Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (65 page)

Two things need to be noted about this metamorphosis. First, it is strict- ly speaking a matter of will rather than of necessity, since not only does Swann’s culture read him as a fully assimilated gentile but Swann’s mother— the bearer, at least halakhically, of his Jewishness—is herself gentile; hence there is no reason for Swann to declare himself a Jew except the fact that he

wants to do so. Swann’s Jewishness is a matter of will or desire or, as I would prefer to think of it, a matter of performance—understood not in the Blochi- an theatrical sense but in the Austinian sense of the performative, as that pred- ication that enacts the very thing it describes. Indeed, it is doubly a matter of performance as it is registered in the text, since it is represented both as a speech act (“he cried out”) and as a physical act (“was returning to the fold”). This is important because it is from this chosen, this willed, this affirmed Jew- ishness that a physiological Jewishness flows. Having proclaimed himself a Jew, Swann’s very visage remolds itself in the guise of his newly affiremed identity:

Whether because of the absence of those cheeks, no longer there to mod- ify 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 phys- ical type that characterizes 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 antisemitic propaganda had reawakened. There are certain Jews, men of great refinement and social delicacy, in whom nevertheless there re- main in reserve and in the wings, ready to enter their lives at a given mo- ment, as in a play, a boor and a prophet. Swann had arrived at the age of the prophet.
(II:715–716)

It is in part, but not only in part, Marcel’s vision that defines Swann as a stereotypical Jew at the moment when Swann chooses to affirm his Jewish- ness. For his place in the picture gallery of stereotypes is quite exact. His can- cer remakes him in the image of the diseased Jew—the Jew as bearer of a phys- ical rot that reflects his moral condition; the description of his nose here could come out of any nineteenth-century stereotyping screed, and in its egregious phallicism (“enormous, tumid, crimson”) brings together all the associations typically ascribed to the Jew’s possession of that organ. Not that Swann is hy- perphallic here: to the contrary, he is exhausted, enervated, barely able to make it through the evening. But it is as if, having decided to affirm his Jew- ishness, having willed himself into Jewishness, Swann’s very physiognomy strains into a shape that has a robust life of its own. So, in affirming these stereotypes, Swann complicates them: his engorging nose proclaims his new life as a Jew even as his physical life comes to its end.

One can’t help but think at this moment of Gregh’s description of Marcel Proust’s own appearance, of the visage of the ancestral rabbi asserting itself as his face was transformed by time—so much so, in fact, that his most ostenta- tiously “Jewish” appearance is represented by his death photograph. But while we seem here to have traveled far from the Sodomite, in fact the text traces a line directly back to that figure one last, powerful time. For Swann’s wasted appearance here anticipates the final transformations of Charlus. I am think- ing of a passage near the end of the book where Marcel sees Charlus from afar and refers to him as the very type of the Sodomite; not recognizing him at first, he confuses his “purplish face” with those of “an actor or a painter, both equally notorious for innumerable sodomist scandals”; when the man greets him, Marcel recognizes Charlus and comments: “One may say that for him the evolution of his malady or the revolution of his vice had reached the extreme point at which the tiny original personality of the individual, the specific qualities he has inherited from his ancestors, are entirely eclipsed by the tran- sit across them of some generic defect or malady which is their satellite.” Just as Swann at the moment of his mortal illness has become the very type of the diseased Jew, so Charlus at the moment of his degradation has become dis- tilled into the quintessence of the invert: “He was himself,” Marcel continues, “but so perfectly masked by . . . what belonged not to him alone but to many other inverts” (III:787). If Charlus becomes as stamped with a racialized sex- uality as Swann with his newly affirmed Jewishness, however, a later series of metaphors link Charlus to the same tragic theatrical grandeur with which Swann is earlier invested. Charlus appears at the Guermantes’s utterly trans- formed: his apoplexy and his cessation of the dying of his hair “had the effect, as in a sort of chemical precipitation, of rendering visible and brilliant all that saturation of metal which the locks of his hair and beard, pure silver now, shot forth like so many geysers, so that upon the old fallen prince this latest illness had conferred the Shakespearean majesty of King Lear” (III:891). The lan- guage of prophetic greatness, ascribed earlier to the Swann, falls here upon the Sodomite; and it is entirely appropriate that it should fall to Charlus, rather than any of the rather unsympathetic social kin, to pronounce a final bene- diction upon Swann (although the narrator, true to form, gives his words a less than sympathetic reading): “Hannibal de Bréauté, dead! Antoine de Mouchy, dead! Charles Swann, dead! Adalbert de Montmorency, dead! Boson de Talleyrand, dead! Sosthène de Doudeauville, dead!” (III:894). In this roll call of dead aristocrats, only one commoner is included: the fully self-identified Jew, Charles Swann. In so doing, Charlus ironically reverses the pattern he has established not only in his antisemitic responses to Bloch but in his opposi- tion between Francité and Jewishness. He acknowledges not only his own

