Proust’s Ethics

Hindus evaluates Proust’s ethics through a study of the Dreyfus case and how he has each of his characters react to the case. He begins with the author himself by recounting an anecdote provided by his good friend, Léon Daudet, a prominent anti-Semite.

At the very height of the political conflict in 1901, in other words in the midst of the Dreyfus Case, Proust conceived the idea of giving a dinner party with sixty guests of various shades of opinion. Every piece of china was liable to be smashed. I sat next to a charming young person, looking like a portrait by Nattier or Largillière, , who, I afterwards learned, was the daughter of a prominent Jewish banker. Anatole France presided at the next table. The bitterest of enemies ate their chaud-froid within two yards of each other, for the currents of understanding and benevolence in Marcel flowed about the guests and enveloped them in coils. For the space of two hours, the greatest imaginable good-will reigned among the warriors. I doubt if anyone except Proust could have accomplished that feat. As I was complimenting the host on his achievement, he replied modestly: “But, monsieur, really, monsieur, it all depends on the first reaction to each other of the different characters.” I gathered that he realized the danger of his experiment and was pleased to see it succeed.” (218)

Proust, an ardent Dreyfusard, was no ideologue, a trait that allowed him to judge clearly the moral foundations of both the Dreyfusard and anti-Dreyfusard. First, the ultra-assimilated Swann:

Something very deep within him is touched, though Proust emphasizes that it is not his sense of justice. From the extreme of not being conscious of any anti-Semitism at all in society, he goes to the opposite extreme of seeing it everywhere. He makes the blanket generalization to the narrator that the whole Faubourg Saint-Germain is against Dreyfus, because it is and always has been completely anti-Semitic, and he says this in spite of the most signal exceptions (such as that of the Prince de Guermantes…) which obtrude themselves on his notice. Now in making such a false generalization, Swann, in the eyes of Proust and of his reader, is acting no differently from an anti-Semite like Charlus, who says that all Jews are for Dreyfus because they always stick together and are a separate and alien nation in the midst of France. It is Charlus, we remember, who announces the precious discovery that Dreyfus couldn’t have committed treason, as he was charged with  doing, because it was Judea that was really his nation; towards France, he was guilty at most of a “breach of hospitality.”

Proust, as he reveals on many occasions in his book, believed almost mystically in the importance of heredity, and in Swann he seems to discover a belated return to his Hebraic ancestors. Swann is punished for the long suppression of the truth about himself by the heart-rending discovery that some of his best friends in life have been anti-Semites all the while. Even Odette, Swann’s wife, is an anti-Dreyfusard and owes her rise into society principally, it  seems, to this qualification, for she lacks any other. (226-227)

The Duc de Guermantes:

Each man went along with his crowd–he was either liberal or reactionary, Catholic or anticlerical–and few were brave or adequate enough morally to make  a deliberate effort to judge the facts for themselves and to adhere strictly to their independent findings. The worst example of conformity represented in the book is that of the most brutal character who can be found in its pages, the Duc de Guermentes…The Duc is automatically against Dreyfus, because he feels that that is what his position in society requires of him. He does not investigate the issues, he does not hesitate for a moment, he has no sensitivity to the question of justice….The final irony about him, such as only Proust seems capable of inventing, is that eventually, he too becomes a Dreyfusard! Not because of the promptings of conscience, but because, at a well-known watering places to which he had gone for his health, he met three noble ladies, who were all Dreyfusards. This coincidence convinces him, by the irrefutable arguments of both social rank and sex, that Dreyfusism, which he had previously regarded as an opinion held jointly by Jews and the riff raff of society, is in reality not merely a respectable opinion but even a smart one! (228)

The Prince de Guermantes:

The Prince de Guermantes, on the other hand, is one who neither makes up his mind by the expectations of his social class, nor perversely moves against it. It does not occur to him that certain views in such a matter are or are not smart…There is an ironic note ending the Prince’s story too. He has concealed his views…even from his family, from his own wife, only to discover by accident eventually that she, too, being evidently a match for her husband, had been subscribing secretly to L’Aurore, the Dreyfusard paper, and had been afraid to worry him by sharing her convictions with him! So we see Proust weaving his ethical commentary together with strands of ironic humor, all of which seems to have one purpose–to reveal the existence of conscientious people and of conscienceless ones, to show the sharp contrast of the thoughtful and the thoughtless, the sensitive and the insensitive. (229-230)

Bloch:

When it comes to such a mean, graceless, and unprincipled character as Bloch, the reader feels sure that the agreement of his views with the truth is entirely accidental. The Case simply presents to him an opportunity to better his intellectual fortunes, to reverse the whole social order perhaps. The last thing in the world that Bloch is concerned with is that which is most troublesome to the conscientious Prince de Guermantes–namely, the personal fate of Dreyfus and the human sufferings of his family. Proust shows us in the Dreyfus Case and later on in the war how social misfortunes are the lucky harvest seasons of the selfish and unscrupulous. (232-233)

The Proust Project II

Edmund White asks, addressing Proust’s discourse on the nature of homosexuality in Sodom and Gomorrah, was he himself a self-hating homosexual as well as a Jewish anti-Semite?

