Proust, Class, and Nation

by Hughes, Edward J.

• ISBN13: 9780199609864
• ISBN10: 0199609861
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Writing in 1927, Julien Benda described France as being afflicted by the twin scourges of narrow, class-based politics and rabid nationalism. He nevertheless identified Marcel Proust (who had died in 1922) as a writer who had refused to embrace the ideological narrowness of his age. Edward J. Hughes seeks to assess how Proust and his novelA la recherche du temps perdumight be understood in relation to issues of class and nation.A la recherchewas produced in momentous times. As an extended textual construction, first conceived of in 1908 and the last tranche of which appeared posthumously almost two decades later, it was assembled against a backdrop of major historical events: pre-war tensions in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair and the Separation of Church and State (issues on which Proust had campaigned publicly); the First World War and the atmosphere of narrow nationalism and Germanophobia which the conflict generated; and the continuing polarization in class politics in the years after the First World War. These all find echoes inA la rechercheand Hughes establishes how the exposure given to questions of class and nation needs to be understood historically. He demonstrates that the frequently entrenched positions of Proust's contemporaries at times square with the language and images of social conservativism to be found inA la recherche. Yet alongside that, Hughes unearths evidence that points to Proust as a free-floating, often playful, iconoclast and radical commentator who, as Theodor Adorno observed, resisted bourgeois compartmentalization.

Author Biography

Edward J. Hughes is Professor of French at Queen Mary, University of London.

Table of Contents

Note on Translations	p. xi
Abbreviations	p. xii
Chronology	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
On the Nation and Its Culture	p. 19
Proust, Halévy, and the politics of literature	p. 19
Barrès and the claims of nation	p. 28
On Church and State	p. 33
Contexts for Class	p. 43
'Nécessité des classes'	p. 43
Fin de siècle dramas of class exile	p. 48
'Oui ou non à l'Université populaire'	p. 63
Ruskin and literacy	p. 71
Combray and the reader-idler	p. 75
Marcel and the military	p. 79
'Tout est affaire d'époque, de classe': Taste in Un amour de Swann	p. 85
Taste as social marker	p. 85
New locations	p. 99
The Swann clan	p. 104
Balbec: A New Sociality	p. 111
Balbec and modernity	p. 111
Class rivalries	p. 114
Interleaving 'le vulgaire': beyond the 1914 Grasset galleys	p. 124
Aristocratic positioning	p. 127
Other taxonomies	p. 132
Ideology and tradition	p. 136
'Eloge de la bourgeoisie française'	p. 147
Frames, Language, Judgements	p. 156
Social-class stills	p. 156
Linguistic authority and social marking	p. 175
Parallel worlds: the strata of judgement and misprision	p. 187
'On, c'est-à-dire le monde'	p. 198
Masters, Laws, and Servants	p. 200
Prelude on finance	p. 200
The rentier and the drama of delegation	p. 208
The servants empowered	p. 214
Hierarchies in Le Temps retrouvé	p. 223
The servant's quarters	p. 223
Working-class soldiers: their glorification and instrumentalization	p. 225
'A vol d'oiseau'	p. 231
Equalization	p. 234
Claims and Complaints	p. 239
Proust, Benda, and the role of the clerc	p. 239
The muse of history	p. 247
'Notre nouvelle Bolchevie'	p. 256
Free speech	p. 262
The hybrid text: Francoise in mourning	p. 263
Postscript	p. 267
Bibliography	p. 277
Index	p. 287
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