Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (63 page)

As such—in its relative and ramifying ambiguity, in its ultimate but pro- ductive undecidability—this representation of Jewishness mirrors Proust’s re- sponse to his origins, and before passing onto the reading I am sketching for the
Recherche
, I need to further explore intricacies of Proust’s descent and of his dealings with that complex fate. For here, as in the
Recherche
, the facts are clear but their meaning is (technically) undecidable, and that undecidability raises the most profound questions about the nature and meaning of both Jewishness and of identity
tout court
—of whether identity is individually cho- sen or socially constructed and, if the latter, racially mandated or culturally rendered. Proust’s much beloved mother was the daughter of a hyperassimi- lated but Jewish-identified family; although she married a Catholic, she never converted and continued, quietly, to observe Jewish holidays. Proust himself was raised a Catholic and identified himself as such, but he was increasingly drawn to sympathies with Jews and Jewish causes, particularly during the Dreyfus affair.
12
And, to heighten the ambiguity, his appearance was ostenta- tiously Jewish, at least as that appearance was construed in the racializing cli- mate of fin-de-siècle France, and this fact did not go unnoticed among his

friends. In his
Profils Juifs de Marcel Proust
Jean Recanati amusingly catalogs the cascade of periphrases that Proust’s friends used to describe his visage, each and every one a significant synonym for the tabooed term “Jew”: “assyr- ian,” “un prince persan,” “un beau visage oriental,” “sa face exsangue et sa barbe noire de Christ armenéen.”
13
What’s striking in this parade of evasion is the necessity for evasiveness at all, a necessity nicely captured in Recanati’s final quotation, from Proust’s friend Fernand Gregh—the model, many think, for the egregious Bloch: “One night, after having let his beard grow, it seemed all of a sudden as if an ancestral rabbi reappeared from behind the charming Marcel we once knew” (Recanati 68). Hidden but visible, euphe- mized but clearly referenced by those very euphemisms, Proust’s own Jewish appearance proclaimed an identity that he could neither confirm nor deny— and one that seemed in his circle to be exterior or even antithetical to the “Marcel charmant que nous connaissions.” Indeed, to look at Man Ray’s fa- mous photograph of Proust’s corpse still in its deathbed is to witness this un- mistakably Jewish visage as it were etched onto the face of the foppish dandy familiar from earlier photographs: the small, neatly trimmed moustache and the carefully parted hair giving way to a full beard and long locks; the nose, prominent but not overpowering in earlier pictures, giving way to one pow- erfully, indeed tumescently, Jewish.
14

Proust’s identity as a Jew, then, is undecidable in the technical sense, be- cause it is bound up in the question of what it is to be a Jew in an antisemit- ic Europe where the “one-drop” theory of racial identity was coming to gov- ern the definition of Jewishness as forcefully as it did that of African Americans in the U.S.
15
Despite his own efforts to foreground his Catholic upbringing, both halakhically—in terms of Jewish law—and in terms of his culture’s racializing logic, Proust was defined as Jewish either by virtue of his maternal descent (according to the logic of rabbinic Judaism) or by his “blood” (according to the logic of antisemitism). To be sure, Proust spent most of his life identifying himself as a non-Jew, in ways at once sincere and obsequious, but he also affiliated with the cause of Dreyfus at a moment of resurgent antisemitism in the very midst of those circles in which, as Tadié delicately puts it, he would “have much to lose” (302). For Proust, in other words, Jewishness was a problem that cut to the core not just of his own iden- tity but of the question of where identity comes from—and of how it might be interwoven with race, nation, and subjectivity. What it is to be a Jew meant, for Proust, to ask questions like these: where does a sense of one’s being come from—one’s mother? one’s father? one’s culture? one’s self (whatever that is)? To what extent can it be willed, performed, or signified; avoided, evaded, or embraced? To what extent is it written into one’s appearance, one’s genes,

one’s very body? To what extent is it the product of cultural ascriptions be- yond one’s control—or even knowledge? How to reckon with that identity in the midst of new configurations of race and nation?