mortality but also that of his class precisely through the figure he has defined as its antithesis: the figure of the Jew.

• • •

There are three implications to my argument, and I want, in conclusion, to step back from Proust a bit to comment further on the ways in which we un- derstand the construction of Jewishness and queer identities at a particularly salient historical moment in the establishment of both; to sharpen our un- derstanding of Proust’s performative representations of Jewishness in this text; and, finally, to use a comparison to Proust to redirect understandings of iden- tity that grow out of a postmodern theory skeptical of the processes through which identity is established—one of the chief uses of Proust’s encounter with Jewishness in the otherwise thoroughly diverse Kristeva (who warns Hannah Arendt, and the rest of us, against the very desire to belong to a race, a nation, a religion), Marks (who uses Proust to insist on redefining Jewishness under the sign of Marrano identity, that is, as a transgressive, hidden heterodoxy rather than an affirmative, and hence sexist and heterosexist orthodoxy), and Sedgwick (who dances toward and away from Proust’s Jewishness in order to affirm a subversive understanding of identity based on a transgressive sexual affirmation and character). Proust, I want to argue in conclusion, is indeed skeptical in ways similar to these critics—but skeptical, as well, of the skepti- cism that they exemplify. And his skepticism, I want to suggest, is based on his sense of the urgency of his own historical moment, his awareness of the moral weight of affirming Jewishness in a historical context in which (as it is not for Kristeva, Sedgwick, and Marks, or for that matter myself ) that affir- mation has had socially problematic consequences.

The first of these issues is I think the easiest to address; the remarkably rich interchange of meanings that Proust draws forth from the interplay be- tween Jewish and sexually transgressive identities over the course of his text (and, for the purposes of space and sanity, I have only begun to discuss them) reminds us that the relation between these two forms of alterity at the moment of the fin de siècle and/or modernity might best be characterized not as an identity or even a dialogue but rather as a crossroads, a space at which assimilating Jews (gay and straight) and gay men and women (Jew- ish and gentile) encountered each other, directed by cultural road signs that led them to that spot, but still able to conduct an enormous amount of imaginative business there. Later in the century, of course, that space be- came shadowed by the concentration camp; later still it became a place where a remarkable amount of imaginative and creative work has been and

is being done, one in which the reimagining of both Jewish and queer iden- tities is underway.

