the potential to be a uniquely French attribute. Proust's Narrator wrestles with his evaluation of the foreigner, taking pains to spell out the worth of those who are not ‘French'. Yet there remains an exclusion of the outsider to the extent that his physionomy, deemed unattractive, is presented as an unpleasant exterior that must be got behind in order to access his inner moral worth. Reflecting the work of Proust's contemporary, the medievalist Emile Mâle, the Narrator asserts the merit of the opus francigenum, the Gothic art of medieval France, and sees specifically in the nation's modernday inhabitants the incarnation of delicacy and boldness.24 Saint-Loup's subsequent acrobatic performance in the restaurant when he spontaneously hops over seats in order to place an overcoat on the shoulders of Marcel is presented, in a first phase of argument, as an indelible mark of the class that Saint-Loup, in spite of his socialist ideals, (p.174) cannot eradicate. His licence to act in this way is not extended to the timid bourgeois, the Narrator adds, his gesture being largely the outpouring of ancestral influence which precludes individual motivation.25 Saint-Loup's indifference to convention is summed up as ‘un dédain que certes il n'avait jamais éprouvé dans son cœur, mais qu'il avait reçu par héritage en son corps' (RTP II. 707) [‘a disdain he had certainly never felt in his heart but had received by inheritance in his body’ (SLT iii. 411)]. The text thus identifies in social class a seductive determinism, the conflation of class and ‘race' (RTP II. 706; SLT iii. 411) being offered as an explanatory framework for behaviour that is eagerly endorsed by the Narrator. (Significantly, in the earlier scene in the same volume where Saint-Loup slaps the face of a journalist who had been smoking in the presence of the sickly Marcel, his gesture functions ‘non seulement au mépris du droit des gens, mais du principe de causalité…ce geste créé ex nihilo' (RTP II. 478–9) [‘in defiance not only of people's rights but of the principle of causality…, a gesture created ex nihilo’ (SLT iii. 178)]. The sense of imperiousness and unaccountability could Page 16 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements be read as an expression of the ‘laisser dire', the indifference to what others might say, as practised by the grand seigneur of the Ancien Régime.26 At the beginning of this chapter, we considered the figure of the subaltern who is held erotically in Marcel's field of vision. Central to the magnetic appeal is the difference of social class which energizes him. In a related way, Saint-Loup's acrobatic performance exerts a mesmeric effect on the bourgeois protagonist, who is transfixed by what is promoted as the lure of aristocratic value. In SaintLoup's case, the ‘perfection intérieure' (RTP II. 703) [‘inner perfection’ (SLT iii. 407)] is supplemented and seemingly matched by a physical grace. With this bodying forth of class, corporeal presences become the conduits for the often intense expression of cross-class sightings and encounters, as much in the case of the anonymous milkmaid as of (p.175) Saint-Loup.27 Significantly however, the Narrator's initial hypothesis, namely that Saint-Loup's gesture springs from a collectively inherited, aristocratic spontaneity rather than from any act of conscious individual will, then comes to be viewed from a reverse angle. In this second phase of assessment, the Narrator abandons the thesis of atavism and prefers to see Saint-Loup's social idealism not as banished from, but rather as informing, his graceful bodily movement. In this new perspective, the Narrator wonders if he does not see in his friend's action the workings of ‘un choix que l'on ne peut faire que dans les hauteurs de l'intelligence, avec cette liberté souveraine dont les mouvements de Robert étaient l'image et dans laquelle se réalise la parfaite amitié' (RTP II. 708; my italics) ['the sort of choice that can be made only by a lofty mind, with that supreme liberty reflected in Robert's impulses and in which perfect friendship thrives' (SLT iii. 413)]. In this way, Saint-Loup's spontaneous gesture of affection in rushing over the restaurant furniture towards Marcel comes to be an extension of his progressive politics rather than an expression of atavistic privilege. The restaurant scene sequence thus foregrounds a concentration of ideological elements: racial stereotyping and the status of the unassimilated Jew in the Third Republic; the notion of aristocratic aura which is both lavishly celebrated and then discarded in a manner that anticipates its broader deconstruction in A la recherche; the energetic promotion of Frenchness and the positing of an aesthetically appealing national cohesion displayed corporeally and visually across different social strata.

Linguistic authority and social marking Prominent among Proust's additions to the Sodome et Gomorrhe volume between 1917 and 1922 was material on the linguistic traits of individual characters in the novel. The addenda are documented by Alison Finch and signal an ambiguous engagement on Proust's part with differences of social class, and in particular with the working class.28 Antoine Compagnon sees the additions as sharpening the realist portrayal of the characters and as a source of comedy.29 Page 17 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements The additions are also significant (p.176) ideologically, reflecting the expanding place given to the representation of subaltern lives in the novel. The presence of Françoise's daughter working as an extra hand in Marcel's parents' home provides an important interlude as he waits for Albertine. The tension in play between Françoise and Marcel stems from bourgeois expectations about social-class roles internalized by Françoise herself. Thus when Marcel interrupts mother and daughter as they are having their supper, Françoise strains to play down the value and quantity of what they are eating: ‘(elle voulait que sa fille eût l'air non seulement de ne nous coûter rien, de vivre de privations, mais encore de se tuer au travail pour nous)’ (RTP III. 124) [‘(for she wanted her daughter to appear not only not to be costing us anything, to live by going without, but also to be working herself to death on our behalf)’ (SLT iv. 129)]. The display of industriousness and self-sacrifice and its linguistic corollary —Françoise protests they are only having ‘une bouchée’ [‘a mouthful’]—are clearly predicated on a logic of social and economic subordination that applies to the domestic class. Significantly, the Narrator sees as reasonable the behaviour of Françoise and her daughter—they had been planning to have a decent meal before the hero walked in. But given her ideological formation, Françoise feels driven to articulate her compliance and subordination. Yet the demeanour of her daughter modifies the class dialectic and shows that in the cultural skirmishes enacted in these kitchen scenes, Marcel's role is far from being hegemonic. A confirmed Parisian, the daughter refers to Combray as Cambrusse, speaks the argot of the capital, and prompts the bourgeois Narrator to extract the sociolinguistic interest in her posturing. As the Narrator presents it, she practises a vulgar version of the fashion for abbreviating to be found in upperclass women; thus she complains that spending a week in Combray would deprive her of the populist anti-Dreyfus newspaper L'Intransigeant, which she casually shortens to L'Intran (RTP II. 446; SLT iii. 144). Her Parisian ways come to seduce the traditionalist in Françoise: ‘La fille de Françoise…parlait, se croyant une femme d'aujourd'hui et sortie des sentiers trop anciens, l'argot parisien et ne manquait aucune des plaisanteries adjointes’ (RTP III. 125) [‘Françoise's daughter…looking on herself as a modern woman who had not abandoned the well-worn paths, spoke the argot of Paris and avoided none of the jokes that went with it’ (SLT iv 131)]. Uninhibited by the hero's anxious wait for Albertine, she converses with him and jokingly asks if his name is Charles. When he naively replies that it isn't, she quips: ‘“Ah, je croyais! Et je me disais Charles attend (charlatan)”’ (RTP III. 125) [‘“Oh, I thought it was! And I'd been saying to myself, Charlatan (Charles attend)”’ (SLT iv. 131)]. Leaving aside the tired joke drawn from the popular repertoire, her line about Albertine never coming will (p.177) eventually prove prophetic: ‘“Je crois que vous pouvez l'attendre à perpète. Elle ne viendra plus. Ah! Nos gigolettes d'aujourd'hui!”’ (RTP III. 125) [‘“I fancy you can wait for her till you're blue in the face. She won't come. Oh, our good-time girls today!”’ (SLT iv. 131)]. Knowledge emanating from the Page 18 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements servant class anticipates the search, in Albertine disparue, for information about Albertine's life, a search that necessarily entails a frustrating dependence, for the protagonist, on the testimony of servants and other social inferiors tasked with finding her. Yet fallibility also marks the servants' lives. When Françoise's niece and the woman butcher are sent on errands which they forget to carry out, their failure seems inevitable to the Narrator. They also persist in error, asserting, in spite of the protagonist's repeated corrections, that the English were involved alongside the Prussians in the war of 1870 and imagining that France languishes under punitive economic sanctions imposed by the victorious British. They advocate war against the enemy to rid the country of its disadvantage. These voices of rural populism dramatically suggest, in Morag Shiach's formulation, ‘those excluded from institutions of knowledge production’.30 But their exclusion derives from an ignorance that is presented as a site of energy and conviction. The Narrator marvels at their prolixity: Tel était, en dehors de beaucoup d'honnêteté et, quand ils parlaient, d'une sourde obstination à ne pas se laisser interrompre, à reprendre vingt fois là où ils en étaient si on les interrompait, ce qui finissait par donner à leurs propos la solidité inébranlable d'une fugue de Bach, le caractère des habitants dans ce petit pays qui n'en comptait pas cinq cents et que bordaient ses châtaigniers, ses saules, ses champs de pommes de terre et de betteraves. (RTP III. 125) [Such, apart from a great deal of honesty and, when they spoke, a stubborn determination not to let themselves be interrupted, to take up again twenty times over at the point where they had been interrupted, which ended by lending to their remarks the unshakable solidity of a Bach fugue, was the character of the inhabitants of this small locality, who numbered barely five hundred and which was bounded by its chestnut trees, its willows, and its fields of potatoes and beetroot. (SLT ii. 130–1)] The verbal obduracy of the domestics suggests a resistance to any form of curtailment although the reader of the Recherche could be forgiven for reading ironically the Narrator's misgivings, given the copiousness of the narrative in a novel where techniques of reprise are so resourcefully developed. Yet how we read the analogy with Baroque music is itself (p.178) important. It represents, self-evidently, a ‘writing from within the dominant culture’.31 Yet in another sense the principle of persistence operative in the Bach fugue is presented as being neither more nor less exceptional than what obtains for Proust's servants in their art of conversation. A form of non-judgemental equalization of social and aesthetic acts emerges, then, from Proust's recording of different cultural forms. To corroborate the view that Françoise and Marcel are equally matched, the Narrator points to the fact that in the bluff between servant and master Page 19 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements surrounding the question of Albertine's expected late arrival at his home, Françoise is as fine an actor as La Berma (RTP III. 132; SLT iv. 137). That the disagreement between Marcel and Françoise about the character, attitudes, and general worth of Albertine should mutate into Marcel's assertion of his superior linguistic knowledge shows the protagonist working back from any egalitarian permissiveness. As they disagree over Albertine's headgear, Françoise openly states her disdain for the ‘petit chapeau plat’ (RTP III. 133) [‘little flat hat’ (SLT iv. 139)], prompting the hero to indulge ‘le plaisir féroce et stérile de riposter ainsi à ses paroles’ (RTP III. 134) [‘the ferocious and barren pleasure of answering her back in this way’ (SLT iv. 140)], a satisfaction that is overlaid with guilt when he finds out later that Françoise has serious health problems. Marcel delivers, slowly and assuredly, what the Narrator sees as his mendacious verdict: ‘“Vous êtes excellente, lui dis-je mielleusement, vous êtes gentille, vous avez mille qualités mais vous en êtes au même point que le jour où vous êtes arrivée à Paris, aussi bien pour vous connaître en choses de toilette que pour bien prononcer les mots et ne pas faire de cuirs”’ (RTP III. 134) [‘“You're an excellent person, I said smarmily, you're kind, you've a thousand good qualities, but you're no further on than the day you arrived in Paris, either in knowing about women's clothes or in how to pronounce words properly and not commit howlers”’ (SLT iv. 139)]. Yet the performative workings of discursive power as practised by the protagonist are instantly disowned, or more accurately redirected by the Narrator, who immediately relativizes notions of linguistic fixity and correctness: Et ce reproche était particulièrement stupide, car ces mots français que nous sommes si fiers de prononcer exactement ne sont eux-mêmes que des ‘cuirs’ faits par des bouches gaulloises qui prononçaient de travers le latin ou le saxon, notre langue n'étant que la prononciation défectueuse de quelques autres. Le génie linguistique à l'état vivant, l'avenir et le passé du français, voilà ce qui eût dû m'intéresser dans les fautes de Françoise. (RTP III. 134) (p.179) [This was a particularly stupid criticism, because the French words we are so proud of pronouncing accurately are themselves only ‘howlers’ made by Gallic mouths in mispronouncing Latin or Saxon, our language being simply the defective pronunciation of a few others. The genius of the language in its living state, and the future and past of French, that is what should have interested me in Françoise's mistakes. (SLT iv. 139)] The juxtaposition of responses (Marcel's vicious tirade and the Narrator's rejection of it) suggests, crucially, a will on the part of the Narrator to outgrow class sectarianism. The move tallies with Proust's own calls for tolerance in the

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Frames, Language, Judgements analogous area of national identity as we saw in his refutation of narrow nationalism in the wake of the First World War.32 By pointing to language's instabilities and insisting on its diachronic framing, the Narrator effectively concedes a fundamental principle of the scientific study of language. Writing in 1925, Charles Bally sums up the reversal whereby the new discipline of linguistics accorded precedence not to the written word but to orality: ‘La norme, c'est la langue parlée.'33 Importantly, the Narrator does not give up on knowledge production for there is a continuing instrumentalization of Françoise, her speech habits now forming the raw material for future linguistic research. Yet he claims programmatically a cognitive exploration that would be neutral in ideological terms, and would counter any caricatural indulgence of narrow social-class prejudice. An additional angle on the episode is that Marcel's brooding over Albertine provides a real obstacle to his active social participation. Of the kitchen scenes, the Narrator writes: ‘Ces pittoresques études de géographie linguistique et de camaraderie ancillaire se poursuivirent chaque semaine dans la cuisine, sans que j'y prisse aucun plaisir’ (RTP III. 126) [‘These colourful studies in linguistic geography and servant camaraderie were pursued each week in the kitchen, without my deriving any pleasure from them’ (SLT iv. 131)].34 Language becomes a touchstone of historical movement and change. The young Mme de Cambremer uses the singular ‘cheveu’ [‘hair’] instead of ‘cheveux’, a usage ushered in by ‘un de ces inconnus qui sont les lanceurs des modes littéraires’ [‘one of those unknown persons who launch literary fashions’] and adopted by all those on the same wavelength as Mme de Cambremer; but the Narrator predicts that ‘de l'excès du singulier renaîtra le pluriel’ (RTP III. 320) [‘out of a surfeit of the singular, (p.180) the plural will be reborn’ (SLT iv. 326)].35 Mme de Cambremer conveys her ambitions linguistically. Thus if Marcel speaks to her like her brother Legrandin, ‘par une suggestion inverse elle me répondait dans le dialecte de Robert [de Saint-Loup], qu'elle ne savait pas emprunté à Rachel’ (RTP III. 214) [‘she, by an opposite suggestion, had answered me in Robert [de Saint-Loup’s] dialect, borrowed unbeknownst to her from Rachel’ (SLT iv. 220)]. As Proust depicts linguistic influence pursuing an aleatory, almost delirious course, with the speech of the prostitute reaching an unsuspecting, aspirational bourgeoisie via the aristocracy, the effect is one of confused, radical democratization. The speech habits of the hotel staff provide an important point of focus in the textual expansion of Sodome et Gomorrhe. The linguistic errors of the hotel manager dominate the opening pages of the ‘Intermittences du cœur’ [‘Intermittences of the Heart’] section where we also read of the changes in Saint-Loup's lexis, certain terms coming into vogue for him every five or six years, the Narrator estimates. The effect of these addenda is to recontextualize our reading of the development in which the hero belatedly mourns his Page 21 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements grandmother: ‘Bouleversement de toute ma personne…’ (RTP III. 152–60) [‘A convulsion of my entire being…’ (SLT iv. 158–65)]. In the immediately preceding paragraph, for example, which forms a later addition, the hotel manager works breezily from one malapropism to another; and the lines that follow straight after the ‘Intermittences of the Heart' anthology piece are similarly punctuated by errors from the manager (RTP III. 160; SLT iv. 165). More tangentially, echoes from the world of ancillary staff also infiltrate the lament for the grandmother, for in his dream, the hero sees her living in a hired room, ‘aussi petite que pour une ancienne domestique’ (RTP III. 157) [‘as small as for some former maidservant’ (SLT iv. 163)] and he thinks he remembers her speaking to him with the humble air of ‘une vieille servante chassée, comme une étrangère’ (RTP III. 158) [‘an old servant who has been dismissed, like a stranger’ (SLT iv. 163)]. Seen in this light, the guilt in Marcel's delayed mourning is transparently exacerbated to the extent that the socially acceptable provision for retired domestic staff constitutes neglect when applied to the bourgeois grandmother. Narrative blocks of social comedy are thus contiguous with plaintive evocations of the deceased grandmother. If the speech of servants is shown to contain the pulse of a living, changing language, the resurrection of memory in which Marcel mourns his grandmother seeks to identify a language shielded from historical wear and tear: thus ‘les expressions de (p.181) son visage [celui de la grand-mère] semblaient écrites dans une langue qui n'était que pour moi; elle était tout dans ma vie, les autres n'existaient que relativement à elle, au jugement qu'elle donnerait sur eux’ (RTP III. 172) [‘the expressions of [grandmother’s] face seemed written in a language that was for me alone; she was everything in my life, others existed only in relation to her, to the judgment she would pass on them’ (SLT iv. 177)]. Two markers of the socially isolating work of mourning, the one linguistic, the other affective, stand briefly as bulwarks against a social dialectic that quickly reasserts itself: ‘mais non, nos rapports ont été trop fugitifs pour n'avoir pas été accidentels. Elle ne me connaît plus, je ne la reverrai jamais’ (RTP III. 172) [‘But no, our relations were too fleeting not to have been accidental. She no longer knows me, I shall never see her again’ (SLT iv. 177)]. Indeed this private mourning and the intrusive linguistic comedy intersect dramatically when the error-prone hotel manager speaks of the grandmother's illness as a ‘symecope’ (for ‘syncope’), a slip which awakens in the hero ‘les sensations les plus douloureuses’ (RTP III. 175) [‘the most painful sensations’ (SLT iv. 180)]. In a late addition to this same section of the Sodome et Gomorrhe typescript, the Narrator offers an extensive reflection on the psychology and merits of the faithful servant.36 While not able to forgo the pleasure of ridiculing domestics as much as their masters and impatient with the sentimentalism of people like Françoise who cannot bear to watch Marcel crying, the Narrator sides solemnly, on this occasion at least, with the old servant:

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Frames, Language, Judgements Mais il faut savoir aussi ne pas rester insensible, malgré la banalité solennelle et menaçante des choses qu'elle dit, son héritage maternel et la dignité du ‘clos’, devant une vieille cuisinière drapée dans une vie et une ascendance d'honneur, tenant le balai comme un sceptre, poussant son rôle au tragique, l'entrecoupant de pleurs, se redressant avec majesté. Ce jour-là je me rappelai ou j'imaginai de telles scènes, je les rapportai à notre vieille servante, et, depuis lors, malgré tout le mal qu'elle put faire à Albertine, j'aimai Françoise d'une affection, intermittente il est vrai, mais du genre le plus fort, celui qui a pour base la pitié. (RTP III. 174) [But we must be able also not to remain insensitive, despite the solemn, threatening banality of the things she says, her maternal heritage and the dignity of the ‘close', when faced by an old cook draped in an honourable life and ancestry, clutching her broom like a sceptre, playing her role for tragedy, interspersing it with tears, drawing herself majestically up. On the day in (p.182) question I recalled or imagined such scenes, and I linked them to our old servant, after which, despite all the harm she was able to do Albertine, I loved Françoise with an affection, intermittent it is true, but of the strongest kind, that which is founded on compassion. (SLT iv. 179; translation modified)] The frequently ludic handling of class inscription in Proust here makes way for a pathos emerging from a powerful, cross-class connection. Class phobia is central to Marcel's suspicions about Albertine and it is dramatically conveyed by Albertine's slip of the tongue as she gives vent to her frustration with life as Marcel's captive. She asks to be allowed some free time, inadvertently explaining ‘pour que j'aille me faire casser…’ (RTP III. 840) [‘let me go out and get…' (SLT v. 311)]. As Elizabeth Ladenson observes, ‘It is the linguistic otherness of [Albertine's] eroticism that appalls him'.37 The impact of the intrusion of sexually explicit language is as shocking for an embarrassed Albertine as it is for a protagonist who remembers hearing such words uttered in the street by his social inferiors. Yet as the Narrator observes, for Marcel and Albertine in their own moments of intimacy there are no bounds set on their verbal vulgarity. Access to vulgarity thus has differing consequences and uses: for the bourgeois couple, it stimulates sexual arousal, yet in the hands of ‘des gens très orduriers’ (RTP III. 841) [‘the most terrible people’ (SLT v. 312)], it constitutes for Marcel a taboo, a social transgression, and activates his phobic response to class difference. More improbably, Françoise is even suspected by the Narrator of finding among his papers relevant pages from the story of Swann's impossible love for Odette and laying these out conspicuously in Albertine's room. The diegetic switch serves to reinforce patterns of distance and to show a long-since-detached Narrator keen to track the ramifications of discursive power working around the Page 23 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements love narrative. The drama of Albertine and Marcel's cohabitation resonates sociolinguistically too. Thus Françoise, whose language (like Albertine's) has undergone the influence of the protagonist, labels Albertine a ‘charlatante’. In the process she enables the Narrator to conclude on the ideological inflection emerging from the servant's induction in the ways of male bourgeois power: ‘[Françoise] employait beaucoup plus ce féminin que le masculin, étant plus envieuse des femmes’ (RTP III. 867) [‘Françoise [… used] the feminine of the word much more often than the masculine, as she was more envious of women than of men’ (SLT v. 337)]. The gendering of (p.183) prejudice points to misogyny and provides a further layer to the power play operating in the protagonist's home. The Narrator deprecates his own moves to exert power, as evidenced by his recording of the efforts of ancillaries to secure a measure of autonomy from their master. In a late addition on two typed pages inserted in the third typescript of La Prisonnière, Marcel gradually learns the patois used by Françoise and her daughter which he had previously been unable to comprehend.38 Even if Françoise expresses hilarity at the idea of fellow patoisspeakers from home hearing Marcel's lousy pronunciation, the drive for independent social space obliges her to develop another linguistic code that he will not understand, Françoise and her daughter now sharing ‘un français qui devint bien vite des plus basses époques’ (RTP III. 661) [‘a French which soon became that of the most decadent period’ (SLT v. 139)]. Marcel can only regret the linguistic decadence for which he feels responsible and evoke with nostalgia the pleasing, historically rooted French that he had earlier associated with Françoise. She behaves in other ways that frustrate a bourgeois employer who craves exactitude in his efforts to police Albertine's movements. Her technophobic inability to use the telephone (which the Narrator puts down to ‘une timidité et une mélancolie ancestrales, appliquées à un objet inconnu de ses pères’ (RTP III. 661) [‘an ancestral shyness and melancholy, applied to an object unknown to her forefathers’ (SLT v. 139)]) means that on the occasion when she is shepherding Albertine home from the Trocadéro, her feedback to Marcel has to be directed via the operator, with frustrating delays in the transmission of information. The Narrator relishes the theatrical potential afforded by the mediation of the servant's message. Likewise, when it comes to providing precise indications of the time—crucial for a paranoid lover like the hero confronted with a busy urban environment—Françoise is unable to read the clock, prompting the Narrator to reflect with resignation on ancestral prejudice and incapacity: ‘je n'ai jamais pu comprendre si le phénomène qui avait lieu alors avait pour siège la vue de Françoise, ou sa pensée, ou son langage; ce qui est certain, c'est que ce phénomène avait toujours lieu. L'humanité est tres vieille. L'hérédité, les croisements ont donné une force insurmontable à de mauvaises habitudes, à des réflexes vicieux’ (RTP III. 662) [‘I have never been able to tell whether the Page 24 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements phenomenon which occurred then had as its locus Françoise's eyesight, or her thought, or her language; what is certain is that it always occurred. Humanity is very old. Heredity and breeding have given an irresistible strength to bad habits, (p.184) and vicious reflexes’ (SLT v. 139–40)]. In an echo of late nineteenthcentury Naturalism, the Narrator-diagnostician presents atavism in a sensationalized light exerting a hold over his social inferior. Lexical shifts and the use of language generally regularly serve as class markers. The extremely wealthy Octave, whose father is a leading industrialist playing a prominent role in organizing the Exposition Universelle of 1900, has a refined and extensive knowledge of the latest consumer accessories and yet no idea of, or interest in, the rules of French grammar or syntax. The Narrator assumes that, as he presents it, the disparity between the cultures of consumerism and learning must be shared by the industrialist father who, even though president of the Balbec syndicate of businessmen, uses the colloquial causer in the formal context of an open letter to the electors: ‘“J'ai voulu voir le maire pour lui en causer…”’ (RTP II. 233) [‘“I was desirous of talking to the Mayor about this matter”’ (SLT ii. 458)]. Albertine's comfortable use of abbreviations such as tram and tacot to describe the local Balbec railway strikes Marcel as strange, while her nasal speech owes something to her provincial origins and to the influence of a foreign teacher. By contrast, her family is decidedly uncomfortable with the doubling of the -n- in Simonet which they see as common and, when used to denote them, as a calumny. The flimsiness of class markers does not diminish their potency, wherever they fall on the social scale: ‘Au fur et à mesure que l'on descend dans l'échelle sociale, le snobisme s'accroche à des riens qui ne sont peut-être pas plus nuls que les distinctions de l'aristocratie, mais qui plus obscurs, plus particuliers à chacun, surprennent davantage’ (RTP II. 201) [‘The lower the level that people occupy in the social scale, the more snobbery they attach to insignificant things, which may be no more vacuous than the things valued by the aristocracy, but which by being more obscure, more peculiar to individuals, are always more surprising’ (SLT ii. 425)]. Within the power nexus that is language, Proust displays characteristic ambivalence. He is iconoclastic when it comes to the academy, as when he reflects, in a gloss on etymology, on the provenance of cultural authority: ‘le défaut de langue, l'intonation d'une vulgarité ethnique, la prononciation vicieuse selon lesquels nos ancêtres faisaient subir aux mots latins et saxons des mutilations durables, devenues plus tard les augustes législatrices des grammaires’ (RTP II. 108) [‘speech defects, the intonation of some ethnic vulgarity, or mispronunciation, inflicted on Latin and Saxon words, in a way that later elevated them into the grammarians’ noble statutes’ (SLT iii. 330)]. In tracking the conversion from native, oral annexation to magisterial authority, Proust subversively relativizes the prestige of the written. The long-established hierarchy which had (p.185) privileged the written language was to undergo Page 25 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements the radical change signalled by Saussure, who argued that the attention given to literary language often masked what was unbroken linguistic evolution: ‘L'immobilité absolue n'existe pas; toutes les parties de la langue sont soumises au changement…la langue littéraire…se superpose à la langue vulgaire, c'est-àdire à la langue naturelle'.39 Proust nods occasionally in the direction of the new discipline as we saw earlier but however much he may relativize the concept of linguistic authority, his Narrator is still caught in an ironic policing of social strata. He dwells playfully on the lexical errors of the lift-operator who, talking of a fresh spell of employment in another hotel in the autumn once the Grand Hotel closes for the season, remarks that he is to ‘“rentrer dans une nouvelle place”’ (RTP II. 157) [‘“recommence” his “new situation”’ (SLT ii. 381)]. Language here also provides an index of social evolution, the Narrator expressing surprise that the lift operator should still have said ‘place’ when ‘situation’ (a term which the employee in fact quickly goes on to use) confers greater prestige on the work being done: ‘car il appartenait à ce prolétariat moderne qui désire effacer dans le langage la trace du régime de la domesticité’ (RTP II. 157) [‘for he belonged to the working classes of modern times, who try to remove from their speech all reminder of the system of domestic service to which they belong’ (SLT ii. 381)]. The socially progressive terms tunique and traitement [‘tunic' and ‘remunerations'] thus replace livrée and gages [‘livery' and ‘wages'], with their connotations of feudal servitude. When ‘le lift’ is off duty (the metonymy, incidentally, works to restrict the individual to his subordinate role), his dress affords him access to a wider social canvas: ‘De même que grâce aux livres la science l'est à un ouvrier qui n'est plus ouvrier quand il a fini son travail, de même, grâce au canotier et à la paire de gants, l'élégance devenait accessible au lift qui, ayant cessé pour la soirée de faire monter les clients, se croyait, comme un jeune chirurgien qui a retiré sa blouse, ou le maréchal des logis Saint-Loup, son uniforme, devenu un parfait homme du monde’ (RTP III. 186–7) [‘Just as, thanks to books, knowledge is knowledge to a workman who is no longer a workman once his labours are over, so, thanks to the boater and to the pair of gloves, elegance had been brought within reach of the “lift” who, having stopped taking guests up for the evening, believed, like a young surgeon who has removed his smock, or Sergeant SaintLoup his uniform, he had turned into a perfect man of the world’ (SLT iv. 192)]. However (p.186) potentially liberating life beyond the typecasting of the workplace seems, in the catalogue of linguistic errors that follows, the Narrator dismisses the equalization of social opportunity as unmerited and misplaced. It is as though the inflated claims of a class are mirrored in the self-image of the lift attendant: short and physically unattractive, he compares himself, to Marcel's bemusement, with those who are tall and good-looking (RTP III. 187; SLT iv. 193). Faced with the symptoms of social contestation, the Narrator also practises a form of ironic retribution in displays of ludic mastery. Puzzlingly for the hero, the Page 26 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements lift attendant refers to ‘cette dame’ and to an ‘employée’ of Marcel's, terms which confuse him since he still thinks in what he mockingly dubs the soon-tobe-abolished language of the bourgeoisie. When the penny finally drops (the employee is Françoise), he seizes the opportunity to ironize at the expense of the worker, using literary history to restore class hierarchy and literary language effectively to reverse the trend in the science of linguistics that saw orality take precedence over the written language: ‘Tout d'un coup, je me rappelais que le nom d'employé est comme le port de la moustache pour les garçons de café, une satisfaction d'amour-propre donnée aux domestiques et que cette dame qui venait de sortir était Françoise…, satisfaction qui ne suffisait pas encore au lift car il disait volontiers en s'apitoyant sur sa propre classe “chez l'ouvrier” ou “chez le petit”, se servant du même singulier que Racine quand il dit: “le pauvre”’ (RTP II. 157–8) [‘Then I remembered that the word “employee” is as essential to the self-esteem of servants as wearing a moustache is to waiters in cafés, and realized that the “lady” who had just left our rooms was Françoise… though even this degree of self-esteem was insufficient for the “lift”, who, as he bemoaned the lot of his own class, also liked to say not “workers” but “the worker”, not “commoners” but “the commoner”, using the sort of singular with which Racine, meaning “poor men”, refers to “the poor man”’ (SLT ii. 381–2)]. As the text works back to Racine, the effect of the techniques of analogy and ludic juxtaposition is to emasculate radicalism. The Narrator's mischievous framing of the lapse in communication across the social divide ensures that the vanity of the bourgeois littérateur is as much indulged as is the assertiveness of the lift operator when expounding working-class solidarity. In the proletarian speech that is drawn into the novel, the Narrator incorporates the energies of popular speech while doubtless harbouring what Proust's contemporary, the linguistician Charles Bally, calls ‘la superstition d'une langue classique immuable, proposée comme modèle à toute la postérité; le purisme enfin…qui (p.187) frappe d'interdiction toute forme nouvelle qui s'écarte de la règle'.40 The ring-fencing of working-class locutions in A la recherche ensures that while these may be occasionally valorized, as when Françoise's speech is seen as providing an authentic link to past eras, it is systematically contained. The use of italics, quotation marks, and parentheses provides the typographical markers which ensure that working-class orality (one of the notable hallmarks of Zola's fiction) is held as a peripheral pool of quasi-exotic utterances. In that respect the novel is radically different from the work of Céline, who aggressively draws on popular speech in an attempt, as he protests, to give life, however transient, to his novels: ‘Le papier retient mal la parole', Céline asserts, adamant in his wish to reject academic language.41 Indeed the scale of incorporation of the demotic in both Zola and Céline allows us to set in context the always controlled exposure given to popular speech in A la recherche.

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Frames, Language, Judgements Parallel worlds: the strata of judgement and misprision Proust's outlook on language use, then, remains often hierarchical and prescriptive, even if concessions are also made to the descriptive approach advanced by the new discipline of linguistics. This mixing of permissiveness, displays of neutrality, and calls to order can be extended to the representation of social rigidity in the Recherche. The Narrator's conviction is that erroneous judgement operates democratically as a generalized phenomenon. Cottard, keen to live what the Narrator terms the feudal dream, may think that the Verdurins offer him the quintessence of aristocratic living: ‘plus les titres sont douteux', the Narrator's corrective reads, ‘plus les couronnes tiennent de place sur les verres, sur l'argenterie, sur le papier à lettres, sur les malles’ (RTP III. 275) [‘the more doubtful the titles the more space the coronets occupy on the glasses, the silver, the (p.188) notepaper and the luggage’ (SLT iv. 280–1)]. Misprision transcends class boundaries, the Recherche becoming a clearing-house for serial examples of misreading and resentment, of evaluations and counter-evaluations. The small trader experiences, on a Sunday visit to a medieval-style building designed by pupils of Viollet-le-Duc, a would-be authentic ‘sensation du Moyen Age’ (RTP III. 275) [‘sense of the Middle Ages’ (SLT iv. 281)]. In the often-cited example of the sighting of the Princesse Sherbatoff, the protagonist does not exclude himself from the social maze, having misidentified her as the keeper of a brothel (RTP III. 285; SLT iv. 290). His grandmother asserts the claim to selfworth of her class, deeming that the young aristocrat M. de Cambremer has done very well to be marrying someone as fine as the middle-class Mlle Legrandin ‘qui devait être difficile en fait de distinction, elle dont le frère était “si bien”’ (RTP III. 305) [‘who must have been very hard to satisfy when it came to refinement, she whose brother was so very “presentable”’ (SLT iv. 311)]. Aristocrats cannot conceive that others not of their class might have a less lofty view of their importance; yet the Prince d'Agrigente is seen as vulgar and foreign by ‘les gens modestes’ [‘people of modest means’] while being a ‘grand seigneur’ [‘nobleman’] within the Faubourg Saint-Germain (RTP III. 296; SLT iv. 301). Being uncertain about the provenance and ‘worth' of individuals seen in public spaces renders classification problematical: ‘Les grands restaurants, les casinos, les “tortillards” sont le musée des familles de ces énigmes sociales’ (RTP III. 285) [‘Great restaurants, casinos, “slowcoaches”, these are the family museums of such social conundrums’ (SLT iv. 291)]. The incremental accumulation of examples of misrecognition suggests that for Proust, the benchmarking of social value fluctuates. This instability in turn serves as a trailer for the radical material mutations in which the situation of figures such as Mme Verdurin will be transformed. Consistent with the democratization that marks the conferral, erroneous or otherwise, of value and judgement in Proust, the gardener at La Raspelière complains to his employers, the Cambremers, about the gardening tastes of the tenants, the Verdurins. Unconvinced, in this instance at least, by the stereotype Page 28 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements of the faithful retainer, an unflattering Narrator sees as an oddity ‘ce morcellement bizarre de l'opinion des gens du peuple, où le mépris moral le plus profond s'enclave dans l'estime la plus passionnée, laquelle chevauche à son tour de vieilles rancunes inabolies’ (RTP III. 309–10) [‘the bizarre compartmentalization of opinion among the common people, where the profoundest moral contempt may be enclosed within the most heartfelt esteem, the which in its turn overlaps with old, unended grudges’ (SLT iv. 315)]. The source of the gardener's gripe is that during the Franco-Prussian War, Mme de Cambremer had (p.189) accommodated (under duress, she insists) enemy soldiers in her château in eastern France. The gardener is thus faithful unto death and yet convinced of her treason. Crucially, however, what the Narrator sees as a bizarre fracturing at work within working-class assessments of others accurately characterizes the protagonist's own responses to figures such as Albertine, Françoise, and the lift operator. What might otherwise be sidelined as proletarian whimsicality is in fact a hallmark of the Narrator's own, volatile, arbitrary judgements and of the conflicted workings of ideology more generally. The growing exposure given to subaltern culture forms part of Proust's expansion of A la recherche du temps perdu and we see this reflected in adaptations to the structural organization of material in the novel. Proust reworked the opening of Le Côté de Guermantes I, for example, to lead with the psychological portrait of Françoise ‘in exile’, now that the Narrator's family have moved house.42 Likewise, the modified opening of Sodome et Gomorrhe II, chapter III, sees the original opening paragraph, a development on the wellestablished thematics of the dream life and thus a throw back to the incipit of Combray, now form paragraph two.43 The definitive opening paragraph provides a burlesque account of working-class aspiration voiced by the page who happens to be operating the lift one evening when Marcel returns to the hotel.44 He speaks to Marcel about his sister, whom he classifies as ‘une grande dame’ [‘a great lady’], citing her piano-playing, her ability to speak Spanish, and her employment of a maid. For the page, arrivisme however requires a display of social antagonism: ‘“comme dit ma sœur, il faudra toujours qu'il y… ait [des malheureux] pour que maintenant que je suis riche, je puisse un peu les emmerder”’ (RTP III. 369) [‘as my sister says, “there'll always need to be some [poor people] so that now I'm rich, I can tell them to go to blazes”’ (SLT iv. 376)]. The sister takes this to a gross degree, defecating in hotel rooms and taxis and delighting in the ensuing discomfort of staff. Moreover, the upbeat hotel employee plies a fatuous optimism: ‘ “La chance est dans ma famille: qui sait si je ne serais pas un jour président de la République?”’ (RTP III. 369) [‘ “Luck runs in my family; who knows (p.190) whether I won't one day be President of the Republic?” ’ (SLT, iv, 375–6)]. The bizarre catalogue of venality, corruption, and whim may seem inconsequential, yet the cameo anticipates the drama for Marcel of life with Albertine to the extent that the page's parents intervene to

