Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (64 page)

In Charlus’s comically failing attempts to veil his own sexuality, Proust finds a witty—if not dialectially apposite—idiom for thinking about Bloch’s fallible assimilation. And vice versa. When Madame de Verdurin convinces Morel to break, publicly and humiliatingly, with Charlus, Marcel writes:

My sole consolation lay in the thought that I was about to see Morel and the Verdurins pulverised. . . . Instead of which, an extraordinary thing happened. M. de Charlus stood speechless, dumbfounded, measuring the depths of his misery without understanding its cause, unable to think of

a word to say, raising his eyes to gaze at each of the company in turn, with a questioning, outraged, suppliant air, which seemed to be asking them not so much what had happened as what answer he ought to make. And yet M. de Charlus possessed all the resources, not merely of eloquence but of audacity. . . . But in these instances he had the initiative, he was on the attack, he said whatever came into his head (just as Bloch was able to make fun of the Jews yet blushed if the word Jew was uttered in his hearing).
(III:321)

The reference to Bloch in this passage invests Charlus—that Montesquiou- like representative of the traditional order and aristocratic prejudices—with a vulnerability and pathos that is borrowed from the frequent object of his oblo- quy, the Jew. His uncertainty at this moment in the text sutures the two under the sign of isolation and vulnerability and reaches its climax when the familiar language of Jewish pathology is brought to bear on Charlus later in the passage, where he is called “sensitive, neurotic, hysterical . . . genuinely impulsive but pseudo-brave”: code words for “Jew” in post-Charcot France as in European culture in general. Here, the language of the Jewish “Race Maudite” returns, but not in its juridico-medical context: rather, it names Charlus’s sense of exclusion, isolation, and loss. And in so doing it transforms the text’s representation of both the Sodomite and the Jew—endowing, if only by implication, the egre- gious Bloch as well as the outrageous Charlus with a certain pathos, if not dig- nity, even—or especially—at the moment of the latter’s discomfi e.

What is implied here is that both the closeting Jew and the closeted ho- mosexual must constantly be on guard at having their identities named in public, must constantly adjust their personae in order to deny that they are that which everyone knows them to be. But—to give this conjunction one last spin—it is the Jew and not the Sodomite whose wish to closet himself is successfully achieved, and achieved precisely through the ability to play with surfaces. Thus from this moment on the paths of Charlus and Bloch diverge; the former declines as he is unveiled as the “pervert” that he is covertly al- ready known to be: but the latter flourishes as a fully assimilated gentile rather than the Jew whom everyone also knows him to be. When Marcel meets Bloch at the home of the new Princesse de Guermantes, Bloch is now a successful novelist who has married one of his daughters to an aristocrat and renamed himself Jacques du Rozier. The name, Seth Wolitz reminds us, ironically (and deflatingly) chimes with that of the Rue des Rosiers, the cen- tral street of the Parisian ghetto; but just as that street is successfully con- cealed by Rozier’s phonetic play (s/z
avant la
Barthesian
lettre
) so too is his appearance:
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I had difficulty in recognising my friend Bloch, who was in fact no longer Bloch since he had adopted, not merely as a pseudonym but as a name, the style of Jacques du Rozier, beneath which it would have needed my grandfather’s flair to detect the “sweet vale of Hebron” and those “chains of Israel” which my old schoolmate seemed definitively to have broken. Indeed, an English
chic
had completely transformed his appearance and smoothed away, as with a plane, everything in it that was susceptible of such treatment. The once curly hair, now brushed flat, with a parting in the middle, glistened with brilliantine. His nose remained large and red, but seemed now to owe its tumescence to a sort of permanent cold which served also to explain the nasal intonation with which he languidly de- livered his studied sentences, for just as he had found a way of doing his hair which suited his complexion, so he had found a voice which suited his pronunciation . . . And thanks to the way in which he brushed his hair, to the suppression of his moustache, to the elegance of his whole fig- ure—thanks, that is to say, to his determination—his Jewish nose was now scarcely more visible than is the deformity of a hunch-backed woman who skilfully arranges her appearance. But above all—and one saw this the moment one set eyes upon him—the significance of his physiognomy had been altered by a formidable monocle. By introducing an element of machinery into Bloch’s face this monocle absolved it of all those difficult duties which a human face is normally called upon to dis- charge, such as being beautiful or expressing intelligence or kindliness or effort. . . . Behind the lens of this monocle Bloch was now installed in a position as lofty, as remote and as comfortable as if it had been the glass partition of a limousine and, so that his face should match the smooth hair and the monocle, his features never now expressed anything at all.

