Proust before Fascism

Abstract

When Proust died in 1922, his novel lay in fragments. Resolutely incomplete, its stray sections and variants were first consolidated into the 1927 edition of the Recherche by Robert Proust, Jacques Rivière, and the Nouvelle Revue française. The myth of Proust’s life and death and the details of posthumous editions of his work can occlude its historical position. His reputation as the great, perhaps last, French novelist who had the ambition to depict society as a whole—as Barthes noted—was soon outstripped by contempt for his world of aristocrats and hauts bourgeois. Shortly after his death, the NRF paid homage to Proust in its January 1923 issue collecting tributes from sixty French and foreign writers. This tribute soon seemed like a second tomb, reminiscent of the eponymous poetic genre: le tombeau.

In the fraught years of the 1930s, when the avant-gardes and arrière-gardes divided literary space with vociferousness, Proust, not to say literature, seemed irrelevant. These were what Aaron Matz suggestively calls the “years of hating Proust,” in which the novelist’s status as an aesthetic ideal and straw man drew “late modernist invective” (355, 368). When he was mentioned, it was to accuse him of privileged, intellectual solipsism symptomatic of the internal corruption that had weakened French intellect and culture to the point of being unable to resist the onset of fascism. Only after critics and philosophers returned to Proust from the 1950s onward did the Recherche become the source of popular and theoretical interest it remains at the recent centenary of the author’s death. The publication of Jean Santeuil and the drafts of Contre Sainte-Beuve further dissociated the author from the narrator and the work, prefiguring theses about the death of the author and the author function, even as the biographic cult of Proust grew unstoppably.

Many interpretive approaches were barred when the last three volumes of the Recherche had yet to appear, making the delayed architecture of the novel imperceptible. After his death, its legacy began to be contested among English modernists. W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice wrote in a poem about the declining interest, “thanks to some recent boosts / There’s been some further weakening in Prousts” (52); in a letter to Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence likened reading him to “too much water-jelly” (100); while George Moore described the Recherche as “trying to plough a field with knitting needles” (Moore, quoted in Peyre 28). Huxley, who had been mentioned favorably in Proust’s novel, had one of his characters exclaim: “How I hate old Proust! . . . that asthmatic seeker of lost time squatting horribly white and flabby, with breasts almost female but fledged with long black hairs, forever squatting in the tepid bath of his remembered past. . . . There he sat, a pale repellent invalid, taking up spongefuls of his own thick soup and squeezing it over his face” (6). Meticulous, narcissistic, feeble, effeminate, and hopelessly nostalgic: the image of Proust was consigned to the past by a politically divisive, satiric, hard-minded modernist present.

Similarly allergic reactions were voiced by Wyndham Lewis. In Time and Western Man, Lewis likened Proust to a privileged Chaplin:

Lewis places Proust with Joyce in the mechanistic time “school of Bergson-Einstein, Stein-Proust” (67). No such “school” quite exists unless viewed from the standpoint of the “enemy,” as Lewis liked to fashion himself. More telling is how Proust’s privilege and intelligence are again aligned with the decaying world of late Victorian and fin de siècle Europe.

For hostile Continental readers, Proust’s novel seemed little more than an account of the corruption and perversion of the chattering classes. While I discuss the extreme instances of Céline, the fascist philologist Kurt Wais, and the German-Italian essayist and novelist Curzio Malaparte below, even Claudel, Sartre, and Aragon proved averse to Proust. The novel’s excess of analytic and critical voice elided its claim to fiction, as it allegedly remained caught in a specular narrative. To be sure, Rivière, Thibaudet, Beckett, and others in France, as well as Rilke, Spitzer, and Curtius in Germany countered such attitudes in the 1930s and 1940s. Benjamin, Blanchot, and Bataille, the focus of the second section below, sensed that Proust had made transformative discoveries about the experience (and experiment) of writing that would change what it meant to write in his wake.

What an alleged hiatus in the influence of Proust brackets is the varying fate of the novel and the reputation of its author between the 1930s and the 1950s. Literary historians show how such a simplistic break can be ascribed to an active forgetting of the many reviews and books written in this period. Vincent Ferré characterizes the early critical receptions as “a spiral, combining moments of favor and periods of oblivion and negative critique” (191). Proust was translated, republished, and read during the war, even though he was considered a “mauvais maître,” responsible for the mentality that led to the defeat (Ragonneau 116). This suspension seems bound to a will to forget antisemitic and class-based readings, as well as oblique responses to them. The present essay does not reconstruct these debates in any systematic or chronological way. Nor does it analyze passages from the novel that might be “prophetically” oriented toward the future. Instead, it asks a relatively simple question in response to the frame of this special issue. It seems uncontroversial to claim that the Recherche had much to say about the structure of French society from the defeat at Sedan in 1870 to the Versailles treaty, not to mention the history of French literature. Yet does this suffice to make Proust a “prophète de malheur” in disguise? If so, how did his work look during the contested period leading up to Vichy, years during which he was supposedly forgotten? Critics who study the novel as a “theory of French society” often do so as a chronicle of social promotion, class mobility, and class struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. “Proust not only diagnosed the causes for the ultimate demise of the French aristocracy,” writes Michael Sprinker, “he also discerned the conditions in and the historical contingency of bourgeois hegemony” (7). Edward Hughes adds that Proust’s “evolving attitudes toward group mentalities formed by the forces of class and nation” compete against the narrator’s attachment to a shared logic of feeling that renders those categories superfluous (15).