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Frames, Language, Judgements ensure that their daughter returns to her wealthy lover while the father pairs his younger son off with an Indian prince. The social organization of prostitution also reflect worlds in parallel, Saint-Loup remarking to Marcel that the brothel that Bloch went to ‘devait etre “extrêmement purée, le paradis du pauvre”’ (RTP III. 92) [‘must have been “exceedingly run-down, the poor man's paradise”’ (SLT iv. 98)]. By contrast, Maineville on the Norman coast comes to be the location for, in the Narrator's words, ‘la première maison publique pour gens chics qu'on eût eu l'idée de construire sur les côtes de France’ (RTP III. 181) [‘the first brothel for the smart set anyone had thought to build on the coasts of France’ (SLT iv. 187)]. The Narrator comments on its ‘luxe de mauvais goût capable de rivaliser avec celui d'un palace’ [‘opulence of bad taste capable of competing with that of a grand hotel’], noting that it stands there provocatively—‘insolemment dressée là’ [‘insolently erected there’]—in spite of protests to the mayor from local residents (RTP III. 181; SLT iv. 187). And when, towards the end of Sodome et Gomorrhe, Charlus and Jupien go there to spy on Morel, what shocks Charlus is that this bustling, magnificent place is noisier than the Stock Exchange or the Hôtel des Ventes (RTP III. 465; SLT iv. 472).45 Alongside the myriad examples of misprision, there are cognitive gains for the Narrator that are significantly grounded in an emerging grasp of historical change. Predominantly unsentimental in his social portraiture, Proust ferrets out populist reaction, asserting that the indignant waiter in the restaurant would happily expose Dreyfusards or homosexuals were he not banking on a tip from them (RTP III. 21; SLT iv. 23). The Narrator speaks of his dawning awareness that the world changes as much as individuals and of the need to register social change: Je n'ai imaginé jusqu'ici les aspects différents que le monde prend pour une même personne qu'en supposant que le monde ne change pas…Dans une certaine mesure les manifestations mondaines (fort inférieures aux mouvements artistiques, aux crises politiques, à l'évolution qui porte le goût public vers le théâtre d'idées, puis vers la peinture impressionniste, puis vers la musique allemande et complexe, puis vers la musique russe et simple, ou vers les idées sociales, les idées de justice, la réaction religieuse, le (p.191) sursaut patriotique) en sont cependant le reflet lointain, brisé, incertain, troublé, changeant (RTP III. 139–40) [Up until now I have been imagining the different aspects that society may take for the same person only by assuming that society does not change… To a certain extent social manifestations (greatly inferior to artistic movements, to political crises and to the evolution that carries public taste towards the theatre of ideas, then towards Impressionist painting, then towards complicated German music, then towards simple Russian music, Page 30 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements or towards social ideas, ideas of justice, religious reaction, an outburst of patriotism) are nevertheless the distant, broken, uncertain, cloudy, shifting reflection of them. (SLT iv. 144–5)] Proust's Narrator provides an engaged sketch of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aesthetic, political, and social movements and new ideological configurations. Beyond the need to track social ideas and tastes and ‘l'évolution intellectuelle’ [‘intellectual developments’], temperaments come to be swept up ‘dans un mouvement quasi historique’ (RTP III. 140) [‘in a quasi-historical movement’ (SLT iv. 145)]. Social advantage accrues to Mme Swann whose salon is built around the now much acclaimed Bergotte and to Mme Verdurin whose latest avatar as champion of the Ballets Russes ensures public prominence.46 In her persistence, she is likened to the politician who, after forty years of trying, becomes a statesman (RTP III. 140; SLT iv. 145). To accentuate the merging of private and public causes and lives, homosexuals trying to enlist others to their ranks demonstrate a ‘zèle d'apostolat, comme d'autres prêchent le sionisme, le refus du service militaire, le saint-simonisme, le végétarisme et l'anarchie’ (RTP III. 22) [‘apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection, Saint-Simonism, vegetarianism or anarchy’ (SLT iv. 24)]. The Narrator thus charts non-judgementally a diversity of campaigning energies in which sexual and social ideals are urgently foregrounded. Yet the mercurial temperament of the Narrator also ensures a proliferation of stories of sexual intrigue across social class that assume the characteristics of farce. Given the liaison that Charlus has with a valet whom he invites to eat at the Grand Hotel in Balbec, the baron hopes that this will provide him with access to a whole range of male domestics. The manservant disabuses him, with the dismissive line, ‘“je ne fréquente personne de ma classe. Je ne leur parle que pour le service”’ (RTP III. 376–7) [‘“I don't associate with anyone from my own class. I only speak (p.192) to them when on duty”’ (SLT iv. 383)] and an offer to introduce the baron to the Prince de Guermantes (in other words, to his own brother). But whereas other mondains, seeing the well-turned-out valet, assume he is American, members of his own class identify him straightaway: ‘il fut deviné par eux, comme un forçat reconnaît un forçat, même plus vite, flairé à distance comme un animal par certains animaux’ (RTP III. 377) [‘they saw through him, just as one convict will recognize another convict, even quicker, nosed out from afar, as one animal is by certain others’ (SLT iv. 383)]. Françoise's recognition of the origins of Charlus's dinner guest is likened to the old nurse Eurycleia recognizing Ulysses in the Odyssey.47 If the intertextual reference shows the Narrator relishing a very literary instance of anagnorisis, the intuitive sense of servants in the Recherche is regularly attributed a more base provenance. Marcel's social inferiors are regularly depicted as being motivated by voracious appetites and gain. Albertine jumps into the car provided by him and kisses him with a dog-like enthusiasm (RTP III. 408; SLT iv. 414); indeed in moments of physical intimacy, she assumes a different voice, and her Page 31 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements cheeks become rougher like those of working-class women from the suburbs (RTP III. 403; SLT iv. 409); and when the chauffeur-driven car carrying the lovers arrives back at the hotel, Aimé ‘ne pouvait s'empêcher, avec des yeux passionnés, curieux et gourmands, de regarder quel pourboire je donnais au chauffeur’ (RTP III. 413) [‘could not help watching, through impassioned, inquisitive and greedy eyes, to see what tip I was giving the chauffeur’ (SLT iv. 419)]. Use of the term ‘monsieur’ by the lift operator to denote the protagonist's driver prompts the Narrator to reflect directly on the question of social class attitudes, in particular his own and those of his mother. The extract is worth quoting in full as it articulates some of the Narrator's core assumptions about class in the Recherche: [Le lift] m'apprenait par la même occasion qu'un ouvrier est tout aussi bien un monsieur que ne l'est un homme du monde. Leçons de mots seulement. Car pour la chose je n'avais jamais fait de distinction entre les classes…; je n'avais jamais fait de différence entre les ouvriers, les bourgeois et les grands seigneurs, et j'aurais pris indifféremment les uns et les autres pour amis, avec une certaine préférence pour les ouvriers, et après cela pour les grands seigneurs, non par goût mais sachant qu'on peut exiger d'eux plus de politesse envers les ouvriers qu'on ne l'obtient de la part des bourgeois, soit que les grands seigneurs ne dédaignent pas les ouvriers comme font les (p.193) bourgeois, ou bien parce qu'il sont volontiers polis envers n'importe qui. (RTP III. 414) [[The lift operator] had taught me at the same time that a workman is just as much a gentleman as is a society man. A verbal lesson simply. Because, as for the thing itself, I had never made any distinction between the classes…between workmen, bourgeois and great noblemen, but would have accepted all of them as friends without distinction, with a certain preference for workmen, and after them the noblemen, not from taste, but knowing that you can demand greater courtesy from them towards workmen than you can obtain from the bourgeoisie, either because great noblemen do not despise workmen, as the bourgeoisie does, or else because they are ready to be courteous to anyone at all. (SLT iv. 420–1)] In spite of the Narrator's egalitarian claims, what is here seen as a minor lexical hitch—the application of the term ‘monsieur’—is elsewhere in the Recherche the occasion for ironic, often resentful comment on workerist claims for social recognition. An alternative reading of the Narrator's stated preferences would be to explore the manner in which the bourgeoisie is edged out of the picture, an excision that squares with the Narrator's sometimes romanticized account of a

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Frames, Language, Judgements conservative accommodation between peasant and feudal lord that pre-dates the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The ambiguities of the Narrator's own position filter through into the block of text immediately following which, like the piece just quoted, forms a marginal addition to the continuous manuscript of Sodome et Gomorrhe.48 Here the Narrator's mother is depicted as unambiguously embodying the conservatism of the established bourgeoisie, a stability that provides a counterpoint to the Narrator's brooding over class entitlements and allegiances. The portrait has a strong biographical basis as Evelyne Bloch-Dano's life of Mme Jeanne Proust helps confirm and extensive quotation helps corroborate Proust's keen interest in the workings of social hierarchy:49 (p.194) Je ne peux du reste pas dire que cette façon que j'avais de mettre les gens du peuple sur le pied d'égalité avec les gens du monde, si elle fut tres bien admise de ceux-ci, satisfît en revanche toujours pleinement ma mère. Non qu'humainement elle fît une différence quelconque entre les êtres, et si jamais Françoise avait du chagrin ou était souffrante, elle était toujours consolée et soignée par maman avec la même amitié, avec le même dévouement que sa meilleure amie. Mais ma mère était trop la fille de mon grand-père pour ne pas faire socialement acception des castes. Les gens de Combray avaient beau avoir du cœur, de la sensibilité, acquérir les belles théories sur l'égalité humaine, ma mère, quand un valet de chambre s'émancipait, disait une fois ‘vous’ et glissait insensiblement à ne plus me parler à la troisième personne, avait de ces usurpations le même mécontentement qui éclate dans les Mémoires de Saint-Simon chaque fois qu'un seigneur qui n'y a pas droit saisit un prétexte de prendre la qualité d' ‘Altesse' dans un acte authentique, ou de ne pas rendre aux ducs ce qu'il leur devait et ce dont peu à peu il se dispense. Il y avait un ‘esprit de Combray' si réfractaire qu'il faudra des siècles de bonté (celle de ma mère était infinie), de théories égalitaires, pour arriver à le dissoudre. Je ne peux pas dire que chez ma mère certaines parcelles de cet esprit ne fussent pas restées insolubles. Elle eût donné aussi difficilement la main à un valet de chambre qu'elle lui donnait aisément dix francs (lesquels lui faisaient du reste plus de plaisir). Pour elle, qu'elle l'avouât ou non, les maîtres étaient les maîtres et les domestiques étaient les gens qui mangeaient à la cuisine. Quand elle voyait un chauffeur d'automobile dîner avec moi dans la salle à manger, elle n'était pas absolument contente et me disait: ‘Il me semble que tu pourrais avoir mieux comme ami qu'un mécanicien’, comme elle aurait dit, s'il se fût agi de mariage: ‘Tu pourrais trouver mieux comme parti.’ (RTP III. 415) [I cannot say on the other hand that this way that I had of putting the common people on an equal footing with members of society, although the latter were very happy to accept it, always gave my mother entire Page 33 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements satisfaction. Not that, humanly speaking, she made any distinction at all between people, and if ever Françoise was upset or unwell, she was always comforted and tended by Mama with the same affection and the same devotion as her best friend. But my mother was too much my grandfather's daughter not, socially speaking, to be a respecter of caste. For all that the people of Combray showed themselves kind-hearted and sensitive, and had taken on the noblest theories of human equality, my mother, when a valet de chambre got above himself, used vous one time and slipped imperceptibly into no longer addressing me in the third person, showed the same displeasure at these usurpations as bursts out in Saint-Simon's Memoirs each time a nobleman who has no right to it seizes on a pretext to assume the title of ‘Highness' in some legal instrument, or not to show a proper deference to dukes, with which he gradually dispenses. There was a ‘Combray spirit', so refractory that it will take centuries of kindness (my mother's was boundless), and of egalitarian theories, to succeed in dissolving it. I cannot say that, in my (p.195) mother's case, certain particles of this spirit had not remained insoluble. She would have found it as hard to offer her hand to a manservant as it was easy to give him ten francs (which anyway afforded him far greater pleasure). For her, whether she admitted it or not, masters were masters and servants the people who ate in the kitchen. When she saw a chauffeur eating with me in the diningroom, she was not altogether pleased and used to say to me: ‘It seems to me you could do better where friends are concerned than a mechanic,' as she might have said, were it a question of marrying: ‘You could find a better match.' (SLT iv. 421)] The fixity of the Mother's views (including arguably an undercurrent of homophobic unease) confirms her role as a guardian of bourgeois norms, a social outlook accentuated and sealed culturally by her retreat into the world of Saint-Simon. Moreover, looking no further than the two brief parentheses in the extract which stress respectively a romanticized view of the mother and the venality of servants, we might conclude that the Narrator provisionally sides with a defender of hierarchy and exposes social inferiors seeking to profit from paternalism. In fact we have the co-presence of a conventional bourgeois alignment (the ‘esprit de Combray' with which Marcel experiences a visceral connection) and a socially progressive discourse energized by the lure of modernity. And while egalitarianism here acquires an ethical gloss, the Narrator remains more impressed by the power of human obduracy and sceptical about human nature and the efficacy of ‘les belles théories sur l'égalité humaine’. The sequel to the extract is that, Marcel having accepted as trustworthy the word of a Parisian driver seconded to Balbec for seasonal work and now apparently recalled to the capital, it emerges that the driver is in fact in league with Morel and angling for the job of driver at La Raspelière. The details of their criminal manoeuvring (RTP III. 415–18; SLT iv. 422–5) confirm that any Page 34 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements egalitarianism posited by Proust's Narrator does not confer moral probity on his social inferiors but rather assumes the corruptibility of all classes. The Narrator is emotionally drawn to, if not intellectually persuaded by, behavioural models taken more from a regressive narrative about nation and class than from the egalitarian model of social interaction. Thus Charlus's first, admittedly false, impressions of Morel are fed by his social paternalism: ‘le génie de l'homme du peuple de France dessinait pour Morel, lui faisait revêtir des formes charmantes de simplicité, de franchise apparente, même d'une indépendante fierté qui semblait inspirée par le désintéressement. Cela était faux’ (RTP III. 448) [‘the genius of the French man of the people traced for Morel, caused him to be clothed in charming forms of simplicity, of apparent candour, of an independent pride even that seemed inspired by disinterestedness. This was false’ (p.196) (SLT iv. 454)]. The abrupt conclusion here fractures the sense of a patriotic fantasy grounded in subaltern pride and independence. Wrestling with the same regressive idyll, Charlus fantasizes about organizing a duel and sees it as deriving from an ancestral greatness conceived of as ‘un exemple de pareille reviviscence ethnique’ (RTP III. 457) [‘such an example of ethnic revivescence’ (SLT iv. 463)]. Fantasies centring around the reinvigoration of ethnicity are thus linked to notions of aristocratic hegemony. The suggestion of racialization implicit in old aristocratic names and ways persists in the story of the Duc de Guise at the hotel in Balbec where he befriends Marcel and is reassured to know that someone else can still distinguish between the Guermantes and the mediocre Cambremers: ‘Tel, après l'incendie de toutes les bibliothèques du globe et l'ascension d'une race entièrement ignorante, un vieux latiniste reprendrait pied et confiance dans la vie en entendant quelqu'un lui citer un vers d'Horace’ (RTP III. 471) [‘Just so, following a conflagration of all the libraries on the globe, and the rise of a wholly ignorant race, might an old Latinist regain his footing and his trust in life on hearing someone quote him a line from Horace’ (SLT iv. 478)]. The Narrator's whimsical, improbable analogy suggests a refusal to accept the conservative alignment urged by Guise. Notwithstanding the need of some to shore up social boundaries, Charlus's ritualized appeal to religious and class lineage as an absolute arbiter is shown to reflect an increasingly redundant social model. So too other systems of behavioural explanation are tested and judged fallible: the Narrator is loathe to view Morel's immorality as unredeemed, citing among his better features his occasional shows of kindness and his staunch loyalty to the Paris Conservatory, so that his character ‘ressemblait à un vieux livre du Moyen Age, plein d'erreurs, de traditions absurdes, d'obscénités, il était extraordinairement composite’ (RTP III. 420) [‘resembled an old book of the Middle Ages, full of errors, of absurd traditions, of obscenities, it was extraordinarily composite’ (SLT iv. 426)]. Elsewhere in the same volume, the Narrator argues that, since peoples are collections of individuals, they are no

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Frames, Language, Judgements less affected by ‘cette cécité profonde, obstinée et déconcertante’ (RTP III. 436) [‘this profound, obstinate and disconcerting blindness’ (SLT iv. 443)]. This pessimistic social diagnosis can be connected to the mosaic of contrasting responses to the domestic class in A la recherche: these include sentimentalized tributes and endorsement, bourgeois and aristocratic condescension and denigration, and more egalitarian moments when the workings of the social dialectic are neutrally assessed by the Narrator. We have the sense of an ethical aside when he laments the (p.197) bourgeois error of dismissing effusive manifestations of sentiment and calls for an empathy that transcends social class: Nous ne nous mettons pas assez dans le cœur de ces pauvres femmes de chambre…. Nous n'aimons pas les grandes phrases, les attestations, nous avons tort, nous fermons ainsi notre cœur au pathétique des campagnes, à la légende que la pauvre servante, renvoyée, peut-être injustement, pour vol, toute pâle, devenue subitement plus humble comme si c'était un crime d'être accusée, déroule en invoquant l'honnêteté de son père, les principes de sa mère, les conseils de l'aïeule. (RTP III. 174) [We do not put ourselves sufficiently often into the hearts of these poor servants…We do not like high-flown phrases or attestations, and we are wrong, we thereby close our hearts to the pathos of the countryside, to the legend which the poor serving-woman, having been dismissed, perhaps unjustly, for stealing, white-faced, become suddenly humbler as if to be accused were a crime, unfolds in invoking her father's honesty, her mother's principles, her grandmother's good advice. (SLT iv. 178–9)] Urban bourgeois error and insensitivity create the conditions in which the culture of the provincial servant class becomes an object of impassioned advocacy on the Narrator's part (although characteristically the urgent note of engaged tenderness duly reverts to one of derision in the lines of text that follow). Similarly, when the lift operator at the Balbec hotel is casual about his failure to fetch Albertine for Marcel, the Narrator pleads for sensitivity in the handling of domestic servants: ‘On ne devrait jamais se mettre en colère contre ceux qui, pris en faute par nous, se mettent à ricaner. Ils le font non parce qu'ils se moquent, mais tremblent que nous puissions être mécontents’ (RTP III. 190) [‘We should never lose our tempers with those who, when we catch them out, start sniggering. They do so, not because they are making fun, but are fearful that we may be displeased’ (SLT iv. 196)]. Marcel himself fails to live by the Narrator's psychologically informed prescription, ridiculing the lift operator's speech, most notably his persistent and vacuous ‘“Vous pensez!”’ (RTP III. 187) [‘“I'll say!”’ (SLT iv. 193)]. The Narrator dismissively posits ‘democratic vanity'50 as an ideological explanation for the lift operator's outlook: the epithet is laden

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Frames, Language, Judgements with the antidemocratic prejudice operating in the Third Republic and that we considered earlier.51 The Narrator finds other ways of reining in his social inferiors. Class is exoticized as he appears to extract the issue from a modern-day social dialectic, recasting it in the chronologically remote religious world in (p.198) which Racine's Athalie is set. The male domestics of the Grand Hotel are cast as the Levites in Athalie and in Proust's whimsical characterization, none of the ancillary staff, who could just as easily have been in the temple of Solomon as in Balbec, can answer Athalie's question, ‘“Quel est donc votre emploi?” car ils n'en avaient aucun’ (RTP III. 171) [‘“Quel est donc votre emploi?” for they had none’ (SLT iv. 176)]. Within the context of lavish display operative in exclusive fin de siècle hotels such as the Grand in Balbec, the plethora of staff serves as an important visual marker in a milieu of conspicuous material consumption.

‘On, c'est-à-dire le monde'52 In the restless evocation of social classes, Proust's Narrator often appears to write resolutely from outside the tribe. A late development in which he reflects on Charlus's tears years after the death of his wife sees the Narrator assert: il avait des larmes, mais superficielles, comme la transpiration d'un homme trop gros, dont le front pour un rien s'humecte de sueur. Avec la différence qu'à ceux-ci on dit: ‘Comme vous avez chaud!’ tandis qu'on fait semblant de ne pas voir les pleurs des autres. On, c'est-à-dire le monde; car le peuple s'inquiète de voir pleurer comme si un sanglot était plus grave qu'une hémorragie. (RTP III. 344) [tears would come, but superficial tears, like the perspiration of an overweight man, whose brow is beaded with sweat at the least exertion. With the difference that to the latter, people say: ‘You're overheated!', whereas one pretends not to notice other people's tears. One, that is to say, society; for the common people are concerned by seeing someone cry, as if a sob were more serious than a haemorrhage. (SLT iv. 350)]53 The textual sequence assembles a set of stepping stones which allow the Narrator to record and yet skirt past the ways of the aristocracy, the unwell, and the proletariat. In his attribution of sentimentality, social reserve, and a deficit in medical knowledge, the Narrator logs various positions of inferred, class-specific consensus. Moreover, the recognition signalled by ‘On, c'est-à-dire le monde’ concedes the precise (p.199) social provenance of the doxa and energizes a Narrator comfortable with foraging outside clearly defined blocks of consensus. If the Recherche constructs parallel social worlds, Proust criticism has tended not to foreground references to the proletariat in the Recherche. Thus for example the story of the dying Swann being abandoned by the Duchesse de Guermantes as she hurries off to a society gathering has been more readily Page 37 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements anthologized than the anecdote involving Charlus, who failed to visit a dying royal in order to keep an appointment to have his hair singed ‘pour un contrôleur d'omnibus devant lequel il se trouva prodigieusement intimidé’ (RTP III. 114) [‘for the sake of a bus conductor by whom he fond himself prodigiously intimidated’ (SLT iv. 119)]. The scandal caused by the escapee in search of pleasure beyond his own class, by Charlus as a temporary transfuge, suggests a form of betrayal analogous to that practised by the Narrator, who regularly forsakes the value judgements of his class before vigorously reaffirming them. Yet in Proust's careful layering of events across social strata, a specular dimension sees happenings in popular milieux reflected in the lives of social superiors. One episode which demonstrates how the Narrator's ludic detachment from others can subsequently mutate into needy self-interest occurs early in La Prisonnière. There, the Narrator makes light of Françoise's predicament at having to leave Balbec in a hurry (in accordance with Marcel's wishes) and thus being unable to say her farewell to the ‘gouvernante' at the Grand Hotel. With its seigneurial/subaltern opposition, the incident helps highlight the two-tier evaluation of affectivity. As a detached spectator, Marcel identifies the physical symptoms of Françoise's emotional upset and reflects on the language she uses to convey her malaise (‘ce souvenir lui mettait un “poids” réel “sur l'estomac”’ [‘this memory really “weighed on her stomach”’]), from which he opportunistically draws the mock-sociological conclusion about class and linguistic streaming: ‘(chaque classe sociale a sa pathologie)' (RTP III. 526) [‘(every social class has its own pathology)’ (SLT v. 10)]. If the content of the parenthesis holds Françoise and her class up to ridicule, her self-diagnosis appearing maladroit and valueless, the Narrator's assertion will come to acquire an air of hubris. For the episode anticipates the later instance of a missed farewell that forms one of the great peripeteia of the novel, Albertine's hasty, unannounced departure and the rush of physical symptoms registered not by a subaltern but by the hero-protagonist in the opening paragraph of Albertine disparue (RTP IV. 3; SLT v. 387). In a form of nemesis which is mapped on to the social strata of the day, Françoise brings to her master the news of his abandonment by his young provincial inferior. Notes:

(1) [‘The love of France is a love of French bodies’], Chaudier, Proust et le langage religieux, 116. (2) The fictional transposition in Proust from homosexual to heterosexual encounter is well established. See e.g. William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 589–90. Proust's quest for information about working-class lives for use in his novel is reflected in a letter of Mar. 1908 to Louis d'Albufera in which he asks to ‘voir un télégraphiste dans l'exercice de ses fonctions…avoir “l'impression” de sa vie’ [‘to see a telegraphist in the exercise of his duties…to have the “impression” of his life’] Page 38 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements (Corr viii. 76, quoted in RTP III. 1198). The homosexual involvement of the working class was a central ingredient in the widely covered Eulenbourg scandal in Germany which Proust refers to in his correspondence in 1907–8. The scandal involved aristocrats close to the Kaiser and a number of working-class associates (see RTP III. 1199–1200). (3) Frank Rosengarten, The Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885–1900): An Ideological Critique (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 77. (4) [‘men who work with their arms are in a constant state of war against those who do not work with their arms’], P. Bourget, La Barricade: Chronique de 1910 (Paris: Plon, 1910), p. xxx. (5) [‘manual workers and the others’], ibid. p. xxxi. (6) [‘the contemporary form of class war involves literally the revolt of muscle against nerve’], ibid., p. xliii. (7) For discussion of patterns of leisure and consumption among the working class of the day, see Helen Harden Chenut, The Fabric of Gender: Working-Class Culture in Third Republic France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 209–52. (8) Translation slightly modified. (9) Lafargue's pamphlet of that title, Le Droit à la paresse, appeared in 1880 and was a widely read Guesdist publication. See Harden Chenut, The Fabric of Gender: Working-Class Culture in Third Republic France, 214–15. (10) For a consideration of Freud's use of archaeology and the connection to the workings of desire, see Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, 18– 27. (11) The Narrator reflects in unmistakably capitalist terms that Robert is spending 100,000 francs a year on Rachel, while her clients pay her 20. The hard-headed calculation, consistently repeated in the text, reflects the folly of Robert's behaviour precisely within the logic of a commodity market in which value fluctuates according to a law of supply and demand. But the Narrator is as obsessive about cost as he is uninterested in any analysis of the social circumstances underpinning prostitution. If Robert is blind to what Rachel does, the Narrator does not invoke morality in his account of the socio-economic phenomenon of prostitution. (12) Stéphane Chaudier and Clément Paradis, ‘La Bourse ou le Temps: L'Imaginaire financier de Marcel Proust', in Martial Poirson, Yves Citton, and Christian Biet (eds.), Les Frontières littéraires de l'économie (XVIIe—XXe

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Frames, Language, Judgements siècles) (Paris: Desjonquères, 2008), 79–91: 87. I am grateful to Dagmar Wieser for bringing this work to my attention. (13) The development ‘D'ailleurs, il n'avait jamais aimé le monde…ne sortait plus de chez lui' (RTP III. 688–9) [‘He had never liked society…never went out’ (SLT v. 165–6)] forms a layer to n.a.fr. 16746:81. The text on Bergotte's death (RTP III. 687–97; SLT v. 165–74) within which the lines about Bergotte's economic calculations are inserted is located in n.a.fr. 16746:81 and 84–101 (classified by the Bibliothèque Nationale as being part of the third typescript for La Prisonnière; see Winton, Proust's Additions, ii, 153). (14) Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France, 413. (15) Translation slightly modified. (16) André Benhaïm argues that the combination of ‘socialist' and ‘sociobiological' elements in the Narrator's description here makes this one of the most extraordinary passages in A la recherche, ‘Panim': Visages de Proust (Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006), 178. (17) For an account of the state of Proust's novel in 1911, see the Pléiade editors' des-cription, ‘Le roman de 1911', RTP IV. 1003. (18) Livio Belloi describes the Proustian character portrait as relying on a technique of ‘sursignifiance', or over-significance, of the body, La Scène proustienne: Paris, Goffman et le théâtre du monde (Paris: Nathan, 1993), 96, quoted in Duval, L'Ironie proustienne: La Vision stéréoscopique, 191. (19) Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 31. (20) An earlier version of the episode involving the appearance of the Le Figaro article features in Contre Sainte-Beuve (see CSB, 217 and the explanatory editorial gloss, CSB, 830–1, n. 1 to p. 217) and ties in with Proust's original plan to shape the projected volume on Sainte-Beuve's method around a conversation about literature between the aspiring young writer and his mother. For a reconstruction of the genesis of the episode, see Jean Milly, ‘L'Article dans Le Figaro' A la recherche d'Albertine disparue, 〈http://www.fabula.org/colloques/ document476.php〉 (accessed Feb. 2007). (21) For consideration of Ruskin's moral message concerning the writer's debt to the subaltern, see the section ‘Combray and the reader-idler' in Ch. 2, above. (22) There are clear echoes of what the reader is presented with in Balbec when the Narrator delivers a hymn of praise to the female offspring of France's

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Frames, Language, Judgements provincial bourgeoisie. See above Ch. 4, the section entitled ‘Eloge de la bourgeoisie française'. (23) Winton explains that the continuous manuscripts (n.a.fr. 16705–27) covering the second half of the novel starting at the beginning of chapter II of Le Côté de Guermantes II date from late 1914/early 1915 on. Since the first Gallimard galleys for Le Côté de Guermantes can be dated between 1918 and 1920, this would confirm the approximate dating of the text which I have cited at length. ‘Cependant je regardais…mais encore créatrices' (RTP II. 702–3) [‘Meanwhile … and still alive’ (SLT iii. 406–7)] forms a margin and layer to the manuscript n.a.fr. 16705: 74, Winton, ii, 83. (24) See Pléiade editor's note, RTP II. 1737, n. 1 to II. 703. (25) Citing the example of the Guermantes for whom family identity is capable of proving a stronger determinant of action than individual motivation, Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen rejects the view that Proust is to be read as drawing his inspiration for the understanding of sociality from Gabriel Tarde. Tarde posited the individual rather than group formation as a model of explanation for human behaviour. See Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 181. (26) In her unpublished conference paper, ‘Proust et la démocratisation du mépris', Brigitte Mahuzier explores the ‘laisser dire' response and argues that the impulse comes to form an integral part of democracy itself in which contempt is made available to the ‘low' as well as to the ‘high'. In this, Mahuzier draws on William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997) and specifically ch. 9, ‘Mutual Contempt and Democracy', 206–34, in which Miller sees democracy as paradoxically spawning the desire for indifference. (27) A comic variant on the above is provided in the still in which the intensity of Legrandin's snobbish discomfort and longing outside the church of Combray is channelled through the description of his quivering buttocks (RTP I. 123; SLT i. 126). (28) For extensive discussion of Proust's additions post-1914 in the area of spoken language, see ch. 3 of Winton, Proust's Additions, i. 124–68. (29) Compagnon refers to the ‘cahiers d'addition', Cahiers 61, 60, 62, and 59; see his editorial note, RTP III. 1248–9. See also Winton, Proust's Additions, i, 80–1. (30) M. Shiach, ‘The Popular’, in Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz (eds.), Popular Culture: A Reader (London: Sage Publications, 2005), 55–63: 58. (31) Ibid. 60. (32) See above, Ch. 1. Page 41 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements (33) [‘Spoken language is the norm’], C. Bally, Le Langage et la Vie (1925; Geneva: Droz, 1965), 69; quoted in Philippe Roussin, Misère de la littérature, terreur de l'histoire: Céline et la littérature contemporaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 275. (34) Translation modified. (35) Translation modified. (36) The sequence ‘Quelles déclamations…Elle me torturait' (RTP III. 173–4) [‘What pitying declamations…It tormented me’ (SLT iv. 178–9)] forms a layer to n.a.fr. 16739:45. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 110. (37) See Elizabeth Ladenson, Proust's Lesbianism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), 108. (38) N.a.fr. 16746:33–4. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 152. (39) [‘Absolute immobility does not exist; all parts of language are subject to change…literary language…is superimposed on vulgar language, that's to say natural language’], Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Paris: Payot, 1990), 193–4; quoted in Roussin, Misère de la littérature, terreur de l'histoire, 274. (40) [‘the superstitious assertion of a classical, immutable language proposed as model for the whole of posterity; the purism, in a word, which places an interdiction on all new forms that would depart from the rule’], Bally, Le Langage et la Vie, 13; quoted in Roussin, Misère de la littérature, terreur de l'histoire, 276–7. (41) ‘Paper cannot hold the spoken word'. Céline writes in Voyage au bout de la nuit: ‘la langue des romans habituels est morte, syntaxe morte, tout mort. Les miens mourront aussi, bientôt sans doute, mais ils auront eu la petite supériorité sur tant d'autres, ils auront pendant un an, un mois, un jour, VECU' [‘the language used in conventional novels is dead, the syntax is dead, everything is dead. My novels too will die, perhaps soon, but they will have been superior to so many others in one modest respect: for a year, a month, a day, they will have LIVED’], quoted in Roussin, Misère de la littérature, terreur de l'histoire, 297 (Céline's use of capitals). (42) The earlier incipit containing the reflection on onomastics and aristocratic prestige, ‘A l'âge où les noms…’ [‘At an age when Names…’], is repositioned two pages into the volume (RTP II. 310–11; SLT iii. 8–9). (43) The paragraph begins: ‘Peut-être chaque soir acceptons-nous le risque de vivre, en dormant…’ [‘Every night perhaps we accept the risk of experiencing, while we sleep…’], (RTP III. 370; SLT iv. 376). Page 42 of 43

 

Frames, Language, Judgements (44) The addendum takes the form of a paragraph on a handwritten page in n.a.fr. 16740:109, i.e. part of the typescript of the continuous manuscript for Sodome et Gomorrhe. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 126. (45) All of this development is late and forms a layer inserted at n.a.fr. 16741:73. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 132. (46) The Pléiade editorial note, RTP III. 1415, n.3 to III. 139, refers to the point in Proust's correspondence where he writes of evolution occurring in the salon of Mme Swann (Corr. xiv. 280). (47) Homer, Odyssey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959), trans. E. V. Rieu, ch. xix; see editorial note, RTP III. 1562, n. 2 to III. 377. (48) These form margin and layer additions to n.a.fr. 16713:33; see Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 128. (49) See e.g. ch. 11, ‘Une maîtresse de maison', of Bloch-Dano, Mme Proust, 141– 58. Bloch-Dano describes Mme Proust as adhering to the bourgeois values of her day in her management of the family servants' duties. Bloch-Dano provides a detail that nicely sums up the social stratification as well as Proust's mother's taste for slightly disdainful irony when she cites Mme Proust's comment on domestic arrangements for the 14 July holiday: on those evenings, the family eat at a quarter to seven ‘afin que le peuple soit libre de bonne heure pour les réjouissances' [‘in order that the people may be free in good time for the festivities’], ibid., 150–1. (50) RTP III. 186; SLT iv. 192. (51) See above, Ch. 2. (52) RTP III. 344 [‘One, that is to say, society’ (SLT iv. 350)], translation modified. (53) Translation modified. The sequence ‘Mme Verdurin exigea d'abord…le morceau fini' (RTP III. 343–4) [‘Mme Verdurin first demanded…The piece having finished’ (SLT iv. 349–50)] forms a margin and layer addition to n.a.fr 16740:89. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii, 124.

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Masters, Laws, and Servants

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Masters, Laws, and Servants Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0007

Abstract and Keywords This chapter begins by considering extracts from Proust’s correspondence with his broker before examining how the protagonist’s attempts to exercise his would-be sovereign will in Albertine disparue, often with the use of money, are ineffectual when faced with the workings of contingency. Proust’s Narrator cites numerous markers indicating high cultural and economic power and concludes implicitly that the display of ownership and dominance is incapable of reversing the loss of Albertine. The chapter further argues that delegation fails the novel’s bourgeois protagonist, the subaltern figures of Aimé and Françoise tasked with executing their master’s will acting in some degree independently. The tensions in class hierarchy thus become the conduit for an implied debate about social policing and the autonomy and rights of the subaltern. Centrally, the chapter argues, Albertine’s independence underlines her ability to resist a power that is gendered, class-specific, and metropolitan. Keywords:   economic power, gender, autonomy, Otherness, subaltern, social policing, loss, role reversal

Prelude on finance ‘J'ai lu cela comme un article de Revue de Paris, mais mieux fait’ [‘I read it as though it were an article in La Revue de Paris but better written’]. The letter in which Proust pays this compliment was sent in August 1915, not to one of his many literary contacts but rather to his financial adviser, Lionel Hauser, whose way of writing about the world of financial markets prompts Proust to wax lyrical. On another occasion, Hauser's financial jargon fills Proust with the same awe, he jokes, as that experienced by Monsieur Jourdain in Molière's Le Page 1 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Corr. xiv. 154). In the same letter, Proust writes playfully that perhaps he himself will acquire the necessary jargon and impress the dealers: ‘Je vais faire avec les mots “escompte” et autres, un peu d'épate’ (Corr. xiv. 155) [‘I'm going to show off a bit with words like “discount” and so on’]. But while flirting with the language of the trader, Proust also voices, somewhat melodramatically, the anxiety of the writer who fears that he will appear to his adviser as someone dominated by narrow, financial materialism. Indeed, recalling Hauser's own references to Buddhism in a previous letter, Proust links the fall from lofty spiritualism into talk about money to the situation of climbers descending too rapidly from altitude and experiencing pains in the heart. Proust adds that the other heart, ‘le cœur moral’ (Corr. xiv. 216), requires a gentle descent from the high to the low, the moral to the material. The novelist and the financier pursue an embryonic philosophical dialogue, Proust referring grandly to one of their exchanges as ‘une lettre philosophicofinancière’ (Corr. xiv. 230) [‘a philosophico-financial letter’]. The particular genre throws up arresting collisions. Proust complains on one occasion that he has yet to hear back from his broker and he expresses the fear that, since many of his investments are Russian (the companies cited are Spassky, North Caucasian, and Doubowaïa Balka), ‘les armées allemandes—ou russes—ne détruisent ces mines ou (p.201) ces usines et que trois ou quatre cent mille francs de fer, de cuivre, et de pétrole, ne tombent à zéro [0]. Est-ce possible?’ [‘the German—or Russian —forces will destroy those mines and factories and that three or four hundred thousand francs worth of iron, copper and oil will fall to zero. Is this possible?’]. And literally in the next line, he talks of the need to throw off some ballast in order to gain moral height: ‘si je n'ai pas la Foi, comme tu dis, en revanche la préoccupation religieuse n'est jamais absente un jour de ma vie’ (Corr. xiv. 218) [‘if I do not have Faith, as you say, on the other hand the preoccupation with religion is present every day of my life’]. Proust's mixed concerns about oil, steel, copper, and religion provide just one of the features to be found in his voluminous correspondence with Hauser. The novelist's material concerns in the years 1914–16 themselves generate an anxiety about possession, retention, and loss. The moratorium on financial transactions coming into effect with the outbreak of the First World War saw the closure of the markets at the beginning of August 1914. This meant major restrictions for rentiers and Proust was no exception, as his regular complaints to Hauser confirm.1 Yet his literary wit never abandoned him. Thus when Hauser, whom he refers to as ‘mon cher Lionel’, reports that the 36,000 francs Proust thought he had in a Crédit Industriel account are now worth 27,000, Proust retorts: ‘Or tu me dis qu'il me restera seulement 27,000’ [‘Now you say that I shall have only 27,000 left’] before going straight into a line from Racine's Athalie: ‘Comment en un plomb vil, l'or pur s'est-il changé?’ (Corr. xiv. 266) [‘How has pure gold become base lead?’]

