What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk 9780226816685

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What Proust Heard

What Proust Heard Novels and the Ethnography of Talk

Michael Lucey

The University of  Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2022 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2022 Printed in the United States of America 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22   1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81665-­4 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81667-­8 (paper) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­81668-­5 (e-­book) DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226816685.001.0001 The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the University of California, Berkeley, toward the publication of this book. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lucey, Michael, 1960– author. Title: What Proust heard : novels and the ethnography of talk / Michael Lucey. Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2021029494 | ISBN 9780226816654 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226816678 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226816685 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Proust, Marcel, 1871–1922. À la recherche du temps perdu. | Speech acts (Linguistics) in literature. Classification: lcc PQ2631.R63 A82866 2022 | DDC 843/.912—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021029494 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

A Note on Citations vii Introduction  1

1  •  Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist  45 Interlude: Talk in Balzac and Eliot  108

2  •  Idiotic Speech (Acts?) and the Form of In Search of Lost Time  123 Interlude: Harmonizing Habitus in Woolf  169

3  •  Proust and Bourdieu: Distinction and Form  185 Interlude: Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  220

Conclusion: Animation and Statistics 261 Acknowledgments  297 Notes  301 Bibliography  321 Index  333

A Note on Citations

When citations from Proust are given in French, the parenthetical reference will be to the four-­volume Pléiade edition edited by Jean-­Yves Tadié. References to the English translation will be to the Penguin edition edited by Christopher Prendergast. Parenthetical references will refer to the individual English volumes as follows: Swann, Shadow, Guermantes, Sodom, Prisoner/ Fugitive, and Finding. (At the time I was writing this book, only the first four volumes were available in US editions, so for the concluding volumes I refer to the UK editions, in which The Prisoner and The Fugitive are included in a single volume.) For details on all these editions, see the bibliography. I will occasionally have silently modified the English translations to bring out a particular nuance. Because the analyses in this volume depend so much on linguistic features that are elusive in translation, I have provided the French of many citations along with the English translation. If no published English translation of a French text is cited, the translation is my own. Ellipses in square brackets are ones I have added. Otherwise, they are original.

Introduction

In Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, utterances are sometimes described as if they were material objects zooming through space. Sound has a material aspect, of course, as a vibration or a wave form passing through a medium of some kind, but the force given to utterances in Search (as I shall refer to it) comes, as we shall see, not from their material aspect, but from their social one. I begin here with an example from toward the end of the novel’s first volume. Our very young hero is in the park and hears one girl cry out to another: “Good-­bye, Gilberte, I’m going home, don’t forget we’re coming to your house tonight after dinner.” The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcefully the existence of the girl it designated in that it did not merely name her, as one speaks of someone who is absent, but addressed her directly; thus it passed close by me, in action so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and the approach of its target;—­transporting along with it, I felt, the knowledge, the notions concerning her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me, but to the friend who was calling her, every­ thing that, as she uttered it, she saw again or at least possessed in her memory, of their daily companionship, of the visits they paid to each other, of the whole of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible and all the more painful to me for being conversely so familiar and so malleable for that happy girl who brushed me with it without my being able to penetrate it and hurled it up in the air in a shout. (Swann, 410–­11) (“Adieu, Gilberte, je rentre, n’oublie pas que nous venons ce soir chez toi

2  Introduction

après dîner.” Ce nom de Gilberte passa près de moi, évoquant d’autant plus l’existence de celle qu’il désignait qu’il ne la nommait pas seulement comme un absent dont on parle, mais l’interpellait; il passa ainsi près de moi, en action pour ainsi dire, avec une puissance qu’accroissait la courbe de son jet et l’approche de son but;—­transportant à son bord,  je le sentais, la connaissance, les notions qu’avait de celle à qui il était adressé, non pas moi, mais l’amie qui l’appelait, tout ce que, tandis qu’elle le prononçait, elle revoyait ou du moins, possédait en sa mémoire, de leur intimité quotidienne, des visites qu’elles se faisaient l’une chez l’autre, de tout cet inconnu encore plus inaccessible et plus douloureux pour moi d’être au contraire si familier et si maniable pour cette fille heureuse qui m’en frôlait sans que j’y puisse pénétrer et le jetait en plein air dans un cri. [1:387])

The narrator speaks as if it is only the single word, Gilberte, that is doing all this work as it zooms past him, but in fact his commentary focuses on the work being done by the entire utterance in which the proper name is embedded. The utterance is described as a particle on a curved trajectory from utterer to recipient, but with the curve perhaps somehow inflected by the interest of the boy who overhears it. Yet this mobile utterance is more than simply a particle. It is a vehicle of some kind. It has passengers on board. It carries, in the narrator’s mind, the traces of the personal history of two people and the promise of their ongoing association. In his commentary, the narrator imagines (or describes his younger self imagining) the mental world from which the utterance arises, elements of which are shared, he assumes, by the speaker and the addressee. Out of the utterance, he constructs, we could say, invoking a term from Charles Sanders Peirce, an interpretant of his own.1 He takes the utterance up and imagines its significance. In constructing that interpretant, he makes use of some implicit semiotic theorizing. He understands the sign formed by the utterance to be able to do its work because of all the ancillary information to which it is able to allude (indexically), not because of anything the words might mean directly. He ascribes to the utterance, we might say, borrowing a phrase from Michael Silverstein, an indexical penumbra.2 In general, Proust’s narrator is hypersensitive to the social indexicality that occurs as people use language, social indexical features of language being those features of an utterance that point to social or cultural structures or concepts or information that are immanent in a speech situation or that exist in some virtual area around it, and that the utterance somehow invokes or calls into salience for at least some of the participants in that situation.

Introduction  3

The narrator’s younger self grasps some of the social forcefulness of language, the sociocultural work that it performs as people use it. Somehow, as he understands it, an utterance invokes some part of a given social universe, almost makes it materialize. The cry of the name Gilberte, in the context of the particular utterance in which it occurs, produces a small sociocultural happening, one that could be compared to a bit of weather: letting float in the air the delicious emanation it [the name Gilberte] had released, by touching them so precisely, from several invisible points in the life of Mlle Swann, from the evening that was to come, such as it might be, after dinner, at her house;—­forming, in its celestial passage among the children and the nursemaids, a little cloud of precious color, like that which, billowing over a lovely garden by Poussin, reflects minutely like a cloud in an opera, full of horses and chariots, some manifestation of the life of the gods. (Swann, 411) (laissant déja flotter dans l’air l’émanation délicieuse qu’il [the name Gilberte] avait fait se dégager, en les touchant avec précision, de quelques points invisibles de la vie de Mlle Swann, du soir qui allait venir, tel qu’il serait, après dîner, chez elle,—­formant, passager céleste au milieu des enfants et des bonnes, un petit nuage d’une couleur précieuse, pareil à celui qui, bombé au-­dessus d’un beau jardin du Poussin, reflète minutieusement comme un nuage d’opéra, plein de chevaux et de chars, quelque apparition de la vie des dieux. [1:387])

The narrator suggests an utterance’s participation in and contribution to a longer social sequence; he perceives how it displays its links to past events and future expectations; he experiences how it asserts and maintains the existence of social relations (built up over time) that are the conditions for the utterance’s very existence, but also that the utterance acts to project into the future. Those horses and chariots, painted onto or attached to scenic clouds at the opera and mechanically projected through the air by stagehands, are, we might assume, the image the narrator offers us of social indexical information being carried along by an utterance.3 We should note one more aspect of this marvelous description: in being so entranced by and providing such a rich account of the indexical penumbra of the utterance he overhears, the narrator/hero (that distinction will figure frequently in the pages ahead) also indexes something about his own relation to language, his own linguistic predispositions or habitus, his ways of listening, what he hears, his forms of interest and of vulnerability. It is not just anyone

4  Introduction

who would have noticed “the whole of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible and all the more painful to me for being conversely so familiar and so malleable for that happy girl,” would have found a way of describing it, and would have characterized his relationship to this instance of the indexical work of language as a painful one. Let me start again, in a slightly different manner. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time shows a sustained and conceptually rich interest in what language is, and, in particular, in what happens when people use it. The first kind of interest might be called linguistic; the second, linguistic anthropological. There is, of course, some common ground between these two areas of interest. A good number of critics have explored various facets of Proust’s interest in and relationship to language and linguistics. Such work has focused variously on topics such as Proust’s knowledge of the field of linguistics as it was being developed by his contemporaries (a topic I will touch upon a number of times in the pages ahead);4 Proust’s (and his characters’) interest in etymology and in proper names;5 Proust’s attention to the speech idioms and mannerisms of his characters—­Françoise in particular, especially in her use of patois;6 or overviews of the relevance of a number of linguistic subdisciplines to Proust’s endeavor.7 My interest in the chapters ahead will have more to do with Proust’s interest in language-­in-­use as a social activity, in language-­in-­use as the crucial medium in which certain kinds of acts occur, as the medium, in particular, in which much of culture is enacted. (Often, instead of saying “language-­in-­use,” I will, when it is a question of verbal utterances, say “talk.” Proust’s novel is, after all, full of talk. But language is in use even when we write, so the two terms are not coterminous.) In all of this, Proust will come to seem like a linguistic anthropologist (a bit ahead of his time), and the three sections of the first chapter of this book will develop the implications of that observation at some length. The ways of being attentive to language-­in-­use that linguistic anthropologists have developed are notably different from those most commonly seen in literary and cultural studies presently. While it is probably possible to draw this contrast too sharply, at least at the outset of this book, it seems worthwhile to insist on distinctive differences. I will mention just a few facets of a linguistic anthropological attitude toward language here, the first of which is an interest in we might call multifunctionality—­the idea that language-­in-­use accomplishes multiple things at once, and that there tends to be, in the way language use is commonly perceived (but not by Proust), a bias toward its semantico-­ referential function (words relating to things in the world, information being

Introduction  5

directly communicated through words) that means that often insufficient attention is paid to other tasks being accomplished or other work being performed in the use of language.8 Understanding the social pragmatics that are in play when language is used, and that happen often or mostly through non-­ semantico-­referential channels, is one of the major tasks linguistic anthropology has set for itself. And understanding how social pragmatics unfold in the co-­construction of an interactive text by multiple parties results in a form of linguistic anthropological attention to a kind of social poetics with its own particular formal and compositional features, varying from context to context.9 The multifunctionality of the semiotic system we call language, the features of that semiotic system that allow it to harbor a social pragmatics through which culture is produced and reproduced, and the attention to the poetics through which multiple agents co-­construct an interactive text that coheres and accomplishes simultaneously an unspecified number of goals, these we could take as three forms of attention central to the discipline of linguistic anthropology. The mode of indexicality, whereby a sign signals to various culturally situated persons the contextual existence of something (e.g., some shared form of conceptual knowledge) relevant to it, has been a key feature of linguistic anthropological thought, and linguistic anthropologists have shown indexicality to function in language much more widely than the simple indexes of time, place, and person that many of us in literary and cultural studies are trained to recognize. Nonreferential, social indexicality happens, in the words of Silverstein, when an index, “independent of any referential speech events that may be occurring, signal[s] some particular value of one or more contextual variables.”10 The utterance from Proust’s novel with which I began is rife with nonreferential, social indexicality, and the novel’s commentary on that utterance, focuses on the social indexical aspect of the meaning being carried by that multichannel utterance. When we hear someone speak to someone else, we hear more than what they are talking about, we hear something of who they are in the social world or who they wish to be, something of who they are or wish to be in relation to the other persons in the speech situation in which they are participating, and even, in a larger frame, we hear something about the range of extant genres through which people conceive of, enact, and manipulate their relations to others in the social universe in question. All of these topics I will be examining in more detail in my first chapter. How did Proust become a novelist so closely aligned to a linguistic anthropological mindset, so closely attuned to this way of  listening to language? I will offer some speculations about this in chapters 1 and 2. But another feature of What Proust Heard has to do with a general preoccupation with this way of

6  Introduction

listening to language that can be found in a certain set of novels, or perhaps a certain kind of novel, or a certain tradition of novel writing. So partly, I am arguing, Proust’s linguistic anthropological mindset arises from the fact that, as a novelist, he was fascinated by other novelists who listened to language in a way similar to the one he arrived at, and who, in their novels, found ways to demonstrate their insights into the functioning of language-­in-­use they perceived. I will pause at various moments in the pages ahead to look briefly at moments from Balzac, Eliot, and Dostoevsky (novelists Proust read attentively) that can help us to understand how the novel itself could become an instrument for linguistic anthropological analysis, as well as at novelists such as Woolf and Sarraute (who shared Proust’s interest in the use of language and were also among his readers). I will also spend some time with Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy. I am not aware of any direct relation between Cusk and Proust, but Cusk’s trilogy certainly provides a useful spur to linguistic anthropological reflections. I am tempted to say that these novelists are in conversation with each other. “The novel as a whole is an utterance,” Bakhtin helpfully noted, “just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letters are.”11 Novelists talk back to other novelists by way of novels, we might say. If we can learn to hear them doing so, we then become capable of perceiving shared preoccupations that result in shared compositional features. We can then gather certain novels together in our thinking, seeing a generic relationship between them and also between them and linguistic anthropological forms of thought and analysis. All these novelists show a keen interest (without, obviously, having the terminology I use at their disposal) in both the social indexical functioning of language-­in-­use and in the different linguistic predispositions and competencies (I will, following Bourdieu, use the term habitus in this context) of speakers. They develop various narrative devices or formal and compositional novelistic features to explore both social indexicality and habitus. There is a productive dialogue that can be created between linguistic anthropology and Bourdieu’s sociology of culture, a dialogue I will pursue across the chapters of What Proust Heard and in the interludes between the chapters. It is tempting to speculate that Proust heard plenty of talk about the field of linguistics in salons he visited and in other conversational contexts with friends and acquaintances. In the pages ahead, we will encounter evidence from Search that this was the case, and indeed I will look at one piece of that evidence in a paragraph or two. Linguistic anthropology, with its interest in what happens in scenes of talk, in how immanent cultural concepts emerge in such scenes, in how social indexicality, dependent on the co-­construction of

Introduction  7

a shared context, functions or fails to do so, is a much later and so far largely a North American development (it really gets going in the 1960s and 1970s). Earlier versions of some of its insights were nonetheless apparent in the work of linguists and other thinkers from the first decades of the twentieth century. There is plenty of evidence that Proust listened attentively, ethnographically, to people talking, and to more than simply what it was that they were saying. Joseph Vendryes comments in 1940: “An eager listener and recorder, Proust notes in passing everything that he hears; he remembers intonations, different kinds of sentence rhythms, the smallest verbal tic. What is important for a psychologist is less what people are saying than the manner in which they say it.”12 This distinction between manner and matter is explicitly present in Search, and the narrator will have significant things to say about the distinction, as we shall see. The Princesse Marthe Bibesco also describes Proust’s ability to mime people he had been talking with: Marcel Proust launched himself into the recounting of a farcical conversation that he had just had with a woman of letters from abroad. —­How do you write, Monsieur Proust? —­ . . . —­That is, is it easy for you to write? —­No, Madam, I write very little, badly, rarely, with great difficulty, almost never . . . —­Ah! she says, not at all like me, then! For me, it’s like water from a spring . . . , etc., etc., etc. Then, for a quarter of an hour she explained to him how she wrote without Marcel Proust losing a single word; he reproduced it all for us, including the accent. I saw him caught up in his comedic genius; for the first time, I heard him laugh . . .13

Yet more than just recording exactly and mimicking precisely the speech of others, Proust and his novel also seem able to decompose speech analytically into multiple channels (we could call them semiotic partials), each carrying different kinds of information. Consider the way the novel, late in the first volume, compares the speech of Charles Swann and the Princesse des Laumes, the future Duchesse de Guermantes: But Swann and the Princesse had the same way of looking at the small things of life, the effect of which—­unless it was the cause—­was a great similarity in

8  Introduction

their ways of expressing themselves and even in their pronunciation. No one noticed the resemblance because their two voices were so utterly unlike. But if in one’s imagination one managed to divest Swann’s remarks of the sonority in which they were enveloped, of the mustache from under which they issued, one realized that these were the same sentences, the same inflections, the turns of phrase belonging to the Guermantes set. When it came to the important things, Swann and the Princesse did not have the same ideas about anything. (Swann, 354–­55) (Mais Swann et la princesse avaient une même manière de juger les petites choses qui avait pour effet—­à moins que ce ne fût pour cause—­une grande analogie dans la façon de s’exprimer et jusque dans la prononciation. Cette ressemblance ne frappait pas parce que rien n’était plus différent que leurs deux voix. Mais si on parvenait par la pensée à ôter aux propos de Swann la sonorité qui les enveloppait, les moustaches d’entre lesquelles ils sortaient, on se rendait compte que c’étaient les mêmes phrases, les mêmes inflexions, le tour de la coterie Guermantes. Pour les choses importantes, Swann et la princesse n’avaient les mêmes idées sur rien. [1:336])

In the span of four sentences, the novel distinguishes between vocal register and timbre (“sonority”), meaning (“ideas”), the effect of the physical appearance of the person speaking (“mustache”) on the listener, pronunciation, prosody (“inflections”), and register in the sociolinguistic sense (“the turns of phrase belonging to the Guermantes set”). Swann and Oriane are aligned, as far as their opinions go, on small issues, but not large ones. They differ as to their vocal register and their appearance. Those differences would most likely cause an untrained observer to miss the fact that their pronunciation, prosody, and social register resemble each other. Some ear training of the narrator here has clearly taken place, some analytical capacity has been cultivated.14 The novel’s and the narrator’s ways of paying attention to utterances show an interest in language that goes well beyond an interest in what is sometimes taken to be its most basic communicative (semantic) function. It listens—­or suggests ways of listening—­to language abstractly, we might say, and for many different purposes. Most people do listen to language on multiple levels, of course. “It is because it is learned early and piecemeal, in constant association with the color and the requirements of actual contexts, that language, in spite of its quasi-­ mathematical form, is rarely a purely referential organization,” wrote Edward Sapir in an essay from 1933. He continues:

Introduction  9

Ordinary speech is directly expressive and the purely formal pattern of sounds, words, grammatical forms, phrases and sentences are always to be thought of as compounded by intended or unintended symbolisms of expression, if they are to be understood fully from the standpoint of behavior. The choice of words in a particular context may convey the opposite of what they mean on the surface. The same external message is differently interpreted according to whether the speaker has this or that psychological status in his personal relations, or whether such primary expressions as those of affection or anger or fear may inform the spoken words with a significance which completely transcends their normal value. [ . . . ] The fact that almost any word or phrase can be made to take on an infinite variety of meanings seems to indicate that in all language behavior there are intertwined, in enormously complex patterns, isolable patterns of two distinct orders. These may be roughly defined as patterns of reference and patterns of expression.15

This is an early statement by a linguist of what linguistic anthropologists characterize as language’s multifunctionality, thanks to which any utterance can be caught up in a number of simultaneous semiotic projects, with what we could call “analytically separable partials of semiosis” coexisting within that same utterance and contributing to one or another or several of those projects, but not always the same ones.16 Reference and patterns of expression, to use Sapir’s large terms, work together or at cross-­purposes; words within utterances are more often than not linked to earlier moments in the speaking or listening history of the interlocutors (Mikhail Bakhtin: “words can enter our speech from others’ individual utterances, thereby retaining to a greater or lesser degree the tones and echoes of individual utterances”17), and so carry a variety of kinds of associations that may or may not be shared by other participants in the semiotic event in question. Words and the sounds with which they are made carry more than their semantic or expressive meanings as well. Sapir adds a few pages later that “the fundamental quality of one’s voice, the phonetic patterns of speech, the speed and relative smoothness of articulation, the length and build of the sentences, the character and range of the vocabulary, the scholastic consistency of the words used, the readiness with which words respond to the requirements of the social environment, in particular the suitability of one’s language to the language habits of the persons addressed—­all these are so many complex indicators of the personality” (17). This is a version of social indexicality, of course, not dissimilar from what Proust’s novel was observing about the Princesse de Laumes and Charles Swann. Breaking down their speech into different separable partials, investigating their language habits, tells

10  Introduction

us something about their personalities and their pertinent sociological commonalities and differences. For Sapir, this falls into the category of psychology: “All in all, it is not too much to say that one of the really important functions of language is to be constantly declaring to society the psychological place held by all of its members” (18). But it seems clear that what he is discussing is the way language use contributes to the maintenance of the social field in which people are (or are not) able to distinguish themselves (sometimes by way of “personality” and sometimes by way of pertinent social identity partials) within the social world(s) they inhabit. Or as Sapir put it in another essay, this one from 1931, society “is being reanimated or creatively reaffirmed from day to day by particular acts of a communicative nature which obtain among individuals participating in it.”18 (What it means to animate society through the way we use language is an issue that will be treated more fully in my conclusion.) I don’t mean to suggest any direct connection between Sapir or Bakhtin and Proust. (It is, however, interesting to think of Proust and Bakhtin as potentially sharing some orientation toward language use and its novelistic representation as a result of their reading of and thinking about Dostoevsky.19) My point is that the field of linguistic anthropology pursues in disciplinary fashion forms of interest in language-­in-­use and its effects and consequences that were present in various intellectual circles of the early twentieth century (and probably even the late nineteenth century), and that these same forms of interest in language-­in-­use were shared in a certain current of novel writing from both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which novelists used their novels as research instruments that allowed them to formalize their insights into what we might call the work that talk does. It is because Proust’s understanding of language-­in-­use (doubtless honed, among other ways, by his reading of novels and his writing of one) seems entirely consistent with that developed latterly in the field of linguistic anthropology that the terms and concepts linguistic anthropologists have developed seem so germane to a description of his achievement, so helpful in enabling us to see what is happening in his novel. Language is taken by linguistic anthropologists to be a “cultural resource” or a “social tool.” Language is a “set of practices,” and speaking or talk is envisioned as a “social practice” with its own specific characteristics, “a form of action that both presupposes and at the same time brings about ways of being in the world.” Linguistic anthropologists focus on language as “a set of symbolic resources that enter the constitution of social fabric and the individual representation of actual or possible worlds,” as a medium for “the transmission and reproduction of culture.”20 As Silverstein insists: “The excitement of linguistic anthropology in particular in recent years has been to establish both

Introduction  11

the intersubjective (as opposed to individual-­cognitive) and the sociocentric (as opposed to agentive-­centric) emergent and dialectical nature of its phenomena, language-­in-­use as sociocultural practice.”21 Proust, as I hope to show in the chapters that follow, shared the kinds of excitement about the study of language-­in-­use as sociocultural practice that Silverstein mentions. In Search, we also see a novelist with an analytical interest in language tip his hat to the discipline of linguistics, in which the earliest expressions of interest in linguistic anthropology were beginning to find expression. Proust scholars and critics will sometimes mention Proust’s distant family relation to Michel Bréal, author in 1897 of Essai de sémantique (science des significations) (Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning).22 Bréal was one of the most important members of the Société de linguistique de Paris in its early years, and taught comparative grammar for several decades at the École pratique des hautes études and at the Collège de France. He wrote on many topics over his career, and from Proust’s correspondence we know that Proust at least read some of Bréal’s writings on Homer. Whether Proust’s acquaintance with Bréal’s specifically linguistic work was deep, superficial, or nearly nonexistent is not of specific concern to me. But I am intrigued by the way Proust’s novel glancingly demonstrates its awareness of the work linguists were engaged in. The first part of Bréal’s Semantics is titled “The Intellectual Laws of Language.” Bréal writes: We define law, using the word in the philosophical sense, as the constant relation discoverable in a series of phenomena. [ . . . ] If the grammar of a language tends consistently towards simplification, we can say that simplification is the law of the grammar of that language. And to come to our point, if certain modifications of thought, expressed primarily by all words, are little by little restricted to a small number of words, or even to a single word, which takes upon itself alone the whole function, we say that Specialisation is the law that has presided over these changes. (11–­12)

Bréal’s successor at the Collège de France was Antoine Meillet. Toward the outset of Meillet’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1906, he notes that certain of his contemporaries in the field of linguistics had shown a particular interest in establishing phonetic laws that could be used to explain sound change over time. A bit later in the lecture, he opines that linguistic changes only become meaningful when one considers the whole development of which they are a part; the same change has an entirely different

12  Introduction

meaning according to the process from which it arises, and it is never legitimate to attempt to explain a detail apart from a consideration of the general system of the language in which it appears. This explains the necessity to attempt to formulate the laws according to which linguistic changes are likely to occur. In that way can we determine what are not historical laws such as “phonetic laws” or analogous formulas that fill today’s linguistics manuals, but general laws that are valid not just for a single moment in the development of a language, but which are rather for all time; they are not limited to a given language, but to the contrary extend equally to all languages. It should be noticed that these will not be physiological or psychic laws, but linguistic ones. [ . . . ] The search for general laws, be they morphological or phonetic, should henceforth be one of the principal goals of linguistics. But by their very definition, these laws extend beyond the bound­ aries of language families; they apply to all of humanity.23

In both Bréal’s and Meillet’s remarks, we can find signs of an effort to broaden the field of linguistics away from the historical forms of inquiry that characterized the work of many of their contemporaries, and also perhaps to promote certain forms of inquiry (semantics inflected by sociolinguistics, we might say) that would differentiate French from German linguistics, or at least from the Neogrammarian school in Germany, famous for a hypothesis regarding diachronic sound change.24 Meillet had a particular interest in establishing links between sociology and linguistics, publishing, for example, his 1904 article, “How Words Change Their Meaning,” in Durkheim’s L’année sociologique, on whose editorial board he sat. In the final paragraph of that article, he sums up his view on semantic change: These examples [ . . . ] allow us to form an idea of the way in which linguistic facts, historical facts, and social facts unite, work together and react with each other to transform the meaning of words: one sees that everywhere the key moment is when a word moves from a general language to a particular language, or in the opposite direction, or in both directions, and that consequently the changes in meaning must be taken to have as their principal cause the differentiation between elements that constitute societies.25

I cite this passage from Meillet because if one were looking for a text from a linguist that internal evidence from Proust’s Search might suggest he had read, this could well be it. I feel no need to make that particular argument, but in any

Introduction  13

case it makes for a rich counterpoint for the passage in Search in which “laws of  language” come up.26 I turn to that passage now. It comes in the novel’s third volume, The Guermantes Way, during a scene that takes place in the salon of Mme de Villeparisis. This is the scene where the hero meets the Duchesse de Guermantes (Oriane) for the first time. The narrator makes a point throughout this scene of showing how metalinguistic talk is a typical feature of salon conversation. That kind of talk occurs, for instance, in the moment when Mme de Villeparisis offers some information to the duchess, her niece, about one of her more awkward guests, M. Legrandin: “He has a sister named Mme de Cambremer, not that it will mean any more to you than it does to me” (“Il a une soeur qui s’appelle Mme de Cambremer, ce qui ne doit pas du reste te dire plus qu’à moi”). But in fact, the duchess has met Legrandin’s sister, and offers a characterization of her to her aunt: “She really is a monster,” said Mme de Guermantes as she met her aunt’s questioning glance. “She’s an impossible woman. She uses words like ‘pen-­ pushing’ [ plumitif ], that sort of thing.” “What does plumitif mean?” Mme de Villeparisis asked her niece. “I haven’t the faintest idea!” exclaimed the Duchesse in mock indignation. “I don’t want to know. That’s not the kind of French I speak.” And, seeing that her aunt really did not know what the word meant, to give herself the satisfaction of showing off her learning as well as her purism, and to make fun of her aunt after making fun of Mme de Cambremer, she said, with a stifled laugh that was controlled by the last traces of her mock ill-­ humor: “But of course I know, everyone knows: a plumitif  is a writer, someone who wields a pen [une plume]. But it’s a horrid word. It’s enough to make you lose your wisdom teeth. No one will ever make me use it.” (Guermantes, 196–­97) (“C’est un monstre, dit Mme de Guermantes à un regard interrogatif de sa tante. C’est une personne impossible: elle dit ‘plumitif,’ enfin des choses comme ça.—­Qu’est-­ce que ça veut dire ‘plumitif ’? demanda Mme de Villeparisis à sa nièce.—­Mais je n’en sais rien! s’écria la duchesse avec une indignation feinte. Je ne veux pas le savoir. Je ne parle pas ce français-­là.” Et voyant que sa tante ne savait vraiment pas ce que voulait dire plumitif, pour avoir la satisfaction de montrer qu’elle était savante autant que puriste et pour se moquer de sa tante après s’être moquée de Mme de Cambremer: “Mais si,” dit-­elle avec un demi-­ rire que les restes de la mauvaises humeur jouée réprimaient, “tout le monde sait ça, un plumitif c’est un écrivain, c’est quelqu’un qui tient une plume. Mais

14  Introduction

c’est une horreur de mot. C’est à vous faire tomber vos dents de sagesse. Jamais on ne me ferait dire ça.” [2:500])

Legrandin and his sister are from a wealthy family of the professional classes. The sister, Mme de Cambremer, has married into the aristocracy, but a minor, provincial part of it. What Oriane senses in Mme de Cambremer’s language is the vocabulary of someone who is not of her ilk, but who is laying a claim to some kind of sophistication to which Oriane has a proprietary relationship. As Meillet notes: Within a given language, defined by an established pronunciation and especially by consistent grammatical forms, there exist in reality as many particular vocabularies as there are autonomous social groups within the society where this language is spoken, and each group of men has its own special ways of designating not only things specific to them, but also many things common to them and other larger groups of which these men are also a part. (19)

In particular, he notes that, “if it is a question of groups that hold a certain prestige, aristocratic groups notably, or else learned ones, individuals who do not have access to these groups enjoy reproducing the ways they speak, and notably their vocabulary” (20). But what we have here is something a bit different: a perhaps trendy usage from elsewhere that a key aristocratic tastemaker refuses to take up. We could say that the novel is interested in the sociolinguistics of lexical diffusion, and that Meillet, too, shares this interest, even though it hasn’t yet been articulated as such. In fact, we could say that the novel is interested in the concept of register and in the particular case of what a linguistic anthropologist might call a register shibboleth.27 What Oriane encounters in Mme de Cambremer is, in fact, a register, the way the phenomenon has been described by Asif Agha: Registers are [ . . . ] reflexive models of language use that are disseminated along identifiable trajectories in social space through communicative processes. [ . . . ] Encounters with registers are not merely encounters with voices (or characterological figures and personae) but encounters in which individuals establish forms of footing and alignment with voices indexed by speech and thus with social types of persons, real or imagined, whose voices they take them to be.28

Mme de Cambremer’s register has made its way to Oriane’s ears. She reacts to it in her performance in front of her aunt, to whom she conveys information

Introduction  15

about the register, the kind of social entailments associated with it, and an appropriate stance toward it. (She also indicates her sense of herself as more sophisticated than her aunt: she knows it is gauche to use the word plumitif, but she—­unlike her aunt—­at least understands what the word means and what the register it comes from stands for.) Oriane gives a practical illustration of Agha’s point that “encounters with registers are encounters with characterological figures stereotypically linked to speech repertories (and associated signs) by a population of users” (45). Mme de Cambremer’s use of the word plumitif to mean writer tells us what kind of a person she is, and one look at her brother is sufficient for Oriane to see (or think she sees) how they are “related”: “So that’s her brother, is it? I still can’t get that idea into my head. But, then, it’s not utterly beyond belief, I suppose. They both have that doormat humility and the mental resources of a circulating library. She’s just as sycophantic and just as annoying as he is. I think I begin to see the family likeness” (Guermantes, 197) (“Comment, c’est le frère! je n’ai pas encore réalisé. Mais au fond ce n’est pas incompréhensible. Elle a la même humilité de descente de lit et les mêmes ressources de bibliothèque tournante. Elle est aussi flagorneuse que lui et aussi embêtante. Je commence à me faire assez bien à l’idée de cette parenté” [2:500]). Now Oriane herself cannot on her own make one person’s speech into a token of an entire register. As Agha notes, “A single individual’s metapragmatic activity does not suffice to establish the social existence of the register unless confirmed in some way by the evaluative activities of others.” We might, however, speculate that one of the ways novels differ from the real world is that, within a given novel’s particular signifying economy, a single person’s speech and a single listener’s processing of it might be all that it takes for the novel to assert the existence of a register. But in any case, future (and past) passages of the novel will go out of their way to confirm the particularities of Mme de Cambremer’s speech (and character) in Oriane’s eyes, and, indeed, in the novel’s. (In fact, in the much earlier passage I cited a few pages ago, in which the novel compares Swann’s and Oriane’s speech, they had been amusing themselves at Mme de Cambremer’s expense.) “Any such register,” Agha continues, “is a model of language use that links a semiotic repertoire of some describable characteristics to a range of stereotypic social-­indexical effects, its social range. Such a model is inevitably a model for someone; that is, it involves a social domain of persons who recognize it as a model enactable through speech” (46). And this is indeed the lesson that the novel seems to want to offer us: the relevant social fact is not just that Mme de Cambremer’s speech constitutes the pretentious register of a particular kind of social climber; it is also that her speech is audible as, and asserted as, such a register for someone like

16  Introduction

the Duchesse de Guermantes—­who is then spurred to a counterperformance in her own distinctive register. I am suggesting that Proust and Meillet share certain linguistic interests and notice similar linguistic phenomena, but that Proust’s novel reveals him to be pursuing and analyzing these phenomena in the manner of a linguistic anthropologist with a more developed set of tools and concepts than Meillet himself was able to marshal. Much the same point can be made about the passage a few pages later in which the novel speaks of the laws of language in relation to a speech tic illustrated by Oriane’s husband, Basin, the Duc de Guermantes. The topic has turned to the Dreyfus affair, and the duke is lamenting that his nephew, Robert de Saint-­Loup, has aligned himself with the supporters of Dreyfus. The refrain of his lament is “with a name like ‘the Marquis de Saint-­ Loup,’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard” (229) (“quand on s’appelle le marquis de Saint-­ Loup, on n’est pas dreyfusard” [2:532]). The narrator is struck by the duke’s emphasis on the phrase “with a name like ‘the Marquis de Saint-­Loup,’ ” which the narrator hears as coming from a register that is inappropriate for someone of the duke’s stature. Here is the metalinguistic commentary he then provides: Now, one or the other of two laws of language might apply here. One of them demands that 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 smallest of the petty bourgeoisie, 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, even about life in high society, without the help of titles and pedigrees, and a plebeian may write things that deserve to be called “aristocratic.” So from what inferior person had M. de Guermantes borrowed the expression “with a name like”? He probably had no idea. But another law of language is that, from time to time, just as certain diseases appear, vanish, and are never heard of again, there somehow arise (either spontaneously or by some accident, like the one that brought into France that American weed the seeds of which, caught in the wool of a traveling rug, fell on a railway embankment) modes of expression that one hears in the same decade on the lips of people who have in no way concerted their efforts to use them. (Guermantes, 229–­30) (Or, l’une ou l’autre de deux lois du langage pouvaient s’appliquer ici. L’une veut qu’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

Introduction  17

quand il voulait parler de la noblesse, tributaire de très petits bourgeois 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, même sur les moeurs du grand monde, les parchemins n’étant là de nul secours, et l’épithète d’aristocratique être méritée par les écrits d’un plébéien. Quel était dans ce cas le bourgeois à qui M. de Guermantes avait entendu dire: “quand on s’appelle,” il n’en savait sans doute rien. Mais une autre loi du langage est que de temps en temps, comme font leur apparition et s’éloignent certaines maladies dont on n’entend plus parler ensuite, il naît on ne sait trop comment, soit spontanément, soit par un hasard comparable à celui qui fit germer en France une mauvaise herbe d’Amérique dont la graine prise après la peluche d’une couverture de voyage était tombée sur un talus de chemin de fer, des modes d’expressions qu’on entend dans la même décade dites par des gens qui ne sont pas concertés pour cela. [2:533])

The first law the narrator offers us has to do with registers and how they are disseminated, and the second has to do, perhaps, with lexical innovation, borrowing, and diffusion.29 Now this latter question was the subject of certain kinds of empirical investigation in the early years of the twentieth century by geographical linguists such as Jules Gilliéron, whose Atlas linguistique de la France was published between 1902 and 1910. Meillet mentions linguistic atlases in his inaugural lecture, and he mentions Gilliéron (and his collaborator Mongin) specifically in “How Words Change Their Meaning” as offering the important insight that certain words that do not stand out as borrowings from elsewhere in their pronunciation can nonetheless be demonstrated to be borrowings in other ways. Meillet’s point is that “a word can carry all the phonetic and morphological marks by which one recognizes that a word has not been borrowed; it can even have subsisted without interruption in the language, and still be at root a borrowed word, if, during a more or less lengthy period, it has not been part of the common language and if it has been solely employed within specific social groups” (21–­22). Two observations: Meillet is interested in how semantic change happens as words move from the lexicon of one social group to that of another, where both groups speak the same language; he also insists that something not immediately apparent about a word (that it is a borrowing) can nonetheless be demonstrated to be true by means of linguistic science. The narrator seems to be on to something similar. He insists that there is something to be gleaned from the duke’s usage of the expression “with a name like” that might not be immediately apparent. Either the duke heard it in the mouth of some petty bourgeois speaker, from whom he has taken up

18  Introduction

the expression unwittingly because of some kind of a shared mindset with that speaker, or else it is an expression that is suddenly cropping up randomly within a given population of speakers, and will somehow go on being used by those speakers for a certain length of time before, perhaps, once again fading away. When, in “How Words Change Their Meaning,” Meillet offers the following reflection on the mechanisms by which the vocabulary in use within a certain group can be modified over time, we can sense again the proximity between the reflections of Proust’s narrator and the reflections of a professional linguist who was his contemporary: One of the causes of particular groups being especially ready to modify their vocabulary is that the elements that go into forming each group are themselves not linguistically homogeneous and that, moreover, they are subject to foreign influences. Indeed, the groups that form within a given society, especially professional groups, are made up of people who do not necessarily come from the same area, or even the same region, which means that their language is not the same. (17)

For Meillet, and we might take this as an expression of a law of his, the main cause of linguistic change, of change in pronunciation, of grammatical change, of semantic change, is the “absence of homogeneity” in any given group of speakers. There is a serious absence of homogeneity in the group of people who find themselves together in Mme de Villeparisis’s salon when the duke utters the revelatory “with a name like ‘the Marquis de Saint-­Loup.’ ” Indeed, the speech taking place around the narrator seems regularly to be involved in the maintenance of various kinds of boundaries—­invisible, social ones—­both between people present in the salon and between people present there and people only referred to. The maintenance of those boundaries is often linked to various features of linguistic register. Both plumitif and quand on s’appelle are examples of the way lexicon relates to register. Another complicated example of this occurs in the conversation between the duke and two decidedly unaristocratic guests, an archivist, who has been helping Mme de Villeparisis organize her correspondence, and a historian, who has come hoping to be able to view a portrait that is in Mme de Villeparisis’s private collection. The archivist, upon hearing the duke complain that Saint-­Loup’s mistress has somehow contaminated him with her “état d’esprit,” her “way of thinking,” attempts to ingratiate himself by informing the duke of a trendy new word the duke might like to know about:

Introduction  19

“You may not have heard, M. le Duc, but there’s a new word to describe that sort of attitude,” said the archivist, who acted as secretary to various antirevisionist committees. “It’s ‘mentality.’ It means exactly the same thing, but it’s useful in that nobody knows what you’re talking about. It’s the last word in sophistication—­the ‘latest thing,’ as they say.” (Guermantes, 230) (—­Vous ne saviez peut-­être pas, monsieur le duc, qu’il y a un mot nouveau pour exprimer un tel genre d’esprit, dit l’archiviste qui était secrétaire des comités antirévisionnistes. On dit “mentalité.” Cela signifie exactement la même chose, mais au moins personne ne sait ce qu’on veut dire. C’est le fin du fin et, comme on dit, le “dernier cri.” [2:533–­34])

Now this anti-­Dreyfusard archivist is not only contributing to lexical diffusion while attempting to win brownie points; he is also expressing an awareness of the way talk works, perhaps specifically in salon culture, when it comes to relatively new words. One looks for occasions to use them, a moment when they would be semantically appropriate, but the reason for using them lies in the effect they are meant to create, a distinctly nonsemantic effect. People won’t understand the word, but they will understand your refined and cutting-­edge fashion statement. Or will they? What if using mentalité were to produce the same effect as Mme de Cambremer using plumitif or some unspecified person using talentueux? Here is how the duke replies to the archivist: “Ah! mentality! I’ll make a note of it and keep it for the right moment,” said the Duc. (This was literally true. The Duc had a little notebook filled with “quotations” that he would consult before dinner parties.) “I like ‘mentality.’ There are quite a few new words like that, which become fashionable but never last. I read recently that a writer was ‘talentuous.’ Whatever that’s supposed to mean. I haven’t seen the word since.” (Guermantes, 231) (“Ah! mentalité, j’en prends note, je le resservirai, dit le duc.” (Ce n’était pas une figure, le duc avait un petit carnet rempli de “citations” et qu’il relisait avant les grands dîners.) “Mentalité me plaît. Il y a comme cela des mots nouveaux qu’on lance, mais ils ne durent pas. Dernièrement, j’ai lu comme cela qu’un écrivain était ‘talentueux.’ Comprenne qui pourra. Puis je ne l’ai plus jamais revu.” [2:534])

It seems that casual discussions of lexical diffusion are a recognizable speech genre in salon culture. But the genre has a certain complexity to it. The duke

20  Introduction

likes mentalité. Why? He doesn’t like talentueux. Why not? The reasons are probably social indexical ones. Perhaps they have to do with how the word comes to the duke’s attention, to whom the word is attached, in whose voice it is spoken. Or perhaps it is an arbitrary reaction meant simply to affirm that the duke believes himself to be a significant arbiter of how people in his circle, or people not in his circle but in his presence, should speak. The archivist perhaps understood a bit of this. The historian unfortunately does not, and so he imagines himself offering a helpful contribution to the conversation: “But ‘mentality’ is more widely used than ‘talentuous,’ ” said the Fronde historian, anxious to be part of the conversation. “I’m on a committee at the Ministry of Education where I’ve heard it on several occasions, and also at my club, the Volney, and even at dinner at M. Émile Ollivier’s.” (Guermantes, 231) (—­Mais mentalité est plus employé que talentueux, dit l’historien de la Fronde pour se mêler à la conversation. Je suis membre d’une Commission au ministère de l’Instruction publique où je l’ai entendu employer plusieurs fois, et aussi à mon cercle, le cercle Volney, et même à dîner chez M. Émile Ollivier. [2:534])

Perhaps the historian thought this information would appeal to the amateur linguists present in providing evidence for the degree of diffusion of this new term. Yet, in fact, what he has done is provided evidence of where, in terms of social register, the word is making inroads. While this might be interesting to someone like Meillet or Bréal (author, in 1872, of the four-­hundred-­page volume Quelques mots sur l’instruction publique en France) in their professional capacity as social semanticists, it does threaten to take the wind out of the duke’s sails, confirming the narrator’s earlier observation that the duke is unwittingly drawn to neologisms that come from social regions below his actual standing. Unsurprisingly, the duke defends himself ruthlessly, and the speech genre regarding the diffusion of neologisms turns into something else: “As someone who does not have the honor of belonging to the Ministry of Education,” the Duc replied with false humility but with a vanity so deep-­seated that his lips could not refrain from a smile, nor his eyes from embracing his audience with expressions of sparkling glee, the ironical impact of which made the poor historian blush, “as someone who does not have the honor of belonging to the Ministry of Education,” he repeated, reveling in the sound of his own voice, “or to the Volney Club—­my only clubs are the Union and the Jockey—­I

Introduction  21

don’t believe you belong to the Jockey, monsieur?” he asked the historian, who, blushing deeper red, sensing the insult but not understanding it, began to tremble from head to foot, “as someone who has not even been invited to dine with M. Émile Ollivier, I confess I hadn’t come across the word ‘mentality.’ ” (Guermantes, 231) (—­Moi qui n’ai pas l’honneur de faire partie du ministère de l’Instruction publique,” répondit le duc avec une feinte humilité mais avec une vanité si profonde que sa bouche ne pouvait pas s’empêcher de sourire et ses yeux de jeter à l’assistance des regards pétillants de joie sous l’ironie desquels rougit le pauvre historien, “moi qui n’ai pas l’honneur de faire partie du ministère de l’Instruction publique, reprit-­il s’écoutant parler, ni du cercle Volney (je ne suis que de l’Union et du Jockey), vous n’êtes pas du Jockey, monsieur?” demanda-­ t-­il à l’historien qui, rougissant encore davantage, flairant une insolence et ne la comprenant pas, se mit à trembler de tous ses membres, “moi qui ne dîne même pas chez M. Émile Ollivier, j’avoue que je ne connaissais pas mentalité.” [2:534])

So now one might well wonder if mentalité will make it into the duke’s notebook of trendy neologisms, turns of phrase, and bon mots–­or whether it will become, like plumitif and talentueux, an index of the kind of person one doesn’t find totally salon appropriate. Once again we see that while the novel acknowledges the forms of interest that contemporary linguists (but also salon goers) held in language, it moves in the direction of language-­in-­use, specifically toward the question of what use people make of talk about language use and their awareness of it. We also arrive here at an interesting question about the narrator’s own way of watching language use. Is his interest in the duke’s relationship to the laws of language different in kind from the duke’s way of scrutinizing the language of the historian or the duchess’s way of scrutinizing the language of Mme de Cambremer? Perhaps the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no. Perhaps the answer is that the novel itself has a linguistic anthropological interest in language use, and the narrator’s own speech (a topic I will take up in detail in my second chapter) provides data to be examined, not just about the social indexical functions of language, but also about the linguistic habitus of various kinds of speakers (including himself)—­just as does the speech of all the other characters that the narrator examines and comments on in such detail. If Proust’s novel demonstrates an awareness of issues present in the field of linguistics of its time (and we will see more examples of this in the second

22  Introduction

and third sections of chapter 1), it need not, we can now easily imagine, be solely because of any reading or studying that Proust did. It could be because of talk he heard or engaged in with other people in a variety of social contexts, including salons. When the father of Proust’s close friend, Antoine Bibesco, died in 1911, Proust wrote to him, “I only ever saw your Father once and for only a minute, I can’t say I knew him. His appearance had the same charm you all have, beauty, a taste for intellectual matters, nobility, and simplicity. That is all I knew along with the kind things said about him by poor people he had assisted.”30 Antoine’s father, the Prince Alexandre Bibesco, served as president of the Société de linguistique de Paris (SLP) in 1894. The SLP had been founded in 1863. Its operations were mostly in the hands of the person holding the office of secretary. Michel Bréal served as secretary from 1868 to 1915, Antoine Meillet from 1916 to 1936,  Joseph Vendryes from 1937 to 1958, Émile Benveniste from 1959 to 1970, and so on. The presidency was an honorary position held sometimes by scholars, sometimes by wealthy friends and patrons, as in the case of Alexandre Bibesco, who gave the SLP a gift of 10,000 francs during his term as president to establish the Prix Alexandre Bibesco that would be given every few years to a notable work in romance linguistics, with a preference for studies of Romanian. In the same year that the Bibesco Prize was founded, Marcel Proust composed one of his youthful society columns, “Une fête littéraire à Versailles,” devoted to a party given by Robert de Montesquiou, where one of the guests was Alexandre Bibesco’s wife, the Princesse Hélène Bibesco, a highly talented pianist, whose musical parties were famous events of Parisian social life. By the turn of the century, Proust would have become close friends with Antoine, having met him at one of Hélène’s soirees. The Bibesco’s residence was at 69, rue de Courcelles in Paris, and the Prousts lived at 45, rue de Courcelles.31 Both Antoine and also his brother Emmanuel would become Proust’s confidants in the first years of the century.32 We might reasonably imagine that Proust’s fieldwork as a budding linguistic anthropologist happened in any number of Parisian salons, and then spread to a wide range of social encounters. Based on his friendship with the Bibesco brothers, their closeness to their linguistically inclined father, and the evidence from scenes in Search of amateur linguistic musings by various parties within the context of salon scenes, it would seem reasonable to assume that Proust would have heard talk about language and perhaps specifically about linguistics as well, in both salons and in private conversation with friends and acquaintances. Linguistics might well have been for him not only a field of inquiry but a recurring topic of conversation in social encounters, and, indeed, a practical knowledge of sociolinguistics would perhaps have been a useful

Introduction  23

social skill within the circles in which he was particularly invested. Were he ever to have met a real-­life linguist in someone’s salon, we might imagine he would have been interested both in that person’s expertise, and also in how that person would fare in trying to use their expertise in conversation with someone like the duke, or perhaps Charlus or the duchess. As we will see in chapter 1, where I develop further the linguistic anthropological disposition of Search, it is not just in relation to the aristocracy and to academics that this disposition comes into play. Albertine and her friends will provide significant impetus for the narrator, the hero, and the novel to reflect on the metapragmatics of language use as well. Chapter 1 is divided into three sections that each examine a different aspect of Search’s socioanalytical attitude toward language-­in-­use. The first section, “Listening to Talk,” will deal mainly with the novel’s attention to nonsegmentable features of language, the narrator’s way of listening to accent, intonation, vocal quality, pitch, and the ways he develops to understand how these linguistic features become indexical signs open to various kinds of social scientific interpretation. Albertine and her friends will be important here, as well as the writer Bergotte. In the second section of the first chapter, “Words, Old and New,” I will look at the novel’s interest in specific words, in particular words spoken by Albertine and by M. Verdurin, and its way of expanding on the indexical capacity of these particular segments of language. The third section of the first chapter, “Social Capital and the Science(s) of Language,” will consider more generally the predisposition demonstrated throughout the novel to view speech as data that social scientific instruments can help to analyze. I will both situate that predisposition within Proust’s intellectual world and also show how concepts developed later, such as Bourdieu’s concept of social capital, can help us understand the power of Proust’s insights. Chapter 2 will shift directions slightly. Within the fields of literary and cultural criticism and theory over the past several decades, when people have turned to the topic of what happens when people use language, a regular reference has been one of the founding texts of speech act theory, J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words. The most prominent developments derived from that set of lectures have centered on the concept of performativity, with interventions by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler being especially influential.33 Linguistic anthropologists have been elaborating a multipronged critique of speech act theory since at least the 1980s.34 Literary and cultural studies scholars, on the one hand, and speech act theorists themselves, on the other, seem mostly unaware of the various features of this critique.35 What I will sketch out briefly here and then more fully in chapter 2 is my sense that

24  Introduction

certain kinds of Austinian speech acts hold an important place in Proust’s novel: a number of characters, including the narrator, are sometimes tightly focused on the observation of a particular kind of speech act as it occurs (an oath or an avowal, e.g.) and on the question of whether it will be carried out felicitously. Yet the manner in which such scenes of attention to speech acts are incorporated into the novel seems to imply that the novel itself has reservations about this way of thinking about and observing language use. Those reservations, it turns out, resonate strongly with elements of the critique of speech act theory that has been elaborated in the field of linguistic anthropology, and suggest that the local interest in speech acts that occurs at various moments in the novel has to be understood within a more overarching framework of attention to language-­in-­use that is more in line with linguistic anthropology, and that reveals important limits to speech act theory’s ability to account for language-­ in-­use in a fully satisfactory way. It is to speech act theory that we owe the notions of constative and perfor­ mative utterances, of illocutionary force, and of perlocutionary effects. How do we know, Austin asks, “whether certain words (a certain locution) had the force of a question, or ought to have been taken as an estimate and so on?” Austin will “distinguish force and meaning,” and he will “refer to the doctrine of the different types of function of language as the doctrine of ‘illocutionary forces.’ ”36 In the case of performative utterances, utterances that do something rather than stating something (although stating something is also doing something, and of course many different things are often being done in any given instance of language use), Austin says, “we attend as much as possible to the illocutionary force of the utterance, and abstract from the dimension of correspondence with facts” (145). Along with its illocutionary force, an illocutionary act can have perlocutionary effects (intended or unintended), as when a question as to whether there is a window open causes someone to find the thermostat and turn up the heat. A contemporary speech act theorist like Rae Langton, who thinks about the kinds of speech acts that are meant to subordinate one person to another, or one group of people (e.g., women) to another, will wonder “how, in general, do we discover what illocutionary force an utterance has? And what do we do in the face of disagreement? [ . . . ] In situations of disagreement, the disputed illocution usually falls short of the paradigm case for the given locution. [ . . . ] When a speech act falls short of the paradigm, though not far short, there may be dispute as to what illocutionary act was performed.”37 In the scene we will look at from Proust in a moment it will be disputable whether Odette swears an oath or does something else, such as, perhaps, refuse to be subordinated. That is, perhaps she will understand Swann’s request that she

Introduction  25

take an oath to be a request for a form of subordination, and she will, to use a term Langton marshals, block his effort. “The success of a speech act,” Langton writes, “can depend on its presuppositions, and on hearers accommodating those presuppositions. That is why blocking a presupposition can make a speech act fail.”38 Perhaps we could say that in this scene, Swann dictates a speech act to Odette, and she, in performing it, blocks one of the presuppositions organizing the whole exchange with Swann, thereby causing the speech act she is supposed to perform to fizzle. Yet, as Michael Silverstein notes, this whole way of thinking about language use has severe limitations. Then again, because for certain language users in their reflective moments it feels so practically right to talk about explicit performatives as an instance of doing something with words, the notions of illocutionary force and performativity hold a certain unavoidable claim on our attention. For Silverstein and other linguistic anthropologists, “performativity” as discussed in the speech act literature is a limited, perhaps ethnographically specific, case of a more general linguistic phenomenon called indexical entailment. In any verbal exchange, there is a dialectic between indexical presupposition and indexical entailment. Any given index that can be analytically isolated will be dialectically balanced between indexical presupposition (e.g., assumptions a speaker implicitly asserts other interlocutors share) and indexical entailment (e.g., some new social dispensation that a speaker implicitly asserts to prevail as a result of speaking). That is, its indexical meaning is composed of two aspects. One is its indexical “appropriateness-­to” at-­that-­point autonomously known or constituted contextual parameters: what is already established between interact­ ing sign-­users, at least implicitly. [ . . . ] The other is its indexical “effectiveness-­ in” context: how contextual parameters seem to be brought into being.39

Someone you recently met briefly at a work function sees you in a café and comes over, sits down, and begins to talk to you in an informal register about a topic that is itself informal, or feels slightly intimate. A coherent complex of indexes is working to establish an atmosphere of informal intimacy, in-­ groupness. Perhaps you will be happy with this development. Perhaps you will quietly resent it. Perhaps you will come up with a way of actively blocking the endeavor. How the interaction proceeds, how you respond, will help determine the balance between what has been presupposed and what has been entailed by the encounter that is underway. As Jillian Cavanaugh describes it in a different context:

26  Introduction

Briefly, indexes—­linguistic, textual, or other interactionally relevant elements of context—­may presuppose or bring to a particular context bits of social information. At the same time, the deployment of these indexes entails, or creates, social information as well, which will shape how the interaction unfolds. Performativity rests on just such indexical entailments, as the verbal performance of particular interactional acts, such as alignment among speakers or directing attention to certain features of the context, creates effects within and beyond those contexts.40

Silverstein comments that the problem with speech act theory begins with the fact that it takes a particular case for a general one: “Austin and his followers err by starting from the ‘explicit primary performative’ formula. [ . . . ] In this approach, the specific conventionally—­normatively expected—­entailing indexical ‘force’ of using a token of such a formula—­its so-­called ‘illocutionary force’—­is identified with the meaning of the verb.”41 (“I promise,” “I swear,” “I hereby bequeath,” “I deny.”) So-­called speech acts explicitly illustrate a property of language (the way its use enables social aims to be accomplished) that is occurring all the time. This leads Silverstein to ask: what of indexical entailments when the so-­called performative formula is neither “explicit”—­containing a minimally inflected highest-­clause verb that denotes the type of act at issue during the course of this communicative segment—­nor “primary”—­as for example when the performance of a formula counts as an act nowhere denoted by its “literal” grammatico-­semantic form? And how to recognize non-­explicit, non-­primary—­or even non-­explicit, primary, for that matter!—­illocutionary forces associated with text-­sentence forms of another language and culture than one’s own? (“Denotation,” 145)

Proust, I think we could say, is deeply interested in these two questions Silverstein poses. Proust is interested in often highly implicit indexical entailments of talk (as in when the duke puts the historian in his place by stating that he has never been invited to dinner by M. Émile Ollivier), just as he is interested in social situations in which people from divergent cultural backgrounds are incapable of understanding what others around them are doing with language. So, as Silverstein says in a way that can help us understand what is going on in the scene from Proust we are about to look at: We may, for example, have a conscious metapragmatic model of something like Austinian “speech acts” elaborated on the basis of the happenstance, but

Introduction  27

salient, socio-­historically specific set of metapragmatic verbs like promise-­, but this is nothing more than one factor in an actually dialectical process of how, in-­ and-­by behaviorally precipitating an occurrent message(-­fraction), its indexical presuppositions are transduced into indexical entailment. [ . . . ] So long as all of the other pragmatic factors remain occluded to folk-­theoretical discourse, the latter is an insufficient model for how discursive interaction works, when it does. Yet folk intuition in the form of a Peircean metapragmatic interpretant is always immanent in the indexical functioning of language and other cultural semiotics. (150)

Novelists like Balzac, for instance, as we shall see in the interlude after chap­ter 1, are interested in how across the span of a conversation (say, about a fan that someone is offering to someone else as a gift) a set of indexical presuppositions (e.g., about the relative statuses of the speakers and the obligations they might feel toward each other) could be “transduced” into entailments (e.g., a deepening of the obligations or an expansion of various kinds of intimacy). A novel can provide an understanding of “how discursive interaction works, when it does” by providing a sufficient number of scenes in which interaction works, in which interaction fails to work, or in which interaction both works and fails to work. It need not necessarily provide commentary (as Search frequently does) to make its point. Sometimes the simple juxtaposition of scenes of interaction, or the formal features of their composition by a novelist, may be sufficient to encourage the reader to extrapolate models of “the indexical functioning of language and other cultural semiotics.” At certain moments in Search, certain of its characters are deeply invested in what they hope will be felicitous performances of certain speech acts (avowals and promises mostly), but that investment occurs within the context of a novel that understands this investment in the idea of performative language to be a misguided or imprecise one: it involves invoking a language ideology that the novel as a whole finds inadequate. In a longer discussion in chapter 2 of the narrator’s occasional obsession with explicit speech acts, I will focus on his relation to Albertine, but, as is well known to experienced readers of Proust, that particular relationship is foreshadowed by Swann’s relationship with Odette in the section of Swann’s Way called “Swann in Love.” I will look at one passage from “Swann in Love” here to offer an initial sketch of the argument. At the moment in question, Swann has recently received an anonymous letter suggesting that Odette has had many past sexual liaisons with both men and women, and for some reason, Swann decides it is urgent for him to question her about her possible past entanglements with other women.42 He asks

28  Introduction

for a particular speech act, an oath, regarding whether or not she has participated in any such relations, and is struck painfully by the words with which Odette replies to his request. “Odette,” he said to her, “my dear, I know I’m being hateful, but there are a few things I must ask you. Do you remember the idea I had about you and Mme Verdurin? Tell me, was it true, with her or with anyone else?” She shook her head while pursing her lips. [ . . . ] When he saw Odette make this sign to him that it was untrue, Swann understood that it was perhaps true. “I’ve already told you. You know perfectly well,” she added, looking irritated and unhappy. “Yes, I know, but are you sure? Don’t say, ‘You know perfectly well’; say, ‘I have never done anything of that sort with any woman.’ ” She repeated, as though it were a lesson, ironically, and as if she wanted to get rid of him: “I have never done anything of that sort with any woman.” “Can you swear it on your medal of Our Lady of Laghet?” Swann knew Odette would never swear a false oath on that medal. “Oh, you make me so unhappy!” she exclaimed, abruptly dodging the grasp of his question. [ . . . ] “Odette, don’t prolong this moment, which is agony for both of us. If you want to, you can end it in a second, you’ll be free of it forever. Tell me on your medal, yes or no, if you have ever done these things.” “But I have no idea,” she exclaimed angrily, “maybe a very long time ago, without realizing what I was doing, maybe two or three times.” Swann had envisaged all the possibilities. Reality is therefore something that has no relation to possibilities, any more than the stab of a knife in our body has any relation to the gradual motions of the clouds overhead, since those words two or three times carved a kind of cross in the tissue of his heart. Strange that the words two or three times, no more than words, words spoken into the air, at a distance, can lacerate the heart this way as if they had really touched it, can make you as sick as if you had swallowed poison. (Swann, 375–­76) (“Odette, lui dit-­il, mon chéri, je sais bien que je suis odieux, mais il faut que je te demande des choses. Tu te souviens de l’idée que j’avais eue à propos de toi et de Mme Verdurin? Dis-­moi si c’était vrai, avec elle ou avec une autre.” Elle secoua la tête en fronçant la bouche. [ . . . ] En voyant Odette lui faire ainsi le signe que c’était faux, Swann comprit que c’était peut-­être vrai. “Je te l’ai dit, tu le sais bien, ajouta-­t-­elle d’un air irrité et malheureux.

Introduction  29

—­Oui, je sais, mais en es-­tu sûre? Ne me dis pas: ‘Tu le sais bien,’ dis-­moi: ‘Je n’ai jamais fait ce genre de choses avec aucune femme.’ ” Elle répéta comme une leçon, sur un ton ironique et comme si elle voulait se débarrasser de lui: “Je n’ai jamais fait ce genre de choses avec aucune femme. —­Peux-­tu me le jurer sur ta médaille de Notre-­Dame de Laghet?” Swann savait qu’Odette ne se parjurerait pas sur cette médaille-­là. “Oh! que tu me rends malheureuse,” s’écria-­t-­elle en se dérobant par un sursaut à l’étreinte de sa question. [ . . . ] “Odette, ne prolonge pas cet instant qui est une torture pour nous deux. Si tu le veux, ce sera fini dans une seconde, tu seras pour toujours délivrée. Dis-­ moi sur ta médaille, si oui ou non, tu as jamais fait ces choses. —­Mais je n’en sais rien, moi, s’écria-­t-­elle avec colère, peut-­être il y a très longtemps, sans me rendre compte de ce que je faisais, peut-­être deux ou trois fois.” Swann avait envisagé toutes les possibilités. La réalité est donc quelque chose qui n’a aucun rapport avec les possibilités, pas plus qu’un coup de couteau que nous recevons avec les légers mouvements des nuages au-­dessus de notre tête, puisque ces mots “deux ou trois fois” marquèrent à vif une sorte de croix dans son coeur. Chose étrange que ces mots “deux ou trois fois,” rien que des mots, des mots prononcés dans l’air, à distance, puissent ainsi déchirer le coeur comme s’ils le touchaient véritablement, puissent rendre malade, comme un poison qu’on absorberait. [1:356–­57])

Four things about this remarkable passage deserve notice for our present purposes. First, when the narrator tells us that “when he saw Odette make this sign to him that it was untrue, Swann understood that it was perhaps true,” there is no commitment offered by the novel that anything is true or false. What we are given is an indication that it is possible to interpret a sign as meaning its opposite, and that Swann avails himself of this possibility at this moment, perhaps because of his reflections on his past communications with Odette or because of something about her attitude here—­or perhaps because of some practical sense of the way this particular kind of speech genre usually unfolds. But whether or not Swann has material evidence from within this specific communication event that the sign should be interpreted in this way, whether his interpretation draws on evidence from elsewhere, or whether it is a willful interpretation is not specified by the narrator. Second point: Swann requests that Odette produce a particular utterance (“I have never done anything of that sort with any woman”) that would belie the interpretation he has already made of her gesture, and she obliges him, but

30  Introduction

produces the utterance “ironically.” So now the utterance, we could say, is animated by Odette, but obviously not authored by her. (It is, rather, authored by Swann.) By her tone, she indicates that she refuses to be the author’s principal as well.43 Apparently believing that the third time might be the charm, Swann tries again, this time attempting to coerce an oath, attempting to force Odette ritually to assume responsibility for the words in question, even though clearly she would still not be the author of the utterance she would make. “Can you swear it on your medal of Our Lady of Laghet?” The response that Odette actually gives (“Oh, you make me so unhappy!”) could count (this is my third observation about this passage) as an example of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick labeled periperformatives: I would like to call them periperformatives, signifying that, though not themselves performatives, they are about performatives and, more properly, that they cluster around performatives. [ . . . ] The fascinating and powerful class of negative performatives—­disavowal, demur, renunciation, deprecation, repudiation, “count me out,” giving the lie—­is marked, in almost every instance, by the asymmetrical property of being much less prone to becoming conventional than the positive performative. [ . . . ] It requires little presence of mind to find the comfortable formula “I dare you,” but a good deal more for the dragooned witness to disinterpellate with “Don’t do it on my account.”44

Sedgwick’s intervention has the virtue of revealing that even explicit performative speech acts can involve several conflicting and even contradictory participation frameworks simultaneously. Only some of those frameworks will carry with them the implied relations between subjectivity, intentionality, and speech, and the concomitant implied beliefs about the effectiveness of speech that are likely to produce felicitous speech acts. Sedgwick is interested in how the coercive force that some of these frameworks appear to exert on those summoned to participate in certain generically specific rituals can be countered (blocked, as Langton would say) or defeased through the creation of nonconforming utterances. Do either Odette or Swann believe, we might wonder, that were Odette to utter the phrase “I swear on my medal that” she would then be under an obligation to (or be any more likely to) state an easily decipherable truth about her sexual history? When Swann refers to an “idea I had about you and Mme Verdurin,” do they both have the same idea as to what he is talking about, so that her oath would even make sense? (One might think

Introduction  31

of Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” and the debates as to whether there were frameworks within which that could be construed as a true statement.45) It would seem that the oath, to be successful, would require something that is patently not present in this scene, something like what Jennifer Hornsby refers to as “reciprocity”: “When reciprocity obtains between people, they are such as to recognize one another’s speech as it is meant to be taken. That there is reciprocity is a fact exactly as ordinary, and exactly as mysterious, as the fact that speakers have the ability not only to voice meaningful thoughts, but also to be heard, by those who share the language, as doing some of the things that they do when they voice them.”46 Yet reciprocity certainly seems not to have been attained in the scene Proust is portraying between Odette and Swann (or in almost any significant scene of linguistic exchange in the novel; think again of the duke and the historian, which is exemplary in this regard), because it cannot be said that either of them has shown any capacity either of recognizing each other’s speech as it is meant to be taken or even of intending, when they speak, that their speech be taken as saying what it would seem to say on the denotational level. It seems rather that what their words could be taken to mean (or to do) only happens in the course of the ongoing event (it is co-­constructed), and/or subsequent to it, in later returns to (reentexualizations of) it. Along with reciprocity, speech act theorists also speak of a related principle of cooperation. Paul Grice defined the cooperative principle in his 1975 essay “Logic and Conversation”: Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.g., by an initial proposal of a question for discussion), or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, some possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the Cooperative Principle.47

32  Introduction

Proust (and/or his narrator) seems to delight in the representation of verbal exchanges in which one or the other (or both) of the principles of reciprocity or of cooperation is not in operation. In a recent essay on “Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record,” Elisabeth Camp has observed that “the cooperative model [ . . . ] has led theorists to largely ignore the range of cases and ways in which communication is less than fully cooperative.” As Camp goes on to note, “Many, even most conversations involve only partial alignment in interlocutors’ interests, either in ultimate goals or in which information they prefer to share.”48 She might as well be talking about Proust’s novel, in which conversations show a wide range of degrees of cooperation, of alignment of interest, and, indeed, of reciprocity.49 This will be notably true of some of the conversations between the narrator and Albertine that I will examine in chapter 2. Here are some operating assumptions about shared language use that seem resolutely not to be in place in many scenes of Search: that everyone holds the same language in mind as those to whom they are speaking and has a more or less equal or equivalent grasp of it; that speakers operate under the same protocols for using the language they putatively share, and that those protocols are somehow clearly in place prior to every linguistic encounter; that reference (as in, e.g., the referent of “the idea I had about you and Mme Verdurin”) is relatively unambiguous or can be easily clarified (that, in this particular case, both parties to a conversation could, before they begin conversing, share the same ideas about what sexuality in its relevant forms is and how to refer to it). Speech act theorists sometimes seem to imagine that for all speakers of a language certain classes of utterances (e.g., performatives) necessarily work in the same way. That is, they assume that practical knowledge regarding certain fixed metapragmatic functions that inevitably regiment certain classes of utterances is somehow an integral part of the capacity of speaking the language in question. Only as a result of that assumption can they refer to something called illocutionary force as if it belonged to an utterance itself or as if it were easily produced between any set of speakers of a given language. “It is a condition of the existence of attempts to do illocutionary things,” Hornsby says, “that, when all is well, they should be recognizable for what they are. For unless it were normal for such attempts to be seen to be the illocutionary acts that they may in fact be, there would be no reciprocity and there would not then be illocutionary acts to be done” (197). We could say that neither Proust nor linguistic anthropology proceeds from the assumption of reciprocity, and so neither find it normal that an easily or widely shared reference to a common repository of illocutionary possibilities or metapragmatic functions necessarily

Introduction  33

produces a uniform recognition of what transpires in this or that instance of language use. This is not to say that nothing is shared, and nothing is prior. To the contrary. Interlocutors come to linguistic encounters with deeply rooted histories in language that are shared by degree with other speakers. But the degree to which those histories are or are not shared can make for different degrees of smoothness or friction in any given verbal encounter. One way of describing this situation that I will make use of at certain points (e.g., in the interlude after chapter 2 in which I discuss a scene from Woolf ’s The Years) is to say that scenes of talk bring together and provide information about the linguistic habitus of the speakers engaged in talk. There is a range of linguistic habitus that exist among speakers who might somehow find themselves speaking to each other. The circumstances of any scene of talk and the histories of the speakers in it may or may not produce a situation in which their habitus are harmonized or synchronized in such a way that the talk in which they are engaged “works,” or in such a way that they find themselves co-­constructing an interactive text that could be described as involving cooperation or coherence or reciprocity, or even as producing an intelligible set of aims that could be accomplished through the talk that happens. It may or may not be possible, for instance, for whatever meaning that arises to be produced through reference to prior, shared, conventions. Meaning may arise creatively and controversially in the encounter itself by means of a fragile construction of a conflictual contextual universe in which little is shared. Meaning may never come to be shared. Language use is regularly a locus of confusion, conflict, and misunderstanding. (As I will indicate in chapter 2, Proust’s interest in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot seems related to that novel’s focus on certain kinds of verbal confusion.) People do not always speak according to the same rules of use; they do not always share the same conventions. What happens in an event of language use—­divergences in uptake, conflicting experiences of the forcefulness or (in)efficacy of an utterance—­is not always predictable; nor is it finalizable; nor can it inevitably be accounted for by reference to prior intentions. Those verbal happenings can be observed, they can be inquired into (e.g., ethnographically) after the fact of the utterance’s uptake and based on further evidence of what that uptake was. (Indeed, any inquiry into someone’s intentions in making an utterance might best be understood as a form of inquiry of this kind, an ex post facto reentexualization of the initial utterance.50) So, and this is my fourth and final point about the conversation between Swann and Odette that we have been looking at, it does not seem correct to say that Odette’s ambiguous avowal (“two or three times”) itself hurts Swann. We have seen how the novel describes the matter: “Strange that the words two or three

34  Introduction

times, no more than words, words spoken into the air, at a distance, can lacerate the heart this way as if they had really touched it, can make you as sick as if you had swallowed poison.” Yet we might suspect that this is a kind of free indirect discourse, and that it is Swann himself who is reflecting on the oddity of the fact that those few words, once uttered, could cause him so much pain (not unlike the way in which one girl crying “Gilberte” to another produced so much longing in the young hero). And of course it is a familiar subjective experience that words we experience as a betrayal or exclusion or insult cause us pain. But they can only do so thanks to a host of other conditions. This conversation is caught up in multiple histories: the conversational history between Swann and Odette, Swann’s sexual history, Odette’s sexual history, the social history of sexuality and its evolving forms, and so on. Odette’s words pain Swann because at the point in time and in space when he heard them, he was predisposed to receive the utterance in a particular way. Think, once again, of the interaction between the duke and the historian (also an interaction in which reciprocity is in short supply). We could say that in that scene Search shows an interest in how the historian comes to find himself in a situation in which he is vulnerable to be wounded by the duke’s words. But the novel is also interested in the fact that while the historian feels the duke’s words to be injurious, he does not fully understand how they could be so. We could therefore take this to be an instance in which the metapragmatic frame in which the duke is operating and the metapragmatic frame through which the historian is trying to understand the verbal exchange are sufficiently divergent that in some ways they are not fully participating in the “same” event, but rather in two overlapping events occurring at the same time in the same space.51 This situation is frequent in Search: different metapragmatic functions guide different people through the “same” verbal event, of which they have different metapragmatic representations both during and after the event. Swann insists on an oath being uttered because he wishes somehow to force metapragmatic convergence onto the event transpiring between him and Odette, a convergence rendered difficult by the fact that there is no indication that they share an “idea” of what precisely Swann is referring to “about you and Mme Verdurin.” Sometimes, a little while after the occurrence of some interaction in which metapragmatic misalignment was apparent to at least one of the parties involved, corrective action might be taken, as when the Baron de Charlus offers the narrator advice on how to conduct himself in certain kinds of conversation with certain parties (members of the Guermantes clan, in particular): “ ‘Monsieur,’ he said icily, stepping back, ‘you are young! But you should take advantage of your youth to learn two things: The first is that you

Introduction  35

should abstain from expressing sentiments that are too natural not to be taken for granted. And the second is that it is a mistake to get on one’s high horse and take offense at things said to one before one has properly understood their meaning’ ” (Shadow, 348) (“Monsieur, me dit-­il en s’éloignant d’un pas, et avec un air glacial, vous êtes encore jeune, vous devriez en profiter pour apprendre deux choses: la première c’est de vous abstenir d’exprimer des sentiments trop naturels pour n’être pas sous-­entendus; la seconde c’est de ne pas partir en guerre pour répondre aux choses qu’on vous dit avant d’avoir pénétré leur signification” [2:126]). That could count as a rich example of metapragmatic mentorship, however icily offered, but sometimes the novel seems to suggest (as in the scene between the duke and the historian, or Swann and Odette) that metapragmatic divergence is the semiotic condition at the heart of most communication, and certainly at the heart of the acts of communication that are most generative within the novel itself. Here is one example of a passage in which the novel indicates, through a deployment of figurative language, how invested it is in an understanding of talk for which reciprocity could never serve as a ground for analysis: Even if I had spoken to Gilberte, she would not have understood me. We always fancy, when we speak, that it is our ears and our minds that listen. If any words of mine had reached Gilberte, they would have been distorted, as though by passing through a mobile curtain of a waterfall, and would have been unintelligible to her, full of ludicrous sounds, and devoid of meaning. Whatever truth one puts into words does not make its way unaided; it is not endowed with irresistible self-­evidence. For a truth of the same order to take form within them, a certain time must elapse. When it has elapsed, the proponent of a political idea who, in the teeth of all the counterarguments and proofs, once said the proponent of the opposite idea was a blackguard, comes at length to share the abhorrent belief, which has been abandoned in the meantime by the man who once wasted his breath on spreading it. The masterpiece which, to the ears of the admirers who read it aloud, sounded pregnant with the proofs of inherent excellence, while to those of listeners it was inept or nondescript, comes eventually to be pronounced a masterpiece indeed by the latter, but too late for its creator to know of it. So it is with barriers of love, which the efforts, however despairing, of the one who is excluded by them can do nothing to force; then a day comes when, as a result of quite extraneous influences at work inside the feelings of the once-­unloving woman, and though he no longer cares about them, the barriers give way suddenly, but to no purpose. (Shadow, 187–­88)

36  Introduction

(D’ailleurs, j’aurais eu beau parler à Gilberte, elle ne m’aurait pas entendu. Nous imaginons toujours quand nous parlons, que ce sont nos oreilles, notre esprit qui écoutent. Mes paroles ne seraient parvenues à Gilberte que déviées, comme si elles avaient eu à traverser le rideau mouvant d’une cataracte avant d’arriver à mon amie, méconnaissables, rendant un son ridicule, n’ayant plus aucune espèce de sens. La vérité qu’on met dans les mots ne se fraye pas son chemin directement, n’est pas douée d’une évidence irrésistible. Il faut qu’assez de temps passe pour qu’une vérité de même ordre ait pu se former en eux. Alors l’adversaire politique qui, malgré tous les raisonnements et toutes les preuves, tenait le sectateur de la doctrine opposée pour un traître, partage lui-­même la conviction détestée à laquelle celui qui cherchait inutilement à la répandre ne tient plus. Alors le chef-­d’oeuvre qui pour les admirateurs qui le lisaient haut semblait montrer en soi les preuves de son excellence et n’offrait à ceux qui écoutaient qu’une image insane ou médiocre, sera par eux proclamé chef-­d’oeuvre, trop tard pour que l’auteur puisse l’apprendre. Pareillement en amour les barrières, quoi qu’on fasse, ne peuvent être brisées du dehors par celui qu’elles désespèrent; et c’est quand il ne se souciera plus d’elles que, tout à coup, par l’effet du travail venu d’un autre côté, accompli à l’intérieur de celle qui n’aimait pas, ces barrières, attaquées jadis sans succès, tomberont sans utilité. [1:601–­2])

The image of the mobile curtain of a waterfall through which spoken words must pass before arriving at the ears of the person to whom they are addressed can be understood as a figuration of the semiotic processes that are involved (a) in the production of an utterance by a speaking subject and (b) in the uptake of that utterance by another speaker. That is, the novel here suggests it understands the exchange of utterances as taking place through what Nicholas Harkness has recently referred to as the “phonosonic nexus.” For Harkness, a voice is “an ongoing intersection between the phonic production, shaping, and organization of sound, on the one hand, and the sonic uptake and categorization of sound in the world, on the other. I give this practical, processual intersection the name phonosonic nexus.”52 A nexus, we might hazard, would be the space in which two linguistic habitus encounter each other and perhaps manage to converge, to harmonize, despite whatever distorting effects are present. Along with questions of utterance production, distortion, and uptake, the novel suggests that there is something conceptual at play as well, again a process that takes place over time (relatively long time frames in this case), in which rather than the concepts or feelings that generated an utterance’s

Introduction  37

production themselves being transmitted to a recipient, only by some accident will a parallel set of concepts or feelings occur to the recipient—­in this example only long after the utterance has been forgotten. It seems the novel is presenting an idea of persons as nodes within which semiosis happens, each node involving a set of possibilities that evolve as the larger system in which they are caught up evolves, with possibilities for political, or aesthetic, or affective understanding—­which one might wish to realize in a shared moment of talk—­ often only being realized asynchronously. There is something about the form of the novel itself that is being implicitly referenced in this passage about the cataract of semiosis. Meaning is a construction that happens in time, over time, and across multiple agents. The co-­ construction of a given real-­time interactive text (a linguistic anthropological way of referring to the act of people talking together) involves a first pass at collaboratively producing a structure (or, as we have seen, multiple conflicting structures) of meaning. But the process does not end when the conversation ends. Search, when looked at in a certain way, could be said to spend a lot of time showing the narrator transcribing and annotating past conversations, reentextualizing them, bringing more and more context to bear upon them (including information about the histories, and present and future states, of the participants), linking them not only to past events, but also to future moments as well as ongoing processes in a variety of social universes. This is how an interest in the social production of meaning in time is woven into the composition of the novel. (And obviously, as I will observe several times throughout these pages, my own text is another example of meaning happening over time and through reentextualization—­in this case the reentextualization of the cultural artifact that is Proust’s novel.) Chapter 2 of What Proust Heard explores in part how and why individual scenes in the novel reveal a problematic longing for language to work the way speech act theory also seems to wish it did, while the novel taken more globally continually reveals that model for understanding language use to be inadequate. Wrestling with this complexity in Search’s attitude toward language-­ in-­use requires us to confront the problem of the narrator’s own speech and stance toward language, his own linguistic habitus. We could say that people, in speaking, are always producing data a linguistic anthropologist might take note of and, of course, a linguistic anthropologist, in speaking, is no different. The narrator’s speech, his stance toward language, his expressed aesthetic views, his way of talking about novelists such as Hardy or Dostoevsky are, as it turns out, data, not only for the narrator at other moments, but also, we

38  Introduction

might say, for the novel itself, for its own larger project (which takes place in a frame that exceeds any instance of the narrator’s consciousness) of exploring language-­in-­use. Chapter 3 will also be concerned with the aesthetic views or stances different people (including the narrator/hero) in Search express or embody, although it takes a slightly different tack from chapters 1 and 2, shifting the emphasis from linguistic anthropology to Bourdieusian sociology. There are for me, as I’ve already indicated, significant elective affinities between these two intellectual enterprises that cause me to associate them here. They demonstrate certain shared preoccupations and shared reference points, but there is also a certain difference of emphasis that will allow my discussion in chapter 3 to home in on the specifically aesthetic experiences and ideologies that are both part of the universe Search represents and also instantiated in its own writing. One of the most obvious shared preoccupations of linguistic anthropology and Bourdieu’s sociology of culture is with the immanent existence of social, conceptual, and linguistic structures that exercise some kind of constraining or structuring force on human action (including talking). Let us think a bit more about the moment when the narrator watches the Duc de Guermantes insult the unnamed historian in Mme de Villeparisis’s salon. According to the narrator’s construal of the scene, the historian suspects he is being insulted without being sure of it, whereas the duke assumes a significant portion of the onlookers are fully aware of the cruelty he is perpetrating. The duke looks around with joyful eyes to make sure the right people are watching and listening as he puts the historian in his place, so to speak. The historian doesn’t understand, and yet blushes and trembles, assaulted by an insult his body seems to understand even if his intellectual comprehension is incomplete. How is this apparent diversity of understandings of what is in principle the same event possible? We could say that it is because Proust’s novel understands there to be a social order (just as, we might say, there is a linguistic order) behind every interaction, and that people come to any given interaction with a given set of capacities as a result of their history and current position within the social order. A situation is never thoroughly understandable on its own. In this it is like an utterance. To assume otherwise would be to fall prey to what Bourdieu, in Distinction, refers to as “the interactionist fallacy”: “The notion of situation, which is central to the interactionist fallacy, enables the objective, durable structure of relationship between officially constituted and guaranteed positions which organizes every real interaction to be reduced to a momentary, local, fluid order (as in accidental encounters between strangers), and often an artificial one (as in socio-­psychological experiments).”53 The duke and the

Introduction  39

historian’s interaction indexes, we might say, the relative social positions they occupy and reveals the fact that their points of view on the social world around them are incongruent. Bourdieu continues: “Interacting individuals bring all their properties into the most circumstantial interactions, and their relative positions in the social structure (or in a specialized field) govern their positions in the interaction.” I would not be the first person to call Proust Bourdieusian, or Bourdieu Proustian, because of the vision they share of the implacable and yet subtle ways in which social structures exist all around us as well as within us, shaping us, our speech, and our ability to act in the world.54 A salon such as that of Mme de Villeparisis, less selective than others we see in the novel, and so more likely to contain “heterogeneous” elements, is a likely place for cruel encounters such as the one between the duke and the historian to transpire, encounters in which conflicting habitus and bodily hexeis come into relief. Habitus and hexis are concepts that Proust and Bourdieu share. Bourdieu of course develops them explicitly across the course of his career, whereas they are implicit throughout Search, as we shall be observing in the chapters ahead. How do you decide whom to talk to and when in a given salon? You’ve been invited in part so that you can see a painting that is important to your scholarly work. Others are there for entirely other reasons. You are an adult, and so you know your way around the world, or do you? As Bourdieu puts it: all knowledge, and in particular all knowledge of the social world, is an act of construction implementing schemes of thought and expression, and [ . . . ] between conditions of existence and practices or representations there intervenes the structuring activity of the agents, who, far from reacting mechanically to mechanical stimulations, respond to the invitations or threats of a world whose meaning they have helped to produce. However, the principle of this structuring activity is not, as an intellectualist and anti-­genetic idealism would have it, a system of universal forms and categories but a system of internalized, embodied schemes which, having been constituted in the course of collective history, are acquired in the course of individual history and function in their practical state, for practice (and not for the sake of pure knowledge). (D, 467)

What Proust’s novel reveals about the duke and the historian (who probably had no idea that he was walking into such danger when he walked into this salon) is that while the two of them are physically in each other’s presence and seem to be conversing, the social worlds that they have constituted around them are not the same, their norms of conduct are incommensurate, and so the

40  Introduction

words they exchange do not so much constitute some kind of shared endeavor at communication as they seem—­despite being apparently addressed to each of them reciprocally—­rather to be involved in two distinct sociosemiotic systems. There is little or no shared meaning being produced, unless, perhaps, it is the metapragmatic meaning the narrator or the novel is trying to provide by the way the scene is represented and commented upon. The incorporated schemas on which the duke and the historian rely to understand what they are doing, and to decide how to act, are too divergent. We could say that the historian’s habitus in particular is inadequate to his current surroundings and that this becomes easily apparent in the distress his bodily hexis reveals. In Distinction, Bourdieu describes how much of the process of responding to happenings in the social world around us that our habitus enables takes place just below the surface of our awareness: The schemes of the habitus, the primary forms of classification, owe their specific efficacy to the fact that they function below the level of consciousness and language, beyond the reach of introspective scrutiny or control by the will. Orienting practices practically, they embed what some would mistakenly call values in the most automatic gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body—­ways of walking or blowing one’s nose, ways of eating or talking—­and engage the most fundamental principles of construction and evaluation of the social world. (D, 466)

We can already see parallels between Bourdieu’s conceptual framework and Search’s constant interest in how and why people move the way they move, how and why they sound the way they sound, how and why their bodies signify in the way they do. (As we will see in the interlude between chapters 2 and 3, Woolf ’s understanding of what is going on between people and their respective habitus during social events tracks quite closely to the understanding found in both Proust and Bourdieu.) Think, among many possible examples, of Charlus’s entry with Morel into the salon at La Raspelière in Sodom and Gomorrah: “As for M. de Charlus, whom the society in which he had lived had provided [ . . . ] the maxim that we must be able, in certain cases, even for members of the petty bourgeoisie, to show off and exploit our rarest charms, normally held in reserve, it was fluttering affectedly, and with the same ampleness to his waddlings as though they were hobbled and made broader by his being in a skirt, that he made for Mme Verdurin” (Sodom, 299–­300) (“Quant à M. de Charlus à qui la société où il avait vécu fournissait [ . . . ] la maxime qu’on doit savoir dans certains cas, pour de simples petits bourgeois mettre

Introduction  41

au jour et faire servir ses grâces les plus rares et habituellement gardées en réserve, c’est en se trémoussant, avec mièvrerie et la même ampleur dont un enjuponnement eût élargi et gêné ses dandinements, qu’il se dirigea vers Mme Verdurin” [3:299–­300]). Bourdieu continues: Taste is a practical mastery of distributions which makes it possible to sense or intuit what is likely (or unlikely) to befall—­and therefore to befit—­an individual occupying a given position in social space. It functions as a sort of social orientation, a “sense of one’s place,” guiding the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position, which “suit” them. (D, 466)

How was the historian supposed to know that his remarks to the duke were unseemly, whereas the archivist’s had been judiciously chosen? They both probably spoke more or less without thinking, guided by their subliminal sense of what seemed appropriate to a given set of circumstances. Now the historian, as a result of the response from the duke that his words accidentally provoked, hardly knows where to put himself. As we will see in both chapters 1 and 3, aristocrats are not, themselves, always at an advantage under all circumstances in all locations in their social world. (Charlus sashaying across the room toward Mme Verdurin, e.g., is probably making some kind of accidental miscalculation.) The particular example that I will take up in chapter 3 is that of responding to music. Finding yourself in a situation where it is necessary to experience and respond to a work of art (musical or otherwise) can be as discomfiting (and dangerous) as finding yourself in an unfamiliar salon, or as reassuring as finding yourself out to dinner with a group of old friends. Having to talk about a popular book, or an old classic, in public can pose similar difficulties. What if you and the duke should find yourselves talking about Balzac, whom you both like, but for different reasons? Or what if one of you likes him and the other doesn’t? What does it mean to think of a book or a musical performance as a social object that produces different kinds of social divisions through its uptake, for this is indeed how both Proust and Bourdieu often think of them?55 “I think that we can admit without hesitation,” Bourdieu observes in one of his seminars from 1982, “that a book or a painting or a musical score is a social thing, which can exist only as a product of human work objectified.”56 A book only moves from being a physical object to being a social one when someone picks it up and reads it: “The book as a physical object becomes a social thing only when

42  Introduction

it meets up with its other half, the half incorporated in the reader, or, more precisely, in the social agent endowed with the dispositions that incline them to read it and enable them to decipher it (these are the two dimensions of the habitus: the ‘inclination to’ and the ‘ability to’)” (HF, 25). Who has (or had, or will have) the capacity and the inclination to read this or that book adequately, or to listen intently to this or that musical performance? “If you keep in mind the fact that the object of the reading is itself designed to function in relation to a habitus, you can find in the object a quantity of signs indicating how it attempts to organise or satisfy the habitus in advance—­for example, the use of underlining, italics, capitals, and the like” (HF, 45). We might wish to expand Bourdieu’s list of features that help us understand how a book is meant to function to include the use of prefaces and other framing devices, the choice of topic, genre, and register, the choice of setting(s), the names characters are given, and so on. In talking about Manet, in another of his seminars, Bourdieu poses the question: What does it mean to understand a work of art? I think that to a great extent it involves one unconscious communicating with another: a lot of things are going on because the artist puts into play a lot of things without realizing it, and the receptor receives all sorts of things without knowing they receive them as they make use of decoding mechanisms that they are not even aware of possessing. Whatever rapture someone experiences from a work of art has to do with the receptor having been touched because of this communication from unconscious to unconscious—­I do not mean the Freudian unconscious, but a social and historical unconscious.57

As we shall see, Bourdieu’s version of understanding resembles in important ways the description of the ongoing reception of a work of art in Search. Importantly,  just as the duke and the historian are in some ways having a different conversation as they each speak to each other, often different people listening to the same musical performance hear different things. This is because, as Bourdieu puts it earlier in the volume on Manet, “There is a social effect of the work, which is not a blanket effect, but is differential, since a work does not have the same effect on everyone.” Bourdieu adds, in an observation we shall attend to more closely in chapter 3 in relation to the Vinteuil Septet, that “saying that there is an effect of the work of art is to say that some of the causes of this effect can be found in the work of art” (M, 27). What Bourdieu suggests is that in fact a work of art, in its performance, can be a kind of instrument

Introduction  43

that reveals something about the structure of the social field in which it exists that might otherwise be invisible. At least a two-­fold analytical project emerges from this suggestion: On the one hand, if a work of art (a book by Bergotte, a painting from this or that period of Elstir’s career, Vinteuil’s Sonata or his Septet) produces sharply different reactions, or acquires a public made up of an unusual set of social subjects, its reception or its public can be studied for what it reveals about the structure of the larger social field in which it is embedded. On the other hand, the work itself must have something “in” it that produces this reception, something that analysis of the work itself (within its various contexts) might uncover, and so “this aesthetic of the effect implies an exhortation to look for the effects of the work, the foundations of the effect of the work—­what we might call the symbolic charge of the work—­within the work itself ” (M, 27). And yet to find what is there in the work itself to enable a certain way of taking it up requires noticing (through some kind of investigation, some kind of fieldwork) that the work has been taken up by someone, or by some group, in this particular way. Chapter 3, like chapters 1 and 2, thus studies the ways Proust’s novel is ruthlessly attentive to aspects of the social order that structure both language use and aesthetic experience, but that are not immediately apparent, that are somehow immanent in the communicative or the aesthetic event, but whose existence can be brought to awareness through observation and analysis. Words traveling through space, carrying a variety of forms of information for those who are attuned to them; scenes of talk in which people aim to achieve different and sometimes contradictory things through the words and sounds they exchange, words and sounds carrying the multiple forms of information they can carry; words and sounds revealing people to be who they are or perhaps enabling them, if they are talented or lucky, to become who they want to be; talk being used to try to extort or enforce, or to temporize or evade; scenes of talk in which different practices of talking find themselves confronted and struggling for dominance; practices of listening to how things are said alongside of or instead of to what is said, of focusing one’s analytic attention on the indexical penumbra instead of on the referential channel—­this is the linguistic anthropological but also novelistic set of concerns to be found in Proust’s novel. What happens when people talk? This deceptively simple question is one Proust’s novel pursues with its methods, just as linguistic anthropologists do with theirs. In the interlude following chapter 3, we will see how a novelist such as Nathalie Sarraute, having understood Proust’s project of investigating talk, will develop her own novelistic methods for continuing this research—­for

44  Introduction

taking it in new directions. We will see her pursue what happens, in particular, when people talk about novels, but then also, in a reflexive vein, what happens when novelists try to take their experience of talk—­their experience of talk working on them—­and keep that experience alive in what they write. In that final interlude and in my conclusion I will juxtapose two different parts of the experience of talk’s work that will have cropped up here and there throughout the earlier sections of the book. One is the experience of animation that talk provides. In Sarraute, in Proust, in the novels of Rachel Cusk, we will see detailed the experience people have of finding themselves animating utterances whose authorship escapes or exceeds them. Animation thus could be an experience of alienation, or perhaps self-­discovery, or perhaps an occasion for critique, in which suddenly we confront the possibility of shaping ourselves by attempting to be more attentive to our own talking. The other experience is that of talk as data. We all process the speech of others in many different ways, ways of which we are sometimes acutely aware, sometimes unaware, sometimes vaguely aware. How aware are we of our own speech as being data about ourselves? Proust’s narrator trains himself, as would a social scientist, to process the talk he hears in certain analytical ways. Proust’s novel understands that its narrator’s speech is also data, and as the novel progresses, the narrator intermittently acknowledges that he, too, can hear what he says as data—­partly about himself, of course, but partly about the world in which he is immersed and the particular form and consequences of his immersion in it. It is finally in this compositional feature of the novel—­in which the narrator’s own words become part of the data out of which the novel is composed—­that the necessity of hearing talk’s multifunctional work poses its most pressing challenges to Search’s reader, both for understanding the novel and for interacting with it.

