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The Guermantes Way/ Le côté de Guermantes.
308 Plays5 months ago
Hosts Emma Claussen and Hannah Weaver enter the glamorous and bleak world of fin-de-siècle Paris through the ironic gaze of the narrator. With new access to the chicest salons, their witty denizens, and their gauche intruders, the narrator finds himself a spectator at the drama of social interaction – even as his beloved grandmother grows sick and dies. We talk about the advent of new technology (the telephone) and hot debates (the Dreyfus affair). As he enters the world of salons, the narrator uncovers the relativity of truth and the hypocrisy of society through the lens of the Affair, the signal anti-semitic scandal of the time. The architecture of the novel emerges alongside the narrator’s growing social acumen. Plus, we ponder the question, “Where would you like to live?” Join us as we search for lost time and remember things Proust.
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Transcript
Introduction to Proust Curious
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Proust Curious, a podcast in partnership with Public Books. I'm Hannah Weaver, an assistant professor of medieval literature at Columbia University and a fellow at the Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
00:00:15
Speaker
And I'm Emma Clausen. I'm an early modernist at Trinity College, Cambridge. Proust Curious is a podcast about the experience of reading ala raach du tompperou All Seven Volumes, written between 1906 and 1922. Published between 1913 and 1927, Marcel Proust's cultural touchstone is an object of enduring fascination and, let's face it, intimidation.
00:00:39
Speaker
We are not Proust experts, but we do study literature for a living, so we feel both under and over-qualified to tackle this. Join us as we search for lost time and remember things, Proust.
Exploration of Volume 3: Paris and Relationships
00:01:09
Speaker
Today, we're talking about the third volume of the Recherche, Le Côté de Germont, that is the Germont way. In this volume, the young adult narrator returns to Paris, develops a crushing obsession with his new neighbour Madame Germont, visits his friend Saint-Luc at the army barracks, loses his grandmother, gets over Madame Germont, and enters high society by attending salons and dinners.
00:01:34
Speaker
But he's still not writing. At this point he's barely even planning to do so. He says at one point that friendships are distracting him from his invisible vocation, though it will all eventually lead to what we are reading now. Put more simply, the narrator hangs out with the cool kids. So cool.
00:01:51
Speaker
That's so cool.
Proust's Ideal Living Place
00:01:55
Speaker
But Emma, before we talk in more detail about the volume, it's time for our weekly question from the famous Proust questionnaire, which was answered by Proust twice at ages 13 and 20 and is now used as an interview device by Vanity Fair magazine. We'll put a link to the questionnaire in the show notes.
00:02:13
Speaker
This week, our question is, where would you like to live? proust's answers were ob be de li pluto de monel that is the country of the ideal or rather of my ideal And his other answer from when he was 20 was celer u sat ten shows because you vore sore lire compar on anantte um ah ulet andreerre tuio patage the one where certain things that I desire would happen as if by magic, and where tenderness would always be shared.
00:02:47
Speaker
How does your answer stack up Emma? Where would you like to live? I mean honestly I would just like to live in Paris. ah Well in that way I guess you're sort of like the narrator. Exactly because you know he has all these dreams and but actually he's kind of happy where he is and he just wants to like get to know his friends and neighbors in the place where he lives. So maybe he does mean Paris, maybe that is his ideal.
00:03:13
Speaker
it Yeah, it's just that's where all the promising friends and neighbors are located.
Hosts' Living Preferences
00:03:17
Speaker
What about you? Where would you like to live? My answer is, I guess, a little bit more vague. I would like to live where my friends live in a place where I can walk around easily and afford seasonal vegetables. So actually, Paris is pretty good for all these things. So perhaps we can just meet in Paris. Yeah, we can be friends who live there.
00:03:41
Speaker
Indeed.
00:03:47
Speaker
Let's move on to the topic of the day,
Intricate Social Scenes in Volume 3
00:03:49
Speaker
Emma. How did you find volume three? What did you notice in this volume? This was new ground for us, wasn't it? We were a bit more familiar with Volumes 1 and 2, and this was yeah and right this whole volume was completely completely new for me. I really enjoyed it. How did you how did you find Volume 3, Hannah? Yeah, I found it to be such a satisfying and almost addictive reading experience. There are these incredible social set pieces, which I think for me are the real delights of Proust. I really enjoyed them in volume one as well in particular. So in the first part of this volume, we get a scene at the Vue de Parisi Salon, and then a dinner at the Gemmont House in the latter part of the volume. And each of these scenes brings together so many of the characters we've gotten to know or that we've heard of along the way, and the dialogue
00:04:43
Speaker
is very witty, but also super plausible, and it's so ah fine-grained. um One of my favorite things that happened in this volume, which I don't think we'll talk about at length, is when ah Madame de Ville Parisis, who was Proust's friend in Balbec in volume two, and in this volume is a memoirist who has her own salon, she fakes falling asleep to convince a gauche guest to leave.
00:05:13
Speaker
It is only. I can't even imagine pretending to nod off in my own home while I'm hosting a party just so that one guy will leave its perfection. Yeah, it's so funny. And also he just, you know because he's so ghost, he's just like, hello, sorry.