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Masters, Laws, and Servants To put it in caricatural terms, it is as though while Proust may be losing economic capital, the cultural capital of citation from the classics is no less available. The splicing of genres in Proust's hybrid “lettre philosophicofinancière’ (Corr. xiv. 230) shows an important conflation and one that has a close bearing on the diegesis of Albertine disparue, where Marcel's hold over Albertine, as I shall go on to discuss, works both fiscally and culturally. Proust's conflation provides a striking illustration of Fredric Jameson's observation that ostensibly different fields in the twentieth century need to be read in tandem rather than as separate discourses. Jameson identifies ‘a dedifferentiation of fields, such that economics has come to overlap with culture: that everything, including commodity production and high and speculative finance has become cultural; and culture has equally become profoundly economic or commodity (p. 202) oriented'.2 As Proust himself confessed in a letter to Robert de Billy in early 1908, “ne soyez pas scandalisé que je passe de Ruskin aux Pins des Landes' [‘Don't be scandalized that I should switch from Ruskin to Landes Pine shares’].3 The conflation of culture and economics has significant bearing on our reading in particular of Albertine disparue. The volume foregrounds (arguably more than other sections of the novel) private bereavement and loss and yet is built up often around quite narrow, historically precise paradigms involving social hierarchy, materialism, challenges to cultural and social authority, and interrogations around the subject of cultural value and its loss. Specifically materialist concerns are central to the volume. To secure the evidence for such a reading, one needs to see Albertine disparue less as a dehistoricized account of Marcel's mourning for Albertine and more as situating that individual subject's grieving within what will emerge for the rentier as a constricting economic order that militates against control, possession, and manipulation of the Other. Ideologically linked to this is the claimed opposition that Proust identifies in his letters to Hauser between the matériellement and the moralement. It is an opposition which in a sense Proust wishes to attenuate if not collapse, for as he says in the seductively worded letter to Hauser of early September 1915 that I have already quoted from, he would have wished, ‘entre le Bouddha dont tu me parles en si nobles et touchants termes dans ta lettre, et un Compte Rothschild mettre des pentes douces' (Corr. xiv. 216) [‘to place a gentle slope between the Bouddha about whom you speak to me in your letter in such noble and touching terms and a Rothschild's bank account’]. This gradual transition between the moral and the material mutates into a conflation of the two levels in certain pages of Albertine disparue which indeed show significant textual overlap with the letters in question.4 This direct transfer of biographical material into A la recherche suggests that Proust's ideological perspective on key issues to do with capital and certain bourgeois codes is not dissimilar to the position adopted by his Narrator. The biographical link can be extended, Stéphane Chaudier and

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Masters, Laws, and Servants Clément (p.203) Paradis pointing out that Proust's hero shares his author's incompetence when it comes to the markets.5 The trip to Venice late in Albertine disparue provides a good initial vantage point from which to consider the contact between high culture and materialism. The journey made by Marcel and his mother is billed as the third important stage in his gradual release from obsession with Albertine. The Narrator encourages us to read the visit to St Mark's as a moment of solemn communion between mother and son set against the edifying cultural backdrop of the baptistry. Yet within this enthusiastic, almost oneiric evocation of Venice whose setting on the water triggers a string of romantic topoi, we find other, intruding narratives— political, economic, erotic—laying claim to the reader's attention. There is an interlude, for example, in which the now ageing diplomat Norpois discusses with Prince Foggi the contemporary political situation in France and refers back to the events of the Franco-Prussian War and to Norpois's key role as a diplomat in the last days of the Second Empire (RTP IV. 213–18; SLT v. 599–603). Alongside these issues of state power, a blunt formulation of economic power, in an episode I now want to consider, also frames Marcel's reflection on how he sought to control Albertine. Both intrusions within the Venetian narrative in fact reinforce the ideological framing of the volume and extensive quotation from this episode will help draw out the Narrator's interleaving of erotic, economic, and materialist elements: Parfois au crépuscule en rentrant à l'hôtel je sentais que l'Albertine d'autrefois, invisible à moi-même, était pourtant enfermée au fond de moi comme aux ‘plombs' d'une Venise intérieure, dont parfois un incident faisait glisser le couvercle durci jusqu'à me donner une ouverture sur ce passé. Ainsi par exemple un soir une lettre de mon coulissier rouvrit un instant en moi les portes de la prison où Albertine était en moi vivante, mais si loin, si profond, qu'elle me restait inaccessible. Depuis sa mort je ne m'étais plus occupé des spéculations que j'avais faites afin d'avoir plus d'argent pour elle. Or le temps avait passé; de grandes sagesses de l'époque précédente étaient démenties par celle-ci, comme il était arrivé autrefois de M. Thiers disant que les chemins de fer ne pourraient jamais réussir; et les titres dont M. Norpois nous avait dit: ‘Leur revenu n'est pas très élevé sans doute mais du moins le capital ne sera jamais déprécié', étaient souvent ceux qui avaient le plus baissé. Rien que pour les consolidés anglais et les raffineries Say, il me fallait payer au coulissier des différences si considérables, en même temps que des intérêts et des reports que sur un coup de tête je me décidai à tout vendre et (p.204) me trouvai tout d'un coup ne plus posséder que le cinquième à peine de ce que j'avais hérité de ma grand-mère et que j'avais encore du vivant d'Albertine. On le sut d'ailleurs à Combray dans ce qui restait de notre famille et de nos Page 4 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants relations, et comme on savait que je fréquentais le marquis de Saint-Loup et les Guermantes, on se dit: ‘Voilà où mènent les idées de grandeur.' On y eût été bien étonné d'apprendre que c'était pour une jeune fille d'une condition aussi modeste qu'Albertine, presque une protégée de l'ancien professeur de piano de ma grand-mère, Vinteuil, que j'avais fait ces spéculations. D'ailleurs dans cette vie de Combray où chacun est à jamais classé dans les revenus qu'on lui connaît comme dans une caste indienne, on n'eût pu se faire une idée de cette grande liberté qui régnait dans le monde des Guermantes où on n'attachait aucune importance à la fortune, où la pauvreté pouvait être considérée comme aussi désagréable, mais comme nullement plus diminuante, comme n'affectant plus la situation sociale, qu'une maladie d'estomac. Sans doute se figurait-on au contraire à Combray que Saint-Loup et M. de Guermantes devaient être des nobles ruinés, aux châteaux hypothéqués, à qui je prêtais de l'argent, tandis que, si j'avais été ruiné, ils eussent été les premiers à m'offrir, vainement, de me venir en aide. Quant à ma ruine relative, j'en étais d'autant plus ennuyé que mes curiosité vénitiennes s'étaient concentrées depuis peu sur une jeune marchande de verrerie à la carnation de fleur qui fournissait aux yeux ravis toute une gamme de tons orangés et me donnait un tel désir de la revoir chaque jour que sentant que nous quitterions bientôt Venise ma mère et moi, j'étais résolu à tâcher de lui faire à Paris une situation quelconque qui me permît de ne pas me séparer d'elle. La beauté de ses dix-sept ans était si noble, si radieuse, que c'était un vrai Titien à acquérir avant de s'en aller. (RTP IV. 218–19) [Sometimes at dusk on my return to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of former times, although invisible, was none the less locked deep inside me, as if in the lead-lined cells of some inner Venice, where from time to time an incident would shake the heavy lid enough to give me a glimpse into the past. Thus for instance one evening a letter from my broker reopened for an instant the gates of the prison where Albertine lay living within me, but so far and so deep that she remained inaccessible to me. Since her death I was no longer engaged in the speculations that I had undertaken in order to have more money to spend on her. But time had passed; the received wisdom of the previous era was nullified by the present one, as had happened in former times to M. Thiers, who declared that the railway could never succeed, thus the shares of which M. de Norpois had said, ‘Doubtless their yield is hardly substantial, but at least the capital will never depreciate', were often those that had lost the most value. If only for the English Consols and the Say Refineries, I had to pay the brokers such considerable differentials, not to mention the interest and the sums carried forward, that I suddenly took it into my head to sell everything, and found myself forthwith the owner of (p.205) barely one-fifth of the wealth that I had inherited from my grandmother and had still possessed while Albertine Page 5 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants was alive. This was known to those of our family and acquaintances who still lived in Combray, and because they knew that I frequented the Marquis de Saint-Loup and the Guermantes, people said, ‘That's where delusions of grandeur lead you.' They would have been quite astonished to learn that it was for a young woman of such modest extraction as Albertine, more or less a protégée of my grandmother's old piano teacher, Vinteuil, that I had been speculating. Moreover in this world of Combray, where everyone is classified once and for all time, as in the Hindu caste system, according to his known income, they were unable to conceive of the great liberty that reigned in the world of the Guermantes, where wealth was considered of no importance, where poverty could be regarded as unpleasant but as in no way more undignified, and having no more impact on one's social status, than an upset stomach. No doubt, on the other hand, people in Combray imagined that Saint-Loup and M. de Guermantes were ruined noblemen with mortgaged châteaux to whom I lent money, whereas, if I had been ruined, they would have been the first to offer me assistance, albeit to no avail. As for my present, relative ruin, I was all the more embarrassed since my Venetian pursuits had just recently focussed on a girl selling glassware, whose blooming complexion offered my ravished eyes a whole scale of amber tones, inspiring in me such a desire to see her every day that, realizing that my mother and I would soon be leaving Venice, I had resolved to try to find her some situation in Paris which would enable me not to be separated from her. The beauty of her seventeen years was so noble and radiant that she became a virtual Titian painting to be acquired before leaving. (SLT v. 603–5)] The opening paragraph provides a reference to Albertine's imagined imprisonment in the Piombi, cells covered in strips of lead and situated in the ducal palace that held political prisoners. Significantly this imprisonment serves as prelude to a picture of Marcel's increasing financial imprisonment in the paragraphs following. While this is another moment of involuntary memory, unlike the madeleine cake which is offered as the plain, material reminder of bourgeois provincialism and is an ostensibly depoliticized icon, the trigger for the resurrection of memory in Venice is aggressively capitalist, namely the letter from the broker. (One might speculate in passing that the foregrounding of naked capital may explain why this particular instance of involuntary memory is relatively underexposed in Proustian criticism.) The concatenation of the argument constructs a thematics of volatility: railways will never be profitable, Thiers once predicted, yet they become so; the once steady, reliable stocks pushed by Norpois, ‘le type du capitaliste' in Philip Kolb's phrase, fail;6 and (p. 206) bourgeois Combray imagines Marcel bailing out ruined aristocrats, whereas had Marcel been hard up, the aristocrats would have been the first to help, help, that is, had they been able to because they in fact were experiencing

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Masters, Laws, and Servants financial hardship. The pulses in the argument replicate the instability and fluctuations of the market. The ‘Parfois au crépuscule…’ [‘Sometimes at dusk’] does not, then, lead into a string of romantic topoi. Rather the Narrator diverts the narrative away from nature by evoking the letter from his broker, reminding the reader in the process that the earlier subjugation of Albertine worked, in part at least, along lines of economic seduction and control. His review of investment, consumption, and expenditure culminates in his speculation that he might bring back to Paris the 17-year-old Venetian seller of glassware who is seen as a commodity (albeit a beautiful one) to acquire. If Proust himself refers to his ‘ivresses spéculatives’ or bouts of speculation (Corr. xiv. 266), his protagonist similarly fails to act in accordance with the advice given to the author by Hauser in a letter of 1915: ‘ne pas mélanger les sentiments avec les affaires de Banque’ (Corr. xiv. 209) [‘do not mix emotion and financial dealings’]. In wanting to entice the young Venetian back to Paris and so fill the void left by Albertine, the Narrator is as aware of economic restrictions as he is of potential psychological benefits. As we saw in the new sociality represented by Balbec, the characterization of value as an inherently fluctuating phenomenon forms a leitmotif in the Recherche. The same sense of volatility recurs in another apparent digression in the Venice pages, centring this time on Mme Sazerat, a family friend who goes back to the old days in Combray. Marcel and his mother run into her in Venice. They invite her to eat at a hotel where, coincidentally, the ageing Mme de Villeparisis and her partner Norpois are staying. For Mme Sazerat, the mere mention of Mme de Villeparisis has a mesmeric effect. She recalls that as the beautiful young Duchesse d'Havré, Mme de Villeparisis had ruined M. Sazerat, her father, forcing the family to ‘vivre petitement à Combray’ (RTP IV. 213) [‘live in straitened circumstances in Combray’ (SLT v. 598)]. For Mme Sazerat, her consolation, now that her father is dead, is that he loved the most beautiful woman of his day. But when in the hotel dining room she finally lays eyes on the person who brought economic disaster on her family, she is unable to spot the beauty, finding only ‘“une petite bossue, rougeaude, affreuse”’ [‘“a horrid little old lady with a red face and a hunchback”']; Marcel's explanation ‘“C'est elle!”’ [‘“That's her!”'] (RTP IV. 213; SLT v. 599) can only confirm how the once precious commodity has lost its value. Similarly, to the uninitiated, her clothing, bought from an exclusive Paris designer's, Worth, looks like something worn by a concierge (RTP IV. 210; SLT v. 595)]. The casual (p. 207) detail pinpoints an anxiety about the identification and recognisability of value and of social distinction. Just as the markets can alarmingly subtract value, as Proust discovered in his disastrous speculation and as the correspondence with Hauser confirms, so the untutored eye of the profane fails to see in the dress of Mme de Villeparisis the value it merits. Proust exploits the language of volatile commodity value in his account of movements in the social class system. Reflecting on the rise of Gilberte, from being the daughter of a Jewish father, Page 7 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants Charles Swann, and of the courtesan Odette through to her marriage into the aristocracy, the Narrator cautions against her presumptuousness about maintaining that status. Indeed he sees in her blasé reaction une erreur, car la valeur d'un titre de noblesse, aussi bien que de Bourse, monte quand on le demande et baisse quand on l'offre. Tout ce qui nous semble impérissable tend à la destruction; une situation mondaine, tout comme autre chose, n'est pas créée une fois pour toutes mais aussi bien que la puissance d'un empire, se reconstruit à chaque instant par une sorte de création perpétuellement continue, ce qui explique les anomalies apparentes de l'histoire mondaine ou politique au cours d'un demi-siècle. La création du monde n'a pas eu lieu au début, elle a lieu tous les jours.… Rien ne résiste à de tels mouvements, les plus grands noms finissent par succomber. (RTP IV. 247–8) [a mistake, for the value of an aristocratic title, like that of a share quoted on the stock exchange, rises when in demand and falls when on offer. Everything we believe imperishable tends towards destruction; a social position, like everything else, is not given once and for all but, just like the power of an empire, is reconstituted from moment to moment through a sort of endless renewed process of creation, which explains the apparent anomalies of social or political history over half a century. The creation of the world did not happen ‘in the beginning', it happens from day to day… Nothing resists such movements, the greatest names finally succumb. (SLT v. 633–4)] Stéphane Chaudier and Clément Paradis make the point that the Narrator in A la recherche makes no move to condemn speculation by invoking the superiority of any moral, social, or political power.7 In the Narrator's assessment, the workings of the money markets replicate fluctuations in political and social fortunes. Cross-class migration forms an additional element in this latent capacity for radical social mutation.

(p.208) The rentier and the drama of delegation Love and attraction often function on a crudely materialist basis in A la recherche. The Duchesse de Guermantes, the Narrator reflects, has too many ‘moyens de séduction, non seulement de beauté mais de situation, de richesse’ (RTP IV. 88) [‘means of seduction at her disposal, drawing not only on beauty but on situation and wealth’ (SLT v. 473)] for Marcel ever to be able to be in a relationship with her. By the same logic of cultural and economic capital, Marcel starts out believing ingenuously that his chances with Albertine are high: ‘Albertine étant pauvre, obscure, devait être désireuse de m'épouser. Et pourtant je n'avais pas pu la posséder pour moi seul. Que ce soient les conditions sociales, les prévisions de la sagesse, en vérité, on n'a pas de prises sur la vie d'un autre être’ (RTP IV. 88) [‘Albertine was poor and obscure and ought to want to marry Page 8 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants me. And yet I had not been able to possess her exclusively. Whatever social conditions prevail, however wise the precautions we take, we can never truly control another person's life’ (SLT v. 473)]. At the microcosmic level the class dialectic in Albertine disparue works centrally around the triangular set of relations involving the bourgeois rentier, the class of economically dependent domestic servants, and the provincial figure of Albertine. We might wonder if the flight of Albertine from the economic control of Marcel is the harbinger of a wider social emancipation. With the First World War signalling significant changes in social hierarchy (the demise of the old aristocracy, the decline in domestic service, more women in the workplace, and emerging signs of greater women's autonomy), strains in class and gender relations become the very stuff of the novel. Social position, then, no longer guarantees control over the Other and it is Marcel's failure to grasp this that injects such melodrama into the opening part of Albertine disparue. Seen from this perspective, certain oftenquoted, sententious lines in Proust on the inaccessibility of the Other can be returned to the economic and social contexts in which they are hatched. As Jacques Dubois remarks with reference to Stendhal's work: ‘faire l'amour, c'est aussi faire la guerre sociale'.8 In the frenzy of activity that follows the flight of Albertine, the error-prone protagonist stumbles from one calamity to another. One of his first moves is to send Saint-Loup off to the Touraine to offer Albertine's uncle 30,000 francs for his electoral campaign in the carefully disguised hope that his niece might return to Marcel in Paris. Bloch inadvertently (p.209) scuppers the plan by saying to the uncle that he should intervene and send Albertine back to Marcel (RTP IV. 25–6; SLT v. 410). Reacting chaotically to this failure, Marcel invites a young girl into his home and has her sit on his lap in an attempt to lessen the anxiety he feels since Albertine has left. His offering her 500 francs prompts her parents to protest to the police, to whom Marcel asserts his innocence. Yet the head of the Criminal Investigation department, himself a paedophile, says to Marcel that he is paying too much for child sex, a view endorsed by Saint-Loup. Assumed to be guilty, Marcel finds that his apartment is placed under police surveillance. Erroneously and irrationally, he fears that the charge of corrupting minors might apply to his dealings with Albertine and he feels beleaguered (RTP IV. 30; SLT v. 414).9 It is this situation of near-criminalization—a failed attempt at bribery, an allegation of child abduction, a brush not just with the law but also with a corrupt enforcer of the law—that forms the context for the gnomic formulation that follows: ‘malgré l'illusion dont nous voudrions être dupes et dont, par amour, par amitié, par politesse, par respect humain, par devoir, nous dupons les autres, nous existons seuls. L'homme est l'être qui ne peut sortir de soi, qui ne connaît les autres qu'en soi, et, en disant le contraire, ment’ (RTP IV. 34) [‘despite the illusions which we hope will deceive us and with which, whether from love, friendship, politeness, human respect or from duty, we hope to deceive others, we exist on our own. Man is a being who cannot move beyond Page 9 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants his own boundaries, who knows others only within himself, and if he alleges the contrary, he is lying’ (SLT v. 418)]. Proustian solipsism, then, implies a rejection of the social that extends beyond love to social duty and good citizenry. Centrally for my argument, such isolation derives from the constricting socio-economic order in which the rentier is confronted with the limits of his material power. At the heart of Marcel's dissatisfaction lies the ambiguous protest of the rentier whose money cannot buy him love and emotional security. The detail of the 500 francs given to the young girl is symptomatic of this. Marcel rejects as false the paedophile allegations made against him by protesting that the lesson of that episode was that ‘les gens aisément refusent la fortune et risquent la mort, alors qu'on se figure que l'intérêt et la peur de mourir mènent le monde. Car si j'avais pensé que même une petite fille inconnue pût avoir, par l'arrivée d'un homme de la police, une (p.210) idée honteuse de moi, combien j'aurais mieux aimé me tuer!’ (RTP IV. 30) [‘people may easily risk their fortunes and their lives, when we think that self-interest and the fear of death rule the world. For if I had thought that the arrival of the police could cause even a little girl who did not know me to form a shameful idea of me, how much I would rather have killed myself!’ (SLT v. 414)]. At one level, the protagonist has proceeded precisely on the opposite basis, namely that appeals to material interest will indeed deliver up the Other (to the money he sends to Albertine's uncle, we can add the payment he offers his spy Aimé to carry out investigations into her conduct that I shall consider presently); in other words, that others can be bought off. The words of the girl's parents give the lie to this when they refuse the money: ‘“Nous ne mangeons pas de ce pain-là”’ (RTP IV. 27) [“We would not swallow that kind of deal”’ (SLT v. 411; translation modified)]. Yet the Narrator now inverts the paradigm appealing to his freedom from worldly gain and his readiness to commit suicide. The same opposition between crude material interest seen as unworthy and emotion that is life-threatening lies at the heart of the rigmarole surrounding the yacht and the Rolls Royce promised Albertine by Marcel. In a letter to her, Marcel bluffs his way, congratulating her on her wise course of action in leaving him. He observes that for them to meet again would be too painful (at least for him, although not for her; she is a ‘“jeune fille insensible”' (RTP IV. 37) [‘“unemotional young woman”’ (SLT v. 422)]. He adds in passing that he got her letter at the same time as a letter from his mother giving him permission to ask to marry her. In other words, the contractual is drawn into the frame only to be quickly dismissed. So too is the question of property. Marcel says that before the onset of ‘oblivion', they might usefully meet to sort out some material issues: ‘comme…je désirais que nous ayons chacun toute liberté dont vous m'aviez trop gentiment et abondamment fait un sacrifice…j'avais pensé à organiser notre existence de la façon la plus indépendante possible, et pour commencer j'avais voulu que vous eussiez ce yacht où vous auriez pu Page 10 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants voyager pendant que, trop souffrant, je vous eusse attendu au port…Et pour la terre, j'avais voulu que vous eussiez votre automobile à vous, rien qu'à vous, dans laquelle vous sortiriez, voyageriez à votre fantaisie’ (RTP IV. 38) [‘as…I wished each of us to dispose of that freedom which you have too kindly and abundantly sacrificed on my behalf…I had thought to organize our existence along the most independent lines possible and, to start with, I wanted you to have a yacht on which you might have sailed while I was too ill to do anything but wait for you in the port…And back on dry land, I would have wished you to have a motor-car all to yourself, which you would use for your own visits and travel at your leisure' (SLT v. 422–3)] (p.211) Perhaps, Marcel's bluff continues, Albertine might cancel these orders, but for that to happen, he reflects, they would have to meet and it would be too much risking one's happiness just for a yacht and a Rolls. ‘“Non, je préfère garder la Rolls et même le yacht”’ (RTP IV. 39) [‘“So I prefer to keep the Rolls and even the yacht”’ (SLT v. 423)]. The crass materialism which I deliberately signal at some length may surprise us in a novel which elsewhere constructs a salvational view of art. Bringing perspective to the account of Marcel's chaotic situation in Albertine disparue, the Narrator asserts that much of life is lived as a confusing dream (RTP IV. 30; SLT v. 414). Marcel's misdirected bribery thus forms a conflicted stage in his life prior to enlightenment, and we can argue that this is the chasing after false scents before entering by the narrow gate of insight. That said, the redemptive view of art which is central to Le Temps retrouvé is compromised at this juncture in that Marcel conflates materialism and aestheticism, advising Albertine that not only will he retain the luxury vehicles but he will have lines from Mallarmé engraved on both: for the yacht, lines that Albertine likes: ‘Un cygne d'autrefois etc.’ [‘A swan of past days…] and for the Rolls, lines that she said she did not understand and that Marcel deems appropriate: ‘Dis si je ne suis pas joyeux |… De voir… la roue | Du seul vespéral de mes chars’ (RTP IV. 39) [‘Say if I am not joyous | To see… the wheel | Of my sole chariot of evening’] SLT v. 423). The aesthetic thus functions here as a conduit for social domination. Notwithstanding Marcel's earlier, repeated assertion that economic capital should not take precedence over happiness, the aestheticization of the commodity (which offers striking corroboration of Fredric Jameson's thesis about the dedifferentiation of economic and cultural fields considered earlier) allows Marcel to parade a cultural capital that is beyond Albertine's reach. As the high literary equivalent of his taunting Albertine with what his money might buy her, it harks back to the conflation of the monetary and the cultural that we saw in Proust's correspondence with his broker Hauser.

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Masters, Laws, and Servants The imbrication of money and the citational play around Mallarmé forms part of the melodrama that dominates this corner of Albertine disparue. Having sent the letter, Marcel imagines a string of disastrous consequences: Albertine will call his bluff by staying away, prompting him to declare openly his need for her and to kill himself outside her front door in the Touraine. But in one of the many ingenious twists of the plot in Albertine disparue, it transpires, after a two-page digression in which Marcel parallels his motivation with that of Racine's Phèdre, that the letter had yet to be sent because Françoise, who was supposed to send it, was unsure of the postage. This switch between tragic and comic, the hermetic world of Racine and the minutiae of postal rates, matches the contrasting positions occupied by Marcel and the servant, setting his paranoia and introspection against her pragmatism. But it also demonstrates that, for (p. 212) Marcel to have impact on others, he cannot dispense with bourgeois social structures, and that, obliged as he is to work through the channels of delegation (it is Françoise and not he who posts the letter), Marcel's power is paradoxically blunted by the socially inferior delegate. Commenting on Proust's ability to track the interdependent movements of the social classes, René Girard sees the author occupying the position of the ‘astronomer novelist': ‘les esclaves gravitent autour de leurs maîtres et les maîtres sont eux-mêmes des esclaves'.10 The master/servant configuration provides a foundational element in the diegesis of the Albertine volumes. It is Françoise who announces the departure of Albertine in the resounding words ‘“Mlle Albertine est partie!”’ [‘“Miss Albertine has left!”'] that both close La Prisonnière and open Albertine disparue. She plays the role of an agent and intermediary, Albertine reporting to her that she is leaving, rather than directly to Marcel. The stages followed by the message and the distance this introduces frustrate Marcel, who is removed from the immediacy of others’ actions. In other words, the social hierarchy intended to work to his advantage effectively allows the Other freedom of manoeuvre. This is nowhere clearer than in the denouement of La Prisonnière, where Marcel has made up his mind that he will abandon Albertine and head off to Venice. In an extension of the intertextual play around Racine's Esther that forms a leitmotif in the volume, he congratulates himself on ‘la ‘sévère loi’ qui faisait que, tant que je n'aurais pas appelé, aucun ‘timide mortel’, fût-ce Françoise, fût-ce Albertine, ne s'aviserait de venir me troubler ‘au fond de ce palais’ où Une majesté terrible Affecte à mes sujets de me rendre invisible. (RTP III. 913) [the ‘stern decree' which meant that, until I called, no ‘timid mortal’, whether Françoise or Albertine, would dare to come and disturb me ‘in the depths of my palace’ where Page 12 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants Une majesté terrible Affecte à mes sujets de me rendre invisible [‘a fearsome majesty | Affects to keep me unseen by my subjects’]. (SLT v. 381)] Yet this overdetermined picture of impregnability, of Old Testament imperiousness—what Proust elsewhere sees as the not so pure pleasure of erudition11—is the prelude to Françoise announcing to her master, (p.213) once he has rung for her to enter his room, that Albertine has left. And while his intention had been to ask Françoise to get him a map of Venice and a train timetable, he is now confronted with a different itinerary, a journey of discovery in which he must work through the tension between his apparent mastery and the independence of the provincial bourgeois girlfriend who has just walked out on him. The Racinian framing given to the story of Marcel's control of Albertine provides a parodic illustration of the power of classical culture as articulated by Pierre Bourdieu in Distinction. On citation from the classics, Bourdieu writes: A practical mastery of social significance…underlies and facilitates […] literary quotation, a quite special use of discourse which is a sort of summons to appear as advocate and witness, addressed to a past author on the basis of a social solidarity disguised as intellectual solidarity. The practical sense of meaning, which stops short of objectifying the social affinity which makes it possible—since that would nullify the desired effect, by relativizing both the reading and the text—provides simultaneously a social use and a denial of the social basis of that use.12 Marcel invokes an exotic Old Testament law (the story of Esther) that is in a sense simultaneously redundant and relevant to the early twentieth-century drama of cohabitation with Albertine. For as Marcel issues his summons to the past to deliver the high-cultural witness, Albertine is making her own move. In material terms therefore, the cultural capital signalled through intertextuality is devalued. The denouement to La Prisonnière thus dramatizes this disturbance in social hierarchy whereby the mastery of the cultured bourgeois male is melodramatically inflated via the Racine before being punctured. In the dense diegesis of La Fugitive, wielding literary quotation thus becomes a parody of power, with the Narrator acting as a leveller, as an accomplice in this ‘relativization', to use Bourdieu's terminology, of reading and text. The protagonist Marcel, by contrast, persists with talk of taste and cultural nurture, part of his therapy in Albertine disparue being to reflect proprietorially on the influence he has exerted on Albertine, whose style of writing now suggests a sophistication that as one of the jeunes filles en fleurs at Balbec she never possessed: ‘qu'elle s'était chez moi enrichie de qualités nouvelles qui la (p.214) faisaient différente et plus complète’ (RTP IV. 51) [‘that she had been Page 13 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants enriched during her stay with me by new qualities, which had changed her and made her more complete’ (SLT v. 436)]. The terms in which male bourgeois value is obstinately expressed assert the putative completeness that eludes social inferiors and recall Marcel's earlier line to Albertine at Balbec: ‘“Je crois que…je suis justement la personne qui pourrait vous apporter ce qui vous manque”’ (RTP IV. 51) [‘“I feel…that I am just the person who could provide you with what you lack”’ (SLT v. 436)]. Simultaneously Marcel persists in the belief that money will buy her off and he is unconvinced when Saint-Loup reports back that with Albertine, money will not carry the day: ‘“tout ce qu'elle a dit ensuite était si délicat, si élevé”’ (RTP IV. 55) [‘“everything she said subsequently was so discreet, so refined”’ (SLT v. 440)], insists the aristocratic spy to a disbelieving Marcel.

The servants empowered Other marks of the destabilizing of would-be settled, bourgeois power present themselves. Notwithstanding the social deference signalled by the servant's use of the formal address in ‘Mlle Albertine’, Françoise acts like a powerful impresario, the Narrator referring to ‘l'inimaginable enfer dont Françoise m'avait levé le voile en me disant: “Mlle Albertine est partie”’ (RTP IV. 8) [‘“the unimaginable hell that Françoise had allowed me to glimpse when she said: “Miss Albertine has left.”’ (SLT v. 436)]. Predictably, Marcel tries to avoid giving her the impression that he is taken aback or that his power is in any sense diminished by these events. The ensuing stand-off leads to some tense role-play in which the master/servant hierarchy is again threatened. Thus Françoise strains to adhere to ‘cette vérité qui guidait d'habitude notre domestique, que les maîtres n'aiment pas à être humiliés de leurs serviteurs et ne leur font connaître de la réalité que ce qui ne s'écarte pas trop d'une fiction flatteuse, propre à entretenir le respect’ (RTP IV. 49) [‘the truth which usually guided our servant, that is, the fact that masters do not like to be humiliated in front of their servants and reveal to them only that part of reality which does not deviate too far from a flattering fiction, liable to maintain respect’ (SLT v. 434)]. Alongside Françoise's grasp of the social imaginary of the master, we have Marcel wondering if it is she who has succeeded in driving out Albertine. Marcel bluffs his way, saying that Albertine will be back but Françoise is unconvinced. By identifying the theatricality and complicity at the heart of power relations, Proust's Narrator clearly steps out of the bind which the protagonist finds himself in and exposes the ‘fiction flatteuse’ at work in social hierarchy. The fact nevertheless that both master and servant are (p.215) ideologically implicated allows Françoise's insecurity to alternate with Marcel's. When he announces Albertine's return, for example, she peers at his face trying to decipher what is going on, just as when the butler announces sadistically a new political order in which churches would close and priests would be deported, Françoise, an illiterate defender of monarchy and religion, stares disconcertedly at the newspaper. As a social conservative, she wishes to see hierarchy preserved. Page 14 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants Hence the fear that Albertine might return would ‘constitu[er] pour moi, c'est-àdire en tant que j'étais le maître de Françoise, pour elle-même, l'humiliation d'avoir été joué par Albertine’ (RTP IV. 50) [‘constitut[e] for me, that is, in so far as I was Françoise's master, for Françoise herself the humiliation of having been manipulated by Albertine’ (SLT v. 435)]. In such a scenario, both servant and bourgeois master would be outmanoeuvred by the scheming parvenue. Françoise's foreboding stands as a conservative gesture that cements the bourgeois/servant order and counters the intrusion of Albertine, the young provincial bourgeoise. The power wielded by Françoise and the dislocation within the master/servant order are demonstrated in the drama surrounding the two rings that Albertine wears. Fearing that Albertine has a generous lesbian lover, Marcel needs desperately to be reassured that she herself had the inscriptions made on the rings, and he likens himself to the person dying of hunger who imagines that ‘un inconnu va vous laisser une fortune de cent millions’ (RTP IV. 47) [‘some stranger is about to leave us a fortune of a hundred million francs’ (SLT v. 432)]. The episode portrays both servant and master in uncharacteristic poses: for the analogy places Marcel, exceptionally, on the side of the destitute, while Françoise assumes the position of the erudite decipherer in her reading of the rings’ symbolism. She demonstrates ‘une effrayante précision…[une] expertise’ (RTP IV. 46) [‘terrifying precision… expert scrutiny’ (SLT v. 431)]. In a way that redistributes cultural knowledge, it is she who goes off to fetch Marcel's magnifying glass and who points out to him the eagle on the ring with the ruby and the identical inscriptions on both rings: ‘“Même sans les regarder de près, on sent bien la même façon, la même manière de plisser l'or, la même forme.…Ça se reconnaît comme la cuisine d'une bonne cuisinière”' (RTP IV. 46) [‘“Even if you don't look close up, you can see the same craftsmanship, the same way of working the gold, the same shape…It stands out like a dish by a good cook”' (SLT v. 431)]. Françoise's trained eye unsettles Marcel, who is anxious to protect his position as superior.13 Moreover the link to culinary (p.216) skill (which elsewhere in the novel might be read as an indulgent marker of the Narrator's superiority—Françoise cooks while Marcel composes) here assumes an altogether more disquieting dimension in that the servant delivers a form of knowledge which the paranoid bourgeois master finds intolerable. Delegation assumes other, risky forms in Albertine disparue and leaves Marcel cautious: ‘avoir l'air de faire faire une démarche, de la prier de revenir, irait à l'encontre du but’ (RTP IV. 12) [‘if I seemed to plead with her or engineer her return, it would be counter-productive’ (SLT v. 396)], he muses, yet enlisting the support of others is vital: ‘Je ne pensais qu'à une chose: charger un autre de cette recherche’ (RTP IV. 18) [‘I could think of only one thing: entrusting someone else with the enquiry’ (SLT v. 402)]. The rationale for the selection of

