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Question of Identity : The “Talmudic” Experience of Marcel Proust 1 Red and White The number of references to
Judaism in Proust’s text attests both to the influence it had on the writer and
to the singular way he approached the subject. Proust frequently quotes from
the Old Testament, but he certainly does not neglect the Gospels. His biblical
citations articulate the primary moment of a sentence or thought by pointing to
the canonical meaning of the sacred text while granting it a personal,
emotional, or comical connotation. These biblical references are part of
Proust’s general cultural background, but he manipulates them with a frequency
and intensity all his own. Proust was also interested
in the esoteric tenets of Judaism and their affinities with Christian culture.
The art of cathedrals, discovered through Ruskin and his cult of Venice, is
what filled Proust with wonder and offered the narrator a privileged example of
the incorporation of the sacred that “time regained” seeks to achieve. The
Jewish tradition seeps discreetly into the splendors of this Christian art and
imbues it with a mysterious ambiguity that draws the narrator’s aesthetic not
only toward the abstract purity of wisdom (the Zohar) but also toward an avowal
that vice is ever-present (Sodom and Gomorrah). Let’s examine this
fragmentary sentence taken from the Carnet
de 1908: “The only merit / of being expressed what / has appeared in the depths / and usually except / when
illuminated / by a flash of lightning,
or in / weather that is exceptionally / clear and brisk, these / depths are hidden. This / depth, this
inaccessibility / for us is the / only mark of / worth, thus perhaps a form of
/ joy. It does not matter / what kind
it is. A / steeple if it is indiscernible / for a few days is worth / more than
an / entire theory about the / world. See in my large / notebook the
description of the arrival / in front of the Campanile / and also the Zohar.” Proust links Venice to the
Zoharic light symbolizing esoteric wisdom and redemption. While Proust was
creating his pastiche of Renan, he read Pauly’s translation of the Zohar. This
text, which dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, was strongly
influenced by Plato and Plotinus and emphasizes disembodied wisdom as the
palace of the Ineffable. Is he deciphering Venice
using the Zohar or, inversely, the Zohar as well as Plotinus encompassed by the
aesthetic splendor of Venetian Catholicism? Anyone who interprets Proust must
inevitably confront this dilemma, which undoubtedly posed a problem for Proust
himself. A link between Judaism and
Venice had already been mysteriously established in Jean Santeuil, when the young man, after breaking a Venetian
glass, dreads his mothers anger and his father’s reprimand. Much to his
surprise, however, he is the object of nothing more than a sort of incestuous
affection followed by his Catholic mother’s bizarre explanation: “He thought
his mother would scold him and threaten to punish him harshly. Yet she remained
calm, kissed him, and whispered into his ear: ‘We can look at it as a symbol of
the indestructible union performed at the temple.’” On the other hand, in the
drafts of Contre Sainte-Beuve written
in late 1908, the narrator’s mother is endowed with some stereotypically Jewish
traits. Proust’s references to
Judaism are ambiguous yet widespread, and they turn up when you least expect
them. To the ritual of the Dominican Mass, for example, Proust curiously adds the Saturday ritual at Roussainville. On
Saturdays, the family eats one hour earlier than usual because Françoise has to
go to the Roussainville market. Moreover, in Notebook 9, the servant is shown
to be a follower of ‘‘ancient Jewish law,” which is at once cruel and delicate.
These details are omitted in the final versions of the book, where Françoise is
cleansed of her Judaism. What is more, Gilberte’s
Jewish redness, passed down from her father, is associated with the pink – a coulour Proust so loved. Note
“the lady in pink” (Odette at Uncle Adolph’s), Oriane’s red dress and shoes,
and the hawthorns, which at first are pink or white and which serve, from
Gilberte’s first appearance on the scene, to divide the text into two
sequences: a virginal, Catholic, white one and its sexual, Jewish, pink
counterpart. Although pink often has maternal undertones, it can also suggest
the secret attraction of paternal authority when such a status is thought to be
Jewish, as in this description of the narrator’s father: “crowned with the pink
and violet {Indian} cashmere scarf which he used to wrap around his head .. .
standing like Abraham in the engraving after Benozzo Gozzoli which Swann had
given me.” The union between sexuality
and Judaism is also colored pink in the case of Albertine, who is merely a
patch of pinkness when the narrator first sees her in Within a Budding Grove.