00:05:33
Speaker
which is what would happen. That's the sort of that sort of you know accuracy of this volume that really was so pleasurable to read. Yeah. Yeah. And there's such a cast of characters. We have to try and hold back from talking about them all, but I do love that little historian who speaks too quietly in the first and foremost. He's sort of imperceptible. Yeah. And at one point he says something and the narrator is like, yeah, only I heard him. So, you know, just
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's really funny, but there are so many characters that sometimes I have to confess I got a little bit confused as to where we met them before or who exactly was who. Of course. Sometimes I was googling them and when I was looking up some of the characters, just to make sure that I was fully tracking what was happening, I saw that these scenes have been described as Dickensian, which I guess speaks to the social portrait aspect, the very lengthy comic dialogue and description. But I don't think that adjective fully captures it, do
Narrator's Behavior and Insights
00:06:37
Speaker
you? No, not at all. ah No, I really don't. I'm not a fan of that adjective for these scenes. No, no. Because that's they're really the subtle evocation of a world in motion, but also overlain by all these asides that give us a sense of the narrator's process as he's thinking about it and then writing about it later. So of of a voice who knows he's guiding us through it all. By the way,
00:07:00
Speaker
We talked before about how the narrator was charming as a kid in volume one especially, maybe a bit more in volume two. I'd say he's getting older now. I'd say he's less delightful at this point. But he's still compelling. I think the narrative voice is also something that really... I yeah i agree it's kind of addictive in in this and this volume.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, I'd say it's ah the narrator's behavior here, which really verges, I'm not even sure verges, just is stalkerish at times. There's a whole long period where he goes out and lies in wait for Madame Guermont on her morning saucy. He knows where she likes to go of a morning and plants himself along her route. Yeah, and at one point he realizes he realizes that she's not loving it.
00:07:54
Speaker
And yet he can't help himself. yeah But so that that sort of behavior is, of course, rather alienating. But the ironic perspective that the later narrator is bringing to that these memories and the flashing insight into what is ridiculous or sad about what he's seeing just made the volume a delicious treat.
00:08:22
Speaker
And what's more, there's an interesting structural thing I observed here. In some ways, this volume had a similar structure to volume two. It's in two major parts, the first of which centers around a love obsession, and the second of which shows the narrator's world expanding and opening.
00:08:41
Speaker
But it is also structured around these dialogue heavy set pieces that now we've mentioned a few times that are foreshadowed at the beginning when they all the major players are gathered in different seats at the theater. And of course, the duchess de gemont has her own box.
00:09:00
Speaker
And it's clear that the real show is mostly the audience, that the show is not the art, but the spectators, which is what we then get over the course of the volume. We see the show of those spectators unfold before us. Can we also have a moment for her amazing dress that she's wearing in the box?
00:09:21
Speaker
It's a really good description. It's a description of a her. Correct me if I've conflated her with the other incredible toilette of the process de germont, which I don't think I have, but hers is sequined like armor, right? The duchess and the princess. It's like a fan fantastical feathered, very much softer creation. Anyway, yeah the contrast and delightful toilette. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Yeah. There's just some great fashion and this, yeah, there's all this stuff about shoe color anyway.
00:09:50
Speaker
It's a tragic scene that centres on shoe colour. You wouldn't think this is possible, but indeed.
Connections Across Volumes
00:09:56
Speaker
ah but Speaking of overall structure, I think of the broader Adarshash, I think one of the things I also found satisfying about reading this volume was maybe also because I'm now progressing in my proof of knowledge, was noticing connections to earlier volumes. For example,
00:10:12
Speaker
Saint-Louis lover Rachel turns out to be the sex worker that the narrator visited, just to talk to, and when when he was pining over Gilbert in Volume 2. The famous rose from ah the woman in pink from Volume 1, who's associated with a scandal.
00:10:29
Speaker
is revealed as actually having been Odette who's now Madame Swann. So everything feels so delicately layered and you're kind of getting rewards or by having your memory, which obviously is a key feature, um jogged as you keep reading. Right, your memory jogged but also replaced in a sense because these reinterpretations are really or ah these re-identifications perhaps are really jarring and have a huge effect on the previous memory as accurate as that one may have been.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, indeed. And sometimes that's the the jarringness is replicated in the narrative because that in that moment where Odette is revealed as the familes, the narrator says, okay, this is a digression. You'll see why it's worth it. um
00:11:16
Speaker
Right. While also introducing another character who doesn't come back, really, but then is going to be significant later. So it's everything is just so carefully built and which is part of what makes these books a world that you can get immersed in. I don't agree that world building is more associated with genre fiction but I can't think of a better phrase than that to describe what Proust is doing.
00:11:37
Speaker
No, I completely agree. it It really does. And it also has that sort of dreamy, absorptive quality that the best genre fiction has to, I mean, certainly not all, but where you just feel like it's truly going through a portal to another place. In this case, it almost feels like a portal to another time. No no no so shock there, given the title of the book we're working on. Is it world building or is it, oh gosh, I hate myself, time building?
00:12:03
Speaker
Ooh, well, that's a great segue into a more kind of academic way of thinking about thinking about this this text because you know the inter-volume references are also part of how Proust is drawing attention to the to the writing process, to writing yourself, to what would be called in those more academic terms, I guess, meta-text.