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Masters, Laws, and Servants Aimé as private detective to investigate Albertine's probably lesbian past is explained at length by the Narrator: Outre qu'il connaissait admirablement les lieux, il appartenait à cette catégorie de gens du peuple soucieux de leur intérêt, fidèles à ceux qu'ils servent, indifférents à toute espèce de morale et dont—parce que si nous les payons bien, dans leur obéissance à notre volonté, ils suppriment tout ce qui l'entraverait car ils se montrent aussi incapables d'indiscrétion, de mollesse ou d'improbité que dépourvus de scrupules—nous disons: ‘Ce sont de braves gens.' En ceux-là, nous pouvons avoir une confiance absolue.’ (RTP IV. 74) [Apart from the fact that he had an excellent knowledge of the location, he belonged to that category of working people who look after their own interests, are faithful to those they serve, are indifferent to all varieties of morality, and who—because if we pay them well they ignore anything that would hinder their devotion to our will, for they reveal themselves to be as incapable of indiscretion, lethargy or impropriety as they are of scruples— pass for ‘good men'. These are men in whom we may place complete confidence. (SLT v. 459)] The provocative portrait of the faithful servant in the pay of his master demonstrates the seamless connection between immorality and discretion which the nous, the bourgeois wishing to protect privacy and property, require. Nevertheless, the whole Aimé episode assumes carnivalesque proportions. Paying Aimé, as Marcel realizes, produces an expectation that the hired hand will generate disclosures about Albertine and he wonders if in fact Aimé is not telling lies ‘pour mériter son salaire, pour me faire plaisir’ [‘to justify his wages, to keep me happy’].14 Delegation, then, becomes the multiplier in Marcel's paranoia. Aimé takes the laundry girl to bed and asks her to perform on him what she did to Albertine. (p.217) What is done to Albertine's body is thus replicated on the body of the paid envoy, Aimé, with Marcel as the excluded party in both scenarios. In that sense, Aimé uses Marcel's money to secure sexual pleasure which he then attributes to Albertine. Indeed with hindsight, Marcel sees his retrospective investigation of Albertine's sexual activities in the period before her death as preparing his own demise (RTP IV. 647). Effectively, then, Marcel is financing his own deepening alienation. That this process might function masochistically is suggested by the fact that, in funding Aimé's trip, he is paying for ‘le mal qu'il venait de me faire par sa lettre’ (RTP IV. 105) [‘the ill that his letter had just caused me’ (SLT v. 490)]. Servants enjoying the pleasures normally reserved for masters is central to the workings of carnival, which itself serves bourgeois order by ultimately reinforcing it. We find a particular expression of this inversion of orders in the letter that Aimé sends back to his master. If Aimé's overuse of ‘Monsieur' signals Page 16 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants a clear deference, the Narrator explains a less obvious trait in Aimé's writing, the confusion between the use of brackets and quotation marks. Thus the words ‘Mlle Albertine', rather than being set in inverted commas or italics, are in fact placed in brackets. Aimé wishes to set the name off from the rest and to use the deferential register required by his master. Proust's Narrator, who interrupts the transcription of the letter to offer a would-be authoritative reflection on the phenomenon, notes to begin with that ‘Aimé avait un certain commencement de culture’ (RTP IV. 96) [‘Aimé…had a certain smattering of education’ (SLT v. 481)], thus gesturing to cultural hierarchy at a time precisely when Marcel is struggling to reimpose his authority, on Albertine, on Françoise, and on Aimé, who is arguably out of control on his mission. Recalling how Françoise uses the term ‘rester’ [‘to wait’] when she means ‘demeurer’ [‘to live, dwell’], the Narrator generalizes: ‘les fautes des gens du peuple consist[ent] très souvent à interchanger—comme a fait d'ailleurs la langue française—des termes qui au cours des siècles ont pris réciproquement la place l'un de l'autre’ (RTP IV. 96) [‘the mistakes made by simple people consist most often in exchanging terms— as the French language itself has done—which over the centuries have changed places with each other’ (SLT v. 481)]. The model of reversibility that Proust's Narrator here extends to philology is intrinsic to carnival too and it is precisely the impression of the master's exclusion from pleasure that we get when he protests that all he has are these external signs of Albertine's other (pleasurable) life: ‘Mais moi, c'est du dehors, sans que je fusse prévenu, sans que je pusse moi-même les élaborer, c'est de la lettre d'Aimé que m'étaient venues ces images d'Albertine arrivant à la douche et préparant son pourboire’ (RTP IV. 99) [‘But in my case it was from outside, without warning, without being able to elaborate the images myself, it was from (p.218) Aimé's letter that I had received these images of Albertine going into the showers and preparing her tip’ (SLT v. 483)]. With its production and delivery grounded in contingency, the letter carries multiple layers of otherness: its arrival is unpredictable and cannot be legislated for; it bears the visible hallmarks of Aimé's popular culture, a culture which itself holds menace for Marcel; and it confirms the radical alterity that Albertine's suspected lesbianism constitutes for him. It is as though with the heterosexual bourgeois now outmanoeuvred, social inferiors are empowered and ‘ex-centric’ sexualities liberated. Hierarchy saturates the text of Albertine disparue; it is implied and explored even in its microcosmic forms. A second letter arrives from Aimé, whose handwriting is unmistakable: ‘car chaque personne, même la plus humble, a sous sa dépendance ces petits êtres familiers, à la fois vivants et couchés dans une espèce d'engourdissement sur le papier, les caractères de son écriture que lui seul possède’ (RTP IV. 105) [‘for everyone, however humble, is a master of those familiar little household creatures whose life lies as it were suspended on the paper, that is, the unique characters of his handwriting which he alone possesses’ (SLT v. 490)]. In this reflection on graphology and the social extension Page 17 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants of literacy, egalitarianism and hierarchy are both in play. Proust considered attributing this development on handwriting to the Duchesse de Guermantes, a figure well used to having others ‘sous sa dépendance’, or beneath her, and he makes a note for himself to the effect that, were he to retain this as a reflection on the aristocrat's handwriting, he would need to delete the ‘même les plus pauvres’ [‘even the poorest’] qualification.15 Yet by attributing to Aimé the micro-drama of domination played out around the literal characters in the individual's handwriting, Proust directs the focus on to the working class and subliminally captures the anxiety that proletarian autonomy triggers. Just as Aimé gives expression to a form of sovereignty in his handwriting, so too his letter holds sway, claiming to record the minutiae of Albertine's sexual independence. The knowledge that Albertine is dead componds Marcel's difficulties. Death, like the inaccessible social strata that so frustrate him, becomes another space that he cannot enter. It is arguably symptomatic of his insecurity about working-class culture that when he does envisage a temporary reprieve in his fevered response to the claims about Albertine's lesbian behaviour made by the bath-attendant, the articulation of the solution includes an analogy from manual work, for ‘je découvris, comme un ouvrier l'objet qui pourra servir à ce qu'il veut faire, une parole (p.219) de ma grand-mère…: “C'est une femme qui doit avoir la maladie du mensonge”’ (RTP IV. 101) [‘I discovered, like a workman finding the right tool for his job, one of my grandmother's sayings…“That woman must have caught lying sickness”’ (SLT v. 486)].16 Likewise, the reigniting of jealousy is captured through reference to skilled manual labour which, in typographic terms, is significantly contained within a parenthesis: ‘(…même une syllabe commune à deux noms différents suffisait à ma mémoire—comme à un électricien qui se contente du moindre corps bon conducteur—pour rétablir le contact entre Albertine et mon cœur)' (RTP IV. 118) [‘(even a syllable common to two different names could enable my memory—as an electrician can use the slightest conducting substance—to re-establish contact between Albertine and my heart)'] (SLT v. 503)]. With jealousy tied to a class nexus, such analogies reflect a thematic drift in Marcel's search for expressivity that subliminally shadows the trajectory of Albertine's quest for pleasure. In his paranoid speculation, Marcel envisages the dangerous social contact in the seaside town of Balbec between the petite bourgeoisie and the town's working-class girls. The view from the restaurant window at the Grand Hotel which elsewhere in the novel Proust uses to signal the risks of social revolution (RTP II. 41–2; SLT ii. 260) returns in Albertine disparue to deliver a further menacing lesson, this time of sexual liberation: de l'autre côté du vitrage, toute cette population, entassée dans l'ombre comme devant le vitrage lumineux d'un aquarium, faisant se frôler (je n'y avais jamais pensé) dans sa conglomération les pêcheuses et les filles du Page 18 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants peuple contre les petites bourgeoises jalouses de ce luxe nouveau à Balbec, ce luxe que sinon la fortune, du moins l'avarice et la tradition interdisaient à leurs parents, petites bourgeoises parmi lesquelles il y avait sûrement presque chaque soir Albertine, que je ne connaissais pas encore et qui sans doute levait quelque fillette qu'elle rejoignait quelques minutes plus tard dans la nuit, sur le sable, ou bien dans une cabine abandonnée, au pied de la falaise. (RTP IV. 102) [on the other side of the glass, Balbec crowded its whole population into the twilight, as if they were watching strange, glowing creatures moving past the illuminated glass of an aquarium, and (although I had never thought of it in these terms before) brought a whole medley of fisher-girls, working-girls and lower‐middle-class girls into close contact with each other, through their envy for this new luxury, a luxury which at least thrift and conservatism, if not wealth, prohibited their parents from enjoying, and among these lower‐middle-class girls almost every evening one could surely find Albertine, whom I had not (p.220) yet met and who would no doubt pick up some little girl there and go to join her a few minutes later in the dark, on the sand or in an empty bathing cabin at the foot of the cliffs. (SLT v. 487; translation modified)] A powerful mutual distrust operates between the wealthy bourgeoisie and social inferiors excluded from ‘ce luxe nouveau'. Set against a broader canvas suggesting social dislocation, resentment, and potentially anarchic energy, Albertine's independence and sexual freedom become the expression of a class and an implicit rejection of Marcel's social origins. The earlier image in A l'ombre of the jeunes filles hopping disrespectfully over older folk seated on the beach has hardened into something altogether more ominous for Marcel. The parenthesis that features in this last quotation—‘(je n'y avais jamais pensé)'— brackets off the Narrator's almost amnesiac relation to tensions of social class and to the sexual licence of the subaltern. The bracket stands as a figure of containment and connects with Marcel's failure to see the radical social alterity and female sexual pleasure before him. This new form of social landscape disturbs Marcel as aestheticism abandons him. Or to reformulate this view in the terms of Bourdieu's argument, aestheticism ‘takes the bourgeois denial of the social world to the limit'.17 Looking at the painting by Elstir of naked women messing around by the water's edge, the Narrator complains that were he to have been ‘un amateur sensible à la seule beauté’ (RTP IV. 108) [‘a connoisseur responding to beauty alone’ (SLT v. 493)], he might have likened the scene to Versailles, where the statues of the great sculptors are scattered in the bushes. But boxed in by suspicions about Albertine, he is much more aware of her sitting beside the laundry-girl. And whereas he earlier referred to Aimé's ‘commencement de culture’ or beginnings of education, an assertion predicated on the idea of Marcel's possession of knowledge and social control, he now oscillates between burning jealousy and numbed incomprehension when faced Page 19 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants with the signs sent back by Aimé of the contact between Albertine and the laundry girl, signs which are merely ‘des abréviations quasi algébriques qui ne me représentaient plus rien’ (RTP IV. 109) [‘an almost algebraic shorthand which meant nothing to me’ (SLT v. 494)]. The redundancy of bourgeois knowledge is thus clearly signalled and sexual licence enjoyed by others comes to be as unreachable as, more generally, the culture of other classes. Marcel's attempts, then, to exercise his would-be sovereign will in Albertine disparue are mercilessly exposed by the Narrator for their blindness to the workings of social contingency. The volume constructs a chaotic parade of markers indicating high cultural and economic power (p.221) (these include Racine, the exploitation of the money markets, Mallarmé, bribery, the architectural heritage of Venice, and the hiring of paid agents); and it concludes implicitly that this frenetic display of ownership and dominance is incapable of reversing a dispossession. Brittle and dependent on others, Marcel confronts a contingent world in which the subaltern figures of Aimé and Françoise, who are tasked with executing their master's will, act to a degree independently. The tensions in class hierarchy thus become the channel for an implied debate about social policing and the autonomy and rights of the subaltern. Marcel's quintessentially bourgeois belief that material means can guarantee the return of Albertine does not cater for the independence of the delegate, be it Aimé or indeed members of his own circle of friends such as Saint-Loup and Bloch. Centrally, Albertine's independence underlines the ability to resist a power that is gendered, class-specific, and metropolitan.18 That she should have fled to the Touraine and earlier enjoyed spaces within the capital that were off limits to the respectable bourgeoisie of the day such as the Buttes-Chaumont points to a geographical departure which has the effect of relativizing and contesting Right Bank social conservatism.19 The limits of the rentier's power throw us back indirectly to a fear playfully articulated by Proust and that we considered at the outset of this chapter. Writing to Lionel Hauser, he expressed the anxiety that undue concern with finance might reflect badly on his art. Proust alludes speculatively to the possible resonances that this fusion of fields might hold: ‘Ainsi c'est l'écrivain qui a peur de paraître trop matériel à l'éminent financier, en lui parlant finances. N'y a-t-il pas là le sujet d'une Fable?' (Corr. xiv. 216) [‘Thus the writer is afraid to appear too materialist to the eminent financier by speaking to him about finance. Is there not the material for a Fable here?’] Proust goes on to make light-hearted reference to La Fontaine's ‘Le Savetier et le Financier', the moral of which fable has a potential bearing on our understanding of Albertine disparue.20 In La Fontaine, the insomniac financier and the cobbler are set in opposition. The cobbler, unsure of his income, nevertheless enjoys peace of mind. The rich financier, regretting that sleep is not a commodity that can be (p. 222) acquired on the market like food and drink, lures the cobbler into a deal, the outcome of which is that having accepted the money proffered by the Page 20 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants financier, the cobbler forfeits his peace of his mind (he no longer sings with brio and is himself now insomniac). The paradigm of alienating material possession, the search for the satisfaction of desire, and transaction across social classes is replicated in Albertine disparue, where the lure of money cannot buy Marcel the pleasure of reciprocal love. Moreover, psychic projection, a key driver in ‘Le Savetier et le Financier', is replicated in Proust where the malaise of bourgeois possession is dialectically linked to the assumed gusto of subaltern living. Notes:

(1) See editorial note, Corr. xiv. 208. (2) F. Jameson, The Cultural Turn (London: Verso, 1998), 73; quoted in Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (eds.), The Jameson Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 10. (3) Quoted in Philip Kolb, ‘Marcel Proust spéculateur', Etudes Proustiennes I, Cahiers Marcel Proust 6 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), 177–208: 185, n. 1. (4) For example, sections of some of Proust's letters to Alfred Agostinelli, who died in a flying accident on 30 May 1914 and of whom the character Albertine is a fictional transposition, are reproduced in Albertine disparue. See e.g. the overlap between Corr. xiii, 217–21 and RTP IV. 39, 50. (5) Chaudier and Paradis, ‘La Bourse ou le Temps: L'Imaginaire financier de Marcel Proust', 80. For further consideration of the link between Proust's financial dealings and his fiction, see Kolb, ‘Marcel Proust spéculateur'. (6) [‘the typical capitalist’], ibid. 177. (7) Chaudier and Paradis, ‘La Bourse ou le Temps: L'Imaginaire financier de Marcel Proust', 83. (8) [‘To make love is also to fight a social war'], Dubois, Stendhal: Une sociologie romanesque, 245. (9) Likening the episode to the world of Nabokov's Lolita, Antoine Compagnon provides a thematic analysis of the subject of justice more generally in A la recherche and reflects also on the technical aspects of French law in respect of the protection of minors; see A. Compagnon, ‘Truth and Justice', in André Benhaïm (ed.), The Strange Monsieur Proust (London: Legenda, 2009), 112–24. (10) [‘slaves revolve around their masters and masters are themselves slaves’], Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 216. (11) Commenting on a passage from Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, Proust writes in ‘En mémoire des églises assassinées': ‘Une sorte de retour égoïste sur soimême est inévitable dans ces joies mêlées d'érudition et d'art où le plaisir Page 21 of 22

 

Masters, Laws, and Servants esthétique peut devenir plus aigu, mais non rester aussi pur', Pastiches et Mélanges, CSB, 133 [‘A sort of egoistic self-regard is inevitable in these joys that draw on art and erudition and in which aesthetic pleasure may become more acute but not remain so pure’], quoted in Bourdieu, Distinction, 499. (12) The quotation is taken from Bourdieu's chapter ‘The Aristocracy of Culture’, Distinction, 73. (13) Referring to the ‘regard de sémioticienne distinguée' [‘look of a distinguished semiotician’] cast by Françoise, Brigitte Mahuzier sees Proust distributing intelligence and blindness to servant and master respectively, ‘Proust et la démocratisation du mépris', unpublished conference paper. (14) RTP IV. 646. This forms part of the extracts from Cahier 54 which are reproduced at RTP IV. 644–7. (15) See the editor's note, RTP IV. 1077, n. a to IV. 105. (16) This is a marginal addition to n.a.fr. 16720: 21; see Winton, Proust's Additions, ii, 176. (17) Bourdieu, Distinction, 5. (18) For an understanding of the power play at work in the relationship between Albertine and Marcel, see Dubois's seminal study, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social. (19) For an analysis of the Narrator's will to domesticate Parisian spaces, see my ‘Parisian Pastoral in A la recherche du temps perdu', Romance Studies, 11/2 (Autumn 1993), 17–25. (20) In the La Fontaine fable, the cobbler succumbs to anxiety on acceptance of the financier's money: ‘Le sommeil quitta son logis | Il eut pour hôtes les soucis, | Les soupçons, les alarmes vaines' [‘Sleep left his dwelling place | Worries, suspicions and vain anxieties | Became his guests’], J. de La Fontaine, Fables choisies mises en vers, Livre VIII, fable II (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962), 208.

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé. These include: the hierarchy of mental and manual labour, particularly in relation to the Narrator’s composition of his work and the analogies with domestic work; the forms of interaction between the proletariat and the aristocracy, specifically when linked to the First World War and to the description of Jupien’s male brothel; and the tension between the work-of-art-assalvation model that shapes a substantial section of Le Temps retrouvé and the call to sociality and community implicit in the images of social overview and documentation present elsewhere in the volume. Keywords:   Class, eroticism, prostitution, working-class Paris, hierarchy, demography, First World War

This chapter explores the contrasting ways in which a range of traditional and often unconnected hierarchies subtend, and are sometimes renegotiated in, Le Temps retrouvé. These include: the hierarchy of mental and manual labour (for example, the Narrator's composition of his work and the analogies with Françoise's manual work and proletarian labour); the forms of interaction between the proletariat and the aristocracy, specifically in relation to the First World War and the evocation of Jupien's male brothel; the tension between what Leo Bersani characterizes as the narcissism present in the work-of-art-assalvation model and the call to sociality and community implicit in the images of social documentation present elsewhere in the last volume of the novel; and the

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé influence of bodily functions, including sleep and the process of ageing, as agents of social levelling.

The servant's quarters One of the memories of childhood evoked by the Narrator in Le Temps retrouvé involves his stay for a week in what served as the home of the domestic servant Eulalie, a small room looking over the church square in Combray, ‘cette petite chambre d'ancienne domestique’ (RTP IV. 459) [‘an old servant's little bedroom’ (SLT vi. 189)]. With its simple furnishings and the sound of the nighttime trains passing over the nearby viaduct, it gives a wondrous, even frightening, sense of extension to Marcel's boyhood imagination, and now in adulthood he contrasts this with princely homes and sumptuous feasts and the ‘néant d'impressions’ [‘utter absence of impressions’] that these have brought him. The image of Marcel living in the servant's room, however temporarily (his aunt Léonie was suspected of having typhoid fever at the time), is suggestive at a number of levels: in its out-of-the-ordinariness, it highlights the deeply embedded social caste system of Combray; (p.224) it may suggest subliminally the hierarchical equivalence of bourgeois child and adult domestic; and in an oblique way, it anticipates the cohabitation between Marcel and Françoise late in Le Temps retrouvé as they work together on the material production of the book the hero feels drawn to writing. There, the Narrator reaches for metaphors from ‘[les] arts les plus élevés’ (RTP IV. 609) [‘the most elevated…arts’ (SLT vi. 342)] to convey a sense of the work that he will compose, before switching to what the Narrator judges to be a more accurate view of the task: Et, changeant à chaque instant de comparaison selon que je me représentais mieux, et plus matériellement, la besogne à laquelle je me livrerais, je pensais que sur ma grande table de bois blanc, regardé par Françoise, comme tous les êtres sans prétention qui vivent à côté de nous ont une certaine intuition de nos tâches …, je travaillerais auprès d'elle, et presque comme elle. (RTP IV. 610) [And as every few moments I changed the comparison by which I could best and most materially represent the task on which I was embarking, I thought that at my big deal table, watched by Françoise, who, in the way that all unpretentious people who live alongside us do, had an intuitive understanding of my task…I would work next to her, and work almost in the same way as her. (SLT vi. 343)] Building the book, then, might be like Françoise making a dress. It is Françoise, the Narrator notes, who always said that she needed the right number of needles to be able to sew properly, Françoise who has, through cohabitation with Marcel, ‘une sorte de compréhension instinctive’ [‘a sort of instinctive comprehension’] of his work: ‘Françoise…devinait mon bonheur et respectait Page 2 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé mon travail’ (RTP IV. 611) [‘Françoise…sensed my happiness and respected my work’ (SLT vi. 343)]. Her work on the paperoles, the hero's ‘manuscribbles’ (SLT, vi, 343), is likened to her blocking up the broken window with paper while waiting for the glazier to come (just as Marcel would be waiting on a packet of proofs to arrive from the printer's). Materiality, then, is central to the story of the conditions of production of the book. Or to borrow from Gramsci's reflection on what he argues is the overdetermined distinction between intellectuals and non-intellectuals, ‘homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens’ in that no human activity is totally devoid of ‘intellectual participation’.1 How are we to read Proust's images of the hero's method of working alongside the servant? As signalling an egalitarian conflation of (p.225) the industriousness of both domestic servant and writer? Or as the marks of a social paternalism indulged in by the bourgeois writer? Or perhaps as the marks simultaneously of fellowship and superiority, the former signalling community and the latter designed to secure connivance between writer and bourgeois reader? The cohabitation of social superior and subaltern comes to form a recurring motif in Le Temps retrouvé when we remember the various scenes in which they are drawn into contact. There is no partitioning off of the working class as the Narrator works the points of contact across social classes and in particular between the working class and the aristocracy. We have Saint-Loup's account of being at the front with working-class soldiers in the First World War; the representation of Jupien's brothel, where Charlus and others from the Faubourg Saint-Germain meet the male employees from Belleville; and the figure of Jupien himself, whose ability to surpass his social betters in the linguistic polish that he displays intrigues the Narrator. Examination of these encounters and situations shows that the persistence of, and modifications to, social and other hierarchies form a core element of the work. I shall consider first Saint-Loup's account of his fellow soldiers in battle.

Working-class soldiers: their glorification and instrumentalization The war provides Saint-Loup with the occasion to live with France's male working class. He frames his patriotic praise of the nation’s soldiers, the ‘poilus’, with a gesture towards aristocratic social decorum in the form of an apology. For his letter to a presumably sceptical Marcel begins with the assertion that there can be no place in epic writing for terms like ‘ils ne passeront pas’ [‘shall not pass’] and ‘on les aura’ [‘we'll get them’], terms which are ‘“cette chose contradictoire et atroce, une affectation, une prétention vulgaires que nous détestons tellement”’ (RTP IV. 332) [‘“that dreadful, contradictory thing, vernacular affectation or pretentiousness of the sort we detest so much”’ (SLT vi. 60)]. But once the concession to the good taste that underpins class hierarchy is made, Saint-Loup is then free to endorse the heroism of the soldiers, ‘“surtout les gens du peuple, les ouvriers, les petits commerçants qui ne se doutaient pas Page 3 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé de ce qu'ils recélaient en eux d'heroïsme et seraient morts dans leur lit sans l'avoir soupçonné”’ (RTP IV. 332) [‘“especially the ordinary people, the workers, the small shopkeepers, who never dreamed of possessing the kind of heroism they have been displaying and would have died peacefully in their beds without ever (p.226) having imagined it”’ (SLT. vi. 61)]. Saint-Loup's cross-class comradeship extends to anglophone troops involved in the conflict: as his mother-in-law Odette boasts (in a way that allows her to indulge her anglomanie), he has picked up the slang of ‘“tous les braves tommies”’ [‘“all the brave tommies”’] and is on equally good terms with the general commanding the base and ‘“le plus humble private”’ (RTP IV. 368) [‘“the humblest private”’ (SLT, vi, 97)]. For Saint-Loup, the nascent epic that will emerge from the war will have the beauty of a masterpiece by Rodin or Maillol, such a work of sculpture itself being made from ‘“une matière affreuse qu'on ne reconnaîtrait pas”’ (RTP IV. 332) [‘“some hideous raw material, transforming it out of all recognition”’ (SLT vi 61)]. Many contradictory elements converge here: social-class condescension, the glorification of the working class, the language of aesthetic redemption of what is base (‘une matière affreuse’), the discourse of nationalist pride. Members of the working class are transformed by a heroism which, Saint-Loup asserts, they never knew they had. In an important sense, the heroization in no way disturbs social class hierarchy. Heroism is here conferred on the ‘poilu’ from without, by his social better. In the section of Minima Moralia entitled ‘They, the people’, Adorno writes: ‘In the end, glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than glorification of the splendid system that makes them so’.2 Certainly, the heroic example of these men will not bring social change but will rather feed Saint-Loup's aestheticization within which their mediocre social situation is transcended. He enthuses that the designation ‘poilu’ will join other terms like ‘Flood’, ‘Christ’, and ‘Barbarians’ which enjoyed such epic resonance long before Hugo and Vigny used them. Saint-Loup then qualifies his remarks: ‘“Je dis que le peuple, les ouvriers, est ce qu'il y a de mieux, mais tout le monde est bien”’ (RTP IV. 332) [‘“Ordinary people, workers, as I say, are the best of all, but everyone is good”’ (SLT vi. 61)], he goes on, singling out Vaugoubert, the ambassador's son, for his conspicuous gallantry. Saint-Loup's view of the common soldier thus connects with his keen interest in socialism, even if throughout the novel he is described as exuding a sense of aristocratic lustre. In an apparent contrast with Saint-Loup's praise of the ‘poilu’, the Narrator looks beyond the conflict. Panning out from immediate events, he writes of ‘les hommes entraînés dans l'immense révolution de la terre, de la terre sur laquelle ils sont assez fous pour continuer leurs révolutions à eux, et leurs vaines guerres, comme celle qui ensanglantait en ce moment (p.227) la France’ (RTP IV. 342) [‘all mankind…swept up by the immense revolution of the earth, that Page 4 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé earth on which they are mad enough to continue their own revolutions, and their pointless wars, like the one that was at that moment steeping France in blood’ (SLT vi. 70)]. Planetary movement and cosmic scale are made to dwarf class conflict and radical social contestation. Yet Saint-Loup's own conversion of the working-class soldier into an icon of epic grandeur similarly emasculates social contestation. Like his nephew, Charlus is drawn to the ‘poilus’ and not just for reasons to do with his search for homosexual pleasure. We learn how he has turned his house into a military hospital, ‘cédant du reste, je le crois, aux besoins bien moins de son imagination que de son bon cœur’ (RTP IV. 387) [‘I believe [… yielding] far less to the demands of his imagination than to those of his kind heart’ (SLT vi. 117)]. A second, textually more conspicuous strand describing Charlus's contact with the working class in Jupien's brothel emerges barely more than a page later. Here the servicing of sexual fantasy engenders a material provision of props and devices requiring strenuous physical effort on the part of the sexworkers. The working-class men employed there make reference to the toil involved in carrying the heavy chains used in sadomasochistic role play. The manual labour required to service clients’ desire for pleasure in the summer heat of the brothel prompts one of the employees, Maurice, to complain. An itemization of his motives for working there is provided by the Narrator: force of habit, poor education, needing the money and ‘un certain penchant à le gagner d'une façon qui était censée donner moins de mal que le travail et en donnait peut-être davantage’ (RTP IV. 399) [‘a preference for getting it in a way that was meant to be less trouble than working, but which may in fact have been worse’ (SLT vi. 129)]. Working-class avoidance of physical effort comes, we may infer then, from that class's historic immersion in manual work. Yet Maurice feeds the social paternalism we saw earlier in Saint-Loup's encomium when he cites the case of an officer who died trying to save his batman, an act sufficient for a tearful Maurice to imagine himself happily serving that particular social superior. The exception (the inspirational officer) thus serves to shore up traditional patterns of hierarchy and sociality and helps offset the suspicion of soldiers who complain about the pursuit of pleasure by the wealthy in wartime Paris. Proust's text prefers the archaic model of social compliance (a compliance momentarily broken and yet ultimately reinforced by the glorious exception) rather than the model of autonomous social contestation of the kind that saw radicalization in early twentieth-century France, most memorably perhaps in the military mutiny of 1917. (p.228) The desire of social superiors to see the subaltern transformed and remoulded assumes a number of guises. We have seen Saint-Loup working to recast the ordinary soldier, to reshape him sculpturally as a glorified defender of the ‘patrie’. His uncle's engagement with the working-class sex-workers marks Page 5 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé another pressure point in the cross-class encounter within which the malleability of the subaltern is solicited and yet not invariably guaranteed. For if the sexworker's role is to play the sadist, the process is thwarted periodically and the limits of instrumentalization revealed—much to Charlus's frustration—when the moralizing voices of the workers surface. The situation is alienating for all parties and ‘authenticity’ in the role play eludes Charlus as well. He speaks to some of the all-male staff using what he imagines to be their authentic rough speech (RTP IV. 404; SLT vi. 134). While he is adept at make-believe, the Germanophile Charlus retreats into melancholic irony when he hears what are for him the unwelcome expressions of ‘jusqu'au boutisme’.3 He finds other forms of working-class conventionalism frustrating, such as Maurice's explanation that the fifty francs he has earned will go to his parents and to his brother at the front. This expression of pious familial duty vexes Charlus, who in his frustrated search for perverse sexual pleasure can only express aristocratic disdain for populist sentimentalism. Seen from these different angles, the brothel becomes the seat of alienation. The episode incidentally provides a textual echo of the scene at Montjouvain in Combray where Mlle Vinteuil's inherent moral sense excludes any prospect of unalloyed perverse pleasure. Yet in the chronologically later pages describing the war scenes in Le Temps retrouvé, the pursuit of sexual pleasure has become freighted with, and in some ways exoticized by, social-class difference. A paradigm emerges in the manner whereby Proust's Narrator operates social and other hierarchies. Charlus has reached a stage in his life where he enjoys the company of ‘[l]es gens du peuple qui l'exploitaient. Sans doute le snobisme de la canaille peut se comprendre aussi bien que l'autre’ (RTP IV. 409) [‘workingclass people who exploited him. Low-life snobbery is no more difficult to understand than the other sort’ (SLT vi. 138)].4 The Narrator's lexical choice of ‘la canaille’ suggests that Proust was comfortable with many of the class prejudices of his age and social milieu. Yet in another way, the Narrator flirts with reconfiguring social relations (which nevertheless remain stubbornly ingrained), as in the following lines where (p.229) he whimsically asserts that the domestics we love ‘restent, hélas, des domestiques et marquent plus nettement les limites (que nous voudrions effacer) de leur caste au fur et à mesure qu'ils croient le plus pénétrer dans la nôtre’ (RTP IV. 328) [‘remain, alas, servants and show most clearly the limits of their class (which we would wish to remove) when they think they have most penetrated into our own’ (SLT vi. 57)]. The particular thrust of this quotation shows hierarchy collapsed by a Narrator who aspires to egalitarianism and then reinstated at the point where domestic servants believe themselves to be on a par with their masters. In other words, the impulse to level socially appears legitimate only when exercised by the superior, who nevertheless values in domestic servants ‘les égards de leur emploi’ (RTP IV. 328) [‘the respect that [goes] with their job’ (SLT vi. 57)].

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé Lingering, Ancien Régime models of cross-class cohabitation are sketched out in Le Temps retrouvé. Thus the ageing Charlus now lives only with would-be inferiors, ‘des “inférieurs”’—the quotation marks are the Narrator's—with ‘la domesticité’ [‘domestic servants’], the Narrator drawing a parallel with the life of the Duc de La Rochefoucauld (RTP IV 409; SLT vi 138-9). But whereas many aristocratic males unashamedly spend much of their time in Jupien's brothel, for a servant or industrial worker (‘un employé d'industrie’ is the term used by Proust), being in such an establishment carries social stigma (RTP IV. 415; SLT vi. 144). The male sex-workers, far from being evil, make marvellous soldiers in the war and in civilian life are ‘de bons cœurs’ (RTP IV 415)[‘kind and generous’ (SLT vi. 145)]. Charlus knows that his ‘tormentor’ in these sexual games is no more ‘méchant’ [‘a villain’] than the pupil in the school yard who is assigned the role of the Prussian and who must therefore endure the feigned hatred of his fellow pupils (RTP IV. 417; SLT vi. 147). The accentuation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ brings with it the exclusion of the intermediate: the bourgeois class so derided by Charlus is squeezed out of this social configuration, an exclusion which finds a correlative in aesthetic terms. Thus Charlus expresses a liking for high tragedy and farce, Phèdre or Les Saltimbanques, but there is no half-way house (RTP IV. 409; SLT vi. 138). The Narrator's consideration of what he presents as Jupien's morally dubious occupation generates both an historically immediate context and the tracing of a grand chronological canvas on which ethical questions are exuberantly explored. We see the latter in this speculative aside: ‘Notre époque sans doute, pour celui qui en lira l'histoire dans deux mille ans, ne semblera pas moins baigner certaines consciences tendres et pures dans un milieu vital qui apparaîtra alors comme monstrueusement pernicieux et dont elles s'accommodaient’ (RTP IV. 416) [‘Our own epoch, to anybody who reads its history in two thousand years' time, (p.230) will probably seem just as guilty of immersing certain pure and tender consciences in settings which then will look monstrously pernicious, but to which they managed to adapt themselves’ (SLT vi. 146)]. More immediately (and the switch between grand millennial sweep and a punctual historical moment is abrupt), the text considers Jupien from the perspective of the Third Republic and the social milieu in which he grew up. For the Narrator, he is a source of wonderment: a supremely gifted individual, he has received little formal education and yet, as we saw earlier in this study, his talent shines through in a verbal fluency and wit not matched by fashionable young men who have been through the socially elitist university system of the Third Republic (RTP IV. 416-17; SLT vi. 146].5 If Jupien thus comes from outside the system, we can ask to what extent the Narrator's range of responses to the subaltern translates into a form of identification and complicity, into a turning away from a controlling division of labour and social roles. Adorno's opening piece in Minima Moralia reflects on precisely this question. This pithy text, dedicated to the author of the Recherche, Page 7 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé characterizes the class from which Proust the writer and intellectual emerged. For Adorno, it is a class that takes its revenge on Proust, who is not seen as a professional but rather as a dilettante out of step with the ways of organized social control: The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become ‘practical’, a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry… The urge [in Proust] to suspend the division of labour which, within certain limits, his economic situation enables him to satisfy, is thought particularly disreputable: it betrays a disinclination to sanction the operations imposed by society, and domineering competence permits no such idiosyncrasies.6 Elsewhere in Le Temps retrouvé, reverberations of class antagonism are felt. Charlus recalls Brichot's article in which the academic ridicules Zola for finding ‘plus de poésie dans un ménage d'ouvriers, dans la mine, que dans les palais historiques’ (RTP IV. 358) [‘more poetry in a working-class household, or down a mine, than in historic palaces’ (SLT vi. 87)]. About Brichot's lucrative wartime journalism, the Narrator is scathing: ‘la vulgarité de l'homme apparaissait à tout instant sous le pédantisme du lettré’ (RTP IV. 369) [‘the vulgarity of the man was constantly visible beneath the pedantry of the literary scholar’ (SLT vi. 99)]. (p.231) This moral portrait of a class connects in other ways with contemporaneous debates. In their conversation, the Narrator and Charlus channel the view expressed by Barrès in his Chroniques de la Grande Guerre that the cathedral of Rheims is less dear to him than the life of ‘le plus humble, le plus fragile fantassin de France’.7 But whereas, as we saw earlier, Saint-Loup proposes a conjoining of the heroization of working-class troops and the aestheticization of matter, the Barrès remark produces a bifurcation, an opposition that juxtaposes the great monument and the anonymous foot soldier. In the raw national debates of the First World War, Proust's novel serves as a conduit for the anxieties and aggression associated with questions of social and aesthetic hierarchy. The clash between Mme Verdurin and Charlus is typical of this aggression, René Girard pointing out that the former's ‘obsession “chauvine”’ [‘chauvinist obsession’] is matched by the anti-chauvinist position of the Baron, thereby drawing both of them into ‘une communion de la haine’ [‘a communion of hatred’].8

‘A vol d'oiseau’9 Earlier we saw Adorno refer to Proust's regular disinclination to endorse conventional social categories. With regard to the Narrator's aesthetic speculation in Le Temps retrouvé about his prospects as a writer-in-waiting, we find both a conventionally positive evaluation and an alternative, more neutral stance on the subject matter of the novel and the methods of its producer. There is a significant hesitancy on the Narrator's part concerning what on occasions he Page 8 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé presents as the singularity of his experience. He makes much play of the way in which an individual life comes to be seen in a more encompassing light: his childhood, youth, maturity, and old age knit together; the stages of friendship, of love's pleasures and loss, assume an encompassing gravitas; and the whole provides the protagonist-artist with the stuff of the book. Yet those passages in which the Narrator champions the notion of the summation of a life through art mask a counter-discourse in Le Temps retrouvé that opens on to community and commonalty. Jacques Dubois makes the point, in relation to both Stendhal and Proust, that critics all too often hear ‘individual’ and (p.232) ‘psychological’ when the writer is saying ‘collective’ and ‘social'.10 Le Temps retrouvé argues against personal apotheosis in significant ways. Thus there are points where the Narrator counters the view that there was something exceptional about his making it into the Guermantes’ inner circle, proposing a more detached, sociological reading of aspirationalism and the emergence of greater class mobility. He is quick to see in French society around the time of the First World War the nation's ‘prodigieuse aptitude au déclassement’ (RTP IV. 535) [‘its prodigious capacity for movement across social class’ (SLT vi. 265)].11 The Narrator's sensitivity to the notion of shared identities and destinies can be illustrated by reference to a lengthy paragraph in the volume which forms one of the many later additions that Proust made to the original base text of the novel.12 In it, the Narrator advocates a radical elision of selfhood in pursuit of a depersonalization which he commends to the reader: D'ailleurs, le cas qui s'était présenté pour moi d'être admis dans la société des Guermantes m'avait paru quelque chose d'exceptionnel. Mais si je sortais de moi et du milieu qui m'entourait immédiatement, je voyais que ce phénomène social n'était pas aussi isolé qu'il m'avait paru d'abord et que du bassin de Combray où j'étais né, assez nombreux en somme étaient les jets d'eau qui symétriquement à moi s'étaient élevés au-dessus de la même masse liquide qui les avait alimentés.’ (RTP IV. 547) [Again, the opportunity which had arisen for me to be admitted into the Guermantes circle had seemed something exceptional to me. But if I looked outside myself and my immediate social surroundings, I saw that this social phenomenon was not so isolated as had at first appeared to me, and that from the fountain-basin of Combray where I was born quite a number of water-jets turned out to have been raised in symmetry with me above the liquid mass which had fed them all. (SLT vi. 277–8)] ‘Sort[ir] de moi’. In ‘looking outside myself', in discarding particularity and individual affectivity, the exceptional mutates into a component of what is socially representative. There is a value shift: the epithet ‘isolé’ suggests a limitation that is here countered, the bird's-eye view coming to transform and indeed neutralize the private. The Narrator thereby affirms the link to a more Page 9 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé powerful life force which permits, explains, and yet also (p.233) dwarfs, the particular. He goes on to concede that in the aspirationalist routes taken by individual bourgeois, particular circumstances do indeed play their part, as confirmed by the stories of Legrandin, Odette's daughter, Swann, and the protagonist. Yet there is a greater force at work, the analogy of the river system rendering individual flows of water subsidiary: ‘Pour moi qui avais passé enfermé dans ma vie et la voyant du dedans, celle de Legrandin me semblait n'avoir aucun rapport et avoir suivi des chemins opposés, de même qu'une rivière dans sa vallée profonde ne voit pas une rivière divergente, qui pourtant malgré les écarts de son cours se jette dans le même fleuve’ (RTP IV. 547) [‘For me, who had always been wrapped up in my own life, and seen it from within, Legrandin's seemed to have no connection with mine, seemed to have followed quite opposite paths, in the same way as a stream in a deep valley does not see a divergent stream, even though, despite the deviations of its course, it issues into the same river’ (SLT, vi. 278)]. The stark contrast between narrow particularity and liberating perspective is underscored by the confluence of disparate elements. To the discipline of physical geography, the Narrator appends statistical analysis. In this analogy, a new form of transcendence emerges from the social overview afforded by the panoptic perspective: Mais à vol d'oiseau, comme fait le statisticien qui néglige les raisons sentimentales ou les imprudences évitables qui ont conduit telle personne à la mort, et compte seulement le nombre de personnes qui meurent par an, on voyait que plusieurs personnes parties d'un même milieu dont la peinture a occupé le début de ce récit, étaient parvenues dans un autre tout différent, et il est probable que, comme il se fait par an à Paris un nombre moyen de mariages, tout autre milieu bourgeois cultivé et riche eût fourni une proportion à peu près égale de gens comme Swann, comme Legrandin, comme moi et comme Bloch, qu'on retrouvait se jetant dans l'océan du ‘grand monde’. (RTP IV. 547) [But taking a bird's-eye view, as does the statistician, who disregards the reasons of sentiment or the avoidable acts of imprudence which may lead to the death of any individual, and counts only the number of people who die per year, one would see that a number of individuals who shared the same social background, the depiction of which occupied the first part of this narrative, had ended up in a completely different one, and it is probable that, since an average number of marriages takes place each year in Paris, every other rich and cultivated middle-class circle would have contributed an approximately equal proportion of people like Swann, like Legrandin, like me and like Bloch, all of whom would be found flowing into the ocean of ‘high society’. (SLT vi. 278)]13

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé (p.234) In drawing attention away from the art-as-salvation topos, the Narrator identifies alternative insight deriving from connection with a broader social viewpoint: hence the parallel claims for physical and social geography and for the book. The statistician's role contrasts with, and yet provides ancillary support to, the work of book creation in Le Temps retrouvé. Here too, there is a levelling in play, the implication being that the intricacies of the narrative thread of A la recherche are ultimately fragile, replicable, and disposable, threatened by the evacuation of the experiential practised by the statistician. In his landmark study The Culture of Redemption, Leo Bersani writes polemically against the idea that literature is to be read as the embodiment of redemption. Seeing Proust as exemplifying this reparative view of art, Bersani invites us to counter ‘our continuously renewed efforts to disguise and to exercise the tyranny of the self in the prestigious form of legitimate cultural authority’.14 Yet Proust's Narrator, it would seem, is himself working back from narcissism when he valorizes the techniques of analogy and extrapolation in the search for the broader social canvas and general law. Indeed indirectly he demonstrates an empathy with the statistician, who, as we have seen, significantly eschews the private theatre of the self, ‘les raisons sentimentales ou les imprudences évitables’ [‘the reasons of sentiment or the avoidable imprudences’] that lead to death. For, through acknowledgement of the work of computation in the social sciences, the Narrator signals a form of detachment and, by implication, an acceptance of a broader sociality, the Other, and mortality. This evidence of an alterity external to, and confronting, the self becomes a condition of possibility for the Narrator's growing openness to the world as difference. At the heart of ‘the culture of redemption’, Bersani sees the idea of ‘identity as authority’ and he works to counter that dominion of the self, seeking evidence of a dynamic that is ‘self-dismissive’.15 In the statistician's art, the Narrator glimpses a computational levelling that provides a release from reflection on anxious selfhood.