Chapter 1

Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist In discursively mediated interaction, whether as “native” users or as analyst-­investigators, we perceive ourselves to be sending and receiving messages to and from so-­called real or fictional individuals; we communicate about states of affairs concerning all manner of experienceable and imaginable things. But we are at the same time experiencing culture by communicating through this exemplar, medium, and site: language-­in-­use. I want to demonstrate here how linguistic anthropologists “listen to” language analytically in this second mode in order to “hear” culture. I want to point out, in particular, that we can “hear” culture only by “listening to” language in a certain way. M i c h a e l S i lv e r s t e i n, “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­Culture Nexus”

Listening to Talk We experience culture when we read a novel; we read more or less well depending on our ability to reconstruct imaginatively the cultural universe from which the novel emerged, its conceptual structures, its forms of intelligibility, its linguistic resources and the ways the novel takes them up and manipulates them. Our success as readers will depend on many things, notable among them the work we have done to make ourselves capable of understanding the various structural relations in play in the cultural universe in which the novel originates, and the ways in which the novel mobilizes, wittingly or unwittingly, those relations. Also, our past experience of reading novels (and other kinds of texts) and of learning how they might be composed, our acquisition of the ability to apprehend those compositional features that might be most salient to the project or projects in which they are engaged, will determine our capacity to notice “what is going on” in any given novel. All of the novels I will discuss in this volume are, in one way or another, about talk, about how talk works, about how to listen to it, or about what happens when we listen in a certain way. In many instances the first step will involve training our ears to hear not so much what people are saying as how they are saying it, learning to hear features of the sound form such as tone, intonation, accent, stress, or prosody. There

46  Chapter One

is melody, and there is rhythm; there are register effects; there are frequency patterns of syntactic forms or of individual words or expressions. Listening to all these aspects of an utterance (social indexical features, because they point to social, cultural, or conceptual structures that are immanent in the speech situation, and they make social meaning happen by invoking those structures for the participants), you learn at least as much about who the speakers are, and what they are doing by exchanging utterances, as you might by focusing your attention mainly on what they are saying. The case I am making in What Proust Heard is that there is a rich current of novel writing, of which Proust is a linchpin, that is interested in producing a form of sociological knowledge that does not arise from semantics or from referential meaning per se, but from other aspects of the linguistic sign, other channels, we might say. The sociological knowledge in question has to do with language-­in-­use, specifically with nonreferential, social indexical features of talk—­talk being understood in these novels as the medium in which key forms of sociocultural activity happen; talk being used continually to reproduce, but also to act upon, various regions of the existing social order. The knowledge these novels pursue is often as much related to the how of saying as to the what. Each of the three sections of this first chapter pursues some of the consequences of listening to language in this way, pointing to passages drawn from different parts of Search in which the novel foregrounds this analytic interest in language-­in-­use. In this first section of the chapter, I would like both to demonstrate in some detail Proust’s interest in this mode of listening, and to present a set of critical tools useful for appreciating his investment in it, drawing on passages from the novel’s second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The second section will focus on one moment from The Prisoner and one from The Guermantes Way, and the third section on a short passage from Swann’s Way and another from Sodom and Gomorrah. Throughout, we will see that Proust’s interest is in the sociological and anthropological functioning of talk, and in the way a social scientific, or anthropological, attitude toward language use allows that functioning to become perceptible; talk is viewed not, in the first instance, as a medium for communicating via the meaning of words, but as a medium in which social work of various kinds is accomplished, often via nonsemantic features of language. Toward the end of Search, Proust’s narrator is reflecting upon the nature of his interest in other people’s speech. “Ce que racontaient des gens m’échappait,” he writes: “what people said escaped me.” This is because “what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim of my research, because it gave me a

Proust the Linguistic Anthropologist  47

specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another” (Finding, 24) (“ce qui m’intéressait, c’était non ce qu’ils voulaient dire mais la manière dont ils le disaient, en tant qu’elle était révélatrice de leur caractère ou de leurs ridicules; ou plutôt c’était un objet qui avait toujours été plus particulièrement le but de ma recherche parce qu’il me donnait un plaisir spécifique, le point qui était commun à un être et à un autre” [4:296]). Noteworthy here is the narrator’s sense of himself as pursuing fieldwork (research) to help him understand people’s speech (to collect the necessary data, we might imagine, to perceive forms of regularity traversing the speech of many different speakers), yet not in order to understand what they say, but rather to grasp the way in which their manner of speech relates them to others, the way in which it situates them in their world and enables them to enact certain kinds of identity or to produce certain social effects. All of this happens, Proust’s narrator suggests, through speech’s pragmatic or social indexical features, through manners of speaking. The novel’s implicit claim here is that this kind of interest in speech, rather than being ill suited to novel writing (as Proust’s narrator says he fears it might be), could itself lie at the heart of a particular kind of novelistic enterprise—­the one that was Proust’s. Proust’s narrator’s reflections on his way of listening and the research he does to understand what he hears come immediately after he has read (and the novel has reproduced) a passage putatively from the journal of Edmond de Goncourt but actually composed by Proust. The novel has thus just displayed several pages of text written in a different manner from that of the majority of the novel, and it has thereby somehow challenged readers both to perceive and to establish the meaning of such a difference in manner. We might thereby be encouraged, the novel seems to imply, to undertake a reading of its own manner, to understand it (and other literary texts to which it might be taken to be responding) as being itself made up of language-­in-­use, as being part of a verbal exchange in which manner is very much at stake. Novels about talk are odd, in one way, in that they are written objects that intend to study features of spoken language that they do not (normally, so far) have the capacity to reproduce. Somehow they represent them; they describe or translate or transduce them into written form.1 Both Proust and his narrator also seem convinced that different novels sound different from each other. (See, in a few pages, the narrator’s discussion of Bergotte’s written accent.) It would be wrong, I think, to say that this is just a figure of speech. Rather, it is a claim that there is a kind of indexical penumbra surrounding written instances of language-­in-­use just as around spoken ones. Just as we may or may not be equipped to perceive someone’s spoken accent, the registers they invoke, or

48  Chapter One

various other indexical features of their speech, so too with novels. Search, as it turns out, is not just a novel interested in talk; it is also interested in novels as talk, and in talking about novels (which is, of course, what I’m doing right now, so to speak). One of the ways in which people could be said to make use of aesthetic objects (including novels) is by talking about them. Proust’s long novel shows an endless fascination with the sociological implications of the ways in which aesthetic objects are used and misused by different publics as their meaning unfolds, develops, or happens over time. Search also understands that to grasp the relation between a work’s meaning and the history of its use by various readers and institutions, we will have to accept that meaning is never simply in things; it happens to them in their use. What I would like to call attention to in the first section of this chapter is the kind of interest we find in Proust’s novel for how people speak—­for how the way in which people speak is a crucial source of sociological information. I would like also to focus our attention on speech in the novel about literary objects, highlighting the novel’s implicit claim that something crucial about the use people make of literary objects can be found in their manner of speaking about them. Finally, I would like to call attention to how the novel demonstrates its interest in conceiving of language-­ in-­use itself as the matter out of which novels are made. Hearing Language-­in-­Use in Proust In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower comes in two parts. The second part is called “Place-­Names: The Place,” and in it Proust’s narrator tells the reader of two interlocking social projects he pursues during his first summer stay at the seaside resort, Balbec. On one hand, he is, over the course of the summer, developing an acquaintance with various members of the aristocratic Guermantes clan: his grandmother’s old school friend, Mme de Villeparisis; her nephew, Robert de Saint-­Loup; and another of her nephews (but Saint-­Loup’s uncle), the Baron de Charlus. On the other hand, he becomes fascinated with a band of young girls whose social status he for a while has a hard time ascertaining and whose acquaintance seems even more challenging for him to make than that of the members of the exclusive Guermantes family. If the narrator and Saint-­Loup seem fast friends within days of their first meeting, it is not until quite close to the end of the volume (and the end of the summer in question) that the narrator is finally able to display how comfortably ensconced he has become in the social lives (and the verbal universe) of the group of young girls.

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In case we had not yet noticed that something in the way the novel is structured asks us to think about these two projects of social exploration (the girls and the Guermantes) as somehow happening in parallel—­complementary case studies, we might say, with important structural echoes between them—­the narrator calls our attention to that fact in a wonderful four-­page-­long paragraph occurring about fifty pages before the five-­hundred-­page volume closes. He does so by revealing that one project of social exploration is now interfering with the other, and in a way that might, from at least one point of view, seem not to be in his own best interest. Here is how the paragraph in question begins: Fashionable gatherings and Mme de Villeparisis’s invitations to carriage outings were not the only pastimes I was willing to sacrifice to my games of ring-­ on-­a-­string and riddles with the girls. Robert de Saint-­Loup had several times sent me word that, since I never went to visit him at Doncières, he had requested twenty-­four hours’ leave to come to Balbec. On each of these occasions I wrote to put him off, inventing the excuse of a family visit I said I was obliged to make that very day with my grandmother. He must have thought badly of me when he learned from his aunt the nature of this family visit and the identity of the people who were my grandmother for the occasion. (Shadow, 485) (Ce n’était pas seulement une matinée mondaine, une promenade avec Mme de Villeparisis que j’eusse sacrifiées au “furet” ou aux “devinettes” de mes amies. À plusieurs reprises Robert de Saint-­Loup me fit dire que puisque je n’allais pas le voir à Doncières, il avait demandé une permission de vingt-­quatre heures et la passerait à Balbec. Chaque fois je lui écrivais de n’en rien faire, en invoquant l’excuse d’être obligé de m’absenter justement ce jour-­là pour aller remplir dans le voisinage un devoir de famille avec ma grand-­mère. Sans doute me jugea-­t-­il mal en apprenant par sa tante en quoi consistait le devoir de famille et quelles personnes tenaient en l’espèce le rôle de grand-­mère. [2:260])

Saint-­Loup is doing his military service a short distance from Balbec, and his newest close friend, our narrator, makes feeble excuses not to come visit him and lies to him to put him off from himself making a trip to Balbec so they might spend some time together. All this is for the sake of time spent in the company of the band of young girls who so fascinate him. The rest of the long paragraph in question explains the narrator’s justification for neglecting his new friend and organizing his time in a way that prevents him from cultivating this seemingly auspicious and advantageous new friendship:

50  Chapter One

Yet, in sacrificing not just the joys of foregathering with the fashionable, but the joys of friendship too, to the pleasure of dallying the whole day in this lovely garden, perhaps I was not ill advised. Those who have the opportunity to live for themselves—­they are artists, of course, and I was long since convinced that I would never be one—­also have the duty to do so; and for them, friendship is a dereliction of that duty, a form of self-­abdication. Even conversation, which is friendship’s mode of expression, is a superficial digression, through which we can make no acquisition. (Shadow, 485) (Et pourtant je n’avais peut-­être pas tort de sacrifier les plaisirs non seulement de la mondanité, mais de l’amitié, à celui de passer tout le jour dans ce jardin. Les êtres qui en ont la possibilité—­il est vrai que ce sont les artistes et j’étais convaincu depuis longtemps que je ne le serais jamais—­ont aussi le devoir de vivre pour eux-­mêmes; or, l’amitié leur est une dispense de ce devoir, une abdication de soi. La conversation même qui est le mode d’expression de l’amitié est une divagation superficielle, qui ne nous donne rien à acquérir. [2:260])

Friendship is a waste of time for an artist, and conversation, which is at the heart of friendship, has nothing to offer someone cultivating their own artistic sensibilities. This judgment might seem a strange one, coming in the midst of a novel so much of which is given over to the reporting of conversation, a novel that demonstrates a fascination with both the mechanics and the aesthetics of talk. It might also seem a bit paradoxical. What, after all, is happening during the time he spends with the band of girls? A lot of talk, it would seem. But it turns out that the narrator’s relation to talk in the presence of Saint-­Loup and his relation to talk in the presence of the girls is not the same. The relation he has to the talk of the girls contributes, he claims, to his development as an artist. His relation to the talk he and Saint-­Loup perform together damages that same development. What is the difference? His justification for his unfriendly behavior to Saint-­Loup has to do with his fascination—­when in the company of the young girls—­with nonreferential indexicality. Indexes, commonly understood as parts of speech with little or no inherent semantic content that serve to anchor utterances in space and time and to establish speaking roles, take their meaning from the context of the utterance itself: its time frame ( yesterday, today, and tomorrow are indexes—­or deictics—­of time, depending on the moment of the utterance for their meaning), its location (here and there are indexes of place), its arrangement of speakers and listeners (I, you, she, he, we, they are all indexes of person), and so on. They help anchor discourse and make it feel meaningful; they establish a framework that allows

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for coherent conversation. Yet there is another (at least one) order of indexicality happening in language that does not exactly have to do with the speaking situation per se, but that serves to anchor utterances in social time and social space. When someone speaks with an accent we recognize as providing evidence of where they spent time in the past, when someone uses a grammatical form (“how y’all be?”) that leads us to assume something about their class or regional affiliations, when someone uses a bit of lexicon that is linked to youth culture at a certain point in time or space (“groovy,” “dope,” “awesome”), when a pronoun choice (tu/vous) or a choice among options for naming someone (Victor, as opposed to M. Victor Hugo, or Hugo) reveals assumptions about familiarity or status relations, this is what linguistic anthropologists call nonreferential indexicality—­“functionally independent of reference as such,” in Michael Silverstein’s words, yet serving to “link speech to the wider system of social life.”2 You can refer to the same person as tu or as vous, as “buddy” or as “mate” or as “dude” or as “sir”; you can call a writer a plumitif. Through your choice, you invoke a social structure and imply something about yourself in relation to the person you address, about who you are, where you come from, and how you understand the situation in which you are speaking. When Proust’s narrator listens to the talk happening around him while in the girls’ company, he appears blithely unconcerned about the topic of the conversation in which he is a participant. He admits that he is often not the slightest bit interested in anything the girls have to say. Yet he listens intently: When we exchanged words, which was not often, the things said by me and the girls of the little gang were without interest; and on my part, they were interrupted by long silences. This did not prevent me from listening to what the girls said with as much pleasure as when just looking at them, discovering through the voice of each of them the vividly colored picture of her. [ . . . ] When I chatted with one of the girls, I noticed that the outline of her individuality, original and unique, was ingeniously drawn and ruthlessly imposed upon me as much by the modulations of her voice as by the shifting expressions of her face. [ . . . ] The intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things. These features of the girls did not, of course, belong just to them: they belonged to their parents. As individuals, each of us lives our lives immersed in something more general than ourselves. Parents, for that matter, do not hand on only the habitual act of a facial and vocal feature, but also turns of phrase, certain special sayings, which are almost as deeply rooted and unconscious as an intonation, and indicate as much as it does a point of view on life. (Shadow, 486–­88)

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(Les paroles qui s’échangeaient entre les jeunes filles de la petite bande et moi étaient peu intéressantes, rares d’ailleurs, coupées de ma part de longs silences. Cela ne m’empêchait pas de prendre à les écouter quand elles me parlaient autant de plaisir qu’à les regarder, à découvrir dans la voix de chacune d’elles un tableau vivement coloré. [ . . . ] Quand je causais avec une de mes amies,  je m’apercevais que le tableau original, unique de son individualité, m’était ingénieusement dessiné, tyranniquement imposé aussi bien par les inflexions de sa voix que par celles de son visage. [ . . . ] Nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses. Sans doute ces traits n’étaient pas qu’à ces jeunes filles. Ils étaient à leur parents. L’individu baigne dans quelque chose de plus général que lui. À ce compte, les parents ne fournissent pas que ce geste habituel que sont les traits du visage et de la voix, mais aussi certaines manières de parler, certaines phrases consacrées, qui presque aussi inconscientes qu’une intonation, presque aussi profondes, indiquent, comme elle, un point de vue sur la vie. [2:261–­62])

Our hero observes with pleasure the many shades and tones he finds in the indexical penumbra of the girls’ speech. He is attentive, he says a bit further on, to “the tasty material that had been fixed, laid down, by the province of origin from which they drew their voice and into which even their intonations had sunk their teeth” (Shadow, 488; but my translation) (“la savoureuse matière imposée par la province originelle d’où elles tiraient leur voix et à même laquelle mordaient leurs intonations” [2:263]). His vocabulary here is precise, inventive, surprising, difficult to translate. (Neither of the extant English translations even attempts to match it!) He perceives the girls’ voices as arising from something material, some rich matter, that is furnished by the region in which they were born. Their very intonations latch on to this matter the way a fish seizes the bait on the hook that catches it. He continues: “Whenever Andrée brusquely plucked a low note, she could not prevent the Périgourdine string in her vocal instrument from producing a singing tone, one that was, in fact, quite in harmony with the meridional purity of her features” (“Quand Andrée pinçait sèchement une note grave, elle ne pouvait faire que la corde périgourdine de son instrument vocal ne rendît pas un son chantant fort en harmonie d’ailleurs avec la pureté méridionale de ses traits”). Here it seems that the physical matter of Andrée’s larynx, the vocal cords themselves, come from Périgord, and that no matter how hard she might try to alter the sound they produce, their place of origin would be revealed to knowing ears despite all her effort. The knowing ears of the narrator are capable not only of positioning French voices precisely on the map of France; they allow him to hear the “philosophy

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of life” that both individuates each girl and also links her to the family that has transmitted that philosophy to her. Yet the philosophy is not to be discovered in any set of stated precepts or maxims; it is not testified to by any action. It is inferred by the narrator from vocal inflections and intonations, from the presence of (but not necessarily the semantic content of ) various characteristic phrases, syntactical turns, lexical choices, verbal tics. If, for the narrator, an accent is so deeply rooted in the “matter” of someone’s voice that it is entirely unconscious and uncontrollable, these other indexes of a “philosophy of life” (which we might take to be shorthand for a particular point of view on the social world that the narrator feels he can locate with some precision thanks to his own experience of that social world and his participation in it) are nearly as uncontrollable, if perhaps slightly more sociological and less material. (If each of us is “immersed [baigne] in something more general than ourselves,” that something in which we are swimming is surely the surrounding social world.) It would seem that the narrator here is gesturing toward his experience of what Silverstein calls “statistical indexes.” As Silverstein notes in an article from 1985: A tradition of so-­called sociolinguistic study has emerged over the last 20 years that relates the frequencies of relatively Standard vs. non-­Standard forms in samples of actual language production to the membership of speakers in any of a number of cross-­cutting social groups and categories, and to the overall task demands of the contextual conditions of the produced samples. That is, frequencies of Standard/non-­Standard linguistic forms can be seen as indexes of both social identities of the speaker and overall contextual “style,” the strength of Standard-­inducing demands made by various contexts of language production.3

In his article, Silverstein is particularly interested in the fact that it is possible to demonstrate that in English, “statistical frequency differentiation of forms goes along with gender-­identity distinctions” (238). It is a question I will come back to later in this volume, whether, when we listen to the talk of others, we are not in some way operating as amateur statisticians, whose mostly unconscious statistical tallying of certain aspects of the speech of others is part of our own ability to function competently in various social worlds. Proust’s narrator, listening to the voices of the band of young girls, is obviously listening to the vocal production of their gender identities, but also to other aspects of their social identities (class-­and region-­based aspects, along with aspects of identity related to religious affiliation, intellectual and aesthetic

54  Chapter One

dispositions, family structures, and other features of social status) that he hears both in certain frequency functions (he is unquestionably interested in statistical analysis) of elements of their speech and also in features of the sound form of that speech such as pitch, intonation, and inflection. Proust’s narrator, in short, “hears” identities happening as he listens to language-­in-­use, he hears the girls swimming in the social world as they use language, and he does so—­at least in the case of these girls—­without paying much attention to “what” in particular any one of them might be saying. What might it mean to read literature with ears such as these? As a step toward approaching that question, we could notice that the narrator also listens to the language use of the Guermantes clan in a way similar to (but not so obviously condescending as) the way he listens to the speech of the girls. Consider his way of reporting the following exchange between Saint-­ Loup and Charlus: “You are quite fond of Andromaque and Phèdre, then?” Saint-­Loup asked his uncle in a tone of slight disdain. “There is more truth in a single tragedy by Racine than in all the melodramas of M. Victor Hugo put together,” M. de Charlus replied. “Aren’t fashionable people atrocious?” Saint-­Loup murmured in my ear. “Preferring Racine to Victor! Really! That’s just off the wall.” He was sincerely dejected by what his uncle had said, but the pleasure of saying “Really!” and especially “off the wall” was of some consolation to him. (Shadow, 344) (—­Tu aimes beaucoup Andromaque et Phèdre? demanda Saint-­Loup à son oncle, sur un ton légèrement dédaigneux. —­Il y a plus de vérité dans une tragédie de Racine que dans tous les drames de M. Victor Hugo, répondit M. de Charlus. —­C’est tout de même effrayant, le monde, me dit Saint-­Loup à l’oreille. Préférer Racine à Victor, c’est quand même quelque chose d’énorme!” Il était sincèrement attristé des paroles de son oncle, mais le plaisir de dire “quand même” et surtout “énorme” le consolait. [2:122])

At least three features of the utterance Saint-­Loup whispers in the narrator’s ear—­features having to do with what the narrator understands to be happening on the social indexical plane—­are called to our attention here: the use by Saint-­Loup (and his pleasure in that use) of idioms that clash with the register expectations that accompany his high social standing; his careful display of his allegiance to the literature written by or represented by Hugo (at least

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when compared to the literature represented by Racine) as well as his claim to some kind of personal familiarity with “Victor”; finally, the fact that this utterance is whispered privately by a renegade (or perhaps we should say, pseudo-­ renegade) nobleman to someone not part of his clan. The narrator’s presence, the proximity of  his very ear, as well as the social position he and his ear occupy (he is an outsider, but sufficiently genteel to be welcomed into this elite company), we could say, are conditions of possibility for this utterance.4 In “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­Culture Nexus,” Silverstein describes how in the course of verbal interactions, participants invoke structures of knowledge and then use expressions that denote elements of those structures to index “specific values or nodes within such knowledge schemata.” In the paragraphs surrounding and including those just cited from Proust, such expressions include “Mme de Sévigné,” “La Fontaine,” “ces Lettres,” “La Bruyère,” “Racine,” “Andromaque,” “Phèdre,” “M. Victor Hugo,” “Victor”—­ tokens to be manipulated in the performance of a social identity. Who is allowed to know and like what kind of  literature? Who chooses to do so? What is the importance of the distinction between classical and romantic writers, and how can it be mobilized? How does an opposition between those two kinds of writing map onto a generational opposition within the aristocracy? How do various generations of aristocrats choose to display their familiarity with both authors and works, and to what end? In Silverstein’s words: What type of person, with what social characteristics, deploys such knowledge by using the expressions that normatively and actually index (invoke) it in a particular configuration of cotext? [Linguistic anthropologists use cotext to refer to the words surrounding other words that help produce their meaning, whereas context refers more widely to often nonverbal framing features that help produce meaning.] With what degrees and kinds of authority do interactants use expressions (reflecting knowledgeable familiarity from the social structural position of the user with respect to ritual centers of authority that “warrant” their use)? To whom is authoritative knowledge ascribed, and who can achieve at least a conversationally local state of authority with respect to it, if not a perduring authority stretching beyond the instance of interaction? (632)

Silverstein calls our attention to the implicit assumptions or ascriptions of authority that happen in verbal interchanges by means of the choice to use certain expressions instead of others while invoking certain kinds of knowledge. We can use Silverstein’s point to foreground one of the consistent rhetorical features of the way in which Proust’s narrator reports the utterances

56  Chapter One

of others. As he does so, he usually maps out for the reader local states of authority being produced in the speech he hears, and in which his own ability to speak is in certain ways circumscribed or curtailed. (It would not be for him to refer to Hugo as Victor . . .) And yet the narrator’s implicit claim in mapping for us the production of these local states of authority is that he, as narrator, over a longer time frame and thanks to the sensitivity with which he registers the workings of language-­in-­use around him, possesses a more “perduring authority stretching beyond the instance of interaction.” Locally, the narrator’s ability to notice something about the way in which Saint-­Loup speaks to him provides him with an experience of his own social positioning at that moment in time. He is a useful foil for Saint-­Loup, enabling the young aristocrat to display his differences from his more snobbish uncle. We could say that the narrator, in the presence of Charlus and Saint-­Loup, is, because of his extreme sensitivity to the workings of  language-­in-­use, made to experience himself as socially useful—­indeed, as used by these two aristocrats as a foil to their interaction—­and that this feeling is, at least on this occasion, a somewhat unpleasant one. Our narrator would probably prefer that the social facts of his personhood not count as elements contributing to the production of the various kinds of meaning to which he is sensitive in the language use around him. In the case of listening to the girls, it seems he feels (at least in the moment we have considered) more that he is useless, inconsequential, invisible, a neutral participant-­observer who imagines his presence has no effect on the discourse that happens around him, a mere medium for registering the speech of the girls, unimplicated socially. (Any such feeling is illusory, of course, as the development of his relationship with Albertine across the next few volumes makes exceedingly clear.)5 The very fact of the difference between Proust’s hero’s experience of his own sociolinguistic position in, on one hand, the exchanges of language with and between the girls and, on the other, those between Saint-­Loup and Charlus reveals to the reader the hero’s nonneutrality within the social world (and also the narrator’s). His speech as well as his silence work to position him socially just as do the speech (and the sounds of that speech) of the girls or of the Guermantes. On another level, then, the novel itself, like its hero and its narrator, is interested in language-­in-­use, interested in the language the narrator uses and the implications of that use. (I will develop this topic at greater length in chapter 2.) Moreover, as the reporting of the conversation about Hugo and Racine implies, the novel is interested in both literature in and literature as language-­in-­use. If the novel, in the passage we have just been considering, implicitly poses the question as to how the narrator himself would choose to

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refer to M. Victor Hugo and what he might have to say about Hugo’s person or his works, it also consistently illustrates how talk about literature differs from social location to social location, and in so doing it illustrates that it is, itself, as a novel, frequently a form of talk about literature. Here, for instance, is the passage from the scene with the band of girls that parallels the exchange between Charlus and Saint-­Loup regarding Racine and Hugo. In it, the narrator reports on a letter from one of the girls, Gisèle, to Albertine regarding an exam that she has just taken and that Albertine will be taking in the near future: The forebodings Albertine had expressed about the difficulty of the essays had been more than borne out by the two topics, of which Gisèle had had to choose one: “Writing to Racine from the Underworld, Sophocles commiserates with him over the failure of Athalie”; and “Imagine that Mme de Sévigné, having seen the first performance of Racine’s Esther, writes a letter to Mme de Lafayette to say how much she wishes the latter could have been there too.” (Shadow, 490) (Les craintes d’Albertine sur la difficulté des sujets proposés avaient encore été dépassées par les deux entre lesquels Gisèle avait eu à opter. L’un était: “Sophocle écrit des Enfers à Racine pour le consoler de l’insuccès d’Athalie”; l’autre: “Vous supposerez qu’après la première représentation d’Esther, Mme de Sévigné écrit à Mme de La Fayette pour lui dire combien elle a regretté son absence.” [2:264–­65])

There is much that could be said about this passage, and the subsequent strategizing among the girls that the narrator reports in detail as to how to prepare for such exams, how to choose among questions, how successful Gisèle’s exam essay (part of which is included in the novel) is, and how it might have been improved.6 Here it simply serves as evidence that the novel is interested in how, why, and when people talk about literature in the way they do, and how they are trained to do so. It is not such a big step to then say that the novel itself is involved in the same game: it both is, and reproduces, talk about literature. It provides the elements of a knowledge schema that organizes information about how and why certain people (upwardly mobile middle-­class girls, cultivated bourgeois grandmothers, older male aristocrats, younger male aristocrats, and their aunts) talk about literature in the way they do, and thus it implicitly suggests that there must be a place in that schema both for the narrator (an aspiring writer) and how he talks about literature, music, and art (more on this in chapters 2 and 3, as well) and for the novel itself (as well as for its

58  Chapter One

readers: it asks that we write about it, use it in whatever way we end up doing, whether it be as students sitting for an exam or me writing this book). In short, Search might be said to understand itself as an extended example of literature as language-­in-­use. It might be asking to be listened to with the kinds of ears the narrator uses to listen to the girls or Saint-­Loup or Charlus. Tools for Apprehending Literature as Language-­in-­Use I would like to take a few paragraphs now to draw together a number of ideas from the work of Bakhtin, Bourdieu, and Silverstein. Out of the interplay between those ideas, I hope to open up some ways of developing what it means to think of, or to be able to read, a particular literary work as an example of language-­in-­use. But as a starting place, let me recall section 432 of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—­In use it is alive. Is the breath of life there within it?—­Or is the use its breath? (Jedes Zeichen scheint allein tot. Was gibt ihm Leben?—­Im Gebrauch lebt es. Hat es da den lebenden Atem in sich?—­Oder ist der Gebrauch sein Atem?)7

Wittgenstein associates “use” with life and with breath. In a famous sentence from section 43 of the Philosophical Investigations, he also associates it with meaning: “For a large class of cases—­though not for all—­in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (18). Wittgenstein’s claims have been taken up as a way of marking a difference from claims that meaning happens “in” an utterance (in the sense that the meaning would arise primarily from its semantic and syntactic features) in order to focus on meaning as produced in the context of the utterance, in its use in context.8 The hesitation between the two final questions in section 432 is interesting: is the breath of life a potential lurking within the word or the utterance itself, waiting to be woken through its use, or is the use itself what makes it live? (Is meaning immanent in an utterance and revealed upon use or emergent from the utterance as a result of its use?) What does the use of an utterance add to it? We could (remembering Proust) easily make a preliminary list of what use adds: it adds context, intonation, accent, a speaker, a location in social space, addressees, bystanders, a situation, the history that leads up to it, and that which follows, and so on. The question regarding to what degree meaning is immanent in or emergent from utterances is one to

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which we will return. In either case, if our focus is on use, we are required to develop a way of thinking about what context is and how use itself brings context into play. Bourdieu could be said to give sociological content to the notion of use that Wittgenstein lays out for us. He develops a particular approach to context through his concept of the field of linguistic or of cultural production, a field in which both language itself and cultural objects are taken up and used in various ways that are linked to the history and the structure of the field in question and to the history and habitus of the agents acting within that field from various positions. For Bourdieu, a focus on use opens a space for sociological observation, revealing something of what is left out, for instance, of the analysis of language as a formal system, language understood as langue as it was elaborated in structural linguistics. Langue, Bourdieu suggested, emphasized “the autonomy attributed to language in relation to its social conditions of production, reproduction, and use.”9 As Bourdieu noted, a sociology of language needs rather to understand how language in its use comes to associate structured forms of linguistic difference with other structured forms of social difference. To speak is to act socially—­but this action often occurs through the invocation or production of meanings that arise from linguistic features statistically linked to specific contexts or regions of use, registered in the “how” rather than in the “what” of what is being said: The social uses of language owe their specifically social value to the fact that they tend to be organized in systems of differences (between prosodic and articulatory or lexical and syntactic variants) which reproduce, in the symbolic order of differential deviations, the system of social differences. To speak is to appropriate one or other of the expressive styles already constituted in and through usage and objectively marked by their position in a hierarchy of styles which expresses the hierarchy of corresponding social groups. (54)

Habits of pronunciation, rhythms of speech, accent and intonation, word choice, the choice of one syntactic form over another, all of these features reveal the socially organizing work that happens in language use. Their meaning depends on the structure of the social universe in which the use takes place, and the use is related indexically to that social structure. On a different level, various ways of talking about literature (the way Charlus would, the way Saint-­ Loup would, the way Albertine would, the way the hero’s grandmother would, the way the narrator or hero would) function in a similar fashion, to distinguish the social location, disposition, and aspirations of the speaker.10 Both language

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use and the uses of cultural objects have histories and also occur within orga­ nized structures to which we necessarily refer and in which we situate ourselves when, in our turn, we make use of them. We invoke a system of distinctive differences as a part of establishing who we are in speaking. When, in literary studies, we think of context, contextualization, or intertextuality, we often dwell in the realm of text artifacts themselves, weighing what claims we can make for the relations between one text and another or between a text and accounts that have been made of its historical and cultural surroundings. To think of literature as language-­in-­use is a slightly different activity. We might characterize the difference as related to a number of slight shifts in emphasis: from the artifactual to the interactive, from the semantic or referential to the pragmatic and social indexical, from context imagined as some kind of fixed surrounding to a sense that context is in a state of continual production. To make an utterance is then to make a claim on context; to make a claim on context is to assert a certain point of view on some aspect of social reality. In their introduction to the volume The Natural Histories of Discourse, Silverstein and Urban note that “to equate culture with its resultant texts is to miss the fact that texts (as we see them, the precipitates of continuous cultural processes) represent one, ‘thing-­y’ phase in a broader conceptualization of cultural process” (1). (Proust, we might recall here, is, if he is anything, a novelist of process.) What Silverstein and Urban, along with other linguistic anthropologists working in the language-­in-­use tradition, aim at is “the study of culture not just as text, but as entextualization processes in which the text is but one moment.” Process is prioritized, because it is in real-­time usage situations that “entextualization reveals an architecture of social relations” (14). In the words of Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer in a 1975 review article, when the language-­in-­use movement in North American linguistic anthropology was just starting to gather steam, what was being pursued was “the study of social structures as emergent in speech events.”11 (They might have been talking about Proust in that moment.) Both halves of the pair of alternatives noted above in Wittgenstein, between immanent and emergent meanings, are regularly referenced in the work of thinkers such as these. What does it mean to say that entextualization (the process of producing an utterance that could be said to cohere with a context—­a context that is itself being delineated or asserted by the speaker out of a myriad possible contextual constructs) reveals an (immanent) architecture of social relations or to say that social relations emerge from speech events? In a different moment, Silverstein describes culture as existing “only by virtue of its being invoked—­indexically called into being—­primarily in discursive interaction, the kind of social action that

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occurs through the use of language and its dependent sign systems.”12 The verb invoke somehow yokes together the two sides of Wittgenstein’s hesitation: meaning that could be called immanent in a culture emerges only thanks to an utterance or an exchange of utterances in a particular context of use that together invoke that meaning. Linguistic anthropologists deal with talk (and with the transcripts and recordings they make of it). What can be gained for the understanding of  literary texts if we take into account that they, like other instances of semiotic activity, live in their use, that, in their “thing-­y” textual form (and it is probably worth recalling that this is not the only form in which they exist) they are also an “extract” of “a portion of ongoing social action”?13 Bakhtin, in “The Problem of Speech Genres,” offers some observations (I previewed the first of them in the introduction) that can help us to pursue this line of thought. If Bakhtin seems germane to this discussion, it is in large measure because in that essay he makes no bones about not distinguishing between talk and (literary) writing: “The novel as a whole is an utterance just as rejoinders in everyday dialogue or private letters are” (62). A few pages later, he will note: “Of course, an utterance is not always followed immediately by an articulated response. [ . . . ] In most cases, genres of complex cultural communication are intended precisely for [a] kind of actively responsive understanding with delayed action” (68–­69). The implication is that in order to think about exchanges of literary utterances we must develop an expanded notion of the “real-­time” of interaction. Literary utterances are part of a conversation that happens over months, years, decades, centuries. Whose contributions to the conversation get heard and become impactful is never done being determined. Nor is the question as to the nature and the genre of those contributions ever fully answered. We could also extrapolate from Bakhtin’s observations that even relatively fixed text artifacts themselves can remain caught up in the flow of cultural process in a variety of ways. We might also note Bakhtin’s reminder that certain features we might take to be specific to spoken utterances may have some kind of correlate in written texts: “Intonation is recognized by us and exists as a stylistic factor even with silent reading of written speech,” he comments (85). In a few pages, we will see how Proust’s narrator “listens” for the writer Bergotte’s “accent” in his published prose. To think about literary texts caught up in an interactive process is therefore to think about their use in an extended “real-­time.”14 When Bourdieu writes about the collective production of the public meaning of a literary work, he too is thinking about a real-­time interactive process (one involving many more kinds of utterances and actions than “purely” literary ones) that is taking place

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within a literary field whose preexisting structures exert a shaping influence on those utterances and actions: The public meaning of the work, as an objectively instituted judgment on the value and truth of the work (in relation to which any individual judgment of taste is obliged to define itself ) is necessarily collective. That is to say that the subject of an aesthetic judgment is a “one” which may take itself for an “I”: the objectivization of the creative intention which one might call “publication” (in the sense of “being made public”) is accomplished by way of an infinite number of particular social relationships, between publisher and author, between author and critic, between authors, etc.15

To perceive the way in which interactions between all these figures are shaped by the field in which they occur involves reconstructing the indexical relations between text and field, between interaction and field; it involves reconstructing the collectively produced interactional text of which cultural objects are a part. In order to explore the applicability of these various lines of thought to a literary utterance, we would have to be willing to put on hold whatever attachment we have to the “thing-­y” notion of, say, a novel, the idea that a novel is a book existing between two covers or a sequence of signs in an electronic file that flow in ordered fashion across the screen of our e-­reader. Our attention would have to shift to those aspects of the novel, those other channels of the sign form, that Wittgenstein referred to as “breath” and “life”: processes in which it is caught up as it comes into being and then processes of uptake across time as it is read, used, ascribed meanings, negotiated with, cited, transmitted, mentioned in conversations, assigned for exams, circulated for all kinds of reasons and to all kinds of ends. This would involve being not just readers of a novel: we must also “read” (or, thinking of Proust’s narrator, we must research or undertake fieldwork regarding) the relations between the novel and other utterances (some of which may have no artifactual existence) or actions that help it to be or become what it is. We could say, then, that the object of our attention becomes the web of social indexical relations in which a literary utterance is caught up. Utterances rely on previous utterances, Bakhtin insists in “The Problem of Speech Genres.” Any speaker or any novelist “presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances—­his own and others’—­with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any

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utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (69). Let us return to Proust’s novel to see how his narrator takes up some of these same lines of thought. Literature and Language-­in-­Use When, in the first half of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust’s narrator attends a luncheon at the Swanns’ where he meets his literary idol, Bergotte, he is immediately attentive to Bergotte’s accent, and embarks upon a long disquisition regarding the relations it is possible to establish between that accent and Bergotte’s writing. In the course of these reflections, the narrator implicitly elaborates a theory of the literary field and its role in the production of certain kinds of meaning. He also insists upon the way in which a literary work can draw meaning from social relations that surround and perfuse it from outside the literary field per se. Most of the properties of utterances or speech genres we have seen elaborated by Bakhtin, much of the thinking about meaning as a process that unfolds interactively that is common to Bourdieu, Silverstein, and Bakhtin, much of Bourdieu’s sociological understanding of the ways in which authors and works are caught up in structured relations and temporal processes specific to their given field of cultural production seem already to have been apparent to Proust and to have found practical expression in his novel. As we have already seen, numerous moments in the second half of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (and indeed, throughout Search) are very much concerned with how meaning happens in specific moments of language use. The passage regarding Bergotte’s accent in the first half of that volume is particularly well suited to allow us to track the movement between, on one level, the concern with forms of social indexicality in a spoken utterance that we have seen in the passage regarding the speech of the girls and, on another level, a concern with indexicality of a slightly different order—­that involving the relationships that come to exist between different works of literature, their authors, and the surrounding cultural universe (concerns we find foregrounded in different ways in Bourdieu’s work on literature and in Bakhtin’s way of thinking about literature). Bergotte’s accent functions as a kind of pivot, a mediating device between these two orders of indexicality. It allows the narrator to listen to Bergotte in the way he listens to the girls, but it also provides him insight into the situatedness of Bergotte’s literary production. Hearing Bergotte’s spoken accent makes Bergotte’s writing mean things for the narrator that it did not mean (could not have meant) before he had heard this accent. In

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the narrator’s ears, this accent establishes relationships between Bergotte, his writing, and his social world as well as between Bergotte and other writers in the surrounding literary field. Certain idiosyncrasies of elocution that could be faintly detected in Bergotte’s conversation were not peculiar to him; and when I later came to know his brothers and sisters, I noticed that their speech was much more marked by these than his was. It had something to do with a sharp, hoarse fall to the last words of a cheerful statement, or a faint and fading voice at the end of a sad one. Swann, who had known the Master as a child, once told me that in those days Bergotte’s voice was as full as his brothers’ and sisters’ of these more or less family inflections, outbursts of violent glee alternating with slow, melancholy murmurs, and that, when they were all together in the playroom, the young Bergotte could be heard holding his own better than anyone in their concerts, alternately deafening and languid. However distinctive it may be, all this noise made by different beings is transitory and does not outlive the beings who make it. But that was not the case with the Bergotte family pronunciation. [ . . . ] Bergotte had transposed and set in prose those ways of drawing out words that find themselves repeated in joyous uproars, or dribble away in sad sighs. There are in his books such sentence endings in which the accumulated sonorities sustain themselves, like the final chords to an operatic overture that cannot bring itself to end and so repeats multiple times its closing cadence before the conductor finally lays down his baton, that I came to see later as a musical equivalent of the Bergotte family’s phonetic brasses. (Shadow, 128–­29) (Certaines particularités d’élocution qui existaient à l’état de faibles traces dans la conversation de Bergotte ne lui appartenaient pas en propre, car quand j’ai connu plus tard ses frères et ses soeurs, je les ai retrouvées chez eux bien plus accentuées. C’était quelque chose de brusque et de rauque dans les derniers mots d’une phrase gaie, quelque chose d’affaibli et d’expirant à la fin d’une phrase triste. Swann, qui avait connu le Maître quand il était enfant, m’a dit qu’alors on entendait chez lui, tout autant que chez ses frères et soeurs ces inflexions en quelque sorte familiales, tour à tour cris de violente gaieté, murmures d’une lente mélancolie et que dans la salle où ils jouaient tous ensemble il faisait sa partie, mieux qu’aucun, dans leurs concerts successivement assourdissants et languides. Si particulier qu’il soit, tout ce bruit qui s’échappe des êtres est fugitif et ne leur survit pas. Mais il n’en fut pas ainsi de la pro­ nonciation de la famille Bergotte. [ . . . ] Bergotte avait transposé et fixé dans sa prose cette façon de traîner sur des mots qui se répètent en clameurs de joie

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ou qui s’égouttent en tristes soupirs. Il y a dans ses livres telles terminaisons de phrases où l’accumulation des sonorités qui se prolongent, comme aux derniers accords d’une ouverture d’opéra qui ne peut pas finir et redit plusieurs fois sa suprême cadence avant que le chef d’orchestre pose son bâton, dans lesquelles je retrouvai plus tard un équivalent musical de ces cuivres phonétiques de la famille Bergotte. [1:543–­44])

That Bergotte has what it seems we should call a family accent is not something the hero knows when he firsts meets him and hears him speak. The narrator later hears this part of Bergotte’s voice retrospectively, we might say, after meeting his siblings and after the conversation with Swann that he mentions here. Only then does this aspect of Bergotte’s speech become audible, sa­ lient, meaningful. The attention to Bergotte’s family accent is an example of the narrator’s listening to Bergotte (over time) in the way the hero listens to the voices of the girls in Balbec later in the same volume. He invests his attention in sonic features of the language rather than semantic ones, finds meaning of various kinds in or through those sonic features, and then goes on to find correspondences between those sonic features and the style of Bergotte’s writing. The sonic features that hold the narrator’s attention position Bergotte in a particular (familial) microcosm of the social world. Also, for those with the ears to hear and the eyes to read, the written equivalent of those sonic features memorializes that family’s way of speaking in works of literature. It is not just his family’s accent that he puts into circulation in written form, it is also the affective registers and flows characterizing their interactions (and existing in the shape of the sound forms themselves) that find themselves incorporated into Bergotte’s prose. Our narrator is not relating to Bergotte here in any way that a literary critic typically relates to an author or to a literary work. He seems more like an amateur sociolinguist or even a linguistic anthropologist—­someone for whom literary texts and audible speech both provide data of a sort, data regarding forms of speech that are perhaps tied to region, class, and family background, as well as age and affect. The literary texts hold meaning for him, or information, but a different kind of meaning or information than a literary critic might seek to find in them. Yet, as the analysis of Bergotte’s speech continues, it takes an interesting turn, one that shows the narrator to have a specific sociological interest in the profession of literature, in literature as part of a field of cultural production. Here the narrator also reveals himself to be attentive to certain ways in which one literary utterance impacts another within the field in question:

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Other features of his diction he shared not with members of his family but with certain writers of his day. Certain younger writers who were beginning to disown him, and who claimed to have no intellectual affinity with him, showed their debt to him without meaning to by way of their use of certain adverbs or prepositions that he was always using, in constructing sentences after his manner, in speaking in the same dawdling and almost toneless fashion, in reaction against the facile grandiloquence of a previous generation. It may be that these young men had never known Bergotte (this was certainly the case, as will be seen, with some of them). But they had been inoculated with his way of thinking, and it had developed in them those modifications of syntax and accent which bear a necessary relation to intellectual originality. This is a relation that requires some interpretation. The fact was that, though Bergotte’s way of writing owed nothing to anyone, he was indebted for his speaking style to one of his old friends, a wonderful talker who had had a great influence on him, whom he imitated unintentionally in conversation, but who, being less gifted than Bergotte, had never written a book that was in any way out of the ordinary. Thus, if judged only on originality of spoken delivery, Bergotte would have been properly deemed to be a mere disciple, a purveyor of hand-­me-­downs; whereas, despite having been influenced in speech habits by his friend, he had still been original and creative as a writer. (Shadow, 130) (C’était, non plus avec des membres de sa famille, mais avec certains écrivains de son temps que d’autres traits de son élocution lui étaient communs. De plus jeunes qui commençaient à le renier et prétendaient n’avoir aucune parenté intellectuelle avec lui, la manifestaient sans le vouloir en employant les mêmes adverbes, les mêmes prépositions qu’il répétait sans cesse, en construisant les phrases de la même manière, en parlant sur le même ton amorti, ralenti, par réaction contre le langage éloquent et facile d’une génération précédente. Peut-­être ces jeunes gens—­on en verra qui étaient dans ce cas—­n’avaient-­ils pas connu Bergotte. Mais sa façon de penser, inoculée en eux, y avait développé ces altérations de la syntaxe et de l’accent qui est en relation nécessaire avec l’originalité intellectuelle. Relation qui demande à être interprétée d’ailleurs. Ainsi Bergotte, s’il ne devait rien à personne dans sa façon d’écrire, tenait sa façon de parler d’un de ses vieux camarades, merveilleux causeur dont il avait subi l’ascendant, qu’il imitait sans le vouloir dans la conversation, mais qui, lui, étant moins doué, n’avait jamais écrit de livres vraiment supérieurs. De sorte que si l’on s’en était tenu à l’originalité du débit, Bergotte eût été étiqueté disciple, écrivain de seconde main, alors que, influencé par son ami dans le domaine de la causerie, il avait été original et créateur comme écrivain. [1:545–­46])

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The narrator understands the literary field in which he and Bergotte are actors to be composed of sets of structured relations in which, for instance, writers of one generation can have a relation to writers of an earlier generation without even knowing or reading them, because the relation is constructed by, mediated by, and endures within the older writer’s effect on the field, an effect that can be transmitted by other means than direct contact. Proust’s narrator is claiming to hear the field’s forces at work in syntactic choices, in choices of adverbs and prepositions, as well as in features of verbal expression such as tone and register. Yet the narrator also understands utterances produced in this field of cultural production to have meaningful connections to other kinds of social relations—­Bergotte’s relation to “one of his old friends,” who was a better talker, and who, through his talking, unintentionally spurred Bergotte’s development as a writer. To be a writer is to be a member of a speech community; in writing, one enregisters different aspects of that speech community. To be a reader or a critic—­to be the kind of reader or critic Proust’s narrator is modeling for us—­is to attempt to reconstruct something of the speech community in which the writing originated. A critic may or may not have, or may or may not be able to acquire, the knowledge necessary to do that. The narrator, devoted reader of Bergotte, seems to have been prompted by that devotion into substantial amounts of fieldwork regarding Bergotte’s family, his intellectual and social development, and his networks of acquaintances. The narrator’s extensive research program has included not only reading, but actually going to hear the speech of key figures of Bergotte’s past. We can imagine that he wanted to listen to the speech of Bergotte and his family and friends in the way we have seen him listening to the speech of the girls: “The intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things. [ . . . ] As individuals, each of us lives our lives immersed in something more general than ourselves.” There are “turns of phrase, certain special sayings, which are almost as deeply rooted and unconscious as an intonation, and point as much as it does to a point of view on life” (Shadow, 487–­88). We could say that one thing the narrator is demonstrating for us is the quest for the knowledge and the interpretative techniques required to make different orders of the indexical functioning of a piece of  literary writing—­and the kinds of meaning attendant on them—­perceptible. I noted earlier that the narrator sometimes likes to pretend (although the pretense is a thin one) that he is not implicated in the social world he is investigating. He and his utterances are obviously implicated in the world he explores, just as is the utterance in which he exists, the novel itself. What I

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have been offering so far has obviously not been an analysis of Proust that attempts to reconstruct any of the contexts in which his own literary utterances were participating (nor one that tries to pinpoint with any precision the literary ideology of his narrator). Rather, I have been offering ways of using Proust’s novel to think about literature as language-­in-­use, ways suggested by the novel itself. For all the passages I have been considering from the novel could (indeed should) be taken as offering a metapragmatic reflection regarding the ways in which meaning happens in and around utterances exchanged in general scenes of talk, utterances specifically about works of  literature, and literary utterances themselves (e.g., novels) as they interact, as they move through time, as they live, we could say, echoing Wittgenstein. These passages from Proust’s novel offer encouragement to read and listen in the way the narrator often does, to various social indexical features of language-­in-­use and to the specific kinds of meaning production attendant upon them. Within Proust’s novel, forms of cultural affiliation as well as forms of sexual desire move in these pragmatic, social indexical channels. In fact, whatever the narrator’s seeming aloofness or distance from the scenes he sometimes describes, his taste (e.g., for Bergotte) and his desire (e.g., for Albertine) are also taking shape pragmatically, in process, almost without being referred to, as the novel unfolds. That the novel itself also meant to intervene in ongoing social processes of aesthetic distinction and ongoing social processes related to the evolution of sexual forms and forms of desire is by now a foregone conclusion, as is, perhaps, the novel’s implicit claim that it is part of the function of  literature to do those very things.16 Search, I am suggesting, is very much alive, in Wittgenstein’s sense, inoculating others (including me, and perhaps now you as well) with its accent and thereby certain of its ways of thinking about how literature works and lives. (It will perhaps be in the case of Sarraute that we will most clearly see a later novelistic practice in which Proust’s accent can be rendered audible.) It is asking, it seems to me, to be used in a certain way—­to be understood as an utterance about itself as an utterance, about other utterances, past and future, responding to any number of them in meaningful ways that require both attentive ears and certain kinds of fieldwork if any attendant meaning is to emerge. Listening to the girls and listening to Bergotte, the narrator hears meaning happening in sonic features of their speech. Sometimes those sonic features are tied to biographical facts (e.g., birthplaces) of the speakers; the narrator combines sonic information and also other aspects of people’s manners of speaking (forms of reference to people, turns of phrase, choices of adverbs, and so on), with other cultural knowledge he has, to reveal a range of meanings their speech or their writing might carry that extends well beyond “what they are

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talking about.” As Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine put it, in what might almost seem to be a description of the metalinguistic activity the narrator has been engaged in, “knowledge that social actors already have makes it possible to notice and pick out phenomena in the buzz and bustle of a constantly changing, socio-­material surround. It allows guesses about what might be signs and a search for what a sign might signal, what it might stand for.”17 Proust’s narrator is often, when listening to people, guessing what might be signs and searching for what signs might signal. As Gal and Irvine insist, knowledge practices and searches for what a sign might signal go hand in hand: “knowledge and communicative action are moments of a single process” (89). That is, the narrator requires numerous kinds of knowledge if he is going to be successful at noticing and communicating to the reader the meanings he finds in what people say. In the second section of this chapter, I will focus on two moments in Search in which specific words, each with their own particularities, catch the narrator’s attention and lead him into speculations about their possible social indexical functions (what they might signal), speculations that would entail various kinds of inquiries (fieldwork, knowledge practices) to be verified. (Note, then, that the narrator is interested in both nonsegmental social indexes such as accent or intonation, and segmental ones, as in the use of individual words such as mentalité or plumitif.) We will also see, in examining the second moment, in which the word mousmé is central, how the novel produces passages in which the narrator’s own speech about the speech of others becomes potential data for analysis. The third section of this chapter will then explore how the novel’s social scientific interest in language-­in-­use can itself be contextualized historically, and also how it can be understood to be instrumental to the project that undergirds the large arc of the novel’s plot, which has to do with tracing the redistribution among various social groups of what Bourdieu has helped us to perceive as social capital.

Words, Old and New Every new word introduced into a language causes a disturbance analogous to that resulting from the introduction of a new-­comer into the physical or social world. M i c h e l B r é a l , Semantics

On any number of occasions, Proust’s narrator indicates to the reader that outside the confines of what is represented in the novel, he has been seeking information that would allow him to hear (or otherwise notice) different kinds of semiotic activity in people’s speech and then convey the significance of that

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activity to the reader. Sometimes particular words are in question. The first word I will take up is mentioned during a moment from The Prisoner, toward the end of the evening during which the Vinteuil Septet is performed. The momentous evening is winding down. A few of the people in the audience have understood what an astonishing piece of music they have just had the good fortune to hear. Many of them, of course, have understood nothing. In any case, the performance, led by the dashing, sexually fluid, young violinist, Morel, and the evening of which it is a part have become an event to be talked about. The Baron de Charlus, Morel’s protector (or at least he was when the evening began), had agreed to collaborate with the social climbing Verdurins to organize this musical evening, of which they were the official hosts. Aiming to further Morel’s prospects, both socially and musically, Charlus encouraged his most notable connections from the Faubourg Saint-­Germain to attend. Even the semimythical Queen of  Naples made an appearance. As Proust’s narrator notes, however, Charlus has not been the most diplomatic of collaborators. Collectors of artists and the artistically inclined, the Verdurins have been angling for some time to draw Morel more tightly into their ambit. Avid for social capital, they also covet the connections the guest list, as curated by Charlus, might bring them. Charlus haughtily neglects to introduce to the evening’s hosts any of the titled crowd who attend mainly because he invited them and insisted on their presence. The major drama of the evening comes after the majority of the titled guests have left, most of them rudely ignoring the Verdurins. At this point, the Verdurins put into motion a scheme they have been cogitating for some time: to suggest disingenuously to Morel that the backing of Charlus (sexually dubious, they inform Morel, who has to pretend they are telling him something he does not already know much better than they do) is morally compromising for him, damaging to his reputation and his career prospects, and that their own backing would serve him better. Having among his attributes neither loyalty nor a particularly astute sense of where social advantage might lie, Morel dramatically renounces his protector in the presence of the few remaining guests. The Queen of  Naples, having returned unnoticed to collect a valuable fan she had accidentally left behind, witnesses this shameful scene of  betrayal, and rescues Charlus from the painful position in which he has unexpectedly found himself, disdaining to notice either the Verdurins or Morel as she and the baron make their exit together. The evening is thus, when all is said and done, an odd mix of success and catastrophe for all concerned.18 It is perhaps especially catastrophic for Saniette, one of the regulars at the dinners the Verdurins give, whose status as the Verdurins’ whipping boy has been repeatedly exhibited to us across the novel. A socially awkward fellow, he

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has served as the object of sport at many a dinner or evening party. Always one to put his foot wrong, Saniette dares to suggest to Monsieur Verdurin and a few others that perhaps Morel’s displays of virtuosity during the performance of the Septet had been a bit more extreme than necessary. As a result, Verdurin loudly and publicly shows Saniette the door. Saniette promptly has some kind of an attack in the courtyard, and is conveyed home in an unconscious state. “He lived for some weeks more, but without regaining consciousness for more than a few minutes at a time” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 244) (“Il vécut encore quelques semaines, mais sans reprendre que passagèrement connais­sance” [3:770]). Saniette suffers a bit at the hands of the novelist as well. (This is the first volume published after Proust’s death in 1922, and so without final revisions or corrections on his part.) In this, Saniette is similar to the doctor Cottard, whose death is announced early on in the evening—­“it was so sudden, the poor professor!” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 221) (“il a été enlevé bien vite, le pauvre professeur!” [3:746])—­even though one of the guests somehow manages to ask him for a piece of advice a bit later on in the course of the soiree (257, 3:783). To make matters more confusing, once all the guests have left and M. and Mme Verdurin are on their own, we learn that Cottard, still alive, had been unable to attend the evening party at all because he was in fact attending to Saniette, who was also unable to attend due to the fact that, having earlier that day lost all his money and gone hugely into debt as a result of a bad gamble on the stock market, he had suffered some kind of an attack. This second attack seems not to have been quite so severe as the first. If the first carried him off after only a few weeks, he survives the second by several years, because the narrator tells us that he learns something from Cottard about the Verdurins’ behavior toward Saniette “some years later, at Saniette’s funeral in fact” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 301) (“quelques années plus tard, à l’enterrement même de Saniette” [3:829]). What the narrator learns at Saniette’s graveside is that the Verdurins, upon hearing of Saniette’s investment losses and subsequent debilitating attack, secretly arranged to rent a small apartment for him and to pay his expenses for the few years remaining between his attack and his death. Not wanting anyone to know of their generosity to the fellow they have consistently treated so badly in person, they convince Cottard to tell Saniette and everyone else that the Princesse Sherbatoff left him a small sum in her will. We might think that this odd story about the surprising generosity of the Verdurins toward someone they had kept inviting to their dinners and parties apparently only in order to be able to continue treating him with alarming brutality belongs to that facet of the novel that delights in revealing the many inconsistencies that exist between patterns of behavior that a single person might exhibit on different levels of

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their existence. (The paradigm case of this side of the novel is Mlle Vinteuil, whose love for her father contrasts so sharply with the ritual desecration of his photograph, witnessed by the narrator. Her girlfriend exhibits a similar behavioral discrepancy, participating in the scene of desecration, but working lovingly and painstakingly on Vinteuil’s manuscripts in order to produce the score of the Septet that has just been performed in the novel.) I have recounted the episode here for a different reason, however, because it provides the occasion for the narrator to go off on a tangent in order to tell us of a strange word that M. Verdurin uses in talking to his wife about Saniette, a word that fascinates the narrator even though he is unable to discover what it is. Verdurin’s Undiscoverable Word We each of us possess an assortment of abbreviated expressions, intelligible only to our intimate friends. Supposing that these abbreviations are adopted all round us, that they become of current usage among a whole class of people, and that they are disseminated in the press, they may one day take their place in the language. M i c h e l B r é a l , Semantics

If the Verdurins use the undead Cottard as an intermediary between them and the equally undead Saniette, it is, so the narrator tells us, to avoid the inconvenience of putting up with scenes in which people will feel it necessary to thank them for their unmotivated act of generosity. Verdurin has a special word for scenes of this kind that he uses in talking to his wife. But, the narrator laments, this mysterious word escapes him. “But my informant could not repeat it to me exactly, for it was not a normal French word, but one of those terms that are used within families to designate certain things, in particular annoying things, no doubt because the family wishes to be able to point them out without the offenders understanding” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 301) (“Mais il n’a pu m’être dit exactement, car ce n’était pas un mot français, mais un de ces termes comme on en a dans les familles pour désigner certaines choses, surtout les choses agaçantes, probablement parce qu’on veut pouvoir les signaler devant les intéressés sans être compris” [3:829]). This observation is the beginning of a reasonably long digression on the category of words to which Verdurin’s unknown one belongs—­a digression that has nothing to do with Saniette, Cottard, or the Verdurins, but everything to do with the forms of the narrator’s (and the novel’s) interest in language. (The digressive nature of many of the narrator’s metalinguistic episodes might lead us to think that those episodes are at cross-­purposes with other aspects of the novel, but I will

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make the case in the concluding section of this chapter that the novel’s interest in language-­in-­use and in metapragmatics is tightly related to its central sociological preoccupations.) Verdurin’s use of this word causes his wife to smile, the narrator informs us, because “the use of this private, personal, secret language instead of the language of every day gives the users of it a self-­centered feeling which is always accompanied by a certain satisfaction” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 301) (“l’emploi de cette langue moins générale, plus personnelle, plus secrète, que la langue habituelle donne à ceux qui en usent entre eux un sentiment égoïste qui ne va jamais sans une certaine satisfaction” [3:829]). And yet the word is, as it turns out, an example of a part of language that, whatever intimate satisfaction it is providing the two Verdurins, is in the process of disappearing from use. Had the narrator been able to report the word to us, he could perhaps have relaunched it, given it a new lease on life, conferred on it a small amount of prestige such that someone else might have wanted to use it. As Bréal points out, “the adoption of foreign words to designate ideas or objects which have come from the outside, and which give rise to an international exchange of relations, is not therefore blameable in itself, and can be well justified.”19 Words from another language can be appealing and trendy (as we shall see shortly); they can be enticing to use. Yet here, the situation is different. The word is a leftover, its meaning slowly being forgotten, as only a kind of affective aura continues to hover around it: Such expressions are usually a throwback to an earlier state of the family in question. In a Jewish family, for example, the word will be a ritual term displaced from its original meaning, perhaps the only word of Hebrew that the family, now wholly French in its manners, has retained. In a very strongly provincial family, it will be a term of their provincial dialect, even though the family no longer speaks dialect and can barely understand it any longer. In a South American family which now speaks only French, it will be a word of Spanish. And in the next generation, the word will survive only as a childhood memory. The children will remember that their parents could speak about the servants waiting at table without being understood by them, using a particular word, but they cannot tell exactly what the word meant, whether it was Spanish, Hebrew, German or dialect, or even whether it had ever belonged to any real language and was not a proper name or simply something invented. (301) (Ce genre d’expressions est généralement un reliquat contemporain d’un état antérieur de la famille. Dans une famille juive, par exemple, ce sera un terme

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rituel détourné de son sens et peut-­être le seul mot hébreu que la famille, maintenant françisée, connaisse encore. Dans une famille très fortement provinciale, ce sera un terme du patois de la province, bien que la famille ne parle plus et ne comprenne même plus le patois. Dans une famille venue de l’Amérique du Sud et ne parlant plus que le français, ce sera un mot espagnol. Et à la gén­ ération suivante, le mot n’existera plus qu’à titre de souvenir d’enfance. On se rappellera bien que les parents à table faisaient allusion aux domestiques qui servaient, sans être compris d’eux, en disant tel mot, mais les enfants ignorent ce que voulait dire au juste ce mot, si c’était de l’espagnol, de l’hébreu, de l’allemand, du patois, si même cela avait jamais appartenu à une langue quelconque et n’était pas un nom propre, ou un mot entièrement forgé. [3:829])

The strange foreign word slowly becomes meaningless, except as an index of family history, or a kind of totem whose use renews certain kinds of familial bonds on certain ritual family occasions. But it ceases, in a way, to be part of what Saussure would call la langue—­the body of linguistic information that is widely shared across a speech community. It exists more and more only in acts of parole—­discrete instances of speech—­disconnected from any but the smallest of groups of speakers. Proust’s narrator emphasizes this aspect of the word in question here by foregrounding again why it cannot even be represented on the pages of the novel. The passage just cited continues: “The mystery can be solved only if there is a great-­uncle, an elderly cousin still living who must have once used the word himself. As I never knew any of the Verdurins’ relatives, I was never able to supply the exact word” (“Le doute ne peut être éclairci que si on a un grand-­oncle, un vieux cousin encore vivant et qui a dû user du même terme. Comme je n’ai connu aucun parent des Verdurin, je n’ai pu restituer exactement le mot”). At any number of points in the novel the narrator makes little indications of moments of  linguistic fieldwork that lie behind his writing, investigations he has performed in order better to understand the details of someone’s manner of speaking, as in the efforts he made to meet Bergotte’s siblings. Here he points to a kind of failure. He had no connections, and apparently could make none, with Verdurin’s family, and so the word he somehow knows Verdurin to have spoken only half enters into the novel.20 It remains undepicted but nonetheless serves as the novel’s example of a certain kind of word, one whose situation of use is described because it constitutes an interesting instance of what the French call a fait de langage, a term that has been variously translated as “linguistic phenomenon,” “speech fact,” “fact of speech,” “fact of  language,” or “linguistic fact.” Unrecoverable by the narrator, it becomes a kind of blank space within the novel itself, a space around which

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text regarding language use accrues. Once again, the novel pauses in the face of an instance of  language use; once again, the primacy of the indexical processes of  language use jumps into the foreground, and whatever else is going on in the novel seems to be sidelined for a moment.21 Bréal/Saussure/Proust Through the functioning of the receptive and co-­ordinating faculties, impressions that are perceptibly the same for all are made on the minds of speakers. How can that social product be pictured in such a way that language will stand apart from everything else? If we could embrace the sum of word-­images stored in the minds of all individuals, we could identify the social bond that constitutes language. It is a storehouse filled by the members of a given community through their active use of speaking, a grammatical system that has a potential existence in each brain, or, more specifically, in the brains of a group of individuals. For language is not complete in any speaker; it exists perfectly only within a collectivity. F e r d i n a n d d e S a u s s u r e , Course in General Linguistics

Michel Bréal was among Ferdinand de Saussure’s supporters in the 1880s, when Saussure, in his twenties, was assigned teaching at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris—­several decades before he would give his famous lectures in Geneva. In Proust’s own stance toward language, one can find elements that resemble those found in the work of both linguists, but also something different. For instance, Proust’s notebooks contain lists of words and expressions that he was thinking of assigning to this or that character. I think we can see now that he was not just making lists to aid in character development or differentiation. He had actual linguistic concepts—­even if he didn’t explicitly theorize or name them—­that he wished to investigate through the way he would represent language-­in-­use. His notebooks could be thought of as the field notes of a practical or amateur linguistic anthropologist just as much as they could be thought of as resources for a novelist. Like Bréal, he was interested in how words come and go, how meanings of words come and go, and how the linguistic processes involved link up with other sociological events. His particular way of being interested in language-­in-­use puts interesting kinds of pressure on the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole so famously elaborated in Saussure’s teaching in Geneva in the years during which Proust was conceptualizing his huge novel. Verdurin’s unrecoverable word is an arrow pointing down a track leading toward rich veins of social information regarding not only his own family, but conceivably larger migration patterns important in the wider

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social field. It is filled with the potential of socialness even if there are only a handful of speakers alive who would have had the capacity to understand it in its context of use. But this is a different kind of socialness than what Saussure is thinking of when he refers to “the social bond that constitutes language.”22 My epigraph from Saussure’s Course is taken from a subsection of his introduction titled “Place of Language in the Facts of Speech” (“Place de la langue dans les faits de langage”) in which Saussure wishes to demonstrate how one would analytically separate out what is langue from what is parole, what is shared in language’s abstract structures from what is part of an individual speech act. For Saussure, but not for Proust, “in separating language [la langue] from speaking [la parole] we are at the same time separating: (1) what is social from what is individual; and (2) what is essential from what is accessory and more or less accidental.”23 The moments of speaking that most interest Proust always reveal something essential about the social processes in which language use is entangled. They depend on language’s capacity for social indexicality, moments in the exchange of language when forms of social engagement are discovered to be immanent in or emergent from acts of language use. These indexical modes (in Silverstein’s words) “link speech to the wider system of social life,”24 and it is those linkages that Proust often has his narrator explore for the reader. Exchanging linguistic signs is part of how humans participate in a medium in and through which they reproduce, maintain, alter, or otherwise intervene in their relations with other humans. They act on their mutual relationships not, or not only, by what they say, but in the ongoing doing of it. As Silverstein describes it: Human mutual social adjustments are everywhere mediated social relations. Participants feel themselves to be co-­constructing a structured realization of knowledge in a denotational text that comes into existence between or among them. And not merely an abstract object that, like a cartoon bubble or balloon with words, floats into the intervening medium from one participant. The denotational text is, in essence, attached or anchored to both participants through their alignments to it; these individual alignments to the mediating denotational text allow the participants to align one to another, giving the illusion that direct human contact has been achieved. In other words, what humans say one to another, the propositional content they feel that they are communicating as “information” or denotational content, comes to mediate how humans interact one with another.25

We could say that the coexistence of and the tension between denotational text and interactive text or an interest in the poetics involved in the simultaneous

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construction of both texts in multiparticipant scenes of talk is at the heart of Search. The narrator’s interest in Verdurin’s mysterious word is a good example of the novel’s ways of being attentive to the different indexical orders that can emerge analytically from episodes of talk. Mousmé When it is our moral life that is in question, the presence of foreign words may produce the impression of a discord. The more intimate the sentiments to be expressed, the more contracted does the linguistic circle become. There is here for the reader or listener an intellectual pleasure of a most subtle kind. Like the housewives of old, who prided themselves on consuming the milk from their own farm, the fruits of their own garden alone, a dainty mind is sensitive to a language in which all the words are products of the same soil, and have an air of familiarity and of kinship. M i c h e l B r é a l , Semantics

The word mousmé is one Proust noted down in one of  his notebooks: “mousmé etc.”26 Pierre Loti imported the word into French from Japanese in his 1887 novel Madame Chrysanthème. As Proust’s editors in the Pléiade edition helpfully remind us, Loti’s novel sung the word’s praises in the following terms: “Mousmé is a word that means young girl or very young woman. It is one of the loveliest words in the Japanese language; it is as if the word contains moue (a sweet, amusing pouting face as they sometimes make) and especially frimousse (a charming, funny, little face as they often have). I will often make use of it, as there is no French word that I know of that works so well” (2:1715–­16). The word, as it is imported by Loti, is surrounded by an erotic orientalist cloud.27 It is precisely the kind of word our somewhat prissy narrator could be expected either to despise or to find comical—­perhaps along the lines of how the duchess must have reacted upon hearing her nephew describe someone as pythique (an episode we will look at in chapter 3). Indeed, the narrator declares that ordinarily he would find the use of the word mousmé “horripilant”: “there is no word that rankles more. The very sound of it sets your teeth on edge, like too large a piece of ice in the mouth” (Guermantes, 354) (“À l’entendre on se sent le même mal de dents que si on a mis un trop gros morceau de glace dans sa bouche” [2:653]). (We might remember the duchess fearing for her wisdom teeth upon hearing the word plumitif.) And yet in the context in which he actually hears the word used, he reacts rather differently. That is because the speaker who uses the word in Search is Albertine, the young woman he met in the second half of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower in Balbec, and with

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whom, in the third volume of the novel, The Guermantes Way, he will become better acquainted, beginning with an encounter in his bedroom in his family’s Parisian apartment. One of the functions of the linguistic exchanges that take place between the narrator and Albertine is, as we shall see on a number of occasions in the pages ahead, to provoke the realization that the narrator, for all that he assumes the stance of the scientific investigator of other people’s language at various points in the novel, is deeply caught up in the action of the novel, and that the affective and erotic turmoil that Albertine provokes is markedly present in his own speech as well. Mousmé is only one bit of Albertine’s speech whose social indexicality captures the narrator/hero’s attention in the scene in question. There is also her way of using the words sélection and distingué, and the phrases à mon sens and j’estime. The passage shows the hero intensely focusing his attention on Albertine’s word choices, in which one potential moment of rich indexicality after another crops up, until finally mousmé presents itself in all its glory. One intriguing element of this passage is that the narrator’s metapragmatic reflections within it are not so much cast in a reflective mode, as if being analyzed in some later moment. They are rather closely tied to the moment at which the scene in question is taking place. That is, the analytic process is represented as occurring in the mind of the narrator/hero while he is actually in the room with Albertine, rather than being some kind of more distanced reflection. The young hero is deciding that based on the manner in which Albertine now speaks, she could never be a serious romantic interest for him, but she could, to use an anachronism that would surely set his teeth on edge, be a good occasional hookup. That is, if certain aspects of her speech as he rediscovers it in this encounter (having first encountered it in Balbec during the summer of their initial acquaintance) reveal that she has been proceeding to develop as any number of young women from her respectable milieu would do, other details somehow signal to the narrator that she has been up to no good, encountering language under all sorts of more suspicious circumstances as well, circumstances that suggest other sides to her personality. She has also been allowing strange, untoward bits of language from those mysterious circumstances to filter into her own sociolinguistic repertory and to serve there as signs of what she might be available for: Finally came evidence of upheavals whose nature was unknown to me but sufficient to justify all my hopes, as Albertine said, with the confidence of a person whose opinion is not to be disregarded:

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“To my mind, it is the best thing that could possibly happen. . . . I see it as the best way out, the stylish solution.” This was so novel, so clearly an alluvial deposit hinting at such capricious explorations on territory hitherto unknown to her, that no sooner were the words “to my mind” out of  her mouth than I drew Albertine toward me, and at “I see it as” sat her down on my bed. (Guermantes, 352) (Enfin m’apparut l’évidence de bouleversements que je ne connaissais pas, mais propres à autoriser pour moi toutes les espérances, quand Albertine me dit, avec la satisfaction d’une personne dont l’opinion n’est pas indifférente: “C’est, à mon sens, ce qui pouvait arriver de mieux . . . J’estime que c’est la meilleure solution, la solution élégante.” C’était si nouveau, si visiblement une alluvion laissant soupçonner de si ca­ p­ricieux détours à travers des terrains jadis inconnus d’elle que, dès les mots “à mon sens,” j’attirai Albertine, et à “j’estime” je l’assis sur mon lit. [2:651])

The hero’s social antennae seem decidedly odd in what they discover among all the signals in the world around him. What is there, in the use of these expressions, that should indicate some kind of sexual availability? A brief, annoying linguistic digression does ensue here: “It is no doubt the case that women with a smattering of culture, marrying well-­read men, receive such expressions as part of their dowry” (“Sans doute il arrive que des femmes peu cultivées, épousant un homme fort lettré, reçoivent dans leur apport dotal de telles expressions”). But the text abandons the digression quickly, seemingly governed by another kind of desire: As I continued to add further links to the chain of irrelevant remarks beneath which I hid my inner desire, with Albertine now secure on the corner of my bed, I talked about one of the girls from the little gang, who was less prominent than the others but whom I nonetheless thought quite pretty: “Yes,” said Albertine, “she’s like a little mousmé.” Obviously, when I first knew Albertine, the word mousmé was unknown to her. It was likely that in the normal course of events she would never have learned it, and as far as I was concerned that would have been fine, for there is no word that rankles more. (Guermantes, 353–­54) (Comme, continuant à ajouter un nouvel anneau à la chaîne extérieure de propos sous laquelle je cachais mon désir intime, je parlais, tout en ayant mainte­ nant Albertine au coin de mon lit, d’une des filles de la petite bande, plus menue

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que les autres, mais que je trouvais tout de même assez jolie: “Oui, me répondit Albertine, elle a l’air d’une petite mousmé.” De toute évidence, quand j’avais connu Albertine, le mot de “mousmé” lui était inconnu. Il est vraisemblable que, si les choses eussent suivi leur cours normal, elle ne l’eût jamais appris et je n’y aurais vu pour ma part aucun inconvénient, car nul n’est plus horripilant. [2:652–­53])

Part of the comedy of the scene depends on the fact that it is written as if the distance between the narrator who is narrating retrospectively and the hero is minimal. The narrator-­hero’s sexual excitement and attention to certain indexical features of Albertine’s current lexicon both feel very present. So it reads as comical or silly that the narrator will have to slow the scene down in order to recount the reflections on language use that existed in the hero’s consciousness alongside his libido. (What kind of people would use the word mousmé ? In what circumstances would they learn of the word’s existence? What are the reasons why such people would be intrinsically so annoying to the narrator? And why would Albertine not be annoying when she uses this word?) But, coming from Albertine, pretty as she was, not even mousmé could displease me. On the contrary, it seemed like a revelation, if not of an external initiation, then of some internal development. Unfortunately, it was now time to say goodbye to her if I wanted her to get home in time for dinner and myself to be up in time for mine. Françoise was preparing it; she did not like it to be delayed and must already have been thinking that one of the articles of her code had been contravened, in that Albertine, in the absence of my parents, should be paying me so long a visit, and one that was going to make everything late. But in the face of mousmé all these arguments fell away, and I hastened to say: “You know, I’m not in the least ticklish. You could tickle me for a whole hour and I wouldn’t feel a thing.” “Is that so?” “I promise you.” (Guermantes, 354) (Mais chez Albertine, jolie comme elle était, même “mousmé” ne pouvait m’être déplaisant. En revanche, il me parut révélateur sinon d’une initiation extérieure, au moins d’une évolution interne. Malheureusement, il était l’heure où il eût fallu que je lui dise au revoir si je voulais qu’elle rentrât à temps pour son dîner et aussi que je me levasse assez tôt pour le mien. C’était Françoise qui le préparait, elle n’aimait pas qu’il attendît et devait déjà trouver contraire à un des articles de son code qu’Albertine, en l’absence de mes parents, m’eût

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fait une visite aussi prolongée et qui allait tout mettre en retard. Mais devant “mousmé” ces raisons tombèrent, et je me hâtai de dire: “Imaginez-­vous que je ne suis pas chatouilleux du tout, vous pourriez me chatouiller pendant une heure que je ne le sentirais même pas. —­Vraiment! —­Je vous assure.” [2:653])

Certainly the narrator’s own speech oddities—­the seeming non sequitur he allows himself in leaping from Albertine’s mousmé to the possibility of her verifying the degree to which he is or is not ticklish—­are as worthy of note as anything to be found in Albertine’s speech, and surely she must be reading as much into his manner of speaking as he into hers, following along in this game in which the sexual availability of  both parties has to be implied because it apparently cannot be stated explicitly. They both must be calculating their own speech turns in response to the moves they imagine the other to be making.28 Françoise is about to enter the narrator’s room without knocking in order to bring in a lamp, which will cause Albertine to leap from the bed to a chair, calling a halt to their dalliance, if only a temporary one. The interruption also seems to allow the novel, freed from the imperious force of the libido attached to the narrator’s youthful self that had momentarily kept it on track, to resume its more typical zigzagged construction, through which forward progress, if and when it is made, happens at a pace that the word dilatory might just about capture. (“Proust tries our patience so long as we expect his story to move forward,” Clive Bell commented in 1928, “that not being the direction in which it is intended to move.”29) A lot of ground (and nine or ten pages) will be covered before the two young people return to making out together on the bed. “Every new word introduced into a language causes a disturbance analogous to that resulting from the introduction of a new-­comer into the physical or social world,” Bréal insisted.30 Albertine is like a word from another language for the narrator, as, perhaps, he must be for her. Who knows, when Albertine said mousmé, how reality changed, how the world was perturbed? Who knew that it was precisely the word she needed to say to make our hero ask her to try to tickle him (changing the way they were aligned with each other)? Her talk seems to have worked in such a way that a door toward which his desire was pushing him suddenly opened. But his talk must be working on her too; she must be listening equally carefully to his speech. That is to say, somehow, Albertine’s presence helps reveal that the hero too is fait de langage, is a contributor to talk’s work. His analytical stance toward Albertine’s speech in this particular

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scene cannot be understood solely as evidence of the novel’s sustained attention to the social and anthropological dimensions of language use. His talking with Albertine constitutes a space in which the hero stumbles, loses his footing slightly, a space in which an analytic attitude toward language itself turns out to be unstable ground, because his own language seems a bit out of control, part of a game in which he and Albertine together pursue a set of co-­constructed sexual identities that neither seems fully to master. Speaking with Albertine, for the narrator/hero, reveals linguistic interaction to be a space in which you are other to yourself  because of the way, in language, you are with others.