00:12:24
Speaker
metatextuality.
Metatextual Elements in Proust's Work
00:12:25
Speaker
So writers attend the salon, the characters discuss literature. Although this isn't heavy-handed, I really must emphasise to any people listening to this and considering reading. it's it's It's funny, you know, there's a moment where they're trying to, ah one of the characters references, I think, Salon Bou and ah the difference between a writer's letters and his novels. And they call that they can't remember the name of Flaubert,
00:12:48
Speaker
to discuss this. So like, is it full bear? Is it full bear? You know, so they're discussing it. Yeah, they're discussing it, not always expertly. Also the narrator in his kind of aside comments on the role of literature and writers in that world. And that is something that I really especially enjoyed this time too. I found it so skillfully interwoven with the dialogue, with the long social scenes and also in the more reflective passages. So you mentioned, for example, that Madame Bilparisi is a memoirist, and that's recurrently mentioned, so there's a sense in which the live action is already being written as it's also being described by the narrator, if you see what I mean, in all these kind of great extra positions of what what it what the what the scene looks like in the memoir as opposed to what it actually is.
00:13:37
Speaker
And as opposed to how it's being represented for us in the narrator's retelling, yeah right? because Because as artful as it is and as real as it feels, it's, of course, still a representation. um And who's to say that his version is more accurate or less accurate? Yeah, and yeah yeah parisi I love that. It feels really as though you're having, as as you're reading it, you're having a conversation with Proust where he's saying,
00:14:04
Speaker
yeah What do you think about how how stories work? right right and but Another example that I'll just mention very briefly is, so these yeah these are constantly interwoven in different ways into different parts of the book. So um in the very sad section where the grandmother is ill and dying, there's also a excursus into Berghut who's the writer that we've met before, into his career, he's very successful now. He's also ill actually, so it's like his body of work is successful as his physical body is too is dying um yes yeah And the narrator is kind of moving away from being such a huge fan of his work. And he says he's found a new writer that he really likes, but he writes these really complicated, long sentences. And so the read when he's reading, he can only get to the end of one in about a thousand of them, but it's really great and worth it when you do. So so yeah this kind of all these self-referential, meta-textual elements of the of the book are just so enjoyable.
00:15:01
Speaker
So yeah, I loved it. And yet, especially as I kept reading, getting into the second half, the more I was struck by the mood being kind of bleak or of these social scenes as well, being kind of depressing. I mean, there's also as another thing we don't really have time to go into in detail is there's the shadow of war with the military manoeuvres and the, oh God, Knopra and the German Fafenheim. isn't he? embrace yeah yeah And complaining about the English. Yeah, so I think there's a kind of shadow over over this text as well as there being kind of interplay between like funny, comic, almost, I don't know, joyous might be too far, but and then kind of melancholic aspect. Yeah, I thought this volume was deeply funny and really touching and sad, kind of an equal measure. And sometimes those two moments
00:15:55
Speaker
converge, really. and There was a lot of dwelling in this volume on les sprees de germonts, which is sort of the wit of the germonts, which they themselves deny existing, a thing as non-existent as the squared circle, according to the duchess who regarded herself as the sole germont to possess it. So she thinks that the real, I mean, the germonts by birth are not possessors of the germonts wit.
00:16:25
Speaker
But it is known in society that this family is supposed to be particularly spiritual, which means witty
Germant Wit and Social Emptiness
00:16:33
Speaker
or clever or, um I don't know, that's it that's one of the sort of untranslatable French words, right? But in practice, that wit is often superficial and cutting, and while it it may make you smile, it also ah really is one of the things that reveals the emptiness of the worldly set. Right, right. So if we think of it as the Garment vibe, it is slightly clever and funny and pleasurable to encounter, but also contains within itself that bleakness stuff that we're mentioning.
00:17:10
Speaker
Yeah, there's a great scene toward the end of this volume where Swann, although he's not a Gémont, he's strongly associated with this Gémont wit and the said to possess it. Swann and Monsieur de Gémont, the Duke, are having a conversation because Monsieur de Gémont has persuaded himself that a painting he owns is an unrecognized Velázquez.
00:17:34
Speaker
And so he asked his friend Swan, who's a known art connoisseur, about the painting, about his opinion. So here's what he says. But you're a dilettante, a master of the subject, to whom do you attribute it? You're enough of an expert to have some idea. What would you put it down as? Swan hesitated for a moment before the picture, which obviously he thought atrocious. A bad joke, he replied, with a smile at the duke who could not check an impulsive movement of rage.
00:18:07
Speaker
Yeah, the Duke. He's irascible. He's irascible. But this scene, even though it's clear, I mean, that's, that's very funny. um That's apparently, by the way, a witticism that, that a post actually heard in society and then transferred into his book. Yeah. According to the notes to my volume, which I was charmed by.
00:18:24
Speaker
I'll keep that. Yeah, he's like, that's a good one. but So but even though that is clearly a ah funny response, who would you what what would you put it down as? I would put it down as a bad joke. That's obviously making fun of Monsieur de Gemont's ambitions, revealing Swann's greater knowledge of the subject at hand. It's kind of punching up, as it were, because Monsieur de Gemont cannot really be hurt by the fact that this painting is worthless because he's so insanely rich.
