Proust, war, intelligence, and idiocy

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Notes

Brigitte Mahuzier is associate professor of French at Bryn Mawr College. She is author of numerous essays on Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Colette, Rodin and Proust; editor of a special issue of Littérature on Proust's new editions (Dec. 92); and co-editor of the Yale French Studies special issue “Same Text/Different Sex” (Dec. 96). She has completed a manuscript entitled “Proust and Sadomasochism” and is currently working on a book entitled “Proust et la Grande Guerre.”

 Theories developed by proponents of “trauma studies” could be evoked here since, although they were developed from experience of the Holocaust, they could apply to any traumatic experience of reality. See Suleiman, Caruth, Agemben, et al.

 A great number of manuals and self-help books “for idiots” have recently flooded the American publishing market, and have also found a niche in France as manuals “pour les nuls.”

 Proust could not have had access to Rimbaud’s Album zutique, a collaborative collection of poems and “bouts rimés” (by Verlaine, Valade, Cabaner, de Carjat, Richepin), most of them parodies of Banville and Coppée, all composed in the early 1870’s and only published in 1936. However, since “zutisme” was publicized by Charles Cros, a poet scientist who was part of the group, it became a well-known form of derisory art in the late 1870s.

 Although his means are seriously hampered (as he cries “Zut, zut, zut, zut,” he brandishes his umbrella with such enthusiasm that he just misses hitting a farmer he meets on the road and he is subsequently unable to share his sublime experience of nature with the farmer who could not care less), he quickly realizes not only that his first “translations” of reality are pitifully short of containing anything pertaining to this reality, but also that his interlocutor might be on a completely different wave length.

 The last wave of Baudelairian critics, inspired mostly by a reassessment of the work of Walter Benjamin and by a return of history on the scene of literary criticism, has made a very good case against this sort of evaluation of Baudelaire. See in particular Chambers, Hiddleston, Oehler, Sanyal, Stephens, Terdiman. Nothing of the kind has been done with regard to Proust yet.

 This experience of failure (presented as the negative counterpart of that described in Martinville) takes place in Balbec, during one of the numerous trips the narrator takes with his grandmother in Madame de Villeparisis’s car.

 One major theme of the first summer in Balbec is that of arrival: the unexpected arrival of the young girls being, for the group-enamoured narrator, the very experience of unimaginable pleasure. Its opposite, the theme of departure (both being characterized by surprise) will later be developed in the Albertine narrative, especially in La prisonnière and Albertine disparue. This theme of departure, death, and the uncertainty of the moment of disappearance (especially in the absence of the dead body) will be developed in the same episode and tie together the themes of love and war.

 Both Jouannais and Rosset emphasize this quality of idiocy. Against the passivity of unintelligence, Rosset underlines the activity of “sottise,” its openness to all that is new, exemplified by Bouvard and Pécuchet.

 For Paul de Man, as Avital Ronell points out, this is where idiocy plays a major role in the Proustian novel: in the relationship between Marcel and Albertine, in the impossibility for Marcel of knowing what Albertine is up to, which de Man reads as an impossibility of knowing what language is up to (for example in Albertine’s use of anacoluthon). Faced with this impossibility, “idiocy […] may be a way of ducking excessive forms of paralyzing resistance” (Ronell 119).

 Werner Heisenberg, born in 1901, was a German microphysicist, who is considered to be the origin of quantum mechanics. Swann’s experience, of course, predates Heisenberg’s principle.

 Of course, the novel also includes the suggestion that there is no such thing as unmodified reality, or at least that the voyeur is never given access to it. In the first scene of Montjouvain, in “Combray,” the young hero as voyeur discovers that the stage is set and an audience anticipated, even if invisible.

 This was the case for the Montjouvain scene, planted there before the death of Agostinelli in 1914. As we know, the ensuing war gave Proust the time to inscribe the character of Albertine in his novel, and give this scene a different and richer meaning than the one planned since it could be read retrospectively with a number of scenes he could not have envisaged at the time of writing the Montjouvain scene (the wartime s/m scene being one of them).

 This is a simple and successful trick, much exploited by the nineteenth century novel and inspired by the rise of a new half-real/half-fictive narrative: the “fait divers.” See Roland Barthes and Philippe Hamon on this question.

 At the very end of his passion for Odette, Swann realizes that, had he been in another place the night he met Odette, he might have loved another woman, and that “what indeed had seemed to him inevitable was what had indeed taken place.” His mind, although “anxious to admire the richness of invention that life shows,” resorts to a fatalistic view of the ways events are chained together, “linked by a sort of concatenation of necessity” (I, 415). Later in the novel, Charlus becomes obsessed with the idea of necessity: he is constantly repeating, to the narrator’s annoyance, the phrase “enchaînement de circonstances.”

 One could say that Charles Bovary’s comment after Emma’s death, “c’est la faute à la fatalité,” does not prove that he is clueless but the opposite: that he has finally recognized Emma’s death, and that its implacability appears to him, in retrospect, as the logical result of a series of circumstances all leading to this tragic end. In this way, Charles Bovary becomes the typical idiot in the sense that Rosset so clearly defines idiocy: as a direct confrontation with reality.

 See Antoine Compagnon’s chapter on Proust in P. Nora’s Lieux de mémoire, vol. 3, 3835–3869.

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Brigitte Mahuzier

Brigitte Mahuzier is associate professor of French at Bryn Mawr College. She is author of numerous essays on Stendhal, Balzac, Baudelaire, Colette, Rodin and Proust; editor of a special issue of Littérature on Proust's new editions (Dec. 92); and co-editor of the Yale French Studies special issue “Same Text/Different Sex” (Dec. 96). She has completed a manuscript entitled “Proust and Sadomasochism” and is currently working on a book entitled “Proust et la Grande Guerre.”