S o c i a l C a p i ta l a n d t h e S c i e n c e ( s ) o f L a n g uag e The narrator’s dealings with Albertine will be central again in the next chapter, where I will examine in more detail what is becoming, I hope, increasingly clear as we proceed: that the narrator’s own language is part of the aesthetic and analytical arrangement of utterances that the novel offers for our consideration.31 Recall, for the purposes of understanding some of the sociolinguistic or linguistic anthropological work in which Proust is engaged in Search, a definition of the novel provided by Bakhtin: “The novel can be defined as a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.”32 Bakhtin’s definition may or may not apply to all novels, but it certainly applies to Search. His definition helps focus our attention on how some novels, including Proust’s, work to produce a form of sociological knowledge arising out of the analysis of language-­in-­use, and, in particular, out of the social indexical features of talk. In the final section of this chapter, I want first to contextualize a bit Search’s way of thinking about speech as data, and then to consider how that attitude toward speech as data links up with the novel’s central sociological preoccupations. Mme de Gallardon For Bakhtin, the practical sense of language-­in-­use that novelists must necessarily gain as they pursue their craft turns them into sociolinguists of a certain kind: “Language is present to the novelist only as something stratified and heteroglot,” he claims (332). Moreover, any time a novelist represents someone speaking, the representation of the language of that speaking subject does more than offer the reader a record of an imaginary act of communication of  information via a verbal channel. “A particular language in a novel is always a particular

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way of viewing the world,” Bakhtin insists (nicely echoing Proust’s narrator’s remarks on the speech of Albertine and her friends), “one that strives for social significance” (333). As we have now seen on numerous occasions, Proust’s narrator, when reporting the speech of others to us, regularly accompanies that report with various forms of metalinguistic and often specifically metapragmatic commentary on the speech in question that seem to emphasize (and the emphasis seems to come either from the narrator/hero or from the novelist, or both, and sometimes in a proportion difficult to establish) not only the striving for social significance (of the individual, or perhaps of a group to which that individual belongs) that can be heard in different individual speech acts, or more generally in the different registers the narrator encounters in the language of others (and in his own register), but also, and more widely, a specific concern with what is happening beyond the simple exchange of words when people are talking.33 At times, it seems clear that the narrator (and the novelist) view the streams of sound coming out of people’s mouths as data requiring different kinds of instruments or techniques in order to be analyzed and understood, with different techniques allowing different kinds of understanding to emerge. (And not just data: there is “noise” too, interference, which can have its own semiotic consequences.) As the data is processed, the semantic content someone who shares a language with the speaker might extract from the sounds emitted will often not be a primary focus of attention. We could say that the narrator does not always reveal himself to be prone to our ordinary, normal “referential bias” in attending to speech.34 He sometimes attends to it differently. Here is one particularly rich example, from “Swann in Love”: If Mme de Gallardon’s conversation had been subjected to those analyses which, by recording the greater or lesser frequency of each word, permit one to discover the key to a language in code, one would have realized that no expression, even the most ordinary, recurred in it as often as “at the home of my cousins the Guermantes,” “at the home of my aunt de Guermantes,” “the health of  Elzéar de Guermantes,” “my cousin de Guermantes’s baignoire.” When anyone spoke to her about a famous personage, she would answer that without knowing him personally she had met him a thousand times at the home of her aunt de Guermantes, but she would answer this in a tone so icy and in a voice so low that it was clear that, if she did not know him personally, it was by virtue of all the ineradicable and stubborn principles which her shoulders touched behind her, like those ladders on which gymnastics instructors make you stretch out in order to develop your chest. (Swann, 342)

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(Si on avait fait subir à la conversation de Mme de Gallardon ces analyses qui en relevant la fréquence plus ou moins grande de chaque terme permettent de découvrir la clef d’un langage chiffré, on se fût rendu compte qu’aucune expression, même la plus usuelle, n’y revenait aussi souvent que “chez mes cousins de Guermantes,” “chez ma tante de Guermantes,” “la santé d’Elzéar de Guermantes,” “la baignoire de ma cousine de Guermantes.” Quand on lui parlait d’un personnage illustre, elle répondait que, sans le connaître personnellement, elle l’avait rencontré mille fois chez sa tante de Guermantes, mais elle répondait cela d’un ton si glacial et d’une voix si sourde qu’il était clair que, si elle ne le connaissait pas personnellement, c’était en vertu de tous les principes indéracinables et entêtés auxquels ses épaules touchaient en arrière, comme à ces échelles sur lesquelles les professeurs de gymnastique vous font étendre pour vous développer le thorax. [1:324])

The narrator has imagined recording a long stretch of speech by Mme de Gallardon and then having someone perform an analysis that would produce a statistical profile of token occurrences within that stretch of speech. The tokens in question include a variety of phrases containing the proper name Guermantes. At first glance, the narrator seems to link the uses to which such a statistical profile might be put to the deciphering of a coded message. I’d like to pursue that avenue just for a moment, because it is so strongly suggested in the passage, but then move toward a different contextualization that will ultimately prove a bit more helpful. An important contribution to the field of cryptography had been made in France by August Kerckhoffs when he published his two-­part article titled “La Cryptographie Militaire” in 1883. Kerckhoffs could be found teaching public classes in cryptography in Paris as late as 1899. His course is announced, for instance, on page 3 of L’Aurore on May 16, 1899. An article by Charles Malo on the front page of the Journal des Débats on April 29, 1899, “The Art of Decoding Secret Dispatches,” describes a part of the second installment of Kerckhoffs’s 1883 article in which he “recounts how he penetrated the meaning of an encoded dispatch related to Egyptian matters, in 1882. [ . . . ] He cleverly told himself that, given the presumed subject of the dispatch and the preoccupations of the day, one might expect to find the words Arabi, Wolseley, Suez, Ismaïlia, canal, etc. . . . and therefore should examine the recalcitrant text every which way in the light of these ideas! Soon enough what had to be the word wolseley appeared, and ‘with that stitch undone the whole thing unraveled.’ ”35

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It is the words “key” and “code” in the Proust passage (clef and chiffré ) that suggest cryptography as a context germane to the passage about Mme de Gallardon, and I have chosen to draw attention to Kerckhoffs’s idea that an encoded dispatch might be more easily deciphered if you presume it will contain the name of an important figure such as Garnet Wolseley (who commanded the British forces in Egypt at various moments of crisis in the 1880s), because of the way the name Guermantes is highlighted in the passage from Proust. And yet perhaps this is not the only context that has a bearing upon the act of statistical analysis imagined by the narrator. It is true that many critics who have written about the novel’s propensity toward metalinguistic commentary have often referred to the purpose of that commentary as a form of decoding or translation of an encrypted message. Here is how one of the earliest commentators in that vein put the matter: Language, and especially spoken language, is not for the novelist simply a tool for communicating or expressing oneself. Here it is a series of symbols to be translated, there it is a “scientific material” to which it is necessary to apply methods from the social sciences. “The duty and the task of a writer are those of a translator,” Proust announces at the end of his work. To translate is “to transmit” to the mind of the reader the deep meaning of the words and phrases pronounced by the speaker. And when it is affective language that is in question, to translate is to reestablish on the rational plane and with conscious clarity “second degree” kinds of maneuvers and involuntary words “just as human speech, changed into electricity via the telephone, is turned back into words in order to be understood.”36

The tendency of this current of commentary on Proust has been to focus on the task of revealing the “deep meaning” of verbal utterances that has been disguised in various ways, and that once understood will help us to understand a character’s truth or the truth of their speech, to appreciate that character’s intentions, however complicated. This view of linguistic activity as tied to agent-­ centered acts and intentions would seem necessarily to miss the novel’s interest in language-­in-­use as a shared social project, an interactive one, one always taking place under complex situational, cultural, and historical constraints. A more recent commentator, Isabelle Serça, writes in much the same vein: The narrator-­as-­interpreter, the true spokesperson for the characters, will be focused on decoding their words, unraveling misinterpretations, clearing up

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ambiguities or misunderstandings sometimes by means of words, but also the prosody or the gestures that accompany them.37

Yet one of the interesting compositional features of novels that make a point of including metapragmatic reflections on the utterances they represent is that they reveal meaning always to be reconstructed after the utterance. That is, they offer an image of a forward moving semiotic process that only appears to discover the meaning that was there, whereas in fact it has been interactively produced only in the moment and in the aftermath of the utterance. Serça also refers to our narrator as a “nouveau Champollion” (138), and her evocation of  Jean-­François Champollion, the philologist who used the Rosetta stone to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, is one that I would like to pursue for a moment. I would like to suggest in what follows that we imagine the ways in which Proust’s narrator and Proust’s novel are working to perceive something about language use itself—­about what happens in language when people use it—­that cannot necessarily be indexed to any characterological aspects of the language user per se. There is what might be called an anthropological or sociological rather than a characterological or psychological or personal side to talk’s work that Proust’s novel is investigating. A few lines before the narrator imagines someone producing an analysis of the frequency of the occurrence of various tokens in Mme de Gallardon’s speech, we read: When she found herself next to someone she did not know, as at this moment Mme de Franquetot, it would pain her that her own awareness of her kinship with the Guermantes could not be manifested outwardly in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics of the Byzantine churches, placed one below another, inscribe in a vertical column, next to a holy personage, the words he is supposed to be uttering. (Swann, 341) (Quand elle se trouvait auprès de quelqu’un qu’elle ne connaissait pas, comme en ce moment auprès de Mme de Franquetot, elle souffrait que la conscience qu’elle avait de sa parenté avec les Guermantes ne pût se manifester extérieurement en caractères visibles comme ceux qui, dans les mosaïques des églises byzantines, placés les uns au-­dessous des autres, inscrivent en une colonne verticale, à côté d’un saint personnage, les mots qu’il est censé prononcer. [1:323])

Mme de Gallardon, it seems, does not know how to make the words she speaks do what she wants them to do, or perhaps she knows that she cannot announce

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what she most wants to have known in a way that would achieve the effect she desires. We might say, on a more anthropological level, that while she is well versed in the structure of her official kinship relations, she is simply not very good at the practice of  kinship, at making her official relations functional.38 Her practical failure is part of what can be revealed by an analysis of her language, and yet perhaps such an analysis also serves to reveal something more general about what language does. Part of the anthropological interest of Proust’s narrator exists not on the level of an analysis of langue, to invoke the Saussurean distinction again, but on an analysis of parole (language-­in-­use), not on the level of language system, but on the level of usage, not on the level of competence, but on the level of performance.39 But the analysis in question is not (or not exclusively) interested in how an act of parole can be seen as an index of a psychological fact, but rather as an index of a sociological or an anthropological one. “Agency in language” is thus not, in this novel “lodged in the individual alone.” Proust would seem then to concur with a linguistic anthropologist such as Silverstein when he asserts that “language in use, like every other socio-­cultural phenomenon, is an intersubjective—­sociocentrically manifest—­object of investigation. [ . . . ] Locating it in and limiting it to individual agents is [ . . . ] a fundamental category error.”40 What are the social or anthropological functions of different instances of language-­in-­use that the narrator imagines it is possible to reveal through an analysis of token frequency—­and perhaps we should add, for this case, token frequency of a particular proper name? More generally, what does it mean to be listening for this level of  linguistic functionality, and what instruments does it require to listen in this way? It wouldn’t seem, for instance, that the tools from cryptography would be particularly useful in this endeavor. If you receive a message in code, you often don’t necessarily even know where the word boundaries are, so you may work with the idea of frequency and patterns of different individual characters, but perhaps not of terms like “the health of Elzéar de Guermantes.” The frequency analysis of a stretch of Mme de Gallardon’s speech imagined in the novel would seem meant to reveal, not some message she has intentionally encoded so that only certain recipients can decipher it, but rather something that she is using language to do, perhaps without even being aware that it is one of the things language does when we use it. Proper names are, of course, at the heart of whatever it is that her language seems to wish to accomplish, but in a way a bit different from Kerckhoffs’s decipherment example. Yet recall what helped Champollion make successful use of the Rosetta stone: he decided that hieroglyphic writing had a phonetic component

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and so attempted to discover how the pharaoh Ptolemy’s name (which he could read in the Greek text on the stone) was represented in hieroglyphics, in part by cross-­referencing with another cartouche containing what could be assumed to be a representation of Cleopatra’s name. Consider, for a better sense of how this resonance of the act of deciphering might be functioning in the Proust passage, a few lines from an 1893 pamphlet by the archeologist and philologist Joseph Halévy, Introduction to the Deciphering of Pseudo-­Hittite or Anatolian Inscriptions We must not forget that the decipherment of hieroglyphs and Persian cuneiforms, one of the glorious achievements of our century, occurred under fairly favorable conditions. Hieroglyphs were read with the help of historical proper names that could be found filling royal cartouches, and they were interpreted by means of  long bilingual texts and an extensive Coptic vocabulary. Moreover, the Persian syllabary, made up of a small number of signs, did not offer much serious resistance once scholars realized that the great inscription from Persep­ olis contained historical names of the Achaemenides. Any attempt to interpret the inscription could rely on Sanskrit and Zend as well as on modern Persian. For Anatolian inscriptions, the situation is entirely different. It is not just that the syllabary contains more than one hundred signs, some ideographic and some phonetic, and that we are dealing with an entirely unknown language; we do not even have the scant resource of being able to assume that the few Anatolian proper names that have been left to us by Antiquity were in use in the region from which the inscriptions have come.41

My intent is not to suggest that Proust would have read Halévy’s pamphlet. Yet certainly he would have been aware of the effort (ongoing in linguistic circles in Paris and elsewhere during the years he was composing his novel) to decipher a number of languages and writing systems, including, for instance, Hittite cuneiform. Given the prominence of accounts of Champollion’s discoveries regarding the Rosetta stone, it is hard to believe that Proust would not have been aware of the role proper names could play in helping to decipher such languages and writing systems, and this must be part of the background to the narrator’s insistence on the frequency with which the strange set of characters representing the proper name Guermantes occurs in the speech of Mme de Gallardon or on her desire that characters representing that name somehow float in the air around her when she is in the presence of some stranger. Writing systems, the implication seems to be, exist to preserve names of “historical” significance (Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Darius, Guermantes) and also to attach

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them to particular individuals. More generally, we could say that efforts at decipherment rely to a certain degree on assumptions about the metapragmatic function—­that is, assumptions regarding the likely genre and ceremonial or memorial functions—­of a given inscription. And yet even though the metaphor­ ics of this passage keep directing us to the decipherment of writing, Proust’s narrator, we must remember, is focused on talk. We could perhaps suggest that he has a novelistically shaped understanding of talk as a practice that produces and maintains the importance of certain proper names thereby worthy of being inscribed in those exteriorly manifested “visible characters” that Mme de Gallardon wishes she had floating somewhere around her, indicating her kinship status not only to current bystanders, but also perhaps for generations to come. There is a lot of context that can be brought to bear upon this example of an imagined statistical linguistic analysis. We could say that Proust has amalgamated a variety of related but distinct contexts in order to create a set of implications we have not yet quite finished unpacking. For still we have not really seen any example of an analysis that records “the greater or lesser frequency of each word” in a given instance of spoken language. We might decide that Proust has imagined something that doesn’t yet quite exist in the linguistics of his time: the idea that frequency patterns of various parts of a given person’s spoken discourse provide a kind of signature effect, marking the speech as theirs as well as revealing something about the psychological, sociological, and anthropological content it is possible to extract from an analysis of language-­in-­use. Token frequency analysis doesn’t really become a regular feature of  linguistic study until well past the midpoint of the twentieth century, when computer-­ based analyses of linguistic corpora begin to be performed. It remains much easier to perform such analyses on written corpora. A celebrated example might be the 1963 paper by Frederick Mosteller and David L. Wallace in which an analysis of word counts in the Federalist papers is used to conclude that “Madison rather than Hamilton wrote all 12 of the disputed papers.”42 (Proper names, incidentally, do not figure in Mosteller and Wallace’s analysis.) The only statistical work of this kind in linguistics that I have come across closer in time to Proust is the 1892 article by William Whitney in the Transactions of the American Philological Association titled “On the Narrative Use of Imperfect and Perfect in the Brahmanas.” In that paper, Whitney demonstrated the shifting ratio of different past tenses, from cases in which the imperfect was used to the exclusion of the perfect to ones in which the ratio is three perfects to five imperfects, to cases where the perfect tense predominates. Whitney makes claims for the evolving relationship of the tenses, for a kind of  historical stylistic

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progression that becomes visible through statistical analysis: “The leading and most conspicuous fact is the increasing use, either by substitution or by association, of the perfect as the equivalent to the imperfect in narration.”43 It is not inconceivable that Proust could have heard of Whitney’s work. Whitney’s Sanskrit grammar was a standard reference at the time. Bréal followed Whitney’s work, some of which had been translated into French. In his 1897 volume, Semantics, Bréal cites a passage from the Swedish philologist Adolf Noreen that mentions a generic statistician. Noreen is addressing the question as to who really has the expert knowledge to determine the correctness or purity of a given contemporary usage. Not historians of the language, Noreen asserts, who can only speak to the past; not linguists, who can only describe rules but not dictate them, and not the statistician, “who merely registers the usage.”44 We might observe that in debates about sound change that were ongoing at this time, frequency of usage was an issue. The linguist Hugo Schuchardt had, in 1885, asserted (in opposition to the Neogrammarian hypothesis mentioned in the introduction) that a sound change requires repetition in order to occur, and so it will occur faster in words of higher frequency.45 “Rarely used words drag behind,” he wrote. “Very frequently used ones hurry ahead. Exceptions to the sound laws are formed in both groups.”46 The very fact that Proust’s narrator would imagine someone registering (recording) Mme de Gallardon’s speech and then calculating frequency rates of certain tokens is an index of some kind of social scientific awareness or ambition. It is perhaps also a kind of position-­taking, asserting that part of the narrator’s perspective on language use will involve attention to semiotic partials that are themselves doing social indexical work on a variety of levels. Establishing precisely which of the possible contexts I have enumerated Proust’s novel actually invokes and amalgamates, or how much the fantasy of a token frequency analysis of Mme de Gallardon’s speech is purely the product of his own imag­ ination, is perhaps less important than understanding what this passage in the novel puts before us as an attitude toward language-­in-­use—­a scientific attitude, we could say, in which a segment of spoken language is abstracted or extracted and taken as an object suitable for extended analysis. At the end of The Life and Growth of Language, published in 1875 and translated the same year into French as La vie du langage, Whitney would write: There is no branch of historical study which is so like a physical science as is linguistics, none which deals with such an infinite multiplicity of separate facts, capable of being observed, recorded, turned over, estimated in their various

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relations. A combination of articulate sounds forming a word is almost as objective an entity as a polyp or a fossil; it can be laid away on a sheet of paper, like a plant in a herbarium, for future leisurely examination. Though a product of voluntary action, it is not an artificiality; what the producer consciously willed it to be is but the smallest part of what we seek to discover in it: we seek to read the circumstances which, unconsciously to himself, guided his will, and made the act what it was; we regard it as a part of a system, as a link in a historical series, as an indicator of capacity, of culture, of ethnological connection.47

It is something like this scientific attitude that we find in Proust. Part of that attitude involves the sense that you can hear in someone’s speech more than what they put there, because language is, as Whitney would notably insist, an institution, a system, in which cultural transactions or happenings occur on multiple levels that are not commensurate with the level of simple communication—­levels that the speakers are sometimes fully aware of, sometimes subliminally aware of, and also levels that are not subject-­centered at all, and so usually outside the awareness of any of the people involved in a given exchange of  language. It is ostensibly Proust’s narrator who suggests the imagined analysis of Mme de Gallardon’s speech that I will be leaving behind for now. (I am proceeding as if it were unquestionably the case that the narrator of “Swann in Love” is the same as the narrator of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower and other parts of the novel. This could be disputed, but I will leave that interesting dispute aside here.) It is also the case, as I have already indicated a number of times, and will deal with more fully in chapter 2, that the linguistic anthropological stance of the novel sometimes depends upon an objectification and analysis of the narrator’s own speech. That is, if we remember Bakhtin’s definition of the novel as an artistic arrangement of a diversity of social speech types, the social speech type of the narrator is part of the novel’s arrangement. The narrator may be our most frequent source within the novel for metapragmatic commentary on the speech of others, but the novel often presents us with examples of his own speech, or his own commentary on his speech, in which he comes to seem at least as much like an informant, a speaker, a source of data. Consider the following passage from the second volume of the novel, shortly after the narrator has met Albertine for the first time. While talking with her, I had been as unaware of where my words were landing, of what was becoming of them, as if I had been throwing pebbles into a bottomless pit. That in general the people to whom we speak draw from within

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themselves the meaning they give to our words, and that this meaning is very different from the one we put into them, is a truth constantly revealed to us by everyday life. But if in addition the person to whom we are speaking is, as Albertine was for me, someone whose upbringing is inconceivable, whose inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, are a mystery to us, then we cannot tell whether our words have any more semblance of meaning for her than they would for an animal to whom we needed somehow to make something understood. Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses. (Shadow, 460) (J’avais causé avec elle sans plus savoir où tombaient mes paroles, ce qu’elles devenaient, que si j’eusse jeté des cailloux dans un abîme sans fond. Qu’elles soient remplies en général par la personne à qui nous les adressons d’un sens qu’elle tire de sa propre substance et qui est très différent de celui que nous avons mis dans ces mêmes paroles, c’est un fait que la vie courante nous révèle perpétuellement. Mais si de plus nous nous trouvons auprès d’une personne dont l’éducation (comme pour moi celle d’Albertine) nous est inconcevable, inconnus les penchants, les lectures, les principes, nous ne savons pas si nos paroles éveillent en elle quelque chose qui y ressemble plus que chez un animal à qui pourtant on aurait à faire comprendre certaines choses. De sorte qu’essayer de me lier avec Albertine m’apparaissait comme une mise en contact avec l’inconnu sinon avec l’impossible, comme un exercice aussi malaisé que dresser un cheval, aussi reposant qu’élever des abeilles ou que cultiver des rosiers. [2:236])

The narrator is here, we might say, obliquely addressing the question of the interactive process of constructing a shared context or frame within which to exchange utterances, or, to borrow language from Silverstein, the way participation in talk, “the co-­construction of denotational text” is a form of projection “into the actual world of social relations.” As Silverstein has it: “The effects of every self-­alignment we achieve in respect of co-­constructing a denotational text are felt on the plane of identities, outlooks, interests being worked on and adjusted in the particular discursive interaction.”48 The entire career of the narrator’s relationship with Albertine across the five central volumes of the novel will be an experience for him of attempts at self-­alignment with someone whose point of view on the social world he continues to insist seems ungraspable, someone with whom the shared work of constructing a context for ongoing verbal exchange, the work of verifying the existence of shared cognitive

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schemes, shared metapragmatic functions and frames, shared speech genres, that ground an interaction, that guarantee the production of shared value and meaning seems impossible to accomplish. (I will come back to this particular passage briefly in chapter 2, where I develop these issues at greater length.) One result of this is that it seems that part of Albertine’s function within the novel comes to be to provoke speech from the narrator that can (should) be analyzed from the same “scientific” point of view he has proposed be applied to the speech of others like Mme de Gallardon.49 That is, one of the brilliant compositional features of Search is the supple play we find in the way the variable gap between the narrator and the hero maps onto (or doesn’t) the difference between dispassionate, objective observation of and impassioned involvement in scenes of talk. The hero and the narrator are perhaps meant to be understood at certain points in the novel as unaware of the potential effects of the words for which they are responsible, although the novelist who crafts their performances probably is not. When we read that in trying to explain himself to Albertine he might as well have been trying to make an animal understand something, we might decide that we are learning something about the way he (the hero when he was the age he was when he met Albertine, and maybe the narrator later in time as well) aligns himself to certain ideologies of gender difference that pervade his social world that it was not his explicit intent to communicate. We experience the narrator’s speech rather in the way he often views the speech of others, as instantiating and exemplifying, in Bakhtin’s words, “a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance,” as indexing aspects of his own identities and outlooks beyond simply his sensitivity to the pragmatics and metapragmatics of instances of language-­in-­use. (Indeed, we would have to say that his kind of sensitivity to pragmatics and metapragmatics is probably an index of something about his own social positioning.) With Albertine, the narrator/hero becomes obsessed with all of the many forms of infelicity that can occur in the act of exchanging utterances, causing various kinds of communicative misfires. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction in examining an exchange between Swann and Odette, Proust’s obsessive narrator can at times sound like he is indulging in philosophical language about speech when he imagines that somehow language should suffice to arrive at something we might call the felicitous exchange of precisely those “things” a speaker intends to communicate to an interlocutor (e.g., the narrator to Albertine and vice versa). Consider, for instance, how the following passages from John Searle’s 1969 Speech Acts (in the passage, Searle is characterizing a position about verbal communication that he ascribes to H. P. Grice) might be

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taken as congruent with the obsessiveness with regards to understanding that our narrator evinces in relation to his linguistic exchanges with Albertine: In speaking I attempt to communicate certain things to my hearer by getting him to recognize my intentions to communicate just those things. I achieve the intended effect on the hearer by getting him to recognize my intention to achieve that effect, and as soon as the hearer recognizes what it is my intention to achieve, it is in general achieved.50

If only. Even though Searle goes on after the passage cited to offer several qualifications of the position he has stated as belonging to Grice, his stance toward the analysis of language use is similar enough to the one he ascribes to Grice that a distinction linguistic anthropologists like to draw can be taken to hold: philosophers such as Grice, Searle, and Austin tend to focus on “isolated sentences and features” and on “culture-­internal and post-­hoc reconstructions of interlocutor intention.”51 Much of what linguistic anthropologists find interesting in language, on the other hand, might not have much to do with the grammatical sentence as a unit, nor with referential or semantic features of the linguistic sign form that are supposed somehow to fit together in order to hold an intention, since it is often not primarily through those units or features that certain kinds of work happening through language-­in-­use can be traced. The philosophers have, in Silverstein’s words, “an instrumentalist view of structured language or actualized discourse, that is, language understood as a resource or causal means by which to effectuate consequential ends.”52 This instrumentalist view is perhaps not so much incorrect (it is obviously a belief held by many language users and used by them to craft things they say), but it is unquestionably an incomplete understanding of what work talk performs. Elsewhere Silverstein comments that “humans experience their mutual adjustments through the use of language and surrounding codes as a process of talking one to another about various things,” a situation that can mean that we sometimes “misrecognize” some (or most) of what we are doing in talking, making it difficult “to understand that discursive interaction is consequential for the way humans arrange themselves in groups and transform the categories to which they belong.”53 In this first chapter, I have been exploring the ways in which Proust’s novel demonstrates a linguistic anthropological stance toward language-­in-­use, one that we could also sometimes call ethnographic, and sometimes sociological. Nonetheless, as we shall see in the next chapter, it could also be said that at certain moments the narrator also attends to language (and particularly Albertine’s or Andrée’s language) as a speech act theorist

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would—­fixated in a nonethnographic way on the question of how intentions are conveyed or concealed by the syntactic form and semantic content of various discrete utterances. Intriguingly, it is when the narrator is obsessively focused on the success, the felicity (or the failure and infelicity) of his communication with someone (and in particular with Albertine) that his speech seems most clearly offered to us by the novel as an object for ethnographic inquiry rather than a source of ethnographic commentary on the speech of others. Of course, it is part and parcel of his status as a participant-­observer in the world of which he is writing the ethnography that the hero’s speech is always available for the same kinds of analysis as that of those around him, even if he (as narrator) seldom explicitly makes his own language the object of his scientific gaze. The novel itself necessarily objectifies his language (as both hero and narrator) for us. To develop this point, let us examine a moment in the novel where he is engaged in the ethnographic study of the speech of those around him while also laying himself open for the same kind of examination. At Table with Proust, Goffman, and Company The particular passage that I will focus on in this final section also deals (as did the passage concerning Albertine and the bees) with cognitive schemes and structures that are not shared between interlocutors. It consists of four long and complex paragraphs (covering twenty-­five pages) from Sodom and Gomorrah in which Proust represents for us the crisscrossing conversations that take place during one particular dinner offered by M. and Mme Verdurin at the elegant summer home they are renting (and perhaps thinking of purchasing) from the cash-­strapped family of M. de Cambremer, the minor regional aristocrat who has already married down for cash, and whose wife, Mme de Cambremer, a member of a bourgeois family well known to the narrator’s own, we have already come across several times. A number of social agendas are in play at this dinner. The Verdurins have invited the Cambremers to dine on the evening in question, perhaps in part in order to gloat by showing them how elegant and functional the house can be when bourgeois tenants with money to burn have made it over, perhaps to remain on good terms with their landlords in view of making an advantageous future purchase. M. de Cambremer will also be meeting our hero for the first time, even though others in his family already know and seem to admire the hero, for whatever mostly unrevealed reasons that make him so intriguing and appealing to nearly everyone he meets. And finally, the Verdurins have invited the up-­and-­coming violinist Morel to dinner and to play for them after dinner, and Morel, a young man

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whose physical charms regularly catch the eye of both men and women, is bringing with him the Baron de Charlus, an illustrious member of one of the most notable families in France who has recently fallen for Morel’s charms and whose elevated social status is perfectly well understood by the Cambremers and the narrator, but grotesquely misunderstood by the Verdurins. (This is the moment in Search when the baron and the Verdurins meet for the first time.) My interest in this passage has to do with the narrator’s way of portraying the time at table as a discursive event, an interactional text in which individual participants certainly have their own agendas, as he is careful to reveal to us, but across which he also reveals to us, as would a linguistic anthropologist, how language links to culture and how culture is both maintained and evolves through language-­in-­use. Linguistic anthropologists practice what Silverstein calls “contemporary semiotic pragmatism,” and their brief is to study not just how language links to culture, but how language-­in-­use enacts culture, how “discursive interaction brings sociocultural concepts into here-­and-­now contexts of use,” and how “ritual centers of semiosis come to exert a structuring, value-­conferring influence on any particular event of discursive interaction with respect to the meanings and significance of the verbal and other semiotic forms used in it.”54 At the dinner in question, our hero ends up seated next to Mme de Cambremer (the user of words such as plumitif ), and his sociolinguistical sensibility quickly makes him impatient with her: Listening to her, I could not for the rest help but acknowledge, without deriving any pleasure from it, the refinement of her expressions. They were those common, in any given period, to everyone of a certain similar intellectual caliber, so that the refined expression is like an arc of the circle in immediately providing the means of describing and limiting the whole circumference. Thus these expressions mean that the people who employ them are at once boring to me as being already familiar, yet also pass for being superior, and were often held out to me as delightful and unappreciated neighbors. (Sodom, 316) (Je ne pouvais du reste m’empêcher en l’entendant parler de rendre justice, sans y prendre aucun plaisir, au raffinement de ses expressions. C’étaient celles qu’ont, à une époque donnée, toutes les personnes d’une même envergure intellectuelle, de sorte que l’expression raffinée fournit aussitôt comme l’arc de cercle, le moyen de décrire et de limiter toute la circonférence. Aussi ces expressions font-­elles que les personnes qui les emploient m’ennuient

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immédiatement comme déjà connues, mais aussi passent pour supérieures, et me furent souvent offertes comme voisines délicieuses et inappréciées. [3:316])

It is a wonderful passage that reveals how attuned the narrator is to the frequency of the occurrence of certain tokens in Mme de Cambremer’s speech, the cumulative impact of which produces the effects of a linguistic register—­ both the effects someone like Mme de Cambremer (whether consciously or subliminally) hopes to obtain by perfecting this particular register, and the effects of her success (or failure) at doing so on the finely calibrated ears of someone like the narrator.55 (Which of the two is the most ambitious social climber?) She finds herself seated next to the “interesting” young man who is our hero; he finds himself bored by her intellectual and artistic pretensions to refined taste. Her would-­be refined expressions, it would seem, are (at least for him) the index of her failure to achieve authentic refinement, be it aesthetic or social. Dare we assume that his speech, which he apparently imagines as normative for anyone of refined taste and an elevated intellectual stature, eschews anything that might appear as a trendy neologism? In fact, the narrator is quite clear about the relation for Mme de Cambremer of aesthetic and social refinement: her ambitions are purely social, even though presented in aesthetic terms. “She had heard that Morel had come with M. de Charlus and hoped, by getting the former to come to her house, to make friends with the latter. She added, however, so that I might not guess her reasons, ‘M. Brichot interests me too’ ” (Sodom, 315) (“Elle avait appris que Morel était venu avec M. de Charlus et voulait, en faisant venir le premier, tâcher de se lier avec le second. Elle ajouta pourtant, pour que je ne pusse deviner cette raison: ‘M. Brichot aussi m’intéresse’ ” [3:315]). No pulling the wool over the narrator’s eyes: the ersatz register in which she speaks has made her banal social ambitions and her aesthetic inadequacies perfectly clear even before any action of hers, or any utterance of an aesthetic judgment by her, could do so. The narrator provides an amusing particular example of Mme de Cambremer’s speech, and offers his usual commentary on it: Meanwhile, she was trying to talk to me on the subject that interested her most, M. de Charlus. She found it touching that he should have a violinist for a protégé. “He looks to be intelligent.” “Extremely full of life even, for a man who’s already getting on,” I said. “Getting on? But he doesn’t look as though he’s getting on, see, he’s still got a full head of hair [le cheveu est resté jeune].” (For the last three or four years, the normal word for “hair,” les cheveux, had been

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used in the singular, le cheveu, by one of those unknown launchers of literary fashions, and everyone on the same wavelength as Mme de Cambremer said le cheveu, not without an affected smile. At the present moment, people are still saying le cheveu, but out of a surfeit of the singular, the plural will be reborn.) (Sodom, 320) (Cependant, elle cherchait à me parler du sujet qui l’intéressait le plus, M. de Charlus. Elle trouvait touchant qu’il protégeait un violoniste. “Il a l’air in­ telligent.—­Même d’une verve extrême pour un homme déjà un peu âgé, dis-­ je.—­Âgé? Mais il n’a pas l’air âgé, regardez, le cheveu est resté jeune.” (Car depuis trois ou quatre ans le mot “cheveu” avait été employé au singulier par un de ces inconnus qui sont les lanceurs des modes littéraires, et toutes les personnes ayant la longueur de rayon de Mme de Cambremer disaient “le cheveu,” non sans un sourire affecté. À l’heure actuelle on dit encore “le cheveu,” mais de l’excès du singulier renaîtra le pluriel.) [3:320])

Mme de Cambremer wishes to be seen as flattering Charlus. The narrator perhaps retains a sly trace of friendly animosity toward him, based on past experience, and in any case seems to want it to be clear that he is much younger than the baron. Mme de Cambremer in effect admits that the baron must be older than he looks based on his hair, but uses a trendy singular of a word usually only used in the plural, thereby indicating the vapid fashionable nature not only of her lexicon but of her very social being and that of others like her. (One might wonder about the register to which the expression of the narrator’s—­ “toutes les personnes ayant la longueur de rayon de Mme de Cambremer” [“everyone on the same wavelength as Mme de Cambremer”]—­could be said to belong.) “It seems that we spend most of our time not engaged in giving information but in giving shows,” Goffman famously observed in the chapter of Frame Analysis titled “The Frame Analysis of Talk,” and this interchange between Mme de Cambremer and the narrator bears out that remark, as does most of the talk at the dinner in question.56 (Even the narrator’s parenthetical digression on the indexical functioning of the use of the singular cheveu could be construed as a show for our benefit.) There is, however, one point on which Proust and Goffman might not fully agree about dinner table talk. Goffman observes that “much of informal talk seems not to be closely geared into extensive social projects, but rather occurs as a means by which the actor handles himself during passing moments; and these handlings of self are very often somewhat optional, involving quite fleeting strips of activity only loosely interconnected

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to surrounding events” (501). It is not that Proust does not provide evidence to support this notion of fleeting handlings of self in passing moments. Plenty of talk at his dinner tables falls into this category. But the overall structure of this dinner, along with its status in the novel as one in a series of such gatherings extending across many years, involves it in several competing extensive social projects. Indeed, it seems ultimately to be these more extensive projects, and their relations to larger social processes, that Proust’s novel as a whole is interested in laying bare. (This is a compositional feature of the novel readers of any single volume in isolation might be hard pressed to notice.) We could say that the projects in question involve the maintenance of existing social hierarchies, attempts to rise within them, attempts to push people down as you (and people like you) rise up, and so on. The confusion surrounding the Baron de Charlus’s social status and moves in various social games that are affected by that confusion are a key part of what the novel is studying in this passage (and in a number of others related to it). We might add that if many at the dinner are confused as to “who” Charlus is, Charlus has his own confusion: what do these people know of his sexual history, and what do they make of his arriving with Morel? Mme Verdurin assumes M. de Cambremer, whom she mistakenly takes to be the highest-­ranking nobleman present, deserves the place of honor at table, and so offers him her arm as they go in to dinner: He hesitated for a moment, saying to himself, “All the same, I can’t go in ahead of M. de Charlus.” But, imagining that the latter was an old friend of the household, seeing that he did not have the place of honor, he decided to take the arm he was being offered and told Mme Verdurin how proud he was to have been admitted into the cénacle (which is how he referred to the little nucleus [ petit noyau], not without a short laugh of satisfaction at knowing the term). (Sodom, 310) (Il hésita un instant, se disant: “Je ne peux tout de même pas passer avant M. de Charlus.” Mais pensant que celui-­ci était un vieil ami de la maison du moment qu’il n’avait pas la place d’honneur, il se décida à prendre le bras qui lui était offert et dit à Mme Verdurin combien il était fier d’être admis dans le cénacle (c’est ainsi qu’il appela le petit noyau, non sans rire un peu de la satisfaction de connaître ce terme). [3:310])

We note again a parenthetical metapragmatic remark by the narrator regarding the difference between petit noyau and cénacle, an index of Cambremer’s status

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as a somewhat parochial fellow, delighted at having an occasion on which to display his small hoard of sophisticated words, secure enough in his sense of self not to be too concerned about appearing ridiculous to people like the narrator in doing so. He is also apparently somewhat socially clueless, unable to perceive that Charlus, like himself, is dining with the Verdurins for the first time. The topic of the relative statuses of Cambremer and Charlus returns as the dinner breaks up. Neither the host nor the hostess happened, during dinner, to overhear any bit of conversation that would have enlightened them as to their mistake, and as they leave the table Verdurin proceeds to make matters worse: M. Verdurin sought to make his apologies to M. de Charlus, and give his reasons, mainly for the pleasure of discussing these social nuances with a man of title, and momentarily the inferior of those who had assigned him the place to which they adjudged he had a right. But first of all he was anxious to demonstrate to M. de Charlus that he held too high an opinion of him intellectually to suppose that he paid any heed to such bagatelles: “Forgive me for mentioning these trifles,” he began, “for I can well imagine the scant importance you attach to them. Bourgeois minds may heed them, but the others, the artists, the ones truly of our own kind [qui en sont], don’t give a damn. And I realized that you were one of us [que vous en étiez] from the very first words we exchanged!” M. de Charlus, who had placed a very different interpretation on this expression, gave a sudden start. (332) (M. Verdurin voulut s’en excuser auprès de M. de Charlus, dès qu’il eut quitté Mme de Cambremer, et lui donner ses raisons, surtout pour le plaisir de causer de ces nuances mondaines avec un homme titré, momentanément l’inférieur de ceux qui lui assignaient la place à laquelle ils jugeaient qu’il avait droit. Mais d’abord il tint à montrer à M. de Charlus qu’intellectuellement il l’estimait trop pour penser qu’il pût faire attention à ces bagatelles: “Excusez-­moi de vous parler de ces riens, commença-­t-­il, car je suppose bien le peu de cas que vous en faites. Les esprits bourgeois y font attention, mais les autres, les artistes, les gens qui en sont vraiment, s’en fichent. Or dès les premiers mots que nous avons échangés, j’ai compris que vous en étiez!” M. de Charlus qui donnait à cette locution un sens fort différent, eut un haut-­le-­corps. [3:332])

Is Charlus “momentarily the inferior of those who had assigned him the place to which they adjudged he had a right”? Posing that question allows us to notice the strange situational specificity of certain kinds of social identity, their

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dependence on other external factors in order to become not only salient but also secure. They work when people are aware of them. They require punctual acts of actualization, performance, and maintenance, and they depend on a support network. They require shared cognitive schemas and something of a shared orientation to the social order. There are at least three such social identities in play in the strip of talk transcribed for us here: “a true lover of the arts”; “a man who has sex with men”; “a nobleman of an as yet to be determined rank.” The lovely French expression en être (to be one of us/them) signals the first to Verdurin, the second to Charlus. Charlus probably has no idea what kind of a creature he is talking to as he listens to M. Verdurin. He may as well be talking to (or listening to) an animal. He is like a beekeeper who forgot to put on his protective garb. With no one of authority near at hand to assert his status for him, he has to worry a bit about being stung. His footing is unsure. “Talk appears as a rapidly shifting stream of differently framed strips,” Goffman notes in Frame Analysis (544). He continues a page or two later: No group in our society seems unable to produce such choppy, streaming lines of change in frame; and no competent person seems to be incapable of easily picking up the frame-­relevant cues and ordering his experiencing of another’s behavior by means of them. And if a participant in a conversation did not constantly apply adjustments for frame, he would find himself listening in on a meaningless jumble of words and, with every word he injected, increasing the babble. (546)

Charlus is having difficulty finding the appropriate frame to make sense of the interaction he has been caught up in. A situation of  babble threatens to emerge. His confusion arises in part because earlier in the dinner he found himself being winked at by Dr. Cottard, and it took him a few minutes to realize the good doctor was not attempting to signal some shared sexual proclivity, but was simply trying to “break the ice” with the unknown noble quantity seated beside him. The rules of engagement in this social world are not immediately apparent to the baron. Fortunately, as Verdurin babbles on, it becomes possible to exclude certain candidates from the set of potential meanings of the stream of talk he is emitting: “Don’t protest, cher monsieur, you are one of us [vous en êtes], it’s as clear as day,” M. Verdurin went on. “Note that I do not know whether you practice some art or other, but that isn’t necessary, nor is it always sufficient. Dechambre, who has just died, played perfectly, with the most robust technique, but

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he wasn’t one [n’en était pas], you sensed right away he wasn’t. Brichot isn’t one [n’en est pas]. Morel is [en est], my wife is [en est], I sense that you are [en êtes].” “What were you going to say to me?” M. de Charlus broke in, who was beginning to feel reassured as to M. Verdurin’s meaning, but would rather he did not shout those ambiguous words from the rooftops. “We put you only on the left,” M. Verdurin replied. M. de Charlus, with a good-­natured, understanding, insolent smile, replied, “Oh, come! That’s of no account at all here!” (332) (“Ne protestez pas, cher monsieur, vous en êtes, c’est clair comme le jour, reprit M. Verdurin. Remarquez que je ne sais pas si vous exercez un art quelconque, mais ce n’est pas nécessaire et ce n’est pas toujours suffisant. Dechambre, qui vient de mourir, jouait parfaitement avec le plus robuste mécanisme, mais n’en était pas, on sentait tout de suite qu’il n’en était pas. Brichot n’en est pas. Morel en est, ma femme en est, je sens que vous en êtes . . .—­Qu’alliez-­vous me dire?” interrompit M. de Charlus qui commençait à être rassuré sur ce que voulait signifier M. Verdurin, mais qui préférait qu’il criât moins haut ces paroles à double sens. “Nous vous avons mis seulement à gauche” répondit M. Verdurin. M. de Charlus, avec un sourire compréhensif, bonhomme et insolent, répondit: “Mais voyons! Cela n’a aucune importance, ici!” [3:332])

Feeling he is back on momentarily firm ground, Charlus finally knows how to respond, and with the simple use of one word, ici/here, he insists on an adjustment to frame, a refiguring of the deictic origo, we might say. Before he said ici, we, along with M. Verdurin, might have thought we were someplace that counted. Suddenly, if we accept the reorientation Charlus asserts, we are in any old place, and in any case, we are in a place where the relation of the relative status of Charlus and Cambremer to where they are seated at table is of no consequence because the entire evening is of no consequence, socially speaking. How authoritative is Charlus’s assertion, and over how long of a time span can it remain so? (“That Charlus is an anachronism by this point in history scarcely needs emphasizing,” Michael Sprinker comments. “The novel explicitly asserts it.”57) He is, after all, dining on property owned by the impoverished Cambremer family, temporarily in the hands of the wealthy Verdurins. As Sprinker notes about the time period in question here: “One clear indication of continuing aristocratic power is the extent to which the bourgeoisie conceded the nobility’s monopoly over social distinction” (57). For perhaps what the entire dinner party shows, and this is probably one of the key frames for understanding the exchange between Verdurin and Charlus as they leave

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the dining table, is that the Verdurins concede nothing to the Cambremers in the way of distinction, Mme de Cambremer being noble only by virtue of her recent marriage in any case. Charlus is the wild card in the scene, still—­ for certain people present—­a reservoir of distinction, but rendered somewhat vulnerable as such, it turns out, by his sexual history,58 as well as by the general downgrading in the credit position of the aristocracy taking place in the social world at large. So perhaps there is even a time limit on, an unspoken “yet” in, his utterance, “That’s of no account at all here!” This is a limit of which he seems still somewhat unaware, but one whose reality will reveal itself as the long-­term processes through which his value as a holder of an older species of social capital is diminishing continue to do their work. After saying here, Charlus laughs, and it allows the narrator another of his metapragmatic digressions, the final one I will consider in this chapter. It is important as a digression because it develops this notion of the relevant time span for Charlus’s stance—­a time span that extends into the past rather than into the future. And he gave a little laugh that was peculiar to him, a laugh that had probably come down to him from some Bavarian or Lorraine grandmother, who had herself got the identical laugh from one of her forebears, so that it had been ringing out like this, unchanged, for a good few centuries in the lesser courts of old Europe, and its precious quality had been enjoyed, like that of certain old musical instruments now grown very uncommon. There are times when, in order to depict someone in their entirety, a phonetic imitation would need to be added to the description, and that of the character which M. de Charlus was playing risks incompleteness for want of this little laugh, so delicate and so light,  just as certain of Bach’s suites are never rendered accurately because the orchestras lack the “little trumpets,” with their particular tone, for which the composer wrote one or another part. (332) (Et il eut un petit rire qui lui était spécial—­un rire qui lui venait probablement de quelque grand-­mère bavaroise ou lorraine, qui le tenait elle-­même, tout identique, d’une aïeule, de sorte qu’il sonnait ainsi, inchangé, depuis pas mal de siècles dans de vieilles petites cours de l’Europe, et qu’on goûtait sa qualité précieuse comme celle de certains instruments anciens devenus rarissimes. Il y a des moments où pour peindre complètement quelqu’un il faudrait que l’imitation phonétique se joignît à la description, et celle du personnage que faisait M. de Charlus risque d’être incomplète par le manque de ce petit rire si

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fin, si léger, comme certaines suites de Bach ne sont jamais rendues exactement parce que les orchestres manquent de ces “petites trompettes” au son si particulier, pour lesquelles l’auteur a écrit telle ou telle partie. [3:332–­33])

We have here a marvelous description of the performance of a family habitus; we have a cleverly phrased reference to the limits of print transcription when it comes to capturing certain sound forms (linguistic, perhaps, but expressive or gestural rather than word-­based) that are key to the meaning production of given episodes of talk; we have an assertion of the way in which it is possible to hear history embodied (indexed) in the tone and timbre of sounds human beings produce; and finally we have yet another example confirming how every metapragmatic reflection provided by our narrator seems also to serve as an index locating him and his own attitudes toward his fellows within social space. Charlus may be an anachronism, a period instrument producing antiquarian sounds; he is apparently nonetheless still somehow charismatic, powerful, and authoritative in this moment. As future episodes in the novel reveal, the Verdurins eventually realize that in fact he is someone to be reckoned with, or, to be more exact, to be exploited and then discarded once his value has been extracted. In any case, for the time being, he seems to come out on top: “But,” explained M. Verdurin, wounded, “it was on purpose. I attach no importance at all to titles of nobility,” he added with that disdainful smile that I have seen so many people I have known, unlike my grandmother and my mother, have for all the things they do not possess, in front of people who will then, so they believe, be unable to use these to establish their superiority over them. “But, then, since M. de Cambremer was in fact there and he’s a marquis, and you’re only a baron . . .” “Permit me,” replied M. de Charlus with a haughty expression, to the astonished M. Verdurin, “I am also Duc de Brabant, Damoiseau de Montargis, and Prince d’Oléron, de Carency, de Viareggio, and des Dunes. It’s of absolutely no importance, however. Do not torment yourself,” he went on, resuming his delicate smile, which grew broader at these final words: “I could tell right away that you weren’t in the habit of it.” (332–­33) (“Mais, expliqua M. Verdurin blessé, c’est à dessein. Je n’attache aucune importance aux titres de noblesse,” ajouta-­t-­il avec ce sourire dédaigneux que j’ai vu tant de personnes que j’ai connues, à l’encontre de ma grand-­mère et de ma mère, avoir pour toutes les choses qu’ils ne possèdent pas, devant ceux qui ainsi, pensent-­ils, ne pourront pas se faire à l’aide d’elles une supériorité sur eux. “Mais enfin puisqu’il y avait justement M. de Cambremer et qu’il est

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marquis, comme vous n’êtes que baron . . .—­Permettez, répondit M. de Charlus avec un air de hauteur, à M. de Verdurin étonné, je suis aussi duc de Brabant, damoiseau de Montargis, prince d’Oléron, de Carency, de Viareggio et des Dunes. D’ailleurs cela ne fait absolument rien. Ne vous tourmentez pas,” ajouta-­t-­il en reprenant son fin sourire, qui s’épanouit sur ces derniers mots: “J’ai tout de suite vu que vous n’aviez pas l’habitude.” [3:333])

The Verdurins are put into their place for now, it would seem, but there might be a question as to how long that now is. When Proust published the first volume of his novel in 1913, he arranged for a short article in interview form to appear in Le Temps providing clues as to how to understand what he was up to, and why his novel, with its additional promised volumes, was going to be so long: “You know that there is plane geometry and solid geometry. Well, for me, the novel is not only plane psychology, but psychology in time. I have attempted to isolate the invisible substance of time, but to do that the experiment had to be able to be long-­lasting.”59 Time is not the only invisible substance Proust’s novel wants to isolate. In fact, his novel seems most interested in revealing the functioning across time of other sociological variables, and in using the representation of talk to do so. Social capital, as it turns out, is the variable that has been our focus for these past few pages. We could say that the dinner table scene, and the larger sequence of scenes to which it belongs, are all scenes in which the novel tracks the way people within the culture under investigation conduct transactions of social capital through the talk they engage in, how they participate in a history of fluctuations in the concentration of social capital among different sets of people, much of that larger history being, in a certain way, beyond their immediate ken. And yet this is what their talk is seen by the novel and its narrator to do. Social capital is, in Bourdieu’s words, “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—­or in other words, to membership in a group—­which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-­owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word.”60 As a concept, it was developed by Bourdieu out of “the need to identify the principle of social effects [ . . . ] particularly visible in all cases in which different individuals obtain very unequal profits from virtually equivalent (economic or cultural) capital, depending on the extent to which they can mobilize by proxy the capital of a group (a family, the alumni of an elite school, a select club, the aristocracy, etc.) that is more or less constituted as such and more or less rich in capital”

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(256n11). Charlus has deep, longstanding resources of this kind that he can draw upon—­his social network is unrivaled for at least one kind of prestige, we might say, a fact of which someone like Cambremer is probably fully aware. Verdurin has no idea; he also possesses no equivalent resources, even though part of his project in life is the acquisition of great sums of social capital of a species indexed to and appropriate to his own social positioning. Invoking the concept of social capital puts us in a position to sum up what I have been trying to demonstrate about Proust’s Search in this last section: it is a novel attuned to the representation of speech diversity of various kinds, a representation that allows for a demonstration of and commentary on certain features of language-­in-­use in specific circumstances of face-­to-­face talk that pertain to the maintenance and the transformation of group membership. Its approach to the study of talk is rigorously ethnographic or sociological or linguistic anthropological. It sets out to observe what talk achieves in sociocultural terms, how talk is a medium through which culture is brought into being interactively, and how the interactions in which this happens are shaped by various institutions. It further has a practical understanding of the functioning (accumulation, accessibility, exchange, conversion) of social capital in individual scenes of talk: certain instances of talk are conceptualizable as skirmishes in a struggle occurring across a larger time frame and having to do with shifts in balances of social capital among different individuals and the groups to which they belong. Proust is a novelist fascinated by what Bourdieu calls the “unceasing effort of sociability” presupposed by “the reproduction of social capital [ . . . ] a continuous series of exchanges in which recognition is endlessly affirmed and reaffirmed” (250). Or in which it isn’t. In the scene we have been focused on here, whether it be the verbal exchanges between M. Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus, or the narrator and Mme de Cambremer, or Mme de Cambremer and Mme Verdurin, recognition is as often actively refused as it is affirmed. The work involved in this unceasing effort of sociability, Bourdieu reminds us, “implies expenditure of time and energy and so, directly or indirectly, of economic capital [and] is not profitable or even conceivable unless one invests in it a specific competence (knowledge of genealogical relationships and of real connections and skill at using them, etc.) and an acquired disposition to acquire and maintain this competence, which are themselves integral parts of this capital” (250). (Remember poor Mme de Gallardon!) Proust’s novel we might then say, is an example of (in Bakhtin’s words) “a diversity of social speech types [ . . . ] and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized” through which it is possible to observe, first, on the part of certain individuals with certain speech characteristics the effort

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expended in particular moments of talk to acquire and then deploy the necessary kinds of competences to enable the accumulation of social capital.61 Second, it is a novel in which scenes of talk are analyzed to reveal how they provide indexes regarding the past accumulation and the future dispensation of present balances of social capital. Ici, maintenant, the Verdurins may have misrecognized Charlus to their misfortune. Time, on the other hand, may be on their side. Finally, it is a novel whose stance toward language is frequently linguistic anthropological in that it studies the use of  language in the particular sociocultural regions it explores not so much as an instrument to say things that are clearly understandable (the preoccupation of the narrator in his obsessive moments) but as a medium—­and also an institution—­in which social life transpires.

Interlude: Talk in Balzac and Eliot

A novelist’s analytic interest in talk need not imply any kind of relation to the fields of  linguistics or linguistic anthropology or sociology. Novels themselves have long taken talk as a topic of interest and investigation in diverse ways and to diverse ends. Novelists learn from other novelists, taking up their interests, their forms of experimentation, and moving forward with them. As I mentioned in my introduction, the three interludes following each of the main chapters will explore the work various novelists have done in this vein. Honoré de Balzac is a novelist preoccupied, like Proust, with how talk relates to different kinds of social value. George Eliot shares this interest, and shares, as well, a novelistic ambition to represent the ways in which acts of talk are continually producing partitions within social space.

Balzac Proust read Balzac and Eliot with great attention. Philippe Dufour, in La pensée romanesque du langage (Novelistic thought on language), identifies a class of novels he refers to as “le roman philologique” (the philological novel), which, he observes, “by representing languages [ . . . ] shows an interest in their political unconscious,” thereby performing a kind of “cultural archaeology” (20). Dufour notes that in this kind of novel, there need be no explicit discussion of the nature of language use. Rather, he says, “form itself is a kind of thought. [ . . . ] In the philological novel, dialogue itself constitutes this thinking by way of form. It is not just there to advance the action or to express the psychology of the characters, it talks about talking. It talks about what talk is

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[il parle de la parole. Il parle de ce que parler veut dire]” (302).1 Balzac is among Dufour’s main examples, and it is easy to agree with Dufour that Balzac’s dialogues show him thinking about how language works. In particular, and in line with the linguistic anthropological stance toward language that was the subject of the last chapter, we could observe that Balzac is intensely attuned to the phenomenon of social indexicality (even if, obviously, he did not have that term for the phenomenon available to him). Even though there may not be the same kind of explicit commentary on language-­in-­use in Balzac that one finds in Proust, still we will see that the interplay between represented utterances and narrative commentary on the scene of talk in which they are occurring does provide evidence for Balzac’s understanding of  how language-­in-­use mobilizes language’s indexical functions in order to achieve its aims.2 Proust also noticed this aspect of Balzac. One finds, for instance, the following commentary on a scene from Balzac’s Lost Illusions, in the writings collected in Contre Sainte-­Beuve: “each word, each gesture, thus has depths [des dessous] that Balzac does not warn the reader about, and they are admirably profound. They are the result of a psychology that is incredibly particular and, since no one but Balzac has ever rendered it, it is a somewhat delicate matter to point them out” (“chaque mot, chaque geste, a ainsi des dessous dont Balzac n’avertit pas le lecteur et qui sont d’une profondeur admirable. Ils relèvent d’une psychologie si spéciale et qui, sauf par Balzac, n’a jamais été faite par personne, qu’il est assez délicat de les indiquer”).3 The scene being discussed is one toward the end of Lost Illusions, where Vautrin, disguised as Carlos Herrera, is speaking to Lucien de Rubempré about Eugène de Rastignac, the young man who had fascinated him in Père Goriot. An older man speaking to a handsome young man about his past affection for another handsome young man: the “psychologie si spéciale” the speaker of this passage from Proust calls attention to is something some readers might be equipped to understand, but others not. That is, the careful work with indexicality in the scene from Balzac (“depths” that are “admirably profound” and “the result of a psychology that is incredibly particular”) is something Proust’s narrator in Contre Sainte-­Beuve is admiring, while also performing careful indexical work of his own, requiring his reader to understand certain traditional ways of pointing to same-­sex sexuality without referring to it. We might speculate that some of Proust’s interest in understanding the complex play of indexicality within verbal exchanges that occurs in the space between denotational and interactive texts was stimulated by his experience of the perils of verbal communication about his own sexuality. What kinds of verbal signs produce that dessous that communicates same-­sex desire? What kind of a semiotic phenomenon are

110  Interlude

the dessous in question, and how regular a part of communication are they? It seems clear from all the metapragmatic analysis in Search that we saw in the previous chapter that Proust came to understand the indexical function of  linguistic and other signs in producing what he refers to here as les dessous to be a central part of verbal interaction. Balzac did also, as we can see in more detail by looking at a scene of dialogue that comes toward the beginning of Cousin Pons, one of his last novels.4 In his Ryerson lecture at the University of Chicago on October 24, 2019, Michael Silverstein remarked that “individuals periodically give off indexical signals that gradually cumulate over the duration of an encounter, allowing us to make cumulative sense of who—­that is, sociologically speaking, what they are, as presenting as identifiable persons in their contributions to an interactional event.”5 This works well as a description of what Proust saw going on in the scene between Vautrin and Lucien, and it seems generally to be part of the way Balzac understood language-­in-­use. Indeed, as we can observe in the scene from Cousin Pons that I would like to consider here, Balzac understands that people cumulate many different kinds of statuses and identities across the same verbal exchange, and that sometimes they work to claim an identity, but fail to do so—­not only because of some inadequacy in their own communicative ability, but perhaps because of the active resistance of their interlocutors to their effort. As Silverstein also observed in his Ryerson lecture, “we are such dynamically figurated stuff as messages make of us,” and this is what Balzac seems to be asking his readers to notice, that people work to figure themselves and also suffer figuration by means of the language they exchange with others. They often come to be identified in ways other than they would wish to be. In any case, Balzac understands that this process of figuration is what Silverstein would call a “projective” one. That is, if we wish to figure ourselves—­to assume some kind of role or identity—­for someone else, we need to invoke, to bring into the conversation, some culturally recognizable type, status, or role to which we are affiliating (or which we are perhaps modifying to suit us) to some degree. Here is how Silverstein describes this process in his article “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life”: Interactional happenings are socio-­actional “events” of [ . . . ] interpretable cultural meanings only to the degree they “instantiate”—­indexically invoke—­ such macro-­sociological partitions of social space, in terms of which cultural values can thus be said to be indexically “articulated.” This connection of identity with value manifests itself in the micro-­contextual order to be sure, where perspectival interests are played out; but it really constitutes a universe

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of cultural imagination that is part of a more encompassing order of semiotic representation, an order of connectivity of micro-­contexts one to another—­ interdiscursivity, in other words—­so as to license or warrant a semiotic gesture to their connectedness in any one of them. So the macro-­sociological is really a projective order from within a complex, and ever changing, configuration of interdiscursivities in micro-­contextual orders. (202)

If Lucien de Rubempré has never been cruised by another man before, never noticed it happening, and never understood that this is a kind of thing that happens, he will surely miss the projection from the context of  his interaction with Vautrin/Herrera to the cultural schema to which Vautrin/Herrera is somehow pointing; he will lack the interdiscursive history that would have enabled him to easily interpret the nature of the interaction in which Vautrin is trying to enmesh him; the dessous in question will, so to speak, be too profond to be apprehended, and so even though he may gather that Vautrin is up to something, it will be unclear to him what that something is. Social indexicality involves referring to “an immanent semiotic fact,” as Silverstein points out, with there being some kind of dialectical relation between the microsociological instance in and into which something is invoked, and the macrosociological “value-­giving schemata,” understandings of which may or may not be shared (or may be shared to some degree) by the participants in the verbal exchange (227). Examples of the “connectivity of micro-­contexts one to another” to which Silverstein refers might include (for you, for me, for Lucien) previous fictional contexts in which Vautrin has cruised young men (say Rastignac in Père Goriot), previous imaginary moments at which Lucien may have been cruised or somehow acquired information regarding the fact that men cruise each other, or that his physical appearance is such that he can expect certain kinds of men (sometimes older men) to take an erotic interest in him, moments in which some readers of Balzac understand this kind of event to be what Balzac is representing and then moments in which they mention this understanding to other people, fictional moments in which Proust has narrators and characters comment (not always explicitly, often via subtle indexical maneuvers) on these queer moments in Balzac, moments where certain readers of Proust notice this particular queer interplay between Proust’s texts and Balzac’s, and then (as is happening right now) write or read about it.6 All of these moments, and others like them, chained together in some way, produce the macrosociological order that can then be invoked in future microsociological interactions. Consider the rich way in which orders of indexicality function in the scene early in Cousin Pons in which Pons arrives at the house of his relations the

112  Interlude

Camusots, bearing a gift for Mme Camusot. Pons is a poor musician, but over the course of his lifetime he has managed to acquire a valuable collection of art objects. An accomplished connoisseur and collector, one who seems to maintain a bizarre lack of awareness regarding the economic value of his collection, he lives in relative poverty. This poverty creates a particular predicament for him, since he has also acquired what Balzac’s narrator refers to as “the disastrous habit of dining well” (28) (“la funeste habitude de bien dîner” [492]). His compelling need to eat fine food causes him to pursue extreme measures to ingratiate himself with the distant family members who still offer him a seat at their well-­appointed tables a few times a week. Mme Camusot de Marville (whose name reflects her aristocratic ambitions rather than any actual status), at whose table he dines regularly, has told Pons she would like a fan, and Pons, wishing somehow to do away with his identity as a parasite, a pique-­ assiette, believes he has made an amazing find that can somehow remediate his status with the Camusots: an antique fan painted by Watteau for Mme de Pompadour.7 A number of agendas are revealed in the conversation that takes place between Pons, Mme Camusot, and her daughter Cécile. Pons tries to establish himself as an expert about art and artistic value, someone whose rare expertise has allowed him to find a remarkable objet d’art to offer to Mme Camusot, someone whose remarkable skill at bargaining has allowed him to acquire the object for much less than what it is worth, and someone whose cultivation alone might justify his regular presence as a guest at their table. Mme Camusot and her daughter seem unwilling to allow Pons to acquire any new status in their eyes. As far as they are concerned, he will remain a tedious, parasitic, poor relative, with no meaningful claim on their attention. There is, however, the fan that he brings them. He persuades them of its value in the course of the conversation, but as the novel represents and comments on this conversation for us, it carefully raises the question as to where this value (which is a hybrid of economic and aesthetic forms of value) exists and what guarantees it. Throughout Cousin Pons, value is shown to be something that is context dependent. In particular it is dependent on forms of knowledge and on verbal interactions in which that knowledge is displayed and mobilized. Pons produces the value of the fan in the course of this interaction with Mme Camusot and Cécile, and by producing the value of the fan, attempts simultaneously to produce a new kind of identity for himself. What he has to work against is both the aesthetic and historical ignorance of his two relatives (Watteau is not a name they recognize), their lack of an appropriate aesthetic sensibility (the

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fan does not seem remarkable to them), and also their difficulty conceiving of the possibility that Pons himself could be entitled to make any kind of claim to social importance as the result of knowledge he possesses. As Silverstein observes, “discursive interaction (and the aspects of  language central to its accomplishment) is the very site of production/maintenance/contestation/transformation of social identities and interests in society, notwithstanding that such identities and interests lie in the plane of the macrosociological.”8 Knowledge about macrosociological structures of value (for people and for “aesthetic” objects) is not evenly shared across members of any social group, and dealing with knowledge discrepancies is also a frequent stumbling block in verbal exchanges. Pons’s relatives ignore his refined sensibility and his success as a collector. To them, he is simply poor. The narrator underlines “the little store which the Camusots set on their Cousin Pons, his devaluation in the bosom of the family” (44) (“le peu de cas que les Camusot faisaient de leur cousin Pons, sa démonétisation au sein de la famille” [506]). All forms of value for the Camusots are somehow translatable into monetary value, and Pons has little of that. Pons himself is hoping to perform a transaction with the fan that engages different systems of value and translates between them. He may not have money, but he has knowledge and the practical skills of a collector, and his hope is that by foregrounding these skills by way of the gift of the fan he can somehow merit the dinners—­past, present, and future—­that his refined palate longs for. Mme Camusot, initially unimpressed, suggests a brutal translation between systems of value: “Do I owe you much for this absurd little article?” At this question, his heart missed a beat, for he had reckoned that the gift of this gem of craftsmanship would pay for all his dinners. “I thought you were allowing me to make you a present of it,” he said in a moved tone of voice. “Really, really!” replied the Présidente. “But let us not stand on ceremony, please. We know one another well enough to have things out sensibly. I know you are not rich enough to go off campaigning at your own expense. Haven’t you already done a lot, bothering to waste your time rummaging in the dealers’ shops?” “My dear cousin, you certainly wouldn’t want this fan if you had to buy it for what it’s worth. It’s a masterpiece of  Watteau, with his paintings on both sides. But don’t worry, cousin, I didn’t pay a hundredth part of its value as a work of art.” (46–­47)

114  Interlude

(—­Vous dois-­je beaucoup d’argent pour cette petite bêtise? Cette demande causa comme un tressaillement intérieur au cousin, il avait la prétention de solder tous ses dîners par l’offrande de ce bijou. —­J’ai cru que vous me permettiez de vous l’offrir, dit-­il d’une voix emue. —­Comment! comment! reprit la présidente; mais, entre nous, pas de cérémonies, nous nous connaissons assez pour laver notre linge ensemble. Je sais que vous n’êtes pas assez riche pour faire la guerre à vos dépens. N’est-­ce pas déjà beaucoup que vous ayez pris la peine de perdre votre temps à courir chez les marchands? . . .  —­Vous ne voudriez pas de cet éventail, ma chère cousine, si vous deviez en donner la valeur, répliqua le pauvre homme offensé, car c’est un chef-­d’oeuvre de Watteau qui l’a peint des deux côtés; mais soyez tranquille, ma cousine, je n’ai pas payé la centième partie du prix d’art. [508–­9])

Mme Camusot underestimates both the aesthetic and the monetary value Pons would have her assign to the fan, and therefore underestimates the exchange Pons was imagining would occur. Had she shared his sense of the fan’s worth, both aesthetic and economic, he would also have gained social value as someone capable of procuring such a remarkable object, and the value so gained (he imagined) would have been sufficient to justify his ongoing place at their table. So for Pons this complex ritual presentation of a gift is meant also to transform him, to put him on some kind of equal footing with his wealthier relatives. Yet Mme Camusot is unable or unwilling to see and participate in what Pons is trying to do; she is not only incapable of understanding the fan’s value, she is unwilling to see Pons as an equal. From the beginning, then, this is an exchange that does not go well; it teeters on the edge of incoherence, because the different parties in it do not share the same presuppositions as to their relative roles and statuses; they do not share the necessary sensibilities to evaluate the gift in parallel fashion; nor are Mme Camusot or her daughter willing to let the ritual entail any new status for Pons. The interaction fails to obtain “interpersonal smoothness” or “non-­incoherence” because of the different understandings of the participants of the social framework in which it occurs.9 “Being ignorant and vain, Madame de Marville was loath to appear to be under the slightest obligation to her parasite, and her ignorance served her admirably, for she did not even know who Watteau was” (47) (“Ignorante et vaniteuse, madame de Marville ne voulait pas avoir l’air de recevoir la moindre chose de son pique-­assiette, et son ignorance la servait admirablement, elle ne connaissait pas le nom de Watteau” [509]). Had she known Watteau’s name, she would still have needed to share some cultural orientation toward valuable

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collectibles that she also seems to lack. She is surprised, for instance, to find Pons standing up to her to defend the fan’s value: “Consequently the Présidente was at a loss to explain her cousin’s sudden audacity, for she had no idea of the value of his gift” (48) (“La présidente ne s’expliquait donc pas la subite audace de son cousin, elle ignorait la valeur du cadeau” [510]). Pons is defending his own worth in defending the fan, and also defending an understanding of gift-­giving as a ritual that cannot be reduced to economics and that involves claims on the relative statuses of the giver and receiver. What is interesting, and even, we might say, tragic, about the encounter is that Pons is in the end more or less able to convince Mme Camusot and Cécile to accept his understanding of the value of the fan, but he is unable thereby to entail a refiguration of his own self in their eyes. A microsociological ritual fails, or fails in part, we could say. Were it to have succeeded, both the fan and Pons would have been transformed in a verbal event that would be, as Silverstein describes, “culturally eucharistic: by using the lingo in context, the lingo has the indexically entailing effect or creative power to index consubstantial traits in the speaker. [ . . . ] The eucharistic exercise is a powerful microcontext of higher-­order indexical authorization.”10 This is what Pons imagines is going to happen. He imagines he, Mme Camusot, and Cécile will commune over the astonishingly beautiful fan, and as a result he will be changed in their eyes. Yet as it happens, only the fan’s entailments change. At first Cécile finds herself utterly uninterested in the object, and yet she asks for more information: “ ‘But tell us about this fan,’ said Cécile, who thought that the curio was too old-­ fashioned” (50) (“Revenons à cet éventail, dit Cécile, à qui le bijou paraissait trop vieux” [512]). She is curious to know how Pons can tell who made it, and this gives him an occasion to offer a lesson in aesthetic appreciation: “And how do you pick out a Wat . . . ?—­What did you say his name was?” “Watteau, cousin, was one of the greatest eighteenth-­century painters. Come now, can’t you see it’s as good as signed?” he said, pointing out to her one of those pastoral scenes showing make-­believe shepherdesses and great lords disguised as swains dancing a reel together. “What fire! What verve! What colouring! And it’s just thrown off like a calligrapher’s flourish; it seems quite effortless. And on the other side, look, a ball in a salon: winter on one side, summer on the other. What ornamentation, and how fresh it has kept!” (52) (—­Et comment savez-­vous que c’est de Wat . . . Comment dites-­vous? —­Watteau! ma cousine, un des plus grands peintres français du dix-­ huitième siècle! Tenez, ne voyez-­vous pas la signature? dit-­il en montrant une

116  Interlude

des bergeries qui représentait une ronde dansée par de fausses paysannes et par des bergers grands seigneurs. C’est d’un entrain! Quelle verve! quel coloris! Et c’est fait! tout d’un trait! comme un paraphe de maître d’écriture; on ne sent plus le travail! Et de l’autre côté, tenez! un bal dans un salon! C’est l’hiver en été! Quels ornements! et comme c’est conservé! [514])

Cécile will surely not be able to recognize Watteau’s signature style anywhere else after only this one lesson. There’s not, in any case, much indication that she has any real interest in old things. Later in the novel, other male members of the family will upbraid her and her mother for their lack of sensitivity here—­both to the fan and to Pons. (As Susan Hiner notes, a “continuing theme throughout the novel [is] the exclusion of women from the aesthetic realm and their consequent connection to the aesthetic’s apparent opposite—­ the commodity.”11) At this point, the only thing Pons’s elevated language instills in them is sense that the fan (but not Pons) probably is actually worth something.12 “If that’s the case, cousin, I couldn’t take anything so valuable as that from you. You ought to sell it and invest the money.” None the less the Présidente asked nothing better than to keep this splendid fan. (52–­53) (—­S’il en est ainsi, je ne pourrais pas, mon cousin, accepter de vous un objet d’un si grand prix. Il vaut mieux vous en faire des rentes, dit la présidente qui ne demandait cependant pas mieux que de garder ce magnifique éventail. [514])

Mme Camusot has been converted. The fan is now magnifique. But she therefore fears too large an obligation to such a low-­status person as Pons and seemingly unwittingly points to the incongruity of Pons’s situation: he is cash poor but art rich, yet apparently unable to conceive of using his own collection (e.g., selling part of it) to generate the necessary income to satisfy his need for fine cuisine. He, like the culture around him, is having a hard time arriving at a consistent vision of how to align social status, the possession of aesthetically valuable objects, and the possession of wealth. The difficulties of alignment are driven home by the way this interaction ends, devolving into a series of acts of symbolic violence against Pons. Mme Camusot (la Présidente) agrees to accept Pons’s gift (which, as we have seen, she has begun to covet—­a sign that something of what Pons has been saying about the fan has hit home), but rudely tries to pay him off immediately with a single special dinner:

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“Very well, I accept it,” said the Présidente with a laugh. “Cécile, my angel, go and arrange with Madeleine for the dinner to be worthy of our cousin.” The Présidente merely wanted to even things up with Pons. This instruction, given audibly against all the canons of good taste, was so like settling an account that he blushed like a girl caught in some unseemly behavior. (53) (—­Eh bien! je l’accepte, dit en riant la présidente. Cécile, mon petit ange, va donc voir avec Madeleine à ce que le dîner soit digne de notre cousin . . . La présidente voulait balancer le compte. Cette recommandation faite à haute voix, contrairement aux règles du bon goût, ressemblait si bien à l’appoint d’un payement, que Pons rougit comme une jeune fille prise en faute. [515])

Even worse, Cécile, who obviously has a low tolerance for Pons, hatches a subterfuge to allow her and her mother to leave Pons alone and to go dine elsewhere. Mme Camusot then says to Pons: “My dear cousin, dinner is ordered. Do have it without us. [ . . . ]” “But I can dine elsewhere, cousin,” said the simple fellow. Cruelly hurt as he was by the way the Présidente had set about reproaching him for his poverty, he was still more dismayed at the prospect of remaining alone with the servants. “Why do that? . . . Dinner is ready. The servants would eat it.” At this horrible remark, Pons drew himself up with a start as if an electric current had passed through him. He gave his cousin a chilly bow and went to pick up his spenser. (57) (—­Mon cher cousin, le dîner est ordonné, vous le mangerez sans nous. [ . . . ] —­Oh! ma cousine, je puis dîner ailleurs, dit le bonhomme. Quoique cruellement affecté de la manière dont s’y prenait la présidente pour lui reprocher son indigence, il était encore plus effrayé par la perspective de se trouver seul avec les domestiques. —­Mais pourquoi? . . . le dîner est prêt, les domestiques le mangeraient. En entendant cette horrible phrase, Pons se redressa comme si la décharge de quelque pile galvanique l’eût atteint, salua froidement sa cousine et alla reprendre son spencer. [518])

Throughout this passage, the narrator’s comments have served not only to provide information about the internal mental states of the participants, but also to provide evidence of the macrosociological concepts and structures that

118  Interlude

have been regimenting the interaction for the different participants. Pons has been imagining a ritual exchange that will permanently elevate his status in the eyes of his relatives; Mme Camusot and her daughter have been imagining themselves being imposed upon by a distant relative who seems no better, and perhaps even worse than a servant. It just so happens that he brings a gift about whose value they become somewhat convinced in the course of their conversation. Still, they remain unable to marshal any particular social grace to acknowledge anything about the person bearing a gift. Instead, they reveal, by the way they suggest that he dine alone at their table in their absence, that they view him as hardly better than a servant himself, servants being a social group from which he has been deliberately trying to distinguish himself for some time. The conversation, never particularly interactively smooth or coherent, devolves into symbolic violence, with multiple conversational norms being transgressed and serious damage being done to Pons’s identity. (Remember again, the duke and the historian in Proust, and the duke’s pleasure in verbally assaulting the historian, but doing so indirectly. Remember Charlus telling Verdurin that his dinner constitutes an event of no social consequence to speak of.) Among Cousin Pons’s subjects is, then, the question of how cultural value is asserted and maintained. It often happens in individual microsociological instances, but those instances must be able to call upon macrosociological conceptions of value that circulate in a variety of ways and along different paths. The disastrous conversation at the beginning of Cousin Pons is, of course, only one of many in that novel that, taken collectively, constitute a study of value’s interdiscursive life, and the practical abilities some people have (or lack) to make use of that value.

Eliot In the scene from Cousin Pons (as in many scenes in Proust) we see the careful composition of represented conversations to demonstrate how identities, interests, and values are pursued, maintained, and transformed; in Eliot we can see talk being abstracted and studied as a collective phenomenon that organizes and partitions social space in numerous significant ways. It would surprise next to no one among attentive readers of Eliot to say that she is a novelist of normativities. The norms that interest me here and that turn out also to be a preoccupation of Proust’s are what Silverstein has referred to (again in his Ryerson lecture) as ethnostipulative or prescriptive norms for communication: who is allowed (or simply able) to talk to whom when and

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where and about what, and how those norms contribute to the production of networks along which information, concepts, and values can circulate. Such networks take shape over time as, in Silverstein’s words, “emergently fixed and tiered structures of emanation from certain centers of value production that anchor particular trajectories of circulation, the values from several of which can intersect—­sometimes conflictually—­at ever new sites of experience and interaction.”13 Eliot’s practical awareness of the interlocking problems of the presence of formal and informal information channels, the unequal distribution of information and concepts across a given social space, and the norms that govern semiotic practices such as “informal” talk can be seen at many points in her novels.14 Consider the opening of chapter 59 of Middlemarch: News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar. This fine comparison has reference to Fred Vincy, who on that evening at Lowick Parsonage heard a lively discussion among the ladies on the news which their old servant had got from Tantripp concerning Mr Casaubon’s strange mention of Mr Ladislaw in a codicil to his will made not long before his death. [ . . . ] Fred knew little and cared less about Ladislaw and the Casaubons, and his mind never recurred to that discussion till one day calling on Rosamond at his mother’s request to deliver a message as he passed, he happened to see Ladislaw going away. Fred and Rosamond had little to say to each other now that marriage had removed her from collision with the unpleasantness of  brothers, and especially now that he had taken what she held the stupid and even reprehensible step of giving up the Church to take to such a business as Mr Garth’s. Hence Fred talked by preference of what he considered indifferent news, and “a propos of that young Ladislaw” mentioned what he had heard at Lowick Parsonage. (599)

Bees collect nectar and pollen for their own use. In the process, other pollen adheres to their bodies, and they perhaps serve to transfer it to another bloom they visit as they continue to collect nectar, thereby unintentionally allowing fertilization to occur. We participate in talk intentionally (Fred delivers his mother’s message), and as we do so, other things happen (Fred spreads the news about the codicil without any thought as to what he is contributing to by doing so). Something about gendered relations, something about family systems, something about conflicting views of appropriate professional aspirations all contribute to this particular happening, as do certain habits of sharing news—­the idea that when you are with certain people talk must

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transpire simply as an acknowledgment that the other person has some status for you. (“We never communicate with others purely as disembodied and a-­social cognitions: our relative positionalities as social selves are essentially involved. [ . . . ] Everyone in a social formation does not communicate directly with everyone else about everything that is on his or her mind, notwithstanding fantasies about happy rational communicators in otherwise unstructured mass ‘public spheres.’ ”15) So Fred spreads news consequential to the developing plot of the novel, of course, but, as the novel carefully notes, he is unaware of this aspect of what he is doing; he is simply (he thinks) using talk to get through a tedious moment with a sister with whom he is required to interact. Wanting to avoid touching on points of contention between them, unable to imagine that his lack of interest in Ladislaw is not shared by his sister, and out of an effort to produce an atmosphere of “indifferent” chatter appropriate to the relation that he would like to pertain between him and his sister, he sheds a bit of news more weighty than he knows. We could take this as Eliot’s rather wonderful way of conveying to us how patterns of circulation collide and thereby somehow reveal a variety of structures of the social field (in rather the way that radar waves might bounce off of objects). Here we have familial networks, tensions between brothers and sisters, servants as vectors of information from house to house, the newsworthiness of information (gossip) about inheri­ tance dramas. Fred thinks he is conveying to his sister something of his indifference to her. He simultaneously participates in a culture’s fascination with inheri­tance and unwittingly creates a disturbance in his sister’s own affective life—­a marvelous example of cultural values colliding in a conflictual way as a single act of talk contributes simultaneously to multiple circulatory vectors. “News” is a word Eliot uses to call attention to patterns of circulation not just of information but of the systems of values and of the structured social relations that partially constitute a culture. Patterns of circulation, by being continually reactivated, maintain a world of social relations and allow it to evolve. So, for instance, “the news that Lydgate had all at once become able not only to get rid of the execution in his house but to pay all his debts in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round it conjectures and comments which gave it new body and impetus. [ . . . ] The business was felt to be so public and important that it required dinners to feed it, and many invitations were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this scandal concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate” (719). While attentive to its unfolding plot, Middlemarch is simultaneously attentive to the order of talk that makes the plot possible. It studies how talk works as its plot progresses. Consider just one more example, the opening of chapter 74:

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In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry her friendship so far as to make plain statement to the wife of the unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbours, various moral impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance. Candour was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candour never waited to be asked for its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth—­a wide phrase, but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than her husband’s character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in her lot: the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-­party. Stronger than all, there was the regard for a friend’s moral improvement, sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer. On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbour unhappy for her good. (741)

The narrator’s stance seems to be that of a slightly cynical or ironical ethnographer.16 “Candour,” “the love of truth,” and concern for one’s neighbor’s “soul” are here treated as pragmatic labels for “moral impulses [ . . . ] which tended to stimulate utterance.” The meaning of these terms, we could say, accumulates via a practice of speech. That speech is, for the analyst, provoked by what are experienced by speakers as moral beliefs, internalized values that structure their impulse to talk. These beliefs (religious ones, and ones about appropriate forms of gendered behavior) also exist as general cultural values that emerge from, that are invoked, produced, and maintained (and inculcated in others) by, the kinds of speaking that occur because of them. This is the dialectical relationship between individual events of talk and the shared (macrosociological) structures of value that both enable them and emerge from them that Eliot shows to be operative in Middlemarch’s verbal universe and in talk in general. We could say that in Cousin Pons we witness a sophisticated effort to represent talk at work and to show how repeated scenes of talk are part of the history of the production of certain kinds of value. In Middlemarch, we see that the act of talking has been in some ways abstracted and is being approached with an

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ethnographic or linguistic anthropological sensibility. Recall the descriptions by Duranti and Silverstein of that linguistic anthropological sensibility that I cited in the introduction. According to Duranti, linguistic anthropologists take language to be a “set of practices,” with talk being envisioned as “a form of action that both presupposes and at the same time brings about ways of being in the world.” Language-­in-­use is viewed as “a set of symbolic resources that enter into the constitution of social fabric and the individual representation of actual or possible worlds,” and as a medium for “the transmission and reproduction of culture.”17 Silverstein emphasized “the intersubjective (as opposed to individual-­cognitive) and the sociocentric (as opposed to agentive-­centric) emergent and dialectical nature of [linguistic anthropology’s] phenomena, language-­in-­use as sociocultural practice.”18 This seems to be the same view of  language-­in-­use that emerges from the novelistic practice of Balzac, Eliot, and Proust. Proust practices the same blow-­by-­blow conversational analysis that Balzac regularly puts before his reader. Search also, like Middlemarch, takes an ethnographic stance toward talk as a kind of ritual activity structured in specific ways in specific cultural locations. As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, the fact that Proust’s novel is cast in the first person adds a new compositional feature with its own specific analytical consequences for investigating talk’s work.

Chapter 2

Idiotic Speech (Acts?) and the Form of In Search of Lost Time A l b e r t i n e , D o s t o e v s k y, a n d   P e o p l e W h o T a l k S t r a n g e ly On January 2, 1920, the Journal des Débats published a long article by its literary critic,  Jean de Pierrefeu, called “The Case of M. Proust.” In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower had been awarded the Prix Goncourt a month earlier; various critics were now taking stock of this second volume of Search and, in Pierrefeu’s case, explaining what was wrong with it.1 Toward the end of the article, Pierrefeu asserts that what Proust has written is in fact not a novel; indeed, it in no way resembles “a work of literature.” It is, rather, some kind of psychological inquiry, quite thorough, quite well-­informed, up to date with the latest discoveries of modern psychiatry, as can be seen in the care taken to discover, even in the modifications of the organism of this person who is influenced by shadowy hereditary forces, by his own prejudices, or even by atmospheric conditions, the motivations for his actions and his feelings.

For Pierrefeu, Proust would have been more successful had he taken the trouble to do a novelist’s job and “organize such rich materials according to principles of literary artistry, which would require an effort at synthesis, a defined perspective, an arrangement better suited to our minds and to the laws of beauty!”2 Proust responds to this critique of an absence of perceptible form in his writing (one that must have been increasingly familiar to him as the years went by) and of its overly (pathologically) introspective bent with an invitation to dinner at the Ritz. Among the several things Proust indicates he hopes to achieve during the dinner, one is to convince Pierrefeu that the primary merit of his work is “la composition” and that it was not in any way his intention

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to “draw my readers deviously into the shadowy realm of the unconscious.”3 That is, novelistic form is a primary concern of his, and he has no particular hidden designs on the psyches of  his readers. (Form and composition are odd kinds of synonyms. I have been favoring composition in What Proust Heard up to this point, and will continue to do so, in part because it was a word Proust favored. To say that a work is composed, as Proust does, is to say that there are features in the way it is put together that are significant for the person who did the composing—­just as there might be features that hold significance that escapes the awareness of the composer. In any case, Pierrefeu fails to notice some compositional features that matter to Proust, and so misses their significance. Taking him to dinner at the Ritz in order to show him what he failed to notice is an interesting implicit acknowledgment of a couple things. First, it implicitly acknowledges that composition/form is a social thing; it happens, for written texts, as someone writes, and then has to happen again as someone else reads. If it doesn’t, well then maybe you have to talk about it. Second, it acknowledges that the capacity to recognize significant compositional features is acquired, and that the recognition of the significance of some kind of compositional feature is itself an index of something—­like an accent. It says something about where you came from, where you’ve been, where you are going, or who your friends are or aren’t.4) When Jacques Rivière wrote a short piece in the Nouvelle Revue Française in January 1920 to defend Proust’s volume from recent attacks against it, he asserted that Proust was giving life back to the French novel, or at least to one strand of it: “he is entirely renewing the methods of the psychological novel.” The critics of his time may not have noticed this fact, but “the choice made by the Académie Goncourt, though it may have displeased a few journalists, will certainly be ratified by the coming generation.”5 That new generation and the ones after it have obviously ratified the academy’s choice, but whatever it was that Proust was renewing about the forms or methods of the novel, French or otherwise, it surely cannot be adequately captured, or perhaps even captured at all, by Rivière’s term “psychological novel.” At one point in In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust’s narrator considers the view that “works written for posterity should be read only by posterity” (105) (“les oeuvres écrites pour la postérité ne devraient être lues que par elle” [1:522]). It seems, the narrator notes, that certain works do not initially encounter a public capable of apprehending them adequately. For such works, a satisfactory form of uptake is something that can only occur later in time or that only comes into being across time. In fact, these works, Proust’s narrator insists, must inevitably be misperceived for a long period, although, as he has

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it, throughout this period of misperception, the works themselves are slowly, as they find a public or publics, performing the additional semiotic and cultural work of producing people capable of understanding them, or, we might say, of producing people capable of allowing some new version of their meaning to be activated. (Perhaps authors inviting recalcitrant critics to dinner at the Ritz is part of this process.) “The work has to create its own posterity” (106) (“Il faut que l’oeuvre [ . . . ] crée elle-­même sa postérité” [1:522]), the narrator comments.6 The narrator, we might say, understands the array of meanings that accrue to a cultural object to be the result of a collective effort. For him, a work’s meaning is one that unfolds over time as it is exposed to the different publics that it acquires. At some point, it will, Proust’s narrator claims, find a reader with a certain mode of apprehension who will shift how it is understood in a consequential way. Search is itself one such work, initially taken to be primarily a psychological novel, a novel about time and memory, later a novel about art and aesthetic experience, a philosophical novel, a phenomenological one, and perhaps only later still a novel with a deeply anthropological and sociological bent, a novel interested in how culture happens, how language is a space in which culture happens, in which it is possible to watch culture happening over time, and to watch social change occur as culture happens. Many real-­time moments of uptake were required for it to acquire some of these ways of apprehending it. The narrator does, of course, speak in the particular passage I’ve cited as if he believes the future-­oriented work’s meaning is somehow harbored within it, awaiting the proper moment to blossom once it has produced readers who are the appropriate medium for that blossoming, as if, when the implied reader comes along, reader and meaning will magically prove to be fully adequate to each other. A study of other passages in the novel might lead us to believe that in fact the narrator (like the novelist) understands that works, by producing different responses in different readers, not only interactively contribute to producing their own reception, but they also become a kind of diagnostic instrument providing information regarding both the historicity of manners of reading and also the way those manners are distributed across the social topography around them at any given time. They serve to reveal the way different kinds of publics are distinctively positioned in that topography by their manners of reading. (This possibility will be examined more closely in the next chapter.) I’d like to take a closer look here at some of the significant features of the novel that could be taken to be part of what Proust refers to as its composition. They are also linguistic anthropological features, tied to the novel’s interest in

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the ways people use language and in what happens through the use of language, even when those happenings are beyond the immediate ken of the people speaking. In 1919, when Shadow first appeared, introducing Albertine to the world, Dostoevsky was also very much a topic of conversation in French literary circles. Albertine is, as many readers will remember, closely associated with Dostoevsky at various points in Search (I will return to this observation later), and the compositional features of the novel that I wish to focus on are related to Proust’s interest in Dostoevsky. I hope to be able to say something further about what the novel is offering us as a method for listening to people talk, a method that understands language-­in-­use to be a place in which an attentive listener can, so to speak, hear culture at work. The talk that will interest me in this chapter will continue to be both talk in general and talk about literature more specifically. The question of how to listen to talk turns out not only to be something the novel’s narrator is interested in; it turns out to be at the heart of the way Search is composed. It was in June 1920, in a complicated letter to, once again,   Jean de Pierrefeu, that Proust wrote: “If you were to ask me what is the most beautiful novel I know, it would be challenging for me to give you an answer. Perhaps I would assign first place to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.”7 Karen Haddad-­Wotling writes that a year later, in a dedication to a copy of Sodom and Gomorrah Proust would once again indicate that The Idiot was “the most beautiful novel I know”; she also mentions that it has been said that Proust knew certain pages from The Idiot by heart.8 In this June 1920 letter to Pierrefeu, Proust seems to have given up the hope that he could guide Pierrefeu to a more interesting perspective not just on Proust’s own writing, but on literature in general: “I find myself writing to someone who has not asked for my advice, who seems to me incapable of profiting from it, both because of his own failings and because of the necessary brevity of my letter” (19:316). He is objecting to Pierrefeu’s way of dealing with a number of authors he has written about recently, and in lecturing the hapless critic, he notes that even though he has only read The Idiot in bad translations, and so has no access to its style, he nonetheless is able to see how deeply structured, how carefully composed the novel is: the novel has important depths, and works with the relations between “general laws” and “particular phenomena” (19:317). If you read only on the surface of novels like The Idiot or Search, Proust implies, you risk missing the compositional effort that unites a novel’s specific details to a larger project of analysis.9 (Remembering the praise we saw in Contre Sainte-­Beuve for the “admirable profundity” of the indexical “depths” in certain scenes Balzac composed, we might decide that Proust was finding something similar in Dostoevsky: a novel’s compositional

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effort to invoke indexically certain cultural forms or certain social systems of  value.) I think of The Idiot as, among other things, a novel about social speech pathologies, a novel in which people are regularly in a state of consternation, or at least bemusement, produced by something someone has said, or by the general manner in which someone is conducting themselves in their speaking.10 Bakhtin, in his essay titled “The Problem of Speech Genres,” notes that every time we make the effort to understand what someone is saying with an idea that we might respond to them, one thing we reconstruct for ourselves is what we take to be the speaker’s “speech plan.” For Bakhtin, that speech plan “determines the entire utterance, its length and boundaries. We imagine to ourselves what the speaker wishes to say.” He tells us that “the immediate participants in communication, orienting themselves with respect to the situation and the preceding utterances, easily and quickly grasp the speaker’s speech plan, his speech will. And from the very beginning of his words they sense the developing whole of the utterance” (77–­78). The Idiot could be characterized as a novel filled with speakers whose speech plans are impenetrable, obscure, eccentric, nonnormative, asocial, or, at the very least, poorly adapted to their circumstances. From the novel’s opening scene on the train, in which we are introduced to Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin, and Lebedev, something is off in the way people speak to each other: “The readiness of the blond young man [Myshkin] in the Swiss cloak to answer all his swarthy companion’s questions [Rogozhin] was astonishing and betrayed no suspicion of the utter carelessness, idleness, and impropriety of some of the questions” (6). Myshkin in general has no sense of when it might be better not to reveal something about himself. But even why Rogozhin is pumping him for information is unclear: “Rogozhin himself, for some reason, was especially eager to make the prince his interlocutor, though the need for an interlocutor seemed more mechanical than moral; somehow more from distraction than from simple-­heartedness; from anxiety, from agitation, just to look at someone and wag his tongue about something” (11).11 The narrator, we note, is also given to speculation about what motivates the speech of this or that character, and sometimes seems to share the confusion of the novel’s other characters as regards certain utterances. At a later point in the novel, when Rogozhin says something to the obsessive and crazed Ippolit in front of a crowd of listeners, the narrator observes: “What Rogozhin meant to say, no one, of course, understood, but his words made a rather strange impression on them all” (386). The reader has little choice but to assume that the narrator is also included in that “no one.”