00:18:53
Speaker
But even though it's definitely somewhat trenchant witticism, the scene is nevertheless quite bleak because Swann has shown up at the Guermont's house very visibly ill. The narrator says that he's horribly changed and it seems that he's come not only to talk to Madame de Guermont about some article that he's written recently, but also to announce to these who are putatively some of his better friends that he is dying
00:19:28
Speaker
But rather than inquire into his health when he shows up looking so unwell, Monsieur de Gamont immediately corners him for his own selfish purposes of authenticating something that is, in fact, inauthentic. And I find that just sort of that current runs throughout this whole scene, which has several very funny moments, but funny in the sort of gallows humor or bleak mode.
00:19:57
Speaker
So the whole idea of the joke is put into play in this bit when Madame de Guermont hears the news and she says, are you joking? Great. That's right. You will outlive us all, she says, which is, of course, a very um flippant thing to say to someone who's visibly deeply unwell and whose doctors have given him not long to live. And rather than stay in and perhaps spend time with her ill friend, she and Monsieur de Guermont must, they say, rush off. And yet when Monsieur de Guermont perceives that she is wearing black shoes with her red dress,
00:20:35
Speaker
he sends her back in to change into red shoes, even though they were theoretically in such a rush. Right. There's time for that, so but two this is a I doesn't actually die here, but he's dying and it's very affecting. So there's two major character dying scenes, I guess. And the other one is the grandmothers. And I think in both, it's interesting how other characters are in a rush.
00:21:04
Speaker
yeah ah yeah around them to do but to do something social. The doctor that the narrator takes the grandmother to see when she's had her episode in the in the park you is rushing to go out to dinner as well. And yes, yeah there's a sense that there's no time. There's no time to die. There's no time for the dying. There's all these these kinds of reflections here. It's also the relative importance of people, right? Because who is the grandmother to that doctor?
00:21:31
Speaker
You know? and but And in that case, it's true. Who is the grandmother to that doctor? That doctor is someone who sees dying people, presumably regularly as yeah part of his professional life. But for that same rush to come back in a innocent scene where it's between friends, where there should be a different attitude, that sort of repetition with a difference points it up all the more, the feeling that there's no time for death yeah when there's so much gaiety to be had.
00:21:59
Speaker
yeah and the living can't cope or can't confront it. and The narrator is fully there the whole time that his grandmother is experiencing her final illness, but at the same time he's kind of detached. It's a very disturbing and sad part of the book.
00:22:17
Speaker
But it felt somehow clinical. Am I am I wrong? It felt really um analytical and clinical. In fact, I was I was afraid um that I would find it really almost unbearable to read. um But I I didn't because there was this sort of.
00:22:35
Speaker
detachment. Whereas on the other hand, there's an earlier scene where the narrator is visiting his friend at his army barracks and calls his grandmother on the phone. Of course, the telephone is a new technology at this time and unreliable and subject to the whims of the women ah ah that work the switchboard, yeah which is evoked at length and very ah they you know beautifully and funnily.
00:23:00
Speaker
But they they lose the connection, which is not so unexpected in these early days of of telephone, nor is it so unexpected today, but now we know what to do, sort of. And the scene where they've lost connection between Paris and a nearby town, is i thought I found it more moving than the scene of her death, really.
00:23:22
Speaker
um Emma, would you like to read this passage? Yeah. This is the moment that they've lost that they've lost connection. And it is also, it's very moving because they are becoming more disconnected with each other as people as well. Yeah, right. The narrator almost, I don't know if this is over reading, but once she is visibly sick, he kind of almost takes it as a betrayal, do you think? Because ah in the beginning of the of the second part, he says, you know, she'd left me before she'd even left.
00:23:51
Speaker
And if it is also to do with him growing up. Yeah, he gets back from Donsieur and sees her when she doesn't see him yet and observes that she looks like a stranger, just like any old woman. So yeah, I do think there is a growing detachment.
00:24:07
Speaker
yeah there's all these forms of distance and detachment that are replicated in her dying. And I suppose that you could say that that is this is the pivotal moment for that. So their loss of connection is so symbolic as well as being really affecting in the moment. The narrator writes, my grandmother could no longer hear me. She was no longer no longer in communication with me. We had ceased to stand face to face to be audible to one another.
00:24:34
Speaker
I continued to call her, sounding the empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying. It seemed as though it were already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose her herself in the ghostly world, and standing alone before the instrument, I went on vainly repeating, grandmother, grandmother, as Orpheus, left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife.
00:24:58
Speaker
So sad. They think about them knocking and having their special communications in Volume 2. Right. But even even during their time in Babek, they draw further apart. yeah So they start from this place of knocking and then he discovers the world and then here he is visiting one of the people he had um befriended in Babek and away from her.
00:25:19
Speaker
um I also find it really interesting that he compares himself to Orpheus and puts his grandmother in the place of a lover. And I think part of what's happening here is the move from family to lovers. um Orpheus left alone. ah it's just really yeah It's something really moving about it, yeah. I continue to call her in the empty night. Her appeals also must be straying, so the idea that she'd be calling back and he just can't hear her. Yes, yeah. And I mean, i it in Doubtless, what's what makes it even more poignant is that Doubtless, he was right. you know Doubtless, she was at her telephone calling to him, um but their voices just couldn't reach each other. Oh, it's very moving.