He starts out with the most extreme (and the most offensive) theory: that male homosexuals are inverts, i.e., women disguised as men. This whole initial disquisition on homosexuality is triggered by Marcel’s realization that Charlus’s face in repose is that of a woman since “he was one.” This the theory of “the soul of a woman enclosed in the body of a man,” first worked out by the German sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1868. (81)

Proust in this passage has already employed the pseudomedical term “invert”; now in elaborate and venomous and confusing sentences he invokes the judge as well as God and Christ (law and religion). But these invocations are embedded in a comparison of inverts to Jews, disobliging to both….Proust sets out to show the similarities between the self-hating homosexual and the anti-Semitic Jew. Just as the Jew who has converted to Christianity must deny his original faith before the bar of justice (the Inquisition), in the same way the male homosexual can enjoy the love of his parents and the camaraderie of his friends only by denying “his very life,” i.e., his real desires. (82)

In his vast novel, which he began only after his parents’ death, he devotes hundreds of pages to the theme of male homosexuality and even more to lesbianism. Just as Vintueil’s daughter and her girlfriend profane her father’s photograph, in the same way Proust in real life installed his parents’ furniture in a male brothel (and gave his father’s clothes to a servant). Was this frankness about the shocking subject of homosexuality in his novel, were these acts of profanation in real life Proust’s ways of avenging himself on parents to whom he could never reveal the truth about his sexual identity? Is he one of those “sons without a mother, to whom they are obliged to lie even in the hour when they close her dying eyes”? Perhaps to divert attention from his own parti pris, Proust rendered loathsome most of the male homosexual characters in his book while carefully preserving the heterosexuality of Marcel; it was this grotesquerie that André Gide complained about to Proust himself. (83)

Proust’s apparent homophobia is matched by his apparent anti-Semitism. Proust may have made fun of the Bloch family by showing how venal and vulgar its members were, but he was also the man who stood by Dreyfus and who would ask his friends to curb anti-Semitic jibes in his presence, because his mother was Jewish. Homosexuals, however, are even more self-hating in Proust’s account. He says that whereas Jews in an extreme case (the Dreyfus Affair) will band together, homosexuals are so self-hating they will not close ranks around one of their pariahs (Oscar Wilde). If these parallels and contrasts that Proust establishes are negative, they conceal a hidden suggestion that homosexuality is not really a sickness after all but that inverts constitute something like a minority. (83)

Homosexuality is a rich, ambiguous subject for Proust to investigate precisely because it is as open to interpretation as love (or life) itself. (85)

Swann’s Final Self

Swann is many things: a sophisticated collector of art, art advisor to the rich, member of the exclusive Jockey Club, confidant of elite members of society. The Dreyfus affair has reduced him in society to one thing: a Jew.

As soon as Swann enters the Prince de Guermantes’s soiree, he is whisked away by the Prince, leading to much speculation among the guests.

[Mme de Guermantes was] dreading the prospect of having to shake hands with Swann in these anti-semitic surroundings. With regard to this, her mind was soon set at rest, for she learned that the Prince had refused to have Swann in the house and had had “a sort of an altercation” with him. There was no risk of her having to converse in public with “poor Charles,” whom she preferred to cherish in private. (IV,98)

Reassured as regards her fear of having to talk to Swann, Mme de Guermantes now felt merely curious as to the subject of the conversation he had had with their host. “Do you know what it was about?” the Duke asked M. de Bréauté. “I did hear,” the other replied, “that it was about a little play which the writer Bergotte produced at their house. It was a delightful show, I gather. But it seems the actor made himself up to look like Gilbert, whom, as it happens, Master Bergotte had intended to depict.”…”The explanation that you have given us,” said Colonel de Froberville to M. de Bréauté, “is entirely unfounded. I have good reason to know. The Prince purely and simply gave Swann a dressing-down and begged to instruct him, as our fathers used to say, that he was not to show his face in the house again, in view of the opinions he flaunts. And to my mind, my uncle Gilbert was right a thousand times over, not only in giving Swann a piece of his mind–he ought to have broken off relations with a professed Dreyfusard six months ago.” (IV,102)

“Yes, after the friendship my wife has always shown him,” went on the Duke, who evidently considered that to denounce Dreyfus as guilty of high treason, whatever opinion one might hold in one’s heart of hearts as to his guilt, constituted a sort of thank-offering for the manner in which one had been received in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, “he ought to have dissociated himself. For, you can ask Oriane, she had a real friendship for him.” (IV,104)

“Don’t you see,” M. de Guermantes went on, “even from the point of view of his beloved Jews, since he is absolutely determined to stand by them, Swann has made a bloomer of incalculable significance. He has proved that  they’re all secretly united and are somehow forced to give their support to anyone of their own race, even if they don’t know him personally.  It’s a public menace. We’ve obviously been too easy-going, and the mistake Swann is making will create all the more stir since he was respected, not to say received, and was almost the only Jew that anyone knew.” (IV,107-108)

The narrator confirms Swann as Jew physically, with the emergence of not  previously noticed characteristics. His face is eaten away with disease.

Whether because of the absence of those cheeks, no longer there to modify it, or because arteriosclerosis, which is also a form of intoxication, had reddened it as would drunkenness, or deformed it as would morphine, Swann’s punchinello nose, absorbed for long years into an agreeable face, seemed now enormous, tumid, crimson, the nose of an old Hebrew rather than of a dilettante Valois. Perhaps, too, in these last days, the physical type that characterises his race was becoming more pronounced in him, at the same time as a sense of moral solidarity with the rest of the Jews, a solidarity which Swann seemed to have forgotten throughout his life, and which, one after another, his mortal illness, the Dreyfus case and the anti-semitic propaganda had reawakened. There are certain Jews, men of great refinement and social delicacy, in whom nevertheless there remain in reserve and in the wings, ready to enter their lives at a given moment, as in a play, a cad and prophet. Swann had arrived at the age of the prophet. (IV,121-122)