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As for the prince, he avows at one point that “I decided to be polite and candid with everybody” (75), but since nearly everyone else in the novel speaks in guarded and strategic manners, it is hard for them to believe the prince really could, or indeed should, be following that plan.12 “You shameless babbler,” Ganya screams at him at one point, to which the prince simply replies, “I assure you that you are mistaken” (83). “It soon becomes evident,” writes Malcolm  Jones, “that the prince has a number of problems in sustaining open interpersonal relations with those among whom he has fallen, which makes it even more difficult for them to situate him. The first is that they are all engaged in secretive manoeuvres in which he is expected to collude.”13 Then there is the novel’s great fabulator, General Ivolgin, quite likely to tell you stories about a role in your childhood that he never in fact played. At one point in the novel, his speech tendency is referred to as “the disorder that had come over him in recent years” (482), one against which he occasionally struggles, but not with much success. There are the inscrutable agendas of Aglaya Ivanovna and Nastasya Filippovna as well. In short, frequently nobody, neither the characters, the reader, nor even, apparently, the narrator, seems to understand in any consistent manner what motivates any given act of speech represented in the novel’s pages. Indeed, critics such as Jones and Robin Feuer Miller develop an argument that just as various characters struggle to determine how to take the speech of  Myshkin and various other characters, so the reader has to learn that the narrator’s own speech plan is challenging to ascertain, and perhaps even incoherent. “The reader must constantly readjust his attitude toward the narrative texture as well as toward the characters it portrays,” Miller writes, and in her analysis, she isolates “four separate modes of narration coexisting within the novel,” with which any careful reader will have to come to terms.14 Particularly critical, in Miller’s view, is the fact that as the novel progresses, “the reader’s confidence in the narrator begins to weaken as he becomes confused by the abrupt, unpatterned changes in the narrator’s voice” (126). Readers of The Idiot, Miller insists, must sensitize themselves to unannounced shifts in narrative stance, and also must learn “to distinguish the narrator’s point of view from that of the implied author who stands behind him” (127). Jones rehearses and extends Miller’s analysis. He recalls that one of the narrative modes in The Idiot is a relatively familiar one, associated with the novel of manners, and encapsulated in “the chronotope of the drawing room or salon”: It is the chronotope of  Jane Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Trollope, to some extent Tolstoy, even Proust, a place where public and private events may come

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together and where historical and biographical time are condensed and concentrated in the dialogic interaction of characters within a specific social setting. (117)

Yet  Jones also notes that Dostoevsky’s reader will need to be cautious, because in The Idiot “the association of the chronotope of the salon with the novel of manners does not entail that every scene set in a salon is a pure example of this type” (118). In the scene in which Rogozhin addresses Ippolit with a remark no one understands, a scene that takes place in Myshkin’s salon, as Jones observes, “the progressive general anarchy and its emotional effect on the host creates a dream-­like atmosphere in which points of reference for behavior seem arbitrary and relativized. Even the narrator seems at sea and unable to distinguish the significant from the insignificant” (119). As we move beyond that scene, and into later stages of the novel, the narrator is revealed to be as odd a speaker as anyone else in the novel, one whose agenda in speaking becomes increasingly inscrutable, as in a chapter that opens with statements such as this: Two weeks went by after the events recounted in the last chapter, and the position of the characters in our story changed so much that it is extremely difficult for us to set out on the continuation without special explanations. And yet we feel that we must limit ourselves to the simple statement of facts, as far as possible without special explanations, and for a very simple reason: because we ourselves, in many cases, have difficulty explaining what happened. Such a warning on our part must appear quite strange and unclear to the reader: how recount that of which we have neither a clear understanding nor a personal opinion? (572–­73)

Is this the same narrator that has guided us through the bulk of the novel up until this point, or has something shifted in the novel, such that the consistency of the narrator can be called into question? Consistency of many kinds seems to dissipate in the late stages of The Idiot. Readers of Proust must also learn that, as is the case for the narrator of The Idiot, there is a problem with consistency when it comes to Proust’s narrator—­in fact there are many such problems. We might then wonder whether this is a compositional feature that Proust’s novel shares with Dostoevsky’s. “Composition” is, as we have already seen, a word Proust invoked regularly. At the very end of a brief text on Dostoevsky published only long after his death, and probably written sometime during or after February 1922, he writes,

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“his originality is not what Rivière said it was, but in composition.”15 Rivière had published a short text, “On Dostoïevsky and the Unfathomable,” in the Nouvelle Revue Française in February 1922, in which he claimed that the difference between French novelists and Dostoevsky was that Dostoevsky insisted on a character’s “complexity,” whereas a French novelist would insist on that character’s “coherence.” French novelists should take Dostoevsky’s practice as a corrective to their own, Rivière asserted (“we French have to be on our guard about our tendency to simplify, to reduce to a common denominator”), but then, having absorbed the lesson, they should do better than Dostoevsky had proved capable of doing: “Rather than letting the mind get lost in some infinite psychological space [ . . . ] be looking for the law that governs an individual without falling into abstraction or schematism.”16 It is easy enough to imagine Proust’s impatience with Rivière’s psychological platitudes, and instructive to note his insistence on the compositional element in Dostoevsky. He was, as we have already seen, preoccupied in these years with the inability of many of his readers to perceive his own compositional work. “My composition is veiled and all the more difficult to take in at a rapid glance because it is developed on such a large scale,” he writes to the critic Paul Souday in October 1919, insisting that scenes in the first volume whose function is not at all apparent are of foundational importance in the volumes yet to be published. His compositional effort is “rigorous.”17 But composition, for Proust, clearly has to do with more than the architecture of his plot. In November 1921, he writes to Jacques Boulenger: “My sole concern is composition. But since I had the misfortune of beginning my novel with ‘I’ and there was no way of changing that, I will be ‘subjective’ in aeternum. Had I begun instead ‘Roger Beauclerc lives in a house . . .’ I would have been classed as ‘objective.’ ”18 He could have been thinking of Jean de Pierrefeu, among others, as he wrote this. Pierrefeu began his review of The Guermantes Way with what must have been an extremely annoying category error for Proust: “M. Marcel Proust has just published the third volume of  his childhood memories.”19 Composition, here, has to do with how the narrator’s speech is to be understood, in what way it is novelistic. It also clearly has to do with the ways in which the narrative arrangement of the novel can be tied to other aspects of the novel’s project. Perhaps Proust felt a formal connection, a compositional kinship with Dostoevsky in this regard.20 For Jones, Dostoevsky is a novelist of crisis: “the crises he depicts are not simply intellectual ones but emerge also on the levels of individual emotion and social psychology” (viii). Jones and Miller also might be taken to demonstrate that the multiple historical crises indexed in Dostoevsky’s novels (e.g., especially given the cast of characters we meet in The Idiot, social changes

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attendant upon the abolition of serfdom, questions regarding the legitimacy of the aristocracy, questions regarding the relevance or force of different Christian belief systems, questions regarding the status of women) are all crises that can be heard, so to speak, in the way talk is arranged in the novels.21 To hear the crises The Idiot represents, one listens not only, or not in the first place, to what is said, but to the ways norms for speaking are played with, even discarded—­ both by characters and by the narrator. Proust’s narrator poses his own set of problems to any attentive reader. Like Dostoevsky’s narrator, he is not always the same. Sometimes he is quite distant from the action he is recounting to us, sometimes quite proximate, even caught up in it. Sometimes he knows too much or too little about the people around him. Whether he knows too much or too little about someone on some given page is not easily correlated to how close or distant (in time or in space) he is pretending to be from the moment being narrated. Gérard Genette writes helpfully of a novelist privileged with omniscience alongside a hero with a certain amount of information and a narrator, who exists in his own information state and “disposes” of  his information “according to his own lights and holds it back only when he sees a precise reason for doing so.”22 For Genette, novelist, hero, and narrator all share the same first-­person pronoun. He notes that Proust’s “narrative practice [ . . . ] plays without a qualm, and as if without being aware of it, in three modes of focalization at once, passing at will from the consciousness of his hero to that of his narrator, and inhabiting by turns that of his most diverse characters” (209–­10). Surely this play with perspective—­ Genette suggests referring to it as polymodality—­should be included in what Proust refers to as his rigorous compositional practice. Genette calls it polymodality to distinguish his description from one in which Proust could be seen as committing “infractions” against a set of norms characteristic of a single narrative mode that he is unable to employ consistently (210). One might think that Proust’s admiration for The Idiot could have to do both with his interest in the ways in which people speaking do or do not respect norms that are meant to produce decorum, to guarantee certain kinds of intelligibility or coherence, and with his interest in what a novel can achieve formally when that concern with (or play with) norms and decorum extends to the narrative practice(s) of the novel itself. Insisting as Genette does on the compositional principle of narrative polymodality appropriately saves Proust from accusations of formal negligence. It doesn’t yet offer an account of what this compositional practice achieves. Note that, most importantly for us, it creates a situation in which, to use Genette’s terms, the hero’s speech can be an object of observation for the narrator,

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and the narrator’s speech can be an object of observation for the novelist. (We should also add that the position of “narrator” has its own complexity in Proust. We might occasionally feel there is a narrator1, a narrator2, and so on, with slightly different temporal locations, and still, in their plurality, distinct from the hero, even if they sometimes seem to blend their point of view with his.23) That is, in this novel with so capacious an interest in the way people talk, and in the sociological and anthropological functions of talk in general, narrative polymodality is the formal feature that allows us to understand that the hero’s speech as well as the narrator’s speech are as much data to be considered as would be the speech of any other character, even if this fact is sometimes occluded by the sense we might sometimes give way to that the narrator houses all the analytical potential in the novel. (We can see why Proust might have been interested by the moments when Dostoevsky’s narrator in The Idiot is suddenly revealed to be as potentially erratic or eccentric a speaker as some of the novel’s characters.) When, in the second half of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, Proust’s narrator/hero is getting to know Albertine, it almost seems as if both of them could be characters from The Idiot. Indeed, the co-­presence of the narrator and Albertine becomes one of the principal situations in the novel in which we are likely to encounter the representation of eccentric speech practices that beg for sociological analysis. It is usually Albertine’s speech that is subjected to explicit analysis within the novel, but the eccentricity of the narrator’s own speech in proximity to her is so noteworthy that it is hard to avoid thinking the novel is offering it up for scrutiny, even if the narrator himself doesn’t elaborate on this. Recall one passage from that volume that we looked at in the last chapter, in which the narrator describes what it was like for him to speak to Albertine in the early days of their acquaintance: While talking with her, I had been as unaware of where my words were landing, of what was becoming of them, as if I had been throwing pebbles into a bottomless pit. That in general the people to whom we speak draw from within themselves the meaning they give to our words, and that this meaning is very different from the one we put into them, is a truth constantly revealed to us by everyday life. But if in addition the person to whom we are speaking is, as Albertine was for me, someone whose upbringing is inconceivable, whose inclinations and principles, even the books she reads, are a mystery to us, then we cannot tell whether our words have any more semblance of meaning for her than they would for an animal to whom we needed somehow to make something understood. Trying to strike up a relationship with Albertine felt

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like relating to the unknown, or even the impossible, an exercise as difficult as training a horse, as restful as keeping bees or growing roses. (Shadow, 460) (J’avais causé avec elle sans plus savoir où tombaient mes paroles, ce qu’elles devenaient, que si j’eusse jeté des cailloux dans un abîme sans fond. Qu’elles soient remplies en général par la personne à qui nous les adressons d’un sens qu’elle tire de sa propre substance et qui est très différent de celui que nous avons mis dans ces mêmes paroles, c’est un fait que la vie courante nous révèle perpétuellement. Mais si de plus nous nous trouvons auprès d’une personne dont l’éducation (comme pour moi celle d’Albertine) nous est inconcevable, inconnus les penchants, les lectures, les principes, nous ne savons pas si nos paroles éveillent en elle quelque chose qui y ressemble plus que chez un animal à qui pourtant on aurait à faire comprendre certaines choses. De sorte qu’essayer de me lier avec Albertine m’apparaissait comme une mise en contact avec l’inconnu sinon avec l’impossible, comme un exercice aussi malaisé que dresser un cheval, aussi reposant qu’élever des abeilles ou que cultiver des rosiers. [2:236])

We could notice any number of things about this passage: that it demonstrates what an unpleasant fellow our narrator often turns out to be; that it illustrates the novel’s ongoing preoccupation with mishaps in attempts at verbal communication (and with discrepancies between different varieties of French); that it indicates that the narrator’s own psychosocial makeup, the structure of his own forms of taste and his own kinds of ambition, are part of the puzzle the novel presents us with. In and around Albertine, Proust’s novel becomes engaged, we might say, in a Dostoevsky-­like display of strange speech plans; indeed, it starts playing with the representation and analysis of speech plans that are unquestionably aberrant. I will return to Albertine and the narrator shortly, but let me jump ahead here to a number of moments after Albertine’s death, when the narrator is talking with Andrée about her. It turns out that important and similar eccentricities of speech occur in this later context as well. The conversations in question are focused on the possibility of the occurrence of sexual encounters between two women. Consider a moment in which the narrator is trying to maneuver Andrée into an avowal of something and she replies to the request for an avowal with an oath. Note the complicated imagery by which, even though it might seem that it is the narrator who is trying to compel Andrée to avow something, he describes himself as under the grip of a compulsion (and in a situation of danger):

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I sensed that Andrée was going to tell me everything that she used to do with Albertine, and, although I did everything I could, from politeness, cunning, self-­esteem and perhaps even from gratitude, to appear more and more affectionate, while the space that I was still able to concede to Albertine’s innocence shrank smaller and smaller, I had the impression that despite my efforts I appeared frozen, like an animal trapped but transfixed by the progressively narrowing circles described by a bird of prey taking its own sweet time, knowing that it can choose the moment to strike, since its prey can no longer escape. I looked at her however and summoning the last reserves of good humour, naturalness and self-­confidence that remain in a person not wishing to seem to fear being hypnotized by someone’s gaze, I dropped the following casual remark: “I had never spoken to you about it before for fear of upsetting you, but now that it is a comfort to speak of her, I can tell you that for some time I had been aware of the kind of relationship that you enjoyed with Albertine; besides, you will be pleased to know, although you knew it already, that Albertine adored you.” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 512–­13) (Je sentais qu’Andrée allait me dire tout ce qu’elle faisait avec Albertine, et tout en essayant par politesse, par habileté, par amour-­propre, peut-­être par reconnaissance, de me montrer de plus en plus affectueux, tandis que l’espace que j’avais pu concéder encore à l’innocence d’Albertine se rétrécissait de plus en plus, il me semblait m’apercevoir que malgré mes efforts, je gardais l’aspect figé d’un animal autour duquel un cercle progressivement resserré est lentement décrit par l’oiseau fascinateur, qui ne se presse pas parce qu’il est sûr d’atteindre quand il le voudra la victime qui ne lui échappera plus.  Je la regardais pourtant, et avec ce qui reste d’enjouement, de naturel et d’assurance aux personnes qui veulent faire semblant de ne pas craindre qu’on les hypnotise en les fixant, je dis à Andrée cette phrase incidente: “Je ne vous en avais jamais parlé de peur de vous fâcher, mais maintenant qu’il nous est doux de parler d’elle, je peux bien vous dire que je savais depuis bien longtemps les relations de ce genre que vous aviez avec Albertine; d’ailleurs, cela vous fera plaisir quoique vous le sachiez déjà: Albertine vous adorait.” [4:128])

He lies, we might as well say, in the face of what he seems to be experiencing as an acutely dangerous situation. Andrée has, early on in this conversation, admitted to a sexual interest in women, and to relations with Mlle Vinteuil, but not with Albertine. We might think that this scene labors not only under the constraints of what it would be possible for someone like the narrator and someone like Andrée to say to each other about their sexual lives and remain

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within the bounds of “polite” conversation, and also under the constraints of  what a novel such as this one could normally allow itself to represent from among the range of possible conversations that people in the world might actually have. When sexuality is approached in conversation, as it frequently is in Search, the particular mix of direction and indirection, of truth and untruth, of explicit and implicit, is subject to frequent renegotiation. And it is so precisely because what the conversation is achieving (even what their own conversational goals are) is often unclear to the parties involved as they pursue with some vigor what only seems to be a specific agenda. We see here the narrator contributing to a linguistic exchange in which forthrightness in the exchange of information about past behaviors seems only a pretense for a scene of talk whose function is disturbingly obscure to both participants. I told Andrée that I would very much like her to let me watch her indulge in this kind of practice (even if she restricted her caresses to those which she would not be too embarrassed to perform in my presence) with those of Albertine’s girl-­friends who shared the same tastes, and I mentioned Rosemonde, Berthe and all of Albertine’s friends, to see her reaction. “Apart from the fact that in your presence I would not do what you mention for anything in the world,” replied Andrée, “I do not believe that any of the girls you mention were that way inclined.” Moving closer, despite myself, to the monster that fascinated me, I replied, “Come, now, you cannot expect me to believe that Albertine was the only person in your group that you did these things with!—­But I never did do things like that with Albertine.—­Listen, my dear Andrée, why deny something that I’ve known for at least three years? I see nothing wrong in it, quite the opposite. I was just thinking of the evening when she was so keen to go with you to Mme Verdurin’s the next day, perhaps you remember . . .” (513) (Je dis à Andrée que c’eût été une grande curiosité pour moi si elle avait voulu me laisser la voir (même simplement en caresses qui ne la gênassent pas trop devant moi) faire cela avec celles des amies d’Albertine qui avaient ces goûts, et je nommai Rosemonde, Berthe, toutes les amies d’Albertine, pour savoir. “Outre que pour rien au monde je ne ferais ce que vous dites devant vous, me répondit Andrée,  je ne crois pas qu’aucune de celles que vous dîtes ait ces goûts.” Me rapprochant malgré moi du monstre qui m’attirait je répondis: “Comment! vous n’allez pas me faire croire que de toute votre bande il n’y avait qu’Albertine avec qui vous fissiez cela!—­Mais je ne l’ai jamais fait avec Albertine.—­Voyons, ma petite Andrée pourquoi nier des choses que je sais depuis au moins trois ans? Je n’y trouve rien de mal, au contraire.  Justement à propos du soir où elle

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voulait tant aller le lendemain avec vous chez Mme Verdurin, vous vous souvenez peut-­être . . .” [4:128–­29])

The narrator and Andrée are, of course, on strange discursive ground throughout this encounter. They have been reminiscing about a recently deceased friend, and the conversation turns to the sexual practices of Albertine and her circle. Andrée’s history of same-­sex relations has been brought to the table, so to speak, and the narrator has just told her he would very much enjoy watching her engage in a sexual encounter in front of him that would imitate her sexual encounters with Albertine. With almost exquisite politeness she indicates her unwillingness to let him watch her make out with other women while also, almost incidentally, denying any sexual history between her and Albertine. When he is on the verge of referring to a particular moment in their shared history, he observes something in her facial expression that leads him to believe that no further truth is to be gained from this encounter. He imagines himself to have observed that some aspect of herself peeked out from behind a stage curtain at him seated in the audience as if to gauge what kind of a public she was dealing with. Before I had come to the end of my sentence, I saw an anxious look, like the face of someone allowed backstage before a play commences who peeps through the curtain then withdraws immediately to avoid being noticed, flash across Andrée’s eyes, making them as narrow and piercing as certain gemstones which are so sharp that jewellers find them almost impossible to use. The anxious look disappeared, everything returned to normal, but I sensed that everything I saw from then on would be artificially arranged for my benefit. [ . . . ] “But I can’t tell you something that is not true just because you don’t disapprove of it. I swear that I never did anything with Albertine and I am convinced that she detested that sort of thing. The people who told you that were lying perhaps from self-­interest,” she said, with a suspicious, questioning air. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 513–­14) (Avant que j’eusse combiné ma phrase, je vis dans les yeux d’Andrée, qu’il faisait pointus comme ces pierres qu’à cause de cela les joailliers ont de la peine à employer, passer un regard préoccupé, comme ces têtes de privilégiés qui soulèvent un coin de rideau avant qu’une pièce soit commencée et qui se sauvent aussitôt pour ne pas être aperçus. Ce regard inquiet disparut, tout était rentré dans l’ordre, mais je sentais que tout ce que je verrais maintenant ne serait plus qu’arrangé facticement pour moi. [ . . . ] “Mais je ne peux pourtant pas

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dire ce qui n’est pas vrai pour la simple raison que vous ne le trouvez pas mal. Je vous jure que je n’ai jamais rien fait avec Albertine et j’ai la conviction qu’elle détestait ces choses-­là. Les gens qui vous ont dit cela vous ont menti, peut-­être dans un but intéressé,” me dit-­elle d’un air interrogateur et méfiant. [4:129])

And yet, has there been any moment in this conversation in which each of their utterances has not been “artificially arranged” for the other? Has there been any moment in which the utterances have been aligned with a framework of straightforward communication? What does it mean to swear an oath (“I swear that I never”) in these circumstances? Readers of Search will perhaps recall that in a future conversation/make-­out session (six months later) Andrée will happily admit to sexual dalliances with Albertine.24 As the narrator thinks over the later revelation and the copious details Andrée goes on to provide, he explicitly notes: “Such were my reflections, as I adopted the hypothesis that Andrée was telling the truth—­which was possible” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 567) (“Je faisais ces réflexions, me plaçant dans l’hypothèse où Andrée était véridique—­ce qui était possible” [4:182]). The narrator and a few other people in Proust’s novel are regularly making hypotheses regarding the communicative agendas and potential truthfulness of their interlocutors. But this is perhaps the clearest statement the novel makes about the metapragmatic function that governs the many conversations it represents in which characters interrogate other characters about their sexual histories (in which, in particular, men interrogate women about their sexual histories with other women). Claims to be forthright and forthcoming in the information one provides, even when bolstered by oaths, are understood to function differently within different contexts, within different speech genres, among different interlocutors. Basically, such oaths mean nothing in these contexts. They are merely something people often say in this kind of conversation.25 “Truthfulness” is a value to be expected in varying degrees according to the particular speech genres in which interlocutors are engaging and the status roles of the speakers. Indeed, we might even observe that there are plenty of scenes in the novel in which it almost seems as if the aesthetic demands of the conversation being collectively elaborated by the participants require the performance of a pretense not only of truthfulness, but of a belief in someone’s truthfulness, in order simultaneously to be able to admire the ability to craft (or to ignore the clumsiness in attempting to craft) compelling statements whose truthfulness no one actually believes in, but which are therefore taken to be in some ways admirable as utterances. We could take this to be part of the Dostoevskian side of Proust’s novel, and one finds many instances of it in

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conversations between the narrator and Albertine. A fine example is the moment in The Prisoner when the narrator asks: “Albertine, can you swear that you have never lied to me?” (323) (“Albertine, pouvez-­vous me jurer que vous ne m’avez jamais menti?” [3:852]). The question is a ridiculous one, since, rather obviously, who could trust a “yes” in reply without some qualification like “as far as I remember,” or “certainly I never did so intentionally”? Then there is the fact that the question might be called inappropriate (given, e.g., the significant lies the narrator has told Albertine), and so there might be the diversionary or confrontational responses such as “why would you ask such a thing” or “by what right” or “I might ask the same of you.” Or there could be some discussion of the philosophical paradoxes that can arise regarding the prospect of answering a question about truthfulness truthfully. 26 Albertine’s response to the narrator’s importunate question is nigh on perfect: “She stared into space, then answered, ‘Yes, that’s to say no’ ” (“Elle regarda fixement dans le vide, puis me répondit: ‘Oui, c’est-­à-­dire non.’ ”). It is perfectly evasive, we might say, showing remarkable conversational skill, showing diplomacy. She provides the narrator with some examples where she intentionally misspoke or where she hid something from him. This leads him to intemperately fume to himself: “I knew too that Albertine’s words when questioned never contained an atom of truth, that she only ever let slip the truth involuntarily, as a sudden collision took place in her between the facts she had previously decided to keep hidden and the belief that they had already been discovered” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 323) (“Je comprenais aussi que les paroles d’Albertine quand on l’interrogeait ne contenaient  jamais un atome de vérité, que la vérité, elle ne la laissait échapper que malgré elle, comme un brusque mélange qui se faisait en elle, entre les faits qu’elle était jusque-­là dècidée à cacher et la croyance qu’on en avait eu connaissance” [3:852–­53]). The narrator is, in general, more sophisticated than this remark suggests about truth and about language-­in-­use, about the typical communicative strategies different people (different kinds of people) employ in dealing with certain kinds of speech situations. Contrast his fulmination here with his more level-­headed weighing of the probabilities regarding Andrée’s veracity: “Such were my reflections, as I adopted the hypothesis that Andrée was telling the truth—­which was possible.” (Not that we should underestimate the oddness of his conduct with Andrée in the two moments we considered earlier . . .) The novel, and often the narrator, have an extremely sophisticated understanding, for instance, of the ways people reveal different kinds of information about their sexual history in different kinds (more or less official kinds) of contexts, about the ways in which certain kinds of information (about sexual practices, sexual histories, family secrets, and so

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on) circulate only unofficially. It understands that it is therefore a kind of communicative gaffe to try to solicit certain kinds of information in the wrong context, to solicit it explicitly, to expect it to be announced. If the narrator seems so communicatively inappropriate, so importunate, so obsessive and intemperate here, then we can understand the novel to be offering his use of  language to us (and, on another level, his understanding of language use) as evidence (data) that we should be considering in an analytical way as we listen to how his speech functions on different planes, as we watch his own speech behavior with a certain kind of vigilance. One of the consistent interpretive challenges of Proust’s novel has to do with this aspect of its composition, with the way in which the narrator is fully enmeshed in the world he uses his linguistic anthropological sensibility to analyze for us. When he is in the midst of analyzing the speech of the Duke de Guermantes or of Mme de Cambremer, the analysis itself often seems not “purely” scientific, not simply “objective,” but part of the production of the narrator’s social identity. For the most part, he fails to subject his own language use to the same scrutiny as that of other characters. (In what register does he speak, for instance? Would he ever say plumitif or mentalité ?) The distinction Genette makes between narrator and hero is at the heart of the composition of the novel precisely in that the novel plays fluently with that distinction, sometimes nearly ignoring it, sometimes insisting on it, sometimes making clear that the narrator’s consciousness is distant in time from the hero’s, sometimes blending them together as if they were in the same moment. The narrator regularly misses significant occasions to speculate about the significance of the hero’s use of language. But it is part of the compositional genius of the novel that even though the narrator misses these occasions, there is no reason for the reader to. There is, in fact, given the steady analytic gaze the novel directs at instances of both spoken and written language use, every reason for the reader not to. (Proust, one imagines, was not only sensitively attuned to the nuances of the speech of others and the various kinds of social work that happen through the many channels of any given contribution to a verbal exchange. He must have been fascinated by his own speech as well—­by, for instance, words that he would hear come out of his own mouth in situations of duress.27) And so one might ask, what meaning is there to be found in the aberrant speech that occurs between the narrator and Albertine? Some of the strange speech in which Albertine and the narrator engage is, of course, about Dostoevsky. A bit further along in the passage from The Prisoner that we were just looking at, the narrator observes, seemingly at random, “What I can’t bear is the solemn way in which people talk and write about

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Dostoevsky” (351) (“Ce qui m’assomme c’est la manière solennelle dont on parle et dont on écrit sur Dostoïevski” [3:882]). Now critics have mined these pages of the novel endlessly for what they might reveal about the forms of Proust’s interest in Dostoevsky.28 I agree with the observation by Christopher Prendergast in a letter in the London Review of Books in 2018 in which he wrote that “for Proust the novelist there are two fundamental sources of inspiration: Dostoevsky and Balzac.”29 Prendergast doesn’t explain his thinking about Dostoevsky at all in his brief letter, but, as I have been trying to demonstrate here, I think a good part of Proust’s Dostoevskian inspiration has to do with how a character’s speech (including the narrator’s) takes on significance in the novel’s project, becomes part of its composition, and, in doing so, makes the novel in some ways about speech and what it does, how speech constitutes the medium in which people exist socially, how it sustains, reproduces, and transforms the social world and the various concepts, categories, and identities that world holds. In this light, the passage on Dostoevsky in The Prisoner is perhaps less interesting for what it has to say about Dostoevsky, and more interesting as a chance to hear what the narrator sounds like when his mind is filled (as it is in that scene) with worries about Albertine’s sexual past and when somehow he starts, on top of this worry, and thanks to a prompt from her, to pontificate about a series of authors. That is, the novel has a consistent interest in how the narrator sounds when provoked to speech by Albertine, just as it has an interest in how conversational situations with Albertine (and Andrée) cause the narrator not only to transcribe his own speech in great detail, but to lay bare (without ever explicitly commenting on it) the participation of  his speech in various sociocultural projects, large and small, some of which perhaps have origins within his own mind, others of which exceed him. The passage in question is a well-­known one within Proust criticism, in which the narrator offers his theories about “les phrases types” (prototypical phrases) that can be found in the work of Vinteuil or Barbey d’Aurevilly or Thomas Hardy. I don’t mean to suggest that Proust might never himself have expressed opinions that were something like the ones he puts in the mouth of his hero here. But when spoken by the hero, it becomes possible, so to speak, to hear how they sound. In the novel, they are objectified, made into the speech of a particular speaker whose speech plans are, as we have seen, frequently Dostoevskian in their pointed irrationality. It is worth remembering that in this scene, and throughout this entire section of the novel, the hero and Albertine are often speaking simultaneously about sexuality and about literature or music. Just after the passage about the “phrases types” in Vinteuil and Hardy, for instance, and just before Dostoevsky is mentioned, they digress

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to talk about moments that Albertine and Gilberte may or may not have spent together when they were much younger. Albertine tells him about Gilberte: “She suddenly asked me if I liked women. [ . . . ] I don’t know why, I wanted to play a joke on her, I said yes.” (You would have thought Albertine was afraid I might have heard the story from Gilberte, and did not want me to catch her in a lie.) “But we didn’t do anything.” (Strange, if they had confided in each other in this way, that they should have done nothing, especially as before that, according to Albertine, they had kissed in the carriage.) “She took me home like that four or five times, maybe a bit more, and that’s all.” I had great difficulty in not asking her further questions, but, restraining myself, so as not to seem to attach any importance to the matter, I came back to Hardy’s stone-­cutters. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 348) (“Elle me demanda tout d’un coup si j’aimais les femmes. [ . . . ] Même, je ne sais quelle idée baroque me prit de la mystifier, je lui répondis que oui.” (On aurait dit qu’Albertine craignait que Gilberte m’eût raconté cela et qu’elle ne voulait pas que je constatasse qu’elle me mentait.) “Mais nous ne f îmes rien du tout.” (C’était étrange, si elles avaient échangé ces confidences, qu’elles n’eussent rien fait, surtout qu’avant cela même, elles s’étaient embrassées dans la voiture, au dire d’Albertine.) “Elle m’a ramenée comme cela quatre ou cinq fois, peut-­être un peu plus, et c’est tout.” J’eus beaucoup de peine à ne poser aucune question, mais, me dominant pour avoir l’air de n’attacher à tout cela aucune importance, je revins au tailleurs de pierre de Thomas Hardy. [3:878])

There is some kind of an immanent suggestion here, built into the composition of the novel we might say, that when someone is talking about something, that might not actually be what they are really doing, what they are primarily doing, what their talk is causing to happen. Of course we see here the narrator (or is it the hero?) tracking possible strategic decisions going into the composition of his interlocutor’s utterances, which are not, it would appear, to be taken at face value. Then, we are told that he makes a strategic decision: since he wants Albertine to believe he is magisterially unconcerned about her past sexual history, he decides to turn the conversation to Hardy and literature. (But suppose there were a parenthesis presenting Albertine’s guess as to what his strategy in doing so might be. What would it say?) As we watch and listen to the hero talk to Albertine about Dostoevsky, what is it that we are actually supposed to hear, other than him talking strangely to Albertine who talks strangely back to him? Is he, for instance, somehow, in talking about Dostoevsky, not being

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assommant (unbearable, tedious), not being solennelle (solemn), the way he accuses others of being? Is he distinguishing himself from other kinds of  literary talk? How would we judge? Is he still pursuing some strategy regarding his hidden desire to acquire information about Albertine’s sexual past? What, for instance, are we supposed to make of, to hear in, the following moment in which Albertine interrupts the narrator? —­I don’t want to interrupt you, but as I see you are moving on from Dostoevsky, I’m afraid I’ll forget what you’ve been saying. Darling, what did you mean the other day when you said, “That’s the Dostoevsky side of Mme de Sévigné”? I admit I didn’t understand. The two seem so different.—­Come here, little girl, and let me give you a kiss for being so good at remembering what I say. You can go back to the pianola afterwards. I admit that what I said then was quite stupid. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 350) (—­Je n’avais pas voulu vous interrompre, mais puisque je vois que vous quittez Dostoïevski, j’aurais peur d’oublier. Mon petit, qu’est-­ce que vous avez voulu dire l’autre jour quand vous m’avez dit: “C’est comme le côté Dostoïevski de Mme de Sévigné.”  Je vous avoue que je n’ai pas compris. Cela me semble tellement différent.—­Venez, petite fille, que je vous embrasse pour vous remercier de vous rappeler si bien ce que je dis, vous retournerez au pianola après. Et j’avoue que ce que j’avais dit là était assez bête. [3:880])

What is the difference that the narrator would like to establish between himself going on about Dostoevsky and all those others who do so in a way that is both solemn and deadly dull? Is it because he is talking to his girlfriend that he feels he shouldn’t sound that way (even if maybe he ends up doing so just a bit)? Is it because he wants to insist that his relation to literature, his way of understanding it, is not dryly academic? Should his repugnant treatment of Albertine throughout this section of the novel have an impact on how we evaluate what he has to say about Dostoevsky? What is distinctive about his way of understanding or appreciating music and literature? Is there a relation between his sexuality, and his obsession with Albertine’s (and later Andrée’s) sexuality, and his way of relating to music and literature? The novel seems, in the way The Prisoner is composed, to suggest that there is. In the particular passage under consideration here, utterances about sexuality and utterances about music and literature are generated nearly simultaneously and intermingle in the interactive text that Albertine and the narrator produce together. In some ways we could take the novel as implicitly suggesting that the narrator’s

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speech, as it occurs in proximity to Albertine, provides the information we need to understand something like what Bourdieu refers to as a habitus, a “general, transposable disposition” that assures that “an agent’s whole set of practices (or those of a whole set of agents produced by similar conditions) are both systematic, inasmuch as they are the product of the application of identical (or interchangeable) schemes, and systematically distinct from the practices constituting another life-­style” (D, 170). One of the questions this section of the novel is posing would seem to be about the possible systematic nature of the narrator’s various dispositions (say, linguistic, aesthetic, literary, and sexual); the best way to cause this systematicity to surface might be to listen to the narrator when he is talking with Albertine, whose habitus contrasts strikingly with his own.30 Recall the passage, in the final volume of the novel, when Proust’s narrator puts down the volume of the journal of the Goncourt brothers he had been reading and worries that he will never be able to be a novelist because, unlike Edmond de Goncourt, he is incapable of remembering anything anyone ever says. We are, of course, supposed to read past the narrator’s worry and understand that the kind of novel we are reading is in fact presenting something to us other than words people say. “What people said escaped me,” he writes, “because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim of my research, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another” (Finding, 24) (“Ce que racontaient les gens m’échappait, car ce qui m’intéressait, c’était non ce qu’ils voulaient dire mais la manière dont ils le disaient, en tant qu’elle était révélatrice de leur caractère ou de leurs ridicules; ou plutôt c’était un objet qui avait toujours été plus particulièrement le but de ma recherche parce qu’il me donnait un plaisir spécifique, le point qui était commun à un être et à un autre” [4:296]). We might by now have taken the hint that when listening to people (including the narrator) talking strangely our effort should be to understand what is going on in their speech besides whatever it is that their words might be taken to mean on the denotational level. (And just because someone doesn’t seem to be talking strangely is no reason to listen to them any differently.) In the first section of chapter 1, we saw the narrator listening both to the speech of the Guermantes clan and the speech of the group of girls while offering a pretense of neutrality as a listener. But what the novel seems to develop, especially across its middle volumes, is the sense that in order to understand the ability of the narrator to “hear” the cultural work happening in the talk of different people around him, we need

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to appreciate not only the work the narrator is doing to hear or to reconstruct (anthropologically, socioanalytically) what is happening in scenes of talk, but also the interference in that work that is caused by the narrator/hero’s own belonging to the world he is listening to. The signs of that belonging are to be found, of course, in his own speech. “Sociology,” Bourdieu comments, “puts in place an epistemological break that consists in switching from the simple point of view of an ordinary social agent to a point of view on points of view which is the scientific position.”31 But to produce the capacity in oneself of leaving behind a spontaneous way of seeing or hearing the world and arriving at a more social scientific one involves coming to understand how you listen spontaneously to the words of those around you. As Bourdieu said about his own work at one point, When I undertake to objectivate an object like the French university system in which I am caught up, I have as my aim, and I need to know this, to objectivate a whole area of my specific unconscious that is liable to obstruct knowledge of the object, all progress in knowledge of the object being inseparably progress in knowledge of one’s relation to the object, and therefore in mastery of one’s unanalysed relation to the object.32

What is wonderful and remarkable about Search is the careful way it works to undermine the narrator’s own asserted neutrality toward both Guermante-­ style speech and Albertine-­style speech as the novel progresses. It does this compositionally, we could say, by careful use of its variable focalizations. As we have seen Genette observe in Narrative Discourse, Proust’s narrative practice “plays without a qualm, and as if without being aware of it, in three modes of focalization at once, passing at will from the consciousness of his hero to that of his narrator, and inhabiting by turns that of his most diverse characters” (210). Search may occasionally seem to be casual in the way the focalization shifts with such insouciant ease between narrator and hero. We can sometimes think of these focalization shifts as alterations in the complex blend of points on the timeline of the narrator’s consciousness that are involved at any given moment of the narration. Sometimes the narrating instance seems quite close to the moment being narrated, with almost no more distant consciousness present (think of the erotic tension in the mousmé scene described in the last chapter, or the narrator’s fury at the idea that Albertine is always lying); sometimes it seems a blend of the consciousness at the moment being narrated and a later consciousness (but there are many different versions of this blend, with

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different concentrations of the components); sometimes it seems mainly a later consciousness with very little of the consciousness of the narrated moment present. There is a play in the degree to which the narrator/hero could said to be objectivated, either by himself or by the novel, according to how the different focalizations are in play. Now perhaps we could say that one of the reasons the scenes with Albertine are so telling (especially the ones in The Prisoner) is because often these are scenes in which the focalization is heavily weighted toward the narrator/hero’s consciousness at the moment being narrated, and so the narrator/hero’s speech and self feel less objectivated in these scenes. But perhaps we could entertain the possibility that because the narrator’s language use and attitude toward that language use feel less objectivated, they may paradoxically be more objectivated when viewed in relation to the novel itself. That is, in these scenes (perhaps especially in the infamous “se faire casser le pot” scene with Albertine that I will look at in a moment), the novel offers the narrator to us simply as another (extremely) odd character whose point of view on the world and whose utterances are no different in status or in kind than Albertine’s, or Mme de Cambremer’s, or Mme de Gallardon’s, or Saint-­Loup’s, or Charlus’s. We might even be tempted to say, looking at things another way, that the novel offers up the possibility that the narrator’s own fascination with the metapragmatics of  language-­in-­use of other characters is something that needs to be objectivated, something that needs to be understood as characteristic of a particular point of view from a particular area of social space. That is, when the narrator is most immediately caught up in his speech, and that speech is particularly odd, the novel offers it to us as data about the narrator. But when the narrator is at a remove from the speaking that is happening, and objectivating that speech in order to say something about it, nonetheless, his attitude itself is something to take note of. “Statements about language are never only about language—­and they are never only statements.” That is the marvelous opening sentence to Susan Gal and Judith T. Irvine’s Signs of Difference (1). If statements about language and its use, such as those the narrator offers to us, are never only statements, it is because, as Gal and Irvine go on to say, such statements “entail ideological positions that are made evident in multiple sites of social life, often in contradictory and contested ways, and they have wide-­ranging consequences in the material world. The communicative signs people use are engaged in social projects, motivating and sometimes transforming their activities—­not only commenting on them.” What are the projects the narrator is engaged in when he speaks and when he speaks about others speaking?

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T h e N a r r ato r at H i s M o st S t r a n g e Before proceeding to the final moment in The Prisoner that I want to look at in this chapter, let me summarize a bit. Recall the moment toward the end of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower that we looked at in chapter 1. The narrator is spending an afternoon with the group of young girls who have become his obsession, and he describes for us how he listens to them—­to their voices rather than to their words: “When we exchanged words, which was not often, the things said by me and the girls of the little gang were without interest; and on my part, they were interrupted by long silences” (486) (“Les paroles qui s’échangeaient entre les jeunes filles de la petite bande et moi étaient peu intéressantes, rares d’ailleurs, coupées de ma part de longs silences” [2:261]). Their words may not interest him, but their voices do, in all the information they contain and transmit through channels other than semantic or denotational ones: When I chatted with one of the girls, I noticed that the outline of  her individuality, original and unique, was ingeniously drawn and ruthlessly imposed upon me as much by the modulations of her voice as by the shifting expressions of her face. [ . . . ] In each of the voices there somehow managed to sound the viewpoint on life already adopted by these green girls. [ . . . ] The intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things. (Shadow, 487) (Quand je causais avec une de mes amies,  je m’apercevais que le tableau original, unique de son individualité, m’était ingénieusement dessiné, tyranniquement imposé aussi bien par les inflexions de sa voix que par celles de son visage. [ . . . ] La voix de ces jeunes filles accusait déjà nettement le parti pris que chacune de ces petites personnes avait sur la vie. [ . . . ] Nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses. [2:261–­62])

There are, as we have now seen, many moments throughout the long novel where the narrator listens to people in this way, with ears that sort people, ears that are some kind of social mapping device, ears that hear the sounds people make as streams of data that provide information about where we are from, where we are currently located in the social world, and also what our point of view on that world might be.

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Such was the case, as we also saw in the first chapter, with the narrator’s reaction to the speech of Mme de Cambremer, although here particular words and phrases she utters become the focus of his attention: Listening to her, I could not for the rest help but acknowledge, without deriving any pleasure from it, the refinement of her expressions. They were those common, in any given period, to everyone of a certain similar intellectual caliber, so that the refined expression is like an arc of the circle in immediately providing the means of describing and limiting the whole circumference. Thus these expressions mean that the people who employ them are at once boring to me as being already familiar, yet also pass for being superior, and were often held out to me as delightful and unappreciated neighbors. (Sodom, 316) (Je ne pouvais du reste m’empêcher en l’entendant parler de rendre justice, sans y prendre aucun plaisir, au raffinement de ses expressions. C’étaient celles qu’ont, à une époque donnée, toutes les personnes d’une même envergure intellectuelle, de sorte que l’expression raffinée fournit aussitôt comme l’arc de cercle, le moyen de décrire et de limiter toute la circonférence. Aussi ces expressions font-­elles que les personnes qui les emploient m’ennuient immédiatement comme déjà connues, mais aussi passent pour supérieures, et me furent souvent offertes comme voisines délicieuses et inappréciées. [3:316])

The narrator takes in the range of words and expressions that occur in his tablemate’s speech, and performs some kind of intuitive statistical analysis that allows him to establish a correlation (an indexical relation) between her lexical profile and her sociological profile. Now this is both, we could say, a demonstration of a social scientific attitude toward listening to language use and a making explicit of a kind of work we all use language to do without necessarily being conscious about doing it. We seem inevitably to engage in a variety of projects (e.g., the accumulation of both social and symbolic capital, or the simple production of an identity for ourselves for which we implicitly request recognition) as we speak, with greater or lesser awareness of what we are doing. We reproduce the social world in all its relationality, and we intervene with greater or lesser efficacy in the relational structure of the social world simply by speaking to others. Language is always doing things (sometimes almost on its own, we could say) and being used to do things (with more or less success) by different speakers who manipulate language both with different degrees of skill and with different

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degrees of awareness (and with no necessary correlation between the skill and awareness that they demonstrate). The divergences between the perspective on language we find in Proust’s novel and views that seem typical of philosophical discourse on speech acts—­ say, that offered by Robert Stalnaker in his essay “Common Ground”—­are instructive. “The reasons people talk to each other are of course varied and complex,” Stalnaker writes, “but it seems reasonable to assume that there are some kinds of purposes that are essential to the practice, and that are the principal reasons for speech in the most straightforward kinds of conversation. In a simple exchange of information, people say things to get other people to come to know things that they didn’t know before. They utter certain noises with the expectation that someone hearing them will thereby acquire certain particular information.” (As seasoned readers of Proust—­or Balzac or Eliot—­we might wonder how common verbal exchanges that constitute “simple exchange[s] of information” actually are, how much of the speaking any of us does actually falls into that category.) Stalnaker is building on an approach to conversation laid out by Paul Grice that I mentioned in the introduction. He writes: “One thing, according to Grice, that is distinctive about speaker meaning, as contrasted with other ways of getting people to believe something, is a kind of openness or transparency of the action: when speakers mean things, they act with the expectation that their intentions to communicate are mutually recognized. This idea leads naturally to a notion of common ground—­the mutually recognized shared information in a situation in which an act of trying to communicate takes place.” This perspective does not seem helpful in understanding many conversations we have seen and will see represented in Proust, in Dostoevsky, in Balzac, in Eliot, in Woolf, in Sarraute, in Cusk. Think again of the scene I discussed in the interlude of Pons trying to impose himself while talking to Mme Camusot and Cécile, think of the scenes of the duke exchanging words with the historian or Swann with Odette that I discussed in the introduction, or the analysis provided of the speech of Mme de Gallardon that I discussed in chapter 1, the conversations between the narrator and Andrée or Albertine that we’ve looked at in this chapter, or the conversation with Albertine we are about to consider. We could say that conversations are rarely straightforward in these novels (or in life, probably). We could say that there are many kinds of information exchange involved when people use language, and that only a few of them are simple or explicit, or related to the specifically denotative aspect of language. Indeed, we might go so far as to wonder what kind of intellectual bias or what kind of position in the social world is required to imagine that conversation is predominantly or prototypically a domain of straightforwardness,

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transparency, and openness. Or we could wonder for what kinds of people the dominant experience of conversation might be one in which common ground easily comes into being, and for what kinds of people in what kinds of circumstances that is not so often the case. When Search does turn its attention away from its social scientific way of listening to language, and instead makes an effort to represent two people who could be said to be trying to understand each other, it ends up, as we shall see in excruciating detail in a moment, showing us people exchanging utterances in a situation that rapidly devolves into one in which neither of them seems to have any idea either what they are using words to do or what their interlocutor is using them for. Let us briefly recap the social scientific understanding of language use that we find in Search. Remember Mme de Gallardon: When she found herself next to someone she did not know, as at this moment Mme de Franquetot, it would pain her that her own awareness of her kinship with the Guermantes could not be manifested outwardly in visible characters like those which, in the mosaics of the Byzantine churches, placed one below another, inscribe in a vertical column, next to a holy personage, the words he is supposed to be uttering. (Swann, 341) (Quand elle se trouvait auprès de quelqu’un qu’elle ne connaissait pas, comme en ce moment auprès de Mme de Franquetot, elle souffrait que la conscience qu’elle avait de sa parenté avec les Guermantes ne pût se manifester extérieurement en caractères visibles comme ceux qui, dans les mosaïques des églises byzantines, placés les uns au-­dessous des autres, inscrivent en une colonne verticale, à côté d’un saint personnage, les mots qu’il est censé prononcer. [1:323])

Mme de Gallardon wishes that there might be no work involved in linguistically revealing, enhancing, or maintaining her fragile social standing as a somewhat minor, socially inept member of the Guermantes clan. The novel’s representation of her sociolinguistic frustration offers a compact illustration of what we might identify as three zones of analysis of language-­in-­use that Search seems consistently to be interested in. The first can be understood in straightforward Bourdieusian terms as the use of language as part of the effort to accumulate social and symbolic capital, to enhance, by way of the accumulation of this kind of capital, someone’s ability to achieve or maintain certain kinds of positions with certain kinds of power.33 (Mme de Gallardon is hungry for recognition. She wishes people to concede her importance. She wishes they would attend her dinners and parties and invite her to theirs.) People can

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be aware, partially aware, or even not at all aware of the ways they are achieving their ends through language within this zone. We could say, following Bourdieu, that this is a practical skill, corresponding to what he has described as a sens pratique, a logic of practice. In such cases, “there may be knowledge and meaning without consciousness.”34 That is, what we know how to do (or, in Mme de Gallardon’s case, wish we knew how to do) on a practical level, we do without always knowing, in the sense of recognizing, that we are doing it. Discerning this logic of practice within the narrator’s speech is often particularly challenging. In the “se faire casser le pot” scene we are about to look at, he both suggests a way of understanding what the logic behind his speech might be and suggests that he may not know what the logic is, even though he assumes that it exists. We have already seen a moment that carries with it a similar suggestion. When the narrator was quizzing Andrée about Albertine’s sexual practices, on one level, we could see that he was strategically lying in order to extort information from her, but the novel also suggested that there was perhaps another level, one the narrator was barely aware of, that was in play: “I had the impression that despite my efforts I appeared frozen, like an animal trapped but transfixed by the progressively narrowing circles described by a bird of prey taking its own sweet time, knowing that it can choose the moment to strike, since its prey can no longer escape” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 513) (“il me semblait m’apercevoir que malgré mes efforts,  je gardais l’aspect figé d’un animal autour duquel un cercle progressivement resserré est lentement décrit par l’oiseau fascinateur, qui ne se presse pas parce qu’il est sûr d’atteindre quand il le voudra la victime qui ne lui échappera plus” [4:128]). This passage is difficult to understand, but we might surmise that the narrator/hero is experiencing his own speech as pursuing ends of which he is not fully aware, so that his speech both is and is not his own. On what might be a more fundamental level, and perhaps more prominently in slightly different kinds of social circumstances, there is a second zone of activity occurring through language-­in-­use, which involves the mutual construction of comprehensible, legible identities through which people might manage to converse coherently. For this to occur, “intersubjectively understood relative statuses are invoked, ratified, or contested as part of the ongoing co-­construction of the role-­relationality, the mutual coordination, of participants in a social event.”35 If this zone of activity is more fundamental than the one in which efforts to accumulate social and symbolic capital occur, it is because, of course, before transactions involving social or symbolic capital can occur, it has to be established whether or not the parties conversing are appropriate to such transactions. (Mme de Gallardon, however hungry

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she may be for recognition of her importance, would probably not want such recognition to come from just anyone.) Social appropriateness comes up in a significant way, as we have seen, around Albertine and her friends. Remember here the narrator’s initial confusion regarding the status of the band of girls he has noticed in Balbec, and the sort of affective effervescence he experiences as he tries to arrive at meaningful frameworks for converse of one kind or another with them: Elstir told me her name—­Albertine Simonet—­and the names of her friends, whom I was able to describe accurately enough for him to have little hesitation in identifying them. It turned out that I had been mistaken about their social status, but in a way that was unlike my usual mistakes in Balbec, where I was in the habit of assuming that the merest son of a shopkeeper riding a horse must be a prince. My mistake this time had been to see the daughters of extremely wealthy middle-­class families from the world of industry and business, as belonging to some shady milieu. (Shadow, 424) (Elstir me dit qu’elle s’appelait Albertine Simonet et me nomma aussi ses autres amies que je lui décrivis avec assez d’exactitude pour qu’il n’eût guère d’hésitation. J’avais commis à l’égard de leur situation sociale une erreur, mais pas dans le même sens que d’habitude à Balbec.  J’y prenais facilement pour des princes des fils de boutiquiers montant à cheval. Cette fois j’avais situé dans un milieu interlope des filles d’une petite bourgeoisie fort riche, du monde de l’industrie et des affaires. [2:200])

Possibilities of friendship, suitable kinds of outings, questions of sexual availability or marriageability—­all these concerns are dealt with practically through language-­in-­use by way of its indexical features, features that allow for the (often implicit) co-­construction of official and unofficial forms of relative status, of recognizable (although always partial and contextual) identities. Finally, and even more fundamentally, a third zone of cultural activity in which we are involved by way of language-­in-­use is the production and reproduction of “culture” itself, a universe of shared concepts, shared forms of knowledge, shared modes of perceiving the world, often implicit and practical in nature, in which those identities, roles, and statuses that we use in improvising our selves exist. (The cultural significance of kinship structures is central to Mme de Gallardon’s being. Cultural codes regarding sexual behavior and forms of sexuality are at the heart of many of the narrator’s interactions with Albertine and Andrée. The religious culture of Middlemarch is sustained in

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part by scenes of talk between married women.) By using language, exchanging words with others (to the extent that we share a language with them), we produce and reproduce the cultural universe in which we and that language both exist. This third zone of activity is one that we participate in willy-­nilly. We may know that we are participating in it; we can’t help but participate in it; we may never give a thought to the fact that we are participating in it. Pressure is brought to bear on all three of these zones in the “casser le pot” scene to which I now turn. The scene takes place upon the return of the narrator from the evening party at the Verdurins during which the Vinteuil Septet was performed by Morel and a group of other musicians. In the famous Mon­ tjouvain scene, in the first volume of the novel, our young narrator, some time shortly after Vinteuil’s death, accidentally sees part of an interaction in which Vinteuil’s daughter and her girlfriend engage in sex play involving a desecration of the photographic image of Vinteuil. This memory is reactivated at the end of the novel’s fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, when the narrator, on the train with Albertine coming home from an evening at the Verdurins’ summer residence, is thinking he should break up with her. He mentions in passing that he is bored with these visits to the Verdurins but wouldn’t mind during one of them finding a way to prompt Mme Verdurin to give him some information about a musician who interests him. When Albertine asks the name of the musician, he snottily says: “If I tell you that his name’s Vinteuil, my sweet one, are you any the wiser?” (498) (“Ma petite chérie, quand je t’aurai dit qu’il s’appelle Vinteuil, en seras-­tu beaucoup plus avancée?” [3:499]). Albertine claims to be amused by this cutting remark, because, as she then tells the narrator, she is close friends with the best friend of Vinteuil’s daughter. The narrator, in the face of this evidence that Albertine is closely linked to a woman who is “a practicing and professional sapphist” (500) (“pratiquante professionnelle du saphisme” [3:500]), feels as if the ground has fallen out from under his feet, feels as if  he once again no longer knows who Albertine is, with the strange result that he no longer wishes to break off relations with her, and finds himself on the verge of tears. The upshot of this emotional transformation is that he develops the plan to have Albertine come live with him in Paris. Feeling some need to offer an explanation to Albertine for his odd behavior, the next morning he tells her: I must tell you something you don’t know. When I came here, I left a woman whom I was due to marry, who was ready to give up everything for my sake. She was due to leave on a journey this morning, and for the past week, every day, I’ve been wondering whether I’d have the courage not to telegraph her that I

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was returning. I had the courage, but I was so wretched that I thought I’d kill myself. That’s why I asked you last night if  you couldn’t come and sleep in Balbec. If  I was going to die, I’d have liked to say goodbye to you. (Sodom, 502) (Il faut que je vous dise une chose que vous ne savez pas. Quand je suis venu ici, j’ai quitté une femme que j’ai dû épouser, qui était prête à tout abandonner pour moi. Elle devait partir en voyage ce matin et depuis une semaine, tous les jours je me demandais si j’aurais le courage de ne pas lui télégraphier que je revenais. J’ai eu ce courage, mais j’étais si malheureux que j’ai cru que je me tuerais. C’est pour cela que je vous ai demandé hier soir si vous ne pourriez pas venir coucher à Balbec. Si j’avais dû mourir, j’aurais aimé vous dire adieu. [3:502–­3])

The narrator could give Dostoevsky’s General Ivolgin a run for his money. Who knows if his story (surely easily falsifiable) holds any credibility for Albertine? It does, of course, remind us of one of the barely concealed aspects of the narrator’s relationship with Albertine—­the question of the marriageability of each of them, and the question of the relationship between sexual behavior and marriageability for young men like the narrator and young women like Albertine. For these are both aspects of “culture” maintenance (the third zone mentioned above) that all talk between the narrator and Albertine, and much talk of both of them with others, bears upon. When the narrator returns from the evening where the Septet was performed, he and Albertine rapidly fall into a fierce argument: “Guess where I’ve been? To the Verdurins’.” I had no sooner said these words than Albertine, her face contorted with feeling, replied, her words seeming to explode with a force that could not be contained, “I thought as much.—­I didn’t think you’d mind if I went to the Verdurins’.” (It is true she had not said that she did mind, but I could see it in her face. It is true too that I had not thought that she would mind. And still, faced with the explosion of her anger, as at those moments when a kind of retrospective double vision makes us feel we have experienced them before, it seemed to me that I could never have expected anything else.) “Mind? Why on earth should I mind? I couldn’t care less. Wasn’t Mlle Vinteuil supposed to be there?” These words infuriated me, and “You didn’t tell me you’d met Mme Verdurin the other day,” I said, to show that I knew more about her doings than she realized. “Did I meet her?” she asked with a faraway look, addressing both herself, as if she were trying to collect her memories, and me, as if I should be able to tell her. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 307)

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(“Devinez d’où je viens? de chez les Verdurin,” j’avais à peine eu le temps de prononcer ces mots qu’Albertine, la figure bouleversée, m’avait repondu par ceux-­ci, qui semblèrent exploser d’eux-­mêmes avec une force qu’elle ne put contenir: “Je m’en doutais.—­Je ne savais pas que cela vous ennuierait que j’aille chez les Verdurin.” (Il est vrai qu’elle ne me disait pas que cela l’ennuyait, mais c’était visible. Il est vrai aussi que je ne m’étais pas dit que cela l’ennuierait. Et pourtant, devant l’explosion de sa colère, comme devant ces événements qu’une sorte de double vue rétrospective nous fait paraître avoir déjà été connus dans le passé, il me sembla que je n’avais jamais pu m’attendre à autre chose.) “M’ennuyer? Qu’est-­ce que vous voulez que ça me fiche? Voilà qui m’est équilatéral. Est-­ce qu’ils ne devaient pas avoir Mlle Vinteuil?” Hors de moi à ces mots: “Vous ne m’aviez pas dit que vous aviez rencontré Mme Verdurin l’autre jour” lui dis-­je pour lui montrer que j’étais plus instruit qu’elle ne le croyait. “Est-­ce que je l’ai rencontrée?” demanda-­t-­elle d’un air rêveur à la fois à elle-­même comme si elle cherchait à rassembler ses souvenirs, et à moi comme si c’est moi qui eût pu le lui apprendre. [4:835–­36])

In this complex back and forth, one can see that both participants are engaged in a constant scrutiny of any available indication of what might be “behind” (or beneath?) the other’s words, and both are proving to be somehow an odd mix of strategic and impetuous in the way they are choosing their words. Despite the narrator’s well-­established history of lying to Albertine, at this point he begins upbraiding her for hiding things from him and for lying. This provokes a strange avowal from Albertine (and inside the avowal, an oath). Since he has suggested (falsely) that in the course of the evening he has learned something about her and Mlle Vinteuil that he is about to reproach her with, she interrupts him: You’re going to say you found out this evening that I was lying when I said I was almost brought up by Mlle Vinteuil’s friend. Perhaps I did lie a little. But I felt you looked down on me and I saw you getting so passionate about this fellow Vinteuil’s music that, seeing one of my friends—­this is really true, I swear—­had been a friend of Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, I had the silly idea of making myself more interesting to you by pretending that I’d known those two girls very well. I could feel that I was boring you, that you thought I was empty-­headed; I thought that if I told you I had spent time with those people, that I could give you details about Vinteuil’s music, then I’d become a bit more interesting to you and that would bring us together. And it has taken this wretched evening at the Verdurins’ for you to learn the truth, which has probably been twisted

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anyway. I bet Mlle Vinteuil’s friend told you she didn’t know me. Well, she’s seen me at least twice at my friend’s house. But of course, I’m not smart enough for people who’ve become so famous. They’d rather say they’ve never met me. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 310–­11) (Vous voulez dire que vous avez appris ce soir que je vous ai menti quand j’ai prétendu avoir été à moitié élevée par l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil. C’est vrai que je vous ai un peu menti. Mais je me sentais si dédaignée par vous,  je vous voyais aussi si enflammé pour la musique de ce Vinteuil que, comme une de mes camarades—­ça c’est vrai,  je vous le jure—­avait été amie de l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil, j’ai cru bêtement me rendre intéressante à vos yeux en inventant que j’avais beaucoup connu ces jeunes filles. Je sentais que je vous ennuyais, que vous me trouviez bécasse; j’ai pensé qu’en vous disant que ces gens-­là m’avaient fréquentée, que je pourrais très bien vous donner des détails sur les oeuvres de Vinteuil, je prendrais un petit peu de prestige à vos yeux, que cela nous rapprocherait. Quand je vous mens, c’est toujours par amitié pour vous. Et il a fallu cette fatale soirée Verdurin pour que vous appreniez la vérité, qu’on a peut-­être exagérée, du reste. Je parie que l’amie de Mlle Vinteuil vous aura dit qu’elle ne me connaissait pas. Elle m’a vue au moins deux fois chez ma camarade. Mais naturellement,  je ne suis pas assez chic pour des gens qui sont devenus si célèbres. Ils préfèrent dire qu’ils ne m’ont jamais vue. [3:839])

Let us remain on the social scientific plane for a moment. From there, we can consider the various ways in which this utterance might be understood in relation to the three zones outlined above. As regards the effort to create social capital for oneself, we could note Albertine’s touching admission of vulnerability and precarity, which, she claims, led her to overreach in making a claim of connection to Mlle Vinteuil’s friend, a claim she assumes the narrator has recently heard denied. (One thinks of Mme de Gallardon, struggling to make a claim on Oriane that never manages to take hold for long.) This touching admission of vulnerability is also an effort to repair, we might think (at least for a moment), her alignment with the narrator. She gently accuses him of cultural or aesthetic elitism, and indicates that she was attempting to justify their ongoing relationship in his eyes through a link to a prestigious source of aesthetic value. But all of this is somehow taking place in the context of what is going on in the third zone, which has to do with the understandings both Albertine and the narrator are exhibiting about sexual norms and norms of marriageability, how they relate to gender, to degrees of wealth, to class identities, to aesthetic identities, to hidden sexual histories, and so on. Consider something that

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Michael Silverstein has written about how contextualization works in the real-­ time elaboration of a co-­constructed text such as the one the novel is showing to be occurring between Albertine and the narrator: “Contextualization” is always logically retrospective in nature: we can only give interactive textual value/interpretation to what has (logically speaking) occurred, not to what is occurring. We never know what the topic of propositional discourse is, for example, until the interactional textual coherence—­in this case, in the very structure of the propositional text—­signals that such-­and-­such has been the topic up to and including the particular propositional text segment in which there occurs some reference-­maintenance marker of specified structural form. We never know what the force of a particular coded speech-­act segment is until its interactional textual coherence—­in the way of securing uptake, whatever it happens to be—­indicates that the coding form contributes to some segmentalizable phase of discursive interaction in a certain figural enactment of  “roles” or “role-­relationships.”36

One of the startling features of this ongoing scene between Albertine and the narrator, to which there are two further turns I wish to examine, is that there is a carefully produced sense that both the narrator and Albertine are participating in the co-­construction of a poetic interactive text, without much concern for whether or not their own image of that constructed text is consistent with the one their interlocutor is elaborating. Is the narrator interested in marrying anyone? Is Albertine a kind of person he could be interested in marrying? Is Albertine interested in marrying the narrator? Is either of them enjoying their sexual relationship? Is the sexual relationship (and the day-­to-­day provision of food and lodging, and maybe the conversation, the musical evenings, etc.) enough to explain why Albertine stays with the narrator as long as she does? What are the norms for sexual relations between people who may or may not marry in the future that each of them holds to, and how does their relationship to those norms impact their relationship to each other both in general, and in this particular moment? What happens next, of course, sharpens all of these questions enormously. Before considering the next upheaval in this astonishing scene of talk, it will be useful to introduce a concept that helps understand what is transpiring: defeasibility. Here is Silverstein’s description: Defeasibility is [ . . . ] the potential for extraordinary creativity, even individual virtuosity, in deferring the closure of interactional-­textual coherence even in the

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face of otherwise strongly compelling presuppositional obviousness. How creative can one be in compelling the re-­segmentation, re-­structuring, re-­figuring (in the sense of cultural figures) of the segment of interactional text up to and including the one being projected in and by the particular creative act at issue? How can one resist the compulsion to closure that an interacting partner offers in particular textual terms? It is, I think, through the “game” of defeasibility, more than through any other “game” of discursive interaction, that the contingency of “context” on what is “contextualized” emerges as the crux of the matter.37

Defeasibility is a conversational move in which one claims that what might have appeared to be the purpose of the conversation was in fact not what was being talked about. Observe what mastery both Albertine and the narrator show of this particular game. It seems her display of vulnerability (maybe we need now no longer believe in its absolute sincerity or veracity) has touched the narrator and so he condescends to her in a rather unsubtle way (but one that is revealing regarding what he imagines to be their particular social alignment at this moment): So, touched by her modesty and the way she had felt insignificant in the Verdurin circle, I said tenderly to her, “But darling, now I think of it, I’d be happy to give you a few hundred francs to go anywhere you like and play the smart lady, you could give a grand dinner and ask M. and Mme Verdurin.” Alas, Albertine was several people in one. The most mysterious, the most basic, the most dreadful one now appeared as she answered with a look of disgust and, to tell you the truth, using words which I did not perfectly understand (even her opening ones, as she did not complete her reply). I was only able to supply them all a little later, once I had guessed her meaning. One can hear retrospectively once one has understood. “Thanks a lot! Spend money on those old gargoyles, I’d much rather you left me alone for once, so I could go out and get . . .” The moment she had said this she blushed crimson, looked heartbroken, put her hand over her mouth as if she could have pushed back into it the words which I had wholly failed to understand. (311–­12) (Aussi, touché qu’elle fût si modeste et se crût dédaignée dans le milieu Verdurin,  je lui dis tendrement: “Mais, ma chérie,  j’y pense,  je vous donnerais bien volontiers quelques centaines de francs pour que vous alliez faire où vous vou­ driez la dame chic et que vous invitiez à un beau dîner M. et Mme Verdurin.” Hélas! Albertine était plusieurs personnes. La plus mystérieuse, la plus simple,

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la plus atroce se montra dans la réponse qu’elle me fit d’un air de dégoût, et dont à dire vrai je ne distinguai pas bien les mots (même les mots du commencement puisqu’elle ne termina pas). Je ne les rétablis qu’un peu plus tard quand j’eus deviné sa pensée. On entend rétrospectivement quand on a compris. “Grand merci! dépenser un sou pour ces vieux-­là, j’aime bien mieux que vous me laissiez une fois libre pour que j’aille me faire casser . . .” Aussitôt dit, sa figure s’empourpra, elle eut l’air navré, elle mit sa main devant sa bouche comme si elle avait pu faire rentrer les mots qu’elle venait de dire et que je n’avais pas du tout compris. [3:840])

Words again are figured as projectiles zooming through space, performing multiple tasks, almost having a life of their own before they are even uttered. And even if you can’t decipher them, they can still wound you retrospectively. After a process of data analysis, including assessing various indexical signs that accompanied the scrambled utterance, assessing the immediate discursive context in which it occurs, assessing the available history of Albertine’s past use of similar sounding locutions, and the probabilities that Albertine might or might not say this or that thing, the narrator decides she was on the verge, but then drew back from saying “casser le pot,” which he takes to indicate a desire on her part to experience anal intercourse. Consider how much she has undone by nearly saying that: she has undone any sense that the sexuality she and the narrator share is sufficient for her, or perhaps even satisfying;38 she has undone any attempt it might have seemed she was making to repair her alignment with the narrator as a love interest; she has undone any effort she may have been making to burnish the emblems of her social capital in order to make herself a more prestigious figure for him. The implications of this scene for the way sexuality is treated in the novel have been compellingly addressed by critics such as Emma Wilson, Elisabeth Ladenson, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.39 My interest here has to do more specifically with how this exchange can be understood in terms of the novel’s interest in language-­in-­use. Having not actually understood what she has said, the narrator asks for clarification, which Albertine is unwilling to provide. His processing of all the many different aspects of the mysterious phrase that nearly escaped Albertine’s lips leads him to an activity that may seem familiar to some of us. Obsessed by someone and by the meaning of some obscure utterance of theirs, we use all the linguistic competencies we have regarding how different people and different utterances are located in the sociolinguistic field around us in order to decipher what they said (or what we think they said). What

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might such a person, making a certain set of gestures, using a certain tone, at a certain moment in a particular conversation, have meant by saying what they seem to have said in our presence? It is this last part of the equation that poses the biggest problem for the narrator/hero, because even should Albertine have meant to say “me faire casser le pot,” which is difficult enough for him to imagine, she shouldn’t have been able to imagine saying it in his presence. That she has managed to do so, intentionally or not, has had a huge effect of undoing, has left the hero unmoored regarding how the two of them can continue to exist together in language (or in life). (This is, of course, only the most extreme of many moments when Albertine has exercised this kind of effect on him.) But as she talked, my mind was still pursuing, in the waking, creative sleep of the unconscious [ . . . ] the search for the meaning of the interrupted sentence whose intended conclusion I wished to discover. And suddenly two dreadful words, of which I had not even been thinking, burst upon my mind: “le pot.” [ . . . ] Up to that point I had focussed obsessively on the last word, “casser.” Break what? Wood? No. Sugar? No. Casser, casser, casser. And suddenly, the sight of her shrugging her shoulders as I made my offer took me back into the earlier words of her sentence. And I realized that she had not said “casser” but “me faire casser.” Horrors! That is what she would have preferred. Horror upon horror! For even the lowest prostitute, who lends herself to that activity, or even welcomes it, will not use in speaking to the man who performs it such a revolting expression. She would feel herself  too humiliated. Only with another woman, if she prefers women, will she use it, as if to excuse herself for yielding to a man. Albertine had not been lying when she had said that she was dreaming. Absent-­minded, impulsive, she had forgotten that she was with me, she had shrugged her shoulders and began to speak as she might have done to one of those women, perhaps to one of my blossoming girls. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 313–­14) (Mais pendant qu’elle me parlait, se poursuivait en moi, dans le sommeil fort vivant et créateur de l’inconscient [ . . . ] la recherche de ce qu’elle avait voulu dire par la phrase interrompue dont  j’aurais voulu savoir quelle eût été la fin. Et tout d’un coup deux mots atroces, auxquels je n’avais nullement songé, tombèrent sur moi: “le pot.” [ . . . ] Jusque-­là je m’étais hypnotisé sur le dernier mot: “casser,” elle avait voulu dire casser quoi? Casser du bois? Non. Du sucre? Non. Casser, casser, casser. Et tout à coup, le retour au regard avec haussement d’épaules qu’elle avait eu au moment de ma proposition qu’elle donnât un dîner, me fit rétrograder aussi dans les mots de sa phrase. Et ainsi je vis qu’elle

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n’avait pas dit “casser,” mais “me faire casser.” Horreur! c’était cela qu’elle aurait préféré. Double horreur! car même la dernière des grues, et qui consent à cela, ou le désire, n’emploie pas avec l’homme qui s’y prête cette affreuse expression. Elle se sentirait par trop avilie. Avec une femme seulement, si elle les aime, elle dit cela pour s’excuser de se donner tout à l’heure à un homme. Albertine n’avait pas menti quand elle m’avait dit qu’elle rêvait à moitié. Distraite, impulsive, ne songeant pas qu’elle était avec moi, elle avait eu le haussement d’épaules, elle avait commencé de parler comme elle eût fait avec une de ces femmes, avec, peut-­être, une de mes jeunes filles en fleur. [3:842–­43])

Perhaps we do not need to imagine that the narrator/hero is totally coherent here (and notice that the distinction between the narrator and the hero seems barely maintained in this moment). He seems more than a little out of control, both in his own language and in his understanding of the language of others. Who have I just become because of what has been said to me? Do I want to be that person? How can I fend off the image of myself in relation to my interlocutor that has just been asserted? This is a point at which the narrator’s own language seems, because it is slightly out of control, to be most revealing about his own social positioning, his own sexual ideologies, his own projects for himself. But here, also, the composition of the novel becomes important, for just as the hero’s (or is it the narrator’s) own use of language becomes most revealing, the narrator/hero (but not, let’s assume, the novel) abandons any social scientific approach to his own or anyone else’s language use, and becomes obsessed instead with the denotational function of  words, words that would simply say what they mean, so to speak, and that therefore can be used deceptively. Once again, the hero bursts into tears, and once again he feels compelled to come up with a lie to explain to Albertine why he is feeling such strong emotions, or so he says. In the meantime, Albertine has pointed out to him that he has behaved quite badly to her by going out for the evening without her and leaving it to Françoise to tell her of  her abandonment. “When Françoise told me you’d gone out (and wasn’t she pleased to be able to tell me!), I wished she’d split my head down the middle instead. I tried to stop her noticing anything, but I’ve never felt so insulted in my life” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 313) (“Quand Françoise m’a dit que vous étiez sorti (elle était contente, allez, de me le dire), j’aurais mieux aimé qu’on me fende la tête par le milieu. J’ai tâché qu’on ne remarque rien, mais dans ma vie je n’ai jamais ressenti un affront pareil” [3:842]). In this war of insults, we are encouraged wonder what the goal (the intent) of each party is (to the extent that either of them knows). But this much at least is clear: something has gone

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awry in the workability of their history together. They each seem to be at a loss as to how to go on talking to each other in a way that would justify their being together given who they take themselves to be. And so the narrator, in order to find a footing on which to go on being in Albertine’s presence, comes up with an amazing utterance, a fabrication: “Albertine, dearest, I said to her in a gentle voice in which my first tears could be heard, I could say that you’re making a mistake, that what I did was nothing, but that would be a lie; you are right, you’ve seen how things are, poor baby: six months ago, three months even, when I was so very fond of you, I’d never have done a thing like that. It’s a tiny thing, but it’s hugely important because it shows how much my feelings have changed. And since you have guessed what I’ve been trying to keep from you, I think it’s time to say this: Darling Albertine, I said gently, with deep sadness, you must see that your life here is depressing for you, we should separate, and as the quickest separations are the best, I will ask you, to make my suffering a little less, to say good-­bye this evening and leave tomorrow morning before I wake up, so that I do not have to see you again.” She seemed astonished, still unbelieving and already heartbroken: “What? Tomorrow? Is that what you really want?” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 314–­15) (“Ma petite Albertine, lui dis-­je d’un ton doux que gagnaient mes premières larmes, je pourrais vous dire que vous avez tort, que ce que j’ai fait n’est rien, mais je mentirais; c’est vous qui avez raison, vous avez compris la vérité, mon pauvre petit, c’est qu’il y a six mois, c’est qu’il y a trois mois, quand j’avais encore tant d’amitié pour vous, jamais je n’eusse fait cela. C’est un rien et c’est énorme à cause de l’immense changement dans mon coeur dont cela est le signe. Et puisque vous avez deviné ce changement que j’espérais vous cacher, cela m’amène à vous dire ceci: Ma petite Albertine, lui dis-­je avec une douceur et une tristesse profondes, voyez-­vous, la vie que vous menez ici est ennuyeuse pour vous, il vaut mieux nous quitter, et comme les séparations les meilleures sont celles qui s’effectuent le plus rapidement, je vous demande, pour abréger le grand chagrin que je vais avoir, de me dire adieu ce soir et de partir demain matin sans que je vous aie revue, pendant que je dormirai.” Elle parut stupéfaite, encore incrédule et déjà désolée: “Comment demain? Vous le voulez?” [3:844])

We might say that our hero/narrator both does and does not know (or intend) what he is doing or saying at this moment. And indeed, as he reports himself saying these words, it is clear he can provide no good reason for what he says.

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In his mind, he has just arrived at the conclusion that the phrase she almost said a few moments earlier was “me faire casser le pot,” and this conclusion has pushed him to a state of despair that he does not (for some reason) wish to reveal to her fully. So, instead of saying, as he was about to, that she was silly to be upset at her interaction with Françoise, he simply says the opposite. As he explains, given that “the despair into which my discovery had thrown me could not be completely hidden, instead of defending myself I began to blame myself ” (314) (“le désespoir où ma découverte me jetait n’était pas possible à cacher complètement, au lieu de me défendre, je m’accusai” [3:843]). But in fact, that is not any kind of an explanation for the lie he tells Albertine. Let us step back for a moment and take in what the novel is showing us about “communication” in these pages. At moments in this scene, neither Albertine nor the narrator/hero seem to know why they say what they do. The narrator, no matter how hard he tries, can reconstruct neither his own intentions nor hers. Albertine apparently did not mean to express a desire to experience anal intercourse outside her relationship with the narrator; the words just slipped out. The narrator apparently did not know that he was going to suggest (without really meaning it) that he and Albertine break up as a way of covering the rush of emotion he felt once he imagined he had discerned the meaning of her inadvertent outburst (“me faire casser le pot”). At different moments, Search shows us numerous different ways in which people are never fully the subjects, nor fully the authors, of their own speech. In this most Dostoevskian of moments, the speakers both mistrust that the other person is speaking truthfully (and thus in paranoid fashion they seek for the indexes that would point to the underlying meaning of their utterances, that would indicate what the underlying speech plan dictating their utterances would be), and they further mistrust that they themselves are aware of their own reasons for saying what they say.40 Here is the narrator scrutinizing Albertine: The intention to leave me, if Albertine were harboring it, appeared only in a disguised fashion, in certain sad looks, certain moments of impatience, phrases which seemed to mean something else but if one thought them over [ . . . ] could only be explained by the presence in her of a feeling which she was hiding from me and which might lead her to begin planning another life without me. Just as this intention was not logically expressed in her words, in the same way the premonition of this intention which I had had since the beginning of the eve­ ning was still vague in my mind. I was still living on the principle of  believing ev­ erything Albertine said. But it is possible that a quite different principle, which

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I did not want to think about, was already taking shape at the back of my mind; that seems all the more likely as otherwise I would have felt no embarrassment at telling Albertine that I had been to the Verdurins’, and, otherwise, it would have been impossible to understand why I had been so little surprised by her anger. So that what had probably taken root in me was the idea of an Albertine quite the opposite of the one my reason had formed of her, and also of the one depicted by her own words, but still not a wholly invented Albertine, since it appeared to be the inner reflection of some of her emotional reactions, like her ill-­temper at my having gone to the Verdurins’. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 319) (L’intention de me quitter, si elle existait chez Albertine, ne se manifestait que d’une façon obscure, par certains regards tristes, certaines impatiences, des phrases qui ne voulaient nullement dire cela, mais, si on raisonnait [ . . . ] ne pouvaient s’expliquer que par la présence en elle d’un sentiment qu’elle cachait et qui pouvait la conduire à faire des plans pour une autre vie sans moi. De même que cette intention ne s’exprimait pas dans ses paroles d’une façon logique, de même le pressentiment de cette intention que j’avais depuis ce soir restait en moi tout aussi vague. Je continuais à vivre sur l’hypothèse qui admettait pour vrai tout ce que me disait Albertine. Mais il se peut qu’en moi pendant ce temps-­là une hypothèse toute contraire et à laquelle je ne voulais pas penser ne me quittât pas; cela est d’autant plus probable que, sans cela,  je n’eusse nullement été gêné de dire à Albertine que j’étais allé chez les Verdurin, et que sans cela le peu d’étonnement que me causa sa colère n’eût pas été compréhensible. De sorte que ce qui vivait probablement en moi, c’était l’idée d’une Albertine entièrement contraire à celle que ma raison s’en faisait, à celle aussi que ses paroles à elle dépeignaient, une Albertine pourtant pas absolument inventée, puisqu’elle était comme un miroir intérieur de certains mouvements qui se produisaient chez elle, comme sa mauvaise humeur que je fusse allé chez les Verdurins. [3:848–­49])

Somehow the division between narrator and hero is in play here, or perhaps the hero function itself has been subdivided at this point. The narrator/hero has a vague notion that Albertine might be thinking of  leaving him and that she is underhandedly communicating this through some set of semiotic partials in what she says, and yet he is choosing to operate under the hypothesis (one not always in place in their interactions, as we have seen) that she is here speaking truthfully. Yet the narrator (not the hero) also seems here to wonder if that really was the hypothesis under which he was operating. Possibly, even probably,

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there was some other level on which he understood Albertine and her speech plan differently, and could even have justified his sense of her speech plan by pointing to certain affective indexes that escaped her. The narrator clearly also entertains the possibility that Albertine is not taking his words at face value: For if on her side Albertine had decided to judge my feelings by what I said to her, she would have learned the exact opposite of the truth, since I only ever showed the desire to leave her when I could not do without her. [ . . . ] My words therefore did not reflect my feelings in the least. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 320) (Car si de son côté Albertine avait voulu juger de ce que j’éprouvais par ce que je lui disais, elle aurait appris exactement le contraire de la vérité, puisque je ne manifestais jamais le désir de la quitter que quand je ne pouvais pas me passer d’elle. [ . . . ] Mes paroles ne reflétaient donc nullement mes sentiments. [3:849–­50])

Nowhere does the narrator say that he imagines Albertine does judge his “true” feelings by what he says they are; he just suggests that were she to have done that, she would have been mistaken. But what the two of them are doing in exchanging utterances in this scene is obviously not trying to understand each other by taking their words at face value. Indeed, the aspect of this passage that is the most difficult to grasp is the suggestion that Albertine and the narrator are speaking to each other without any intention of understanding the other person or of being understood. It is finally utterly unclear in this scene what speech is doing and to whom it is being addressed. The narrator understands that the reader might also be confused: My words therefore did not reflect my feelings in the least. If the reader has only a faint impression of this, that is because, as narrator, I describe my feelings to him at the same time as repeating my words. But if I were to hide the former from him so that he heard only the latter, my actions, which corresponded so little to my words, would so often give him the impression of strange changes in direction that he would think me almost mad. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 320–­21) (Mes paroles ne reflétaient donc nullement mes sentiments. Si le lecteur n’en a que l’impression assez faible, c’est qu’étant narrateur je lui expose mes sentiments en même temps que je lui répète mes paroles. Mais si je lui cachais les premiers et s’il connaissait seulement les secondes, mes actes, si peu en rapport

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avec elles, lui donneraient si souvent l’impression d’étranges revirements qu’il me croirait à peu près fou. [3:850])

Here the narrator himself distinguishes the hero function and the narrator function, and suggests that the narrator’s commentary on the hero’s emotional state could, under ordinary circumstances, be taken by the reader as a kind of helpful metapragmatic commentary on the hero’s speech. Without that commentary, a simple representation of the hero’s words and actions would make him seem simply crazy. And yet, it has to be said, the narrator’s explanations only add to the sense of not only the hero’s, but also the narrator’s eccentricity—­both in speaking and in explaining his own speech. (We might, at this point, pause to imagine the kinds of analytical—­and aesthetic—­stakes there might be in a novel constructed only of dialogue without any commentary. It would involve readers in an intense effort to reconstruct both the social indexicality operative within the novel’s imagined universe and the speech plans of the individual speakers that were or were not aligning to produce conversational coherence. Novels like Virginia Woolf ’s The Years, as we are about to see in the interlude following this chapter, lack commentary from a narrator, but they represent the thought as well as the speech of the characters conversing, thus providing a window onto how certain participants within a scene of verbal exchange imagine it to be transpiring.) Is it possible to reconstruct one’s own (or someone else’s) intentions to the extent that their speech will make sense? This might seem to be the question the novel is posing, but then answering by saying that in some way it is the wrong question, since by this point the novel has sufficiently demonstrated that the retrospective reconstruction of speaker intentions is neither a necessary nor a sufficient framework for understanding what language means and does when someone uses it. The narrator does try valiantly. The passage just cited continues with the narrator imagining for a moment the possibility of a novelist presenting only words spoken, but none of the thoughts or feelings behind them: A method which would not be much more misleading than the one I have adopted, since the images which prompted my actions, so different from those that were depicted in my words, were still at this time very obscure: I had only an imperfect understanding of the nature that was directing my actions, whereas today I know the truth about it, at least from a subjective point of  view. As for its objective truth, that is, whether these semi-­hidden intuitions were any better than my reasoning at capturing Albertine’s real intentions, and whether

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I was right to trust to my nature or whether it did not in fact distort Albertine’s intentions instead of clarifying them, is difficult for me now to say. (Prisoner/ Fugitive, 321) (Procédé qui ne serait pas du reste beaucoup plus faux que celui que j’ai adopté, car les images qui me faisaient agir, si opposés à celles qui se peignaient dans mes paroles, étaient à ce moment-­là fort obscures: je ne connaissais qu’imparfaitement la nature suivant laquelle j’agissais; aujourd’hui j’en connais clairement la vérité subjective. Quant à sa vérité objective, c’est-­à-­dire si les intuitions de cette nature saisissaient plus exactement que mon raisonnement les intentions verbales d’Albertine, si j’ai eu raison de me fier à cette nature et si au contraire elle n’a pas altéré les intentions d’Albertine au lieu de les démêler, c’est ce qu’il m’est difficile de dire. [3:850])

I didn’t have any idea what I was saying or doing at the time. My reasons for my words and actions were obscure to me. In retrospect, I understand why the person I was would have acted and spoken the way I did, at least on the “subjective” level. But there is another level, let’s confusingly call it “objective,” on which the person I was in that moment had a different understanding (but not a conscious one) of what Albertine was up to as she spoke, but then I have to admit, looking back on it, that, on that other apparently unconscious level, instead of actually succeeding at grasping what Albertine was doing, I might have made it all up. The sense of the intentionality of our own utterances, the novel suggests, can only ever be a retroactive effect produced by later utterances and actions. We can only imagine we apprehend it as a result of examining utterances and actions that may follow, and perhaps only if certain additional kinds of fieldwork are done. It is as if the narrator is suggesting he would need to investigate the linguistic habitus of  his younger self  in order to imagine how it would cause him to respond to the kind of provocation that younger self rightly or wrongly perceives Albertine to offer with her words. It is as if the narrator here reveals his hero as someone else, as a character he would need to interview so that the hero could talk further (hopefully in a trustworthy fashion) about what his speech plan might have been (or the part of it that he knew or can reconstruct), and perhaps so that the hero could be made to talk about his beliefs about sexuality, or the likelihood or appropriateness or appeal of marriage between someone like him and someone like Albertine, or any number of other things that must have been part of the context surrounding his utterances and hers, so that the kind of person he is might be made ethnographically

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apprehensible, and the kind of talk in which he is engaged with Albertine could be placed more precisely as an example of speech genres used by people like him and her (or as eccentric to what should be normative speech genres for them). The result might then be that something of what was actually happening in this strange scene could be understood. But in fact, the hero’s use of  language threatens at this moment to be as opaque to the narrator as Albertine’s.41 That the hero’s speech and speech plan are opaque to the narrator is the key point here, and is tied to what Proust has called the novel’s composition. It is composed in such a way that a certain project of understanding language via the reconstruction of intentions is shown to fail spectacularly: it fails within the confines of a single first person, the first person shared by the narrator and the hero. The novel is asking us to think about the narrator/hero’s speech otherwise. That is to say, the novel is suggesting that we should attempt to listen to the narrator’s eccentric speech the way he listens to other people, in which it is necessary to reconstruct some kind of model of who they are, of what kind of linguistic habitus they have, and how that habitus both causes them to respond in certain ways and reveals itself in those responses. Undoubtedly the ability to listen to himself in this way often escapes the narrator (although there are signs, as we shall see in the conclusion, that this is not always the case). But the novel itself must know better. Surely, for instance, the narrator’s way of speaking to people like Andrée and especially Albertine is to be listened to as part, among other things, of the ongoing history of bourgeois sexuality in France in the early years of the twentieth century, a history with which the novel is constantly engaged. Novels, when they take up certain aspects of sexuality, find themselves caught up in wider forms of indexicality whether they want to be or not. Search clearly wants to be, and its effort to be caught up in the history of sexuality and its concepts could be said to be testified to by the way it represents Albertine and the narrator talking to each other “about” what is or is not going on between them sexually. They never say that this is what they are doing (perhaps they don’t even know what they are doing), nor does the novel, exactly. It just offers us training in listening to people caught up in culture, in sexual culture in this case, swimming in language in a way that says more about them than they can know in the moment in which they speak: The intonations of our voice express our philosophy of life, what one says to oneself at each moment about things. [ . . . ] As individuals, each of us lives our lives immersed in something more general than ourselves. Parents, for that matter, do not hand on only the habitual act of a facial and vocal feature, but also turns of phrase, certain special sayings, which are almost as deeply rooted and

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unconscious as an intonation, and point as much as it does to a point of view on life. (Shadow, 487–­88) (Nos intonations contiennent notre philosophie de la vie, ce que la personne se dit à tout moment sur les choses. [ . . . ] L’individu baigne dans quelque chose de plus général que lui. À ce compte, les parents ne fournissent pas que ce geste habituel que sont les traits du visage et de la voix, mais aussi certaines manières de parler, certaines phrases consacrées, qui presque aussi inconscientes qu’une intonation, presque aussi profondes, indiquent, comme elle, un point de vue sur la vie. [2:261–­62])

In the narrator’s speech and Albertine’s, we hear conflicting points of view on life engaging with each other unproductively. The narrator’s values and dispositions around sexuality and Albertine’s exist in their speech in ways that exceed anything they could explicitly state, although it does seem here that the narrator, like Swann before him, reveals himself to be less astute, less modern, less attentive to and welcoming of sexuality’s widely variable expression than a number of his interlocutors, including Albertine. At this moment, at least, he cannot hear his own point of view in the eccentric language he speaks. But perhaps, training our ears, we almost can.