00:26:05
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. I suppose it's also because the telephone is a less typical thing to use in that moment. But this is a kind of, it could be so banal. Yeah. So he leaves phone connection all the time, he's like, hello, hello.
00:26:24
Speaker
How many times do you hear someone on the train? You're just like, no, don't make phone calls on the train. Sorry, I'm in the train. ha yeah But out of that, in this particular historical moment of of the telephone, but also through his through his way of writing, through his way of thinking about these everyday things, made it so so sad and so beautiful. Yeah, I do think, I mean, that's not to reduce our reading experience to one pithy statement, but a lot of this book is about really ordinary things and looked at in an extraordinary way. Yeah, with like death underwriting the whole thing.
00:27:07
Speaker
all Always subtended by death. As are we all, Emma, really. But indeed, and yet laughing. That's exactly it, the bleak laughter of Volume 2. We're just replicating it, truly.
00:27:23
Speaker
But you know, ah it's not just bleakness and laughter in this volume. There's also this third mode, which I feel like I can't quite find the right word for it, but it's sort of a mode of aesthetic contemplation. Do you know what I'm talking about, Emma? Yeah, definitely.
00:27:43
Speaker
If we're agreeing on the same thing, there are these descriptive moments that are really pleasurable also because there's a sense that the narrator is taking pleasure in observation. And also that he's yeah describing something relatively commonplace in completely unexpected metaphorical language and that just sort of um fascinating, almost synesthetic
00:28:12
Speaker
juxtapositions of different sights and sounds and sensations from one realm to another. And some of my favorite examples of this are he has a tendency. ah we've I've picked out a couple examples for us to look at, but I would say it it already had started in previous volumes. He loves to describe people as aquatic beings. We had already talked about the nymphs in our last episode, but there seems to be a real fascination with society as a sort of aquarium or a play of water deities, I guess. Which, can I just say, do you remember that he is an investor in a water company?
00:28:54
Speaker
and i Indeed, I forgot. So he's just independently rich. Because of his water investments. that's right But he's also you know poetically invested in the water company, evidently. um One of these happens really early in this volume when he's at the opera in that sort of theatrical scene that we had already mentioned at the opera chromique, where he sees Laberma again and reevaluates her, much to his surprise. But honestly, to me, his reevaluation of Laberma, this is my perspective, is forgettable compared to the way that he sees those the stalls full of high society above him, or what do we call them? The boxes full of high society above him.
00:29:40
Speaker
I'll read just a short excerpt um so that you can see how they turn into watery kingdoms. On this side of them began the orchestra stalls, a bode of mortals forever separated from the transparent shadowy realm to which at points here and there served as boundaries on its brimming surface the limpid mirroring eyes of the water nymphs.
00:30:03
Speaker
For the folding seats on its shore, the forms of the monsters in the stalls were painted upon the surface of those eyes in simple obedience to the laws of optics and according to their angle of incidence. As happens, with those two sections of external reality to which, knowing that they do not possess any soul, however rudimentary, that can be considered as analogous to our own, we should think ourselves mad if we addressed a smile or a glance of recognition.
00:30:30
Speaker
Namely, minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced. Emma, can you paraphrase a little bit what he's saying? Because I think this is really a spectacular joke, but I'm afraid that the length of that sentence may have lost our listeners. Effectively, he's saying that the theatre is a seascape. Yes. And then there are kind of creatures on the shoreline? No? Who are kind of mirrored. Yes, on the eyes. Yeah, on the eyes. But it would be a mistake to recognise them. Well, it would have be a mistake to recognise them as the real beings because they are in fact
00:31:14
Speaker
mirror images and not real beings. And so then he makes this joke that you you wouldn't introduce yourself basically to a mirror image because it doesn't have a soul. You'd be like a lunatic if you were to introduce yourself to a mirror image. and And the things that do not have any souls here are name mineral yeah minerals and people to whom we have not been introduced.
00:31:42
Speaker
But it's deeply complicated. As you're in the sort of fugue state of the sentence, it's easy enough to sort of follow one proposition to the next, but then to summarize it actually becomes fiendishly complicated, um even though the delight of the joke, I think, is apparent for me almost immediately, but then to actually think of the underwater optical troubles that are also optical troubles that have to do with with literal eyes. Yeah. It's all really rather confusing. Proust Curious is brought to you in partnership with Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. You can find us at publicbooks.org. That's publicbooks.org. To donate to Public Books, visit publicbooks dot.org slash donate.
00:32:35
Speaker
So, so far we have talked about the social, we've talked about the emotional, we've talked about the literary, but this is also a really political volume which treats extensively like important current
Political Themes in Volume 3
00:32:53
Speaker
events. I mean, I've mentioned the shadow of war, the war in Europe, there's kind of shadows of the colonies as well.