Consider the complications of Proust’s multiple identifications in the fol- lowing, famous, episode. The day after enduring an antisemitic tirade from his friend, the Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Proust responded with the fol- lowing letter:

Yesterday I did not answer the question you put to me about the Jews. For this very simple reason: though I am a Catholic like my father and brother, my mother is Jewish. I am sure you understand that this is rea- son enough for me to refrain from such discussions. I thought it more re- spectful to write this to you than to answer you in the presence of a third person. But I very much welcome this occasion to say something to you that I might never have thought of saying. For since our ideas differ, or rather, since I am not free to have the ideas I might otherwise have on the subject, you might, without meaning to, have wounded me in a discus- sion. I am not, it goes without saying, referring to any discussion that might take place between the two of us, for then I shall always take an in- terest in any ideas on social policy which you should choose to expound, even if I have a most fitting reason for not sharing them.
16

The sheer diplomacy involved in this performance is impressive, partic- ularly if the antisemitic ravings of Charlus bear any relation to the “tirades” of Montesquiou. But what’s more impressive is the way the text articulates the terms of its author’s identity, revealing and concealing, “closeting” and “outing” the author at one and the same time. The syntax of the first clause—“Si je suis catholique comme mon père et frère,” “while” or “where- as I am Catholic like my father and brother”—resonates with identification with a gentile masculine identity; the bluntness of the second clause (“ma mère est Juive,” “my mother is Jewish”) reminds his reader (and himself?) that he is by the fact of his birth directly implicated in the very Jewishness the rest of this sentence would disavow.
17
Significantly, these kinds of ef- fects—the effects of affirmed distantiation, of claiming and disavowing an identity at one and the same time—are effects that can only be obtained in the very form that Proust writes about choosing to employ, namely, writing. As the passage suggests, by invoking the formal properties of
writing
(both the mediated impersonality of
écriture
and the conventions of self-expression allowed by the French epistolary tradition), Proust can negotiate the delicate tasks of confronting his friend without losing his friendship, of affirming his

own Jewishness without connecting it to the strikingly visible signs of his “race.” By putting his identity into writing, Proust can out himself as a Jew while (quite literally) saving face.
18

And this moment not only provides a model for thinking about the ways Proust rewrites his own identity within the confines of the
Recherche
, it also indexes Proust’s use of the Jew-queer equation within that text. Biographical- ly, Proust seems to have been far more “out”—far more open in his dealings with—his sexuality than his Jewishness; for in the circles Proust wished to enter it was the latter, rather than the former, that brought with it the touch of exoticism, the whiff of deviancy. This is not to say that Proust’s sexuality was a matter he could openly declare in all contexts. His desire to shield his mother from a knowledge she in all likelihood possessed may have been, as Sedgwick reminds us, strictly comic; but French society was hardly free from homophobia, and a number of press-hyped homosexual scandals in England and Germany could only have reinforced for Proust the powers of social re- pression in a world governed by a scandal-obsessed media. However, if Proust could be safe as a lover of men anywhere in France, it would be in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. As Eugen Weber has observed, the dandyism that formed one powerful model for aristocratic male identity in Belle Epoque France meant that traditionalist attitudes toward
la patrie
and its institutions could coexist quite peacefully with non-normative sexualities of all sorts.
19
Thus the diatribes of Drumont conspicuously did not linger over the charge (common elsewhere in Europe and later in France)
20
that homosexuality and Jewishness were virtual synonyms. To cite a more relevant example to Proust, the arch-reactionary Montesquiou was so open about his sexuality that he is buried next to his lover.

In Belle Epoque France, and especially in the circles in which Mon- tesquiou and Proust, Charlus and Swann, all moved, however, Jewishness was an entirely different matter. The Dreyfus affair marked a new style of anti- semitism in France, one that identified Jews—legitimated by the universalist rhetoric of the Revolution and granted full citizenship by Napoleon—not as full citizens but as an alien excrescence in the national body. (As Charlus re- sponds when Marcel tells him Bloch is a Frenchman: “Indeed . . . I took him to be a Jew.” [II:297].) This new style of antisemitism was motivated, histori- ans tell us, by a number of different factors, including a burst of immigration from the Russian Empire, capitalist debacles at home, and the search for a scapegoat following the national humiliation inflicted by the newly unified German nation-state in 1870. Whatever its causes, this new form of anti- semitism was firmly, and powerfully, conjoined with two principles on the right: an almost hystericized nationalism with particular animus directed at