Where does this leave the possibility of literature as prophecy? In the Greco-Roman tradition, prophets interpret or speak on behalf of the divine (prophētēs), rather than predicting an unseen future. The Old Testament nabi reveals no future but speaks revealed truth to criticize worldly ways. Commenting on André Neher’s study of prophetism, Blanchot writes, “Le terme de prophète . . . nous tromperait s’il nous invitait à faire du nabi celui en qui parle l’avenir. La prophétie n’est pas seulement une parole future. . . . Quand la parole devient prophétique, c’est le présent qui est retiré et toute possibilité d’une présence ferme, stable et durable” (Le Livre 109–10). Proust’s narrator accidentally discovers how the past persists, warps, and surges into the present to the point of indistinction, ushering him into the unstable time of writing. The fabric and reception of the Recherche contests accounts according to which time is split between a historical past and a sociological present, leaving only the future to the writer as Cassandra. For Céline, Wais, and Malaparte, Proust retrospectively exemplifies the prevailing decadence of the dominant class. For Blanchot, Benjamin, and Bataille, his novel alters prevailing notions of justice, desire, figural language, and the structure of time through the experience of writing. My contingent selection questions a view of literature that delimits its stance toward time relative to the advent of sociology, modern historiography, and the new social sciences. Readings of Proust in the shadow of fascism pit the rhetoric of decadence against experience and experiment. Revisiting these readings is a way, furthermore, of asking how his novel remains related to this ever-imminent political futurity.

Eradicating Proust? Céline, Wais, Malaparte

Of the three instances discussed below, the case of Céline’s novelistic and personal revulsion toward Proust is the most well known. Much has been made of this antipathy as it opposes the two “great” novelists of twentieth-century France. As Pascal Ifri notes,

Such an equation of style, sociohistorical insight, and form hides a deeper antagonism. The class divide between Proust, Céline, and their characters could not be greater, just as the themes and stylistic proclivities of the two novelists drive them apart. Yet Céline was greeted in the press as “un étrange Proust de la plèbe” (Madeleine Israël, Le Mât de Cocagne, December 15, 1932, quoted in Céline, Romans 1270). The early pages of Voyage au bout de la nuit contain the infamous passage in which Bardamu thinks of Proust, not unlike Lewis’s or Huxley’s characters: “Proust, mi-revenant à lui-même, s’est perdu avec une extraordinaire ténacité dans l’infinie, la diluante futilité des rites et démarches qui s’entortillent autour des gens du monde, gens du vide, fantômes du désirs, partouzards indécis attendant leur Watteau toujours, chercheurs sans entrains d’improbables Cythères” (Céline 174). Proust, the spectral author, is confounded with his narrator only to be further relegated to the abyss of worldly rituals and sophistication. His vacuous class yearns for representation like the fête galante in Watteau’s 1717 Voyage to Cythera. Yet the noble figures in the painting simultaneously lack the impulse to set out on such a quest, forever remaining frozen on the shores of utopia. Despite its enduring popularity, Watteau’s painting was considered emblematic of aristocratic frivolity in the postrevolutionary period. Bardamu’s scorn targets the internal contradiction of lingering among the dominant classes of Third Republic France while being unable to shift the focus beyond its dissolute agents. All this dithering is opposed to Céline’s Madame Hérote, whose popular, sturdy origins and brutally precise predilections make her ideal to run a bordello.