Interlude: Harmonizing Habitus in Woolf

Part of my goal in chapter 2 was to demonstrate that Search in roundabout ways suggests that we would need to investigate the narrator’s habitus, in particular (but not only) his linguistic habitus (and especially around talk about sexuality), in order to begin to understand the oddity of his speech to Albertine or to Andrée. Search, despite having a narrator who devotes considerable energy to studying other people’s speech, does not offer much that is immediately helpful in providing direct information regarding the narrator’s uses of language. This disequilibrium is central to the form, to the composition, of Proust’s novel. The somewhat unhinged verbal exchanges in which the narrator engages with Albertine give us an occasion to step back and wonder what kinds of people find themselves in these kinds of situations, and how the kind of people they are reveals itself in the way they respond to them. “ ‘Interpersonal’ relations,” Bourdieu has reminded us, “are never, except in appearance, individual-­to-­individual relationships and [ . . . ] the truth of the interaction is never completely contained in the interaction. [ . . . ] In fact it is their past and present positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of dispositions which are so many marks of social position.”1 Search clearly has an implicit investment in a concept like Bourdieu’s habitus, “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures,” systems produced by our past exposure to the world and that mean that we act in ways that are not random and that have some chance of being adequate to situations in which we find ourselves, including situations of talk.2 In the “me faire casser le pot” scene, the narrator and Albertine find themselves in a

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situation of talk that challenges their improvisational competence, and seems to leave them at something of a loss. The interaction itself can nonetheless be taken as producing data (in the form of their utterances) regarding what their dispositions, competences, and structures might be. Bourdieu writes: Every confrontation between agents in fact brings together, in an interaction defined by the objective structure of the relation between the groups they belong to (e.g. a boss giving orders to a subordinate, colleagues discussing their pupils, academics taking part in a symposium), systems of dispositions (carried by “natural persons”) such as a linguistic competence and a cultural competence and, through these habitus, all the objective structures of which they are the product, structures which are active only when embodied in a competence acquired in the course of a particular history (with the different types of bilingualism or pronunciation, for example, stemming from different modes of acquisition). (Outline, 81)

The narrator’s struggle to construct for himself a representation of the system of dispositions that Albertine embodies seems sometimes to be viewed by him as an ethnographic one—­she is somehow culturally other to him. The result is that the cultural discrepancy between them produces particularly marked speech  from him that a reader might think also calls out for ethnographic study. Different novelists deal with (study) the question of what we might call difficulties in the alignment of  linguistic habitus among speakers in a given scene of talk in different ways. For the space of this interlude, I will be interested in the complementary example Woolf provides to Proust in this regard.3 Bourdieu was a devoted reader of  Woolf. In his seminar for May 15, 1986, he takes up the problem of how we might understand what it means for someone to be present with others exchanging utterances. In the course of his discussion, he uses the dinner scene in the first part of Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse to illustrate a point he wishes to make. In this particular seminar, Bourdieu is elaborating on what a dispositional logic can help us to understand about a given punctual social interaction: “in order to understand a reaction, it is necessary to understand the durable dispositions of the agent that produce that reaction: those durable dispositions can somehow be called forth by a momentary cause [ . . . ] but the real source of the reaction lies in the durable dispositions of the agent in question.”4 How do we account, Bourdieu is asking, for the way that even in scenes of what Erving Goffman would call “fresh talk,” our utterances are both fresh, in that they occur in response to a novel situation, and also produced not only out of the responsive faculty that has accumulated in us

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over time, but also out of linguistic materials and capacities deeply marked by historical and social forces. This means that usually we don’t just say any old thing, but something that is “us,” something that is in some way the product of who we are, who we have become over time, and also something that is not us, but is held in language, with all the social, cultural, and historical information that is unavoidably there.5 It is part of the indexical capacity of  language-­in-­use to point to the social formations that structure our utterances. Our linguistic habitus, we could say, has an indexical presence in our speech. Novelists like Woolf and Proust have a practical (and novelistic) understanding of this fact, which partly explains why the juxtaposition of  Bourdieu and linguistic anthropology is so useful in understanding their achievements. In situations of verbal incoherence (such as the ones we were examining in the previous chapter), situations in which even the pretense that there is some shared understanding of a co-­constructed interactive text is difficult to maintain, we could say that the disaster arises from features particular to the context of the specific interaction in combination with features that are part of the various embodied dispositions that find themselves provoked to the exchange of utterances. The interlocutors find themselves disposed in radically different ways to the same scene of interaction because of features of the scene itself and because of the habitus (both linguistic and sexual in the scene between the narrator and Albertine that we were looking at) that are theirs. One’s habitus helps determine what one understands (practically or intellectually) a certain scene of interlocution to be “about,” or what one understands (the understanding is often practical rather than explicitly articulated) oneself to be doing in it. “It [the habitus] selects from within the situation the traits it considers pertinent from its point of view (in effect, the habitus is a durable and socially situated point of view). In a certain way, it constitutes the event, or the situation, as a meaningful [signifiant] one, and it is that meaningful event that motivates the reaction to the situation” (SG, 2:898). If people sometimes have astonishingly different understandings of what they have just said or heard, it is because they are predisposed to different points of view and different courses of action, and therefore we could practically say that they participate simulta­ neously in different verbal events that only appear to coincide. When, to take a simple example, in Middlemarch, Will Ladislaw says to Dorothea, “Of course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in a trance,” Eliot’s narrator tells us that he then pauses, “imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea to misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself and offending against his self-­approval in speaking to her so plainly; but still—­it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would

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never woo her.” Plainly spoken, it may have been to him, “but Dorothea’s mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another vision than his” (633). We might say not only that Will and Dorothea are not disposed to understand each other in this moment, but that in some ways because of their dispositions they are not sharing the same moment. “Social agents,” Bourdieu observes, “can never be reduced to the contemporaneity of their practices; what they do or what they think is never completely intelligible in the instantaneity of synchronicity, in the immediate present” (SG, 2:901). It is to illustrate this point that Bourdieu turns to Woolf, in whose narrative technique he sees a careful examination of what it means for people co-­present to each other nonetheless to exist in different temporalities. Woolf ’s virtuosity in passing from consciousness to consciousness within a single scene of talk has often been noted. Dora Zhang observes that “by stitching together multiple perspectives with unprecedented fluidity, [Woolf ] creates a common reality while allowing her readers glimpses of how this reality is differently experienced by different subjects.”6 We might say that Woolf reveals what is held in common and also what is not held in common in the reality people co-­construct in exchanging utterances. Bourdieu offers a description of how in Virginia Woolf ’s novels, insignificant events trigger series of representations that become more and more distant from the present, in the chronological and public sense of the term, representations that recede into the depths of time; and the plurality of consciousnesses, the plurality of agents endowed with habitus express themselves in the plurality of temporalities. These agents that only appear to be contemporaries (they are together in the same room and can even talk to each other), are at the same time separate from one another; their thoughts develop within different social times, within different histories whose generating principle is the habitus. (SG, 2:903)

One way of describing what Woolf achieves in certain scenes of talk (the example I will use will not be To the Lighthouse, but rather the dinner party in the “1914” section of The Years) is that she manages to represent the different orientations to participation, the different indexical frameworks, that are operative in the mental universes and in the utterances of the different participants along with a vision of the particular regions of the social world that are brought into contact when these speakers find themselves face to face in the physical world.7 (I will have more to say about what it means to talk specifically about a “social world” in the next chapter.) Such orientations and frameworks are

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shaped by past experience, produced out of habitus that are harmonized to some degree or perhaps not in harmony at all. On the one hand, when people come together around a dinner table, it is as if they are called to a shared moment, a shared public time. “People will find themselves to have been synchronized,” as Bourdieu says about the dinner scene in To the Lighthouse. “They had developed, each in their own corner, their own stories, based on their own histories, and then they will find themselves brought to simultaneity for the length of a meal which, in the confines of a private house, is the public moment” (SG, 2:904). Yet even when, in public together, people (such as Martin and the young woman, Ann, seated next to him at his cousin Kitty’s formal dinner party in the “1914” section of The Years) are called to partake of the same moment in time, they rarely succeed in doing so fully. Even when called to be present to each other, “the representations that agents produce for themselves of the social world or of the field in which they are acting are themselves linked to the immediate trigger [ . . . ] only as mediated by the habitus which, itself, is independent of the present moment. There is a kind of temporal indepen­ dence of the representations a consciousness forms, in relation to the present moment, in relation to the exterior event that gives rise to them” (SG, 2:904). It is the contours and consequences of this predicament that Woolf ’s novelistic technique seems so well suited to studying. Balzac’s and Eliot’s narrators stand somewhat outside the world they present and offer commentary on it to help us understand both what characters are doing with language and what language itself is doing. Proust’s narrator participates in the world he presents and offers commentary of various degrees of cogency, scientificity, and reliability regarding how he and others are using language, and what is happening thanks to the way language is being used. Woolf ’s novels offer not so much a narrator capable of providing commentary as what Banfield calls “the narrator’s disappearance in the novel’s multi-­consciousness style.” For Banfield, “the consequence of the narrating ‘I’’s disappearance is the novel’s collection of shifting points-­of-­view.”8 But even in the absence of commentary, somehow the points of view in the novel, by their juxtaposition, by the contrasts and commonalities that come to exist between them, show us crosscutting divisions in the social world, divisions based, for instance, on gender, on family structure, on generation, on class and other forms of social status, on aesthetic inclination, as well as on a range of other axes of socialization. Woolf ’s novels are designed to show us how these divisions in the social world(s) of the characters exist both within the embodied mental universes of the characters and within language as a shared resource for social activity.9 A novel like The Years offers two dialectically related

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approaches to talk. It offers, on the one hand, linguistic anthropological kinds of insights into the way language’s indexical capacities enable the construction of interactional texts (through which people do various kinds of identity work) that are also linked to other interactional texts produced at other sites (a process through which cultural concepts are created, circulated, perpetuated, or modified). On the other hand, it also offers insights we could loosely call Bourdieusian regarding how each individual represents a structured point of view on the social world, a bundle of embodied predispositions that are a form of incarnated history, predispositions linked to that individual’s trajectory through the physical and the social world, producing regularities and irregularities, distinctions and resemblances with others proximate to or distant from them in those physical and social worlds and in time. The Years is written as a series of episodes tied to given dates—­1880, 1891, 1907, and on up to “Present Day”—­in which members of an extended family appear and reappear in different configurations and in the company of other individuals, evolving in relation to each other and in relation to the world around them. All sorts of chains of interdiscursivity are woven within any given episode, across the series of episodes, and across different scales from interactions between siblings, to interactions between cousins, to interactions across generations, to interactions with various kinds of strangers who must be woven into ongoing discursive streams for shorter or longer periods of time. The “1914” section of The Years is very much involved with the point of view of Martin Pargiter, who has been invited to an elegant dinner party being given by his cousin Kitty, who married into the aristocracy. The perspectival shifts in this section allow us also to share Kitty’s point of view from time to time and, for a few brief paragraphs, that of her maid, Baxter. At dinner, the forty-­something Martin will find himself seated next to the very young and beautiful Miss Ann Hillier, who is attending only her third “real party” (238). It is the interactions between Ann and Martin during dinner and between Kitty and Martin after dinner that will interest me here. It is also worth noting that the novel quietly underlines the historical situation of the single spring day recounted in this section, and how contemporary events put various kinds of pressure on the talk that occurs at the party. Nijinsky had performed a few times in London that March, and he will be a topic of conversation at dinner. The Government of Ireland Act is receiving its third reading in Parliament, and so “Ireland” is also on the tip of many tongues. The war that was to break out in a month or two was not yet on anyone’s minds or tongues, but it looms over the chapter as the kind of event that will somehow impact everyone’s

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speech, everyone’s point of view on the social world, forcing many of them into some common public time, even if their responses to that forced synchronization will prove to be quite diverse. (There is a different kind of dinner party in the “1917” section of The Years, in which the assembled diners end up in a basement during a bombing raid.10) And so we watch all these people as they go about being men and women, being English in any number of different ways, being members of different generations, being more or less wealthy, being cousins, being from different classes, having different kinds of learning or expertise, having different kinds of aesthetic interests and tastes, perhaps having different sexualities, pursuing endless agendas of which they are aware or unaware to different degrees.11 Here is Martin, arriving at the party: “Captain Pargiter,” the man boomed out; and there was Kitty standing at the door. She was formal; fashionable; with a dash of red on her lips. She gave him her hand; but he moved on for other guests were arriving. “A saloon?” he said to himself, for the room with its chandeliers, yellow panels, and sofas and chairs dotted about had the air of a grandiose waiting-­room. Seven or eight people were already there. It’s not going to work this time, he said to himself as he chatted with his host, who had been racing. His face shone as if it had only that moment been taken out of the sun. [ . . . ] No, it’s not going to work, Martin thought as they talked about horses. [ . . . ] When a party worked all things, all sounds merged into one. [ . . . ] He glanced at Kitty’s portrait by a fashionable portrait painter as he chatted, standing first on this foot, then on that, to the grizzled man with the bloodhound eyes and the urbane manner whom Kitty had married instead of Edward. Then she came up and introduced him to a girl all in white who was standing alone with her hand on the back of a chair. “Miss Ann Hillier,” she said. “My cousin, Captain Pargiter.” (235–­36)

When a party “works,” we might surmise, it is because various people present have done a lot of work to bring themselves together in a way that is more than a matter of physical presence. If Martin feels that this party is not really going to work (and perhaps it doesn’t, really, at least for him), it is because he is unable to find a way into the world of talk out of which the party ends up being constructed that he finds pleasant or satisfying or rewarding. So when he encounters the interior design of Kitty’s sitting room, the word that presents itself to him, “saloon,” is a derogatory one, indicating his disapproval of his hosts’ taste; that seemingly involuntary act of disapproval leaves him feeling a bit out

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of  joint. Martin seems perfectly able to talk about racing and about horses, but they are not, we can surmise, topics that he finds conversationally valuable or interesting. Again, they indicate to him that he is not quite in his place here. (His shoes, as we are about to see, perform a similar function.) Equally worrisome is that his cousin has arranged the table so that his dinner companion will be Ann Hillier, and it is unclear what common ground anyone imagines they could stand on in order to talk to each other. “Have you been to the races?” he said aloud to the girl whom he was to take down to dinner. She shook her head. She had white arms; a white dress; and a pearl necklace. Purely virginal, he said to himself; and only an hour ago I was lying stark naked in my bath in Ebury Street, he thought. “I’ve been watching polo,” she said. He looked down at his shoes, and noticed that they had creases across them; they were old; he had meant to buy a new pair, but had forgotten. [ . . . ] “I’ve thought of three subjects to talk about,” he began straight off, without thinking how the sentence was to end. “Racing; the Russian ballet; and”—­he hesitated for a moment—­“Ireland. Which interests you?” He unfolded his napkin. “Please,” she said, bending slightly towards him, “say that again.” (236–­37)

Throughout the earlier scenes that make up “1914,” we have seen Martin be reasonably conversationally adept in a variety of different contexts involving other relatives of his. We know from earlier sections of the novel that Kitty’s marrying up (instead of marrying Martin’s brother Edward) created some turbulence within the family that apparently has never fully subsided and that is reactivated for Martin as soon as he arrives, sees the furniture, and has to participate in talk about the races. We surmise that Martin is not unfamiliar with the social rituals out of which a dinner party such as this one is constructed, but also that he does not participate in such rituals so regularly that they are second nature to him. There are protocols for conversation at table. (You are responsible for talking with the person you entered with, and also, later, with the person on your other side, and, generally, with people nearby—­but no raised voices!) Martin knows them, but his “I’ve thought of three subjects to talk about” perhaps indicates too explicit an acknowledgment of them and of his lack of ease with his obligations. His young partner is a bit inexperienced, perhaps, at managing table talk, and so fails to attend to his awkward list of subjects. Does he really want to continue talking about the races? Does he think politics (Ireland) will be a rich conversational vein with this partner? His goal,

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he thinks to himself at one point, is simply to make a good impression: “He would like her to say, he thought, as his glass was filled, ‘What a charming man I sat next!’ when she went to bed that night” (238), and yet the age disparity between them obviously weighs on him, and, indeed, influences her as well, since she seems more inclined to talk to the dashing and younger fellow on her other side (perhaps a sign of her not yet understanding her duty at table): “And now tell me,” he said, feeling that they had broken the ice—­when she turned her head to answer some remark of the man on the other side. He was annoyed. The whole fabric that he had been building, like a game of spillikins in which one frail little bone is hooked on top of another, was dashed to the ground. Ann was talking as if she had known the other man all her life; he had hair that looked as if a rake had been drawn through it; he was very young. Martin sat silent. (238–­39)

A few pages later, after the women have left the table, and when we have shifted to Kitty’s point of view, Kitty will inquire as to the success of her odd seating plan: Kitty paused for a moment. “I hope you liked my old cousin?” she said to Ann as they walked upstairs together. [ . . . ] “I thought him charming!” Ann exclaimed. “And what a lovely tree!” She spoke of Martin and the tree in exactly the same tone. (242)

It is not as if Martin’s wish to be perceived as charming has actually been fulfilled. Given that she is closer in age to Martin than to Ann Hillier, Kitty’s odd “my old cousin” is perhaps a form of apology to Ann for the seating arrangement. Ann is not socially skilled enough to accept the apology elegantly. Kitty registers Ann’s admission that she had not much enjoyed meeting Martin in the tone with which Ann indicates Martin might as well have been a tree to her. Perhaps his creased shoes were part of the problem. In any case, as the party breaks up, Martin is forced to realize he has achieved next to nothing in conversing with her: “Coming with us?” Martin heard Ann say to the youth through whose hair the rake seemed to have been passed. They turned to leave together. As she passed Martin, who stood with his hand out, Ann gave him the least bend of her head, as if his image had been already swept from her mind. He was dashed; his feeling was out of all proportion to its object. (250)

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Ann has the advantage of youth, so to speak, and so feels no need to make a graceful exit, one that would somehow bring her exchange with Martin to an elegant ritual close. Perhaps his having been referred to as “my old cousin” by Kitty has contributed to Ann’s sense that her behavior to him is of no real consequence. And why should he care, given how uninteresting he has probably found talking with her to be? But alas he does. And yet, there had been at least one lively moment of the conversation between Martin and Ann, a moment that might even be called a success: “Have you seen the Russian dancers?” she was saying. She had been there with her young man, it seemed. And what’s your world, Martin thought, as she rapped out her slender stock of adjectives—­“heavenly,” “amazing,” “marvellous,” and so on. Is it “the” world? he mused. He looked down the table. [ . . . ] But Ann was talking. “And when he gives that leap!” she exclaimed—­she raised her hand with a lovely gesture in the air—­“and then comes down!” She let her hand fall in her lap. “Marvellous!” Martin agreed. He had got the very accent, he thought; he had got it from the young man whose hair looked as if a rake had gone through it. “Yes: Nijinsky’s marvellous,” he agreed. “Marvellous,” he repeated. (240–­41)

The dancers (not racing or Ireland) were indeed the ideal topic between them. She has things to say that give him things to listen to: her slender stock of adjectives that are apparently not his, and the collocation of which constitutes a generational register, signaled also by the manner in which they are said—­which is apparently gendered, since when Martin pronounces “marvellous” in Ann’s register, he says it not in her way, but in the way of her dashing neighbor. About Nijinsky, Martin and Ann can agree. Perhaps most (but surely not all) of the people at the party could find common ground around Nijinsky. One imagines that, out of respect for their immediate circumstances, the guests would agree to disagree quietly about the question of Irish home rule should a diversity of conflicting opinions emerge. Woolf is perhaps subtler than Proust in the way she paints the undercurrents of symbolic social violence and aggression that circulate through this dinner party. Martin feels bad for his acts of aggression immediately upon committing them. Already cranky when he arrived, perhaps further bothered by his lack of conversational success while at table, he takes it out on Kitty, as we see in a passage that moves back and forth between their two points of view:

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He was looking round the room. It was crowded; there were little tables with photographs; ornate cabinets with vases of flowers; and panels of yellow brocade let into the walls. She felt that he was criticising the room and herself too. [ . . . ] “Like a hotel, isn’t it?” she continued. “A saloon,” he remarked. He did not know why he wanted to hurt her; but he did; it was a fact. “I was asking myself,” he dropped his voice, “Why have a picture like that”—­he nodded his head at the portrait—­“when they’ve a Gainsborough . . .” “And why,” she dropped her voice, imitating his tone that was half sneering, half humorous, “come and eat their food when you despise them?” “I don’t! Not a bit!” he exclaimed. “I’m enjoying myself immensely. I like seeing you, Kitty,” he added. It was true—­he always liked her. “You haven’t dropped your poor relations. That’s very nice of you.” “It’s they who’ve dropped me,” she said. “Oh, Eleanor,” he said. “She’s a queer old bird.” “It’s all so . . .” Kitty began. But there was something wrong about the disposition of her party; she stopped in the middle of her sentence. “You’ve got to come and talk to Mrs. Treyer,” she said, getting up. (249)

The furniture, a painting, the fact that Martin’s sister Eleanor declined her invitation to the dinner party. A single word, “saloon,” suffices to convey in a hurtful manner the fact that Kitty, in her cousins’ eyes, moved into a world of compromised taste by marrying up. Not just the furniture is in poor taste. They own a major painting, but instead of putting it in a place of honor, that place is occupied by an incompetent portrait of  Kitty herself. Kitty shares Martin’s taste, it would seem, at least as far as the painting is concerned, but knows that in her own household her opinions do not matter in this regard, and so has no choice but to put up with what is there on the wall. “Don’t let’s look at it.” But, if Eleanor has not accepted the invitation, it is not just because of the furniture and the art. It is also the company, conversations about racing, horses, polo, Nijinsky, French poetry, and Ireland the way they would occur among this set of people. One might say that the very fact that Martin found himself taking Ann Hillier uncomfortably in to dinner proves that he shouldn’t even have been there. (That he is there and that Eleanor isn’t perhaps says something about gender’s part in determining whose role it will be under different sets of circumstances to maintain family ties, or to let them loosen.) There is no narratorial commentary that states this kind of thing (as there might have

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been in Proust). We as readers need to come to understand the partitions in the social universe and the way they have been embodied in the dispositions of the various guests by watching the interactional text of the evening unfold in all of its indexical glory. Sometimes commentary does emerge from within the characters’ own mental space, as in the moment when we observe Kitty observing that the intellectual Tony Ashton is standing by himself and needs someone to talk to: He would like to talk to some smart woman—­Mrs. Aislabie, or Margaret Marrable. But they were both engaged—­both were adding sentences with considerable vivacity. There was a pause. She was not a good hostess, she reflected; this sort of hitch always happened at her parties. There was Ann; Ann about to be captured by a youth she knew. But Kitty beckoned. Ann came instantly and submissively. (247)

Kitty seems more solicitous of  Tony Ashton’s well-­being than she does of  Martin’s. Martin is a cousin. He can be used as Ann is here, as a quick fix for a problem that has come up in “the disposition of her party.” Tony is also more urbane than Martin, it seems. It is Tony that Ann will remember from the eve­ ning as the charming older fellow. He is invited to join her and her friends as they head off to some further event after Kitty’s party, something that Martin notices “with a bitterness that surprised him” (251). Is Kitty a bad hostess? Is her guest list badly drawn up? Is the disposition of her party awkward? Is the social world it contributes to sustaining going to survive the war that lies ahead? We could say that the quiet brilliance of what Woolf has achieved in the composition of this scene lies in the way she demonstrates the dialectical connections between (1) what Silverstein has referred to as the “macro-­sociological partitions of social space, in terms of which cultural values can [ . . . ] be said to be indexically ‘articulated,’ ” (2) the “micro-­ contextual order [ . . . ] where perspectival interests are played out,” and (3) the individual habitus from which the act of speaking arises.12 Indeed, when Kitty comments to herself that she is not a good hostess, when Eleanor declines the invitation, when Martin realizes somehow this party is not for the likes of him, they are all having a practical experience of degrees of homo-­and heterogeneity of habitus. Kitty belongs to the world she married into, but is not quite comfortable there because of her origins. Nor is she quite comfortable in the world of her cousins even though she knows it well from her childhood, and returns to it periodically throughout The Years. The experience of the misfit of different habitus in public scenes of verbal exchange may be somewhat gentler

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in this scene from The Years than it is, say, in scenes we have seen involving the Duke de Guermantes and other guests at Mme de Villeparisis’s salon, or between the narrator and Albertine, or between Charlus and the Verdurins. Yet Woolf studies it as intently as Proust does with her particular novelistic methods. When Martin thinks to himself that this party is not going to work, when Kitty feels something awry in the disposition of the party, they are worrying about the harmonization of the habitus assembled in this social event, which is also an event constructed out of talk. The question might be, do habitus have to be (or to what extent do they have to be) homogenous in order to harmonize the time of a dinner party? Is that what parties are for? Bourdieu writes (and it could almost be taken as a description of what The Years sets out to study): One of the fundamental effects of the orchestration of  habitus is the production of a commonsense world endowed with the objectivity secured by consensus on the meaning (sens) of practices and the world, in other words the harmonization of agents’ experiences and the continuous reinforcement that each of them receives from the expression, individual or collective (in festivals, for example), improvised or programmed (commonplaces, sayings), of similar or identical experiences. The homogeneity of habitus is what—­within the limits of the group of agents possessing the schemes (of production and interpretation) implied in their production—­causes practices and works to be immediately intelligible and foreseeable, and hence to be taken for granted. (Outline, 80)

What is at stake in The Years is degrees of homogeneity and harmonization within the habitus of people who wish, or who are called, for the time of a dinner party, to imagine that they belong to some singular group, or to some shared world. When they talk, the work of talking is the production or the confirmation of that supposed group or that imagined world. But talk also reveals particularities and divisions (of age, taste, modes of  life, political belief, gender, and so on) that challenge the “taken for granted” quality of any number of things, the practical mastery of action and interpretation of which Bourdieu speaks. Did the guest list bring together too many different zones of the social world, ones that are too divergent for harmonization to happen? It is a relief for both Martin and Kitty when the party is over. On reflection, for Martin, it wasn’t as much of a disaster as he perhaps experienced it as being as he participated in it: “It did work, he said to himself, descending step by step into the hall. Off and on; by fits and starts. But was it worth it? he asked himself, letting the footman help him into his coat. [ . . . ] Then he shook hands with that good fellow his host, who had had quite as much wine as was good for

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him, and walked off  through Grosvenor Square” (252). What Martin means by “it did work” would appear to be that he leaves with his sense of  himself intact, and with a sense that nothing too socially disruptive has happened at the party. He is, we have seen, neither fully part of the set of people the party was for, nor entirely outside of it. He feels secure in his ironic perspective on the upper-­ crust figures he just socialized with, and secure in the sense that something transpired that evening that mattered in some wider project. Some part of the social world was affirmed and reproduced as all these people ate and talked. Kitty in fact seems more ambivalent about the value of the evening than her cousin. She had been hoping the party would not drag on, because she was planning to catch an overnight train to the Lasswade estate in the north (where she could be alone). That is, she had a personal investment in the timely ending of  her party, and, fortunately for her, her guests do all depart just in time for her to catch her train. As she rides the train north, “fragments of talk kept coming back to her, sights came before her. She saw herself raise the window with a jerk; and the bristles on Aunt Warburton’s chin. She saw the women rising, and the men filing in. She sighed as she turned on her ledge. All their clothes are the same, she thought; all their lives are the same. And which is right? she thought, turning restlessly on her shelf. Which is wrong? She turned again” (257). Our minds are filled with talk we have heard, talk we have participated in, hypothetical talk, talk yet to come. Within all that talk, we try to understand who we are, who we have been, who we might yet be, where we belong. Kitty remembers not just talk, but a physical action of hers that failed to be as graceful as her situation might have called for. She remembers an unpleasing detail regarding the physical appearance of a relative (by marriage), one that does not correspond to her own view of femininity perhaps. She remembers (perhaps with some disdain) the rigidly gendered structure of the ritual of which she was the chief celebrant. She quietly disapproves of the vestimentary codes of the group she married into, even though she was following those codes herself; it is a group she somehow still feels ill at ease within, however well integrated into it she might nonetheless know herself to be. In Kitty’s thoughts and speech, as in the thoughts and speech of her cousin Martin, Woolf shows us something of the work people do as they talk (and as they remember talk, or imagine it) to remain who and where they are, socially speaking, or to, as Bourdieu would say, “keep their distance”: In fact it is their present and past positions in the social structure that biological individuals carry with them, at all times and in all places, in the form of

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dispositions which are so many marks of social position and hence of the social distance between objective positions, that is, between social persons conjuncturally brought together (in physical space, which is not the same thing as social space) and correlatively, so many reminders of this distance and of the conduct required in order to “keep one’s distance” or to manipulate it strategically, whether symbolically or actually, to reduce it (easier for the dominant than for the dominated), increase it, or simply maintain it (by not “letting oneself go,” not “becoming familiar,” in short, “standing on one’s dignity,” or on the other hand, refusing to “take liberties” and “put oneself forward,” in short “knowing one’s place” and staying there). (Outline, 82)

All of this is part of talk’s work, and a fascination with how to portray this work (and a virtuosity in doing so) is something Woolf and Proust share. It explains their attentiveness to conversation at table, for instance, their interest in social rituals in general, and their interest in characters (e.g., Proust’s narrator or Kitty or Martin) whose social place has something murky about it, people who keep their distance in various ways, who experience themselves as interlopers even in regions of social space to which they (or others) might be justified in claiming they in fact belong. In the next chapter, and in the interlude on Nathalie Sarraute and Rachel Cusk that follows it, I turn my attention to the place of aesthetic experience (of music and of novels) within talk, and to ways in which the chances of and also the contours of any given aesthetic experience are shaped by the same social topographies that people negotiate in all conversations, topographies that unfailingly involve a multivariable calculus of pertinent factors (gender, sexuality, class, age, family structure, upbringing, educational history, employment history, religious affiliation, race, ethnicity, and so on). The social worlds we find in Woolf and Proust are, of course, for the most part “elevated” ones, zones in which people mostly from various sectors of what we might call the upper middle class are found associating with aristocrats of various degrees of wealth and distinction.13 Sarraute’s novels are themselves also very much novels of the rituals of upper-­middle-­class life. Novels such as Search or The Years or Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits (Les fruits d’or) and Between Life and Death (Entre la vie et la mort) are not only instruments devised to study the role of talk (including talk about aesthetic and literary experiences) within the rituals of life in these segments of the social world; they also somehow become a part of the worlds they study. There are different ways of appreciating Nijinsky or Dostoevsky and speaking about them. There are those who understand the

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difference between a Gainsborough and a lesser painting and those who don’t. There are those who read Proust, Woolf, or Sarraute in ways that are markedly different from the ways others read them. Social indexicality is at work in producing and maintaining all of these distinctions, which contribute to shaping not only the topography of various sectors of the social world, but also the people who inhabit them. It is to the question of distinction, then, that chapter 3 turns.

Chapter 3

Proust and Bourdieu: Distinction and Form I suspect he is making a distinction well, who isn’t F r a n k O ’ H a r a , “Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-­Paul”

“It seems to me that your school is not preoccupied with the substance of things,” wrote George Sand to Gustave Flaubert in December 1875, “and that it remains too much on the surface. Being so caught up with form, it slights substance.” Flaubert, writing from Paris, had informed her a few days earlier that he tended to see a group of familiar associates on Sundays—­Turgenev, Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt—­and he had asked her if she had any thoughts about the writing of a couple of the names on that list. It was in her response to his query that she offered her opinion about the failings of his “school.” In his reply to her letter, he insists that he is doing his best to have no such thing, and he insists on distinguishing himself from his associates by saying that they “strive for all that I scorn, and are only concerned in a mediocre way by the things that torment me.” He elaborates: I consider technical details, local pieces of information, really the whole historical and exact side of things as quite secondary. Above all I seek Beauty and my companions have only a mediocre concern with that. I find them unmoved when I am ravished with admiration or with horror. I swoon in the face of phrases that seem to them entirely ordinary. Goncourt, for example, is delighted when he overhears someone use a word in the street that he can then stick in a book. Whereas I am most pleased when I have written a page without assonances or repetitions.1

This passage from Flaubert’s correspondence caught Bourdieu’s eye. He cites it in The Rules of Art in a discussion of the kinds of formal work that manage

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somehow to bring social reality into a work of art, to register or to index some aspect of the social world, we could say. Flaubert might seem, in his response to Sand, to be asserting that the documentary and the social have no place in his work. He writes to other ends. Yet part of what Bourdieu sees Flaubert as doing is making a claim for the ways both his aesthetic agenda and his artistic practice are distinct from those of his contemporaries, are distinctive. As such, he positions himself within the literary field, and, by extension, within the social world. But Bourdieu is also interested in the specifics of Flaubert’s practice, or, perhaps better said, what transpires because of the specifics of that practice. Flaubert may not wish to be associated with his “realist” colleagues, the ones who want to describe minute technical details they observe in the material world around them, or who collect snippets of spoken language with which to ornament their books. Yet for Bourdieu, Flaubert achieves what he calls a realist formalism. Bourdieu notes that in certain circumstances, in certain hands, “it is pure work on pure form, a formal exercise par excellence, that causes to surge up, as if by magic, a real more real than that which is offered directly to the senses and before which the naïve lovers of reality stop.”2 This “real more real” of which Bourdieu is speaking is the reality of the social world and all its immanent tendencies, the reality of the social topography we all move through with varying degrees of practical skill. Both texts and their makers are shaped by the forces that produce the social world. Certain makers of texts, by the work they do in making them, reflect upon, or uncover, or recover (in a process Bourdieu calls anamnesis) the relationship between the writing they do and the way the social world is shaped and has shaped them: The research that could be called formal and that bears upon the composition of the work, the articulation of the stories of different characters, the correspondence between the setting or situations and the behaviors or “character types,” as well as on the rhythm or the color of phrases, the repetitions and assonances that must be hunted out, the received ideas and conventional forms that must be eliminated, is all part of the conditions of the production of a reality effect more profound than the one analysts ordinarily designate by this term. (Rules, 108)

As authors choose sets of characters and their interrelated stories, as authors craft sentences with a certain rhythm and with certain poetic effects, sentences they and similarly disposed readers might find ravishing or swoonable, as they eliminate or include repetitions of words or even sounds, their choices from among a world of possible such choices reveal something about where they are

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or would wish to be situated within their own particular universe of cultural producers. They produce distinctive utterances that situate themselves and their works relationally, or that start to map the relations that structure the social world generally. Bourdieu continues: It is through this work on form that the work comes to contain those structures that the writer, like any social agent, carries within him in a practical way, without having really mastered them, and through which is achieved the anamnesis of all that ordinarily remains buried, in an implicit or unconscious state, underneath the automatisms of an emptily revolving language. (Rules, 108)

The work of composition that Proust called attention to at various moments, which included in his case the formal principal of a first-­person narrator who studies the speaking of others while recording enough speech of his own to allow himself to be situated within the social universe he traces, is another instance of the kind of work on form Bourdieu refers to here. I will come back to look at further details from this intriguing passage from The Rules of Art a bit later in this chapter. Let me briefly associate it now with a different text, in which Bourdieu referred—­borrowing the phrase from another of Flaubert’s letters to Sand—­to Flaubert’s (or any author’s) poétique insciente, their unkenned poetics, the poetic activity that happens subliminally as they work. In this other text, Bourdieu wrote, discussing Flaubert’s use of that expression: I think he [Flaubert] wanted to say that a poetics, which is to say the set of generative principles that is at the origin of poetic (or literary, more generally) creation, is not something constituted as a corpus of codified precepts. This poetics is something the poet has in his or her head or body or skin, in the form of practical dispositions. The poet’s body is an incorporated corpus, but a corpus that is not thetical or objectivized yet which allows the poet to say: “no, that is ugly, but that works . . . This is what I want, but not that . . .”3

When a sentence doesn’t feel right and compels a revision, when an image feels poorly chosen and needs to be replaced by another, when something somehow sounds off, when a character speaks in a way that doesn’t quite work, the act of correcting is in some way, to some degree, a social one, a social indexical one. It indexes—­among other things—­how an author understands their work, socially speaking. One of the implications of all of these remarks from Bourdieu is that the range of compositional features of a given literary work that could be taken to

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index, or render salient, or reveal some aspect of the social world in which it originated is remarkably wide and diversified. It depends for its perception on the work that is done (by readers) to establish the context in which a given indexical function can be perceived. If Bourdieu liked the contrast between Flaubert and Goncourt that Flaubert somewhat snidely drew (“Goncourt, for example, is delighted when he overhears someone use a word in the street that he can then stick in a book”), it is surely because Goncourt represents for him a kind of naive empiricism in the face of social reality, whereas Flaubert’s hostility toward that empirical reality counterintuitively helps him to produce works that register it and his relation to it in more astute, if unkenned, ways. Proust is no Goncourt, and yet his notebooks as he works on Search are filled with words, phrases, and syntactic turns that he perhaps overheard, and notes down intending to put them into the mouths of one or the other of his characters, as in the following: Charlus ou St Loup cosmique pratique catastrophique4

If Proust turns out to be a less naively empirical novelist than Flaubert takes Goncourt to be, it is in part because there is a richer and more developed conceptual framework behind what he imagines the representation of speech to be able to do. Doubtless this is to a certain extent part of  his poétique insciente, but there is much about it that is done in a way that is not at all unkenned. Here, for example, is the beginning of the passage in which “cosmique” makes its way into Search. The narrator is elaborating on his fascination with the language spoken by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes: A literary type would similarly have been enchanted by the conversations, which for him [ . . . ] would have been a living dictionary of all the expressions that are passing out of the language by the day (Saint-­Joseph neckties, children pledged to wear blue, and so on), and which survive today only among people who have taken it upon themselves to act as the obliging and benevolent custodians of the past. (Guermantes, 549) (Un littérateur eût de même été enchanté de leur conversation, qui eût été pour lui [ . . . ] un dictionnaire vivant de toutes ces expressions qui chaque jour s’oublient davantage: des cravates à la Saint-­Joseph, des enfants voués au bleu,

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etc., et qu’on ne trouve plus que chez ceux qui se font les aimables et bénévoles conservateurs du passé. [2:839–­40])

Proust’s narrator takes his own distance from the kind of practice for which Flaubert criticized Goncourt—­imagining that a word you really heard somewhere out in the world will bring authenticity to your novel. It is not, for Proust and his narrator, a matter of simply representing “how people talk.” It’s a matter of understanding all the different things it means that people talk the way they do. The passage continues: The pleasure that a writer experiences in their company, far more than in that of other writers, is not without its risks, for he is in danger of believing that the things of the past have a charm in themselves, of transporting them raw into his work, which, if he does, becomes stillborn and smacks of staleness, for which he consoles himself with the thought, “It’s appealing because it’s authentic, that’s how people talk.” These aristocratic conversations had the further charm, in Mme de Guermantes’s case, of being conducted in excellent French. For this reason, they made it permissible for the Duchesse to react hilariously to the words “vatic,” “cosmic,” “Pythian,” “supereminent,” which formed part of Saint-­Loup’s vocabulary—­in the same way as she did to his Bing furniture. (Guermantes, 549) (Le plaisir que ressent parmi eux, beaucoup plus que parmi d’autres écrivains, un écrivain, ce plaisir n’est pas sans danger, car il risque de croire que les choses du passé ont un charme par elles-­mêmes, de les transporter telles quelles dans son oeuvre, mort-­née dans ce cas, dégageant un ennui dont il se console en se disant: “C’est joli parce que c’est vrai, cela se dit ainsi.” Ces conversations aristocratiques avaient du reste, chez Mme de Guermantes, le charme de se tenir dans un excellent français. À cause de cela elles rendaient légitime, de la part de la duchesse, son hilarité devant les mots “vatique,” “cosmique,” “pythique,” “suréminent,” qu’employait Saint-­Loup,—­de même que devant ses meubles de chez Bing. [2:839–­40])

This is, we could say, a Bourdieusian moment. The hypothetical person described as fascinated by the register in which the Guermantes speak is a generic figure, un littérateur, who could almost be (but obviously is not) the narrator, someone attuned to and reflective about the way people’s speech locates them within social space, someone attuned to the fact that registers (that of the duke and duchess and that of their hipster nephew Saint-­Loup) are fundamentally

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relational or even oppositional. The passage also suggests that an interest in, an enchantment by, the register of speech that is the duchess’s is in itself an indication that you, as a littérateur, are a particular kind of person, with a particular point of view, and that your own point of view, like that of the duchess or of Saint-­Loup, is one of the constituents of the social space in question. As Bourdieu said in his seminar on May 26, 1982, “The basic idea that I have in mind is this: the way that social subjects represent the social world is part of the objective truth of the social world.”5 This not so simple idea was also a key part of Proust’s novelistic practice, and, as I argued in the last chapter, its presence shapes the novel’s composition in any number of ways. In this particular scene, the implication that a generic littérateur could have one form of interest in the kind of registers, lexicons, and verbal exchanges that occur in the ambit of the Duchesse de Guermantes, whereas the narrator apparently has another (and the novelist perhaps yet another), is an indication that there is, for the narrator (and the novelist), a hierarchy of sophistication with which a writer might approach the novelistic representation of talk. The littérateur, like Goncourt, uses register to create a kind of reality effect in the speech of certain characters. The narrator seems interested in something else, in the force produced by language-­in-­use such that an adjective employed by one person (Saint-­Loup saying “cosmique”) could cause another particular person to burst out laughing, just as she might upon catching sight of some new piece of art nouveau furniture he has recently acquired.6 The general question that I am developing here has to do with how an instrument like a novel can be said to register a social world in a critical way that could be understood both as kenned and unkenned by the novelist (by, say, as aesthetically refined a novelist as Flaubert), and also how a novelist with a certain kind of social scientific predisposition (like Proust), self-­conscious about the history of novelistic practice and about the ambitions other novelists have demonstrated for their performances on this instrument, can reflect upon what a novel can do to register the social world, while simultaneously producing a novel that is also in the process of doing what it is reflecting on.

M o d e l i n g S o c i a l L o cat i o n In 1988, Bourdieu participated in a set of five conversations on the radio station France-­Culture with the historian Roger Chartier. The interviews were published in print form under the title Le sociologue et l’historien (The sociologist and the historian) in 2010. At a certain moment, Bourdieu and Chartier turn to the kinds of resistance that cultivated intellectuals expressed when

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Bourdieu’s classic sociology of French culture, Distinction, was published in 1979. Bourdieu notes that in many of the attacks directed by intellectuals at that book, there can be found the expression of a kind of suffering that is provoked by “the analysis of the relation to culture that haunts all cultivated men.” He then goes on to say: And if people had read Distinction all the way to the end instead of reducing it to absurd simplifications, they would have seen, in a post-­script where I refer to Proust, that I describe not only the specific forms of pleasure provided by a relation to culture, but also the specific forms of suffering that go along with the disenchantment of culture. Proust, who was an admirable sociologist, had said before I ever did, but in his own kind of language—­which means that no one understood him—­everything that is said in Distinction.7

Here I would like to begin to investigate how we might understand what Bourdieu meant, how Proust could be saying through the composition and the language of an immensely complex, long novel what Bourdieu is saying in the form of an immensely complex, and statistically detailed, sociological treatise—­regarding the “the specific forms of pleasure provided by a relation to culture, but also the specific forms of suffering that go along with the disenchantment of culture.” That the experience of cultural artifacts and events is one that can be, on the one hand, pleasant, engaging, joyful, uplifting, even ecstatic, and, on the other, a moment of palpable sorting, of division, of painful deception, is something novels such as Proust’s have no problem representing. The cruelty of the social world when it comes to reacting to the aesthetic foibles of other people is novelistic material par excellence, although its representation can be marshaled to many different ends. That Bourdieu understands that novels can be, in the right hands, powerful instruments of sociological analysis, should be clear to anyone who has read his work. Yet how certain novels perform their sociological analysis is not the same from case to case. Nor is it self-­evident that any given reader will find the sociological work happening in a novel to be readily apparent. As a way of reading any given novel or novelist, an attunement to its sociological side may turn out to be as distinctive as any other way of reading. Remember Bourdieu’s observation, mentioned in the introduction, that works have differential effects on the people who encounter them, that “a work does not have the same effect on everyone” (M, 27). To understand that differential effect involves understanding both something about the work’s composition and something about the composition of the people who encounter it. Uptake,

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we could say, is fundamentally interactive.8 In the current chapter, I want to explore how Proust’s novel understands the differential uptake of aesthetic objects (and this is one way of understanding how Proust and Bourdieu might be, in some way, “saying the same thing”), but doing so necessarily involves me in suggesting a particular way of taking up Proust’s novel. Distinction is difficult to understand and often misunderstood. One way to misunderstand it is to personalize its lesson in certain ways. “We know ‘Bourdieu,’ whether we’ve read the man or not,” writes Nicholas Dames in an unfortunately titled piece, “Forget Bourdieu,” in n + 1 from 2009. He continues: “Pierre Bourdieu’s most easily translatable idea—­that aesthetic taste, or judgment, is always a move in the cultural game of ‘distinction,’ whereby we disaffiliate ourselves from social inferiors—­progressed with astonishing speed from a daring argument against Kant’s third Critique to conventional wisdom.”9 In Dames’s account, Bourdieu’s Distinction taught us the rules of a certain kind of game: when we tell people what music we like, we tell them something about who we are. A certain kind of “confession of musical taste,” Dames notes, “has become a drearily familiar part of everyday life” (199). Because, for Dames, Bourdieu has offered us one way to understand what we are doing when we assert our allegiance to difficult forms of avant-­garde music, or when we embarrassedly admit that we still like some middle-­or lowbrow form of music from our early teen years, he perceives Bourdieu to be fixing the cultural significance of this or that work of art, fixing the ways it can be used to distinguish ourselves from others. He refers somewhat disapprovingly to “the hard-­edged boxes of Bourdieu’s famous diagrams, where artworks are splayed on the cross formed by the two axes of cultural and economic capital, fixed in their social connections.” What an artwork needs is “a chance [ . . . ] to detach itself from its Bordelian fixity and to move to new publics, new kinds of articulation, new contexts.” An artwork should not simply be “an allegory of the social profile of its consumer” (203). Which, of course, Bourdieu never said it was. Bourdieu’s sociology of culture is profoundly relational, which explains in part his insistence that works of art will exert different kinds of effects on different kinds of people. The patterns of circulation of  interest in individual artworks may be useful in revealing social relations; social relations may reveal themselves in the uptake of this or that work by some agent or group of agents; the meaning and manners of uptake of given aesthetic objects themselves evolve and are produced and reproduced along with the visions and divisions of the social world themselves. It is not that Bourdieu’s Distinction (or Proust’s novel) cannot be said to show

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that people play games of social distinction via the aesthetic judgments they make. It’s just that that is really not what the book is primarily about. (We might just add in passing that Bourdieu would have no problem doing the analysis necessary to determine where Proust’s name would sit within the geometric modeling of social space that he constructed in Distinction—­the regions of social space where Search is most likely to encounter readers—while simultaneously continuing to insist that Proust is an “admirable sociologist.” These are two rather different points of view on “Proust” that it would be possible to entertain simultaneously: focusing, on the one hand, on what certain kinds of readers can learn from reading Proust; on the other, on identifying in which sectors of social space you are most likely at any given point in time to find people who read Proust. There are obviously distinctive differences among ways of reading Proust that could be accounted for as well.) If it is true, as Bourdieu suggests, that Proust’s novel and Distinction say “the same thing” in different languages, this may well be because they are both, to a very great extent, about an experience of “social space” that we all might have as individuals, and about the analytic construction of that space that can be undertaken via different means. Proust and Bourdieu share an understanding of how to think about social space. Social space is not, obviously, the same as geographic space. It is, however, something we all most likely have some degree of practical experience of, even if its specific topography is something that, as Bourdieu set out to show in Distinction and elsewhere, requires specific kinds of instruments to map. He writes in “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” for instance: The “social reality” which Durkheim talked of is a set of invisible relations, those very same relations that constitute a space of positions exterior to each other and defined by their proximity to, neighborhood with or distance from each other, and also by their relative position—­above or below, or even in between, in the middle. Sociology, in its objectivist moment, is a social topology, an analysis situs as this new branch of mathematics was called at the time of Leibniz, an analysis of relative positions and objective relations between these positions.10

The positions of which Bourdieu speaks are not, it needs to be emphasized, the same as people. People occupy positions, or shift from position to position over time, traversing the topography of the social field in various ways. What Bourdieu sets out to do in Distinction is to construct a certain social space at a certain point in time, to demonstrate how its topography is organized, what

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kinds of movement it shapes and is shaped by. Presenting his results necessarily involves describing the kinds of people one is most likely to find in certain areas of social space, and this necessity produces certain misunderstandings. Bourdieusian sociology is “a relational way of thinking [ . . . ] which identifies the real not with substances but with relations” (SSSP, 126), and yet to reveal relations, you have to describe the things that are related, and you run the risk of being understood as being interested in those things rather than in their relationality: The groups that one has to construct in order to objectify the positions they occupy conceal those positions and the chapter in Distinction on fractions of the dominant class is read as a description of the different life-­styles of these fractions, instead of being read as an analysis of the way they have to be seen as positions in the space of power positions. (SSSP, 126–­27)

Something similar could be said about Proust’s Search, that it exhibits “a relational way of thinking” in its sociological investigations, but that often it can be mistaken as describing different lifestyles of different segments of the aristocracy, the professional classes, the grande bourgeoisie, and the petite bourgeoisie. This is partly because it is easy to forget that the narrator himself represents a point of view within the relational space in question. If the novel has as part of its project the analytical construction of a social space, the narrator’s own social observations count as evidence within that project, with the novel’s construction of the social space in question being, we might say, more scientific than the narrator’s. The narrator’s understanding of social space counts as evidence of where he is positioned within it. The novel makes use of that evidence in offering its own construction of the social space in question. As Bourdieu reminds us: Habitus implies a “sense of one’s place” but also a “sense of the other’s place.” For example, we say of an item of clothing, a piece of furniture or a book: “that’s petty-­bourgeois” or “that’s intellectual.” What are the social conditions of possibility of such a judgment? [ . . . ] Agents classify themselves, expose themselves to classification, by choosing, in conformity with their tastes, different attributes, clothes, types of food, drinks, sports, friends, which go well together and which they also find agreeable or, more exactly, which they find suitable for their position. [ . . . ] This means that nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies. (SSSP, 131–­32)

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We might say, then, that Proust’s narrator’s difficulty in classifying the band of young girls he meets in the second part of In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower is relevant information the novel supplies as part of its construction of social space: Elstir told me her name—­Albertine Simonet—­and the names of her friends, whom I was able to describe accurately enough for him to have little hesitation in identifying them. It turned out that I had been mistaken about their social status, but in a way that was unlike my usual mistakes in Balbec, where I was in the habit of assuming that the merest son of a shopkeeper riding a horse must be a prince. My mistake this time had been to see the daughters of extremely wealthy middle-­class families from the world of industry and business, as belonging to some shady milieu. (Shadow, 424) (Elstir me dit qu’elle s’appelait Albertine Simonet et me nomma aussi ses autres amies que je lui décrivis avec assez d’exactitude pour qu’il n’eût guère d’hésitation. J’avais commis à l’égard de leur situation sociale une erreur, mais pas dans le même sens que d’habitude à Balbec. J’y prenais facilement pour des princes des fils de boutiquiers montant à cheval. Cette fois j’avais situé dans un milieu interlope des filles d’une petite bourgeoisie fort riche, du monde de l’industrie et des affaires. [2:200])

It is not just the form of the narrator’s errors that are relevant here; also relevant is that the corrective information comes from Elstir.11 That is, the narrator does not only obtain corrective information about Albertine, her friends, and their class background; he also learns (or we learn) that this information comes from Elstir: he has to adjust his sense of social space not only so as to cease confusing the sons of shopkeepers with princes, but also to account for the fact that both he and the band of girls are accessing a kind of proximity in social space to Elstir, but from different directions. How do you account for the existence of a social property you share with someone (the capacity to enter into a meaningful friendship with an artist such as Elstir) when faced with so much in that person that is either incomprehensible or an indication of opposing aesthetic tastes? For the narrator’s early acquaintance with Albertine is one of the many places in the novel where we do find one of those telling, and apparently decisively classifying, admissions of musical taste. Here are our narrator and Albertine strolling on the boardwalk as she chatters away:

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The thin one in the raincoat is the conductor of the orchestra. What? You don’t know him? His playing’s divine! You didn’t go and hear Cavalleria Rusticana? Oh, I think it’s just lovely! He’s giving a concert this evening, but we can’t go because it’s in the Town Hall—­the Casino’s all right, but the Town Hall’s out of bounds: they’ve gone and taken down the crucifix, and Andrée’s mother would throw forty fits if we went! (Shadow, 462) (Le maigre avec un imperméable, c’est le chef d’orchestre. Comment, vous ne le connaissez pas! Il joue divinement. Vous n’avez pas été entendre Cavalleria Rusticana? Ah! je trouve ça idéal! Il donne un concert ce soir, mais nous ne pouvons pas y aller parce que ça a lieu dans la salle de la Mairie. Au Casino ça ne fait rien, mais dans la salle de la Mairie d’où on a enlevé le Christ, la mère d’Andrée tomberait en apoplexie si nous y allions. [2:237])

The amount of sociologically pertinent information Albertine is shedding here is obviously enormous, and it is not just about the fact that she likes Mascagni’s hugely successful 1890 verismo opera; nor is it solely a question of the style of aesthetic appreciation she indexes here. It is the fact that her appreciation for this opera is tied up in a dense web of other social considerations: who knows whom in the local government, how allegiances to Catholicism play against political ambitions in this moment in the history of the Third Republic, and how there are regularities that tie all these other sociological characteristics together with aesthetic judgments. When people from divergent positions in social space find themselves interacting, as is the case here, one has to look behind the interaction to see how the topography of the social field shapes it. As Bourdieu puts it, “interactions [ . . . ] conceal the structures that are realized in them. It’s one of those cases in which the visible, that which is immediately given, conceals the invisible which determines it. One thus forgets that the truth of the interaction is never entirely to be found in interaction as it is available to observation” (SSSP, 127). Interactions need to be scrutinized for what they can reveal about the relative positions of the interactants and about the contours of the social topography that either unite them or separate them within social space. Social variables such as aesthetic judgment need to be understood as influencing and as being under the influence of an array of other pertinent social variables. Here is how Bourdieu, in Distinction, expresses this insight, one that led to his particular way of collecting and processing data, and to his attempt to model it geometrically in a variety of ways. He notes how difficult it can be to perceive how different variables interact with each other in producing either a sense of social location or of social identity:

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The particular relations between a dependent variable (such as political opinion) and so-­called independent variables such as sex, age and religion, or even educational level, income and occupation tend to mask the complete system of relationships which constitutes the true principle of the specific strength and form of the effects registered in any particular correlation. The most independent of “independent” variables conceals a whole network of statistical relations which are present, implicitly, in its relationship with any given opinion or practice. (D, 103)

One of Bourdieu’s aims in Distinction was to find a method of modeling social data that would be able to take into account a network of relations, to take into account “the structure of relations between all the pertinent properties which gives its specific value to each of them and to the effects they exert on practices” (D, 106). His modeling is thus geometric, using the techniques of linear algebra to plot and sum different vectors in a multidimensional space. And yet it is also susceptible to various narrative or descriptive forms of accounting. Here, for example, is a descriptive account by Bourdieu of the “multisidedness” of the social reality he is investigating: Despite this potential plurality of possible structurings—­what Weber called the Vielseitigkeit of the given—­it is none the less true that the social world presents itself as a highly structured reality. This is because of a simple mechanism, which I want rapidly to sketch out. The social space [ . . . ] presents itself in the form of agents provided with different properties that are systematically linked to each other: those people who drink champagne are opposed to those who drink whiskey, but they are also opposed, in a different way, to those who drink red wine; but those who drink champagne are more likely than those who drink whiskey, and far more likely than those who drink red wine, to have antique furniture, play golf, ride horses or go to see light comedies at the theater. These properties, when they are perceived by agents endowed with the pertinent categories of perception (capable of seeing that playing golf makes you “look” like a traditional member of the upper-­middle class), function, in the very reality of social life, as signs: the differences function as distinctive signs, and as signs of distinction, either positive or negative, and this happens outside of any intention of distinction. [ . . . ] In other words, via the distribution of properties, the social world presents itself, objectively, as a symbolic system which is organized in accordance with the logic of difference, of a differential variation. The social space tends to function as a symbolic space, a space of lifestyles and status groups, characterized by different life-­styles. (SSSP, 132–­33)

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And now here is Proust’s account of the same phenomenon, again figured via the relationship in social space of the narrator, Elstir, and Albertine. The narrator is learning how symbolic space functions by learning how there are categories of perception he does not (yet) possess that are relevant to understanding overlaps and divergences between his tastes and perceptual abilities and those of both Elstir and Albertine: To someone whose taste in things of dress was poor or deficient, there was nothing remarkable in Mme Elstir’s dresses. Taste in these things, which I lacked, Elstir had in abundance, or so Albertine said. I had had no idea of this; nor had I noticed that the objects ranged about his studio were wonders of elegance, but also of simplicity, things he had yearned to possess for a long time, kept his eye on at every auction, things whose whole history he knew, until the day came when he had made enough money to acquire them. Albertine, who was as ignorant as I was on this aspect of Elstir, could tell me nothing about it. (Shadow, 463) (Les robes de Mme Elstir passaient inaperçues aux yeux de quelqu’un qui n’avait pas le goût sûr et sobre des choses de la toilette. Il me faisait défaut. Elstir le possédait au suprême degré, à ce que me dit Albertine. Je ne m’en étais pas douté ni que les choses élégantes mais simples qui emplissaient son atelier étaient des merveilles longtemps désirées par lui, qu’il avait suivies de vente en vente, connaissant toute leur histoire, jusqu’au jour où il avait gagné assez d’argent pour pouvoir les posséder. Mais là-­dessus, Albertine, aussi ignorante que moi, ne pouvait rien m’apprendre. [2:239])

The narrator’s younger self was not equipped to notice the care some people take in dressing, nor the elegance they achieve in their dress. One could well imagine his own family background including training in being appropriately well-­dressed, but not fashionably or elegantly so according to the codes that prevail in other social circles. (Indeed one might imagine he was taught to be suspicious of certain forms of elegance.) Would he now be predisposed to acquire a sensitivity to these forms of vestimentary refinement, and in what would that training consist? Does he believe Albertine when she tells him about the depths of Elstir’s knowledge in this area? Does it matter that his awareness of his ignorance is produced by a kind of triangulation in social space involving Elstir and his wife at one point and Albertine at another? If both the young hero and Albertine are ignorant when it comes to the aesthetic prestige some might attach to the objects that Elstir displays in his studio, where does that

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information come from and what would make him wish to acquire it? How, for instance, might this information prove useful in his relations with Saint-­ Loup, and his ability to understand distinctive differences in taste between Saint-­Loup, Charlus, and, say, the Duchesse de Guermantes? As he learns to perceive these distinctive differences, what will be the impact on his own set of aesthetic values and interests? The passage continues: However, on women’s dress, with her instinctive delight in attractive clothes, and perhaps also with something of the longing of the girl who, though poor, is disinterested and modest enough to enjoy the spectacle of rich people wearing what she will never be able to afford, she could tell me things about Elstir’s standards of taste, so refined and exacting that in his view all women were badly dressed, and that, with his concern for every proportion and slightest nuance, he would spend huge sums having his wife’s sunshades, hats, and cloaks made, explaining to Albertine the while the charm of such things, of which a person devoid of taste would have been as ignorant as I had been. Albertine had also dabbled in painting, though she had, as she said herself, no “bent” for it, and greatly admired Elstir; and, from what he had told her and shown her, she had acquired an appreciation of good painting that was in marked contrast to her liking for Cavalleria Rusticana. The fact was, invisible as this was to me at the time, she was highly intelligent; and though there was stupidity in things she said, it was not her own, but that of her peers. Elstir had influenced her for the better, but only partially. Not all modes of cultivation and sensibility were equally developed in her. Her appreciation of painting had now almost caught up with her taste in clothing and in all things fashionable, but her musical taste had not kept up and now lagged far behind. (Shadow, 463–­64) (Tandis que pour les toilettes, avertie par un instinct de coquette et peut-­être par un regret de jeune fille pauvre qui goûte avec plus de désintéressement, de délicatesse chez les riches ce dont elle ne pourra se parer elle-­même, elle sut me parler très bien des raffinements d’Elstir, si difficile qu’il trouvait toute femme mal habillée, et que mettant tout un monde dans une proportion, dans une nuance, il faisait faire pour sa femme à des prix fous des ombrelles, des chapeaux, des manteaux qu’il avait appris à Albertine à trouver charmants et qu’une personne sans goût n’eût pas plus remarqués que je n’avais fait. Du reste, Albertine qui avait fait un peu de peinture sans avoir d’ailleurs, elle l’avouait, aucune “disposition,” éprouvait une grande admiration pour Elstir, et grâce à ce qu’il lui avait dit et montré, s’y connaissait en tableaux d’une façon qui contrastait fort avec son enthousiasme pour Cavalleria Rusticana. C’est qu’en réalité, bien

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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. Elstir avait eu sur elle une influence heureuse mais partielle. Toutes les formes de l’intelligence n’étaient pas arrivées chez Albertine au même degré de développement. Le goût de la peinture avait presque rattrapé celui de la toilette et de toutes les formes de l’élégance, mais n’avait pas été suivi par le goût de la musique qui restait fort en arrière. [2:239])

About painting and music (if not about fashion and interior design) the young hero seems to feel himself to possess some competence that allows him to critique Albertine’s development. But if he knows nothing about fashion and interior design, might someone not hold him to account for both the way he dresses and the accessories with which he surrounds himself ? According to what set of values do musical and artistic taste matter more than taste in clothes and accessories? All of these questions are, we could say, questions about the distribution of properties that characterizes a social field. The narrator/hero is implicitly situating himself and his point of view, and we are slowly acquiring the necessary data to imagine how he might look to someone positioned elsewhere in the field. Income level, fashion sense, musical taste, artistic taste, artistic ability, class background, religious and political affiliations, education, intelligence, and, of course, vectors of desire—­we have here a cloud of data points out of which it becomes necessary to produce some sense of regularity. Proust’s novel uses the narrator not only as a collector of this data, but also as an informant, as a set of data points in its own analysis of a multidimensional social space that exists as a set of structured relations, including contrasting or distinctive forms of aesthetic sensibility and aesthetic practice. One could begin to make a chart out of this passage from Search: who knows their way around sophisticated painting and who doesn’t; who knows their way around highbrow classical music, or middlebrow classical music; who knows their way around the kinds of refined ladies’ hats and umbrellas that appeal to Elstir; who follows auctions in order to find prized antique objects at a reasonable price? What does the narrator share with Elstir, and what doesn’t he? What with Albertine? What does Albertine share with Elstir? What kind of person imagines that someone’s taste in painting and in music should be somehow aligned? What kind of a person thinks in terms of tastes that are advanced or that fall behind? Does that person think that a taste for fashion should accompany “advanced” tastes in painting and music? Is it possible that a liking for fashionable clothes could be viewed by some as a negative indicator in a person who also likes the most advanced forms

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of painting and music? Does it even make sense to talk of “advancement” in the arts this way, or is the propensity to do so a social indicator in its own right? As Bourdieu says in another essay, “Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’ ”: sociology [but also, we now see, certain novels also do this] presents itself as a social topology. Accordingly, the social world can be represented in the form of a (multi-­dimensional) space constructed on the basis of principles of differentiation or distribution constituted by the set of properties active in the social universe under consideration, that is, able to confer force or power on their possessor in that universe. (229)

Proust’s novel paints for us a social world in which people are always discovering proximities in social space that astonish them, only to realize that those proximities remain in effect only while a certain combination of social variables frames one’s vision. Swap one variable for another, and suddenly those same people are miles apart. This is one experience of, one vision of, social space that Bourdieu and Proust both convey in languages (sociological and novelistic) that are themselves both congruent and incongruous.

Literary Form and the Reality of the Social World What I’ve been exploring so far in this chapter is the question of how the experience of social reality can be communicated in a literary work such as a novel. Bourdieu once described the social world as a “space of immanent tendencies,” a “lieu de tendances immanentes.” Because of those immanent tendencies, people face the social world with unequal chances. The different kinds of capital that Bourdieu discussed and elaborated in his work—­economic capital, cultural capital, social capital—­serve as conceptual tools to help understand how different agents are positioned differently within a social field, and to account for the different chances individual agents have when faced with similar circumstances within the same social world, to explain why “everything is not equally possible or impossible for everyone at any given moment” (SG, 2:1168). What kind of reality could we say that immanent tendencies have? What is required to be able to notice that some people face an uphill battle, others are coasting downhill, others traversing a level surface, while all pursuing similar trajectories? Different social universes function differently, have different topologies, sometimes because the active properties that shape that topology are different from those found elsewhere. In some social worlds, the number of languages

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you speak makes no difference; in others, it does. In some, physical strength and dexterity are hugely important; in others, less so. In some, it is important to be able to distinguish who is exquisitely well-­dressed; in others, not at all. And so on. As Bourdieu pointed out in Distinction, one of the properties that is unequally distributed in many social worlds, and that may or may not be important, is “the capacity for deeply meaningful encounters with works of art” (29). Proust’s Search is, of course, filled with moments in which people either have, pretend to have, or miserably fail at having inspired encounters with works of art and other refined cultural artifacts—­say, the famous Vinteuil Septet. Sometimes their successes and failures in this regard are consequential and sometimes not. But in every case, we can see that Proust’s novel shares with Bourdieu’s sociology an interest in what Bourdieu refers to in his late lectures on Manet as “a social effect of the work.” A work of art (say, Cavalleria rusticana), being the product of a social world, can also on occasion serve as an instrument that reveals something of the immanent structures that contribute to the shape of the social topology around it. It does so by producing effects on the public. The social effect of a work is, Bourdieu reminds us, “differential”; it is not “a blanket effect [ . . . ] since a work does not have the same effect on everyone” (M, 27). Both the Vinteuil Sonata in the first volume of Proust’s novel and the Septet in the fifth are presented as works that have this kind of differential social effect; that is, by producing different responses in different listeners they become a kind of diagnostic instrument providing information regarding the social topology around them and the way listeners are positioned in that topology. Indeed, the scene of the Septet’s performance (which is the one I will focus on here) is described in intense ethnographic detail and in ways that signal that certain members of the audience represent prototypes of different manners of listening that are characteristic of different, and perhaps opposing, social regions. The narrator’s role is particularly complex because, as I’ve already noted, he is both the ethnographer and a participant in the scene, someone whose own attitudes and manners serve to distinguish him from the other listeners and reveal something about both his social location and his social trajectory. Here, for instance, is how he views the Baron de Charlus as the Septet’s performance is about to get underway: Suddenly M. de Charlus, drawing himself up, [ . . . ] took on the expression of a prophet and turned upon the assembled audience a look of seriousness that told them the time for laughter was past; more than one lady suddenly blushed, like a schoolgirl caught in misbehaviour before the whole class. I

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found something comical in M. de Charlus’s attitude, noble as it was; for at one moment he silenced his guests with fiery looks, and then, so as to indicate to them, as if by an order of service, the religious hush, the detachment from all earthly things, that they were to observe, he offered them, lifting his white-­ gloved hands to his fine forehead, a model, to be imitated by all, of gravity, almost of ecstasy, not acknowledging the greetings of late arrivals, who lacked the decency to understand that it was now time for great Art. Everyone was hypnotized, no one dared make a sound or move a chair; respect for music—­ thanks to the prestige of Palamède—­had suddenly been instilled into a crowd as ill-­mannered as it was elegant. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 227–­28) (Aussitôt M. de Charlus, redressant sa taille en arrière, [ . . . ] prit une expression de prophète et regarda l’assemblée avec un sérieux qui signifiait que ce n’était pas le moment de rire, et dont on vit rougir brusquement le visage de plus d’une invitée, prise en faute comme un élève par son professeur en pleine classe. Pour moi, l’attitude, si noble d’ailleurs, de M. de Charlus avait quelque chose de comique; car tantôt il foudroyait ses invités de regards enflammés, tantôt, afin de leur indiquer comme en un vade mecum le religieux silence qu’il convenait d’observer, le détachement de toute préoccupation mondaine, il présentait lui-­même, élevant vers son beau front ses mains gantées de blanc, un modèle (auquel on devait se conformer) de gravité, presque déjà d’extase, sans répondre aux saluts des retardataires, assez indécents pour ne pas comprendre que l’heure était maintenant au grand Art. Tous furent hypnotisés, on n’osa plus proférer un son, bouger une chaise; le respect pour la musique—­de par le prestige de Palamède—­avait été subitement inculqué à une foule aussi mal élevée qu’élégante. [3:752–­53])

There are two sets of guests at this musical soiree, the bourgeois guests, invited by the Verdurins, and the nobles, invited by the Baron de Charlus. There are in both camps eager listeners and ignorant ones—­more ignorant ones than eager ones, it seems. But guides to how to listen—­or how to look like you are listening—­are predominantly provided by Charlus and Mme Verdurin, in ways that are similar and yet different. Here is the narrator’s description of Mme Verdurin: I looked at the Patronne, whose fierce stillness seemed a protest against the rhythmically nodding, ignorant heads of the ladies of the Faubourg. Mme Verdurin did not say, “You know, I know this music really pretty well! If I had to express everything I feel, you’d be here all night!” She did not say it. But her

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straight-­backed, unmoving posture, her expressionless eyes, her escaping locks of hair, said it for her. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 230) (Je regardai la Patronne, dont l’immobilité farouche semblait protester contre les battements de mesure exécutés par les têtes ignorantes des dames du Faubourg. Mme Verdurin ne disait pas: “Vous comprenez que je la connais un peu cette musique, et un peu encore! S’il me fallait exprimer tout ce que je ressens, vous n’en auriez pas fini!” Elle ne le disait pas. Mais sa taille droite et immobile, ses yeux sans expression, ses mèches fuyantes, le disaient pour elle. [3:755])

The “detachment from all earthly things” that both model listeners seem to wish to illustrate for their fellow listeners is, of course, a fabricated performance to some unspecified degree. It is, after all, possible to be caught up in an aesthetic experience, attentive to it, and at the same time have some attention left over for who is arriving late, or who is beating time with their heads. Mme Verdurin and Charlus are thus both similar, in laying claim to an appropriate form of receptivity to the music, and yet displaying that receptivity from markedly different social positions and to different ends. His white gloves and her romantic hairdo both index different social profiles, different styles of listening, rival forms of sophistication. While turning his attention to the music, the baron keeps track of who from among his set does not have the respect to arrive in time for the performance; he knows he has to demonstrate to his set that talking is not allowed during this performance (because, one assumes, their habit at other musical events in salons they attend is to talk away as they please); he has no expectation that they will appreciate the performance, but he does expect that, in this particular instance, they will sit quietly through it. Mme Verdurin expects appropriate signs of musical cultivation in her audience. In a form of music in which the meter is surely fluid and underemphasized, trying to keep time is a sign of a hopeless lack of sophistication. There are other musical features that should ravish your sensibility, but you must not betray that ravishment in any too corporeal a manner. And what of our hero, who is observing all of this social action around him while also attending to the music in his own way?12 In fact, the question as to whether or not it is appropriate to talk during a performance and the question of meter both come up in his account of his own listening. The concert began, I did not know what they were playing; I was in unknown territory. Where could I place it? In which composer’s work was I? I longed to know, and not being near anyone I could ask, wished I could have been

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a character in the Arabian Nights, which I constantly reread and in which at moments of uncertainty there appears a genie or a maiden of ravishing beauty, invisible to all but the perplexed hero, to whom she reveals exactly what he wants to know. Now at this moment I was suddenly vouchsafed just such a magic apparition. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 228) (Le concert commença, je ne connaissais pas ce qu’on jouait; je me trouvais en pay inconnu. Où le situer? Dans l’oeuvre de quel auteur étais-­je? J’aurais bien voulu le savoir et, n’ayant près de moi personne à qui le demander, aurais bien voulu être un personnage de ces Mille et Une Nuits que je relisais sans cesse et où dans les moments d’incertitude surgit soudain un génie ou une adolescente d’une ravissante beauté, invisible pour les autres, mais non pour le héros embarrassé, à qui elle révèle exactement ce qu’il désire savoir. Or à ce moment, je fus précisément favorisé d’une telle apparition magique. [3:753])

Lacking a program, and unaware that the Septet exists, the narrator at first thinks, upon seeing a large group of musicians assembling to perform, that it must be the work of some other composer that will open the program, because as far as he knows, Vinteuil has only written a sonata for violin and piano (a work he knows well). If the appropriate person had been seated near to him, he would have leaned over and posed a question: what piece are they performing? A dangerous act, if you don’t know the person you are asking. What if they reply too loudly? What if they think you are an idiot? What if they are shocked that you have broken the expected code of silence? His mind wandering, daydreaming we might say, he imagines a genie or a pretty girl (and in fact it is characteristic of the narrator that listening to music frequently arouses libidinal currents, causing him to imagine pretty girls, or to think of Albertine in slightly erotic ways) arriving to orient him in his listening. What arrives is the famous little phrase of the Sonata, figured as the adolescent daughter of some friends whose garden you find yourself passing by at a moment when you thought you had gotten lost on your walk. Knowing which composer he is listening to orients our narrator’s attention in certain ways. He becomes fascinated by the experiential difference between listening to the Sonata, which he has done many times, and listening to the Septet, of whose existence he was previously unaware. His language is rich and endlessly fascinating. For our purposes, notice this passage in particular: And a cry was already piercing the air, a cry of seven notes, but the most unheard of, the most different from anything I could ever have imagined,

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something both unvoiceable and strident, no longer a murmuring of doves as in the sonata, but something that tore the air, as bright as the scarlet note that had suffused the opening bars, something like a mystic cock-­crow, an inexpressible but shrill call of eternal morning. [ . . . ] [The effect of the music] seemed to give material form to the coarsest joy. To tell the truth, I did not find this joy motif aesthetically pleasing; it seemed to be almost ugly, its rhythm bumped so heavily along the ground that one could have copied it in almost all essentials just by a certain way of banging sticks on a table. I felt that in this passage Vinteuil had been lacking in inspiration, and as a result I allowed my own attention to drift slightly. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 229–­30) (Et un chant perçait déjà l’air, chant de sept notes, mais le plus inconnu, le plus différent de tout ce que j’eusse imaginé, à la fois ineffable et criard, non plus roucoulement de colombe comme dans la sonate, mais déchirant l’air, aussi vif que la nuance écarlate dans laquelle le début était noyé, quelque chose comme un mystique chant du coq, un appel ineffable mais suraigu, de l’eternel matin. [ . . . ] [The effect of the music] semblait matérialiser la plus épaisse joie. À vrai dire, esthétiquement ce motif de joie ne me plaisait pas; je le trouvais presque laid, le rythme s’en traînait si péniblement à terre qu’on aurait pu en imiter presque tout l’essentiel, rien qu’avec des bruits, en frappant d’une certain manière des baguettes sur une table. Il me semblait que Vinteuil avait manqué là d’inspiration, et en conséquence, je manquai aussi là un peu de force d’attention. [3:754–­55])

It is at this moment, as his attention wanders, that the narrator’s eyes fall upon Mme Verdurin sitting upright in her chair, her posture and her hair conveying her investment in the music, her immobility an implicit critique of the nodding heads of others in the audience. And yet, their heads must be nodding at this same passage that has displeased the narrator because of its rhythm, too unsubtle or too foregrounded. Uninspired, the narrator has it. Thus is the narrator’s investment in this music, and his way of conveying it, diacritically related to those of Charlus and Mme Verdurin. He would be willing to whisper a comment to a neighbor while the music was playing if the limits of that exchange could be appropriately controlled. He, like Mme Verdurin, eschews any physical acknowledgment of the rhythmical features of the music—­this form of response being understood as unsophisticated, just as the appeal of rhythm, it is implied here, is too facile. So, we might imagine, for the narrator, the fact that the ignorant heads of a few of the elegant ladies of

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the Faubourg are bobbing at this particular moment in the concert is not only a sign of their unsophisticated relation to musical apprehension; it is also, at least for him at this moment, a sign of the compositional weakness of the music that they are hearing. We are back to what Bourdieu called the “social effect of the work, which is not a blanket effect, but is differential, since a work does not have the same effect on everyone.” Bourdieu continues: “This differential social effect holds revelations concerning the work of art. [ . . . ] Saying that there is an effect of the work of art is to say that some of the causes of this effect are there in the artwork” (M, 27). And this, it seems to me, is what Proust’s Search is interested in here, the way that “within” the Septet as it is being performed there are certain causes that produce the effects we see around the room: the position of Charlus’s gloves, the immobility of  Mme Verdurin’s spine, the nodding heads of the elegant but unsophisticated listeners, the wandering attention of the narrator. Bourdieu suggests that one analytical task, a socioanalytic one, faced with a work such as the Vinteuil Septet or a painting by Manet is to “try to see in these works something that will allow us to explain these effects.” To undertake such a task would be to undertake “an investigation [une recherche] regarding what we might call the symbolic charge of the work” (M, 27). I won’t here develop the way in which Proust’s novel commits itself to investigating what Bourdieu calls “the symbolic charge” of various kinds of musical works (particularly the kinds of works associated with people such as Fauré or Franck), how their way of mobilizing and balancing the resources of melodic and rhythmic development, how certain ways of refusing the obvious and the well known in terms of both harmonic progression and compositional form, contribute to their ability to produce the differential effect that Bourdieu discusses and that Proust’s novel represents. Notice though, the ways in which all of those considerations lie behind a passage like the following, which occurs further along in the extended description of the performance of the Vinteuil Septet: Hesitantly it approached [a musical phrase], disappeared as if startled, then returned and began to link arms with others arriving, as I was to learn later, from other works, called together still others which quickly became equally appealing and persuasive as they became more familiar, and entered into the dance, the heavenly dance which remained invisible to the majority of listeners who, seeing before them only a confused mist behind which they could discern nothing, punctuated with random, admiring exclamations an unending boredom of which they thought they would die. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 238)

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(Hésitante, elle [une phrase de Vinteuil] s’approcha, disparut comme effarouchée, puis revint, s’enlaça à d’autres, venues, comme je le sus plus tard, d’autres oeuvres, en appela d’autres qui devenaient à leur tour attirantes et persuasives aussitôt qu’elles étaient apprivoisées, et entraient dans la ronde, dans la ronde divine mais restée invisible pour la plupart des auditeurs, lesquels n’ayant devant eux qu’un voile confus au travers duquel ils ne voyaient rien, ponctuaient arbitrairement d’exclamations admiratives un ennui continu dont ils pensaient mourir. [3:764])

Notice all that is implicit here: that the narrator is the kind of  listener who studies musical works in order to enhance his understanding of them, and will be studying this one in detail in the near future (“arriving, as I was to learn later, from other works”), that the thematic complexity of Vinteuil’s compositional style, and his technique of reusing material from one work in another means that repeated listening to his works as a whole, rather than focused attention on any individual work, seems to be what his works “ask for,” and that, because of the complexity of his way of treating thematic or melodic material and his way of creating a system of cross-­referencing between different works of his, his compositional style poses significant challenges to a casual listener, even a practiced casual listener, who may well find nothing to listen to (“an unending boredom of which they thought they would die”). One of the questions I have been dealing with in this chapter is how an expe­ rience of social reality might be communicated in a novel like Proust’s, in particular an experience of that aspect of the social world that makes it a “space of immanent tendencies.” How can a novel provide us with an experience of social topographies and their evolutions? I mentioned earlier Bourdieu’s iden­ tification of what he called “a realist formalism” and his assertion (he was speaking of Baudelaire and Flaubert in particular) that in certain circumstances, in certain hands, “it is pure work on pure form, a formal exercise par excellence, that causes to surge up, as if by magic, a real more real than that which is offered directly to the senses and before which the naïve lovers of reality stop” (Rules, 107). The “real more real” in question is that place where one might find explanations for the differential experience of a work of art such as the Septet. Let us now return to a passage from Bourdieu that we looked at earlier to continue to explore how Search pursues this kind of sociological analysis: The research that could be called formal and that bears upon the composition of the work, the articulation of the stories of different characters, the correspondence between the setting or situations and the behaviors or “character

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types,” as well as on the rhythm or the color of phrases, the repetitions and assonances that must be hunted out, the received ideas and conventional forms that must be eliminated, is all part of the conditions of the production of a reality effect more profound than the one analysts ordinarily designate by this term. [ . . . ] It is through this work on form that the work comes to contain those structures that the writer, like any social agent, carries within him in a practical way, without having really mastered them, and through which is achieved the anamnesis of all that ordinarily remains buried, in an implicit or unconscious state, underneath the automatisms of an emptily revolving language. (Rules, 108)

What I would like to suggest here is that the anamnesis of the shaping effects of the social world and of the determinants of the immanent tendencies that produce its topography are present in Proust’s novel in all of the formal features Bourdieu mentions and in at least one more. The novel carefully links the performance of the Vinteuil Septet that we have been looking at to a number of its own thematic features, all of which are interlaced in a way rather like the way the narrator describes the themes of the Septet itself dancing together: there are the social ambitions of the Verdurins, and the way they shape and instrumentalize their own aesthetic preferences in order to give their salon its appeal; there is the intimate attachment that exists (at least until the end of the evening) between Charlus and the violinist Morel; there is the fact that the score of the Septet was itself reconstructed and edited by the girlfriend of Vinteuil’s daughter: the score to be played, the musicians to play it, the patrons to arrange the performance, the salon in which it happens, and the audience that attends the performance are thus all carefully produced and articulated in the novel in a way that suggests Proust’s attentiveness to the kind of multivariable calculus of socially pertinent variables (sexuality, class, age, educational background, gender, status) that shapes social topographies, but also the chances of and the contours of any given aesthetic experience. The formal feature of Search that still needs to be mentioned in this context is the construction of the first-­person narrator in his differential relation to so many other characters—­as we have seen here, in particular, his own aesthetic stance in relation to those of Mme Verdurin and the Baron de Charlus. That is, the work on language that produces the language of the narrator, and that produces the possibility that a reader might recognize all the kinds of person the narrator might be is compositional work, but compositional work that points readers not only back at the work itself but also to their own experience of their own social world. It is work on language

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(and also on other architectural or compositional features of the novel) that then requires of the reader an effort to experience the immanent tendencies of the social world indexed in the language and other structural features of the work itself. This often then involves experiencing the social aspect of utterances in features other than those bearing on their most immediate kind of (semantic) meaning—­experiencing utterances not in their meaning, but rather in what is invoked of the social world by their very use. (Not only language-­in-­use can be thought of in this multifunctional way, Search seems to be suggesting, but also other semiotic systems such as music. Musical performances can both provide the material that provokes various individual aesthetic responses and at the same time themselves index divisions within the social universe in which those responses occur.) A final citation from The Rules of Art: Finally, to make of writing a research project that is indissolubly formal and material, trying to use the words which best evoke, by their very form, the intensified experience of the real that they have helped to produce in the very mind of the writer, is to oblige the reader to linger over the perceptible form of the text, with its visible and sonorous material, full of correspondences with a real that is situated simultaneously in the order of meaning and in the order of the perceptible, instead of traversing it as if it were a transparent sign, read and yet unseen, in order to proceed directly to the meaning. It constrains the reader to discover there the intensified vision of the real that has been inscribed by the magical evocation involved in the work of writing. (109)

There is more meaning in the words we exchange (or in the musical sounds we make and listen to) and in the manner in which we exchange them than we could ever know or control. Often without even fully knowing it, we index, musically or in talk, the immanent structures of the social world and attempt to act upon them by speaking with others. The formal work of which Bourdieu speaks, and of which Proust’s Search is a compelling example, is work that asks us to notice this, to reexperience it, to react to it, to attend to something that happens in language all the time.

Becoming Distinctive In 1999 Bourdieu’s seminar at the Collège de France was called “L’Effet Manet.” It was about one month into the seminar, on February 3, 1999, that he observed the following:

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Whether one likes it or not, whether one knows it or not, to exist within a field is to produce with reference to your co-­producers. There is one particularly stupid thing among many that people claim I have said, which is that social agents, be they ordinary agents or artistic agents, act in order to distinguish themselves: and yet this is explicitly contradicted in Distinction. What is said there is that, try as they might, social agents do distinguish themselves from each other because they exist in a social space which is constituted as a symbolic space in which actions are perceived in terms of diacritical principles; they produce actions or works that, being immediately subjected to this diacritical perception, become distinctive, which is to say they may be taken as distinguished or as vulgar, the vulgar being as distinctive as the distinguished. The search for distinction is only one of a number of particular forms taken, in certain social categories, by the relation to this universal anthropological property which is that, no matter what it is we are doing, we distinguish ourselves. (M, 76)

Becoming distinctive is something that happens to works thanks to the actions of multiple agents and because of the fact that a cultural producer exists among co-­producers, between all of whom different kinds of diacritical differences come to exist, immediately in some cases, and over time in others. Much of what Proust’s Search studies regarding the distribution of different forms of aesthetic perception across a given social topography has a relation to what Bourdieu suggests in this passage. Before turning to the question of the stupid thing that Bourdieu wishes people wouldn’t claim he ever said, we might just notice how central what Bourdieu here calls diacritical perception is to the way Proust’s narrator takes in aesthetic objects, as, for example, when he describes what he imagines the composer Vinteuil to have been doing as he composed his Septet. In the passage in which he hears the Septet for the first time, the narrator notes that musicologists might, at some point in time, demonstrate how Vinteuil’s musical phrases are related to ones by earlier composers, but insists that such relations will only ever be of secondary importance. The direct impression of these musical phrases will, he insists, be different from any other, “as if, in spite of the conclusions which science seemed to be reaching, individuals did exist” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 234) (“comme si, en dépit des conclusions qui semblent se dégager de la science, l’individuel existait” [3:760]). That is to say, for the narrator, a suitably trained listener will distinguish Vinteuil’s musical works from anyone else’s, because there will be a diacritical difference that has come to exist between him and everyone else, a difference that marks him as an individual.

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For then Vinteuil, striving powerfully to produce something new, searched into himself, and with all the force of creative effort touched his own essence, at a depth where, whatever question one asks, the soul replies with the same accent—­its own. A particular accent, this accent of Vinteuil’s, separated from the accent of other musicians by a difference much greater than the one we perceive between the voices of different people [ . . . ] a real difference [ . . . ] for it is to a unique accent that those great singers, the original musicians, always return in spite of themselves, and it is proof of the irreducible individuality of each soul. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 235) (Car alors Vinteuil, cherchant puissamment à être nouveau, s’interrogeait lui-­même, de toute la puissance de son effort créateur atteignait sa propre essence à ces profondeurs où, quelque question qu’on lui pose, c’est du même accent, le sien propre, qu’elle répond. Un accent, cet accent de Vinteuil, séparé de l’accent des autres musiciens, par une différence bien plus grande que celle que nous percevons entre la voix de deux personnes [ . . . ] une véritable différence [ . . . ] c’est bien un accent unique auquel s’élèvent, auquel reviennent malgré eux ces grands chanteurs que sont les musiciens originaux, et qui est une preuve de l’existence irréductiblement individuelle de l’âme. [3:760–­61])

Whatever the narrator’s theories do or do not prove about the existence of the soul, they reveal a way of thinking about a field of cultural production that is organized around a principle of diacritical difference that the narrator refers to as “newness.” The narrator assigns this struggle for newness to the composer, but the point is also being made implicitly that this is a mode of perception that the narrator has inculcated in himself and that may differ from other modes of perception in the world around him, say, those of the musicologists he has just mentioned, who, rather than newness, are predisposed to hear the ways in which Vinteuil’s music sounds like other people’s. If Vinteuil’s works are distinctive, it would appear that it is not just anyone who can hear and therefore know this. It requires someone like the narrator, who is already primed to be listening in a certain way, just as it requires an implicit conception of a field of production structured around diacritical differences. Let me come back to Bourdieu for a moment, and verify that one thing he said in the passage I just cited above is accurate. Here is someone claiming that Bourdieu says what Bourdieu insisted he didn’t say:

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Bourdieu’s interpretation was that tastes were serving as strategic tools. While working-­class tastes seemed mainly a default (serving at best to express group belongingness and solidarity), for everyone else taste was not only a product of economic and educational background but, as it developed through life, a force mobilized as part of their quest for social status (or what Bourdieu called symbolic power). What we have agreed to call tastes, he said, is an array of symbolic associations we use to set ourselves apart from those whose social ranking is beneath us, and to take aim at the status we think we deserve. Taste is a means of distinguishing ourselves from others, the pursuit of distinction. And its end product is to perpetuate and reproduce the class structure.13

That is from Carl Wilson’s quite delightful book, Let’s Talk about Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste, which might also be titled, since this is what it is about: Why Doesn’t Everyone Hate Céline Dion as Much as I and Other People Like Me Do?14 It is apparently not among the governing conventions of music journalists actually to cite the thinkers whose positions they are representing, so we have no way of knowing what passage from Bourdieu Wilson might be claiming to paraphrase. It may be the case that Bourdieu at some point really did say something that Wilson’s description could be said to reflect accurately. But not, just for the record, in the following passage from Distinction: The logic of the functioning of the fields of cultural-­goods production, together with the distinction strategies which determine their dynamic, cause the products of their functioning, be they fashion designs or novels, to be predisposed to function differentially, as means of distinction, first between the class fractions and then between the classes. The producers can be totally involved and absorbed in their struggles with other producers, convinced that only specific artistic interests are at stake and that they are otherwise totally disinterested, while remaining unaware of the social functions they fulfil, in the long run, for a particular public, and without ever ceasing to respond to the expectations of a particular class or class fraction. (233–­34)

Bourdieu’s point would seem to be this: that what the narrator calls Vinteuil’s attempt to be new might correspond to his “struggles with other producers,” an aesthetic agenda that may govern the musical field that unites him with other composers in which his personal goal may be to sound only like himself. If he is to sound only like himself, there will need to exist someone, or some

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group of people, who can recognize the distinctive differences in his musical works and assign value to them. Such distinctive value may well not be audible to anyone, or only to a select few. It may take time for someone to acquire the ability to hear it. (The people to whom it is most important in Search seem to be the narrator and Vinteuil’s daughter’s girlfriend.) By becoming audible, it gains the potential to be correlated to other kinds of social divisions. Remember the narrator’s eyes falling upon Mme Verdurin’s rigorously immobile countenance during the performance of the Septet. Mme Verdurin refuses to nod, because to do so would be, we might say, vulgar. The aristocratic ladies are perhaps desperately nodding in time to a moment in Vinteuil’s composition, which they in general seem to be finding intensely soporific, because this moment provides enough rhythmic transparency to enable them to engage in a bit of physical movement that might help them stay awake, might make time move a bit more quickly. The narrator at the moment of his initial audition of the Septet is convinced of the aesthetic weakness of this moment in Vinteuil’s composition. One hundred or so pages later, however, he will seem to change his mind about this. In that later moment, he has undertaken to study the Septet in more detail using the technology of the pianola. Thanks to repeated listening, he comes to overwrite the impression of the composition that he gained on his first acquaintance: In the music I had heard at Mme Verdurin’s, certain phrases which I had not noticed at the time, mere formless larvae, now grew into dazzling, complex structures; and some which I had barely distinguished from the others, which at best had seemed to me ugly, became my friends, like those people to whom we do not “take” at first, and of whom we could never believe that they will turn out as they do when we come to know them well. Between these two states there was a real transmutation. On the other hand, some phrases which had been distinct even the first time, but which I had not recognized in this position, I could now identify with phrases in other works, like the phrase from the Religious Variations for organ which at Mme Verdurin’s had passed unnoticed in the septet, in which, however, like a saint who had come down the sanctuary steps, she found herself mingling with the fairies more familiar to the musician. On the other hand, the “bells at midday” phrase which had seemed to me too unmelodic, too mechanically rhythmical in its heavy-­footed joy, was now the one I loved the most, whether it was that I had become used to its ugliness, or that I had discovered its beauty. (Prisoner/ Fugitive, 345)

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(Dans la musique entendue chez Mme Verdurin, des phrases inaperçues, larves obscures alors indistinctes, devenaient d’éblouissantes architectures; et certaines devenaient des amies, que j’avais à peine distinguées, qui au mieux m’avaient paru laides et dont je n’aurais jamais crue, comme ces gens anti­ pathiques au début, qu’ils étaient tels qu’on les découvre, une fois qu’on les connaît bien. Entre les deux états il y avait une vraie transmutation. D’autre part, des phrases, distinctes la première fois, mais que je n’avais pas alors reconnues là,  je les identifiais maintenant avec des phrases des autres oeuvres, comme cette phrase de la Variation religieuse pour orgue qui chez Mme Verdurin avait passé inaperçue pour moi dans le septuour, où pourtant, sainte qui avait descendu les degrés du sanctuaire, elle se trouvait mêlée aux fées familières du musicien. D’autre part, la phrase qui m’avait paru trop peu mélodique, trop mécaniquement rythmée de la joie titubante des cloches de midi, maintenant c’était celle que j’aimais le mieux, soit que je me fusse habitué à sa laideur, soit que j’eusse découvert sa beauté. [3:875–­76])

Sustained study of  Vinteuil’s Septet has changed the narrator’s taste—­not necessarily because he was trying to distinguish himself from anyone else, but because he was pursuing his own musical interests. But the result is that his understanding becomes more distinctive. Since a particular characteristic of Vinteuil’s style is that he recycles and resignifies thematic material from work to work, the narrator’s more thorough study allows him to acquire new forms of specialized knowledge, charting the movement of thematic material from composition to composition and finding descriptive language for distinguishing the different contexts of their use. Most interesting for our purposes, however, is his relation to that moment in the Septet that set those heads nodding and that caused Mme Verdurin resolutely to engage all the necessary parts of her musculature to ensure immobility in the face of this rhythm. Now this very musical moment has become the narrator’s favorite moment in the whole piece, and yet he cannot decide if it is an ugly moment or a beautiful one. A field of cultural production, Bourdieu reminds us, is always offering up works that give us the occasion either to reaffirm or to rethink our taste. The field of production, which clearly could not function if it could not count on already existing tastes, more or less strong propensities to consume more or less clearly defined goods, enables taste to be realized by offering it, at each moment, the universe of cultural goods as a system of stylistic possibilities from which it can select the system of stylistic features constituting a life-­style. (D, 230)

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What Search shows us is the narrator realizing his taste by way of his ongoing relation to the Vinteuil Septet. If the producer of an artistic object works within a particular field of production that is organized diacritically, but in which the diacritical differences could perhaps be said to include ones that are professionalized or disinterested, then it might be possible to imagine that the project of realizing one’s taste by means of a particular distinctive work shares those same qualities—­producing a professionalized listener, whose ears seem attuned to those musical qualities that are essential to the forms of diacritical difference most actively in play in the field of cultural production in question. The narrator, we might note, implicitly asserts that his mode of perception in relation to Vinteuil’s Septet has a more compelling normative claim than does that of Mme Verdurin, while also recognizing that her mode ranks higher than that of the “dames du Faubourg” of the nodding heads. We can also see here part of the reason why it is important to think of musical compositions as time-­based works in Proust—­not only because it takes time to perform them, but because they have to be reperformed and reexperienced so that the time of apprenticeship in listening to them can happen for those disposed to undergo such an apprenticeship. Part of what Search studies is how the professionalization of the narrator’s listening over time becomes imbricated in his own sense of social distinction as a critic of works of art—­a kind of distinction that almost becomes, we might say, scholarly (which is not to say that it is not also social). Indeed, taking up a scholarly, professional attitude toward aesthetic objects turns out to be one of the narrator’s primary ways of successfully asserting his social status, because he claims this scholarly stance gives him access to the true content of the works in question.15 What we might say we are being shown, as the narrator learns over time and with repeated listening what he likes about Vinteuil’s Septet, is a small part of the collective labor that aims to produce a normative understanding of an iconoclastic or innovative work, an understanding capable of insisting on and supporting the value of that work for a particular community of listeners, for a particular public. Of course, Proust’s novel has carefully shown us more than just the narrator’s response to the work. The narrator imagines the different likely response of certain musicologists. He depicts for us the varied responses of Charlus, the nodding women, and Mme Verdurin. He speculates for us about the labor of Vinteuil’s daughter’s girlfriend, who assembled the score of the Septet from the manuscripts Vinteuil left behind at his death. We could say that the work itself, as the novel imagines it, by provoking different responses, is shown to reveal something about the history of the field of cultural production from

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which it emerges and about the distribution of different modes of perception, different forms of uptake, different manners of use in the social world of its listeners. In this, we could say that Proust’s novel presents the Septet to us so that we can, in Bourdieu’s words, “study the effect that the work produced on the public” (M, 27). Toward the very end of Distinction, Bourdieu refers to Proust as someone “who never ceased to cultivate and also analyze cultivated pleasure” (D, 498). The passages about the Vinteuil Septet provide a clear example of this dual agenda. Bourdieu cites an early text of Proust’s where Proust writes that “true distinction, besides, always affects to address only distinguished persons who know the same customs, and it does not ‘explain’ ” (D, 499). We could perhaps say that the narrator feels he has been especially addressed by the Vinteuil Septet, but it has taken him some time to understand what the work was offering to him, without explaining, about its distinctiveness. He cannot nod along with the women from the Faubourg, but he realizes that what the music was saying was not vulgarly rhythmic, or not merely that; it was a more complex challenge: don’t nod, don’t refuse to nod, listen on a different level where the enjoyment has to do with recognizing that while there may be an ugliness (a vulgarity, a lack of distinction) in music that encourages nodding, there may be a refinement in appreciating music that only seems to encourage nodding in order to produce, on one level, a distinction between those who nod and who don’t, but on another level, a more important but less explicable distinction between the whole set of people nodding or not nodding, and another set, for whom they are both amateurish, engaged in a misunderstanding of the musical moment that is crafty enough to sort them into those two groups while discretely suggesting that the ultimate distinction would be to appreciate this moment without needing finally to decide if it is ugly or beautiful, because its value is elsewhere. But finally, we should probably remember, this is not what the novel suggests the Vinteuil Septet has achieved; it is the meaning the narrator decides he has heard there as he explores or realizes his own taste and imagines himself to be contributing to the becoming distinctive of the Septet he has fallen in love with in his own distinctive way.