But speaking as a historically minded critic, it is important not to move too fast to the disasters and the recoveries of the later twentieth century: not to see catastrophe as inevitable even as one reckons with the work that flour- ishes after its completion. Instead, we need to follow Proust to use it to chart a careful discrimination of differences. For Proust’s insistence in bringing the Jew and the Sodomite together at the moment of their most insidious confla- tion is to insist on the incompletion of the interplay between race and de- sire—of the ways that cultural ascriptions and individual identities do
not
fit together; in so doing he makes us aware with remarkable prescience of the ways that a racializing culture will attempt to do precisely that with all its var- ious others. To give one delightfully droll Proustian example, we learn that “vulgar people” respond to the Princesse de Guermantes’s alleged love of M. de Charlus, “combined with what was gradually becoming known about the latter’s way of life,” by hinting that she has influenced her husband into be- coming a Dreyfusard because she is herself either a Jew, an invert, or a Wag- nerite, and, as we all know, “whenever you come across a Dreyfusard, just scratch a bit. Not far underneath you’ll find the ghetto, foreign blood, inver- sion, or Wagneromania” (II:1180). Rarely have the bizarre metonymic con- flations of a racializing logic been put under clearer—or funnier—display; by the end of the passage, Wagneromania, that supreme instance of musical an- tisemitism and hystericized, hypertrophied masculinity, has been transformed into irrefutable proof of inversion and Jewishness alike. It is precisely this kind of amalgamation of seemingly similar others into a common pool of alteri- ty—in its positive or its negative form—that Proust’s text warns us against over and over again; and it is the temptation to do that that we need to bear in mind in the current critical moment as much as in Proust’s own.

But it is to see something else as well: that the discourse on Jewish iden- tity is susceptible of ambiguity, multivalence, and play as is the discourse on queer identity, and for many of the same reasons. Indeed, I have been argu- ing that for Proust the veiled self-identification as a gay man his text enacts may well be more stable—more fully articulated, more richly signposted— than the text’s complex and knotty discourse on Jewishness; and that this in- terplay represents an important act of self-veiling on Proust’s part: Proust closets himself as a Jew by opening the closet door to reveal, however par- tially, sexual identity and affiliations. In so doing, however, he does some- thing else as well: he opens up the signification of the term
Jew
to the same play of ontological and epistemological uncertainty he creates through his anatomization of sexualities. Swann and Bloch, to restrict ourselves only to

these two among the welter of Jewish characters we encounter in this text, represent not only the gap between assimilated versus nonassimilated Jewish families but also the split between Western and eastern European Jews, French-speaking and Yiddish-speaking Jews, perhaps Sephardic and Ashke- nazic Jews (many French Jews being of the former category, Bloch defini- tively being of the latter) and second and third-generation Jews. Jewishness, in other words, stands for Proust (contra Kristeva) not as a marker of group identity but a case study in the factitiousness of any such identity: the only thing that unites the various Jews in the novel into a coherent group at all is the prejudice against them.

As such, Jewishness in Proust’s text has the further property not only of calling into question the coherence of out-groups, but also that of in-groups. When Swann calls the aristocrats a “different race,” he not only recasts them in the image of his own racial difference but reminds us that, despite the claims of figures like Charlus for the inevitable linkage between aristocratic identity and organic French nationality, “the thousand years of feudalism in [their] blood” is very much a mixed matter. Given the notorious interrelation of the ruling families of Europe, both the older language of “blood” and the newer one of “race” that supplements it make the connections between the French nobility and that of other nations a problematic one indeed—an inti- macy heightened by the rise of the new, militarized nation-state of Germany, out of a rubble of principalities and duchies, into a threat to
La Belle France
. In such a situation the best gloss on the thoroughly internationalized aristoc- racy is none other than those international hybrids, Jews. And the affinity be- tween the two is only enhanced by the novel’s recognition, established early in the novel’s account of the Dreyfus affair and confirmed late in its repre- sentation of the First World War, that, given another spin in the wheel of time, those very links expose aristocrats to precisely the obloquy to which they have subjected Jews. As Marcel puts it, in the 1890s,

Everything Jewish, even the elegant lady herself [Lady Israels, i.e., Roth- schild] went down, and various obscure nationalists rose to take its place. The most brilliant salon in Paris was that of an ultra-Catholic Austrian Prince. If instead of the Dreyfus case there had come a war with Germany [as of course there had been by the time Proust wrote these words], the pattern of the kaleidoscope would have taken a turn in the other direc- tion. The Jews having shown, to the general astonishment, that they were patriots, would have kept their position, and no one would any longer cared to go, or even have admit that he had ever gone any longer to the Austrian Prince’s.
(I:557)