Proust and Sociability Florentina Dedu-Constantin a Dissertation
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The Good Distance: Proust and Sociability Florentina Dedu-Constantin A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2017 Reading Committee: Douglas P Collins, Chair Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen Lucy A. Jarosz Richard Henry Watts Program Authorized to Offer Degree: French and Italian Studies ©Copyright 2017 Florentina Dedu-Constantin University of Washington Abstract The Good Distance: Proust and Sociability Florentina Dedu-Constantin Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Emeritus Douglas P Collins French and Italian Studies Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu has been studied more than any other in French literature. Scholars have analyzed it from specific perspectives such as the relation between the artist and his art, class dynamics, sexual preference, and biographical issues, to mention just a few. Yet the novel purposefully intertwines these various threads. The novelty of this dissertation’s approach consists in bringing together these themes to examine them in their interactivity, as the author has conceived them. The main questions addressed are why and how aestheticism, nationalism and xenophobia, sociability in the salons of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and the budding artist, come together to become the material and the story for the genesis of a novel. First and foremost a man of his day and age, Proust is preoccupied by the issues of the time. By establishing a dialog between the novel and pertinent contemporary texts by Maurice Barrès, Julien Benda, Gabriel de Tarde, Auguste Rodin, and Georg Simmel, this dissertation illumines aspects of the text relevant to its analysis. In the process, the nationalistic and anti-Semitic climate dominating France during la Belle Epoque, the political configurations it engendered, as well as the particularity of Proust’s subject position as a gay Jewish writer increasingly isolated by his illness, come to the foreground. Furthermore, a close examination of the contrast La recherche makes between the cosmopolitism and inclusion of noble salons and the insistence on the separation between insider and outsider dominating their bourgeois counterparts, highlights features of the Belle Epoque’s sociability. It intimates that the dynamics at play in French society at the time were grounded in the fundamental distinction between Frenchness and foreignness. Notwithstanding aforementioned differences between the noble and bourgeois environments, in final analysis sociability fails in the novel. As a result, particular aspects of the Proustian aesthetics, such as his attention to details and rejection of masterpieces become relevant in an art that intends to move away from the group and its dangerous collective pursuits that lead to persecution and exclusion. As a conclusion, this dissertation proposes that Proustian aesthetics, conceived as interiorized individual contemplation whose goal and reward are in itself, foster non-confrontational social interactions grounded in a limited emotional involvement as a means to social harmony. Table of Contents Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 7 Nationalism during la Belle Époque ................................................................................. 19 French Identity .............................................................................................................. 20 Politics and Politicians .................................................................................................. 57 The Combray Opening ................................................................................................ 101 Frenchness and Foreignness ........................................................................................... 116 La France profonde ..................................................................................................... 116 The Nobility ................................................................................................................ 146 Social “Haussmannization” ........................................................................................ 181 A Pervasive Innocuousness......................................................................................... 197 Frivolity, Clannism and Culture ..................................................................................... 204 Foreignness and Culture ............................................................................................. 205 Culture and Clannism ................................................................................................. 238 Two Models of Sociability.......................................................................................... 248 Art and Sociability .......................................................................................................... 296 Distantiation and Sociability ....................................................................................... 297 Sociability and Kindness............................................................................................. 308 Sociability and Culture ............................................................................................... 315 The Recourse to Aesthetics ......................................................................................... 319 Ubiquitous Heterogeneity ........................................................................................... 342 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 361 Works cited ..................................................................................................................... 371 Proustian sources ........................................................................................................ 371 Historical, Critical and Theoretical Works ................................................................. 371 Dedu-Constantin 7 Introduction Why one more? “More books have been written about Proust than any other French writer, including those who lived centuries before him” (Gans, 37). Is there a new angle yet to be discovered or a subject left untouched? Proust’s work has already been analyzed from the perspective of the relation between the artist and his art (Anne Henry, Leo Bersani), class dynamics (Walter Benjamin, Michael Sprinker, Catherine Bidou-Zachariasen, Edward Hughes), sexual preference (Elisabeth Ladenson, Erin Carlston), as well as other biographical issues (Jean- Yves Tadié), to mention just a few. Yet La recherche purposefully intertwines these various threads. The novelty of this dissertation’s approach consists in bringing together these themes to examine them in their interactivity, as the author has conceived them. Why and how do aestheticism, nationalism and xenophobia, sociability in the salons of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, and the budding artist, come together to become the material for and the story of the genesis of a novel? This is what this essay will address. The rest of this introduction is a brief survey of this approach. Throughout la Belle Epoque, an obsession with the motherland in danger haunts the French intellectual and political elite, eventually engulfing the entire society. No one expresses it more eloquently than Charles Morice in his 1914 preface to the first edition of Auguste Rodin’s Les Cathédrales de France. There he exhorts all Frenchmen to dedicate themselves “à la constitution d’un nouvel état collectif des consciences”, yet in the same breath he admits that “personne ne sait sur quelles bases le pacte d’union pourra se conclure.” Nonetheless, “personne n’a droit au repos tant qu’elles n’auront pas été trouvées” exactly because unless “[c]e pacte sera l’œuvre des générations vivantes, . leur jour n’aura pas de lendemain” (Morice LXXXIX). His Dedu-Constantin 8 apprehensions announce what will be the main objective of the Collège de sociologie in the two years preceding World War II, between 1937 and 1939, namely what Georges Bataille terms “la sociologie sacrée étudiant le mouvement communiel de la société, c’est-à-dire toutes les activités humaines en tant qu’elles sont créatrices d’unité” (Le collège de sociologie 139). Yet such concerns started as early as 1871 with the Prussian defeat and the civil war of the Parisian Commune, reaching a popular pitch with the publication of Maurice Barrès’s Les déracinés (1897) and Scènes et doctrines du nationalisme (1902). Analyses of historically anchored oeuvres such as A la recherche du temps perdu must take into account the nationalistically charged context of the period. The thesis of this essay is that Proust responded to calls of duty such as that of Morice insisting that “[i]l n’est permis à personne de s’y dérober, par la modestie non plus que par l’indifférence” (Morice LXXXIX). The primary endeavor of French intellectuals – a figure significantly born from the clash of the Dreyfus affair which enthralled the young Proust to the point of getting actively involved in it – is to solve the question of the nation. La recherche constitutes his answer. Specifically pertinent to readings of the work is the writer’s insistence that “il ne peut y avoir d’interprétation des chefs-d’œuvre du passé que si on les considère du point de vue de celui qui les écrivait” (Proust, Contre Sainte-Beuve 266). Without attempting