There is nothing particularly surprising, or even inaccurate, in the contention that the Proustian novel largely luxuriates in the “phantoms of desire” of the upper classes. Céline’s view quickly turns from style to sexuality when he reads in the former the mark of a “perversion” of the latter. The aristocracy is conflated with the world of sexual outcasts, while the complexity of represented speech and thought becomes an oblique way of describing who is on top. After the war, Céline wrote to Milton Hindus: “Proust explique beaucoup pour mon goût—300 pages pour nous faire comprendre que Tutur encule Tatave c’est trop” (Hindus 142). Proust becomes guilty less for the complaisance of his class than for his prolix perversions or perverse prolixity, as his taste for explanation is itself homophobically rejected. There is, of course, pastiche and competition involved in Céline’s quest for a prose style that could outstrip the style classique moderne associated with the NRF, especially Gide and Proust. Through sheer energetics, argotic, and vulgar writing he shoots beyond “the investment in clarification and analysis he so detested in Proust” (Matz 362). While critics—Ifri and Godard among them—detail Céline’s ambivalent thematic attachment to Proust (in comedy, childhood, sexuality, love, religion, society, memory, and literature itself), his antisemitism considerably complicates, if not negates, such affinities.

The entanglement of homosexuals, Jews, and aristocrats becomes an obsession for Céline. As Vincent Berthelier argues in a recent study of “le style réactionnaire,” Céline is the archetype of the reactionary writer whose antisemitic pamphleteering relegates him to the Far Right, even as his transformative idiom makes him an exemplary French writer who disrupts relations between style, politics, and prose. He targets Proust to dissolve the equation of literature and high society, style and classical language; the novel and analytic consciousness; not to say the place of marginalized identities within French public space. His style announces the changing directions of the novel in the 1930s, when Malraux, Blaise Cendrars, and Joseph Kessel began pushing it toward a kind of anthropological investigative journalism.

Proust was not explicitly banned or withdrawn from circulation by the Nazi government in France. Nor did he fall out of favor among pro-Nazi or Vichyite critics, as Jean-Yves Tadié notes: Ramon Fernandez, Lucien Rebatet, and Robert Brasillach all appreciated his work, which did not end up on the Otto list of banned works in 1940. Kurt Wais’s views on Proust show why such a legal gesture was perhaps unnecessary to “neutralize” the influence of the French novelist. The Tübingen Romanist and Germanist edited a substantial overview of contemporary European literature that “vigorously endorsed the racist ideology of National Socialism,” leaving Peter Szondi to regret Wais’s “shadow” over the “German school of comparative literature” (Boos 142). In his entry on French and Belgian letters, Wais attacks Proust (alongside Gide) as a decadent whose sexual perversions, stylistic excess, and “Jewish origins” make him symptomatic of an “unnatural turn” in the French novel: “A real explosion of the stable, firmly rooted form of the novel . . . was undertaken by two non-full Frenchmen, the half-Jew Marcel Proust and André Gide, who was brought up in the gloomiest Calvinism. Both enjoyed complacently pursuing their own inner contradictions, and each of them would have sinned against their own nature, to produce a well-rounded, complete work had they been able” (Wais 214; trans. in Szondi 147). Here failures of form are attributed to “racial” and religious deviation from norms of French Catholicism whose ideal, national expression ought to be bolstered by the novel as a genre. Instead, their fiction registers “the moods and leaps of waking life” while falling into “an unbound and disconnected subjectivity” redolent of the contemporaneous French mania for Dostoevsky (214). Their “gourmet” prose was merely a symptom of the ways their libertinage eroded a sense of national order and duty. Wais describes Proust as a flattering mandarin, whose work rejects self-justification for equivocation (lacking even Gide’s “protestant” literary ethos) and dissects the human, embalming subjects in time:

It is shocking, but not surprising, how the qualities critics gradually ascribed to Proust—everything from his nonnormative views on sexuality and gender to his minute investigations of intentionality and nonintentional states—serve here as signs of mental and moral degeneracy for Wais.¹ It is no accident that the heart of this transformation lies the trope of Proust’s “Talmudical ultra-intelligence.” What interests me more than Wais’s intense, yet finally banal, homophobia and antisemitism is the insistence that Proust was merely obsessed with infiltrating closed strata of society. His portraits of the fin de siècle aristocracy, it follows, were based on the most passing knowledge, as he only ever knew musicians and dilettantes, just as the only members of the working class he encountered were wily butlers and dissolute maids. No cliché is spared in Wais’s entry. German readers—most of whom would have hardly known Proust’s novel—are told instead about a world-weary, pagan asthmatic whose style is a mixture of “Arabic” music and deflated Bergsonism (216). Only when the idealized aristocracy, from Saint-Loup to the Duchesse de Guermantes, have been violently demystified can the narrator begin to write. Wais’s attempt to suppress Proust from contemporary French literature does not repay further reconstruction. Although some among l’Action française—Charles Maurras, Thierry Maulnier, and Léon Daudet in particular—may have admired Proust, this was hardly the case for the authorities beyond the Rhine.²

