My Father and I: The Marais and the Queerness of Community

[3] Things Past

[3] Things Past [ 113 ] Proust’s Way Am I the only one who thinks that Remembrance of Things Past wasn’t such a bad English title for Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu after all? Not so much because of its Shakespearian reference, but because Proust’s novel is essentially about, well, things of the past—chief among them, I believe, Jewishness and queerness and, beyond, survival in general. Using each as a metaphor for the other, Proust repeatedly describes queers as Jews and Jews as queers. A cunning rhetorical trick, if there ever was one, it simultaneously makes sense and obscures meaning, since each category he summons to clarify the other is really characterized by its resistance to stable identification , something that also imparts on each group a deep sense of social out-of-placeness.1 For tactical reasons, Proust may use the essentializing lexicon of race to depict and analyze the socially marginal, he nonetheless conceives their identity as the outcome of social forces and cultural practices, as in the following passages about inverts: [L]ike the Jews again . . . brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism to which they are subjected, the opprobrium into which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race. (4:22) [comme les Juifs encore . . . rassemblés à leurs pareils par l’ostracisme qui les frappe, l’opprobre où ils sont tombés, ayant fini par prendre, par une persécution semblable à celle d’Israël, les caractères physiques et moraux d’une race. (3:18)] And later: forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more effective and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, vocabulary, and one in which even members who do not wish to know one another recognize one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs. (4:23) [formant une franc-maçonnerie bien plus étendue, plus efficace et moins soupçonnée que celle des loges, car elle repose sur une identité de goûts, de besoins , d’habitudes, de dangers, d’apprentissage, de savoir, de trafic, de glossaire, et dans laquelle les membres mêmes qui souhaitent de ne pas se connaître, aussit ôt se reconnaissent à des signes naturels ou de convention, involontaires ou voulus. (3:18–19)] The idea that identity is externally produced and results from negative identi fication may be said to foreshadow Sartre’s essay on the Jews,2 but to some of Proust’s contemporaries, it surely echoed the theories of Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, two (Jewish) theorists of degeneracy who attributed the perceived mental and physical decay of the Jews to centuries of oppression . Either way, the Jews and queers of the novel don’t stand for stable categories in themselves but, rather, work as irritants to a power system increasingly reliant on the pathologization of deviance and obsessed with taxonomy as guarantor of social order.3 This is especially the case when it comes to the class system, so central to Proust’s novel, that queers and Jews inhabit or mimic or piggyback on so as to quietly unsettle its bourgeois claims to naturalness. Jewish characters, most notably Swann and Bloch, sometimes pass as Gentiles, while in the parallel universe of inverts, the ambassador is a bosom friend of the felon, the prince, with a certain insolent aplomb born of his aristocratic breeding which the timorous bourgeois lacks, on leaving the duchess’s party goes off to confer in private with the ruf- fian; a reprobate section of the human collectivity, but an important one, suspected where it does not exist, flaunting itself, insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in prison, on the throne; living, in short, at least to a great extent, in an affectionate and perilous intimacy with the men of the other race, provoking them, playing with them by speaking of its vice as of something alien to it. (4:23–24) [l’ambassadeur est ami du forçat; le prince, avec une certaine liberté d’allures que donne l’éducation aristocratique et qu’un petit bourgeois tremblant n’aurait pas, en sortant de chez la duchesse s’en va conférer avec l’apache; partie réprouvée...