00:33:00
Speaker
And in this volume, anti-Semitism, which is a recurring theme of the Rishash, and that we've mentioned already, becomes much more prominent. And this is the result of repeated and in-depth discussion of the Dreyfus affair, and also who is Dreyfusard or anti-Dreyfusard, like pro-org against Dreyfus, among the noator's acquaintances, and in these salon social aristocratic worlds, because it becomes an enormous question of belonging, both within friend groups and in Paris and in and in France. So, Hannah, what was the Dreyfus Affair? We have mentioned it before, but let's go into a bit more detail now. Yeah, we mentioned it briefly in our last episode, but the Dreyfus Affair was really the emblematic drama of the Third Republic. The Third Republic dated from 1871 to 1940.
00:33:52
Speaker
And it remains both a critical example of government malfeasance and a touchstone in the history of European antisemitism. Here's the sort of um TLDR version, although there are many twists and turns that are not fully covered here. In 1894, the Alsatian Jew Alfred Dreyfus, who was a captain in the French army, was wrongly condemned to a lifetime of forced labor and exile for the crime of having turned over military secrets to the German army. Now Ferdinand Wilson Esterhazy, another French officer, was the real traitor. But although he was brought to trial, he was acquitted on January 11, 1898. Two days later, Émile Zola published Jacques Hughes, an open letter to the president of the republic, which alleged that governmental collusion had led to Esterhazy's acquittal.
00:34:47
Speaker
Though this article provoked anti-Semitic and anti-Dreyfus demonstrations, it also more justly caused a new civil trial to begin for Dreyfus, and in 1899, he was released. And in 1906, he was finally officially pardoned.
00:35:04
Speaker
Weirdly, he used his freedom to serve once more the French army, which is not the decision I would have made, but... Yeah, he served in the First World War. Yes, so um very ah sort of impressive commitment to the patrie there from from Alfred, but this this ah I mean, a wrongful conviction that is ultimately overturned is sort of a ah tragic ah tragic comedy in the sort of most most literary historical sense. But his conviction and eventual acquittal really had an outsized effect on French society. it It was a situation that involved one man, but it really
00:35:45
Speaker
involved the whole country because of the amount of discourse it generated. Yeah, it became team Dreyfus, team anti-Dreyfus. Yes, you really see that in this volume. It's, I guess, a case study in the kind of polarisation that can happen when it gets infected by conspiracy theories, mistrust of government. you But it feels really like a kind of paradigm for some of what we continue to live through.
00:36:22
Speaker
Yeah, especially right now. Yeah, yeah. So Proust was Dreyfusard, he was a defender of Dreyfus's innocence, i.e. he was on what people love to refer to as the right side of history. ma He was, he was in us in this case. And yet, this volume mainly showcases the anti-Dreyfusard. It's a really a real variation of anti-Dreyfus characters, some of whom are so anti-Dreyfus that they're they arere also against the other anti-Dreyfusars for not being anti-Dreyfusar enough. right wait but
00:36:58
Speaker
And then Narita doesn't really show his cards that clearly. He's just like, I asked this person about the Dreyfus affair and we discussed it for a bit. I mean, right his friend San Lu is probably the most San Luen swan other Dreyfusar Well, and block, is but block is not really. Oh, yeah, of course, block. It doesn't really have a choice in the matter. No. Well, neither does Juan, right? Yeah, true. and According to the logic that prevails at this time, which is which the narrator skewers. But there iss there's one passage, I think, on his night out with Sang Lu, where it becomes clear that the narrator too inclines to support Dreyfus. But it's a very brief mention, and it's certainly the main point is not the narrator's point of view.
00:37:43
Speaker
Instead, the the Dreyfus affair becomes a lens through which certain things are revealed. One of those things is the latent antisemitism of the noble class and the bourgeoisie. But another is really about how we understand historical events and truths, which is a pretty massive theme to come up against.
00:38:09
Speaker
Also, what I was really struck by is how they're kind of addicted to this debate. Debator is a kind of funny word for it. It's the one point where the narrator goes home and to Vellie outside his house so also arguing about it, right the the way that this thing that affects this one man's real life, but also the makeup of a society and also the you know the lives of a vulnerable minority population become this obsession and almost like a pleasurable gossipy obsession for everyone else. Right. I mean, it had real political consequences too, but it is it is just sort of the topic of the day. It's like more of a conversation starter than really yeah something where you're reflecting about the actual lived consequences for different people.
00:39:00
Speaker
but so What it does reveal is the intense antisemitism of the Nobel class and the bourgeoisie. How casually and easily those who might have never expressed it so virally in other circumstances are able to draw on it.
00:39:16
Speaker
i mean There's some really shocking parts in this in this volume, I would say, especially Chiaolus, but we could also think about Odette, Madame Swann, who's married to a Jewish husband, and she really instrumentalises the antisemitism provoked by the Dreyfus affair to to shore up per state her social status. She becomes passionately anti t-Dreyfus so that she she can maintain her already slightly precarious position in with her friends. and yeah and previous In the previous episode, I think we talked about how her debt is, she's a person of fashion. She changes her style quite deftly, depending on what is the trend. right And when that's what flowers and crockery and clothes you have. right That's one thing. But then it's if it's how you feel about a whole group of people, it's pretty different. I mean, there's this passage which describes this happening. Madame Swann, seeing that I mentioned that the Dreyfus case had begun to assume and fearing that her husband's racial origin might be used against herself, had besought him never again to allude to the prisoner's in innocence.