And is her last name not Simonet! A name with only one n, as if prompting us to read the name of Simon Maccabeus of
biblical fame. Yet this hardly keeps her from hating the Jews as well the
Simonnets with a double n. Was it
because they were too close to her, too shameful to mention? Finally, In Search of Lost Time is strewn with a
broad range of literary references to Judaism. The grandfather’s humming of
passages from the second act of Halevy’s La
Juive when Bloch comes to the house, the “Rachel when from the Lord”
nickname taken from the fourth act of the same opera, and the line from
Halevy’s opera that irresistibly evokes Nissim Bernard’s Oriental atavism—all
this prepares us for a more elevated art form: Racine’s two Jewish tragedies, Esther and Athalie. The homosexuals of Sodom and Gomorrah recite lines from
Racine’s Jewish plays. Is this a parody of Racine’s love for Judaism, of his
predilection for cross-dressing, or of homosexuality itself, which displays
Louis XIV-like pretensions? Proust’s irony, which was
clearly a consequence of his guilt, combined two “peculiarities”—the Jew and
the homosexual—through a never-ending pursuit of what they have in common. In
this way, Sodom and Zion contaminate each other and become merged into one,
suggesting a crossing of paths or an intolerable hostility. From this
perspective, some of Charlus’s flights of oratory prefigure modern-day horrors
as yet unknown to Proust: “But then a ghetto is as beautiful as it is
homogenous and filled to capacity.” In the end, Proust’s irony—the flip side of
his uneasiness and loneliness—is what keeps him going. Far from eradicating
difference, Proust’s carefree superimposition of codes reinforces polysemy and
overloads his characters with sensations and impressions. They become as
ambiguous and indiscernible as the “trans- vertebration” of a kinetoscopic
image. Proust clearly is not attempting to describe the sociological situation
of a Jew or his community, nor even the psychological situation of the
homosexual. Instead, by juxtaposing these two marginalities and by cataloging
the criticisms and scandalmongering that “polite society” inflicted on them
both, Proust turns all this malevolent
behavior on its head. By dissipating persecution, however, he also
invalidates the persecuted person’s need
to have his own identity. He snatches him away from his pedestals, whether
sociological or psychological, and reduces him to a single, unique character.
In the end, nothing will remain but the bursts or folds of his own characterhis
differences, regrets, and secret desires. In Proust, the intertwining
fates of Judaism, homosexuality, and art are placed within the context of his
references to the Hebraic cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and to the Book of Daniel. The Bible condemns Sodom
and Gomorrah for their sexual wickedness and greed. The beginning of Sodom and Gomorrah (which “reverses”
Proust’s condemnation of homosexuality found in the part of Contre Sainte-Beuve entitled “The Race
upon which a curse is laid”) describes the invert as “an extraordinary
creature” destined for exile and redemption. Charlus’s transmutation into a
woman is described in a long digression referring to the Book of Daniel. The Zoharic tradition, and
more particularly Daniel, knew how to look inside a face in order to make out
the signs of another soul with which it is “coupled.” In like manner, Proust
looked into the face of a homosexual and saw the presence of maternal traits.
He thus resurrected the esoteric tradition without abandoning his predilection
for treating both esotericism and homosexuality with acute irony. This sort of
polysemy, however, also leaves open the question of a promised salvation. At the same time, the
narrator mistrusts and rejects any attempt to inflict forced social identities,
generalizations, or facile classifications on the Jew and the homosexual: “Let
us ignore for the moment those who . . wish to share their taste (with)
apostolic zeal, just as others preach Zionism, conscientious objection, Saint-Simonianism,
vegetarianism or anarchy.” “But I have thought it as well to utter here a
provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as people
have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist movement and to
rebuild Sodom.” Exemplary militant behaviour, vice and even anarchy consolidate
and destroy unique experience. The narrator keeps his
characters’ ambiguities alive, and he also engages in the inversion of values,
either through the passing of time or by merging disparate points of view into
a single instant. In doing so, he amasses contradictory meanings that produce a
comical effect drawn from the inadequacy of meaning. The twists and turns of
Proust’s never- ending sentences are sometimes accompanied by a knowing smile.