The remainder of this section turns to what is perhaps the strangest and least well known text in my idiosyncratic triad: Curzio Malaparte’s Du côté de chez Proust. Malaparte, a pseudonym for the German writer Curzio Sickert—both a Francophile and an Italophile—was best known for his incendiary 1931 tract La technique du coup d’État. During the war, he wrote his two most enduring pieces of auto-fiction, Skin (La Pelle) and Kaputt, which recount, in sickening detail, the effects of the War in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and on the eastern front once American forces debarked. Immediately after the war, Malaparte, moved by the success of a new “situational” theater—especially Sartre and Camus—tried writing for the French stage. That he chose to adapt Proust and Marx in succession is symptomatic of his boundless, if often misplaced, ambition. Both plays received a largely negative reception. Du côté de chez Proust nevertheless offers dramatic mediation between Céline’s anxiety of influence and Wais’s will to eliminate. To place Malaparte in this company is at once to recall his adherence to the Italian Fascist Party—from which he was expelled by Mussolini—and his subsequent turn to a highly theatrical communism, Maoism, and Catholicism after the war.

An “impromptu en un acte,” the play distills the novel to Rachel Quand du Seigneur, Proust (at once the author, narrator, and character), and Robert de Saint-Loup. The trio exposes the “determinism” of Proustian vision, as well as the “parody of the bourgeois world it reveals” (Serra 457). Suggestive of Malaparte’s newfound appreciation for the “somber beauty” of Marxism, the characters represent the three classes of fin de siècle Europe: the “resolutely decadent aristocrat”; the proletariat who must “sell her body or her arms to survive” but whose “inner energy remains devoted to the redemption of the oppressed”; and the bourgeois, who observes collective illusions and enthusiasms, without aligning with the conservatives or the revolutionaries (458). Much of the play revolves around an accidental encounter when Proust arrives unannounced in the middle of the night at Saint-Loup’s “modern style” apartment near the Place de l’Étoile. Expecting to find Saint-Loup alone, he is surprised to meet Rachel, whom he recognizes not as the up-and-coming actress she will become nor the “literary” mistress she pretends to be, but as a “grue à vingt sous” he once met in a bordello. The class elements are thus clearly set up between the aristocrat with intellectual proclivities (a reader of Proudhon and Nietzsche keen to save Rachel), Proust (the sickly novelist intent on humiliating her), and Rachel (an at once a “fallen,” impertinent, and illegible woman who provokes both men by miming other women from their past).

The apartment—“où tout est Guermantes”—is furnished with the requisite mixture of bibelots, alongside paintings by Picasso, Boldoni, Jacques-Emile Blanche, Lebourg, Guillamin, de Chirico, and of course, Elstir. Malaparte comments, “toute la pièce témoigne de l’aisance, de l’inquiétude, de l’exquis mauvais goût de cette génération” (11). Rachel soon discovers another collection: Saint-Loup’s closet is full of dresses by Fortuny, Callot, Doucet, and Paquin, themselves duplicates of those worn by the women of their milieu. The spectral défilé, in which one woman morphs into another, sends the narrator into swooning recollections in which he relives and describes the effect of seeing the past reincarnated. Somewhere between pastiche and homage, the play turns on Rachel’s ambivalent status as both actress and prostitute who embodies the desires of the male gaze. Yet she disgusts the narrator by revealing that she knows almost everyone whose company he has sought over time, from Swann, Odette, and Gilberte to the Guermantes, which paradoxically places them in the same class.

Malaparte’s unvoiced commentary, masked as stage directions, clarifies his investment in the Recherche. The politics of the play lie more in what audiences do not see or hear than its stilted dialogue. This interior is already a symptom of “le rôle à la fois de témoins et de protagonistes de cette décadence de la société parisienne au début du siècle, dont les causes sont à rechercher non dans la corruption des mœurs mais dans la fatalité des lois de l’évolution sociale, étudiée par le marxisme” (11). While this claim would not be exceptional for a doctrinaire Marxist, it is surprising coming from Malaparte. Perhaps it is better read as architectural critique from the designer of the iconic, spartan 1930 Casa Malaparte on Capri. The decor is soon undone by the presence of Rachel, who is described as the “revolutionary consciousness” of society: “Rachel Quand du Seigneur représente la conscience de cette fatalité des lois de l’évolution sociale, ainsi que la conscience du rôle révolutionnaire que les ‘grues’ exercent, de même que les ‘prostituées’ de Dostoïewski, dans les vielles sociétés aristocratiques” (11–12). While many readers have noted the social ascension of Odette and Madame Verdurin, as well as the codependence between aristocrats and their servants (Françoise, Jupien), not to mention their protégés (Morel, and even the narrator), Malaparte’s claim about Rachel’s radicalism is striking for several reasons. First, it zeroes in on prostitution as the revolutionary key to the class structure of the Recherche without mentioning its layered allusions to Rachel’s Jewishness, which range from Joseph Halévy’s 1835 opera to the Old Testament.³ We are told—as in the novel—that Rachel is a staunch Dreyfusarde who weeps at the thought of his suffering on Devil’s Island. Paradoxically, then, Robert with Rachel, becomes one of the:

