Proust, Class, and Nation by Edward J. Hughes (review)

Marcel Proust is seldom regarded as having been politically engaged. Certainly, the crucial events of the Dreyfus Affair, the First World War, and the decline of the ruling classes constituted significant material for his masterpiece, but he was also fascinated by the condition of the lower classes and by the question of national identity. One of the main goals of Edward J. Hughes’s volume, a key contribution to Proust studies and our understanding of the figure of the writer in Third Republic France, is ‘to explore Proust’s evolving attitude to the group mentalities formed by the forces of class and nation’ (p. 5). As a young man and author of the (unfinished) early novel Jean Santeuil, Proust was a seeming proponent of political revolt, especially with regard to the Dreyfus Affair and Zola’s trial; but, in light of his growing realizations about the nature of time and about human psychology, both collective and individual, Proust’s appetite for political engagement apparently diminished. In the eight main chapters of his study, Hughes communicates to the reader a sense of the relevance of the period in which Proust lived, and he highlights the author’s use of empathy and nuance as critical operating modes at a time when radical sociopolitical opinions and positions were rampant. In the opening chapter, Hughes shows how, in the wake of the Great War, Proust rejected calls for a collectivist identity; figures like Halévy or Barrès, he maintained, were equally misguided in their radical conception of nationalism. For Proust, the writer’s duty to the nation begins and ends with his own art. The following four chapters focus on the concept of class. In Chapters 3 to 5 especially, Hughes demonstrates how Proust’s obsession with the characteristics not only of the bourgeoisie but also of the working classes mirrored the concerns of a society in the process of modernization, and found expression, often in derisive terms, in his own output. Chapters 6 and 7, dealing with social rifts more specifically, focus on the economic dynamics between the classes. The eighth chapter, in which the Recherche is compared with Julien Benda’s 1927 Trahison des clercs, is enlightening: while Proust may share Benda’s temptation towards disinterestedness, ‘by divorcing literature from social engagement and the discourse of national morality’, the Recherche ‘establishes an important connection with contemporary history’ (p. 254). Proust’s rapport with History is the subject of Hughes’s Postscript; his conclusion, however, might disappoint those looking for a clear-cut portrait of the author either as a bourgeois or as a defender of the working classes. Hughes’s study shows that ‘Proust’s novel offers important evidence of how accumulated ideological tensions accompanied the novel’s sui generis absorption of momentous historical events’ (p. 276). These tensions also appear in the emerging figure of the author, who will always resist a unique, definitive identification. Underpinned by impeccable documentation and an incisive use of existing scholarship, Proust, Class, and Nation presents an original and powerful thesis that exemplifies the complexity and richness of an oeuvre that never ceases to elicit new and pertinent readings.