At other times, however, they provoke wild laughter. In turn, the polyphony of
interpretations gives the impression that everything is contradictory, which
may lead to a psychological “flash of lightning.” We know that the Jewish
tradition, particularly in the Talmudic currents that interested Proust, tends
to offer different interpretations of the same event, such that one attains an
understanding of meaning and of the divine that includes—and perhaps
requires—laughter. After teetering on this delicate balance point, religion
topples over into what it no longer is: the intermittencies of meaning that
approach nonmeaning. It is from this perspective that Proustian experience
could be called a “Talmudic” one. 2 The Dreyfus Case; or, The Indiscernible Truth “I was the first
Dreyfusist, for it was I who went to ask Anatole France for his signature.”
Indeed, Proust, along with his friends Jacques Bizet, Robert de Flers, Léon
Yeatman, Louis de la Salle, and the two brothers Halevy, organized the Manifeste des 104, which gathered three
thousand signatures on Dreyfus’s behalf within a month’s time. In a touching
gesture revealing a naive faith in literature and its potential to influence
people’s lives, Proust had a copy of his Les
Plaisirs et les jours placed in Colonel Picquart’s cell at Mont-Valerien. And yet, at the end of Time Regained, the narrator places the
Dreyfus case, along with the First World War, in the category of those
secondary events that “turn” the writer away from the “interior book of unknown
symbols”: “every public event, be it the Dreyfus case, be it the war,
furnishes the writer with a fresh excuse for not attempting to decipher the
book: he wants to ensure the triumph of justice, he wants to restore the moral
unity of the nation, he has no time to think of literature”. Besides
offering an indictment of “descriptive literature,” this sentence reveals
Proust’s dissatisfaction with social and political life, and especially with
the dogmatic stances that are inevitably prompted by political commitment. In
this particular case, Proust, initially a Dreyfusard, became appalled at the
anticlericalism and cynicism displayed by some supporters of his own cause. In his naivete, Bloch
believes that truth resides “permanently, beyond the reach of argument and in a
material form, in the secret files of the President of the Republic and the
Prime Minister, who imparted it to the Cabinet.” On the other hand, as the
Affair progresses and as Dreyfus’s innocence becomes clear (even if it is never
really acknowledged), the narrator, and Proust by implication, becomes
convinced that partisan interests had secured the truth for personal or
ideological gains. These same partisan interests resulted in intolerance,
indolence, and arbitrary thinking. As a result, the narrator’s altitude toward
the Dreyfus case changes as the book develops. He identifies with the fate of
the convicted and exiled Jewish captain (who is like those homosexuals “driven
from every lodging . . . excluded even, save on the days of general misfortune
when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied around Dreyfus”),
and he eventually finds society to be under a sort of hypnosis, prone to fraud
and abuse of power and unable to tell the truth. More specifically, Proust was
hardly sympathetic to the Combesian anticlericalism and Marxist antipatriotism
adopted by some Dreyfusist groups. In sum, with his cathedrals and his Venice,
Proust may have been closer in spirit to Bernard Lazare and even to Charles
Péguy, whom he criticized, than to Romain Rolland. L’Affaire is
presented as a junction of mistakes, excesses, imitations, changes of opinion,
sincere contradictions, and ambiguities that are cravenly maintained. It
occurred at just the right time to show, with the help of the prism of Proust’s
characters, how the most undeniably innocent person can be maligned, belittled,
and diverted from his goals—in the hands of his detractors, of course, but also
of his supporters. Truth is never partisan, for there can never be an
“appropriate” bias. In the end, and whatever one may initially or naively
believe, everything is a pretext for schemes and abuses. So let’s take refuge in our
“interior book.” The Dreyfusards’ exploitation of the Affair, which preceded
and accompanied the death of Proust’s mother, eventually convinced Proust that
social commitment was futile and that the experience of writing a novel was the
only thing he could do to offer an “authentic” frame for “real life.” Indeed, who could be
trusted? “The social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning and . . . the
Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social
ladder.” Described as a “frenzy” and a “cyclone,” the event merely crystallized