This volatile superposition of Marxism and homosexuality coincides with the coming end of Christianity and capitalism. Malaparte, once more, excludes the role and fate of Jewishness in Proust’s novel. From the Dreyfus affair onward, as Arendt argues, Proust’s society witnessed the transformation of the “crime” of Judaism into the “vice” of Jewishness, which could only be eradicated by Nazism (80–81).⁴ To avoid such a reading, after the war, with Malaparte’s intimate knowledge of its horrors, is baffling, to say the very least.

Malaparte insists that “la décadence économique, politique, et morale d’une société se révèle surtout par la vie sexuelle” (20). In what sounds like a slogan from 1968, all homosexuality is deemed an unconscious form of “homosexual Marxism” of which Proust is the Aristophanes or the Plutarch (20). The political unconscious of queer life is opposed to the social climbing of Odette and the narrator (both figures of the parvenu) and Rachel (who remains resolutely prolétarienne). While Rachel becomes the heir to La Berma, just as Madame Verdurin supplants the Princesse de Guermantes, the initial relation that draws her into Saint-Loup’s milieu has less to do with desire than with the “laws of social evolution,” themselves reflective of “pure sexuality.” Malaparte concludes that “Rachel, de tous les personnages de Proust, est le seul en qui prend conscience la fatalité de la révolution sociale et se révèle avec plus de spontanéité le trouble apporté dans les rapports sociaux par l’intimité et la secrète pression des masses” (25). She cuts across both the narrator’s monologues and Saint-Loup’s courtesies, as she likens his solitude to a “grève générale qu’est la vie d’un jeune seigneur parisien de nos jours” (69). Rachel sees a fundamental difference between herself and Odette, Albertine, and the narrator, who all aspire to be accepted by an idle aristocracy that remains indifferent to them. The narrator slaps her when she says that she too (“la petite grue prolétariennne”) will one day dine at the table of the Duchesse de Guermantes (“la vieille putain sacrée”) (99).

If the intermittent appearances of Rachel in the novel can be “seen as a text or set of signs open to various interpretations, by Marcel, by Robert de Saint-Loup, by the reader . . . none of these is ultimately verifiable as what Rachel ‘really is’ since that remains forever secret” (Miller). Malaparte takes Rachel’s rebellious duality, secrecy, and dramatic ascent as a cipher for the decline of the Third Republic. The play, as mentioned above, was not well received at its Parisian debut in November 1948 at the Théâtre de la Michodière. Critics and audiences admonished it at once for being too Marxist, too sadistic, too short, and too “spaghetti” Italian, and for sounding as if it were translated from Russian (Serra 459). Compared to Das Kapital, Malaparte’s play about Marx, Jenny Marx, and Godwin in London, Du côté de chez Proust reads like a draft of a play or a staged lecture. Yet its central contentions—that the determinist coupling of “Marxist homosexuality” and prostitution are the matrices of Proust’s novel—deviate from more familiar considerations of memory, sensation, worldliness, and aesthetic experience.

The instances discussed above tend to erase or unravel the image of Proust. Céline’s relation to Proust is one of envy, satire, and agon that can be understood in terms of his effort to move the ground, style, and tropes of the novel in French away from his work. Finding a voice after Proust—at once a looming and contested figure—meant moving from mandarin syntax to guttersnipe voices and ellipses, from capital and immobility to poverty and transience, from reflection to resentful populist complicity. Wais’s “expert” gaze seeks to suppress Proust’s aberrant place in contemporary French literature by reducing him to a clinical case, alongside Gide, both of whom are judged ambiguous, adulterated, and foreign. Their marginality is ostensibly mirrored in the text, threatening the solidity and transmissibility of the French novel. Malaparte, finally, shifts from the anxiety of influence and the desire for containment to a form of adaptation that reduces the ambit of the novel to its core: prostitution. Femininity and desire are rehearsed through Rachel’s dressing and undressing. The fraudulent character of the élites, whose venality led to war, is laid bare as a striptease for closeted aristocrats and novelists. The social climbing of the bourgeoisie recalls the libidinal economies of sex work without acknowledging the existence or exchange of capital.