Equalization Other forms of equalization are explored in Le Temps retrouvé. While conceding that the Narrator narcissistically cultivates private experience not given to serial replication (what Bersani calls ‘the constraints of anxious desire, constraints that threatened to erase the phenomenal (p.235) diversity of the world from the field of Marcel's troubled vision’16), one sees counter-evidence suggesting a form of common idiom that the Narrator may not endorse and yet confesses to using. The often-cited line about the great writer as translator, not as inventor, of ‘ce livre essentiel, le seul livre vrai … puisqu'il existe déjà en chacun de nous’ (RTP IV. 469) [‘the essential book, the only true book…because it already exists within each of us’ (SLT vi. 199) adds to the ambivalence. The Narrator's speculation oscillates between acknowledgement of a demotic dimension and the idea of a private hieroglyphics of experience comprehensible to the writer, the two seeming to be ambiguously connected: ‘Si la réalité était cette espèce de Page 11 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé déchet de l'expérience, à peu près identique pour chacun, parce que quand nous disons: un mauvais temps, une guerre, une station de voitures, un restaurant éclairé, un jardin en fleurs, tout le monde sait ce que nous voulons dire’ (RTP IV. 468) [‘If reality were a kind of residue of experience, more or less identical for everybody, because when we talk about bad weather, a war, a cab-stand, a brightly lit restaurant, a garden in flower, everybody knows what we mean’ (SLT, vi, 198)]. Crucially however, the Narrator wishes to retrieve not a mere residue but what might be the otherwise unrecorded, creative particularity lying behind these banal linguistic signs; and yet that we each carry within us the material of a book (and in the Narrator's democratic formulation, it is for us to say if our inner book is reflected in his—‘me dire si c'est bien cela’ (RTP IV. 610) [‘tell me if it was right’ (SLT vi. 343)]) is consistent with the fitful movement of levelling and other disturbances to hierarchy generated by Proust's Narrator elsewhere in the novel. Within the freethinking dynamic of Le Temps retrouvé, hierarchies based on intelligence levels, sanity, and insight are also subject to scrutiny. Thus redemptive connections are identified between the writer and the person he has written about. The latter may be ‘vulgaire’ and view with hostility the motifs of the writer but the search for the general brings both advantage to the artist and also transformation in Proust's eyes to the subject being described: ‘Car [l'écrivain futur] n'a écouté les autres que quand, si bêtes ou si fous qu'ils fussent, répétant comme des perroquets ce que disent les gens de caractère semblable, ils s'étaient faits par là même les oiseaux prophètes, les porte-parole d'une loi psychologique’ (RTP IV. 479) [‘For [the future writer] has listened to the others only when, stupid or demented as they may have been, repeating like parrots all the things that other people of similar character say, they make themselves into birds (p.236) of prophecy, mouthpieces of a psychological law’ (SLT vi. 209)]. The notation of detail becomes like an entry in an anatomist's notebook, the Narrator remarks, and in a further addition to the base text, he rehabilitates those who embody mediocrity and pathology:17 Les êtres les plus bêtes, par leurs gestes, leurs propos, leurs sentiments involontairement exprimés, manifestent des lois qu'ils ne perçoivent pas, mais que l'artiste surprend en eux. A cause de ce genre d'observations le vulgaire croit l'écrivain méchant, et il le croit à tort, car dans un ridicule l'artiste voit une belle généralité, il ne l'impute pas plus à grief à la personne observée que le chirurgien ne la mésestimerait d'être affectée d'un trouble assez fréquent de la circulation; aussi se moque-t-il moins que personne des ridicules. (RTP IV. 480) [The stupidest people manifest by their gestures, their comments, their involuntarily expressed feelings, laws of which they are unaware but which the artist manages to catch in them. Because of observations of this sort, the writer is commonly thought to be malicious, wrongly so, because in an Page 12 of 16

 

Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé idiosyncrasy the artist sees a beautiful generality and no more holds it against the person observed than a surgeon would dismiss someone for suffering from a common circulation disorder; indeed, he is less likely than anyone to make fun of people's foibles. (SLT vi. 210)] The sense is of a Narrator working to get beyond narrow judgemental categories and eager to valorize a wide swathe of human experience in all its mental and bodily imperfection. The alliance between fool and writer, doctor and patient, again points to a collaborative connection and, as Adorno signals, an uneasiness about compartmentalization. Continuing with forms of democratic levelling channelled this time through images of the body, we see the Narrator, fighting against sleep, noting that he must break off from reading to pay his daily due to the ‘maître au service de qui nous sommes chaque jour, pour une moitié de notre temps’ (RTP IV. 295) [‘master, in whose service we spend, each day, a large part of our time’ (SLT vi. 23)]. For centuries, the Narrator adds, we have remained sleep's ignorant, recumbent slaves, with even the wiliest unable to secure a conscious glimpse of its procedures. Elsewhere, one particular form of demotic experience—that of narrow patriotism–triggers the curious, indeed alarming suggestion of corporeal engulfment: referring to those who surround us in, as the Narrator terms it, ‘la vulgarité de la vie quotidienne’ [‘the vulgarity of everyday life’], he cautions against the risk of our total, bodily absorption in an oppressive social consensus: ‘à moins (p.237) alors d'être tout à fait ceux-là, de ne faire qu'une chair avec eux’ (RTP IV. 354) [‘unless we are completely the same as them and form one flesh with them’ (SLT vi. 83)]. To the levellers that are sleep and blind patriotism, the Narrator adds the image of the body as a marker of irremediable human imperfection. Giving primacy to corporeality, he argues that we should see the life of thought much less as un miraculeux perfectionnement de la vie animale et physique, mais plutôt qu'elle est une imperfection, encore aussi rudimentaire qu'est l'existence commune des protozoaires en polypiers, que le corps de la baleine, etc., dans l'organisation de la vie spirituelle. Le corps enferme l'esprit dans une forteresse; bientôt la forteresse est assiégée de toutes parts et il faut à la fin que l'esprit se rende. (RTP IV. 613) [a miraculously perfected state of animal and physical life, [rather as] an imperfect state, still at the same rudimentary level as the communal existence of protozoa in polyparies or as the body of the whale, etc., in the organization of the life of the mind. The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up. (SLT vi. 345)]

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé Old age similarly disturbs class distinctions. Thus the ageing grand seigneur, who wears a simple alpaca garment and an old straw hat that petty bourgeois would not want to be seen in, resembles the gardeners and peasants among whom he has lived: ‘Des taches brunes avaient envahi leurs joues, et leur figure avait jauni, s'etait foncée comme un livre’ (RTP IV. 524) [‘Patches of brown had appeared on their cheeks, and their faces had yellowed and darkened like the pages of a book’ (SLT vi 254)]. If the exclusion of the petty bourgeois from this cameo of feudal sociality reinforces the Ancien Régime model of cohabitation obtaining in Jupien's brothel, the conflation of peasant and aristocratic faces signals a cross-class social cohesion that is no less seductive for the Narrator. Moreover, the implicit parallel between the peasants as chattels of the grand seigneur and the books as his possessions provides a variant on the configuration that draws together the ageing Françoise and the worm-eaten ‘paperoles’ of the writer-Narrator that she strives to preserve. The Narrator's pairing of ageing peasant and aristocrat triggers its own, for him, surprising discovery: ‘Chose curieuse, le phénomène de la vieillesse semblait dans ses modalités tenir compte de quelques habitudes sociales’ (RTP IV. 524) [‘Strangely enough, the phenomenon of old age seemed in the way it operated to take account of some social customs’ (SLT vi. 254)]. The reflection on ageing thus acquires a social dimension, the focus again switching from isolated, private destinies. Significantly, the sociological (p.238) method which was gaining ground as a new academic discipline in Proust's day and which elsewhere in the novel is denigrated here comes to be accessed in the Narrator's speculation about a heuristic sociology of old age. I referred earlier to Adorno speaking up for Proust, who is ‘suspected [by his generation] of being a secret envoy of the established powers’. For Adorno, Proust rejects ‘the departmentalization of mind’. He characterizes him as someone ‘who repudiates the division of labour—if only by taking pleasure in his work’ and who experiences vulnerability as a result.18 Proust's reflection on hierarchy encompasses both the cross-class sociality considered in the earlier part of this chapter and the Narrator's discursive attempts to represent sociality and writing. While Bersani warns against the ‘narcissistic retreats and intensities of literature’—and there is clear evidence of that in the novel's high modernist enthusiasm for the work of art—the forms of cultural and bodily equalization put forward in Le Temps retrouvé stand as liberating experiments in that they cut across social departmentalization and conventional evaluations of selfhood and community, mind and body.19 It may be objected that Proust is flirting with idiosyncratic forms of sociality and role play that ultimately restore established categories of power. Alternatively, we may read them as ambiguous conceptual models and expressions of social interaction that leave the writer both within, and adrift from, an alienating compartmentalization.

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé Notes:

(1) See David Forgacs (ed.), The Antonio Gramsci Reader (1988; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1999), 321. (2) Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005), 28. (3) [‘fighting to the end’]. (4) As René Girard points out, Charlus's desire for those of lower social rank points to a ‘snobisme “descendant”’ [‘a “descending” snobbery’], Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 212. (5) See above, Ch. 2. (6) Adorno, Minima Moralia, 21. (7) [‘France’s most humble and fragile infantryman’]. See RTP IV. 1231–2, editors’ n. 1 to IV. 375. Charlus nevertheless forthrightly rejects Barrès's ‘revanchiste’ posturing. See RTP IV. 1231, editorial n. 4 to IV. 374. (8) R. Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 213. (9) RTP IV. 547; [‘Taking a bird's-eye view’ (SLT vi. 278)]. (10) Dubois, Stendhal: Une sociologie romanesque, 12. (11) Translation modified. The Narrator draws a parallel with the influence in pre-Revolutionary France of Rousseau's ideas on aristocrats who were moved to embrace simpler lifestyles (RTP IV. 605; SLT vi. 338). (12) The paragraph forms a layer to the continuous manuscript for Le Temps retrouvé and is located in n. a. fr. 16727:45. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 204. (13) Translation modified. (14) Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 4. (15) Ibid. 3; italics in the original. (16) Ibid. 27. (17) The excerpt ‘Les êtres les plus bêtes … le plus souffrir’ (RTP IV. 480) [‘The stupidest people…the most suffering’ (SLT vi. 210)] forms a margin and layer to n. a. fr. 16726:23. See Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 199. (18) Adorno, Minima Moralia, 21.

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Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé (19) Bersani, The Culture of Redemption, 4.

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Claims and Complaints

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Claims and Complaints Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0009

Abstract and Keywords The chapter begins by exploring how Proust’s contemporary Julien Benda identified the intensification of political attitudes towards class and nation as forming the regrettable hallmark of the age. Significantly, Benda was quick to flag Proust’s uneasiness about partisanship and was scathing about those contemporaries who fuelled class warfare or aggressive nationalism. The chapter reflects on Benda’s characterization of Proust as a writer who dissociated himself from what, Benda complained, was the alarming emergence of intolerant, mass-group identities. The chapter goes to draw out the ways in which Proust’s novel, constructed over a period of almost fifteen years, bears the compositional traces of an often ironic engagement with the social dialectic in a period of major social change (the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, loss of social position for the aristocracy, the signs of working-class assertiveness). Keywords:   Benda, the intellectual, history, textual composition, genetic criticism, group identities

Considérons ces passions, dites politiques, par lesquelles des hommes se dressent contre d'autres hommes et dont les principales sont les passions de races, les passions de classes, les passions nationales.1 Julien Benda

Proust, Benda, and the role of the clerc ‘L'âge actuel est proprement l'âge du politique', Benda wrote didactically in La Trahison des clercs, published, as was the last volume of A la recherche, in 1927.2 The intensification of political attitudes towards class and nation formed Page 1 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints for Benda the regrettable hallmark of his age. Significantly, he was quick to flag Proust's uneasiness about partisanship and was scathing about those contemporaries who fuelled class warfare or aggressive nationalism (Georges Sorel, Barrès, Maurras, the disciples of the Bolshevik Revolution). Benda singled out Proust as a writer who dissociated himself from what, Benda complained, was the alarming emergence of intolerant, mass-group identities. We saw in Chapter 1 how he commended Proust specifically for rejecting the intellectual defence of nationalism promoted by the ‘Parti de l'Intelligence’ in July 1919 and hailed him as ‘[un] vrai prêtre de l'esprit…un vrai clerc',3 as a writer committed to things other than the power of the sword. Benda's approval helped offset some of the hostility that Proust's work was to attract by the late 1920s. Louis Aragon railed against the narrowness of his social realism: ‘Ce réalisme de parti pris n'est que réalité pour une coterie…Saint-Simon en dit en trois lignes autant que Proust en trois livres';4 Céline wrote no less negatively in (p.240) Voyage au bout de la nuit of Proust as a revenant pursuing ‘les gens du monde, gens du vide'5 and endlessly seeking an elusive Cythera; and writing in Europe in July 1930, Emmanuel Berl argued that it was impossible to transpose into everyday language Swann's socially distinguished jealousy for Odette in Un amour de Swann.6 By contrast, Benda saw in the author of the Recherche the extension of a philosophical lineage stretching back beyond Spinoza, Pascal, and Bossuet to Plato. How accurate is Benda's characterization of the author of the Recherche? To what degree can Proust be read as a clerc or clerk in the humanist sense intended by Benda? And in the light of Proust's handling of issues to do with class and nation and Benda's acute concern with both phenomena, how close might the fit between the two authors be? Some reconstruction of Benda's thesis will assist in the comparison-making. He argued that historically the writer-clerk had served as a disinterested, dissenting voice, unsettling social consensus; the latter-day equivalent in France, he reflects, has become an eager promoter of temporal values. Thus huge swathes of the population now endorse social intolerance in the form of rivalries grounded in national and class-based self-interest: ‘Notre siècle', he asserts in the conclusion to the opening chapter of La Trahison des Clercs, ‘aura été proprement le siècle de l'organisation intellectuelle des passions politiques. Ce sera un des grands titres dans l'histoire morale de l'humanité'.7 In a movement which Benda describes as the glorification of prejudice, the modern writer rejects as shameful any concern with truth in itself, promoting in its place social truth.8 With its unquestioning assertion of the imperium of the patrie, Barrès's stance on the Dreyfus Affair encapsulated that attitude.9 Benda sees moral perversity as characterizing (p.241) the social debate of his day: ‘on les a vus apprendre aux hommes que l'embrassement d'une erreur qui les sert (le “mythe”) est un mouvement qui les honore tandis que l'admission d'une vérité qui leur nuit est chose honteuse'.10 Benda's retort is that the role of the clerc should be to see beyond the religion that is concern with the temporal.11 Page 2 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints For him, the perfecting of political hatreds (he uses the term ‘perfectionnement') comes to a head in his own era. Tracing this through from the late eighteenth century, he presents the development as a dangerous condensation: in Germany and Italy, historic rivalries between small states mutate into national rivalries; in France, the hatred between the nobility of the court and the provincial nobility subsides as, together, both groupings confront all that is not noble [‘tout ce qui n'est pas noble']; likewise, high and low clergy find common cause in resisting laicization. This cascading effect delivers ever narrower reconfigurations: ‘la haine du clergé et de la noblesse s'évanoui[t] au profit de la haine de tous deux pour le tiers ordre; enfin, de nos jours, la haine des trois ordres entre eux se fon[d] dans la seule haine des possédants pour la classe ouvrière. La condensation des passions politiques en un petit nombre de haines très simples et qui tiennent aux racines les plus profondes du cœur humain est une conquête de l'âge moderne'.12 Anticlericalism, anti-Semitism, and what Benda terms the multiple forms of socialism are the conduits of collective aggression directed against democracy in France in the 1920s and he is struck by the virulence of these collectivist formations: ‘combien ce bloc de haine est peu affaibli par des manières personnelles et originales de haïr (on pourrait dire: combien il obéit lui-même au “nivellement démocratique”)’.13 In a similar way, the Narrator reflects in Le Temps retrouvé on the absorption of the individual within collective consensus in the two preceding decades. Proust identifies a tight link between national psyche and individual psychology. Thus the memory of boyhood reading (when the (p.242) young Marcel cannot rest until he is sure, by skipping to the end of the book, that the rogue in Bergotte's fiction gets his just deserts) finds its correlative in a French national call in wartime for defeat to be inflicted on the German enemy. A national scene on which judgemental hatreds are worked out is superimposed on scenes of private moralizing. In the Narrator's words, ‘je sentais cette influence capitale de l'acte interne jusque dans les relations internationales' (RTP IV. 492) [‘I was aware of the crucial influence of this inner reality even in international relations’ (SLT vi. 222)]. With the connectedness of the particular and the collective, of politics and psychology, emerging as a central strand in the Recherche, we can thus link Proust's theory of the ‘individu-France' (RTP IV. 353) [‘the France individual’ (SLT vi. 82)]—in which private citizens are absorbed as mere cells into the collective national body—to the characterization of the ‘nous Nation' to be found in Benda. Like Benda, Proust puzzled over the genealogy of collective antagonisms and posited the notion of a succession of hatreds. On the transformation that sees Joseph Reinach, the one-time scourge of the anti-Dreyfusards, become a prominent exponent of l'Union Sacrée, the Narrator insists: ‘j'avais déjà vu dans mon pays des haines successives qui avaient fait apparaître, par exemple, comme des traîtres—mille fois pires que les Allemands auxquels ils livraient la France—des dreyfusards comme Reinach avec lequel collaboraient aujourd'hui Page 3 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints les patriotes contre un pays dont chaque membre était forcément un menteur, une bête féroce, un imbécile, exception faite des Allemands qui avaient embrassé la cause française' (RTP IV. 491-2) [‘I had already seen in my country successive hatreds which had, for example, made traitors—a thousand times worse than the Germans to whom they delivered France—of Dreyfusards such as Reinach with whom today patriots were collaborating against a country every member of which was by definition a liar, a wild animal, or a fool, exceptions being made for those Germans who had embraced the French cause’ (SLT vi. 221-2)]. As Ruth Harris observes, the background and upbringing of Joseph Reinach, a prominent politician, defender of Franco-Judaism, and man of letters, captured a particular form of Republican social ascent.14 In the attempt to deliver detribalized reflection on group antagonisms in Le Temps retrouvé, Proust's implied will to be freed from the chain of hatreds, both private and collective, bears something of the moral censure at work in La Trahison des clercs. Likening Proust's capacity to contest social consensus to that of Montaigne and Voltaire, Jean-Yves Tadié shows the novelist rejecting his bourgeois (p.243) comfort and refuting ‘le sectarisme, antisémite, militariste, sexiste, belliciste ou chauvin'.15 Unlike A la recherche, however, Benda's work contains an important proleptic dimension: the power of antagonisms to mutate is how he accounts for a conjuncture that, in the wake of the First World War, spells, in his view, a nefarious cultural narrowness. Like his contemporaries, he could already see the rise of Fascism in Italy during the years of composition of La Trahison des clercs (1924–7), but his warnings about vitriolic forms of racial and class-based intolerance were also to prove prescient. Antoine Compagnon stresses the lucid way in which Benda foresaw Vichy and underscores the pertinence of Benda's analysis of the entre-deux-guerres which was founded on the argument that war between nations was a variant on civil war and class war.16 In an extended note on how nationalism is ideologically configured with capitalism, anti-Semitism, and antidemocratism in 1920s France, the author of La Trahison des clercs is scathing about bourgeois economic self-interest. For Benda, moreover, middleclass nationalism and talk of the fear of war are designed to ‘cré[er] dans une nation une sorte d'esprit militaire en permanence. Plus précisément, ils créent dans le peuple la facilité à admettre la hiérarchie, à accepter un commandement, à reconnaître un supérieur'.17 Likewise, on the refusal of the bourgeoisie to countenance any form of international cooperation and the insistence within that class that national hatreds would never be extinguished, Benda counters: ‘elle ne veut pas que cette extinction se produise. Elle sait que le maintien de ces haines lui coûtera la vie de ses enfants, mais elle n'hésite pas à accepter ce sacrifice si c'est à ce prix qu'elle peut conserver ses biens et sa mainmise sur ses serviteurs'.18

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Claims and Complaints On some of the dangers which concern Benda—an overly hierarchical state and the power of the bourgeoisie—Proust is arguably less exercised although the later composition of La Trahison des clercs may partly explain (p.244) its author's greater alarm.19 Yet the attitude-formation spawned by anti-Semitism and relations with Germany did preoccupy Proust. Benda's characterization of nationalist, as well as class-based, formations as ‘une masse passionnelle compacte, dont chaque élément se sent en liaison avec l'infinité des autres' extends the conception of the nation carried in Le Temps retrouvé.20 ‘[D]ans ces querelles', the Narrator observes, ‘les grands ensembles d'individus appelés nations se comportent eux-mêmes dans une certaine mesure comme des individus. La logique qui les conduit est tout intérieur, et perpétuellement refondue par la passion' (RTP IV. 352) [‘in these quarrels the great gatherings of individuals called nations behave to some extent as if they were individuals. The logic they follow is completely internal, and perpetually recast by passion’ (SLT vi. 81)]. In the revised edition of La Trahison des clercs published in 1946, Benda also reflects on the lessons of totalitarianism, arguing that the individual problematically pays to the tribe a form of ‘adoration religieuse, qui n'est au fond que la déification de sa propre passion'.21 Proust's Narrator's relationship to what in Benda's terminology was the ‘masse passionnelle' triggers a confessional note in Le Temps retrouvé: in his earlier life, the Narrator explains, he had naively believed the protestations of the Kaiser just as he might have given credence to the claims of Albertine. But as ‘une des cellules du corpsFrance' (RTP IV. 353) [‘one of the cells of the France-body’ (SLT vi. 82)], he acknowledges the difficulty of transcending nationalist prejudice. Ideological formation is something that the Narrator is ambiguously held within and strives to comprehend and step outside. He discredits extremism as a force bringing ‘la satisfaction que cause à un imbécile son bon droit et la certitude du succès' [‘the complacency that an imbecile derives from the excellence of his cause’] and reflects pessimistically that ‘les sots sont en tout pays les plus nombreux' (RTP IV. 354) [‘in all countries most of the people are silly’ (SLT vi. 82–3)]. Marion Schmid's probing work on Proust's handling of ideological issues in his preparatory manuscripts shows that the drafts of the period 1914–18 are ‘surprisingly lucid and (p.245) outspoken about the political and intellectual climate in France behind the front' and that Proust nevertheless sought to temper the tone of these passages to guard against being branded an antimilitarist.22 As Schmid shows, the strategies employed by Proust to distance himself from the very social critique he developed in his drafts included the offloading of provocative positions on to characters in the novel other than the Narrator and the dispersal of ideological intensity through the distancing effect of irony and the use of wider frameworks of reference.23 We might take as an example of the broadening of philosophical reflection established by Schmid in Proust's printed work a moment in Le Temps retrouvé when the Narrator argues that whether it is in medicine, the Dreyfus Affair, or Page 5 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints the First World War, those who exercise power, ‘les gens du pouvoir' (RTP IV. 493), insist crudely on the rightness of their judgements and the sureness of their knowledge: ‘j'avais vu…croire que la vérité est un certain fait, que les ministres, le médecin, possèdent un oui ou un non qui n'a pas besoin d'interprétation, qui fait qu'un cliché radiographique indique sans interprétation ce qu'a le malade, que les gens du pouvoir savaient si Dreyfus était coupable' (RTP IV. 493; Proust's italics) [‘I had seen people believe truth to be a kind of fact, believe that ministers or doctors possess a yes or no which requires no interpretation, and which ordains that an X-ray photograph indicate what the patient has without interpretation, believe that the men in power knew whether Dreyfus was guilty’ (SLT vi. 223)]. Unconvinced by the authoritarian discourse, the Narrator sees his whole life as pointing to the conclusion ‘que seule la perception plutôt grossière et erronée place tout dans l'objet quand tout au contraire est dans l'esprit' (RTP IV. 493) [‘that only coarse and inaccurate perception places everything in the object when the opposite is true: everything is in the mind’ (SLT vi. 223)]. Proust also identifies the workings of ideology in the delusional belief that one is exercising independent judgement, Charlus picking up on the blurring of individual and collective judgements: ‘“ce public qui ne juge ainsi des hommes et des choses de la guerre que par les journaux est persuadé qu'il juge par lui-même”. En cela M. de Charlus avait raison’ (RTP IV. 367) [‘“the public that thus judges the men and the events of the war solely on the basis of newspaper reports is convinced that it is forming its own judgments”. In that M. de Charlus was right’ (SLT vi. 96)]. (p.246) If the corrosion of individual judgement and the pitfalls of prejudice are concerns of Benda, Proust's Narrator likewise voices weariness when, in the context of a discussion about patriotism, he complains of ‘la vulgarité de la vie quotidienne' (RTP IV. 354) [‘the vulgarity of everyday life’ (SLT vi. 83)]. Similarly, while the volatile Charlus may frustrate the Narrator by openly parading his Germanophilia and his connections with aristocratic German rulers, the baron also experiences revulsion at the spectacle of unbridled power, preferring not to read legal judgements so as not to suffer viscerally the anguish of the condemned man and venting a frustrated rage against the judge, the executioner, and ‘la foule ravie de voir que “justice est faite”’ (RTP IV. 354) [‘the crowd cheering the fact that “justice had been done”’ (SLT vi. 83)].24 The autonomy of literature is defended by both Benda and Proust. In a manner that recalls the rebuttal of Barresian nationalism in Le Temps retrouvé when the Narrator asserts that the writer should not become the vehicle for national fervour, Benda cites positively the reaction of the Emperor Julian who praises Aristotle for the pride the latter takes in authoring the Traité de théologie, a much greater achievement in Aristotle's view than were he to have overcome the military might of the Persians. By contrast, contemporary culture, Benda laments, prizes artists and philosophers who promote militarism, as in Péguy's call for ‘[les philosophies qui] se sont bien battues'.25 There is an irony for Benda Page 6 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints in that so many of those who wield the pen (the ‘hommes de plume') decry the sedentary lifestyle they themselves pursue and endorse the warrior. But if Benda cites evidence from earlier French writers calling for an undisguised bloodletting (Froissart, Ronsard, Bertrand de Born), he reproaches the contemporary writer for using every doctrinal refinement to sustain and yet mask this urge.26 (p.247) The aspiration to disinterestedness in Proust is nevertheless fitful, his social mimesis conveying class- and nation-specific values from which the Narrator in A la recherche often struggles to detach himself. Contrasting his own response with that of Charlus, he confesses that he, Marcel, is an actor, part of ‘l'acteur-France' and thus necessarily implicated in nationalist ideology: ‘je ne pouvais arriver au détachement' (RTP IV. 353) [‘I could never feel completely detached’ (SLT vi. 82)]. This extends to social-class allegiance. While the aspirations, attitudes, and speech habits to be found across the class spectrum are regularly exploited as sources of curiosity and sometimes derision in the novel, there are nevertheless significant moments in the Recherche when a defence and illustration of Proust's own class emerges. The author who situated himself squarely on the ‘rivage bourgeois' [‘middle-class shore’] (Corr. xxi. 620), as we saw in his correspondence with Daniel Halévy in 1907, to an important degree sustains this ideological positioning for much of the novel.27 In this regard, the Narrator's explicit reflection on the interface between literature and history highlights the extent of Proust's embeddedness in the ideological assumptions of his class.

The muse of history Were we to restrict our assessment of Proust's evaluation of history to the manner in which the Narrator in Le Côté de Guermantes describes the professional historian's research into the life of the Duchesse de Montmorency, the resulting account of history would be unflattering. The impression of arid, narrow historiography restricted to aristocratic lives is not the only negative take on history, which is regularly contested in those pages of the novel where aestheticism and subjectivism dominate. In his theorizing, the Narrator in A la recherche can sound hostile to the social and the historical. Yet we should not be surprised that Proust, a graduate of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, developed a curiosity about past and contemporary history that was to become deep-seated and assumed many forms. As Tadié observes, Proust's knowledge of writers such as Michelet, Chateaubriand, Renan, Gobineau, and Mme de Boigne places him halfway between literature and history.28 His pastiches of nineteenthcentury literary predecessors, his exploration of military history, his knowledge of religious architecture and his defence of the ‘églises (p.248) assassinées’ [‘destroyed churches’] (CSB, 63–149) all point to an engagement with culturally specific forms of historical knowledge.

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Claims and Complaints The sense of history thus conveyed could be taken to illustrate Walter Benjamin's view that the adherents of historicism empathize with the victor and that ‘the spoils…carried along in [history's] procession' are indeed the cultural treasures of the victor.29 But any sense of triumphalism in Proust does not map straightforwardly on to the bourgeois hegemony which the Third Republic came to embody. An avid reader of the contemporary press and analyst of the diplomatic world, Proust offers a view of history that in Tadié's words involves a constant play of reflections.30 The radical reconfiguration of society that the Dreyfus Affair hastens is described, in Proust's own optical metaphor, as being ‘pareille aux kaléidoscopes qui tournent de temps en temps, la société pla[çant] successivement de façon différente des éléments qu'on avait crus immuables et compos[ant] une autre figure’ (RTP I. 507) [‘after the manner of kaleidoscopes, which are turned from time to time, society composes new designs by jumbling the order of elements that once seemed immutable’ (SLT ii. 90)]. The tactic of working from the particular to the abstract, when applied to the depiction of the First World War, produces a similar distancing technique which attracted criticism most obviously when Proust secured the Prix Goncourt in 1919. A protective aura, what the Narrator in Le Temps retrouvé calls ‘[une] impression de surnaturel’ (RTP IV. 336) [‘that sense of eeriness’ (SLT vi. 65)], distances the Narrator and the reader from the combatants. The reliance on individual private lives, which are elided in military and political histories and yet ideologically connected to them through the power nexus of the Third Republic, opens up a complementary, bourgeois-familial history that is illustrated by a well-known moment in Albertine disparue. As Marcel and his mother return from Venice by train, he surprises her with details of the unexpected marriage between the middle-class Gilberte Swann and the aristocrat Robert de Saint-Loup. The mother, who has held back her own news until after Milan in order to keep her restless son occupied during the latter part of the journey, trumps (p.249) his story with news of a recent marriage that reflects an even greater social irony: the niece of the former tailor Jupien on whom Charlus has conferred the title Mlle d'Oloron has married into the aristocratic Cambremer family.31 The poignancy of the stories derives largely from the invasive appeal of déclassement. So momentous are these unions that as the train pulls into the station in Paris, mother and son are still absorbed by the issues they raise: wealth, social prestige, unpredictability, and disruptions to class hierarchy. It is a conversation that will carry on when they are back home. For the Narrator, such stories constitute the wisdom not of nations but of families, ‘sagesse… inspirée par la Muse qu'il convient de méconnaître le plus longtemps possible…la Muse qui a recueilli tout ce que les Muses plus hautes de la philosophie et de l'art ont rejeté, tout ce qui n'est pas fondé en vérité, tout ce qui n'est que contingent mais révèle aussi d'autres lois: c'est l'histoire!’ (RTP IV. 254) [‘wisdom…inspired by the Muse, whom we should fail to recognize for as long as possible…the Muse who has assumed everything rejected by the higher Page 8 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints Muses of philosophy and art, everything unfounded in truth, everything which is merely contingent but which also reveals other laws: the Muse of history!’ (SLT v. 639–40)]. As Proust's Narrator tentatively promotes the would-be inferior Muse of History, the move is strategically significant in that the history of individual families and lives (bourgeois and aristocratic lives, that is) is to become one of the cornerstones of the novel.32 The links forged between memory and history in A la recherche can be linked, then, not just to the acknowledgement and incorporation of contingency but to a particular form of class solidarity. When reflecting on the stories of déclassement, Marcel's mother, still in mourning for her own mother, adopts in the Narrator's words the only point of view that is possible for her, that of his grandmother (RTP IV. 252; SLT v. 638). Her position and attitude reflect closely what for Freud is the psychic prolongation of the deceased through the process of mourning.33 Yet she uses the story of these unexpected marriages to pay tribute to what she protectively labels her dead mother's prescience, knowledge thus remaining centred within the bourgeois family. Domestic conversations of this kind are a source of wisdom for the Narrator: (p.250) Ainsi se déroulait dans notre salle à manger, sous la lumière de la lampe dont elles sont amies, une de ces causeries où la sagesse non des nations mais des familles, s'emparant de quelque événement, mort, fiançailles, héritage, ruine, et le glissant sous le verre grossissant de la mémoire, lui donne tout son relief, dissocie, recule et situe en perspective à différents points de l'espace et du temps ce qui, pour ceux qui n'ont pas vécu semble amalgamé sur une même surface, les noms des décédés, les adresses successives, les origines de la fortune et ses changements, les mutations de propriété (RTP IV. 253–4) [Thus under the dining-room lamp which encourages them, there unfolded one of those conversations where the wisdom, if not of nations at least of families, seizes on some event—a death, an engagement, an inheritance or a ruin—and places it under the magnifying glass of memory, throwing it into high relief, dissociating, distancing and placing in perspective at different points in time and space things which, for those who have not experienced them, seem to run together on a single plane—the roll of the deceased, changes of address, sources of and changes in wealth, transfers of property (SLT v. 639)] Given the salience of property and inheritance, the history made available is that constituted and accessed through the private memory of the economically dominant within the Third Republic. Freud's reading of mourning foregrounds a psychic investment in the lost object (which he indeed likens to ‘the loss of some abstraction…such as one's country, liberty, an ideal and so on').34 Proust's muse Page 9 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints of history, not unexpectedly, restores a bourgeois familial memory via the train conversation between Marcel and his mother as they return from Venice. No longer seduced by the master narrative of aristocratic history, Marcel undergoes the immediate and concrete influence of his own family history, which is described as functioning atavistically. The Narrator affirms that we wait to welcome, in a Michelet-style embrace, ‘tous nos parents arrivés de si loin et assemblés autour de nous’ (RTP III. 587) [‘all those relatives who have come so far to assemble around us’ (SLT v. 68)]. Unlike the mother, whose mourning delivers an idealized dialogue with the dead, Marcel's conflicted reflection on the influence of ancestors concedes the presence of aggression and resentment. Thus preceding generations ‘nous jet[tent] à poignée leurs richesses et leurs mauvais sorts’ (RTP III. 587) [‘scatter over us handfuls of their riches and their misfortunes’ (SLT v. 68)]. Marcel's fraught treatment of Albertine may, then, be predetermined by the attitudes of forebears in that he wonders if he is not mimicking inherited traits or responding to biological programming—‘que les délicates et mystérieuses incrustations du pouvoir (p.251) génésique eussent en moi, à mon insu, dessiné comme sur la feuille d'une plante, les mêmes intonations, les mêmes gestes, les mêmes attitudes qu'avaient eues ceux dont j'étais sorti’ (RTP III. 615) [‘whether the delicate and mysterious incrustations of genetic power had also drawn in me, without my knowing, patterns like those on the leaves of a plant: the same intonations, the same gestures, the same postures as had belonged to those from whom I sprang’ (SLT v. 95)]. Similarly, a form of ventriloquy ensures that the very tone of voice and attitudes of deceased relatives are reproduced in Marcel. In this way, private bourgeois histories supplant the history of kings and queens, while for the mature Narrator, family genes supplant rival, aristocratic genealogies and come to form an alternative locus for history. The cult of the archaic is also channelled via genealogy, so that the names of guests as heard by Marcel at a Guermantes dinner, for example, make up ‘une récitation criée des grands noms de l'Histoire de France’ (RTP II. 833) [‘a vociferous recital of great names from the history of France’ (SLT iii. 544)]. Significantly, the Narrator distances himself from this mythologization. Thus he is suspicious about the explanation that Mme de Marsantes's simplicity of manners derives from her noble blood; rather, in his view, she plays at simplicity (RTP II. 548; SLT iii. 248). Likewise, he will eventually remove from the duke and duchess the aura of the Guermantes name in which they previously bathed, leaving them ‘maintenant pareils aux autres hommes et aux autres femmes’ (RTP II. 814) [‘today just like other men and other women’ (SLT iii. 524)]. The Narrator thus comes to throw off the spell of aristocratic prestige and implicitly to assert domestic bourgeois values.