Posterity A certain kind of work of art, we remember Proust’s narrator tells us at a one point, “has to create its own posterity” (Shadow, 106) (“Il faut que l’oeuvre [ . . . ] crée elle-­même sa postérité” [1:522]). The narrator imagines himself and people like him as Vinteuil’s posterity. Certainly the novel shows

218  Chapter Three

him to be someone concerned with revealing some kind of aesthetic meaning that is immanent in the Septet. Here is something Bourdieu says in his Manet seminars about the immanent content of an artwork: It is because the painter sets to his or her practice with her or his habitus, and not with intentions, that the work contains many more things than the painter could have wanted to place there. [ . . . ] All human actions have much more meaning than agents can ever consciously give them, because the genetic principle of these actions is laden with history, and because these actions unfold in situations that are themselves laden with history. All of this means that ev­ erything we do, everything we say, is loaded with a kind of surfeit of meaning. (M, 328–­29)

The artwork contains a good deal of unrealized meaning waiting to be brought out in the encounter with readers or listeners or viewers with the appropriate predispositions to respond to its provocations. Somehow certain kinds of works also contain instructions on how to go about discerning their “legitimate” meanings, preferred ways of being understood or appreciated. Bourdieu’s description from early in Distinction of that state of affairs is as follows: Any legitimate work tends in fact to impose the norms of its own perception and tacitly defines as the only legitimate mode of perception the one which brings into play a certain disposition and a certain competence. Recognizing this fact does not mean constituting a particular mode of perception as an essence, thereby falling into the illusion which is the basis of recognition of artistic legitimacy. It does mean taking note of the fact that all agents, whether they like it or not, whether or not they have the means of conforming to them, find themselves objectively measured by those norms. At the same time it becomes possible to establish whether these dispositions and competences are gifts of nature, as the charismatic ideology of the relation to the work of art would have it, or products of learning, and to bring to light the hidden conditions of the miracle of the unequal class distribution of the capacity for inspired encounters with works of art and high culture in general. (D, 28–­29)

One could say that certain works and certain kinds of publics collaborate over time to generate a legitimate approach to them that grounds their claim on posterity. But of course works usually don’t just have or develop one kind of meaning. Legitimacy becomes part of what is at stake, what distinguishes

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certain forms of uptake from others. Works, after all, develop multiple and often contradictory meanings for different publics across time.16 We could say that Bourdieu and Proust call our attention to an interactive artistic or musical text, an interactive text collectively produced over time, but also an interactive process that is potentially itself conflictual. The way of reading Proust’s Search that I have been proposing here, is, of course, interactive both with the text and multiple social worlds, and also distinctive—­whether anyone wants it to be or not. I hope I am making a convincing case that the novel calls out for the kind of reading I am offering, that it carries in its form. “A social object in its objectified [ . . . ] form presents itself as something that calls out to be taken up [reprise], to be reactivated by the appropriate habitus [habitus adéquat]” (HF, 39). What Bourdieu names reprise, I have been calling uptake. In this chapter my project has been to use the relation between Bourdieu’s work and Proust’s novel to try to perform a distinctive uptake of Search that it would seem the novel is asking for by means of various of its compositional features—­to embody part of one of the manifold “habitus adéquat[s]” it holds immanent within its pages, and to encourage you to do the same.

Interlude: Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk

Two novels by Nathalie Sarraute, Les fruits d’or (The Golden Fruits) and Entre la vie et la mort (Between Life and Death), from 1963 and 1968, respectively, pursue a Proustian kind of project, investigating aspects of talk’s work around literary objects. Sarraute’s novels can help us explore further the interrelations between the sociological content of aesthetic experience (Bourdieu’s concern in Distinction and elsewhere) and the functioning of indexicality in language-­in-­use as we have seen it described by linguistic anthropologists such as Silverstein.1 It was in her essay “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation” (“Conversation et sous-­conversation”), first published in 1956, that Sarraute described both the way her novelistic interests derive from Proust and how she imagines her explorations moving beyond his. “Proust [ . . . ] more than any other novelist [ . . . ] excelled in the very minute, exact, subtle, highly evocative descriptions of the play of features, the glances, the slightest intonations and inflections of voice in his characters,” Sarraute notes. (“Proust [ . . . ] a plus qu’aucun autre romancier excellé dans les descriptions très minutieuses, précises, subtiles, au plus haut degré évocatrices, des jeux de physionomie, des regards, des moindres intonations et inflexions de voix de ses personnages.”)2 The attention to these kinds of details is what allows one to distinguish between the two terms, the two levels of talk that Sarraute designates in the title of her essay. When Sarraute makes this distinction between conversation (which could be taken to be something like the denotational text someone like Silverstein refers to, the propositional or referential content that can be found in an exchange of utterances) and sous-­conversation (which would seem to include both the

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implicit content of utterances and also the other kinds of effects and meanings that utterances can produce via the indexical functioning of linguistic signs), she is making a distinction we have already encountered, in the passage from Proust’s Contre Sainte-­Beuve on the dessous of  Jacques Collin’s utterances to Lucien de Rubempré: “each word, each gesture, thus has depths [dessous] that Balzac does not warn the reader about, and they are admirably profound. They are the result of a psychology that is incredibly particular and, since no one but Balzac has ever rendered it, it is a somewhat delicate matter to point them out” (“chaque mot, chaque geste, a ainsi des dessous dont Balzac n’avertit pas le lecteur et qui sont d’une profondeur admirable. Ils relèvent d’une psychologie si spéciale et qui, sauf par Balzac, n’a jamais été faite par personne, qu’il est assez délicat de les indiquer” [273]). In discussing this passage in an earlier interlude, I observed that we could take it as the expression of an interest in the play of indexicality in the space between denotational and interactive texts, in the play between what the words uttered “mean” on the semantic level and all the other kinds of meaning that occur through their use. I noted that the passage strongly suggested the ways in which Proust’s attentiveness to this kind of interplay would have been heightened by his own experience of the delicacy and difficulty of verbal communication related to forms of sexuality that could not easily be expressed openly. Sarraute shares with Proust an interest in what she calls the décalage (discrepancy) between the two levels of verbal communication she identifies, but she considers that Proust’s narrator is too invested in explicitly pointing to such discrepancies: Should there be the slightest discrepancy between the conversation and the sub-­conversation, should they not entirely cover each other, he immediately intervenes; at times, before the character speaks, at others, as soon as he has spoken, to show all he sees, explain all he knows; and he leaves no uncertainty except that which he himself is bound to feel, in spite of all his endeavors, his privileged position, the powerful instruments of investigation he has forged. (108) (Qu’il y ait entre la conversation et la sous-­conversation le plus léger décalage, qu’elles ne se recouvrent pas tout à fait, et aussitôt il intervient, tantôt avant que le personnage parle, tantôt dès qu’il a parlé, pour montrer tout ce qu’il voit, expliquer tout ce qu’il sait, et il ne laisse au lecteur d’autre incertitude que celle qu’il est forcé d’avoir lui-­même, malgré tous ses efforts, sa situation privilégiée, les puissants instruments d’investigation qu’il a créés. [1602–­3])

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Sarraute underlines a difference between her novelistic practice and Proust’s. She aims to create a text in which this kind of discrepancy between what language is saying and what it is doing is something readers will experience without necessarily having their attention explicitly directed to it through commentary. (Still, if there is not, in these novels of Sarraute’s, a narrator who actively comments on talk’s work, it turns out that characters themselves do.) Sarraute, we might say, wants to build a certain experience of interactivity into her texts. Both the aesthetic and the sociological complexity of achieving this aim will also be something her novels take up, as we shall see. Her interest in the interactive potential of a written text is one of my main reasons for discussing her here. Consider now the range of phenomena the word décalage might need to capture. At first glance, we might take it to mean a kind of discrepancy in meaning caused by the kinds of phenomena we call irony or innuendo or obliquity or indirection in which someone is using words that mean one thing on the most obvious denotational level while implicitly communicating some other message only to knowing ears (as might be the case in verbal communications and negotiations around sexuality). But this understanding of décalage does not suffice for what we find in Sarraute or Proust. If we want to understand all the consequences of language use that we encounter in Proust or Sarraute (or Cusk), as we have seen numerous times in the preceding pages, we have to be able to take into account the kinds of work language-­in-­use performs that exceed or precede or accompany any intention or motive the speakers themselves might hold. In his essay “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized: The Shapes of Discourse,” Silverstein, in describing verbal interaction, refers to “an emergently coherent (or at least non-­incoherent) denotational text—­‘what has been/will have been said’ in-­and-­by discourse in the way of communicating propositional or representational meaning,” which exists in tandem with “an emergently coherent (or at least non-­incoherent) interactional text—­‘what has been/ will have been done’ in-­and-­by discourse in the way of relevantly consequential social action.” As he observes, “the ‘meaning’ of any stretch of discourse—­let alone that of a complete discursive interaction—­includes both, of course, and the two kinds of meaningfulness are intimately related and governed by criteria of  how denotation projects into interaction in determinate ways, the discovery of which is one task of linguistic anthropology.”3 It is a task novels also set themselves. What Sarraute called décalage, Silverstein labels projection: the sounds and signs of utterances stretch indexically—­project themselves—­into

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a realm of consequential meaning and social action that operates across many different scales. Noticing this “consequential social action” includes noticing, in Silverstein’s words, “how one presumes upon and establishes and ratifies social iden­ tities as relevant to an interaction in-­and-­by how we use language and other behaviors as the mediating codes of social coordination” (TEA, 57). Think of  Woolf ’s Martin trying to be who he is at dinner in conversation with Ann Hillier or Balzac’s Cousin Pons trying to sustain his relations with his relatives, or Proust’s historian trying to be someone in the eyes of the Duc de Guermantes. It includes projects of accumulating or maintaining social capital. Think of Mme de Cambremer or Mme Verdurin or Mme de Gallardon or the narrator himself when they speak in a variety of social circumstances. It includes (again citing Silverstein) “the everyday business of sustaining the wider, presumptively shared sociocultural reality in which [individuals] feel their interactions are immersed and from which they derive their purpose and significance” (TEA, 55). Think of the way Eliot describes the functions of talk in sustaining the social world of Middlemarch, or Proust’s detailed representations of the reproduction of various sectors of the social world through talk in salons, at dinner parties, or at soirees of various kinds. We will see that Cusk’s novels too are deeply engaged—­but in a different manner—­with this particular aspect of language-­in-­use. The range of actions that happen through the work of talk would thus seem to be larger than the range of things we might normally include in considering “how to do things with words.” That is, “ ‘what has been/will have been done’ in-­and-­by discourse in the way of relevantly consequential social action,” viewed from a linguistic anthropological perspective, will be a wider and richer phenomenon than what has come in literary and cultural studies to be called the performative use of language (punctual or reiterative speech acts through which people do something—­or aim to do something—­in the saying of it); those actions or happenings that are often referred to as performative are perhaps some kind of a subset of the many things that happen through the mobilization of the indexical aspect of language. We have learned to think about performative speech acts by thinking about explicit performative verbs (I promise, I refuse, I pronounce) or by words like hereby. You are hereby cautioned. Austin: “ ‘Hereby’ is a useful criterion that the utterance is performative.”4 Hereby produces an indexical entailment, we could say. It tells us something about the genre of the utterance; the utterance is not describing, but acting. Yet indexical entailments are everywhere and are more various than

224  Interlude

normal construals of performativity allow for.5 Let us consider an example of indexical entailment from Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits. In her novels, Sarraute infamously and frequently shows language acting—­as if it were some kind of object, a weapon, a jet of acid, a projectile (somewhat along the lines of the cry of “Gilberte” with which I began this book)—­impacting the psychologies and the bodies of different participants in a linguistic exchange. Often, in so acting, language, for Sarraute, draws people into some kind of group, or pushes them to the margins of a group, or exiles them from it. Sarraute’s novels frequently describe the feeling of this happening to individual participants, but in doing so they also study how language works to do this (often subliminally—­the uptake of indexical force as Sarraute portrays it is usually not something that happens with full, or even partial, consciousness). The Golden Fruits describes people constantly grouping and regrouping themselves by way of discourse they interactively produce about a novel they have all been reading (or perhaps pretending to read), also called The Golden Fruits. Here is a moment when a group of people are together, two of whom have an unfavorable opinion of the novel, which leads someone else to speak in the novel’s defense; another person then expresses what it feels like to align with the discourse of the person defending the novel: lively, frolicking, I escape, I do, here’s where I cling, I clutch at just anything, I don’t let go, a mere twig supports me, I’m so light, so frothy, I sparkle and shine, champagne, quicksilver . . . I remain suspended in air, I take hold of just anything . . . “privileged language,” “very new,” “perfect rhythmic signs,” “tensions,” “takeoffs,” “a-­temporal dimension,” “poem” . . . Words that leap and bound, words, lighter than down, to which I hang, impalpable, transparent words, rhythms, flights, takeoffs, they lift me up, I’m flying higher, I rise through seas of clouds, higher and higher, toward pure skies, azure skies, immaculate whiteness, suns, beatitudes, ecstasies . . . “How true it is, what you say, and how well you demonstrate it. A really poetic work. Ah, you are right, we are more than gratified.” (74) (vif, batifolant, je m’échappe, moi, ici je m’accroche, j’agrippe n’importe quoi, je ne le lâche pas, une brindille me porte, je suis si léger, tout mousseux, je pétille et brille, du champagne, du vif-­argent . . . je me tiens suspendu en l’air, je saisis n’importe quoi . . . “langage privilégié,” “très neuf,” “parfaits signes rythmiques,” “tensions,” “envols,” “dimension intemporelle,” “poème” . . . Mots bondissants, mots, auxquels, plus léger qu’un duvet, je me suspends, mots impalpables et transparents, rythmes, vols, envols, cela me soulève, je vole, je

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survole, je m’élève à travers des mers de nuages, toujours plus haut, vers des ciels purs, azurs, blancheurs immaculées, soleils, béatitudes, extases . . . “Que c’est vrai, ce que vous dites, comme vous le montrez bien. Une oeuvre vraiment poétique. Ah vous avez raison, nous sommes comblés.” [65–­66])

On the one hand, this person is describing a feeling of being uplifted by the discourse of another, a feeling of fulfillment, of being recognized by that discourse, a feeling of a sense of affiliation. The passage also shows that the means of enacting this affiliation involve the recognition of a particular linguistic register. This person identifies a register in the commentary they are listening to and then enacts a related register in their own remarks. If we hear, perhaps, some irony in the way this person’s rarified way of speaking is presented (“lively, frolicking, I escape [ . . . ] I sparkle and shine [ . . . ] pure skies, azure skies [ . . . ] beatitudes, ecstasies”), it is because their words (the entitled-­sounding register to which they belong) allow us to start to localize them within an implied social topography. The person producing this pretentious language in response to something they are hearing is signaling that they have recognized the register in which the defense of The Golden Fruits is being conducted. They affiliate with the defense of the novel by implicitly claiming to speak in the same register. While Sarraute often speaks of words as impacting people, and will often dwell on this or that particular word as it is spoken, she also frequently studies how talk’s work happens by way of nonsegmentable features of language such as accent, intonation, or register. In Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory, Ann Jefferson has observed that “the particular language system that is mobilised by a given speaker in a given context is always just one, socially marked, language system that is inevitably at odds with others. Linguistic differences are inseparable here from social differences, and differences of both these kinds have to be negotiated by individual subjects every time they speak.” Jefferson distinguishes Sarraute’s understanding of language use from a Saussurean one, and suggests thinking of it instead in Austinian terms: “The social and the individual are not the mutually exclusive alternative that Saussure presented them as being, and every utterance is always perceived as an active intervention in a social situation. Seen in this light, all language use has what the English language philosopher J. L. Austin calls an ‘illocutionary force,’ that is to say that a speech act is precisely that: an action performed by the utterance itself ” (8). I agree with the gist of  Jefferson’s position, but I would suggest that we might more profitably think of something like indexical force rather than illocutionary force. Frequently the effects of an utterance that impact a listener in Sarraute (or Proust or Woolf or Balzac or

226  Interlude

Eliot) have little to do with the intentions or motivations of the person speaking, or with the presumed ability of the listener to decipher those intentions and thereby classify the kind of illocutionary act the utterance is taken to be. An utterance has impact in Sarraute because of the way one of its features provokes a reaction in the listener due to an indexical relation between that feature of the utterance and some aspect of the context for that utterance that the interlocutors together bring into being.6 Indexical force, unlike illocutionary force, would not be a quality one imagines a particular speech act to hold in itself. It would be a demonstrable effect within an interaction on the emerging sense(s) of coherence within that interaction. It would result from the indexical invocation of some kind of a cultural concept or schema of values (of which a particular kind of register laying claim to literary sophistication might be an example) that would continue for some time to organize or regiment the ongoing interaction. Indexical force would be produced out of the way the denotative text projects indexically (to recall Silverstein’s turn of phrase) into the interactive text through its invocation of cultural factors previously only immanent within the surrounding cultural universe. It would exist contextually and interactively, and not on the level of the words themselves or the utterance itself, as illocutionary force is often taken to do. It requires the uptake of various participants, which is never guaranteed. This interactive phenomenon is, I think, the kind of thing Sarraute studies in novels like The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death. How precisely could one represent in a novel the presence of indexical force within discourse? How could something interactively produced be denoted? Linguistic anthropologists have confronted this problem (a problem of transcription) as well. Silverstein has written regarding typographical resources such as page layout, upper-­and lowercase letters, punctuation, didascalia, and the like, that “all of these graphic devices indicate, at best, a few of the most basic features of denotational textuality unfolding as the organization of words and expressions into functional units. The reader, attuned to genre conventions, must projectively develop an understanding of the interactional text thus implied” (TEA, 62). That is, readers who are being asked by a novelist or by a linguistic anthropologist to notice the way the indexical force attending a denotational text is being interactively efficacious require some kind of training or sensitivity or effort of imagination or relevant past experience to allow them to understand the various formal features of a printed (or on-­screen) text that are meant to imply or illustrate or produce interactive aspects of the discursive situation. As Silverstein notes, there will always be some kind of “selectivity

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in artifactualization” (TEA, 63). A transcript cannot include everything. And he wonders: “might we be able to transform the conventions for graphic representation in text-­artifacts so as to reveal what actually happens in the entextualization, the coming-­to-­textual formedness of discourse?” (TEA, 74). We can translate these questions of Silverstein’s into questions about how a novelist like Sarraute shifts convention for representing speech, thoughts, affects, and narrative commentary in order to produce the conditions for a certain kind of readerly experience of the interactive text. That is, we could imagine that what Sarraute sees herself as transforming in novelistic practice, how she sees herself as moving forward from Proust’s novelistic practice regarding the observation and analysis of language-­in-­use, has to do with the attempt at a transcription of indexical force. “It is a matter for some serious reflection just what about an event of communication is to be graphically represented in a transcript, and how the behavioral flow of discourse plus whatever else accompanies it is to be rendered in some suitable visual form in a text artifact,” Silverstein writes (TEA, 62). Sarraute notes in “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation” that “it is therefore permissible to dream—­without blinding ourselves to all that separates the dream from its reality—­of a technique that might succeed in plunging the reader into the stream of these subterranean dramas of which Proust only had time to obtain a rapid aerial view, and concerning which he observed and reproduced nothing but the broad motionless lines” (110–­11) (“il est donc permis de rêver—­sans se dissimuler tout ce qui sépare ce rêve de sa réalisation—­d’une technique qui parviendrait à plonger le lecteur dans le flot de ces drames souterrains que Proust n’a eu le temps que de survoler et dont il n’a observé et reproduit que les grandes lignes immobiles” [1604]). All the analyses of the previous chapters regarding Proust’s detailed description of interactive subtleties within even the smallest conversational moments might lead us to believe that Sarraute is unfair in her way of describing Proust as only interested in “the broad motionless lines” at the expense of the “countless, tiny movements which prepare the dialogue” (108) (“mouvements innombrables et miniscules qui préparent le dialogue” [1603]) that will become the center of attention for her own novelistic practice. That said, what is interesting to me about Sar­ raute’s novelistic practice is the way it is accompanied by writing such as “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation,” which works to help train her readers, to create forms of attention to the kind of experience of the dessous of  language that she wishes to capture, to help readers perceive what she is providing a transcript of. It requires, as Sarraute says, readerly “vigilance”:

228  Interlude

The reader [ . . . ] knows that here every word is of importance. The by-­words, the quotations, the metaphors, the ready-­made, pompous or pedantic expressions, the platitudes, vulgarities, mannerisms and pointless remarks with which these dialogues are cleverly studded are not, as they are in ordinary novels, distinctive signs that the author pins on the characters to make them more easily recognizable, more familiar and more “alive.” They are here, one feels, what they are in reality: the resultant of numerous, entangled movements that have come up from the depths, and which anyone perceiving them from the outside takes in at a glance, but which he has neither the time nor the means to separate and name. (115–­16) (Le lecteur [ . . . ] sait qu’ici chaque mot compte. Les dictons, les citations, les métaphores, les expressions toutes faites, ou pompeuses ou pédantes, les platitudes, les vulgarités, les maniérismes, les coq-­à-­l’âne qui parsèment habilement ces dialogues ne sont pas, comme dans les romans ordinaires des signes distinctifs que l’auteur épingle sur les caractères des personnages pour les rendre mieux reconnaissables, plus familiers et plus “vivants”: ils sont ici, on le sent, ce qu’ils sont dans la réalité: la résultante de mouvements montés des profondeurs, nombreux, emmêlés, que celui qui les perçoit au-­dehors embrasse en un éclair et qu’il n’a ni le temps ni le moyen de séparer et de nommer. [1606])

Remember Saint-­Loup’s “catastrophique,” “cosmique,” and “pythique.” They weren’t so much identifying emblems, novelistic stylizations of speech, as they were signs that Saint-­Loup was, in the way he put his speech together, trying to be a certain kind of person, someone different from but still tied to his relations; hearing him use them made the narrator perk up his ears and take note, and made the duchess laugh out loud. The very fact that your use of a word or a set of words could carry a force that might provoke someone to laughter (because, we might speculate, of their estimation of the improbability of those words successfully making you into a person other than the person they know you to be) signals some of the work talk can do. This is the kind of work that fascinates Sarraute, although she tends in her novels and in her essays to highlight less the comic and more the directly aversive signs of the different kinds of force talk’s work can bring to bear on listeners. In “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation,” she writes: For there is nothing to equal the rapidity with which [words] attain to the other person at the moment when he is least on his guard, often giving him merely a

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  229

sensation of disagreeable tickling or slight burning; or the precision with which they enter straight into him at his most secret and most vulnerable points, and lodge in his innermost recesses, without his having the desire, the means or the time to retort. But once they are deposited in him, they begin to swell, to explode, they give rise around them to waves and eddies which, in turn, come up to the surface and spread out in words. By virtue of this game of actions and reactions that they make possible, they constitute for the novelist a most valuable tool. (97–­98) (Car rien n’égale la vitesse avec laquelle [les paroles] touchent l’interlocuteur au moment où il est le moins sur ses gardes, ne lui donnant souvent qu’une sensation de chatouillement désagréable ou de légère brûlure, la précision avec laquelle elles vont tout droit en lui aux points les plus secrets et les plus vulnérables, se logent dans ses replis les plus profonds, sans qu’il ait le désir ni le moyen ni le temps de riposter. Mais déposées en lui, elles enflent, elles explosent, elles provoquent autour d’elles des ondes et des remous qui, à leur tour, montent, affleurent et se déploient au-­dehors en paroles. Par ce jeu d’actions et de réactions qu’elles permettent, elles constituent pour le romancier le plus précieux des instruments. [1597–­98])

Think of this as a description of a kind of experience of indexical force, the way words or other nonsegmentable features of utterances bring about an experience at once physiological, psychological, and sociological—­an experience that relies on a kind of indexical competence, the ability to hear (and so experience) the way these features of language invoke aspects of culture, cultural concepts, invoke or produce divisions in the social world, invoke or work to establish status and identity relations between the various participants in the linguistic exchange. I say physiological, psychological, and sociological because Sarraute and many critics who write about her seem to overemphasize the physiological and psychological aspects of her project. In my view, much of the interest of Sarraute’s work has to do with linguistic considerations only partially related to the indeterminate (and apparently mostly physiological and psychological) construct she calls the tropisme and that many critics take as being so unavoidably central to her work. It’s not that those critics seem to me wrong; it’s just that other things, linguistic anthropological things, are also happening—­being investigated—­in Sarraute’s writing, things that Sarraute may not have so explicitly addressed in her critical writing or interviews, but that are perfectly legible in the novels she wrote.7

230  Interlude

For the most part, Sarraute’s literary and linguistic fieldwork took place within the narrow confines of what we might call the cultured Parisian bourgeoisie. Her novels (even, it seems to me, the late ones like Ici and Ouvrez) investigate the interactivity of  language, how the exchange of  language produces effects that depend on some kind of loosely shared indexical competence among the people present regarding how this or that aspect of an utterance invokes, makes part of the exchange, a feature of the context of the utterance, meanings and values that are in no way explicit or denotational. Often Sarraute shows us these values as they arise within an individual consciousness, but as she writes in “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation,” These inner dramas [ . . . ] cannot do without a partner. Often it is an imaginary partner who emerges from our past experiences, or from our daydreams, and the scenes of love or combat between us, by virtue of their wealth of adventure, the freedom with which they unfold and what they reveal concerning our least apparent inner structure, can constitute very valuable fictional material. [ . . . ] For this flesh-­and-­blood partner is constantly nurturing and renewing our stock of experiences. He is pre-­eminently the catalyzer, the stimulant, thanks to whom these movements are set in motion, the obstacle that gives them cohesion, that keeps them from growing soft from ease and gratuitousness, or from going round and round in circle in the monotonous indigence of ruminating on one thing. (93–­94) (Ces drames intérieurs [ . . . ] ne peuvent se passer de partenaire. Souvent c’est un partenaire imaginaire surgi de nos expériences passées ou de nos rêveries, et les combats ou les amours entre lui et nous, par la richesse de leurs péripéties, par la liberté avec laquelle ils se déploient et les révélations qu’ils apportent sur notre structure intérieure la moins apparente, peuvent constituer une très précieuse matière romanesque.  [  .  .  .  ] C’est ce partenaire en chair et en os qui nourrit et renouvelle à chaque instant notre stock d’expériences. C’est lui le catalyseur par excellence, l’excitant grâce auquel ces mouvements se déclenchent, l’obstacle qui leur donne de la cohésion, qui les empêche de s’amollir dans la facilité et la gratuité ou de tourner en rond dans la pauvreté monotone de la manie. [1595–­96])

What Sarraute seems to be suggesting is that we develop our indexical competence (our ability to be competent to understand—­and/or to be affected by—­ the dessous of a conversation) by privately enacting imaginary exchanges with people we have met in the world or people we imagine who are somehow like

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  231

people we have met in the world. We practice talking to others in talking to ourselves (we will see in the conclusion that this is an insight Sarraute shares with Proust), and when we talk to ourselves, we are doing so in an attempt to imagine how we sound, or to imagine the consequences of how we sound, for example, whether we should say something a little bit differently to this or that person, because the small difference feels significant on the level of indexical force. When we read, there is a way in which we “hear” the indexical force behind the words, but in order to do so, perhaps we must construct some kind of a social and psychological profile of an imagined speaker to hear the force of the language such a speaker would employ. It might be a question of understanding the implications of which form of a verb is used, as in this scene from The Golden Fruits, where seeing an imperfect subjunctive on one of the book’s pages causes a reader to imagine to themselves the indexical entailments of the usage of that form: Like those large artfully distributed flowers that hold aloft their stiff, serried petals on a faultlessly mown, velvety, thickset lawn, a long, ponderous imperfect of the subjunctive unfurls with regal assurance, in the middle of a page read at random, of a smooth, closely knit sentence, the clumsiness of its enormous ending. But this subjunctive, with its stiff, overloaded terminations, which the brisk, supple rhythm of the sentence lifts with no effort, is more like the embroidered train of a heavily brocaded gown, that a nervous little foot kicks aside, while a delicate powdered head bends over ceremoniously and draws up again with haughty courtesy. Gesture to which any well-­born person responds at once, quite naturally, by a deep bow. Heavy, slightly ridiculous forms of the modes of other times which, when taken over by a couturier of genius, and refined by him, reduced to their pure substance, to their quintessence, astutely dosed, lend a nostalgic charm, at once youthful and out of date, to the mode of today. In this imperfect of the subjunctive, this slightly ridiculous, unwieldy caudal appendix, the finest ramifications of our minds converge, like the nerve fibers on the end of a scorpion’s fearsome tail: its sensitive point stretches, slackens, then shoots out something extremely tenuous, almost intangible, a barely discernible virtuality, an imperceptible intention. (34–­35) (Comme ces grosses fleurs disséminées avec art qui dressent leurs pétales rigides et épais sur un gazon impeccablement tondu, soyeux et dru, un long et lourd imparfait du subjonctif déploie avec une assurance royale, au milieu

232  Interlude

de cette page lue au hasard, de cette phrase lisse et serrée, la gaucherie de sa désinence énorme. Mais il est plutôt, ce subjonctif aux finales raides et surchargées que le mouve­ ment vif et souple de la phrase soulève sans effort, pareil à la traîne chamarrée d’une pesante robe de brocart qu’un petit pied nerveux rejette, tandis qu’une fine tête poudrée s’incline cérémonieusement et se redresse avec une courtoisie hautaine. Révérence à laquelle toute personne bien née, aussitôt, tout naturellement, répond par un profond salut. Lourdes formes un peu ridicules des modes d’autrefois qu’un couturier de génie reprend et qui, épurées par lui, réduites à leur pure substance, à leur quintessence, savamment dosées, donnent à la mode actuelle un charme nostalgique, à la fois juvénile et suranné. Dans cet imparfait du subjonctif, appendice caudal un peu ridicule et encombrant, les plus fines ramifications de notre esprit viennent aboutir, comme les filets nerveux au bout de la queue redoutable du scorpion: sa pointe sensible s’étire, se détend et pique vivement quelque chose d’extrêmement ténu, de presque impalpable—­une virtualité à peine discernable, une imperceptible intention. [30–­31])

It is a virtuoso passage, Flaubertian, we might say, in its indirection, in its way of representing the mental processes that accompany the uptake of a verb form such as parlassent or connussions or parvinssiez when it is encountered on a printed page. The final paragraph of this description seems somehow to become a metafictional moment, describing more from the point of view of the narrator than from that of the person whose point of view is being represented the process of experiencing (as the verb form is perceived, as it is cognized) something virtual that its usage invokes. That is, this final paragraph thematizes what the experience of a certain kind of indexical force is, the provocation (the sting) produced out of a set of cultural associations, the emergence—­through the uptake of some feature of an utterance—­of a context with a rich set of coordinates that are both personal and sociological by means of which you are invited to position yourself in some social world. And this is what appears to have happened in the previous few paragraphs. The imperfect subjunctive has suggested wealth and status, a well-­maintained property, a kind of ostentation that might in itself  be offensive, vulgar and ridiculous, were its surroundings not somehow to indicate that it was used knowingly, with an effort to balance out the clumsy weight it seems to carry with a sense of care, of lightness, of nostalgia, of assurance, of entitlement—­all of which you are invited to share if you so choose.

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  233

If you do share in the set of virtual values that you imagine to be related to the use of the imperfect subjunctive, or as related to the register of which that verb form would be a part, you might then generate more language that you imagine contributes to the perpetuation of those values: No critic will ever praise enough, ever prescribe with enough severity this written language that sifts, refines, purifies, compresses between its firm somewhat rigid contours, arranges, constructs, hardens what should endure. (35) (Aucun critique ne vantera jamais assez, n’imposera jamais avec assez de rigueur cette langue écrite qui tamise, raffine, épure, resserre entre ces contours fermes, un peu rigides, ordonne, structure, durcit ce qui doit durer. [31])

There is a kind of language ideology here (generated by the character, iro­­ nized by the narrator), a sense of the importance of a particular written register, one that, it seems, provides distinction to the person capable of manipulating it successfully and ensures the perpetuation of a set of conservative social values, or at least reassures this reader of the durability of such values.8 Such a language ideology is reproduced and thereby maintained, we could say, in and by way of certain specific instances of the uptake of a given text. The Golden Fruits seems particularly invested in the idea that the very cultural competence that would allow for a certain kind of uptake of a literary text is itself unevenly shared, is some kind of sociologically distinctive commodity. Within Sarraute’s novel, acts of inculcating such competence, acts that assert the particular metapragmatic framework that would allow for a text’s attitude, or tone, or ideology to be correctly heard, often have a kind of social cruelty built into them. This is precisely because the uneven distribution of certain kinds of cultural competence is itself being reproduced. Indeed, the very notion of competence itself becomes contentious. Where some might hear studied refinement in the diction of the novel they are all reading, others might hear pretentiousness, false sophistication, and an absence of substance: Very pretentious. Hence its success. Full of false mystery. Of “deep ideas.” In an exalted, slightly hermetic style . . . to give it tone . . . which often conceals . . . shall I tell you what . . . you’re going to think it’s a scream: great banality of thought and sentiment . . . and lots of platitudes . . . At times it’s really startling. (106–­7)

234  Interlude

(Très prétentieux. D’où ce succès. Plein de faux mystère. De “grands thèmes.” Dans un style surélevé, un peu hermétique . . . ça fait mieux . . . qui masque souvent . . . je vais vous dire quoi . . . vous allez trouver ça tordant: une grande banalité de pensée, de sentiments . . . beaucoup de platitude . . . C’en est par moments stupéfiant. [94])

This is apparently the view of a reader from out of town, one who considers himself an astute, educated, and refined reader of literature; he is someone who, when visiting Paris, enjoys poking fun at the pseudo-­sophistication of the locals, who have a propensity, he seems to feel, to be too easily taken in by the latest literary fad. Our skeptical reader takes the way his Parisian acquain­ tances read to be biased by their desire to appear sophisticated and elevated in their taste, as compared to other readers, a desire that, in this case, has backfired, or so this skeptical reader claims. They have been taken in by fake goods. Until, that is, one of the sophisticated Parisian readers he knows informs him that the novel is, of course, written in a style that is meant to seem pretentious without actually being so. It has been done on purpose: “On purpose. It’s done on purpose. Come now, how is it possible you don’t see that?” The blow makes him stagger, he sees clusters of sparks, he sees stars. He tries to hold to just anything to keep from falling . . . “How do you mean on purpose? But listen to me, that’s not an excuse . . . If the writer did it on purpose, so much the worse for him . . .” He pulls himself up . . . “If  he writes platitudes, on purpose or not, he has no taste, and that’s that.—­Well, believe it or not, he writes without taste on purpose.” This fresh blow makes him totter, he hangs on . . . “But then, you ought to feel it.—­Everybody does feel it, except you. People who know something about it, in any case, don’t mistake it.” (109–­110). (“Exprès. C’est fait exprès. Voyons, comment ne le voyez-­vous pas?” Le coup le fait tituber, il voit des gerbes d’étincelles, il a trente-­six chandelles devant les yeux. Il essaie de se retenir à n’importe quoi pour ne pas tomber . . . “Comment exprès? Mais écoutez-­moi, ce n’est pas une excuse . . . Si l’auteur l’a fait exprès, tant pis pour lui . . .” Il se redresse . . . “S’il écrit des platitudes, exprès ou non, il manque de goût, voilà tout.—­Mais il le fait exprès, figurez-­ vous, de ne pas faire preuve de goût.” Le nouveau coup le fait chanceler, il se cramponne . . . “Mais alors, il faut qu’on le sente.—­Mais tout le monde le sent, sauf vous. Les gens qui s’y connaissent un peu, en tout cas, ne s’y trompent pas.” [97])

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  235

One might remember here Flaubert’s famous project in Madame Bovary, described by him in a letter to Louise Colet on September 12, 1853: To write mediocrity well and at the same time to be sure that it keeps its own look, its cut, its very words, that’s diabolically difficult.—­and I see at least thirty pages of this kind of niceties processing away in a line in front of me!—­style is something that costs one dearly. (Bien écrire le médiocre et faire qu’il garde en même temps son aspect, sa coupe, ses mots même, cela est vraiment diabolique.—­et je vois se défiler maintenant devant moi de ces gentillesses en perspective pendant 30 pages au moins!—­ça s’achète cher, le style!)9

How do you write so that banality or mediocrity can be perceptible in your writing, but not assignable to you? How, as a reader, do you decide if something is banal or mediocre in the writing, and then decide if that banality has been placed on display intentionally or accidentally? How can mediocrity be well written? Some kind of special readerly competence is clearly involved in making these determinations. It could be that the writing signals (indexically) some kind of second-­order or metapragmatic function and assumes that some readers are equipped to notice that signaling being done, equipped to recognize the writing as belonging to a genre with which they are already familiar in which somehow inadequacy is understood to be displayed knowingly. It could be that the very name Flaubert comes, over time, to serve as precisely such an index because of the way information about his projects has circulated through chains of readers. Flaubert’s own statements in his letters have come, as they have circulated over time, to help maintain the existence of a metapragmatic framing for his own writing in Madame Bovary and elsewhere. But if you are as of yet unaware of that framing, you might become a victim of what Dominique Rabaté has referred to as “Flaubert’s terrorist project [ . . . ] to leave everything permanently within quotation marks, an ironic ventriloquist of all the most hackneyed commonplaces, and of bourgeois pseudo-­ideas.”10 What if you, as a reader of Madame Bovary, only noticed its way of attending to mediocrity and didn’t notice the “bien écrire” that accompanied that attention? What if you found Madame Bovary to be a mediocre novel and said so? When the author of the novel being discussed in The Golden Fruits uses an imperfect subjunctive, or formulates some platitude or other, how is one to know if it is done knowingly, or with artistry, or if it is, in fact, a sign of foolishness, pretentiousness, inadequacy, aesthetic inferiority?11 This is not exactly

236  Interlude

the problem that Sarraute pursues in her own novel. She reveals, rather, how claims on either side of such a debate would necessarily call upon the experience of (competence in) things like genre or register or metapragmatic function, heavily indexical features of language use. They would involve claims (implicit or explicit) to competence, expertise, and sensibility as regards both literary history and the contemporary moment of literary production. Sarraute also reveals how the clash over what constitutes appropriate indexical competence in order to convincingly assign value to a literary object can produce severe affective turmoil (“the blow makes him stagger, he sees clusters of sparks”). Throughout her work, the most notable, the most conspicuous and striking experiences of the indexical force of language-­in-­use are anxious or aversive or painful ones, related to group affiliation and status claims. In Between Life and Death, Sarraute’s attention shifts from verbal interactions between different readers of the same novel to interactions between an author and his public, or—­and this is the feature of Between Life and Death that is particularly interesting in relation to the kind of novelistic interest in talk’s work I have been focusing on throughout this book—­to the process by which an author endeavors in writing to represent language-­in-­use so that the written account might successfully convey an experience of indexical force to some potential reader.12 In making this attempt, Sarraute’s author divides himself in two, creating an imaginary internalized interlocutory situation (just like the one Sarraute described in “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation”) that serves as a kind of mental laboratory in which he simulates an experience of the constitutively interactive quality of indexical force. Indexical force, we might say, has to be animated to be experienced. Sarraute’s novel represents and studies both the efforts of this author to use language in a way that animates it and gives it force and the kinds of interaction by which the author establishes and maintains a relationship between himself and his readership. The two projects are intertwined: from the outset Between Life and Death suggests that any given novelist will produce a novel that only certain readers will have the capacity, the desire, and the inclination (all aspects of indexical competence) to animate in a way that matches the novelist’s point of view, and that literary works (like musical works in Proust) inevitably perform a sorting function within a given literary universe. This may not only be because certain readers (or listeners) have training and sensibilities that others lack, but also because it is more likely that you will be able to experience the indexical force of a language that you are familiar with and that is proximate to you within social space or that is familiar to you in literary space.

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Early in Between Life and Death, one privileged reader of the author at the heart of the novel will say to him: “While I was reading you, I kept saying to myself . . . it’s astonishing how all of this concerns me . . . and the fact is, that you and I speak the same language . . .” (“En vous lisant, je me disais tout le temps . . . c’est étonnant comme tout cela me concerne . . . ce qu’il y a, c’est que vous et moi, nous parlons la même langue . . .”). There could be many things she is trying to gesture at here, a sense of sharing an outlook on the world, or sharing a generational experience, or sharing a set of aesthetic attitudes, all of which have somehow been indexically conveyed to her through the language the author writes. It could be that she is conveying a practical understanding that within the field of literary production a range of registers is represented, and she recognizes and wishes to affiliate with the literary register she perceives in his work. He replies: “Yes, that’s true. The same language. That’s what it is. I’ve always felt that . . . Which is why . . . I was no longer afraid . . . But now I know it: you belong . . . even more than I had dared hope . . . you belong here” (9–­10). (“Oui, n’est-­ce pas? La même langue. C’est bien ça. Je l’ai toujours senti . . . C’est bien pour ça . . . Je n’en avais que plus peur . . . Mais maintenant je le sais: vous êtes . . . plus encore que je n’osais l’espérer . . . vous êtes d’ici” [15]). That strange locution, “you belong here,” causes the woman to raise her eyebrows. What kind of claim could the author be using “here” to make? He explains that even in childhood, listening to people talk, he would hear in their speech not what the words were meaning but rather some kind of a claim to belonging: Yes, that’s an expression I used to use when I was a child. For me there were people who belonged here and others who belonged out there . . . It was a sort of segregation. The ones from out there revealed themselves all at once, always without knowing it, through something undefinable that exuded from them . . . an effluvium . . . I recognized it right away. In thinking it over, I see that it was always, just as you said . . . it seeped from the words they used, from the way they pronounced certain words . . . These words made it possible to detect their presence. Words which people out there use constantly without any objection being made . . . But even someone from here, hearing them, would never dare . . . These are things nobody touches. Nobody speaks of. (10) (Oui, c’est un mot à moi que j’employais quand j’étais enfant. Il y avait pour moi ceux d’ici et ceux de là-­bas . . . C’était une sorte de ségrégation. Ceux de là-­bas se révélaient tout à coup, toujours à leur insu, par quelque chose

238  Interlude

d’indéfinissable qui filtrait d’eux . . . une exhalaison . . . Je reconnaissais cela aussitôt. En y repensant, je vois que c’était toujours, justement, comme vous le disiez . . . cela suintait des mots qu’ils employaient, de leur façon de prononcer certains mots . . . Ces mots permettaient de déceler leur présence. Des mots qui là-­bas s’emploient couramment sans que personne trouve rien à y reprendre . . . Mais même quelqu’un d’ici en les entendant n’oserait jamais . . . Ce sont des choses auxquelles on ne touche pas. Dont on ne parle pas. [16])

The novelist changes topic slightly from the recognition of and affiliation to a literary register by a reader to a child’s recognition of the way register difference can index some kind of social antagonism. What he recognized as a child in the talk of people around him was the way lexical choices, variations in prosody, and even the choice of conversational topic all produce status registers that are meant to differentiate people in an exclusionary way. Doubtless this was good ear training for someone wishing to be a certain (Proustian) kind of novelist. But the trajectory of the overall conversation is worth dwelling on. A reader tries to put an author at ease or ingratiate herself by expressing some kind of affiliation with, some special relation to, the linguistic point of view from which he writes. He replies by indicating that he views her as “belong[ing] here,” that his sense of the way she talks has led him to believe, and now he is convinced, that they are on the same side of some sociolinguistic divide. Or perhaps he is trying to ensure her allegiance to him somehow. In any case, he and she have both, in different ways, confused his novelistic interest in social indexicality—­in the dessous of utterances, or in what, in the vocabulary he uses here, words exhale or suintent (what oozes or filters out of them), and what is accomplished via this indexical channel—­with the question of their own affiliation and how it might be verified by the social indexical features of his writing and her speech. We could say that this scene is interesting in that it includes a description of the linguistic phenomenon of social indexicality (“it seeped from the words they used, from the way they pronounced certain words”) via the recognition of and participation in a system of registers, and, at the same time, it shows that very phenomenon to be at work in the interaction we are watching transpire between these two people in which they are, at least on the surface, talking about her reaction to one of his books. Perhaps scenes like this one can help us understand the profound unease that resides at the heart of Sarraute’s simultaneously aesthetic and socioanalytic project: the novelist in Between Life and Death may sometimes seem to demonstrate an analytic engagement with language that resembles Sarraute’s,

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  239

but the social world in which he moves, and the pretentions both he and others in that world exhibit, seem sometimes (if I have read the tone of the novel correctly . . .) to be represented with a kind of withering scorn. Sarraute shows her novelist, as part of his way of existing as an author, submitting himself to social interactions that he finds debased and debasing—­and in which he finds himself haplessly behaving in an abject manner. In certain moments of those abject interactions, he feels acutely the force—­both disagreeable and aversive in these instances—­of talk’s work, and it seems that the disagreeable experience of this force is something he wishes to illustrate in his novels, to reproduce by way of his writing. Sarraute’s novel could be said to be reflexive in multiple ways. Of course it is reflexive in that it too is interested in the ways language-­in-­use works; but it also objectifies the world of literature. It almost steps outside of that world, given the intensity of the gaze it directs at it. The discomfort of novels like The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death lies in the way they tangle together an interest that is both intellectual and novelistic in linguistic anthropological questions having to do with talk’s workings and a frank acknowledgment of the exclusionary aesthetic training and social positioning required to be disposed to read such reflexive novels in the first place. The Golden Fruits is obviously not the same novel as the one sharing its title that is the object of so much talk within Sarraute’s novel. It is nonetheless going to be taken up in talk just as the fictional one is. The author-­protagonist of Between Life and Death is not a direct stand-­in for Sarraute, and yet his acute sense of  how the language he chooses will be more likely to produce affiliations with some readers—­some kinds of readers—­than with others is surely a sense that Sarraute also has and wishes her readers to be aware of. Do we belong to a special club if we become devoted readers of Sarraute? As a child, the author-­ protagonist of Between Life and Death understood that some people dared do things with language that others wouldn’t. As a child, patterns of language use began to teach him how to map the social world; as a writer, later versions of those patterns and maps orient his aesthetic choices. Here is how Bourdieu describes this kind of situation: In every moment, whatever we are doing, there is a vague point of reference: “That can be done,” “That can be said,” “That breaks the rules, but you can get away with it,” “That’s unthinkable,” “That’s impossible,” “You can’t do that.” It’s a kind of evaluation, but it’s hard to understand how it is constituted. I think it is constituted by a kind of practical statistics, one that’s semi-­conscious. In any case, I think that it’s very important, if you want to understand phenomena

240  Interlude

like literary revolutions, or ways of behaving and acting in daily life, to know that this sensitivity to an objective index of acceptable practices is something that exists. (SG, 2:103)

Sarraute’s novelist could easily be used to illustrate Bourdieu’s point that there is some kind of innate sense—­common to ordinary daily behavior and to the attempt to compose a distinctive work of literature—­that this or that choice is more or less likely to be successful in this or that context, with this or that kind of reader; that certain kinds of readers “belong here,” and others do not; that certain publishers are likely to publish this or that kind of book; that you’d rather be published by this or that publisher; that certain reviewers probably aren’t going to like or understand your book, but others might; and so on. In a scene portraying the novelist at work writing, we observe him thinking about how to achieve the effects he wants in representing what I have been calling language’s indexical force, and what he had earlier referred to as language’s ooze, or when he is feeling more positive, the vibration, or resonance, or music of words formed into utterances: They open out, the thread that runs through them grows taut, they are vibrating . . . he listens as their resonance reverberates . . . Alone with them, he himself completely set right, outside the soft, insipid substance into which he had been plunged, he is delighted with their movements, he places and displaces them, to make them form more skillfully shaped arabesques. Their vibration increases, it has now become music, song, an accentuated march. The rhythms create one another, as though by attraction words arrive from all sides . . . (65) (Ils se déploient, le fil qui les traverse se tend, ils vibrent . . . il écoute comme s’épandent leurs résonances . . . Seul avec eux, lui-­même complètement redressé, hors de la substance molle et fade où il était plongé, il s’enchante de leurs mouvements, les place et les déplace pour qu’ils forment des arabesques plus savamment contournées. Leur vibration s’amplifie, c’est maintenant une musique, un chant, une marche scandée, les rythmes se créent les uns les autres, des mots comme attirés arrivent de toutes parts . . . [66–­67])

This positive attitude toward language seems possible to him only in isolation, when there is no one but him present, when there is no, or only minimal, interlocution.13 He is entranced, we might say, by the power of “the literary,” or at least one particular version of what that value might be. Yet this turns out to be an experience of the delusory entitlements of linguistic solitude, during

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  241

which you might believe language signifies just as you wish it to. It is a short-­ lived experience. The next moment in his writing process, a corrective to the solitary one, is one in which he produces a scene of internalized interlocution to reconsider the writing that had seemed so musical (perhaps arising from a self-­satisfied relation to an elite literary register) through, so to speak, another set of ears: This is the moment when we must become two persons. One-­half of me becomes detached from the other: a witness. A judge . . . I’m all excited . . . just a second . . . Wait . . . I know what you are going to say . . . I know it, I felt it . . . But I beg of you, be very careful. Don’t be too severe. You’re always so afraid of being too lenient . . . (68) (C’est le moment où il faut se dédoubler. Une moitié de moi-­même se détache de l’autre: un témoin. Un juge . . . Je suis tout agité . . . encore un instant . . . Attendez . . . Je sais ce que vous allez dire . . . je le sais, je le pressentais . . . Mais je vous en supplie, prenez bien garde. N’exagérez pas la sévérité. Vous avez toujours si peur d’être trop indulgent . . . [69])

The author’s inner critic has a tendency to be harsh, and the typical criticism offered—­“It’s dead. Not a breath of life.” (“C’est mort. Pas un souffle de vie.”)—­seems to have to do with the ability of the text to operate on multiple channels, including the social indexical one, in order to produce a response in the reader. Of course, as we have been noticing, there is a dialectical relationship between the indexical competence of any given reader and the indexical capacity of any given text, and our author, in writing and then in having his inner critic comment on his writing, is endeavoring both to imagine the indexical competencies of some ideal reader and to produce a text with the capacity to engage those competencies: It’s first one image then another . . . it’s snatches of conversation, or perhaps merely an intonation, an accent through which runs a rapid movement, that are as though seized, shaken by a brief convulsion. This movement must be caught, we must isolate it, try . . . wouldn’t it be possible in order for it to recur more clearly and evolve, to create more favorable conditions? . . . to insert it elsewhere, among other, better assembled images, other words or intonations, the way we transplant a wild shoot in improved earth, enriched with loam, fortified with fertilizer, in an enclosed spot, a hothouse in which the appropriate temperature is constantly maintained? (72)

242  Interlude

(C’est une image et puis une autre . . . ce sont des bribes de conversation, ou bien juste une intonation, un accent qu’un mouvement rapide traverse, qui sont comme parcourus, secoués par une brève convulsion. Il faut capter cela, ce mouvement, l’isoler, chercher . . . n’est-­il pas possible pour qu’il se reproduise avec plus de netteté et se développe de créer des conditions plus favorables? . . . le faire passer ailleurs, dans d’autres images mieux assemblées, d’autres paroles ou intonations, comme on transplante une pousse sauvage dans un terrain amélioré, enrichi de terreau, nourri d’engrais, dans un lieu bien clos, une serre où sera maintenue constamment une température appropriée? [73])

The experience of this interplay between capacity and competence has been part of the author’s (and surely everyone’s) training in language-­in-­use throughout his life, but Between Life and Death focuses in particular on its import in the struggle of a writer to find (to participate in producing) a public that responds to their writing. Even in the passage just cited, we see the fiercely demystifying potential that Sarraute has written into her novel: as soon as the novelist starts to expound on his process (“the way we transplant a wild shoot in improved earth, enriched with loam, fortified with fertilizer”), his own language risks becoming silly, mediocre, falsely sophisticated—­all the kinds of worries that accompanied the uptake of the novel within the novel in The Golden Fruits. (We might see here again how much Sarraute’s writing draws on the resources of a Flaubertian irony as well as a Proustian interest in talk’s work.) Toward the end of Between Life and Death, the author participates in an event, an interaction, some kind of social occasion with a literary focus, an informal “meet the author” kind of gathering perhaps, arranged by the privileged reader we met earlier in the novel for some friends of hers, the kind of gathering where there will be chitchat about the author’s writing process, or about the excellent reviews his book has received, or about this or that scene in his book some reader particularly likes. The meeting is a kind of ordeal in which the author’s vague paranoia and insecurity are on full display, but in which he proves again to be particularly sensitive to how his aversive experience of relating to members of his reading public can provide material for further writing: Here they are, the slow crawlings, the limp uncoilings, the tremblings, tiny particles become excited, whirl about, draw together, complicated forms appear and come apart . . . it’s still there, the old fascination . . . in little drops of gray

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  243

gelatine miniature worlds are gravitating . . . he yields to every touch, to every sticky contact, all repulsion disappears, all instinct for self-­preservation . . . may he feel them crawl over his body, the better to follow the meanderings of their antlike procession, may bacteria circulate in him destroying the globules of his blood, he wants to feel again . . . further . . . to the very limit . . . he clings to them, he keeps them warm . . . (172) (Les voici, les lentes reptations, les mous déroulements, les flageolements, des particules minuscules s’agitent, tournent, s’assemblent, des formes compliquées apparaissent et se défont . . . la voici, la vieille fascination . . . dans des gouttelettes de gélatine grise des mondes en miniature gravitent . . . il s’abandonne à tous les attouchements, aux contacts gluants, toute répulsion disparaît, tout instinct de conservation . . . qu’il sente ramper sur son corps pour mieux en suivre tous les méandres leurs processions de fourmis, que les bactéries circulent en lui détruisant les globules de son sang, il veut sentir encore . . . plus loin . . . jusqu’au bout . . . il se colle à eux, il les réchauffe . . . [164])

The aversive experience of the indexical aspects of the use of language involved in interacting with a literary public—­performing roles, defending status, pontificating, flattering, allowing readers to connect with you, perhaps stating your views about this or that work or this or that style, or attempting to lay out an aesthetic project, affiliating, disaffiliating, feeling compromised, feeling assimilated—­all of this is taken in as the matter for his future writing.14 It seems, in fact, that the struggle of this writer going forward will be between writing language that strikes him as beautiful (limiting himself to the relatively unreflective deployment of a certain received literary register) and writing language that is arranged (poetically, perhaps, but in a different way) in an effort to project or to reproduce an indexical force that communicates the complex and often highly aversive affective experience he has when interacting with readers and with other people he meets in his daily life. But perhaps novels such as these would give offense—­how could they not?—­to some of those very members of the reading public who attended the literary events the novelist found simultaneously so unpleasant and so stimulating. Indeed, it might seem that The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death are themselves novels meant to be provoking to certain segments of the public—­given the sharply demystifying attitudes toward the kinds of talk that happen around literature they offer in order to pursue their inquiry into the kinds of work that talk does. Maybe only a novelist who has already achieved a certain success would dare to do this, dare this cruelty. This might represent another calculation involving what

244  Interlude

Bourdieu has called a “spontaneous statistics,” one based on a practical sense of your place in your field: One might therefore call to mind this kind of spontaneous statistics that we all practice, and that allows us to acquire in some way what Goffman calls the “sense of one’s place,” which is to say the sense of the “right place,” the sense of where you are, in the social world. In a given field, in the space of writers, all writers, whether they want to or not, whether they know it or not, know more or less where they are. (SG, 2:470)

How challenging do you dare to be? Sarraute’s novels are technically challeng­ ing—­hard to read—­as well as aesthetically challenging, ruthlessly puncturing (if you notice it) various platitudes that anchor different kinds of relations to the literary field in the service of a rigorous, ongoing project of  literary exper­ imentation with language-­in-­use. In “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized,” Silverstein suggested that “we should contemplate what one might then want to see incorporated into transcription/visuo-­graphic artifactualization adequate to capturing key aspects of  both denotational and interactional textuality” (67). Sarraute’s project, I have been endeavoring to demonstrate, is contemplating something like this. In laying down language on the pages of a novel, how can the indexical force that links the denotational and the interactional levels of textuality be rendered more salient? Much of the imagistic commentary on the effects of interlocution within the two Sarraute novels being considered here could be taken as a form of metapragmatic discourse ( just as essays such as “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation” are), directing readerly attention to the difference between words themselves and what happens pragmatically through their mobilization and uptake when they are exchanged. In Between Life and Death, Sarraute’s novelist finds himself doubled within himself trying to imagine what composition of words will make something happen, and for whom. For there will surely be some who will read his text and feel nothing—­uptake will fail: “Herme­ tism . . . He’s lost his way . . . Alone. With no possible contact with anyone” (182) (“Hermétisme . . . Il s’est égaré . . . Seul. Sans contact possible avec personne” [173]). And yet he will have a sense of the capacity of what he has written to produce something interactive. When he rereads what he writes, he will ask a question about the indexical force of his words: “does it emit, deposit . . . as on the mirror we hold before the mouth of the dying . . . a fine mist?” (183) (“est-­ce que cela se dégage, se dépose . . . comme sur les miroirs qu’on approche de la bouche des mourants . . . une fine buée?” [174]). But what kind of

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  245

a trace is it that is being emitted? Finally, it is not “there” on the printed page. Yet we have been told to look for it. Sarraute’s novels, like Proust’s, require of the reader an attitude toward language that is nearly social scientific and/ or anthropological in nature. We need instruments (Sarraute uses that word on a number of occasions in “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation”) to help us perceive talk’s work. The mirror held up to a dying man’s mouth is an image of a kind of instrument meant to verify the presence of something that is not directly perceptible by our senses, something that needs to be processed, analyzed, for its presence to be revealed. Listening to language becomes a strange sort of data processing if we, as readers of Sarraute and Proust, have learned our lesson well. As I draw What Proust Heard toward a conclusion, I would like to underline two aspects of data processing central to the demands Proust, Sarraute, and others (including Cusk) place on us: a demand related to animation and a statistical demand. We have, as readers, to be competent in certain ways (or to acquire that competence) in order to be able to animate the words on the page so as to hear the indexical force they might carry for this or that speaker, and we have to have (or to acquire) some sense of the likelihood that this or that kind of interactive text could have been constructed by this or that set of interlocutors—­just as, on another level, we are gauging the probabilities that we are the right readers, that we are reading in a way suitable to the demands that the text puts forth. Before returning to Search to watch the interplay between animation and statistics, I’d like to show them at work in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, made up of Outline (2014), Transit (2016), and Kudos (2018)—­a fascinating recent literary experiment with language-­in-­use. The trilogy sometimes seems strangely reminiscent of Sarraute’s The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death. I say strangely reminiscent of Sarraute’s novels because in many ways they are not at all alike. Both sets of novels are certainly intent on representing (in their own ways) the kinds of ritual events that go into constituting the literary field. In Cusk’s case these include writing workshops, interviews, literary festivals, lunches with editors, conversations between novelists, between novelists and their translators, encounters with readers, and forums in which readers, critics, and authors talk with each other. Yet narratively speaking, these sets of novels might seem utterly divergent. Sometimes commentators on Cusk feel unsure that anyone, including themselves, has yet understood how to read these novels. The collective task of producing an understanding of them is, we might say, still in its early stages. Tone is often seen as a major feature that poses certain problems of understanding. The narrator of these novels, a novelist named Faye, writes in “studiously

246  Interlude

neutral tones,” according to Daniel Aureliano Newman in the Toronto Review of Books.15 In the New Yorker, Katy Waldman describes the trilogy in these terms: “Faye encounters acquaintances and strangers, who helplessly begin to talk at her. She reports what they say, her flat, precise, and scrupulous voice homogenizing each narrative fragment.”16 “Every character sounds like her,” Waldman adds. Merve Emre speaks in Harper’s of “Cusk’s sharp, relentless exteriorizing voice.”17 Also in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz describes Cusk’s narrator Faye as a “radical experiment in passivity,” as “neutral as a blank page,” as someone who encounters people, “listens to each of them in turn, sometimes passing judgment, but more often leaving it to the reader to decide how to interpret what we have heard.”18 But what is tone? Speaking loosely, it is the sense that the words offered to a reader provide enough clues to create an image of how a voice speaking them would sound and to use that auditory image as data to position the speaker in various ways. It is an interactive phenomenon in which a reader with the appropriate indexical competence projects from the imagined indexical potentials of the discourse represented on the page onto a social universe in which various ways of speaking, tonal options, are known to exist. It also depends on a sense of the kind of fiction we are reading. Emre, for instance, refers to Cusk as “perhaps the cruelest novelist at work today.” This is, we could say, a claim about the metapragmatic function at work in the novels. As Silverstein notes, “metapragmatic function serves to regiment indexicals into interpretable event(s) of such-­and-­such type that the use of language in interaction constitutes (consists of ).”19 The claim to see cruelty in the novels is a claim to understand the tonal regime governing the representation of  language in the novel. Perhaps Cusk is cruel the way Flaubert and Sarraute are cruel. But conceivably different readers could make different kinds of claims. Consider the opening of Outline: Before the flight I was invited for lunch at a London club with a billionaire I’d been promised had liberal credentials. He talked in his open-­necked shirt about the new software he was developing, that could help organisations identify the employees most likely to rob and betray them in the future. We were meant to be discussing a literary magazine he was thinking of starting up: unfortunately I had to leave before we arrived at that subject. He insisted on paying for a taxi to the airport, which was useful since I was late and had a heavy suitcase.20

Studiously neutral? Flat, precise, scrupulous? Judgmental? Immediately we are faced with the problem of understanding something not only of what we

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  247

might call the narrator’s stance, but also, we might say of the book’s (or perhaps the implied author’s) stance to the narrator.21 What is this language doing? What kind of person is this narrator? What kind of tone is she taking? Should we like her, align with her, or be suspicious of her? Is the novel itself tonally aligned with her? All of these kinds of questions are questions of metapragmatic regimentation. It is, of course, possible to read the novel while barely raising these questions at all. Readers with certain kinds of training will raise them in different kinds of ways and resolve them by imagining various parts of this text as invoking concepts (or literary practices) of different orders. Why would someone meeting a billionaire need the assurance of that billionaire’s liberal credentials? What kind of a person would be going to meet a billionaire at a London club anyway? Is the structural relationship between employer and employee related to the structural relation between billionaire and writer, and is the writer particularly likely to betray the billionaire? Is that potential metaphor of betrayal placed there intentionally by the narrator (Faye) herself as a clue for the reader, or is it a clue for the reader that Faye might not be aware of ? Is it important that the lunch didn’t last long enough for its purpose (the potential founding of a literary magazine in which perhaps Faye would have a role—­and a salary—­underwritten by the billionaire) to be fulfilled? Should the billionaire have paid for the taxi? Should Faye have let him? How do questions of gender and wealth, of cultural capital (a writer with enough of a reputation to get invited to this lunch) and economic capital (a billionaire who maybe wants to be/buy a writer) relate? How salient in this scene is the economics of the literary field meant to be? Is the literary field corrupted by money? Is this a novel critiquing the way money distorts the literary field? Behind all these questions: How is speech being reported in this novel? The billionaire had been keen to give me the outline of  his life story, which had begun unprepossessingly, and ended—­obviously—­with him being the relaxed, well-­heeled man who sat across the table from me today. I wondered whether in fact what he wanted now was to be a writer, with a literary magazine as his entrée. A lot of people want to be writers: there was no reason to think you couldn’t buy your way into it. This man had bought himself in and out of a great many things. [ . . . ] On Sundays he played drums in a rock band, just for fun. He was expecting his eleventh child, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded when you considered that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala. I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told. The waitress kept bringing more things, oysters, relishes, special wines. He was easily distracted, like a child with too many Christmas presents. But when he

248  Interlude

put me in the taxi he said, enjoy yourself in Athens, though I didn’t remember telling him that was where I was going. (3–­4)

We are still early in the novel obviously, but perhaps already we are sensing something of the experience that will characterize the entire trilogy. We might call it a kind of indexical deprivation: it is the effect that critics have been pointing to by using adjectives such as neutral or flat, or by referring to the homogenizing effect of the narrator, Faye’s way of telling us in her own voice what people have said. She is sparing in the use of direct discourse or of much in the way of indicators of the interactive components of the exchange of language, or of any of the impact that any of this language-­in-­use might be having on her or anyone else involved in the exchange. She seems to mix free indirect discourse (“he was expecting his eleventh child, which wasn’t as bad as it sounded when you considered that he and his wife had once adopted quadruplets from Guatemala”), reported speech (“enjoy yourself in Athens”), her own reported thoughts (“a lot of people want to be writers”), description (“the waitress kept bringing more things”) in a way that feels somehow disorienting. Sarraute and Cusk are strikingly divergent when it comes to what we might call indexical deprivation or indexical saturation. Sarraute’s writing dwells intensely on the impact of words as they move between speakers. More time, we might say, is given to representing the impact or the consequences of the words than to the words themselves. The effects of a single utterance can take pages to describe. Cusk seems somehow to provide to her readers a sharp experience of a certain facet of talk’s work in the absence of any effort to describe (or even indicate an awareness of ) that work. Schwartz, whose New Yorker interview of Cusk originated as a live event, commented: “I do think that it’s actually remarkable to see the number of people in this room, which is only a very small sample size of the people who adore and are extremely moved and influenced by these books. And these are books without plot and without a clear kind of character coding or emotional coding.” The books are compelling, and yet they fail to “code” language (they purposefully dampen the representation of a certain indexicality, we might say) so that we are left having to imagine much of what surrounds or accompanies or animates these linguistic exchanges, having to imagine how they sound, how they feel, what they make happen. Recall that Proust’s narrator, in the final volume of Search, commented in a worried way on the fact that he could never remember the actual words people said: “What people said escaped me, because what interested me was not what they wanted to say, but the manner in which they said it, in so far as this revealed their character or their absurdities; or, rather, the object that had always been the aim

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  249

of my research, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another” (Finding, 24). Cusk’s Faye seems rather to remember and repeat pretty much exclusively what people have said, and even perhaps to shape their discourse into a rather formal indirect report, but in so doing to show no concern for the manner in which they said whatever it is they said. One way of formulating the problem might have to do with assimilation. (“I was finding it difficult to assimilate everything I was being told.”) It may have been alcohol and oysters that prevented Faye from assimilating some aspects of her exchange with the billionaire, or it may be that her project, or the novel’s project, involves an attention to aspects of linguistic exchange that do not have to do with manners of speaking and all of their indexical presuppositions and entailments. Cusk tells Schwartz in her interview that she understands that people do not talk in the way that their speech is represented by Faye: “And the idea that people don’t talk like that—­it may not be how it sounds, necessarily, but it is how it is to me.” That is, she (both Faye and Cusk perhaps) seems to be “hearing” something else, something other than “how it sounds,” and asking her reader to do so as well. But what? What are we to assimilate about what is going on when people talk (as they do endlessly) in these novels? Faye (or the novel) treats her own discourse in a way similar to the way ev­ eryone else’s discourse is treated, recounting utterances that must be freighted with affect, impactful on the person saying them as well as on the person hearing them, and utterances that surely cannot help conveying further corollary information about the utterer, even if the nature of that further information somehow remains astonishingly blurry (unassimilated, neglected, simulta­ neously proffered and shunted aside). The following conversation takes place at a dinner party toward the end of Transit: “I think people are frightened,” Eloise said. “Frightened of their own children.” If that was true, I said, it was because they saw in their children the register of their own failings and misdemeanours. “You’re not frightened, are you?” she said, looking at me beadily. I found myself telling her about an evening some years before, when I was alone at home with my two sons. It was winter; it had been dark since mid-­ afternoon and the boys were becoming restless. Their father was out, driving back from somewhere. [ . . . ] The boys began to argue and fight, in the way that they often did. [ . . . ] My younger son was pestering the older one, wanting him to play with him, and the older one was becoming increasingly irritated. I stopped what I was doing, intending to intervene in their fight, when I saw my

250  Interlude

older son suddenly take his brother’s head in his hands and drive it down hard against the countertop. The younger one fell immediately to the floor, apparently unconscious, and the older one left him there and ran out of the room. This show of violence, the like of which had never happened in our house before, was not simply shocking—­it also concretised something I appeared already to know, to the extent that I believed my children had merely acted in the service of this knowledge, that they had been driven to enact something that they themselves didn’t realise or understand. It was another year before their father moved out of the house, but if I had to locate the moment when the marriage had ended it would be then, on that dark evening in the kitchen, when he wasn’t even there. Eloise was listening with a sympathetic expression on her face. (Transit, 232–­34)

Novels are always offering lessons in how to read them. Perhaps we could take this passage as one such lesson. Faye seems to have the tables turned on her here, and seems to be provoked into speech by someone else’s presence, speech that is understood to be not exactly under her control. What is provided on the page of the novel is surely not an exact account of what we are to understand that she said to Eloise. It has been shaped and formed and represented indirectly just as is so much of the rest of the represented speech in the trilogy. Nor does it seem possible to imagine that really all Eloise did was to listen “with a sympathetic expression on her face.” Once again (unlike in Sarraute) the interactive component of talk seems intentionally dampened. “Was he all right?” she said. “Did you have to take him to hospital?” He was shocked and upset, I said, and he had a big lump on his head, but he didn’t need to go to hospital. She was silent for a while, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes downcast. (235)

The novel, of course, also asks us to notice the use of direct citation for Eloise’s words, and the absence of the quotation marks around Faye’s. (There is a relative paucity of quotation marks throughout the novels.) One way of glossing this compositional feature would allow us to wonder about the role of something like Sarraute’s “sub-­conversation” within Cusk’s own novelistic practice in this trilogy. As we saw earlier in The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death, “sub-­conversation” designates a certain kind of implicit content in utterances; it happens, as I have described it, by means of the indexical

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  251

functioning of linguistic signs through which interlocutors interactively and pragmatically construct a shared cultural context in which to exist and in which to act on each other and on the social world. Would it be possible to hear some kind of “sub-­conversation” occurring in and around Faye’s exchange with Eloise, or with any of her other interlocutors? It almost seems as if Cusk’s novels, while signaling their awareness of these aspects of language-­in-­ use (even perhaps depending on them), disdain to take any notice of them; but perhaps they offer another, related direction for our attention. The direction is suggested in the passage we have just read, in the assertion that the violence between the two boys seems to be “in the service of ” or expressive of something they “know” without knowing, something Faye “appeared already to know,” having to do with the end of her marriage, and, perhaps more generally, with a kind of deep cultural “knowledge” about relations of domination, relations between men and women—­perhaps, we could say, mainly between heterosexual men and women (although the conclusion of the final novel in the trilogy will speak to the possibility of an outside to heterosexuality in quite complex ways). In any case, what we see here is Faye, without full control over what she is doing (“I found myself telling her”), being caught up in a scene of  language-­in-­use that requires careful processing by the reader. Both the scene she is describing (of her and the boys in the kitchen, and the violence that brings into some kind of focus the untenability of the gendered family situation in which they were then existing) and the scene in which she is participating (talking to Eloise) are examples of scenes in which, to return to a point I made in chapter 1 when talking about Mme de Gallardon, thoughts, words, and actions are saying and doing more than anyone knows. They are somehow producing a kind of knowledge that comes from somewhere else. You can hear in someone’s speech more than what they put there. Language being a widely shared system, one through which cultural universes are sustained and in which cultural forces move, it so happens that when we think and talk in language, we participate in cultural transactions or transmissions occurring on multiple levels, including levels that are not subject-­centered (not conscious) at all. Conceivably, the novels in the Outline trilogy have a strong interest in these other levels, and are trying to develop the literary techniques to transcribe and call attention to them. Cusk suggests something to this effect in her interview with Schwartz. Schwartz asks her about the lack of differentiation in the way various people speak in the trilogy: “What about the subtleties of character or the subtleties of self-­expression, or different personal experience?” Cusk replies: “I think those are shared. I’m not saying they don’t exist. I’m seeing them as more

252  Interlude

oceanic and as things that you can enter and leave in certain phases of your life that aren’t completely determined by the fact that you’re Jane and this is your life. I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character. Which, as I said, I don’t actually think is how living is being done anymore.” To see experience in a lateral sense means understanding it as something that is part of a common stock, something shared, exchanged, moved through, passed on. If so, when people express “their” experience in words, we might indeed hear in their speech what Proust’s narrator was looking for: “the object that had always been the aim of my research, because it gave me a specific pleasure, was the point that was common to one being and another.” It’s just that in Cusk the commonality is not projected from manners of speaking but involves some kind of mutual recognition of the force of cultural forms—­a force that language use can reveal, a force that is exerted as we talk, but that is not necessarily part of our most immediate communicative efforts. Consider the scene in Kudos in which Faye is to be interviewed for television in a temporary studio set up in a hotel, except that there are some technical difficulties with the equipment that a team of men is trying to get up and running. The delay is filled, as best we can tell, by a long monologue spoken by the woman journalist assigned to conduct the interview. The woman’s monologue begins: The technicians were asking us to talk, she said to me, so that they could adjust the sound levels and work out what the problem was. They had told us to just talk about what we had for breakfast today, she said, though there were probably more interesting things we could discuss. She was hoping our conversation would focus on the problem of recognition for female writers and artists: perhaps I had some thoughts on that subject I could share with her, so that she could make sure to ask the right questions in the interview. The topic probably wasn’t new to me, but it might well never have occurred to their viewers that the same inequalities that beset the home and the workplace could dictate what was presented to them as art, so she saw no reason not to give the nail another bang on the head. (188–­89)

If Faye does share any thoughts with the journalist, they are not recorded in the novel, which rather leaves us with the impression that the journalist goes on and on offering her own ideas on the subject until finally it turns out that the technical difficulties the men have been trying to overcome are insurmountable:

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  253

“It seems extraordinary,” she said, “that all these men together can’t fix the problem, but they say they will have to take the equipment back to the studio to repair it. It is very disappointing,” she said, rising from her chair and beginning to disentangle the microphone cord from her clothing, “and considering the subject of our conversation, more than a little ironic.” (197)

Perhaps, indeed, there was a conversation between Faye and the journalist and Faye has simply omitted to include her contributions to it. (“You dispense with another form, which is conversation,” Schwartz observed in her New Yorker interview.) But the effect of this monologue, like so many of the others (at least to me), is to convey a sense of the immense self-­involvement of the person to whom Faye is speaking. The ironies are thus multiple: that a team of men proves unable to provide the women with a telecasting platform to discuss art and writing produced by women; that the journalist, so fascinated by her own thoughts about Louise Bourgeois and Joan Eardley, seems to leave no room for Faye to get in a word; that whatever quality or interest the journalist’s thoughts and experiences might have, they are also notable for the effect they create of Faye’s silence, her listening to words that are purportedly meant to be explaining the condition to which they are subjecting her. Faye’s life as a writer seems to involve continually submitting to scenes of abjection similar in quality to those Sarraute’s author experiences in Between Life and Death—­except, of course, that there are particular forms of abjection Faye experiences as a woman writer (at the hands of both women and men), whereas Sarraute does not specifically take up the issue of gender in relation to writing. Cusk’s novels, however, leave it to the reader to notice and experience the abjection that Sarraute goes to such pains to dissect. Yet it is a constant question throughout the trilogy: does the lack of the sign of any intervention by Faye in these monologues really mean she was silent? Or should we imagine she speaks, but does not include her words in the novel? Perhaps she did converse with the woman journalist; perhaps they communed, found some agreement, remained friends. In speaking about Faye and responding to Schwartz’s point about the absence of conversation in the novels, Cusk observes: So she has no identity, so what can her participation [in a conversation] be? Because conversation is—­it’s like a peacock showing their feathers to you. It’s a showing of identity to each other, and a search for conformity, a search for agreement. A search for agreement is really all that culture actually is, and it’s

254  Interlude

an amazingly good system. It’s what enables things to be recognized if enough time can pass.

The idea of conversation as a ritual in which people show their peacock feathers (cf. Silverstein: “through the machinery of language, two relative strangers come to interact as mutually ‘visible’ and legible identities with outlooks and attitudes created in the course of saying/doing things with words”22) is hardly new to us by this point. Did Faye and her interviewer arrive at this conformity? Did some kind of recognition occur? The matter of the journalist’s speech (how women are discriminated against, in particular in the dissemination and forms of uptake of any art they produce) seems, after all, central to Cusk’s own project. When describing what she was getting at in the way she ends Kudos, Cusk said to Schwartz: “in the end I sort of had to conclude that, whatever women are, they are institutionally disadvantaged.” This idea, at the heart of the journalist’s monologue, has been thematized in many of the trilogy’s other monologues as well. Is the content of what the journalist was saying supposed to be what primarily holds our attention? How are we supposed to be listening to talk and the work it is doing in these novels? What kind of attention should we be paying? Why might we feel that there is something about the way a discourse is animated that needs to be taken into account? Have we been collecting enough data so that what Bourdieu called our spontaneous statistical sense could help us localize various speakers in social space, localize Faye, localize this novel, our own literary affiliations, our relation to Cusk’s novels? At the end of the novel, a taxi driver drops Faye off on the side of the road, giving her directions toward a beach. The beach turns out to be a gay one, where naked men are cruising and socializing. But before she finds the beach, Faye receives a telephone call from her son: “There’s been a bit of a disaster,” he said. Tell me, I said. It happened late last night, he said. He and some friends had accidentally started a fire, he said. There had been some damage and he was worried about what the consequences would be. There was no point in phoning you because you were away, he said. But then I couldn’t get hold of Dad either. I asked him whether he was all right. I asked him how on earth it had happened, and what he had been thinking of. “Faye,” he said fractiously, “will you just listen?” (226–­27)

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  255

We are five pages away from the end of the trilogy, a series of novels in which Faye seems to have done almost nothing but listen; only occasionally have we been told that she spoke at any length or been told of what she spoke. Her son’s admonition is therefore startling. Are we to understand from her son’s effort to get her to be quiet so he can tell her what happened to him that we have misunderstood something all along, that perhaps Faye is, in fact, garrulous, and that she has just failed to report her own interventions, urgent, panicked, concerned, or otherwise? After she apparently quiets down, and her son is able to fill her in on what happened, we do see represented on the pages of the novel what seems like a conversation: When are you coming home? he said. Tomorrow, I said. Can I come over? he said, and then he said: Sometimes I feel as if I’m about to fall over the edge of something, and that there’ll be nothing and no one to catch me. You’re tired, I said. You’ve been awake all night. I feel so lonely, he said, and yet I have no privacy. People just act as if I’m not there. I could be doing anything, he said. I could be slitting my wrists and they would neither know nor care. It isn’t your fault, I said. They ask me things, he said, but they don’t connect the things up. They don’t relate them to things I’ve already told them. There are just all these meaningless facts. You can’t tell your story to everybody, I said. Maybe you can only tell it to one person. Maybe, he said. Come when you feel like it, I said. I can’t wait to see you. (229–­30)

Now just conceivably, the breaching of privacy, a privacy Faye’s son feels he lacks, has been a regular occurrence throughout the trilogy—­not exclusively by Faye (although perhaps it feels a bit like that here, and certainly if she were a real person and you met her, you might, having read the trilogy, be a bit wary about talking to her). Privacy has also been breached by many of  her interlocutors, in the way they expose themselves and others in their lives to Faye as they talk. The son’s further complaint (“They ask me things [ . . . ] but they don’t connect the things up. They don’t relate them to things I’ve already told them. There are just all these meaningless facts”) could be taken to be a complaint

256  Interlude

against Faye: she asks people things, she provides versions of what they say, she does little work to connect anything anyone says to anything anyone else says. Her novel proceeds by juxtaposition. Both Faye and the novel leave connecting up to the reader. But perhaps Faye’s son’s complaint is one of the moments where the novel makes clear its expectations of its reader: connect things up; demonstrate your indexical competence; see what is happening as people talk. If the conversation between Faye and her son is startling because of her son’s admonition that she “just listen” (but to what channel in what anyone is saying should we be listening?), the scene that follows it and ends the novel is extraordinary because it involves a nonverbal interaction between Faye and a burly bear who is one of the gay men gathered together on this beach, socializing, being intimate, perhaps having sex, when she comes along, disturbing the intimacy among the gay friends and strangers gathered there, passing by them, taking off her clothes, and going for a swim. She seems sensitized in various ways to the eroticism that unites the men: They were men, either naked or sometimes wearing a simple loincloth. Some of them were hardly more than boys. They were mostly silent as I passed, and either looked away or seemed not to see me, though one or two stared at me frankly and expressionlessly. A boy of startling beauty glanced into my eyes and glanced away again, burying his face shyly into the thick muscled shoulder of his companion. He was kneeling and I saw the rounded shapes of his buttocks beneath the other man’s large hand. (231)

Here the dialectic between a text’s indexical capacity and a reader’s indexical competence comes acutely into view. Here the neutrality of tone and the indexical deprivation that accompanies it take on a particular form of acuteness. Should we understand that she is surprised to find sexual intimacy occurring between someone who is “a boy of startling beauty” and an older man? Or is she celebrating the eroticism of what she sees? Is the proximity of this passage to the passage recounting the phone call with her own teenage son relevant? Did she know she was going to be walking on a gay beach? Did the taxi driver know when he dropped her off ? Does she have a sympathetic understanding of gay culture? Why would the novel and the trilogy end with her going for a swim on a gay beach when heretofore it has so resolutely focused on heterosexual relations? As she is swimming, one of the men comes to the edge of the ocean:

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  257

He came to a halt just where the waves broke and he stood there in his nakedness like a deity, resplendent and grinning. Then he grasped his thick penis and began to urinate into the water. The flow came out so abundantly that it made a fat, glittering  jet, like a rope of gold he was casting into the sea. He looked at me with black eyes full of malevolent delight while the golden jet poured unceasingly forth from him until it seemed impossible that he could contain any more. The water bore me up, heaving, as if  I lay on the breast of some sighing creature while the man emptied himself into its depths. I looked into his cruel, merry eyes, and I waited for him to stop. (232)

It is an astonishing—­and astonishingly described—­act of communication. Merve Emre, in commenting on this passage, sees Faye as taking up “the burden of femininity; the ‘malevolent delight’ of the male gaze is first neutralized, then reciprocated by her silent, ecstatic act of noticing.”23 But this is not precisely a male gaze, is it? It is the gaze of a proud, sexy, gay bear. But what degree of understanding of the multiple forms of gay sexuality is being indexed here? What understanding of the possible range of relations between gay men and women is being presupposed or gestured toward? Has Faye committed some kind of trespass here? Accidental or intentional? Is she welcome or unwelcome? Offended or amused? What about the grinning, delighted, gay bear? What is malevolent about his act? The passage is astonishing in its ambiguity—­perhaps as likely to be evoking cultural frameworks hostile to gay men as ones friendly to them. It is difficult to parse what is animating it or how to animate it. When Cusk describes the passage to Schwartz, she says: I see it as an acceptance of an element of, not violence exactly, but separateness, distinction, and this question of men and women—­which, as I say, I’ve fenced all around it and in the end I sort of  had to conclude that, whatever women are, they are institutionally disadvantaged. I needed to find not just an image for it but a sort of feeling about it, a feeling about that victimhood which I could understand, which is so much to do with the production of children, the nurture of children, and the defense of them, which is increasingly a shared world and no one owns any of it—­it’s changing all the time. But this, as I say, elemental difference that is sex itself, it’s not violent but it looks like it. So the ending is really that—­it’s crude, I suppose, and primitive—­and it’s about genitals, bodies, none of which are mentioned very much in any of the other three books, but then suddenly there they are.

258  Interlude

This passage too seems fraught with ambiguity. Is the gay bear being understood as prototypical of masculinity, as somehow condensing various aspects of the role men play in the production of women’s victimhood? What about the “boy of startling beauty”? What ideological potential does he carry? What cultural frameworks are being evoked here about gay men and the many forms of relationship they construct for themselves? Will Faye’s use of language in these concluding paragraphs describing her interactions with these gay men make something about her identity legible in different ways to differently positioned readers? If it does, it may happen, so to speak, in spite of her, simply because of the way language works, inevitably indexing cultural concepts for whomever is involved in understanding it, or because of the way, so to speak, it pre-­inhabits any speaker, because of the way they animate it in specific ways by using it. As I’ve mentioned, the two keywords for the conclusion to What Proust Heard that follows this interlude will be animation and statistics, and by them I mean to call attention to the ways in which users of language exercise control, but only partially, over the resources of language as they use it. They animate it in the pursuit of certain ends, some of which are pursued consciously, some subliminally, but they are also animated by it, and, we might say, they also serve its ends. As people use language, conformities emerge, and we experience those conformities, in a way, statistically, guessing that it is more or less likely that such-­and-­such a speaker would be producing such-­and-­such a meaning through this or that use of language. The ending of Kudos is interesting because there seems to me no satisfying way of pinpointing precisely the place in social space in which Faye and the gay bear are interacting. I am left feeling on the edge of some imminent disaffiliation. The way that Cusk invokes the word oceanic in her conversation with Schwartz seems relevant to the ending of the novel. Obviously, on the final page Faye is at sea, afloat on a semiotic ocean, adrift. This effect is one Cusk says she was seeking, in opposition to the sense of a localizable character on which, she says, novels often depend: And I think that we’re just very used to a novel being carried by a self that we believe in, and we believe in it as a simulation, or a representative of us. We think that’s what our experiences are like, and this is the form which that experience of being in a self is like, and I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s true. I think, as I said, that experience is much more lateral and oceanic, because there’s also ideas about fate here, and how you cause things to happen, and who decides what happens to you. And what Faye says is: everything I decided to

Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk  259

do hasn’t worked out that well, and this idea of going against the current—­what would happen if  you were just swept along like a leaf on the water? What would happen to you? And that’s really what she’s trying to find out. Because the ultimate fruit of civilization is to allow her or anyone to believe they’re deciding what their life will be like. And that’s what she lets go of.

Sort of. People shift laterally from experience to experience, Cusk suggests. Experience is a shared realm. When we speak, we give voice (form) to experience that we do not fully possess. But of course, it is probably statistically more likely that certain kinds of people will share certain experiences than others, will be informed by certain kinds of experience than others, will talk in one way rather than another. We may find ourselves animating or animated by things (words, actions), buoyed up by possibilities that are not precisely ours, that feel, even, foreign to us. Faye may float passively on the ocean into which the gay bear pees. Urinating here is surely a metaphor for writing, which is what Faye and Cusk also do. It is not a passive thing. It positions you in a world of others. Even the idea that you could just let go and float, once it is expressed, provides data about who and where you are—­a bit, perhaps, like using an imperfect subjunctive might. It registers you, we could say. To experience your own register, to plot the kinds of language you manage to animate, to experience the kinds of immanent tendencies your talk reveals, to have a practical experience of the fact that not all utterances are equally likely for this or that speaker at any given moment—­Cusk’s novels constantly hover on the brink of this kind of self-­reflexivity. Proust’s narrator hovers on this same brink, and it is to this hovering that I turn in my conclusion.

Conclusion: Animation and Statistics

All of the novelists I have considered in these pages hear more than what is being said when people talk and ask their readers to do the same. What else exactly is to be heard or understood as we process the language we hear or read might be different from case to case. Sarraute might be asking us to hear how words can, through an interactive process, be given the indexical force (my term, not hers) to cause distress in someone, to exclude them, to produce affiliation or disaffiliation. Balzac might ask us to notice that a consequence of talk is that the value (both cultural and economic) of various kinds of artifacts (and of persons) is asserted, accepted, maintained, or refused. Eliot might ask us to notice that talk has its own pathways through sociocultural space, and to hear how general cultural values that pertain within a certain realm of social space are perpetuated and even enforced through talk. Woolf might ask us to be attentive to the collective work that is going on to produce a shared space of talk that allows a social event (a dinner party) to succeed, and, as a result, various kinds of identity and various versions of social order to be maintained. Cusk might ask us to hear how when people imagine themselves to be expressing their individuality, they are nonetheless participating in and reproducing collective cultural forms or struggling against them. All of this shows an attentiveness to what I referred to in my introduction as the multifunctionality of language-­in-­use. Some forms of this kind of attentiveness are acquired as a part of daily life. Others are the result of specific kinds of training—­perhaps formal or informal training in how to read literary texts, perhaps formal training in various social scientific disciplines.