tendencies that were already present in French society. Although Bloch, who was
not well known, could still pass unnoticed, “leading Jews who were
representative of their side were already threatened.” The French salon
cultivated its Jew as an eccentricity, as an “Orientalism,” as an “aesthetic
interest,” or as a source of “local color,” especially when the Jew in question
had not “been limbered up by the gymnastics of the Faubourg” or ennobled by a
“crossing with England and Spain.” The Jew, described as “a
strange and savory spectacle,” as is Bloch, becomes caught up in the
anti-Dreyfus cyclone and turns into an object of scorn, hatred, and
exploitation. Within the unfathomable
swirls of this social kaleidoscope, Swann seems to identify once again with the
narrators sympathies and reservations. Although he, too, is a Dreyfusard from
the beginning of the Affair, he is described as “comically blind.” He has a
certain admiration for Clemenceau, whom he had once believed to be a spy for
England. What is even more important is that “the wave overturned Swann’s
literary judgments too, down to his way of expressing them. Barres was now
devoid of all talent, and even his early books were feeble, could scarcely bear
rereading.” This display of fundamentalism (before the term was even coined)
was initially spotted by the Dreyfusards, and it allowed Proust to accuse
(cleverly, he must have thought) the anti-Dreyfusards of the same fault. The
Dreyfusards’ attempt to close down churches could only have offended Proust,
and this bolstered his defense of men who were as hostile toward Dreyfus as
were the members of the Action française.
Proust will have to stake
out a place for himself in the Saint-Simonian pantheon of literature. That will
be another “affair.” Let’s call it l’Affaire
Proust, which consists of superimpositions that make cathedrals tremble. 3 From Vice to Infinity In a text entitled “On
Anti-Semitism,” which was inspired to a large degree by the image of the Jews
that, emerges from Proust’s novel, Hannah Arendt stresses the important role
played by the Jews’ assimilation into society. Because of Jewish support for
the ideals of the bourgeois revolution and because of the part they played in
financial and industrial growth as well as in politics, journalism, and the
military, Jewish integration in society was primarily an upper-class
phenomenon, which does not mean that these well-to-do members were “cleansed of
their Jewishness.” More insidiously, “Jewish origin, without religious and
political connotation, became everywhere a ‘psychological quality.’ It was
changed into ‘Jewishness,’ and from then on could be considered only in the
categories of virtue or vice.” It was an “interesting” vice for some, and for
others, this vice was a crime that had to be eradicated, especially when
political and economic factors were searching for a scapegoat: “Such perversion
was made possible by those Jews who considered it an innate virtue.” Hannah Arendt has drawn
attention to the way Judaism was thereby reduced to a difference, to a
strangeness, even to an object of psychic or moral curiosity. By relinquishing
Judaism as a religious sign, Jewishness came to be identified with closed
clans. They sometimes joined such clans. Arendt quotes Proust : "The
question is not as for Hamlet, to be or
not to be, but to belong or not to
belong” (Search, 3:1055), where they were often praised for their
eccentricity and distinctive perversity. Some thus declared themselves
Dreyfusards through pure snobbery among them, people such as the Verdurins and
even the due de Guermantes, whose sympathies for the Jewish captain were
motivated only by his desire to please some Italian noblewomen he had met at
the baths. Yet once Dreyfus was
declared innocent, he ceased to be vice-ridden and consequently lost his
appeal. With him, the Jews regained the very limited status they had left
behind, for he was presumed to have raised the tempting vice attributed to them
to the rank of the crime for which they had always been held responsible. Going beyond the confines
of the Dreyfus case, Arendt foresaw the insidious sociological, religious, and
psychological forces that would result in the death camps and the Holocaust.
Whether it is desired or simply endured, the conversion of Judaism into
Jewishness is seen as a precondition for these unprecedented massacres, which
can only be thwarted, Arendt claims, if Jewish origins are restored through the
courage of the Zionists. After taking the Proustian path of
Jewishness-made-vice for a while and recognizing the veracity of Proust's
diagnosis, Arendt was able to head very naturally in a more political
direction. And she si right. Where is the narrator?
