Proust’s China

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu) is permeated with allusions to many periods and places in the Near, Middle, and Far East.¹ The Arabian Nights, the Persian look of the church at Balbec, Marcel’s fascination with the eastern-inspired architecture and stones of Ruskin’s Venice, and France’s Jewish heritage, mapped in Swann, Bloch, and Gilberte and refracted through a contested national imaginary in the Dreyfus case: all trace France’s continuities with southwest Asian history and culture. A period French orientalism surfaces in such details as Madam Cottard’s comically clueless anecdote about the “salade japonaise” of Dumas fils’ new play, Francillon, at a Verdurin dinner party; the Baron’s japoniste fan painting; the narrator’s word paintings of landscapes and seascapes after Japanese screens and prints; and Odette’s “very odd little house full of Chinese things,” as one of her myriad former lovers remembers it: a very Parisian courtesan’s potpourri of Oriental draperies, Turkish beads, gas-lit Japanese lanterns, silk cushions, chrysanthemums, palms in Chinese porcelain pots, fans, “fiery-tongued dragons” on a bowl or fire-screen, a silver dromedary with ruby eyes, and a carved jade toad. There, in a “pink silk dressing gown,” Odette first receives Swann for “afternoon tea” (adulterated with cream English-style), which they both feel, perhaps for different reasons, to be “something precious.”² Not least, Luc Fraisse and Jan Hokenson observe, the overture of this work of art rises from “a japoniste cup of tea” as the narrator likens the sudden apparition of his childhood Combray to tiny Japanese folded papers which, dropped into a porcelain bowl of water, bloom into “flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable.”³

It would be easy enough, Hokenson remarks, to dismiss the European Orients of the Recherche “as yet another modernist’s Orientalism, trite and faintly racist” (20). It would be easy, too, to see them as part of the given world brought forth by the narrator in all its inexhaustible particularity, here with exquisite description, there with Daumieresque comedy, again with grim or tragic irony, so that readers can say “whether ‘it really is like that,’ . . . whether the words that they read within themselves are the same as those which I have written” (ISLT, 6:508). In that case, such effects of “otherness” would be remarkable not as tokens of static essences but in their unbounded translatability as figure (“it really is like that”) and abstraction.⁴ Further, like that cup of limeblossom tea, any detail of Proust’s book may become translucent to historical depths: what appear to be solid objects may melt into the temporal flow of the conditions, things, and events that produced them. Hokenson, for example, traces Proust’s cup of tea to the late nineteenth-century milieu of the Goncourts and the Impressionists, when French japonisme was no passing fad but “the discovery of a new aesthetic continent” at a critical moment in western mimetic traditions—a “revolution in European aesthetics” of “Copernican proportions” that reaches its summa in Proust’s masterly use of the Japanese aesthetic.⁵ As for Proust’s southwest Asian themes, André Benhaïm, reading the Recherche from a postcolonial vantage, finds that “Proust’s Orient owes little to Orientalism” but rather works to “disorient” racialized ideas of France, Frenchness, and the nation. In a new century of nationalist violence and ethnic persecution, the Recherche captures influences from far beyond France’s borders to conjure a “vision of a past that . . . looks forward to the present, and beyond.”⁶

Such readings illuminate the way the Recherche opens not only the nation’s geographic borders but the very categories of the French, the European, the western to the circulating currents of historical process and a dynamic global imaginary. Rather than betokening an essentialized “East,” the Orients of the Recherche register what Ezra Pound called “the ‘new’ historic sense of our time.”⁷ Pound extends to Far Eastern cultures T. S. Eliot’s Eurocentric description of a writer’s “historical sense,”

a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its...