The Marxist Bedroom: Sex and Class Struggle

Jarrod Hayes The Marxist Bedroom: Sex and Class Struggle (on Michael Sprinker's History and Ideology in Proust: "A la recherche du temps perdu" and the Third French Republic [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994]) Quant à l'honnête travailleur communiste, qui, retour de militer, rejoint sa famille patriarcale et bien soumise, userait indigné qu'on lui dise que cet Ordre-au-Foyer travaille pour le patronat et en assure l'avenir. . . . As for the hard-working communist, who, after his militant activities, returns to his patriarchal and submissive family, he would be indignant if told that this Order-in-the-Hearth works for the bosses and guarantees their future. . . . —Tony Duvert, Le bon sexe illustré Michael Sprinker's Historyand Ideology in Proust is a historical reading of Proust that situates A la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Third French Republic. Students of Proust will find extremely useful Sprinker's lengthy discussions of the history, society, culture, economy, political structures, educational system, apparatuses of state power, and press of this period. Sprinker's study is also a Marxist analysis of a literary work that displays no socialist leanings and has often "been denounced as decadent bourgeois aestheticism" (4). Sprinker organizes his analysis of Proust according to "the classical categories ofhistorical materialism"—"[b]ase and superstructure, class and class struggle, ideology, and revolution" (4)—categories that also become the titles of his study's four chapters. In the context of Proustian criticism, the iconoclastic use of these categories to structure a reading of one of the most consecrated authors of the French literary canon (even by conservative standards) requires a substantial dose of chutzpah and constitutes part of History and Ideology's ingenuity. Though Sprinker distinguishes his study from more formalist readings of Proust, he does not see formal and Marxist analyses as being mutually exclusive: "Formal or aesthetic features are themselves a part of ideology, as well as its efficient cause in literary representation. In literature , ideology can only appear in the presentation of form, so that formal analysis is never a dispensable exercise for materialist criticism " (4). While the study promises to close a long-standing distance between poststructuralist (or "formalist," as he puts it) and Marxist literary theories, this divide remains at the end of his work, and in 208 the minnesota review fact, parallels another long-standing division, that separating Marxism and its traditional blind spot, sexuality. Though Sprinker goes much further than many Marxists in his consideration of sexuality, in that he fails to read sexuality historically and to consider the importance of the consolidation of compulsory heterosexuality in the rise of capitalism, the bedroom remains exempt from Marxist analysis and therefore from revolution. Itbecomes the closet ofclass struggle where capitalist relations remain untouched. As Sprinker acknowledges, his attention to class structures and struggles in Proust is not entirely unprecedented and follows a line established by Fredric Jameson and Walter Benjamin. While Sprinker agrees with Benjamin that the Recherche generaUy ignores the economic realities of the working classes and acknowledges that Benjamin "has provided much of the inspiration for the present project" (181), he disagrees with Benjamin's account of Proustian aesthetics as a "veil" for economic realities. Unlike Benjamin, Jameson reads the Proustian narrator's aesthetic theory as an allegory of a political utopia, an aesthetic vision of a classless society free of alienated labor; Proust represents not only the class struggles of his time but also those to come by using social climbing and the desire for aristocratic leisure as the allegory for an "unconscious Utopian impulse" (Jameson 153, qtd. in Sprinker 180). In contrast, Sprinker argues that Proust ignores the possibility of such a society. Sprinker's Marxist reading of Proust thus falls somewhere between Benjamin's and Jameson's in terms of the extent each is willing to grant Proust the status of revolutionary: The text recognizes not only that the aristocracy has made its final exit, but that the era of liberal capitalism, when the ruling classes could rely on the general loyalty of those over whom they ruled, was equally a thing of the past. What it fails to register, save in the most attenuated and allusive manner...