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Claims and Complaints In a further statement of cultural assertiveness, he positively resents the greedy appropriation of history that he sees symbolized in medieval architecture: ‘l'aristocratie, en sa construction lourde, percée de rares fenêtres, laissant entrer peu de jour, montrant le même manque d'envolée, mais aussi la même puissance massive et aveuglée que l'architecture romane, enferme toute l'histoire, l'emmure, la renfrogne’ (RTP II. 826) [‘Thus does the heavy structure of the aristocracy, with its rare windows, admitting a scant amount of daylight, showing the same incapacity to soar, but also the same massive, blind force as Romanesque architecture, enclose all our history within its sullen walls’ (SLT iii. 537)]. In this expression of cultural animus, the Narrator dismisses the Guermantes' exaggeration of ancient French greatness, just as elsewhere he likens Charlus's obduracy to that of the academic who prefers one of Horace's odes to a contemporary poem that is arguably superior (RTP II. 116; SLT ii. 338). Embracing other histories, the Narrator speculates on the mentality of the medieval artist and peasant. He attributes the inexact impression they (p.252) formed of ancient and Christian history to ‘une tradition à la fois antique et directe, ininterrompue, orale, déformée, méconnaissable et vivante’ (RTP I. 149) [‘a tradition that was at once very old and very direct, uninterrupted, oral, deformed, hardly recognizable, and alive’ (SLT i. 152)]. A vernacular tradition acquires the status of a counter-history, the equivalent of what Michelet proposes when he goes beyond the political history of the dominant in search of ‘ces masses de mystiques et vaillants ouvriers’.35 Like other objects of desire in Proust, the past is capable of resistance and impenetrability. The appropriation of the language of preceding generations brings inexactitude and mutilation. The symptoms already begin to present themselves at a generational level. As the Narrator speaks to a young friend of Bloch's, an impression of misalignment prompts him to reflect on a wider problem: Dans un champ plus restreint et de mondanité pure, comme dans un problème plus simple qui initie à des difficultés plus complexes mais de même ordre, l'inintelligibilité qui résultait dans notre conversation avec la jeune femme du fait que nous avions vécu dans un certain monde à vingtcinq ans de distance, me donnait l'impression et aurait pu fortifier chez moi le sens de l'Histoire’ (RTP IV. 542) [In a more restricted field, one purely social, as in the case of a simple problem which leads on to difficulties more complex but still of the same order, the lack of intelligibility which resulted, in my conversation with the young woman, from the fact that we had lived in a certain society at twenty-five years' distance from each other, gave me the impression, and might have strengthened within me the sense, of History (SLT vi. 273)].

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Claims and Complaints While introducing a scientific perspective with the passage from the simple to the complex and the consolidation of a diachronic perspective, Proust nevertheless underscores the central component of unintelligibility, of otherness, in history. Fallibility thus becomes inherent in the very construction of history: ‘L'histoire même des gens qu'on a le plus connus, on en a oublié les dates’ (RTP IV. 550) [‘When it comes to the sequence of events in the lives even of those one has known best, one has forgotten the dates’ (SLT vi. 281)], the Narrator affirms. Prompted by a humorous reflection on one of Françoise's linguistic slips, he analyses other erroneous perceptions that carry altogether more momentous consequences, such as the nationalist (p.253) dream of ‘la Revanche’ against Germany (RTP IV. 154; SLT v. 538). Perplexed by this spectacle of collective delusion, Proust proposes a theory of error which approximates to the view of ideology as deformation and aberration: ‘Nous voyons, nous entendons, nous concevons le monde tout de travers.… Cette perpétuelle erreur qui est précisément la “vie” ne donne pas ses mille formes seulement à l'univers visible et à l'univers audible, mais à l'univers social, à l'univers sentimental, à l'univers historique, etc.’ (RTP IV. 153–4) [‘We see, hear and conceive the world inside out and back to front…This perpetual error, which is nothing but “life” itself, does not invest with its thousand forms the visible and audible universes alone but also the social, sentimental, historical and other universes, too’ (SLT v. 538)]. Error and prejudice thus form crucial elements in social life; integral to the weave of history, they claim the attention of the historian. Proust's identification of error as a driver in history throws us back to Benda's diagnosis of the distortion practised by contemporary writers who promote as glorious myth the moral perversity of their vision in an era blighted by political partisanship. To varying degrees, both writers are drawn to socially detached models of thought but Proust's ambiguous connectedness with the sociality of the Third Republic contrasts with the overtly didactic pitch made in La Trahison des clercs. Adrift from the values of his age, Benda delights in research pursued in its purest forms, recalling Plato's hymn of praise to geometry as a form of disinterested speculation.36 In a similar vein, the pure mathematician, he argues, voices a preference for the theory of numbers as a branch of science unsullied by practical application.37 The virtues of thinkers without earthly preference [‘préférence terrestre'] such as Plotinus, Aquinas, Descartes, and Kant are extolled by Benda, who adds that even ancient thinkers imbued with a sense of the superiority of their class and nation such as Plato and Aristotle never sought to make their philosophical reflection on transcendence underscore that social position.38 Within the binarism of La Trahison des clercs, Benda's preferences and misgivings are marked: he criticizes German philosophers such as Hegel and Fichte for fusing patriotic and philosophical imperatives, and commends Tolstoy, Page 12 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints Anatole France, Erasmus, and Montaigne for their promotion of universal values. While conceding that it is a protest against the egotism that is nationalism, he criticizes internationalism as another (p.254) earthly passion [‘passion terrestre'] adhered to variously by workers, bankers, and industrialists in pursuit of practical ends. Benda takes his praise of speculation further, cautioning against any instrumentalization of thought. The clerk will have contempt for practical interests, he asserts.39 Indeed the line of argument pursued in the 1946 addenda to the first edition of La Trahison amounts to a forthright rejection of social engagement: ‘L'activité artistique, en tant qu'essentiellement désintéressée, qu'étrangère par nature, comme la science, à la recherche du bien, matériel ou moral, de l'humanité, est une valeur cléricale'.40 By divorcing literature from social engagement and the discourse of national morality, Benda seeks to create a form of disinterestedness. In ‘le Temps des masses' that is the twentieth century, he reacts against an invasive contemporary history.41 Proust is similarly forthright in rebutting the idea of an engaged literature or indeed the suggestion that scientists and writers might place their efforts in the service of peace. Hence the visceral misgivings he expresses about Romain Rolland's pacifism.42 Benda too labels Rolland's campaign a mystical pacifism.43 Yet there are crucial divergences between Benda and Proust. If Benda exhorts his reader to turn away from history and look to Malebranche in the quest for ‘la méditation métaphysique', Proust's novel establishes an important connection with contemporary history.44 In a tangential way, Proust's attempts to promote his novel in the immediate aftermath of the First World War brought to his attention the work of Benda, whose high-profile pieces in Le Figaro he viewed with some envy.45 In his correspondence, he alludes to a number of Benda's articles, adding that in one of them Benda categorized him, negatively Proust assumes, as one of the ‘ultraromantiques' wedded to subjectivism.46 Like a number of Proust's contemporaries, Benda levels the familiar charge that the Recherche lacks coherent structure and yet Proust quickly identifies the schematization in Benda's method that would later be a (p.255) feature of La Trahison des clercs: ‘Mais comme j'ai eu le malheur de commencer mon livre par “je” et que je ne pouvais plus changer, je suis “subjectif” in aeternum. J'aurais commencé à la place: “Roger Beauclerc occupant un pavillon, etc.”, j'étais classé objectif' (Corr. xx. 542) [‘But since I had the misfortune to start my novel with “I” without ever being able to change it, I am “subjective” for eternity. Had I started with “Roger Beauclerc occupying a villa, etc.”, I would have been classified as objective’]. Briefly pastiching Benda's style and method, Proust infers the limitations of his binarism.

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Claims and Complaints Yet if Proust believed he had the measure of him, Benda's visibility in the press brought its own challenge. Robert de Flers, joint editor of Le Figaro, explained to Proust that with all eyes on the outcome of the Treaty of Versailles (which had been signed on 28 June 1919), there was no space in the paper for a leading article by Proust, de Flers suggesting instead that he submit something to its literary supplement.47 Mulling over the issue of journalism's priorities in the post-war period in a letter to de Flers, Proust took the opportunity to assert the seriousness of his literary endeavour: ‘je comprends très bien que les hommes de lettres, même ceux dont les livres, comme les miens, sont soudés très étroitement à la guerre et à la Paix, doivent garder effacement et réserve: “Cedant armis libelli”’ (Corr. xviii. 303) [‘I fully understand that men of letters, even those whose books, like mine, are intimately linked to issues of war and peace, must show self-effacement and reserve: “Cedant armis libelli”’].48 That books might yield to arms offers a variant on Benda's complaint in La Trahison des clercs that militarism now infects literature. Nevertheless, Proust's promotion of the Recherche as a book about war and peace underlines his desire to convince publishers of the scale and socio-political resonance of his novel. Benda, by contrast, looks for radical ways out of the contemporary: positing the non-evolving character of clerical values, he commends, and quotes from, Spinoza's Ethics: ‘All transformation is destruction and the perfect should in no way depend on Time.'49 Proust's treatment of time in Le Temps retrouvé corroborates Spinoza's observation to the extent that the experience of being in Time [‘dans le Temps'] necessarily entails an acceptance of the logic of transformation and destruction. Yet (p.256) notwithstanding his promotion of art as a salvational force, Proust at another level gives priority to the documentation of radical social change.50 And whereas Benda promotes Spinoza and the idea of liberty from the preoccupations of one's age, a substantial part of the Recherche embraces the social particularity of the Third Republic, the immediacy and complexity of ideological struggles thereby forming the terrain on which Proust chooses to work.51

‘Notre nouvelle Bolchevie'52 The doctrine of historical materialism enjoyed considerable exposure in the French press in the wake of the October 1917 Revolution and we find a convergence of views on the subject between Benda and Proust. In an article entitled ‘L'Eternelle Idole’53, Benda turns his attention to a Romanticism that is for him more far-reaching in its impact than its literary manifestation, namely social and political Romanticisms [‘les romantismes sociaux et politiques']: entre autres et pour nommer un des plus graves le dogme du progrès nécessaire ou croyance que l'avènement du bonheur est assuré à l'espèce…cet avènement n'étant retardé que par le mauvais vouloir des Page 14 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints riches et des gouvernants…La doctrine prend maintenant des allures scientifiques: biologique, elle s'appelle ‘l'évolutionnisme’…; économique, elle se nomme le ‘matérialisme historique’ et prononce que ce sont les transformations de la production qui nous apporteront à la longue la paix et la justice.54 (p.257) Benda also dismisses those who dogmatically assert the impossibility of social progress. He thus consistently rejects the progressivist and regressivist models represented by historical materialism, evolutionism, and primitivism. In his conclusion, he remarks that hatreds existing at the level of nation and class have been perfected: Barrès epitomizes the former, summed up in the exhortation to ‘“défendre en sectaire la partie essentielle de nous-même”’;55 and political developments in Italy and in Russia provide further evidence, Benda argues, of the excesses of nation- and class-based hatred: ‘à quel point de perfection inconnu jusqu'à ce jour l'esprit de haine contre ce qui n'est pas soi peut être porté, chez un groupe d'hommes, par un réalisme…enfin libéré de toute morale non pratique'.56 The class antagonisms that manifested themselves in the aftermath of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution leave textual traces in the Recherche. In Le Temps retrouvé, a horrified Narrator alludes briefly to the victims of the 1917 Revolution in Russia in, as Marion Schmid observes, ‘a highly disturbing, unfinished paragraph'.57 But far away from such scenes of carnage, class antagonisms continue to operate in the everyday dramas of private lives. In Proust's own case, one gets a sense of these through the coupling of genetic criticism and biographical evidence. In 1919, Proust was reworking Le Côté de Guermantes. In the middle of an enforced move from his apartment in the Boulevard Haussmann at the end of May, he received proofs for the volume from Gallimard and worked on these at his new address in the Rue Laurent-Pichat out near the Bois de Boulogne.58 The May Day protests that year had seen widespread violence in the capital and the death of a protestor in clashes with the police. Proust referred to the day of action in a letter written early that morning to his friend Walter Berry, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Paris. He began by complaining about the lack of progress at the Paris Peace Conference before referring to the strike:59 ‘Tout, du reste, marche à l'envers et à peine j'ai commencé à (p.258) vous écrire avant de me coucher, mon électricité s'est éteinte parce que c'est le premier mai qui va commencer. Je vois à peine avec mes bougies les mots que je vous écris’ (Corr. xviii. 198). [‘Besides, everything is upside down and no sooner did I start writing to you before going to bed than the electricity supply was cut because it's the start of the First of May. With my candles, I can barely see the words I am writing to you.’] In a postscript, he mentions trying to put a phone call through to Berry to see if they might meet that evening at the Ritz Hotel: ‘Je vous ai fait téléphoner pour dîner avec vous ce soir au Ritz, on n'a pas répondu car les téléphonistes, sans doute, ne veulent plus téléphoner dans notre nouvelle Bolchevie’ (ibid.) [‘I Page 15 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints had a call put through to you in order to dine with you this evening at the Ritz; there was no answer since doubtless the telephonists no longer want to put calls through in our new state of Bolshevia’]. Proust's quip picks up on a detail in Berry's Fourth of July speech of the previous year in which he had asked rhetorically who was better off: the American worker or the worker in France, ‘ce malheureux pays que l'on pourrait appeler aujourd'hui la Bolchevie’.60 In 1919, Proust published Pastiches et Mélanges, a volume which he dedicated to Berry in patriotic terms. Berry, he wrote, had been instrumental in bringing America into the First World War in defence of France.61 That the Berry/Proust correspondence of Spring 1919 should be coloured with references to battles to do with social class is perhaps not surprising. Working-class anger against the government in early 1919 was intense with the latter's refusal to offer an amnesty to soldiers who had been the victims of military tribunals and frustration was compounded with the acquittal of Jaurès's assassin on 30 March.62 Membership of the Confédération Générale du Travail was substantially up on the 1911 enrolment of under 700,000, rising to a million by the end of 1919 and almost to two million by 1920. Membership of the Socialist Party (p.259) quadrupled in the year after the Armistice.63 One of the aims of the general strike called between the end of May and the end of June 1919 was to see the implementation of the eight-hour day, for which legislation had been passed in April. In the middle of the strike, Berry sent a message to Proust complaining he was unable to find a taxi anywhere: ‘J'ai erré par les rues jusqu'à la Seine—mais rien, nulle part. C'est l'arrêt complet de tout. Pour moi aussi, rien ne marche.’64 And he jokes that Proust's new address out near the Bois de Boulogne means that he is ‘là-bas, au bout du monde taxicable’!65 The general strike saw delays in the production of A la recherche. Three of Proust's titles were meant to be on sale that year: a reprint of Du côté de chez Swann, the new second volume, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, and the volume of literary pastiches dedicated to Walter Berry. The printers wrote to Gallimard cataloguing the problems: ‘journées de huit heures, grève partielle, grève perlée, grève des bras croisés, etc.’.66 This climate of militancy finds its own textual resonance within A la recherche. Françoise, once the epitome of conservative provincial ways, now assumes the hard-nosed attitudes of the Parisian domestics who surround her. She adopts ‘les idées, les jurisprudences d'interprétation des domestiques des autres étages, se rattrapant du respect qu'elle était obligée de nous témoigner, en nous répétant ce que la cuisinière du quatrième disait de grossier à sa maîtresse’ (RTP II. 364) [‘the ideas, the agreed codes of procedure used by servants on the other floors, compensating for the respect she was obliged to show us by repeating the bad language the cook on the fourth floor had used to her mistress’ (SLT iii. 61)]. Gone is the cross-class osmosis of the Combray household. The response of the Narrator's family to Françoise's newfound confidence is to feel solidarity with Page 16 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints the unnamed bourgeois neighbour they loathe on the fourth floor and to assert themselves, however sheepishly: ‘pour la première fois de notre vie … nous nous disions que peut-être, en effet, nous étions des maîtres’ (RTP II. 364) [‘for the first time in our lives…, we told ourselves that perhaps we too were employers like any others’ (p.260) (SLT iii. 61)]. Class inscription is thereby foregrounded, Marcel and his family now being drawn squarely into adversarial class relations. If their social mastery was previously real but understated, it is now asserted precisely because it is contested. The focus on class thus sharpens dramatically. The Narrator now knows just how dialectical the encounter between master and servant is, seeing himself as the photograph with his servants forming the photographic negative. He introduces radically different forms of sociality from outside the bourgeois power nexus of the Third Republic: mentioning a string of aristocratic figures, he likens the lifestyle of the king at Versailles to that of the Pharaohs and to the Doges of Venice. But in a twist to this argument, he speculates that the life of servants is ‘sans doute d'une étrangeté plus monstrueuse encore et que seule l'habitude nous voile’ (RTP II. 364) [‘perhaps even more strange and abnormal, and it is only familiarity that conceals the fact from us’ (SLT iii. 62)]. In Proust's exoticizing account, servants form a tribe apart.67 Previously, Marcel's family had been amused more than anything by their neighbour Mme Sazerat, who had her own vitriolic way of talking about servants: ‘“Cette race, cette espèce”’ (RTP II. 364) [‘“that race”, “that species”’ (SLT iii. 62)]. The line matches the nineteenth-century view of the biological inferiority of the subaltern. The homology between class and race sees servants racialized, the better to be despised. Faced with working-class radicalism, Marcel comes round to Mme Sazerat's view. In the textual development that follows, the social dialectic in bourgeois domestic spaces is further contoured around the template of race, the Narrator deploying images of attack and counter-attack and referring to ‘la race générale des domestiques et…l'espèce particulière des miens’ (RTP II. 364–5) [‘the race of servants in general and…my own species of servant in particular’ (SLT iii. 62)].68 The ‘new Bolshevia' predictably exercised not only Proust but other contributors to Le Figaro alongside Benda. In a leading article of 14 June 1919, Joseph Reinach, the one-time high-profile Dreyfusard, referred with derision to theoreticians [‘des théoriciens']—some of them miners – in both the West and Russia, ‘les uns à ciel ouvert, les autres en souterrain, [qui] réclament pour une seule classe, celle des ouvriers de l'industrie, un (p.261) privilège analogue à celui des aristocraties et des oligarchies d'autrefois'.69 He adds that this class will impose its will on the nation and thus bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Referring to an earlier article in L'Humanité by a Monsieur Mayéras, Reinach is disbelieving about reference to ‘la mystique croyance dans les miracles jusqu'à présent inconnus du suffrage universel'.70 And having vaunted his pro-labour credentials by reminding his readers that years earlier he had voted with Léon Bourgeois and others to reduce the length of the working week, Page 17 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints he ends his article by insisting on national sovereignty and citing Article 3 from the constitution according to which ‘le principe de toute souveraineté réside essentiellement dans la nation…nul individu ne peut exercer d'autorité qui n'en émane expressément'.71 Reinach's contestation is centred, then, on a critique of Marxist discourse and in his ironic detachment from the workings of universal suffrage, we find an echo of the dismissal of workerist claims in A la recherche. Yet in another way, Proust's Narrator does engage with the otherness that is working-class culture, but crucially from what we might term, borrowing from Sophie Duval, a position of militant irony.72 Earlier in the life of the Third Republic, Othenin, Comte d'Haussonville, had used a literary analogy to capture the idea of social conflict. He likened the interdependence of manual workers and other social classes to the situation facing the Duke of Milan in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Prospero may speak ill of the uncouth figure of Caliban but has to concede that it is he who fetches the wood for his master's fire and provides other services. Othenin concludes: ‘Caliban, c'est aujourd'hui le suffrage universel. Il apporte le bois ou plutôt il extrait le charbon…on ne saurait se passer de lui.'73

(p.262) Free speech If for Othenin, cross-class negotiation has become unavoidable, an example of the Narrator's encounter with the proletariat comes with his handling of the extensive speech of domestics to be found in many of the early pages of Le Côté de Guermantes. The concentration may be explained in terms of the genesis of A la recherche, crucial passages on class tensions coming to be added to the original base text of the novel. Thus the volume Le Côté de Guermantes, intended in Proust's pre-war plans to showcase the aristocratic family of that name, now also accommodates in a substantial way the servant class, whose words and whims flood into the text to be tracked and contained by the Narrator. The sequel to the domestics' lunch scene in Le Côté de Guermantes confirms this class rivalry which, as Sophie Duval explains, is here specifically worked through the Narrator's satirical use of the topos of the mundus inversus, the turning of the world upside down.74 As Françoise catches sight of the horse-drawn carriage in the Guermantes courtyard, she and Jupien, whose workshop is downstairs, compare notes. Françoise may be envious of the fine-looking horses yet the tailor reassures her by saying that ‘“Vous aussi vous pourriez en avoir si vous vouliez”’ [‘“You could have [horses] too if you wanted”’]; restoring order, the Narrator corrects the insubordination: ‘Ces “vous” qui eussent pu avoir plus de chevaux que les Guermantes, c'était nous’ (RTP II. 319; Proust's italics) [‘The “you” who might have owned more horses than the Guermantes meant us’ (SLT iii. 17)]. The switch in pronouns is central to the discussion of social class in Proust for it allows the bourgeois family which employs Françoise to reassert its place in society and put her in hers. The return to a nous signals social power, the vous-to-nous correction marking a distinction that is both grammatical and Page 18 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints social. Yet in a cunning twist to the argument, the Narrator ends up settling for Jupien's all-embracing vous: ‘pareille à ses plantes qu'un animal auquel elles sont entièrement unies nourrit d'aliments qu'il attrape, mange, digère pour elles et qu'il leur offre dans son dernier et tout assimilable résidu, Françoise vivait avec nous en symbiose’ (RTP II. 319) [‘Françoise, like those plants that are completely attached to a particular animal and nourished by that animal with food it catches, eats and digests for them, offering it to them in its final and easily assimilable (p.263) residue, lived with us symbiotically’ (SLT iii. 17)]. Proust's plant biology delivers a brutal put-down in the face of the servants’ assertiveness and shows science shoring up nineteenth-century male bourgeois ideology. In the symbiotic view of Françoise and her employers, biological analogy and social paternalism converge. If the animal actively absorbs and digests food, releasing a residue that sustains the plant that is dependent on it, so too the bourgeois, by virtue of his possessions and social standing, provides (or so the Narrator invites his reader to believe) the vicarious prestige necessary for his employee's self-worth: ‘c'est nous qui, avec nos vertus, notre fortune, notre train de vie, notre situation, devions nous charger d'élaborer les petites satisfactions d'amour-propre dont était formée … la part de contentement indispensable à sa vie’ (RTP II. 319) [‘we were the ones who, with our virtues, our wealth, our style of living, our position, had to take it upon ourselves to devise the little ways of humouring her which constituted…the portion of contentment without which her life could not be lived’ (SLT iii. 17)]. Proust's socially reactionary lines work in several directions. In asserting the pride taken by the subaltern in her master's position (and gender is as central an axis of subordination here as social class), the Narrator locks the domestic into servile, mindless dependence. The biology of symbiosis is proffered as an explanatory model. As Eric Hobsbawm writes of nineteenth-century sociology, its reliance on the biological model of the social organism suggested cooperation across social groups rather than class warfare; in Hobsbawm's words, ‘it was ancient conservatism dressed up in nineteenth-century costume’.75 Yet Proust's misapplied biology can be read as symptomatic of a wider tension, for in reworking his manuscript he is reinforcing hierarchy precisely at a time when Parisian working-class militancy was literally impacting on the production of the novel.

The hybrid text: Françoise in mourning One of the consequences of the sharpening of class antagonisms is that the textual additions they trigger give Proust's novel a streaky, hybrid character, an instructive example being provided by the narration of Marcel's grandmother's death. The original base text depicts Françoise in the role of dutiful, distressed servant. There is something deeply reverential in the image of her combing the hair of her deceased mistress one last time. The Narrator works the moment back to a remote, idealized past: just as (p.264) the medieval sculptor depicts the dead woman as a young girl, so death rejuvenates the grandmother (RTP II. Page 19 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints 640–1; SLT iii. 343). Yet among the marginal additions to the 1919 printers’ proofs, a series of textual addenda depicts Françoise differently, as an intruder whose behaviour is branded gauche, ignorant, or egocentric by an indignant Narrator. Confused by the comings and goings of the medical specialists (the fictional doctor attending Marcel's grandmother is described by the founder of modern neurology, Charcot, as a leading light in the fields of neurology and psychiatry), Françoise, on hearing the names of these doctors, wonders vacuously about the consultation process and the personalities involved: ‘“Ah! je ne sais pas, c'est très possible”’ (RTP II. 597) [‘“Ah, I don't know about that. It's more than likely”’ (SLT iii. 297)]. Exasperated by these meaningless lines, Marcel gives private vent to his frustration. As the Narrator observes: ‘On avait envie de lui répondre: “Bien entendu que vous ne le saviez pas puisque vous ne connaissez rien à la chose dont il s'agit; comment pouvez-vous même dire que c'est possible ou pas, vous n'en savez rien?”’ (RTP II. 597) [‘One felt like retorting: “Of course you don't know, since you haven't a clue what we're talking about. How can you even say whether it's likely or not, when you know nothing about it?”’ (SLT iii. 297)]. The sadistic dismissal thus has to be read alongside other, approving images of a dutiful Françoise. In essence, this splicing of narrative strands of different tonality is the effect produced, in part at least, as heightened class tensions are refracted in the ongoing composition of Le Côté de Guermantes.76 In the fuller, final version of the text, the story of the last days of the grandmother carries a litany of working-class faux pas: the family's footman fights with the concierge and so distracts Françoise from caring for her dying mistress. Françoise frets about delaying the dressmaker who is arranging her outfit for the funeral.77 Hence the Narrator protests that her mourning is narcissistic before conceding that her grief is deep: ‘c'était ses (p.265) impressions à elle, Françoise, qu'elle tenait à nous faire connaître. Et elle ne savait que répéter: “Cela me fait quelque chose”, du même ton dont elle disait, quand elle avait pris trop de soupe aux choux: “J'ai comme un poids sur l'estomac”, ce qui dans les deux cas était plus naturel qu'elle ne semblait le croire. Si faiblement traduit, son chagrin n'en était pas moins très grand.’ (RTP II. 636) [‘what she was most anxious to impart to us was what she, Françoise, felt. And all she could do was to repeat: “It's had a nasty effect on me”, in the same tone in which she would say, when she had had too much cabbage soup: “There's something weighing on my stomach”, which, in both cases, was more natural than she seemed to think. However feebly expressed it was, her grief was none the less considerable’ (SLT iii. 338–9)]. If her verbal banality is exposed, the Narrator nevertheless sees her underlying distress. She in turn objects that the professional Parisian family she works for does not know how to grieve properly. Her complaint has to do with middle-class emotional containment.78 As master and servant trade stories of each other's inadequacies,

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Claims and Complaints Françoise is criticized for the self-centredness of her grieving by a Narrator who himself knows narcissistic behaviour intimately. Françoise's moments of insubordination draw a predictable response from the Narrator. She believes, for example, that the grandmother's medical treatment should include the application of what she misnames ‘des ventouses “clarifiées”’ [‘“clarified” cupping glasses’] when it should be ‘ventouses scarifiées’ [‘scarified cups’]. While this is only one of the many linguistic errors she makes in the novel, the Narrator delights in explaining to the bourgeois reader how her mistake is compounded. For were she to look up the dictionary she would never find the word since she wrote ‘esclarifié’ and so was looking the term up under the wrong initial (RTP II. 630; SLT iii. 332). The insistence on orthography, then, provides a vehicle for his authority. Elsewhere in the novel, the butler mispronounces technical terms and this is seen ironically by the Narrator as the working class spuriously exercising the right to liberty given to them by the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789. Proust, so often subversive and dismissive of social convention within the pages of his novel, is far from being one of Sanford Elwitt's ‘moderate men of order’ who resisted both Ancien Régime reaction and social revolution in the Third Republic.79 Yet in central ways, A la recherche (p.266) du temps perdu tracks the emerging bourgeois dominance of his day. One of the consequences of the hold exerted by filial piety is that the mother's value system (that of the professional middle class of the Third Republic) is given sympathetic exposure in the novel.80 Beyond that, Proust registers, which is not to say that he endorses, the ascendancy of the bourgeoisie and this is evident in both the novel's critique of aristocratic privilege and its ironic deflation of subaltern assertiveness. Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen argues persuasively that it is the practice of an ultimately adept form of social positioning that sees the inexorable rise to power of the paragon of bourgeois taste, Sidonie Verdurin. From being an object of ridicule as depicted in Un amour de Swann, the Verdurin ‘clan' gains in prestige via the strategic embrace of progressivism (the salon becomes Dreyfusard in orientation, with Zola and Picquart among its guests) and by championing the avant-garde aesthetic tastes epitomized by the Ballets russes. As Madame Verdurin's star rises, that of Oriane de Guermantes is set to wane. With the rise in social mobility delivering ‘[une] permutation de légitimité' [‘[a] permutation in legitimacy’] as Bidou-Zachariasen spells out, A la recherche provides the diachronic and synchronic dimensions which allow the emergence of this new hegemony to be understood and revealed.81 Notes:

(1) [‘Let us consider those passions we call political whereby men rise up against other men; the principal ones are the passions of races, the passions of classes and national passions’], Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 107.

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Claims and Complaints (2) [‘The present age is specifically the age of the political’], ibid. 123. (3) [‘a real priest of the mind, a real clerk’], ibid. 253. (4) [‘that realism is based on prejudice and reflects the reality of a mere coterie; Saint-Simon says as much in three lines as Proust in three books’]. (5) [‘people from high society, people of emptiness’]. (6) L. Aragon, ‘Je m'acharne sur un mort', Chroniques, 1918–1932 (Paris: Stock, 1998), 131; L.-F. Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Paris: Gallimard (Pléiade), 1992), 74; Europe, 15 July 1930, 450. All of these sources are drawn from Jeanyves Guérin, ‘La Gauche progressiste et l'analyseur Proust', in id. (ed.), Autour de Proust: Mélanges offerts à Annick Bouillaguet. (Marne-la-Vallée: Travaux et Recherches de l'Université de Marne-la-Vallée, 2004), 170, 172, 173. (7) [‘Our century will have been precisely the century of the intellectual organization of political passions. It will provide one of the main headings in the moral history of humanity’], Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 121. (8) Ibid. 199 n. 120. (9) Benda writes of Barrès that although he started out on the path of intellectual scepticism, he saw his star rise dramatically when he became ‘l'apôtre des “préjugés nécessaires”’ [‘the apostle of “necessary prejudices”’] (ibid. 205). In relation to the Dreyfus Affair, Barrès advocated a ‘justice de circonstance' [‘a justice adapted to circumstances’]: ‘“la patrie eût-elle tort, il faut lui donner raison”’ [‘“even if the fatherland were to be wrong, it must be held to be right”’] (ibid. 163), Barrès argued, a position which Benda forthrightly rejected. (10) [‘they were seen to teach men that embracing an error that served them (the “myth”) is something that bestows honour on them and that admitting a truth which harms them is something shameful’], ibid. 199. (11) Ibid. 106. (12) [‘the hatred of the clergy and of the nobility faded, to be replaced by the hatred felt by both groups for the third order; and today, the mutual hatred within the three orders becomes the overriding hatred that unites the wealthy against the working class. What the modern age has succeeded in doing is to reduce political passions to a core of very simple hatreds whose roots lie deep within the human heart’], ibid. 110. (13) [‘how little impact personal and original forms of hating have had on this block of hatred (one could say that this block is itself in line with “democratic levelling”)’], ibid. 108. Page 22 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints (14) Harris, Dreyfus, 93. (15) [‘the sectarianism of antisemitism, militarism, sexism, war-mongering, and chauvinism’], Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 826. (16) Compagnon, Les Anti-modernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, 335, 339. See also Michel Winock, Le Siècle des intellectuels (Paris: Seuil, 1997), 246. (17) [‘create in a nation a sort of permanent military mindset. More precisely they leave the people well disposed to accepting hierarchy, to accepting orders, to recognizing a superior’], Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 232–3. (18) [‘[The bourgeoisie] does not want to see this extinction. It knows that the maintenance of these hatreds will cost it the lives of its children, but it accepts this sacrifice unhesitatingly if this is the price needed for it to retain its possessions and maintain its hold over its servants’], ibid. 233; Benda's italics. Scathing in his critique of bourgeois materialism, Benda accepts as well-founded Machiavelli's counsel in ch. XVII of The Prince that the ruler refrain from taking his subjects’ property since the latter will more quickly forget the loss of a parent than the usurpation of their patrimony. (19) Nevertheless, in Belphégor: Essai sur l'esthétique de la présente société française, a work already completed before the First World War, Benda's thesis about the capitulation of the intellectual is substantially present. (20) [‘a compacted passionate mass in which each element feels itself to be linked to the infinite number of other elements’], Benda, La Trahison des clercs, 108. (21) [‘religious adoration which, at root, is nothing other than the deification of his own passion’], ibid. 108. In the copious appendices introduced with the republication of La Trahison des clercs in 1946, Benda takes the opportunity to reinforce his thesis: ‘[les] valeurs cléricales' [‘clerical values’] are disinterested, rational and static (ibid. 99). The post-Second World War context is important here; in Minima Moralia (1949), with its analogous call to ‘the intellectual conscience' to preserve artistic integrity, Adorno writes of what he terms the ‘present cultural morass', Minima Moralia, 29. (22) Marion Schmid, ‘Ideology and Discourse in Proust: The Making of “Monsieur de Charlus pendant la guerre”’, 963. Schmid's searching analysis of Proust's working of ideological issues is centred specifically around the figure of the Baron de Charlus. (23) Ibid. 972–6.