(III:995–996)

This passage is one of the most savagely satirical in the book, but also, like all of Proust, does not resonate in its full irony unless one takes it at (as it were) face value. For
that
, the value of a face as a true marker of racial identi- ty, is precisely what is at stake here. Through his “determination”—his will— to pass as a gentile, Bloch has determined—recast—his very appearance and hence, according to Marcel, his very self. But it’s precisely the spectaculariza- tion of the Jew’s appearance that Bloch continually exemplifies—not only in his first appearance at the tent in Balbec but in his appearances in Madame de Villeparisis’s salon, where he is compared to figures in Oriental (and Ori- entalist) tapestries—that makes his passing possible. Indeed, like other Jews

in the text—the great actress Berma or her would-be successor “Rachel-when- from-the-Lord”—Bloch responds to a culture that responds to him as a visu- al spectacle by becoming a kind of performer. Or, to put it another way, pre- cisely because he understands his Jewishness as a performance, Bloch assimilates by changing his costume: straightening his hair, placing a mono- cle on his prominent Hebraic proboscis, pronouncing his words (as we later learn) with a faux English drawl.

The success of his efforts is acknowledged by the text as it turns away from the antisemitic topoi it has previously invoked. For Bloch’s face no longer can be interpreted in the language of Jewish legibility attached to it earlier. The pas- sage swarms with references to a kind of visual semiotics, as did the previous descriptions of Bloch, but here the semiosis is a strictly negative one: his face can no longer be read, the significance of his nose has altered; his features ex- press “never anything at all.” As such, Bloch can be read as achieving the ulti- mate in assimilation; but his impassive and unreadable visage also betokens a malleable or metamorphosing identity that the text associates with the very lin- eaments of modernity. Smooth, limousinelike (a significant trope in the novel, as in Proust’s life, for a kind of rapid motion that defines the emerging order), Bloch (or “du Rozier”) exemplifies the kinds of identity that emerge in the con- temporary world: mobile, performative, produced for effect and effect alone.

As in contemporary conservative polemics—Eliot’s “Burbank With a Baedecker, Bleistein with a Cigar” was written in 1912, the year before
Swann’s Way
first appeared in print—Proust would seem to be associating the fully assimilated Jew with modernity at its most malign. Floating free of any organic social ground, the Jew here betokens the degradation of cultural co- hesion as fully as he does in Eliot’s poem—or, more precisely, in the antise- mitic writings of Drumont, in those of Proust’s friend Leon Daudet, or in those of his acquaintance Barrès.
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But even more is at stake here than culture at large. For in a work that intensely ties questions of value to the matter of writing—and where Marcel is constantly worrying about his fitness to write the text that we are reading—Bloch’s writerly perversion of stable criteria of cultural value achieves a special kind of perniciousness. And more: Bloch as a sign of the degradation of culture is explicitly posed as a comic threat to—or potential within—Marcel himself, one with which he is frequently (and com- ically) confused. On the one hand his Combray neighbor Mme de Sazerat “was firmly persuaded that I was the author of a certain historical study of Philip II which was in fact by Bloch” (I:186); on the other Bloch plagiarizes shamelessly from Marcel’s journalistic contributions to the
Figaro
. Bloch stands as a kind of a perverted double of Marcel himself, a representative of

Marcel’s emergence into the world and work of writing who shadows writing itself with the aura of the fraudulent, the counterfeit, that was so frequently associated with the figure of the assimilating Jew. That is, insofar as the Jew is constructed in European culture as someone who enters into society as a mimic of gentile identity—as the “Other within,” in Jonathan Boyarin’s fe- licitous phrase, who takes on all the features of the gentile as he worms his way into the culture—Bloch’s Jewishness manifests itself most fully as he models himself on Marcel, even as he lords it over him, and suggests, by the logic of metonymy that takes over racial representation in this novel, that Marcel himself as writer, as intellectual, is himself a kind of Jew like Bloch.