Germany and a powerful identification of
la France
with the aristocracy, the Catholic Church, and the Army.
21
During and after the Dreyfus affair both antisemitic attitudes and the collage of attributes the right called
Francité
— the undefinable yet irrefutable sense of Frenchness—found a home not only in the provincial backwaters but in the fashionable aristocratic circles in which Proust was moving. As Swann wryly puts it while discussing the anti- Dreyfus opinions of his friend, the Duc de Guermantes, “After all, young or old, men or women, when all’s said and done these people belong to a differ- ent race, one can’t have a thousand years of feudalism in one’s blood with im- punity” (II:604). And despite his quite pronounced Dreyfusism (“I am the first Dreyfusard,” Proust famously proclaimed), Proust seems to have spent much of his time in the Faubourg Saint Germain minimalizing his own Jew- ish origins, responding to the antisemitism of a Montesquiou or a Maurice Barrès with the kinds of half-measures we have seen above, and even going so far as to dedicate
The Guermantes Way
to one of the most notorious anti- semites of his literary world, Léon Daudet.
22

In such a setting the Sodomite/Jew conjunction works to allow Proust, under the cover of investigating the first of these phenomena, the room to anatomize the second: to reckon with an increasingly heterogeneous social sphere where Jews and racially mixed characters like himself were entering into, mixing with, and becoming the socially powerful and prominent—and to reckon as well with the changes that this loaded process might make in the reconstruction of national and racial categories, at a moment when they were undergoing utter transformation. This multiple process is clearest, perhaps, in the relation between Bloch and the text’s prime example of sexual perversity, the Baron de Charlus. For if, as Sedgwick has so powerfully argued, the com- plicated dynamics of sexual veiling and openness that organize knowledge in the novel (self-knowledge, knowledge of others, social knowledge) are best demonstrated by the case of Charlus, so Charlus’s comically failing conceal- ment of his sexual proclivities are best glossed by Bloch’s attempts to “pass” as an antisemite. Indeed, the network of allusions that knits the two together is tightly bound from the first, since Charlus’s attempts to “pass” as a straight man are compared by the narrator with reference to the most aggressively self- hating tactics of assimilated Jews. (His frequent denunciations of homosexu- als are compared to those of “a Jewish journalist [who] will come forward day after day as the champion of Catholicism”; even more disturbingly, when Charlus threatens his friend, Brichot, with telling his superiors at the Sor- bonne “that he was in the habit of walking about with young men, it was in exactly the same way as the circumcised scribe keeps referring in and out of season to the ‘Eldest Daughter of the Church’ and the ‘Sacred Heart of Jesus,’

that is to say, without the least trace of hypocrisy, but with more than a hint of play-acting” (III:208–209). So too the attempts of Bloch, the second-gen- eration son of Ashkenazic immigrants who still retain traces of Yiddish in their speech, to pass as a gentile are wrought by denouncing his own people:

One day when we were sitting on the sands, Saint-Loup and I, we heard emitting from a canvas tent against which we were leaning a torrent of imprecation against the swarm of Jews that infested Balbec. “You can’t go a yard without meeting them,” said the voice. “I am not in principle ir- remediably hostile to the Jewish race, but here there is a plethora of them. You hear nothing but ‘I thay, Apraham, I’ve chust theen Chacop.’ You would think you were in the Rue d’Aboukir.” The man who thus in- veighed against Israel emerged at last from the tent, and we raised our eyes to behold this anti-semite. It was my old friend Bloch.
(I:793)

Indeed, not only the logic but also much of the imagery of closeting that Sedgwick describes with respect to Charlus applies here to Bloch. The tent provides a precise image of self-enclosure: it is at once orientalizing, and hence an emblem of his Jewishness, and leisure class, and hence an emblem of his preferred vector of assimilation. What is most striking about these attempts, however, is their failure, or, more precisely, the Charlusian form that this fail- ure takes. Just as Charlus is known to all for what he truly is, so Bloch is forced to reveal himself because his face as well as his name bears the visible signs of Jewishness. His “thundering” voice does not give him away—even though Saint-Loup and Marcel can clearly hear his classmate through the tent in which he closets himself, they can only identify him as
la voix
—a voice, tellingly, that seeks to pass as a non-Jew by mimicking the Jew’s mimicry of French. When his unmistakably semitic features appear, by contrast, all mim- icry is forgotten; those features define him as the quintessential Jew whose at- tempts to pass as a Frenchman Bloch has been mocking in order to position himself as a gentile.