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Claims and Complaints (24) Reflecting on the Dreyfus Affair in Jean Santeuil, Proust commends in legal and medical cases the pursuit of truth based on scientific detachment, a fearless scrutiny of evidence, and indifference to the workings of public opinion, ‘[La Vérité et les opinions]' (JS, 649-51). See above, Introduction. (25) [‘[philosophies that] have fought well’], Péguy, Note sur M. Bergson et la philosophie bergsonienne, Cahier de la Quinzaine; cited in La Trahison des clercs, 250. Alain Finkielkraut forthrightly rejects Benda's conflation of Péguy, Barrès, Maurras, and others, and objects to Péguy's inclusion among those seen by Benda as paving the way for the European crisis of the 1930s and beyond; see A. Finkielkraut, Le Mécontemporain: Péguy, lecteur du monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 16. Benda also distances himself from Jacques Bardoux, a professor of moral science who singles out for praise French soldier-writers such as Vauvenargues, Vigny, and Péguy, La Trahison des clercs, 250. (26) Benda quotes from the medieval troubadour Bertrand de Born, who expresses the wish that ‘nul homme de haut parage n'ait d'autre pensée que couper têtes et bras' [‘no man of noble birth have thoughts other than of cutting off heads and arms’], La Trahison des clercs, 251. (27) For the discussion of Halévy and working-class culture, see above, Ch. 2. (28) Tadié characterizes Proust's method for the representation of history as involving a mirror-like play of reflections, J.-Y. Tadié, Proust et le roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 355. (29) W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 258. In this context, we can link our discussion in Ch. 2 of Ruskin's insistence on the contribution of the many to the success of the writer-intellectual to Benjamin's view that cultural treasures ‘owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries' (ibid.). (30) [‘tout en reflets, en jeux de miroirs’], J.-Y. Tadié, Proust (Paris: Belfond, 1983), 69. Anne Henry observes that ‘le social et l'historique ne font qu'un chez Proust' [‘the social and the historical are essentially one in Proust’], La Tentation de Marcel Proust (Paris: PUF, 2000), 136. (31) For my earlier discussion of the d'Oloron/Cambremer marriage, see above, Introduction. (32) In ancient Greek mythology, Jupiter had nine daughters by one of his first wives whose name was Mnemosyne, or Memory. The daughters were the nine Muses, one of whom, Clio, was the Muse of History. History, then, was the daughter of Memory. Page 24 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints (33) S. Freud, Mourning and Melancholia (London: Pelican, 1984), Pelican Freud Library, xi. 253. (34) Ibid. 252. (35) [‘these masses of mystical and valiant workers’], J. Michelet, ‘Préface de L'Histoire de France de 1869’, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Flammarion, 1974), 24. Proust's Narrator expresses his enthusiasm for the prefaces to both L'Histoire de France and L'Histoire de la Révolution française (RTP III. 666; SLT v. 143). (36) La Trahison des clercs, 197–8. (37) Ibid. 151–2. (38) Ibid. 152. (39) Ibid.101–2. (40) [‘Artistic activity, in that it is essentially disinterested and by its nature, like science, not focused on humanity's pursuit of material or moral good, is a clerical value’], ibid. 103. (41) [‘the Time of the masses’]. See Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli, Le Temps des masses: Le Vingtième Siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2005), vol. iv of JeanPierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli (eds.), Histoire culturelle de la France, 4 vols. (42) See above, Ch. 1. (43) La Trahison des clercs, 218. (44) [‘metaphysical meditation’], ibid. 154–5 n. 35. (45) In a letter to Jacques Boulenger of late Nov. 1921, Proust writes of Benda: ‘Je ne le connais pas, mais je lui trouve un grand talent' [‘I do not know him but he is in my view a prodigious talent’] (Corr. xx. 542). (46) Proust adds that Benda had placed him ‘en fort “noble compagnie”’ [‘in very “noble company”’], ibid. (47) Letter of early July 1919, Corr. xviii. 301. (48) As the editorial note explains, the ‘Cedant armis libelli' [‘may books yield to arms’] is an adaptation from Cicero's De Officiis, xxii. 76 ‘Cedant arma togae…’ [‘may arms yield to the toga’], Corr. xviii. 304. (49) Benda quotes from the French translation: ‘Toute transformation est destruction et le parfait ne doit dépendre aucunement du temps'. The reference is to the preface to Pt. IV of Spinoza's Ethics (La Trahison des clercs, 99). Page 25 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints (50) Whereas the composition of his novel spans the years 1908–22, much of Proust's theorizing about art was inserted early on in the construction of A la recherche and was therefore present in the complete draft of the novel held by Proust in 1916. The aesthetic theories remained unchanged, unlike other dimensions of the novel which underwent significant development and modification in the period from 1917 to the time of Proust's death in 1922. See Anne Simon, Proust ou le réel retrouvé: Le Sensible et son expression dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu' (Paris: PUF, 2000), 35. (51) Proust refers to Benda in a manuscript note as being ‘faussement 17e siècle' [‘falsely seventeenth century’], Carnet 3, fo. 27V; see Corr. xiv. 349 n. 6. (52) [‘Our new Bolshevia’], Corr. xviii. 198. (53) J. Benda, ‘L'Eternelle Idole', Le Figaro, 9 Mar. 1920, p. 1. In the same article, Benda describes literary romanticism as being rampant [‘en pleine virulence'] in his day. He argues that nineteenth-century Romantics like Hugo, Musset, and Lamartine had a classical education which makes them look like exponents of universalism when compared with Barrès, Mme de Noailles, and more recently with ‘le moins généralisable des auteurs' [‘authors who most resist generalization’], Proust and Giraudoux. (54) [‘among others and to name one of the most serious, the dogma of necessary progress, that is to say the belief that the human species is assured of the advent of happiness…which is only being delayed by the hostility of the rich and those who govern. The dogma now assumes scientific guises: in its biological guise, it is called “evolutionism”…its economic form goes under the name of “historical materialism” and affirms that transformations in material production will eventually bring us peace and justice’], ibid. (55) [‘“defend in a sectarian manner the essential part of ourselves”’]. (56) [‘to what point of hitherto unknown perfection the hatred for what is not oneself may be taken within a group of men acting in compliance with a realism that is…freed from all morality without practical consequences’], La Trahison des clercs, 216–17. (57) RTP IV. 433; SLT vi. 162. See Schmid, ‘Ideology and discourse in Proust: The Making of “Monsieur de Charlus pendant la guerre”’, 965. (58) See Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 820–1. (59) Proust insists he is no militarist but that Marshall Foch would be the best leader in peace-time just as he was during the war. (60) [‘this wretched country which could today be called Bolshevia’], Walter Berry, ‘Devant la mêlée’, 22; quoted by Kolb, Corr. xviii. 201. Page 26 of 29

 

Claims and Complaints (61) In the dedication Proust commends Berry for having defended France ‘avec une énergie et un talent incomparables' [‘with an incomparable energy and talent’] (CSB, 3). Berry's Fourth of July address in 1918 also drew an enthusiastic response from Proust, who especially enjoyed the line about the greatest river in the world. For people living in the United States, Berry reminisces, there could only be one answer: the Mississippi. But as the First World War had now shown, it was no longer the Mississippi that mattered but rather the strategically vital River Marne, the Marne of Joffre, Berry enthuses, the Marne of Marshal Foch, the Marne, too, of General Pershing (Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1917). (62) Stéphane Courtois and Marc Lazar, Histoire du Parti communiste français (Paris: PUF, 2000), 36. (63) From 36,000 in Dec. 1918 to 133,000 in Dec. 1919. See Philippe Bernard and Henri Dubief, The Decline of the Third Republic 1914-1938, trans. Anthony Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des sciences de l'homme, 1988), 87. (64) [‘I wandered the streets as far as the Seine—but there was nothing to be found anywhere. Everything has come to a standstill. For me too, nothing is working’]. (65) [‘over there, at the end of the world as far as taxis are concerned’], Berry's letter of 10 June 1919, Corr. xviii. 257. (66) [‘eight-hour days, partial strikes, selective strikes, workers downing tools’], letter from Gustave Tronche to Proust, Corr. xviii. 262. (67) The categories Proust chooses here could be read as a variant on the nineteenth-century topos of privileged classes versus the multitude used notably by Disraeli in Sibyl: The Two Nations. (68) The text ‘Mes parents, il est vrai…Pour en revenir à Françoise' (RTP II. 363– 5) [‘It is true that my parents…To return to Françoise’ (SLT iii. 61–2)] forms an additional layer to n.a.fr. 16760:7vi; see Winton, Proust's Additions, ii. 61. (69) [‘some in the open air, others under ground, calling for a single class, the class of industrial workers, a privilege analogous to that of aristocracies and oligarchies from another era’]. (70) [‘the mystical belief in the hitherto unknown miracles worked by universal suffrage’]. Although Reinach dates the L'Humanité piece as 3 Feb. 1919, that particular issue of the paper does not appear to contain the article to which he refers.

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Claims and Complaints (71) [‘the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation…no individual may exercise authority that does not emanate expressly from it’]. (72) In the second main section of L'Ironie proustienne: La Vision stéréoscopique, Duval shows in satire the workings of ‘une ironie militante', 135–234. (73) [‘Today, Caliban is universal suffrage. He fetches the wood, or rather he extracts coal from the ground…there is no way we can make do without him’], Comte d'Haussonville, Etudes sociales: Socialisme et Charité, 304. Othenin was writing in 1895. (74) Duval cites as examples of the parodic reversal of the social order Mme de Guermantes affecting to speak like a peasant, Tante Léonie being likened to Louis XIV, and Mme de Villeparisis being mistaken for an ageing concierge, Duval, L'Ironie proustienne: La Vision stéréoscopique, 202–3. (75) E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital 1848–1875 (1975; London, Abacus, 2004), 307; see also ibid. 290. (76) Aude Le Roux-Kieken reflects persuasively on the element of social class present in contrasting behavioural manifestations of mourning in Proust's novel, citing: the insincerity and respect for conventions to be found among the aristocracy and the Verdurins; the peasant response, exemplified by Françoise, of an ostentatious expressivity that delivers a strong socialization of death; and a private, bourgeois, secular response typified by Marcel's family, Imaginaire et écriture de la mort dans l'œuvre de Marcel Proust (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), 149–50. (77) The Narrator adds the throwaway line: ‘Dans la vie de la plupart des femmes, tout, même le plus grand chagrin, aboutit à une question d'essayage’ (RTP II. 631) [‘In most women's lives, everything, even the greatest sorrow, comes down to a question of “I haven't got a thing to wear”’ (SLT iii. 333)]. Likewise when Françoise laughs nervously at the sight of the leeches that the doctor places on the patient's face, Marcel feels that the subaltern is belittling and infantilizing his elderly relative (RTP II. 630; SLT iii. 333). (78) ‘Sachant que nous nous épanchions peu…' (RTP II. 636) [‘Knowing that we were not in the habit of showing our emotions…’ (SLT iii. 339)]. Likewise, Françoise worries that her daughter's absence from Paris means that she has no one to whom she can tell the latest. (79) See Elwitt, The Making of the Third French Republic, 10. (80) If the demise of the grandmother marks the end of an era in familial terms, so the class antagonisms that Proust works into his narrative in the post-war years anticipate the terminal decline of domestic service.

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Claims and Complaints (81) Bidou-Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 20.

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Postscript

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

Postscript Edward J. Hughes

DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.003.0010

Abstract and Keywords The Postscript draws out how Proust’s scepticism about trenchant political positions frequently manifests itself as a playful, ironic working with ideological issues and generates what the critic Jacques Dubois refers to as an amorous sociology. The chapter shows how in this eccentric discipline which merges analytical method and desire, the study of sociality in the Recherche often forms an object of erotic fascination. The chapter also looks back at early Proust texts on Boulangism, fashion, and the politics of cultural taste and shows an author not only reflecting on, and connecting with, populist taste but also curious to understand the links between power and sociality. The chapter concludes that A la recherche du temps perdu is, in a very real, material sense, a product of its time, resonating with, and needing, the social antagonisms of the Third Republic. Keywords:   sociality, desire, irony, populism, power

Reflecting on those who helped pave the way for his Croix de la Légion d'honneur in 1920, Proust observed that the support both of the Socialist Léon Blum and the Royalist Léon Daudet was proof that the decoration was not a political one.1 The positions he himself took on a range of issues during his writing career had a political bearing and pointed to intellectual and social conviction: his open campaigning on behalf of Dreyfus; his active defence of France's ‘églises assassinées' [‘destroyed churches’] in the run-up to the separation of the Churches and the State in 1905; his privately voiced hostility to the pacifism promoted by Romain Rolland; his opposition—expressed trenchantly in unpublished drafts of the novel and in modified form in the Page 1 of 11

 

Postscript Recherche2—to expressions of militarism and xenophobia promoted by figures such as Barrès; his rejection of Maurras's post-war Parti de l'Intelligence, in private correspondence with Daniel Halévy. While Proust was wary of writers pushing what he saw as sectarian ideological positions (Rolland in Jean Christophe, for example), he expressed relief in February 1914 at finding in Jacques Rivière a reader who intuitively saw in his work ‘un ouvrage dogmatique et une construction' (Corr. xiii. 98) [‘a dogmatic work and a construction’].3 In the same letter, he says that only at the end of his novel, once the lessons of life are learnt, will his thought be revealed; there, he will work towards ‘la plus objective et croyante des conclusions' (Corr. xiii. 99) [‘the most objective and believing of conclusions’]. The truth claims contained in the letter (he writes of being ‘à la recherche de la Vérité' [‘in search of Truth’]) square with his insistence on intellectual beliefs. Notwithstanding this categorical affirmation, scrutiny of key issues of Proust's day (Dreyfus, the War, sexual morality, class, the autonomy of art) is often delegated in A la recherche to the Narrator and other (p.268) characters, the novel functioning dialogically as an echoing chamber for rival evaluations and ideological positions. In A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the debate— progressive versus conservative—between Charlus and his socialist nephew Saint-Loup is steered to the right in the conclusions drawn by the Narrator: onetime warring nations now opting for universal disarmament may trigger instability and more war; authoritarian governments embracing democracy may lose prestige; leniency shown to wrongdoers may lead to further criminality; and ‘artistic peoples' intent on modernization may see their talent dissipated (RTP II. 116; SLT ii. 338).4 The combination of noble motive and negative outcome matches the cautious liberal conservatism signalled in Mme Proust's letter of September 1889 when, writing to her adolescent son Marcel in the run-up to the elections that were to see the defeat of Boulanger, she observed unambiguously that ‘en politique, je suis comme toi…du grand parti “conservateur libéral intelligent”’ (Corr. i. 132) [‘in politics, I, like you, belong to the broad “intelligent liberal conservative” party’]. The capacious scope of A la recherche allows for the political legacy of both conservatives and radicals to be contested: thus the Narrator opposes the anti-Semitic view that Jews are incapable of becoming loyal French nationalists, the xenophobic view that Germany bears an enduring hatred against the Latin races, and (in the context of the Church/State debate) the view of the Radicals that religious orders can have no role to play in national education (RTP IV. 492; SLT vi. 222). The impression is of an author voicing independent-minded wariness about stridently formulated group identities and attitudes. Proust's reflection on the claims of the nation and of specific social classes often expresses itself as a scepticism about trenchant political positions, a scepticism that can indeed assume the uncompromising form consistent with Proust's label of ‘un ouvrage dogmatique' [‘a dogmatic work’].

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Postscript The scepticism frequently manifests itself as a playful, ironic working with ideological issues in what Jacques Dubois strikingly categorizes as ‘une sociologie amoureuse'.5 In this eccentric discipline which merges analytical method and desire, the study of sociality in the Recherche often forms an object of erotic fascination. In his ‘Petits commentaires de Proust' [‘Short Commentaries on Proust’], Adorno postulates, in the case of the snob, the erotic investment of social events whereby the snob converts these into the most (p. 269) powerful form of love.6 We can trace the crucial element of affectivity in Proust's social analysis back to an early piece of writing in which a primitive identification with populist nationalism is articulated. As an adolescent, Proust wrote to Antoinette Faure (daughter of Félix Faure, future president of the Republic) about the mass enthusiasm in Paris for Boulanger and he openly states just how seduced he was by the mood of popular approval for the Revanchist general, who had just been removed from ministerial office and whose posting to Clermont-Ferrand had prompted a large demonstration at the Gare de Lyon on 8 July 1887. Proust describes the scene in the streets of Auteuil for the 14 July celebrations and speculates about his mother's response to his enthusiasm: Croiriez-vous que maman m'a déchiré une lettre pour vous. L'écriture était trop mauvaise. Au fond je crois qu'un grand éloge de notre brave général, du soldat ‘simple et sublime’ comme dit le Petit Boulanger, a excité les vieux sentiments orléanistes-républicains de madame Jeanne Proust. Jamais les rues d'Auteuil (où j'ai passé seulement la journée du 14) n'avaient été aussi animées qu'hier. Vous ne trouvez pas entraînant ce refrain: Gais et contents nous allions triomphants ou: C'est Boulange, lange, lange, hurlé par tous, femmes, ouvriers, jusqu'aux petits enfants de cinq à huit ans qui le chantent très très juste—avec ardeur.7 [Would you believe that Mama has torn up a letter I wrote to you. The handwriting was too bad. Actually, I am inclined to think that my great praise of our good general, that ‘simple and sublime’ soldier, as the Petit Boulanger calls him, aroused Mme Jeanne Proust's old Orleanistrepublican sentiments. The streets of Auteuil (where I spent only the day of the 14th) had never been as lively as yesterday. Don't you find the refrain Gais et contents nous allions triomphants rousing? Or Page 3 of 11

 

Postscript C'est Boulange, lange, lange, shouted by everyone, women, workmen, even children from five to eight years old, who sing it perfectly in tune—and with passion.]8 While the teenage Proust concedes that Boulanger is ‘très commun et un vulgaire batteur de grosse caisse' [‘terribly vulgar, always beating the big (p. 270) drum’], he prizes the image of a broad cross-section in the street scene and hails the collective expression of approval as both reconnecting with visceral instincts of revenge and breaking the hold of banal reality: ‘ce grand enthousiasme si imprévu, si roman dans la vie banale et toujours la même, remue dans le cœur tout ce qu'il y a de primitif, d'indompté, de belliqueux' (Corr. i. 97; Proust's italics) [‘this enormous, unforeseen enthusiasm, so romantic in the midst of our humdrum monotonous existence, stirs everything that is primitive, untamed, warlike in one's heart’].9 The energies of populism here become the stuff of the imagination and literature. Excited and at the same time perplexed by the extent of his own enthusiasm, the 16-year-old lycéen pleads a lack of philosophical insight when it comes to accounting for his desire to bawl out ‘Il reviendra' [‘He will return’], the Boulangist slogan that was to give its name to a three-act musical review at the Alcazar in Paris in November 1887.10 While his enthusiasm for Boulanger was short-lived, Proust's early letter recognizes the power of tribal instinct and he regrets not having the philosophical insight that would explain his primitive rhythmic chanting. The ingredients—the deficit in self-knowledge, the presence of intense desire, a sense of delirious connection with the social—allow access to that which is ‘si roman'. The same elements also show how the urge to know the self and know the nation are entwined in a play of desire. Significantly they feature obliquely in Proust's earliest plans for his novel. In Le Carnet de 1908, commenting on how an author's letters often point the way to their works, Proust alludes to the ‘paroles de Mme Michelet dites par Michelet dans sa conférence' [‘the words of Mme Michelet spoken by Michelet in his lecture’].11 The reference is to a lecture given at the Collège de France on 25 January 1851 in which the historian applied directly to his analysis of the nations of Europe a line which Michelet's young wife-to-be, Mlle Mialaret, had included in the first love letter she sent him.12 The line allowed Michelet to declare his undying, eccentrically amorous fidelity to the nations of Europe (even when, as he asserted, they strayed politically, towards dictatorship for example). In Michelet, then, history carries this suppressed erotic substratum. Daniel Halévy had written about the courtship that had so transformed Michelet's life, Proust writing to Halévy of the ‘émotion extraordinaire' [‘extraordinary (p.271) emotion’] that he himself had experienced on reading Halévy's article.13 Proust found deeply seductive the ability of intense national and individual emotions to overlap, as the later, recurring analogy in the Recherche demonstrates: the blindness in Marcel's intense relationship with Albertine finds its collective

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Postscript corollary in the nation's xenophobic response to other nations. The erotic investment of the social is thus extended. Halévy describes Michelet as being ‘accablé de toutes les douleurs de l'histoire' and the impression of the historian's capacious, pathological attentiveness to the social is strongly conveyed in ‘Le Mariage de Michelet'.14 If, in Halévy's words, Michelet described with pleasure ‘la multitude à demi consciente des artisans, des ouvriers, des paysans'15—reminiscent of the young Proust's response to Boulangism—, the topos of the nation as object of desire is present in another early Proust piece, the brief text ‘Snobs', published in Le Banquet in 1892.16 Fashion here provides the access point to the nation. Whereas upper-class Parisian women studiously resort to periphrasis to avoid any reference to ‘le chic', preferring to see their taste as an embodiment of ‘l'élégance', their social subordinates, ‘celles qui n'ont pas encore le chic ou qui l'ont perdu, le nomment dans leur ardeur d'amantes inassouvies ou délaissées' [‘only women who have not yet been accepted by Society or those who have lost their place in it, call it by name, its ardent and unsatisfied or forsaken mistresses’].17 The erotic investment of sociality again manifests itself as Proust situates on a national scale the craving for connection with ‘taste' as hierarchically sanctioned. Evoking the plight of provincial women, he speculates: Il y a, paraît-il, dans la province, des boutiquières dont la cervelle enferme comme une cage étroite des désirs de chic ardents comme des fauves. Le facteur leur apporte Le Gaulois. Les nouvelles élégantes sont dévorées en un instant. Les inquiètes provinciales sont repues. Et pour une heure des regards rassérénés vont briller dans leurs prunelles élargies par la jouissance et l'admiration.18 [There are women in the provinces, it would seem, like shopkeepers whose brains are tiny cages imprisoning longings for Society as fierce as wild (p. 272) animals. The postman brings them the Gaulois. The society page is gobbled up in a flash. The ravenous provincial ladies are satisfied. And for the next hour, their eyes, whose pupils are inordinately dilated by veneration and delight, will shine with an expression of perfect serenity.]19 The feverish enjoyment of social connection by proxy points to petty bourgeois aspiration being encompassed and erotically satisfied within a Parisian-centred hierarchy of taste. Chic, then, operates as part of an ideological formation which sustains class hierarchy and links the provinces magnetically to tastes set arbitrarily in the metropolis. A third early text will serve to consolidate the sense of pleasure taken by Proust in constructing a social landscape energized by erotic aspiration working collectively. In ‘Eloge de la mauvaise musique', Proust launches a defence of popular taste as part of a pluralist conception of culture: Page 5 of 11

 

Postscript Détestez la mauvaise musique, ne la méprisez pas. Comme on la joue, la chante bien plus, bien plus passionnément que la bonne, bien plus qu'elle elle s'est peu à peu remplie du rêve et des larmes des hommes. Qu'elle vous soit par là vénérable. Sa place, nulle dans l'histoire de l'Art, est immense dans l'histoire sentimentale des sociétés. Le respect, je ne dis pas l'amour, de la mauvaise musique n'est pas seulement une forme de ce qu'on pourrait appeler la charité du bon goût ou son scepticisme, c'est encore la conscience de l'importance du rôle social de la musique. Combien de mélodies, de nul prix aux yeux d'un artiste, sont au nombre des confidents élus par la foule des jeunes gens romanesques et des amoureuses. Que de ‘bagues d'or’, de ‘Ah! reste longtemps endormie’, dont les feuillets sont tournés chaque soir en tremblant par des mains justement célèbres, trempés par les plus beaux yeux du monde de larmes dont le maître le plus pur envierait le mélancolique et voluptueux tribut,— confidentes ingénieuses et inspirées qui ennoblissent le chagrin et exaltent le rêve.20 [Detest bad music but do not despise it. As it is played, and especially sung, much more passionately than good music, it has much more than the latter been impregnated, little by little, with man's tears. Hold it therefore in veneration. Its place, nonexistent in the history of art, is immense in the sentimental history of nations. The respect—I do not say love—for bad music is not only a form of what might be called the charity of good taste, or its skepticism; it is also the consciousness of the importance of music's social role. How many tunes, worthless in the eyes of the artist, are numbered among the chosen confidants of a multitude of romantic young men and girls in love. How many ‘bague d'or', how many ‘Ah, reste longtemps endormi,' whose pages are turned tremblingly by hands justly famous, drenched with the tears of the most beautiful eyes in the world, whose melancholy and (p.273) voluptuous tribute would be the envy of the purest magicians—ingenious and inspired confidants that ennoble sorrow and exalt dreams.]21 As with the teenage Proust's response to Boulangism, popular music is both discredited and valorized. On the one hand, Proust appears to endorse a narrow aestheticism according to which popular culture would have no intrinsic value. The discrediting is clear: popular music is bad, it is rejected by ‘toute oreille bien née et bien élevée’ [‘every well-born and well-trained ear’], the ritornelli are ‘fâcheuses’ [‘miserable’], the ballads ‘mauvaises’ [‘bad’].22 Nevertheless he retrieves such culture by insisting on the immense part it occupies in ‘l'histoire sentimentale des sociétés’ [‘the sentimental history of nations’]. It is as though societies are collectively led towards affectivity. Deeply influential socially, such culture ushers in a democratization of desire. It also challenges the intellectual, as Theodor Adorno observes in another context: ‘What is true of the instinctual life is no less of the intellectual: the painter or composer forbidding himself as Page 6 of 11

 

Postscript trite this or that combination of colours or chords, the writer wincing at banal or pedantic verbal configurations, reacts so violently because layers of himself are drawn to them'.23 Adorno's perspective approximates to the position taken by Proust to the extent that the latter's representation of sociality entails a necessary engagement with the banality of everyday living. In ‘Eloge de la mauvaise musique', Proust sketches a form of sociology in miniature, in which he draws together various social strata in a Michelet-style configuration of the nation: ‘Le peuple, la bourgeoisie, l'armée, la noblesse, comme ils ont les mêmes facteurs, porteurs du deuil qui les frappe ou du bonheur qui les comble, ont les mêmes invisibles messagers d'amour, les mêmes confesseurs bien-aimés. Ce sont les mauvais musiciens'24 [‘The people, the bourgeoisie, the army, the nobility, all of them, just as they have the same mail carriers, purveyors of afflicting sorrow or of crowning joy, have the same invisible messengers of love, the same cherished confessors. Bad musicians, certainly’25]. Proust's eulogy thus becomes a panegyric in the etymological sense, the Greek panêguris signalling the idea of the assembly of the whole people. In the flood of affectivity it channels, popular music ensures the collectivization of erotic desire. Furthermore, it holds a consoling, edifying function in that well-known airs become ‘des confidentes ingénieuses et inspirées qui ennoblissent le chagrin et exaltent le rêve’ [‘ingenious and inspired confidants that (p.274) ennoble sorrow and exalt dreams’]. The so-called ‘mauvaise musique’ is thus both profane and sacred, becoming venerable when, through the intercession of the priest-musician, ‘la grâce rêveuse et l'idéal’ [‘the dreamy charm and the ideal’] are redemptively transmitted.26 In recognizing the socially homogenizing impact of ‘bad music', Proust offers an early example of the democratizing logic and cultural relativization that are regularly to feature in A la recherche. The fusion of cultures recalls another context in which Roland Barthes exposes ‘l'opposition dans laquelle nous sommes enfermés: culture de masse ou culture supérieure’.27 Earlier I quoted Malcolm Bowie's observation that Proust's Narrator demonstrates an ability to offer himself ‘both as a representative of the bourgeoisie in his daily habits and expectations and as miraculously classneutral and unaligned’.28 In respect of the nation, a similar ambivalence obtains, with Proust standing inside and outside collective consensus in important ways. The Narrator upbraids writers who turn away from their writerly task in order to pursue justice, as in the Dreyfus Affair, or moral unity for the nation in the context of the First World War: ‘Les écrivains…n'avaient pas le temps de penser à la littérature' (RTP IV. 458) [‘[Writers] were much too busy to think about literature’ (SLT vi. 188)], he complains. Yet the defence of literature's autonomy has limitations, Perciles Lewis making the point that Proust's idea that the artist best serves the nation through the pursuit of art remains itself ‘oddly utilitarian'.29 Nor does the move to protect the writer's autonomy equate to the immunity from partisanship that Benda advocates in his call for the timeless, disinterested values of the clerc. Like the painter Elstir who speaks the everyday Page 7 of 11

 

Postscript language of his bourgeois neighbours (RTP II. 215; SLT ii. 439), the Narrator defends his class, however fitfully. Lewis sees the positioning of the Narrator within the conventional nationalist discourse heightened by the conditions of the First World War as setting limits to his self-understanding and argues that the ‘ethical and sociological individuals' within the Narrator coalesce to the extent that the citizen who is touched by patriotism cannot secure detachment from the body politic: ‘At the outside limit, the war provides evidence to Proust's narrator of a (p.275) type of hermeneutic circle, according to which the self as it currently exists can only grasp its own history from within the language it has inherited, along with a set of ideologies'.30 Lewis concludes that Proust's vision articulates a fairly conventional expression of liberalism. The exposure given to nation and class in A la recherche grows dramatically with the representation of the First World War and the development of the Albertine cycle. Tadié makes the point that the War allowed Proust to reflect on the connections linking literature, history, and politics.31 Dubois, in turn, sees the character of Albertine prompting within the Narrator and the author an ‘aggiornamento idéologique', a fresh way of seeing sociality entailing engagement with the class of wealthy provincial merchants and also with the popular social world in which she moved.32 If war and the workings of déclassement render the novel's ideological matrix more dense, the range of tones present in Proust's reflections on class and nation contrasts with the consistently didactic manner in which Benda urges the writer to shun the ‘nous Classe' and ‘nous Nation'.33 Proust's reflections are by turns ludic, moralizing, inconsequential, sceptical, erotic, cynical, and campaigning. Faced with the workings of xenophobia, Proust's Narrator can urge tolerance on his reader, as when he distances himself from Germanophobia in wartime Paris, or respond with an amused complicity as with the two young ‘courrières' at the Grand Hotel in Balbec whose florid, quasi-literary language interspersed with their blunt rejection of ‘la “vermine” des étrangers' (RTP III. 243) [‘those foreign “vermin”’ (SLT iv. 248)] mesmerizes a disbelieving protagonist.34 The new socialities the Narrator discovers in fin de siècle Normandy and in the Paris of the First World War provide the occasion for often intensely playful evocations of social difference. As we have seen, the assertive subaltern no less than the legacy of 1789 and the discourse of democratic entitlements she or he stands for, is regularly the butt of the Narrator's energetic condescension: characters like Jupien impress Marcel's grandmother and yet awaken in Marcel an obdurate class resentment aimed at curbing the social rise of the tailor; Morel is cast as embodying not only socially but also morally inferior attributes in his exploitation of Marcel: ‘Mais comme j'avais en moi un peu de ma grand-mère et me plaisais à la (p.276) diversité des hommes sans rien attendre d'eux ou leur en vouloir, je négligeai sa bassesse, je me plus à sa gaieté quand cela se présenta' (RTP III. 303) [‘But as I had something of my grandmother in me, and took pleasure in men's diversity without expecting anything from them or Page 8 of 11

 

Postscript holding anything against them, I overlooked his servility, took pleasure in his gaiety when it showed itself’ (SLT iv. 248)].35 The morally neutral stance of the protagonist points to a suspension of judgement in the Narrator: inquisitive, fitful in his judgementalism, and accommodating in his observation across the social hierarchy, he nevertheless often maintains an underlying loyalty to the values of the professional middle class embodied by his parents. Resisting the ‘bolshy' servants (to return to an example from Le Côté de Guermantes considered earlier36) in what Proust in May 1919 exaggeratedly calls the new Bolshevia, places social contestation in a burlesque setting and opens up a fresh seam for the continuing production of the novel. Proust's Narrator complains about the insubordination of servants while also laying bare his own aggressive response to this; he condemns narrow nationalism while singing the praises of the poilu through the mouth of Saint-Loup; and in lodging these complaints, he thickens the weave of his novel. A la recherche is, in a very real, material sense, a product of its time. It resonates with the social antagonisms of the Third Republic; indeed it needs them. As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which reached its reading public almost two decades later, Proust's novel offers important evidence of how accumulated ideological tensions accompanied the novel's sui generis absorption of momentous historical events. Barthes's characterization of Proust as ‘l'ouvrier tantôt tourmenté, tantôt exalté' may thus be extended to include the images of Proust as the free-floating iconoclast and radical commentator, as the social conservative and fitful defender of class hierarchy, and also as the writer who (as Adorno lucidly pointed out) resisted bourgeois compartmentalization.37 Notes:

(1) Letter to Paul Souday of 27 Sept. 1920, Corr. xix. 485. (2) See Schmid, ‘Ideology and Discourse in Proust: the Making of “Monsieur de Charlus pendant la guerre”’, as discussed above in Ch. 8. (3) Italics added. (4) See above, Ch. 4. (5) [‘a sociology infused with passion’], Dubois, Pour Albertine, Proust et le sens du social, 22. (6) Quoted in Barbara Carnevali, ‘Sur Proust et la philosophie du prestige', in ‘Les Philosophes lecteurs', Fabula LHT (Littérature, histoire, théorie), 1 〈http:// www.fabula.org/1ht/1/Carnevali.html〉, endnote 9 (accessed Feb 2006). (7) Letter of 15 July 1887, Corr. i. 96–7.

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Postscript (8) Proust, Selected Letters 1880–1903, 7. (9) Ibid. 7. (10) See editorial note, Corr, i. 98, n. 4. (11) M. Proust, Le Carnet de 1908, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 59. (12) In a piece on the Pre-Raphaelites published in 1903, ‘Dante Gabriel Rossetti et Elizabeth Siddal', Proust concludes with reference to the pleasure experienced by the young Mme Michelet on hearing her historian husband reproduce her words, CSB, 474. (13) Halévy's article, ‘Le Mariage de Michelet', appeared in La Revue de Paris, 1 Aug. 1902, pp. 557–79. See Proust's letter to Halévy of January 1908, Corr. xxi. 631. (14) [‘weighed down with all the sufferings of history’], Halévy, ‘Le Mariage de Michelet', 567. (15) [‘the half-conscious multitude of artisans, workers, and peasants’], ibid. 558. (16) Le Banquet, 3 (May 1892). (17) JS, 44. Reference is here to the Pléiade edition of Jean Santeuil précédé de Les Plaisirs et les jours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); Proust, Pleasures and Regrets, trans. Louise Varese, preface by D. J. Enright (London: Peter Owen, 1986), 67. (18) Les Plaisirs et les jours, 44. (19) Pleasures and Regrets, 67–8. (20) Les Plaisirs et les jours, 121–2. (21) Pleasures and Regrets, 138–9. (22) Les Plaisirs et les jours, 122; Pleasures and Regrets, 139. (23) Adorno, ‘If knaves should tempt you', Minima Moralia, 29. (24) Les Plaisirs et les jours, 122. (25) Pleasures and Regrets, 139. (26) Les Plaisirs et les jours, 122; Pleasures and Regrets, 139. (27) [‘the opposition in which we are imprisoned: mass culture versus high culture’], Barthes, Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 58–9. For Barthes, it is the art of Charlot which is both very popular and underhand Page 10 of 11

 

Postscript [‘très populaire et très retors’], which awakens ‘une joie complète parce qu’[il] donne l'image d'une culture à la fois différentielle et collective: plurielle’ [‘a complete joy because it provides the image of a culture that is both differential and collective, and thus plural’]. (28) Bowie, Proust Among the Stars, 169. See above, Ch. 4. (29) Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 127. (30) Ibid. 152. (31) Tadié, Marcel Proust: Biographie, 787. (32) [‘ideological updating’], Dubois, Pour Albertine: Proust et le sens du social, 193. (33) The suspicion directed by Benda against the ‘nous-nation' may be mapped on to Perciles Lewis's observation that ‘the nation is the particular form of the fiction ‘we' that claims to define the self through and through', Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 152. (34) For consideration of the two ‘courrières', see Edward J. Hughes, Marcel Proust: A study in the Quality of Awareness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 124–5. (35) Characterizing Proust's moral language as ‘strange and provocative', Malcolm Bowie observes that ‘vice, virtue and their cognates are not exclusively moral notions in either French or English, and [Proust] exploits this ambiguity throughout his work', The Morality of Proust: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 25 November 1993 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3, 15. (36) See above, Ch. 8. (37) [‘the worker now tormented, now elated’], R. Barthes, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1993–2002), 5 vols., v. 459.