Combat, excision, and equivocal adaptation are all reactionary stances to varying degrees. These responses take style as the quintessence of being and vice versa, indicting Proustian fiction for the corruption of French society, sociality, and sexuality. In what follows, I turn briefly to three more readings of Proust—by Benjamin, Bataille, and Blanchot—that focus on the ways his novel registers and rescinds subjective, synthetic, and temporal experience in the act of writing. While they do not directly refer to the conditions leading to Vichy nor the rise of fascism, they are necessarily cognizant of them. In these decades, Proust was not simply a disappearing literary figure relegated to the prewar era but the object of ongoing, if oblique, political dissensus.

Inventing Experience: Benjamin, Bataille, Blanchot

That the figures invoked below demand minute discussion goes without saying. What matters for my argument is how each of them finds in various stages of Proust’s writing—from Jean Santeuil to the Recherche—a point of departure to redescribe the structure of “experience.” Proust’s novel is treated less as a social index, a text to be read, or an aesthetic theory to reconstruct than a set of provocations to reimagine the demands of writing in his wake. Animated neither by rivalry, nor adaptation, let alone outright hostility, these readings nonetheless remain “critical” insofar as their own figural language resists and comes undone by Proust’s images in subtle ways, whether in the relations of life and writing, memory and aging, metaphor and image, justice and transgression, or time and literary space.

Benjamin had a triple relation to Proust, as translator, critic, and writer (especially in A Berlin Childhood); a relation further intensified by a partially overlapping understanding of language, the work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility, and the “Jewish” dimension of the Recherche (Kahn 7). He situates Proust after Baudelaire, whom the rise of the bourgeoisie in the Second Empire made a traumatophile, a “désoeuvré,” as Benjamin puts it in one of his French essays, “l’oisif par excellence” (Écrits 311). While his analyses of spleen and correspondences in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939) are well known, less often recalled is how central Proust is to this account. He is cast as an exemplary reader of Baudelaire, a technician whose physiology of society proves his unparalleled eye as a social critic. His narrative style counts as a major technical breakthrough since “the writer is everywhere present, taking a stance, giving an account of himself and constantly placing himself at the reader’s disposition” (Benjamin, “On Some Motifs” 755; translation modified). His transgeneric narratives constitute a great “achievement for freedom.” Rather than finding such freedom in themes, Benjamin locates it in Proust’s provocative portrayal of a world of consumption, which rigorously “excludes everything that is involved in production” (755), including reproductive sexuality. The exclusion of production entails a blindness to the class structure that founds the world of the novel. Despite its allusions to servants, coachmen, prostitutes, and various other members of the lower classes, it remains relatively indifferent in political terms, as if the portraits of individual proletarian characters could outstrip their material conditions and need. Proust’s inability to depict the crowd, even the street, other than a mass of sensory perception for the gaze or hearing of a few is what makes passages in Céline’s writing, however tendentious, technically impressive to Benjamin. Although their conclusions differ entirely, these observations about the marginalization of classes and masses recall both Céline and Malaparte’s views.

The structure of memory in Proust proves decisive for Benjamin’s account of experience. The Recherche “may be regarded as an attempt to produce experience, as Bergson imagines it in a synthetic way under today’s social conditions, for there is less and less hope that it will come into being in a natural way. Proust, incidentally, does not evade the question in his work. He even introduces a new factor, one that involves an immanent critique of Bergson” (Benjamin, “Towards” 315). An ensuing account describes the mémoire d’intelligence as information without a trace of the past, a past that lies beyond its reach and is available only by chance. If Bergson critiques the quantification of sensation underlying the psychology and psychophysics of his time, Proust, whom Benjamin places closer to Freud, questions the voluntarism of memory and consciousness altogether.⁵ Only involuntary forms of signifying offer a glimpse of what remains hidden from the inquests of conscious intelligence, lived experience, and voluntary memory. Yet, as John McCole argues convincingly, Benjamin silently contests the idealized or aestheticized account of Proustian time that follows. Instead of escaping an imperfect present through the timelessness of the work of art, the historical past demands actualization in the present. “The eternity that Proust opens to view is convoluted, not boundless, time” (McCole 244). One is tempted to conclude with McCole that Benjamin attributes his own evolving views on memory and experience to Proust’s novel.

Proust restores the figure of the Erzähler, or storyteller, reporting on the narrator’s childhood through a kind of narrative that does only takes on significance in hindsight. Here the antinomic paths of conservative memory (Gedächtnis) and destructive reminiscence (Erinnerung) momentarily collide in Eingedenken, a rare neologism in Benjamin’s writing akin to the notion of commemoration, or rather immemoration, closer to forgetting.⁶ “In this way, voluntary and involuntary memory cease to be mutually exclusive” (Benjamin, “Towards” 316). Drawing on Theodor Reik rather than Freud, Benjamin exacts Proust’s insight that “only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an isolated experience [Erlebnis] can become a component of the mémoire involontaire” (317). In passage that is dense even by Benjaminian standards, we read the following hypothesis: “If we think of the associations which, at home in the mémoire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of the object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds to the experience [Erfahrung] which in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice” (337). The “aura of the object” is freed by the involuntary stumbling into likeness, often through the “lower” senses of smell or taste. Lived experience (Erlebnis), or voluntary memory, holds such contingent collapse of past and present, perception and association, aura and object at bay.