262  Conclusion

Characters in Proust are perfectly aware of this kind of linguistic multifunctionality. It is not just the narrator who hears the language people emit as a form of data that can be subject to different kinds of processing in order to reveal different kinds of information. Here is Albertine describing to the narrator the way that she and her friends listened to Andrée’s way of talking during a particular period in her life. They used features of her talk to ascertain how much time she had been spending with the narrator and what the nature of their relationship must have been: Anyway, didn’t you notice how she’d started to talk like you, to use your arguments? Especially when she’d just been with you, it stood out a mile. She didn’t have to tell us that she’d seen you. As soon as she arrived, if she’d been with you, we could tell at once. We’d look at each other and laugh. She was like a coalman trying to pretend he isn’t a coalman, but he’s all black. A miller doesn’t have to tell you he’s a miller, you can see the flour all over him and the place where the sack was on his back. Andrée was just the same, she moved her eyebrows like you, and then that long neck of hers, I can’t explain. When I pick up a book that’s been in your bedroom, I can take it out of doors, but anyone can still tell it’s yours because there’s always a trace of your horrible fumigations. It’s a tiny thing, I can’t tell you, but there’s just a hint which is actually quite nice. Every time somebody said anything nice about you, or seemed to think a lot of you, Andrée was in the seventh heaven. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 13) (Du reste, vous n’avez pas remarqué qu’elle s’était mise à prendre vos manières de parler, de raisonner? Surtout quand elle venait de vous quitter, c’était frappant. Elle n’avait pas besoin de nous dire si elle vous avait vu. Quand elle arrivait, si elle venait d’auprès de vous, cela se voyait à la première seconde. Nous nous regardions entre nous et nous riions. Elle était comme un charbonnier qui voudrait faire croire qu’il n’est pas charbonnier, il est tout noir. Un meunier n’a pas besoin de dire qu’il est meunier, on voit bien toute la farine qu’il a sur lui, il y a encore la place des sacs qu’il a portés. Andrée, c’était la même chose, elle tournait ses sourcils comme vous, et puis son grand cou, enfin je ne peux pas vous dire. Quand je prends un livre qui a été dans votre chambre, je peux le lire dehors, on sait tout de même qu’il vient de chez vous parce qu’il garde quelque chose de vos sales fumigations. C’est un rien, je ne peux vous dire, mais c’est un rien, au fond, qui est assez gentil. Chaque fois que quelqu’un avait parlé de vous gentiment, avait eu l’air de faire grand cas de vous, Andrée était dans le ravissement. [3:530])

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This lovely passage could practically serve as a primer on Peircian indexicality. For Peirce, indexicality is a particular kind of ground that links a sign to its object, perhaps existentially (a Boston accent and a period early in life spent in Boston) or physically (my finger pointing at you), or perhaps causally (smoke to fire, fever to an infection) or through co-­presence (tears and sadness), or through contiguity or co-­occurrence (a knock at the door and the person knocking).1 For Albertine and her friends, Andrée’s speech would be filled with indexes that linked her to the narrator, or that suggested she had recently spent time in his company. Just as a book that had been in his room would retain that room’s odors for some time after being removed from it, Andrée’s word choices, her thought patterns, syntax, intonation, and gestures would all suggest—­to an appropriately informed set of interlocutors—­recent time in the narrator’s company. Even Andrée’s emotional reaction to certain utterances favorable to the narrator would index, for her friends, her growing emotional attachment to the narrator. This way of processing the information carried in someone’s speech, attitudes, and emotions is, of course, part of the practicalities of life, and within the grasp of most users of language. As for the narrator himself, he suggests that he takes this question of data processing to a more rigorous level. He is prompted to do so, in the section of the novel from which these passages are drawn, by his obsessive preoccupation with Albertine’s truthfulness and fidelity. His obsession seems also to generate some crucial semiotic theorizing that is, in fact, characteristic of the novel as a whole: As I got older, I had developed in the opposite direction from those peoples who adopt a phonetic script only after having used characters as symbols; for so many years I had looked for people’s real lives and thoughts only in the direct utterance that they voluntarily provided, but now, because they seemed missing there, I had come to do the opposite, to attach importance only to those statements that are not a rational, analytical expression of the truth; I relied on words only when I could read them like the rush of blood to the face of a person who is unsettled, or like a sudden silence. A certain adverb (like the one M. de Cambremer used when he thought I was “a writer” and when, not having yet spoken to me, he was describing a visit he had made to the Verdurins, and said, turning to me, “actually de Borrelli was there too”) flaring up, sparked by the unintended, sometimes dangerous proximity of two ideas unexpressed by the speaker, from whose discourse I could, by appropriate methods of analysis or electrolysis, extract them, told me more than a whole speech. Albertine

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sometimes left such loose ends trailing in her speech, precious compounds which I hastened to “process” so as to turn them into clear ideas. (Prisoner/ Fugitive, 77) (J’avais suivi dans mon existence une marche inverse de celle des peuples qui ne se servent de l’écriture phonétique qu’après n’avoir considéré les caractères que comme une suite de symboles; moi qui pendant tant d’années n’avait cherché la vie et la pensée réelles des gens que dans l’énoncé direct qu’ils m’en fournissaient volontairement, par leur faute j’en étais arrivé à ne plus attacher, au contraire, d’importance qu’aux témoignages qui ne sont pas une expression rationnelle et analytique de la vérité; les paroles elles-­mêmes ne me renseignaient qu’à la condition d’être interprétées à la façon d’un afflux de sang à la figure d’une personne qui se trouble, à la façon encore d’un silence subit. Tel adverbe (par exemple employé par M. de Cambremer quand il croyait que j’étais “écrivain” et que, ne m’ayant pas encore parlé, racontant une visite qu’il avait faite aux Verdurin, il s’était tournait vers moi en me disant: “Il y avait justement de Borrelli”) jailli dans une conflagration par le rapprochement involontaire, parfois périlleux, de deux idées que l’interlocuteur n’exprimait pas, et duquel par telles méthodes d’analyse ou d’électrolyse appropriées, je pouvais les extraire, m’en disait plus qu’un discours. Albertine laissait parfois traîner dans ses propos tel ou tel de ces précieux amalgames que je me hâtais de “traiter” pour les transformer en idées claires. [3:596])

I started out like most people, he seems to suggest, focused on the most common understanding of how to grasp the meaning of utterances: establish the denotational text, learn to parse the most direct meaning of the words people wrote or said. But it turns out that an understanding of the denotational text did not give access to “people’s real lives and thoughts.” (Our true life and our true thoughts, this passage seems to suggest, occur mostly implicitly. We are perhaps only rarely fully aware of them.) Utterances would need to be examined for their indexicality, most prominently featured in signs like a blush or a sudden silence (a symptom being a classic Peircean example of an index). The narrator’s approach to M. de Cambremer’s adverb takes the analysis to a new level, however. Here we are fully in the domain of a linguistic anthropologist looking at how different bits of an utterance contribute to carrying out a certain social task: M. de Cambremer, whomever he was speaking to at a moment when the narrator was also present, uses an adverb ( justement, actually) to perform a social pivot, to make a conversational move to include the narrator as an addressee of his utterance, to grant him standing and even privilege.

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M. de Cambremer uses the adverb, the direction of his gaze, and the piece of information that a certain minor French poet (Raymond de Borrelli) had been at an event he attended to indicate a certain kind of interest in and recognition of the narrator, to express his belief that the narrator is himself a “writer,” and to indicate that in his view writers are entitled to a certain respect. None of this is said, but all of it is meant, our narrator points out, and the meaning is produced interactively through the exchange of an amalgamation of words, gestures, manners, by drawing on contexts past, present, and future, by the invocation of shared bits of knowledge and the acknowledgment of kinds of social identities that exist in relation to other such identities, by an appeal to a shared understanding that the utterance hopes to bring into being between Cambremer and the narrator. If you wish to be able to perceive and describe all of these workings of talk, you will need to practice some kind of analysis; you will need to run the interaction through some kind of data processing; you will have to isolate the relevant bits of the utterance and the correspondingly relevant bits of the context and show how they are brought together. It is not just because the narrator does not trust Albertine’s truthfulness and fidelity that he learns to think of and listen to language in this way. It is something he has been training himself to do over many years and in relation to many different kinds of people: Swann, Gilberte, Odette, the duke and duchess, Charlus, Morel, Bergotte, and others. This kind of ear training and data processing is also explicitly tied to his efforts to imagine himself to be a novelist. In the final volume, as the novel draws to a close and the narrator is sitting in the library waiting to be allowed to enter the party being given by the latest Princesse de Guermantes (the former Mme Verdurin), the party where the novel’s final scene takes place, he describes for us what he imagines to be a necessary instinct for someone who wants to be a writer. This passage recalls certain elements from the passage I cited at the beginning of chapter 1 when, after reading a (pastiched) passage from Edmond de Goncourt’s journal, the narrator lamented his own inattentiveness to the words people said, because his attention was caught instead by their manner in speaking. Here there is no such lament. Instead, that division of attention is simply asserted as what is required of a writer: For, driven by the instinct that was in him, the writer, long before he thought that he might one day become one, regularly failed to look at a large number of things that other people looked at, which caused him to be accused by other people of not paying attention and by himself of not knowing how to listen or look; during that time he was telling his eyes and ears to retain for ever things

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that to other people seemed puerile trivialities, the tone of voice in which a phrase had been said, and the facial expression and movement of the shoulders that at a certain moment, many years before, some person had made about whom perhaps he knows nothing else, and that because this tone of voice was one that he had already heard, or felt that he might hear again, that it was something that might be repeated, something durable; it is this feeling for the general which, in the future writer, itself selects things that are general and that will be able to be part of the work of art. (Finding, 209) (Car, mû par l’instinct qui était en lui, l’écrivain, bien avant qu’il crût le devenir un jour, omettait régulièrement de regarder tant de choses que les autres remarquent, ce qui le faisait accuser par les autres de distraction et par lui-­même de ne savoir ni écouter ni voir; pendant ce temps-­là il dictait à ses yeux et à ses oreilles de retenir à jamais ce qui semblait aux autres des riens puérils, l’accent avec lequel avait été dite une phrase, et l’air de figure et le mouvement d’épaules qu’avait fait à un certain moment telle personne dont il ne sait peut-­être rien d’autre, il y a de cela bien des années, et cela parce que cet accent, il l’avait déjà entendu, ou sentait qu’il pourrait le réentendre, que c’était quelque chose de renouvelable, de durable; c’est le sentiment du général qui dans l’écrivain futur choisit lui-­même ce qui est général et pourra entrer dans l’oeuvre d’art. [4:479])

Here there is an implicit assertion of the fact that communication is occurring simultaneously on many different channels when language is used, and therefore, according to how you process what you are listening to, you may extract different kinds of information. What the narrator here calls “things that are general” we might link to some social form, some cultural concept, something that could be described as repeatable (renouvelable) or durable only if it is noticed across multiple occurrences of  language use. What is being noticed is something that is social indexical in nature, the way some semiotic feature of an utterance could be said to point to some conceptual schema, or some schema of values, or to some organizing principle of the social world that exists as part of the potentially invocable context of a given utterance. This experience of indexicality has been present for the narrator/hero from early on in the novel, for instance, when he heard Gilberte’s name being thrown across the park by her friend, or when Saint-­Loup said “cosmique” or Albertine said “mousmé,” or when Charlus’s voice exhibited some particular intonation. In the next sentence from this passage, the narrator links the writer’s interest in these indexical features of language to the identification of “psychological laws,” but as we have seen and will see again in a moment, he and the

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novel show those features to have wider forms of applicability than solely the psychological. They contribute to our ability to construct ourselves as persons; they contribute to our ability to organize our perception of the social world; they contribute to the ongoing evolution of our aesthetic experiences, our sense of taste. For he [the 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 of prophecy, mouthpieces of a psychological law. The only things he remembers are the general. It was by tones of voice like these, by such facial movements, even if seen in his earliest childhood, that the life of others was represented in his mind, and when later he comes to write, he will describe a common movement of the shoulders, as realistically as if it had been written in an anatomist’s note-­book, but in order here to express a psychological truth, and then on to those shoulders graft somebody else’s neck movement, each person having contributed his momentary pose. (Finding, 209) (Car il [l’écrivain] 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. Il ne se souvient que du général. Par de tels accents, par de tels mouvements de physionomie, eussent-­ils été vus dans sa plus lointaine enfance, la vie des autres était représentée en lui et, quand plus tard il écrirait, viendrait composer d’un mouvement d’épaules commun à beaucoup, vrai comme s’il était noté sur le cahier d’un anatomiste, mais ici pour exprimer une vérité psychologique, et emmanchant sur ses épaules un mouvement de cou fait par un autre, chacun ayant donné son instant de pose. [4:479])

Let me highlight two points in this passage. When the narrator says that the novelist will use a movement of someone’s shoulders observed at some earlier moment in life to “express a psychological truth,” he is once again indicating the centrality of the indexical sign to his project. When he suggests that a shoulder movement seen in one body could be amalgamated with the movement of a neck seen in another, he is suggesting that there is a shared cultural code in play, common to certain kinds of bodies, and that the amalgamation is the work the writer does to provide an effective image of the workings of the social world to a reader who is equipped to notice and decipher the indexical signs in question. Proust’s narrator is here perhaps touching upon a version of

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the novelistic problem we saw Sarraute’s novelist facing in Between Life and Death—­how to make sure that the text he composes will have the capacity to communicate to readers via some indexical channel the exact information he wants conveyed, along with a general understanding that people, when they use their bodies in the exchange of utterances, contribute to the production of various kinds of meaning through a shared indexical repertory that allows for the invocation of common cultural frameworks of understanding. Now in this particular passage (and at many points throughout the novel), the narrator suggests that his life has been that of an observer (of accents, of intonations, of facial expressions, movements of heads, necks, and shoulders), a novelist-­in-­the-­making a major portion of whose life has been taken up with a kind of preparatory observational fieldwork for writing. Yet as we have also had the occasion to observe, the narrator is always participating in the world he observes, and that participation contributes to a certain observational bias that needs to be accounted for. He also does, despite protestations to the contrary, frequently remember the exact words people say, but, as we might notice, he is often as interested in their indexical as he is in their denotational values. He knows he not only participates in the world, but is influenced and transformed by it. He can even watch himself being influenced, and seems to act as if, by doing so, that influence could somehow be controlled. There is, for instance, a moment, after a long dinner party hosted by the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes in The Guermantes Way, when he explains how he remained under the glamour of the duchess long after the evening has ended. During the dinner, she had cited a few verses from early in Victor Hugo’s career, and commented that Hugo’s later poetry was “so dreadful” (Guermantes, 490) (“détestable” [2:783]). The narrator is of the view that whatever was significant about Hugo’s poetry is to be found nearly exclusively in his later verse, long after the time when Hugo composed the verses the duchess cites over dinner. Yet, the narrator admits there was something to the duchess’s taste that he needed to think over: And so I had been wrong to confine myself up to this point to Hugo’s later collections. It is true that Mme de Guermantes had used only a fractional part of the earlier ones to embellish her conversation. But the point is that, by quoting an isolated line in this way, you increase its power of attraction ten-­fold. The lines that had entered or returned to my mind in the course of this dinner party acted as magnets in their turn, powerfully called up the poems within which they were normally embedded, so that my magnetized hands were unable to put up more than forty-­eight hours’ resistance to the force that drew them

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toward the volume in which Les Orientales or Les Chants du crépuscule were bound. [ . . . ] I reread these volumes from cover to cover and found respite only when I suddenly stumbled, waiting there for me in the light in which she had bathed them, on the lines that Mme de Guermantes had quoted. (Guermantes, 547–­48) (Aussi avais-­je eu tort de me confiner jusqu’ici dans les derniers recueils d’Hugo. Des premiers, certes, c’était seulement d’une part infime que s’ornait la conversation de Mme de Guermantes. Mais justement, en citant ainsi un vers isolé on décuple sa puissance attractive. Ceux qui étaient entrés ou rentrés dans ma mémoire, au cours de ce dîner, aimantaient à leur tour, appelaient à eux avec une telle force les pièces au milieu desquelles ils avaient l’habitude d’être enclavés, que mes mains électrisées ne purent pas résister plus de quarante-­huit heures à la force qui les conduisaient vers le volume où étaient reliés Les Orientales et Les Chants du crépuscule. [ . . . ] Je relus ces volumes d’un bout à l’autre, et ne retrouvai la paix que quand j’aperçus tout d’un coup, m’attendant dans la lumière où elle les avait baignés, les vers que m’avait cités Mme de Guermantes. [2:838])

Here the hero, in the days immediately following this dinner party, seems rather like a Sarraute character, passively influenced (magnetized) by someone else’s taste; retrospectively (as narrator?) he rebels against that taste, while softening the rebellion by indicating that perhaps there was something worthwhile and helpful to him in the duchess’s way of invoking Hugo’s verse that he could see once he had gotten over her influence. The passage continues: For all these reasons, talk with the Duchesse was like the discoveries we make in the library of a country house, outdated, incomplete, incapable of forming a mind, devoid of almost everything we value, but occasionally offering us some curious piece of information, or even a quotation from a fine passage that was unknown to us and which subsequently we are happy to remember as something we were introduced to because of a stay in a splendid stately home. And because we have discovered Balzac’s preface to the Chartreuse or some unpublished letters of  Joubert, we are then tempted to exaggerate the value of our stay there, the barren frivolity of which we forget in the light of a single evening’s happy discovery. (Guermantes, 548) (Pour toutes ces raisons, les causeries avec la duchesse ressemblaient à ces connaissances qu’on puise dans une bibliothèque de château, surannée,

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incomplète, incapable de former une intelligence, dépourvue de presque tout ce que nous aimons, mais nous offrant parfois quelque renseignement curieux, voire la citation d’une belle page que nous ne connaissions pas, et dont nous sommes heureux dans la suite de nous rappeler que nous en devons la connaissance à une magnifique demeure seigneuriale. Nous sommes alors, pour avoir trouvé la préface de Balzac à La Chartreuse ou des lettres inédites de Joubert, tentés de nous exagérer le prix de la vie que nous y avons menée et dont nous oublions, pour cette aubaine d’un soir, la frivolité stérile. [2:838–­39])

It’s an interesting moment, one of many in which the narrator insists on distinguishing himself from the duchess, and in describing her and her taste in ways that show him to advantage while disadvantaging her. He defines or positions himself and his taste in relation to hers. Her position in the social world also constitutes for him a necessary reference point that he uses to orient himself. There remains the question of how his knowing her, how experiencing both her prestige and her taste, has impacted him and his taste. Does the glow that she has imparted to certain Hugo verses that he had previously discounted fully fade, or does it exercise some enduring influence over his ongoing aesthetic evolution? Is it the case that anything he accidentally learns to appreciate thanks to her mention of it will be appreciated by him according to his own structures of taste, or will something of her taste have gone into forming his without his knowing it? Will he come to understand that his taste exists relationally, and specifically in relation to hers? This is an area, I think, in which the novel teaches us that the narrator cannot exactly be trusted. We see here the narrator commenting on a process he underwent, and yet his commentary on that process is, in fact, itself part of that process, a process of taste formation. It is data as least as much as it is commentary. Frequently the narrator offers us general commentary on the social world, while failing to convince us that the commentary is not still caught up in that world. He offers us generalizing commentary on affective relations between people without convincing us that he has successfully unraveled his own affective tangles. He reflects on aesthetic experience “in general” without ever successfully making the case that his discourse is anything other than one that somehow indexes or represents the interests of people (like him) occupying a certain social location. Let me set side by side two passages that can help us explore the complexities of this facet of the novel. First, here is a passage from the scene in the library in the final volume of the novel that is often taken as voicing the key tenet

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of Search’s aesthetic credo regarding a deep truth inside each person that it is the novel’s goal to reveal: Most of all, I would eliminate all words which come from the tongue rather than the mind, humorous remarks of the sort we make in conversation and which after a long conversation with other people we continue to address artificially to ourselves and which fill our minds with untruths, these purely automatic remarks which, in the writer who sinks so far as to transcribe them, are accompanied by the little smile, the little grimace which constantly spoils, for example, the spoken sentence of a Sainte-­Beuve, whereas true books must be the product not of daylight and chitchat but of darkness and silence. (Finding, 206) (Plus que tout j’écarterais ces paroles que les lèvres plutôt que l’esprit choisissent, ces paroles pleines d’humour, comme on en dit dans la conversation, et qu’après une longue conversation avec les autres on continue à s’adresser facticement à soi-­même et qui nous remplissent l’esprit de mensonges, ces paroles toutes physiques qu’accompagne chez l’écrivain qui s’abaisse à les transcrire le petit sourire, la petite grimace qui altère à tout moment, par exemple, la phrase parlée d’un Sainte-­Beuve, tandis que les vrais livres doivent être les enfants non du grand jour et de la causerie mais de l’obscurité et du silence. [4:476])

What is deep is what is true. Social life is superficial. Certain examples of language use in daily life have next to nothing of value about them. To know yourself, you have to withdraw from the world and find a private inner language that expresses your deep self. To understand art, you have to explore your own sensations (often deep and hidden ones) in relation to the artwork, not talk with other people about it.2 These ideas rest uneasily alongside the kinds of research the narrator has described himself doing throughout the novel in order to locate where certain relations to art objects are localized in the social field or in certain kinds of people, where certain forms of language come from and what interests they indicate, and to understand the process by which those relations and those forms are reproduced, inculcated, incorporated in various kinds of people. Consider, in this light, a second passage, from the dinner party scene in The Guermantes Way, in which the narrator describes the form of his interest in the duchess: And so, because of these various influences, Mme de Guermantes expressed at once the most ancient period of aristocratic France, then, much later, the

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manner in which the Duchesse de Broglie might have enjoyed and found fault with Victor Hugo under the July Monarchy, and, finally, a keen appreciation for the literature that sprang from Mérimée and Meilhac. I found the first of these influences more to my taste than the second, and it did more to alleviate the disappointment of my journey to and arrival at the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, so different from what I had imagined it to be; but I found the second preferable to the last. (Guermantes, 492) (Ainsi, par ces diverses formations, Mme de Guermantes exprimait à la fois la plus ancienne France aristocratique, puis, beaucoup plus tard, la façon dont la duchesse de Broglie aurait pu goûter et blâmer Victor Hugo sous la monarchie de Juillet, enfin un vif goût de la littérature issue de Mérimée et de Meilhac. La première de ces formations me plaisait mieux que la seconde, m’aidait d’avantage à réparer la déception du voyage et de l’arrivée dans ce faubourg Saint-­Germain, si différent de ce que j’avais cru, mais je préférais encore la seconde à la troisième. [2:785–­86])

We are formed by many kinds of experiences throughout our lives. The narrator, in observing people, observes how different levels of their formation continue to be legible (to be expressed indexically) by the words and gestures, by the exhibitions of taste, that they proffer even much later in life. So Oriane interests the narrator primarily, he asserts, because of the way she reproduces certain cultural features that have characterized her status group for generations. He also sees in her expressions of taste that correspond to the habitus of a literarily well-­connected aristocrat of a generation or two earlier. Finally, he observes that works she has read or seen (Mérimée, Meilhac) during her own formative years have deeply marked her own aesthetic preferences, and in a way he evidently finds unsophisticated. The passage continues: For, while Mme de Guermantes was a Guermantes almost to her fingertips, her à-­la-­Pailleron preferences, her taste for Dumas fils were carefully considered and deliberate. Since such tastes were the opposite of my own, she fed my mind with literature when she spoke to me about the Faubourg Saint-­Germain, and never seemed so stupidly Faubourg Saint-­Germain as when she talked about literature. (Or, tandis que Mme de Guermantes était Guermantes presque sans le vouloir, son pailleronisme, son goût pour Dumas fils étaient réfléchis et voulus. Comme ce goût était à l’opposé du mien, elle fournissait à mon esprit de la

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littérature quand elle me parlait du faubourg Saint-­Germain, et ne me paraissait jamais si stupidement faubourg Saint-­Germain que quand elle me parlait littérature.)

How shall we listen to the narrator (and what shall we absorb about the clues he gives regarding his aesthetic ideology) in passages like these? Surely we should listen to him the way he listens to the duchess. What does it mean for aspects of someone’s taste to be “carefully considered and deliberate”? Would the narrator’s opposing tastes be equally willful? She likes successful middlebrow theater (Dumas fils, Pailleron), it seems, as do many others around her. The narrator, one assumes, likes more exclusive, highbrow fare (Maeterlinck perhaps), but surely his tastes in theater are as revealing as are the duchess’s. When the narrator asserts that “she fed my mind with literature when she spoke to me about the Faubourg Saint-­Germain,” he appears to mean that there are certain moments when he can extract cultural information from her talk (doubtless both the matter and the manner of that talk) that she almost cannot help but put there, whereas when she intentionally expresses an opinion about literature, she cannot help but disappoint him. By talking, she gives him essential data that he processes as he imagines the composition of his novel. But what about his talk to her or anyone else? Surely he has also incorporated a lot of  history. He admits as much at many points, raising for us the central issues I wish to highlight to bring What Proust Heard to a close. How do we come to possess and to animate our own speech? Do we in fact always animate speech that we intend? How does our sense of who we are help form the speech we utter, shaping the image we produce of ourselves for others? How do we know what to say and what not to say? How is it that we come to understand what “someone like us” should or should not say? How do we then follow that guidance or move beyond it? On one occasion the narrator hears himself say something to Albertine and recognizes that the words he spoke were not exactly his own. This leads to a reflection on his manner of speaking that in fact places it into the same category as the speech of the duchess, data to be analyzed: All of these words—­for a large part of what we say is merely recitation—­I had already heard from my mother. [ . . . ] No doubt, since everyone must carry on in himself the life of his progenitors, the steady, humorous man who had not existed in me at the beginning had come to join the sensitive one, and it was natural that I should become in turn what my parents had been. Furthermore, as this new me took shape, he found his words ready and waiting for him in

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the memory of the ironic, reproving language that had been used to me, and which I was now to use to others, and which came to my lips quite naturally, whether I was reviving it by imitation and association of memories, or whether the delicate and mysterious incrustations of genetic power had also drawn in me, without my knowing it, 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. (Prisoner/Fugitive, 95) (Ces paroles, car une grande partie de ce que nous disons n’étant qu’une récitation, je les avais toutes entendu prononcer à ma mère. [ . . . ] Sans doute, chacun devant faire continuer en lui la vie des siens, l’homme pondéré et railleur qui n’existait pas en moi au début avait rejoint le sensible, et il était naturel que je fusse à mon tour tel que mes parents avaient été. De plus, au moment où ce nouveau moi se formait, il trouvait son langage tout prêt dans le souvenir de celui, ironique et grondeur, qu’on m’avait tenu, que j’avais maintenant à tenir aux autres, et qui sortait tout naturellement de ma bouche, soit que je l’évoquasse par mimétisme et association de souvenirs, soit aussi que les délicates et mystérieuses incrustations du pouvoir 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 eus ceux dont j’étais sorti. [3:614–­15])

The narrator, in this beautiful passage, does listen to himself the way he listens to the duchess, or to Charlus, or to the girls in Balbec, or to Albertine. He understands there are multiple signatures that might be identified in his speech by someone with the tools and the capacity to notice them. And, because here he has the experience of both talking and hearing himself talk, he can pose the problem of authorship in relation to his talk. Things come naturally out of his mouth that are not his own words. In the background to the questions I have been posing in the past few paragraphs is a 1979 essay by Erving Goffman, “Footing.” Goffman’s influential essay can help us to an appreciation of the kinds of insights that are developed in Search in those moments where the narrator pauses to listen to himself talking and endeavors to understand what it would be to listen to one’s own speech as data of a certain kind. In “Footing,” Goffman suggested that we might do well to break down the commonplace notion of a “speaker” into a number of partials. He labels them “animator,” “author,” and “principal.” An animator is a “sounding box in use,” a “talking machine, a body engaged in acoustic activity, or, if you will, an individual active in the role of utterance production.” An author is something different, “someone who has selected the sentiments that are being

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expressed and the words in which they are encoded.” Finally, a principal is the person “whose beliefs have been told [ . . . ] who is committed to what the words say”—­someone who is willing, in today’s parlance, to own the words being spoken.3 If you find yourself possessed and uttering words coming from elsewhere, then you are an animator without being a principal or an author. If you tell someone what you more or less want to say, and they then write the speech that you later deliver, then they are the author, but you will be the animator and principal (at least partly). If you write and deliver a speech or a one-­act play meant to represent some moment in the life of some historical figure, then you are the author and the animator, but perhaps not fully the principal. And so on. Just referring to a speaker, Goffman underlines, risks failing to grasp the complexity of what is occurring when words are uttered. “When one uses the term ‘speaker,’ ” Goffman writes, “one often implies that the individual who animates is formulating his own text and staking out his own position through it: animator, author, and principal are one. What could be more natural? So natural indeed that I cannot avoid continuing to use the term ‘speaker’ in this sense, let alone the masculine pronoun as the unmarked singular form” (145). Part of the delight of this passage is its voicing, and the work its voicing does to illustrate and add complexity to Goffman’s point. What does he mean that he “cannot avoid” using the masculine pronoun to refer to the antecedent speaker? He cleverly marks the unmarked form (unmarked, at least, at the moment he was writing—­or in the process of ceasing to be so) and suggests that what it was unavoidable for him to say is perhaps not something that he is fully the author of, and not something that he fully backs as principal. He has been a voice box for something “natural,” something that seems to have piggybacked on his own speech, something that, we might assume, some part of  him means to suggest is not natural; it is, rather, social. He has been a voice box for the social order or for socially sedimented habits of speech and thought relating to how “we” think of “speakers” and how “we” use pronouns, and then some other part of  him has questioned his own role as speaker, his allegiance to what his language has communicated. Or, we could say, this was all a performance: Goffman has performed a piece of theater in those three sentences, shifting his footing slightly in each sentence, so as to illustrate how slippery the roles of author and principal are even in what would seem to be the simplest moments of formulating and producing utterances. “Often,” Goffman notes, “when we do engage in ‘fresh talk,’ that is, the extemporaneous, ongoing formulation of a text under the exigency of immediate response to our current situation, it is not true to say that we always speak our own words and ourself take the position to which these words attest” (146).

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I think that what Goffman has suggested, although he doesn’t take up the suggestion, is that even in situations that seem to be made up of “fresh talk,” the analytic roles of animator, author, and principal themselves will not be fine-­ grained enough to capture what happens through language use. The reasons for this have to do with how language, a social institution, inhabits individual speakers and how we conceive of what individual users achieve (and for whom they achieve it) as they use the language that inhabits them. That is, even when we think we are producing speech of our own authorship and with our own backing, that speech will be the vehicle for other meanings or effects or consequences that have a complex relationship to our partial roles as animator, principal, or author of our utterances. Bakhtin and Sapir can help us appreciate the complexities of language-­in-­use toward which Goffman has gestured. In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Bakhtin observes: The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones, and they must be taken into account in order to understand fully the style of the utterance. After all, our thought itself—­philosophical, scientific, and artistic—­is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well. [ . . . ] Any utterance, when it is studied in greater depth under the concrete conditions of speech communication, reveals to us many half-­concealed or completely concealed words of others with varying degrees of foreignness. Therefore, the utterance appears to be furrowed with distant and barely audible echoes of changes of speech subjects and dialogic overtones, greatly weakened utterance boundaries that are completely permeable to the author’s expression. The utterance proves to be a very complex and multiplanar phenomenon. (92–­93)

Here Bakhtin is describing (much as we just saw Proust’s narrator doing) how the history of any given speaker’s experience of language contributes to the formation of each utterance that speaker makes, with the result that, we might say, the authorship of every utterance is shared because so many bits of that utterance echo the previous linguistic encounters that have brought the speaker to the point in time and the place in social space at which any given utterance is produced. We could say, combining Goffman and Bakhtin, that authorship is distributive. And not just authorship. We could even extend Bakhtin’s thought to imagine that animation is distributive. Our way of animating an utterance is also the result of a long apprenticeship in language use. It is not just words that come from the utterances of others but overtones, sonic aspects of an utterance. The

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tonal aspects of our language use, our ability to inflect utterances, is also an acquisition, with the result that our very “acoustic activity” is not ours alone but carries information willy-­nilly from elsewhere. What individuates us also contributes to our social profile, to our social legibility. Sapir observed, in a passage I cited already in the introduction, that the fundamental quality of one’s voice, the phonetic patterns of speech, the speed and relative smoothness of articulation, the length and build of the sentences, the character and range of the vocabulary, the scholastic consistency of the words used, the readiness with which words respond to the requirements of the social environment, in particular the suitability of one’s language to the language habits of the persons addressed—­all these are so many complex indicators of the personality. (“Language,” 17)

Goffman, we could say, portrayed something of  his personality to us in his wry performance of someone reflecting back critically on a sentence they had just written. And if our personality individuates us, it does so by telling others how to situate us relationally. In Sapir’s words, “All in all, it is not too much to say that one of the really important functions of language is to be constantly declaring to society the psychological places held by all of its members” (18). And probably not just the psychological but also the social places held (or imagined to be held) by all of its members. The way that Sapir couches his phrase (“one of the really important functions of  language is to be constantly declaring to society”) also suggests that he understands speakers, even in situations of “fresh talk,” to be speaking  for “language” itself, as “language” addresses “society.” We might say that Sapir’s point is that if an utterance is (in Bakhtin’s word) multiplanar, on one plane language is using individual speakers to address itself as it also addresses society—­society existing in language, and language being fundamentally social. The role of principal, we might assert, is thus also distributive, just like the role of animator and author. While we address whomever we imagine ourselves to be addressing, language is also happening, evolving, transforming; it is perpetuating itself, pursuing agendas we cannot perceive precisely because our utterances would need to be aggregated with others over time for what is in the process of occurring to become evident.4 In Search, Proust sometimes stages scenes of people talking to themselves (the narrator in particular, but not only), and these scenes almost inevitably become moments in which the novel offers some kind of a reflection on the multi­ planar aspect of language use, or on the ways the roles of animator, author, and principal are more distributive than integral, even in what we might think

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of as the most “private” moments of language use. In the past decade, linguistic anthropologists such as Teri Silvio have opened a discussion of  how an investigation of contemporary media forms can demonstrate the usefulness of seeing “animation as a trope for human action on/in the world.”5 Silvio defines animation as “the projection of qualities perceived as human—­life, power, agency, will, personality, and so on—­outside the self, and into the sensory environment, through acts of creation, perception, and interaction” (427). In Proust (as perhaps in a novelist like Cusk), it seems rather that people have the experience of being animated by talk, that people experience themselves as a medium into which language is projected, that they experiment with the possibility of a sense of self accruing (or notice when a sense of self fails to accrue) around language they have been uttering. Perhaps they notice that they animate different voices or persons in different contexts. In any case, my goal in the next few paragraphs is to watch Proust’s narrator and his novel ponder the experience of animation and unfold the consequences of a reflection on that experience. In the first of three scenes I wish to look at, it is Charles Swann who is talking to himself or, more exactly, he is doing what we often do when we talk to ourselves—­he is imagining a scene of himself and others talking together. He is imagining things he might like to say to other people, and things they might, in turn, say to him. In particular he is imagining something he wants to have happen but that won’t. (Why it won’t is an interesting question too long to take up here.) He wants some day to introduce his soon-­to-­be wife, Odette, and their daughter, Gilberte, to his friend Oriane, who has recently become the Duchesse de Guermantes: But at moments when Swann sat daydreaming about what it might be like to be the husband of Odette, he always saw the moment when he would introduce her, and especially their daughter, to the Princesse des Laumes, or the Duchesse de Guermantes, as she had become upon the death of  her father-­in-­law. He had no desire to present them to anyone else; but as he imagined the Duchesse talking about him to Odette, and Odette talking to Mme de Guermantes, and the tenderness the latter would show to Gilberte, making much of her, making him proud of his daughter, he could be so moved that he spoke aloud the words they would say. The circumstances that made up this fancied presentation scene were as detailed and concrete as those invented by people who set about drawing up ways to spend some huge imaginary lottery prize. To the extent that a decision may be motivated by a mental image coinciding with it, it can be said that the purpose of Swann’s marrying Odette was to introduce

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her and Gilberte, even though no one else might be present, even though no one else might ever know of it, to the Duchesse de Guermantes. (Shadow, 43) (Mais quand Swann dans ses heures de rêverie voyait Odette devenue sa femme, il se représentait invariablement le moment où il l’amènerait, elle et surtout sa fille, chez la princesse des Laumes, devenue bientôt duchesse de Guermantes par la mort de son beau-­père. Il ne désirait pas les présenter ailleurs, mais il s’attendrissait quand il inventait, en énonçant les mots eux-­mêmes, tout ce que la duchesse dirait de lui à Odette, et Odette à Mme de Guermantes, la tendresse que celle-­ci témoignerait à Gilberte, la gâtant, le rendant fier de sa fille. Il se jouait à lui-­même la scène de la présentation avec la même précision dans le détail imaginaire qu’ont les gens qui examinent comment ils emploie­ raient, s’ils le gagnaient, un lot dont ils fixent arbitrairement le chiffre. Dans la mesure où une image qui accompagne une de nos résolutions la motive, on peut dire que si Swann épousa Odette, ce fut pour la présenter elle et Gilberte, sans qu’il y eût personne là, au besoin sans que personne le sût jamais, à la duchesse de Guermantes. [1:462])

The narrator makes an astounding assertion: that Swann marries Odette at least partly because he has something he wants to say (to Oriane), and some things he wants to hear other people (Odette, Oriane, and Gilberte) say to him and to each other. He marries because it is one of the preconditions for a scene of talk—­one he has authored and even animated on a number of occasions when he was by himself—­that he wishes could be realized. Sometimes the desire to say something (or to arrange for something to be said) can be incredibly strong in Proust’s novel, as we shall see again in a moment. But what kind of a desire is the one Swann is experiencing? It doesn’t seem that far-­fetched to say that the desire is not only Swann’s. Its agency is complex and distributive. There is a social component to the desire, and even perhaps a sociolinguistic one. Language wants to go somewhere, and Swann is caught up in its sociolinguistic currents. Part of what is at stake is the microlevel shifts regarding speech conventions that participate in macrolevel social processes. On the microlevel, who gets to say what to whom, when, and why? How do the conventions that regulate such things evolve? In another of his essays, “Felicity’s Condition,” Goffman observed: The bearing of acquaintanceship and close ties, of the generation and intentional construction of  joint biography, of being or not being in a state of talk,

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of the various locators we employ to provide a framework for the statements we want to be in a position to utter succinctly—­all these critical matters have been little studied. Behind all this, and linking these themes together, is the socially prescribed place of what is taken to be the operation of the mind. A question of who can say what to whom, in what circumstances, with what preamble, in what surface form, and, given available readings, will not be thought mindless in doing so. A question of what we can say and still satisfy Felicity’s Condition.6

For Goffman, meeting “Felicity’s Condition” is a complex social calculation, and it involves having a sense of “who can say what to whom” that passes as normal. Small wonder we spend so much of our time when we are talking to ourselves privately acting out scenes of talking to others—­as if to see how they sound, as if to test the effects of animating the words we author, to test whether we will seem mindless, or perhaps clueless, if we animate them while inhabiting the role of principal, while owning them, so to speak. This is an example of  what we earlier saw Bourdieu calling “a kind of practical statistics,” the kind that grounds our sense of conduct in everyday life: Do I dare to say this? How likely is it that someone will ever say that? Once I marry Odette, what are the chances Oriane will allow me to arrange for them to meet? If I can imagine what they would say to each other, does that make it any more likely that the meeting will occur? If it can’t occur right now, could it occur in a few years? Who would have to say what to whom for it to happen? As it turns out, we do not always need to own the speech that is authored within our private mind-­space, and indeed sometimes we will wish to disown it. Sometimes utterances seem just to appear, almost of their own volition. Or so Proust’s narrator claims during one of the first scenes in which his younger self finds himself in a state of talk with Oriane, someone for whom he has felt an obsessive fascination for a long time, someone he has been longing to meet. Here they are, finally at the same afternoon party, and she has offered only the slightest acknowledgment of his presence when they were introduced. In the course of the party, she makes some disparaging remarks about a play by Maeterlinck: “What a bird-­brained woman!” I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. I found a sort of grim satisfaction in this evidence of her total incomprehension of Maeterlinck. “So this is the woman I walk miles to see every morning, and out of the kindness of my heart! Well, now it’s my turn to turn the cold shoulder.” This is what I said to myself, but my words had

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nothing to do with what I really thought; they were purely conversational, like the words we utter to ourselves when we are too agitated to remain on our own and feel the need, in the absence of a listener, to talk to ourselves idly, as we would to a stranger. (Guermantes, 223) (“Quelle buse!” pensais-­je, irrité de l’accueil glacial qu’elle m’avait fait. Je trouvais une sorte d’âpre satisfaction à constater sa complète incompréhension de Maeterlinck. “C’est pour une pareille femme que tous les matins je fais tant de kilomètres, vraiment j’ai de la bonté! Maintenant c’est moi qui ne voudrais pas d’elle.” Tels étaient les mots que je me disais; ils étaient le contraire de ma pensée; c’étaient de purs mots de conversation, comme nous nous en disons dans ces moments où trop agités pour rester seuls avec nous-­mêmes nous éprouvons le besoin, à défaut d’autre interlocuteur, de causer avec nous, sans sincérité, comme avec un étranger. [2:526–­27])

“My words were the opposite of my thoughts,” is what the French says more exactly: “ils étaient le contraire de ma pensée [ . . . ] de purs mots de conversation.” Nothing but pure conversation. We thoughtlessly author and sometimes animate language as the result, it seems, of an urgent need to be with someone, anyone, and to utter words in their presence. So then, whose words are “Quelle buse!”? Who actually thought, “What a bird-­brain!”? No one, the novel seems to suggest, or perhaps they represent a thought certain kinds of people might have under similar circumstances, but that the narrator decides he does not want to have.7 The words occurred when certain people found themselves in a certain situation. The passage seems to suggest that our linguistic faculty runs on a separate track from our thinking faculty. It produces subjectless speech for us, speech that, should we utter it, we would do so at our peril, precisely because even though it occurs to us and in us, we have not authored it, and its ownership is uncertain. Perhaps we risk being possessed by it. A bit later in Proust’s novel, after the narrator has spent his first evening at a dinner party given by the duchess (the same party at which Victor Hugo’s verse is discussed), he leaves the party unpleasantly filled to the brim with speech that is not his own: The stories I had heard at the Duchesse’s house [ . . . ] were foreign to me. Entering me for a moment and possessing me only physically, it was as though, being of a social, not an individual, nature, they were anxious to escape. I writhed as I sat in the carriage like a prophetess in a trance. I envisaged another dinner party at which I myself might become a sort of Prince X, or a Mme de

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Guermantes, and tell the same sort of stories. In the meantime, I stammered them out through my trembling lips and tried in vain to restore order to a mind that was carried away by a centrifugal force. And so it was with feverish impatience not to have to bear the weight of all this any longer on my own, in a carriage where I made up for the lack of conversation by talking aloud to myself, that I rang at M. de Charlus’s door, and it was in long monologues with myself, in which I rehearsed everything I was going to tell him with scarcely a thought of what he might have to say to me, that I spent the whole of the time awaiting him in a drawing room into which I had been shown by a footman, and which I was too wound up to take in. I was so anxious for M. de Charlus to listen to the stories I was dying to tell him that I was bitterly disappointed to think that the master of the house had perhaps gone to bed, and that I would have to go back home to work off my verbal intoxication. (Guermantes, 545–­50) (Les histoires que j’avais entendues chez la duchesse m’étaient étrangères. Entrées un instant en moi, qui n’en étais que physiquement possédé, on aurait dit que (de nature sociale et non individuelle) elles étaient impatientes d’en sortir. Je m’agitais dans la voiture, comme une pythonisse. J’attendais un nouveau dîner où je pusse devenir moi-­même une sorte de prince X, de Mme de Guermantes, et les raconter. En attendant, elles faisaient trépider mes lèvres qui les balbutiaient et j’essayais en vain de ramener à moi mon esprit vertigineusement emporté par une force centrifuge. Aussi est-­ce avec une fiévreuse impatience de ne pas porter plus longtemps leur poids tout seul dans une voiture où d’ailleurs je trompais le manque de conversation en parlant tout haut, que je sonnai à la porte de M. de Charlus, et ce fut en longs monologues avec moi-­même où je me répétais tout ce que j’allais lui narrer et ne pensais plus guère à ce qu’il pouvait avoir à me dire, que je passai tout le temps que je restai dans un salon où un valet de pied me fit entrer, et que j’étais d’ailleurs trop agité pour regarder. J’avais un tel besoin que M. de Charlus écoutât les récits que je brûlais de lui faire, que je fus cruellement déçu en pensant que le maître de la maison dormait peut-­être et qu’il me faudrait rentrer cuver chez moi mon ivresse de paroles. [2:840])

Here you are, talking to yourself  because there are words that have gotten into you that need to get out, that need to be shaped into new utterances and passed on to someone else. You know (or part of you knows) that they are not your words, that you will not fully be the author or the principal of any reshaped utterances you may animate. Part of you wishes you could escape from this compulsion. Speaking to yourself doesn’t solve the problem; it’s just a rehearsal for an interpersonal event that might successfully relieve you of this burden—­but

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might not, because where are you ever going to find someone who wants to sit there and listen to exactly what it is that you (or is it you?) want (or do you want?) to say? What is this feverish energy that is propelling this whole process through which we exchange utterances with one another, and how does it inhere in language as that language moves from speaker to speaker, all these speakers somehow divided in themselves, aware only vaguely, or not at all, that they are animating language for ends other than their own? Hearing language provokes us to using it, Proust’s narrator suggests, and when we do use it, we can never fully know what we are doing, nor can we know what is happening in and to language through our use of it. Here is how Bakhtin couched a similar observation: “Utterances are not indifferent to one another, and are not self-­sufficient; they are aware of and mutually reflect one another. These mutual reflections determine their character. Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication” (“Speech Genres,” 91). In all of the three examples I’ve just cited, the speakers (Swann in the first, the narrator in the second two) experience themselves as a medium in which speech or potential speech happens. Such an experience, Search asserts, is not one that can be easily mastered, if it can be mastered at all. The narrator suggests that he can at least distinguish between words that are foreign to him and words that would somehow come from his own mind, actually be part of thinking. Yet it is difficult to imagine that even were he to identify some stretch of inner speech or speech he vocalizes that he felt were truly his, it wouldn’t—­just because it is language—­also provide data about any number of other things and that it wouldn’t, in doing so, show the narrator’s speech to be doing work he does not intend and/or is unaware of. If conversation is often, on practical and subliminal levels, about the construction of inhabitable social roles and relations and the accumulation of the social capital necessary for the satisfaction of various aims (and the poignancy of the passage about Swann enacting scenes of Oriane and Gilberte conversing is that he knows that his willful imagination is insufficient to produce the circumstances in which any such conversation could take place, in which his desire could be satisfied), then speech that is not “foreign” will have in some way to be separated off from social activity—­which the novel consistently demonstrates speech can never be.8 Two of the activities in which the narrator engages that might sometimes be held out as potential sites for nonforeign speech would be analytical discourse (about society or about language) or descriptions of aesthetic experience. And yet, as I hope has become clear throughout these chapters, those very two activities are consistently linked together throughout Search in

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a way that leaves little doubt that aesthetic responses should be taken as part of the patterning of the social world that so fascinates the narrator and that the novel also studies in such detail, and that his (and others’) analytical projects themselves also regularly become caught up in social agendas of various kinds. The narrator explicitly or implicitly links aesthetic responses and efforts at social positioning at every turn, including in his comments on the thought he has (but disavows) upon first being introduced to the duchess: “ ‘What a bird-­ brained woman!’ I thought to myself, still smarting from the icy greeting she had given me. I found a sort of grim satisfaction in this evidence of her total incomprehension of Maeterlinck.” Of course these remarks are disavowed as an example of the meaningless chatter one sometimes indulges in with oneself, “talk[ing] to ourselves idly, as we would to a stranger.” But, this being a novel, the utterance is not random, and so we may as well assume that “idle” talk itself is being presented to us as revealing something. Not just anyone would say this, even idly. If we said this to a stranger, or if a stranger said this to us, we would take in the data provided and process it. It would not only be data helping us understand our unfamiliar interlocutor, it would be data helping us understand what it means to appreciate or to dislike Maeterlinck (or—­as we saw in chapter 3—­what it means to like or scoff at Cavalleria Rusticana), according to what modalities that appreciation or dislike might be expressed, what kind of people might be involved, what the possibilities for relating to those people might be, where and when you are likely to see them, what kind of life they lead, and so on. Here is another moment—­in fact, two passages from the same moment—­ where the narrator’s aesthetic stance, and his understanding of the way other people’s stances operate socially, comes to the foreground. The narrator knows how susceptible to influence people’s tastes can be, which leads him maliciously (or in a sincere effort to improve someone’s taste) to intervene in Madame de Cambremer’s way of looking at Poussin and listening to Chopin: “But,” I said to her, sensing that the one way of rehabilitating Poussin in Mme de Cambremer’s eyes was to let her know that he was back in fashion, “M. Degas assures us that he knows of nothing more beautiful than the Pous­ sins at Chantilly.” “Oh yes? I don’t know the ones at Chantilly,” said Mme de Cambremer, who did not want to be of a different opinion from Degas, “but I can talk about those in the Louvre, which are horrors.” “Those, too, he admires enormously.” “I shall have to look at them again. It’s all a bit old in my head,” she replied after a moment’s silence, and as if the favorable judgment she would

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certainly soon be delivering on Poussin must depend, not on the news I had just conveyed to her, but on the supplementary and this time definitive examination to which she was relying on subjecting the Poussins in the Louvre so as to facilitate the reversing of her verdict. (Sodom, 209) (—­Mais,” lui dis-­je, sentant que la seule manière de réhabiliter Poussin aux yeux de Mme de Cambremer c’était d’apprendre à celle-­ci qu’il était redevenu à la mode, “M. Degas assure qu’il ne connaît rien de plus beau que les Poussin de Chantilly.—­Ouais? Je ne connais pas ceux de Chantilly, me dit Mme de Cambremer qui ne voulait pas être d’un autre avis que Degas, mais je peux parler de ceux du Louvre qui sont des horreurs.—­Il les admire aussi énormément.—­Il faudra que je les revoie. Tout cela est un peu ancien dans ma tête,” répondit-­ elle après un instant de silence et comme si le jugement favorable qu’elle allait certainement bientôt porter sur Poussin devait dépendre, non de la nouvelle que je venais de lui communiquer, mais de l’examen supplémentaire et cette fois définitif qu’elle comptait faire subir aux Poussin du Louvre pour avoir la faculté de se déjuger. [3:207–­8]) However, the rejuvenation of the Nocturnes had yet to be announced by the critics. News of it had been passed on only in casual conversation by “the young.” It remained unknown to Mme de Cambremer-­Legrandin. I took plea­ sure in informing her, though by addressing her mother-­in-­law for this purpose, as when, in billiards, you play off the cushion in order to strike a ball, that, very far from being old-­fashioned, Chopin was Debussy’s favorite musician. “Well, I never; how amusing,” the daughter-­in-­law said with a smile, as though this were merely a paradox tossed off by the author of Pelléas. Nevertheless, it was quite certain now that she would only ever listen to Chopin with respect or even with pleasure. (Sodom, 213) (Pourtant ce rajeunissement des Nocturnes n’avait pas encore été annoncé par la critique. La nouvelle s’en était transmise seulement par des causeries de “jeunes.” Il restait ignoré de Mme de Cambremer-­Legrandin. Je me fis un plaisir de lui apprendre, mais en m’adressant pour cela à sa belle-­mère, comme quand au billard, pour atteindre une boule on joue par la bande, que Chopin, bien loin d’être démodé, était le musicien préféré de Debussy. “Tiens, c’est amusant,” me dit en souriant la belle-­fille, comme si ce n’avait été là qu’un paradoxe lancé par l’auteur de Pelléas. Néanmoins il était bien certain maintenant qu’elle n’écouterait plus Chopin qu’avec respect et même avec plaisir. [3:212])

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Is the narrator being a manipulative jerk? Is he just trying to make sure art and music that should be appreciated are appreciated? Does he think that Mme de Cambremer’s shortly-­to-­be-­discovered admiration for Chopin’s Nocturnes and for Poussin will be a reliable, deeply rooted authentic aesthetic response? Is he reveling in his own ability to be taken seriously enough that his opinion carries such force? So much is going on not only in what he says, but in his report of his own saying of it—­allowing us to situate him, Mme de Cambremer, a deeply felt or hurriedly assumed taste for Chopin or Poussin at this particular moment in time, and so on. Even as he analyzes and positions the language and the taste of others, he offers the necessary data for others to analyze and position him, enacting Bourdieu’s helpful rule of thumb: “nothing classifies somebody more than the way he or she classifies” (SSSP, 132). The narrator speaks as if he occupies a space of intellectual, analytical, and aesthetic freedom from which he can somehow see how others are determined in their ways of thought, in their words, in their ability to respond to art, music, and literature, by various features of their social histories and current social locations. If Mme de Cambremer is not yet attuned to the shift in Chopin’s reputation, he points out, there is a reason for it, and the reason can be heard even in the way she speaks: Even in Paris, as an invalid, she lived largely in her bedroom. It is true that this handicap managed to draw attention to itself mainly in the choice of expressions that Mme de Cambremer thought were fashionable, which would have been better suited to the written language, a nuance she had not discerned, for she derived them more from reading than from conversation. This last is necessary for an accurate knowledge less of people’s opinions than of the new expressions. However, the rejuvenation of the Nocturnes had yet to be announced by the critics. News of it had been passed on only in casual conversation by “the young.” (Sodom, 212–­23) (Même à Paris, malade, elle vivait beaucoup dans sa chambre. Il est vrai que l’inconvénient pouvait surtout s’en faire sentir dans le choix des expressions que Mme de Cambremer croyait à la mode et qui eussent convenu plutôt au langage écrit, nuance qu’elle ne discernait pas, car elle les tenait plus de la lecture que de la conversation. Celle-­ci n’est pas aussi nécessaire pour la connaissance exacte des opinions que des expressions nouvelles. Pourtant ce rajeunissement des Nocturnes n’avait pas encore été annoncé par la critique. La nouvelle s’en était transmise seulement par des causeries de “jeunes.” [3:211–­12])

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This is a lovely example of an informal statistical analysis of certain tokens in Mme de Cambremer’s speech. The analysis relies on language’s indexical functions for its deductions: Mme de Cambremer’s health doesn’t allow her to get out much. From her vocabulary choices, you can guess the kind of reading she does (her subscriptions to various journals must somehow indicate her desire to appear cutting-­edge in cultural matters). Her inability to distinguish between oral and written registers when using trendy new terminology points indexically to her health (she doesn’t participate in as many live conversations as she otherwise might). Her ignorance about Chopin coming back into fashion indicates where we are, currently, in the timeline of that rehabilitation: it is currently spreading among youth who don’t have much formal media access. More established tastemakers will catch on a bit later, so currently you have to have your ear to the ground to know this movement is underway—­as the narrator evidently does. The narrator cannot reveal all these deductions he is making from his indexical analysis of Mme de Cambremer’s spoken discourse without also revealing something of his own location in culture. The narrator is thus obviously as subject to being determined by an array of forces in the social world around him as anyone he talks to, a fact he quietly admits to in a new way quite close to the end of the novel, just in case we haven’t yet realized it by observing his more unguarded reactions in speaking with others throughout its pages. Indeed, it is in this final moment that the novel perhaps offers its most touching expression of the difficult relation between determination and freedom—­not in any scene of brilliant sociological or linguistic analysis, not in any scene of deep aesthetic contemplation, but in a moment when the experience of talk and the experience of determination coincide to produce a moment of insight—­which also turns out to be the moment of the unique occurrence of the word statistician in the novel. Bourdieu has spoken of “the work [ . . . ] that consists in making determinisms visible—­ starting with those that impinge on the person who is working to make the determinisms visible” (HF, 178). I hope I have been successfully making the case that Search is engaged in this kind of process, showing us a narrator so brilliantly attuned to the multiple levels of talk’s work and the way people and their social worlds are shaped by and through it, and so talented at communicating his insights, that inevitably we and he come to see the determinations acting on him as well as everyone else. Bourdieu continues: “Since sociology provides us with a knowledge of determinisms and therefore the possibility of breaking free from determinisms, so writing or broadcasting sociology to the world at large in such a way as to make it intelligible without distorting it means working to disseminate and universalise the possibility of such freedom” (HF,

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179). Perhaps we could say that the possibility of this freedom exists on the level of the composition of the novel (its interest in language-­in-­use combined with the way it constructs a narrator/hero who is not always in full control of his own speech or his own insights) and that the narrator himself only approaches an understanding of what this freedom might entail as he confronts toward the novel’s end the task of understanding himself by way of the tools he applies to others. Bourdieu also comments that it is not always the social scientists who are most successful at generating these kinds of possibilities: “there are scientific agents or literary and artistic agents—­for it is not always science that brings this promise of freedom—­who achieve better than others some human potential that previously had not seemed possible or even thinkable” (HF, 179). Search makes something possible, makes something thinkable that lurks on the edges of the narrator’s brilliance. Suppose someone analyzed the narrator’s speech the way he proposed might be done to Mme de Gallardon’s (“analyses which, by recording the greater or lesser frequency of each word, permit one to discover the key to a language in code” [Swann, 342]); suppose someone had listened to the composition of the narrator’s voice the way he listened to the girls in Balbec; suppose someone researched his family’s “accent”; suppose someone proved as fascinated by what the narrator’s conversation would reveal about the structure of some part of the world to which he belonged as he was by the Duchesse de Guermantes and the Faubourg Saint-­Germain; suppose he became data for others, and even for himself. What would be the result? Something like this happens when the narrator, in the party scene with which the novel ends, meets a young woman friend of Bloch’s. He and she quickly get caught up in a lively conversation that nonetheless is somewhat difficult for both of them to pursue. It would seem her interest in him has to do with the kinds of data she might extract from him (she listens to him the way he has listened to so many others throughout the novel). His interest in the conversation has to do with the particular difficulties of data transmission that are occurring between them: The friend of Bloch and of the Duchesse de Guermantes was not only elegant and charming, she was also intelligent, and conversation with her was enjoyable, but it was made difficult for me because it was not only my interlocutress herself whose name was new to me, but those of a great number of the people she was talking about and who currently made up the core of society. It is true, on the other hand, as she wanted to listen to what I had to say, that many of the names I mentioned will have meant absolutely nothing to her, they were

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all sunk in oblivion, or at least those who had shone only with the light of their own individual celebrity and were not the permanent, generic name of some famous aristocratic family [ . . . ] and she had never, in most instances heard [these names] pronounced, having started moving in society [ . . . ] only some years after I myself had withdrawn from it. (Finding, 271–­72) (L’amie de Bloch et de la duchesse de Guermantes n’était pas seulement élégante et charmante, elle était intelligente aussi, et la conversation avec elle était agréable, mais m’était rendue difficile parce que ce n’était pas seulement le nom de mon interlocutrice qui était nouveau pour moi, mais celui d’un grand nombre de personnes dont elle me parla et qui formaient actuellement le fond de la société. Il est vrai que, d’autre part, comme elle voulait m’entendre ra­ conter des histoires, beaucoup de ceux que je lui citai ne lui dirent absolument rien, ils étaient tous tombés dans l’oubli, du moins ceux qui n’avaient brillé que de l’éclat individuel d’une personne et n’étaient pas le nom générique et permanent de quelque célèbre famille aristocratique [ . . . ] et elle ne les avait pour la plupart jamais entendu prononcer, n’ayant commencé à aller dans le monde [ . . . ] que quelques années après que je m’en étais moi-­même retiré. [4:541])

The narrator had been cut off from society for an unspecified number of years in a sanatorium and has returned to find society transformed, made up of a mix of people he knows well, but who are much older now and related to each other in new ways, and of people he knows not at all, such as this young woman. Why would she want to hear him tell stories about people whose names she doesn’t recognize? Why would he be interested in the conversation she makes when he knows her not at all, nor any of the people she talks about? There is here a question of what I have been calling indexical competence that is being brought into play. The narrator and the woman share enough reference points to make conversation possible, even “instructive” (273; 4:542), but what is instructive about it is the incoherence, the “lack of intelligibility” (“inintelligibilité”) produced by the fact that they are, so to speak, temporally maladjusted one to the other. He identifies the problem as a “difference between our two vocabularies,” by which he means that the connotations and associations of various proper names seem incommensurable. The names can be the same; their indexical capacities are at variance. Moreover, it must be said that this ignorance of the true situation which every ten years makes individuals suddenly emerge in their current guise, as if the

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past never existed, which prevents a newly disembarked American woman from seeing that M. de Charlus had held the highest social position in Paris at a time when Bloch had had none, and that Swann, who put himself to such trouble for M. Bontemps, had been treated with the greatest friendship by the Prince of Wales, this ignorance does not only exist among the newcomers, but among those who have always frequented adjacent sections of society, and this ignorance, in the latter as in the others, is also an effect [ . . . ] of Time. (Finding, 273) (Du reste, il faut bien dire que cette ignorance des situations réelles qui tous les dix ans fait surgir les élus dans leur apparence actuelle et comme si le passé n’existait pas, qui empêche pour une Américaine fraîchement débarquée, de voir que M. de Charlus avait eu la plus grande situation de Paris à une époque où Bloch n’en avait aucune, et que Swann, qui faisait tant de frais pour M. Bontemps, avait été traité avec la plus grande amitié, cette ignorance n’existe pas seulement chez les nouveaux venus, mais chez ceux qui ont fréquenté toujours des sociétés voisines, et cette ignorance, chez ces derniers comme chez les autres, est aussi un effet [ . . . ] du Temps. [4:543])

Indexical signs are time-­sensitive. This is the experience his interlocutor is providing to the narrator, and that he extends to an American also present at the party. Values shift over time; distinctions evaporate; new ones come into play. In a kind of second-­order indexicality, the indexical values a sign holds for you (say the sign “Charlus”) become another kind of index, one of your age, or of the moment at which you entered a particular social world and the knowledge you accumulated there. So our narrator, speaking to the young woman, is not just experiencing the time-­sensitivity of indexical signification, he is experiencing himself as an index for her of a certain social group at a certain moment in time. That is, he is not only providing her with historical information about people in that group, he is providing her data regarding kinds of people (him) who became part of the group at a certain moment and occupied a certain point of view on the group. The narrator feels his own legibility shift faced with this new acquaintance, and imagines that it would shift even more in the case of someone truly foreign (American!), someone to whom all the specificities that he might think make him distinctive would be illegible. His conversation partner in this moment is intelligent and engaged enough to make their talk interesting, because she is interested in arriving at her own understanding of the world of which they are

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both now a part and she has been told his ability to tell stories would interest her. For a moment he identifies with the predicament of someone like her, a relative newcomer to these circles, associating it with his own situation in the moment when he himself first arrived, ignorant, in this world. He finds something in the comparison worthy of  his writerly attention. From changes brought about in society I could all the more easily extract truths which were important and worthy to hold one part of my book together, as they were not in any way, as I would have been tempted to believe at the outset, peculiar to our time. At the time when, scarcely arrived in society myself [à peine parvenu], I first entered, even more of a newcomer than Bloch himself today, the Guermantes’ social circle, I must have regarded as an integral part of that circle elements absolutely different, recently incorporated, and which would have seemed curiously new to older members from whom I did not differentiate them, who in turn, believed by the dukes of that period always to have been members of the Faubourg, had either themselves been, or their fathers or their grandfathers had once been, parvenus. (Finding, 276) (De changements produits dans la société je pouvais d’autant plus extraire des vérités importantes et dignes de cimenter une partie de mon oeuvre qu’ils n’étaient nullement, comme j’aurais pu être au premier moment tenté de croire, particuliers à notre époque. Au temps où, moi-­même à peine parvenu, j’étais entré, plus nouveau que ne l’était Bloch lui-­même aujourd’hui, dans le milieu des Guermantes, j’avais dû y contempler comme faisant partie intégrante de ce milieu, des éléments absolument différents, agrégés depuis peu et qui paraissaient étrangement nouveaux à de plus anciens dont je ne les différenciais pas et qui eux-­mêmes, crus par les ducs d’alors membres de tout temps du Faubourg, y avaient eux, ou leurs pères, ou leurs grand-­pères, été jadis des parvenus. [4:545])

Depersonalization, generalization, the search for commonalities, the identification of laws—­of course the narrator frequently insists on these processes as what is crucial to his writerly endeavor. But I think at least as crucial as any of those is the identification of a semiotic problem having to do with an indexical sign’s ability or inability to perdure over time, or with the fact that indexical signs invoke different qualities at the same moment for different people engaged in taking them up. This second issue, of the uneven distribution of indexical competency (who is able to know or remember that this or that

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name signals a parvenu from this or that period), shows that different forms of indexical competency themselves index different social standings—­but only to people who are competent to perceive this aspect of the social world. At this point, the narrator suddenly begins to envision a way of looking at himself based on an entirely different kind of competence: 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. (Finding, 277–­78) (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. [4:547])

The narrator imagines the possibility he could be seen as an example of a social trajectory other people also follow.9 Could there actually be people around him who see him as not all that different from Bloch or Legrandin or even Swann, when he has been so insistent on differentiating them? And perhaps if there are such people around, it is not because they lack competence to understand the distinctions the novel has been making—­“it was in a quite different manner that Legrandin in his turn (through the curious marriage of his nephew), had penetrated into these circles, or that Odette’s daughter had married into them, or that Swann himself, and then finally I had come to them” (“c’était d’une façon toute différente que Legrandin (par l’étrange mariage de son neveu) à son tour avait pénétré dans ce milieu, que la fille d’Odette s’y était apparentée, que Swann lui-­même, et moi enfin y étions venus”)—­but because they have another form of competence that allows them to perceive commonalities that hitherto it might have made the narrator uncomfortable to notice: 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

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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. But taking a bird’s-­eye view, as does the statistician, who disregards the reasons of sentiment or the unavoidable 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 bourgeois 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.” (Finding, 278) (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. 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.” [4:547])

Of course it is not at all clear that the narrator has been entirely “wrapped up in my own life”; nor is it clear that the attitude of a statistician is as unfamiliar to him as he claims. His way of  listening to people talk has always had something of the statistical in it, and we could therefore perhaps now pose the question, if we were able to collect samples of Legrandin, Bloch, Swann, and the narrator talking, as to whether there would be some way of analyzing the data that would reveal something about their talk to be the same. We might remember the example of the narrator listening to the band of girls that we looked at in chapter 1, when we saw him being attentive to “the tasty material that had been fixed, laid down, by the province of origin from which they drew their voice and into which even their intonations had sunk their teeth” (Shadow, 488)

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(“la savoureuse matière imposée par la province originelle d’où elles tiraient leur voix et à même laquelle mordaient leurs intonations” [2:263]). Someone might hear something on this order in this band of boys that made it into the Guermantes set. Or perhaps someone might do a statistical analysis of the kind the narrator imagined being performed on Mme de Gallardon to reveal how the band of  boys shared a particular social ambition. Or perhaps a sociologist of culture would listen to them all talk about art, music, and literature, and hear in their discourse indexes of a similar aesthetic habitus. And yet is it not the case that what statistics excludes (“the reasons of sentiment or the unavoidable acts of  imprudence”) is what novels are made of ? Yes and no, it would seem we would have to answer. For Search has been suggesting throughout a different story—­that our own speech could be teaching us statistical lessons about ourselves if we knew how to listen to it, and that hearing ourselves we learn how we are made, and we perhaps grant ourselves the possibility of  being or becoming something other than what we are. Or at least we recognize something of who we might be. The passage with the statistician in it continues: Moreover, they recognized one another there, for if the young Comte de Cambremer astonished the whole of society with his distinction, his refinement, his sober elegance, I recognized in these—­at the same time as in his winning looks and his burning desire to succeed—­the same characteristics as those of his uncle Legrandin, that is, of an old friend, supremely bourgeois for all his aristocratic appearance, of my parents. (Finding, 278) (Et d’ailleurs ils s’y reconnaissaient, car si le jeune comte de Cambremer émerveillait tout le monde par sa distinction, son affinement, sa sobre élégance, je reconnaissais en elles—­en même temps que dans son beau regard et dans son désir ardent de parvenir—­ce qui caractérisait déjà son oncle Legrandin, c’est-­à-­dire un vieil ami fort bourgeois, quoique de tournure aristocratique, de mes parents. [4:547])

People like the narrator, Bloch, Legrandin, and Swann do recognize each other by the indexical signs they give off. Others around them may lack the indexical competence to recognize a homeboy, but when they see Mme de Cambremer’s son, however well turned out he may be, however carefully he enacts a “tournure aristocratique,” they will perceive him to be what he “is,” someone like them. So the narrator has quietly contradicted himself. It is not that he would not have been capable of seeing the world through the statistician’s eyes, and so perceiving classifications that otherwise would have remained obscure to him.

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He can’t help but admit that his indexical competence is such that “the young Comte de Cambremer” can have no secrets from him. He, too, is a parvenu. It is talk’s work to reveal this: to reveal what the young Cambremer is, and to reveal that the narrator can’t resist (slightly sardonically? or because he can’t stop analyzing talk?) pointing out to us that he knows what the young Cambremer is. So the novel goes on artfully showing us talk’s work, how we are caught up in it, and how we might think about it. And there the narrator is, talking, and talking about talking, right up to the end. * Talking, that is, in the way narrators do, through words on the page that we read, as you are reading these words. I am just about done talking myself—­ except, of course, that I have been writing (or typing). Printed utterances zoom through space in different ways than spoken ones do. They can do so in the form of a book, for instance, traveling farther and lasting longer than the spoken ones (unless the spoken ones were somehow recorded)—­but also requiring an act of reading. Now ways of reading, the practical skills of reading in one way or another, are also things that must circulate if novels (or other written utterances) are to be read in one way or another. When Search’s young hero experienced the cry of the name Gilberte, thrown from one girl’s vocal apparatus to another girl’s ears and incidentally available to the ears of others within its range, as transporting forms of implicit knowledge whose presence he could sense but whose meaning he could not apprehend, what he experienced was social indexicality. He experienced simultaneously an utterance’s indexical capacity and his own indexical incompetence in the face of that particular utterance. It was an utterance that, in the moment of its occurrence, left him out, socioculturally speaking. One way of summing up what I have been doing in What Proust Heard would be to say that I have been demonstrating Search’s preoccupation with the phenomenon of social indexicality, and with the dialectical relationship between the experience of indexical capacity and the effort to acquire indexical competence—­a dialectic that is at the heart of what is commonly called culture. I have also been endeavoring, in writing about how Proust’s narrator listens, to put into circulation a way of reading (one attuned to social indexicality) that is akin to the kind of  listening the narrator was doing. I have been endeavoring to inculcate a certain novelistic indexical competence that involves objectifying the ways of reading to which any of us have access. That any of us reads and writes about Search in one way or another is also proof that literature is language-­in-­use in written form, that we

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are also doing what I have been referring to here and there as “talk’s work” as we write about the literature that has provoked us. I have been trying not only to be reasonably clear and convincing in what I have been saying about Search and the other novels I have discussed; I have also been trying (perhaps without always fully knowing it in every moment) to sound a certain way. I have been trying to create a context for certain passages in Proust (or Woolf and the others) to sound a certain way, to signify. I have endeavored to put that manner of signifying into circulation. All novels are language-­in-­use. Of course, not all novels are as significantly about language-­in-­use (in either its written or its spoken forms) as the ones I have discussed here. Not all novels aim to teach us about it to the same extent as these ones do. It is part of what makes them distinctive. They ask us to be attentive to how spoken things sound; they ask us, we might say, to hear even as we read. They ask us to think about how people sound, how we sound; about how this or that novel might be read; about how we are reading this or that novel right now, about what that might mean (indexically speaking). They ask us to take a certain kind of care. They ask us to pay this kind of attention, to do this kind of noticing, because it can make a difference to our relations with others. It can make a difference to our and others’ ways of being in the world together. It can, perhaps, make the world more meaningful. It can, perhaps, allow more people, and also more of what people say, to be heard.

Acknowledgments

Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is an astounding novel, and it is ex­ hilarating to spend time working away at understanding it. Part of the argument of What Proust Heard is that understandings of aesthetically complex textual artifacts like Proust’s novel are ongoing, processual things. Such understand­ ings are themselves social achievements, produced by collective efforts and en­ abled both by various kinds of conceptual work that have been accomplished by many people over time and by institutions. Those understandings circulate in various ways, are preserved, taken up, modified, disputed, enhanced in part by means of lots of further writing and talking. Sometimes it is the encounter with writing and talking on other topics, using other concepts, coming from a wide range of disciplines and points of view, that brings about new understanding. What Proust Heard is deeply marked, I need hardly say, by my encounter with the field of linguistic anthropology, a discipline, a set of concepts, and a stance toward language that has been key to my thinking across several book projects now. Michael Silverstein’s work in particular has been crucial to my own, and it was also wonderful (and immensely educational) to become his friend over these years. His death in July 2020, shortly after I finished writing the first draft of these pages, was an immeasurable loss. He listened to me present early ver­ sions of some of this material and made many useful suggestions about it. That he will not read this book now that it is finally done saddens me immensely. In an effort at consolation, I imagine him carrying on a conversation in some great beyond about salon culture, the history of linguistics, and about how and why novels became instruments for studying talk with interlocutors like Proust and Woolf and Bréal and Meillet and many others.

298  Acknowledgments

I’m immensely grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which is one of the institutions that made this work possible. Thanks to a Mellon Disserta­ tion Seminar Grant, I spent six weeks in the summers of 2011 and 2013 working with groups of typically brilliant Berkeley graduate students on the relevance of work in linguistic anthropology to the kinds of work we do in comparative literature and related fields. In 2013, we worked on Proust specifically, and that seminar is where this project really found its feet. From 2018 to 2019, my colleague Tom McEnaney and I had the good fortune to be able to run a Mel­ lon Foundation Sawyer Seminar at Berkeley titled “Linguistic Anthropology and Cultural Critique.” The seven three-­day sessions of that seminar provided me regular bursts of intellectual stimulation that helped shape this project in its final stages. I can’t thank the members of the Sawyer Seminar working group, the visitors to the seminar, Tom McEnaney, and the Mellon Founda­ tion enough for that experience. My first tentative steps toward writing on Proust in the way I have done in these pages took place in the context of a seminar for the American Com­ parative Literature Association conference that Tom McEnaney and Tristram Wolff set up. Tom and Tristram have been wonderful intellectual companions throughout this project. Material from that first ACLA seminar and subse­ quent ones grew into a series of longer lectures that I delivered at the Maison Française at the University of Oxford in 2012 and then at the 2015 Cambridge French Graduate Conference, and again at All Souls College, Oxford, also in 2015, and for Berkeley’s Linguistic Anthropology Working Group in 2016. Thanks very much to Matt Phillips, Tomas Weber, Martin Crowley, Christo­ pher Prendergast, and Emma Wilson for their Cambridge hospitality and to Ricardo Rivera for the invitation to speak to Berkeley’s LA working group. Conversations with Michael Sheringham over the years, and in particular dur­ ing the term I spent as a visiting fellow at All Souls in 2015, carried with them a unique kind of personal and intellectual pleasure. I feel again acutely his loss as I write these words. The months I spent at All Souls were a key moment in the genesis of this project. I thought that I understood the project’s structure when I arrived there and merely needed some time to write it up, but by the time I left, thanks to the work I did there, some lectures I heard, and an immense amount of productive conversation, I realized the project’s shape was still shifting. Chapter 2 of this final version, in particular, bears for me the mark of my time at All Souls. It was a wonderful place to engage in talk about talk. Seminars were another rich place for talking about Proust and talk, and I owe a big thanks to all the graduate students from my Berkeley seminars where

Acknowledgments  299

we read and discussed Proust together while I worked on this book, the vari­ ous comparative literature seminars titled “The Novel and Sociological Forms of Knowledge,” and my French seminar from Spring 2017 titled “Proust, Speech Act Theory, and Language-­in-­Use.” I tried out my thinking on Proust and Bourdieu first at a panel at the 20th/21st Century French Studies International Colloquium in 2014, along­ side a wonderful set of panelists, Hannah Freed-­Thall, Suzanne Guerlac, and Brigitte Mahuzier, and I’m grateful for the stimulating conversations with them and the audience members present. I got to try out later versions of that mate­ rial at the conference celebrating Michael Sheringham on his retirement from All Souls in Oxford, in early 2016, “What Forms Can Do: Attending to the Real in 20th and 21st Century French Literature,” ably organized by Patrick Crowley, Shirley Jordan, and Emily McLaughlin, and again at Yale University later that year, where I owe thanks to Morgane Cadieu and Alice Kaplan for their hospitality. My thanks to Elisabeth Ladenson for the invitation to deliver a part of chapter 2 at a fun conference, “Proust 1919,” at Columbia University in 2019. Eric Naiman’s advice on that chapter made a big difference. Virginia Jackson prompted me to read and think about Rachel Cusk and talked to me about genre and form. Chatting with Didier Eribon about Bourdieu and Sarraute was a useful pleasure. Thanks to UC Berkeley for a Humanities Research Fel­ lowship from 2014 to 2015. Thanks to the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and to the libraries at Berkeley and the University of Oxford, whose resources and congenial spaces enabled my research and writing. Thanks to Alan Thomas, Randy Petilos, Mark Reschke, Meredith Nini, and everyone else at the Uni­ versity of Chicago Press, and to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their efforts and insights. This book was finished during difficult times in the wider world. So many lives lost and voices stilled unnecessarily, and so much mourning still to be done. For keeping my spirits up day to day, I owe great thanks to some re­ markable feline companions: the much-­lamented Rascal, and also Paquita and Mr. Willoughby, deeply literary creatures. But most of all I owe thanks to Gerry Gomez. Here are places where earlier versions of this work appeared: part of chap­ ter 3 as “ ‘La recherche que l’on peut dire formelle’: Proust with Bourdieu,” in What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th-­and 21st-­Century French Literature and Thought, ed. Patrick Crowley and Shirley Jordan (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020), reproduced with permission of Liverpool University Press through PLSclear; part of chapter 1 as “What You Might Hear

300  Acknowledgments

When People Talk, or Proust as a Linguistic Anthropologist,” in Parasites: Exploitation and Interference in French Thought and Culture, ed. Matt Phillips and Tomas Weber (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2018); part of the conclusion as “On Proust and Talking to Yourself,” in Qui Parle 26, no. 2 (2017): 281–­93, repub­ lished by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press; part of chap­ ter 1 as “Proust’s Bifurs,” in The Made and the Found: Essays, Prose and Poetry in Honour of Michael Sheringham, ed. Patrick McGuinness and Emily McLaugh­ lin (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), reprinted by permission of the publisher; and part of chapter 1 as “Proust and Language-­in-­Use,” in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 48, no. 2 (2015): 261–­79, republished by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.

Notes

Introduction 1. William Hanks explains the term in a helpful manner: “An interpretant might be a simple sign, or it might be an entire elaborate discourse. That is, it might be greater than a single sign. [ . . . ] An interpretant may be derived from the original sign plus other knowledge or experience that the addressee has at her disposal. [ . . . ] More than a mere sign, the interpretant is like an ideological horizon, a background of evaluative ‘glosses’ that actors in a social group apply to any sign” (Language and Communicative Practices, 42–­43). 2. See Silverstein, “Translation, Transduction, Transformation,” 89: “how does one capture the ‘tone,’ i.e., indexical penumbra, of a word or expression in a source text by one in a target language used in a highly distinct culture?” 3. This same passage is also the object of commentary in Leo Spitzer’s “Le style de Marcel Proust,” 405–­6. 4. See, e.g., Kawashima, “The Grammar of Forgetting,” and Fraisse, L’éclectisme philo­ sophique de Marcel Proust, 529–­60. 5. See, e.g., Vendryes, “Marcel Proust et les noms propres”; Barthes, “Proust et les noms.” 6. See, e.g., Pierron, “La ‘langue Françoise’ ”; McCrea, Languages of the Night, 121–­46; Le Bidois, “Le langage parlé des personnages de Proust”; Serça, “Portrait du narrateur en sociolinguiste,” Winton, Proust’s Additions, 1:124–­68; Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation, 179–87; Rhodes, “Dialogism or Domination.” 7. See, e.g., Bidaud, “Les idées linguistiques de Marcel Proust”; Ferré, “Marcel Proust et la linguistique.” A fuller bibliography, along with a sample of recent approaches, can be found in Henrot Sostero and Serça, eds., Marcel Proust et la forme linguistique de la “Recherche.” 8. See Silverstein, “Shifters,” on the multifunctionality of utterances. Of all the works on Proust and language I have read, the one that comes closest to a linguistic anthropological understanding of language use is Gérard Genette’s “Proust and Indirect Language.” Genette’s notion of “indirect language” mobilizes the well-­known idea of connotation to explain how language produces meaning that is not directly present semantically in an utterance; he invokes the notion that this meaning

302  Notes to Pages 5–12 is lurking in the depths of an utterance, while not being apparent on the surface. Explaining connotations is somehow linked to exposing the truth of an utterance for Genette. While I have always found Genette’s work inspiring, I think that this particular point of view (of  hidden meaning lurking in the depths of an utterance) is actually wrong. In any case, it is not semiotically exacting enough to explain the multifunctionality of language-­in-­use in a satisfactory manner. 9. On co-­construction and interactivity, see, among many possible resources, Gumperz, “Contextuality Revisited”; Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-­thing-­ness of Culture”; Silverstein, “How Knowledge Begets Communication Begets Knowledge.” 10. Silverstein, “Shifters,” 29. 11. Bakhtin, “Speech Genres,” 62. 12. Vendryes, “Marcel Proust et les noms propres,” 120. 13. Bibesco, Au bal, 112. 14. Of course, these events were taking place before the narrator was born, so, as the fiction has it, our narrator must have had these events narrated to him by someone else, including, apparently, a good deal of detailed information about how things sounded. See Genette, Narrative Discourse, 241–­42: “With respect to its source this episode is doubly metadiegetic, first since the details were reported to Marcel [Genette refers to the narrator as “Marcel”] by an undetermined narrator at an undetermined time, and then because Marcel is remembering these details in the course of certain sleepless nights. These are memories of earlier narratives, therefore, from which the extradiegetic narrator once again gathers up the whole kitty and in his own name tells this whole story that took place before he was born—­not without introducing into it subtle marks of his subsequent existence.” 15. Edward Sapir, “Language,” 12. 16. Silverstein, “Translation,” 75. 17. Bakhtin, “Speech Genres,” 88. 18. Sapir, “Communication,” 104. 19. The first version of Bakhtin’s study of Dostoevsky was published in 1929, the same year as was Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Bakhtin’s and Vološinov’s formulations have both been important reference points for linguistic anthropology. On Bakhtin, see chapter 2 of Emerson, The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin; Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, esp. 84–­86; and Brandist, “The Bakhtin Circle.” 20. I borrow these phrases from an introduction to the field written by Alessandro Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology, 1–­4. 21. Silverstein, “How We Look,” 276. 22. See, most notably, Kawashima, “The Grammar of Forgetting.” Jean-­Yves Tadié refers to Bréal as Proust’s “cousin.” (See Tadié, Marcel Proust, 300.) As best I can tell, the relation between the two was quite distant and indirect: Bréal’s wife’s sister’s daughter had married a man who was the son of the sister of Proust’s maternal grandmother. Proust’s correspondence reveals not only that he was a reader of Bréal, but that his family and the Bréal family to a certain extent moved within the same social circles.  23. Meillet, “L’état actuel,” 4, 11–­13. 24. The Neogrammarian hypothesis regarding sound change was that “every sound change, inasmuch as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws that admit no exception. That

Notes to Pages 12–23  303 is, the direction of the sound shift is always the same for all the members of a linguistic community except where a split into dialects occurs; and all words in which the sound subjected to the change appears in the same relationship are affected by the change without exception” (Osthoff and Brugmann, preface to Morphological Investigations in the Sphere of the Indo-­European Lan­ guages, 204). See Phillips, “Word Frequency and the Neogrammarian Controversy” for further discussion. For helpful background, see Nerlich, Semantic Theories in Europe. 25. Meillet, “Comment les mots changent de sens,” 38. 26. In a dissertation titled “Proust and Speech” from 2019, Matthew Trumbo-­Tual discusses the work of Gaston Paris and Arsène Darmesteter as potential sources for Proust’s thinking about language (55–­59). 27. On register shibboleths, see Silverstein, “The Voice of  Jacob.” 28. Agha, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment,” 38. 29. In “Proust and Speech,” Trumbo-­Tual discusses the two laws at some length (102–­19). For me, it is the second that is particularly interesting, in that it helps us attend to the ways in which this salon scene itself is serving as a locus of lexical diffusion. 30. Proust, Correspondance, 10:330. 31. Here is Antoine Bibesco, describing his mother’s talents, her parties, and his meeting with Proust: My mother, devoted to music and a great virtuoso herself, was also hospitality and goodness incarnate. She surrounded herself with precious beings, musicians, artists, writers. I can remember hearing her play duets with Saint-­Saëns, with Fauré. Paderewski first performed in her salon, as did Enesco, whose career she made possible. [ . . . ] Naturally someone as curious as Marcel Proust about sociality would have wanted to see my mother’s salon. At one of her evening parties the young man I was at the time watched a man come up to me, slightly bent over, with quite the head of dark hair, quite pale also, with eyes like Japanese lacquer. He held out his hand. There are different ways of shaking hands. One might even call it an art. It was not his strong suit. He would hold out a hand that hung limply (I would often tease him about this later). There was nothing pleasant about his grip. I showed him later how one should grip someone’s hand forcefully. —­If I followed your advice, he objected, I would be taken for an invert. (In Proust, Let­ tres de Marcel Proust à Bibesco, 29–­30.) 32. On the history of the SLP, see Bergounioux, “La Société de Linguistique de Paris (1876–­ 1914).” On Alexandre Bibesco, see Carnoy, Dictionnaire biographique, 1:17–­18. On the establishment of the Prix Bibesco, see the announcement in the Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris (1894): 95–­96. “Une fête littéraire à Versaille” was published on the front page of Le Gaulois on May 31, 1894. See the helpful links at https://proustpresse.hypotheses.org/corpus /les-­ecrits-­de-­presse/liens-­vers-­les-­articles. 33. Cf. Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, and Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative; Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. 34. Cf. Silverstein, “Denotation and the Pragmatics of Language”; Richland, “Speech Act Theory, Ethnocentrism, and the Multiplicity of Meaning-­Making Practices”; Duranti,

304  Notes to Pages 23–34 “Intentions in Speaking and Acting: The Standard Theory and Its Foes”; or a number of the contributions in Hill and Irvine, eds., Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. 35. Speech act theorists seem in their work to cite almost exclusively other speech act theorists and rarely work on language use from the fields of sociology, anthropology, or cultural studies. See, e.g., Fogal, Harris, and Moss, eds., New Work on Speech Acts. Scholars from literary and cultural studies seem rarely to have read more from the field of speech act theory than Austin and have rarely read anything from the field of  linguistic anthropology. There may be occasional references to Searle (especially to his debate with Derrida), and perhaps to Grice. See Searle, “What Is a Speech Act?”; Grice, Studies in the Way of Words; Derrida, Limited Inc. 36. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 99–­100. 37. Langton, “Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts,” 40–­41. 38. Langton, “Blocking as Counter-­Speech,” 145. 39. Silverstein, “Indexical Order,” 195. 40. Cavanaugh, “How the Sausage Gets Made,” 113. 41. Silverstein, “Denotation and the Pragmatics of Language,” 144–­45. 42. For a helpful extended discussion of  jealousy in the novel, see chapter 2, “Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge,” of Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan. On lesbianism in Proust, see Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism. 43. It is Erving Goffman who famously divides the role of speaker into these three role partials in his essay “Footing.” The principal is the person “whose beliefs have been told [ . . . ] who is committed to what the words say” (144). More on this in the conclusion to this volume. 44. Sedgwick, “Around the Performative,” 68–­70. 45. See, e.g., Saul, “Did Clinton Say Something False?” 46. Hornsby, “Illocution and Its Significance,” 192–­93. 47. Grice, “Logic and Conversation,” 26. 48. Camp, “Insinuation,” 41. 49. On the first page of Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762–­1830,  Jon Mee notes that “Various of Grice’s ‘maxims’ of the ‘co-­operative principle,’ for instance, on avoiding redundancy, sound very like those set out in eighteenth-­century handbooks and essays on conversation. From my perspective, Grice’s account tends to downplay the diversity of conversational practices that the eighteenth-­century handbooks were designed to regulate, not least by ignoring the combative aspects of social talk” (1n2). The conversational practices detailed in Search are similarly combative on many occasions. 50. It might seem that certain novels, with their various ways of representing the mental universes of their characters, would be able to align themselves with the view that utterances arise from and can be grounded in the motives and intentions of their speakers. Yet for the novelists who interest me here, this turns out to be more complicated. Novelists such as Proust, Woolf, and Sarraute seem more interested in developing techniques to represent something like the linguistic and social habitus out of which speech arises and the capacity that habitus provides for apprehending and working with the indexical potential someone else’s utterance might harbor. 51. “Our conscious ability as actors in discursive interaction to conceptualize what we and others are engaged in qua discursive interaction rests on metapragmatic representability, and hence on imposing a coherent textual segmentation (with whatever ideological commitments),

Notes to Pages 34–56  305 that thus maximizes presuppositional relationships and patterns, especially—­and ironically—­as we try to strategize and plan what we might call the ‘perlocutionary’ compulsiveness (compulsiveness of indexical entailment) of  linguistic use by invoking such type-­level representations as ‘illocutionary acts’ ” (Silverstein, “The Indeterminacy of Contextualization,” 60). 52. Harkness, Songs of Seoul, 13. 53. Bourdieu, Distinction, 578–­79n25. I will indicate future references to this volume parenthetically by D. 54. Bourdieu himself remarked on the parallel, as we shall see at the beginning of chapter 3. See also Baudelot and Establet’s helpful “École, la lutte de classe retrouvée,” as well as the first three chapters of Freed-­Thall’s insightful Spoiled Distinctions and chapter 3 of Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation. There have been efforts made to establish that Proust was a reader of Gabriel Tarde, and that he is somehow Tardian as a result (e.g., Henry, Marcel Proust, 344–­65, or Fraisse, “Une sociologie transfigurée”). A careful analysis of the novel reveals such claims to be unsustainable on conceptual grounds. See, on this point, e.g., Bidou-­Zachariasen, Proust sociologue, 171–­203, or Dubois, Le roman de Gilberte Swann, 17–­34. 55. “Art is a weapon in the salon wars,” writes Malcolm Bowie. “Listening to a sonata or a septet is always a social act in Proust.” See Bowie, Proust among the Stars, 70. 56. Bourdieu, Habitus and Field, 24. I will indicate future references to this volume parenthetically as HF. 57. Bourdieu, Manet, 329–­30. I will indicate future references to this volume parenthetically as M.