00:40:24
Speaker
when he was not present, she went further and used to profess the most ardent nationalism, in doing which she was only following the example of Madame Vergiron, in whom a middle-class antisemitism, latent hitherto, had awakened and grown to a positive fury. Madame Swann had won by this attitude the privilege of membership in several of the women's leagues that were beginning to be formed in antisemitic society, and has succeeded in making friends with various members of the aristocracy, because that's the the other thing that you see here is that it becomes such a bond between those who are Dreyfus, pro-Dreyfus and anti-Dreyfus that it can transcend previously unbreachable social barriers and ah make aristocratic friends thanks to becoming a raging anti-Semite.
00:41:07
Speaker
ah Right, whereas before she was excluded because of having previously been a kokot, now she can penetrate those circles just because of nationalism. So again, this is it it's back to the kaleidoscope we discussed in the last volume, where different things come to prominence and other crystals, as it were, recede. And um so here we see the sort of optics of society.
00:41:29
Speaker
shifting, it no longer matters as much that she was once of the denimons, and instead it it matters much more that she ah says the things that people want to hear. Sharouz, on the other hand, has a much more, I mean, for Odette, it's so transparently instrumental that it's kind of hard to take seriously, particularly because she does have a Jewish husband, which is also an instrumental choice, right? All of this is instrumental for her. ah yeah But Sharouz's opinion is just wildly virulent. Having met Bloch at ah Madame de Villaparicis' house, or really having crossed paths with Bloch is maybe more accurate. He asks the narrator for more information after the narrator explains who this person Bloch was. Chardu says, it is not a bad idea if you wish to learn about life, ah to include among your friends an occasional foreigner.
00:42:23
Speaker
I replied that Bloch was French. Indeed, said Monsieur de Charles, I took him to be a Jew. Yeah, it's just so It's so flagrant. Charles, he goes on to suggest that Bloch might do an exotic performance for him um to sort of ah demonstrate his foreignness as ah as a spectacle. It's a completely bizarre passage that culminates with Chardu's saying, he might even, while he was about it, deal some stout blows at his hag, or as my old nurse would say, his hagach of a mother. So he's suggesting that Bloch beat up his mother as part of a spectacle. He gets way upset with Bloch's mother.
00:43:03
Speaker
And yes the narrator at one point is like, I think his mother actually is dead. That would be an excellent show. It would not be unpleasing to us, a my young friend, since we like exotic spectacles, and to thrash that non-European creature would be giving a well-earned punishment to an old camel. As he poured out this terrible, almost insane language, Monsieur de Chardu squeezed my arm until it ached.
00:43:31
Speaker
I mean, it's it's i mean it's completely um in so almost say it is insane. screaming when I read this. He travels into this bizarre fantasy of a camel. It's so horrific. And yet, I think Proust uses Charleuse to say something really important about what really is at the heart of this issue, which is about nationalism and identity and who is and isn't French.
00:44:09
Speaker
And that extends, you know, because Charlotte also brings in the kind of colonial viewpoint. He says, if we bring over Senegalese and Malagashis, I hardly suppose that their hearts will be in the task of defending France, which is only natural. natural He's basically saying that, you know, why even prosecute Dreyfus for for treason or any other person who he doesn't count as truly French? Right, it it there it's this sort of bizarre this bizarre turn where he's actually not anti-Dreyfus because he just doesn't consider him French at all. It's like he's so beneath Chardus' notice that it's not worth being anti-Dreyfus.
00:44:46
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In this kind of crucible of nationalism of the turn of the 20th century, you really see the precedence for what happens in later decades. And it's really, really horrifying both from an anti-Semitism and from a colonial point of view. Yeah. And the second thing that the Dreyfus affair really reveals in this volume is the way that Even with events as actually relatively simple, world historically speaking, as the wrongful conviction of an innocent man, the ways of accessing the truth are always only partial and are always sort of part
Complexity of Historical Truth
00:45:30
Speaker
of a larger picture, which it seems that no one really has access to while these things are going on and that can only be fully understood in retrospect.
00:45:40
Speaker
So we end up seeing Bloch trying to get at some kernels of information that seem to him really important to the defense of Dreyfus in Madame de Vieux Parises' Salon, but the narrator comments that Even if he had been able to access these these nuggets that he's mining for from Monsieur de Nois Poix, quote, it is seldom that these have any more value than a radiographic plate on which the layman imagines that the patient's disease is inscribed in so many words when, as a matter of fact, the plate furnishes simply one piece of material for a study to be combined with a number of others, which the doctor's reasoning powers will take into consideration as a whole and upon them found his diagnosis.
00:46:25
Speaker
So too the truth in politics, when one goes to well-informed men and imagines that one is about to grasp it, eludes one. Yeah, I think everything that we've been talking about does show Proust being extremely acute about political structures and truth and evidence. There's a kind of echo, but a version of the trial happening in this volume.