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Bibliography

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

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Index

Proust, Class, and Nation Edward J. Hughes

Print publication date: 2011 Print ISBN-13: 9780199609864 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199609864.001.0001

(p.286) (p.287) Index Aberdam, Daniel  2n Aberdam, Edith  2n Agostinelli, Alfred  202n A la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)  xiv, 38, 41, 66, 76, 86n, 167n, 175, 209n, 221n Amphion  135 autonomy of art  246 and Benda  234, 239, 243 biographical link  18, 193, 202–3, 257 as book on war and peace  255 class antagonism  259–60 class attitudes  192 class dialectic  63 class prejudice  114 cultural value  97 defence of literature  24, 26, 72, 170, 234, 274 democratization  143 domestic class  87, 196–7 expansion of  180, 189, 262 hierarchy  91–2, 165 militarism  80, 83 materialism  208 money markets  207 moral relativism  32 mundus inversus  90, 262 parallel worlds  199 popular art  26 power structures  43–5 preparatory drafts  21n, 25, 33, 75n, 91, 92, 119n, 122n, 124–7, 132, 134, 136n, 137, 171n, 175n, 216, 244, 256n, 270 and Proust's ideological trajectory  4, 5–7, 110 rebuttal of engaged literature  254 Page 1 of 21

 

Index rejection of ideology  24 and sacrificial lives  73n, 235–6 and Sand  12–13 school system  65 social analysis  15–16 social class and distinction  60 social class immurement  49 social mobility  84, 207 social particularity  256 social rigidity  187 sociality and eroticism  268 subaltern culture  189 time  255 working-class culture  261 working-class language  187 Albuféra, Louis d’  158n Alden, Douglas  125n A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (Proust)  xiv, 111, 143, 150–1, 220, 268 alternative classifications  132 anti-Semitism  148 bourgeoisie  154 composition  124–6 cross-class encounters  166 hierarchy  45, 63 imaginary relations  123 intolerance  146–7 leisure and sociality  112–13 regression  140 social analysis  167 social mobility  118–19 Action Française  17, 21, 50, 56, 57, 64, 154 Adorno, Theodor  226, 230, 231, 236, 238, 244, 268, 273, 276 aesthetic order   77 ‘Affaire Marie’  1, 7–9 Albertine disparue (Proust)  xv, 167, 171, 199, 213 class dialectic  208 delegation  169–70, 208, 212, 216, 221 economics and culture  201–3 hierarchy  218 master-servant relationship  177, 212, 214–18 materialist concerns  202–3, 211, 221–2 private lives and history  248–9 sexual liberation  219–20 Althusser, Louis  117, 123 Amour de Swann, Un (Proust)  33, 17, 85–110, 123n, 240, 266 art and eroticism  109 belonging  89 jealousy  88 sexual and economic profligacy  92–3 Page 2 of 21

 

Index social-class prejudice  86, 89 taste  85, 97–9, 108–9 Amphion  135 Ancien Régime  43, 54, 56, 141, 174, 229, 237, 265 (p.288) anti-aestheticism  102 anti-Semitism  see also Dreyfus Affair 41–2, 91–3, 241, 243–4, 268 cross-class  53, 148–50 and Dreyfus Affair  3, 6, 21 ‘Appel: Fière Déclaration d’ Intellectuels, Un’ (Rolland)  23–4 Aragon, Louis  239, 240n aristocracy  18, 45–6, 113, 123, 128, 138, 198, 208, 251 challenged  90, 97, 172, 207, 251 double vision  4, 121, 131–2, 142 and Dreyfus affair  6, 53 language  180, 184 and proletariat  223, 225 praised  103 race apart  133 suspicion of  87–8 Aristotle  246 arrivisme  92, 118, 189 art  95–6 and eroticism  109 patriotic  28–9, 31–2 as salvation  211, 234, 256 Athalie (Racine)  198 authoritarian discourse  26, 32, 120, 245, 268 autonomy  32, 77, 83 of Françoise  115, 121 of literature and art  13, 24, 246, 267, 274 proletarian  218, 221 of servants  183 of women  208 Bales, Richard  viii, 89n, 125–6, 136n Bally, Charles  179, 186–7 Balzac, Honoré de  4n, 12, 62, 110, 127–8, 162 Banquet, Le  271 Bardoux, Jacques  246n Barrès, Maurice  17, 30, 33, 41, 152, 231, 239–40, 246 ecclesiastical heritage  34–7 militarism  267 nation as race  21–2 patriotic art  28–9, 31–2 prejudice  240, 257 social voluntarism  145 Barricade, La (Bourget)  160 Barthes, Roland  18, 27, 73n, 243n, 274, 276 Bataille, Georges  1, 3, 5, 7–9, 12–13, 24 Beauquier, Charles  12n Page 3 of 21

 

Index belonging  89–90 Belloi, Livio  169n Benda, Julien  17, 42, 152, 154, 239–46, 253–7, 260, 274–5 Benhaïm, André  167n, 209n Benjamin, Walter  248 Bergson, Henri  9n, 67, 152, 246n Berl, Emmanuel  240 Bernard, Emile  97 Bernard, Philippe  259n Berstein, Serge  66–7 Berry, Walter  257–9 Bersani, Leo  18, 223, 234, 238 Bertrand, Louis  20 Bible  55, 65n, 75, 158, 164 New Testament  51, 52, 55, 58, 65, 122 Old Testament  55, 212, 213 Bidou-Zachariasen, Catherine  6n, 15, 18n, 22n, 86, 138, 174n, 266 Billy, Robert de  76n, 202 Blanche, Jacques-Emile  48 Bloch-Dano, Evelyne  9n, 14n, 49, 101n, 193 Blum, Léon  267 body  134–6, 154, 169n, 174–5, 217 and aristocratic bearing  130, 174 changing  151 and class  174, 217 democratic levelling  26, 236–8 of the nation  242, 244 proletarian  159 Bois, Elie-Joseph  33n Bolshevia  xv, 256, 258, 260, 276 Bolshevik Revolution  20, 239, 257 Bordeaux, Henri 145n Born, Bertrand de  246n Borrel, Anne  73n Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne  102, 240 Botticelli, Sandro  11, 95 Bouillaguet, Annick  146n, 240n Boulanger, Georges  268, 269–70 Boulangism 271, 273 Boulenger, Jacques  254n Bourdieu, Pierre  85, 93, 94, 105, 109–10, 213, 220 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le (Molière)  200 bourgeoisie  5, 50–2, 59, 77, 88, 94, 123, 156, 174 anti-international  243 and anti-Semitism  6 aristocratic disdain for  97, 229 aspirational  55, 96, 107, 113, 132–3, 139, 180 Bourdieu  220 and capital  91 Page 4 of 21

 

Index caste-like  84 (p.289) Catholic  48, 49, 53 class rule  43, 55, 58n, 63, 78, 157, 169, 182, 214–15, 243, 260, 262–3 conventionalism  10–11, 13, 98, 195 delegation  169–70, 208, 212, 216 domestic space  158, 164, 260 dominance  61, 266 entrepreneurship  44–5, 113 familial history  248–51 fashion  96 figure of the writer  17, 225 Flaubert  115 haute bourgeoisie  48, 90, 93, 104 hegemony  16, 42, 43, 45, 118n, 193, 248, 266 identity  8, 153–4 language  186 leisure  118 Mme Jeanne Proust  193n marriage  14 materialism  105 moneyed  104, 113, 145n, 147, 206, 220, 222, 275 mourning  264n petite bourgeoisie  9, 99–100, 102, 106, 107, 134, 160, 166, 219, 237, 277 philanthropy  65, 67, 69 in praise of  147–55, 172n professional  113, 119, 123 Proust’s allegiance to  5, 67–9, 74, 84, 242–3, 247, 274 provincial  114, 118–19, 147–8, 154, 172, 205, 213, 215, 271–2 Ruskin  78–9, 84 self-interest  243 sexual predation and eroticized subaltern  159–62, 163, 182 social imaginary  87, 114, 197, 206 solidarity  259 staging of power  162 traditionalism  50, 89 utilitarianism  107 work ethic  44 Bourget, Paul  xiii, xiv, 17, 39, 43, 63, 69–70, 97 anti-democratic  53–4, 56 class war  160 conservatism  112, 145 elitism  84 literary canon  60 Proust’s response  75, 84 and Sainte-Beuve  64 on social mobility  48–50 and workers’ education  64–5, 67 on working class  57–9 Bowie, Malcolm  16, 83n, 88, 113, 163n, 274, 276n Page 5 of 21

 

Index Braudel, Fernand  115n, 145n Brunetière, Ferdinand  131 Cahiers de la Quinzaine, Les  22, 27n, 66, 73 capitalism  73–5, 243 Carnet de 1908, Le (Proust)  270 Carter, William C.  158n Carnevali, Barbara  269n Catholic Church  4, 21, 26, 34–8, 40 Cavell, Stanley  82 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand  179n, 187, 239–40 Certeau, Michel de  82, 115 Chambige, Henri  69 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste  114n charité  36n, 55–6, 65, 272, 277n Charle, Christophe  2n Charles Péguy et les ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ (Halévy)  22 Chateaubriand, François René de  25, 34, 127, 247 Chaudier, Stéphane  15, 36n, 37n, 90n, 157, 165n, 202–3, 207 Chêne, Janine  2n, 4n, 91n Chenut, Helen Harden  161n, 163n Cheyette, Bryan  92n chic  96, 271 Chroniques de la Grande Guerre (Barrès)  231 Church and State, Separation of  xiv, 4, 17, 21, 34, 37, 40–1, 75, 153, 267 Cicero  255n Clark, Kenneth  78 class antagonism  49–53, 110, 171, 230, 257, 259–60, 263, 266n in A l’ ombre  139, 166 in Sodome et Gomorrhe  189 in Le Temps retrouvé  230 in Un amour de Swann  89–90, 103 and race  65, 91, 119, 132, 133, 174, 260 class attitudes  5, 17, 64, 247, 259 in A l’ ombre  131, 133, 143–7, 154 in Halévy  68 in Sodome et Gomorrhe  192 class dialectic  17, 63, 76, 161, 167, 176, 196–7, 260 in A l’ombre  118, 122, 126, 129, 132, 137, 139, 151 in Albertine disparue  208, 222 in Combray  82 (p.290) in Sodome et Gomorrhe  181 class differences  70, 163, 166, 174–5, 182, 228, 275 in Un amour de Swann  97, 100 in A l’ ombre  113, 116, 147, 151, 154 class frames  157–8, 168, 186 class markers  85, 114–15, 118, 126, 137, 147, 156 language  156, 181, 184 class prejudice  86, 89, 108, 110, 114, 146, 179, 228 class solidarity  105, 114, 122, 159, 163, 186, 213, 249, 259 Page 6 of 21

 

Index class suspicion  83, 86–7, 122, 129, 160, 169, 182, 221n Classic, The (Prendergast)  64 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste  43, 55 collective identity  15, 114, 153, 175, 232, 270–4 against autonomy  32–3 and anti-Semitism  148 and Benda  253 bourgeois  153 in Le Temps retrouvé  232, 241–2, 245 and writer  170–1 collectivism  24, 28, 47, 51, 66n, 145 colonialism  20, 29, 51 Combray (Proust)  33–7, 43, 89n, 90, 167, 189, 228 bourgeoisie  43 conservative social order  45, 50, 60, 76–7, 84, 104, 111, 131, 172–3, 194–5, 204–6 domestic affairs  105, 167 hierarchy  165 material culture  105–6 militarism  75, 80–3 and Sand  13, 61 social hierarchy  78–80 war  75 Comédie humaine, La (Balzac)  127 commercial exchange  91, 94 commodification  93–4, 98n, 134, 158, 201, 206–7, 211, 221 commodity value  93, 94, 207 communism  26, 46–7, 258 Communist Party Manifesto  23 Compagnon, Antoine  58n, 68n, 73n, 110, 175, 209, 243 Compagnon du tour de France, Le (Sand)  62 Confédération Générale du Travail  26, 258 conservatism  46–8, 63, 84n, 105, 120n, 134, 221, 263, 268 aristocracy  134 bourgeois  51, 193–5 and Eliot  76 and Haussonville  54–7 and sexual liberation  219 Contre Sainte-Beuve (Proust)  25, 128n, 171n Correspondence (Proust) Barrès  22, 28, 29–30, 41 Berry  257–8 Billy  202 Faure, A.  269–70 Halévy  22, 27–8, 41, 66–71, 84, 247, 267 Hauser  200–2, 207, 211, 221 mother  69 Rivière  76 Coser, Lewis A.  147n, 150n Côté de Guermantes, Le (Proust)  xv, 3, 115n, 121, 161, 173, 189, 257 Page 7 of 21

 

Index army  83–4 class antagonism  264, 276 Frenchness  173 history  247 nostalgia  83 proletarian culture  163 race  133, 260 servants  262 Cotelle, Théodore  56n Courtois, Stéphane  258n Criticism and Ideology (Eagleton)  60 Croix de bois, Les (Dorgelès)  xiv, 111–12 cross-class relations  53, 135, 174, 182, 207, 237–8, 259, 262 A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs  166 and anti-Semitism  148 and education  65, 69–71 rivalry  114 and sex  62, 109, 191–2, 228 Temps retrouvé, Le  225, 226, 229 cultural Catholicism  35, 40 cultural domination  20, 167–8 cultural value  90, 97, 99, 104, 202 Culture of Redemption, The (Bersani)  234, 238n Daudet, Léon  267 Daumard, Adeline  145n, 240n Déclaration des droits de l’homme  59 déclassement  6, 59, 61–3, 67, 232, 249, 275 Degré zéro de l’écriture, Le (Barthes)  27 delegation  169–70, 208, 212, 216 delusion  90, 123–4, 204–5, 245, 253 democracy  xiii, 38–9, 43, 50, 53–8, 75n, 84, 143n, 157, 174n, 241, 268 democratic levelling  236–7, 241n (p.291) democratization  16, 58, 81, 126, 142–3, 165, 180, 188, 273 démopédie, la  75n determinism  151–2, 155, 174 Devine, Fiona  129n dictatorship of the proletariat  42, 260–1 Disciple, Le (Bourget)  39, 69 ‘Discours de Metz, Le’ (Barrès)  28–9, 31, 32, 33 disinterestedness  115, 143, 165, 195, 244n of intellectual  30, 96, 105, 240, 247, 253–4, 274 Disraeli, Benjamin  260n distancing technique  248 distinction  45, 48, 60–3, 73, 119, 122, 140, 188, 207 Distinction (Bourdieu)  85n, 93n, 94n, 105n, 109n, 213, 220 domestic servants  see also master-servant relations 122, 130, 160–1, 181–2, 208, 229 and envy  86–7 language  175–7, 180, 262–3 technophobia  183 Page 8 of 21

 

Index domestic service  71, 77, 84, 165, 168, 197, 223, 225 Dorgelès, Roland  xiv, 111–12 Dreyfus, Alfred  1, 3, 41, 51, 66, 75, 131, 267 Dreyfus Affair  1–7, 9, 16–17, 21, 24, 43, 52–3, 92n, 148n, 152, 171, 176, 190, 240n, 242, 245, 246n, 248, 260, 266–7, 274 Drumont, Edouard  92 Du côté de chez Swann (Proust)  xiv, xv, 4, 65n, 259 and Sand  12 traditionalism  33–5 Dubief, Henri  259n Dubois, Jacques  4, 83, 87, 91, 94, 119, 122, 125, 131, 137, 152n, 208, 221, 231, 232n, 268, 275 Dunwoodie, Peter  20n Durand, Jean Dominique  4n Durkheim, Emile  50n, 147, 150 Duval, Sophie  90n, 169n, 261–2 Eagleton, Terry  60 ecclesiastical heritage  34–7 Echo de Paris, L’  28, 57n economic liberalism  46, 76, 113 economic power  203, 20 economics and culture, conflation of  201–2, 211 educational change  58–9 egalitarianism  32, 63, 84, 131, 143, 195, 218, 229 Eliot, George  76 ‘Eloge de la mauvaise musique’ (Proust)  272–3 Eloge du bourgeois français (Johannet)  147n, 154 Elwitt, Sanford  43, 45, 84n, 265 engaged literature  254 Enright, D. J.  271n Épisode, Un (Halévy)  xiv, 27, 66–9, 74 equalization  108, 115, 178, 186, 234, 238 Erasmus  253 eroticism  see also sexuality 116, 119, 126, 141, 203, 275 and class  91, 93, 97, 109, 116, 162–3, 174 and economics  206 and labour  159, 227 and language  182 and sociality  119, 268, 271–3 and subordination  158–60, 162, 163 Essais sur le mouvement ouvrier en France (Halévy)  22, 144n Esther (Racine)  212–13 Etape, L’ (Bourget)  xiii, 48–50, 53–7, 60, 63–5, 69, 75, 84 ‘Eternelle idole, L’’ (Benda)  256 Ethics (Spinoza)  255 Eurydice  99 Exposition Universelle (1900)  184 Faguet, Emile  31 family history, bourgeois  249–50 Page 9 of 21

 

Index fashion  96, 108, 117, 179, 271 as international  32–3 and working class  161 Faure, Antoinette  269 Faure, Félix  269 Febvre, Lucien  67 Fénelon, Bertrand de  70, 143n fetishization  47, 104, 146, 159–60, 161 Figaro, Le  xiv, xv, 4, 22, 32, 33, 41, 48, 57–8, 84, 148n, 161, 167, 169, 170–1, 255, 256n Benda  254, 260 Church and State  34, 37, 38 dictatorship of the proletariat  260–1 fashion  32–3 literature and the nation  31 Parti de l’Intelligence, Le  19, 20–1, 23–4 social conservatism  45, 47, 56, 161 finance  200–2, 204–5, 207, 221–2 Finch (Winton), Alison  122n, 124n, 126n, 128n, 132, 146, 165n, 173n, (p.292) 175, 181n, 183n, 189n, 190n, 193n, 198n, 219n, 232n, 236n, 260n First World War  xiv, 17, 18, 23, 41, 42, 179, 225–7, 231, 243, 245, 248, 274–5 finance  201 manifestos  23 pacifism and nationalism  142 national pride  173 prostitution  18, 223 publication history  124, 126 social change  63, 132, 208, 232, 257–8 socio-economic issues  143 working-class soldiers  225–7 Flaubert, Gustave  12, 21, 40, 58n, 76, 115 Flers, Robert de  255 Foch, Marshal  258n Foire sur la place, La (Rolland)  25 Forgacs, David  224 Fors Clavigera (Ruskin)  78, 79 Fouchardière, G. de la  4n Fouillée, Alfred  58n, 64 France, Anatole  xiii, 2, 3, 5, 67, 253 France Juive, La (Drumont)  92 Frenchness  22, 33, 36n, 149, 172–3, 175 Freud, Sigmund  88n, 163n, 249–50 Furet, François  59n Gamble, Cynthia 135n Gauguin, Paul  97 Gaulois, Le  xiii, 54, 56, 148, 261 gender  18, 48, 62, 82, 114, 126, 133, 144, 156, 159, 161n hierarchy challenged  12, 208, 221 and idealism  62 and language  182 Page 10 of 21

 

Index stereotyping  29 and subordination  81, 126, 263 genealogy  141, 251 genetic criticism  17, 124, 126, 257 Genette, Gérard  18n Génie du Christianisme, Le (Chateaubriand)  34 Germanophilia  24, 228, 246 Germanophobia  19, 29, 41, 242, 253, 275 Gide, André  4 Girard, René  4, 17, 111n, 170, 212, 228n, 231 Giraudoux, Jean  256n Gramsci, Antonio  224 Grande Pitié des Eglises de France, La (Barrès)  34n, 35–7, 41 Guins, Raiford  177n Halévy, Daniel  xiv, 17, 19, 21–2, 24, 27–8, 41, 73–5, 84, 90, 91n, 144n, 247, 267 on Michelet  270–1 workers’ education  66–71 Halévy, Ludovic  66 Halévy, Jean-Pierre  73n Hardt, Michael  202n Hardy, Thomas  76 Harris, Ruth  3, 242 Hassine, Juliette  92n Hause, Steven C.  11n Hauser, Lionel  200–2, 206, 207, 211, 221 Haussonville, Othenin Comte d’ (and Comtesse)  xiii, xiv, 45–8, 54–8 liberalism  84 social conflict  261 workers’ education  64–6 Heath, Stephen  88 Hébert, Jacques  27 Henry, Anne  145n, 248n Henry, Emile  69 Hernani (Hugo)  64 hierarchies  see also master-servant relationship  23, 37, 45, 47, 63–4, 105, 110, 128, 143, 157, 165–6, 193, 195, 249, 276 and Benda  243 and capital  91 challenged  12, 26, 72, 145, 208, 221 accepted  40, 53, 80, 128, 169 and handwriting  218 imbricated  18 and language  184, 186–7 moral  98 multiple  133, 223–8, 225, 235 and eroticism  126, 271–2 stable  76–8 and talent  116 in Le Temps retrouvé  223–38 Page 11 of 21

 

Index historical materialism  167, 256–7 history, the Muse of  247–56 Hobsbawm, Eric  80, 263 Hollier, Denis  12n Homer  192n homosexuality  62, 158n, 190–1, 227 Horace  251 Hugo, Victor  10, 12, 64, 76, 127, 162, 226, 256n humanism  42, 66, 240 Humanité, L’  xv, 23, 24, 261 Hurcombe, Martin  112 ichthyology  140–1, 167 idealism  5, 6, 10, 12–13, 60n, 61–2, 72, 98, 141–2, 175 (p.293) Ideological State Apparatus 117 ideology as defined by Althusser  117, 123 and capital  202, 243 and chic  272 class mindsets  14–15, 17, 26, 42, 48, 91, 94, 96, 157, 165, 171, 247 cultural identity  17 as delusion  245, 253 and the Dreyfus Affair  4, 6–7, 13, 24, 243 language use  17, 182 literary-political debate  12, 60, 76 nationalist  24, 36, 42, 175, 243, 247 and nineteenth-century science  263 Third French Republic  50, 65–6, 80, 83, 142–3, 175, 197, 243, 248 Illusions perdues, Les (Balzac)  60 industrialist class  113, 184, 254 inheritance  105, 174, 250 intellectuel  2, 23–4, 64, 69, 131, 243 internationalism  23–6, 29, 32, 253 intolerance  39, 103, 138, 146–7, 239–40, 243 ‘Irréligion d’ Etat, L’’ (Proust)  xiii, 39–40 Jacques Vingtras (Vallès)  58, 60 Jameson, Fredric  201–2, 211 Jaurès, Jean  2, 8, 29, 46–7, 91, 258 jealousy  87, 88, 219, 220, 240 Jean Christophe (Rolland)  25–6, 267 Jean Santeuil (Proust)  xiii, 1–3, 5–8, 12, 14, 16, 24, 246n, 271n Affaire Marie  7–9 art as meliorative  109 biographical link  1, 8, 9, 14n idealism  13 narrator’s mother  9–11, 14 Jewishness  91–2, 152 Jews  3, 9n, 41, 52–3, 92, 148–9, 172, 175, 268 Johannet, René  154 Julian, Emperor  147n, 246 Page 12 of 21

 

Index Julliard, Jacques  67n Kemp, T.  65n, 76n Kolb, Philip  3n, 19n, 33n, 69n, 202n, 203n, 205, 258n, 270n Kristeva, Julia  92n Labrousse, Ernest  115n, 145n Ladenson, Elizabeth  182n La Fontaine, Jean de  221 Lafargue, Paul  163 laicity  4, 19, 39, 48, 148 Lamartine, Alphonse de  10, 30, 64, 256n Lamennais, Félicité Robert de  54 language  17, 27n, 31, 40, 56, 107, 115n, 154, 175–87, 275 lower‐class  199, 217 servants  259, 262–3, 265 Lazar, Marc  258n Lazard, Jean  69n Léautaud, Paul  67 Lebaudy, Jacques  117n Le Béguec, Gilles 46n, 66 Leconte de Lisle, Charles Marie  125 leisure, culture of  17, 27, 111–14, 116–18, 125, 135, 138, 151, 161 and hierarchy  45 and race  149 servants  82 upper-class  95, 105, 127n working class  161 Lemaître, Jules  56, 57n Lerminier, Jean-Louis Eugène  64 Le Bon, Gustave  50n Le Brun, Charles  105 Le Roux-Kieken, Aude  264n Lewis, Pericles  17, 21, 25, 32, 274–5 liberalism  84, 275 Lindenberg, Daniel  2n, 91n linguistics  176, 179, 186, 187 literary canon  31, 60, 128, 142 literary culture  63, 69, 143 broadening participation  71–2 and class  26–7, 127–8 Littérature et le Mal, La (Bataille)  1, 4n, 8n, 9n, 13n Louis XIV  262n love  see also eroticism, jealousy, marriage, prostitution 25, 41, 65n, 85, 95, 97, 99, 103–5, 157, 182, 229, 231, 270 and subjectivism  41 and materialism  165, 206, 208–11, 222 and social analysis  269 Lully, Jean-Baptiste  105 Luttes et Problèmes (Halévy)  67n, 69 Machiavelli, Niccolò  243n Page 13 of 21

 

Index Madame Bovary (Flaubert)  60, 115 Mahuzier, Brigitte  94, 143, 174n, 215n Making of the Third French Republic, The (Elwitt)  43, 45n, 84n, 265n Mâle, Emile  173 Mallarmé, Stéphane  211, 221 manual and intellectual workers, fraternalism  64, 71 manual/mental division  18, 64–5, 71, 78, 135, 171 (p.294) manual work  57, 76, 79, 136, 156, 158–61, 171, 218–19, 223, 227, 261 Margueritte, Paul  31 ‘Mariage de Michelet, Le’ (Halévy)  271 marriage  11, 12, 13–14, 172, 233 cross-class  48, 53, 61–2, 207, 248–9 master-servant relations  see also domestic servants, hierarchies 160–1, 178, 181, 186, 194–5, 208–22, 229, 260–1 in A l’ ombre  115, 132 and capital  16 in Combray  77–8 language  178, 183, 265 in La Prisonnnière  199 in Le Temps retrouvé  229 material culture  104–6, 158 and literature  170–1 materialism  23, 39, 96, 98, 105, 106, 134, 165, 200, 202–3, 208–11, 222, 243n Maurras, Charles  21, 64, 246, 267 medievalism  33, 38, 76, 156–7, 173, 251, 264 Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Chateaubriand)  25 memory  11, 16, 25, 28, 33, 34, 38, 66, 81, 92, 127, 141, 180, 205, 219, 241, 249–50 Mercier, Lucien  27, 67n meritocracy  48–9 Mézières, Alfred  32 Michelet, Jules  162, 247, 250, 252, 270, 271, 273 Michelet, Athénaïs, Mme  270 middle classes  see bourgeoisie militancy  5, 259, 263 militarism  see also war 7, 29, 51, 80–2, 83, 243, 246, 255, 267 Miller, William Ian  174n Milly, Jean  171n Minima Moralia (Adorno)  226, 230, 238n, 244n, 273n misrecognition  112, 151, 188, 190 mission civilisatrice  20 Molière  200 monarchist cause  21, 54, 56, 66, 215 money  see also capitalism, finance 87, 113, 124, 145, 165 and sex  209–11, 214, 217, 227 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de  17, 242, 253 moral relativism  32 Moriarty, Michael  88n, 96, 105n, 140n ‘Mort des Cathédrales, La’ (Proust)  xiv, 4n, 37–8, 40 mourning  180–1, 202, 249–50, 263–5 Page 14 of 21

 

Index mundus inversus  90, 262 Musset, Alfred de  128 Nahmias, Albert  103n Naquet, Alfred  12n narcissism  18, 223, 234, 238, 264–5 nation  see also Church and State, Separation of and Barrès, Maurice and duty  19 and ecclesiastical heritage  34–5, 37, 40 and déclassement  63, 232 and culture of leisure  116 and imperial expansion  117 and individual psychology  231, 244, 270–1 and le corps-France  244 and literature  16, 19, 22, 28, 30–2, 246 and meritocracy  48 and the military  80, 83 and narration  22 as object of desire  271 and primary education  59, 65 and race  20–21 and regeneration  41 and social voluntarism  145 and war  71, 74, 243, 268 national identity  5, 42, 80, 83, 179 national psyche  241–2 nationalism  see also patriotism 25, 34, 142, 179, 226, 252–3, 269, 276 and anti-Semitism  6 and Barrès  34 and Benda  243, 246–7 and literature  19–20, 22, 30–1 rejection of  17, 42, 179, 239 nature  124–5, 126–7, 158, 164, 206 new rich  118–19, 123 Nordlinger, Marie  xiii, 73 nouveaux riches  see new rich Odyssey (Homer)  192 ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’ (Ruskin)  71–2, 74 old age  14, 231, 237–8 opus francigenum  172–3 Orientalism  29, 92, 165 Orléanist movement  xiii, 46, 54, 57, 66, 84, 269 Orpheus  99 Ouston, Philip  35 Ozouf, Jacques  59n pacifism  142, 254, 267 Panama Scandal  1, 7–8 Panzac, Daniel  10n (p.295) Paradis, Clément  165n, 202–3, 207 Pareto, Vilfredo  50n Page 15 of 21

 

Index Parrinder, Patrick  22–3 Parti de l’Intelligence, Le  xv, 19–24, 28, 41–2, 66, 239, 267 particularism  25, 26, 31 Pastiches et Mélanges (Proust)  xv, 22, 25n, 40, 213n, 258 paternalism  49, 103, 122, 130, 143, 166, 195, 225, 263 Haussonville  46, 55, 57, 65, 84 Ruskin  71, 75n patriotic art  28–9, 31–2 patriotism  see also nationalism 23, 41, 80, 84, 111n, 157, 191, 196, 225, 236, 237, 246, 253, 258, 274 St Paul  52n Péguy, Charles  22, 66, 73, 246 Péladan, Joséphin  34n Perrot, Michelle  115n petite patrie  33 petrification  156–7 peuple, le  8, 26, 67, 70, 153, 193, 198, 226, 243, 273 philosophico-financière  200–1 Picquart, Georges  1–4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 131n, 266 Plato  102, 122, 240, 253 popular music  272–4 popular taste  101, 114–15, 272–3 power nexus  85, 90, 169, 248, 260 and language  184–5 Prendergast, Christopher  6n, 64 Prévotat, Jacques  46n, 66 Preuves, Les (Jaurès)  2 Prisonnière, La (Proust)  xv, 100n, 152n, 170, 183, 212 cross-class parallels  199 disturbed hierarchy  213 materialism  165 physical labour  162–3 progressivism  19, 53, 58, 71, 132, 145, 257, 266 proletariat  see working class Propos de peintres (Blanche)  48 prostitution  18, 97–9, 106, 140–1, 146, 164, 180, 190, 227–9 Proust, Adrien, Docteur  xiii, 9–10, 14n, 193 Proust, Jeanne, Mme  xiii, xiv, 9, 14n, 46 co-translator  73 conservatism  193, 268, 269 Proust, Marcel  see also specific topics and works Anglophilia  76n evolving attitudes to sociality  5, 42, 125–6 family  9, 49 finances  200–1, 203 and history  247 Légion d’honneur  xv, 267 May Day protests  xv, 257 politics  38, 75 Page 16 of 21

 

Index Prix Goncourt  xiv, 111, 248 publication history  xiv–xv, 4, 33, 259 provincial bourgeoisie  114, 118, 147–55, 172n, 213, 215 public space  106–7, 163, 188 Pugh, Anthony  33n race  20–1, 41, 149, 151–2, 155, 167, 171–2, 239, 268 Jews  91–2, 149 and Barrès  31 as class  50, 59, 133, 196 racial stereotyping  29, 51, 92, 175 Racine, Jean  54–5, 105n, 186, 198, 201, 211, 212, 213, 221, 229 Ravel, Jean-François  7n reader, bourgeois  170 reading  12–13, 26–7, 58, 71–2, 76–9, 82, 105, 170, 236, 241, 271, 276 Rebérioux, Madeleine  47n Reinach, Joseph  41, 242, 260–1 relativization  7, 13, 45, 108, 110, 178, 184–5, 213, 221, 274 rentier class  94–5, 201, 202, 208–9, 221 Revue des deux mondes, La  64 Rey, Pierre-Louis  113, 118n Rioux, Jean-Pierre  254n Rivarol, Antoine  59, 70 Rivière, Jacques  76, 267 Rogers, Brian G.  146n Rolland, Romain  xiv, xv, 23–4, 25–7, 142, 254, 267 Rosanvallon, Pierre  50, 57, 58n, 61, 64n, 165–6 Rosengarten, Frank  160 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  270n Rouge et le Noir, Le (Stendhal)  60 Roussin, Philippe  179n, 185n, 187n Rouvier, Maurice  7–8 Ruskin, John  xiii, xiv, 9, 17, 71–6, 84, 171, 202, 212n, 248n harmony  135 work and privilege  78–9 Russia  xiv, 26, 149, 190–1, 200–1, 257, 260 1917 Revolution  257 (p.296) Sacre du citoyen, Le (Rosanvallon)  50n, 57, 58n, 64n, 164n Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin  54, 64, 128n, 171n Saint-Simon, Duc de  105, 194–5, 204, 239 ‘Salon de la Comtesse d’Haussonville, Le’ (Proust)  xiv, 45–7, 54, 57 Sand, George  11, 12, 60n, 98n idealism  61–2, 63 in Recherche  12–13 Sartre, Jean-Paul  93–4 Saussure, Ferdinand de  185 Savage, Mike  129n ‘Savetier et le financier, Le’ (La Fontaine)  221–2 savoir-vivre  94, 119 scepticism  108, 240n, 268–9, 272 Page 17 of 21

 

Index Scheherazade  72 Scheurer-Kestner, Auguste  2 Schiach, Morag  177, 178n Schmid, Marion  viii, 21n, 75n, 92n, 244–5, 257, 267n Schor, Naomi  12, 60n, 61–2, 63, 98n sectarianism  21, 36, 42, 103, 154, 179, 243, 257n, 267 sentimentalism  30, 97, 152, 160, 181, 196, 198, 228, 272 ‘Servants’ Wages’ (Ruskin)  78 Sesame and Lilies (Ruskin)  xiv, 71–2, 73n, 74, 75n sexual and economic profligacy  94 sexual liberation  92, 219–20 sexuality  see also eroticism 17, 18, 156 and power  126 Shakespeare, William  261 Sheringham, Michael  82–3, 139n Skinner, Quentin  65–6 Siddal, Elizabeth  270n Sirinelli, Jean-François  46n, 254n social adaptation  112, 137 social analysis  15–16, 22n, 79, 122, 125, 167, 269 social class and habitats  100–1 social contestation  14, 18, 120n, 186, 227, 276 social dialectic  17–18, 82, 122, 126, 132, 137, 139n, 167, 181, 196–7, 260 social emancipation  16, 141, 146, 160, 208 social inversion  106 social mobility  48–50, 54–5, 60, 63–4, 111, 118, 132, 207, 266 social morality  146 social value  85–6, 93, 119, 130, 188 socialism  xiii, 1, 5, 8, 12, 40, 55, 66, 72–3, 128n, 130, 167n, 226, 241 Socialisme et Charité (Haussonville)  46n, 55, 261n Socialist Party  47, 258 sociality  13, 16, 18, 69, 82–3, 155, 171, 174n, 206, 253, 260, 275 in A l’ombre  110–12, 116, 118, 119–20, 124, 150 in Un amour de Swann  89–90, 106 baroque  131n and eroticism  137, 268, 271–3 feudal  237 proletarian  69 in Le Temps retrouvé  223, 227, 234, 238 socio-economic conditions  17, 23, 95, 142–3, 164, 209, 257–9 Sociologie et Littérature (Bourget)  43n, 50n, 53n, 54n, 56n, 57n, 59n, 65n, 70n, 84 Socrates  1, 122 Sodome et Gomorrhe (Proust)  xv, 110, 193 brothel  190 conservatism  193–5 language  175–7, 180 servants  181–2 social-class antagonism  50–3 Page 18 of 21

 

Index working-class aspiration  189 solidarity  55–6, 84, 105, 114, 122, 150, 159, 163, 186, 213, 249, 259 Sorel, Georges  73n, 239 Souday, Paul  267n Souvenir Français, Le  28, 33 Spinoza, Baruch  240, 255–6 Sprinker, Michael  84n, 120n, 123 Staël, Mme de  46, 47, 48 Stendhal  4, 31, 76, 208, 231 Sternhell, Zeev  4n Stoddart, Judith  79 subaltern  see also cross-class relations, hierarchy  9, 16, 81, 83n, 115, 176, 189, 196, 222, 230, 263 aspiration  119 assertive  266, 275 biological inferiority  260 and Bourget  49 and eroticism  109, 159, 162, 174 framed  156, 157 and idealization  166 language  120 and Ruskin  74–5, 84, 171n and sexual licence  220 and social superior  52, 199, 225, 228 (p.297) Tadié, Jean-Yves  3n, 4, 8n, 17, 22n, 113n, 124, 143n, 242, 243n, 247, 248, 257n, 275 Taine, Hippolyte  59, 152 talent  10, 55, 60, 116, 121, 268 and class  61, 230 Tarde, Gabriel  50n, 145n, 174n taste  3, 52n, 105, 123n, 134, 144, 188, 190–1, 213 and Benda  152 bourgeois  77, 97, 123n, 266 and class  26–7, 107–8, 271–2 language  20, 225 Parisian-centred  272 and social apartheid  139 social critique  109–10, 140n as social marker  85, 96–9, 101–4, 114–15, 119 Tempest, The (Shakespeare)  261 Temps, Le  28, 29, 33n, 51 Temps retrouvé, Le (Proust)  xv, 14, 15n, 18, 26, 30, 43, 73n, 141, 245, 257 aristocracy  47–8 art  24, 28, 211 class transformations  112 group antagonism  230, 242 hierarchies  223–38 literature as true life  72 nation  145, 244, 246 Page 19 of 21

 

Index nation as race  21 national and individual psychology  241 psychological and social readings  232–4 and Rolland  25 and Sand  12–13 social change  45, 90 subjectivism  41–2 tempus fugit topos  16, 151 war  225–31, 248 Third French Republic  xiii, 53, 56–9, 61, 63, 65–6, 73n, 75n, 104, 110, 148, 153, 155, 197, 230, 250, 253 army  83–4 class tensions  63, 276 bourgeois hegemony  16, 248, 265–6 power structures  43–5, 260–1 provincial life  79–80 race  21, 175 social evolution  48–50, 56–9, 61, 125 social particularity  256 socio-economic factors  142–3 tempus fugit topos  16, 151, 237 Todorov, Tzvetan  18n Tolstoy, Leo  3, 253 traditionalism  33–4 Trahison des clercs, La (Benda)  17, 42, 154, 239, 240, 242–4, 246n, 253–5, 273n truth  1–3, 8, 9, 11, 33, 209n, 245, 246n, 249, 267 and prejudice  240 Ulysses  192 uncontested social order  84 Union Sacrée, L’  242 universalism  142 Université Populaire  17, 22, 27–8, 41, 63–71, 84 Unto this Last (Ruskin)  74 urban geography  100–1, 112, 170, 223 suburbs  99, 100n, 163, 164, 192 Vallès, Jules  58–9 Valman, Nadia  92n value  19, 93–4, 107–8, 164, 206–7 aesthetic  93, 139 cultural  97, 99, 104, 202 social  86, 90, 119, 130, 188 Vauvenargues, Marquis de  246n Vigny, Alfred de  127–8, 226, 246n Voltaire  17, 242 Voyage au bout de la nuit (Céline)  187, 240 vulgarity  12–13, 93, 102, 127, 145, 147, 182, 184, 230, 236, 246 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer  11n war  see also militarism 225–7, 274, 275 and capitalism  74–5 Page 20 of 21

 

Index Watt, Adam  viii Watteau, Antoine  24, 47 Weber, Eugen  80, 83 Weeks, Kathi  202n Weil, Jeanne  see Proust, Jeanne, Mme Weil, Louis  xiv, 48–9 Whistler, James McNeill  114n Willard, Claude  115n Wilson, Stephen  92n, 148n Winock, Michel  67n, 243 women  6, 93 civilizing influence  144–5 emancipation of  10–12, 13 Oriental  29n, 92 rejection of patriarchy  11 retreat to private sphere  13 self-deception  136 subordination  98n, 107, 165 work ethic  44–5 workers’ education  see also Université Populaire 64–5, 67 working class  xiv, 5, 8, 15n, 57–9, 63, 70, 101, 144–5, 261 (p.298) elite ignorance of  67–8 eroticized  107, 158–64, 219, 228 language  185–7, 265 literary representation  62 as le nombre  50, 53 radicalization  166, 258, 260, 263 reading tastes  26 sociality  120–1 soldiers  225–7 unintellectual  58–9 working-class culture  101, 161n, 163–4, 189, 261 fear of  101, 138, 218–20 xenophobia  see also Germanophobia 24, 41, 42, 267, 268, 271, 275 Zaragoza Cruz, Omayra  177n Zethos  135 Zola, Emile  xiii, 3, 6, 64, 71, 101, 131n, 187, 230, 266

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