“Some Motifs” elaborates this distinction in reference to Baudelaire’s terror of photography and the way new technologies of reproducibility spurred the ambivalent decline of aura, or the decay of this inscription over time. Buried in a footnote about Proust, however, we find a claim that goes against the “redemptive” reading of Le Temps retrouvé that supposedly redresses this situation through a series of ecstatic experiences: “In Proust, the deterioration of experience manifests itself in the complete realization of his ultimate intention. There is nothing more ingenious or more loyal than the way in which he casually, and continually, tries to convey to the reader: Redemption is my own private show [die Erlösung ist meine private Veranstaltung]” (“On Some Motifs” 354n70). Redemption appears here less as literary communion than as a singular flight from the complex of symptoms otherwise known as civilization.⁷ By insisting that Proustian redemption is a “private show,” Benjamin forecloses readings that would make its aesthetic usable by the reader, let alone transmissible to contemporary society.

If subjective cohesion is an effect of voluntary memory, Benjamin discovers in Proust’s novel a set of techniques and practices for breaking out of empty, homogeneous time, communicative models of language, naturalized social and sexual hierarchies, and a historicist theory of aesthetic emergence. “On the Image of Proust” (1929) turns to Proust’s use of images, vying with their complexity. Commenting on its title, Carol Jacobs asks, “Does the essay present a portrait of the man Proust or is it, rather a discussion of the literary image, a consideration of the Proustian metaphor? Benjamin’s text authorizes no clear choice” (40). His essay also reflects more explicitly on the comedy of class in the Recherche, which “designates the entire inner structure of society as a physiology of chatter . . . in which the unity of family and personality, of sexual morality and professional honor, are indeed smashed to bits. The pretensions of the bourgeoisie are shattered by laughter. Their return and reassimilation by the aristocracy is the sociological theme of the work” (Benjamin, “Towards” 241). This satirical critique remains unrecognized by Céline and Wais. Malaparte does give voice to it in passing, but only through Rachel’s derision of a “Proustian” veneration for the aristocracy. While the narrator learns to decipher the code language of the salons, Benjamin notes, his readers are led to recognize a class

Proustian art veils class and its occluded economic basis. Benjamin anticipates and inverts Wais and Malaparte by arguing that the novel is less enamored of the aristocracy than a veil for the economic substructure of the bourgeoisie that aspires toward it and is absorbed by it. To adapt his definition of beauty, from the essay on Goethe, one might say that critique is not the veil nor what lies beneath it (the economic substructure) but what lies beneath (the substructure) in its veil. The image of Proust, toward which his essay tends but upon which it never settles, is “the highest physiognomic expression that the incessantly growing discrepancy between poetry and life was able to produce” (237). This discrepancy has less to do with some literary incapacity to depict life than the voiding out of life in modernity. The image that poetry is drawn to and repulsed by proves to be a “voided life” or a “dummy” subject.

The collapse of opposites is what draws Bataille to Proust in the wide-ranging “Digression sur la poésie et Marcel Proust” in L’Expérience intérieure (1943), his “sadism” in “Proust et la mère profanée” (1946) (republished in the Œuvres complètes, vol. 9), and his “L’Amour de la vérité et de la justice et le socialisme de Marcel Proust” (1952) (republished in La Littérature et le mal, 1957). The last essay, originally a review of Jean Santeuil, opposes the “naïveté aggressive” of Proust’s Dreyfusard commitment in the early novel. Discussing passages where Jean admires a thinly disguised version of Jaurès, Bataille underscores the surprising militantism of these pages—including a call to arms and the desire to kill rogue cops—to ask how Proust might have drifted into political “indifference” in the Recherche. These oppositions—morality and the transgression of the moral law, jouissance based on the criminality of eroticism, intelligence and passion, good and evil—must remain entangled to retain any allure or significance: “La lisibilité de ce tableau est fascinante. Ce qui sombre en elle est la possibilité de saisir un aspect sans l’aspect complémentaire” (Bataille, La Littérature 105). Hence the rarity of credible novelistic accounts of happiness to which Proust is no exception: “À la fin, la vertu du bonheur est faite de sa rareté. Facile, il serait dédaigné, associé à l’ennui. La transgression de la règle a seule l’irrésistible attrait qui manque à la félicité durable” (105). Narrative economies find a pendant in political economies, where an investment in the future itself relies on weakness, an “exaltation of greed,” and the suppression of present waste, expenditure, and excess pleasure. As a result, any “passion for truth and justice” distances itself from crowds whose political demands often tend in the opposite direction.