From the impersonality of
écriture
to the destabilizing play of parodic self- representation, writing and the revelation of Jewishness are here intimately connected yet again. But at this moment it is Jewishness as a
taint
, a stain on the work of writing, that obsesses Proust’s text: as it moves from metaphor to metonymy, from a stable figure for perversion to a proliferating instance of perversion itself, Jewishness comes closer and closer to Proust himself, shad- owing first literary production and then the narrator with suggestions of in- authenticity and fraudulence. From here to a direct reflection on the closet- ed—but only partially closeted—Jewish identity of the author himself is only one small step. One would be tempted to stop here again and diagnose the portrayal of Bloch as a clear case of that peculiarly modern malady, self- hatred—in this case, using tactics exactly like Charlus’s or Bloch’s by indict- ing someone else for something you fear yourself to be accused of—but for one thing: Bloch (and hence Marcel—and hence Proust) possesses another, far less equivocal, double in the text: Charles Swann. I won’t—I
can’t
—go into enormous detail with respect to the representational issues raised by Swann, except to suggest that, even more than Bloch, he comes to terms with his Jew- ishness in such a way as to redefine the potentialities of Jewish character and identity alike. If Bloch learns that he can transcend his innate Jewishness by redefining its outward marks of signification, Swann follows a precisely op- posite trajectory. This Jew who can pass in the highest circles of the aristocra- cy, who is admitted to the Jockey Club, nevertheless comes to reject the anti- semitism of that world and to reaffirm his identity as a Jew on a strictly voluntary basis. And like Bloch he too undergoes a metamorphosis, but one with an utterly different outcome. As a result of this volitional choice he grows physiologically into a racial identity he has chosen to avow.

The evolution of Swann’s Jewishness takes place over a long period of time in the novel; indeed, early on, he is a prime example of successful-seeming as- similation. While his father is descended from Jews and performs the arche- typal Jewish role of stockbroker, his mother is not, and, moreover, Swann is

accordingly perceived in confused terms by Combray. He is, Marcel’s antise- mitic grandfather makes clear, “of Jewish birth” (“d’origine Juive”) as opposed to Bloch, who is unmistakably “a Jew” (“un Juif ”; I:98); although Marcel’s mother mocks him for his Jewish origins. Swann’s Jewishness is barely men- tioned in that piece so spectacularly identified with him,
Swann in Love
, al- though, as David Halperin has reminded me, it is clearly the subtext of many of the “nucleus’s” responses to him. Swann as the representative of
amour fou
might be thought of as representing the characteristic Jewish tendency toward sexual depravity, but the text goes on to demonstrate similar tendencies in many of its characters: Charlus’s love for Morel has exactly the same structure. So does Saint-Loup’s for Rachel and Marcel’s for Albertine.

Swann, far more than Bloch, in other words, represents the ambiguous sta- tus of assimilating Jews in later nineteenth-century France. The welter of con- flicting perceptions of Swann by his gentile friends and neighbors places him both within and without the ambit of both Francité and Jewishness at one and the same time. As such, it might be added, Swann becomes one of those tragic- comic figures of mixed race and/or affiliation who populate modernist fiction: he is like the gentile–enamoured Jew Leopold Bloom of
Ulysses
, to cite one contemporaneous example, or, to cite another, more tragic case, like the mixed-race Joe Christmas of Faulkner’s
Light in August
. Indeed, like Faulkner’s (but unlike Joyce’s) character, Swann is finally forced to choose an affiliation for himself out of the welter of possible ones that he might affirm. Ill with can- cer, sick at heart over the Dreyfus affair, Swann affirms his Jewishness—a fact that appears to Marcel as a species of absolute physical metamorphosis. Al- though he thinks that Swann has been much “changed” due to his illness (an illness that is explicitly linked to Swann’s
gentile
mother), it’s clear that this change is the result not only of his new, lower status in the world as a result of his marriage to Odette but also his newfound sense of himself as a Dreyfusard and Jew. Swann, for example, ascribes the Guermantes’s anti-Dreyfusism to an- tisemitism, a charge Marcel refutes (they are, at various times, both right); the narrator then adds the phrase: “besides, having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is being tormented, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers” (II:603). It is as if Swann has decided to become a Jew to register his solidarity with his own people at a moment of their persecution.