Chapter One 1. I’ve written about this problem previously as regards the novelist Robert Pinget’s interest in tone in the composition of  his novels. See chapter 7 of Someone. Tom McEnaney has written in fascinating ways about interactions between tape recording and writing. See, e.g., his “Forgotten Histories of the Audiobook,” and also “The Sonic Turn.” I’ve also found Howard Fisher’s work on Musil and Stein in his Berkeley PhD dissertation, “Possibility, Singularity, Disqualification: Experimental Fiction and the Queerness of Language-­in-­Use,” extremely illuminating on these questions. 2. Silverstein, “Shifters,” 42, 53. See also Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology,” 6. 3. Silverstein is referencing the work of sociolinguist William Labov, Sociolinguistic Patterns. See Silverstein, “Language and the Culture of Gender,” 234–­35. 4. See also Genette, “Proust and Indirect Language,” where this passage is discussed on 262. 5. See, e.g.,  Jacques Dubois, Pour Albertine on this general topic. Note also that the narrator is as attentive to questions of inflection and intonation in aristocratic voices as in the voices of the band of girls. The paragraphs just cited on Racine and Victor Hugo are followed by one including a famous description of Charlus’s voice: “His very voice, like certain contralto voices in which the middle register has been insufficiently trained and which, in song, sounds rather like an antiphonal duet between a young man and a woman, rose as he expressed these subtle insights to higher notes, took on an unexpected gentleness, and seemed to echo choirs of brides and sisters pouring out their tenderness” (Shadow, 345). (“Sa voix elle-­même, pareille à certaines voix de contralto en qui on n’a pas assez cultivé le médium et dont le chant semble le duo

306  Notes to Pages 56–75 alterné d’un jeune homme et d’une femme, se posait au moment où il exprimait ces pensées si délicates, sur des notes hautes, prenait une douceur imprévue et semblait contenir des choeurs de fiancées, de soeurs, qui répandaient leur tendresse” [2:122–­23].) 6. See Austin, “Pastiche Expelled,” for information on the moment in the history of education that provides the social background for this passage. 7. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 108 (translation modified). 8. See, e.g., Conant, “Wittgenstein on Meaning and Use.” See also the interesting discussion of use in Wittgenstein in chapter 1 of Moi, Revolution of the Ordinary. 9. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, 33. 10. Cf. Merve Emre’s Paraliterary, which explores “how reading of any kind—­good or bad, autonomous or instrumental, detached or passionate, deep or shallow, artistic or technocratic—­ depends on the historical convergence of aesthetic forms, textual artifacts, social practices, and human actors” (253). 11. Bauman and Sherzer, “The Ethnography of Speaking,” 112. 12. Silverstein, “Improvisational Performance,” 266. 13. Silverstein and Urban, “The Natural History of Discourse,” 1. 14. See Lucey, “Real-­Time Literary Texts.” 15. Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field and Creative Project,” 104. 16. See Lucey, Never Say I, especially chapter 6, on this topic. 17. Gal and Irvine, Signs of Difference, 89. 18. For more on this scene, see Lucey, “Ami ou protégé: Balzac, Proust and the Variability of Friendship.” 19. Bréal, Semantics, 261. 20. Family Lexicon, by Natalia Ginzburg (who translated part of Proust’s novel into Italian), could be seen as a much larger exploration of the phenomenon Proust’s narrator is calling our attention to here. It takes as its primary subject how a family talked to each other, what they said, how they sounded, what phrases recurred, what words they invented, what word games they played. Almost, it seems, this attention to a family, its speech, what Proust’s narrator might call its accent, causes the book to place history and major life events (the rise of Italian fascism, Ginzburg’s marriage, or her husband’s murder in prison during the war) in the background. Ginzburg is interested in the kind of bond language-­in-­use creates within a family more than, it seems, how that language contributes to their involvement in the wider social world: “If my siblings and I were to find ourselves in a dark cave or among millions of people, just one of those phrases or words would immediately allow us to recognize each other. Those phrases are our Latin, the dictionary of our past, they’re like Egyptian or Assyro-­Babylonian hieroglyphics, evidence of a vital core that has ceased to exist but that lives on in its texts, saved from the fury of the waters, the corrosion of time. Those phrases are the basis of our family unity and will persist as long as we are in the world, re-­created and revived in disparate places on the earth whenever one of us says, ‘Most eminent Signor Lipmann,’ and we immediately hear my father’s impatient voice ringing in our ears: ‘Enough of that story! I’ve heard it far too many times already!’ ” (23). 21. Constantine V. Nakassis has suggested that “the critical intervention of  linguistic anthropology over the last 40 years has been its ethnographic focus on indexicality, in particular, the

Notes to Pages 75–88  307 ways that indexical processes undermine language as an autonomous object, entangling it with other semiotic modalities and thereby displacing it beyond its putative borders” (“Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language,” 330). 22. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 13. 23. Saussure, 14. 24. Silverstein, “Shifters, Linguistic Categories, and Cultural Description,” 53. 25. Silverstein, “How Knowledge Begets Communication Begets Knowledge,” 34. 26. See Proust, Carnets, 403. 27. As Malcolm Bowie put it, it “brings an exotic micro-­climate with it. [ . . . ] When used by Albertine it connotes not simply the Orient but the tantalising cross-­currents of  homo-­erotic feeling that are in play among Albertine’s female friends. A woman looks at another woman, renames her, and is overheard by an excitable male.” Bowie, Proust among the Stars, 222. 28. See, e.g., the way Jacqueline Rose recounts this scene from Albertine’s point of view in her novel Albertine, 44–­52. 29. Cited in Hodson, Marcel Proust: The Critical Heritage, 382. 30. Bréal, Semantics, 284. 31. Although I will be focusing on speech between the narrator and Albertine, speech between the narrator and Françoise would be another place to find further evidence of the limits of the narrator’s objective stance toward language. On the narrator’s relation to Françoise, see Sedgwick, “The Weather in Proust,” 22–­26. 32. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” 262. 33. Cf. Serça, “Portrait du narrateur en sociolinguiste.” 34. The phrases “referential bias” and “referential skewing” can be found in Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology: Introducing Semiotic Mediation,” 2. 35. Charles Malo, “Revue Militaire: L’art de déchiffrer les dépêches secrètes,” Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, April 29, 1899, 1. 36. Le Bidois, “Le langage parlé des personnages de Proust,” 217. 37. Isabelle Serça, “Exercices de traduction simultanée,” 148. See also Pierron, “Ce beau français un peu individuel”: Proust et la langue. 38. “As soon as we ask explicitly about the functions of kin relationships, or more bluntly, about the usefulness of kinsmen, a question which kinship theorists prefer to treat as resolved, we cannot fail to notice that those uses of  kinship which may be called genealogical are reserved for official situations in which they serve the function of ordering the social world and of legitimating that order. In this respect they differ from the other kinds of practical use made of kin relationships, which are a particular case of the utilization of connections. The genealogical diagram of  kin relationships which the anthropologist constructs merely reproduces the official representation of the social structures, a representation produced by application of the structuring principle that is dominant in a certain respect, i.e. in certain situations and with a view to certain functions” (Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 34). 39. See Silverstein, “How We Look from Where We Stand,” 276, who mentions “so-­called langue and parole, competence and performance, system and usage.” 40. Silverstein, 276. 41. Halévy, Introduction au déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudo-­hittites ou anatoliennes, 19.

308  Notes to Pages 89–98 42. Mosteller and Wallace, “Inference in an Authorship Problem,” 275. A series of tips from Michael Silverstein (directing me to Mosteller and Wallace, and also to Whitney) were invaluable in helping me write these pages. Different kinds of frequency studies of spoken language were pushed along in the 1960s by the effort to develop automated speech recognition and speech synthesis technologies. See, e.g., Denes, “On the Statistics of Spoken English,” by a researcher at Bell Laboratories. 43. Whitney, “On the Narrative Use of Imperfect and Perfect in the Brāhmaṇas,” 33. 44. Bréal, Semantics, 274. 45. See the introduction to Bybee and Hopper, eds., Frequency and the Emergence of Lin­ guistic Structure, 10. 46. Cited in Fought, “The Reinvention of Hugo Schuchardt,” 422. See also Malkiel, “Each Word Has a History of Its Own.” Gal and Irvine (Signs of Difference, 263–­68 and 288n18) discuss the importance of Schuchardt’s “radical” views on the difficulties of mapping languages and dialects because “there are no entirely unmixed languages” (268). 47. Whitney, The Life and Growth of Language, 311–­12. 48. Silverstein, “How Knowledge Begets Communication,” 38. 49. Note, in passing, that this bafflement in the face of Albertine’s speech differs from the attitude toward the speech of the group of young girls found elsewhere in this same volume of the novel, and which I discussed earlier in this chapter. Jacques Dubois makes a related point on the way Albertine functions in the novel as an “analyseur.” See Pour Albertine, 13. 50. Searle, Speech Acts, 43. Cited in Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology, 231. When Duranti cites this passage (somewhat inaccurately taking it to be a statement of Searle’s own position), he does so in an effort to draw a distinction between the stance taken by linguistic anthropologists toward language-­in-­use and the stance often taken by philosophers talking about “speech acts.” Duranti paraphrases anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo’s critical characterization of the stance toward language use of philosophers like Searle as “an interesting but rather poor ethnography of western personhood and action” (234). For a fuller account of the critique elaborated by linguistic anthropologists of speech act theory, see Richland, “Speech Act Theory, Ethnocentrism, and the Multiplicity of Meaning-­Making Practices.” 51. The snippet “isolated sentences and features” comes from Silverstein, “The Improvisational Performance of Culture in Realtime Discursive Practice,” 234. The second snippet comes from Silverstein, “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­Culture Nexus,” 625n. 52. Silverstein, “ ‘Direct’ and ‘Indirect’ Communicative Acts in Semiotic Perspective,” 337. 53. Silverstein, “How Knowledge Begets,” 34. 54. Silverstein, “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­Culture Nexus,” 621–­23. 55. “Encounters with registers are encounters with characterological figures stereotypically linked to speech repertoires (and associated signs) by a population of users. Language users typify such figures in social-­characterological terms when they say that a particular form of speech marks the speaker as masculine or feminine, as high-­or low-­caste, as a lawyer, doctor, priest, shaman, and so on” (Agha, “Voice, Footing, Enregisterment,” 45). 56. Goffman, Frame Analysis, 508. My interest is in Goffman’s work on talk in relation to Proust’s interest in the same topic. Others have made different kinds of connections between Goffman’s work and Proust’s novel. See notably Belloï, La scène proustienne.

Notes to Pages 102–119  309 57. Sprinker, History and Ideology in Proust, 40. 58. On this topic, see chapter 6 of Lucey, Never Say I. 59. Proust, “Swann Explained by Proust,” 234. 60. Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 248–­49. 61. Sprinker writes that “one might say that in the Recherche conversation is at once everything and nothing, that in certain scenes [ . . . ] it occupies much space without offering significant insight. Characteristically in Proust, what counts is what the Narrator says about the talk he reports; the talk itself remains almost entirely vacuous” (History and Ideology in Proust, 65). There are at least two problems with this point of view. In the first place, it ignores the novel’s interest in the multifunctionality of speech. That is, speech that might appear vacuous from one point of view could be achieving something of immense significance from another, a phenomenon to which the novel is closely attuned. Second, too sharp a distinction between the talk the novel represents and the narrator’s own talk about that talk might cause us to fail to observe how the narrator’s own speech requires the same kinds of critical perusal as does the speech of any of the other characters.

Interlude: Talk in Balzac and Eliot 1. About Proust, Dufour comments helpfully, “In Search, talk is continually being commented on. It is less something spoken and more something listened to: the philological character of the listener turns him into the essential actor of its dialogue” (41). 2. Bronwen Thomas’s Fictional Dialogue provides a helpful rundown of various other kinds of approaches to dialogue in novels. 3. Proust, Contre Sainte-­Beuve, 273. 4. On the role sexuality plays in Cousin Pons, see chapter 3 of  Lucey, The Misfit of the Family. 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylwNisalLT8&feature=youtu.be. 6. See the epilogue to Lucey, The Misfit of the Family and chapter 5, “Proust’s Queer Metalepses,” in Lucey, Never Say I, on moments like these. 7. In fact, Watteau couldn’t have painted a fan for Mme de Pompadour, since he died a few months before she was born. Critics disagree as to whether this was an oversight on Balzac’s part or intentional, perhaps meant to cast some doubt on the level of Pons’s expertise or the claims being made for the fan’s value. See Hiner, “Fan Fashion,” 183. 8. Silverstein, “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts,” 638. 9. Silverstein, “Indexical Order,” 201. 10. Silverstein, 226. 11. Hiner, “Fan Fashion,” 178. 12. See Silverstein’s helpful description of the kind of education Pons is providing by example: “The aesthetic dimensionalities of the art object to be experienced are defined (constructed) through the orderliness of one’s educated experiencing of those dimensionalities, just as the experience tests and furthers one’s abilities at discernment (construal) of them” (“ ‘Cultural’ Concepts,” 641). 13. Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-­thing-­ness of Culture,” 329. In that essay, Silverstein helpfully lays out a tripartite vision of “semiotic space”: “My aim is briefly to outline the intersecting dimensions of a semiotic space in which ‘culture’ is to be found, such dimensions being

310  Notes to Pages 119–125 (a) a regime of evenemential signification immanent in the very experience of situated social practice, (b) a regime of implied paths or networks of circulation of signifying value across such event-­nodes in an intuited socio-­spatio-­temporal structure, and (c) a regime of multiple centers and peripheries—­polar-­coordinated geometries—­of circulatory emanation of signifying value always, inevitably, in flux” (328). 14. See Wolff, “Afterword,” for a helpful look at a different passage from Middlemarch from a linguistic anthropological perspective. 15. Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-­thing-­ness of Culture,” 337. 16. Cf. Buzard, Disorienting Fiction, 288: “A theme of this book has been that the so-­called culture-­concept of modern times arises only in tandem with the model of the Participant Observer, and that we need to attend to the reciprocal relationship between them if we are to complete our view of culture’s emergence and of the role English novels played in the process.” Buzard draws attention to what he calls “insider’s outsideness,” which is perhaps what we see Eliot’s narrator offering here. 17. Duranti, Linguistic Anthropology, 1–­4. 18. Silverstein, “How We Look,” 276.

C h a p t e r T wo 1. See Laget, Proust, Prix Goncourt, for a helpful account of the award and its aftermath. 2. Jean de Pierrefeu, “Le Cas de M. Proust,” Journal des Débats,  January 2–­3, 1920, 3. 3. Proust, Correspondance, 19:49. Pierrefeu regularly expressed concerns about the effects of reading on the mental health of the reader. Later that year, e.g., in October 1920, he would warn that reading books like Colette’s Chéri could cause a loss of cerebral function. See Lucey, Someone, 36. 4. At one point in The Rules of Art, Bourdieu is speculating about the possibility of “construct[ing] methodically the space of possible points of view on the literary (or artistic) act in relation to which the method of analysis to be proposed is defined” (193). He adds in a note that “it would be necessary to gather the sociological information necessary to understand how, in a determined state of a determined field, different analysts are distributed among different approaches, and why, among the different possible methods, they appropriate one rather than another” (378n31). We think we choose our methods for intellectual reasons, and of course we do, but not only. Proust’s novel is constantly showing its characters trying to act, to choose, to interpret, to respond aesthetically in ways that might seem to them “free,” but that the novel understands to be taking place in a determined social field filled with implicit tendencies that could be followed or resisted by different agents (including, most obviously, the narrator/hero). 5. Jacques Rivière, “Le Prix Goncourt,” La Nouvelle Revue Française, January 1920, 154. 6. Joseph Acquisto discusses this passage in relation to Beethoven’s late quartets—­which the narrator has mentioned in the passage. See Proust, Music, and Meaning, 149–­60. Acquisto writes: “I am not arguing, then, that there is an exact parallel between Beethoven’s musical forms and Proust’s literary form, but rather, that attentive listening to Beethoven with particular focus on the limits of conventional analysis can awaken us to similar kinds of interpretive difficulties in Proust” (157), and describes a bit later “a crucial way in which passage through music such as late Beethoven encourages us to rethink the ways in which we confront the meaning of a work

Notes to Pages 125–130  311 like the Recherche. It forces us to be attentive, to listen otherwise than we had been listening, to abandon attempts to hear in the sense of understanding the work fully and definitively. To pursue such lines of inquiry is not to come closer to what the author might have ‘intended,’ but nor is it to suggest that meaning simply unravels as the cruder kinds of deconstructionist approaches would have it. Rather, it is to recognize the role of the reader as co-­creator of meaning, in a way that makes space both for the individual and for the social contexts in which each reader moves, those of  both his or her own time and also the history of past interpretation in which each listener participates to some extent” (160). 7. Proust, Correspondance, 19:317. 8. See Haddad-­Wotling, L’illusion qui nous frappe, 9 and 20. 9. Pierrefeu would publish a review of The Guermantes Way in the Journal des Débats on November 24, 1920. Proust would write him another letter in early December, telling him that he had learned Pierrefeu was out of town and so regretfully he had been unable to invite him to another dinner at the Ritz he had just organized, but that he thought of him throughout the dinner as “the one who is absent and whom I could not convert, who still believes that my novel, conceived as a whole and where the words The End have long been written, is to the contrary some kind of barely organized memorandum made up of childhood memories” (Correspon­ dance, 19:655). 10. In an article about Crime and Punishment, Konstantine Klioutchkine observes that “Dostoevskii’s position in the world of letters opened his text, not just to the press as a whole, but more pointedly, to speech emanating from its most intense channels—­newspapers and the back sections of  journals. [ . . . ] The text of the novel was engaged in and constituted by the flow of speech that circulated through the media and permeated all its products—­the newspaper and the novel alike” (Klioutchkine, “The Rise of Crime and Punishment from the Air of the Media,” 99–­100). 11. A few years after The Idiot was published, Dostoevsky would return to the phenomenon of talk among strangers on a train in “Something about Lying” from A Writer’s Diary: “You can manage to travel pleasantly and happily on our railways if you have the ability to allow the others to fib and believe them as much as possible: in that case you, too, will be allowed to tell a few with effect should you be tempted to do so; the benefit, thus, is mutual” (275). If this implicit social contract is the one Rogozhin and Lebedev are following in The Idiot’s opening scene, clearly Myshkin is in breach of contract. A quick thank you to my colleague Eric Naiman here, for helping me refine my thinking about Dostoevsky and The Idiot. 12. In the introduction to Dostoevsky’s Democracy (8–­21), Nancy Ruttenburg provides an illuminating discussion of why certain characters refer to Myshkin as a “democrat,” partly in order to explain his problematic way of speaking. 13. Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin, 124. 14. Miller, Dostoevsky and “The Idiot,” 8. 15. Proust, “Dostoïevski,” 645. 16. Jacques Rivière, “De Dostoïevsky et de l’insondable,” Nouvelle Revue Française, February 1922, 178. 17. Proust, Correspondance, 18:464. See also Chardin, “Le Dostoïevksi de La Recherche,” 95–­96.

312  Notes to Pages 130–137 18. Proust, Correspondance, 20:542. I discuss further what Proust might mean by composition in this context in Never Say I, 215–­49. 19. Jean de Pierrefeu, “Le Côté de Guermantes,” Journal des Débats, November 24, 1920, 2. 20. Brian G. Rogers calls attention to Proust’s “adaptation of Dostoevsky’s practice of representing characters as amalgams of apparently incoherent selves,” and notes that Proust’s “recognition of similarities between his own and Dostoevsky’s varying focalisations” would be essential to the ways Proust developed his novel from 1913 to 1922. See The Narrative Techniques of “À la recherche du temps perdu,” 134. 21. Jones cites Bakhtin’s “Discourse in the Novel” at the outset of his book: “Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships” (Jones, Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin, xiv). 22. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 206. 23. Rogers writes: “Montages of impressions drawn from different stages in the journey offer permutations of apparently separate personalities, permutations which gain in complexity as the quest proceeds” (Narrative Techniques, 115). See also Matthieu Vernet, “Faut-­il prendre le narrateur au sérieux?” 24. “Besides, the idea that a woman might have had a relationship with her only provoked in me the desire to have this woman too. I told Andrée this while I caressed her. Then without making the slightest effort to reconcile her words with those which she had uttered a few months previously, Andrée told me with a half-­smile: ‘Oh, yes, but you are a man. So we can’t do quite the same things together that I used to do with Albertine’ ” (563–­64) (“D’autre part, l’idée qu’une femme avait peut-­être eu des relations avec Albertine ne me causait plus que le désir d’en avoir moi aussi avec cette femme. Je le dis à Andrée tout en la caressant. Alors sans chercher le moins du monde à mettre ces paroles d’accord avec celles d’il y avait quelques mois, Andrée me dit en souriant à demi: ‘Ah! oui, mais vous êtes un homme. Aussi nous ne pouvons pas faire ensemble tout à fait les mêmes choses que je faisais avec Albertine’ ” [4:179]). 25. At one point in The Prisoner, while the narrator and Albertine are living together in his family’s apartment, he mentions something that he has just learned from a woman who had been Gilberte Swann’s maid at the earlier moment during which he had a crush on Gilberte. During the period in which the narrator had a crush on Gilberte and was visiting her every day, she was in love with a different young man, and the maid helped Gilberte and her lover hide their relationship from the narrator. “I had briefly suspected this at the time, and had remembered questioning this same maid. But as she knew I loved Gilberte, she had denied everything, sworn that Mlle Swann never set eyes on the young man. But now, knowing that my love was so long dead, that for years I had left all Gilberte’s letters unanswered—­and perhaps also because she was no longer in Gilberte’s service—­she told me of her own accord the whole story of the amorous episode I had known nothing about. It seemed to her quite natural to do so” (Prisoner/ Fugitive, 119–­20) (“J’en avais eu un instant le soupçon à cette époque, et même j’avais alors interrogé cette même femme de chambre. Mais comme elle savait que j’étais épris de Gilberte, elle avait nié, juré que jamais Mlle Swann n’avait vu ce jeune homme. Mais maintenant, sachant que mon amour était mort depuis si longtemps, que depuis des années j’avais laissé toutes ses lettres

Notes to Pages 137–149  313 sans réponse—­et peut-­être aussi parce qu’elle n’était plus au service de la jeune fille—­d’elle-­ même elle me raconta tout au long l’épisode amoureux que je n’avais pas su. Cela lui semblait tout naturel” [3:641]). What we might say about the narrator’s apparently unsurprised attitude both to the maid’s earlier dissembling and to her more recent willingness to overshare is that it is entirely consistent with an understanding of linguistic interaction in which strategy and relative social position are paramount considerations. 26. On the role of the paradoxes of truth and truthfulness in Proust, see chapters 1 and 5 of Prendergast, Mirages and Mad Beliefs. On the importance of lying in Proust, see chapter 2 of Malcolm Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan. Chapter 2 of  Joshua Landy, Philosophy as Fiction, is devoted to the problem of self-­deception in Proust. None of these critics, however, develops their topic in relation to the pragmatics of talking in different kinds of circumstances. Gilles Deleuze’s somewhat awkward framework for thinking about Proust and signs in his book of that title is mostly unhelpful to my project in What Proust Heard, because of the way he understands an apprenticeship in interpreting signs as caught up in a project of deciphering truth (“The Search for lost time is in fact a search for truth” [15]) and discovering essences (“Essence is indeed the final quality at the heart of a subject” [43]). An essence is something that can be “revealed” (88) for Deleuze. There is not much purchase within this framework for understanding the socially interactive pragmatic semiotic process that Proust’s novel seems committed to studying. 27. Some might want to ask if it is even possible for someone to listen to themselves in this self-­conscious manner. There are a number of ways in which this might happen, e.g., through recording and then some kind of social scientific analysis of that record. I wonder if the novel might not be, in the hands of someone like Proust or Dostoevsky, an analytical instrument for a process of objectivation of someone’s speech, and also, taking a further, Bourdieusian step, for “the work of objectivation of the subject of objectivation,” for considering who is undertaking the objectivation (of their own speech or of the speech of others) and why. The formal complexity of the narrators in both Proust and Dostoevsky, the relation of the narrators and of the novels that contain them to the speech of characters and to the narrators’ own speech, seems tied to this issue. See Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 94. 28. Cf. chapter 14 of Descombes, Proust: Philosophie du roman. 29. Christopher Prendergast, “Powell v. Proust,” London Review of Books, August 30, 2018. Consulted online at https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n16/letters#letter5. 30. See Dubois, Pour Albertine, 13, for helpful commentary on this aspect of Albertine’s role in the novel. 31. Bourdieu, Sociologie générale, 2:451. 32. Bourdieu, Science of Science and Reflexivity, 92. 33. Recall Bourdieu’s definition of social capital, cited in chapter 1. It is “the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—­or in other words, to membership in a group—­which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-­owned capital, a ‘credential’ which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word” (“The Forms of Capital,” 248–­49). Symbolic capital, as Bourdieu describes it, is “the power granted to those who have obtained sufficient recognition to be in a position to impose recognition. [ . . . ] the power of creating things with words [ . . . ] a power of consecration or

314  Notes to Pages 139–169 revelation, a power to conceal or reveal things which are already there” (“Social Space and Symbolic Power,” 138). It is what Pons lacked in the scene we looked at in the first interlude. 34. “Saying that the social world is a place of acts of  knowledge, that social subjects know the social world and act in it knowing full well, so to speak, what they are doing, that they are orientated by their sense of practice and the social world in terms of which they devise their practices, that they are orientated by meanings that are not necessarily ends, does not imply at all that they are subjects conscious of such meanings and acts of cognition” (HF, 49). 35. Silverstein, “Discourse and the No-­thing-­ness of Culture,” 333. 36. Silverstein, “The Indeterminacy of Contextualization,” 71–­72. 37. Silverstein, 72. 38. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 238–­39. 39. See Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, 92–­93; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 231–­40; Ladenson, Proust’s Lesbianism, 104–­8. 40. The notion of eccentric speech plans à la Dostoevsky crops up in a number of places throughout this volume of Search. Here is just one example: “In certain families given to lying, a brother who visits his brother for no obvious reason and asks him, apropos of nothing, in the doorway, as he is leaving, a question the answer to which he hardly seems to take in, conveys to his brother by his very off-­handedness that this question was the purpose of his visit, for the brother recognizes the faraway look, the words spoken as if between brackets, at the last moment, from having often used them himself ” (Prisoner/Fugitive, 97) (“Dans certaines familles menteuses, un frère venu voir son frère sans raison apparente et lui demandant dans une incidente, sur le pas de la porte, en s’allant, un renseignement qu’il n’a même pas l’air d’écouter, signifie par cela même à son frère que ce renseignement était le but de sa visite, car le frère connaît bien ces airs détachés, ces mots dits comme entre parenthèses à la dernière seconde, car il les a souvent employés lui-­même” [3:617]). 41. Sedgwick has suggestively pointed out in “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind” that “according to Proust’s showing, Theory of Mind is in no degree a purely cognitive issue, even though Proust’s narrator (like many of Poe’s) often seems to insist that his every mental event, his every premise and conclusion, emerge from sheer ratiocination. Instead, his Theory of  Mind is so deeply imbricated with affect that there is no motive in the book [ . . . ] that can be separated from the question of others’ and one’s own mental opacity” (154). For Sedgwick, “the sheer monstrousness with which the narrator treats Albertine raises the question of whether he can possibly have a Theory of Mind” (155), that is, “the very least obvious question about this narrator is whether he actually possesses the knowledge that other people have mental states that can differ from his” (154). But if one shifts the question slightly to the question of  language use, one might also think that this moment in the novel is the place where the novel itself insists on us noticing that the narrator, for all his virtuoso metapragmatic observations about the speech of others, is often as helpless in the face of  language (including his own), helpless regarding what happens when we use it, as any of the other users whose usage he carefully dissects.

Interlude: Harmonizing Habitus in Woolf 1. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 81–­82. 2. Bourdieu, 72.

Notes to Pages 170–191  315 3. Among helpful commentaries on Woolf ’s own reading of Proust, see Mares, “Woolf ’s Reading of Proust”; Tudeau-­Clayton, “ ‘Time Passes’—­Virginia Woolf ’s Virgilian Passage to the Future Past Masterpieces”; and chapter 4 of Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Migrations of Language. 4. Bourdieu, Sociologie générale, 2:899. Future references are given parenthetically as SG. 5. In my conclusion, I will be discussing Goffman’s essay “Footing,” which includes a consideration of what “fresh talk” might be. 6. Zhang, “Stream of Consciousness,” 141. See also Banfield, Phantom Table, 307–­36, on Woolf ’s “method of multiple perspectives.” 7. In “Dialogue in a Discourse Context,” David Herman writes about a scene in To the Lighthouse between Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay: “Woolf uses the scene to suggest how inner and outer worlds, inferences and utterances, are integrated to form larger ecologies of talk. [ . . . ] Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are represented as actively co-­constructing in their communicative encounter” (78). 8. Banfield, Phantom Table, 350, 349. 9. Herman writes that Woolf ’s “scenes of talk suggest that one cannot make sense of utterances except in the context of the larger speech events to which they contribute.” He adds that To the Lighthouse “insists on the situatedness of cognitive and communicative acts in the larger environments that make them acts of that sort” (“Dialogue in a Discourse Context,” 77–­78). 10. See Paul K. Saint-­Amour’s discussion of the “1917” section of the novel in Tense Fu­ ture, 120–­25. Saint-­Amour refers to the narration in The Years as a “jagged territory of half-­ completed gestures and utterances, intermittent bursts of fellow-­feeling, and fleeting or grudging alliances” (121). 11. On sexuality in The Years, see Cramer, “ ‘Pearls and the Porpoise’: The Years—­A Lesbian Memoir.” 12. Silverstein, “Indexical Order,” 202. 13. See Rosetta Young’s helpful doctoral dissertation, “Big Talk: The Nineteenth-­Century Anglo-­American Novel and the Rise of the Upper Middle Class,” on the role of a certain set of novels in producing the legibility of a group called the upper middle class.

Chapter Three 1. Flaubert and Sand, Correspondance, 509–­14. 2. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 107. Further citations from this volume will be indicated parenthetically as Rules. 3. Bourdieu, “Le critique ou le point de vue de l’auteur,” 133. 4. Carnets, 409. 5. Bourdieu, Classification Struggles, 67. 6. On Siegfried Bing’s Maison de l’art nouveau in Paris, see Richard Dorment, “The Shop That Sold Art’s New Dream,” Telegraph, December 22, 2004, https://www.telegraph.co.uk /culture/art/3633838/The-­shop-­that-­sold-­arts-­new-­dream.html. 7. Bourdieu and Chartier, Le sociologue et l’historien, 41–­42. Hannah Freed-­Thall has commented that “it is only a slight exaggeration to say that La Distinction is a book about Proust” (Spoiled Distinctions, 46–­47).

316  Notes to Pages 192–224 8. See Lucey, “Real-­Time Literary Texts.” 9. Dames, “Forget Bourdieu,” 199–­200. 10. Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” 126. Future parenthetical references are indicated by SSSP. 11. For an interesting discussion of Elstir’s association with Albertine, and of the fact that both the narrator and the hero (but not the novel) seem unaware of the significance of that association, see Dubois, Pour Albertine, 73–­74. 12. See chapter 4 of Acquisto, Proust, Music, and Meaning, for a careful reading of the passages concerning the narrator’s own listening throughout this and subsequent scenes of Pris­ oner. See also Hughes, Proust, Class, and Nation, 272–76, on the narrator and musical taste. 13. Wilson, Let’s Talk about Love, 90–­91. 14. Wilson’s mischaracterization of Bourdieu’s project in Distinction is similar to that of Nicholas Dames cited earlier, which is hardly surprising given that Dames is reviewing Wilson’s book in the article of  his I cited. 15. For helpful information about how Proust conceived of the way he wrote about music in relation to his contemporaries, be they ordinary listeners, composers, journalists, or trained listeners, see the section called “Professionnels contre amateurs,” in Leblanc, Proust écrivain de la musique, 181–­204. 16. See Michael Warner’s seminal “Publics and Counterpublics.” See also chapter 2, “Sexuality and the Literary Field,” in Lucey, Someone.

Interlude: Indexical Force in Sarraute and Cusk 1. In Spoiled Distinctions, Hannah Freed-­Thall suggests that “in many ways, and more precisely than the work of either Proust or Ponge, Sarraute’s fiction exemplifies Bourdieu’s sociology of culture” (113). To my eye, the sociology of culture seems more explicitly part of Proust’s novelistic agenda, and more implicitly part of Sarraute’s. I explore here how that implicitness functions. 2. “Conversation et sous-­conversation” first appeared in La Nouvelle Nouvelle Revue Fran­ çaise, before being collected in Sarraute’s 1956 volume of critical essays, L’ère du soupçon. I will cite this essay in French from the 1996 Pléiade edition of Sarraute’s Oeuvres complètes. (This passage is on 1602.) The English version can be found in Sarraute’s The Age of Sus­ picion (107). Her two novels I will cite in French from the readily available Gallimard Folio editions. 3. Silverstein, “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized,” 57. Future references will be indicated parenthetically by TEA. 4. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 57. 5. “So-­called ‘performativity’—­social consequentiality, i.e., indexical entailment in the contextual use of language—­emerges as a surprising phenomenon only from the point of view of narrow denotationalist doctrines of language. [ . . . ] All messages, i.e., emergent segments of texts-­in-­context, are consequential, that is, have indexical entailments as a function of their occurrence; the question is the degree to which in-­and-­at its moment of occurrence a message determines, or at least constrains under a principle of normativity, what is consequent upon its having occurred” (Silverstein, “Denotation and the Pragmatics of Language,” 145).

Notes to Pages 226–236  317 6. Recall that for Austin, “explicit performative verbs” are helpful in “mak[ing] explicit [ . . . ] the illocutionary force of an utterance, or what illocutionary act it is that we are performing in issuing that utterance” (How to Do Things with Words, 149). But also recall Austin’s observation that “an effect must be achieved on the audience if the illocutionary act is to be carried out. How should we best put it here? And how can we limit it? Generally the effect amounts to bringing about the understanding of the meaning and of the force of the locution. So the performance of an illocutionary act involves the securing of uptake” (115–­16). There is thus at least an implicit understanding in Austin that illocutionary force, were there to be such a thing, would be interactively produced. 7. “There is nothing so pointless as to discuss an author’s theories without considering the results those very theories produced,” wrote Sarraute about Flaubert. (“Rien n’est plus oiseux que de discuter les théories d’un auteur sans considérer les résultats auxquels ces théories ont abouti.”) See Oeuvres complètes, 1624. 8. For a good summary of the development of the concept of  language ideology by linguistic anthropologists, see Kroskrity, “Language Ideologies.” He writes, e.g., that one of the dimensions of the concept includes the idea that “language ideologies are productively used in the creation and representation of various social and cultural identities (e.g. nationality, ethnicity). Language, especially shared language, has long served as the key to naturalizing the boundaries of social groups” (509). 9. Flaubert, Correspondance électronique, https://flaubert.univ-­rouen.fr/jet/public/tmp /folio_10045.pdf ?d=1585517098. 10. Rabaté, “ ‘Le chaudron fêlé,’ ” 29–­30. In her essay “Flaubert le précurseur,” Sarraute will give a careful account of how Flaubert makes use of “inauthenticity” or “the flattest of conventions” to discover an “unknown novelistic substance” (Oeuvres complètes, 1633–­34). 11. Freed-­Thall has observed that “Sarraute’s 1962 novel, The Golden Fruits, which dramatizes the reception of a novel titled The Golden Fruits, is explicitly about the perils of asserting cultural domination through the appreciation of a work of art” (Spoiled Distinctions, 119). 12. Annabel Kim discusses both The Golden Fruits and Between Life and Death in chapters 1 and 4, respectively, of her interesting book Unbecoming Language. My reading of the novels is different than hers. Kim insists in a way I would not on Sarraute’s “dissolution of identity categories and hollowing out of differences” (46). I would also qualify her claim that in novels like The Golden Fruits “Sarraute eliminates any indication of the relationships that connect the various voices to each other so that there is no way of confirming their relationship outside the individual interactions that arise” (66). There are, as I read them, well-­identified characters in both novels, including, in Between Life and Death, an author, a mother and father, the woman reader to whom the author feels a particular attachment, and others. Sometimes people read the novel as being about a collectivity of authors, rather than a singular figure. “This, her fifth novel, comprises a selection of scenes from a writer’s life, but there’s no attempt to construct a coherent portrait of a single individual,” writes Ann Jefferson in her compelling biography of  Sarraute (308–­9). Mary McCarthy, in reviewing Between Life and Death in the New York Review of Books in 1969, identified several different novelists within Sarraute’s author figure. (See her “Hanging by a Thread.”) Sarraute, in presenting her novel to readers, warned them not to be on the lookout for well-­formed characters, because the novel’s hero was “put together from disparate

318  Notes to Pages 236–257 elements” (“fait de pièces disparates”) (see her Oeuvres complètes, 1863). It strikes me that Sarraute is particularly masterful at, and acutely interested in, the ways that verbal interactions are a locus in which relationships and roles are constantly being formed, maintained, and reproduced in reference both to past histories of the participants and to the range of roles and forms for interaction that can be drawn from the surrounding cultural universe. Sarraute is a rather brilliant student of the ways in which talk works both to perpetuate culture and to invoke the cultural forms that maintain speakers in relation to each other (or that attempt to rupture those relations). 13. Kim understands Between Life and Death as advocating for an idea of the “beauty” of language to be found in “the relationship, necessarily intimate and private, that the writer can have with it” (Unbecoming Language, 189). I would place the emphasis elsewhere. The way I see it, in Sarraute’s novels, including this one, language is inevitably understood as the medium of interlocution, and the experience of language that Sarraute explores—­the effects of language on people—­arises from the experience of its use among people. 14. In the first chapter of her book Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, Merve Emre provides a fascinating account of Henry James’s 1904 somewhat awkward tour of American “ladies’ culture clubs” and of the way James came to be read in women’s colleges around the same time. Emre’s account is a fine illustration of the unintended and unexpected ways that publics can form around works, influencing how they are understood, and an illustration of how they sometimes come to be used in unexpected ideological enterprises. She extends the consequences of this complex uptake of  James’s writing forward to the time when Mary McCarthy was writing her Birds of America as, in part, a reflection on the historical development and ideological underpinnings of both the American novel and education abroad programs within American higher education. Her account is a compelling example of how to think about literature as language-­in-­use and its place within a complex cultural field. 15. Newman, “Portrait of an Invisible Artist: Transit by Rachel Cusk,” Toronto Review of Books, May 9, 2018, https://www.torontoreviewofbooks.com/2018/05/portrait-­of-­an-­invisible-­artist/. 16. Katy Waldman, “ ‘Kudos,’ the Final Volume of Rachel Cusk’s ‘Faye’ Trilogy, Completes an Ambitious Act of Refusal,” New Yorker, May 22, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/books /page-­turner/kudos-­final-­volume-­rachel-­cusk-­faye-­trilogy-­ambitious-­act-­of-­refusal. 17. Merve Emre, “Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2018, 89–­94, quote on 94. 18. Alexandra Schwartz, “ ‘I Don’t Think Character Exists Anymore’: A Conversation with Rachel Cusk,” New Yorker, November 18, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-­new -­yorker-­interview/i-­dont-­think-­character-­exists-­anymore-­a-­conversation-­with-­rachel-­cusk. 19. Emre, “Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye,” 89; Silverstein, “Metapragmatic Discourse,” 37. 20. Cusk, Outline, 3. 21. On the notion of “implied author,” see, e.g., chapters 5, 6, 7, and 9 of Chatman’s Coming to Terms. 22. Silverstein, “The Voice of  Jacob,” 491. 23. Emre, “Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye,” 94. Francine Prose goes even further, writing that “we witness a man—­a stranger—­purposely ruining a woman’s brief interlude of plea­ sure and peace, doing something aggressive and disgusting that will make her life momentarily

Notes to Pages 257–281  319 uglier, for no reason other than the fact that he can. [ . . . ] I kept imagining him [ . . . ] resembling one of the powerful politicians currently enacting their perverse dramas of cruelty and mean-­spiritedness on the world stage” (“Real Talk: Rachel Cusk’s Kudos,” 534). I suppose the novel, in its flatness of tone, leaves itself open to this kind of reading, although it does seem singularly inattentive both to the wider gay context of the passage and to many of its lustrous details.

Conclusion 1. For more on indexicality and indexical ground see Nakassis, “Indexicality’s Ambivalent Ground.” 2. About the “earnest longueurs” of this set of reflections about art and literature in the novel’s final volume, Christopher Prendergast wonders, “Am I alone (I doubt it) in the view that much of the prolonged meditation on the literary vocation and the redemptive conception of ‘literature’ is simply wearing?” (Mirages, 3). Prendergast’s treatment of skepticism in the novel provides another perspective on the need to objectify the narrator’s discourse at many points in the novel, as opposed to imagining it is endorsed by the novel. 3. Goffman, “Footing,” 144. Future page numbers will be given parenthetically. As Michael Silverstein pointed out to me in an email (December 28, 2017), Goffman is using principal in its legal sense: “(Of a person) being the actual perpetrator of or directly responsible for a crime” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. [Version 3.80, 2007], s.v. “principal”). Silverstein wrote: “the ‘principal’ has a stake in an event at talk in that the truth or falsity of the denotational content matters, the success or failure of illocutionary intent-­as-­formulated matters, etc. In this sense, note that we can be, as I have long held, ‘participants’ in discursive interaction without being ‘parties’ to it. No standing, as the courts declare of plaintiffs; and note how close ‘standing’ is to ‘footing’!” 4. Linguistic anthropologists have worked in interesting ways both with and on Goffman’s ideas about participation frameworks and roles. Judith Irvine, in “Shadow Conversations,” e.g., has helpfully suggested that rather than imagining it would be possible to arrive at a well-­defined fixed set of partial roles that together make up a larger notion of  “speaker,” it is instead necessary to take close account of each particular situation and of “the process by which participation structures are constructed, imagined, and socially distributed. [ . . . ] It is not only an analytical problem; it is also a participants’ problem, to which there are creative, if often evanescent, solutions” (136). She also points out that “utterances are set within larger wholes which also have a bearing on how participation is organized” (140). 5. Silvio, “Animation: The New Performance?,” 422. 6. Goffman, “Felicity’s Condition,” 48. 7. Paul Manning and Ilana Gershon observe that when we take the phenomenon or the model of animation seriously, then there is no reason for “assum[ing] single authors for utterances and presum[ing] that these utterances, produced by a single person, could give insights into what the person believes—­people’s statements are insights into their thoughts. This is, as anthropologists know too well, not a universal assumption but rather a very culturally specific set of assumptions” (“Animating Interaction,” 126). It is a set of assumptions that Search finally calls into question.

320  Notes to Pages 283–292 8. In the course of this long novel, we do eventually read what Swann dies without being able to hear: the words Oriane says to Gilberte about her father after they have finally met. But that possibility could only be realized because of certain events that took place after Swann’s death. 9. The passage contains a reference to an earlier description (in Sodom and Gomorrah) of a fountain designed by Hubert Robert, where the fountain is taken to provide an image of a social order whose regularity is produced by certain kinds of forces (the fountain’s mechanism), but also sometimes disrupted by other kinds of forces (a gust of wind). See Bidou-­Zachariasen, “Le ‘jet d’eau d’Hubert Robert.’ ”

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Index

Acquisto, Joseph, 310–­11n6, 316n12 aesthetic experiences, 38, 43, 115–­16, 125, 183, 204, 209, 220, 267, 270, 272–­73, 283. See also art “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind” (Sedgwick), 314n41 Agha, Asif, 14–­15, 308n55 À la recherche du temps perdu. See In Search of Lost Time (Proust) anamnesis, 186–­87, 209 “Animating Interaction” (Manning and Gershon), 319n7 animation: and language, 281, 283; and narrators, 278; and semiotics, 263; and statistics, 245, 258, 261–­96; and talk, 44, 278; and utterances, 30, 44, 319n7 anthropology: and kinship, 87, 307n38; and language/talk, 46, 81–­82, 89, 132; and social sciences, 245; and sociology, 46, 81–­82, 86–­89, 125, 132, 245. See also ethnography; linguistic anthropology; sociology archaeology, novels as cultural, 108 aristocratic speech/voice, 14–­18, 23, 41, 55–­57, 95, 102–­6, 112, 130–­31, 174, 183, 189, 194, 214, 271–­72, 289, 294, 305n5, 315n13

art, 185–­89, 192, 207–­11, 217–­19, 310n4; and aesthetic experience, 125; and conversation/friendship, 50; and culture, 218, 317n11; and literature, 185–­86, 286, 294, 319n2; and music, 192, 200–­202, 286; and posterity, 217–­18; and social field, 42–­43; and social reality, 185–­86; talk about, 57–­58; as weapon in salon wars, 305n55; and writing, 253. See also aesthetic experiences; cultural production Atlas linguistique de la France (Gilliéron), 17 Austin, J. L.: on explicit performative verbs, 317n6; on hereby, 223–­24; on illocutionary force, 24–­26, 32, 225–­26, 317n6; and linguistic anthropology, 94; and speech act theory, 23–­27, 304n35 authors, implied, 128, 246–­47, 318n21 Bakhtin, Mikhail: and animation, 276–­77; on dialogue as utterance, 6, 61; on discourse in novels, 312n21; and Dostoevsky, study of, 302n19; and language-­in-­use, 58, 82–­83; and linguistic anthropology, 9–­10, 302n19; on literature, 63; on novel, defined, 82, 91; on novel as utterance, 6, 61; on points of view, 93; on speech genres,

334  Index Bakhtin, Mikhail (cont.) 61–­63, 127, 276, 283; on speech types, 91, 106; on utterances, 6, 9, 61, 276–­77 Balzac, Honoré de, 6, 27, 41, 121–­22, 126, 128, 140, 309n4, 309n7; and animation, 261, 269–­70; and common ground, 148; dialogue in, 109–­10; and indexical force, 221, 223, 225–­26; insider’s outsideness of narrator, 173; and language-­in-­use, 122; and social indexicality, 109; talk in, 108–­18, 122 Banfield, Ann, 173 Baudelaire, Charles, 208 Bauman, Richard, 60 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 310–­11n6 Benveniste, Émile, 22 Between Life and Death (Sarraute), 183, 220, 226, 236–­39, 242–­45, 250–­51, 253, 267–­68, 317–­18n12, 318n13 Bibesco, Alexandre (prince), 22, 303n32 Bibesco, Antoine, 22, 303n31 Bibesco, Emmanuel, 22 Bibesco, Hélène (princesse), 22 Bibesco, Marthe (princesse), 7 “Big Talk” (Young), 315n13 Birds of America (McCarthy), 318n14 Borrelli, Raymond de, 263–­65 Boulenger, Jacques, 130 Bourdieu, Pierre, 305n54, 307n38, 313n27; on anamnesis, 186–­87, 209; and animation, 286–­88; on art, 42–­43, 185–­89, 192, 202, 207–­11, 217–­19, 310n4; on book’s functions, 42; on classification, 286; on cultural production, 186–­87, 211–­12, 215–­16; on distinction and form, 38–­43, 185–­221, 316n14; on Flaubert, 185–­90; on habitus, 6, 39–­40, 142–­43, 169–­74, 181, 194; and indexical force, 239–­40, 243–­44, 254; on interactionist fallacy, 38; on interactions, 196; on interpersonal relations, 169–­70; and language-­in-­use, 58–­59, 61, 63, 69, 149; on langue, 59; and linguistic anthropology, 38, 171; on literature, 63;

on logic of practice, 150; on novels as sociological analysis, 191; on objectivity, 181; on poetics, 187; on practical statistics, kind of, 280; and Proust, 39–­41, 185–­219, 299, 315n7; on realist formalism, 186, 208; on reprise, 219; on social agents, 172, 181; on social capital, 23, 69, 105–­7, 149, 313–­14n33; on social reality, 197; on social scientists, 288; on social spaces, 193–­94, 201; on social structure, 182–­83; on social topology, 201; on social world, 190, 193–­ 97, 201; on sociology, 38–­43, 63, 144, 194, 201–­2, 287–­88; on sociology of culture, 6, 38, 190–­93, 316n1; on spontaneous statistics, 244; and Woolf, 170 Bowie, Malcolm, 304n42, 305n55, 307n27, 313n26 Bréal, Michel, 11–­12, 20, 22, 69, 72, 73, 75, 77–­82, 90, 297, 302n22 Butler, Judith, 23 Buzard, James, 310n16 Camp, Elisabeth, 32 “Case of M. Proust, The” (Pierrefeu), 123–­24 Cavanaugh,  Jillian, 25–­26 Champollion, Jean-­François, 86–­88 Chartier, Roger, 190–­91, 315n7 Chéri (Colette), 310n3 citations, for Proust works, vii Colet, Louise, 235 Colette, 310n3 “Common Ground” (Stalnaker), 148 communication: and knowledge, 69; in novels, 162 composition, 139–­40, 144, 191, 207; and form, 123–­29; and habitus, 6, 167; movement of thematic material in, 215; Proust on, 124, 187–­88, 312n18; and social indexicality, 6 contextualization, 60, 84, 155–­57 Contre Sainte-­Beuve (Proust), 109, 126, 221 Conversable Worlds (Mee), 304n49

Index  335 conversation, 304n49; and artists, 50; dessous of, 230–­31; and friendship, 50; and logic, 31; as ritual, 254; and utterances, 220–­21 “Conversation and Sub-­Conversation” (Sarraute), 220, 227–­31, 236, 244–­45 Course in General Linguistics (Saussure), 75–­76 Cousin Pons (Balzac), 110–­18, 121–­22, 223, 309n4, 309n12 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 311n10 cryptography, 84–­85, 87. See also hiero­­ glyphics/hieroglyphs cultural archaeology, novels as, 108 “ ‘Cultural’ Concepts and the Language-­ Culture Nexus” (Silverstein), 45, 55, 308n51 cultural locations, 122, 287. See also social locations cultural production, 59, 63, 65, 67, 186–­87, 211–­12, 215–­17. See also art cultural values, 110, 118, 120–­21, 180, 261. See also social values culture: and art, 218, 317n11; disenchantment of, 191; and language, 10, 26, 45, 55–­56, 96, 308n51; and language-­in-­use, 96; and novels, 310n16; and participant observer, 310n16; and pleasure, 191; and social change, 125; and social indexicality, 295; sociology of, 6, 38, 190–­93, 316n1; and talk, 318n12; transmission and reproduction of, 122 Cusk, Rachel, 299, 318–­19n23; and aesthetic experience, 183; and animation, 44, 261, 278; and collective cultural forms, 261; and common ground, 148; indexical force in, 222, 245–­59; and linguistic anthropology, 6; and self-­reflexivity, 259 Dames, Nicholas, 192, 316n14 Darmesteter, Arsène, 303n26 data: speech as, 23, 44, 82–­83, 132, 145, 246, 274; talk as, 44, 274 Daudet, Alphonse, 185

décalage (discrepancy), 221–­23 defeasibility, 156–­57 Deleuze, Gilles, 313n26 denotational text, 31, 76–­77, 92, 109, 143, 146, 160, 220–­22, 226, 230, 244, 264, 268, 316n5, 319n3 “Denotation and the Pragmatics of Language” (Silverstein), 316n5 dessous, 86, 109–­11, 149, 221, 227, 230–­31, 238 dialects, 73, 303n24, 308n46 dialogue: and form, 108; and language, 109; and linguistic anthropology, 6; and listening, 309n1; in novels, 108–­10, 165, 227–­28, 309nn1–­2; overtones, 276; and social positions as paramount consideration, 312–­13n25; and sociology of culture, 6; and utterances, 6, 61, 276 diction, 66, 233 discourse: and habitus, 294; and indexes, 50; and indexical force, 226; and meaning, 50; metapragmatic, 244; in novels, 312n21; and social action, 222–­23; and utterances, 50, 249 “Discourse and the No-­thing-­ness of Culture” (Silverstein), 309–­10n13 “Discourse in the Novel” (Bakhtin), 312n21 discrepancy (décalage), 221–­23 Disorienting Fiction (Buzard), 310n16 distinction: aesthetic, and ongoing social processes, 68; and form, 184, 185–­219, 316n14; and posterity, 217–­19; and sociology, 191. See also social distinction Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Bourdieu), 38, 40, 190–­97, 202, 210–­18, 220–­21, 315n7, 316n14 distinctive, becoming, 210–­17 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 6, 10, 33, 37, 123, 126–­33, 137–­42, 148, 153, 162, 183, 302n19, 311nn10–­12, 312n20, 313n27; and eccentric speech, 314n40 Dostoevsky’s Democracy (Ruttenburg), 311n12 Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin (Jones), 312n21 Dubois,  Jacques, 305–­6n5, 308n49, 316n11

336  Index Dufour, Philippe, 108–­9, 309n1 Duranti, Alessandro, 122, 302n20, 308n50 Durkheim, Émile, 12, 193 Eliot, George, 6; and animation, 261; and common ground, 148; and habitus, 171–­73; and indexical force, 223, 225–­26; insider’s outsideness of narrator, 173, 310n16; and language-­in-­use, 122; talk in, 108, 118–­22 Emre, Merve, 246, 257, 306n10, 318n14, 318–­19n23 essence, 212, 218, 313n26 ethnography: and cultural locations, 122; and indexical entailment, 25; and indexicality, 25, 306–­7n21; and language-­in-­use, 94; and linguistic anthropology, 25, 90–­91, 306–­7n21; and listening, 7, 202; and narrators, 121, 170; and novels, 95; and performativity, 25; and speech, 95, 170; and speech acts, 25; and talk, 7, 106, 121–­ 22, 166–­67, 295–­96; and utterance, 33; of western personhood and action, 308n50. See also anthropology; sociology fait de langage, 74, 81 families, language of/talk in, 64–­65, 72, 306n20, 314n40. See also kinship Family Lexicon (Ginzburg), 306n20 Federalist papers, word counts in, 89, 308n42 “Felicity’s Condition” (Goffman), 279–­80 Fictional Dialogue (Thomas), 309n2 Finding Time Again (Proust), 46–­47, 143, 248–­49, 265–­67, 271, 288–­94 Flaubert, Gustave, 185–­90, 208, 232, 235, 242, 246, 317n7, 317n10 “Footing” (Goffman), 274–­75, 304n43, 315n5, 319n3 form. See literary form formalism, realist, 186, 208 Frame Analysis (Goffman), 98, 101, 308n56 frame analysis, of talk, 98, 101, 308n56 France-­Culture (radio station), 190–­91

Freed-­Thall, Hannah, 299, 305n54, 315n7, 316n1, 317n11 Fugitive, The (Proust). See Prisoner/Fugitive, The (Proust) Gal, Susan, 69, 145, 308n46 Genette, Gérard, 131–­32, 139, 144, 301–­2n8, 302n14 geographical linguists, 17 Gershon, Ilana, 319n7 Gilliéron, Jules, 17 Ginzburg, Natalia, 306n20 Goffman, Erving, 95, 319nn3–­4; and animation, 274–­77, 279–­80; on frame analysis, 98, 101, 308n56; on fresh talk, 170–­71, 276, 315n5; and Proust, 308n56; on sense of one’s place, 244; on speaker, roles, 304n43; and talk, 308n56 Golden Fruits, The (Sarraute), 183–­84, 220–­45, 250–­51, 317nn11–­12; indexical entailment in, 224 Goncourt, Edmond de, 47, 143, 185, 188–­90, 265 Grice, Paul (H. P.), 304n35, 304n49; on cooperative principle, 31; and linguistic anthropology, 94; on speaker meaning, 148; and verbal communication, 93–­94 Guermantes Way, The (Proust), 7–­8, 13–­21, 46, 77–­80, 130, 188–­90, 268–­73, 278–­82, 288–­94, 311n9 habitus, 3, 36–­42, 59, 104, 142–­43, 194, 218–­19; adéquat, 219; and animation, 272; and composition, 6, 167; and discourse, 294; and hexis, 39–­40; and homogeneity, 181–­82; and interlocution, 171; and language, 40; linguistic, 21, 33, 36–­37, 166–­71, 304n50; misfits in, 180–­81; of narrator, 169–­70; social, 304n50; and social indexicality, 6; and social world, 40; and utterances, 304n50; in Woolf, 169–­84 Haddad-­Wotling, Karen, 126 Halévy,  Joseph, 88

Index  337 Hanks, William, 301n1 Hardy, Thomas, 37, 140–­41 Harkness, Nicholas, 36 Harper’s Magazine, 246 hearing: and acquiring information, 148; language-­in-­use, 48–­58; and language use, 283; by narrators, 63–­64, 71, 144, 147, 228, 287; ourselves, 294; and reading, 231, 296; and register, 225; spontaneous way of, 144; and talk, 44, 131, 249, 274. See also listening; sound hereby, 223–­24 Herman, David, 315n7, 315n9 hexis, bodily, 39–­40. See also habitus hieroglyphics/hieroglyphs, 86–­88, 306n20. See also cryptography homogeneity: and habitus, 181–­82; linguistic, 18; of narrators, 248; and semantics, 18 Hornsby, Jennifer, 31–­32 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 23–­ 24, 223, 317n6 “How Words Change Their Meaning” (Meillet), 12, 17–­18 Hugo, Victor, 51, 54–­57, 90, 268–­72, 281, 305n5 identities. See social identities ideologies, 38, 93, 160, 317n8 idioms, 4, 54 Idiot, The (Dostoevsky), 33, 126–­32, 311n11 idiotic speech (acts), 23–­38, 123–­68 illocutionary acts, 24–­25, 31–­33, 225–­26, 304–­ 5n51, 317n6 illocutionary force, 24–­26, 32, 225–­26, 317n6; and performativity, 25 illocutionary intent, 319n3 implied authors, 128, 246–­47, 318n21 “Indeterminacy of Contextualization, The” (Silverstein), 304–­5n51 indexical authorization, as culturally eucharistic, 115 indexical capacity, 23, 171, 174, 241, 256, 289–­90, 295

indexical competence/competency, 229–­31, 236, 241, 246, 256, 289, 291–­92, 294–­95 indexical entailments: compulsiveness of, 304–­5n51; and ethnography, 25; and hereby, 223–­24; and imperfect subjunctive, 231–­32; and indexical presuppositions, 25, 27, 249; and performativity, 25–­26, 316n5; and social consequentiality, 316n5; and talk, 26 indexical force: and animation, 261; and discourse, 226; in Sarraute and Cusk, 220–­59; transcription of, 227 indexical ground, 319n1 indexicality, 5, 319n1; and animation, 263; and appropriateness, 25; and effectiveness in context, 25; and ethnography, 25, 306–­7n21; and higher-­order authorization, 115; and language, 23, 75, 171, 174; and language-­in-­use, 151, 171, 220; and linguistic anthropology, 306–­7n21; and literature, 67; and meaning, 67, 268; nonreferential, 5, 46, 50–­51; and proper names, 289–­90; and reading, 188; and relations between text and field, 62, 180; and speech, 47–­48, 76, 171; and talk, 77; and utterances, 264, 268, 304n50. See also social indexicality indexical meaning, 25 “Indexical Order and the Dialectics of Sociolinguistic Life” (Silverstein), 110–­11 indexical orders, 77, 110–­11 indexical penumbra, 2–­3, 43, 47, 52, 301n2 indexical presuppositions, and indexical entailment, 25, 27, 249 indexical signs/signals, 5, 23, 110, 267–­68, 290–­94 indexical values, 290 inflections, 8, 53–­54, 64, 220, 305–­6n5 In Search of Lost Time (Proust), 11–­13, 297; as aesthetically complex textual artifact, 297; Albertine’s role in, 308n49, 313n30; amateur linguistic musings in, 22; art and aesthetic experience in, 57–­58, 97, 125, 200, 202, 218–­19, 319n2; and distinctive

338  Index In Search of Lost Time (Proust) (cont.) value, 214; ethnographic stance toward talk, 122; and habitus adéquat[s], 219; and hearing talk’s multifunctional work, 44; idiotic speech (acts) and form in, 123–­68; jealousy in, 304n42; language and its use in, 4–­5, 125–­26, 149; and language-­in-­use, 23, 37, 122, 149, 158; laws of language in, 12–­14; and linguistic anthropology, 1–­38, 69, 76–­77, 82, 96; narrator’s language/ speech in, 46–­47, 145–­70, 173, 309n61, 314n41; as phenomenological novel, 125; as philosophical novel, 125; as psychological novel, 125; reentextualization of, 37; relational way of thinking in, 194; skepticism in, 319n2; social fields, characters in, 310n4; and sociocultural regions, language use in, 107; sociological analysis in, 208–­9; talk in, 4, 43–­44, 76–­77, 309n1; time and memory in, 125 “Insinuation, Common Ground, and the Conversational Record” (Camp), 32 “Intellectual Laws of Language, The” (Bréal), 11 intentionality, 30, 166–­67 interactional acts/events, 26, 110–­11 interactional/interactive texts, 5, 26, 33, 37, 62, 76–­77, 96, 109, 142, 156–­57, 171, 174, 180, 219, 221–­22, 226–­27, 244–­45 interactionist fallacy, 38 interlocution: and habitus, 171; internalized, 241; and language, 240, 318n13; and metapragmatic discourse, 244 interpretant: metapragmatic, 27; Peirce on, 2, 27; term, usage, 301n1 intersubjectivity, 10–­11, 87, 122, 150. See also subjectivity In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Proust), 34–­35, 46, 48–­58, 63–­64, 66–­67, 77–­78, 91–­92, 123–­26, 132–­33, 146, 151, 167–­ 68, 195–­99, 217, 278–­79, 293–­94, 305n5 intonations, 7, 23, 45–­46, 51–­54, 58–­59, 61, 67, 69, 146, 167–­68, 225, 241–­42, 263, 266,

268, 274, 293–­94; and inflections, 53, 220, 305–­6n5 Introduction to the Deciphering of Pseudo-­ Hittite or Anatolian Inscriptions (Halévy), 88 Irvine, Judith T., 69, 145, 308n46, 319n4 James, Henry, 318n14 jealousy, 304n42 Jefferson, Ann, 225–­26, 317n12 Jones, Malcolm, 128–­31, 312n21 Journal des Débats, 84, 123, 311n9 Kant, Immanuel, 192 Kerckhoffs, August, 84–­85, 87 Kim, Annabel, 317n12, 318n13 kinship, 77, 86–­87, 89, 130, 149, 151, 307n38. See also families, language of/talk in Klioutchkine, Konstantine, 311n10 Labov, William, 305n3 Ladenson, Elisabeth, 158, 299, 304n42 Langton, Rae, 24–­25, 30 language: and acoustic activity, 277; as acting, 224; agency in, 87; and animation, 281, 283; and anthropology, 46, 81–­82, 89, 132; as autonomous object, 306–­7n21; beauty of, 318n13; and codes, 94, 223; and collectivity, 75; as cultural resource, 10; and cultural semiotics, 27; and culture, 10, 26, 45, 55–­56, 96, 308n51; and dependent sign systems, 60–­61; dessous of, 227; and dialogue, 109; and discursive interaction, 113; effects of on people, and use among people, 318n13; as formal system, 59; functions of, 10, 24–­25, 27, 277; and habitus, 40; and hearing, 283; in highly distinct culture, 301n2; ideologies, 233, 317n8; and illocutionary forces, 24; indexical entailment in contextual use of, 316n5; indexical functions/work of, 4, 27, 90, 109, 266–­67, 287; and indexicality, 23, 75, 171, 174, 306–­7n21; indirect, 301n8; as institution,

Index  339 91; interactivity of, 230; and interlocution, 240, 318n13; laws of, 11–­14, 16, 21; linguistic anthropological understanding of, 301–­2n8; and linguistics, 4, 22, 59; listening to, 147, 149; mapping, 308n46; multifunctionality of, 4–­5, 8–­9; and narrators, 86; nonsemantic features of, 46; and novels, 108–­9; performative use of, 223; and personality, 9–­10; philosophical, 93; pretentious, 225; reflexive models of, 14; science(s) of, 82; as semiotic system, 5, 27, 210; as set of practices, 10, 122; as set of symbolic resources, 10; shared, 32–­33, 317n8; as social, 277; and social activity, as shared resource for, 173; social and anthropological dimensions of use, 46, 81–­ 82, 89, 125, 132; and social bond, 75–­76; and social capital, 82–­107, 149; and social-­ characterological terms, 308n55; and social coordination, 223; and social fabric, 10; and social groups, 14, 317n8; and social life, 107; and social pragmatics, 5; as social tool, 10; and social world, 9–­10, 40, 209–­ 10; as socio-­cultural phenomenon, 87; and speech acts, 148; and speech act theory, 37; as system, 91; talk about, 21; unmixed, 308n46; use of, 4–­6, 14–­15, 21–­25, 32–­33, 37, 43, 46, 54, 56, 59–­63, 74–­76, 80–­82, 86, 90, 94, 107–­8, 125–­26, 139, 145–­49, 160, 167, 222–­25, 236, 239, 243, 246, 252, 258, 266, 271, 276–­78, 283, 304n35, 308n50, 308n55, 314n41, 316n5; and writing, 88, 243. See also language-­in-­use; speech; talk language-­in-­use: analysis of, 46, 87, 89; and culture, 96; and ethnography, 94; hearing, 48–­58; and identities, 150–­51; indexical capacity of, 171; indexical features/functions of, 68, 109, 151; and indexicality, 151, 171, 220; as intersubjective, 87; and linguistic anthropology, 4, 10, 60, 308n50; and literature, 56–­69, 295, 318n14; metapragmatics of, 72–­73, 93, 145; multifunctionality of, 4–­5, 210, 261,

301–­2n8; and narrators, 37–­38; in novels, 158; novels as, 296; practical sense of, 82–­ 83; as set of symbolic resources, 122; and social fabric, 122; social indexical features/ functions of, 6, 68; social or anthropological functions of, 87–­88; social scientific interest in, 69; and social space, 145; and social world, 223; socioanalytical attitude toward, 23; as sociocultural phenomenon/ practice, 10–­11, 87, 122; and sociology, 94; and speech act theory, 24, 37. See also language; speech; talk langue, 59, 73–­76, 87, 233, 237, 307n39. See also parole/paroles Let’s Talk about Love (Wilson), 213 lexical diffusion, 14, 17, 19–­20, 303n29 lexicon, 18, 51 Life and Growth of Language, The (Whitney), 90–­91 linguistic anthropology, 1–­38, 43, 94, 96, 297, 302n19, 319n4; and cultural critique, 298; and dialogue, 6; and ethnography, 25, 90–­91, 306–­7n21; and habitus, 171; and indexical force, 226; and indexicality, 306–­ 7n21; and language ideology, 317n8; and language-­in-­use, 4, 10, 60, 308n50; and novels, analysis of, 6; and social indexicality, 109; and sociology of culture, 6, 38; and speech act theory, 23–­24; and talk, 61, 106, 121–­22. See also anthropology; linguistics; sociolinguistics Linguistic Anthropology (Duranti), 308n50 “Linguistic Anthropology and Cultural Critique” (Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar), 298 linguistics: history of, 297; indexical function of, 110, 221; and language, 4, 22, 59; multi­ functionality of, 262; and sociological knowledge, 46; and sociology, 12. See also linguistic anthropology; metalinguistics; sociolinguistics listening, 53–­54, 61; and dialogue, 309n1; and ethnography, 7, 202; to language,

340  Index listening (cont.) 8, 147, 245; to language in novels, 5–­6, 149; to music, as social act, 305n55; in novels, 126, 149, 216; to ourselves, 294; and reading, 295; to self, 313n27; as social act, 305n55; spontaneous way of, 144; and talk, 23, 45–­48, 126, 254, 309n1. See also hearing; sound literary form: and composition, 123–­29; and dialogue, 108; and distinction, 38–­43, 184, 185–­219, 316n14; and idiotic speech (acts), 23–­38, 123–­68; and social world, reality of, 201–­10 literature: and art, 185–­86, 286, 294, 319n2; comparative, 298–­99; and language-­in-­ use, 56–­69, 295, 318n14; as language-­ in-­use in written form, 295; and music, 142, 286, 294; redemptive conception of, 319n2; and social world, 186; talk about, 57–­58, 126. See also novels “Logic and Conversation” (Grice), 31 London Review of Books, 140 Lost Illusions (Balzac), 109 Loti, Pierre, 77 lying, 136, 144, 150, 154, 159, 311n11, 313n26, 314n40. See also truthfulness Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 235 Madame Chrysanthème (Loti), 77 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 273, 280–­81, 284 Manet, Édouard, 42, 202, 207, 210, 218 manner(s): and attitudes, 202; and matter, 7, 273; and meaning, 192 mannerisms, 4, 228 Manning, Paul, 319n7 matter: and content, 254; and manner(s), 7, 273; of voice, 53 McCarthy, Mary, 317n12, 318n14 meaning: and discourse, 50; and force, 24; and ideas, 8; indexical, 25, 296; and knowledge, 150; of locution, 317n6; and manner(s), 192; and metapragmatics, 40; and music, 310–­11n6; and novels, 48,

296; and reading, 125, 296; and shared value, 93; and social action, 222–­23; social production of, 37; and utterances, 68, 85–­86, 220–­21 Mee,  Jon, 304n49 Meillet, Antoine, 11–­22, 297 metadiegetics, 302n14 metalinguistics, 16, 69, 85; and metapragmatics, 83; and narrators, 72–­73; and salons, 13; and talk, 13. See also linguistics metapragmatics, 15, 68, 78, 86, 91–­93, 99–­ 100, 103–­4, 165, 314n41; analysis, 110; and discourse, 244; and frames, 34, 233, 235; functions of, 32–­35, 89, 92–­93, 137, 235–­ 36, 246; of language-­in-­use, 72–­73, 93, 145; of language use, 23; and meaning, 40; and metalinguistics, 83; and regimentation, 247; and representability, 304n51; and socio-­historical verbs, 26–­27; and speech acts, 26–­27 Middlemarch (Eliot): ethnographic stance toward talk, 122; linguistic anthropological perspective, 310n14; points of view in, 171–­ 72; and religious culture, 151–­52; social world in, 223; talk in, 119–­22, 223 Miller, Robin Feuer, 128–­31 modulation, 51, 146 Mongin,  J., 17 morphology, 12, 17 Mosteller, Frederick, 89, 308n42 mousmé, 69, 77–­82, 144, 266 music, 216, 316n15; and animation, 284–­86; and art, 192, 200–­202, 286; and indexical force, 236; listening to as social act, 305n55; and literature, 142, 286, 294; and meaning, 310–­11n6; and novels, 183; and semiotics, 210; and social action, 203–­4; talk about, 57–­58, 183 Nakassis, Constantine V., 306–­7n21, 319n1 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 144 narrative polymodality, 131–­32

Index  341 Narrative Techniques, The (Rogers), 312n20, 312n23 narrators: and animation, 278; and ethnography, 121, 170, 202; habitus of, 169–­70; hearing/listening by, 53–­54, 63–­64, 71, 144, 147, 167, 204–­5, 228, 287; and heroes, 3, 38, 78, 82–­83, 93, 95, 131–­32, 139, 140, 144–­45, 150, 159–­60, 162–­64, 167, 200, 266, 269, 288, 310n4, 316n11; homogeneity of, 248; hovering, 259; and language, 86; and language-­in-­use, 37–­38; and metalinguistics, 72–­73; at most strange/as odd, 146–­ 70; objectivity of, 307n31; points of view, 128, 132, 145, 168, 194, 200, 232, 290; social identity of, 139; and social world, 270, 284, 287; and speech acts, 27; and speech/ talk, 131–­32, 137, 140, 145–­70, 295, 309n61, 312n21, 313n27 Nathalie Sarraute, Fiction and Theory (Jefferson), 225–­26 Natural Histories of Discourse, The (Silverstein and Urban), 60 Neogrammarian hypothesis, regarding sound changes, 12, 90, 302–­3n24 neologisms, 20–­21, 97 Newman, Daniel Aureliano, 245–­46 New Yorker, 246, 248, 253 New York Review of Books, 317n12 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 174, 178–­79, 183 Noreen, Adolf, 90 Nouvelle Revue Française, 124, 130, 316n2 novels: as analytical instrument for process of objectivation of someone’s speech, 313n27; as cultural archaeology, 108; defined, 82, 91; and ethnography, 95; historical development and ideological underpinnings of, 318n14; as instruments for linguistic anthropological analysis, 6; as language-­in-­use, 296; philological, 108–­9; psychological, 124; social voices in, 312n21; as sociological analysis, 191; of talk, 1–­44, 47–­48, 108, 183, 295–­96. See also literature

objectivity, 38, 59, 62, 91, 93, 130, 139, 165–­ 66, 170, 181–­83, 190, 193, 197, 218, 239–­40, 307n31. See also subjectivity O’Hara, Frank, 185 “On the Narrative Use of Imperfect and Perfect in the Brahmanas” (Whitney), 89–­91 Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu), 169–­70, 181, 182–­83, 307n38 Outline trilogy (Cusk), 6, 245–­59 Paraliterary (Emre), 306n10, 318n14 Paris, Gaston, 303n26 parole/paroles, 36, 52, 54, 74–­76, 87, 92, 102, 109, 133, 138, 146, 163–­66, 229, 242, 264, 267, 271, 274, 282, 307n39, 312n24. See also langue Peirce, Charles Sanders, 2, 27, 263–­64 performativity: and ethnography, 25; and illocutionary force, 25; and indexical entailment, 25–­26, 223–­24, 316n5; peri-­, 30; and social consequentiality, 316n5; and speech act theory, 23, 25, 30, 32 perlocutionary compulsiveness, 304–­5n51 perlocutionary effects, 24 Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein), 58–­62, 68 phonetics, 9, 11–­12, 17, 64–­65, 87–­88, 103, 263, 277 phonosonic nexus, and utterances, 36–­37 Pierrefeu, Jean de, 123–­24, 126, 130, 310n3, 311n9 Pinget, Robert, 305n1 pitch, 23, 54 Poe, Edgar Allan, 314n41 poetics, 5, 76–­77, 187 points of view, 310n4; linguistic, 238; of narrator, 128, 132, 145, 168, 194, 200, 232, 290; of novelist, 236, 238; parental, 51, 167–­68; and philosophy of  life, 53, 67; on Proust, 193, 297; scientific, 93; and social agents, 144; and social reality, 60; and social space, 145, 190, 193; and social world,

342  Index points of view (cont.) 38–­39, 49, 53, 92–­93, 144–­46, 171–­83; and sociology, 144; subjective, 165 polymodality, narrative, 131–­32 posterity: and art, 217–­18; and distinction, 217–­19; of works, 124–­25 pragmatics, social, 5. See also metapragmatics; semiotic pragmatism Prendergast, Christopher, vii, 140, 298, 313n26, 319n2 Prisoner/Fugitive, The (Proust), 46, 70–­73, 133–­46, 150, 153–­55, 158–­66, 202–­8, 211–­14, 262–­64, 273–­74, 312–­13n25, 314n40, 316n12 “Problem of Speech Genres, The” (Bakhtin), 61–­63, 127, 276, 283 projection, 92, 111, 222–­23, 278 Prose, Francine, 318–­19n23 Proust, Marcel, 297, 304n50; and Balzac, 6, 108, 122; and Bourdieu, 38–­41, 185–­219, 299, 315n7; and Bréal, 11, 75, 77–­82; citations and editions, vii; on composition, 124, 187–­88, 312n18; context/signify, 296; and cultivated pleasure, 217; distinction and form in, 185–­219; and Dostoevsky, 6, 130, 312n20, 313n27; and Eliot, 6, 108, 122; and Goffman, 95, 98, 101; hearing language-­in-­use in, 48–­58; interpretive difficulties in, 310n6; and language, 4, 46, 75, 81–­82, 89, 125, 132, 148, 222, 278; language-­in-­use in, 10–­11, 48–­58, 109, 122; lesbianism in, 304n42; as linguistic anthropologist, 1–­38, 43, 45–­107, 301n8; and linguistics, 4, 6, 22, 75, 262, 304n50; as listener, 7; and mime, ability to, 7; narrative practice, 144; narrators in, 132, 179–­ 80, 309n61; poétique insciente of, 188; and Saussure, 75–­77; scientific attitude in, 91; self-­deception in, 313n26; and sociological knowledge, 46, 82; and verbal confusion, interest in, 33 Proust, Music, and Meaning (Acquisto), 310–­11n6, 316n12

Proust among the Stars (Bowie), 305n55, 307n27 Ptolemy, 87–­89 “Rachel Cusk’s Unforgiving Eye” (Emre), 318–­19n23 Racine, Jean, 54–­57, 305n5 reading: and book as physical object, 41–­42; and hearing, 231, 296; and historical convergences, 306n10; and indexicality, 188; and listening, 295; and meaning, 125, 296; and mental health, 310n3; objectifying ways of, 295; and social indexicality, 295; and talk, 295–­96; ways of/practical skills of, 295 realist formalism, 186, 208 “Real Talk: Rachel Cusk’s Kudos” (Prose), 318–­19n23 reentextualization, 31, 33, 37 register(s): aristocratic, 14–­18; and indexical force, 225; and lexicon, 18; as reflexive models of language use, 14; as relational, 189–­90; shibboleth, 14; social, 8; and social-­characterological terms, 308n55; and social world, 190; and sociolinguistics, 8; and sound forms, 65; and timbre (sonority), 8; and tone, 67; vocal, 8 Rivière, Jacques, 124, 129–­30 Robert, Hubert, 320n9 Rogers, Brian G., 312n20, 312n23 Rosaldo, Michelle, 308n50 Rules of Art, The (Bourdieu), 185–­89, 208–­10, 310n4 Ruttenburg, Nancy, 311n12 Saint-­Amour, Paul K., 315n10 salon culture, 19–­20, 297, 303n29 salons: and art, 305n55; chronotope of, 128–­ 29; linguistics in, 6, 22; and metalinguistics, 13; talk in, 22, 204, 223 Sand, George, 185 Sapir, Edward, 8–­10, 276–­77

Index  343 Sarraute, Nathalie, 6, 299, 316nn1–­2, 317n7, 317nn10–­12, 318n13; on accent, 68; and aesthetic experience, 183; and animation, 261, 267–­69; and common ground, 148; and cultured Parisian bourgeoisie, 230; on décalage (discrepancy), 221–­23; and habitus, 304n50; indexical entailment in, 224; indexical force in, 43–­44, 220–­46, 248, 250–­51, 253; and interactivity of language, 230; on language, 318n13; on readerly vigilance, 227–­28; and social indexicality, 183–­84; and sociology of culture, 316n1; on talk, 43–­44; on tropisme, 229; and upper-­ middle-­class life, 183; on vigilance, 227 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 74–­77, 87, 225 Schuchardt, Hugo, 90, 308n46 Schwartz, Alexandra, 246–­54, 257–­59 Searle, John, 93–­94, 304n35, 308n50 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 23, 30, 158, 314n41 semantics, 8, 90, 210; and homogeneity, 18; and language/sound changes, 12, 17–­18; and sociolinguistics, 12 Semantics (Bréal), 11–­12, 69, 72, 77, 90 semiosis, 9, 37, 96 semiotic partials, 7–­9, 90, 163 semiotic pragmatism, 96, 316n26 semiotics: and animation, 263; cultural, 27; indexical function of, 27; and interdiscursivity, 110–­11; and language, 5, 27, 210; multifunctionality of, 5, 210; and music, 210; and signification, 309–­10n13; socially interactive pragmatic process, 313n26; and social pragmatics, 5; socio-­, 40; and utterances, 9 semiotic space, 309–­10n13 sexuality: in Cusk, 251; history of, 34, 136, 167; in Proust, 135–­37, 158, 167–­70, 304n42; in Woolf, 315n11 “Shadow Conversations” (Irvine), 319n4 Sherzer, Joel, 60 Signs of Difference (Gal and Irvine), 145, 308n46

Silverstein, Michael, 5, 10–­11, 25–­27, 297, 307n39, 308n42, 309n12, 316n5, 319n3; on communication, 118–­19; on consequential social action, 223; on contemporary semiotic pragmatism, 96; on contextualization, 155–­57; on conversation, 254; on culture, 45, 55–­56, 308n51; on defeasibility, 156–­57; on discourse, 60, 222–­23, 226–­27, 244; on discursive interaction, 113; on illocutionary acts, 304–­5n51; on indexical authorization, higher-­order, 115; on indexical entailments, 26; and indexical force, 246; on indexical orders, 110–­11; on indexical penumbra, 2; and language-­in-­use, 10–­11, 58, 122; and linguistic anthropology, 10–­11, 51, 53, 63, 76, 87, 92, 94, 96, 122, 220; on performativity, 25; on projection, 222–­23; on selectivity in artifactualization, 226–­27; on semiotic space, 309–­10n13; on social space, 180; on sociocultural reality, 223; on sociolinguistics, 110–­11; on speech act theory, 26; on statistical indexes, 53; on typographical resources, 226–­27; on utter­­ances, 220–­21, 301–­2n8; verbal interac­tion, 222 Silvio, Teri, 277–­78 SLP. See Société de linguistique de Paris (SLP) social action: and discourse, 222–­23; and language, 60–­61; and meaning, 222–­23; and music, 204; and sign systems, 60–­61; and talk, 61; and utterances, 222–­23 social agents, 144, 172, 181, 211 social appropriateness, 151 social capital, 23, 69–­70, 103, 105–­7, 155, 158, 201, 223, 283, 313–­14n33; and language, 82, 149 social changes, 125, 130–­31 social consequentiality, 118, 316n5 social distinction, 102, 183, 192–­93, 216. See also distinction social fabric, 10, 122

344  Index social identities, 10, 53–­55, 100–­101, 113, 139, 150–­51, 155, 196–­97, 223, 265 social indexicality, 1–­7, 9, 15, 20–­21, 26, 46–­ 47, 54, 60, 62–­63, 68–­69, 76, 78, 90, 109–­ 18, 165; and animation, 266; and composition, 6; and culture, 295; and distinction, 187; and habitus, 6, 183–­84; and indexical force, 238, 241; and language-­in-­use, 6; of language use, 2; and linguistic anthropology, 109; and reading, 295; and speech, 47; and talk, 46, 82; and utterances, 3, 5, 46, 62, 172 socialization, 173 social life, 22, 51, 76, 107, 145, 197, 271 social locations, 57, 59, 202, 270, 286; modeling, 190–­201. See also cultural locations social order, 38, 43–­44, 46, 101, 261, 275, 320n9 social reality, 60, 185–­86, 188, 193, 197, 201, 208 social relations, 3, 60–­63, 67, 76, 92, 120, 192 social sciences, 23, 44, 46, 69, 85, 90, 144, 147, 149, 155, 160, 190, 245, 261, 288, 313n27. See also anthropology; ethnography; sociology “Social Space and Symbolic Power” (Bourdieu), 193–­94, 196–­97, 286 “Social Space and the Genesis of ‘Classes’” (Bourdieu), 201 social spaces, 14, 41, 51, 58, 104, 108, 110, 118–­ 19, 145, 180, 183, 189–­90, 193–­201, 211, 236, 254, 258, 261, 276. See also social world social structures, 39, 51, 59–­60, 169, 182–­83, 307n38 social topographies/topologies, 125, 183–­84, 186, 193–­94, 196, 201–­2, 208–­9, 211, 225 social values, 59, 108, 114, 233. See also cultural values social world, 69, 81, 180–­86, 193–­97; and aesthetic experiences, 183–­84; anamnesis of, 186–­87, 209; of aristocrats, 41, 103, 183; and art/literature, 185–­86; and conversation, 148–­49; and distinction, 183; and

habitus, 40, 173; interaction indexes, 38–­39; as interactive, 219; and language, 9–­10, 40, 54, 173, 209–­10; and language-­ in-­use, 223; and literary form, 201–­10; and meanings, 314n34; microcosm, 65; and narrators, 92–­93, 270, 284, 287; nonneutrality within, 56; and novels, 67, 183–­84, 190, 217; and philosophy of life, 53; and points of view, 146, 171–­83; regions/zones of, 172, 181, 183; and register(s), 190; and relationality, 147; rules of engagement in, 101; and social indexicality, 184; and social reality, 186; and speech/talk, 5, 140, 172, 182, 223; topography of, 184; and utterances, 67, 187, 266; of writers, 64. See also social spaces Société de linguistique de Paris (SLP), 22 sociocultural reality, 223 sociolinguistics, 8, 12, 14, 22–­23, 53, 56, 65, 78, 82, 96, 110–­11, 149, 158, 238, 279, 305n3. See also linguistic anthropology; linguistics sociological knowledge, 46, 82 sociologue et l’historien, Le, 190 sociology, 38–­43, 63, 201–­2, 208–­9; and animation, 287–­88; and anthropology, 46, 81–­ 82, 86–­89, 125, 132, 245; of culture, 6, 38, 190–­93, 316n1; and distinction, 191; and indexical relations, 147; and language-­in-­ use, 94; and language/talk, 46, 59, 81–­82, 89, 132; and linguistics, 12; and point of view, 144; as relational, 194–­96; and talk, 106. See also anthropology; ethnography Sodom and Gomorrah (Proust), 40, 46, 95–­ 99, 126, 152–­53, 284–­85, 320n9 sonority, 8, 64–­65 sound: diachronic changes, 12; material aspect of, 1; Neogrammarian hypothesis regarding change, 302–­3n24. See also hearing; listening sound forms, 65, 104 speech: as data, 23, 44, 82–­83, 132, 145, 246, 274; development of automated recogni-

Index  345 tion and synthesis technologies, 308n42; eccentric, 314n40; and ethnography, 95, 170; and indexicality, 47–­48, 76, 171; multifunctionality of, 309n61; and narrators, 145, 312n21, 313n27; and private mind-­space, 280; social-­characterological terms, 308n55; and social indexicality, 47, 238; and social life, 51, 76; as sociological information, 48; and writing, 67. See also aristocratic speech/voice; language; talk speech acts, 37; and cooperation, 31–­33; and ethnography, 25; and language, 148; and literary form, 23–­38, 123–­68; and metapragmatics, 26–­27; and narrators, 27; performative, 223; philosophers on, 308n50; and reciprocity, 31–­36; success of, 25; theory, 23–­24, 26–­27, 304n35, 308n50 Speech Acts (Searle), 93–­94, 308n50 speech act theory, 23–­27, 93–­95, 304n35; and illocutionary force/acts, 24; and language, 37; and language-­in-­use, 24, 37; and linguistic anthropology, 23–­24; and performativity, 23, 25, 30, 32; and utterances, 24 Spoiled Distinctions (Freed-­Thall), 305n54, 315n7, 316n1, 317n11 Sprinker, Michael, 102, 309n61 Stalnaker, Robert, 148 subjectivity, 30, 34, 130, 165–­66. See also intersubjectivity; objectivity Swann’s Way (Proust), 1, 3, 7–­8, 27–­30, 46, 83, 86, 91, 149, 168, 283 Tadié, Jean-­Yves, vii, 302n22 talk: about talk, 108–­9, 126, 295, 298; ecologies of, 315n7; and ethnography, 7, 106, 122, 166–­67, 295–­96; as form of action and ways of being in world, 122; fresh, 170–­71, 276, 315n5; multifunctional work of, 44; and new understandings, 297; novelist’s analytic interest in, 108; novels and ethnography of, 1–­44, 295–­96; to ourselves, 231, 278, 280; and principals, having stake

in events, 319n3; shared moments of, 37. See also language; language-­in-­use; speech talk’s work, 44, 81, 86, 122, 183, 220, 222, 225, 228, 236, 239, 242, 245, 248, 287, 295–­96 Tarde, Gabriel, 305n54 Temps, Le, 105 “Texts, Entextualized and Artifactualized” (Silverstein), 222–­23, 244 Theory of Mind, 314n41 Thomas, Bronwen, 309n2 timbre: and register, 8; and tone, 104 Time Regained (Proust). See Finding Time Again (Proust) tone: and indexical penumbra, 52, 301n2; neutrality of, 256; in novels, 305n1; and register, 67; and timbre, 104 Toronto Review of Books, 245–­46 To the Lighthouse (Woolf), 170–­73, 315n7, 315n9 Transactions of the American Philological Association, 89 Trumbo-­Tual, Matthew, 303n26, 303n29 truthfulness, 137–­38, 162–­63, 263, 265, 270–­ 71, 313n26. See also lying Turgenev, Ivan, 185 turns of phrase, 8, 21, 51, 67–­68, 167, 226 Unbecoming Language (Kim), 317n12, 318n13 upper middle class, in novels, 183, 197, 315n13 uptake, 33, 36, 41, 62, 124–­25, 156, 191–­92, 216–­17, 218–­19, 224, 226, 232–­34, 242, 244, 254, 317n6, 318n14 Urban, Greg, 60 utterances: and animation, 30, 44, 276–­77, 319n7; and common ground, 172; in context, 315n9, 319n4; and conversation, 220–­21; dessous of, 238; and dialogue, 6, 61, 276; and discourse, 50, 249; and ethnography, 33; and habitus, 304n50; illocutionary force of, 317n6; and indexicality, 264, 268, 304n50; and intentionality, 166–­67; and meaning, 68, 85–­86, 220–­21;

346  Index utterances (cont.) multifunctionality of, 9, 301–­2n8; novels as, 1, 5–­6, 8, 61; performative, 223; and phonosonic nexus, 36–­37; and semiotics, 9; by single person, 319n7; and social action, 222–­23; and social indexicality, 3, 5, 46, 62, 172; and social sequence, 3; and social world, 67, 187, 266; and speech act theory, 24; truth of, 302n8 Vendryes, Joseph, 7, 22 Vinteuil (septet/sonata), 42–­43, 70, 72, 134, 140–­41, 152–­55, 202, 205–­9, 211–­18 Vološinov, Valentin, 302n19 Waldman, Katy, 246 Wallace, David L., 89, 308n42 Whitney, William, 89–­91 Wilson, Carl, 213, 316n14 Wilson, Emma, 158, 298 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58–­62, 68, 306n8

Woolf, Virginia, 6, 33, 40, 165, 297, 315n3, 315nn6–­7, 315nn9–­11; and animation, 261, 296; and common ground, 148, 172; context/signify, 296; harmonizing habitus in, 169–­84, 304n50; and indexical force, 223, 225–­26; sexuality in, 315n11; and social indexicality, 183–­84; social worlds in, 183–­84; talk in, 172–­73, 183, 315n9 words: borrowed, 17; old and new, 69–­72; Verdurin’s undiscoverable, 72–­75 writing: and art, 253; and language, 88, 243; and new understandings, 297; social indexical features of, 238; and speech, 67; and talk, 43–­44, 89, 297 Years, The (Woolf), 33, 165, 172–­83, 315nn10–­11 Young, Rosetta, 315n13 Zola, Émile, 185