00:46:51
Speaker
I can't help thinking as well, this is also part of the bleakness of the volume. It's not <unk> not a hopeful account. I mean, why should it be given given what happens given what happens later and given already the kind of layers of irony that are present in Proust's kind of retrospective account of this, yeah know given that have I think when he's writing, or at least when he's writing later, Dreyfus is serving in the First World War, so are many Senegalese and Malgash people, um very right you know, all going into the churn of this hideous and confusing nationalism. The way that Proust has shown all this with his, he's turned his kind of laser-like observation to this and exposes what everybody is saying and all of the hypocrisy, and that is a kind of intervention in itself.
00:47:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's right. I think i think it is it is really saying how, in fact, the novel is in a way the perfect form for exposing these sorts of hypocrisies and logical fallacies that riddle the cultural conversation around what was happening to Dreyfus.
00:48:09
Speaker
So now we are at our final, final segment after this discussion of I think the longest volume of Al O'Shev. Is that right? I loved it, but it was deeply long.
00:48:24
Speaker
And this is the time to ask who are winners and losers of the volume R. Hannah, should we do winners first? Let's do winners first. Let's start on a high note instead of ending on a high note. Okay, who was your winner of Le Côte des Germantes? My winner was Orianne, a.k.a. the duchess de germont, a.k.a. Madame germont. We saw her as the princess de l'homme in Swan in Love, and now she is the duchess. She is my winner because she has beauty and brains. I'm not going to say further. Who is your winner, Emma?
00:49:08
Speaker
Okay, bear with me. I realise he's been a candidate at various points, but my winner of this um volume is the narrator. so ok he still Ah, still a bit of a loser for all the reasons that we still like him, even though he's a weirdo, like that bit where he cries in a but in a stack of carpets because he's disappointed. But I noticed that in this volume, people are giving him compliments.
00:49:34
Speaker
like Albertine, who we'll talk about more in future, is like, oh, you've got such nice eyes, you've got such nice hair. People are like, oh yeah, you're so charming. Everyone seems to like him, everyone ultimately seems to want him around. He is succeeding in penetrating these environments that he's been fascinated by since childhood.
00:49:51
Speaker
He's doing well. He's winning. They even tolerate it when he spends like hours admiring as steers and makes a whole dinner party late, um which is just like so the social discomfort of that and his total obliviousness. Anyway, okay, I buy it. I buy it.
00:50:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. he's He's got momentum, I feel. He's got momentum. Who was your loser, Emma? Okay, so I agonized about this because there's so many candidates. But my loser is Nochpois. Ah, Nochpois. Yes, a good loser. Continue. Yeah. Because he is so odious.
00:50:31
Speaker
And so transparently so. He's so, he's so two-faced. The way he blanks the narrator in the street, even though they know each other well. The way he's supposed to be friends with the narrator's dad, but he's not going to vote him into the academy. And then he just kind of drops off as well. So because of his connection with Vidpar, you see he's part of that group. But then he's just a kind of name mentioned incidentally, like later on, more, right?
00:50:58
Speaker
Yes, that's right. So he's also this incredibly pretentious and pompous man who is not really in high society anyway. Not that that's necessarily our value system, but ah yeah, those are the reasons why he is my loser of the volume. Fair, only fair. What about you? Who's your loser? My loser is, wait for it, I have a real shocker on deck. oh also Orianne, the winner and the loser. I thought about her as ah as a potential loser, actually. So when you said she was the winner, I was like, okay. I gave a really flip answer for why she was the winner. But I guess i in in the value system that the book is depicting, not necessarily the value system that the book has, she's clearly the winner, right? Like she's the queen bee. But in the value system that the narrator and one can assume Proust actually has, she's the loser.
00:51:50
Speaker
because she has this salon that's absolutely sterile where the same people come. They give up their promising careers to just stand around in dinner dress, seemingly. She has this tendency towards empty and sort of frivolous cruelty. She's constantly cheated on. Her wit is um only at a surface level. Like it doesn't seem that she profoundly understands any of the things that she's able to be clever about. And just in general, she ends up seeming like a hollow monster. Yeah, yeah i yeah I strongly considered her for being the loser for similar reasons, just because she's so mean. She's so mean. And vacuous.
00:52:41
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Hollow monster. Here, you've got it. Yeah, okay. That's a lesson for us all about popularity. Don't be a hollow monster. But where are we, Emma? How are we doing in in terms of the project as a whole? We're episode three. Right. so What's coming?
00:53:02
Speaker
Next, very excitingly, we have Sodom and Gomorrah, you for which given the title, I think we can expect to be a thrilling read again in another turn of a different version of the kaleidoscope.
00:53:19
Speaker
Yes, I think that's that's what we have. and i And I must say, still plunging further into the unknown for me. Yeah, I mean, same. All of this is is is new to me. I think this is the kind of turning point where will be over halfway at some point during the next volume. Really? Yes, because it gets shorter after Sodom and Gomorrah. Yeah, so we're roughly halfway now. Yeah, that's right.
Conclusion and Tease for Next Volume
00:53:44
Speaker
Well, that's it for this episode of Proust Curious. We hope we've piqued your curiosity. If you liked the podcast, please tell a friend about it. Proust Curious is hosted by Emma Glorson and Hannah Weaver and produced by Michael Goldsmith.
00:53:59
Speaker
you can reach us at prustcurious at gmail dot.com. We'd also like to thank our partner Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, arts and scholarship. Check it out at publicbooks.org. Join us next time for volume four, Sodom Igomach.