Proust is at the center and the periphery. The elegant idleness displayed by
Swann, who wrongly believes life to be a novel, can fit in with the holy of
holies found in the very faubourg that rejects Bloch's increasingly and
destructively boorish behavior. Indeed, the Jews, those singular beings, hold
up a mirror to the singularities of the clan or clans. When aristocrats,
homosexuals, or those with the privileges of family or gender see their own
reflection in it, they realize how different they really are. The groups inner
layers thus start to palpitate, for the barriers are no longer airtight.
Everyone becomes uneasy and lets himself be seduced, penetrated, and contaminated.
The hierarchies still endure, of course, but how long can they last? A single logical process
unites all these differences. Hannah Arendt called this process “vice,” and
Proust portrayed it in his novel, where each group congregates around a being
who is not like the others, who enables the group to live out the logic of
sadomasochism. It is the love of hate, the hatred of love, persecution,
humiliation, and delectable sorrow. There is no specifically social means for
escaping this logic, for the whole of social life is contained within it: “It
is the soul of the ancient Hebrews, torn from a life at once insignificant and
transcendental... and so disturbing because it nonetheless resembles humanity
all too closely gives us a sense of the supernatural, in our poor everyday
world where even a man of genius from whom, gathered as though at a table at a
seance, we expect to learn the secret of the infinite.” At once insignificant
and transcendental, the soul of a genius or of a Jew uprooted from the past
diffuses (like a “seance table”), the “secret of the infinite” into our meager
world. The narrator, Jews like Swann, and homosexuals like Charlus all hold the
key to society. Vice is not an accident of
history, my dear Hannah. Proust seems to say vice is latent within us; it is
the other, infinite side of society. Proust seems to have discovered this
Freudian truth without Freud’s help. There is no way not to be one of them, not
to be part of society—and thus of perversion, unless, of course, you describe,
decompose, recompose, and reinvent them. Writing does not eradicate vice, but
it does absolve it. To the realism that it propels, the novel adds a
metaphysical paradigm in which vice is at once approved and condemned.
Ultimately, vice is displayed in order to be removed. Thus Hannah Arendt is
mistaken. According to Proust, Jewishness is not a vice. It is “assimilated”
and displaced into another religion (Catholicism, in this case) under the name
of a fascinating and abject foreign body. It reveals that sadomasochism adheres
to the dark center of every society. When Jewishness irradiates social groups,
it points to this truth. Yet by
extracting Jewishness from these social groups to reinforce the purity of
Judaism, we protect it and risk perpetuating the incessant wars between clans,
ethnic groups, and nations. Such is the logic of history, and Hannah Arendt
seeks a tolerable conclusion for history. Nevertheless, when Jewishness reveals the intrinsic truth of
homogenous social groupings, it bears witness endlessly to the reversibility of
the passions—of love, jealousy, and death. It is simply a source of beauty and
does not solve the problems of history. Whereas Judaism has a history,
Jewishness is an inspiration for art. And what remains is time regained—a mirror
of the irreparably lost time that passes before us. Such is the path taken by
Proust: the path of pure time embodied. This process of embodiment
is violent, but real beauty always comes at a price. Let me summarize what I
have said thus far. To create characters, one must know how to be one of them and how not to be one of them. To know how to be Swann, to love him, and also to be
detached from him, to be no longer a part of him. To do both at once, before
you encounter that strange osmosis between the projectionist and the shadow he
casts: “And yet, my dear Charles (Swann), whom I used to know when I was still
so young and you were nearing your grave, it is because he whom you must have
regarded as a young idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that
people are beginning to speak of you again and that your name will perhaps
live.” Who will live? Who is the character? Haas? Swann? Proust? Inside and out, at the
center of the clan (where the narrator thinks he is) and at its periphery
(which is more likely)—in this way, you can engrave something into other
people’s flesh and into your own, sadistically and with precision. Neither on one side nor on
the other, and by constantly bypassing them both, Proust never ceases to
disturb those who wish to be “one of them.” JULIA KRISTEVA
Conférence : "Question of Identity : The “Talmudic” Experience of Marcel Proust" |
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