The relatively circumscribed argument above differs significantly from the “excursus on Proust” in L’Expérience intérieure, where the discursive mode dissolves into the fragment and meta-critical commentary. Bataille follows a lapidary critique of dogmatic servitude and mysticism with an outline originally sketched out for the rest of the volume. The transformation of a failed writing project into a rejection of projects is characteristic on Bataille’s part. That he has not written the remaining chapters is taken to mean that he should not write them out of fidelity to the inner experience: “J’entends par expérience intérieure ce que d’habitude on nomme expérience mystique: les états d’extase, de ravissement, au moins d’émotion méditée. Mais je songe moins à l’expérience confessionnelle qu’à une expérience nue, libre d’attaches, même d’origine, à quelque confession que ce soit. C’est pourquoi je n’aime pas le mot mystique” (Bataille 15). The reason that Bataille strays into a discussion of Proust is later described as complicity: “Si j’ai voulu parler longuement de Marcel Proust, c’est qu’il eut une expérience intérieure limitée peut-être . . . mais dégagée d’entraves dogmatiques. . . . Le mouvement poétique de son œuvre et quelle qu’en soit l’infirmité, prend le chemin par où la poésie touche à l’extrême’” (171–72).

“Poetry” moves toward unknowing, leading from knowledge to nescience. Accounts of love, lying, failed inspiration, seduction and possession, inattentive communication and referential speech, teleological intelligence and involuntary memory exemplify the “lucidité désagrégeante” of Proust’s “poetry”:

If desire is bound to the unknown, a will to possess as physical or mental property expels desire. While the bleakest insights of the Recherche about sociality, love, and friendship seem to follow this schema, one might equally see in them the possibility of a distant, dispossessed relation to the world and the other—what Bataille calls “poetry pushed to its limit.” Once more, a paradoxical connection emerges between Proust’s critics across the political spectrum: the difficulty of gleaning politics, poetics, or dogma from his novel.

Blanchot, too, discusses Proust in terms of “expérience” in essays published after his discussions with Bataille about the “dernier homme,” the renunciation of authority, and inner experience. “L’expérience de Proust” (1943) agrees with Bataille about the role of anguish, the vanity of values, and the absence of dogmatism in Proust’s writing. However, despite the range of criticism on Proust, and because the narrator attempts to interpret it, the basic nature of experience in the novel remains obscure. While the novel plays with delays of writing in and against time, death surges at its core, not only as individual death but also as the intermittencies of life. Only a latent promise of “pure time” rises beyond this preponderance of death. Yet this promise, reliant on involuntary memory, is where Proust seems to betray his own experience to save his oeuvre:

Proust’s novel can only exist at the cost of falsely stabilizing nondiscursive moments into knowledge; using the joy of such moments to overcome anxiety once and for all; and identifying truth and sensation with experience that allow involuntary memory to overcome the everyday. Yet, insofar as the aesthetic coherence of the novel “misuses” them, the enigmatic nature of involuntary experience remains hidden. In resisting the idealizing impulse of the narrator’s aesthetic theories, Blanchot agrees with Benjamin, while nonetheless acknowledging Bataille’s “extremist” Proust.

Benjamin’s Proust, who produces experience synthetically in the face of the decline of aura, is a writer whose use of an image can never be stabilized. Instead, his novel intensifies the gap between literature and life, mirroring the incessant hollowing out of modern selfhood. Bataille finds in Proust a writer whose limit-experience shows how any value invariably has its opposite at its core, consistently complicating the very possibility of experience and discursive knowledge. Finally, Blanchot finds Proust’s experiments with pure time and narrative to be ones that hold the promise of overcoming death, even as they withhold the essentially inscrutable nature of contingent experience (58). While Céline, Wais, and Malaparte read Proust as a purveyor of decadence, Benjamin, Bataille, and Blanchot glean experiential possibilities in his writing.

Proust lacked the apocalyptic tone that would make him a prophet of misfortune. While the readers above take the Recherche as a novel that records political, social, and historical events—from the Dreyfus affair and a morphing class structure to the onset of the war—none of them see it as a conscious announcement of looming disaster. When the republican experiment of universal freedom was suspended by the onset of fascism, it also revealed a limit in French modernity. The structure of French literary and cultural modernity, with its allegories of political ideology from the Revolution onward, was revised after the war, often at the cost of momentarily forgetting those who wrote before, during, and immediately after it. Such was the case with those who read and misread Proust in the shadow of fascism.

Notes

Works Cited