Race et imaginaire biologique chez Proust by Pauline Moret-Jankus (review)

This is an impressive work of scholarship that makes a significant contribution to Proust studies, as well as to the cultural history of the fin-de-siècle period more broadly. Pauline Moret-Jankus's study impresses in its handling of secondary literature (in French and in English) on Proust and his novel, and draws most fruitfully on similarly impressive reading across a wide and diverse range of scientific and historical sources. The author contends that 'Proust reprend des modèles de pensée issus des savoirs biologiques afin de comprendre l'homme' (p. 14) and that 'la science chez Proust est un "imaginaire", un fonds d'images et de vocabulaire' (p. 220). Neither of these contentions is radical nor particularly new. Notions of race and ideas relating to or stemming from the sciences subtend much of Proust's novel, as brilliantly demonstrated in Nicola Luckhurst's Science and Structure in Proust's 'A la recherche du temps perdu' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). What distinguishes the clear and well-paced argument of the current work, however, is its meticulous attention to a substantial body of writings in various fields of biology, evolutionary theory, zoology, natural history, race, and racial theory, which is combined with a thoroughgoing critical engagement with Proust's novel and his correspondence. Across five distinct though complementary sections ('Taxinomies', 'Penser la race', 'Proust et la race juive', 'Homosexualités', 'Hybridités littéraires'), Moret-Jankus explores how Proust came into contact with theories of evolution and heredity via figures such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Charles Darwin, and Ernst Haeckel, and nationalist and racialist thinking via those such as Arthur de Gobineau, Maurice Barrès, and Jules Soury, and how these ideas—or traces of them—come to inform or colour Proust's novel. By scrutinizing race and the 'imaginaire biologique' in Λ la recherche du temps perdu, Moret-Jankus draws our attention in new ways to an unresolved tension with which readers of the novel have long been familiar: the tension between the particular and the universal, the micro and the macro. The biologist or natural historian, by Moret-Jankus's account, has a mode of seeing that Proust latches onto and adapts to his own ends. Persuasive parallel readings highlight, for example, the importance for Proust of Jules Michelet's natural-historical writings; and two important turn-of-the-century documents are reproduced as annexes to the main text of the book: Salomon Reinach's refutation of contemporary discourses concerning Judaism, 'La Prétendue race juive' (originally published in the Revue des études juives, 47 (1903), i—xiv), and excerpts of Isidore Weil's tract 'La Caractéristique d'Israël' (originally published in L'Univers Israélite, 16 (1890), 259-62, 294-96, 360-63, 387-91, 505-09, 600-03, 630–31). Exploring the fine details of Proust's assimilation and adaptation of the scientific air du temps, Moret-Jankus shows deftly how threads common to discourses of evolution, metamorphosis, and heredity are woven creatively by Proust into his own search for knowledge, re-emerging in the novel in networks of metaphor and simile, in images of transformation, growth, reproduction, sterility, and atavism. The book's multiple indexes ('Personnes', 'Personnages', 'Thèmes et notions') and excellent bibliography mean that it will be a valued resource for scholars across a range of fields.